Monster Age

by GR Griffin

  With an awakening snort, Sans jerked his head up. “Papyrus? Bro?” He looked around blindly. With the poster still glued to his face, he showed the disorientation of a dog with a bucket on its head. “Where are you?”

  “Of course you were not at attention.” Papyrus shook his head in disappointment. “You were napping all night again, weren’t you? Why do you think you’re never ready every morning?”

  Alphys raised a claw to speak her two cents. “I, uh – actually, Papyrus, I don’t think he was napping. That looked like s-sleepi—”

  Papyrus interrupted sharply, whipping out a gloved hand to punctuate his point. “I don’t want to hear it, doctor.” He had heard that tired old excuse from everyone: Sans, Undyne, Fleck, Asgore, Lady Asgore, himself one time in the mirror, and also from their pet rock.

  Oh, yes, their pet rock has gained the ability to talk thanks to Papyrus’s generous care and affection. His name was Dwayne, he liked rock candy, listening to rock music, taking idyllic walks on the beach, and suggested that Papyrus should help Sans with washing his sock collection every once in a while. Papyrus once commented that Dwayne’s voice bore an uncanny resemblance to his brother, who went AWOL during those heart to heart moments.

  The last thing Papyrus wanted to hear was that sleeping lark coming from the bucktoothed mouth of a certified dermatologist.

  “H-hey, where’d the light go? Why’s it so dark all of a…” Sans slumped his head and sighed as if remembering the saddest moment of his life. “Guess it was bound to happen sooner or later… Oh well…” Raising his head, he called out, “Papyrus, you up yet? After breakfast, how ‘bout we finish that invisible maze you’ve been working on? I promise I won’t hide the orb in your battle body for the third time.”

  “What are you talking about, Sans?” Alphys asked. “And where did you get those clothes?”

  His head followed the sound of her voice. “Oh, hey, you invited the doc over too? Is she here to help install that tile puzzle you’ve always wanted?” Alphys reached out and yanked the poster away. Sans blinked as the unexpected flood of light stung the whites of his bleary eye sockets. He rubbed at them before taking in his surroundings, looking confused. “Hold on. This isn’t my…” He gazed at the walls, the cliffs, the sky and the ground as if he was still dreaming, seeing them for the first time.

  “Sans, are you okay? What were you talking about just then?” Alphys repeated herself.

  “Uh, nothing really, I’m fine,” Sans stammered, rubbing the back of his neck. His hat tipped forward and the brim stopped halfway over his eyes. “I guess I was having a bad dream.”

  “About what?”

  Sans paused. “About being back in my old bedroom… in the Underground…”

  “Dear brother, you were not back in the Underground.” Papyrus looked at the paper in the doctor’s hands. “You were merely blinded by this wanted poster with a perfectly unaltered, standard definition photograph of Fleck on it.”

  “And besides,” Alphys began, “we’re in the completely wrong direction to be in the Under—w-w-what? Wanted poster? F-Fleck?” She pulled the sheet in front of her eyes. The resulting image made her shriek. “Oh my god, they’re wanted!”

  “Wanted?” Papyrus asked, the blankness in his sockets portrayed his obliviousness. “Did Fleck file for a name change while I wasn’t looking?”

  “No! Fleck is wanted!” Just once, Alphys wished that Papyrus could break from his land of racing cars, spaghetti, and spaghetti in the shape of racing cars and join her in the real world. “Fleck has a bounty on their head! They’re a wanted criminal!” Her claws were unable to hold it straight. Fleck was a fugitive. A hunted target. On the run.

  And she was the one who let go.

  Sans took the poster. His flat face was concealed as he inspected it. He pulled it down and his friends gazed at his empty sockets – the light in them gone, but his smile constant as always. Papyrus had seen that look before, but he could not recall where or when. It filled him with concern. Sans had been on the short end of the stick many times, the butt of many jokes, yet he always shrugged it off with a chuckle, a bad pun, and a bottle of mustard for the road. However, those rare moments when he made that face, Papyrus knew that someone had wronged him in the worst possible way.

  A monster ruler demanding the soul of an innocent kid in order to fulfil their own self-centred wishes. For Sans, it was the Underground all over again. He thought, hoped, that he could finally put those days behind him. So many déjà vus and recurring dreams. Days overlapping one another, like he was reliving them on a regular basis. Time and time again, he felt like he saw the same faces, heard the same sentences, and witnessed the same mistakes repeat themselves. Saw the ones he loved happy and content one day. Saw them reduced the dust the next. The memories reoccurred so many times that he lost count. Everything blurred into one, and in that collective picture stood a single solitary image.

  A flower…

  Eventually, Sans stopped caring. He smiled… and forgot to stop. There was no point to anything, nothing he ever did made a lick of difference. Everything became a joke to him. He stopped trying, and slumped into a slothful stupor. He became the Sans that everyone saw today.

  His façade served one purpose: to keep his brother happy.

  Every time he fell into slumber, a terrifying feeling scrapped away at the back on his skull. The horrible feeling of not knowing what he would awake to. He was certain that prior his short nap at his post in Hotland, he had eaten a delicious brunch at Grillby’s and wished his brother well at his training session with Undyne. Awakening, his brunch had been cancelled due to an unforeseen fire closing Grillby’s, followed by a phone call from the captain of the Royal Guard stating that Papyrus had not turned up for his one-to-one session. Each shift took a piece out of him, made it feel like there was no point to anything.

  But Fleck changed all that. Before meeting that determined human, life felt like one big jumble. That child set everything straight. They helped break the barrier. They led them to the sun. They ended this madness. The repeating dreams stopped. The déjà vus ended. He was stuck in the past no longer, finally moving onward to the future. Every day was new and exciting, a mystery waiting to be solved. The next day held new people to meet, more friends to make, and more opportunities to sleep on the job.

  His brother was happy. He should be happy too.

  However, still, when he awoke in the mornings, before opening his eyes to the glorious yellow ball of fire in the sky, he feared he would look out his window, see only a rocky ceiling, and think nothing of it. No matter how much he tried to tell himself that this world was here to stay, a small piece of that fear had become a part of him.

  He would probably keep that part for the rest of his life.

  Now, the future lay before him, printed in ink on paper. To awake to a fresh new day should be a blessing, but all he could see was history repeating itself. Just how it repeated itself time and time again under the Earth’s surface.

  “Someone better have some answers for this…”

  “Sans, please, don’t be mad,” Papyrus said the most mature thing they’ve heard from him since ever. “We have nothing to worry about.”

  The white dots returned. Sans pulled the hat back as both he and Alphys gave Papyrus questioning looks. “How can you be so calm at a time like this?”

  Papyrus responded, “It’s quite simple, actually,” which almost made Sans burst out laughing. The land above the clouds they were lost in, coupled with the fact that their friend had a bounty on their head, meant that their current predicament was anything but simple. Papyrus remained as valiant as ever. “If I, the infallible puzzle master Papyrus, was able to infallibly fail at capturing Fleck, then logic dictates that nobody else stands a chance at capturing them.”

  That sentence alone was enough to lift a massive weight off Sans’s mind, mainly because there was nothing better to him than seeing Papyrus act like Papyrus. “Sometimes, I wish I had your con
fidence, pal.”

  “My puzzle making abilities are not the only thing that is infallible. Now, returning to the question posed thirty paragraphs ago: where did you get those clothes?”

  The door beside them flung open and three vegetable monsters stumbled out before Sans had a chance to answer; a leak down to his underwear, a celery figure shivering his shrill arms, and a pepper with a visible grove in his head. Inside the black interior, the only furniture visible was a circular table with four chairs, haloed under a single lightbulb. Wisps from cigar butts in silver trays lingered in the white light. The scene alone answered that question.

  After Alphys went on her murderous rampage of vocal principles and his brother had slinked away to the kitchen, Sans got roped into a poker game. With nothing of financial worth on their persons, they had to make do with the clothes on their backs. Quite literally. His opponents probably scoped him for an easy target, with him being short and scruffily dressed.

  To their surprise, who knew Sans was a mean streak at cards? As soon as he took his seat, he was unstoppable. He never folded once yet never lost a single hand. The look on Pepper’s green face when Sans bested his full house with a straight flush was the highlight of that tournament, earning him the hat resting on his bald head. Lady Luck had well and truly went all in on his side that night.

  And the fact that the lights kept flicking off and on played no part in it whatsoever.

  “I hope you don’t plan on hiking around in those, brother,” Papyrus said. “You look like a skeleton who doesn’t know how to properly dress himself.”

  The flicker of a grin twitched on Alphys’s lips as a snarky quip tugged on the fringes of her sense of humour. However, she did not know whether to aim that comment at Sans with “Big change there” or at Papyrus with “look who’s talking”. She played around with the snappy line for too long – three seconds too long, rendering her comment void before it even came out the gate.

  Sans flicked the hat off, revealing sweat on his bald head. As cool as a fedora was, it was not his style. “Nah. I wasn’t playin’ for keeps anyway.” He remarked as he brushed the coat off his shoulders. After what he did to obtain them, there was no way he could not keep them with a clean conscience. “’Sides, all these clothes make me hot under the collarbone.”

  Ba-dum pish!

  Papyrus gritted his teeth. “Oh my god, Sans! Why do I put up with you?”

  “Because I’m the one racking all the dough in,” Sans said as he kicked the boots off and removed the jeans. His slippers and shorts were still on underneath. No wonder he was so warm.

  That statement seemed to fuel his brother’s agitation. He straightened himself up and raised a hand, looking so stiff like he had contracted rigor mortis. “Well, you know what?” He prepared for his comeback of the century. “You’re absolutely right.”

  Sans chuckled. “Ain’t I always?” He was glad that the chill side to him had returned.

  “O-okay, glad we got that sorted out…” Alphys said with a sigh. “N-now can we please talk about how we’re going to find Fleck and the others?”

  “Y’know, come to think of it,” Sans said, “we never did go into this whole ‘jump-into-a-teleporter-thing’ with a plan? We don’t even know where we are.”

  Papyrus pointed up the lane. “Perhaps we could ask these fine, shiny folks for directions?”

  Fine, shiny folks? Up ahead, a group of ten monsters geared head to toe in knights armour shuffled down the street, kicking up red dust in their stride. They looked like members of some order from the dark ages, and were impossible to miss due to the amount of dazzle their suits produced. Nine of them kept an arrowhead formation while one at the front went from citizen to citizen, regardless of condition, and flashed what looked like three squares of paper at each of them.

  One monster he addressed faced down the street and pointed directly at Alphys and her associates.

  The squad of soldiers stopped before the doctor, the former watchman, and the hopeful for the disbanded royal guard. The leading monster with a glazed look in his eyes, whose species was impossible to recognise under his armour, looked the trio up and down. He scanned the set of pictures, checking to see if they matched the appearances of those before him.

  He looked at the pictures, then back to them. Back to the pictures, then back to them.

  He held the pictures before his face, then lowered them. He brought them up. Lowered them again.

  Finally, after quintuple-checking, he was satisfied that the monsters he was confronting were indeed those he had been ordered to find.

  The leader of the bunch hesitated for a moment, revealing that he may have lacked public speaking skills. They must have been desperate for recruits that day. “By o-order of, uh, Emperor Zeus, you…” He squinted back at the pictures, getting the name of the one in the lab coat. “Al-pee-he-is?”

  The one he named – or trying to – opened her mouth to correct him, but Alphys’s lack of confidence stopped the words from coming out. The guardsman continued.

  “And you Papyrus.” He pronounced it as if the ‘Y’ was an ‘I’, so it came out Papi-rus. “And you San… s, are to be, err, detained and brought to Castle, uh, Highkeep in light of you may hold knowledge on an escaped convict. There, you will be, you know, held and questioned and such until further notice, I guess.”

  “Hold on, detained?” Alphys took a step back. “You mean you’re arresting us?” she cried.

  “We’re not arresting you, just – you know – taking you to a secure location for a while, for your own safety. We fear that you may be in danger… or something along those lines.”

  Alphys was not listening as she was too deep in her drowning worry. “B-b-but we didn’t do anything? D-did we? W-what did we do? Did we break the law?”

  “You haven’t broken any laws, it’s just—”

  The worst fears from all the adult manga she had watched flashed in her mind. “I-I can’t go to jail! Look at me, they’ll treat me like currency!”

  He held his gauntlet hands out, trying to put a lid on this situation. “Hey, calm down, will you? I’m just following my orders here.”

  Sans ushered the sobbing scientist back, acting as the voice of reason. “You said you’re detaining us because of an escaped convict?”

  “Yeah, the same human that everyone’s talking about.”

  “Oh.” Papyrus took the poster from Alphys and presented it. “You mean this one?”

  “Yeah, yeah, that’s the one.” The leader had spend the most part of the night putting those up that he could recognise it by touch, if needed. He was running on fumes and cheap energy drinks at this stage.

  “Well, I, the great Papirus, will gladly impart my vast knowledge of Fleck unto you.”

  “You will? That’s a relief,” said the guard. “I was afraid you’d put up—”

  Papyrus started without giving the guard time to finish. “Fleck’s hobbies include creative writing, arts and crafts, listening to music, and watching scary movies at night. Or at least I think they do, it’s hard to tell from behind the cushion.”

  The guard went to speak. “Actually, that’s, uh, not what I—”

  Papyrus continued over him. “Their favourite fruit is apples. They’re partially fond of grapes, and enjoy the occasional banana.”

  “I kinda don’t need to hear—”

  “From their choice of wardrobe, one would believe that their favourite colour is blue. This statement has been proven false by yours truly. Their favourite colour is, in fact, red.”

  Sans quickly chimed in. “Bro, you’re not helping.”

  Alphys followed with, “You should really stop talking now.”

  The guard’s brow furrowed. His voice began to crack. “Will you just listen to me for one—?”

  Papyrus would not shut up. “And here’s some top secret information—”

  “Listen to me.”

  “—for specific ears only.”

  Sans got louder. “Bro. S
top.”

  The guard got louder. “Listen to me.” His fellow guards on his flanks were exchanging looks.

  Papyrus got louder. “Fleck is especially ticklish—”

  Alphys was sweating buckets. “Papyrus, shut up! Please just shut up!” Already, she could feel the spray of the showers assault her scales.

  Sans was shouting. “Bro!”

  The guard was shouting. “Listen to me!”

  Papyrus was shouting. “—on their knees!”

  The guard was yelling. “LISTEN TO ME!”

  Alphys was yelling. “PAPYRUS!”

  Sans was yelling. “BRO!”

  Papyrus was yelling. “WHY ARE WE ALL YELLING IN ALL CAPITALS?”

  “ENOUGH!” The guard threw his hands down and stamped on the ground. “You know what? You are under arrest! Grab ‘em!”

  Sans’s had a fraction of a second to come up with a plan as the line of suited monsters pushed forward on the balls of their feet. Time stopped. His brother was standing straight, with his jaw still wide and hands clenched from his battle of the bellows, like he was attempting to roar them into submission. Alphys had stumbled backwards with both eyes and mouth open in terror, holding her claws up to her chin defensively. Not like that would help much against monsters double her size and suited in thick metal plating.

  He span to the left, widened his eye sockets, feigning shock, and pointed between the rows of houses. “Look, guys, it’s Fleck!”

  That name sent powerful alarms ringing in Papyrus’s and Alphys’s heads, strong enough to pull them away from the real threat ten feet in front of them. They both swung in that direction. The guards went to follow, almost tempted by the prospect of finding the main fugitive, but promptly held their gazes on them.

  Sans refocused on the soldiers while his friends were distracted.

  The guards saw their chance; the majority of the targets had diverted their attention. The only one remaining was the skeleton who was half their size. They thought they had an easy capture, or so it seemed.

  They went to take one step forward and immediately took two steps back. Those at the rear crashing into those in front.