Chapter Text
A 16 year old boy opens his eyes laying atop a hospital bed, growing more and more uneasy as he viewed his surroundings.
He was quite literally in a room which could be best described as something out of science fiction.
Clunky, ancient-looking computers...
Bulky Monitors...
Cables snaking across the floor...
Tubes containing what seems to be shifting balls of energy...
Bubbling sludge in vats...
Coat hangars...
A mish-mosh of the sci-fi and mundane.
If there was a doo, there was a hickey to go along with it.
On the walls were diagrams of strange and anatomically confusing creatures. Some more humanoid than others, somehow.
Moldsmal... Shyren... Vegetoid... Whimsun... Loox... Migosp...
It honestly just gets harder to pronounce the further he read, so he stopped.
Shifting his focus to something more immediate, if only to get his mind off what he could only assume to be an index of hells beasts, he glances over at the heart monitor beside of him.
Well, at first glance he thought it was a heart monitor. But it didn’t actually display a pulse. Or anything useful to him for that matter. In fact, it looked like video game stats more than anything.
What is EXP?
The thing also had his name, even though he was never even conscious to give someone his name in the first place.
Somehow, that was the most eerie topping on this scary pizza of mysteries.
...Ginos doesn’t sound too bad right about now.
Considering what he was trying to achieve before he even got here, he was actually quite frustrated at this whole ordeal. He could yell at his supposed 'saviors' later however, finding out where the hell he even was seemed like a more important task.
It was only then that he noticed there was an IV coming from... somewhere in the ceiling. Inside of said line was what was thought to be blood initially, but not actually so.
It was glowing, like it was a halloween decoration party pack.
It was also snaking up into his blanket.
Ah... Glowing substances, being injected into me without my consent.
Intuition, and a 4chan post, told him that glowing ANYTHING was not safe at all inside the human body. Then he remembered what he was doing prior, and cared less about it.
Ripping that IV off could also mean excruciating pain, and that was pain he wasn't exactly brave enough to see through just yet.
He was also simply too exhausted to give that much of a damn.
As Sunny shifts around underneath the hospital blanket, he's caught off-guard by how strange everything feels from a tactile standpoint.
Raising his hand to scratch at his scalp in confusion, he freezes.
Through a state of shock, his brain lists out the bone groups he saw in sequence.
Phalanges... Metacarpals... Carpals... Ulna... Radius—
His whole ass arm is literally just bone. NO muscles. NO ligaments. NO skin attached.
Yet it somehow moves at his command just as if his muscles were still there, intangible and invisible.
Sunny's immediate thought was that he was dreaming. The product of his own mental decline and sick mind.
Sadly, that thought was ruled out quite fast as he attempted the tried and true method to differentiate ones self from dreaming. A pinch to his arm.
His arm had no skin, either.
...But he could actually feel it.
He could quite literally feel everything. Somehow. Impossibly.
He could feel the unrelenting surface of his finger trying to squeeze the equally unrelenting surface of his arm.
The slight pain of his own thumb and index joints struggling and grinding together in vain to pinch something that was completely solid.
His bones were acting as if they had nerves in them, like it had replaced the skin.
No no no nononono—
“EEEEEAAAAUUUUURUUHHHEEEEAAAAAAARRRREEEEEEHHHHCCCCUUURRRFFFRRRSSSSAAAAAAEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJ"
An obnoxious garbage-like noise comes through overhead speakers, startling Sunny right out of his internal downward spiral.
The garbage noise then proceeds to... clear its throat? Shifting its 'frequencies' towards legible and coherent speech like it hadn’t just made the sound akin to a 7-layers-of-hell demonic cry?
A miraculous and confusing turn of events all around.
The unseen—now understood as an individual—garbage noise source tests the microphone with loud, obnoxious tapping to its housing.
Just to make sure audio was coming through. Just to make sure.
It totally wasn’t annoying the shit out of Sunny and grating to his ears... Totally not ticking that pet peeve.
A gravely, but no less polite sounding voice rings through the room.
"One two three- One two three- Ah! Perfect!"
A gigantic screen suddenly flickers on in the direction of Sunny, unveiling a sight that was certainly unexpected.
A fully sentient, fleshless skeleton.
"EURETHRA!"
Exclaimed the televised bone, with quite some glee in its voice.
"The first Necromantic Human-Skeleton Soul Infusion in centuries!"
...What did he just say?—
That's a skeleton. That's a skeleton speaking English to me.
Of course, one would be rightfully shocked seeing a skeleton walking up and about. Especially since this one was talking about necromancy.
The televised skeleton realizes this upon gathering a modocrum of common sense. Steadying himself and clearing his throat nervously this time around, he continued.
"Ah! Um... I see!... I seem to have... forgotten! That Humans are not accustomed to the presence of Monsterkind anymore."
The old fairytale? Sunnys thoughts, as always, drift back to Mari. Mari often leveraged legends to create her own.
It was mostly just to make Kel freak out, and in the process make Hero worry about the existence of ‘spider-monsters’.
Wait. If Monsters really do exist, does that mean—
Fortunately, before Sunny could yet again step foot into another ever-so-often downward spiral about his fears, he was taken out of it once more as the skeleton continued.
"Greetings, Human. You may call me Doctor W.D Gaster. You are in a place colloquially known as the Underground. You may have heard stories about... ahem... ‘creatures’ that lurk underneath the very mountain you have fallen into.”
The doctor waits for his normal human response of average disbelief and distrust. Of freaking out or something of the sort. It would be a normal monster response too.
But Sunny simply does not respond, just blinking slowly.
Gaster did not know how to respond, so he simply just kept going.
"...Aha... Well... It is true. I am one of those ‘creatures’ as a matter of fact. Even if it is very rude to refer to us as such."
A pause is held, expecting some kind of gasp. Some kind of disbelief—of which Sunny doesn't partake at all of course.
Just a widening of his eyes, like hearing something interesting.
The doctor couldn’t help but raise their... brow?
Socket?
How can bone do that?
"...Right then. I will be in shortly to further explain your... erm... condition."
Sunny watched as the screen flickered off, the speakers doing similar with a crackle and a pop.
...Condition? As in... my hand?
This entire situation was surreal. More surreal than his literal dreams, and those were pretty damn surreal.
He was just spoken to by a monster. An ACTUAL monster from those literal fantasies.
One of which who was more intelligent than him by—most likely—multiple margins.
There's so much he’s having to fathom all at once that he doesn't even know WHERE to start.
His mind kept blanking out upon tangent after tangent.
“Aha... Ha... Hem... You don’t even know about the concept of the... soul?”
The doctor was stumped by that. Like it should be a common thing for souls to be necessary in the concept of day to day critical thinking.
“What are human schools even teaching? It’s a fundamental part of life! How-”
The doctor immediately sighs in interruption, rubbing their nonexistent temples. The culture shock was seemingly too much for them.
“I’m not made for this. I’m not a teacher. Oh my Angel- Okay, just try to keep an open mind.”
What could be more earth shattering than the concept of the soul being an actual thing? They JUST started talking...
No more flesh for Sunny. Anywhere.
No heart to pump. No muscles to stretch. No tendons to pull. No lungs to breathe. No stomach to eat.
Not even a brain was left inside his skull to think.
The logistics to how that even worked weren’t even dwelled upon. Glossed over by the impatient and socially inept doctor.
“Aha... Ha... Flesh is heavy and cumbersome! You will not miss it!”
Sunny very much missed his flesh actually, despite the doctors insistence.
“Humans are sooo bulky. You need a physical buffer to even use the parts given to you! Magic is so much more efficient, yes?"
Sunny wasn't even paying attention to the increasingly embarassed doctor anymore. He was too busy trying to figure out... everything. Everything the madman said.
‘Gluing’ my soul back together.
Skeleton-monsters being half-descendants of humans.
Something about Determination?... and Patience? AND Justice?
...AND Magic. Somehow. Whatever that means!
Barely held together on a physical level...
I'm a breath away from dying at all times...
Nothing would ever be the same.
The rushed conversation had gotten genuinely annoying to Sunny. Especially when he understood none of the concepts being talked about.
It was an impressive feat to find someone who sucked this much at reading the room. Kel was a hard bar to beat in that regard.
If they hadn’t mentioned his fragility, he would have tried to slap some sense into them when they were still here.
Sunny wasn’t too far off from his previous assessment about himself being a Frankenstein’s monster. Quite literally an abomination that shouldn’t be even possible.
...Yet, there he stood. Staring at what was left of him in a mirror.
Magic, bones, a soul barely held together.
