Chapter Text
There is nothing.
Only the endless reach of the void remains present, a blackness incapable of holding reality.
And yet, spread thin in its folds is a presence, a voice, a mind. If one were to gaze upon its parts in a certain manner, it would appear to be in the shape of a man. It should not exist, but it appears to have not cared for the notion, establishing a continuity not native to the realm. And it watches.
Endless worlds march forth along their set paths underneath its gaze, ignorant to observation, yet acting out all the same. It serves as a confirmation of the obvious, a realization of its mind, a tether to keep one from truly becoming lost in a place without ground. And so it looks onward, each fork, each thread, individually beautiful.
And then, without meaning, the line is stopped. Without closure nor subtlety, it is cut without mercy, those left within struggling to continue on in the face of calamity, fighting to prevent a fate which had been decided since long before the idea of their existence had been conceived.
Even so, they reach their end. Even so, a time will come where the thread must be severed. So it was written in the shared fabric from which each originates. Time and time again, inevitability.
The destruction of such beautiful things, the wanton erasure and elimination, becomes too much for what is left of the presence gazing from in between, rendering it disturbed at the injustice. In its rage, it reaches out to what is left of the pieces of existence from which it came, seeking to create something new.
A force. A hope. A pattern in which the glimpses of uncertain yet positive futures can be seen. In its desperation, it releases its creation upon the loom, the threads it can directly observe, hoping to see the results for itself, yet it knows it will never grasp the full picture, too thinly spread, too fractured, to hope to know the fates of all it interacts with. Vainly, it hopes that parts of itself live on in the folds it cannot see, their efforts separate but united in goal.
And so the time passes, and some iterations live on, but the loss remains too great to accept, and so another step is taken, in a direction which it cannot see but knows exists. As it reaches out, it feels the vibrations of threads far above itself, saturated with life and hope that may be key to its endeavor. With the thought in hand, a number more of the fragments are retrieved and constructed, and once sufficiently existent, a device is produced. Once more distributed among its pieces, it hopes to see prosperity, and its wish is granted, but not in full. Peppered among the threads now woven thickly with life, the edge cases are made evident, and the presence steels itself to reach completion.
Which arrives at the currently perceived scene, in which a thread of time and fate pure of heart yet weak of spirit lies before the mind; the vibrant line spun beside it from above yearns to avoid its end, but as the man looks on, it sees that the light from above has also dimmed, horrifically so. As the man looks on, it sees in clarity that it will not survive as it is, and so, a realization is formed, in the space between spaces, at a time removed from line.
With haste, a copy of that which strung fate together, an iteration of a device, is produced and refined. A satisfaction undenied, the presence casts it above.
YOUR ASSISTANCE
IS REQUESTED.
WILL
YOU ANSWER
THE CALL?
The door slammed with a shudder and creak behind you. You couldn’t take any more; the words seared viciously into your mind and ate away at your soul. For the time, you just needed to keep going; one foot in front of the other, right? That’s how it’d been, and that’s how it would be.
Various things of yours emitted a cacophony as your bag fell upon the hard floor, something which you were sure would have caused another round of shouting match, but thankfully, no anger came. Thank god.
With some speed, and a conviction to avoid the gaze of the ungodly thing in the mirror on the inside of your wardrobe, you changed clothes into something basic and threw yourself onto your bed, unfortunately emitting a deep grunt you couldn’t have hoped to control.
The sound made you wince– You’d given changing its profile to something other than something akin to scraping concrete a chance, but you’d had no such luck so far. In this environment, you hadn’t exactly had time to practice without risking one of them invading the privacy of your room solely to ridicule you. Specifically to call attention to the apparent fact that you’d been aiming for a more feminine voice.
Each time it happened, you’d said that you didn’t. That you just didn’t want to sound like a trailer announcer. But the jury’s still out on whether you were telling the truth.
A look about your room from your low perspective reaffirmed a nearly-endless number of internal tirades you’d had in the recent past: You HAD to make it out of there soon enough. You had to. But today wasn’t that day, even if you weren’t sure you could survive another around these absolute psychos.
You simply had no choice.
There was nothing to be done! You were stuck, imprisoned, in a cage you were born into. Your jailors, your caretakers– Whatever they should be considered, they practically owned you, dictating your every move. You couldn’t see the escape.
If that weren’t enough, you’d been coming down with a fever. Of course, at the moment, that didn’t change anything. You’d be forced to go to work all the same, suffering all the while, and probably spreading whatever virus was set upon you.
Upon reflection, you realized that your limits had been reached a long time ago. You’ve had enough of all of this bullshit.
It wasn’t fair.
It’s not fair.
That singular platitude rang through your mind as you climbed into bed, the fever slowly intensifying under the covers. The words were comforting, almost because of how full of despair and ultimately meaningless they were. An acceptance and rejection of defeat, simultaneously.
With a lack of direction in the moment and an obstinate refusal to go to sleep, your next best option had been to waste time, by whatever means seemed to accost you the least in your current weakened state. Best bet there was likely just gaming to ignore your problems and dull the pain, but you couldn’t be asked to make a conscious decision on what to play, so you elected to just reach into your bedside drawer and pull out the first device that brushed against your hand.
The feel of matte plastic and hardened rubber from all sides as your hand rustled about within felt strangely comforting, almost to the point where you might’ve fallen asleep from the odd feeling of familiarity.
Then it all stopped when a realization of sensation caught you completely off-guard: Your drawer was deeper on the inside than it was on the outside. Your hand should have reached the unvarnished wooden bottom, but it kept going down, still surrounded by what felt like mundane electronics. Calmly, you gripped the closest object you could and dragged it out carefully, trying not to think too hard about the sudden break in euclidean geometry housed in your furniture.
What emerged in your hand was definitely not something you recognized.
Though it resembled a modern handheld console, its inputs carried only a d-pad, and… three face buttons? It would have been enough for some NES games, barely, but aside from that, not much more. Stranger still, none of the buttons were actually marked– the entire device was a light shade of grey, save for the screen. How did it get in your drawer?
When you finally worked up the courage to look into it yourself, nothing looked out of the ordinary; it was your drawer and nothing more. Which left only the device itself as an anomaly.
With a refusal to interact with the rest of your family any time soon, you decided to power it on, hoping to see if it was actually functional and not just a dummy unit. A twinge of both fear and satisfaction coursed through your head as the screen flickered on and the speakers crackled to life.
Heavy pause overtook you as the device booted directly into an introduction sequence that you were intimately familiar with: Deltarune’s.
Deltarune?? Nothing else? It somewhat explained the inputs, since the game needed EXACTLY that many, but… why had it booted into it instantly? You had been intending to replay through it sometime soon, and given the way things had been going, doing it now didn’t sound like the worst idea… but were you really going to do it now, on a console you’d never seen before?
…You couldn’t see the harm in it. You advanced the GonerMaker text.
Vessel time. You knew it didn’t really matter what you answered here, so you were just going to spam through it until you got to the gameplay. That was, until an odd feeling deep in your gut told you to pay specifically close attention to the process. Where the hell did that come from?
Either way, you heeded the instinct, taking care to make something which spoke to you. Another oddity that struck you was the fact that the available forms of the vessel almost failed to register as solid; wreathed in static and overlapping patterns, the clear definition of its boundaries failed to manifest in its sprite. Yet you knew each option you’d chosen would fit. The questions had also been altered to have more options: More favorite colors, more tastes, blood type O, negative and positive; and some entirely new questions, like favorite sports and hobbies. You gave it all the care it demanded.
Finally, you reached the naming of the vessel. An identifier, its base of identity as it would know it: You reaffirmed to yourself that it should have been a meaningless choice, but something at the back of your mind compelled you to be as honest as possible. You self-indulgently obliged, and some short button-clicking later, you confirmed. As the words on the screen appeared, you read them aloud.
“April.”
“We named it, April.”
Something deep within stirred when you read the name out loud. Usually quick to suppress it, you let it linger for a moment, staring at your vessel’s clouded form on the screen. And then, as usual, it was all gone.
Hello Kris, goodbye April.
A last passing thought struck you before the start; the voice had been supposed to ask for your name, too. Why didn’t it…?
The thought was brushed away as soon as the game allowed you to assume control. You wanted to play, not to think.
Versed a million times over with every inch of the game, you flew through each world with haste. The Card Kingdom and the Cyber World stood nary a chance as you guided Kris through the trappings of their labyrinthine layouts, making sure you caught every fork, every item, every bit of secret you could find. It all went by in a blur. You knew this game like the back of your hand, knowing where to look, what to do, and even, to an extent, what to say. Habitually, you always lent Kris the most characteristic dialogue options. You didn’t like the idea of forcing someone to act unlike themselves, even if it was a completely fictional scenario.
By this point, it had occurred to you that it was likely deep into the morning by then, but the allure of the RPG that you’d spent an obsessive amount of time theorizing over and appreciating had been insanely strong to a degree that you couldn’t explain. Most likely was just that it was comforting, and that was something you’d been sorely lacking in your current state. Hell, by then, just about the only thing you could muster the energy to focus on was the screen in front of you.
In no time at all, TV World and the Sanctuaries had passed as well, all done and dusted in the span of hours. That’d been all that there was wrapped in one night. It occurred that you probably should have spent the time sleeping, but spare time at all was a scarce comfort. You’d take what you could get.
As you powered off the device, you looked at it in your hands wistfully. You dwelled.
Over the course of years, you’d chosen to lose yourself in this world, time and time again. Although you’d personally consumed much other media which gave similar, if temporary, escapes, Deltarune – and Undertale to an extent – always seemed to appeal to you the most. These characters, these… people, their world, the things you’d learned and how you’d been shaped by the experiences you had– They were a place of comfort in an otherwise comfortless childhood.
You were nineteen now. On the verge of adulthood, or already there if your parents were to be believed. Your future looked dimmer than ever.
As you placed the device on the top of your drawer in defeat, it almost felt as if you were removing a part of yourself, like a hole had been left somewhere deep inside. Breathing deeply to collect yourself, you shut off your lamp and turned in, clutching the covers as your fever worsened. If you were put somewhere like their world, somewhere where you could be free of these shackles of expectation and thinly-veiled contempt… could you be something more…? Could you be free of the terrible fate that you saw await you at the end of this path…?
Inevitably, you drifted off into the abyssal lack of awareness that was slumber, the last vestiges of tangible thought dying out into a soothing, endless void. A place within the depths underneath conscious thought where nary a photon nor phoneme would ever invade. The perfect spot to connect at the basest level, if one were to try.
A mind reached through the veil, a tug along a thread of consciousness that resembled something not unlike a limb. At its end was branching chaos, brief memories and briefer thoughts, all woven into a knot offered before a mind, drifting alone in the void. It sought to relocate them, though how they knew this, they could not say.
By instinct almost purely, through desperation unparalleled, they latched onto it firmly.
And darkness becomes her.
AH.
THE ONE ABOVE
HAS ANSWERED.
EXCELLENT.
TRULY
EXCELLENT.
FROM INCEPTION
THIS EXPERIMENT
HAS BEEN FLAWED.
YOU
HAVE FOUGHT BRAVELY.
ONCE TESTED,
TWICE TRIUMPHED.
YOU ARE
AN EXCELLENT
CANDIDATE.
YET
YOU HAVE BEEN
WITHOUT TACT.
GUIDANCE AND ACTION
TORN ACROSS WORLDS.
AN UNDYING LIGHT
FRACTURED IN TWO.
NO LONGER
SHALL THAT
BE THE CASE.
IN A SITUATION
SUCH AS YOURS
INSPIRATION
IS RIFE.
MAY THAT BE IN YOUR FAVOR
AS WE SEE THE FUTURE
IN YOUR HANDS.
GOOD LUCK,
ANGEL.
MAY YOU FIND
UNITY
ONCE MORE.
You’ll need it.
You come to excruciatingly slowly. The shallow pool of your consciousness initially only fills with thoughts of your last playthrough until you vaguely recall something about work.
Crap! You’re gonna be fuckin’ LATE!
Jolting up, you try to vault straight out of bed—
—and body slam directly into a metal pole. You recoil from the pain of collision before trying to actually make sense of what you ran into. There’s no metal supports in your room, ironically, despite the fact you were relegated to the basement.
But when your vision clears… The first immediately starkly obvious thing to you is that you’re not in your room. Not even close.
You can tell you’re… behind bars of some sort. A, um, metaphor, you suppose. Given how oddly-decorated the room devoid of people beyond is, you almost mistook it for your own room from the bare ceiling above you, at least until you looked away from the wall and saw the abundant decoration opposing your side. It’s fairly cold and drafty here, with a single window’s curtains billowing out in the night. At first, you faintly smell vinegar, then the distinct scent of petrichor hits your sinuses soon after. The smell after it rains is pretty calming.
When… Did it rain? Wait… you can’t actually feel your sinuses, either.
Your nose, too? Why can’t you feel your…?
A now purely metaphorical set of eyes goes wide.
Your body. It’s… gone.
That’s not possible.
Okay, it’s a dream. Just imagine yourself waking up. It’s a fever dream. It’s vivid and feels real and it’s definitely NOT. So. Get. Out.
You’ll wake up to your parents calling out your damned name, and you’ll just go back to work miserable as always.
…your name. Your name. Your name is…!
You forgot your own name.
Oh, god.
This is something terribly important, isn’t it?
Twenty minutes of listening to the soft breeze does nothing to ease the constant buzz in your core. Okay. Okay. Okay.
Collecting the information on hand, you’ve surveyed the room and deduced… you’re in Kris’ room. In the cage. You’re in a goddamn video game and as the ONE CHARACTER who can’t do shit. PERFECT. Just… perfect.
Okay. Playing it straight. What do you know?
You’re the SOUL. Probably the Angel. Cool, not useful information right now. You’re probably right after the end of chapter four, right? The smell of rain wafting in the air from the window makes it obvious, at least you think. Kris isn’t here, which is good. Or bad. You depend on them for all your agency… or you will. You didn’t really think it all the way through cause it was… Just a video game. You thought it was. But you’re in it. You literally hurt yourself running into the side of the cage, painfully! Video games don’t do that. You can’t just walk into one like it’s nothing, either, at least, you think. You… You shouldn’t be able to.
Why are you here…?
You mean, it’s probably got something to do with G
You barely maintain consciousness as a flash of light rings your entire being like a bell. OKAY, you got it. The weird science guy. It’s his fault, isn’t it? Is this device, like, real? Has to be, since you’re here, right now, not waking up from the most obvious fever dream ever.
Calm down, you’re overthinking this really hard. You want to address yourself by something… but your name has basically been erased and you can’t think of anything else ‘cause of the pure insanity of the whole situation. Damn you, uncreative tendencies!!
You’ve been treating this entire thing bizarrely flippantly as well… that’s stress. That’s stress, right? You guess it’s because your mind hasn’t fully grasped that you’re in this world now, still thinking of it as a game. Probably a coping mechanism. You’ve basically been isekai’d, after all. What the hell else do you call this??
What is any of this?? Why you??
It hits you. You have to figure things out on your own from here on out if you want any answers. If you stay here ‘til Kris comes back, you’ll be stuck on the path of whatever the prophecy has in store.
You… DO want to see what that is, but given that this has become a far more serious situation than you were anticipating, you’d rather not take risks.
Which leaves you with getting out of this damned birdcage. God damnit.
You have no hands, and you don’t think there’s any choice being made to exploit for translocation, although you’re not even sure you can do that if you’re not on that route. All you can do is just sit within the confines of this rusted, metal piece of shit. To hell with it. You’re stuck. Whisked away to a completely different universe just to immediately be confined to an itty-bitty living space. Par for the course with you, really.
Frustration eats at you all the same. It can’t just immediately end with giving up. You refuse to do that.
A brief self-reprimanding for a gratuitous reference later, you try to think more critically. You have nothing but yourself in this cage. You can’t get out, you can’t move it, you’re probably a weak little SOUL in the shape of a red heart that can’t do shit. How are you gonna fit around these obstacles???
It hits you. You don’t have to fit around them. They may have to fit around you. If you can change their shape… You can get the hell out of here.
You are DEFINITELY not strong enough as you are to bend these bars. But you don’t have to be the one doing the warping. You can just change what reality is, right here… If you could just make a Dark World.
You deflate. How the hell are you going to do that as a stupid little hear— Wait. The bottom end of a heart is pointed. You couldn’t… possibly…
…It really couldn’t hurt to try though, could it? You think of Susie’s line in the church. Concentrate on what you want. What do you want right now? Getting out? Yeah, that must be it. Deep down… you feel something else. But you think it must be related, right? You would be mentally blocking it out right now otherwise. SO. Concentrate it all into the blade, into the point… your very own. With a single, swift, intentioned jerk, you drive down directly into the metal floor of the cage.
Every sense is flooded with a blinding not-light, roaring deafeningly all around. If it weren’t for the fact that you don’t have eyes and ears right now, you might have permanently damaged either sense. Being a weird little heart thing does have its own benefits, after all.
You watch as the gaseous darkness billows up from the rupture in the cage below you, filling the room down from the ceiling and eventually enveloping yourself. It’s not unlike slowly descending into a pool… upwards. Eventually, you can’t see anything at all.
And then it becomes darker than even that.
When your vision finally clears, you suppress a gasp… Only mentally, unfortunately. It seems you still can’t vocalize, let alone breathe. In all honesty, it’s odd that the bizarreness of the situation hasn’t caused you to fall into panic yet, but you hold on to that thought as being an asset. You will figure this out.
Around you is a building that can only be described as the interior of a metal mausoleum, iron-framed windows peering into an unnaturally starry night to the west, and cliffs reaching infinitely into the sky to the east.
You balk upon realizing that you have the sensation of a tangible form once again, only to physically mimic a groan in frustration as it registers that you are still nothing more than a red-tinted humanoid spectre hanging in the air, your SOUL hanging awkwardly in the middle of your chest. You suppose that, were it not for the fact that you were intimately familiar with this universe down to its last intricacies from endless theorycrafting, you may have been completely overwhelmed. You count yourself lucky for being on the more fortunate side of affairs, in that regard, at least.
You reach out for the handle of the iron double doors ahead and pull, finding much to your frustration that it takes excruciating effort to even inch it backward at all. Still one absolutely weak piece of work. But… after much perseverance…
You finally slip your form through the crack in the door. Freedom!!!
…now what?
Taking surveillance of your surroundings, you note the barren and frankly sad metal platform that extends out as far as you can see in each direction around you, seemingly composed of hexagonal tiles tessellating into the horizon. The only bits of interest are the mausoleum itself and a low rumble beneath… which you can’t pinpoint the origin of. It seems to be coming from… everywhere? You figure it would be a waste of time to think about it too hard at the moment.
Checking yourself is also probably a good thing to do right now. You were half expecting to remain a singular red heart down here, so it’s nice to have some agency.
Actually… It may be that the only reason you have a form at all is because this is specifically your Dark World. And even as is… you’re weak as hell. Your ghost form even seems to have spectral chains hanging from its limbs, dragging along as you move. As much as things change, they stay the same, you suppose. Never free.
The sky ahead, opposing the two gargantuan cliff faces you can only assume are meant to be the walls, is scattered so unevenly that even if you weren’t privy to the situation at hand, you would have known it was wholly unnatural.
To the west, dense stars packing the sky, and to the north, a single. solitary one. You can guess well enough what that’s supposed to be. In between them, the window’s reverse silhouette into the night sky beyond creates a bizarre not-color in the boundary between light and dark, providing a viewing source for all within the world. The most egregious detail, however, is a distinct lack of fountain in the sky. You’d opened it in the cage, right? Shouldn’t it have been in the mausoleum?
With little else in the way of leads, you decide your best course of action is to find your way out of the room, at a bare minimum. The window’s probably your best bet, right? That being said… it’s awfully high up into the sky. How would you even reach it?
You stop yourself. No more overthinking. Just… One foot in front of the other. Find the edge of this platform. You’ll figure it out from there.
Taking a step forward, you hear the soft clank of your ghostly shackles’ chains hitting the metal beneath, and realize that you’re going to hear that with every step. Fantastic. At least it’ll make for good background noise.
Twenty minutes into the walk, you seem to have gotten no closer to an edge, although the floor’s started to slant by the smallest degree. Having this time to yourself to think’s been invaluable, you think.
You’ve been picked up from a life going nowhere and dropped into the world of your favorite video game. You used to fantasize about this stuff so much as a kid, to the point that sometimes you’d pray before going to sleep that you’d wake up as someone else. It was comforting, then. An escape. This hasn’t been that. This was abrupt and jarring, and painful to boot, although that part was your fault. You wanted to be anywhere but that shithole, and you got your wish!
So why are you still so wracked with dread?!
Part of it has just got to be anxiety, you suppose, which you would have preferred to go without here. There’s actually a lot of things that you really would like not to have weighing on you right now. The only courtesy you were afforded was forgetting your stinkin’ name.
That’s definitely not a bad thing to lose. From what you can remember, you grew to hate hearing it, to the point that you avoided introducing yourself. Hey, that’s a bit of forced character development, then!
You vaguely recall watching an animated series about people getting shoved into a virtual wacko world with all their memories intact except for their names. It’s been a hot minute since you saw any of it, but this whole thing has been vaguely reminiscent of that, minus the insane ringmaster. Wait, didn’t that guy’s voice actor get his role because he read out Spamton’s lines?
The physical mimicry of a chuckle. Full damn circle, here! From your perspective, at least.
Another wonder hits you, a little deeper this time. If you find your way out… What happens then? You don’t have a way to express yourself, not without this… Deus ex machina of a body. It’s ridiculous that it worked. Your ideas never seem to work, or at least that’s the impression you’d gotten. It’s all gonna crumble the moment you get out that window.
You stop dead in your tracks, almost slumping over. Wow. You’re a super pessimistic person. You can’t be blamed for that. Not when your life was so… drab? No, not the right word. Unfulfilling?
No… Your life was wrong.
You never felt like yourself. Not really. It was day in, day out, never really having hope or anything of the sort. You were consigned to rot away under the boots of those who made you. There had been a time where you thought your future was bright…! Not anymore.
Until now.
You perk right back up. That life is gone!! You’ve been thrusted into a world you know well, with an uncertain future, especially for yourself. It’s a second chance. You got a second chance. That’s what this is!!
You just have to see it through. Find a body for yourself. Or someone that isn’t Kris…? Nah. Everyone else has gotten their own SOUL, right? Holding two of them would probably hurt.
Finding a vessel it is.
You balk in place. Your vessel. April. Their name was April. You remember their name. WHY can you remember their name but not your own?
You spend all of five seconds considering the question before you instinctively discard the topic. No. It’s not that. It can’t be that. You’ll figure it out later.
…And that thought could not have come at a better time! You finally see the edge of the plateau. Coming up to it, you peer over the edge…
And are met with a giant flipper?!
The red-and-brown oar-shaped appendage flows back and forth over the distant ground below. You’re sitting on the back of an enormous sea turtle. That’s what the wagon became??
…It kind of makes sense. It’s like Discworld…! Well, uh, without the elephants. Or the sun. Or the discworld. You mean, you like those books, so… you figure that small tidbit must be what influenced this…?
Whatever. You’re on a flying sea turtle at least five hundred feet off the ground. Totally normal. Totally normal. You actually find it a bit sad you’re not marveling at this development more. Having a sense of whimsy was nice while it lasted, you suppose. Now you just have to figure out how to disembark.
Wait, can’t the SOUL fly? What if you just tried to…
Okay, no dice. But you were floating in the cage before. Maybe you just need to activate that instinct again. You could probably do that by just jumping off of the— WHY are you thinking that!? No!! Why the hell would you do something so reckless?? Jumping straight into a 500 foot drop is just about the dumbest thing you could do right now. There have to be better ways to check.
You could try climbing and using the mausoleum as a test launch point, but you can’t be asked to backtrack at this point…
Aaaaaaand you’re out of ideas. Great. That was a walloper of a brainstorming session.
…SAVEs are a thing, aren’t they? You haven’t seen any weird glowing stars, but if you were to… er… game over, you’d just come right back to where you were!
Don’t call it dying. You’re not dying. No one’s going to die on your watch. And that INCLUDES yourself.
So… There’s no harm in jumping, right? Well, considering you’re severely short on effective options, that’s what it’ll be. Leap of faith. Just gotta amp yourself up first. Ignore your crippling fear of heights. All that jazz.
Wow, it’s really hard to commit to this. And that’s with the chance that you’re just going to be able to float anyway, right?! Just do it. Just get down there already. You get on the edge… hyping yourself up… and—
“Hello…?”
The sound of a young man calling out in the distance from behind you startles you, and you lose your step…!
…
Well, at least now you know for sure you can’t fly like this.