#firmbodies being beings that made of things other than magic

[twitchesandstitches]

A Girl In The Underground

I was playing Undertale and I got to thinking; what if Sierra went through the events of a True Pacifist Frisk in Undertale’s plot, using magic to make a defensive shield and befriending everyone and hurting nobody?

Possibly as a backstory to the monsters joining the fleet; she set them all free, and their sheer numbers massively inflated the proto-Fleet, bringing it closer to its later status.

Not sure if this should be canon or not, as I’ve implied that the monsters joined the convoy at an earlier point than Sierra even being born. Still, it's fun to at least consider as a micro-AU!

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“We call it the Underground,” the skeleton-man said, shuffling through the snow and incidentally clearing a path for her to follow.

Sierra trundled along behind him; she was tall enough that she could handle the snow easily. By human standards, she was massive even just in her mid-teens; compared to some of the monsters she had encountered, she was so unbelievably wide, they were just so thin. Others had been a lot broader. Sans was almost dwarvish; he wasn’t particularly tall, but he was very wide and when he moved, it was like a low wall was shifting itself around. And of course Toriel was a giant, Sierra didn’t even known how she had fit into the cramped ruins-

She tried to put a stop on that thought. Thinking about Toriel, alone in the ruins now with the doorway sealed… it hurt too much.

The skeleton, Sans, stopped. “Hey, kiddo. What’s the hold up?”

Sierra wiped hot tears away from her eyes and tried to hide it. She sniffled wetly, all bundled up in the clothes Toriel had given her. Her old robes, big and thick enough for the ogrish monster mother, and Sierra was nearly swaddled in them, like a child walking around in her mother’s clothes.

Oh no. That hurt too.

“It’s nothing,” she said meekly, a girl who had grown up without someone to watch over her like that. It happened; not everyone in the convoy could spare attention for every individual kid, and their numbers had massively underestimated the amount of kids to go around.

She doubted she’d ever see the convoy again. Never see any of her friends again, her family. Just like how she’d never see Toriel again. She’d promised she wouldn’t go into the dark… wouldn’t open up that door again.

Promises hurt so much.

Sans was carefully looking the other direction. “Weather sure is nice today,” he said in a slightly overloud tone. “Guess I’ll just stand over here and let some snow fall on me. I don’t mind.”

Sierra sniffled gratefully, and he left her to her crying.

A few minutes later, her face was a slightly redder shade of brown, but she had let it out for now. “Thanks,” she mumbled, walking into step behind him. He continued moving on.

“Don’t know what you mean, kiddo,” he said, grinning cheerfully. It was funny, she considered. He wasn’t exactly a skeleton, in the sense of being animated bones. He looked like a human skeleton, close to it, but he wasn’t that. He almost looked like he had a solid carapace, bits that almost looked like bones. His face wasn’t a skull, though it looked like one; his expression shifted, a bit like some of the carapacians Sierra had seen on the fleet.

One eye socket glowed faintly. The other didn’t seem empty. Just dim, with only a faint hint of blue. He looked a bit like he was winking all the time, or was half-asleep.

They walked down the bridge, and Sierra’s heart skipped a beat as she looked down; there was nothing down there between the two cliffsides linked by bridge but a swirling chasm. There was blackness, a hint of proto-matter spontaneously appearing and then dissolving, and then… nothing at all. From a distance of what looked like millions of feet. So far down, the depths had its own micro-climate, and there were distant rushes of water where tiny rivers had formed and drained away into the abyss.

Stretching out sideways, the realm continued for some distance. Unimaginably far, miles and miles by the thousands, and Sierra thought that the cracks in the walls of the realm were broken down mountains, so large they had their own dour presence. Past them, beyond cracks so mind-breakingly big that Sierra thought you could fit a whole bunch of planets between them, there was the boundaries of the realm. More of the swirling abyss beyond them, and if you looked up, you saw more of the same.

The Underground, as Toriel had called it, was a prison. A vast realm indefinitely large enough for them to sprawl out, but a limited place. A dry place, and a dead one. Monster magic had brought life to it, but it was weak and fading.

The melancholy of the world around her would have brought Sierra to tears if she hadn’t already spent hers. She obliged her moral duty with a sad sigh. “It’s so big down here but it feels cramped at the same time.”

Sans shrugged as he tugged her open sleeve across the bridge. “Yeah. We’re stuck down here and we make the best of it. Shame you got stuck here.”

“I… might have come here on purpose,” Sierra said, and it wasn’t completely wrong. She had her information wrong, but she had always thought that a heroine-in-training ought to to certain things. She heard a tale of a dimension where persecuted monsters had been sealed away for eons, and she ran to help. That somehow, a human was important to freeing them; she ran faster to do that. And that her own people, the humans, were responsible for their suffering…

Well, that encouraged her to do it even more.

She was starting to suspect she had the facts a bit off.

She was lost in her thoughts and jerked with a surprise as Sans tugged her across the end of the bridge, and she sighed in relief as her feet found solid ground. She was thus unbalanced again when Sans casually said, “You haven’t killed anyone since you came down here, huh?”

She bristled indignantly. “Of course I haven’t! I won’t ever kill someone if I don’t have to!”

He gave her a look that was very hard to read. “...Y’know, most monsters, we don’t really fight. We communicate with magic, but, uh, you fleshy things. It can hurt you and we don’t even realize it.”

Sierra nodded. “Yeah, I figured.”

“But some of us will attack you. Maybe because they’re scared, or because they don’t think they have an alternative.”

“I won’t hurt anyone if I can find another way,” she promised.

He gave a sidelong look at her. “‘Spose it’s good you brought a shield, then, huh?”

Sierra clutched at the old toboggan board strapped to her back. “It’s not a shield! I mean, I’m using it as one, but that’s not what it’s meant for.”

Some part of her felt that the great heroine, Redglare, would probably be laughing at her right now. Not maliciously but still, laughing. For one thing, even if she was using magic, Sierra had no idea how she had channeled power into the toboggan and made it resist hits that should have shattered it.

She just really had thought, in the heat of her battle with Toriel and the crashing flames, that she really didn’t want to hurt anyone, or have to. And something had flowed out of her.

They continued along the path for some time.

“So… my friend in the ruins,” Sierra said, wincing at the lie. “She told me that there’s some kind of a barrier here? And it's what’s keeping the monsters trapped here?”

“Yep,” Sans agreed, snow crunching as they walked. “See, the Underground is a self-contained realm. It’s big, but it has its boundaries. You to go past them, and you just get fired back out. Only way in or out, and that’s the barrier.”

“...So if it was destroyed,” Sierra said slowly, the plan she’d been mulling over clicking into place. “You would be free?”

“...yeah,” he said, very quietly and wistful. He paused, glancing up and staring into the sky. An unchanging, empty sky, without sunlight or clouds or stars.

He didn’t much like thinking of a future where might see real stars. Hope was not something he dared to keep these days.

“So all I have to do is bust down the barrier!”

Sans said nothing to do that, not right away. He was too deep in thought.

The two walked down to the valley, where a town could be seen in the distance.

Eventually, the stocky skeleton spoke.

“The way out,” Sans said. “Is through the barrier. Past the king.”

“Barrier?”

“It’s the only way out of the Underground. And there’s no way of knowing how to bust through it. But human bodies work differently from monster bodies; we’re mostly made of magic and you ain’t!” he threw a friendly punch to her muscular arm to make the point. “So maybe you’re made of different stuff than us and you could just walk through.”

Sierra smiled, never considered that maybe he was choosing his words very carefully. “You really think so?”

“Yeah, could be. Whatever happens… you were nice to my brother, and you seem like a good gal. So I guess I’m rooting for ya, kid.”

He glanced at her shield again. A purely defensive weapon, from someone who could have killed to survive, and had refused to no matter how badly it hurt her. Someone with the resolve not to kill.

He thought of the six human souls, and how all they needed was one more.

And here she was.

And she was so nice.

Sans sighed. “I can’t believe someone like you wound up down here,” he said, and he meant it.