"What did Mammon do now?"
The greedy demon was in his underwear, hanging upside down from a rafter in the hallway. He tried to coerce you into letting him down as you walked by, but you knew better than to do so without consulting Lucifer.
"Gambling. The usual." Lucifer had a hand on his forehead, pushing his hair up while jotting something down at his desk.
"Mammon gambles every day," you pointed out. "What'd he really do?"
By the way Lucifer groaned, you knew it was something juicy. "I caught him pilfering one of my rarest records, a gift from Diavolo, to use as collateral in a bet. It's one-of-a-kind. I doubt he even knows what it is, but Mammon always has a knack for finding things of high value."
"His secret sixth sense," you agreed. "What'd you do with his clothes?"
"They make it harder to tie him up tightly. He has a slightly higher chance of wiggling free with clothes on, so I made him strip." Lucifer gestured, Mammon's clothes had been put on some kind of mannequin, tucked away in the space between two bookshelves.
You'd never seen it before. Your jaw dropped into the widest half-smile half-astonished expression possible. It had Mammon's hair and his goofy smile. Even a flashy golden earring. "What is that?"
You practically ran across the room to inspect it. It was dressed properly in Mammon's shirt and tie. There were a lot of seams, more than seemed necessary, perhaps from being repeatedly repaired over years of use. "Lucifer, this is adorable."
"It's a necessary tool for my sanity." He pushed the chair back, standing up to join you.
"What do you mean?"
"I'll give you a demonstration."
Lucifer comically wound up his closed fist. With ballistic force, he struck the figure right in its chest. It flopped back, then sprung back up wildly to receive a fistful of lighter blows from Lucifer.
"You made a Mammon punching bag? Really?" You didn't know whether to laugh or cry. "Isn't that a bit much?"
"I didn't make it, Mammon did."
Surprise of the day number two. "Mammon made this? Himself?"
To stop the wobbling, Lucifer grabbed the punching bag's tie, pulling it tight and then smoothing it out. "Cute, right? He thought it might make me go easy on future punishments. It's a very thoughtful gift from my little brother."
"Yeah, I didn't know he could sew. Huh." The two of you stood to admire it before Lucifer returned to his desk. You followed him. "Kind of reminds me of the doll Levi made of me."
Lucifer smiled. "Leviathan made you a doll, did he? How very kind."
"No, he made a doll of me."
Lucifer froze to process this information, frowning.
You continued, "I don't know where he usually keeps it, but I saw it under his desk one time. It's pretty big and detailed. I mentioned it once and offered to lend him a shirt for it, but he got really embarrassed and pushed me out. He's gotta take more pride in his work, it was really impressive."
"I see." Lucifer gritted his teeth. "You know, something I have to do just came up. Let's finish this conversation later." He was quietly seething as he escorted you to the door. Along the way he gave punching-bag Mammon a soft whack to the head.
You realized you forgot to ask if you could untie the real Mammon, but Lucifer had already marched down the hall in the direction of Leviathan's room. Rather than trying to catch up, you decided to go see how the Avatar of Greed was doing.
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The giant was in an iron cage that had once held an elephant in the menagerie.
Here in the dungeons, it was still too small for it to sit up in. It was lying on its side, knees drawn up to its chest, facing the opposite wall.
Gretta had been forbidden to see it. Well, no, that wasn’t right – nobody had even told Gretta that it was here. Her sisters and the staff of the castle had apparently been expressly forbidden to tell her, but Margit had a soft heart and told her the night before that they had finally caught the giant.
It stung that even her little sister had been told and that she hadn’t.
She didn’t sleep after that, and she spent the long morning looking for an opportunity to slip away. Now in the gloom of the dungeon, she stood in the entranceway and watched the slow rise and fall of the giant’s breathing.
She could feel the heart in her chest beating, a quick thud-dump, thud-dump, thud-dump that shook her whole body. Once upon a time the giant was a menace that had pillaged and ransacked the whole western coast of the kingdom. It was a story her mother had told her and her sisters and had made Margit burst into tears in the middle of the night–
“I know that heartbeat.”
Gretta froze. The words had been slow, and low, and had made pebbles on the stone floor shiver.
Chains started to jingle together. “That is a heart I’ve not heard beat in three long years,” the giant said as it started to turn in its cage. “I’d know it anywhere.”
The giant settled on its other side. In the low glow of the dungeon’s torches, its grin gleamed like rubies.
“Hello again,” the giant rumbled. “Do you remember me?”
Gretta swallowed. She remembered–
She remembered being lulled to sleep as the carriage rocked on the highland road. She remembered the door being pulled off its hinges with a shower of splinters. She remembered the grey hand as wide as a wagon wheel reaching out to her–
She remembered waking up with a long, delicate stitch along her sternum.
Her hand reached unthinking to feel the long scar under her shirt.
“Yes,” she said. “You’re the giant who put its heart in my chest.”
“I missed the sound of it. It’s beating fast, so very fast.” The ruby grin flashed again. “Are you frightened of me?”
Gretta stared. Then she set her shoulders and turned her chin up to a haughty angle. “I’m not frightened of an animal in a cage,” she said.
The grin vanished. “Fine,” it said. The chains rattled again as it turned to stare up at the ceiling.
“I want to know why you did it.”
There was a very long, thoughtful pause. For a moment she was worried it wasn’t going to speak.
“I’m sure you guessed,” it finally rumbled. “The queen did – she only caught me to confirm what she already knew. A giant cannot be killed while its heart is outside of its body.” Another sound of metal as it shrugged. “Other giants bury their hearts or hide them in an egg in a duck in a well in a church on an island. I wanted something more… certain.”
“And that’s why you chose me?”
The giant was silent. The heart in her chest continued to beat, thud-dump, thud-dump, thud-dump…
The giant sighed. “It was never meant to be you,” it said. “I meant to grab the seventh daughter.”
Gretta blinked. “Margit?”
“Oh yes. Sweet, simpering, insipid Margit, who still sings with the birds and cries over baby animals. The kingdom would’ve had a conniption over having to kill her to kill me – if they did, it would be such a heinous death that they would remember it for generations in song and story. And I would’ve gotten my immortality either way.
“Instead I got you.” The giant looked back at Gretta and gave her a look of such contempt she nearly reeled. “You,” the giant said again, and she had never heard the word said with more disgust. “Who cares about you.”
“Excuse me!”
“Sixth of seven daughters,” the giant said. “Not the eldest, not the youngest, not even a proper middle child. An extra. A spare. Worthless, except for maybe an interesting marriage.”
“You have no right to–”
“They’ll just kill you.”
The dungeon was suddenly deathly still.
“They won’t be happy about it,” the giant continued, turning to stare at the ceiling again. “They’ll be very somber and austere and I have no doubt that Margit will cry over you, as she does over all little animals about to die. But they’ll say that you’re more valuable dead than I am alive, and so for the sake of the kingdom you will be given the noble task of dying. And that will be the end of us both.”
Gretta opened her mouth. She closed her mouth. She opened her mouth again. “Is that it?! If you’re so sure, why don’t you – why don’t you break out of your chains? Ransack the castle? Run back to your mountain, do something?”
“What an odd thing to say,” the giant said. “You know that if I live, I can escape to murder and pillage and ransack again. Surely, any good princess would want only the best for their people.”
Gretta said nothing. The heart in her chest went thud-dump, thud-dump, thud-dump…
She could feel the giant’s grin. “The queen had me captured so she could confirm what she already knew,” it said. “It seems to me that you’re here to do something very similar.”
Halfway up the stairs from the dungeon, Gretta ran into her mother.
Gretta stared. Her mother blinked. Gretta considered her options.
She set her head at a haughty angle. “I know you caught it,” she said.
There was a very long, thoughtful pause.
“What did it tell you?” her mother asked.
Gretta looked at her mother. She looked at her mother’s hand on the hilt of her sword.
She felt the beat of her heart go thud-dump, thud-dump, thud-dump.
“Nothing I didn’t already know,” she said.
She ran away that night.
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please think about how toriel exists as a purposeful venture by toby fox to create a "mom" character who isn't just there to write letters to the protagonist offscreen and act as motivation for them even though we barely know her and actually reacts realistically when innocent children leave her safe home to go on a dangerous adventure because of the inherent and rarely-explored grief and tragedy that come with being such a character in a video game, to be powerless to do anything but watch as both your children sacrifice themselves for a cause they ABSOLUTELY should not have to die for at their age, because that's your only role in the narrative, and you're the "mom," just there to make them pie, and whenever you find another child they always ALWAYS leave you in the same way and die and you feel like you keep losing second and third and fourth etc etc chances. if only you could redeem yourself. if you can save even a single child, that will make it okay, right? that will mean there is hope for you. this time will be different, you'll see. you'll destroy the exit to the ruins. you'll never let asriel and chara your dear fallen wards go again.
moreover, please think about how in deltarune chapter 3, toriel will almost certainly be a major part of the adventure. she will get to accompany her beloved child as they explore a strange, daunting new world, bond with them, learn more about their delightful new friend, FINALLY she will not have to simply stand there in the shadows. the tragedy of the nameless mother who never gets to look after her child in video games as they fight has been explored thoroughly, and now we can delve into something both delightful and potentially even MORE heartbreaking: the mother who HAS to watch her child fight.
on an unrelated note, y'know how the game over screen in chapter 2 has whatever companion you're with begging kris to wake up get up as they lie there, ostensibly dead?
...yeah. think about that for a second as well.
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