Entry 2

I knew this day was coming.

It's always been coming from the day I grafted these two from the marrow of my hands, the day that they first showed signs of life within the sterilised tubes they were grown inside of, the day I strapped them down to a table and drilled a metal plate into their hands, when the first of many agonised screams would echo from these walls.

I don't know why it bothers me so much, the thought of completing what I've been working on for so long. Perhaps it's because I never thought that this day would arrive, convinced that these experiments were doomed to be a failure as I waded through the dust of the creations that I had birthed, the last few remnants of the skeleton species that were damned to rot inside these green walls.

Perhaps it was because I was excited, marvelling at the thought that unlike those before them, these two subjects had lasted the longest, had not withered into dust unlike their predecessors. A part of me, no matter how much I wish to deny it, had wished to take these two home, to simply kill the human and forget about these experiments I had forsaken myself to, to show the two of them the Underground and the world they had never known and never would.

But that future was gone, buried underneath the screams and betrayal that had come from the day I had plugged the drill into the outlet, connected it with the marrow in their hands, their screams joining together in a chorus that never truly end. I should have known that, I should have accepted the fact that fantasies such as that were only for the weak-minded, for those that put their own selfish needs in front of the needs of others.

What I was doing, no matter how much I was troubled or mourned for the things I had done, it was inconsequential for what all of monsterkind was suffering, rotting in this dark world and would continue to do so for the rest of their lives if I did not continue with this experiment. My sufferings, their pains, it was necessary if there was any hope for a better future.

2-P was complete, or at least as ready as he would ever be. I did not want to imagine how his sibling will react upon seeing him, an emotionless and hollow vessel compared to the once vibrant youth that he had been. It is also admittedly curious to see how 1-S will function now without his brother. He lacks in the deflect to glow, a characteristic of the skeleton species in which we illuminate a part of our body - mainly focused in the eyes - to release a build-up of emotions. This defect was subdued in the fact that both 2-P and 1-S were able to join together and combine their abilities, to both release their emotions at once.

But given that 2-P has no soul, no way to harness the magic locked away inside his bones, I fear that there will be some consequences for 1-S without a way for him to glow and release the build-up of thought inside his mind. And with the world he lives in, one where there is no outlet of safety, I wonder how that will play upon his mental stability.

While curious, it is nothing I can trouble myself on. I am convinced now that 2-P will be the vessel required to absorb the human's soul and present it to the Barrier as the final human soul needed to break the Barrier and free all of monsterkind. The main challenge now is being able to adapt and change the human's soul so that it can be contained within a monster's vessel without shattering. While 2-P now has the structural capacity to maintain holding a human's soul, the soul by itself needs to be able to survive outside the human in a foreign place. I have a theory that increasing the levels of determination will allow it to persist outside of the body itself long enough so that I can present 2-P to the Barrier along with the other human souls.

But that does leave me with the problem of 1-S' fate. I do not know if I can bring myself to kill him upon the hypothetical scenario in which these experiments are a success and we can take down the Barrier. I am not sentimental, it would be a massive waste of effort and resources just to kill him on the whim.

Where 1-S lacks in physical strength, he makes up in intellect. He does not like to play onto it, but he is smarter than he leads others to believe. In a different situation, he would have made an ideal assistant with my research, though his current attitude towards me suggests that such a setup is nothing more than a faint hope. But then again, mind and memory are nothing more than brief fragments of code that can be altered if the right buttons are pushed. Perhaps there is a future for him.

I have allowed 1-S to return to the cell along with the human, though 2-P remans in my custody. They will begin to demand to see him soon and grow suspicious of my actions. Though I am near the end of these damned experiments, the human is still not ready, it is still too soon. I suppose I will have to tell them the truth eventually if I ever wish for them to somewhat comply with further experimentation.

Though if telling the truth would be for their own good, I do not know.

"Something's gone wrong."

"I'm sure everything's fine," you reassured Sans as you watched the skeleton pace back and forth around the cell, panic evident within his gaze. You wished more than anything to tell him the truth, to tell him that his brother was now nothing more than a hollow shell without a soul, no signs of life humming anywhere inside his bones. But just the thought of gazing into his eyes and seeing the sorrow that would inevitably follow was something you did not think you wanted to see nor did you think it was something you could handle.

"I mean, sure, sometimes we're gone for days on end, but never this long," the skeleton sat on the ground and buried his skull into his hands. "Oh god, what if he's dead? What if the scientist went too far and slipped up? It wouldn't surprise me if he did, he doesn't give a damn about whether we live or die anyway."

You did not think that last statement was true, that the scientist would not bat an eye should Sans or Papyrus wither away into dust. Despite his nonchalant attitude towards the mutilation and torture, you were convinced that a part of the scientist empathised with the sufferings of the two skeletons, that a part of him wanted to reach out and save the two of them and yet was held back by strings unseen, bound by whatever goal he was working to achieve.

"I-I can't," Sans muttered, beginning to rock back and forth. "If he's gone, if Papyrus is dead, then there's nothing here, no life, nothing. He's the last bit of anything, any hope that exists here. And if that's gone, extinguished, than what is there for us? It's never going to end, (Y/n). We're going to be stuck here day after day, enduring one torture after the next until the scientist slips up again, cuts a little deeper than he meant and it's our turn to die."

"That's not going to happen!" You snapped a little louder than you meant to. "There is a world outside these walls, you can catch a glimpse of it through the cracks in the tiles. What may seem forever is only fleeting, big things that seem impassible that fall the next second when you least expect it. One day we will get out of here, one day we will earn the freedom we've been waiting for so long."

"There isn't a future," Sans snarled. You noticed an odd sight near his left eye, the way that a blue and yellow iris seemed to flicker there for a moment before fading out of sight, as if some pent up energy was trying to escape from him. "We're going to die down here, wither into dust while the monsters in this world live about without a clue of who we are. We could scream as loud as we wanted to and nobody would hear us, nobody would care. Nobody is coming for us. Who knows, maybe the monsters were the ones that ordered this to happen for whatever reason. Maybe - "

"What's wrong with your eye?" You intervened, pointing to the flicker of blue electricity that was crawling across his skull like a serpent. Sans stopped talking and raised a shaking hand to his eyesocket as the tip of his finger brushed against the magic.

"It's a thing skeletons can do, where we harness our thoughts and feelings into a certain part of our body and released all the pent-up emotion," Sans explained, though the panicked expression on his features did not offer you the slightest relief. "I used to be able to do it through my eyes but something went wrong a few experiments ago and I lost the ability. It isn't a big deal since Papyrus was able to help me siphon off some of it, but now that he's gone - "

Sans could not finish speaking as he doubled over, attempting to restrain the blue energy and magic that was threatening to tear him apart. "What do I do?" You asked, rushing over to his side, attempting to figure out how you could remove the energy that was building up inside him as a result of his emotional state.

"You have to - " The skeleton leaned against the wall, pressing his head against his hand. He stumbled forwards as a fresh wave of pain racked across him and you moved to his side to prevent Sans from falling over. As if sensing your presence, the blue electricity that crackled around his bones began to snake its way across your arm. You tried to remove your hand from where it was clamped around Sans' forearm but found it stuck there, held in place by the energy that was binding the two of you together.

But the energy was not only winding its way across your limbs, it was pressing its way into your mind, undoing any mental barriers you attempted to set up around yourself, destroying them like they were nothing, leaving you exposed and vulnerable. The energy wrapped around your consciousness, isolating it from the rest of your body and you felt yourself being lifted as if weightless, leaving behind the mortal trappings of your corporeal form and into a world that was white that knew no beginning and no end.

Your first thought was that you had finally escaped the prison you had been inside your entire life but later realised that this wasn't and couldn't be the case. Everything in this white world seemed flat and without definition. As you looked down at your own hands, you found them to be a pure black colour, similar to the shade that composed the writing on the scientist's notes that he often kept on his clipboard. You too seemed flat, as if you were drawn on a sheet of paper rather than existing in a physical world.

Shaking, you took a step forward in an attempt to locate Sans. The energy that had left him and gathered into your thoughts was still there, linking you to him. You weren't sure how long you wandered this world for until you came upon a strange-looking prison that was composed of black bones that jutted out of the ground at awkward angles, trapping a skeleton-like figure within. You thought it to be Sans as you wandered the outside of the prison, wondering how he was trapped in there.

When you attempted to communicate with him, you found that no sound left your mouth. You weren't sure if you even had a mouth in this one-dimensional world. Determined, you wrapped your fingers around the bones that constructed the cage and began to pull, desperate to remove them from where they trapped the skeleton. You felt immensely tired as you managed to remove one bone that constructed the cage, as if you were doing more than just disassembling something, as if you were using the energy within your own body to repair something broken inside the skeleton himself.

Ignoring the crashing wave of fatigue that dawned over you, you wrapped your hand around another bone and removed one after another before there was a clear pathway for Sans to walk through. He reached out a bony hand and wrapped his fingers around yours. You pulled with all your might as you ripped him from the cage he was trapped inside, a gasp escaping your lungs as your consciousness began to return to your body, leaving this flat world and returning to the hell of reality that you had come to known for far too long.

When you opened your eyes once more to embrace the coldness of the green tile floor you lay upon, you found that the blue energy was gone, no sign that it had ever existed in the first place. Sans was leaning against the wall, looking dazed. "What the hell happened?" you asked, rubbing your head as you got back up to your feet.

"I-I don't know," the skeleton stammered. "But all of the magic, the pent-up rage and anger and hatred, it's all gone."

"For now," you replied darkly, wondering what had transpired. You knew that your consciousness had been raised to another plain of existence, one where neither time nor physical space seemed to exist. It had happened only when you had allowed yourself to take on the magic and emotions that were gathering inside Sans, unable to be expelled since he lacked the ability to remove them. Perhaps by allowing the two of your minds to mix for a brief second, for two consciousnesses to take on the burden of sharing a torrent of emotion, did it allow for the pent-up emotions inside Sans to release as if he had removed it through the normal process that a skeleton often dissipated their rage and anger.

There was, however, no time to discuss what had happened as the laser that normally kept you trapped wavered and vanished from view as the scientist returned, holding the slumped form of Papyrus strung over his shoulder. "You have asked to see your counterpart and I have granted that request. Take it as you will, but his condition cannot be reversed, nor do I have any intentions of fixing it. The two of you will not be alive longer to care as of anyway."

Before Sans or you could begin to even ask a series of questions, the scientist dumped Papyrus' limp body into the room before typing a sequence of digits into a keypad on the wall and the laser once more popped into existence. He walked down the hallway, whistling a tune to himself.

"P-Papyrus?" Sans took a step closer to his brother who had not stirred from the spot in which he had been deposited by the scientist. There was something sickening at the way Papyrus remained, the way that he was alive and the way that his internal structures functioned just as fine as yours and Sans', and yet there was no trace of vitality or anything inside him. Sans prodded his brother once on the side as if to get a response.

When the latter of the two again did not respond, Sans turned towards you, his eyesockets dark, reflecting every ounce of hatred and bitterness that was accumulating inside of him. You did not think this was particularly a good thing, the way that the skeleton allowed such emotions to manifest so quickly inside himself. He had already proven a few minutes ago that he didn't have any way of channelling his emotions without someone else helping him and you didn't think you had the strength right now to do so again any time soon.

"He's gone," Sans snapped, taking a step away from the lifeless form of his brother. "He scooped out whatever made Papyrus himself and threw it away like it was nothing. He's not even alive, there's not even a whisper of the person that he used to be. What's the point of living then, of fighting to stay alive in this damn hell when the scientist can do whatever the hell he wants whenever he feels like it? What's the point in our existence if he can wipe our mind clean in a matter of seconds without any regard to anything that we've ever been through?"

You wanted to comfort him but could not think of the words that could bring such an intended effect. Sans did have a point though. How unnerving it was to think that there was any hope for you in the future when your entire existence could be erased, scooped away and discarded like it had never been there in the first place!

You did not bring your gaze to meet Papyrus', whose empty eyesockets stared into the flickering light of the laser they could not see. Sans had retreated into the farthest corner of the cell, attempting to put as much distance between himself and his brother as possible, treating the shell of a skeleton as if he was nothing more than poison. "I know why he did this," Sans muttered, his eyes trained on the wall. "He wanted to show us that there isn't any hope for us, that there is no end to any of this and at any moment, he could do the same to us as he did with Papyrus."

As you turned over to one side, preparing to delve into the world of dreams and forget about the nightmares of the present, you knew and perhaps even Sans knew that there was worse a fate in store for the both of you. If the scientist had intended to do the same to the two of you as he had done with Papyrus, you would already be a blank slate staring at the wall without the slightest flicker of consciousness. No, the truth of it was that there was a much darker future in store, one that was shrouded in shadow and uncertainty, so uncertain to such a degree that even Heisenberg himself would not be able to make sense of it.

And so the last of the lights within the laboratory darkened, once more signaling that another night had fallen upon the green tomb with no end in sight, just another night of many that never seemed to have an end. Somewhere else in the laboratory, the shadows of the night began to stir, grinning as the last of the light within this placed ceased being and paved the way for the jesters of night to once more begin their dance.