Today probably couldn't go any worse.

"Okay," you thought aloud, pacing back and forth. Occasionally you would bump into a piece of furniture that was concealed in the darkened world of the monsters, only adding to the growing sense of panic that was building inside your mind. "So I've been abandoned in a place with no way out, where I'm probably going to starve to death while a psychotic skeleton is out on the Surface probably about to end the whole of human civilization."

Honestly, things weren't that bad when compared to the one night where you had eaten five too many burritos.

Your hands trailed along the smooth surface of the wall, allowing it to guide you through the house. Eventually, you reached the door which acted as the entrance to the outside world but you froze, wondering what the point of this venture was. If you left this house, opened the door and stumbled out into the unforgiving cold, what point was there? You knew not of a way out of this place, nor did you think you could find it on your own without any source of light in the few days that lapse before you starved to death.

Perhaps it was better to stay cooped inside this house and wait for starvation to take its toll. Anything, in your opinion, was better than wandering outside in the quiet and cold while the snow slowly froze your life's blood, sowing the seeds of death as your mind slowly faded into the smiling jaws of oblivion.

"I'm alone," you muttered, running your hands through your hair. "I guess that's alright, I mean I could have been stuck stranded here with Jerry." Your mind wandered back to the demented looking creature that you and Dust had encountered, a foul thing that had apparently survived the comedian's genocide solely out of the fact that it was boring.

"The wifi here sucks."

You froze at the voice that sounded suddenly to your left, a part of you hoping that this was merely the beginning of insanity starting to take its toll. You refused to accept the truth, that perhaps you were not alone, that perhaps there was another Jerry sitting next to you where it would begin to bore you to death in the few hours of your life that remained.

"What the hell are you doing here?" You spat, looking in the direction from where Jerry had spoken. "I thought we killed you?"

"Alas," Jerry replied though it did not sound sad at all. "You killed only one of my kind. The Jerry's are a bountiful race that flourishes even when the rest of monsterkind has perished form all of existence. It was through key evolutionary tactics, the way that we seem to radiate boredom, that the skeleton overlooked us in his slaughter and went about killing everyone else while we waited in the shadows."

"Wait a minute," you figured, your mind slowly piecing together the details that were being thrown into your face. "You're basically telling me that the Jerry species has this inborn trait where they can be so boring that it makes you invisible should you command it? Why didn't you use this to help the other monsters when they were being slaughtered."

There was a brief moment of hesitation before the Jerry replied. "It was part of our master plan," it explained. "With all the monsters in the Underground, the wifi here sucked. But when the monsters were killed, there was no one left alive to use the wifi and we got it all to ourselves."

"Fat lot of good that turned out to be," you snorted, remembering your encounter with the other Jerry. "Shortly after all the monsters died, so did the power and the wifi in turn. By allowing the monsters to die so you could have faster cell service, you allowed for the collapse of the government and made it so that there was no wifi left."

"The wifi will return," the Jerry replied. "Every night in this world of darkness, the Jerrys emerge from their hiding places and gather forth to offer prayers and sacrifices to the gods of wifi to return and bestow their gifts upon us. One day soon, wifi will once more return to this world and the Jerrys will know what it was like to prosper."

"You've dedicated a religion around wifi," you replied seriously.

"No!" The Jerry exclaimed hotly. "Religion is the false prophecies that the humans on the surface dilute themselves with, taint their mind to distract them from the fact that death is their never-ceasing enemy, an eternal slumber that none can evade. What we do is true, we have no such thing for lies in our world!"

"Sounds like the same thing to me," you mused, slightly humoured by this whole ordeal. "You're distracting yourselves from the fact that wifi will never return rather than accepting the stark reality that it's never coming back, choosing to worship entities with no evidence that they exist in the first place. Sounds like the text-book definition of a religion to me." You frowned for a moment. "But, knowing your species, it's probably more like a cult than anything."

"How dare you insult us!" The Jerry roared and there were several other angry mumblings in the room. It occurred to you that this Jerry was not the only one here. "We are a proud race that has escaped the slaughter of the monsters and are championed as heralds to the new civilization that will dominate this world of darkness. So as long as we appease the gods of wifi, than they will one day return it to us!"

"Okay, fine," you held out your hands in defence, though it probably did no good because it was impossible to see anything in this darkness. "But I don't understand why you're even bothering to talk with me in the first place. I'm not exactly a part of your species, so what business do you have with me?"

"The gods are not pleased with your presence," the Jerry muttered and there were several other agreements throughout the house. "The Society of the Jerry, as we call our new order and government, has decided that we cannot allow you to live in our land. You are an outsider, and outsiders are not welcome around these parts."

"So you're going to kill me then?" You raised an eyebrow, remembering the feeble form of the Jerry that you and Dust had encountered prior, wondering how such a monster could do lasting harm to you.

"No," the Jerry replied as if you had asked the most ridiculous question in the world. "We are not barbarians, and the gods of wifi would not give us a ride home if we murdered someone. Your very existence here is blocking our wifi signal - "

"There isn't even wifi in the Underground right now," you interjected.

"Your very existence here is blocking our wifi signal and thus we have decided to combine our hidden magical abilities to cast a spell that will lift you from these dark catacombs and into the land of the living, far away from us!" The Jerry continued, not addressing what you said.

That detail caught your attention. "You guys can really do that?" The Jerry species had struck you as a type of monster that could not really do much of anything even if it really wanted to. "I mean no offence or anything, but in the few hours that I've gotten to know your species, you don't exactly look to be the strongest when it comes to wielding magic - "

"You dare challenge us, the obedient servants and children of the wifi gods?" The Jerry replied vehemently, seeming very offended. "For countless years and moons we have hidden away in the dark, making countless sacrifice in order to appease our gods. Since then, they have blessed us with their strength and our power in the art of magic has grown. Because now we can tap into the wifi itself, harness the very energy and channel it into our core to shape the world around us."

"But that makes no sense," you protested, trying to reason with these monsters even though they seemed to be devoid of all logic. "You just said yourself that the wifi doesn't even exist anymore in the Underground, so how can you harness its powers to fuel your own magic? It's like running a car when there's no gas."

"Silence!" The Jerry tribe leader roared, seeming even more offended that you were trying to reason it. "Logic and science is not welcome here in the Society of the Jerry for we are a democracy that is run by a dictator! The arts of science are an arcane tool that was used by our primitive ancestors, and look where that got them! No, we have been enlightened by the wifi gods and will use their power and might to better ourselves. We shall not let the petty ramblings of a human distract us from what is true."

"But you believe it to be true," you insisted, not understanding how the monsters could be so thick that they could not understand this. "I could believe and have faith that the sky above is red but that doesn't necessarily make it true, does it? So even if you put all your faith and belief that there are meme gods giving you the power of the wifi, that doesn't necessarily mean that is actually happening, right?"

However, your rant about the fallacies within the Jerry Wifi religion was lost as the Jerrys began to chant, singing a long and ominous song that chilled your blood to ice. They spoke in a language that seemed foreign and arcane, as if it belonged in a dead world from a forgotten time years and years ago. After straining to make out the words that they were saying, it occurred to you that they were speaking in binary, the very language that composed the wifi and every living organism.

You watched in transfixed fascination as your hands began to glow a deep blue colour, your body rising inches from the stone ground that you had once tread upon. Through the dim lighting you could make out the circle of Jerrys that surrounded you and shuddered at their ugliness.

"Take kindly upon the blessings of the wifi gods for they have spared you our request," the tribe leader warned you. An awful thought was beginning to dawn upon your mind, that perhaps these Jerrys had been right after all and there were actual wifi gods governing the mortals that wandered below, dictating the lives and stories of the lesser beings. And to think that you had had the nerve to insult them!

Or perhaps it was just the magic of the Jerrys that was causing this whole scenario to happen.

"I don't understand," you asked as your body began to float of its own accord, guided by the invisible magic that wrapped around your limbs. "Why would you help me? The Jerrys remained hidden before, when all of monsterkind was being slaughtered you remained in the shadows. You could have just contented yourselves in watching me rot and die of starvation, and yet here you are, saving my life."

"Because," the tribe leader said plainly as if the information he was about to deliver should be known and recognized by every living thing. "Our favourite YouTuber just airdropped us a new Fortnite video and you're blocking our wifi signal by just existing."

You did not know whether to utter a retort or feel thankful that these damn monsters were saving your life in the first place, but you rocketed out of the house, watching as the small house on the edge of the town of snow forever left your gaze, buried underneath a crypt of darkness.

The magic guided you through the marshlands of the Underground. You liked this area most of all, the way that the gemstones embedded on the ceiling of the rocky cavern would twinkle as the faint light of your magic passed them by. You thought that if you had been on the ground and looked up above, these stones could have been mistaken for the very stars that painted the dome of the human sky up above on the Surface.

Are you a star?

You caught sight of wilted flowers throughout the marshland. It occurred to you that the native flowers of this region seemed to have been uprooted during the genocidal slaughter that Dust had wreaked across this world.

You passed through a hotter region of the Underground. Here there was light, even if faint, from the faint glow of the lava that swam beneath the rocky grounds of this world. But even still, the lava seemed to have lost any forms of life as if it too realized that the monsters that had once given this underground world so much life had ceased from existence and like everything else, the lava had contented itself to dying, slowly losing any vitality that it once had.

And even the regions of fire and lava became a distant memory as you passed through a large city, no more than an above spectator looking at the graveyard to the dead. Here, the large city that seemed to be the capitol of the monster world possessed much of a semblance to Snowdin. Within the streets and gutters of this city was a fine coating of dust. One thought that it might have snowed.

And then you were flying, soaring up through a staircase that was getting higher, transporting you out from the land of the dead to the land of the living, where life and death had not yet greeted one another as friends but continued to be bitter rivals, each struggling to game dominance over the other while none could yet claim victory.

You let loose a gasp as the magic ceased its hold of you, dropping you near the outskirts of a city, the city that you had known and called home for so many years now. You got to your feet, looking at the skyline where the thin rays of the sun had yet to touch and meet the buildings of grey and steel that stood out as a cold monument to the human empire that was slowly festering and growing on the back of this planet like an unwanted fungus.

Somewhere within the corridors and unwanted alleyways of the city, where memories and lives had been thrown away as was the nature of all cities in the growing age of capitalism, the skeleton from the land of monsters was lurking, his mind lost beneath the insanity that had ravaged and followed him for so many moons.

Your resolve hardened, the path clear. No matter what, no matter what difficulties you may have faced in your life, no matter the fact that your mind was constantly at war with itself, insanity and rationale struggling to gain the upper hand and dominate your persona, you refused to let that falter your path.

For you would save every last person within that city. Not another human would fall victim to slaughter, and the skeleton that was hellbent on bringing about the end of the human empire would too know the likes of mercy, of compassion, something that he had been denied for so long.

As if agreeing with this, the very tips of the sun's rays broke over the line of skyscrapers, heralding the beginning of a new day.