By the time Sans, Trent, and Lester crested the last rise, the night air tasted like scorched metal and burnt code.
The impact site was impossible to miss.
Something had gouged a deep trench into the earth, tearing a path through grass and soil as if it were paper. Dirt fanned out in a rough crescent around the crash, still warm, still faintly glowing at the edges where raw magic had kissed it.
At the far end of the trench sat the object.
Up close, the “meteor” looked more like a bruised starship than anything that belonged in their quiet little town. A sphere—mostly. Bone‑white metal showed through in places where the outer crust had cracked, seams of old, reinforced plating glinting under layers of fused stone and char. One side was crushed flat from impact, the other half‑buried in the hillside.
A web of fractured glass clung to the front like the remains of a giant eye.
It stared back at them, opaque and dark.
For a long, suspended breath, nobody spoke.
Then Trent broke the silence.
“WHAT,” he said, “IN THE NAME OF EVERY SINGLE SAFETY REGULATION WE HAVE EVER WRITTEN…IS THAT?”
“not from around here,” Sans said.
Lester took a slow step forward, eye sockets narrowing as he scanned the hull.
“It’s…grown,” he murmured. “There’s a core structure underneath, but the outer shell is almost entirely impact accretion. Rock. Dust. Space‑junk. It’s been traveling a long time.”
“TRAVELING FROM WHERE?” Trent demanded. “And WHY DID IT CHOOSE OUR TOWN TO CRASH INTO?”
Sans tilted his head, gaze unfocused for a second as he stretched his magic outward, feeling along the curve of the sphere.
“don’t think it chose anything,” he said. “more like…this is where the ride finally ended.”
Under the metal and stone and burn, he felt something else.
“there’s someone in there,” he added.
Lester’s hand lifted, fingers twitching as he traced a pattern in the air. A faint, glitchy shimmer washed over the pod—his own stripped‑down version of a scan, the best he could manage without the full lab.
Symbols flickered briefly in his right socket, then resolved into something like horror and fascination mixed.
“…two someones,” he said quietly. “Double signature. Both skeletal. Both…very, very strange.”
Sans’s grin didn’t return.
Lester stepped closer, boots sliding a little in the loose dirt.
“Their soul frequencies are…out of spec,” he said. “One reads like a twisted hybrid of light‑type and void‑type magic. The other is…an inversion. An eclipse with threads of starlight. That shouldn’t be possible with anything we know how to build.”
“GREAT,” Trent snapped. “MYSTERY SPACE CHILDREN. WONDERFUL. EXACTLY WHAT WE NEEDED.”
He squared his shoulders and marched down into the trench, heat wafting up around him from the scorched earth.
“Trent,” Lester warned. “Careful. We don’t know how stable that casing is. Or what it’s leaking.”
Trent hesitated for half a second, then kept going. “I AM being careful! THIS is my careful walk!”
His careful walk still looked a lot like a purposeful stomp.
Sans followed at a slower pace, hands in his pockets, sockets half‑lidded but tracking every shift of debris, every crack in the hull. The back of his neck prickled.
Up close, the pod hummed.
Not with active power—nothing overt, nothing beeping or glowing—but with the tired, residual vibration of something that had burned hard for too long and finally coasted to a stop.
Trent stopped a few feet shy of the hull.
The thing towered over him, half‑sunken, half‑tilted. The cracked viewport loomed at chest height, dark and opaque from accumulated soot and fused dust.
“HELLO?” Trent called, because of course he did. “IS ANYONE ALIVE IN THERE? THIS IS THE TOWN WATCH. WE ARE HERE TO HELP. PROBABLY.”
Sans suppressed the urge to point out that if anyone inside was awake enough to hear and respond, they probably wouldn’t need that much help.
He stepped up beside Trent, laid a hand against the hull.
He pushed a tiny thread of blue magic into the metal, testing.
It slid along old conduits like water in dry pipes, finding dead ends, rusted intersections, and, finally, a faint, stubborn seam of still‑responsive circuitry.
“hey,” he murmured. “knock knock.”
The pod did not appreciate the joke.
Something inside clicked.
A line of faint light sparked along the edge of the viewport, then died. A different mechanism answered instead—a deep, groaning shift as emergency systems several decades past their intended lifetime tried to obey one last command.
A narrow ring around the viewport hissed.
Cracks spider‑webbed across the fused glass.
Sans’s eye‑lights flicked sideways.
“uh, quick question, bro,” he said casually. “how do you feel about low‑grade space radiation?”
Trent blinked at him. “WHAT?!”
“y’know,” Sans went on, tone light but a little too steady, “mysterious object from orbit, unknown tech, long exposure in high‑energy environments. sometimes you open these things and everyone nearby gets a nice glow‑in‑the‑dark buff.”
Trent made a strangled noise. “SANS. THIS IS NOT THE TIME FOR JOKES ABOUT RADIATION.”
“who’s jokin’?” Sans said, even as he took a small step to the side, angling his body a little between Trent and the cracking viewport. “lester, you’re not picking up any ionizing surprises, right?”
Lester, who had already started a more detailed scan, shook his head once, curt.
“Nothing acute,” he said. “Background is ugly, but not lethal. Yet. Just don’t breathe in the dust.”
“see?” Sans said. “no glowy buff. shame.”
He still didn’t move his hand from the hull.
“BACK UP,” Sans added a beat later, already stepping away for real.
Trent took two large strides backward.
Lester retreated to the lip of the trench, ready to yank both of them out with a burst of magic if anything exploded.
The viewport shattered outward.
Not in a violent spray—more in a tired collapse. Chunks of glass and melted stone slid down the hull, clattering onto the dirt around Sans’s slippers.
It smelled like stale filters, old magic, and something buried under both—a faint tang of void and star, like someone had tried to bottle a piece of space and forgotten to label it.
“That is NOT a smell I ever wish to experience again,” he announced.
Sans leaned forward, peering into the opening.
The interior of the pod was dim, lit only by a few dying lines of runes along the inner ring. Harnesses criss‑crossed the cramped space. Aging padding clung to the walls like petrified moss.
Two small forms were strapped into the central cradle.
They were unmistakably monsters.
Smaller even than Frisk had been, back when Frisk had first fallen.
One lay slightly curled toward the other, skull turned as if in mid‑reach. Faint, scattered star‑specks flickered behind their eye sockets, outshone by the soft, twilight halo of magic clustered around their ribs. A thin void‑ring hummed along their spine, just visible where their cloak had shifted.
The other was stiffer, more tightly bound by the harness, head tilted back against the rest. A soft, dark glow burned steadily in their chest—an eclipse held at mid‑moment—rimmed in stubborn white‑gold threads that had not gone out despite everything.
Both were utterly unconscious.
Neither moved when the cold air hit them.
For a stretch of heartbeats, Sans did not move either.
Something in his chest—a place he preferred to keep very, very quiet—twitched.
“kids,” he said, very softly.
Trent shouldered in beside him, scarf brushing Sans’s arm.
“Oh,” he said. “Oh NO. No no no no no. THEY ARE CHILDREN.”
Lester descended the last of the slope as quickly as he dared, coming up on Sans’s other side.
His expression shuttered.
“Their soul structures are…” He stopped, chose a different track. “We need to get them out. Gently. Whatever this thing passed through, they’ve already survived more than they should have.”
Trent’s hands hovered uncertainly near the harness edge.
“I— I DON’T KNOW HOW TO UNSTRAP SPACE CHILDREN,” he admitted. “Lax—”
“yeah,” Sans said. “i got it.”
He climbed up onto the lower lip of the pod with a small grunt, bones protesting slightly at the angle. Inside, the air was even colder, heavy with the residue of stasis and long travel.
Up close, the details sharpened.
The star‑haloed one—Celestark, though Sans didn’t know the name—had tiny chips along the edges of their fingers, the kind you got from climbing things you weren’t supposed to. Their robe was scorched at the hem, stitched in a way that said someone had cared enough to mend it by hand.
The eclipse‑cored one—Eclipse—was more contained. Harness straps cut a faint groove into their cloak. Their fingers were clenched very slightly, even in unconsciousness, as if braced for impact that had already come and gone.
Sans’s hand hovered for a second over the nearer harness buckle.
Different context. Different kind of fall.
Same small, still shapes.
“hey, kiddo,” he murmured, mostly to himself. “hope you’re friendlier than the last meteor we got.”
Blue magic flickered around his fingers as he felt for the release latches. The system was old but not incomprehensible—safety glyphs, mechanical backups, a few dead manual fasteners.
The strap snapped free with a reluctant jerk.
Celestark slumped forward.
Sans caught them with more care than he bothered to use on himself.
He eased them against his chest for a moment, feeling the faint, flickering rhythm of their soul against his ribs—a strange, half‑familiar pattern of light and void that made the hairs along his spine prickle.
He passed them gently to Trent, who took the small skeleton as if handling a bomb made of glass.
“I HAVE YOU,” Trent said, voice low and surprisingly steady. “YOU ARE SAFE NOW. PROBABLY. HOPEFULLY. SAFE‑ISH.”
Celestark did not respond.
Their head lolled against his shoulder, constellations behind their sockets dim but present.
Sans turned back for the second harness.
This one had locked in harder—emergency restraints triggered on impact. He had to cut through two of the straps with sharpened bone, muttering under his breath as ancient stitching resisted.
“you and your safety features,” he grumbled. “congrats, kid, you’re very securely unconscious.”
Eclipse didn’t slump as far as their sibling had. Their body held more tension even now, as if some part of them refused to fully let go.
Sans slipped an arm under their shoulders and another under their knees, lifting them carefully out of the cradle.
The eclipse in their chest flared faintly at the movement, then subsided.
Up close, Sans felt it clearly.
Twisted magic. Broken rules. The kind of soul you only got when somebody somewhere had been playing with things way above their clearance.
He’d seen something like that once.
He swallowed that memory and climbed down from the pod, Eclipse’s small form cradled in his arms.
Lester stepped back to give him room, watching with an intensity that bordered on predatory—but his hands, when they hovered out as if to check for injuries, shook very slightly.
“We need to get them away from this site,” he said. “The residual energy here isn’t…healthy. For anyone.”
“AGREED,” Trent said at once, clutching Celestark a little closer. “My apartment is closest.”
“nah,” Sans said. “too many stairs. grillby’s back room first. then the lab.”
“I can have equipment ready by the time you get there,” he said. “And I need to see exactly what this thing passed through. If this is a breach from…anywhere else, we need to know how far that damage extends.”
Trent looked between the two unconscious children, the ruined pod, and the smoking trench.
“SO,” he said, voice going oddly gentle around the edges. “We agree, then. We are not handing them over to the humans. Not yet.”
“humans can barely handle their own kids,” he said. “these two came in wrapped in a space rock. they’re ours.”
“THEN WE WILL PROTECT THEM,” he declared. “UNTIL WE KNOW WHAT THEY ARE. AND WHERE THEY CAME FROM. AND WHETHER THEY ARE DANGEROUS. AND—” He cut himself off, looked down at the small skull resting on his shoulder. “…and even if they are.”
Sans glanced at Eclipse’s still face.
A faint crack ran along one cheekbone, half‑healed. Their jaw twitched minutely in some faraway dream.
“yeah,” he said. “guess we will.”
The night around them felt very large and very quiet.
Up above, the stars looked down on a hill that had just become the start of someone else’s story.
Sans shifted Eclipse’s weight in his arms.
“c’mon, kid,” he said softly. “let’s get you somewhere that isn’t on fire.”
They turned away from the smoking pod and started back toward town—two brothers, a scientist, and two unconscious strangers from a world none of them yet knew existed.
Behind them, the escape sphere cooled, steam fading into the night, its purpose fulfilled.
The real trouble, as always, was just beginning.
