#fire.txt

so first off, this is a bit weak, but the core is blue, very much like deltarune. in comparison, the rest of the game uses a lot of oranges. it doesn't avoid other colors, of course. the ruins are purple, snowdin is... kind of blue? but not particularly. waterfall is very blue. but all those places are "outside" or basically just exterior. i can't think of a single other interior that's blue, but that may just be my memory. (plus it would all make sense if we said the water in waterfall was runoff from the core. waterfall is also also explicitly dark and contains history as well as its own version of the prophecy. waterfall is weird. that said, undyne, napstablook, and mettaton's houses are all orange inside. i might think about waterfall and the true lab at some point but my ideas are less cohesive and more a lot of little things) the core is a very specific blue, and we see the contrast in the approach. it's a very intense contrast, too.

and like i just said, it is a very particular blue.

so that's a bit weak, but it contributes to me thinking that the core itself is sort of a pseudo dark world. the enemies in particular stand out to me. they all come out of the darkness, and are dark even if you come back after true pacifist. final froggit, astigmatism, and whimsalot are even "evolved" versions of froggit, loox, and whimsum. basically what i'm saying is

madjick and knight knight are a little weird, but they're stated to be mercenaries so like i think they count less for this. that said, knight knight seems like it may be the same sort of monster as snowdrake, and madjick reminds me of a dummy

so you may be like, "okay but why would they be in their dark forms? it's not like frisk changes." and i think i have an answer. i don't quite recall where it was, but there's at least one scene in deltarune where kris and susie leave the dark world, and rather than immediately switching, it takes a moment before they fade back into their light world forms. it could be that since they're fighting at the edge of darkness. but that's a lot of "could be"s and "maybe"s and "reminds me"s so let's move on to the environment.

the core, a high tech location, looks remarkably similar to cyber city, another high tech location. it could just be that this is what toby thinks of as high tech and electrical, but i feel like it's worth at least pointing at.

and then of course, gaster, who created the core. we know he was studying dark worlds, at least from an observational standpoint, via entry 17.

ENTRY NUMBER SEVENTEEN DARK DARKER YET DARKER THE DARKNESS KEEPS GROWING THE SHADOWS CUTTING DEEPER PHOTON READINGS NEGATIVE THIS NEXT EXPERIMENT SEEMS VERY VERY INTERESTING … WHAT DO YOU TWO THINK

entry number 17 is in the middle of alphys' determination experiments, and missing from her entries (it was removed in a patch but in the final version of the game it is missing). this of course means that gaster was likely involved, meaning he was experimenting with determination. the power to persist path death yes, but also according to queen, the thing it takes to create a dark world. and as many many people have pointed out across the years, both potential gaster sprites are monochrome (like the amalgamates) and plausibly melted (like the amalgamates)

what's interesting to me is that gaster's absence is felt throughout undertale. there was a previous royal scientist. someone built the core. there's a man who speaks in hands. this all points to gaster being forgotten rather than overwritten. (like the man behind the tree but idk if i'll get to that.) which means since flowey was able to reset, he had the most determination in the underground. and considering he was just a flower + asriel's dust injected with determination, there's not any reason his determination would outstrip someone else who injected it.

which means one of two things. first, that gaster didn't inject determination. he studied what appears to be dark fountains in a different way. either through someone else, a human, or a "survey program" (i don't like putting that here on the timeline though). alternatively, and what seems both more interesting and tracks better to me, is that this was an extremely brief window. of time.

entry 6

ASGORE asked everyone outside the city for monsters that had "fallen down. "Their bodies came in today. They're still comatose... And soon, they'll all turn into dust. But what happens if I inject "determination" into them? If their SOULS persist after they perish, then... Freedom might be closer than we all thought.

entry 9

things aren't going well. none of the bodies have turned into dust, so I can't get the SOULs. i told the families that i would give them the dust back for the funerals. people are starting to ask me what's happening. what do i do?

entry 12

nothing is happening. i don't know what to do. i'll just keep injecting everything with "determination." i want this to work.

entry 13

one of the bodies opened its eyes.

entry 14

Everyone that had fallen down... ... has woken up. They're all walking around and talking like nothing is wrong. I thought they were goners...?

entry 16

no No NO NO NO NO NO

entry 17 (unused and removed but good for timeline purposes)

monsters' physical forms can't handle "determination" like humans' can. with too much determination, our bodies begin to break down. everyone's melted together...

entry 18

the flower's gone

so the unused entry 17 is really interesting to me. even without it, the entry just before it implies its events. so while it isn't canon, it's still correct in the timeline.

speaking of timelines, alphys injects the monsters with determination in entry 6, and ramps up treatment in entry 12. they start waking up in entry 13, walking around in entry 14, and then they start melting around the time of entry 17. flowey wakes up between 17 and 18. we don't know how long it takes between entries, but enough time passes for alphys to examine everyone and notify their relatives. (though she may not have examined very thoroughly because she doesn't make the connection between the determination and the monsters walking around.)

there is one issue, though.

entry 5

I've done it. Using the blueprints, I've extracted it from the human SOULs. I believe this is what gives their SOULs the strength to persist after death. The will to keep living... The resolve to change fate. Let's call this power... "Determination."

blueprints. well, that throws a wrench into the whole "gaster and alphys worked together" thing. the sort of thing that happens when you don't do multiple drafts. but while there's now not an actual reason as to why entry 17 is missing, it does work a bit better, (why hire alphys if there's already a royal scientist) it's just less tight.

but let's push on anyway because it could be that gaster designed the machine and handed off the blueprints to alphys, rather than her just finding them. she does only mention finding tapes when she searches the castle, and asgore requests for her to find a way to make souls persist after death, not for her to extract determination. the souls were seemingly for the sake of study, so why he'd give her blueprints is a bit weird considering she came up with the idea of determination injections on her own. so for now let's just close our eyes and pretend this could go either way. because otherwise this entire section of the post is trivialized.

so on this timeline, it takes about 1-7 entries for everyone to wake up, and 2 more past that for them to start seeing the negative effects. assuming gaster didn't test on himself just because and instead did it because he saw the effects, that means he could have been determined enough to open a dark fountain in entry 17 if he did his injection as soon as everyone started waking up. it could've been earlier, too. as a way to see what happens if it's injected into a living monster. this gives gaster around 9 days to work with.

but even if he injected just before entry 17, that's hardly enough time to build the core. and it's certainly not enough time for him to fall into it before entry 18. but flowey resetting doesn't necessarily mean he was the most determined from the get-go, just that he was at that moment. so there's a bit of a grey area between entry 18 and when flowey first died, which according to him was "weeks." assuming he gave asgore and toriel the same amount of time, this gives us a decent blank spot to put our building of the core. then when flowey resets, gaster doesn't come back because of how he shattered.

"but wait, he still only had 9 days. and a project like the core would take years." yes, but this can be reduced to semantics.

"he created the core" - yes, but this could mean he designed it and others built it, created it with magic, or...

"he fell into his creation" - yes, and i've already mentioned how it would be weird if that creation wasn't the core. unless...

gaster's comeuppance is described as "falling into his creation," "his experiments going wrong," and him being "shattered across time and space." the second one is what sticks out to me, though. his experiments went wrong. he talks about an experiment with darkness in entry 17.

so i've already put forward the idea that the core is powered by a dark fountain. or at least implied it throughout. and we know gaster's experiments were with darkness, and he created the core.

so after all this slog, maybe you're understanding what i'm saying a little bit.

the idea that i came up with is that (you can start here if you don't gaf)

during the determination experiments, gaster injects himself to see what will happen.

after doing so, he creates a dark fountain where the core is.

over the next few days, he does experiments on it and works on a design to harness its power (to convert hotland's geothermal energy into magical energy)

construction may even begin while he's doing his experiments.

his physical form starts to deteriorate, but it doesn't stop him. (either this or what comes next his the experiment that went wrong)

gaster then, while overseeing the beginning of the core's construction, is on his last legs. he falls into his creation, either because of his state, or willingly jumping after seeing how it changes people, hoping it will help.

something happens, and he's shattered across time and space. maybe he entered the fountain, maybe his failing body didn't mesh well with the dark world, maybe something else.

if you wanna know what i think happened, i think um...

ok so here me out on this. i don't know if friend is important or just background lore, but as of chapter 5 we know it wants the eggs. in the chapters where we stash the eggs, we put them in safe locations. the man who gives you the eggs is someone who's been forgotten.

i think that gaster like, shattered shattered, becoming multiple characters. particularly the narrator and the man behind the tree. both have evidence pointing to it, but they can't be the same person because they just don't talk as if that's the case.

at least, that would be a reasonable thing to say, if the very first track on the deltarune soundtrack wasn't a remix of him.ogg titled another him. another installment in the "him" genre of tracks? maybe, they use the same melody and piano. i feel like that's the takeaway a lot of people got. but what if it literally means "another him"? another gaster?

i think both the narrator and the man behind the tree are different aspects of gaster, and the eggs are "fragments" that are part of him but aren't necessarily on the same level. eggs are potential for life. if nurtured, they could become another aspect. we fish them out of the dark worlds because the man behind the tree can't do it himself. we protect them from the thing that wants to destroy them, friend.

so like. what the hell is friend?

friend is also gaster. a third aspect of him, his twisted self that represents why he does his experiments. let's look at the actions i've speculated him taking. first, he injects a strange and potentially dangerous substance into himself. then he starts doing experiments, and creates a dark fountain. rather than going "oh fuck oh shit we gotta do something about this," he starts experimenting on it, too. despite not fully understanding it, he tries to harness its power in the core. then, out of hope or depression, he tosses himself in. either that, or he falls in due to his body collapsing, his hubris actively catching up with him.

those are the actions of someone who is profoundly reckless and self-serving. he doesn't help alphys with her experiments, he just draws up the blueprints and then uses the determination from the extractor for his own purposes. he's not necessarily evil, the core helps monsterkind, but it arose out of reckless experimentation. of trying again and again. to see what would happen.

friend is that part of him. that freedom. an impulsive, bitey observer. someone who lures people into the dark to see what will happen. and someone who does not like the other pieces of itself. the kindness and lightheartedness that holds it back. the serious and objectivity that limits its enjoyment of blind experimentation.

the narrator is the one who puts things in motion, who documents everything. but he's hands off. the man behind the tree gives you literal easter eggs to hunt. he smiles, he rambles, and gives you something interesting. friend observes. friend is the curious one. it's a cat. it's shaped like endogeny, an amalgamation born of scientific curiosity. it's impulsive and reckless. it bites you.

curiosity. unbound, unsanctioned. doing things just to see what will happen, no matter what harm they cause.