#interlude perseverance

Chara painstakingly cleans up the inside of the house, leaving the bespectacled human in the front yard for Muffet’s couriers to pick up. While curious, Chara closes the curtains, worried that seeing too much of her process would only give her another reason to silence them. With the purple soul safely contained and the floors mopped clean, Chara moves on to Asriel’s bedroom. 

Fortunately, the only mess here is the human’s belongings and the torn notebook paper scattered about. With a sigh, Chara stoops down to start collecting the pages. Sketches of local plant life, notes about alleged cryptid sightings, and journal entries of human’s thoughts. All trash. 

Chara notices a torn page that settled on Asriel’s bed: it has a garish heading in large, looping letters with little flowers doodled around it: “February 6, 2056 !!” it reads, and under it, “My birthday!”

Chara pauses, and reads it again.

2056? That can’t be right.

They pick up the remains of the notebook and begin leafing through the other pages. All are dated with the same year, the most recent being March 21, 2056.

Chara sinks down onto Asriel’s bed, mind racing to make sense of the date. Did the human travel backward through time? Or perhaps, something had messed up the timeline on the surface, thrusting humans years into the future while the Underground remained stagnant.

No. Chara shakes their head to dismiss the thought. That was backwards. Something had messed up time down here, and that something had to be them. Ever since their brush with death, Chara had continually turned back the clock, ensuring a life free of mistakes, embarrassment, and regret. And while time stepped back within the Underground, it must have continued marching on, untouched, on the surface. Chara never questioned how much time they had lost over the years, but now they were facing the startling truth: nearly 30 years sacrificed to retries and fixes.

Chara feels a pang of guilt, as if they had committed some sort of abomination against the rules of the universe. They push it down. No, they haven’t done anything wrong. Quite the opposite. This is how it has to be--how it should be. With their interference, Chara can collect all the souls and ensure the monsters’ freedom within their own lifetime. They will have to be aggressive with the reloads, but considering they had already compressed 42 surface years into only 13 underground years, collecting three more souls would be easy.

Chara stands, their doubt transformed into curiosity about the surface that awaits them. They set the documents aside and stride into the kitchen, lifting the soul container to eye level.

“What do you say?” they ask, a wry smile on their face, “Should I bring you back for a short interview?”

Chara gave the soul a moment to respond, before nodding in mock agreement, “Ah yes, you are right. It would be a pity to undo all this clean up, wouldn’t it?”

They set the container back down with a sharp laugh, running a hand through their hair, “I suppose I’ll just have to save my questions for the next one.”

interlude: perseverance (bonus) // end