--

Sienna rested in the room with the bridge puzzle, her signature cowboy hat tugged low over her eyes. She took a polishing cloth out of her pocket and ran it over her gun a few times, a nervous habit her mom had never been able to break her of. 

She was starting to think she might not see her mom again. She’d do everything in her power to get through the underground alive, of course, but some of the monsters down here were really strong, and the sheer amount of people that wanted her dead was terrifying.

Even scarier was that she was almost out of bullets, even though she’d never planned to use any at the start of this.

Her favorite poncho was stained with dust, that clingy white stuff monsters turned into when she shot them. She didn’t regret it, no. Every kill she’d made had been in self defense, but she still hated the necessity of it.

Looking around the room, she didn’t see any monsters anywhere, though she knew there could be some hiding in the reeds. She also knew she’d encounter more if she continued on, and she just wasn’t ready yet.

She decided to mess around with the bridge seeds instead. Maybe if she could get all four of them into the water fast enough, she could ride them down the river to some nicer place.

Carefully, she took each seed and placed it on the edge of the water, just barely balancing on the small ridge that separated Waterfall’s spongy earth from the flowing water.

All at once, she pushed the seeds off. They sprouted into a bridge and she hastily leapt on before it could be washed down the stream.

Sienna cautiously got to her feet on her improvised boat, holding her arms out to keep her balanced. She was doing it! It had really worked! 

She let out a laugh of pure joy.

Maybe now she could leave peacefully!

Just as she was getting excited, her seed bridge came to an abrupt stop, causing her to tumble forward.

Before she hit the ground, a blue glow enveloped her, stopping her momentum entirely.

“geez, i don’t even know you and you’re already falling for me,”

--

Sans was still sitting on the bench when he heard a wild laugh from just outside the room. Curious, he turned his head, just in time to see some kid falling over from where they’d been standing on some bridge seeds.

He knew faceplanting was bad for those fleshy types, so he grabbed their soul with blue magic to stop their momentum. Because he couldn’t resist, he coupled his timely assist with a pun.

“geez, i don’t even know you and you’re already falling for me,” He said, winking and finger gunning.

The kid got shot back to their feet with a wild look, pulling an actual gun out of a holster at their side and pointing it at him.

Sans was confused, to say the least. “uh, normally if people don’t like my jokes, they just groan at me. no need to start taking out the weapons, y’know?” He gave them some side eye that they one hundred percent deserved. Seriously, who pulls a weapon over a joke? Who down here even had a weapon?

“Are you gonna try and kill me?” They demanded, and he noticed that their arms were shaking just slightly.

Sans tilted his head. “why would i do that? it’s not like you’re a-” Sans paused for a moment, taking in the dust on their pocho and the fear in their face. Suddenly, he remembered that there was a human in the underground. 

“oooooh. you’re the human, aren’t you?”

“Yeah! What’re you gonna do about it?” 

He deliberated for a moment, bringing his hand up to support his chin. His eyes narrowed and he made a long “hmm” sound.

Suddenly, he snapped his fingers, making a bony clacking sound. 

“i know!” The human tensed. “i’m gonna do absolutely nothing.”

Their jaw fell open, producing a comical expression of surprise. “You’re not going to try and kill me?”

“nope,” he popped the p.

Their eyes narrowed slightly. “And you’re not going to try and capture me? Not going to shoot magic at me or try to break my legs or set me on fire?”

“did people actually do that? you look like, eight,” Sans couldn’t imagine what he would have done if people had done all that to him. He felt somewhat horrified, but he kept it to himself, hiding it behind a jovial grin and a friendly tone. He didn’t know what people had done to this human, but they were pointing a gun at him with their finger on the trigger and he knew all too well that it would only take one shot.

“Of course they did! Monsters have done nothing but try to kill me since I fell down here!” There was something raw in their voice as they said it, and he couldn’t suppress a pang of sympathy.

“that does sound pretty sucky,”

The human rolled their eyes. “Gee, you think? I just want to go home and see my mom again, and there’s literally only one monster in this whole place who’s been actually nice to me,”

“wow, is it me?” Sans asked, fluttering his eyesockets.

“No. You’re weird and suspicious. I’m still trying to figure out what the hell you’re trying to sell me here,”

Sans mimed a dramatic gasp, placing his hand over his heart and looking to the side. “how could you, human whose name i don’t know. i thought we had something special here, with our forty seconds of interaction,” Dropping the hurt tone, he said in a more serious manner, “and of course i’m being nice to you. you’ve got a gun pointed at me and you look like the twitchy type.”

The human gave him a searching look, like they were trying to telekinetically implode him, before nodding, flipping the gun’s safety back on, and sticking it back in the holster all in one fluid movement that made him question how a little kid knew how to operate a handgun in the first place.

“That’s fair. You planning to attack me now that I’ve got it put away?” They asked.

“i don’t really see the point, to be honest. you’ll die pretty much irregardless of my actions, so why should i get blood on my hands?” 

They glared at him. “So you’re only refusing to fight because someone else’ll do it for you?”

Sans thought for a moment, and shook his head. “not quite. more like… i dunno whether i agree with killing every human who falls down here, and it’s not like the king is gonna listen to some kid about it, so i can at least make him face the consequences of that decision himself,” He explained.

“and we have to get to the surface somehow, right? the underground can’t support monsters indefinitely. the clock’s been ticking since we got sealed down here.” It was wrong to kill kids for freedom, it had to be. But what other choice did they have? It was seven humans measured against thousands of monsters, and while both options sucked, there was a pretty clear winner, in Sans’ view.

The kid’s eyes widened. “So you guys are gonna die if you stay down here?” 

“not all of us, necessarily. but monster society as it is will probably completely break down within fifty to seventy years, going by the ratio of population growth to how many farmable fields we’ve got,”

“Why not just stop having kids?”

Sans blinked. Then he flashed back to a human book he’d found in the dump a few years ago and was pretty sure he knew the source of confusion. 

“monster kids don’t work like human kids. they kinda just pop up wherever there are large concentrations of magic. that’s why we know there aren’t more than a handful of monsters living on the surface, is because the barrier sucks up all the magic on earth to stay powered,”

“That’s so weird, dude.” They looked like they were about to ask follow up questions, but Sans didn’t want to talk more about the inevitable decline of his species, so he spoke before they could.

“what’s the surface like, anyway?”

The human raised their hand and made an a aborted gesture, before flapping their hand. “Uh. It’s, a lot of things? It’s kinda big, so there’s a lot going on,”

Sans was absolutely floored by this stunning revelation. He’d never guessed that the surface might be large, of all things. “i was kinda hoping for specifics, kid,”

They shrugged “It’s hard to sum up, okay? I guess the country I live in has a lot of parks and stuff?”

“i’ve heard of those. they’re like big areas of land cordoned off for animals to live in, right?” 

“Some of them are, I guess. I think most parks are just big tourist attractions, though. But I guess they have to be? Since it’s not like the government’s gonna give them enough money,”

??? Sans was confused. What did they mean, the government wouldn’t give proper money? Wasn’t that the whole point of having it in the first place?

“the government won’t give them money?”

“Well yeah, bastards are too busy lining their own pockets to give proper funds to necessary amenities. Even insurance is privatized,”

“what’s insurance?”

The human looked at him, and blinked very slowly. They raised their hands as if to gesture a point, before once again lowering them to their sides.

“Monsters don’t have insurance?”

“i mean, we might. you still haven’t explained what that even is,” Judging by their vaguely shell shocked expression, he was guessing it was something pretty universal.

“Insurance is like… If you get in a car crash, or your house burns down, a company will give you a payout based on the damages, and in exchange you give them a set amount of money, which they put into a pool, which is where they get the money to pay their clients from,”

“that’s just a pyramid scheme with extra steps,”

“How do you know what a pyramid scheme is but not insurance?”

He shrugged. “monsters have scammers too. ask me about jerry sometime,”

They gave him a dubious look before continuing. “Anyway, insurance isn’t quite a pyramid scheme, mostly because it’s pyramid schemey-ness pretty much only exists to combat the healthcare system, which is infinitely, infinitely worse. Also, what do you guys do if you have a disaster you can’t pay for if none of you have insurance?”

“why would you have to pay for a disaster?”

“The people doing the repairs have to get money from somewhere, right?”

“the government???” 

“Your government actually cares about you?”

“yours doesn’t?”

“It’s the government? Wouldn’t that be obvious?”

Sans could clearly see that this line of questioning wasn’t going anywhere, so he decided to ask about something else confusing they’d said. 

“what did you mean when you said your healthcare system was a pyramid scheme? how does that even work?”

The human made a face. “Lemme just give you an example. So, some humans have this disability called diabetes, and they need to inject a chemical called insulin semi-frequently so they don’t die,”

Getting a sense of where this might be going, Sans prepared his sense of horror.

“Insulin costs about $2.50 per bottle to manufacture. I know you guys probably don’t use the same monetary system, but just try and guess how many dollars it costs to buy,”

Sans figured that it must be bad, given the human’s seeming assurance that this would prove their point handily, so he guessed high.

“fifteen dollars?” 

The human chuckled without a trace of humor. “Try 50.”

Sans was physically incapable of paling, but he gave a valiant effort. “but you said they need it to not die,”

“Yep,”

“and 50 is a lot?”

“Yep. Especially since they end up needing a lot of it.”

The rictus of a grin on their face raised another question in his mind. How did some probably-eight-year-old have this nihilistic an outlook on life? (Later he would look back on this thought and giggle to himself)

“how old are you, anyway? you seem to know a lot about this,”

“I’m twelve,”

Sans blinked. “wait, we’re the same age? that feels so weird, i’ve been calling you kid this entire conversation,”

“You’re twelve too? Damn, you act like you’re thirty,”

“i could say the same to you,”

“Why’d you assume I was younger than you anyway? I’m way taller than you,”

Sans sniffed. “i’m going to pretend i didn’t hear that,”

“Why? It’s true,”

“i take everything nice i thought about you back. you’re by far my least favorite human,”

They rolled their eyes. “And how long ago did the last one fall?”

“like forty years, what’s your point?”

The two snickered.

“you know, it’s kinda a shame there’s a war. i think i would’ve liked to be friends with you,”

They smiled, the motion bittersweet. “Yeah. Same to you. I should go,”

The human turned, walking from his life as quickly as they’d entered it.

“wait!” He said just as they were about to turn out of sight.

They rotated at the waist so that they could see him without turning all the way around. “What?”

“you said your mom is on the surface, right? if you tell me your name, i could make sure news of you gets to her, in case… you know.”

They looked slightly touched. “Yeah, okay. If I’m gonna die, let me be remembered as Sienna Auren, instead of just ‘the girl with the gun’,”

Then they paused. “You should tell me your name too, so I can think of you as something other than ‘that weirdo who gave a pickup line to someone he was actively at war with’,”

He winced slightly at the distinctly unflattering description. “sans.”

“Goodbye, Sans. I’d say see you, but I probably won’t.”

And then she left for real. The only human he’d likely ever meet, in and out of his life in less than twenty minutes.

--

Sans sat on the bench, his head tilted back to regard the only stars the underground could lay claim to. He pulled a coin out of his pocket and flipped it, but he didn’t catch it and it landed in the river.

How long would she live? How many more times would she fire that gun? how many times would she have no choice?

Each second she spent in the underground, each step she took, was a countdown ticking to the demise that awaited her in the castle with the king. Her poncho was stained now with dust, but how long would it take for that to be mixed with blood? 

How long would it take for the sixth human who fell into the underground, the girl the same age as him who hated those who ruled the world she came from with such ferocity, who searched for the surface so her mother could see her once more, how long would it take for Sienna to be nothing but a body in a coffin and a soul in a canister?

What a world, where children were sacrificed at the idol of freedom.

Sans couldn’t cry. He wasn’t capable.

He hugged his knees to his chest and wondered why it was him who was left with her memory.

“i guess…” He began, his words directed at nothing more than the knowledge that he now must grieve for someone he didn’t even know, because no one else would.

“i guess i just…” He broke down laughing midway through the sentence, and for someone who couldn’t cry, his giggles sounded remarkably like sobs.

He pushed himself to his feet, the rough wood of the bench scraping at his fingers. He tore his gaze from the lights above, for he had no wish right now that was in their power to grant. He pulled his hands to his face, covering his bone dry eyesockets from the judging view of the stars above.

“i just wasn’t ready for the responsibility.”