#wtmyh

Okay so. Here we go. 

Chapter 209

Supposed to be Morwenna POV, big talk between her and Gaster about their argument that drove Frisk away, them reaching a mutual agreement about their admittedly-childish behavior. This was meant to be build up for their dynamic moving forward. @mod2amaryllis You had totally convinced me to do more with Gaster/Morwenna thanks to your wonderful art of the two of them. <3

The two of them were going to preemptively apologize to Hope for what happened, and then she was going to ask Frisk exactly what happened, and there was a possible subplot planned where she was going to get Gaster a pet or something to distract him and keep him occupied aside from pestering people.

Chapter 210

Fatima POV! A nightmare about her time with the Vigilum, focusing on emotional manipulation/deception by Avery Fletcher (the big bad from ACT Two, if you forgot) to highlight the source of her trust issues.

After she wakes up, she decides to text Chris to see if he’s awake so she can talk, he asks if he can call her, she realizes he actually WAS asleep but they’re all cute and this was more setup for their relationship. After Chapter 210

Those were the only two specific chapters I had planned out. So after that...

There were certain setup things I needed to do:

More monsters being killed by the Anathema, possibly even secondary/tertiary characters with recognizable names such as the Nice Cream Guy, Leveretta, or Bonnet. 

Deacon was going to spend more time with Howard (you know, the mage cop) talking about his concerns about having kids.

We were going to see more of a mage girl named Valerie Bowman, who had been introduced once before in an earlier chapter. She was going to befriend Fatima after a few failed attempts at flirting with Rashid.

Sans was going to start having flashbacks of his forgotten memories, mostly the ones with Gaster as he spends more time with his dad.

More moments with Morwenna/Grant/Gaster.

Bonding between Morwenna and the twins.

The kids were then going to get back to school as the summer ended, and after a few more people went ‘missing’. Enough that the monsters were starting to notice.

Frisk and Deacon were going to have some bonding over Frisk talking to him about using their magic, nudging Deacon a bit in the direction of giving having kids a chance (he eventually does decide to say yes to Bo, they eventually have a little sandy-colored wolf girl that @mod2amaryllis guessed correctly ages ago).

The timing of things are a little wobbly here but bear with me.

Fatima was going to start realizing her feelings for Chris, things there were going to develop.

Deacon, forever a grudge-holder, tries to warn her away from him, citing his flakiness with being there for Hope a million years ago as signs of his un-trustworthiness (and knowing playing into her own trust issues). He was also specifically supposed to drop the line, “He’s beneath you.” in reference to Chris as a callback to what the Busperson told Fatima before.

Hope would find out by accident from Gaster about the Geno runs. There would of course be some drama and fallout, and mostly tie in with some Themes of closure for Sans that we’ll get to in a little bit.

As more of the monsters started to go missing, the monsters start to cast suspicion on the mages. They’d spent years trying to get over their deeply-ingrained divide, but this new, subversive threat is starting to wear down that peace. 

In response to that, the Literatum decides to take it upon themselves to look into what’s happening to prove that it isn’t them. However, Fatima and Rashid are excluded from these ‘team meetings’ because Grant still doesn’t trust the twins, thinking that they’re still brainwashed by Avery and the Vigilum. They, of course, resent this.

Frisk and Asriel, who are also worried about what’s going on, also want to look into the disappearances. The two of them, the twins, and a hesitant and worried Chris form a ‘scooby gang’ to work on their own. (Chris is very worried, but wants to spend time with Fatima and Frisk, but also thinks that Hope is going to kill him if she finds out. He also feels kind of like the ‘idiot without magic’ in the party.)

Morwenna breaks things off with Grant again, frustrated with his stubborn refusal to believe Gaster and the hostility forming between Grant and Gaster. Morwenna has been spending more time with Gaster by this point. The very beginnings of a maybe-relationship start to form.

Then shit starts to get real.

Frisk and the scooby gang witness the Anathema killing someone, and specifically see it using Cyan Magic. Chris drags them away and they rush over to the Literatum who are currently having a meeting.

But when they get there, they discover that Howard is missing.

A little bit of time passes here, and it is believed that Howard is dead.

However, Howard had just been kidnapped by the Anathema and was feeding off of him because unlike monsters, it could drain some of the magic out of a mage without taking all of it, kind of like a vampire reusing a victim over and over again. Howard eventually found a way to reach out to the others while the Anathema was gone before getting re-captured. He is being kept in the Underground.

The Literatum stage a rescue mission. This culminates with Morwenna and Deacon getting separated from the party, but finding Howard and then getting cornered by the Anathema. Morwenna tells Deacon to take Howard and run, that she’ll keep it distracted so that they can escape. (The Anathema constantly fights with itself, between the multiple personalities of the primary Souls that comprise it, so she had a plan to manipulate that to her advantage.)

Morwenna ultimately sacrifices herself to save Deacon and Howard, citing the fact that they both have families who need them. (Bo, at this point, is pregnant. Howard has his wife and daughters.)

The aftermath of Morwenna’s death is explosive.

Grant, in particular, is devastated, and takes his grief out on the people around him. Primarily Deacon, who he blames for her death, and goes so far as to try and punch him when the news breaks. Grant and Gaster also get into a heated argument because Grant wants to start an all-out offensive against the Anathema, against better judgement.

Speaking of Gaster, he becomes very withdrawn and throws himself into his research into how to combat the Anathema. He and Morwenna had never began a relationship, but he’d been holding out hope of it.

Deacon, Fatima, and Rashid are all very much in mourning. They all saw her, in different ways, as a surrogate maternal figure.

The rescue of Howard and the discovery of the Anathema fully puts everyone into crunch time. 

This is where my notes start to get a little foggy.

Sans and Gaster come up with a plan to use The Machine to get the Anathema back into the Font. They do their best to keep Frisk and Asriel in particular uninvolved in this plan, since they’re children. Hope agrees. 

They get The Machine up and running again. This is particularly troubling for Sans, who has been using The Machine as a safety net in case of another Reset. This goes back to those themes of closure for Sans in having to relinquish this last piece of ‘safety’ from his past.

However, before they can execute the plan. Valerie Bowman (you know that girl from before) reveals herself as Avery Fletcher’s niece, there to exact some kind of revenge for her family (who are sort of on the outs with the rest of the Vigilum). She and her family don’t want the Anathema gotten rid of, instead wanting to use it for themselves (or something). So Valerie sabotages the machine.

This results in Frisk and Asriel ultimately having to open up another tear into the Font like before. However, this time Hope refuses to let the kids do this alone, and her presence and the way her Soul resonates with Frisk’s helps ground them and prevents the kids from getting sucked inside like last time (because of Chara’s Soul and its connection to the Font). This was meant to be a sort of echo back to the end of ACT One.

The end. Sort of.

So obviously there’s some holes in there. There was also a lot of debate on my end over how exactly the Anathema was going to be dealt with. I had a lot of stuff in my notes about the different Souls of the mages who comprised the core of the Anathema, in particular the Red Soul, who was a mage who was actually on the side of the monsters, who had married and had children with a monster and whose family was among those trapped behind the Barrier. 

She, along with a couple other mages on the monster side, were forced to help create the Barrier in exchange for the surviving monsters being spared instead of massacred. This was a big cause for the huge conflict among the parts of the Anathema, because they were enemies. The Red Soul in particular had held onto scraps of her sanity after becoming the Anathema, which is why we would never see the Anathema use Red magic against anyone. The Anathema’s central eye color would change based on which Soul was most in control, and she was basically never in control.

We were going to find out that the Red Soul’s family was actually Undyne’s family line. That one of her ancestors was a mage. Asgore was meant to later reveal this to her when, during an encounter with the Anathema, it refused to attack Undyne after the Red Soul took over and called Undyne by a different name before retreating.

There was also some uncertainty over what exactly was going to become of the Anathema itself. The groups within the story were going to argue over this as well because there were a few different ways to go:

They could try to destroy the Anathema. It would release, theoretically, every single mage Soul that they had absorbed, releasing all the contained magic. This would mean that mages would go back to their pre-war power, which has it’s own risks.

They could simply send the Anathema back. Let it continue to weaken mages as it removed mage Souls from returning properly to the Font and the cycle of human magic.

Or, what I think I was ultimately going to go with, they were (somehow) going to be able to alter the Anathema somewhat. Put the Red Soul in primary control of the Anathema through some method I was going to worry about later so that the Anathema still existed, but didn’t continue to capture Souls going forward. 

The ending was still giving me some trouble, as you can see, and there was lots of character-development planned between lots of different groups of people. (I have a LOT of notes!) 

But, well, this was basically how WTMYH was supposed to go!