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= The forgotten man =
({{thingamajig|caps=y|Redacted}}Tale AU / Deltarune adaptation)

This is my {{em|interpretation}} of what is happening in {{game|Deltarune}}. At times, I chose to ignore certain lore contradictions and make it deliberately depart from the games, usually either because there was no good "real answer" on something or I thought the answer I came up with was funnier. I tried not to do this at times that I believed to be "important". Sometimes my concept of what was "important" was motivated by trying to line up the story with the original premise that kicked all this theorizing off, which is best summarized as "What if {{game|Undertale}} explained the Memoryheads the way it explained Flowey?". With that cleared up, here's the story of {{game|Deltarune}} presented as the backstory of my unofficial "{{game|Deltarune}} prequel story".

{{BopCSS}}<div class="bop academic date"><h2><time datetime="2025-10-24T17:11:30H" data-created="2025-10-16T05:09:25Z">Dess</time></h2>
<div class="bop-text">Our story begins in a small northeastern town named Hometown... or at least it would if a certain family of icy deer-people were honest with themselves. All the way over in a satellite city named Furtherville, one {{b|December Holiday}} has quietly escaped the dreary clutches of Hometown in order to see the world one suburban mess at a time. She is at least thirteen years old — small enough that her absence might bring some concern, but old enough to have turned notably rebellious and become a pain. Usually known as "Dess", she has always been drawn to sports, danger, and loud ways of expressing herself, never to be confined by any particular box of what anyone else takes "woman" or "girl" to be.

As Dess wanders through Furtherville, she stumbles onto a particularly strange human child crouching at the edge of a wooded area eating moss ({{b|Kris}}). This child has an unnatural way of moving, shuffling or shambling from place to place such that when they stand on any particular spot half the time they seem to be standing at an oblique angle to reality. She has never seen anything alive that {{em|looked}} more like a cryptid.

Undeterred, Dess steps out into the light. At the sight of a big assertive shadow with antlers towering out of the bushes from who knows where, the cryptid child jumps.

{{b|Dess:}}  Ooh. Afraid of me, huh. {{stage|[raises hands and makes grizzly claws]}} Yes, I'm a Monster, we eat human Souls.
{{stage|[Kris tilts their head upward, definitely not scared now, but intrigued.]}}
{{b|Dess:}}  {{stage|[arms deflate to sides; impressed]}} Oh. You're a tough one, aren't you.
{{b|Dess:}}  I have some money. You want a pizza?
{{stage|[Kris perks up.]}}

Dess has brought the mysterious cryptid child to eat some pizza, which they gobble down, when she gets a call from her mother asking where on earth she is.

{{b|Dess:}}  Everything's fine, mom. I {{em|am}} getting pizza, just like I said.
{{b|Dess:}}  But uh... I found this weird homeless human. So... can you come pick us up in Furtherville? I know this kid just needs a home. I'm fine. {{stage|[frowns]}} ...What I worry about is whether they are.

Dess and the mysterious human child return to Hometown. Carol, town mayor and stodgy, wrinkle-faced cold front of a woman who seems to blast rooms with a cloud of icy mist by walking in, has mixed feelings about this event. She could be angry about this. She could go off about what a terrible lapse of judgement this was. But she's not. This time she can't. In a town where at least a few people find her uncaring and almost oppressive, and where she hardly has time for anyone, anything that reflects positively on her family is something she can only defeatedly embrace, and seeing her child show concern and generosity toward somebody else, her otherwise annoying headstrong child, has simply drained all the anger out of her. For the next week or so she will take this event in stride and try to pretend like she always meant for it to happen. {{i|Sure, December doing nice things for her communities, I always encouraged that — what I wondered is how long it would take for her to finally come around}}. {{i|Dess, if you want to help people, what you should really do is......}} She will repeatedly try hinting, unsubtly, at various things which would surely reflect well on Dess but which Dess will probably have no interest in doing. But for now, the most important thing is simply that they made it back safely, and that they find the human child a home. A home somewhere which isn't here.

A frighteningly few seconds after expressing her relief the incident "turned out well", Carol turns around and says there is no way their house has space for another child and they will have to "get it out of here" as though Kris were just a thing (with an implied "as soon as possible"). Dess and her sister glance at each other. Not only did she specifically choose to phrase things in one of the least inviting ways possible, but they both know this is a very strange thing to say when they live in the single biggest residential building in town. Their mom clearly does not like this shambling human kid or want them around here.

To be fair, when Dess' sister Noelle — who is far younger than her — first caught sight of the strange bedraggled forest human, she did get a bit spooked for a moment, but that wasn't really a matter of running into the town's first human child as much as a matter of Kris silently standing off-kilter in the hallway like some sort of liminal demon. But to Noelle that wasn't even all that bad after the first couple of times it happened. She'd always found spooky things fascinating. So it wouldn't take long for Noelle to line up beside Dess and begin conspiring together on how they could make sure their new friend wouldn't actually have to leave. With input from her sister on what would make a truly eye-catching ad, Dess puts up ads in a few places including the school. Being a teacher at the school, it isn't long before Toriel sees the ad, and will be following its suggestion to offer the human a pie. Toriel, Asgore, and Asriel all seem to warm up to the human child quickly once they have met.

But the time leading up to that feels like forever. As Kris is still living in the shadows of the Holiday mansion, having to bear the knowledge that the second known place they've been clearly doesn't want them, Dess catches them in a particular mood of being generally "down". Restless. Frowning. Not engaging with much of anything. Seeming to almost blend into the shadows as if bending away from reality. As much as Kris has generally been an off-kilter hall demon, this is not their happy "I'm a spooky ghost" face; this is the life and vigor actually draining out of them a bit. <ref name="d"/>

Dess quietly collects Kris back into their guest room, pulls them to her heart, and hugs them.

{{b|Dess:}}  {{stage|[messes Kris' hair]}} Don't you have such a downtrodden face, you little apparition.
{{b|Dess:}}  I'll make sure you have somewhere to live. You won't have to leave here. You'll be across the street somewhere.
{{b|Dess:}}  I'm not going anywhere. Even if you can't see me every day, I'll always be here.

{{stage|[Dess ponders. Even as Kris looks a little calmer everything is still. It's still a little dreary around here.}}
{{stage|After a little silence, she gently claps Kris on the shoulder and sings a single spontaneous lyric:]}}
{{b|Dess:}}  {{i|Don't forget, I'm with you in the dark}}
{{stage|[Kris looks a bit confused.]}}
{{b|Dess:}}  I can write you a song. But I'll have to get the guitar.

{{stage|[Dess comes back with the guitar, and the two start attempting to turn the lyric into a song.]}}
{{b|Dess:}}  {{i|When the...}}
{{b|Kris:}}  {{i|—light is running low}}
{{b|Dess:}}  And the cold begins to grow
{{b|Kris:}}  {{stage|[puzzled]}} Cold doesn't grow.
{{b|Dess:}}  ...You're right.
{{b|Dess:}}  {{i|When the light is running low / And the shadows start to grow / And - everything you knew seems like fantasy,}}
{{stage|[Dess thinks a moment]}}
{{b|Dess:}}  {{stage|[pointing to Kris]}} {{i|There's a light inside of you}}
{{b|Dess:}}  {{stage|[running out of ideas]}} {{i|...If you only knew}}
{{stage|[Dess sings the first "freedom motif" without words]}}
{{b|Dess:}}  {{i|Don't forget, I'm with you in the dark}}
{{b|Kris:}}  {{stage|[contemplative]}} ...Needs some work.
{{b|Dess:}}  Yeah.

Over the next couple of days the two finish the song together. (Or at least, they finish it to the extent we see it in Deltarune trailers. Being so short, perhaps it's still technically unfinished.)

Neither Noelle nor Carol really understands what's going on because all they see is Dess and the demon child messing around making a bit of noise and looking like they're having entirely too much fun with this. But that's okay, because it still means a lot to the two of them. At the end of it, Dess scrawls out a music sheet for Kris, just the notes, and hands it to them to put inside their small pile of things they've brought from Furtherville — a book that appears to be from a library, a weird red-accented newspaper, and a couple things pressed into the book? There's no particular reason any of these things should be special enough to bring along unless they were some kind of... {{em|bundle of memories}}. Sure enough, without Dess having to say or ask anything about it, Kris casually stows the music sheet inside the book and wraps it in the newspaper.

{{b|Dess:}}  {{stage|[handing Kris music sheet]}} I don't know if you can play it, but there you go, it's yours.

The joke will be on her when Kris becomes really good at the piano in a few years and has played this thing many many times as well as several highly elaborate variations of it. (If you look closely enough, you'll see that "Piano that may not be played well" is simply an extended version of the two ending "freedom motifs" in "Don't Forget". As you can now see, the otherwise-ironic title of this song is "actually" in reference to what Dess said {{em|before}} Kris learned to play the piano.) When Kris just needs to let off some energy, they will be coming to the Holiday house and playing mysterious jumbles of chords on the piano. If one thing's for sure, this music sheet has been burned into Kris' very being, and there is more or less nothing that could make them forget it. <ref name="p"/><ref name="dr2"/>
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<div class="bop academic"><h2><time datetime="--" data-created="--">Noelle</time></h2>
<div class="bop-text">Time passes. As Kris becomes a member of the Dreemurr family, Kris, Toriel, and Asgore save back one of Dess' ads as a funny little memory. Kris, Noelle, and Dess become good friends. The three children get into various misadventures. Carol is internally bothered that Dess never seems to straighten up and just gradually gets into more trouble over time even if the trouble is rarely big. She ends up being lenient on Dess and taking out her anger on Kris, Noelle, and Kris' new older brother Asriel. After all Dess has done to find Kris a home and hold the group of friends together, really extending more love to Kris and Noelle than their parents in a way, Carol just can't bring herself to ever be seriously harsh on Dess, and everybody else gets to suffer for it. Does she hate Asriel? No. But if pinning Asriel between Toriel's rules and her own rules can teach Dess a lesson about the consequences of not getting along with other people's parents, then that's the method she'll use.

When the children are not getting into trouble, they are often playing imagination games in various places, especially Kris' house. Kris invents a game of creating scenarios out of the most arbitrary objects. Out of the collection of things they brought from Furtherville, Kris takes the newspaper and folds it to a bit bigger than the size of a book, then sets the book for pressing things on it, and the cat wizard {{TTS|tts=Shawm|Seam}} on top of that. Inspired by a couple weird, poetic phrases from the newspaper, they say that this is the tale of how "the old world will end" after a great unstoppable "crisis" — this story is true whenever they put this particular altar of found objects in the room. Noelle remarks that the premise is "a little dark". Kris points to the monochrome picture of a phoenix monster barely visible below the edge of the book and notes that when phoenix monsters are delivering this prophecy, it's not all gloomy and the world can probably rebuild itself; maybe if everyone is nice and favors making friends over killing each other, the outcome would be more favorable. They stand the green crayon next to the book and {{TTS|tts=Shawm|Seam}} and start voicing these ideas through it like a smaller friendly wizard who is a local expert on the Prophecy. Noelle finds this pretty funny, confused why there are two wizards. Kris is full of explanations for everything as long as they are always too terse to actually make things any clearer.

Kris and Noelle play cards near the altar, they make up storylines about "the demise of kings and queens", the newspaper once again at fault for some very fancy poetry. Noelle makes horror stories out of things that shouldn't be frightening, like the wall plugs. They have quite a time with their various games. But, of course, all things have to end. <ref name="e"/>

One day Kris and Noelle spot a strange crack running through the earth like some kind of long thin wire, or pointed tail. Out of curiosity, they follow it out across the outskirts of Hometown just to see what kind of abnormal lake or river mouth lives at the head of {{em|this}} thing. Noelle remarks that she would hate to see the mouse or cat this was attached to. The pointed tail extends for quite some distance before ever widening out. As they follow it deeper and deeper to its source, they finally see it begin to widen into a gap no bigger around than a baseball, containing no visible dirt or rock but instead a total pitch-black darkness from the tiniest milimeter over the edge. Without thinking about it too much, Kris reaches down and pokes just a couple fingers in. Their hand comes out safely, but nothing that goes into this hole is the least bit visible.

Shortly, Dess catches up to them. She is about to tease them lightly for going somewhere dangerous in her own unique tone that implies her problem with this is more that they left her out of the fun. But then she sees what they're looking at. She kneels down next to the crack and begins messing with it, tapping one side of it with her fist to see what will happen. The ground tears and frays as if it were made of some kind of sturdy paperboard. She starts peeling away bits of terrain on the other side of the crack to confirm it. It would seem that in this particular part of the world, the earth is simply a thin sheet which is cracking and peeling away to leave an endless black void. Dess tears a significant chunk off the other side to reveal what vaguely resembles a faint night sky filled with glints of light. Kris and Noelle's expressions have gone from intrigued to a little scared. Then, very abruptly, the terrain where Dess is standing caves in and she disappears into the darkness without a trace. No sight of her. No sound. She is gone. <ref name="ut17"/>

Kris and Noelle are both {{em|terrified}}. Noelle runs the other direction as fast as she can. Kris hesitates at the edge for just a few seconds that seem like they are expanding out to half an hour. They feel as if there is some unknown action that if they don't take within the next few seconds they will never have the opportunity to take again. They feel like they deserve to be hurled into this pit and destroyed even if nothing ever comes back out of it. They have no idea whatsoever how they might pull Dess back out. They know she fell in way too fast to be able to reach in and catch her. They stick their arm in anyway. They find nothing. It feels utterly empty. Kris turns around and walks home. They feel sick. They feel like by messing with the crack they just killed the one person that really cared about them. Maybe from the beginning they've been nothing but trouble. Having to be rescued by Dess. Taking up space in Carol's house. Messing with Noelle. Killing Dess. Nobody should like them now. Nobody should be willing to raise this and put up with this.

Ever since Kris had been rescued, they always looked up to Dess. Failing to save her, leading her into the void. What had they done?

When Kris and Noelle come back alone, Carol looks at them with narrowed eyes. She knows Dess did something forbidden and is not happy about that, but once again, has to take it out on the children. Especially with Carol bearing down on them they are both too afraid to be able to articulate what happened and all they can really do is choke out "dark" and point an arm in the right direction.

Carol goes and investigates the rift, and sees that the problem is very much not normal. She ponders what to do. Her top concern is still her own image. Shortly, she brings in some contractors from another town to build a shelter that encloses the center chasm, and fill in the thinner cracks with rocks, dirt, and grass seed that for some mysterious reason seem to patch up the cracks entirely and not fall in any deeper. She puts an announcement in the paper that Asgore is fired as chief of police, although this is really just a lie. Secretly, she is forming a task force with him to investigate the shelter. The contractors built a tunnel into the heart of the chasm, which surprisingly did have a bottom after all. At the bottom of the chasm would be a strange and eerie world built from a darkness beyond darkness. The few people in town that have any idea about any of this are told to never talk about it, and act as if the original chasm never existed.

The town takes on a deep emotional sickness. Kris has trouble facing Noelle directly. Noelle comes to think of Kris as the beginning of Dess disappearing. She doesn't {{em|dislike}} Kris in any way, but she can't stop thinking of the correlation between Kris originally appearing and losing her sister. Kris can just barely bring themself to come to Noelle's house and play the piano, seemingly mashing out strange jumbles of chords to cover up the melody, trying to channel what it was like for Dess to be there without focusing on it. <ref name="fm"/> The fact the two were playing games about the world ending in darkness before the world actually did break apart into darkness makes them uneasy whenever they think about anything they did before. Kris fears the day that Noelle will turn around on them and snap at them for being such a "heartless murderer". Eventually they realize that pushing through this simply isn't going to make things better, and they stop coming to Noelle's house at all.

Over time all of Kris' memories begin to become slightly poisoned. The altar of things and the games in the classroom all feel like they secretly hide the concept of Kris being a murderer and Noelle or Carol or Dess somehow bursting up out of the depths of the earth and turning into terrifying abominations that will end Kris and end everything. Kris moves some old things from their house to the classroom. This process is loosely connected to why their room is so empty in-game, although it's not the exact same set of things; as they clear some things out, they don't have the heart to put other things in.

Noelle continues to look everywhere for signs that Dess is still alive — that she maybe got out of the darkness somehow, maybe she wandered through the tunnel and turned up in some other town. Dess had shown interest in the idea of getting out of this town multiple times, so maybe this had weirdly become part of her plan somehow. She keeps doing web searches for "December Holiday". She looks through her spam emails, mostly out of boredom, but also in the back of her mind feeling like it's just true that ads are the connection between someone looking for someone else, and ads can help people. Kris, as much as they cannot say it out loud, "knows" that Dess will not come back and could only have died that day.

[unfinished]
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<div class="bop academic"><h2><time datetime="2025-10-28T09:58:11H" data-created="2025-10-16T05:09:25Z">Memoryhead</time></h2>
<div class="bop-text">Near the end of {{game|Undertale}}, Asgore's royal scientist Alphys accidentally leaves open the entrance to a hidden basement lab. The place is dark, dingy, creepy, and worst of all, way off in the corner the faucets leak something no faucet should ever be dripping. A melty skeletal head with six faces which can whisper through phones the option to "join" it and hand people "Bad Memories". There is never any explanation in {{game|Undertale}} of what this thing is. This is the Memoryhead's story.

The time Kris spent in Furtherville before meeting Dess wasn't actually very long. Kris, little did anyone know, had miraculously spawned into the world out of nothing at approximately six years old. Having no family, they were left to simply wander around the town eating and collecting whatever they could find.

In the process, there are about six people they run into a bit more often than others or that caught their eye as especially striking that they simply start observing.

One of these memories begins at the Furtherville library. Kris finds a book sitting around which is about some lion that goes into a wardrobe and finds a weird hidden civilization of humans that shortly try to lead him into senseless human wars. They are lukewarm about this book, but will end up reading through it anyway out of the crushing dread of being alone and not having anything in particular to do. <ref name="n"/><ref name="cn"/> Too young and new to this world to really be very clear on what a library is, they simply take the book with them, and the beeper doesn't go off because in actuality it wasn't a library book, and just a book somebody brought to a library, now unfortunately "misplaced". While at the library they see a Torosaurus-shaped skeleton monster go by with a cart of books squinting at a particular old, weathered one and inaudibly murmuring something about where to shelf it. They also see some kind of curved blue bird monster heading to the second floor, who never says anything but who they presume to like the books upstairs. When "the tragedy" would happen, this Torosaurus-shaped monster would spawn into the {{thingamabob|caps=y|Redacted}}Tale world as the Underground's first librarian who once took much better care of things, {{i|Antiqua}}. (In the {{thingamabob|caps=y|Redacted}}Tale world this character is wholesale just a four-legged dinosaur. In the Deltarune world they stand up diagonally like a theropod, walking around horizontal but able to tilt their body up to see over a counter.)

Another of these people is an older man, a fuzzy bluish creature with characteristics of both bats and birds or possibly dragons if you squint. (These monsters are called "birbats" and they include in their ranks Berdly, Snowdrake, and Martlet if you are taking Undertale Yellow to be somewhat continuous with Undertale and {{thingamabob|caps=y|Redacted}}Tale.) He is distinctly short, smaller than most people in the town, but spry. He seems to like to go on hikes but also to stop and take a rest on a bench reading odd books about spirituality and expanding your mind, or sometimes just the newspaper. One day, he accidentally left a slice of quiche under a bench while deciding to go to a store, which stayed there into the evening. Kris ate it. Another day he dropped a packet of fresh sage. It was a bit strange how despite being in such good physical form and willing to improve himself he was so prone to dropping things. To remember him, Kris would press one dried sage leaf into their book between paper, like you'd press a flower. When "the tragedy" would transpire, he would spawn into the {{thingamabob|caps=y|Redacted}}Tale world as the one mythical sage hidden in a cloud of common annoying birbats, {{i|Sage}}.

One day Kris would be witness to an inexplicable gathering of protestors standing around a table full of newspapers and pamphlets with a big sign next to it saying "{{caps|End sanctions now}}". Kris hasn't the slightest idea what the sanctions could be on, or even what sanctions actually are for that matter. They get closer to the table in order to see if they can get any more information about what's happening here. One of the three small phoenix monsters perched on the table tosses them a newspaper. It would appear that this particular activist group has been having a lot of trouble getting the word out, to the point they are desperate enough to hand their weird red-accented newspapers to children. The phoenixes try to announce to Kris exactly what important world event all of this is about, but all of it is still going totally over their head — the elemental birds' odd dialect similar to a London accent put through a garbage disposal not being the main reason, but probably not helping. When "the tragedy" would take place, the three phoenixes would spawn into the {{thingamabob|caps=y|Redacted}}Tale world as the three great Communist theorists {{i|Ellwing, Ellshriek, and Ellsburn}}, also known as "The Three Ells". (These aren't their actual names in Deltarune. Kris just saw something about "three greats" in their newspaper and assumed it "had" to be referring to them.)

(There are supposed to be three more people, but as of now they didn't get finished before the first {{thingamajig|caps=y|Redacted}}Tale post got scrapped and redone. The basic idea is that they are monster types that didn't appear in Undertale. The fourth one is a dragon monster similar to Susie. So that leaves the last two probably belonging to Waterfall, or possibly one in Snowdin depending on where Sage lives.)

These six people, although seemingly random at first, would become etched into Kris' early memories, all embedded into the collection of things Kris brought with them from Furtherville into Hometown. This "Dark World creation altar" is the only trace of Kris' early memories of a world that December Holiday neither appeared in nor vanished from. Should the whole world of Deltarune become ripped apart into nothing, these fading traces of random people would be one of the only fragments of Deltarune that remained. But at the same time, this bundle of memories would also be capable of generating its own whole world where nothing was so bad. The key to this sat in the very center of the pile, with a single buried piece of sheet music. The memory that would spawn the mythical seventh member of the memory pile — Asgore's forgotten royal scientist, {{i|W.D. Gaster}}.

The world of Undertale is an alternate version of the Deltarune world. The {{thingamabob|caps=y|Redacted}}Tale world is a ghostly image superimposed on Undertale telling an odd, dubious story of what happened "before" Undertale that doesn't seem to totally match up. (Think of it as booting up {{game|Undertale}} and finding a hidden route in the game.) The Deltarune world preceded both of them. Kris is one of the points of connection bridging the two worlds. And were Kris to vanish from the Deltarune world, falling over the edge, their hopes and memories would follow them in, never to be seen again.

Did you know that if you name yourself Kris in {{game|Undertale}}, every encounter with Flowey will be replaced with a Memoryhead? There's a good reason you didn't know that. <ref name="r"/>
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<div class="bop academic"><h2><time datetime="2025-10-28T21:32:03H">Chara</time></h2>
<div class="bop-text">[Chara] was not born.

[Chara] was _caused_. [Chara] was _eventuated_.

[Chara] was a being spawned out of the universe, from the deepest darkest game-mechanical frameworks that made a picture into a lizard-person and a virtual "D20" into a meaningful event. Within the Deltarune universe, there is a particular process that can happen. As waves of despair and emotional darkness ripple through the world, the universe spawns a "destined hero" who will fulfill a prophecy. This destined hero spawns into a character customization screen, and receives a name. The character creation process defines all its attributes and smooths all of its manufacturing defects away. Were a destined hero to spawn in without going through the character creator, their behavior would be strange and their movements would be erratic and inhuman, the characteristic biology of an unfinished creation.

When the destined hero spawns in, it is not necessarily a happy occasion. Born at the nexus of everyone's negative thoughts, the destined hero appears almost precisely at unhappy moments. Nobody knows for sure that the Angel people say commands the hero from beyond will be a merciful being. The only thing guaranteed is that a generic being thrown together from off-the-shelf parts is _going to come solve people's problems_ one way or another and make them go away, whether or not that method is particularly gentle or nice. So all in all, [Chara] appearing can very easily be less an occasion of hope than an event of great dread.

But there is one interesting quirk of spawning a destined hero exactly at the moment no one has hope. Were someone who felt darkness rising inside them to turn around and strike back hard enough to hit it out of the field, the process would have to stop, and everyone would be free.

And this is what Dess did. Beginning to feel a deep void inside that could turn the entire Dark World landscape of a person's mind malignant, Dess banished the Titan and headed into Furtherville where it just happened the destined hero had been dropped. He was a new man, and whatever anybody said, he would live his life as he wanted to and was not going to let anybody else drag him down. Thus he did something few other people could do, and allowed the "destined" "hero" vessel to escape the hold of the dark connections between different people's individual despairs weaving a shared prophecy and dictating every fraction of its life.

The Deltarune world is not actually itself a game. Deltarune is one big paranormal ghost-story of a "regular" universe of humans and monsters _transmogrifying_ into a console game whether or not they actually want that.

Of course, everything that rises out from darkness has a dark side. Though Dess and Kris would each overcome their own forms of anxiety and isolation, both of them would eventually slide backward, regenerating the Prophecy and trapping Kris — the "cage of human soul and parts" — back into their double cage of one artificially created Soul trapped in a vessel and one Angel trapped in a human. If Kris would reject help completely, they could only slide further from the pulse of independent life.

In the real world inhabited by toby fox, they say that living animals are born of earth and will return to dust. But have you ever wondered what that progression looks like for fictional characters? A game character is nothing more than a bunch of pixels, numbers, and ontological statements. A data structure put down in a room map and assigned some kind of path. A game can contain a narrative telling the oral history of how its characters got there. It can contain dialogue. A game can tell you that its characters have "Souls" and put fancy heart-shaped objects on screen, but none of it can truly make those characters live or feel.

So it was with W.D. Gaster. A created being doodled on spare pages of paper (and then wiped from that paper), he could hardly be more to the Deltarune world than a bunch of logical statements, a tower of scientific and philosophical propositions. You don't fail to be smart about something when you're literally the book on it; even "compassion" isn't outside your abilities if you have enough book knowledge about morality. But you will never have an actual stake in anything. So you only operate off your core objectives. Protect the destined hero. Do not let the destined hero think of the one they killed.

It wasn't that way for Kris. The game universe may have brought them into being as a simple empty vessel, but Dess was able to transform them into something more than that. To allow them to live and to grow and to learn to overcome their unfinished bits on their own. To become a person through connection and the love of another living being on their own level of reality.

With Dess vanished from the world, it was as if all of that had gone with her. In every low moment it was like nobody actually knew what love was and nobody could break through the barrier. If the lost girl was not coming back, which she certainly was not, there was nothing to really stop their process of psychologically disintegrating. Their outer shell of experience and personality — what little they felt they had anyway — flew away, and left behind a simple instantiated object.

Or at least that is what happened to the version of Kris that abandoned all hope and fell into the Roaring before Sans and Gaster would team up to step backward through the Undertale timeline and snatch Kris back out of there. [Chara] could not be erased from the Undertale world, but given that the two worlds' timelines had each become consistent, everything was fine.

Inside the world of Undertale, [Chara] would attempt to push the monsters into a war to destroy the surface. Forcing the alternate version of their brother Asriel to absorb the Protector that Gaster had marked them with as a matter of course for anything permanently entering his world, they got Asriel through the Barrier carrying their body. What Undertale fails to mention about this event is that Asriel did not look like Asriel on the surface, and looked something more like the Roaring Knight. The people of the Undertale world experienced the surface as fantastical and the people of the surface world experienced the Undertale world as something horrifying. Asriel returned, dying, but to his last moment wondering why he had to lose his sibling. Kris might vanish from all their problems in the Deltarune world, but nobody would get to escape the curse of feeling like the one person who anchored and created their world had been replaced with a gaping void. (The Memoryheads would be there to haunt anyone overly sure they had.)

Then Asriel would get turned into a flower, and Flowey would take over the ability to save, and lock Gaster out of rewriting the timeline fully. And that's where Undertale's main story begins.

Little did Kris know, they were simply missing the wrong thing. It was not the lost girl that would be coming back.
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== Footnotes ==

<references>
<ref name="d">Theme: Dark Worlds and darkness being the space outside reality, or a hidden place beyond reality.</ref>
<ref name="p">Theme: Dark Worlds as subconscious or collective unconscious.</ref>
<ref name="ut17">Theme: W.D. Gaster "falling into his own creation", or other characters generally "falling into a creation".</ref>
<ref name="fm">Theme: Kris trying to draw a person and ending up drawing a tree over the top.</ref>
<ref name="e">Theme: fictional narratives and dreams always have to {{em|terminate}} at some point even when they don't end properly.</ref>
<ref name="n">Theme: Deltarune characters wanting to break free from constricting narratives.</ref>

<ref name="dr2">I'm not marking up these themes play-by-play because I think readers are stupid, or think they need a grade-school-textbook "comprehension questions" section. I'm marking up themes because it's genuinely easy to forget all the tiny moving parts of the actual games, and because when I wrote this post [[User:Reversedragon/UTDR/pointed-tail|as a stream-of-consciousness]] laying out everything explicitly it got too unwieldy and redundant even for me. So now you get this post as a better-paced narrative with the connecting themes all laid out down here. Deltarune is absolutely dense for a console-styled role-playing game, I'm telling you.</ref>

<ref name="cn">This is supposed to be the Deltarune world's version of {{book|The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe}}. Because monsters wrote it, it's about the idea of nonhuman characters getting dragged into a violent world of humans that doesn't make any sense where the humans are always trying to fit things into narratives and justify wars, but the monsters just don't understand it.</ref>

<ref name="r">The reason is that it's fake. It's a fan game, or a purported concept for one anyway. But that doesn't mean it isn't funny to imply "the reason" is that some terrifying Gaster aura is protecting the secrets of {{game|Undertale}} and {{game|Deltarune}}. Within {{game|Deltarune}} Gaster is trying hard to make sure nobody finds out who he really was, and Gaster or the Memoryhead hiding the {{thingamajig|caps=y|Redacted}}Tale route of {{game|Undertale}} is just an extension of that.</ref>
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