Editing User:Reversedragon/UTDR/pointed-tail/v2 (section)

=== Alone ===

If the Angel threw Kris into the pit alone in Chapter 5, they will drop into the Titan world alone in Chapter 6. This does not make it impossible to complete the Titan world or anything of the sort, although it does make things considerably harder. Kris can go through basically everything the whole party would do in this chapter, with some minor differences. (Of course, if these chapters really existed you could simply abandon your other save file and load up Chapter 6 without any particular completion data for Chapter 5 to simply get a full party of Kris, Susie, and Noelle, but if that particular save slot didn't find them in Chapter 1 and Chapter 5 respectively, no original Starwalker, and no Oll'een.)

As Kris goes through the pedestal areas, a few Darkners will simply have come down off the pedestals already transformed, and roam the map as slightly-menacing dark monochrome versions of themselves. The guitars on pedestals don't do this, nor do the un-transformed journals. For the transforming journals, Trihard will appear as a bunch of shimmering gray Chapter-4-styled triangles and chase you down before showing up in prettier rainbow colors in its encounter. Overall, you get the feeling this place is filled with unknown dangers and Kris may not feel comfortable here.

When Kris encounters the guitars, they will have an interesting response of picking up exactly one of them if they like it more than the one they currently have. When the other Lightners are not around Kris does not react as noticeably to the Gaster guitar; they are a little unsettled, and they will not pick it up, but are not afraid of the big problem of the others asking what this is. The Shadow Crystal character is a pain because without Noelle you have to simply wait the fight out or use the option that gives you the extra-hard pattern. Fortunately, it just happens to be doable anyway because within the Titan world, there are a couple of extra-difficult opponents where Kris can simply run when the opponent is Tired to have the same effect as Pacifying them. This isn't the case for most opponents, and most of the time Kris will actually have to Spare them. Some of the encounters get very tense without Ralsei there to heal... or Susie, or Noelle. Kris can join the ranks of Lightners with healing moves if you go really really out of your way to find it in Chapter 5, but unfortunately for you, the story is structured such that if you're the kind of person who'd toss Kris into the pit, you're less likely to have found that.

When Kris encounters some of the objects particularly connected to Noelle, they still find them a little uncomfortable. Most of Noelle's memory objects still show up. The couple of objects that were specifically connected to Susie do not show up, and are replaced with duplicates of Kris or Noelle's objects. Kris absolutely remembers Noelle, as much as sometimes they wish they didn't.

When Kris arrives on the right floor and crosses the bridge to the secret floating room, this is when things truly get interesting. The camera pans up to the room with urgency like it must be very important, and you can clearly see the odd illegible name plate that says "D…r H…l…day", but as the frame slowly returns to Kris, Kris only stands on the spot and stares at this room for a second like they are not actually sure how they feel about going in here. Unfortunately for Kris, nothing interesting happens here if you turn around and walk away, so they have no real option but to go in.

As Kris enters the room, they encounter a shadowed deer man awaiting them in a swivel chair.

[The shadowed deer man stands up.]<br/>
Dess:  [fateful] Well. You're finally here.<br/>
Dess:  Anything to say for yourself?<br/>
[Kris' mouth tenses shut in vague resentment.]<br/>
Dess:  [laughs] No need to argue with me. We both know what you did.<br/>
Dess:  ...To think that over the years, nothing has gotten better for you.<br/>
Dess:  You're still the same as always.<br/>
Dess:  I would have thought Noelle would make it here.<br/>
Dess:  But oh well, I guess we'll just be one misty-eyed reunion short.<br/>
[Dess looks into Kris with a particular piercing apathy, a little like Carol but more bored.]<br/>
Dess:  Kris.<br/>
Dess:  Have you ever once stopped to think about what got you here?<br/>
Dess:  Just look at you.<br/>
Dess:  You have nothing. You have nobody.<br/>
[For a moment, neither says anything, and the room is particularly still.]<br/>
Dess:  How much longer are you going to keep turning around and running?<br/>
[Kris seems to be frustratedly fidgeting by churning their fists. They look less ready to run than ready to fight.]<br/>
Dess:  If you keep going nowhere, then one day you'll get there.<br/>
Dess:  You should go.<br/>
Dess:  At this point, there is nothing more for you to do.

[Dess takes off his gloves and puts them in his pockets in an unsettling way that suggests he is building up to something.]<br/>
Dess:  But not before...<br/>
[Dess thrusts out one arm to the side palm up and materializes a thorn-like blade, then flicks his wrist and turns it into a guitar. He takes the guitar in his hand, and takes his stance.]<br/>
Dess:  [looks up at Kris darkly] —I teach you the meaning of pain.

The room disappears into darkness, and Kris is in the same endless voidscape they would be in if they entered this fight with Susie and Noelle. Dess appears on the left side of the encounter screen, and Kris appears on the right side, but otherwise, this fight plays like any normal major encounter from previous chapters. There is a battle box, and the red heart can dodge things in it. There are HP bars and menus, just like there were in the all-together Dess fight. The only twist is that the fight is wickedly difficult. The theme playing is Deltarune's version of "Megalovania". It's more Megalovania in spirit than in content. It has motifs related to Dess. It may have multiple versions of Gaster's theme in it, one literal and several "figurative" in the sense of several of the first tracks you hear in Deltarune that sound like Gaster is standing just behind the curtain. (I heard one track someone made that played the lost girl motif _as if it was_ Gaster's theme. I think that one was really onto something.) It's intense. It's daunting.

The attacks go crazy. It's daggers. It's shards. Dess hurls storms of thorn daggers from all directions. There's an attack where he clenches his fist and cracks the battle box like a broken screen, and you can see the ground shattering beneath Kris. There's an attack where he brings his fist down in a hammering motion and a big dagger comes down and pierces into the battle box and drags it around, a bit like King's attack; afterward it can be seen falling through the cracks it created into some unseen abyss below. Some of Dess' attacks are controlled with the guitar, usually the ones where things are flying around, while some of them he controls with his hands. There's a common theme of sharp glass shard obstacles being bad to run into, but them also being all around you. There's probably a terrible twisting hall of glass shards that just side-scrolls on and on. Very rarely and only at certain points, there are glowing-eyed deer-skull cannons that at once _aren't_ Gaster-blasters but also kind of are. They are weirdly restrained compared with their appearances in Undertale; they just appear for about a second in one fairly nasty pattern of beams that nearly covers the box and then go away.

One of the weird things about this fight is that while you often see Dess lightning-flash for a second or churn and boil into Gaster, Gaster never seems to want to hurt you. There are no weapons or attacks that come specifically from Gaster. All he does is flash in for a little longer than normal to say something vaguely supportive, reassuring Kris that everything will be fine. Dess seems really frustrated and like he is full of old burnt-out anger, but Gaster just seems willing to forgive everything.

Dess:   Kris. It's time to face the truth.  [flashes into Gaster]<br/>
Gaster: YOU ARE YOUR OWN WORST ENEMY. HAVE MERCY.  [flashes back]

Dess:   Why are you here?<br/>
Dess:   After all this time. You come in here now.

Dess:   You can't have come to throw me an un-birthday party.

Dess:   Kris. Everything that's happened to you, you've created.  [flashes into Gaster]<br/>
Gaster: YOUR BONDS. WHOLE WORLDS. IT'S AMAZING.  [flashes back]

Dess:   Kris. Stop this now.<br/>
[Dess turns the red heart blue and with a swing of his arm slams Kris and the Soul into the ground.]

Dess:   This is your own doing.

Dess:   I'm done being angry. I just want you to stop lying to yourself.

Dess:   This can't go on any more.  [flashes into Gaster]<br/>
Gaster: SO LET US HONOR ALL WE LEAVE BEHIND.  [flashes back]

Dess:   [furious; wielding guitar in hands like an axe] Do you really think you can squeak by on siding with—  [Dess is cut off, and burbles into Gaster]<br/>
Gaster: [lighthearted] NOBODY, AND COMING ALONE? THAT WAS A SILLY MOVE, KRIS.<br/>
Gaster: FRIENDS ARE IMPORTANT. THEY CAN HELP YOU CONQUER ANYTHING.<br/>
[As if on cue, that terrible six-headed cat apparition with human teeth from Chapter 3 just kind of happily floats across the screen in the background. You can see its shadowed body outlined in white and all the heads between its legs awkwardly churning like it has no idea what walking or swimming even is.]

Gaster's "honor all we leave behind" line is actually a hint. If you press "f" while Gaster is saying this — or any of his other lines before — then he will give a particular expression of clapping or steepling his hands together with a slow blink and a smile like he is weirdly eager for something, playing the Undertale Gaster-poofing sound effect as he fades away to leave Dess. The next time you get defeated by all the crazy patterns and the Soul snaps in two, Gaster will simply hurl in another red or blue heart-shaped object, letting you continue the fight. You can keep doing this all you want. It's not outright told to you explicitly, so if this chapter were real and had just dropped, a lot of people would not have found the secret cheat code unless they made a really good guess, or went digging in the decompiled game executable to find it. Gaster is the anti-Sans. He's willing to _help_ you at levels that are complete bullshit.

If you don't want to attack Dess or just defend every turn, there are a few Acts Kris can do — although not a single one of these is helpful, and almost all of them involve Kris deliberately misinterpreting what action was intended.

[Surrender]<br/>
<nowiki>*</nowiki> You surrendered your heart to darkness.<br/>
[This act turns the red or blue heart to gray for two turns and allows you to escape the blue Soul mode.]

[Apologize]<br/>
<nowiki>*</nowiki> You apologized for your reluctance to follow the last prophecy.<br/>
<nowiki>*</nowiki> He forgives you.

[Disarm]  (attempts 1 and 3, etc)<br/>
<nowiki>*</nowiki> You told the man he has a great phone voice.<br/>
<nowiki>*</nowiki> You complimented the man on his aura.<br/>
<nowiki>*</nowiki> Your opponent has no idea what you're talking about.<br/>
[This act delays some of the nastiest moves from Dess and gives you a more normal one, although by the standards of this fight that will only be so helpful.]

[Disarm]  (attempt 2)<br/>
<nowiki>*</nowiki> You reached out for Dess' hand.<br/>
<nowiki>*</nowiki> Your hand was sliced horribly.

Kris getting cut on Dess' blade hands is the only way to get stuck with "karma" damage in the Dess fight, where up to a third of Kris' full HP bar will turn dark blue and drain slowly, and all attacks do more damage. Unlike in the Sans fight, the karma wedge will stay at a minimum of 1 unless Kris uses a healing spell for more than the karma amount, which will make it go away.

Dess looks frazzled, yet determined to keep pushing on. He gets to the very end of his tricks, throwing a glass shard into the menus and shattering them if you take a bit too long scrolling through them while actively moving the cursor the whole time. (So, this attack won't target you just for leaving the keyboard.) The menus then un-shatter and un-crumple themselves and come back for some reason. You know why by now — Gaster made these things and has the power to fix them.

[Dess is beyond the time for guitars, letting it poof away some number of turns ago, and is on his knees.]<br/>
Dess:   Kris. You have to tell them.  [flashes into Gaster]<br/>
Gaster: WHEN THEY LEARN HE IS BOUND TO HERE, THEY'LL UNDERSTAND.  [flashes back]<br/>
[Where Dess' hands meet the nondescript shadowed ground you can see what appear to be small drops of blood.]

Dess:  [looking into floor, shaky, fighting back tears]<br/>
Go. Get out of here. Leave me be.<br/>
[The encounter ends, and the dark landscape fades away, releasing Kris back into the office.]

Dess:  Go home. Go back to the surface.<br/>
Dess:  I can complete my plan, and save this world.<br/>
Dess:  It's better you go back and forget I was ever here.<br/>
Dess:  Noelle? Tell her I'm dead.<br/>
Dess:  Although maybe... if she looks out across the many pieces of time and space.<br/>
Dess:  The clear days. The stars.<br/>
Dess:  She can still see a trace of me.<br/>
Dess:  Tell her not to worry. She should banish the darkness and be happy.

What Dess is meaning to say here is that as he exerts the powers he at least _believes_ he has to halt the Roaring and stitch the cosmos back together, anyone looking at the world itself or the implied presence of Gaster and the connecting darkness below everything that creates game mechanics and physics and the world will be seeing the traces of Dess in the beauty of the universe and his work in putting it back together again. The slightest trace of Dess' hand in fixing the universe is like a fragment of Dess. Although he didn't actually die in the accident or shatter into nothing, his influence would be spread across time and space.

When Kris goes to the bottom floor after encountering Dess, they can enter the final Knight room through twisting a floating Shadow Crystal dagger as usual. The sequence manages to look just a hair more unsettling than it did already with only Kris there. But everything is normal, as much as it can be. Kris goes into the room. If this is a game, the sequence that follows is all narrator boxes in places where there would have been character dialogue. There is a creepily-blank encounter screen featuring Kris staring down the trapped Knight. Kris has some very concerning battle options, most of which they would not actually want to do. If Kris is made to attack, the Knight will manifest floating daggers and you have to dodge a dagger pattern. If you "Taunt" the Knight, it looks at Kris hard, as frustrated as one could possibly look without a face, and you get a nasty dagger pattern. If you "Kick" the Knight, it rattles around with a shriek and the box is just a horrible diagonal rain of daggers going like a train. If you attempt to "Dismember", Kris {{em|will}} try to slice the Knight's hands off, but it won't work; its body is too tough, and doesn't actually come apart. This action, oddly, is one of the few that results in an easy pattern rather than a hard one, implying that the Knight wouldn't actually mind being cut apart just to be free. From everything else going on, this would appear to be more out of tired resignation than there being anything positive about this process; there is a certain unspoken shared misery between the entity and Kris that makes it willing to align with Kris onto what it wouldn't take from Susie. Of course, if you have feelings, you could always "Console" the Knight. This is basically the action where Kris goes up and sits beside them. You could try to use Kris' super obscure healing technique on the Knight if you happen to have it, but it won't do anything. You could attempt to "Unshackle" the Knight, leading Kris to try to remove the invisible shards that imprison the Knight, and cut their hand. This is something of a stupid thing to do because unless Kris can heal themself they will take blue "karma" damage like in the Dess fight and will not be able to use some Acts. If they do have the ability to heal, though, they will just do it independent of your control and regardless of what TP you were at; Kris isn't going to sit and wait for your permission on whether they get to fix their hand. One of the best things you can do is "Harmonize", where if Kris is sitting next to the Knight they will start playing chords on the guitar. (The animation even shows the correct guitar, although it's solely done with palette swaps.) If Kris plays the guitar a while the Knight will just lie down and sleep, and count as Tired. Kris is then allowed to run from the encounter as if they were able to Pacify the Knight. The Knight will just be there on the floor of the room asleep as they leave the room, and ascend back up the spiral of areas and floors.

You can read the journals. You can shut off all the baby Titan vents. The place feels very eerie when you've done everything. There is this unspoken feeling over the empty Titan fountain as a place that even if you don't truly know what Kris is going through, {{em|you}} have had enough of being there and {{em|you}} just want to get out.

When Kris emerges, they are not in the burned flower field, but in Hometown. Susie and Noelle are still there although a lot of time has clearly gone by. The town is all torn up. The Roaring is breaking through; more and more tiny cracks are extending serpentine. But Susie and Noelle are there, with a large jug of water and some kind of emergency duffel bag. They are sitting against each other. Susie is holding Noelle's hand. Noelle still looks like she's panicking. Then a Dark Fountain bursts through the earth and Kris emerges from it in a glowing light, sealing it away. The two of them are stunned, and leap to their feet. Kris does not look all right, and doesn't quite want to look at them. Susie gently takes them by the arm, mostly in a gesture of friendship and support, but also because the three of them do really need to get moving. Chapter 6 ends, and Chapter 7 begins.
</div>

<div class="bop academic"><h2><time datetime="2025-11-09T09:38:39H">Hometown</time></h2>
When Kris, Susie, and Noelle emerge in Hometown, everything is a mess. All the buildings that already held Dark Worlds are notably disturbed, but so are a number of others. There are great fissures running through the world fracturing it into separate cliffs. The residents are nowhere to be seen at the moment. There is a single prerecorded message playing from somewhere loudly yet distantly, apparently giving everyone instructions on where to have gone.

{{b|Father Alvin,}} {{stage|in his unique dialogue sound he would actually have to have had in this version of Deltarune}}{{b|:}}<br />
{{i|This is a state of emergency. The town is under evacuation. There is a shelter to the south. Do not stay inside. Go south to the shelter. This is an evacuation. Go south to the shelter. Do not stay inside.}}

As the three wander through the wreckage, there will occasionally be a new fissure bursting through the world in the background. There are Titan children everywhere, and with no actual weapons _per se_, Kris simply has to let the red Soul shine brightly to banish them. There are no encounters, and just what amounts to one long bullet-box sequence where you can "attack". In some places there are stranded residents that can't quite find their way to safety, and Kris or Susie can help guide them to the smallest gaps they may be able to walk over or jump over, or help them escape from obstructing piles of debris. The last few trapped residents of Hometown are your recruits for this chapter. If you fail to save all of them, you will get Deltarune's default disappointing ending.

As the chaos goes on, you'll see several actually-big Titans stand up out of the chasms ranging from the size of a city department store to the size of a mountain. There is a somewhat wide range of sizes. There are not exactly three of them. They're more or less just everywhere.

Chapter 7 has the _feeling_, although not the literal requirement, that Kris and friends only have a limited amount of time. They have to navigate through things carefully. If they don't defeat enough small Titans before they make it to a certain point it's over. If they don't rescue all the stragglers from Hometown before they get to a certain place it's over. They can't actually fight the big Titans, and mostly have to run. If for some reason they don't make it to the shelter door before things get out of hand it's over.

If Kris and their friends make it all the way into the shelter, what they will find is that everyone is hiding out within a Dark World. The place is relatively calm. It's become an odd little desolate frontier town sandwiched between a frozen bay and a vast red-and-orange tundra. Carol is acting as temporary mayor. Overall things are not bad at all; it's starting to vaguely resemble Undertale in a way, although you certainly don't {{em|remember}} a starry midnight frozen-marsh Alaska-Yukon-Canada area untold depths below Hotland.

But everything has to end. Every dream, every series of moving pictures, every fantasy. <ref name="e"/> Whether Kris, Susie, and Noelle actually make it to the shelter or not, eventually the Roaring simply tears through everything, even the hidden shelter Dark World. Frozen in one last moment of fear and realization, the Lightners are all torn to shreds, splintered into the thinnest wisps of sadness and memory.

This is the default ending of Deltarune that happens in most "normal" scenarios if the player had never been there, or the player made questionable choices. The Roaring completes, and the story does not actually end, it only {{em|terminates}}.

But, there is also a true ending to Deltarune. Thanks to a certain mysterious narrator who introduced "his" Deltarune to everyone as {{caps|Survey_Program}}, {{em|somebody}} put together a prophecy of how to stop the Deltarune world from disintegrating. There are two ways to read the prophecy to reach an actual ending. Both of them will work. One of them is much less agreeable. But the prophecy writer... well, he doesn't really care which one you choose, because he has only one goal. He wants to save the world of Deltarune, and the strange vessel-child that resides within it. And to do that, he wants to carry out the end objective of his prophecy.