User:Reversedragon/UTDR/pointed-tail/2

The forgotten man

(RedactedTale AU / Deltarune adaptation)

This is my interpretation of what is happening in 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 Undertale explained the Memoryheads the way it explained Flowey?". With that cleared up, here's the story of Deltarune presented as the backstory of my unofficial "Deltarune prequel story".

Dess

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 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 (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 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.

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

Dess: Everything's fine, mom. I am getting pizza, just like I said. 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. [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. 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. 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.

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

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

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

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

Dess: [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 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.

Noelle

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.

[unfinished]

Memoryhead

Near the end of 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 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. 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 RedactedTale world as the Underground's first librarian who once took much better care of things, Antiqua. (In the RedactedTale 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 RedactedTale.) 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 RedactedTale world as the one mythical sage hidden in a cloud of common annoying birbats, 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 "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 RedactedTale world as the three great Communist theorists 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 RedactedTale 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, W.D. Gaster.

The world of Undertale is an alternate version of the Deltarune world. The RedactedTale 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 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 Undertale, every encounter with Flowey will be replaced with a Memoryhead? There's a good reason you didn't know that.

Footnotes

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deltashard1 RedactedTale/ basic concept

<< pointed-tail fitting REDACTEDtale into Deltarune chapter 4 (scrap / first version of this entry)

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2972_pointed-tail2

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REDACTEDtale/ narrative of how Dess disappeared, based on "bad-memory" theory