User:Reversedragon/UTDR/pointed-tail
so there's the "forgotten man". he only appears in the Dark Worlds, and he's clearly symbolic in some way. Gaster may actually be a wild embellishment of the forgotten man that appeared within greater and greater and greater darkness — a Darkner Darkner that wrapped around to being real. in turn, the forgotten man might somehow be a haunting memory of Dess that Kris half wants to get rid of so Kris and Noelle can move on, where the Weird Route is about slaying this fake "Dess" but basically, the more you fight her she only gets stronger, because she's made out of bad feelings and killing your friend's sister can't feel all that good. the forgotten man and the Knight would be two manifestations of the same thing and as for the Goners, a Goner is somebody who has "world-died" — which totally isn't an English word, but so what. when a world dies its living characters (and possibly some dead ones?) turn into Goners; it has already happened to Darkners when they step out of a Dark World context they belong to. Gerson is another hint of what a Goner is: game characters don't fully die when they die, they are only really gone when their world dies and they become "world-dead". Deltarune's basic premise may be that there is one ending but Kris ran away from the ending so long the world is about to die before the game actually reaches its ending. this would explain how Deltarune was "the ending to a dream" that would become "the ending to a game" — Deltarune's most common "ending" is also the most common ending to a whole lot of dreams. simply tearing apart without actually ending. so putting that together, the Memoryheads in Undertale might actually be shadows of the forgotten man taunting the people of the Underground after tiny Kris ran away from them and died. why there are six faces on there isn't totally intuitive. it could have something to do with there being six major characters from Deltarune that were saved by going into Undertale? or it could be six faces of Gaster showing at different angles through a broken mirror to become one weird skull thing, thanks to something to do with shadow crystals and Gaster fragments. one of those two. I do think Chara is an alternate version of Kris that went into the shelter at a young age while the world would later die at the same time it would in "normal" Deltarune containing older Kris. the fact kids can still come into the Underground after the Deltarune world died is a little strange, but hey, Dark Worlds can make up all sorts of stuff, so maybe those kids really are refugees just like Kris that unfortunately died before they could find their freedom from scary game endings. either way Deltarune technically exists in Undertale, it's basically the surface and it's just shifted to a different time. I also think Asriel is Undertale's version of the Roaring Knight. which is why everyone was so utterly scared of him. Undertale left out the fact that the Underground is capable of seriously distorting things only in some cases and making them really really weird to look at when they get back to the surface. however, we're given slight hints of this when we see "god of hyperdeath" and Omega Flowey, two very strange distortions of Asriel. imagine if Asriel got to the surface and he already looked like Omega Flowey. you can see why people would immediately want to slaughter him. so that is my working theory of Deltarune. Kris really is the main character of Undertale, but died, so you really are naming the main character. Undertale was a sort of maladaptive haven from reality that somehow turned out okay when everybody else cleaned it up.
Memoryhead can be six random people that became Goners... as long as they're from Deltarune. sure. that isn't really ruled out, even if Deltarune never explicitly said these people existed. but those six characters are actually people Kris spotted randomly while passing through the town they were in before Hometown. young Kris is sneaking around, detached, unconcerned, maybe just a little preoccupied on something specific. they see six people that are particularly notable, and start making up stories about who these people might be in their head. this causes these people to be entered into the Dark Worlds as possible characters that could emerge from some appropriate object connected to them that then becomes a Darkner. when Kris gets to Hometown, and ultimately dies in the shelter, the six random people leak out of their fracturing Soul and become Undertale characters, as well as the seventh mythical character, the forgotten man / W.D. Gaster. these six people are Goners because the world of Deltarune died, and they didn't actually jump into the shelter before it happened. if anybody accidentally remembers that event, suddenly the six "memory heads" will vanish. this makes a ton of sense. gosh. I was maybe about halfway to guessing Deltarune, I just was never ever going to guess it without seeing the Roaring Knight.
I like this new lore because it is just really really funny to imagine Kris existing in this semi-realistic world in Not Hometown, in Furthertown, and running into these still semi-realistic but larger than life characters. just, this inexplicable demonstration of a pathetically small number of Communists around this booth or table with signs about some kind of important world event that small Kris totally absolutely does not understand at this age, that just, out of desperation after not getting through to anyone else hands a kid a newspaper. and this might be the actual item that first spawns the Three Ells as Darkners. their stupid newspaper. it's unclear if their names are actually Ellsburn, Ellshriek, and Ellwing in real life, or if that's just what the Dark World made up. from Kris' point of view they're enigmas.
this small but formidable looking birbat. kid Kris sees this old guy out hiking or something and taking a rest on a bench and they see him take one look at some other man, in reality probably just in admiration of like, "nice to see these younger people are also at my level", and subliminally starts wondering if the odd sage guy is into men. going home from town one day old guy accidentally drops, ironically enough, a packet of sage, leading kid Kris to think, sage! well how can he not be special now. when you're a fairly small child you always connect the logic of things a bit weirdly. so Kris scoops up the sage, and probably eats it like a gremlin because who knows if they have anything to eat, but keeps the bag or one leaf for reasons. they take this leaf and press it into a book like it was actually interesting
Antiqua is at the library. Kris finds a book sitting around, which might even be the How to Draw Dragons book (I have no idea if that will actually be explained in Deltarune or not), and either gets lost in reading it or just has been carrying it around a bit too long. they walk out of the library with it and yet somehow forget they have it, but the beeper doesn't go off because somebody had actually checked it out, just not them. while at the library they see Antiqua go by murmuring something about where to shelf an uncommon kind of book, and passively assume them to be the librarian, though they are actually some other kind of staff member. they also spot some kind of curvy bird monster heading to the second floor, who never says anything but who they presume to like the books upstairs. this later registers both these monsters into the Dark Worlds as potential Goners.
as for why these specific six people become the Memoryhead... I don't know. my guess is that Kris just remembers them the most strongly after having seen them on multiple days. they're some of Kris' earliest memories before Hometown, uniquely connecting them to "the past", and the edge of "forgetting someone". I also don't think the six "memory heads" rule out all the other people being resurrected either, as long as Kris so much as caught a glance of them once and mostly forgot them. one of the six "people" is actually a group of three people, after all.
the only thing this doesn't cover is why Dess is so significant in Deltarune and there may or may not be traces of her/him/them in Undertale. why would it be that Gaster is this really important overblown mythical figure born of Kris' mind that could most likely only be a reflection of the traumatic event of Dess missing, but Kris would only remember six random people that manifest in Undertale as an Amalgamate and not Dess? why wouldn't Dess be Gaster, or at least the person Gaster is trying to cover up with darkness to create a better world we know as the Undertale world?
but seeing a big shadowed deer-person just emerge out of the bushes suddenly perhaps with a bat might be a little scary for a second when you're a child. Dess is younger at this time, but definitely after the time she turned notably rebellious and became a pain.
Kris is mysteriously wandering around near some dumpster or maybe at the edge of a forest area eating up moss, when Dess steps out Kris 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, intrigued. seeing somebody be intentionally scary isn't really scary to them but does make that person very interesting. Dess: [arms deflate to sides; vaguely 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 the hell 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 Furthertown? I know this kid just needs a home. I'm fine. [frowning] ...What I worry about is whether they are.
Carol would be angry about all this but seeing her child, her otherwise annoying headstrong child, show concern and generosity toward somebody else has deflated her anger. Carol knows deep down that a few people find her uncaring and almost oppressive, and when she hardly has time for anyone herself, anything that reflects positively on her or her family is something she simply has to embrace. so for the next week or so she takes this event in stride and tries to pretend like she meant for it to happen — sure, December doing nice things for her communities, I totally encouraged her to do that. she will try a few times to unsubtly hint at things Dess should do for her own town, but mostly ends the discussion with "I'm glad it turned out well". and then, quite abruptly, she informs Dess that despite the relatively great amount of space in their house they do not have room for another child and they will have to send Kris to foster care. Noelle catches sight of the strange bedraggled forest human and does get a bit spooked for a moment. though it's not really even the sight of a human child, and specifically the weird way they silently stand off-kilter in the hallway like some sort of liminal demon. the town doesn't really have any specific place to put extra children, and Carol has to put up a classified ad. before long the Dreemurrs find out about Kris, probably before they even notice the ad, and bring them in. Asriel warms up to them quickly. all three like Kris pretty well. things seem good. they clip out the ad as a funny little memory, which Kris soon stows in their "collection" of old objects.
time passes. Kris goes to school. Kris, Noelle, and Dess become friends. Kris invents a weird game of creating scenarios out of seemingly random objects. Kris lays out the folded red-accented newspaper and puts the book on it and sets Seam or something on top, and inspired by a couple words from the newspaper, says 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 notes that when phoenix Monsters are delivering this prophecy, it's not all gloomy and the world can probably be rebuilt. maybe if everyone is nice the outcome would be more favorable. they stand the green crayon next to the book and Seam and start voicing these ideas through it like a smaller friendly wizard who totally knows about the prophecy. Noelle finds this pretty funny, confused why there are two wizards. Kris is full of explanations as long as they are always too terse to actually explain anything. 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 terrifying, like the wall plugs. they have quite a time with this.
Kris, Noelle, and Dess get into various misadventures. Carol is internally bothered that Dess never seems to straighten up and just 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 Noelle. it internally drives her crazy when Dess won't respect Toriel's unfair rules on Asriel, so she snaps at Asriel and shoos him away, not Dess.
one day Kris, Noelle, and Dess investigate "the pointed tail". I'd rather this was the Dark World manifestation of some mundane event, but I'm not sure what that would be. so, all we know is "the children followed the pointed tail". Dess goes out of bounds somehow. she finds a thin fracture going through the earth that the three follow to its center, and thinks it looks like fun to bust it open. Kris and Noelle are neutral about this, maybe a little scared but too intrigued to make her stop. so, after picking at the crack a bit, seeing that the frayed edges of the ground look a bit like cardboard, Dess simply punches through it. below is nothing but airy darkness filled with faint stars, something like outer space. as her arm goes through, it becomes invisible. she tries to pull herself out, and successfully extracts her arm, but to her dismay the ground cracks further and she simply falls in and disappears entirely. Noelle runs the other direction as fast as she can. Kris hesitates for a fraction of a second, grasping toward the void but not quite brave enough to actually dive in and potentially be lost forever. before long, Kris runs the other direction too. Kris feels terrible about the incident. ever since being rescued, they always looked up to Dess. Dess was scary sometimes but overall, more like a brave warrior that protected people. failing to save the one that saved them, letting her fall into the void without trying, it felt almost as bad as deciding to kill someone. why would they murder their hero?
Carol investigates. she sees that the problem is very much not normal. she ends up bringing in some contractors from another town to build a shelter that entirely encloses the hole. where cracks have extended outward, the contractors fill them in with rocks and dirt, which don't fall into the hole and seems to be sufficient. the few people in town that actually see the hole are told to never talk about it, as if it didn't exist.
the town takes on a deep emotional sickness. Noelle comes to think of Kris as the beginning of Dess disappearing. the fact they were playing games about the world ending in darkness before something that sure looks like it actually happened makes their relationship uneasy. Kris becomes tense like Noelle really ought to be mad at such a "murderer" and snap at them about it if they even come close. one day, Kris strikes first and as Noelle talks about doing web searches to find Dess, simply says "she's dead". this possibility is the only frightening thing Noelle is genuinely too afraid of to look in the eye. she looks away. she takes it very hard. for a long while the two don't even speak to each other 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 ground and turning into terrifying abominations that will end Kris and end everything. Kris moves some old things from the house to the classroom. this process is loosely related to why their room is so empty, 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. things continue to gradually get worse. the Dreemurr and Holiday families themselves destabilize, and Toriel and Asgore get divorced. the silence wears on everyone. then one day, one fateful day far in the future, the Roaring Knight appears and begins creating Dark Fountains. Carol rounds up Kris and tells them they have to promise to go into the void. it isn't about the consequences of not doing it, but they will be forgiven for everything if they only locate Dess. Asgore too — though she doesn't tell him going into the void is possible.
the Roaring Knight isn't actually Dess at all. not literally, not physically.
the Roaring Knight is precisely the fear that Dess wants revenge, or that Kris deserves to be smited. the fear that Noelle can't trust Kris, and Kris can't trust Noelle. the fear from Noelle that Kris somehow is a Monster-killer. the fear from Kris that they will actually hurt Noelle. all of that crystallized, semi-literally, into the Roaring Knight, because the void itself turned both of their thoughts into one very nasty Darkner.
but here is what I think the twist of Deltarune is. Dess is somewhere else in the darkness. she doesn't even know about the Roaring Knight. Dess might even have turned into a scientist studying the Dark Worlds in the weird dilated expanse of time she was down there. Dess might have come out as not female and got a slightly different appearance. any number of crazy things could have happened in there. I'll just say those two things are true for Redactedtale purposes, because it is a /wild/ image.
this ultimately causes Kris, on some subliminal level, to invent the character of W.D. Gaster. he fell into his creation, but he's not actually out to get anyone. he actually wants to solve all of this and make things better. maybe if the world is actually ending he could even stop it... given enough determination, who knows what could happen. so Gaster is categorically Kris' hero, but he is associated with darkness and fear and being "The Opposer" (ha-satan, 666) because Kris perceives themself as evil, afraid others see them as evil; only a highly ominous figure could ever be their hero. a figure that is able to protect others because he strikes fear in the hearts of only those who are actually dangerous. Asgore is characterized as having hired Gaster because the "real" Asgore is leading the investigation to find Dess. it's a weird way of Kris trying to get Dess to save themself because Kris knows they should be strong enough. so "Asgore" "hires Gaster" to create a better world. literally. Gaster creates the core that makes the Underground exist, like the Underground's Soul, and then the rest of the Underground and the happy endings for various people we see in Undertale coalesce around that.
the Underground is a sort of idyllic world that small Kris either intentionally or unconsciously creates to escape the harsher outcomes of Deltarune's world. in Deltarune, this imagined world is somehow thrown away, and Kris continues to grow up. in Undertale, Kris does not grow up and somehow tosses themself into the void as a child, never to be seen again. for some reason, Kris' sacrifice makes Undertale exist as reality, and the alternate Asriel inside it has to help either the Kris that fell in or some imagined projection that replaced Kris to break out and attack Hometown. it's hard to say what's going on there because on one hand Kris dies in the story of Undertale, suggesting the real Kris is mounting the attack, but on the other hand, everything we know about Kris in Deltarune doesn't necessarily suggest that the real Kris would do that. maybe it's just the story I've constructed here that rules that out, and the idea is simply that small Kris likes the imagined characters in Undertale better than the real ones and wants them to destroy the real ones so they can take their places. that would more or less make sense. though I don't see anybody as commanding the Roaring Knight, Kris deliberately changing to be the one who would do that is possible, especially if it's not teenage Kris.
I guess this is where Sans and the quantum mechanics book come in. the reason there are two versions of Kris is simply "many-worlds interpretation". Kris dreamed about a world where they fell in, but they actually don't have to because little did they know it also happened. this is one of the weakest actual-plot-points-in-Deltarune because there's no real reason for it to happen or not happen that we know of so far. the only way it fits together with anything is like, Deltarune is stated to have one progression of events, so you need a way of forking the timeline which doesn't truly depend on anyone's choices and is "scientific" or "realistic" in that sense. it's possible that Gaster reaches over and puts the Angel into Deltarune so that it will have an "observer" and set off the many-worlds timeline fork — that's not the way real quantum mechanics works but it is a frequent mischaracterization which is quite conceptually funny to use in this kind of fiction, so we let it slide.
Gaster talks about creating "a new future" because he is quite literally the replacement for Deltarune's future. when he says "my Delta Rune", he means the Deltarune that will be capable of a new future. where it gets confusing is when we are trying to figure out what Gaster created (or fell into). according to this theory, what Gaster actually created was Undertale, not Deltarune, and the phrase "my Delta Rune" is meant to throw us off from this simply so we wouldn't guess the rest of Deltarune before Chapter 4. after Chapter 4, I suspect toby knew it would get more "predictable" as the actual narrative pieces aligned, and this is why he acted like Undertale fans might find Deltarune disappointing. but looking at all this? I greatly doubt anyone actually will. even if this theory is correct, you know the game will be wild and full of visual and gameplay surprises. the actual scene revealing the day Dess disappeared will be crazy. so, Gaster creates the Underground, he disappears because the narratives of the characters become too real and even the better version of Dess has to disappear 'into darkness', he manages to create the Red Soul device which loops around and finalizes the creation of Undertale, but the Red Soul device simultaneously causes the creation of the timeline where Kris survives and has to live with the existence of The Angel. the Angel has existed before the game booted up, that really is what the birdcage means, it's just that Deltarune happens to timeskip over a bunch of years where the Red Soul was theoretically making decisions but real-world players didn't get to see it, only the in-world Angel. the Angel is diegetic more than it's literally us, even though it's also us.
so. the only real loose thread that's still hanging is what happens if Dess is found. does Gaster stop existing? the funny thing is that doesn't actually break continuity, because we already know Gaster stopped existing. "Gaster" disappears the moment a player finds him. maybe his purpose was fulfilled and that's why he disappeared. maybe his overall mission was ultimately to become a Goner, because Gaster having no reason to exist is actually the best possible outcome. if Gaster has no reason to exist, it happens because Dess was found and there was no need to construct an elaborate mythical future to help find them.
around the time of Chapter 2, I once half-believed a theory that there was some kind of conservation of Goners where only some characters could exist and their existence pushed out other characters that then had to be Goners. I now am almost positive that's not true, because the only character that is actually true of is Gaster. his purpose is to not exist, but that's highly specific to him, and as of the time of Undertale we weren't supposed to know this until Deltarune Chapter 4 because it might spoil Deltarune.
why does Kris avoid the shelter? fear of the Knight, fear of Dess' revenge if Kris runs into them. maybe Kris somehow knows deep down that the Knight and the Titans are basically the same thing, and thinks on some level, I don't want to open the shelter door and have a Titan jump out at me. Kris confronts the Titans in Chapter 4, but that's because Susie and Ralsei are there. in the sword route Kris is alone, which explains why they don't want to go to the shelter. the sword itself is a projection of what it feels like for Kris to be alone.
and as for the brown door on the stream? we'd only get angrier at it being skipped if we had the full Deltarune. Dess is behind that. in some weird sense I could not predict, there is a version of Dess behind that door.
I still kinda like the Gaster Amalgamate idea, even though you'd have to change it a lot to make it work with Deltarune the whole entry needs to be rewritten to end up at the "right" Gaster lore and yet... if you look at it as the story of Kris everything but the hints toward Gaster were oddly on point, so "rewrite it" is actually a positive thing to say.
I guess how it would work is the Gaster Amalgamate would represent the "good" version of Dess merging with the Roaring Knight to become an unsalvageable horror. you use the concept of the Underground being a mirror to Deltarune where unreal Asriel is going to replace real Asriel, and basically the Knight created from everybody's negative feelings crosses over that mirror to merge with Dess. the Gaster Amalgamate or Dess Amalgamate is then the Dark World reflection of itself but also the imagined-world version of Dess existing in Undertale. we replace the concept of mutually-exclusive individual Goners with mutually-exclusive Deltarune vs Undertale worlds, and it still somewhat works as long as we're only focused on Asriel or Dess.
> Every possibility that presented itself, you let slip by you and fade into nothing. ... > ... We are the only thing powerful enough to save this world Gaster being super mad when you fail to prevent the accidents was crazily on point. I don't even think I had a lot of information about Deltarune at that time. I couldn't have had any idea I was predicting the Roaring Knight. I was going solely off Undertale. so, it's crazy how much the teeny tiny bit of information about Gaster in Undertale reveals about Deltarune. it's actually almost like the Gaster lore became a bit incoherent solely out of the need to be Deltarune foreshadowing. but, in light of that we could fix it here if needed
if there's an angry Gaster, Alphys interacting with Gaster is probably something that would happen. as well as protecting Frisk from danger — I mean, in Deltarune she's the teacher so she wouldn't really want Kris falling into the void. Alphys, Undyne, Sans, Asgore, and Toriel all likely don't believe Kris "killed" Dess. I think that really provides context for what characters appear in Undertale. it's highly notable how Carol and Noelle aren't major or noticeable Undertale characters.
> Just because you are who you are it doesn't mean you're hopeless! still a really good message for Kris and their image of Dess it's so important to keep in mind that it doesn't matter whether Kris is dead or not in Undertale, Undertale is still full of themes that apply to Deltarune either way. that kind of thing is a lot stronger here, but it's also in the actual Undertale, even if it's harder to find.
where alternate-Asriel is practically crying about Kris not being there, I picture Dess as being almost more outraged and angry that Kris had to die to create this imagined world and try to bring him back and didn't go on living without him like a sensible person. Kris goes through the time to Deltarune afraid Dess is mad at them for not trying their hardest to bring back Dess, but it's actually the opposite — Dess is mad Kris would sacrifice themself to find him instead of the other way around
Kris, Asriel, Gaster, and Dess are all connected. they're all bound together by the tragedy that happens in alternate-Deltarune to create Undertale. so Dess is going to be torn up by the death of Kris in some way, maybe one which is more "real" in that it's closer to Deltarune and less buried in the fantasy realm of Undertale.
even if we have to maintain the concept that Undertale players are basically walking into the middle of Deltarune without any context, Dess saying all these vague and strange but important-sounding things that absolutely do not make any sense until you play Deltarune. exactly like Deltarune is the secret you've-gone-way-too-deep lore of Undertale, which it kind of is.
I think in a certain way I had it kind of right by totally bluffing with what Gaster is about and represents and means, like Gaster is on his own higher plane of lore merely parallel to Deltarune and if you found Gaster in the heyday of Undertale's world it's almost like nothing he said would make any sense at first. you would have to be really deep in Deltarune lore to have any idea what he was on about. my main mistake there was not having actual information about Deltarune I could skillfully hide under some amount of opaque pronounced redacted such that only when you knew about Deltarune it would become shockingly coherent.
Dess kind of just wants people to move on and let him work so he can help them rather than the other way around. as he's gotten lost in the infinite expanse of non-time within the great canvas of imagination he's started to realize that there are ways he can fix the world of Deltarune and perhaps rearrange it or something so the great disaster he now knows about won't even happen, at least in the same sense or in a way that would be a big problem. so Kris doing something crazy like dying and creating a whole separate layer of Dark World universe so Dess doesn't have to fix Hometown is a big issue that gets in the way of his plans and makes him at least a bit mad. "complete without issue"? the issue is that if Kris picks up the eggs it will transform Dess into the globby skeleton man because Dess' last anchor to Hometown and "reality" will be destroyed.
I think there are a couple of little nonlinear-narrative complexities here. I think what I'm describing is that in a sense the Dark Worlds do corrupt people into slanted versions of themselves, sometimes in a good way like turning Undyne into a crazy anime warrior, but sometimes in a less good way. here, Dess kind of goes a bit crazy from dissolving into fiction and legend in the Dark World. not in a strictly bad way where they become a cartoon mad scientist. more like after being immersed in darkness for a seemingly infinite amount of time and under a lot of stress knowing Hometown is slated to be destroyed, they simply psychologically snap and throw themself into their work at unreal ten-times speeds. kind of like Carol, in a weird way — neither this version of Dess nor Carol wants to be disturbed in their surely-very-important work and they get mad at people under pressure. Dess just wants to finish his breakthrough and get out of the darkness, maybe give Kris a bit of a hard time jokingly for letting him fall in, if after all this work and stress and sheer breakdown of normal reality he isn't feeling terribly grumpy with a wild rotating headache as he probably will be. he has totally lost track of what time actually is, and has somewhat forgotten that time will have moved on and everyone will have been suffering and driven apart and stuff. it's really not his fault he can't remember that, it's very much the darkness that's done that.
so there's the "normal" version of Dess before they went missing, there's the version of Dess all the way at the bottom warped by the darkness but never to be un-transformed because he has actually been finding himself at the same time he's been lost to the world, then there's the forgotten man on layer 5 (who helpfully changed gender to match the real Dess on layer 4.5), and then there's Gaster, the strictly mythical version of Dess that lurks way below on layer 6. layers 2, 3, and 4 below Hometown are sort of continuous with each other, just one great gradient of the same darkness that seems like it can always go deeper if you know how. 1 - The Angel 2 - Hometown 3 - Dark Worlds 4 - true darkness, trauma, The Titans 5 - the forgotten man 6 - Gaster, and Undertale
RedactedTale Dess is at either level 3.5 or level 4.5, not totally sure. the notion that level 4.5 exists and Dess could be chilling out inside a Titan because it's actually a world of its own is definitely really interesting.
it is the case that in Chapter 4 there is a waterfall you can walk through, while we also learn that the Titan is a Darkner made from a Dark Fountain. is that an illusion? is the real galaxy brain thing maybe to just walk through the Titan into the next level and find the grumpy deer man? I do love that image. it would finally explain the whole bizarre story of the Undertale monsters "walking through darkness using crystals to find their new home". only for fictional characters, digging the hole deeper and deeper turns out to be weirdly sufficient for solving their problems if only they had enough hope. I love the "troll physics" aspect of it where it is absolutely not real, yet it feels like the characters have made a great discovery. nope, this wasn't an allegory about "escapism", not exactly, it was just a fun worldbuilding exercise with a surprising conclusion. I like it. I like how it'd be committing to its premise and committing to being an abstract mood rather than aiming itself toward a specific moral. I definitely find it funny to imagine the Undertale-Deltarune setting being used to explore particular morals like with the Communist phoenixes, but I think the reason that succeeds at being so funny to me is I know that's not what it's for, so I know to deliberately play it as a joke. on the other hand, this notion of punching through all the levels to reach Undertale actually feels tonally correct to the games.
so, to sum that up, Dess (on level 4.5) is running out of time. he wants to get out of there and save Hometown. Kris (on level 2) is trying to save Dess before time runs out, but is inadvertently making Dess' time run out by creating Gaster. the antagonism between Dess and Gaster-proper drives a silent rift between Kris and Dess, which accidentally spawns the Roaring Knight (on level 2.5 or 3). Dess didn't even mean to do that, but if enough people think the same thing the Dark World creates it, and when everyone is thinking negative antagonistic thoughts about Kris, Noelle, and Dess fighting, that'll create the Knight. it's like a slider. each time Kris imagines the forgotten man or Gaster, Dess moves down the slider and Gaster moves up the slider, until they potentially crash into each other. like matter and antimatter unwinding, when the two crash into each other Gaster vanishes from Undertale and Dess vanishes from Deltarune. this is quite the mess. ultimately, Kris can stop it by just, not creating the forgotten man and Gaster any more, and coming to terms with the fact they don't want to confront that they might never find forgiveness for leaving Dess and yet Dess could be alive. if Kris would embrace that one uncertainty, this huge knot of problems would no longer be an issue if they could only overcome the terrifying physical division between world and mind to actually go into the Titan and retrieve Dess. likewise Dess has a few problems of his own, not wanting help and trying to be vastly better than Kris and apparently falling backward into outdoing Carol's expectations of him and everything. the more Kris makes seemingly exaggerated projections of Dess in the form of Gaster, prideful hero who tried way too hard and fell backward into himself, the more those projections turn out to be actually somewhat correct analogies if taken as a bit of a metaphor.
so this is how you get a Gaster Amalgamate with two opposite-pointing faces. one face is the real Dess, one face is the idealized mythical Dess. real Dess is good, Gaster is good, the collision of Dess and Gaster trying to destroy each other and marking the beginning of the surface-underground war is bad. I think it would be cooler if Dess actually manifested as two colliding black and white deer people, stark, shambling, angular, drippy from darkness-water, but relatively defined, more like god-of-hyperdeath Asriel and less like mysteryman. that sounds like a totally killer Deltarune boss encounter. that's my Chapter 7 "prediction". showy cataclysm in about chapter 6, game has no ending without true ending, bizarrely grounded "Yume Nikki" and character interaction section with a bit of trippy imagery in Chapter 7, where we finally see Gaster, but it's Dess.
Gaster is definitely this mythical superhero kind of figure that a kid makes up — Kris deciding that somebody lost deep in the darkness outside the earth will turn into some kind of spooky but very cool withery skeleton. it's one of the only things that genuinely makes sense with every occurrence of Gaster or "him". and here on this timeline, it's even easier to explain the thought process because it's just Kris' brain free-associating. they see skeletons in Furthertown, skeletons are weird, they're apparently allied with phoenix Monsters to save the world, phoenixes are known to regenerate so maybe skeletons do that too, and maybe Dess regenerated into a weird super-powerful skeleton guy.
this makes a lot more sense in the context of Kris being found by Dess. Kris has always been taking things from Hometown — help from Dess, help from the Holidays, maybe taking attention away from Noelle, and finally Dess themself. it begins to make a lot more sense as far as why Dess disappearing drove a rift between the Dreemurrs and the Holidays, if Kris turned Carol against Noelle and Toriel and Asgore and then got rid of Dess such there was nothing holding it all together. both by accident of course, yet both things happened.
as Kris is still living there, Dess catches them with a particular expression of being generally down. restless. frowning. not engaging with much of anything, seeming to almost blend into the shadows away from reality a little. as much as Kris is always 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 them back into their guest room and pulls Kris 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: 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. [She does, 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: cold doesn't grow. Dess: [obliging] 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 they finish the song together. at least 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 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 "Dark World creation altar". this is the object that will ultimately generate W.D. Gaster as well as creating the Memoryhead around it, and the whole world of Undertale. this one page of music that, once burned into Kris' mind, was impossible to truly get rid of.
Dess: I don't know if you can play it, but there you go, it's yours.
the joke's on her when Kris becomes really good at the piano later and has played this thing many many times isn't the melody Kris plays in Chapter 4 a weird highly elaborated version of "Don't Forget"?? yeah this is why that happened. and then we also just have Kris generally coming to Noelle's house to play the piano. they're trying to channel Dess and "find" her in some abstract way. oh gosh it's really coming together. if I haven't solved "the" Deltarune I've sure solved "a" Deltarune
the "don't forget" picture is critical to Sans' concept. it depicts what's likely Kris, Susie, and Ralsei. but "don't forget" refers to Dess. and Dess is Gaster. and Gaster is a skeleton. so... did Sans locate Gaster before he would ever find Dess? accidentally taking the wrong side in this whole weird trainwreck because of the false familiarity of this weird... man.
Gaster: pronounced Surely you must know who I am. Sans: ......no? Gaster: pronounced I am the only one who can save this world,pronounced [insert wild glitchy static] Sans: [stands there stunned for a bit, deeply confused yet totally understanding the static at the same time] Sans: ...pronounced [wild glitchy static]. nice name.
one thing that only occurs to me now is... there could have been two different fates for Sans, just like for Kris. one of the Sanses could have dived into the void, maybe after Kris, maybe this is where his narrative of being the very last person you'd send in after a crisis came from. the other one could have remained in the Deltarune world until Deltarune doing something else. just imagine. Sans goes in to save small Kris, who due to time shenanigans is already dead, but Gaster is there, and is like, don't fear, I'm a mythical hero skeleton and we can still save your world. this is the start of Sans' arc downward. for whatever reason losing Kris is really really depressing. maybe just because Sans knows this is a kid who didn't even get long to live and was homeless and stuff, and was like, that's a bummer. or maybe because he knows the world of Deltarune is ending and now seeing one of the last people who was supposed to save it die is more than he can take. meeting Gaster only makes things a bit better. when they eventually start to discover they can't really save the Deltarune world or go back, then Sans' outlook goes downhill. based on the story I've given so far you'd think Susie and Ralsei may or may not be secretly wandering around in Undertale, but even if that was true, if the whole world of Deltarune vanished except for them it could still be something to be depressed about. I mean, Toriel could have been torn apart. the other Papyrus could be no more. both of those would be serious losses even if new versions of both of them exist in Undertale. I guess the picture could always be of Toriel, Papyrus, and some other secondary character, or them and Sans. Gaster is still going to disappear, and Sans probably knows that on some level, so you'd think he has a doodle of Gaster too, although we know that it would probably look like a bunch of scribbles with a tree drawn over them; that's the way you draw Gaster. I don't know what the deal with the machine is. it doesn't really fit with the themes of Deltarune so far, which are all about magic and imagination and mind. so I just don't have any ideas right now.
otherwise I love this. I love the idea of just stitching the plot holes in the AU to make an adaptation rather than trying too hard to fit them to what was shown, just like Carol bringing in the dirt to fill in the cracks in the Deltarune universe. it feels like carefully fixing loose strokes in sketches or paintings by painting onto the errors. it wouldn't have been possible at the time of Deltarune chapter 1, but when we know so much more now it's a lot more fun to do it this way, just extend out the working theories in good faith to make Undertale a bit better instead of asking why potential errors in Undertale don't perfectly line up.
here's how I see Deltarune: it's like a happier mirror to Omori. instead of Sunny being haunted by terrifying phantoms of bad things that happened, Kris is being "haunted" by a bunch of good heartwarming things that are painful to look at and that sometimes they almost need to turn away from. these things fill the void left by Dess and yet Kris really really doesn't want to remember that Dess existed or how Dess disappeared because that's really painful.
so, Kris' mind starts making up alternate reasons for their memories connected to Dess. the relationship between Noelle, Kris, and Dess turns into a relationship between Sans, Papyrus, and Gaster, somewhat abstract in form with respect to the latter. when Gaster disappears within the Undertale narrative to turn into the narrator of Deltarune, Papyrus sort of slides over into the Dess slot. Sans is Noelle, Papyrus is Dess, even though they are these distorted misremembered "doodles" of any of Kris' actual memories, because it's like, this is now Noelle and Dess before Kris came into the picture, not Noelle and Dess after Kris is there. and that's why the two of them are in Snowdin, because they're a metaphor for the Holidays. they're still their own characters within Undertale but certain aspects of them are designed to be relatable to Kris, Noelle, and Dess without necessarily mapping to them 1-to-1. this is why the otherwise maddening correspondence between the Dess gumball door and the missing Gaster door in Sans and Papyrus' house would exist. this is why Gaster would be related to Sans and Papyrus although he was originally supposed to be Dess.
I like the rather crazy idea that Sans never actually had a brother until Undertale. that he is just totally lying and it's another one of his pranks, making people question whether he has a brother. Sans is just lonely, so he made up a "brother"... in a tone only slightly subtler than when he brags about "befriending" Toriel. Kris may or may not have totally fallen for this, unable to think of what the opposite of having a brother could be, and thought, oh, of course he actually has a brother, he could only be lying about something else, and his brother must be a lot cooler than him. Kris may or may not have made several doodles of their own imagination of what Sans' brother looks like, either before or after Dess disappeared — it'd make just as much sense that Kris is fixated on the idea of cooler, helpful older siblings while Dess is there. after Dess disappeared, Kris might have made one more drawing attempting to add Gaster to the picture, but every time they try to draw Gaster it turns into a bunch of aimless scribbles. they know who Gaster should be and maybe even what he looks like within the back of their mind but they just can't bring themself to actually draw him because there is still this tiny thread connecting Gaster back to Dess.
if Toriel ever found these drawings it could be why Kris went to therapy. Kris went to therapy to try to become able to draw Gaster, but no matter how they tried they only ended up drawing a bunch of scribbles and painting a tree over it. this became the Forgotten Man, a figure whose entire job was to obscure the relationship between Gaster and Dess. the Forgotten Man is more or less the reason that Undertale began shearing away from the Deltarune world and became its own world — a world where Gaster existed just because he existed (or once existed), and not because he was based on anyone else. (for a bit I thought the Forgotten Man was created before Gaster, but now I'm going with the story he was created after because at least within RedactedTale that makes a lot more sense.)
I think it's something like this: when the Deltarune characters shove enough stuff deep enough into the darkness for long enough, it pierces through. it pierces through the other side of the Titan fountain like a reverse Dark Fountain, and it becomes uncontained. and then it just starts forming its own world. in principle you'd think that layer could have been utterly terrifying, but, you know, Gaster fixed it. Gaster turned it around on itself and then he left Undertale and went to Deltarune. because somebody had to fix all this. so why not him.
despite them being separated mirrors of each other that could be in conflict, Gaster does not consider the Forgotten Man an outright enemy because as long as Kris doesn't rediscover where the Forgotten Man came from Gaster himself is totally safe from disappearing again. so Gaster thinks of the Forgotten Man as something of an accidental ally as long as Kris never actually finds him. Gaster nudges Ralsei toward the Prophecy and Kris and Susie toward Ralsei to prevent the Forgotten Man from being discovered before the heroes end the story, even though that will allow the Roaring to happen and they will just have to banish the Angel before the world is entirely destroyed rather than trying to end the story before the Roaring finishes like they're logically supposed to.
I guess what I'm saying is that the Angel is more destructive to the world of Deltarune than the game ending, and it's almost like the Angel being there causes the Roaring though not precisely like that; if the Deltarune characters only kick out the Angel then they could reverse the start of the Roaring, and keep living their lives, while the players just wouldn't see it. according to this story they already reversed the Roaring once, so yeah, why not. but there is some in-world reason the Angel being there makes you choose between the true ending and The Roaring, or in this case Gaster coming up with a clever way to have the Roaring and also not have it. (to be fair, you can read Christianity as only letting life on earth go on while no god is watching anyone whatsoever, while what Revelation would be saying is that when God shows up the story of humanity ends. so maybe the Angel showing up really does speed up the Roaring.) Gaster's ending is clearly not the best ending, but it's certainly better than nothing. it's like, the last hope for Hometown when the story is far off the rails, where otherwise there would just be The Roaring and no ending.
Kris can kind of tap into the world and predict what's going to happen, when they do things like vaguely talking about The Roaring while playing games on the creation altar. but absolutely nobody is actively aware of this power including Kris. in a different way, Kris is able to create Undertale by sort of predicting what the Dark World (or the Titan world specifically) will generate even after multiple people are adding to it. Kris doesn't really have control over Undertale in the sense of those theories where Asriel is literally just coding Undertale on his computer. instead, Undertale exists independently of Kris but as it comes to exist out of the process of everyone's pain and the Roaring happening naturally, it ends up being made from Kris and Noelle's minds simply as the passive ingredients of what created it. Undertale reflects their pain but they didn't simply fabricate Undertale in a purposeful way, it's more like it comes to exist as the artifact of not solving their problems fast enough.
Sans just exists in Deltarune. he's a bit lonely, he's not entirely likeable. all he has is bad jokes, and a dubious "brother" he made up. then this weird little gremlin child comes into Hometown, apparently found by the mayor's kid. Sans has something to smile about for a moment, because he has someone new to annoy. but things settle down soon enough. he vaguely catches sight of the big kid and the small ones getting into misadventures but fortunately not into trouble most of the time. then the mayor's kid goes missing. he's not really clear on what happened. it's not really a very Sans-like thing to go all the way to the pointed tail to actually get a look at it. then a weird malaise extends over the town. this is the moment he really starts noticing things. nothing is normal any more. various people are growing apart from each other. mostly the mayor and her children and those fiery people a little ways over. but even some like the Cattenheimers(?) and the crocs are getting angry at each other. he doesn't really know what to do. he's never exactly been proactive. so more or less, he just tries to survive it.
Sans is watching science documentaries because sitcoms aren't actually funny, but somehow every strange little speech quirk or personality quirk of the consultants trying to explain black holes is way more interesting. sometimes when he can't sleep the best way to feel better is to just watch a documentary about aliens and start laughing wildly at a slightly unusual name somebody has that is in no way actually funny. there is something uniquely magical about bad jokes. good jokes lose their power quickly. but bad ones? there is nothing funnier than the concept of something that is not funny being funny, because nobody expects that. Sans occasionally ponders the philosophical question of if things that initially aren't funny are the only things that can actually be funny. he doesn't know. all he knows is that the funniest possible thing would be somebody having a clueless response to that question and not understanding why somebody else thought it was funny. this is his thing. fractally bad humor is the thing that's "with him in the dark". off to the side is a lamp with a blatantly fake face tied to the pole, involving fake glasses or googly eyes or something like that. he's tied a red scarf around the lamp as a "gift to his brother". Sans does have a "brother" in his house despite his lies being lies; this is his own little game he plays with mostly himself. he refuses to let most people see his creation because nobody else will be able to appreciate how funny it is.
one day for reasons he cannot begin to guess Sans starts having dreams that the lamp turned into an actual interesting character. he dreams that he is living in a "situation drama" where various furniture objects and food items live in a town and work at a retail store, and it's structured a lot like a sitcom but it's in no way meant to be funny. it's more like a horror show; it's almost the same genre as Don't Hug Me I'm Scared. one day the lamp character looks like the room light. one day he looks more like a streetlight. one day he is stuck in the ceiling of the store and it's played for body horror. the lamp character is confident and often boldly getting into situations he's not prepared for, but sometimes younger characters look up to him, convinced he will protect them. one day Sans dreams the lamp character shattered into a million pieces, and wakes up quite disturbed. he looks, and his actual lamp just has a burnt-out bulb. weird.
Sans comes to an event that is simply meant for the town as a whole, a county fair kind of thing maybe, maybe that's what the "festival" is and we're talking about the previous "festival" a year or two ago. he makes himself useful by selling hot dogs. then he somehow runs into Toriel. she has Asriel with her but the demon child is strangely missing. neither of the two seems exactly happy. Sans balances a few hot dogs and surprises the two. but whatever he does it's hardly enough to lift this terrible atmosphere over everything. even so, the two seem to like him and seem to be distracted from the family's recent divorce or whatever it is that's really ailing them.
one day, the demon child appears to Sans, knocking on his door. he opens the door to find he is being gifted a strange drawing of what looks vaguely like him and a taller confident skeleton with a red scarf. he studies it in confusion for a second before his mind matches the drawing up to the lamp character made from his "brother". he looks back up at the human in disbelief. the human smiles at him somewhat emptily, and then walks away. Sans looks back down at the picture. off to the side of the two skeletons, shrunk a little ways away through perspective, there is an enigmatic green tree. the brother character is holding up a finger giving advice, and for some reason proclaiming "We're fine by ourselves" and in bigger print "Always forget!". he has no idea what to make of any of this. at least, not right now. not yet.
Sans calls up Toriel simply to inform her he's been gifted a strange drawing, and ask if she has any idea what's going on with it. Toriel notes that the human child did not come back. Sans gets a little nervous. he calls the mayor's house to see if the human went there. the phone rings for a bit, and then Noelle picks up. as far as she can tell, the human child hasn't been to their house for the past few weeks. Sans knows something is wrong. he calls the police, and tells them he wants help tracking down the human child. they give him the unexpected response that while they will go, the area he is talking about is off limits and he is not supposed to go there. when Sans hangs up, he only becomes more determined to actually find out what's going on.
Sans gets ready to leave. then his phone rings again. he picks it up. a strange and unearthly voice informs him that it has already prepared him a ride. Sans: what, a ride to UFO jail? how much trouble am I in? Phone: No. It will take you to the human instantaneously. Phone: Please keep in mind: you must not let the Knight win.
a Dark Fountain bursts through the apparent reality of Sans' room, but instead of filling the room it simply solidifies into a brown door almost exactly like the doors in his house. blown away, with no real thoughts or words, he opens it.
as Sans steps through the door, he emerges right next to the human child. over near the mysterious shelter that people only speak of occasionally, another great crack has emerged, darkness and stars peering out. the human stands on the edge of the crack, clutching to their chest some strange pile of books and newspapers. they tip over the edge and begin to plummet in. Sans acts quickly and, one foot firmly in the doorframe, plunges in and catches them by the ankles. far below is... a strange patch of grass and pink flowers. the book pile falls into the hole, never to be seen again. a single golden flower apparently from the edge of Hometown falls out of the pile. then, the eight or so fallen objects become drained of color, and burble away into bubbles of grayish slime and into nothing. Sans pulls the human out. as they fall back onto the grass, it becomes apparent they were becoming grayscale as well. color floods back into the human, though they are still lying on the grass looking bedraggled and drained as if they don't want to be here, or anywhere.
Sans scoops up the human carefully, never having been all that strong in the end but just barely able to lift a child, and slowly ports them back into the door. setting the child down onto his couch, he tries to phone Toriel. the mystery voice has a few more words for him first. Phone: Very good. Phone: Now, please do not be alarmed. I have given the child a Protector, and they may attempt to remove it.
Sans looks up from the phone. seemingly personally offended by having to come back to life, Kris has weaponized the last of their strength to tear out a mysterious heart-shaped object, panting, holding it at arm's length. the color left them briefly, but is slowly seeping back in as if due to blood circulation or something. a few drops of blood fall from the red heart onto their face, and greater blotches of color wash through them as each one hits, as if the heart were dropping some kind of reality paint. shortly, they are entirely colored in despite having removed the red heart. they cast it onto the floor weakly, having no strength left.
Sans looks at the scene blankly. Sans: ...okay, so what do I do if they did? Phone: Leave it. Phone: Each time they lose the Protector, they have one day. Phone: I must go now. I repeat: ignore the Knight. Do not let the Knight win. Sans: okay. when I have any idea what a Knight is, I'll definitely do that.
on one hand, Gaster sort of sees himself as more important than the Deltarune world, so Kris leaving Deltarune to go to Undertale wouldn't be bad in and of itself. but on the other, Gaster has a commitment to save the inhabitants of Hometown from the Roaring just so the real Dess won't win and come back; he has specific, oddly self-interested motivations. so, he sticks to his principles and makes sure Kris is put back, knowing sticking to his prophecy is the best way to save both the Undertale and Deltarune worlds. (I've implied that Gaster's "prophecy" is the prophecy in game, though I'm not sure how true that is. if we're being perfectly accurate to Deltarune it could be his interpretation of the prophecy and Dess' interpretation of the prophecy would be different. the prophecy panels are the same, but Deltarune practically has three endings — Gaster's ending, the true ending, and the Weird Route where you deliberately kill the Knight and Noelle's memories. here, the Weird Route would still be in line with Gaster's goals of getting rid of Dess, it would just be much more aggressive than he asked for.)
there is this "lightning-strike" moment of Dess flicking between being Dess and being Gaster. right as Kris walks in, he's a neat composite of the two character concepts, just a weary Dess with a sort of flamboyant, final-fantasy type long, collared black leather jacket and the obligatory turtleneck. he has a short messy beard that's somehow not quite gross, and looks like he doesn't sleep enough. but as division strikes through the Titan fountain, Dess for a moment appears like literally just Gaster. a strange skeleton Monster with a coat seemingly forged from darkness who looks related to Sans but also like he is somehow a being beyond comprehension with terrifying powers. sometimes when Dess flicks back from Gaster to Dess, he goes through a brief sequence of being the Roaring Knight. an especially nightmarish big, bad, whorling and distorting "if the Knight isn't me then I'm the Knight's dad" version of the Roaring Knight. then he goes back to Dess.
Dess: Out! [burbling through The Knight, into Gaster a second, and back to The Knight] Can't you see my plan is almost complete?! [Dess, calm and with back turned] You didn't have to come here. Susie: Okay, but we did. Susie: Now, look, I don't care about any of this stuff between Noelle and Kris and you seven years ago. I just know we need to get you out of here. I'll drag you out if I have to. Ralsei: [optimistic smile] Dess. You're going home. [Dess turns to face them at about a three-quarters angle, staring into them distantly but not fully committed away from turning his back.]
Dess: [staying Dess; subtly drooping, looking into the floor, weathered] No. You don't understand any of this. [A short exposition montage begins] Dess: This world is going to end one way or another. Dess: The end started before us. There were only a few years before everything ended. Dess: This world... it's like one big piece of paper tearing in the wind. Dess: And there's nothing you can do to stop it. Any of you. [panel of Susie and Ralsei as stylized paper dolls ripping to shreds in the breeze] [Dess phases into a version of himself with Roaring Knight armor but with the helmet open] Dess: [speaking downward dramatically] Unless. Dess: [looks back up at them, piercing] Unless we close it. Dess: A Dark Fountain is an act of creation. Every time you put pen to paper, a darkness pierces the calm, and allows for a great flood of creativity. Dess: But if you press the pen all the way through, then it can destroy. As the darkness creates one thing it destroys other things. And so creation going on and on will destroy the world it created.
Susie: That's lame. Susie: Where do you even get this stuff? Dess: [small voiceless laugh, happy heroes are keeping up] These are my inferences. [produces notebook from darkness like a warp door] While I've been down here I started taking notes. Dess: There's not much to do down here, and before long you notice everything is connected. It all leads to everything else. Dess: I wrote down every connection, and I compiled them into a Prophecy. [prophecy panel proclaiming "Here it will be recorded" with a squarish Dess hand scrawling in a notebook] Ralsei: Yup. Susie: [split-second realization] So you're—...... Dess: [Gaster boils into reality out of Dess] THE VOICE FROM THE FLOWER PATCH? [phases back to Dess] No. Dess: That wasn't me. Susie: ...What's going on here?? Kris: [still and quiet]
[A dialogue box pops up. If this is an animated story, then a big floating dialogue sign in 3D perspective just happens anyway. As Kris stares forward into the darkness, into the "camera", there is an unnatural reflection of the dialogue box across them as if they were a slightly frosted glass window, such that we can see the heart projected onto them jumping to either side of them. It looks like the rounded heart-shaped object from the Sans incident, and is more vivid than the rest of the reflection, almost like it's protruding or emanating from Kris.] Box: pronounced (on the left) It's horrible; pronounced (on the right) It's natural [After a bit of jumping around, even if we can't see the answer at all the dialogue box clicks.]
Dess: [confident] Exactly. Dess: Since I ended up here it's been nothing but pain. But it had to be this way. Dess: There's only one way we can fix this. To let everything go back to normal, and let the world heal from its wounds. Dess: We have to banish the Forgotten Man. Dess: ...And his messenger.
Susie: Nothing about this makes sense.
I like the concept that what the last prophecy panel says is something to the effect that they have to kill Dess. Kris and Noelle's one objective is to find Dess and not forget Dess, but what the prophecy says is nope, you've gotta destroy them. this would make a lot of sense as far as the fact the prophecy panel wasn't shown to us. people assume it had to involve Kris, Susie, or Ralsei, but that's because they don't know about a possible twist of Dess being the source of Gaster who is then the source of the prophecy. which there would be decent reason to keep hiding for just a little bit into Chapter 4. why was there a silent guitar when you futilely try to go back to that panel specifically? there's a very good chance that panel is about Dess.
so my thought is this: the hidden panel simply says "forget." and has a drawn tree symbolically sliced in two diagonally.
on the RedactedTale timeline the Dess explanation above is exactly what it means. they have to banish the Angel to be able to repair the world rather than it falling apart entirely, but because the Angel is working with the Forgotten Man, they also have to get rid of one of the two Forgotten Men to end "the act of creation which has become destructive", which is to say, made the world Dess came from but then flipped over and created Gaster and the Roaring.
Kris and Susie want to retrieve Dess. but Kris of course has a strong tie to Gaster because of the red Soul device or "Protector" Gaster put in there and all the general helpers and coping mechanisms the Gaster-realm provided. of course, by the time of the game, Kris is awfully sick of the Protector. I've characterized them here as sick of the Protector from day one. I think the reason Kris appears sick of Ralsei in-game is the same. Kris doesn't hate Ralsei but is just getting tired of Gaster's total control and how Ralsei is a manifestation of everything turning into perfect RPG railroads in a way Kris isn't comfortable with any more.
I do not think Kris would destroy Ralsei, even if the prophecy panel suggests it.
here with RedactedTale we have an interesting possible solution: Kris draws out the Dark World creation altar as a Dark World object in a battle of notebooks, and magically stows Ralsei in the book so he can be a memory instead of having to be destroyed.
that would be very convenient if for some reason they can't take Ralsei into the Titan fountain at all because going through that barrier would just shatter him. that could be very close to the real in-game reason the Darkners "will turn to stone". it isn't actually Dark Fountains that kill them — it's Titan fountains destroying the Dark Worlds where they live, squashing the world into "Titan space" and the Light World and not actually leaving a Dark World left.
in the context of RedactedTale it's kind of like Kris' choice to make is really easy except that they sort of don't want Susie and Noelle to know how much they screwed everything up by creating Gaster, so they are tempted to stay silent about what the Dess/Gaster entity is.
Kris' two major problems to solve in "Chapter 7" are A) coming clean about "I screwed up Dess by making Gaster" without making everybody mad B) figuring out how to unravel the Dess/Gaster entity to rescue Dess, which isn't as trivial as just "fight off Gaster". first, Gaster really is just parts of Dess, so there's nothing to simply destroy, and second, trying to fight Dess is going to hurt Dess.
but, if you Snowgrave the entity, then that's one way to solve it. the problem is that in that case Gaster definitely wins. regardless of what form the entity is in at the moment. he just sort of emerges from the body now unbound and totally free to roam the Titan space. they will never get Dess back. the block explodes and Dess shatters into fine dust, completing the Gaster mythos about him supposedly being "shattered" into many pieces that appear in the dark corners of Undertale. the silver lining is that Gaster will actually use his ability to move Dark Fountains to help them fix the world, outright shift the Titan fountain and move all the fissures in the earth back into place. the story can end peacefully. he was always there to help. but if you accept his help Dess is dead.
so I guess what that implies is Dess can maybe learn to use the Deltarune-Gaster powers and fix the world? it's usually Gaster using them when he phones Sans and creates the doors, but the Roaring Knight also has the ability to move Dark Fountains at a low level. so I suppose Dess can harness those powers to forestall the Roaring one last time and go home. all of this revolves around Dess going home, like, we can't have an edgy ending where he just stays down there with the guarantee of always being able to stop the world from breaking. that would make Dess' endings indistinguishable from Gaster's ending. so no, the true ending of Deltarune has to be that Dess goes home even though the biggest plot beats of the ending are the same. the in-game Prophecy "spoils" the ending of Deltarune, but it doesn't fully explain that Dess can go home if everyone makes the right choice.
clear parallels "to something" inside Deltarune and what I am assuming them to mean
- pronounced Rules Card infiltrating Elnina and Lanino's relationship is meant to represent Susie moving to Hometown and meeting Kris and Noelle, only to be rather confused what is happening and how to fix it. the concept of a "relationship" is generic here, although the Weird Route carries on trolling the player with unnecessary imagery of an actual marriage and divorce. here I am assuming this is the game messing with a player who doesn't care about figuring out how Dess affected the relationship (connection) between Kris and Noelle enough to make the choice to remember and retrieve Dess.
- Ralsei cracking under pressure in Chapter 4 after not knowing which of a mountain of secrets to keep and Kris having to help him "not smile" is a mirror of what Kris will ultimately have to go through. Darkners generally reflect somebody's problems, but they often help characters figure out how to get over them.