User:Reversedragon/UTDR/pointed-tail/2
The forgotten man[edit]
(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".
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. [1]
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. [2][3]
[unfinished]
Footnotes[edit]
- ↑ Theme: Dark Worlds and darkness being the space outside reality, or a hidden place beyond reality.
- ↑ Theme: Dark Worlds as subconscious or collective unconscious.
- ↑ I'm not marking up these themes play-by-play because I think readers are stupid, or think they need a grade-school-textbook "comprehension questions" section. I'm marking up themes because it's genuinely easy to forget all the tiny moving parts of the actual game, and because when I wrote this post as a stream-of-consciousness laying out everything explicitly it got too unwieldy and redundant even for me. So now you get this post as a better-paced narrative with the connecting themes all laid out down here. Deltarune is absolutely dense for a console-styled role-playing game, I'm telling you.