interstellar5555 | Dance, Dance, REVOLUTION

Who: Frisk and OPEN
What: Come bother Frisk at work!
When: Saturday afternoon
Where: Pizza Planet

[A]

Pizza Planet is a big, kid-themed pizza chain, popular for birthday parties. The Vista City location where Frisk works is attached to the mall, and as such is particularly large and extravagant. There's singing animatronics, sure, but the main attraction is the games.

Frisk's job, today, is to restock all the machines with tickets. They're pretty small for a worker. If not for their employee uniform, complete with a little hat, they could easily blend in with the children shouting joyfully and running from game to game. But for the most part they ignore them, focusing on their work. As fun as that would be, making good friends with any kids from here would cause too many problems. They're not sure they could contain themself, if the topic of music ever came up...

They go quietly from machine to machine, opening up a panel on each with a key and loading in a new roll of tickets. Out on the game floor like this, it's not unusual to get approached by customers.

Honestly, it's not entirely unusual for Frisk to just hand some kids a few tickets here and there either. It's against the rules, but it's not like anyone notices. And it makes people so happy!

[B]

They get a break for lunch, but Frisk doesn't really need the full time. They're used to scarfing down their meals fast, and it's a habit that's never fully faded. So they can be found in their street clothes for part of the afternoon, playing Dance Dance Revolution alone in the corner.

As it happens, they are utterly killing it.

The easier songs have long since ceased to be fun, so now they're working their way down from the hardest options. Some kids stop to watch from time to time, but they're largely heedless of any silent onlookers. Their mind is elsewhere.

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"Ah," he says. "Yeah, that...fits pretty much everything I saw of her here, too."

Still, it's weird imagining her crashing on his couch. Around here, he got the impression she considered him only tier above sewer water. Sans visibly looks a little unbalanced by the whole concept. Not least because they keep talking about this Papyrus guy.

"Dunno why, but...almost everything I've remembered revolves around you, kid."

Really? Frisk looks thoughtful about this.

"I haven't known you as long as them. But a lot happened since then." It feels longer for them, of course, but that shouldn't matter to Sans. But it was a pretty important and memorable series of events for everybody, even the people who just had one of them. And maybe, since they aren't quite as vital as Papyrus, the bosses just put less time into erasing Frisk from the equation.

Or maybe it's that he's had to remember them once before?

Well, it doesn't matter. It's kinda lucky in its way. They are the one here now. "All the monsters escaped from the Underground," they explain, since they know what they said was kinda vague. "We've been setting everyone up on the surface for a while."

And that's when some aliens decided to kidnap him? Typical. The idea feels heavy in his chest, with a heavy dose of resentment on the side. That heaviness shows on Sans's face in the subtle ways that come from him being human, hard to read by human standards but compared to his regular face, it's all clear as day.

He hates this. He's starting to feel really tired from it all.

"Haven't we been here before?" he asks. He feels like he needs to check - if the fighting wasn't real, then what is? Memories of snow and boring jobs and magic. "The first thing I ever remembered...was about not being able to remember something. You were there, and I had no clue who you were...until suddenly I did."

He falls quiet for a moment, and then speaks up again.

"That sound familiar?"

Yeah, Frisk's not too pleased about the timing either. Things were supposed to finally be okay.

They lift their head at the question, looking at Sans with wide eyes. Is he talking about...but none of them remembered that! They'd have said something if they did, right? "Um...was it...just sort of black?" they ask, hesitantly. Frisk can't imagine any other time that Sans could mean, but they feel like they have to confirm anyway.

Well, that acknowledgement is something! He relaxes slightly, relieved that what has been such a formative memory isn't just totally made up or without context.

"Yeah, basically. Kind of an out of body experience sort of deal. I think a whoopee cushion was involved?" Always prepared, even in the astral plane.

Frisk smiles despite themself, letting out a short huff of amusement.

But this whole thing isn't very funny. They can't leave Sans hanging on this. "That happened. You all said you didn't remember it after." It must have something to do with how his memory's been screwed around with. Between all their friends, someone would have mentioned if they started remembering the incident after all. Even if they didn't quite remember how or why it happened.

Sans isn't acting like he remembers the whole thing. Honestly, they're not even sure how much the monsters could have been aware of at all. They were all inside Asriel the whole time; maybe they couldn't see him.

They don't have to tell the whole story. "You had the whopee cushion in your pocket and I hugged you. It really helped."

His grin becomes less strained for a moment. It's not bad memory even though the circumstances had seemed...questionable? What was going on? He remembers going on the attack with the bone weapons he's seen in other memories but then the kid just hugged the murder out of him, apparently.

He laughs, low but sincere, even though his look afterwards is pretty sober.

"Why couldn't I remember you that time? Don't tell me this has happened more than once..."

He winks, suggesting he is kidding around, but the fact that he can't totally be sure has an edge of uncertainty there.

They know he means the question more than he wants to admit, but Frisk smiles anyway. It's been a while since they've seen him wink; they like that he remembers how much he enjoys doing that.

"It..." There's a moment of silence, where they're obviously considering how to answer. "Your soul got stolen. I don't know if that always happens when monster souls get taken, but it wasn't like this." Frisk isn't even sure if the loss of memory was a side-effect of the soul thing or something Asriel deliberately chose to do. There's nothing in the monster books about that. Either way, he never tried shaping the lost souls into different people.

Maybe they're being too gentle on him. He did take the souls for their power - like the music bosses, just using a different sort of energy. But Frisk can never really feel angry at Asriel.

They should have seen him a couple months ago - just winking up a storm back then. It's strange...he probably acts less like the guy they recognize now, despite the fact that he's recovering more and more pieces of his memory. He's been falling further and further out of context, which is making some habits a bit harder to keep up.

Joking and winking isn't much good when you're not in the mood for it. Yet, in the past he's always been in the mood for it, exclusively. A trying time, to be sure.

He looks more curious than horrified in response to that explanation, as if having a soul stolen is something that just makes more practical sense to him than being kidnapped or shapeshifted. Because it does. From everything he remembers about magic, souls have always been heavily involved. Hell, he's pretty sure that something to do with stealing souls was a regular fixture of research. He taps at his lip thoughtfully - it's a similar gesture to one he always did as a skeleton, more notable for the sound of bone against teeth.

"And you fixed it, huh?" he asks. It's really less of a question, and more like a roundabout thanks. He can acknowledge the worth of that gesture all over again. "Sounds like we've got quite the history."

Frisk is glad he remembers about souls, at least. Their fellow rescuers have needed a lot of explanation whenever they bring it up, and all their knowledge is purely practical. It's hard for them to put into words things that they just know - things they've been trying hard to keep secret.

"I guess." They shrug. They're not sure how much they really did about that; they just talked to Asriel until he felt better. Someone certainly had to do it, but he was the one who broke the Barrier and put the souls back. They never could have made him. "A lot of things happen," they stress. "I was the first human in the Underground for a long time."

Dance, Dance, REVOLUTION

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