Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26006155-20190820122909/@comment-26006155-20191003171345

My reply to Ambassador: https://undertale.fandom.com/wiki/Thread:172707#232

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There has to be a reason why Toby said he hates the term "Genocide Route" and prefers to use "No Mercy Route".

Even if Chara did want to kill literally everyone.. I don't think she succeeded, even at the end of the No Mercy Route.

Alphys' force fields might keep Chara-possessed-Frisk from killing the evacuated monsters themselves, but if they were all just hanging out in the true lab together, this wouldn't protect them from The End Of The World at the end of No Mercy.

Unless... Alphys and the evacuated monsters were no longer IN that world/timeline.

Sans leaves the timeline when he's defeated, and goes into another one where Papyrus is still alive. Although he's very dead in our present one.

Undyne said Alphys was taking the monsters somewhere where Chara could never find them. Considering that we already know the Core contains the time/space portal that Gaster was shattered in, and that Alphys is an ace at dimensional tech, I think the reason that the No Mercy run isn't an actual Genocide is because Alphys evacuated them all to a different world beyond Chara's reach.

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The monster's technological revolution must have been sudden.

Somehow, they went from modern surface human technology and handheld VCR recorders at the start of 201X.. to building the anime-tech Core later in the same decade.

They learned dimensional warping, sentient robot construction, how to build massive Arcologies like The Core, and how to put 60 seconds of flight fuel into a cell phone along with laser weaponry... all in less than a decade.

And this from a relatively small population with a medeival culture, that had been getting by entirely by studying surface human garbage until that time.

This isn't just a big breakthrough for them, it's colosal. Somehow the monsters gained several centuries of technology after remaining scientifically dormant for hundreds of years.

And remember that nobody in Asgore's kingdom even came close to Gaster's level of brilliance, because it took Asgore years to finally settle for Alphys as the best mind he was able to find among his own poeple.

This scientific revolution in the monster world, which allowed them to utterly eclipse surface human technology in a few sort years and banished their fear of the surface humans, must have been Gaster's doing.

Alphys has proven that while she can't innovate like he can, she does have the power to learn from Gaster's notes and unlock his secrets. And yet.. these amazing technological wonders which ought to overturn everything in their path have just started to spread into the monster world outside the Core at the time Frisk arrives.

Gaster didn't arrive centuries ago. He only left a few years before Undertale begins.

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"Okay, how do you know that the True Lab is where he shattered? Can you provide evidence for this claim?"

Gaster fell into The Core, which was his own creation. An event that ended with him being shattered across time and space.

One doesn't just get shattered across time and space by tripping over their own shoelaces. Gaster must have been researching dimensional warping at the time for such an accident to even be possible.

And the Gaster Followers wonder whether the very same thing will happen to Alphys, who seems to be following a path uncannily similar to Gaster's own.

For this same fate to be possible for Alphys, the same dimensional-warping equipment Gaster fell into must still be operational in The Core. Of which the True Lab is a part.

... when you run into a seeming paradox, it usually means that one of your assumptions going into the situation was wrong.

For example, if there was only one bad guy in FNAF, and Phone Guy was clearly corrupt, who eats Phone Guy in the Night 4 phone call? And then mocks you on Night 5 when you realize that the person you thought you were talking to this whole time has been dead for some time?

Phone Guy did questionable things, but he wasn't the only actor in the story. And neither was William Afton. When 8BitGaming pointed out the difference between the Purple Guy and Magenta Man, something clicked, and indicated the story was a lot more complex than I realized.

But back to Undertale. You said "You're right, it's not a paradox. A paradox means we got something wrong. Which simple means Gaster didn't perform the DT experiments."

That's a bit of a leap where I don't see the connections. By all accounts Gaster was brilliant. And he made the blueprints Alphys used to make her DE Extractor, they were artifacts she found in the lab.

While there might be several mad scientists in the world Gaster is from, Sans is from that world, and doesn't have his level of scientific prowess.

Somehow, somewhere, Gaster gained knowledge of how to use Determination. Either he must have studied humans in the Underground before Chara fell, or there were humans back in his homeworld that were so similar to the ones on the surface above that their Determination both worked the same way in different worlds.

Remember that Alphys got all her extracted Determination from the Six Human Souls, all of which were from humans who fell from the surface. Anime might not be real on the surface above, but the humans there have the same type of Determination that they have back in Gaster and Sans' homeworld.

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It is possible that humans Toriel wasn't counting could have fallen through the skylights above Asgore's Garden. Although I don't see them getting very far.

Once again, Toriel never gives us the number of actual humans who passed through the Ruins, so this possibility exists, and is something we need to be aware of going forward.

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"Human heads? They wouldn't be able to talk. They'd be DEAD. This is clearly a skeleton head."

Gaster Follower #1: https://youtu.be/3C1cvPaaoiU?t=8

Gaster may have been shattered across time and space, but the pieces of his soul still seem to be quite viable in a ghostly sense.

And the head we see talking in Gaster Follower #1's hand doesn't look like a skeleton head. It's mouth moves when it talks, and it seems quite fleshy.

Not as if we even know what skeleton heads should act like. Papyrus has fully animated features, while Sans' face never changes except the eyes. We've already had that long conversation.

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Asriel ponders why Chara climbed a cursed mountain. So Mount Ebott's bad reputation existed before Chara fell.

We've been over how the Waterfall Glyphs and Librarby books were written by different civilizations at different times. The glyphs describe a world very different from Asgore's kingdom, where no entrances and exists exist at all.

The glyphs claimed no monster had ever absorbed a human soul before, and now it would never happen. But it clearly did happen in Asriel and Chara's case.

And we agree that the Waterfall statue, which Undyne says existed longer than anyone can remember (and Gerson can remember the end of the pervious war and Barrier casting) must have been from an earlier civilzation.

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While many different timelines are certainly possible depending on how we play Undertale, Flowey talks about how everyone is ripped out of the timelines they ended up in, and returned to this one when everything is reset.

Undertale is a world where somebody messed with time.

Chara's flowers knew in advance where Frisk would fall, just as Sans knew exactly what Frisk would look like when he emerged, and that he would eventually emerge from the Ruins. Sans and Alphys both repeatedly talk about different dimensions and other versions of people.

But there only seem to be two copies of Sans/Frisk running around. Which would indicate that Sans backtracked through time only once, otherwise there would be more of them, a duplicate for every rewind.

There are two versions of True Lab Entry 17, written by two different people. And while Gaster wrote the first one, he couldn't have written the second one because in that timeline he died long beforehand, being replaced eventually by Alphys.

While it would require someone to repeatedly rewind time to erase the memories of someone from the world, reloading a save might be a lot simpler than tearing through the fabric of the universe to go to a place you've never been before.

Whatever other worlds exist, Frisk experience a world where time has been rewound once during Undertale. It might be different with Deltarune, but if you want to propose a Gamma and Delta timeline, we need evidence for that.

"So why would Sans pick a disguise that can easily be seen through by the monsters, on sight? Since you argue that Papyrus could see Sans as a human through pure sight?"

Papyrus has known and lived with Sans for years. At first he probably couldn't see through Sans' disguise. But being that close to both Sans and Gaster, especially on the night of the darkest experiment, would certainly give Papyrus a better look at these two than any other monsters had.

Papyrus did not see through Sans' disguise on sight. And quite clearly, Sans' mask fools almost everyone else that he hasn't shared his secret with.

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San's fight dialogue: https://undertale.fandom.com/wiki/Sans/In_Battle

"our reports showed a massive anomaly in the timespace continuum."

Sans isn't alone. He was with at least one other person when he heard this report.

"look, i gave up trying to go back a long time ago."

Sans has demonstrated that he can travel through time. Yet there's a place he once was that he can't get back to anymore.

"and getting to the surface doesn't really appeal anymore, either."

Sans once tried to get to the surface, but gave up trying. To Sans, The Place He Was From, and The Surface are two different things. Sans is not from The Surface. Even if the Barrier comes down, he still can't go home.

If Sans and Gaster were from the Underground originally, why did they need to build The Silver Key Machine? It's the vehicle they used to travel here and investigate The Anomaly

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"Why should we find them (Gaster Blasters) in the True Lab? They're magical constructs that vanish when your turn is over."

Nope. Remember that Papyrus showed us the box of bones he used for his attacks. While the battle screens might show the weapons being used in an idealized, cartoon fashion, the weapons are real. And Frisk's attacks change depending on what weapon he's weilding.

Gaster invented his blasters at some point in time. We don't see evidence of creation in the True Lab in Undertale, because in the Beta timeline Gaster died before he could invent them.

Meanwhile, Sans and Papyrus have their blasters as artifacts from the Alpha Timeline they traveled from.

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"No she wouldn't have. How would Asgore know that Alphys worked for The Royal Scientist, when nobody knows who the Roayl Scientist even was?"

Everyone might have forgotten Gaster, but if Alphys was working as an understudy of Gaster's at the time, and she wasn't repeatedly killed, people would still remember her.

And Alphys would certainly remember all the science she learned from Gaster. Even if she couldn't remember who taught it to her.

This is a world where a very specific bit of information has been deleted. And if Alphys was already a highly trained scientist at the time of Gaster's death, she still should have been a shoe-in for continuing his research.

It took years for Asgore to find Alphys. It wouldnt' have if she was already there.

"Everyone forgot everything about Gaster, except for Sans and the Followers. Because Sans isn't from Undertale's world, and thus wasn't affected by the memory retcon."

This is debunked in the fight with Hyperdeath Asriel, where Sans, along with all the other Lost Souls, start to forget who Frisk is as we're repeatedly killed by Asriel.

Only two people seem to remember what happens in these cases: The killer and the victim.

And Sans DOES remember Gaster. He's carrying a gun with his name on it. And remembers the companion he traveled from the other world with.

Sans wanted everyone else to forget Gaster. It worked. Almost...

--

The memory of Gaster might have faded, but his work remains.

Alphys found his blueprints and used them to make her Determination Extraction machine.

And in Sans' lab, there are notes that can't be read. Because, perhaps, they're all in Wingdings.

---

I'm sure Gaster did write his own list of True Lab entires. Who knows, if DeltaRune is what remains of the Alpha Timeline, and those notes are still down there in the slowly melting Core, we might actually be able to read them someday.

But both Entry 17's exist in the void of the game code, something the player can never naturally experience without hacking.

How can two Entry 17's exist, at the same point in time? Because they both happened in different timelines.

Alphy's writing talks of the Amalgamates as a recent development, the worried families are still sending her letters about them. Her Entry 17 was written recently.

But although Gaster died years ago.. somehow he was able to stand where Alphys was, and write his own version of Entry 17?

Not in this timeline. Not in Undertale's Beta timeline.

Gaster's Entry 17 must be a relic from the Alpha Timeline.

"Because *nobody traveled to the past*." "There was no trip!"

Sans actively talks about Time Travel at different points in the game. And the quantum multiverse of differently branching timelines is hammered home as lore of interest in this game.

Explain to me how Sans and Chara's flowers gained so much pre-knowledge about Frisk's journey if no time manipulation was taking place?

Messing with time, resetting time by reloading saves, there are major parts of the lore of Undertale.

Undertale's story doesn't work unless you factor in time travel.

The Silver Key is an HP Lovecraft story about time travel, after all. And Sans' love of quantum physics and science fiction(?) is hammered home far too much for it to be irrelevant.

"Which doesn't make sense. If you go back before the Barrier, it will succeed. There's no reason why it woudn't."

Unless the Barrier also prevents time and dimensional travel beyond the limits of when and where it existed.

Alphys should have been able to find an alternate dimension where the Barrier didn't exist.. and yet she wasn't. Perhaps the Barrier itself prevented this, making soul energy collection necessary.

Nobody was able to break the Barrier without collecting monster souls. Including Gaster.

The story constantly focuses on soul collection as a driving part of the narrative.

There's a puzzle here that we're supposed to detect, and solve.

My crack at it is in the script.

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"Or they were never trapped in the first place. They could have just been visiitng."

The Waterfall glyphs clearly describe the monsters being trapped behind a Barrier.

And while the ancient war the glyphs describe was over before it started, with a massive human sneak attack.. Asgore's war lasted a long time before his people were defeated.

Two civilizations at different times. Two times a Barrier was cast.

Two times a Barrier was broken.

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Are the Amalgamates more powerful than Undyne? They've very ghostlike and probably require magic to defeat, just like Mad Dummy. And despite all of his advanced PSI powers, Frisk never had magic to throw at them.

I wonder how long the Amalgamates would last if their weakness to magic was exploited.

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I don't see any evidence that Alphys even knew that Undyne was getting Determination from the seagrass ice cream.

And I'm really curious just how much of the stuff Alphys has eaten herself. We never got to fight her to find out.. and I'm super curious why that is.

Anyways, Undyne and Alphy's experience with Determation was very different from what the Fallen experience. The Fallen slowly woke up, and seemed completely normal, until they fused.

The Waterfall Glyphs say it would take an amazing amount of power to take the soul from a living monster. Which confirms right there that such a thing is theoretically possible.

You say that other flowers that absorbed part of Asriels' dust would act like seperate organisms.

Well, that's what happed to the other golden flowers (all of which were tracked by by Asriel at first) when they decided to grow in places where Frisk would fall in the future.

Gaster's soul was shattered across time and space, leaving multple versions of him. It seems the same happened to Chara and Asriel.

Who, in the Alpha TImeline, knew Sans. And where his adventures would take him.

Perhaps bits of Chara's soul, still infused in Asriels' essense, allowed the flowers to remember events from the world before, as time was reset? Letting them act with this pre-knowledge?

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Elevator Voice has definitely met Chara before. Even if she can't seem to remember it.

I changed "It's been a long time" to "It's been a long time since we've met" to better flesh out what this dialog says about the past.

Elevator Voice very clearly knows Chara. Well.

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"I still think the catch about never being able to leave if a human went in is what lead to the fear being lost."

For that to work, the monster would have had to know a human was in their midst.

The first identified human they knew about was Chara.

Who arrived long after the construction of the New Home/Core complex.

Because the monsters has already migrated to New Home at the time Chara arrived.

..... because the monsters had already lost their fear of humans years ago.

Chara was not who caused the monsters to lose their fear of humans.

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Do we know for a fact that only skeletons talk in fonts?

I've already listed mountains of evidence why Sans and Gaster must have been human at some point.

The Font Brigade is certainly an important aspect to the lore. And sure, Uncle Semi looked like a skeleton. But I think the Font Brigade is more important because it establishes a link between these characters. They've been singled out as font-speakers for a reason.

I've written much about the past Sans, Papyrus and Gaster share. It's not inconcievable they'd all adopt a weird quirk like this.

Either Gaster needed motivation for time travel.. or Sans did.

Again, something about The Darkest Experiment caused a rift in the Font Brigade, that caused Sans and Papyrus to make the trip to Snowdin.. without Gaster.

Leaving without Gaster wasn't only inexplicable, it was personally devastating to Sans. Only Gaster could fix the Silver Key machine he needed to go home again.

Something happened that was so bad that it tore apart friendships that had lasted for years, and literally transended time and space.

Gaster trying to genocide monsterkind by vacuuming in all their souls is the only thing I can think of with the raw power to do this so quickly and violently.

Sans loves Papyrus, and the other monsters. He couldn't sit by and let something like that happen.

Not unless he had a damn good reason.. like not wanting to have to fight himself.

We might not know the timeline events that led to Sans somehow appearing in the Ruins without his costume, and calling himself Frisk. But I've compiled a huge list of evidence in the script for why this must have been what happened.

Perhaps one day we'll see the rest of the story, and all these observations will make sense.