Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26006155-20190425222457/@comment-26006155-20190510162901

But Sans/Alpha Frisk didn't travel back in time with another human. He traveled with Alpha Papyrus, a monster.

Here's a breakdown of what we know about the timelines:

Originally, in the Alpha Timeline, there was only one version of each character: Sans/Alpha Frisk, Alpha Papyrus, and Alpha Gaster. It was the first, unaltered timeline, without duplicates.

The duplicated True Lab Entry 17's show that in one timeline, which can't be Frisk's timeline, Gaster wasn't replaced by Alphys, but stayed on as the Royal Scientist up to the same point in the timeline that Alphys recorded her own Entry 17.

Gaster talks about a Darkest Experiment..and then Alphys mentions Flowey has vanished, which wasn't her doing. The Darkest Experiment involved Flowey in some way, and as in the Halloween Hack, the timelines can subtly effect each other.

Alphys was using Gaster's notes on Determination Extraction to try and extract souls from dying monsters. Making monster souls collectable was the main boon of Gaster's original Determinaton research, and his influence on Flowey shows he was also creating a vessel that could contain both human and monster souls.

Soul energy is the only thing that can break the Barrier, and it can't be artificially replicated. So Alphys and Gaster were both working on collecting soul energy in their respective timelines.

Gaster asks two other people in the room what they think about his Darkest Experiment, which is strongly hinted to be Very Very Bad. The other two people were very like Sans and Papyrus, the other two members of The Font Brigade. The blasters they carry show that they've certainly met Gaster before.

Whatever happened on The Night of Gaster's Darkest Experiment, it shattered the friendship between the three characters, causing Sans/Alpha Frisk and Alpha Papyrus to attempt the highly dangerous maneuver of traveling to the past to change the future, something they wouldn't do if they liked what had happened in their current timeline.

The act of Sans and Alpha Papyrus traveling to the past split reality, and created a new timeline: The Beta(2nd) Timeline. The Snowdin shopkeeper recalls how Sans and Papyrus just appeared one day, and asserted themselves.

Sans and Alpha Papyrus may have made many changes when they went back in time. But one outcome is certain: In the Beta timeline, Beta Gaster dies and has the Memorial Fountain built for him in 201X, earlier than Chara's arrival at New Home around Christmas 2019.

Alpha Gaster's ghost probably re-invaded the Beta timeline after his counterpart's death. This would explain how he'd know how to control Flowey, something Beta Gaster wouldn't know.

What could Gaster's Darkest Experiment have been, that was so horrible that his friends objected to it so strongly, and violently?

It definitely involved the collection of monster souls in an attempt to break the barrier. But it also had to be an approach different from Alphys.

Alphys was trying to collect souls from dying monsters to gradually build up a large enough stockpile of monsters souls so that, over generations, the power equivalent of the 7th human soul could be reached, in a realtively humane way.

But another possibility exists: If someone could draw in the souls of all or monster of the monsters in a single flash of massive power, like how Flowey did when he became Asriel, they could break the Barrier instantly.. if they were willling to genocide monsterkind.

This option, the Dreaded Option C I talked about much earlier in these threads, is one that Sans, who tries to do the right thing, would never accept. And it's the only thing horrible enough I can find that would lead to such a violent disagreement with Gaster, and the destruction of the 3-person party.

A mad scientist of Gaster's calibur would have also been able to see the scientific benefits of keeping a supply of monster souls around to allow humans to agument their powers. So I think it's a reasonable assumption that, rather than wiping out all monsters, Gaster would have a plan to capture some of them.

The Core is designed for massive powerkill, if power generation was its only goal. And all the puzzles and laser arrays within the Core point to the designer trying to deliberately immobilize the monster population working within in, which happens once the puzzles in the Core are re-activated. Gaster was very exacting about his designs, and I doubt these features were an accident on his part.

So Alpha Gaster tried to break the Barrier by wiping out most of monsterkind.. leading to a fight with Sans/Alpha Frisk, and Gaster's scattering across time and space. Then Sans and Alpha Papyrus warped back to the past to try to help Frisk/BetaSans get a better ending. A trip that resulted in Beta Gaster's earlier death in the timeline.

These are the only events that I feel confident about. Which still leaves a lot of unanswered questons:

How exactly did Beta Gaster die? I don't know.

What happened to Beta Papyrus? I don't know.

Are there other timelines besides the Alpha and Beta ones? I can't prove there aren't, but Occam's Razor suggests that two timelines can explain most observable things.

I don't see that my theories have inconsistencies.. only gaps.

Significant parts of both timelines remain unmapped.

And perhaps in the Alpha Timeline Sans didn't use his skeleton disguise all the time. (Although, if this is a time where Asgore has already collected six human souls, it seems his human-harvesting edict is in effect. So Sans using a disguise would still be wise.)