Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26006155-20181229180615/@comment-26006155-20190110124440

(continued)

And that’s how Sans and Papyrus left their original timeline, and warped into Frisk’s timeline, as they suddenly appeared in Snowdin down one day, according to the shopkeeper.

If you try to tell Sans that Papyrus isn’t cool when you eat with him at Grillby’s, he’ll tell you sarcasm isn’t cool, and that the idea to establish the guard station at the exit from the Ruins was Papyrus’s idea in the first place. A decision that Frisk ultimately owes his life to, because if Papyrus hadn’t encouraged Sans to keep trying to fix the situation, no matter how bad it had become, Frisk would have met someone very different once he entered the Underground.

Despite Papyrus’ insistence that he doesn’t know what a human looks like, the other Undertale monsters have no trouble figuring this out themselves. A human was a member of the Royal Family for a while, after all. And even if Papyrus first says he’s keeping you clumsily trapped in the dog house until he can hand you over to Undyne, if you keep escaping and getting recaptured by him, he’ll start anxiously giving you hints about how to win the fight, and asks if you just want a house to live in. For all his show in acting like Skeletor, Papyrus will never actually hurt Frisk under any circumstances. And even if you kill him, he’ll still say he believes in you, even as he fades to powder.

Not only does Papyrus know that Frisk is a human, he also knows which human Frisk is. Whether it was deliberate, or accidental, Papyrus is the one who inspired Sans to travel back in time to begin with, and accompanied him on this journey.

There are still a few questions I can’t answer. Why didn’t Gaster or Sans rewind time to undo The Night of the Darkest Experiment? Flowey reveals to Chara-possessed Frisk that he can no longer reload his save, because her determination seems to exceed his own. Sans’s determination to save his friends could have overpowered Gaster’s conflicted plan to enslave and destroy them, and prevent him from reloading. Sans may have also seen no point in rewinding time because Gaster would still be infected by the alien like before, and there was no way to reveal that Gaster was a human without the monsters descending on him, and perhaps Sans himself too.

Why does Frisk always end up back in the Ruins, wearing an old bandage that has already been used many times, with no memory? It could be that, since he was traveling alone, whenever Frisk meets a neutral ending, and cannot leave through the barrier, he takes the portal trip by himself, and ends up trying another chance in another dimension. We assume he’s fallen through the skylight just like Chara did at the beginning of the game, and landed on the same patch of flowers.. But we have no proof of this, and he could just as easily tried to dimensional warp out of the barrier, went as far as he could, then bounces off the barrier and fell to the floor, hurting his head once again.

How does Gaster go from standing right where Alphys did when both of them recorded Lab Entry 17, at a time when Asgore had already collected six souls and was on the verge of breaking the barrier, to dying in the past and having a memorial fountain made for him even before Chara fell into the Underground? I don’t know. One possibility is that Sans went into the past and re-killed Gaster so that Frisk would never have to deal with him on his own run, and maintain his innocence. The monsters still revered Gaster at the time he fell in Frisk’s timeline, otherwise they wouldn’t have made a fountain for him. So Gaster died long before The Night of The Darkest Experiment arrived, and the monsters continued to keep using The Core as a benign power plant and science complex, without ever learning its true nature as an epic deathtrap designed to enslave and destroy them all.

Why do the stripes on Frisk’s shirt strange flash between one and two stripes when he enters Sans’ room for the first time? This is definitely concerned. Perhaps, there is some greater link between Chara and Frisk that crosses the now-changed timelines, in the same way that Gaster seems able to influence Flowey from beyond the grave, even if Alphys created Flowey in the present timeline?

This idea of timelines and dimensions still being able to cross and influence each other, even when their existences should be completely separate, may seem strange, but it’s far from impossible.

Because we see this very thing happen, in the project Toby made before Undertale.

- Chapter 10: Secrets of the Earthbound Halloween Hack -

(to be continued)