Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26006155-20190617222636/@comment-32182236-20190719193228

The rules for traveling between there and the Underground are weirdly specific: Only burrowing creatures (like Flowey or the Vegetoids), ghosts (like Napstablook or Gaster), and Toriel can feely travel between the two realms.

That's not weirdly specific at all. It makes perfect sense. You have a door blocking the way. Ghosts are incopreal, they can go right through it. Doors have gaps underneath them that could be burrowed through. And those are the only two ways you could theoretically go past a door. Whatever, or whoever, the cause might be, both The Ruins and Underground are experiencing an uptick in monsters "Falling Down" to the point where the monsters now wish they had hospitals.

...Do note that there's also a population explosion. There used to be so few monsters that one single city would suffice. Now the monsters need four.

It could even mean that the glyph about it taking nearly all monsters to reach the power of a human is far outdated, and I argue that is indeed the case, explaining MatPat's analysis on how many SOULs' worth of power Asriel has.

Certainly Toriel is super-protective. But she's protecting her monsters as much as any visiting humans. She doesn't want either side to hurt the other.

Which is another reason to keep the human from reaching the rest of the underground.

While we don't know the exact reasons yet, Sans was once transported to the ruins without his costume, and went through Toriel's care as one of the humans passing through. Which is how he knew who Frisk was and when he's going to arrive in the Underground.

Or he got that information from analyzing the anomaly, like he specifically said he was doing in his Genocide battle.

...I'm taking the possibility that requires the fewest additional entities. So Toriel didn't recognize Sans immediately, even through Sans knew who she was the whole time.

...Why would Toriel know if Sans is Frisk?

It does make we wonder if Sans and Papyrus changed costumes when they went back in time to Snowdin though.

Well, Papyrus' current "battle body armor" was made a few weeks ago. So Papyrus must have had a different costume before then.

"we made that a few weeks ago for a costume party. he hasn't worn anything else since"-Sans

Do we know for certain that the start of 201X is when the monsters left Home/The Ruins? Remember that Toriel and Asgore recorded a home movie at New Home before Asriel was even born.

...No, it GOT to New Home. Did you forget about room_asriel? The flower drawing that perfectly matches the one in New Home, the latter of which we know Chara made? Which couldn't have came from other humans, because after seeing the New Home one, they couldn't go back to the Ruins? And echo flowers can only be found in Waterfall, so that couldn't be the inspiration either.

Alphys found this tape in the Castle, so the Dreemurs had been established at New Home for a while.

Or, the Dreemurrs brought the tape that they had with them to New Home. Sans and Papyrus would have had to arrive in Snowdin at a time when Snodin was occupied, certainly. But Gaster spent plenty of time in New Home, it's connected directly to The Core.

But that doesn't mean he wasn't in Snowdin at all. Either way, Sans and Papyrus showed up AFTER the move to New Home. So well after Gaster was already a scientist. Possibly even after Gaster started his experiment... I don't think we have a solid timeframe on when or why the monsters went back New Home.

...Yeah, we probably don't. My take was just an alternative. (If you haven't realized, I'm a skeptic in nature.)

If Gaster was erased from reality, removing everyone's memories of him.. why would his technology remain? If he had truly been -erased- from the timeline, you'd think everything he made would have been erased too.

It is rather strange indeed. Gaster himself was shattered. Perhaps his memories do still exist, but because they're shattered with them, nobody can actually recall them? ...But that wouldn't explain why the Followers mess up our phone, or why they're faded.

...Then again, Gaster does the same thing in Deltarune. ...Maybe Deltarune will give us more answers on the matter.

Actually the Snails are proven to have souls. Napstablook recalls when Asriel did his 'summoning' and a blazing white light called to him, yet he didn't answer. He remembers seeing all of the snails vanish, absorbed by Flower/Asriel with his monster soul vaccum blast.

And it didn't count as a human SOUL.. meaning that snails are actually on the monster side, taxonomically. Very interesting.. I'd have expected them to be on the human side.

What about the birds? Could Gaster have extracted determination from them? And why haven't the monsters tried using THOSE souls?

"it's a beautiful day outside. birds are singing, flowers are blooming..."

Asgore also says that birds are singing and flowers are blooming.

Why would monsters need a spell to initiate a fight? Most monsters that encounter Frisk start a fight immediately and try to stab him with various things.

...No, they literally take Frisk's SOUL out of their body, and attack that.

"See that heart? That is your SOUL, the very culmination of your being!"-Flowey, tutorial

THAT would require a spell. Though it's a pretty cheap one. And one that would be used often. So it'd turn into an instinctual thing. It'd become as easy as jumping is to us. Actually essense seems to be something external to the soul. Monster souls vanish on death, but their essense remains behind. Fragments of Chara's soul might have resided in Asriel's essense, but Asriel's mind was able to come back regardless.

The SOUL vanishes, but the essence lives on. The essence is at first contained within the SOUL, however. This is why when Asriel absorbed Chara's SOUL, control was split between the two. By absorbing Chara's SOUL, their essence was absorbed with them. When the SOUL shattered, the essence lived on within the body. A body that Asriel was carrying at the time. Latched onto Chara's old body, only to be reawakened when Frisk's power brought the essence back to life.. Soulless, like Flowey.

The idea of the HUD itself evolving is interesting. And I agree that the HUD plays an important role in the game since it changes between Undertale and Deltarune.

It's more between the Dark World and the real world. The HUD works nearly identically in Deltarune in the real world.. But the position of the menu is still different. Darkners have colored portraits, and lightners are still in black and white. Sans, interestingly, is black-and-white on the overworld, so we'd have no idea if his portrait is colored or not. If he was a Lightner or a Darkner.

Although we don't know of the HUD actually did evolve, or it just something woven into the game.

Either works, as if it was woven into the world, it'd still explain the left-handedness all the same. But if it did evolve, it'd explain a lot of the functions. I'm just considering evolution before creationism when it comes to the HUD. (But hey, the Dark World was probably created by Gaster.. Maybe creationism is true in Undertale. After all, we already have a candidate. But let's not use the Dog of the Gaps fallacy.)

Although human SOULs are stated to not be able to use magic, something that still stands in Deltarune, that doesn't mean human SOULs don't have a different power of their own.

Of course. My candidate on the power is massive amounts of determination. Wizards could use some kind of arcane procedure to convert their SOUL power into usable magic. Humans could theoretically use magic.. But only artificially, not naturally. So they couldn't represent themselves with it, or make complex bullet patterns on the fly. Telekinesis is certainly legal for human souls to possess, since we see The Six Souls rebel and rip their way out from inside Omega Flowey, something moving themselves with their own non-magical force.

Plus SOULs move on their own in the battle (okay, we control them, but not with a body)

PSI is a real thing in Undertale.

Maybe it is, maybe it's not. It's still unknown what magic there is.