Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-31066439-20170116175126/@comment-31066439-20170117051845

You make good points. I still think the probability of the flowers being asters creates a likely connection between them and Gaster, especially considering their meaning. (In the "language of flowers," one of an aster's meanings is "a wish that things had gone differently."  They can also mean "patience," which in Undertale is represented by the color light blue, which is a tone theme of Sans's.)  We also know that the flowers were included in the determination experiments, which makes me think that Gaster was involved in the determination experiments (connected to the lab + connected to the flowers = connected to the experiments, probably). Either Gaster or Alphys could have built the DT extractor, but there's no need for Gaster to get the blueprints from someone else if he built it. If you're building something complex, you ALWAYS make up blueprints first. That way, when you put it together, you have a plan to follow that will prevent you from making expensive and/or work-intensive mistakes. So I think it's equally possible for Gaster, Alphys, or both of them together to have made the DT extractor.

The "maybe trying to bring back the children" thing IS a bit of a leap, I'll admit. That, in particular, was just an idea I thought I'd throw out there. It IS implied, I think, that Flowey/Asriel owes his current state of existence to the determination experiments somehow, though there's no actual evidence of this beyond the peculiarity of him being a sentient flower of a type that's not normally so talkative. I got the "children" idea because it occurred to me that it's odd for Asriel to have been caught up in any of this, especially if, as is fully possible, he may have been dead at the time. You're right that there's no actual evidence, though, so it's best to take that idea as more of a starting point for other speculations, and less of a hypothesis in its own right. :)