Frisk lazily opened her eyes, blinking a few times to try and focus her groggy vision. She was standing now, though she didn’t remember getting up off the floor of the Ruins corridor at all. As the blurriness slowly cleared away, she realized she was standing in the living room of her home now. Only, it looked…different.

Everything was in ruins…more ruined than they were before. The walls were cracked, crumbled and had gaping holes where other rooms could be seen through, while the floor was missing floorboards and had rubble and broken furniture strewn all around it. It was a disaster, but that wasn’t even the thing that struck her the most surprising. Frisk had to rub her eyes to make sure she wasn’t seeing things - that her blurry vision was truly cleared away - and sure enough, it was still there.

The dust. A thick layer of dust covered absolutely everything. The walls, the floor, the furniture, the rubble, even the ceiling. It was unreal. Frisk’s eyes widened slightly at the sight of it all as she took in her surroundings. From one end of the room to the next…it was just dust and ruin.

“M…Mom…?”

She spoke quietly, meekly, her voice shook slightly. What was going on? Where did all this dust come from? How did she get here? Wasn’t she just sitting in the corridor downstairs? Did she sleepwalk? She was monumentally confused, was beginning to feel anxious and all she really wanted right now was to find her mother.

Frisk took a step backwards to turn herself around, causing a powdery cloud to puff up where her foot had landed - but when she did so, the first thing her gaze landed on was her mother’s armchair. Upon seeing it, her eyes instantly widened even more and she had to clap her hand to mouth to stifle a scream.

Not only was the chair also covered in a layer of dust and grime like everything else, but piled on the seat was a large heap of dust that appeared to be draped in her mothers robes. It was almost as if the pile of dust WAS her mother. Frisk shook her head in disbelief, her body starting to tremble with her increasing heart rate. She kept her hand clamped tightly on her mouth in fear of letting out a horrific scream should she release its hold. That couldn’t be her mother…could it? She knew monsters dusted when they died…but there was no way her mother was dead! She was just talking to her not too long ago!

Frisk was frozen in place, completely paralyzed in horror and unable to stop staring at the dust pile in her mother’s armchair. The world around her seemed to grow darker - contorting and twisting as she tried to make sense of what she was looking at, unsure if what she was seeing was even real. Then suddenly and without warning, a shadowy and distorted figure appeared mere inches behind her, reaching out an ominous, claw-like hand and placing it on her shoulder. Before Frisk had any time to react to the strange and startling new presence, the figure leaned forward…and whistled a familiar birdsong-like tune into her ear.