From outside, a familiar voice can be heard. It makes Alphys’ ears rise up.

“Alphys… let us in…” Undyne pleads as she knocks gently not wanting to startle them. She must have thought that they’ve been drinking too much coffee that even a soft rustle could startle, alerting their system which leads to an even worse scenario.

Undyne from the other side of the door tells the crowd gathering that they should leave and let her handle the rest from here.

“Alphys… please, you’re working yourself too much… you’ve drunk enough coffee already…” she scoffs disappointedly as she rests her head on her unharmed arm that’s onto the door “And we both know this isn’t good for your health.”

“Undyne— no… Love… please.” Alphys looks down, disappointed. Tears started rolling from her eyes. She must have already felt the huge burden on her back from wanting to save everybody in this universe, and one wrong move could result in a different calculation far more worse than what she had been anticipating.

“I still have much more work to do.”

“But you have to rest! As much as… everyone… do…” she slammed her fists on the door.

“I know… but this is my job.”

Undyne not being able to resist that she’s hearing Alphys overworking herself again, she manages to force her way inside the office. This broke the door and almost slammed Hiro down just inches away when Undyne stepped too hard on the door.

“EEEK!! ARE YOU NUTS!” Hiro startled, started shouting at Undyne

“This is no time to argue. You are coming with me.” Undyne walks toward Alphys and carries her like nothing as if carrying a huge log. Surprisingly… Alphys is rather more lightweight than she had remembered.

“Put me down!!” Alphys wails Undyne’s back and tries to break free from being carried over easily. “I-I’m busy!!”

“Nope, you’re not. You are going to rest just like everybody else.”

“But this is Important!!” Alphys grunts from trying to push herself outwards, but not even budging works and Undyne’s arms are still tied to Alphys’ waist. “The safety of our people lies in my hands!”

“How about you? How about your safety? Huh? Your health?” Undyne walks outside the office as she continues to converse with Alphys. Hiro on the other hand gives Alphys a thumbs up. What does it even mean for her? Is Hiro going to work on it alone? Is he even going to succeed? Alphys lost hope at Hiro instantly. Even lost hope to budge out of Undyne’s strong capture.

It's as if Alphys’ disappointed face quickly translated and struck Hiro’s confidence.

“But this is much more important… our universe is at stake.” Alphys slumped at Undyne’s shoulders, and accepted defeat that she really isn’t as strong as her lover.

“And what does that mean?”

“I told you! Argh not even you understand!” Alphys crosses her arms and pouts

“I would be happy if you could tell me.”

“Fine… but first, can you at least put me down first…” 

“why—”

Alphys’ face turns red.

“I feel embarrassed being seen in this state by my co-workers…”

“Oh- sorry” Undyne puts her down gently, Alphys on the other hand fixes her uniform properly and her messed up hair.

“And done. As you are saying?” As soon as she puts down Alphys, she sprints down the hall back to her office. “What a pain… So persistent huh? Can’t even take a short break… geez Alphys.” Undyne facepalms and smirks.

While it looks like she’ll want to chase after her, she then realizes that there’s really no stopping Alphys to even take a break just for a short while. Time is gold to her, and every second counts. She then just paces back slowly towards her partner’s office to check on her—maybe stay beside her in the office just to watch over her. Undyne’s really caring when it comes to her partner’s health, she’d first prioritize her more than everything—but that doesn’t stop her from prioritizing the whole monster’s civilization as well. Talk about multitasking, only she, the legendary warrior could do something like that.

“What are you guys staring at? Keep working, everyone!” Undyne, still strict as ever even if it's not her knight squad. 

As soon as she reaches the office door of Alphys, she rests her back at the door frame and crosses her arms as she looks at the messy room. She keeps gazing at every corner and it’s no mistake… She's judging it. It’s been only a few hours since she came, how messy did it become already? Her worry seems to get more serious at this point.

“Alphys…” she says in a low voice, “Not to be that person but… this room ain’t working for you.”

“I hate to be the bad person, but you’ve caused me multiple seconds already precisely—” and Alphys went on a mathematical spree and kept on muttering knowledge Undyne doesn’t seem to recognize nor does she even want to know about.

“...and if you’ve caused me this much time, then I’ve wasted like…” Alphys continues on the spree, even using her fingers to count when suddenly Undyne holds both of her arms, grips on them, not too tight.

“I know.” Undyne gently says “I’ll let you keep working, but in exchange, allow me to stay in this room to watch over you.”

Alphys’ eyes suddenly had the spark that she’s being allowed to keep on working—worse, even overworking—but quickly replaced with a dead and cold stare. She thought she’ll be left alone to work with, but even had to worry about someone during work.

“Oh come on… Don’t make that face now.” Undyne worriedly says “I’m just worried and all!”

“Fine, but if I find that you are distracting me, I’ll have no choice but to excuse you.” Alphys stood, carrying countless files, messed up in different colors of folder, and proceeded to bring them over her office desk.

“She even gets you on this?” Undyne asks Hiro who’s kneeling down on the floor, tired, sipping cup noodles to satiate his hunger.

“It is with utmost importance that we get to solve this as soon as possible… We don’t have any more time to waste.” Hiro replied, as he sipped the noodles off of his food making a mess in his uniform.

“She says that as well…” Undyne helps to clean some of the mess up while keeping a conversation with Hiro. It's best that she doesn’t interrupt Alphys right now, even if she wants to. Right now, she’s keeping a close eye on her.

“Well… it's an emergency—a wide scale one.”

“How huge is this emergency compared to the anomaly that entered our universe?” Undyne’s eyes are focused on Alphys closing her eyes from being too tired. Her head falls but she would quickly catch it and straight up go back to working. She’s even sipping a cup of coffee, Undyne wonders how much coffee she has drunk.

“Well… much bigger.” Hiro said

“How big—”

Hiro slams his palms on the coffee table

“Multiversal Threat… It’s a threat to the very existence of the tree itself. Every Universe that we know exists, every reality—will be wiped out—only leaving behind the original one thus resetting the tree back to zero.”

It sent shivers down Undyne’s spine just hearing those ominous words coming from Hiro.

“Well, what’s the plan? Haven’t you guys come up with something yet?” Undyne looks at Alphys with a worried look, Alphys notices it

“We do have a plan… but it’s beyond knowledge thus knowing if it's even possible… with a probability of 4% success rate, we don’t know if it’ll succeed or not. And bringing back a person from being casted out of existence is basically not entirely possible too, with a success rate of 2, we’d be glad to even bring back a piece of his clothing let alone his whole body…” Alphys goes on a wild calculation as she mutters to herself, she seems happy at some points but then feels defeated knowing the success rates becoming low and low as she calculates.

“Can you… explain it… you know.” Undyne makes hand gestures pointing towards her head signaling that she may be a powerful Knight but she isn’t that knowledgeable to know scientific words.

“Ugh… fine. We need Gaster, and bringing him back might be impossible.”

“Gaster? That scoundrel?” Undyne’s eyes turned red for a moment but she quickly calms herself before she does anything stupid in Alphys’ office.

“W-what's wrong?” Hiro asks while he’s sweating as she’s never seen Undyne’s scary side until today.

“Uh… Wasn’t it written in your files or something about what Gaster did?”

“Not that I’ve heard of…” Both Undyne and Hiro look at Alphys at her office desk signaling that they need explanation.

“W-what? Oh! Um… yeah… didn’t I mention that when we first checked it earlier, Hiro?”

“Um No? You never did!”

“I must have forgotten it… haha…” Alphys nervously laughs “Anyway, let me bring up his file real quick… huh? That’s weird… I know this file has been tampered earlier, but… this is completely changing what’s written all over-”

“What?” Hiro asks as he stands up and goes over behind Alphys, Undyne follows up feeling a bit jealous about Hiro getting  close with her lover. Undyne notices he’s being too close so she bumps him to the side a bit making it look like she accidentally slips but quickly catches herself. It didn’t create that much tension and Hiro just shrugs it off.

However, Alphys clearly feels Undyne’s tension. Now’s not the time, Undyne… ugh… Alphys whispers to her mind.

“Anyway… Look at this. It’s even being tampered live as we are viewing it.” Alphys points at the document.

“Well, who else has access to these files?” Hiro asks, even though he already knows.

“Are you dumb or just acting dumb.” Alphys lowers her eyebrows, a visible sign of annoyance towards Hiro’s stupidity. 

She sighs and goes back to face her laptop.

“Okay okay- but should you be doing something? Why aren’t we stopping it?” Hiro asks confusedly.

Alphys looks again at Hiro. God… is he THAT really stupid? And facepalms.

“Okay okay I get it you don’t have to look at me like that.” Hiro pouts and crosses his arms mumbling to himself.

“Anyway… yeah I can stop this, hold on…” Alphys proceeds to work on stopping the live tampering right away, and eventually she is able to stop it. As simple as it is, she just created a copy of the file and removed the current file that’s being tampered. But even if it’s that easy, she’ll need to first activate a permission only High Scientists like Alphys can give access to and since she’s the one solving it right now, she doesn't need any permission at all.

As convenient as it is, they’ll need to secure all forbidden files into a much more secured location.

Meanwhile somewhere in the forgotten distant realms, one resides where one tampers with the files…

“What?” he snaps back and opens his eyes. “Huh… looks like they managed to surpass my intelligence. No wonder they replaced me with her..” his fists clenched as he bit his lips.

A humanoid, idling in an infinite darkness. Meditating through and through. His body has been severely damaged, piece by piece its very existence is becoming but a dust in this reality. One wrong move and it could wipe him out of this very alternate. He tries to maintain his spiritual energy and controls the delay of his degradation. However, his fate still lingers. Death awaits him.

“I must eradicate this entire alternative, and conquer the next one to regain my peak… just so you wait… Asgore.” He sinisterly mutters to himself in a low voice, clenching his fists again.

“I, Wingding Gaster, will take back what’s rightfully been mine!” He laughs sinisterly, and it echoes through the broken realm. Pillars breaking down, and a few dead puppets scrambled everywhere.

He raises his hands and opens his palms. Dark matter emerges, and a head of a small puppet comes out. It wasn’t as perfect as he thought it would be, as it came out its proportions were rather… dislocated and missing a few parts.

“Ugh… still not enough…” He lowers his hands and the puppet disappears into thin air. “Once I get out… I’ll take Alphys’ life and gain her powers. Next, I’ll take out Sans and gain control over the Aetherial Beacon… Just you wait…”

A hologram appears in front of him, showing Sans with his brother Papyrus at the hospital beds in a room while in the other hologram, Alphys with Hiro and Undyne behind her.

“Where could that person be? It’s been a while since I’ve contacted that human… took almost half of my life doing that…” He clenches his fists. His form appears to be dissolving slowly from bottom, where he now just levitates.

He tries to summon one of his puppets, though the appearance is small and its body is dissolving, summoning one consumes his life’s source. And now that he’s no longer in his peak form, he continues to risk it despite knowing the consequences.

Right now, all Gaster could think of is to use this opportunity to strategize and plan it well without overusing his remaining source. One wrong move and it could mean that he’ll be erased in this existence, only to remain a History and a Legend from the past.

“Go on, follow the person we entrusted our life with.” He blew onto the doll’s body and it brought life, although as mentioned it doesn’t look very trustworthy right now. It moves like a drunk person but that small doll can still cut through the neck neatly.

“Now that it’s on its way to find that person, I must see if I can sustain another hologram to watch over…” He tried to snap his fingers once, twice… but it only sparked a bit and it failed. He groans and rolls his eyes and tries to snap back again and in its 4th snap it is finally summoned. 

“Gosh that worked me out so much… I hate this current state of my body… I really can’t wait to get a hold of the Aetherial Beacon in my hands… Once I have it, I’ll return to my peak form and I’ll take control of this timeline and every timeline in the whole universe!”

After his echoing sinister laugh in the dark void, he quickly snaps back and coughs as if he’s a bit embarrassed of what he just did.

“Anyway… let’s skip that awkward laugh, we’ll work on that.” and proceeds to move his hands and swipes through the holograms. He looks at the recently summoned one that is currently traversing and finding The Anomaly.

“Hmm…” after that silence, he seems to notice something and continues to process what he’s been thinking. But he shrugs it off. It doesn’t seem like it’ll make a change if I had a thought about it. I’ll eventually have a limited amount of time before I die. 

He spoke with his own thoughts in his head.

I’ve been saving this for a lot of years now since I was casted out… I’ll make them all pay for wrongly accusing me of being exiled.

Just as that thought passes by his head, he smirks and a huge red glowing eyes glows behind him. It doesn’t look like those normal blasters like Sans and Papyrus have, this is a human skeleton’s head. Only the top part is cut from the middle of the mouth, the lower part is missing, and the top head is cracked just like how it replicates Gaster’s head currently. Strings attached everywhere in the huge skull as if it’s manipulated—more like… controlled just like how a puppeteer works.

Gaster looks behind him and smiles.

“C’thilpo, don’t worry. I’ll take good care of you.”