[He hears the disdain, and he hears the unspoken, unsigned command. Stop them. Yeah. He's always trying and failing to stop anomalies.]
[Kids playing with matches. You'd think after burning themselves so many times already they'd know when to Quit. But he wouldn't be surprised if the existential atom bomb that heralded Gaster's arrival here didn't summon Chara immediately. Frisk might have the good sense to stay away, at least. They said they were done digging. Of course, they say a lot of things.]
[And Asriel's here somewhere, and any number of other Frisks and Charas, and people totally unrelated to their world who will want to come solve the neat mystery of the missing man.]
[Yeah. This needs to stop. He just needs to figure out how to take their shovels away.]
[He looks up again.]
yeah, i know. no point in getting into all that with you. not fair to either of us.
[Gaster pauses, and he did that, maybe took some kind of pleasure in it. His halting, calculated manner of communication that made it so easy to pause and hold a bombshell over someone's head and contemplate the destruction he was about to wreak.]
[Sans was an only child.]
[Something kind of snaps. Sans goes away for a bit.]
[His mind scrambles, tries to piece together the variables, the constants, assigning numbers and values to each individual event in his life, trying to find which direction this equation runs, how it all matches up. What variables, what course of events would be required for such a thing.]
[His parents wanted kids. Papyrus was just their second try at having one that was normal.]
[Hypothesis--they never bothered to try again. Settled themselves with the meagerness of Sans's existence. Maybe they couldn't. They disappeared not many years later, afterward. Additional hypothesis: they were different people altogether, maybe better people.]
[Maybe they loved him.]
[Irrelevant to the hypothesis. Discard.]
[He grows up. He's sick. Stuck in bed all the time, reading books because it was all he had energy for.]
[Pursues science and has nothing to lose. Is more willing to compromise. Is more willing to ignore the growing problems.]
[Backtrack. Gaster's negation altered the timeline enough to allow for Papyrus to exist. How? Gaster must have affected some kind of variable that Sans isn't aware of. Of course he never could have been aware of all the variables. There was no way to track every single individual change from G=yes to G=no.]
[Simple if/then statement. If G=yes, then P=no. And vice versa.]
[He blinks slowly, settles, and his eyelights come on for the first time in this entire conversation.]
no subject
yeah. regular tiny army, at this point.
[He hears the disdain, and he hears the unspoken, unsigned command. Stop them. Yeah. He's always trying and failing to stop anomalies.]
[Kids playing with matches. You'd think after burning themselves so many times already they'd know when to Quit. But he wouldn't be surprised if the existential atom bomb that heralded Gaster's arrival here didn't summon Chara immediately. Frisk might have the good sense to stay away, at least. They said they were done digging. Of course, they say a lot of things.]
[And Asriel's here somewhere, and any number of other Frisks and Charas, and people totally unrelated to their world who will want to come solve the neat mystery of the missing man.]
[Yeah. This needs to stop. He just needs to figure out how to take their shovels away.]
[He looks up again.]
yeah, i know. no point in getting into all that with you. not fair to either of us.
[Gaster pauses, and he did that, maybe took some kind of pleasure in it. His halting, calculated manner of communication that made it so easy to pause and hold a bombshell over someone's head and contemplate the destruction he was about to wreak.]
[Sans was an only child.]
[Something kind of snaps. Sans goes away for a bit.]
[His mind scrambles, tries to piece together the variables, the constants, assigning numbers and values to each individual event in his life, trying to find which direction this equation runs, how it all matches up. What variables, what course of events would be required for such a thing.]
[His parents wanted kids. Papyrus was just their second try at having one that was normal.]
[Hypothesis--they never bothered to try again. Settled themselves with the meagerness of Sans's existence. Maybe they couldn't. They disappeared not many years later, afterward. Additional hypothesis: they were different people altogether, maybe better people.]
[Maybe they loved him.]
[Irrelevant to the hypothesis. Discard.]
[He grows up. He's sick. Stuck in bed all the time, reading books because it was all he had energy for.]
[Pursues science and has nothing to lose. Is more willing to compromise. Is more willing to ignore the growing problems.]
[Backtrack. Gaster's negation altered the timeline enough to allow for Papyrus to exist. How? Gaster must have affected some kind of variable that Sans isn't aware of. Of course he never could have been aware of all the variables. There was no way to track every single individual change from G=yes to G=no.]
[Simple if/then statement. If G=yes, then P=no. And vice versa.]
[He blinks slowly, settles, and his eyelights come on for the first time in this entire conversation.]
well that's real weird.