A Hearty Dose Of Determination

CHAPTER 1: A Hearty Dose Of Determination

It was a beautiful day outside on the Earth's surface. Birds were singing, flowers were blooming, and people simply would not stop praising the sheer brilliance of Undertale.

Shortly after saving all of the monsters in the underground from certain doom and achieving the best ending in the game, Frisk, the legendary heroic kid who fell into the underworld through a large hole in Mount Ebbot up on the surface, had decided to turn a new leaf.

ABOUT TWO WEEKS LATER...

"What do you MEAN you aren't going to reset the game?" Flowey angrily asked Frisk in confusion as the two of them sat together next to Sans' house in the freezing wastes of Snowdin. "Don't you understand the RULES that I have PERSONALLY obligated to you through your god-damned STEAM CONTRACT? I don't care HOW good OR bad of an ending you ACHIEVE, Mr. Goody-Goody Two Shoes! One of these days, you're going to have to RESET, you hear me?! ALL the way back to the freakin' beginning, you son of a bitch!"

"Hmm...no response, eh? Well, FINE! Have it YOUR way, asshole! We'll SEE who has the last laugh NOW, won't we?" Flowey cackled, burrowing into the ground and disappearing.

"Like I haven't heard it before..." Frisk sighed, walking into Sans' house and falling asleep on the couch.

Meanwhile, in the soggy, damp, cavernous marshland of Waterfall, Undyne had just finished building herself a new house and was busy wondering where her nerdy little lizard girlfriend, Alphys, had bolted off to this time.

"Aw, who am I kidding? That dorky little dweeb is locking herself in her lab again, isn't she?" Undyne groaned, filing her pointy fish nails and gnashing her razor-sharp fish teeth together as she laid on her cot and stared at the massive tarantula on her ceiling. "Man, if only she wasn't so damned cold-blooded, then I would've been able to go a lot more places with her..."

"Hey, spider, do you have any idea what I'm talking about?" Undyne asked the tarantula.

"Uhh...what's a lesbian?" the tarantula asked.

"DIE!" Undyne yelled valiantly, skewering him with one of her laser spears and hurling him out the window.

"Okay...I changed...my mind...lesbians...are awesome...would you please...autograph...my legs?" the tarantula rasped in agonizing pain.

"Fifty dollars per leg." Undyne sighed, stomping on the floor and then grabbing her prized magic marker as it magically fell from the ceiling.

"Never...mind..." the spider coughed and wheezed, curling its legs together and passing out.

"Say, you know what I oughta do?" Undyne realized, snapping her fingers with sudden realization. "Why, I oughta take that big ol' dead spider and hang him up on a stake right outside my front door! Why, that'll give me the PERFECT makeshift mascot for a lemonade stand!"

TWELVE SECONDS LATER...

"Well, that was a bust." Undyne sighed, her face covered with nasty toxic spider bites. "I'm...just...going to...take a...little...nap now..." she mumbled exhaustedly, collapsing onto the floor and falling asleep.

"Hey, look, Papyrus, there she is!" Sans informed his brother Papyrus as the two of them suddenly found her lying on the ground in a state of unconsciousness.

"Sans, did you have this whole thing planned out all along?" Papyrus sighed.

"Of course, bro! Wouldn't have had it any other way." Sans snickered, patting Papyrus on the back so hard that one of Papyrus' teeth flew out and hit Monster Kid right in the eye.

"OWWW, MY EYEEE!!!" Monster Kid screamed in pain, running around aimlessly before finally scraping the tooth out of his eye with his feet since he had no arms whatsoever.

"Let me guess; you also planned for THAT to happen as well?" Papyrus groaned.

"You betcha!" Sans busted out laughing as Monster Kid walked up to him and kicked him in the shin. "OW, what was THAT for?"

"HA HA! Guess what the GREAT Papyrus foresaw happening in advance?" Papyrus boasted.

"Put a sock in it, bonehead." Sans chuckled. "Now come on, help me lug this big lug over to Alphys' lab!" Sans explained, hoisting the top half of Undyne over his shoulder while Papyrus carried the bottom half.

"But Sans, Alphys' freaking lab is located in freaking HOTLAND! For God's freaking sake, brother, my freaking SKIN will freaking burn right freaking off!" Papyrus cried.

"Papyrus, how many frickin' times do I have to tell you? YOU DON'T EVEN HAVE SKIN! NEITHER TO I, FOR THAT MATTER! WE'RE FREAKING SKELETONS!" Sans ranted irritatedly.

"Does that mean...I've been living a LIE this whole time?!" Papyrus stammered. In that very unprecedented moment, the great Papyrus' mind was expanded.

"Oh my freaking God..." Sans groaned, rolling his eyes as the two of them crossed the bridge into Hotland, where Alphys, being cold-blooded and all, naturally lived.

Immediately after reaching the other side of the bridge, Sans and Papyrus found a water dispenser that Sans had already known about for quite some time.

"Gosh, what would anything living HERE need WATER for?" Papyrus wondered, scratching his head as the two of them set Undyne down onto the hot, dry, rocky ground.

"Papyrus, I'm telling you, dude...one of these days, you're gonna have to learn to think outside the BOX." Sans warned him.

"WHAT box?" Papyrus asked. "You mean as in the DIALOGUE box that has suddenly appeared right below I, the GREAT Papyrus?"

"You know what? Just forget it." Sans shrugged, grabbing a plastic cup from the dispenser and filling it with cold water. "Papyrus, please hold Undyne's mouth open, would you?"

"Okay, bucko!" Papyrus agreed, holding Undyne's mouth open and then snapping it shut just as Sans' cup-holding hand went into it. "HA! FOOLED YOU! NYEHEHEH! Hope that took a nice big BITE out of your overwhelmingly massive ego! Yet another glorious victory for I, the GREAT Papyrus!" Papyrus rolled on the ground laughing.

"Heh...nice try, pal." Sans snickered, opening Undyne's mouth back up with telekinesis and phasing his arm back into existence. "You'll have to try a little harder than THAT!"

"I see you two morons haven't changed one BIT..." Undyne laughed as she woke up to the familiar sound of the skeleton brothers bickering each other to death as they always did.

"Does it even LOOK like I care?" Sans snickered, levitating himself into the air and positioning himself as if he was lying on a hammock.

"Sans, it's at times like these that we simply cannot AFFORD not to care anymore!" Papyrus yelled at him angrily.

"You can say that again." Sans chuckled as he led Papyrus and Undyne straight to the front door of Alphys' Lab. "Hey, what do you say we lean up against this door here and eavesdrop on one of her conversations for old time's sake?"

As Sans, Papyrus and Undyne leaned up against the front door of the Lab, Alphys was busy telling Asgore for literally the fourty-eighth time in the past week about her catastrophic experience with studying the effects of determination overdosage on the bodies of monsters.

"W-wait, wait, it g-gets even b-better from t-there!" Alphys laughed and sobbed, with tears of partially forced sorrow streaming down her unwashed, smelly, scaly, sweaty, nerdy face.

"What happens next?" Asgore, who had only recently been strapped onto an operating table and hooked up to magical life support, sighed with boredom.

"W-when the p-patient w-woke up, h-her S-SKELETON was m-missing, h-half of her entire b-body was s-sloughing off of the other s-side, her organic m-matter was f-fused and m-melted together with t-that of at least s-sixteen other p-people, and b-best of all, the d-doctor was n-never h-heard f-from AGAIN!" she laughed and sobbed even harder still, burying her head in her hands and breaking down into a fit of unrestrained weeping.

"A-anyway...t-that's how I l-lost m-my MEDICAL license!" Alphys chuckled, wiping her eyes off as she lifted her head back up out of her hands to face Asgore, who simply yawned with boredom from having already heard about the incident at least a hundred times before.

"Mother of God..." Asgore groaned exhaustedly, trying and failing to pretend that he was even slightly interested in hearing about Alphys' tragic and horrifying backstory for at least the fourty-seventh-and-a-halfth time in the past week.

"Mother of Snowdrake, you mean." Alphys corrected him, causing Sans to burst into the room with trombone in hand and play a few obligatory notes for comedic effect.

"SANS! This is a very serious moment, and therefore, I, the GREAT Papyrus, shall NOT allow you to RUIN it for these poor unfortunate souls!" Papyrus scolded Sans, grabbing him by the collar of his hoodie.

"What, you can't handle a little BONE-DRY humor every once in a while?" Sans winked straight at the reader of this story, throwing his hands out beside him.

"SANS! What did I tell you about breaking the fourth wall?" Papyrus reminded him.

"That it's FUN and REWARDING and not in the LEAST bit disturbing?" Sans chuckled, summoning a hot dog out of thin air and attempting to hand it straight to the reader when Papyrus suddenly smacked it out of his hand.

"SANS! This is why you don't have any REAL friends!" Papyrus sighed, facepalming gently.

"Hey, we can all afford to be a little BONELY every once in a while, can't we?" Sans winked yet again at the reader. "I mean, TIBIA honest, I don't exactly have a SKELE-TON of joke material to work myself to the BONE with here!"

That did it. Papyrus simply could not take any more of Sans' unbearable puns. Therefore, he flew into a trolling-induced rage and tackled Sans onto the ground...except that Sans immediately teleported right out of the way before Papyrus could even touch him.

"What, you think I'm just gonna stand there and take it?" Sans chuckled.

Papyrus pounded his fists on the floor in frustration, knowing that he would never truly be as cool as his brother. "SANS, I SWEAR TO THE FLYING SPAGHETTI MONSTER, I, THE GREAT PAPYRUS, AM GOING TO FREAKING-"

"Say, what's all that ruckus out there?" Asgore asked, pointing to the front door of the lab.

"Oh, I dunno, who cares? Just something about strangling someone with a bunch of wet noodles..." Alphys snickered, glancing over at her last jar of ramen noodles. "Hmm...I just remembered what those were originally intended for..." she whispered to herself.

"What?" Asgore asked Alphys as the battle between Sans and Papyrus continued raging outside.

"Oh, nothing, my dear!" Alphys giggled, sweating so much that it was starting to create a stagnant liquid trail on the floor.

"Geez, do you ever mop the floor in here?" Asgore asked, looking around and noticing all of the slimy food crumbs, weeaboo sweat, dust bunnies and artificial dog residue strewn everywhere.

"Some creatures have different taste in household hygiene than our own." Alphys shuddered, heading over to the lab sink and sawing the dried endogenous black substance off of her dog bowl with a high-grade laser cutter.

"Hey there." Sans greeted Alphys and Asgore, casually strolling right in through the front door. "I see nothing's changed around here? Geez, it sure is good to see that only WATER came out of the sink this time!"

"SANS! Alphys already got rid of those dreadful, accursed, abominable...for lack of a more descriptive word in my vocabulary...blasted THINGS a LONG time ago!" Papyrus reminded Sans angrily, his teeth shaking.

"Well, she's still cleaning up their royal MESS, ain't she?" Sans snickered, casting a mean glare at Alphys. "Looks like she's been having a real bad time, am I right?"

"Sans, for the love of anime, what do you WANT?" Alphys sighed.

"We just wanna know what this whole thing we've been hearing about you wanting to make your OWN anime is all about, that's all." Sans explained.

"Let's hold off on that for now." Alphys suggested. "Because right now, I have some work to do."

"Does it involve jerking off to anime?" Sans snickered at her.

"SANS!" Papyrus and Undyne yelled at him.

"Surprisingly, no. Rather, it involves me injecting-"

"OH, NO YOU DON'T!" Sans growled, tackling Alphys onto the ground.

"Please...don't...hurt...me..." Alphys stammered, wetting the floor.

"I am NOT going to let you inject your god-damned DETERMINATION-whatever into ANYONE else! ESPECIALLY after what happened the LAST time you tried that..." Sans yelled at her, clenching his fists.

"Oh, yeah, THAT...I was just discussing that, wasn't I?" Alphys sighed. "Well, I mean, after all...there's no use crying over spilt milk, right?"

At that moment, Sans raised his fist in anger. "WHY, I OUGHTA-"

"SANS, NO!" Undyne warned him.

"Sans, she's right! Let her be! This isn't what I, the GREAT Papyrus, would have wanted!" Papyrus suggested nervously trembling in his boots.

"Okay, just promise you won't try to melt me and my bro Papyrus together like what happened in that one AU on the Internet!" Sans begged Alphys, grabbing her by the collar of her lab coat.

"Ah, yes, the Internet! I'm QUITE popular there!" Papyrus chuckled.

"So am I, but you don't see ME bragging about it..." Undyne groaned, rolling her eyes.

"Everybody make some popcorn, cause I'm about to do some crazy...stuff." Alphys sighed, opening up her refridgerator, the front of which was covered with countless photos of her and Undyne together.

"Guess you could say Undyne's...HOOKED on you. Like a FISH!" Sans winked at Alphys, nudging her in the process.

"Go fornicate with yourself." Alphys muttered back at him, pushing the severed head of who-knows-what out of the way as she pulled Asgore's heart out of the refridgerator.

"Now, most hearts couldn't withstand this amount of determination..." Alphys explained, holding the heart in her greasy hand as she pulled her new and improved determination injector out of her pocket, "...but I'm fairly certain that your heart will-"

SPLAT! Asgore's heart exploded, splattering all over the place.

"What in the hell was that disgusting noise?" Asgore asked, trembling in terror.

"Twas the sound of determination, my friend." Alphys chuckled, her face contorting into an incredibly awkward expression of WHAT HAVE I DONE.

Suddenly, right when everyone least expected it, Asgore's heart literally exploded IN REVERSE, reforming itself back into Alphys' grimy hands!

"What in the actual fish-frying F***?!" Undyne gasped in amazement.

"UNDYNE! LANGUAGE!" Papyrus scolded her.

"What, is this a little too WEIRD for you?" Alphys laughed before turning around and seeing Reaper Bird craning its freakishly long and deformed neck into Asgore's open chest.

"Reaper Bird, NO! SHOO! SHOO!" Alphys scolded Reaper Bird, shooing it out of the lab with a rolled-up newspaper. "It's filthy and cholesterol-loaded in there! Ugh...BIRDS!"

"THAT was a BIRD?!" Undyne shuddered.

"Sure could've fooled me." Sans snickered.

"Sans, if and when we ever get back home, could you please triple the number of bedtime stories you read to me every night?" Papyrus begged Sans, collapsing onto the floor and grabbing his ankles.

"YOU, my friend, need to GROW UP to at least THREE times the age you're acting right now!" Sans suggested angrily, levitating Papyrus back up onto his feet.

"Good idea!" Papyrus giggled. "I heard that acting mature attracts the ladies, so why else would I ever do it anyway? I, the GREAT Papyrus, am rather well above such ludicrously unimportant and meaningless things as GROWING UP! NYEHEHEH!"

"I'd like to describe how utterly pathetic what you just said was...but, unfortunately, it would seem that I'm all out of bone puns." Sans sighed, sitting down on the floor and burying his head in his hands in shame.

"Take it from Sans." Undyne warned Papyrus. "If you keep going the way you are now, you're gonna have a bad time."

Meanwhile, at the operating table, Alphys had almost finished going about her surgical experiment.

"Should I be awake for this?" Asgore asked her nervously. "More importantly...since my wife Toriel fired you from your job as the Royal Scientist about two whole weeks ago, is this even LEGAL in the first place?"

"Well, no..." Alphys sighed, licking her blood-drenched hands. "But as long as you are awake, could you hold your ribcage open a bit? I CAN'T...SEEM TO..."

"AUUUGGGHHHH!!!" Asgore screamed in agony as Alphys ripped one of his ribs out with her bare hands.

"Oh, don't be such a Whimsun! RIBS grow back!" Alphys laughed, chucking Asgore's removed rib out of the window, where it apparently hit some random cat off in the background.

"NO, THEY DON'T!" Alphys moonwalked over and whispered into Undyne's ear, causing Undyne to clasp her hands over her mouth in an amazingly strong effort not to vomit.

"What was that you just said? Was it something about lollipops and rainbows? PLEASE tell me it was something about lollipops and rainbows!" Papyrus asked.

"Trust me, pal, you don't wanna know ANY of what's happening right now." Sans reminded him.

"Wow, this is an astonishingly excellent result of my astonishingly QUESTIONABLE experimental ethics!" Alphys gasped. "WHY, ASGORE, I can literally FEEL your heart PULSATING with DETERMINATION, fluffybuns!" Alphys laughed maniacally.

"Umm...should we get out of here?" Undyne stammered, looking frantically behind her to make sure that the front door wasn't locked.

"Would true heroes like I, the GREAT Papyrus, EVER run from a good hearty serving of DANGER? NEVER, I say, NEVER! NYEHEHEHEH!" Papyrus laughed.

"We are officially boned..." Sans sighed.

"Hmm...well, I suppose this looks good!" Alphys laughed, suddenly calming down as she unceremoniously plopped the heart back into Asgore's chest.

"How in the love of f*** is Asgore still alive after all that?" Undyne gasped, utterly baffled beyond belief.

"Magic!" Alphys replied, snorting a few times for added effect. "Now watch this!"

Smugly closing her eyes, Alphys performed an uncomfortably sexy jazz pose and snapped her fingers in just such a way that the magic energy surrounding Asgore went completely wild and instantaneously reformed his entire chest, organs and all, around the heart.

"Heh heh...NOW...Let's go practice MEDICINE." Alphys cackled, taking Asgore's hand as he got back up off of the operating table and onto his giant, reeking feet. "And by medicine, I mean sitting around and watching anime with me like a total LOSER!"

"Hey, that's MY job!" Undyne reminded her angrily.

"Is...is our favorite big fuzzy pushover okay?" Papyrus asked.

"What do YOU think?" Sans asked him somewhat sarcastically.

"I think that my experiment just might be a SUCCESS after all!" Alphys laughed excitedly as the freshly rejuvenated Asgore wrapped his massive, burly arms around her, squeezing her lungs. "Um, okay...you can stop...ch-choking me now..."

"Aw, don't mention it, Lizard Nerd Girl!" Asgore laughed uproariously, nuzzling her forcefully.

"Hmph." Alphys grunted, narrowing her eyes.