Standing Up For Himself

CHAPTER 7: STANDING UP FOR HIMSELF

"Greetings, everybody!" Mettaton greeted his massive audience with a bow. "Today, I'd like to test our newest lucky contestants with a certain special thing I like to call...20 TRIALS!"

"In 20 Trials, two individual team members, preferably close friends or siblings, must perform outrageous tasks randomly suggested to them in no particular order by me. Don't worry, it's a lot less agonizing than it sounds." Mettaton explained.

"What's in it for US?" Undyne asked him. "Am I gonna have to ram my fricking SPEAR up your ass again, or are you just gonna spill the beans already?"

"Oh, don't worry, my darling, it won't be anything TOO out of the ordinary." Mettaton laughed. "In fact, it literally won't even BE anything at ALL!"

"You cheap little bastard!" Sans growled.

"I, the Great Papyrus, need to at least have some SPAGHETTI from time to time!" Papyrus sneered angrily.

"Papyrus, you make spaghetti all the time." Sans reminded him.

"I meant as in GOOD spaghetti." Papyrus finally admitted, shrugging his shoulders.

"Okay, everyone, are you ready? LET THE GAMES BEGIN!" Mettaton beckoned to them.

"Since you lovely underground-folk appear to be divided into two widely differing individual duos of people, I have therefore decided to give out 10 Trials for each duo! GOOD LUCK, BEAUTIES!" Mettaton laughed.

"Sans and Papyrus! YOU'RE UP FIRST, MY DARLINGS!" Mettaton called for the skele-bros as they both approached him to hear what he had to say.

CHALLENGE #1

"OKAY! FIRST CHALLENGE!" Mettaton explained. "Sans and Papyrus must go to the local comedy club and perform some good old classic stand-up in front of a live audience! Need I remind you darlings that no less than literally ALL of these challenges must be performed in front of a massive live audience?"

"Oh, brother..." Sans sighed.

"Grr, I HATE puns!" Papyrus groaned. "I hate them almost as much as I hate losing, and you know how much I HATE losing, don't you!"

"Save it for another time, pal." Sans sighed as the two of them drove their taxi to the nearest comedy club and hurriedly wrote themselves scripts for each other. However, little did Papyrus know, Sans had secretly swapped his OWN script with Papyrus' surprisingly less embarassing one at the last minute!

"Oh man, this is gonna be SO freaking good..." Sans snickered to himself as the show began.

"Um...Sans, I really don't feel comfortable doing this." Papyrus sighed nervously.

"Papyrus, you can't back down on a brother promise. I'm your brother, and you promised me; so therefore, it is a brother promise." Sans explained, causing the crowd to chuckle a little in response. "Now get in there and make me proud!"

"Ugh, FINE!" Papyrus shruggged, approaching the microphone with Sans' script in hand while Sans tried his hardest to keep a straight face despite the fact that his face was clearly locked in a perpetual skeletal grin.

"Umm...AHEM...is this thing even on?" Papyrus asked, checking to make sure that everyone in the audience could hear him speaking. "Well...alrighty then, here goes nothing, I guess...um...hello, everyone..."

"Uh...you know how when you boil spaghetti, it goes...SOFT?" Papyrus asked the audience, obviously reading off of Sans' script. "Well, you make my spaghetti...HARD...?!"

"SANS, THIS IS HUMILIATING!" Papyrus yelled furiously at him, crumpling Sans' script into a ball, throwing it on the floor, and bolting straight out of the building in frustration, causing the entire audience to bust out laughing as Sans collapsed onto his hands and knees.

"No, wait, come back! You're-you're doing GREAT!" Sans laughed hysterically; if he hadn't been a skeleton, he would've been in tears from laughing so hard.

"Well, uh...heh...that's alright, cause I didn't even need a script in the first place." Sans winked at the audience, almost every single member of which happened to have a crush on him.

"OH MY GOD, SANS, CAN I BONE YOU?!" some rabid, frothing, hyperactive Sans fangirl in the front-row seats squealed, trying to break free of Sans' telekinetic grip on her so that she could quite literally pounce onto him and shower him with kisses.

"How about I bone YOU instead, miss?" Sans chuckled, throwing a bone straight at her forehead and knocking her out cold.

"The only thing colder than how cold I just knocked that bitch out would have to be Philly during the wintertime, am I right?" Sans snickered as the audience laughed with him.

"Tell me about it..." Alphys shuddered, shivering despite the fact that she was in an incredibly thick jacket.

"HEY! WHO LEFT THE DAMNED FRONT DOOR OPEN?! CLOSE IT OR FACE MY UNBRIDLED WRATH!" Undyne roared furiously.

"Anyway, as I was saying, that reminds me...I just realized, just now, that I really cannot trust ANY of my team members on this fantastical journey of mine!" Sans chuckled.

"Damnit, he needs to learn one of these days that it's MY adventure, not HIS." Alphys sighed.

"Don't worry, you'll probably get your chance to have a larger role in this story someday." Undyne reassured her, patting her on the back.

"I mean, first of all, Papyrus is a freaking MANCHILD. I mean, granted, I do love him, he is my brother and all that jazz...but I mean, for crying out loud, he can't even go to SLEEP at night without ME reading something along the lines of Peekaboo With Fluffy Bunny to him! No, really, that's actually the REAL freaking name of one of his books!" Sans explained to the audience.

"For the love of God, man, seriously, what's next? Am I gonna have to freaking feed him applesauce with a goddamned SPOON and say HERE COMES THE FRICKING AIRPLANE?!" Sans ranted for comedic effect as the audience laughed with him.

"Second of all, Undyne is freaking INSANE!" Sans shuddered. "If you try to give her food, she says she'd rather pry it from your cold, dead hands! Literally every time she tries to cook, she puts so much goddamned brutality into it that she literally burns her entire freaking HOUSE down!"

"Whenever she gets into a fight with you, even if it's about something as simple as a disagreement with you regarding which anime you prefer over another, she'll be all over you like a f***ing SPEAR ORGY! Almost half of the people she's talked to have been shish-kebabed at some point or another, let me tell you!" Sans chuckled as the audience laughed a bit with him.

"Wow, am I really that freaking terrifying?" Undyne gasped.

"Girl, you don't even know the damned HALF of it." Alphys snickered, remembering the secret determination experiment that she had performed on Undyne at some point in the past.

"And last but not least...ladies and gentlemen...I present to you...ALPHYS!" Sans beckoned, calling Alphys up onto the stage to volunteer.

"W-wow, w-what a terrific a-audience!" Alphys stammered nervously, going back into the audience area and sitting back down in her seat next to Undyne.

"Anyway, since her crippling social awkwardness causes her to take a CRIPPLINGLY long time to actually SAY anything, allow me to paraphrase: this girl is straight-up freaking MENTAL. I'm not even joking around this time, this shit is the REAL deal." Sans explained.

"She scrawls the names of random people in the margins of her notebooks. She contemplates suicide constantly as if it's just some stupid fricking everyday action like brushing her eyeballs or shaving her tongue!" Sans chuckled.

"She's so obsessed with anime and her girlfriend...yes, I just said HER girlfriend...that for f***'s sake, she might as well be literally freaking surgically attached to BOTH of them at this point!" Sans snickered.

"Am I not surgically attached to you already, fishy-poo?" Alphys teased Undyne.

"You're really scraping the bottom of the fish barrel, you know that?" Undyne warned her.

"And OH, MY GOD...you guys ain't even GONNA believe what I'm about to reveal next...um, guys? You listening? Alright, here goes..." Sans shuddered, using the local projector to display a group photo that Alphys once took of herself standing with her Amalgamates while holding a bag of dog food and sweating nervously.

"Well, technically this image is fanart, and it was actually made not by me, but by some random dude named ffSade on Deviantart, but, uh...guys? Where the hell did you all go?" Sans asked.

"Dude, you freaking scared them off without even threatening acts of violence upon them! I am SO damned jealous of you!" Undyne squealed fangirlishly.

"Well, that was certainly something..." Alphys sighed.