VOXISTALE: Novel Edition

Chapter 21

Asgore was silent during the entire drive. Frisk could tell that he was upset, and dangerously so. He held a vice grip on the steering wheel the entire ride in the rented truck, and still said nothing as they parked in the lot at the hospital. Frisk opted not to ask him about it yet. Not until he'd calmed down. Personally, she too was upset. Attacks kept happening and she had no idea how to stop them, or even try to.

When Asgore got out of the vehicle, Frisk could see that his fists were tightly clenched. She'd never seen him this angry-looking—had something else happened aside from Papyrus's attack? The two entered the hospital, Frisk growing increasingly worried. When they reached the front desk, the scarlet-headed young woman manning the ship seemed to immediately know what they were looking for. "Room 116 . . . uh, I mean . . . 117, down the left hall," she informed them with uncertainty. She was probably new.

Asgore gave her a curt nod, and led Frisk to the room, passing a few doctors and patients along the way before reaching the room; the door was wide open. There was only one bed, which Papyrus laid on. Sans and Undyne occupied the room as well, the short skeleton sleeping on the chair beside the bed as Undyne stared out of the window.

"Hey, Papyrus," Frisk greeted, checking out the damages. Papyrus wasn't wearing his battle body nor his chef outfit, instead in a long hospital gown, heavy bandages wrapped around his skull.

"OH, HELLO, HUMAN! I'M SO GLAD YOU'VE COME TO SEE THE GREAT PAPYRUS IN HIS TIME OF NEED!" the skeleton said happily.

"Of course." Frisk replied, looking toward Undyne, who gave her a nod before making her way past Frisk to Asgore, giving the girl a light squeeze on the shoulder as she went by before the two stepped outside to talk privately, Sans opening a single eye to look at Frisk, but said nothing.

"How are you feeling?" Frisk asked the younger skeleton.

"WELL . . . ADMITTEDLY, THE GREAT PAPYRUS ISN'T FEELING AT HIS BEST RIGHT NOW," the skeleton admitted. "BUT THE DOCTORS SAY I'M GOING TO BE FINE, SO THE GREAT PAPYRUS IS IN HIGH SPIRITS! NYEHEHE!"

"That's good, I'm glad to hear it!" Frisk smiled, and took a seat at one of the other chairs in the room as Papyrus began to describe his experience, making sure to make himself as bold as possible in the story.

Undyne and Asgore meanwhile, were discussing what their next step was; "We need to see who's next," he told her.

"Prepare accordingly this time. I'm done with these attacks, and these people don't know that we have information on them," Undyne added.

"Good idea," Asgore nodded. "As long as we keep a close eye on whoever's next on their list, we should be able to avoid another death. Perhaps we could even take their next assassin to justice."

Undyne nodded, holding up the flash drive. "I made copies," she informed him, "just in case."

Pleased, Asgore gave her a small smile, "Good. We may be in need of copies at some point. Do you have your computer on you?"

"The Laptop is in my cruiser," she replied, to which he folded his arms, glancing about.

"Go get it," he ordered, and Undyne left the building to go retrieve her laptop. Asgore still couldn't get over what he'd seen on that hard drive- the date of Toriel's death, and the supposed name of her attacker.

"DEMON."

He clenched his fists tight just thinking about it. Now he had a name, something specific to latch his fury onto. These were all clearly codenames of some sort. 'Demon', 'Trickster', 'Raptor', 'Psycho' . . . but their motives didn't make any sense. According to Papyrus, the man had simply desired to kill the skeleton, and made it clear that that was his only motive.

Was this just an organized group of anti-monster radicals?

Soon enough, Undyne returned with the laptop, the hard drive already plugged into the side. She took a seat out in the main lobby, opening up the lid of the computer. Asgore took a seat beside her, eager to see who was next. He could feel his stomach turn when the data loaded. It was a picture of Undyne in the form of a text character, and beside it was a date and another codename.

The date was tomorrow.

The codename was 'WARMTH.'

They were silent for a moment, before Undyne let out a sigh. "Perfect," she grinned, "I'll spend all of tomorrow at the jailhouse, the vacant one uptown. You can be with me, and we can trap this 'Warmth' guy in a cell. Interrogate him properly before handing him over to my superiors."

"Are you sure?" Asgore raised an eyebrow. "As strange as these attacks are, I highly doubt these people would be foolish enough to walk into a jailhouse."

"Exactly. So it can go one of two ways- either we screw up their attack, or we get one of them in a cell. Or both. There's no way it could go wrong."

Slowly, Asgore nodded in agreement. "Very well. What of Carl and the VCPD?"
"I'd rather keep Carl at arm's reach than anything," Undyne replied. "And there's no way I'm taking anything to the Chief. It's been made pretty clear that I'm not getting help with this. Doing this at the jailhouse means we're not likely to draw attention or have collateral."

"Well . . . if you're certain we can do this alone," his voice trailed off, recalling their prior encounter with an assassin when they'd first obtained the flash drive. With that, Asgore returned his attention to the computer, looking through at the different targets. There were still a lot of them, and a majority had 'GRUNT' for the word. Perhaps this was one individual, or a collective name for the lowest members of whatever caste this group had formed. He found Sans pretty quickly, the date being in four days, 'MAGNUM' beside his name, and the next he found . . .

His heart stopped.

Frisk. Three days from now. 'TRUCK' beside that.

"No," he growled, fists clenched so tightly that Undyne could see the poor guy's tears from Psycho's whip begin to open back up, even through his fur. "Why is Frisk on this list?"

Undyne squinted with her one good eye, before seeing that it was true. "I—what? She's just a little girl, and she's not even a monster. Why is she here? Who the hell is Truck?"

"Somebody who has made a grave mistake, crossing my family," Asgore replied, his voice dark and gruff, even managing to send chills down Undyne's spine.