Royal Blue

Behind the Mask of Silence (Chapter Ten)

The light of Alphys's desktop monitor flickered, for just a moment.

The footage replayed over and over as she tried her damndest to correct the corrupted code; to find out something, anything about what happened.

Her stomach curled with worry.

All her cameras had properly followed Undyne and Zero on their path through the Core and back toward Snowdin. Undyne had seemingly waited outside the Lab doors for Zero.

And though their interaction seemed... rather awkward —though it's not as if Alphys had any room to talk on that front— they reached, then entered, the elevators without issue.

Security footage from within the elevators showed that things had... malfunctioned somewhat; something not unusual for the old machinery, and yet Zero's magic had flared a disproportionate amount as the elevator shook rapidly.

The shockwave of pure magic caused the camera in the corner to short circuit.

She'd have to go out and replace it later.

None the less, they'd managed to leave the elevator on L2.

Only, that was where things got... Weird.

As soon as the two exited the elevator, the video interference began. At first, it seemed it was just regular static; but then the view began cutting away to different cameras, totally involuntarily.

And it wasn't an issue of signals getting crossed; there was no way so many wildly different cameras, from totally different areas, would have the same malfunction. It was just so highly improbable.

She examined the cameras it cut to; trying to determine something from the chaos she was being shown.

One view was positioned near the R1 elevators, running normally.

Another was near the L3 elevators, also running normally.

But perhaps, far odder, were the other two, which struck down any pattern of simply 'being near the elevators'...

They were in Waterfall.

One, at an empty dock... and another, in some seemingly nondescript, damp, grey looking hallway.

Odder still? It didn't seem like it was just normal footage being played back...

Though she had very little solid proof, at every location that the footage jumped to, something... something was there.

She couldn't always see it, but it... it was the kind of thing you just... feel.

Like when someone's staring at you from across a crowded room. Or when you hear static and, ever so faintly beneath it, it feels as though something is trying to speak up.

After that, the camera at the L2 elevator recovered. And yet, Zero and Undyne, had vanished.

No surrounding camera's portrayed any similar signs of malfunction; and there was no probable cause toward their fall.

The only other area with similar video and audio corruption was a single camera on the outskirts of waterfall, that watched over a small, icy late, almost at the border of Snowdin.

Because of it, the images were vauge; the camera's lens having been fogged over by frost and its circuits damaged by the moisture.

From there, it was a similar story, only, in reverse. The camera glitched out, though this one being far more similar to Zero's magical burst in the elevator than... whatever else had been at play in Hotland.