Misadventures in the Ruins

A Setback (part 1)

(I love how I literally said that this was gonna be a one shot book, and I'm starting out with something that will have (hopefully only) two parts... Meh, I just really wanted to write this and it kinda blew up from there...
I never said all of these would be happy though)

It hadn't been very long since the mission to Snowdin. It had been only a few days at most, and things were going well so far. It had been slightly difficult figuring out chores and who would do what and when. Within a day or so they had evenly divided up the household chores, ranging from who was going to cook, to cleaning the dishes, to checking for humans every day.

One thing that Toriel had been working on in her spare time was cleaning out the storage room to make space for a guest bedroom. She thought that her room mates might want separate rooms or if they preferred to keep with their current sleeping situation that she could have it there for when another human fell. The only thing about it was that the new room didn't have a mattress... Toriel didn't know how she would go about solving this problem, but figured she would cross that bridge when she came to it. Sure, it wasn't what she typically would have done, but she really didn't see much fixing it and didn't want to worry herself over such a small thing.

It was her day to clean the dishes and her week to walk the Ruins in case of a human falling or an accident with some puzzle and a monster, so she decided to tell the skeleton brothers of the possible room switch so they could talk it out while she was gone. It would give them something else to do for a while. Plus the sooner they had it figured out, the sooner she could address the mattress problem and deal with whatever they chose. It did no good to put off a problem in her mind, so this would be one more step to working on a few problems at once; the mattress, who was going where, getting settled in in general, and possibly improving the communication between the two brothers. She hoped that leaving them free of her influence would allow them to communicate more freely, but a certain voice in the back of her mind was whispering to her that something could go wrong.

Toriel shrugged the feeling off, Papyrus had been doing much better lately, Sans had been too, and she was confident this wild cause no harm. "Sans, Papyrus," she called from in the kitchen, just as she was finishing the dishes. "I have cleaned out the storage room to let it serve as an extra bedroom, and I thought one of you may like to move in there so you could each have your space."

Toriel pulled the last dish out of the water and began drying it with a hand towel. "The only problem I can see with it is that it has no mattress, and whoever decides to stay in there would have to sleep on a makeshift one," she paused as she put away the final dish. "If you want to separate that is. You do not have to have your own rooms if you do not wish to." She took of the rubber gloves she had been using and set them out to dry. "It does not matter to me which you choose," she added, not wanting to influence either of their thinking.

Toriel walked into the living room, seeing both of their eyelights fall on her as she entered. "I am going to do my rounds, so you can talk this over while I am gone if you wish," she said, starting to the door. Sans stood up from his seat and spoke, "y-yeah, we'll do that." Toriel smiled, turning to wave at the two of them before she left. "Goodbye," she said waving at them, closing the door behind her. It closed with a click, leaving the two skeletons alone in the house.

Sans and Papyrus both turned to look at each other. "W-why don't we g-go check out the new room?" Sans proposed. Papyrus shrugged, a silent 'why not', then stood to follow his brother to the end of the hall. It was a small space in the front half of the storage room, a small carpet lay on the floor in the center of the space, there was a chair against one wall, and a wardrobe and nightstand lay against the opposite wall. There was space left for a bed in between them.