Chapter Text
On October 15th, Dr. W.D. Gaster creates a beast. It isn’t large, at first—merely a blob of white magic and DNA, hardly bigger than a cell and visible only underneath his microscope’s polished lens. He keeps it in a small vial of DT/M50 solution, which is constantly filtered and replenished to provide the zygote with both determination and an external magic source. The first twelve attempts had all died within their first month of life, due to concentrations of DT/M50 that were either too low, too high, or too unstable. Mistakes are inescapable, and Gaster knows this. Still, twelve is—a bit much, if you ask him. A waste of valuable resources.
He’s determined that this thirteenth beast will survive—so it sits in an incubator right beside his desk, and it grows.
It makes it through the first month.
The second month he can see it with the naked eye. It’s still not large—hardly bigger than a pea, but it’s there, and alive, and—
He’s proud. Asgore will be pleased with him, if this pans out.
The third month it’s even larger, at a successful five inches. It’s starting to take shape, too. No longer just a formless blob of magic—he can see bones. A delicate, transparent femur tucked near the miniscule curve of its ribs. The little knobs of vertebrae, a whip-thin tail. A fragile skull with the world’s tiniest fangs. It almost makes him want to laugh. This? This is the prototype of a beast designed to slaughter humans? It’s just—so—small.
He moves it from the vial to a larger flask.
By the fourth month, it’s a few inches larger, and it’s beginning to move. Its paws twitch, its tail flicks, and it opens and shuts its mouth—a suckling reflex, no doubt. He wonders where it got that from. Skeletons don’t nurse. Blasters certainly don’t. He spends more time than he should watching it. Of course, as he does, he takes meticulous notes on its movement and development, and increases the DT/M50 concentrations accordingly. Larger bodies need more determination, more magic, to sustain them, and if this beast grows the way Gaster wants it to—
Well, needless to say, the kingdom is going to spend a surplus of funds purchasing DT/M50.
In the fifth month, the beast begins to respond to sounds. Gaster realizes this as he’s proofing some of his papers. He plays soft jazz in his office on habit—the noise helps him concentrate. Several minutes into his editing, however, the pulse of the beast’s magic increases. He glances up, checks the vitals display that always sits beside the incubator. The magic pulse is measured by a small wire connected to the beast’s sternum, and it appears, upon first inspection, to be properly connected. Nor is the beast moving overly much, so he assumes the pulse’s increase isn’t due to unnecessary strain—unless the beast is falling ill. He feels a bit ill himself, thinking that. He’s spent so much time, he’s invested so much hope—
He turns the jazz off. The beast’s pulse slows. He turns it back on. The pulse increases.
Huh.
From then on, he always tries to keep soft music playing in the background. Whoever said a beast couldn’t appreciate classical Mozart or spiffy Duke Ellington? He also speaks to it, at times. Who else is he going to speak to, after all? His office is a lonely place—and he likes it that way, certainly, but—
But, well, it’s nice to have an unconditional listener, sometimes—especially one he needn’t translate for constantly.
He tells it about his research into quantum physics, about his lunches with Asgore, about his meetings with Alphys and his coworkers. “They’re all very excited to see you,” he says, and the beast’s legs stretch as it yawns, clearly enthused with the conversation. “We’ve never had one that survived so long. You’ve met Jackson, of course—he’s the little ambitious one who comes to monitor you at night, along with Lucky. Smart, those two. A little unoriginal, but smart. I wouldn’t let them monitor you otherwise, you know. And then you’ve met Alphys, but you were very tiny back then. It was almost three months ago, I think. She’ll be impressed with how you’ve grown. And Asgore!” He huffs out something that's almost a laugh. “Oh, Asgore’s going to love you. He’s been excited about this project for a very long time. He was the one who initially requested it, you know, so you have him to thank for your existence.”
The beast yawns again. Ah, the joys of an unconditional listener.
Alphys comes to visit at the start of six month. When she sees the beast, she gasps, her eyes going round. “Oh, Dr. Gaster—oh, my goodness. It’s g-gotten a lot larger, hasn’t it?”
“It has,” Gaster says, observing her fascinated expression with approval. This is a fascinating project, after all, if not the most fascinating. He’s no biologist, but—well, he thinks he might certainly see the appeal of becoming one. “It weighed a pound and a half yesterday. Perhaps not as heavy as most monsters in this stage of development, but then, it is mostly bone.”
“And it moves!” She leans forward, bracing her hands on her knees so she can peer through the incubator’s glass front. “I read your last report—you said it responds to s-sound now, too?”
“It does. It seems particularly inclined to like Louis Armstrong.”
Alphys laughs. “Oh, you’re ruining h-him already.”
“Him?”
“S-sorry, sorry! It, I m-mean. Only, um—isn’t it a he, if it has y-your DNA? B-biologically speaking, anyhow, though I s-suppose that doesn't truly matter—”
Gaster taps a finger against his teeth. “Well—yes, I suppose. He. That will be fine. I don’t suppose it cares, either way. He seems particularly inclined to like Louis Armstrong. I think he’s taken a liking to the trombone.”
Alphys shakes her head fondly. “Can you b-believe that? The first line of defense against humanity likes a human’s j-jazz.”
“There is a certain irony to it,” Gaster admits, crouching in front of the incubator. The beast opens and closes his mouth slowly. He almost looks like he’s smiling. Gaster’s own mouth tugs up at the edges.
“Does h-he respond to any visual stimuli yet?”
Gaster shakes his head. “No. I expect he’ll start soon, if all goes to plan. We’ll start testing at the end of the month, should eyelights appear.”
“How do you plan to t-test for it?”
“Simple stimuli—we’ll test for an eyelight response to light and dark, first, to ensure that the peripheral nervous system is intact and functioning. After that, I suppose we’ll see if he can focus on anything in his line of a sight. A toy, perhaps. Something colorful. Then we’ll…”
Gaster goes on to explain their ideas for testing to Alphys, who nods and listens and suggests her own ideas when he prompts her for them. The two of them shuffle over his reports, discussing the future of the project with excitement, until she has to leave a few hours later. Farther into the month, as Gaster had hoped, the beast’s eyelights appear. They appear gradually—a small fuzz of gray that flickers in and out for days at a time, until they finally solidify into little white dots.
“Well, look at you,” he says, crouching in front of the incubator with a penlight. He flashes the light across the beast’s eyes, and the eyelights shrink and swell accordingly. “Functioning responses, that’s a good sign. Can you see me?” He waves his hand in front of the incubator door. The beast’s eyelights follow it. Gaster almost grins—almost. “Good. Very good.”
A few days later, Asgore comes to visit. The beast has learned to close its eyesockets, and tends to do so while sleeping—though not always. Fortunately, both eyes are closed (he’s found that disturbs most people less) when the king arrives. Gaster meets him in the lab’s lobby, and—
“Wingdings!” Asgore crushes him into a tight hug, nuzzling one fuzzy cheek against Gaster’s. He’s shedding his winter coat already, and several white hairs end up embedded into the collar of Gaster’s shirt. “Hello, there. How have you been?”
Gaster pats Asgore’s arm, and the king graciously sets him back on his feet. “I’ve been well, Your Majesty. Yourself?”
“Oh, well enough.” He rubs his paws together. “I’m very excited to meet this pet project of yours. How is the little guy? Alphys told me he was getting pretty big.”
“So he is. Come, I’ll show you. Right this way,” Gaster says, leading the king down the hallway towards his office. “He’s two pounds, now, and has both vision and hearing intact. I assume his other senses will be equally intact, though those are difficult to test, as long as he remains in solution. He requires higher concentrations of DT/M50 almost daily, due to his rapid growth, and has yet to develop any magical abilities—which is as expected. He’ll probably be at least a year old before he can manage any attack or defense.”
“Just a baby,” Asgore whispers, and Gaster is—regretting this, a little bit, already. It won’t do for anyone to get attached. It simply won’t do.
“He has no soul,” Gaster reminds him as he opens his office door and ushers Asgore inside. “He’s entirely non-sentient. He’s just an—extremely mobile rock, if you will.”
Asgore crouches in front of the incubator and makes an unintelligible sound Gaster translates to mean oh my stars that's cute. “That is the most adorable mobile rock I have ever seen,” he says earnestly, resting a paw against the incubator’s glass. Gaster winces, but refrains from shooing him away because germs, germs around his precious experiment, germs. “It looks like a—a puppy, or, er, if a puppy had a baby with a small dragon.”
“A most scientific description,” Gaster says, wry. He reaches for a bottle of disinfectant, rubbing some across his hands before offering the bottle to Asgore, who (thank the stars) takes it and massages some into the fur of his paws.
“How old is he now? Six months?”
“Six months and ten days.”
“When do you plan to take him out of solution?”
“Ten months. I want to give him as much time to grow as I can, but I don’t want him to be in solution when he learns to use magic. In addition, his training will need to begin before he becomes too large to control easily.”
“How large will he become?”
“If you recall, this was the model we based his genome off of,” Gaster says, summoning a pool of magic from his soul. It dances into place, forms and solidifies into bones, into the full skeleton of a blaster that stands across the office from them. Asgore gapes, although he’s seen the model before—they ran over it time and time again before they settled on it as the prototype. “Eight feet at the shoulder, twenty-one feet from snout to tail-tip. Of course, that’s how large he’s genetically predisposed to become. The environment always plays a factor. I hope it’s been ideal for his growth, but we won’t find out until he reaches maturity.”
“And how long until he reaches that?”
“Only a few years, I hope, but—again, this is a prototype. There are lots of unknowns involved.” He waves a hand and the blaster model dissipates, the magic flowing back to his soul.
“It’s incredible.” A furry paw comes to rest on his skull. “What you’re doing here. It really is incredible, Wingdings. I’m very pleased with your work. I tell ya, a guy couldn’t ask for a better Royal Scientist.”
“Ah.” Gaster’s mouth tugs towards a smile. “Thank you, Your Majesty. I appreciate it.”
“Anytime.” The paw moves, like it’s trying to ruffle hair Gaster doesn’t have. “Now—does the little guy have a name?”
Gaster frowns. “No, I’m afraid not. Again, he’s—non-sentient, Your Majesty. He isn’t a monster, so we’ve refrained from naming him. Names make it easier to become attached, and attachment isn’t what you want, with an experiment like this. He’s a weapon. You know that. For data purposes, we’ve been referring to him as Gaster’s Blaster Prototype 01—GBP01.”
“Well, that’s not a fun name.” Asgore squints at the incubator. “I think he looks more like a Sam, or a Buddy.”
Gaster rubs his temples.
“Will there be more?”
“Hm?” Gaster glances over. “No. No, not yet. We need to gather data from the prototype before we try again. Improvements will doubtlessly need to be made. Here—” Gaster stands, stretching his spine. “Would you like to help me move him? I’m transferring him from the flask to a larger beaker for the next couple of months.”
Asgore practically springs to his feet, clasping his hands in front of him. “Oh, I’d love to help! That sounds very exciting. How—how do we do it?”
First, they scrub down in the sink, using antibacterial soak. After that, Gaster offers Asgore a freshly-sterilized lab coat, and they both pull on blue surgical gloves. Gaster gathers a large beaker, fresh from the autoclave, and sets it down on top of the incubator. He spritzes everything liberally with diluted bleach, then quickly sets up the DT/M50 filter and insert (there are two sets of tubes for each bucket of solution, for this express purpose) before he unplugs the tubes running into the beast’s current flask. Movement must happen quickly, after that, lest the concentrations in DT/M50 change too drastically.
Gaster opens the incubator and removes the flask—the movement stirs the beast awake, and it opens its eyes and watches them both carefully. Asgore coos. Together, the two of them carefully tip the solution (and the beast within it) into the larger beaker. Gaster takes care to keep the angles slight, so that the beast slides into the beaker rather than splashing into it. Too much movement would disturb it, so he does his best to keep the process quick and smooth. After that, he seals the beaker and slides it back into the incubator. Asgore peels off his gloves and coat as Gaster resets the DT/M50 levels for the bigger container.
After that, Asgore whisks him off to dinner and a show at the newest hotel in the capital. The food is grand, and the play is interesting, but—
But the whole time, Gaster only wants to be back in the lab, working on his projects—working on the beast.
During the seventh month, the beast’s bones begin to harden, and he grows ever more rapidly—he jumps from two pounds to four, and from seven inches to thirteen. The higher concentrations of DT/M50 actually appear to distress him, as after they’ve been upped, his pulse spikes and doesn’t settle. Gaster brings the concentrations back down, and homeostasis resumes. It appears the concentrations required for survival and growth have settled—finally, Gaster thinks. At the rate they were going, the beast would’ve soon been downing three gallons of solution a day. Ridiculous, even for a fully-grown blaster, let alone something this small.
At eight months, the beast is five pounds and seventeen inches from crown to tail-tip. He’s beginning to respond even more to his environment. He wags his tail when he sees Gaster—or when he hears jazz. Gaster swears that strange, draconic skull can smile. He also takes to touching the tip of his muzzle to the edges of the beaker, to the lid, to the base. He seems—curious, Gaster thinks. Undeniably curious. That’s good. Curiosity means intelligence, and intelligence means he’ll be easier to train. (Leastways, that’s what Gaster hopes.)
At nine months, the beast stays awake for longer periods of time—sometimes up to an hour, when Gaster is in the office and speaking to him. “...so we’ll start with simple obedience first,” Gaster explains to him, one day. The beast functions well as a board to bounce ideas off of. “Sit, stay, down—those types of things. I imagine it will be a bit like training a puppy. After that we can move onto more complex instructions, such as using magical attacks. I’ve found a book on the humans’ military K9 operations, and I believe it will be remarkably helpful. Here—would you like me to read it to you? I’ve already finished the first few chapters, but I’m sure you’ll catch on. ‘Public setting training is vital for all military operational dogs. It reduces the risk of distraction while working in the field, and ensures civilian safety by….’”
He finishes the book within the day. After that, he has to scrounge the libraries for more information on animal behavior and training—a rather limited topic, in the Underground, since few people have pets. He takes thorough notes on what books he does find, and shares his findings with the beast when he can. Thinking out loud, if you will. He’s fully aware that the beast doesn’t understand or care about his research, but that’s alright. If nothing else, it’s familiarizing the beast with his mannerisms and voice, which his books assure him will make training easier. Well, most of his books, anyhow—some have, er, rather conflicting ideas about training. A few say that he needs to begin asserting himself as the alpha of the ‘pack’ already, lest the beast turn on him and become unwieldy.
Somehow, he gets a feeling that these books are rather outdated.
“Besides,” he tells the beast one day, leaning against the incubator. “It isn’t as though blasters have pack dynamics. Do they?” He leans his head against the glass front. “I suppose we’ll find out.”
Because the thing is, the blasters he creates with his magic aren’t real. The knowledge of them, their shape and biology and power, is a genetic understanding embedded in his DNA. Every skeleton instinctively knows how to form a blaster, though indeed it takes practice and prowess to be able to do so successfully. Nevertheless, the blasters a skeleton summons in battle aren’t sentient creatures. They’re merely magic, taken form in an ancient shape. They have no will, no free thought. They’re weapons—just as this beast will be. The only difference is that this beast isn’t connected to his magic. Instead, the beast survives off of external magic, making him infinitely more valuable—because even if Gaster dies, as long as the beast has some source of available magic, he will continue to live. However, Gaster supposes that the beast’s independence from him may result in certain biological imperatives coming into play—without a skeleton’s control, what is a blaster?
He’s excited to discover the answer.
The tenth and final month sees the beast up to eight pounds and twenty-two inches. He still sleeps most of the time, but when he’s awake, he watches everything with sleepy curiosity. He’s taken to putting his paws against the side of the glass whenever Gaster nears him. On occasion, Gaster will place his hand on the glass over them, and the beast smiles that odd animal smile.
The day they remove the beast from solution is absolutely terrifying. Gaster’s gone over the schematics and procedures again and again—he knows the plan as well as he knows the beast’s genetic code (which is to say, very damn well, since he spent years modifying it from the genetic blueprints embedded within his own DNA). Despite his precautions and research, he still feels sick with uncertainty as they remove the beast, for the last time, from the incubator. They set the enormous beaker inside of the beast’s first home—a small, heated room near Gaster’s own lab. Near the back of the room is a filtered pool of warm DT/M50 solution. Hopefully the beast will be aware of his own body—enough so to go and immerse himself into the pool whenever he feels weak, anyhow.
Beside the pool is a bowl of finely-mashed chicken meal; it’s part of a diet prepared specifically by their nutritionist to provide the beast with all the energy he should need, outside of his DT/M50 requirements. If he can metabolize monster food, they’ll be one step closer to success, especially if it helps cut back on his DT/M50 consumption. On the other side of the pool is a mobile vitals’ system, prepped and ready to be connected to the beast as soon as possible. Gaster rubs his hands together. The blue latex of his gloves sticks and clings.
“Well,” he says, and his team comes to attention—four white-coated, freshly-sterilized monsters with hope gleaming in their eyes. “Let us begin.”
Two of his assistants gently set the beaker of solution the beast is in next to the pool and tip it onto its side. The beast opens his eyes, stirring sleepily. Gaster kneels beside the beaker and carefully uncaps it. Excess solution trickles into the pool, and the beast’s paws jerk when his skull touches dry air for the first time. His eyelights widen. “There we are,” Gaster murmurs, and the beast’s eyes search for him. “You’re alright.”
He reaches inside—moves swiftly, smoothly, tries his best not to touch the beast any longer than he must—and curls his fingers around the beast’s shoulders. The beast squirms, still slow and weak, but Gaster feels each movement like an earthquake in the palm of his hand. He pulls the beast out of the beaker and slides him into the pool, where solution swirls around him again. The beast relaxes, but Gaster coaxes his skull up and out of the solution and rests it on the side of the pool, instead. It’s best if he begins to adjust to a dry environment before he becomes too attached to the solution.
Once the beast is safely in the pool, Gaster and his last assistant rush to attach the vitals’ wires. A wire to his sternum, to measure the pulse of his magic through his skeleton. A wire to his first phalanx to measure the oxygen saturation of his bones. A wire to his second phalanx to measure the DT/M50 saturation of the same. A wire coiled around a rib to measure body temperature. The beast tolerates all of this without moving more than an inch—no doubt he’s still struggling to adjust to his new environment.
The assistants sweep away the old incubator and beaker, and Gaster sits with his creation for a couple of hours, ensuring that he adjusts well. Most of the time, the beast simply lays, immersed to his shoulders in solution, and sleeps. But he survives the transfer and that, to Gaster, counts as an immediate success. After a few weeks, however, there’s still been no change in the beast’s activity level. Of course, Gaster wasn’t expecting a drastic jump in activity, but it seems as though there’s even less, now. It’s—worrisome, to say the least. The beast doesn’t eat or drink, either, despite a constant supply of fresh food and water.
“What are we going to do with you?” he asks the beast, near the end of the eleventh month. The beast opens one eye and regards him sleepily, content to snooze and survive off of solution and nothing else. Gaster folds his arms across his chest. How to encourage him to eat, to move, to interact with his environment? Well—well, how did humans raise orphaned puppies? That’s similar to this, Gaster thinks. The beast has no parents or siblings to show him how to live, so that duty falls to Gaster and his team.
Gaster goes to get a bottle.
A few hours later, he’s sitting next to the pool, the beast’s chin cupped in one gloved hand. The bottle—made mainly of glass, such that it can be put through the autoclave to be sterilized—is filled with the same chicken meal in the beast’s bowl, watered down with copious amounts of a warmed milk replacer. It smells absolutely atrocious. He has a small, needleless syringe filled with the same horrid concoction, should the beast prove unable to suckle.
“Alright,” Gaster murmurs, fitting the nipple of the bottle between the beast’s little fangs. “Let’s try this, then. I know you have a suckling reflex—don’t try to fool me. I saw you sucking air earlier, you scoundrel.”
But the beast doesn’t suckle. He chews for a moment, then shifts his head away, unperturbed. Gaster sighs.
“Of course. Don’t try to make it easy on me.” Gaster picks up the syringe, next, and fits it between the teeth near the back of the beast’s jaw. He pushes a small amount of liquid into the beast’s mouth, and sees it vanish in a flush of soft white magic. The beast’s eyesockets widen. “Yes? Pretty good, right?”
The beast turns his head back, mouthing at the syringe until Gaster obligingly presses the rest of the formula into his jaws. Then he scoops up the bottle again, presses the nipple to the corner of the beast’s mouth. The beast turns his head on instinct, fits his frontmost fangs around the nipple, and sucks. Gaster doesn’t laugh with delight—certainly not. That would be undignified of him.
He just—smiles, a little bit.
After that, the beast’s meals are delivered solely through bottle-feedings. He teaches Jackson and Lucky the precise steps to take during feedings, and sees to it that the beast is fed consistently five times each day. To his delight, he discovers that the extra energy from the food is quickly metabolized. The beast resumes his rapid growth, and he begins displaying more movement. Still, he can’t move outside of solution, and Gaster decides that’s simply something he’ll have to help him with, too.
One year after the beast’s creation as a single-celled zygote, Gaster begins teaching it to walk. Each morning, an hour after his first feeding, Gaster will scrub himself down with disinfectant and then remove the beast from the pool. The beast protests this most heartily, the first few times. He squirms and whines and whimpers and altogether makes Gaster feel like a terrible no-good person. To counteract this, Gaster moves feedings back and begins offering the beast’s first meal of the day only when he’s outside of the pool.
Pavlov was a clever human. Gaster has to give him that.
Before long, the beast looks forward to being outside of the pool. Gaster lays him out on the floor just in front of it and holds the bottle up, encouraging the beast to stretch his neck. As he feeds, Gaster uses his free hand to guide the beast’s limbs through a wide range of motions, strengthening his joints and (in theory) triggering more magic to flow to those seldom-used areas. After a few weeks of this, the beast surprises him by climbing out of the pool on his own, one morning. He’s slow and clumsy, and he holds himself close to the ground, wobbling unsteadily—hardly more than a crawl, but Gaster is absolutely delighted with the progress.
By the time the beast is fifteen months old, he can walk and trot (mostly) without stumbling. Running proves to be a bit more difficult, but Gaster chalks that up to new-living-creature clumsiness. However, with such new movements come new challenges. Gaster can barely squeeze through the room’s door before he’s got a beast squirming at his feet, whining with excitement. In addition, as the beast continues to grow and survive, more and more people want to see him. He can’t blame them, but having so many people trekking in and out of the room makes him uneasy—he doesn’t want the beast falling ill if someone was improperly sanitized, and he doesn’t want all of the attention to disturb the beast’s as-of-yet uncertain psyche. Still, he can’t very well refuse everyone who wants a chance to observe and take notes, but he does his best to limit the traffic through the room when he can.
Asgore comes to visit one afternoon, and he nearly falls over himself trying to snuggle Gaster’s beast. The beast seems thrilled with the attention, squirming in Asgore’s arms and snuffling against his face and throat. “Oh my goodness,” Asgore whispers. “Oh my stars. Wingdings. I want one. I need one.”
Gaster looks fondly at the king, sliding down to sit against the far wall. The beast squirms out of Asgore’s arms and bounds over to him, dropping into a position Gaster recognizes from a few of his canine behavior books—a playbow. Obligingly, Gaster taps a hand on the floor, allowing the beast to pounce at (though never to land on) it. Encouraging hunting instincts will be beneficial, he thinks, especially when it comes to the beast’s future job—hunting the enemy.
“I’m afraid they’re not pet material,” Gaster says. “He’s not dangerous now, but once he gets larger—” Gaster shakes his head. “No. He’s not a pet at all.”
“But he’s so cute,” Asgore whispers, looking adoringly at the beast.
“Cute things can be dangerous.” Looking at the king himself, Gaster knows that’s true.
“Well, I suppose you’re right about that.” Asgore’s mouth twists, his eyes darkening for a moment before he shakes himself off. “Nevertheless—how is he, Wingdings? I know you mentioned teaching him magical attacks once he was a year old. How has that been going?”
Gaster shakes his head. “I’m afraid it hasn’t been. His growth is much slower than I’d anticipated, and he hasn’t shown any signs of manifest magic yet. I’ve only just started his obedience training, but that’s been going well. He’s very clever. Watch—01, pay attention.” The beast’s eyes snap to him, animal grin in place. “Sit.” The beast’s haunches touch the ground, and Gaster flicks a piece of soft hamburger towards him. It gets snapped out of the air. “Very good. Down.” The beast lays down, tail thumping expectantly. Another piece of hamburger. “ Stand.” The beast (rather less enthusiastically) clambers back to his feet. Two pieces of hamburger, for that. Lazybones.
“He is doing well,” Asgore says, and Gaster preens (just a little bit) under the praise. “What a good boy he is. Aren’t you?” He coos at the beast, who paces around him in delight. “Yes you aaare, you’re the good boy, it’s youuu. Such a clever little monster you are. Oh, Wingdings, can’t I give him some more hamburger?”
How can Gaster deny a royal request when it’s asked so nicely? (And when it comes with not one but two sets of puppy-dog eyes?) He sighs and hands Asgore the packet of hamburger. The beast’s tail wags furiously. He’s always very happy when Asgore comes to visit, after that, the gluttonous thing.
Eighteen months into the beast’s existence, and Gaster thinks things are going remarkably well. A little slower than he would have preferred, perhaps, but that’s alright. He’ll simply have to figure out a way to speed the growth of the next generation—which may be coming soon, if Jackson has his way. He’s been clamoring for a few new beasts the last couple of months, and Gaster is inclined to create some for him. He’s drafted some changes he believes might help with growth and development. All that’s left is to edit them into the genome, seed the DNA with magic, and then incubate the resulting zygote. The second generation’s genome is already in progress, as a matter of fact. A few more months and they’ll have more beasts around, he hopes—the whole lab hopes.
Eighteen months into the beast’s existence, and he can walk and trot and run and jump. He responds to an incredible list of commands—sit, stay, stand, down, come, heel, place, speak, back up, off, leave it, wait, pay attention. He loves eating hamburger (and french fries, as Lucky had discovered early on, much to Gaster’s chagrin). His favorite toys are tug ropes (good for bite training) and squeaky balls (good for hunting). He’s still rather small, weighing in at only thirty pounds and measuring twenty inches at the shoulder and seventy-two from snout to tail-tip, but he’s always growing. He still needs the DT/M50 every few hours or his energy levels plummet, but he gets the rest of his nutrition from solid foods.
Eighteen months into the beast’s existence, and Gaster is feeling hopeful about this whole thing. He’s created a beast. He’s created a beast that can walk and sense and learn. He thinks, perhaps, he’s created a beast that can kill a human—a beast that will be the first line of defense should a human fall into the Underground again, or the first line of attack after the Barrier is broken and monsters return to the surface. He’s created a beast that feels nothing but instinct. A beast that likes to play and interact and cooperate, so long as it gets something out of it, but a beast that, in truth, feels no love or hope or attachment. A beast that has no soul, no sentience. A beast that he needn’t feel bad about ordering to its death, in a fight against a human. Just a beast. Nothing more.
Eighteen months into the beast’s existence, and the beast learns to talk.
“Lo,” the beast tells him, one morning, watching him with that animal grin. “Lo, ‘aster.”
Eighteen months into the beast’s existence, and Gaster’s project is ruined.