Chapter Text
The world is dull and empty around December as she wakes up. She can’t tell if it’s a blank black expanse, or maybe it’s a flat white, or grey? It hurts her soul to focus on. She stands, but as soon as the action is complete she can’t be sure she wasn’t standing to begin with.
“Hello,” comes a voice from someone Dess hadn’t noticed before.
She shifts just slightly and then they are in front of her. She isn’t sure where they had been before.
They’re a human, maybe thirteen or fourteen years old, with reddish-brown hair and bright red eyes. Maybe it’s that, or maybe it’s the green shirt with a gold stripe across it, or maybe it’s simply the fact that they’re human, but this stranger reminds her of Kris.
“Hi,” Dess greets back, a bit hesitant.
The two of them stand silent for a minute, trying to figure out what to do next. The human breaks the silence. “What do you know about why and how we’re here?”
“Uh,” Dess says, “Nothing. Should I know something?”
“I don’t know,” the stranger says slowly. “Give me your hand.”
“What? Why?”
“This is the Void. It’s a bunch of nothing. I am a human with a determination type soul. Despite everything, that still means something here. I can lend a bit of it to you, in a sense, so that we can track you down again when the Void decides to shift itself. Trust me, you don’t want to be lost,” the stranger says.
Already, they’re reminding Dess less and less of Kris. Much more talkative, straightforward, and formal. She holds out her hand and the human takes it. A red glow passes from their hand to hers. It feels like fire, messing with the very structure of her being. She jerks away from them suddenly and backs up, defensive.
“You shouldn’t melt, but if you do I can always show you how to put yourself back,” the human says.
“I might what.”
“Might being the operative word - that I didn’t say, by the way. There’s a chance you might become.. a little bit more of a liquid than you should be. But, the one good thing about the Void is that it’s malleable and it remembers things, so even on the off chance you do get less solid, you’ll be fine,” the stranger waves it away.
“Do you understand,” Dess asks, “that what you’re saying could not possibly be less reassuring?”
“It could, really,” the human answers. That’s not better. “I am Chara, by the way. We’re.. going to be here a while. I hope you are patient, or fall asleep easily.”
“I am neither.”
“Oh. That sucks.”
Yea, Dess thinks, it really does. She does not say that. Instead, she asks, “So what do you mean when you say we’re in the Void?”
Chara hums and tilts their head in thought. “It’s the space between dimensions, as far as we know. It’s a whole bunch of nothing. … Dr. Goo once told me to think of it like one of those shelves that are separated both horizontally and vertically that you put little boxes in. The void is the shelf itself, it holds the dimensions together and makes an immovable wall between them. The boxes are dimensions.”
“Dr. Goo,” Dess repeats. For one, that sounds less like a name than her own - December Holiday. She wonders why her parents thought the theme was a good idea - and two, Chara has yet to mention a second person so far.
“That’s not actually his name,” Chara says. They neglect to tell her what his name actually is. “He’s.. well, first word to come to mind is ‘old’, which, he is, but that’s not the word I was looking for. I guess you’ll just have to see when you meet him.”
“Right.”
Dess isn’t quite sure when Chara moved beside her instead of the two being face to face, but they are now floating cross legged to her right. The fact that this has happened three times now where the environment has changed and she hasn’t noticed sends a cold, anxious feeling through her chest.
“I’ve got a question for you now,” Chara says. “How are you so calm after what happened to bring you here?”
Aaaand now the anxious feeling is worse. Somehow, the thought of how she got here never even crossed her mind. “What happened?”
“Yea, with the bunker and- oh. You’re not repeating it, you’re asking me what happened.”
“What happened?” Dess asks again.
Chara yet again takes a minute to consider their words. “Shelf metaphor again. Sometimes there are gaps in the walls between the boxes. Usually this means that things from the universes who share a gap will trade things on accident. Sometimes, someone drilled a hole in on purpose. We aren’t really sure what happened to make the hole in your universe specifically, but it’s quite a large one that somehow we keep managing to get stuck on. When you’re in a bunch of nothing for as long as we’ve been, you take whatever chance you get to be in something again, so we went exploring.”
“We found that your world has some weird as hell mechanics, and somehow there are easily accessible doors to other planes in it - I don’t have a metaphor for that one, sorry - and those doors are wildly unstable in relation to each other. We came up with a plan to make a temporary fix for it while we tried to come up with a more permanent one, and we were trying to execute that plan when you got caught in the middle,” Chara winces, “literally.”
“How did I do that?” Dess wishes her voice sounded more composed than it does.
“Maybe for now, it’s best you take in the information you already have,” Chara says a bit quieter than they’ve been the rest of the conversation. “Just in case I manage to jog your memory. It, um, looked like it hurt.”
It’s quiet for a minute. Dess turns her head to look at Chara, but they’re gone now.
And now Dess is alone.