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The king wants very specific things from a new royal scientist. There’s a reason the position has been empty for years even though he’s been actively trying to fill it.
Alphys is a good engineer. It’s one of the few things she’s really confident in.
Alphys is not a good biologist. She hates the squishy stuff, it’s gross and you have to talk to people to get anything done. Not her thing.
But she wants the resources the royal scientist has access to. Needs them, even, to do anything more complicated than soup up her computer. She doesn’t have the money on her own to do the projects she knows she can do, the ones she knows will help people.
So she made a deal with Mettaton, and she lied her scaly ass off, and here she is, sitting in a derelict lab building that hasn’t been occupied for years, minimum, staring down a mountain of paperwork that reaches above her head.
Apparently things pile up when you go years without anyone to deal with them. Who knew?
The number of things that need dealt with, many of them urgently, is overwhelming. The CORE needs maintenance and repair. New Home’s electrical grid is failing. There’s no running water in Snowdin. Waterfall’s carefully designed levee system is falling apart and several people’s houses have already been flooded.
Somehow, all of this is her job.
It’s something for a team of people, not a lone nerd with an engineering hyperfixation. She literally can’t deal with all of this on her own, not even if she were somehow able to stop needing sleep.
She doesn’t think she can hire the full team she probably needs for this. Trying to train that many people at the same time as dealing with all of this would be a recipe for disaster. Plus, she hates social interaction. She’d fuck it up somehow and the king would fire her and then she’d be back to rooting through dumpsters for salable trash and she just can’t deal with that, ok.
No, what she needs is an assistant. Someone who can give her an extra pair of hands and be trusted not to break anything if she takes her eyes off them for a few seconds. Someone who can handle staff training if she’s still this swamped by the time mass hiring becomes an option for her.
She writes up an ad.
—
Sans is twenty-two, and he lives alone in a Hotland apartment, and he is miserably fucking depressed.
He moved out of his parents’ house in New Home back when he was seventeen, because he loves his family but he doesn’t really like most of them that much, and if he’d had to stay in that house a second longer he would have started setting shit on fire.
They’re just… tiring. They love their kids but there’s only so many times he can handle being asked whether he wants to try whatever new snake oil they’ve found that increases hp. The fact that Papyrus moved out less than a year after him (read: the second he turned seventeen and had enough savings to afford his own place) really says all he needs to say about it.
Anyway, Sans is currently working two jobs, fiddling with a weird machine that came with the apartment in his free time, and still unable to distract himself from how incredibly awful he feels literally all of the time.
It’s not a physical health thing - he’s hardly a paragon of that but he’s been stable since he was a kid, he’s not falling down or anything. He just… feels like shit. All the time. Or not all the time, but often enough that it’s a serious problem.
The worst part is he doesn’t even know why. He’ll just be passing by the CORE or looking for new shortcuts or fiddling with the machine, and suddenly this terrible melancholy will come over him, and then he’ll feel like utter garbage for the rest of the day. He’s learned to avoid some of the triggers, over time, but half the time he can’t even figure out what they are.
Maybe that’s why he fucks around so much with the machine. He found it the same day he had his first major depressive episode, so maybe now doing something with it and feeling normal again are just irrevocably associated in his mind.
He checks his mail. The newspaper has been running a lot of scientific articles lately. in honor of the new royal scientist, so he’s been reading it for those. More entertaining than staring blankly at a wall while waiting for his next shift at his nothing jobs, at least. Like, they pay the bills, but geez. Talk about unfulfilling.
It says… Huh.
“Royal scientist looking for assistant. Scientific background preferred, but not required, so long as candidate is willing to learn quickly and listen to direction. Social skills preferable, but not required. Further information available at…”
He reads through the whole thing before calling the attached number for details. He’s answered by a nervous sounding woman with a stutter who tells him where the candidates are supposed to head for interviews and a test to figure out where they are knowledge-wise.
Both his jobs are the type he could quit without notice and not ruin anyone’s day, so it’s pretty low risk to try out. If he fails, he won’t even have to mention he tried. If he succeeds… Well.
Science sounds a hell of a lot more fulfilling than running a hotdog stand or being an assistant janitor at the MTT Resort.
—
Two days after the interview concludes, Sans’ phone rings.
“Hello. Is this- is this Comic Font?”
“uh. yes, but also please never call me that again. i usually just go by sans. who is this?”
“This is- um. I’m Alphys. I’m the royal scientist? I’m calling about your application to be my assistant.”
“oh. what about it?”
“You’re hired. How soon can you get here?”
“wait, what? just like that?”
“Y- yes…? Should there be more? Your application was- um, solid as long as I ignored the formatting, so…”
“huh. uh, thanks. no, it’s fine, i just didn’t expect things to be that simple, i guess. gimme a few minutes to quit my current job and i can be over there before lunch.”
“Great! See you then!”
She hangs up without giving Sans the chance to return her goodbye. He stares at his phone for a moment, bemused, before realizing that she’s the same woman who answered him when he called about the job originally.
Wait, does that mean she had no one else to handle it for her? Is she running the whole lab alone? Holy shit, no wonder she wants him there asap, she must be drowning in there.
He calls his (now former) boss.
“sup, boss.”
“HELLO, SAND. WHY ARE YOU CALLING ME? I’M ON AIR IN LESS THAN TEN MINUTES, DARLING, SO UNLESS YOU’RE FINALLY AGREEING TO STOP WASTING YOURSELF ON JANITORIAL WORK AND ENTERTAIN THE GUESTS WITH YOUR AWFUL (BUT STILL INEXPLICABLY ENJOYABLE) SENSE OF HUMOR…”
“still no. actually, i’m quitting.”
“WHAT.”
“yeah, i got hired as the royal scientist’s assistant, so…”
“OH, FUCK ME. YOU REALLY HAD TO GO BACK INTO SCIENCE? WAIT, DON’T ANSWER THAT, I WASN’T KIDDING WHEN I SAID I DON’T HAVE TIME FOR THIS. I’LL BRING YOUR LAST CHECK TO THE LAB LATER, WE CAN DISCUSS DETAILS THEN.”
“what details? i’m quitting.”
“ALPHYS IS A CLOSE FRIEND OF MINE, DARLING. YOU’RE NOT ESCAPING THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY THAT EASILY.”
On that ominous note, Mettaton hangs up.
Sans still doesn’t understand that guy. He only got a job at the resort in the first place thanks to Paps (apparently they’re pen pals or something?) and every time he talks to Mettaton he tries to convince Sans to become a stand-up comedian.
And he has no idea why. Like, sure, yes, maybe he’s funny enough for it, he doesn’t know, it’s not like he’s ever tried it, but why is the guy so obsessed with the idea?
Sans gives his phone a weird look, shrugs, and heads off to get ready.
—
Science is a surprisingly unpopular career in the underground. Alphys is honestly kind of weirded out by it. Like, someone built the CORE, and the electrical grid, and figured out how to use magic to make a version of a phone that doesn’t require ores the underground doesn’t have, (even if it’s clunky as shit and she could do better in her sleep) and none of those inventions were all that long ago, and yet.
It’s almost like all the scientists who made these inventions just evaporated into nonexistence one day. It’s extremely annoying to deal with.
There are a couple promising candidates, but all of them seem to have one problem or another, and there’s absolutely no one with prior experience.
In the end, she picks a guy whose only major issue is poor taste in fonts and an allergy to capital letters. She can deal with subpar formatting as long as he actually knows what the fuck he’s doing, and his application indicates that he probably does.
She hears a knock on the Lab’s doors almost five minutes on the dot after she hangs up on him. Pretty impressive. considering his listed address is at least fifteen minutes away. She decides not to question it, at least for now.
The door opens to reveal a skeleton slightly shorter than her (an impressive accomplishment) wearing a hoodie, basketball shorts, and fluffy pink slippers. She doesn’t know what she was imagining someone who types exclusively in comic sans would look like, but he’s pretty much exactly it.
“sup.” He says. “alphys, right?”
She nods. “Um. Yes, that’s- yeah. And you’re Sans?”
“in the flesh.”