Chapter Text
[SYSTEM_REBOOT]
[ERROR LOG: MEMORY CHAIN – CORRUPTED]
[SOUL LINK – NULL]
[IDENTITY FILE: MISSING]
[BOOTING BACKUP PROCESSOR...]
Darkness.
Then—pain.
No, not pain. Wrongness.
He opened his eyes .
Weird, he doesn't remember closing them.
[DATA CORRUPTED]
RELOADING . . .
FILENAME: ?????????
Colors snapped in and out—fragments of black, white, static, red. His vision wobbled as it came back in pieces. His body didn't feel right. It felt... jumbled. Like it had been cobbled together by a doctor using the remains of someone else.
The Beings skull ached.
No—no, he was- No he is a male.
He didn't even know his own name.
He was laying in the middle of nowhere. The ground under him felt soft, crunchy, like something—but he couldn't tell what until he looked at it later .
His breath hitched, whether it was from the pain or confusion he wasn't sure.
His fingers twitched as he brought them to his face. the white powder falling off to revel a white sleeve wrapped around what felt like his hand.
They were bones. At least... they looked like bones.
Except they were glitched ? —flickering between colors, dragging red and blue static like smoke when he moved them. white after affects trailed off it like ash. He flexed his hand slowly, waiting to see if he felt any pain from it.
The back of his head pulsed.
He brought the hand reaching up, trembling, and touched his face. Bone or what he thought felt like it. He let go of his face and le his hand drop to beside him on the ground.
The snow was cold.
That was thing he noticed. Not the pain he was in. Not the dizziness. Not the static fizzing at the edge of his thoughts that he only just realized was there.
Just... cold.
A groan slipped from somewhere deep in his chest—he wasn't even sure if it even came from him. Limbs, heavy and foreign, shifted beneath a thick blanket of snow. His fingers—bone fingers, he had to remained himself—dug into snow. Hard. Unfamiliar. His entire body was screaming in discomfort, twitching like he'd been struck by lightning. Or torn apart. Most likely both from what the pain he was ignoring told him.
He pushed himself up. The snow slid off his hoodie—white, oversized—and fell around him like sand.
That's when he finally noticed what's been bugging his head the whole time his been awake.
He saw incredibly clearly what looked to be numbers and words, but mostly numbers everywhere.
Everything had a number an name a value then a rule.
No matter where he looked or how hard he blinked, they were still there.
Lines and strings. Variables. Tags. Parameters.
It was all around him—overlaid on the world like subtitles on a video
He looked down onto the snow covered grass, and more words popped up in response.
ground_Snow_covered
object_flag: placeholder asset
gravity = Default
He blinked again.
Still there.
"...great," he muttered, rubbing the back of his skull with his hand as he muttered. "I've got dev tools for eyes."
He froze.
Did he just say a pun at a time like this?
"...Was that... supposed to be funny?" he murmured, His voice was deep but he didn't notice that static that overlaid it.
He didn't know.
It just came out.
Like it was as easy as breathing, Like he didn't need to think to say it.
And worse?
He felt better after saying it.
Like something inside eased up. Clicked into place.
And that bothered him.
"Okay," he mumbled, pacing slowly across the snow. His boots didn't echo. The only sound was the static that surrounded him. "Lots of snow. Floating numbers and words every where. Everything's code. And I... can make jokes on instinct now ."
He kept walking, reading the numbers hovering over everything as he made to walk past the trees.
"...Do I do that a lot?" he asked aloud, hopping the numbers around him would help.
No answer, of course.
He sighed and kept walking. The snow crunched underfoot, accompanied by the constant sound of static that surrounded him.
The snow covered forest he at least knew, was some what familiar too him so he knew he was making some form of progress. Cold wind. Pale trees. A quiet that felt too deliberate—like something was waiting for him to ambush him.
That didn't change the fact he still didn't know where he was.
And worst of all... everything he looked at wouldn't shut up.
Snowdin Snow
Tree Object - Static
Temperature: -5°C
Wind Velocity: 2.2m/s
Tag: Zone Start
The words floated over every surface in a dull pale white glow. Small, Messy and constantly moving in his vision. And behind each one he could feel what felt like tangled wires waiting to be pulled, stretched massive webs of data—layered beneath everything like a second skin.
He grit his teeth, exhaling sharply as his sockets darted from tree to tree, snow to stone. Each glance brought more clutter. More meaningless noise.
"Shut up," he muttered, voice low. "Just... shut up."
He focused—forced every ounce of whatever power he had into one task: stop seeing it. Push it out. Silence it all.
Nothing changed.
He tried again, and with just a thought, he focused—harder this time —this time however. He pulled at them instead.
Suddenly, everything exploded into a blinding wall of symbols.
INSTANCE ID: 034A - ROOT_DEPTH: 0.42m - ANCHOR_STABLE: TRUE - CODE STACK: 45308_LINES_LOADING...
The forest around him was gone. In its place, a sea of scrolling code burst across his vision like raw numerical vomit. Strings, values, hexes, tags. The entire world peeled back like a skin. All that was left were a red and blue background with letters, Numbers, Weightless and infinite covering every angle.
The pain hit instantly. Like staring directly into the sun—if the sun was trying to speak to you in screams.
He staggered, gasping, clutching his head as a sharp glitch-static screamed came out from his skull.
"NGHH—Fuck, okay, too much. Waaaay too much."
He squeezed his eye sockets shut and pushed the overwhelming code back down, tried to suppress it—just enough to still be able to see normally, without hurting him.
When he opened his eyes again, the storm of data was gone.
Attempt world Override: unsuccessful
System Alert: Observation Layer Accessed
Permission Level: INSUFFICIENT
A sharp glitch-crack rang through his skull like feedback, and he stumbled back, wincing.
"Ghhh—dammit!"
The best he could do was dim it. Blur the details. Make it manageable. Instead of full code, he now saw only faint tags floating in his view. Words like:
Tall Tree
Zone Marker
Object: Rock
Still there. Still very not normal. But good enough.
"I hate this," he grumbled, dragging one hand down his face. "I fucking hate this."
He turned his head skyward—only to be met with a giant carven roof above him
SKYBOX: Underground Cavern
ERROR: Surface Script MISSING
Surface Locked and incomplete
"Of course," he muttered bitterly, sockets tilted to look at the crystals on the caverns roof above. "Even the sky's fake."