being infirm is not especially pleasant

Unexpected noise and unexpected people were deeply unpleasant to Gaster, so much so that they couldn't put him in the infirmary. When there was a knock, he had to remind himself to calm down before he could say "Enter."

Ah. Shane.

"Lucky you," Gaster said from his bed. "You don't have to lie down and stare at a ceiling for days after exerting yourself past the point of exhaustion."

"Honestly I'm just glad that your limbs dislocate rather than get severed," Shane said. "Also, I brought you books."

"Thank you," Gaster said, quietly. "But at the moment I am too tired to hold a book up."

"Do you want me to read to you?"

"What?"

"If you don't have the strength to read a book, I can do it for you."

"Why would you do that for me?"

"Roy hasn't woken up yet, so I'm the only one of us three in any state to do anything. I'm getting bored," Shane said. Even now Gaster still struggled to believe that people would voluntarily spend leisure time with him, so Shane wanted to be gentle.

"All right. What do you have for me?"

"This one is a field study of the flora and fauna of the Viridi Atrium," Shane said. "It's by Alia Cometshine."

Alia was a naturalist from Kurago that Gaster had met a few times: a Patience mage who used her own magic's ropes to climb trees so she could take notes among the leaves of the forests that others couldn't observe. "Oh, this must be the new monograph she was telling me about last year. Glad to hear it's finished."

"Can I begin reading?"

"You may."

Shane opened the book and flipped through the first few pages to find where the writing started. "For those who have never been to the Viridi Atrium it is difficult to overstate the sheer scale of it. It takes fathoms to encircle the girth of the smallest trees, and the height of three ordinary deducious forest canopies before you even reach the understory of this one. I was told that scaling these trees is a fool's errand. I, of course, am a fool..."