Hard-Boiled Caviar (WIP)

Hometown napped on a lazy Saturday afternoon. The town was no louder than "quiet" on its most raucous day, and for the past few hours it had fallen absolutely silent.

Schoolchildren and their teenage counterparts lounged at home, enjoying their weekends inside and away from the autumn chill. Their parents did the same, relaxing whether they were at home or going through the motions of work. Even the wildlife followed suit; The creatures that hadn’t fled south ahead of the nip in the air rested fat on their winter reserves that afternoon. It was as if every force that drove life in the quiet little town had taken a day off.

Every force except justice.

Undyne strode eastward, cutting through the still of the day like a hot blue knife through butter made of laziness.

She was on her fifth walk- no, her fifth patrol that day, and she was confident it would be the one. The streak-breaker.

This time, for sure, she would find some kind of criminal engaged in some kind of crime. And the rest of her afternoon would fly by in a whirlwind of day-saving and violent heroics. She was sure. She could feel it.

The clacking of dress shoes on concrete grew quicker.

Ninjas who’d forgotten their sword permits would be the high end, as far as ideal criminals went. An unruly biker gang would do the job, too. Or maybe some belligerent hobo who’d just blown into town. She wouldn’t tell anyone, but she’d settle for a litterbug or a tax evader if none of the above could make it.

Undyne wasn’t sure what kind of scum she’d be dealing with, but she’d be dealing with something. She could taste evildoing on the air, right then.

The daydreaming cop forgot to look out for the dispatcher’s elusive housemate while passing their lopsided home. She stopped booking imaginary lowlives just in time to pass Asgore’s, though.

She didn’t break stride, but she did glance to her left. Her old friend’s shop sat as bright, and pleasant, and dusty as ever. But a little emptier than usual.

It must have gotten him, too. That insidious force. Peace.

It had been coming for a lot of people, recently. The reckless motorists who used to make the mistake of driving where she could see them went AWOL ages ago. The little blue turd who thought being a jay gave him license to jaywalk hadn’t messed up in at least a month. Even her archnemesis had succumbed; Their long running game of fish-and-wyrm fizzled out weeks ago.

It was a good thing, she knew. Good that her favorite quarry had turned over a new leaf. That even Asgore had given up trying to look busy on the off chance a certain tubby hermit walked by his shop.

Good that the town was at rest.

She was an officer of the peace. It was her job to make sure things were that way. She just wished she wasn’t so good at it, sometimes. Often, if she was being honest.

The thought perished as clacking became crunching.

None of that mattered, she told herself, as she approached the lake. Today was going to be the day.

She caught sight of two burly figures, and for a moment she was soaring. Renegade lumberjacks, she reasoned. Poaching trees without a license. The phantom of a double-leg takedown was already coiling itself up in her knees.

And then the pair of them saw her, and waved, and she felt like a clown.

Those disguises were FAR too convincing.

“Hey,” called the burly rabbit, as his boss skidded to a stop. His scaly partner simply waved his greeting.

Undyne found herself waving back at him for a moment, before duty started calling.

“Plain Clothes Officer 01,” she recited, “Plain Clothes Officer 02. Please tell me you found something to arrest.”

Hometown’s tied-for-second most vigilant protectors shared a glance.

“Uh, boss, we’ve actually been thinking about something,” said the rabbit.

Undyne’s curiosity was piqued. “Shoot,” she told him.

So the rabbit shot.  “Like, if you keep calling us ‘plain clothes officers’ out in the field, won’t it like…”

“Blow our cover?” his draconic partner finished.

Undyne blinked, and chewed over the new information for a minute.

It did kind of ruin the whole “covert” thing the pair of them had going, didn’t it?

Granted, the rabbit and the dragon weren’t in any danger. The town they all protected wasn’t exactly crawling with criminals; Hometown was lucky to be crawling with snot nosed little schoolkids on a Monday morning, let alone people who would care if the two giant men by the lake were secretly cops.

But it was the principle of the thing. Like she was insulting her junior officers.

“You’re right,” she eventually admitted. She considered writing herself up when she got back to the office, but decided on just a warning. This time.

Undyne cleared her throat, and started over. “Normal Civilian 01, Normal Civilian 02, if you two were secretly cops and you were reporting to your cool boss, what would you tell her? Hypothetically.”

The fish puffed up just a bit. That sounded even more convincing out loud than it had in her head.

“We’d tell her we’ve got a big goose egg,” the bunny reported, not missing a beat, “Again.”

Undyne deflated.

“Sorry boss,” 01 continued. “I mean, like, sorry random lady.”

The random lady waved his apology away. Wasn’t his fault.

“Been a slow day,” 02 offered. “Lots of those, lately.”

“Yeah, you’re telling me,” said Undyne. She stopped short of sighing like some teenager.

“But I just have this feeling that today will be different, you know?” she told the muscle men. “Like I’m right about to stumble on some crazy bust. Like there’s some law-breaking shoe that’s right about to drop, illegally.”

And then something glinted in Undyne’s eyes. “You two get what I’m saying?”

They didn’t quite get what she was saying, but neither wanted to pipe up.

She was smiling at them, now.

“There’s just something criminal in the air. Can’t you smell it?”

The undercover bros exchanged glances under their steel visors. They weren’t psychics or even detectives, but they had an idea how the next few moments were going to play out. To their credit, they didn’t groan.

“Uhhh, no, boss,” 01 ventured, pitching her an easy one to get it over with.

“Well neither can I!” Undyne shot, before an already-primed cackle escaped from between the long teeth of the law.

She didn’t care if she was the only one laughing. Jokes at the expense of that fancy schmancy fifth sense everyone else apparently had were evergreen as far as she cared.

When she’d chuckled herself out she gave the pair the most serious look she could manage.

“So you really didn’t see anything weird?”

“Nah,” said 01 “Well, we saw the human kid walk around for a minute, but that’s not illegal.”

“Looks like crime took the day off,” 02 said.

Undyne frowned, and nodded. “Crime’s been taking a lot of days off, recently. I’m gonna have to call crime’s supervisor. Tell ‘em crime’s been slacking.”

Undyne wondered what crime’s supervisor looked like.

“Try not to go too crazy, boss. I mean, lady,” the rabbit told her. “Something will come up, eventually.”

His partner nodded in agreement.

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll try,” she told them, as she turned to leave. “Keep up the good work. Er, keep up the… uh, civilian stuff.”

“We will,” said 01 with a wave.

“Good luck scaring up some crime, officer lady,” 02 offered, along with a wave of his own. His tone suggested he didn’t think she’d find any, but she appreciated his words anyway.

Undyne waved goodbye to the bucket-headed lumberjacks she’d never met before, and checked “contact lake unit” off of her patrol checklist. She was coming up with a goose egg of her own, and fast.

When she was out of earshot, she finally allowed herself a sigh. That feeling of impending crime lingered, but the possibility of going stir crazy in the station was growing realer by the minute. She’d rather do anything than more of that.

She may as well cut the middleman and lock herself in HQ’s holding cell, for as much freedom as the building promised her. At this point she had counted every dot on the station’s speckled ceiling at least once, and she could almost assemble a complete mixtape of the dregs of songs she’d heard the dispatcher humming over the past few weeks.

There were actually a few fun things to get up to, but Officer Blook had talked her out of all of them. They actually seemed to enjoy the stillness of small town cop life, and she wouldn’t begrudge them that. But she wished they’d cut her some slack. Would it kill anyone to let her daisy-chain a steel lasso out of all their handcuffs, or build up her immunity to mace?

If some renegade mechanical bull with pepper spray breath ever charged into town, she hoped the buzzkilling little sheet didn’t come crying to her.

Not that it would. Unlicensed ninjas and malicious lumberjacks and noxious robotic cattle only ever visited Hometown in Undyne’s imagination, on boring crimeless afternoons.

Quiet, she corrected herself. Not crimeless. On afternoons like this one Undyne found herself nearly drowning in crime.

Just, not the kind of crime that she could sink her teeth into. Diet crime. Zero calorie crime. Gluten-free crime, maybe. The kind her law-enforcing instincts made up for her when they had nothing substantial to do. She was fighting it right then and she couldn’t even bat an eyelash for all the excitement it brought her.

Dozens of colorful little lawbreakers were crunching out in protest, begging for amnesty, for mercy. All they found was justice, crushed under the heel of the long legs of the law. Their judge, jury, and executioner offered them no pity. She didn’t offer them anything, really, but least of all pity. The leaves were criminals; it was plain as day that they were guilty of littering.

No, that wasn’t right. The leaves were loitering.

The trees were littering. Littering after she’d spent the better half of a previous quiet Saturday afternoon warning them that they didn’t get to toss their trash all over nature just because they were nature. On some future quiet afternoon, after the station’s supply shipment came in and the surplus of citation pads became troublesome, she might just have to write the whole forest up.

That’d certainly kill a day, maybe two. Undyne prayed to law enforcement gods that it wouldn’t come to that.

The lake was one of her last hopes. If her helmeted comrades had found so much as an unregistered campground, or abandoned beer cans, or some sap trying to fish out of season she’d have had a whole day’s worth of something to do.

Instead there was nothing. Nothing but trees to give warnings to, and nothing but leaves to beat up. And absolutely nothing at all to arrest or write up to prove that she’d done something that day besides count dots on the ceiling.

For now, at least, Undyne told herself. She still had the south side of town. The outskirts.

A brief mechanical hiss slapped the daydreamer awake. The sound was harsh, and close, and eerily prominent in the silence of the morning. Undyne was too fearless to be startled, of course, but for a brief moment she was on edge. By the time the second hiss rang out, though, she had her wits back. She didn't hear that noise every day, but she'd have to be a fool to forget what it was.

She pulled the beckoning radio from her front pocket, and crushed its shiny red button.

“Hello?” she asked the little box, as a courtesy. She had a pretty strong suspicion about who was on the other end, since there were only three people who had access to the line and she’d just said goodbye to two of them.

“Hey,” it offered, in an even more muted rendition of a normally quiet voice. “It’s me.”

“Heya, dispatch. Almost spooked me there, for a second. Almost.”

“Oh, sorry about that...” Dispatcher Blook trailed off as they so often did.

“So what’s the occasion, Blook? Did you need something, or did you just miss me?” She didn’t dare get her hopes up.

“Oh, I just wanted say ‘hi’ and uhhh, ask how the patrol’s going.” Her ghostliest co-worker wasn’t projecting confidence, but that wasn’t strange for them.

“Well, it’s…”

Boring, she stopped herself from saying. She had talked a big game about tasting evildoing in the air, and about this one being the one before she had set out. She didn’t want to give away that it looked like she was full of shit just yet.

She’d have to be smart, here, and use that trick Asgore had once taught her. The art of lying without lying. Diplomacy, she thought it was called.

The fish clicked her tongue to ask for a moment to think, and the dispatcher obliged.

Undyne mulled over her patrol, as she worked about how to phrase things.

She’d cleared Main Street first, as she always did. The station and the neighboring hospital rarely gave her any action, and it was no different the fifth time she’d checked that day.

Then she’d gone north and hit the business district and the apartments. Nothing to see there, as usual.

She’d had a little hope when she’d gone further north, to the residential district. Once upon a time, Hometown’s northernmost street was teeming with curfew breaking, cigarette smoking teens to shake down. Now, though, they were all off to school, old enough to smoke, or unable to break curfew. She found nothing there, and about as much at the lake.

Undyne struggled to find a word besides “boring” to call her current patrol. Diplomacy was hard. The most interesting that happened that day was Blook calling her on the radio, and that didn’t really count. It was a really routine sort of patrol, standard in every regard.

Wait, that was a good one.

“It’s a, uh, standard patrol,” she finally settled on, crossing her fingers.

“Oh, so it’s boring, then?”

Damn it, she knew that wouldn’t fly.

“Yeah,” she admitted, “All me and the other two found was a fat lot of nothing. Fattest lot of nothing we’ve ever seen... Since the last one.”

“Awww, that’s a bummer,” said the ghost. “You were really excited when you left.”

“Well, it happens,” Undyne said, scratching the back of her head. “That’s what I get for getting ahead of myself.”

Undyne received only silence in response. Undyne hoped she wasn’t passing them second-hand disappointment, or something.

“Oh, 01 and 02 thought of something smart, a minute ago,” she realized aloud.

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah, they figured that it kind of killed the point of the whole ‘undercover’ thing if I call them by their cop names out in the field,” she recounted.

“Ohhh, yeah…” Blook said, chewing over the information, “It kind of does, doesn’t it?”

“Yep, I’m gonna start calling them ‘Civilian 01’ and 'Civilian 02' from now on. Much more covert.”

“Good thinking,” the spirt told her.

Silence settled in again.

“Well, was that all you were calling about, dispatch?”

“Ummm… there was one other thing…” the dispatcher trailed off again.

Undyne gave them a moment.

“Well, we... We got a call.” Blook offered, hesitantly.

“WHAT?”

Undyne’s question echoed on the cool, silent air while dozens of its peers rattled around in her head.

Who called in? Were they in trouble? Where was she going? Why was dispatch trying to stall?

Before any of them could spill out off her lips, Blook continued. “Not like a 9-1-1 call,” they told her. “Somebody just called in to the station’s regular phone.”

A whole head of metaphorical steam whooshed out of the excited officer. A whirlwind of questions transformed into a groan-inducing realization. “Who called the station’s normal phone?” was an even easier mystery to solve than “Who called in on the radio?”

There was only one person in town who had that number.

“What did she want?” Undye grumbled.

“Well, she said that, uh…” Blook started, floating on metaphorical eggshells, “She said that… given our current uh, activity level, we could maybe… arrest some leaves… into piles by the road.”

The ghost sounded like they had only gotten halfway into rehearsing this. “Because the county’s leaf pickup thing is coming next Wednesday. To take them to uh, leaf jail. If you-”

“Alright dispatch, I get the picture,” she said, to rescue her junior officer. Undyne kicked at a pile of orange and yellow criminals loitering underfoot. “And I think I’m way ahead of her on that.”

Hometown’s hero managed to not sigh again. “Just let me hit the south side of town, and then I’ll head back and we can talk about raking.”

“Alright, chief.” The airy voice sounded relieved. “I’ll see you soon, then.”

“Well, who knows?” she wondered aloud, although she had a sinking feeling that she would be seeing them soon. “Oh, and thanks for the heads up.”

“You’re welcome,” the dispatcher told her.

Undyne really was thankful she had the dispatcher around. For as much of a wet blanket as Blook could be, they really did try their best. And they were much better at diplomacy than she was. Undyne knew for a fact that the mayor hadn’t tried to dress up raking leaves with cop talk.

Undyne’s favorite woman in town would never make an effort to be fun. She could practically hear that woman heckling her undead comrade, squawking like a soccer mom at a restaurant manager about how little the police department had done last month. Undyne scowled at the very idea.

Maybe if a certain somebody hadn’t snapped their weird hoof fingers and made Undyne’s bread-and-butter crime legal, Hometown PD would have better numbers to put up. But there was no use crying over spilled laws. Undyne shook the thought of that woman from her head, and continued her trek back to town.

Soon enough the crunching of leaves became the clopping of dress shoes on concrete once again. On her way back she caught Asgore back in place at his counter, and the pair exchanged a wave. Looked like the big fellow had gotten one over on peace after all. Good for him.

She still didn’t see the elusive second ghost haunting Blook manor, but she remembered to look on the return trip. One of these days she’d catch a glimpse of that phantom… phantom, but not today. Looking really hard but finding nothing seemed to be the theme of the day.

Tomorrow’s theme was probably going to be raking. Raking might have been a bit more engaging than counting dots, but the prospect still brought her no joy. She worked her way through the police academy, not landscaping school. She was a peacekeeper, not a groundskeeper, damn it.

Her own righteous fist struck her palm like a battering ram against sturdy steel. The sting of pain only magnified her indignation.

She glared at the looming visage of town hall, as it sneered down at her from above the trees. She glared at the trees, too, no doubt laughing in their mysterious tree language at the overgrown sea monkey who would soon be picking up their trash. She even glared at herself for good measure, for being so good at her job that she was in this predicament.

And then she had her fill of glaring. There was only so much anger she could direct at things she couldn’t change. Nothing to do but put a bow on her boring patrol and start planning out her attack on the leaves.

The south side of town was always the least eventful part of any peacekeeping excursion. Undyne had learned not to go looking for crime near Town Hall. Checking the graveyard was also fruitless; the dead didn’t commit any crimes, and not even the nastiest teen wanted to vandalize that old resting place.

She thought the church might be promising at one point. She’d heard rumors that Father Alvin gave wine to children. The vigilant fish had even caught him in the act once. Now THAT had been a day. She’d carted him off and thrown the book at him. But then he opened it and found the exact bylaw that said he was allowed to do that, and just like that Undyne had ruined her last church service.

No hard feelings, though.

The turtle on her mind smiled when he noticed her approaching Hometown’s place of worship. Undyne saw a vision of her future, as he set down his rake and waved at her. The churchyard was surprisingly green, for a place dangling so close to the mouth of the woods. More knee-high piles of leaves than she could count at a glance told her the young priest had had a long morning.

Undyne made sure to wave back at him.

“Good afternoon, officer!” he called. “How’s the patrol going?”

“Boring,” she told him. “How’s the yard work going?”

“Boring,” he informed her, before he scratched the back of his neck in thought. “But fulfilling in its own way. You know what they say about idle hands.”

Undyne didn’t know what they said about idle hands, but if she let that on she was worried he might tell her. She simply nodded.

“Have a good one, father,” she said. He returned her nod, wished her the same, and she set out again.

He was an odd one, that Father Alvin. And not just because he gave sips of hootch to kids. He was slow, and thoughtful, and quiet. Undyne was pretty sure that made him weird for a turtle. The only other one she’d known hadn’t been like that at all.

She wouldn’t hold it against him, though. He was a kindred spirit in his own way. He spent most of his time trying to look busy. Most days he stood out in front of his workplace offering advice or bibles to passersby, but once in a while, like today, he’d do grounds keeping duties or maintenance work on the chapel. Undyne's routine was more or less the same, except she did a lot more walking, and she doled out warnings and pamphlets about drugs instead of sermons and holy books.

As she walked, Undyne imagined what it would be like if she did Alvin’s job and he did hers. That’d make for an interesting Sunday.

Soon enough the idea’s novelty faded, though, and Undyne was left with nothing but the wailing of doomed leaves, and the dull howl of wind blowing through the trees. Three out of four locations on the south side weren’t worth looking at, so Undyne was cutting straight towards the fourth.

Years ago, when Hometown had more than just one delinquent, she used to find things out by the doors. Discarded soda cans, beer bottles, discarded fast food wrappers, and all other manner of nefarious teenage waste. It was always difficult to pin anything on any individual suspect, but the thrill of crime scene investigation used to keep her going for days.

Those times seemed to be passed, though.

After a few moments of walking the forest trail, Undyne’s ears picked up something strange. Every other step came out soft and quiet instead of loud and crunchy. It was almost as if someone had walked a trail through the dead plant matter ahead of her. On a different day that notion might have excited her, but today was enough of a dud that her hopes had thrown in the towel.

The taste of what she once thought was crime still blew in the breeze, but Undyne was over it. She must have confused the sour flavor of evildoing with that of imminent yardwork.

The little mound of earth finally came into view, looking strangely pretty dusted in yellow and orange. Undyne wondered if Mayor Killjoy wanted her to rake this far out, but resolved to ask about it later.

She crested the sad little hill in a few strides, and began her ceremonial inspection. Trees, she saw. Trees and leaves and clear blue sky. Pretty, maybe, but not anything she could work with.

She gave the clearing a second pass, for good measure, and turned her back on it. Nothing.

Nothing she wouldn’t expect to see out in the woods on an autumn day. Just gnarly brown tree trunks, an orange and yellow carpeting of leaves, and gre-

Undyne whirled around went to check something.

She scanned the bottom of the artificial hill once more, and found what she was looking for. Streaks of pale green littered the base of the ground, some with little wads of blue on their ends.

Flowers, she realized. Flowers, and not the kind that naturally grew around the little mountain town. Nicely cut flowers, that someone had left here.

From their vantage point, the sharp eyes of the law caught something else they had missed before. A few little patches of red and white a few feet away from the flowers.

Undyne brandished her regulation magnifying glass and confirmed her gut reaction. Pizza. A pepperoni pizza slice discarded out in the woods.

Teenagers.

The cold realization hit her before the feeling did.

Undyne pinched herself.

And then she threw a crooked haymaker up into the sky as everything caught up to her.

Flowers and pizza was a much stranger combination than burgers and beers, but some poor unfortunate little lawbreaking lowlife had littered the forest floor with them all the same.

She sure as hell wouldn’t be doing any leaf-hoarding today. She was looking at an honest-to-goodness crime scene.