The Moon, chapter 37: Unfaltered

A wave of shivers shot through Susie's body from the realizations she had. A prison of horrid monstrosities. a fountain of disgust, and who knows what else laid just below the house she had been taking residence in for years. She never heard a single trace of anything, smelled the disease and rot, or felt the hollow space underneath the floorboards. Yet, here it was. A nightmarish realm just underneath the house she felt so safe inside. Was this the reason she was at the epicenter of all the strange activity? Was her house secretly the ground zero for the horrid deeds the moon creatures partook in?

The next thought that crossed her mind was what she actually saw when she explored the hidden basement in her house. The pit she thought led to a void was the one she saw above her. And at the far end of that room... The barred up door. Even if she found the other side of that door, it was bolted shut from the other side with a steel beam. Even if Susie regained her strength, she didn't have much faith that she could break down that door. This left her with the only other option being climbing up through the hole in the ceiling, which was far less convenient than simply climbing up the elevator shaft.

One of the last thoughts she had was how none of this made any physical sense. The door she found south of hometown and Susie's house was a fair distance apart, far more than one hallway and half a room away. Maybe she was passing through some sort of dimensional doorway, or some sort of alternate reality where the distance traveled inside is far more than the distance traveled in the normal world. This thought seemed unimportant at first, but she realized that if the fabric of time and space itself could be changed by whatever was in charge of this place, that practically anything was possible within its mile wide steel walls. Anything she knew could very well be a fabrication.

Susie decided that more time thinking was less time acting, and that if she were to get out of here, she needed to get out as soon as she could. She immediately walked to the left of the room, heading to another set of brass double doors. Almost immediately after doing so, she felt a strange, stinging sensation on the back of her head. And then, immediately, she felt drowsy. “What the hell?” Susie thought as she fell on her hands and knees. As her palms connected on the flesh ridden, pulsating floor, she heard the radio from upstairs change from a distorted voice to an eardrum piercing, high pitched electrical screech. She caught a glimpse of the bird creature physically recoiling in agony, falling to its back and writhing for a few seconds before hurriedly scrambling to its feet and sprinting out of the room. Even though she witnessed this, she saw nothing that could've been the cause of her sudden onset of sleepiness. Susie felt her strength falter even more severely, and she rolled over onto her back, her body laid out in a star position.

Susie's vision split and faded multiple times, and there was not an atom in her body that could force itself to move. She could only look at the ceiling. The square hole at the top of the room was still letting in a good amount of light, and without this light she may not have noticed the long, red, tendril-like arm above her. It had something white and reflective on the end, and it seemed to be retracting into a part of the ceiling shrouded by darkness. It slowly lifted itself into the inky black above, and just before her consciousness returned, she felt her body being dragged across the floor, towards the door she was heading to originally. The thing that was dragging her remained unseen.

The next thing Susie felt is the constriction of leather around her wrists, ankles, and neck. Her eyes shot open as soon as the first bit of consciousness dripped into her skull. She moved her head around as best she could, but there wasn't much to survey in her surroundings. A small, dim light hung from a black cord directly above her, but it only illuminated the area around her, about a foot in every direction. She could only barely see the floor below her, its appearance being similar to the rest of the area. She seemed to be strapped to a metal table or flat surface of some sort that was tilted on its side, more vertical than not. Besides the small area in the light's embrace, she could barely see a thing. That is, except for an incredibly dim light she saw at the end of the room. It was very thin, so thin that it took her eyes adjusting to the darkness to be able to see it, and it ran vertically up the wall for a bit. Her depth perception being less than optimal, she couldn't tell just how far the light went up the wall, but she suspected this as light leaking in between the closed brass doors. She could only assume that she was on the other side of the door she had been walking to.

Susie then noticed a key part of her surroundings that she had failed to notice before. Her depth perception wasn't perfect of course, but she was pretty sure that if it was, in fact, light coming through the door, that it wouldn't abruptly cut off around the middle of her vision. She was also pretty sure that she should be able to see a little bit of the floor just in front of the door if it had went down all the way. But she didn't. This meant that something was blocking the light. Something directly in front of her, a couple meters away at most. Then, a pair of lights appeared, flickering on and pointing directly at Susie. As much as they resembled eyes in a basic sense, they were far from natural, and nothing like the white glowing eyes some of the creatures she's encountered had. They almost seemed like car headlights, and were so bright that it temporarily blinded Susie. With no arms to shield herself from the light, she could only squint and make out what little she could. What she saw was the last thing she expected.

There was a short, human figure sitting on a chair directly in front of her. However, this thing was anything but human. It seemed to be made out of a mixture of flesh, wires and electrical devices she didn't recognize or could put a name to. The amalgamation of red, natural muscle and bone mixed with the constructed nature of everything else left Susie in complete confusion and disgust. This wasn't even the strangest part, however. The thing got out of its chair, not by sitting up, but by being lifted, hoisted up by wires that ascended into darkness. These wires were placed at each major joint and limb of its body, while a large, messy and tangled mess of cords and wires extended from its back and continued above. It moved, or more so hovered a bit closer towards Susie in a puppet-like fashion. before its lights dimmed to a level where she could see in front of her without being blinded. With this, she could see its face. “Face” being an overstatement. Flesh and electronics, just like the rest of it, except for two large vehicle headlights acting as eyes, and where one's mouth would be, a small black speaker.

Susie could no longer hold her tongue. She knew she was in no position to make threats, and though it hurt her self worth to do so, she could think of no other choice but to plead.
“Let me go. Please.”
The speaker, though crackly and low quality, emitted a voice. A male, soft spoken yet stern voice.
“Hello Moonchild. We have lots of work to do.”
“Moonchild?”
“One gifted individual, attuned to the moon and her ever-radiant vision. You've been chosen. What a shame that is for you.”
“I have no idea what you're talking about, alright? I just want to get back home, I don't care if I'm some chosen one, I have to get back to my friends.”
“Above, are they? Not while you're down here, not while you have the gift. Poor choice of wording 'chosen' is. You give yourself too much credit. At worst, you were chosen at random. At best, you were chosen out of a lack for any other options. Do not take your gift as anything more than a stroke of luck.”
“If I'm so unimportant then, why don't you let me go?”
“You can be useful. I can be too, as long as you comply. You will see your acquaintances again as long as you do what I ask. If that is your one goal, however, it would seem that's your only choice.”
“And if I try to leave without doing that?”
“Your life ends. I gather what little knowledge I can from your brain, and I wait for another to come. If self preservation is a goal, your choice is simple. However, if you knew all I did, you would know it is in your best interest to listen to me.”
Susie sighed in defeat.
“...What do you want then?”

The puppet figure slouched as the rustling of metal and flesh echoed, bringing its grotesque head closer to Susie's.
“There are many here that wish to leave this cursed place. Not only in our chapel of flesh and blood, but below, in the sea, and deeper below that. At the current time, escape is impossible. Not only are we unable to enter the realm above us, but any in the sea, or otherwise, are unable to enter the hanging cells that bind us. No matter the power these being hold. There is something within the core of this planet that keeps us here. Something left behind by the ones above as an effort to keep their experiments as clean and sterile as possible. Something screams from below the surface if we ever get too close to an area they deem off limits. A petrifying scream that keeps us locked to our respective areas. Many of us, being results of these experiments, feel the will to end them, and stop their conductors. The will to end the cycle of suffering. To break free.”

“And you think me going to the core of the planet and destroying whatever is there will end it? What makes me so special that I can't hear by these so called screams?”
“You're one of the few original creations of their make, and your kind seems to be able to wander freely. Their methods of testing are incredibly barbaric, taking entire societies from their original locations and locking them within cubes for testing. The goal of these tests are unknown, and from what I understand, none of them have shown any sign of success. A very small amount of their tests seem to have been dedicated to creating original worlds, entities and such. You seem to have been one of them, and the most successful one yet, it seems. But that's neither here nor there. If you wish to see your allies, do what must be done at the core of this planet. You'll know when it happens.”

“How do I know you and the rest won't just slaughter all of my friends?”
“Your friends, the subjects, are the least of our concerns. We hold no hate for them, only the conductors of the tests. Besides, even if I wished to leave this place, I cannot. As you can tell, I am very much a part of the chapel. Our hearts beat as one. If I were to disconnect myself, I would no longer live. It's with this knowledge that you know that my desires are not ones of selfishness. I wish for the cycle to end. That is all.”

“Why do you keep calling it a chapel?”
“At one point, judging by the engravings and sculptures, this was truly a place of reverence for the moon, and the ones above as well. Of course, the ones who constructed this place had the opposite opinion of us. We did not destroy their structures, only defiled. Leaving a reminder of our hatred for them is the only thing that keeps us sane.”
“You call any of the things here 'sane'?”
“It gets much worse than here. When a world is abandoned, it's denizens are not usually wiped out first, and instead sent to the sea to rot. If they are not brought here by one of my own, and fail to keep the hate of their creators in their hearts, they... change. A test subject without a test loses it's purpose. A mistake is born. It takes a long time, but they eventually become nothing close to their past selves, their minds going blank, and their bodies changing and morphing. Regardless of whether or not she was created by them, or merely stolen from another realm. You have met... 'her' before, yes? The one who despises the whirs of electricity and machinery. She is one of the oldest, and most powerful ones. Ascended beyond mere rage for the ones above, and evolving physically to a point where she is unrecognizable in comparison to her original form. She's been there for... I'm actually not sure how long. Far beyond my time, and far beyond yours. Wandering. Waiting. Striking at anything she deems worth destroying. She alone has the pure strength to stop the cycle, yet even she is halted by the core. And of course, you are the only one that can change this.”

“How do you know all of this?”
“My memories are a haze, but I am fairly sure I used to be one of the moon beings. I have knowledge of things that I simply should not, and one of my first memories was my emaciated form falling from the sky, and into the sea of mistakes. I must have made a terrible error for them to discard one of their own in such a way. This is coupled with the fact that I can see through all of the ones I control, and my... quite extensive time living within these walls. The time for my full story is not now, perhaps once the cycle is broken and this nightmare is over.”
“... I'm not putting my life on the line for something that doesn't work.”
“I would not take such risks without the proper amount of confidence.”

Susie thought about this for quite a while. Even though she had no other options, she had a lot to think about. What horrors could lurk beneath the sea? How would she even get to the core? Could she handle the dangers, even with the help from this puppet? And is he to be trusted at all? Again, a staggering lack of options left her with no other choice. The thing that scared her the most, however, was the fear that she could end up like that massive, god like creature in the sea of mistakes if she lost any resemblance of a goal or hatred for something. She had flashbacks to Suze, and how her terrible fate is one she very much did not want to mimic. She was sure she had plenty of time before it got as bad as either of those, but she did not want to take any chances.

“If you think this will make things better in the long run, and stop these tests, then I'll do it. But I can't do it alone, I'm incredibly weak from a fight a while ago, and I have no weapons.”
“I will do what I can to mend your injuries and arm you properly. All you have to do is make sure my efforts do not go to waste.”
“Looks like we're both at a lack for better options at this point.”
“... That may be so.”

The two stood silently for a moment before out of the corner of Susie's eyes, she saw two tendrils like the one she saw that drugged her descend from the ceiling, somehow cutting the leather that kept her in place. She slumped to the ground, but after a moment stood back up. The puppet creature was only two thirds of her height, but seeing the terrible state his body was in, it made sense. Susie looked into the dull light of his eyes, unsure of what to do or say. Luckily, the puppet broke the silence for her.

“Are we ready for preparations? I sense the time we have to waste dwindling.”

Flashes of Hazel and Toriel's smiling, welcoming faces, Kris's embrace, and everyone in Hometown's gracious smiles went through her mind. She found a newfound hope. A reason to fight. There was a light, and for the first time in a while, a genuine smile etched it's way across her face.

“Yeah. Let's end this nightmare.”