The Moon, chapter 24: Fabrication

The room opened to the middle of a bright white hallway, not unlike the kind you would see in a hospital. To her left, the hallway went on for a while before turning to the right. To her right, it was much the same, except it turned to the left at the end of that hallway. Blook noticed Susie observing the place, and hurried her along.
“It would really be best if we got going... I'll be able to explain stuff a lot better when we get up to the roof.”
At least the place had a roof at all. Directly parallel from the room she was in was a set of elevator doors resting on the other side of the hallway. With the quick push of a button, the elevator doors opened. She wasn't exactly too happy to be in another elevator so soon, but this one seemed a lot safer, at the very least. The inside of the elevator was strangely colored a dark purplish red, accented by gold ribbon-like designs that covered the walls. Strangely high class, Susie thought.

Blook pressed the topmost button on the elevator panel, of which there were only five buttons laid out vertically. From top to bottom, they were labeled R, Re, M, Ma, D. The elevator doors closed, as they began heading upward. A small screen above the doors read “M”, and slowly ascended up the list of letters until with a high pitched ding, the doors slid open. Susie felt a little bit more confident in her walking, and although it was a bit difficult, she let go of Blook and began to sort of limp out of the room. Blook almost tried to stop her, but held back and stayed silent. The roof's surface was rusted and aged from innumerable years of weather. Susie felt a familiar cold wind blow across her body, and looked off of the roof from a rusted railing on the edge of the building.

She seemed to still be in the same “Sea of Mistakes”, but in a completely different place. She stood atop a large five story building, held high above the water by four immense cylindrical support beams on all four corners of the main building. The outside of the building was weathered and rusted heavily from the winds and the water of the sea, most notably and most concerning on the supports, which were completely brown and red from the rust. Miles around in every direction were small islands that were made out of a gray, snow like substance that had weird looking bumps and sticks that emerged from their surfaces. There were a few buildings like the one Susie was standing on scattered around, but  most either looked long abandoned or were half submerged in the water, empty shells of their former selves. Looking even further away, she saw silhouettes in the distance of gigantic skeletal, if not, rotting hands reaching into the pitch black, starless sky, the bodies they belonged to unseen to her.

By far, the most terrifying thing she saw was in front of her, far, far away from anything else in her vision, but it was large enough that she could see it from what must've been hundreds of miles away. Hanging by gigantic steel chains that ascended into the darkness of the sky and beyond her vision was an incredibly massive metal cube that had to have been innumerable miles across each side. She recognized it as what made up the steel ceiling back in the elevator. This means she must have floated quite the long distance to be able to be found here. It's a wonder she was alive at all. But this was the least of her worries. A revelation hit her like train that made her heart sink. Her entire life, all of her memories, and everything she ever knew and experienced was... fake. Stuck inside a cube floating in a sea of darkness.

For all she knew, she was just... made a couple weeks ago. Created with false memories and pushed into a world she had no genuine close attachment to. Susie needed to think about this. She had suspiciously few memories of being outside that small village she'd been in all her life. She can't actually remember much before that day she went into the storage closet with Kris. It was all a blurry mess of half memories and second guesses, but some part of her brain blocked it out of her mind until she left the cube. Was it all a lie? Was anything she did worth it? Were Kris and Toriel and Alphys and all the others even real? Surely if they were anything like Susie, they would be, right? Even if they don't realize it, they may as well be real, right?

Susie sat down and laid her back against the railing, it squealing a little. Blook looked towards her.

“Th-That's the test chamber. The cube. That's where the beings from the moon do their experiments. They've tried cloning old monsters from worlds ago and putting them in new worlds with a few new monsters and humans. T-Trying to make a paradise. But it never works. And everything that doesn't work... they send out here. Burned to ash. Sometimes they d-don't even go that far and just d-dispose of their waste intact. I-I found you a couple miles toward the cube from here, washed up on one of the last ash islands in the area in a pool of blood. You must have gotten out of there. I was happy you got out but... You were technically dead for... a couple days. Your heart s-stopped beating. I don't know what's keeping your heart going, but... it has to be something p-pretty determined. I'm sorry this happened, that you couldn't j-just live on happy in there. That the truth is so... terrible. But, look on the bright side, you're free now. Free from their influence and-”

“I need to get back in there.”
“... E-Excuse me?”
“I need to save them. My friends are in there.”
“B...But Susie, they're-”
“What? Fake? I don't care. They're real to me. And as far as I'm concerned, I'm real too. I don't care if I was made yesterday and everything I've felt was made up, I still felt it. And that's what matters. The people in there? They feel pain just as real people would. They feel happiness and sadness and whatever the hell they want to feel. So I'm going to get back into there, and I'm going to get them out.”
“... W-Well... We, um... We can let you stay here before you try that... A-And maybe help, but... It'll be tough.”
“I know. But hell, if I can survive being blown across an ocean, I can survive whatever they can throw at me.”
“I-If you say so... Uhm... Anything else you wanna know?”
Susie thought about it. She should probably get to know as much as she could so she knew how to tackle this. If she wanted to save everyone, she needed all the info she could muster.

“Alright.”
Blook perked up. Susie looked at him with a look of insurmountable determination in her yellow eyes.
“Tell me everything.”