Papyrus (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spaghettimonster) wrote2021-05-02 03:52 pm
spaghettimonster) wrote2021-05-02 03:52 pm
True pacifist / winter clock content
History sections usually aren't done anymore, but sometimes wikis are incomplete, so I'm offering this as an outline of my assumptions and justifications (largely copied from previous draft):
Time is ambiguous in Undertale. Many main characters reference things that happened in the past, but not how long ago they happened. The human's journey through the underground might take place in as little as a day. And even the year the game takes place in isn't clearly specified.
Undertale is a videogame taking place in an alternate Earth some time in the future, an unspecified number of years after 201X.
(201X is the year everyone thinks of because that's the time the game was released in, and the year mentioned in the opening video.)
At nearly the end of the game, though, we find out that the starting video depicts when the first fallen human climbed Mount Ebott and fell into a cave, only to be found by the prince of all monsters living within.
Toriel and Asgore both saved calendars from the year they met and adopted the first human child, kept in their respective homes in the Ruins and New Home, and both of those are "old" calendars dated 201X.
The kid lived with them and their son Asriel for an unspecified amount of time, at least long enough to knit Asgore a sweater, before an (intentional) incident with the young prince led to the deaths of the children, a declaration of war on humanity by the king, and the desertion by the queen.
By the start of the game, most monsters don't recognize a human by sight - even though all their hopes for freedom rest on finding and killing enough humans to break the magic barrier trapping them within the mountain's caves. Multiple NPCs gossip to the player that they heard there's a human in the underground, but never realize who they're talking to.
The captain of the Royal Guard, Undyne, does recognize a human when she sees one - but she has never fought one before, and is surprised by their resilience.
She trained with the king, Asgore, for years - since she was a young kid - but she's never met the disappeared queen before, and doesn't recognize Toriel from seeing her.
Likewise the Royal Scientist Alphys doesn't recognize Toriel by sight - meaning Toriel has been missing from the underground for at minimum enough years that two adults don't know what the disappeared queen looks like.
The shopkeeper in Snowdin, an adult in the settlement nearest to where Toriel's been living, says that the door to Ruins has been locked "for ages."
The only monsters outside the ruins who have stories about Toriel are Gerson and Asgore. The former so ancient that he was an adult warrior before the underground was ever sealed away, the latter is as functionally immortal as Toriel is.
And monster technology, based on whatever trash they've scavenged from the underground rivers, has provided them with enough supplies to have a functional underground internet, cell phones, and electric power.
So:
It's been somewhere between decades and centuries since the arrival of the first fallen human.
I assume a century, based on a comment Sans makes ("she just howls with laughter. like it's the best joke she's heard in a hundred years." He's an uncanny judge of details like that.)
It conveniently lets the numbers in Papyrus and Undyne's usernames potentially line up to the last two digits of the years they were respectively born, too.
Most of the main characters in Undertale have friends or family who tell at least one story of years before: we can hear a couple anecdotes of Toriel's time as queen, of Undyne's mischievous childhood, of Alphys leading kids into the dump to look for treasures, of Asgore's lessons on responsibility, and even Mettaton and Napstablook have stories from their past.
Papyrus and Sans don't.
No one seems to have known them before they moved to Snowdin, they don't tell any stories of their childhoods, and they don't even mention where they moved from.
Papyrus claims to know nothing about Waterfall and Hotland (other than that Hotland is terrible), which seems to point to New Home. But it's not conclusive.
There's a popular fan theory, based off (1) a note in Papyrus' concept art, (2) a comment Sans makes in some promotional material, (3) a name of a song in the soundtrack, (4) the appearance of a hidden nameless character, and (5) a comment made by another hidden character.
The theory goes: the previous, redacted Royal Scientist Doctor W.D. Gaster was Wingdings Gaster, a skeleton with a font name, and father to Papyrus and Sans. The theory further posits that Gaster experimented with time, fell in his creation, and was retroactively erased from widespread memory.
I've used this theory in previous games, where the head mods also played from the Undertale cast and approved of the theory, to explore the idea that Papyrus barely remembers his childhood due to losing the memories connected to one of the two main people in it.
I don't intend to use this headcanon extensively unless other castmates and mods approve. I'll have Papyrus largely evade the subject with vague answers and general Papyrus-strangeness.
What we actually know of before the game:
A good while before the start of the game, long enough ago to entrench themselves as parts of the town but recently enough to still be novelties, Papyrus and his brother Sans move together to the quiet border town of Snowdin.
They rent a house on the edge of town, with Sans paying the rent through mysterious means. Sans tinkers with a mysterious science box and blueprints in the basement, less and less often as he fails to accomplish anything with it, and eventually establishes himself as a regular at the local bar instead. Papyrus handles the bulk of the housework, regularly drags Sans out of the local bar, and becomes a sentry as the first step to joining the Royal Guard.
(The Royal Guard are the people tasked with protecting monsterkind from humans, to capture if not kill them, for the King to absorb their SOULs. They're respected for offering the hope of freedom to the underground, even if the Snowdin members are all dogs with no real impressive abilities.)
Papyrus pushes Sans to take a similar job, if only so his brother will get out of the house to do something more productive than miring in a depressive rut and frequenting the bar... and eventually Papyrus decides that the best way to join the Royal Guard is to ask the head of it directly, and that he should go to her home in the middle of the night to ask. She slams the door on him because she's trying to sleep, he waits outside until she's finished sleeping. Rather than be sensibly creeped out by his loitering, she's impressed by the fortitude it displays, and agrees to train him.
The actual training period only lasts a short while, but it's long enough for Undyne and Papyrus to spar and let Undyne conclude that (1) Papyrus is very tough - in durability and magical prowess - and (2) he has absolutely no willingness to kill anyone, which is something of a liability for someone applying to join a military unit with the task of killing intruding humans.
Seeing no future for him in the guard, Undyne avoids letting him down by giving him the task of meeting daily with the report from the Snowdin sentries, and begins giving him cooking lessons in hopes he'll do something else. She doesn't admit her intentions to him, and he doesn't challenge her about it, but he does eventually begin searching for another way to impress her and get her approval.
Somewhere in this general time period, the royal scientist Alphys gives up on an experiment with a golden flower and returns it to the garden in the king's castle. The flower becomes sentient, imbued with the lingering memories of a monster whose remains were absorbed the flower originally grew, and gains the power to rewind time. After the flower attempts to recreate his previous life and fails to feel love for his parents, he discovers and uses that time travel power to enter an uncountable number of time loops in which he meets everyone in the underground, attempt to befriend and solve all their personal problems for them, and then - once bored enough - begin experimenting with hurting and killing them, in the style of someone playing god in a videogame.
By the loop that the game begins in, the flower's experimenting with something far more quiet and subdued. He hasn't revealed himself to many people. He appears to Papyrus, in private places where it's just the two of them, to encourage him with flattery, predictions, and advice, pushing him toward some agenda. (This may be where Papyrus gets the idea that capturing a human would be the way to convince Undyne to let him into the Royal Guard, and that's my default assumption.)
A few weeks before the start of the game, Papyrus, Sans, Undyne, and any number of other monsters attend a costume party in Waterfall. Sans helps Papyrus make a costume for it - his "battlebody" - which he proceeds to wear all the time up through nearly all the events of the game. (It's not styled after the Royal Guard armor, but seemingly based on a mix of comic book hero and videogame character.)
Events of the Game:
By the time of the game's start, Papyrus has added more puzzles to the road along Snowdin with which to baffle, delay, and entertain an approaching human, along with practicing speeches to impress and intimidate them... And he's worked out at least a couple entertaining routines with his brother - like an entire spiel around the crossword puzzle where Papyrus pretends to be surprised that Sans only put down a piece of paper as his puzzle. (Papyrus walks past that area to get to his sentry station every day, he knows Sans hasn't buried a complicated puzzle there, and going by the version of the comments in the genocide run - where Papyrus starts to say the same things, then trails off as the human interrupts him - at least some of that conversation is staged).
Then the human arrives. It throws Papyrus in a bit of a tizzy, in which he stammers and shouts and finally recovers enough to give part of his monologue, before storming off triumphantly. He focuses more on being a good host than effectively capturing the human - he escorts them from puzzle to puzzle, seeing how they fare and offering commentary along the way, even providing (terrible, frozen) spaghetti to eat along the way.
After the last of the puzzles, Papyrus rushes ahead to the edge of town, past his and Sans' house, to block the way - and provide a boss battle. He goes through a spiel about pitying them for being lonely in a way that drips of projection, beginning to offer them friendship, then revoking the offer for the sake of his ambitions (capture human, present to Undyne, ???, popularity).
He tests them with easily avoidable attacks until they make their intentions clear (attacking, flirting, insulting, or sparing him), and pranks them with a gotcha that he and Sans seem to have collaborated on; Papyrus throws a volley of blue attacks, easily avoided by following Sans' advice to just stay still - and then he pings their soul blue, subjecting them to a sudden gravitational pull toward colliding with a quick white bone. At this point, he spends the battle tossing volleys of bone patterns at them, applying beauty products to himself, and talking aloud about his ambitions and his hopes for friendship, mulling over what he wants to do.
The human gets tripped up and damaged enough that he defeats them, knocking them out and securing them in his shed - full of dog supplies. They escape, fight again, get captured again, and wake to the improved facilities - the dog food now has hot dogs sliced into it. When they withstand his attacks on the third round, he gives in to the power of friendship and offers to help them leave.
Either way, the human leaves to continue forward, and Papyrus leaves to go meet with Undyne with his daily report. He fails to convince her to not capture or kill the human, and agrees to cooperate with her - in order to subvert her orders and help the human continue.
The human, who overheard all this, turn backs to investigate what's going on. They head to meet Papyrus for their hangout session, finding him standing outside his house, where he greets them with a stammer and a claim that he's not feeling suspicious. After a lot of shenanigans, including a brief tour through town, a more detailed and self-driven tour of his house, and the hangout session itself... Papyrus encourages them to try also befriending Undyne (claiming the human is a little intense for him, and needs more friends), gives them his number, and heads to Undyne's house to wait. It's from there that he answers their calls with fun comments about Waterfall (mostly unhelpful and whimsical) and calls them with a suspicious question about their outfit on behalf of Undyne.
In this timeline, balancing friendship between enemies works out great - the human might mock Undyne by pouring some water near her, but does give her enough to let her get up and leave with her pride in tatters. Papyrus loiters outside her home, ready to facilitate another meeting on better terms - or at least one where Undyne's sense of guest rights and honor means she can't just try killing the kid again. With a hilariously flimsy excuse, Papyrus excuses himself and lurks outside the window to prompt them into trying to become friends... and after some hurdles and a heart-to-heart, the fish and human get along like a house on fire. Literally lighting her house on fire.
Undyne heads back to join Papyrus in Snowdin, where they hang out and banter, while the human continues forward with occasional calls back to them. Royal Scientist Alphys and her "malfunctioning robot" go through a whole routine of seemingly fighting about what to do with the human, whether to help them forward or kill them, and it all ends in a live broadcast of reveals, dancing, and tearful calls from fans.
That's not the end end, though. That takes a quiet ominous exchange with Sans, a fight with Asgore that goes lethal at the end, a surprise confrontation with a flower, and then turning time backwards to take Undyne's call - at Papyrus's goading and Flowey's initial idea - to befriend Alphys, face the mysteries of the true lab and Alphys's shame, and then face the real final boss: a dead kid. The power of friendship and the refusal of broken hearts triumphs, and Frisk wakes surrounded by friends ready to join them on the surface.
True Pacifist / Winter Clock content:
Some time in the first winter after the Barrier's breaking and monsters moving to the surface (or possibly a particularly snowy September), Papyrus invites the various main friends from that adventure over to his and Sans's house for a party. Toriel, Undyne, Alphys, Asgore, Mettaton, Napstablook, Mad Mew Mew, and Flowey find their way there - though Flowey largely stays out of sight.
Papyrus's decor included clothes supporting candelabra, MTT-Winter decorations, an enormous cobbled together tree... Even a welcoming puzzle in front of the house, a labyrinth of ice, snow, and musical instruments to "baffle and confound his friends with holiday cheer." It was enough for Asgore to get stuck in, and for most of them to circumvent by entering through the back door.
Festivities included putting presents under the tree, enjoying the de-boned food that Papyrus had decoratively stuck bones into, watching MTT-holiday specials, lighting the tree together, singing carols, and locking Toriel in the garage after she got roudily drunk off Mettaton's super strong alcoholic eggnog. At some point, Papyrus exchanged gave Flowey the gift of a ribbon bow to wear as a matching scarf. By the end of the event, the living room was a mess of confetti and spears and a detached robotic leg, and Sans was happily asleep on the couch.
Time is ambiguous in Undertale. Many main characters reference things that happened in the past, but not how long ago they happened. The human's journey through the underground might take place in as little as a day. And even the year the game takes place in isn't clearly specified.
Undertale does not take place in 201X (tl;dr it's 202X minimum, and I think more like 211X)
Undertale is a videogame taking place in an alternate Earth some time in the future, an unspecified number of years after 201X.
(201X is the year everyone thinks of because that's the time the game was released in, and the year mentioned in the opening video.)
At nearly the end of the game, though, we find out that the starting video depicts when the first fallen human climbed Mount Ebott and fell into a cave, only to be found by the prince of all monsters living within.
Toriel and Asgore both saved calendars from the year they met and adopted the first human child, kept in their respective homes in the Ruins and New Home, and both of those are "old" calendars dated 201X.
The kid lived with them and their son Asriel for an unspecified amount of time, at least long enough to knit Asgore a sweater, before an (intentional) incident with the young prince led to the deaths of the children, a declaration of war on humanity by the king, and the desertion by the queen.
By the start of the game, most monsters don't recognize a human by sight - even though all their hopes for freedom rest on finding and killing enough humans to break the magic barrier trapping them within the mountain's caves. Multiple NPCs gossip to the player that they heard there's a human in the underground, but never realize who they're talking to.
The captain of the Royal Guard, Undyne, does recognize a human when she sees one - but she has never fought one before, and is surprised by their resilience.
She trained with the king, Asgore, for years - since she was a young kid - but she's never met the disappeared queen before, and doesn't recognize Toriel from seeing her.
Likewise the Royal Scientist Alphys doesn't recognize Toriel by sight - meaning Toriel has been missing from the underground for at minimum enough years that two adults don't know what the disappeared queen looks like.
The shopkeeper in Snowdin, an adult in the settlement nearest to where Toriel's been living, says that the door to Ruins has been locked "for ages."
The only monsters outside the ruins who have stories about Toriel are Gerson and Asgore. The former so ancient that he was an adult warrior before the underground was ever sealed away, the latter is as functionally immortal as Toriel is.
And monster technology, based on whatever trash they've scavenged from the underground rivers, has provided them with enough supplies to have a functional underground internet, cell phones, and electric power.
So:
It's been somewhere between decades and centuries since the arrival of the first fallen human.
I assume a century, based on a comment Sans makes ("she just howls with laughter. like it's the best joke she's heard in a hundred years." He's an uncanny judge of details like that.)
It conveniently lets the numbers in Papyrus and Undyne's usernames potentially line up to the last two digits of the years they were respectively born, too.
Papyrus doesn't mention his childhood, and neither does Sans - and it's not clear why
Most of the main characters in Undertale have friends or family who tell at least one story of years before: we can hear a couple anecdotes of Toriel's time as queen, of Undyne's mischievous childhood, of Alphys leading kids into the dump to look for treasures, of Asgore's lessons on responsibility, and even Mettaton and Napstablook have stories from their past.
Papyrus and Sans don't.
No one seems to have known them before they moved to Snowdin, they don't tell any stories of their childhoods, and they don't even mention where they moved from.
Papyrus claims to know nothing about Waterfall and Hotland (other than that Hotland is terrible), which seems to point to New Home. But it's not conclusive.
There's a popular fan theory, based off (1) a note in Papyrus' concept art, (2) a comment Sans makes in some promotional material, (3) a name of a song in the soundtrack, (4) the appearance of a hidden nameless character, and (5) a comment made by another hidden character.
The theory goes: the previous, redacted Royal Scientist Doctor W.D. Gaster was Wingdings Gaster, a skeleton with a font name, and father to Papyrus and Sans. The theory further posits that Gaster experimented with time, fell in his creation, and was retroactively erased from widespread memory.
I've used this theory in previous games, where the head mods also played from the Undertale cast and approved of the theory, to explore the idea that Papyrus barely remembers his childhood due to losing the memories connected to one of the two main people in it.
I don't intend to use this headcanon extensively unless other castmates and mods approve. I'll have Papyrus largely evade the subject with vague answers and general Papyrus-strangeness.
What we actually know of before the game:
A good while before the start of the game, long enough ago to entrench themselves as parts of the town but recently enough to still be novelties, Papyrus and his brother Sans move together to the quiet border town of Snowdin.
They rent a house on the edge of town, with Sans paying the rent through mysterious means. Sans tinkers with a mysterious science box and blueprints in the basement, less and less often as he fails to accomplish anything with it, and eventually establishes himself as a regular at the local bar instead. Papyrus handles the bulk of the housework, regularly drags Sans out of the local bar, and becomes a sentry as the first step to joining the Royal Guard.
(The Royal Guard are the people tasked with protecting monsterkind from humans, to capture if not kill them, for the King to absorb their SOULs. They're respected for offering the hope of freedom to the underground, even if the Snowdin members are all dogs with no real impressive abilities.)
Papyrus pushes Sans to take a similar job, if only so his brother will get out of the house to do something more productive than miring in a depressive rut and frequenting the bar... and eventually Papyrus decides that the best way to join the Royal Guard is to ask the head of it directly, and that he should go to her home in the middle of the night to ask. She slams the door on him because she's trying to sleep, he waits outside until she's finished sleeping. Rather than be sensibly creeped out by his loitering, she's impressed by the fortitude it displays, and agrees to train him.
The actual training period only lasts a short while, but it's long enough for Undyne and Papyrus to spar and let Undyne conclude that (1) Papyrus is very tough - in durability and magical prowess - and (2) he has absolutely no willingness to kill anyone, which is something of a liability for someone applying to join a military unit with the task of killing intruding humans.
Seeing no future for him in the guard, Undyne avoids letting him down by giving him the task of meeting daily with the report from the Snowdin sentries, and begins giving him cooking lessons in hopes he'll do something else. She doesn't admit her intentions to him, and he doesn't challenge her about it, but he does eventually begin searching for another way to impress her and get her approval.
Somewhere in this general time period, the royal scientist Alphys gives up on an experiment with a golden flower and returns it to the garden in the king's castle. The flower becomes sentient, imbued with the lingering memories of a monster whose remains were absorbed the flower originally grew, and gains the power to rewind time. After the flower attempts to recreate his previous life and fails to feel love for his parents, he discovers and uses that time travel power to enter an uncountable number of time loops in which he meets everyone in the underground, attempt to befriend and solve all their personal problems for them, and then - once bored enough - begin experimenting with hurting and killing them, in the style of someone playing god in a videogame.
By the loop that the game begins in, the flower's experimenting with something far more quiet and subdued. He hasn't revealed himself to many people. He appears to Papyrus, in private places where it's just the two of them, to encourage him with flattery, predictions, and advice, pushing him toward some agenda. (This may be where Papyrus gets the idea that capturing a human would be the way to convince Undyne to let him into the Royal Guard, and that's my default assumption.)
A few weeks before the start of the game, Papyrus, Sans, Undyne, and any number of other monsters attend a costume party in Waterfall. Sans helps Papyrus make a costume for it - his "battlebody" - which he proceeds to wear all the time up through nearly all the events of the game. (It's not styled after the Royal Guard armor, but seemingly based on a mix of comic book hero and videogame character.)
Events of the Game:
By the time of the game's start, Papyrus has added more puzzles to the road along Snowdin with which to baffle, delay, and entertain an approaching human, along with practicing speeches to impress and intimidate them... And he's worked out at least a couple entertaining routines with his brother - like an entire spiel around the crossword puzzle where Papyrus pretends to be surprised that Sans only put down a piece of paper as his puzzle. (Papyrus walks past that area to get to his sentry station every day, he knows Sans hasn't buried a complicated puzzle there, and going by the version of the comments in the genocide run - where Papyrus starts to say the same things, then trails off as the human interrupts him - at least some of that conversation is staged).
Then the human arrives. It throws Papyrus in a bit of a tizzy, in which he stammers and shouts and finally recovers enough to give part of his monologue, before storming off triumphantly. He focuses more on being a good host than effectively capturing the human - he escorts them from puzzle to puzzle, seeing how they fare and offering commentary along the way, even providing (terrible, frozen) spaghetti to eat along the way.
After the last of the puzzles, Papyrus rushes ahead to the edge of town, past his and Sans' house, to block the way - and provide a boss battle. He goes through a spiel about pitying them for being lonely in a way that drips of projection, beginning to offer them friendship, then revoking the offer for the sake of his ambitions (capture human, present to Undyne, ???, popularity).
He tests them with easily avoidable attacks until they make their intentions clear (attacking, flirting, insulting, or sparing him), and pranks them with a gotcha that he and Sans seem to have collaborated on; Papyrus throws a volley of blue attacks, easily avoided by following Sans' advice to just stay still - and then he pings their soul blue, subjecting them to a sudden gravitational pull toward colliding with a quick white bone. At this point, he spends the battle tossing volleys of bone patterns at them, applying beauty products to himself, and talking aloud about his ambitions and his hopes for friendship, mulling over what he wants to do.
The human gets tripped up and damaged enough that he defeats them, knocking them out and securing them in his shed - full of dog supplies. They escape, fight again, get captured again, and wake to the improved facilities - the dog food now has hot dogs sliced into it. When they withstand his attacks on the third round, he gives in to the power of friendship and offers to help them leave.
(Peculiarly, Papyrus recounts the same commentary through his fight each time they fight, as though the entire exploration of his worries about capturing a human was something he'd already considered and planned a monologue about.)
(This isn't just a failure of game design - he gives very different commentary at the start of each of the repeat fights. It seems like he's not planning on capturing them at all, but befriending them after putting on a show of reluctance, through which he shows them how to survive a difficult fight and befriend someone resistant to friendship. He later repeatedly and insistently tries to get the human to befriend Undyne, and he's still operating under some secret advice from Flowey, so it's entirely possible that's what he's doing.)Either way, the human leaves to continue forward, and Papyrus leaves to go meet with Undyne with his daily report. He fails to convince her to not capture or kill the human, and agrees to cooperate with her - in order to subvert her orders and help the human continue.
The human, who overheard all this, turn backs to investigate what's going on. They head to meet Papyrus for their hangout session, finding him standing outside his house, where he greets them with a stammer and a claim that he's not feeling suspicious. After a lot of shenanigans, including a brief tour through town, a more detailed and self-driven tour of his house, and the hangout session itself... Papyrus encourages them to try also befriending Undyne (claiming the human is a little intense for him, and needs more friends), gives them his number, and heads to Undyne's house to wait. It's from there that he answers their calls with fun comments about Waterfall (mostly unhelpful and whimsical) and calls them with a suspicious question about their outfit on behalf of Undyne.
In this timeline, balancing friendship between enemies works out great - the human might mock Undyne by pouring some water near her, but does give her enough to let her get up and leave with her pride in tatters. Papyrus loiters outside her home, ready to facilitate another meeting on better terms - or at least one where Undyne's sense of guest rights and honor means she can't just try killing the kid again. With a hilariously flimsy excuse, Papyrus excuses himself and lurks outside the window to prompt them into trying to become friends... and after some hurdles and a heart-to-heart, the fish and human get along like a house on fire. Literally lighting her house on fire.
Undyne heads back to join Papyrus in Snowdin, where they hang out and banter, while the human continues forward with occasional calls back to them. Royal Scientist Alphys and her "malfunctioning robot" go through a whole routine of seemingly fighting about what to do with the human, whether to help them forward or kill them, and it all ends in a live broadcast of reveals, dancing, and tearful calls from fans.
That's not the end end, though. That takes a quiet ominous exchange with Sans, a fight with Asgore that goes lethal at the end, a surprise confrontation with a flower, and then turning time backwards to take Undyne's call - at Papyrus's goading and Flowey's initial idea - to befriend Alphys, face the mysteries of the true lab and Alphys's shame, and then face the real final boss: a dead kid. The power of friendship and the refusal of broken hearts triumphs, and Frisk wakes surrounded by friends ready to join them on the surface.
True Pacifist / Winter Clock content:
Some time in the first winter after the Barrier's breaking and monsters moving to the surface (or possibly a particularly snowy September), Papyrus invites the various main friends from that adventure over to his and Sans's house for a party. Toriel, Undyne, Alphys, Asgore, Mettaton, Napstablook, Mad Mew Mew, and Flowey find their way there - though Flowey largely stays out of sight.
Papyrus's decor included clothes supporting candelabra, MTT-Winter decorations, an enormous cobbled together tree... Even a welcoming puzzle in front of the house, a labyrinth of ice, snow, and musical instruments to "baffle and confound his friends with holiday cheer." It was enough for Asgore to get stuck in, and for most of them to circumvent by entering through the back door.
Festivities included putting presents under the tree, enjoying the de-boned food that Papyrus had decoratively stuck bones into, watching MTT-holiday specials, lighting the tree together, singing carols, and locking Toriel in the garage after she got roudily drunk off Mettaton's super strong alcoholic eggnog. At some point, Papyrus exchanged gave Flowey the gift of a ribbon bow to wear as a matching scarf. By the end of the event, the living room was a mess of confetti and spears and a detached robotic leg, and Sans was happily asleep on the couch.