Fanfic / The Scientist

The Scientist by talkingsoup is an ongoing Undertale fan fiction series focusing mainly on Dr. Gaster and Sans.

Thus far, it primarily consists of three novel-length stories. The first, The Scientist, is a Prequel following the life of Doctor Gaster, and is currently complete at 53,000 words. The second, Entropy, follows Sans in the fallout from the first story and leads up to the time of the game, and is also complete at 195,000 words. The third, How to SAVE the World, (or HTSTW) acts as a Sequel to both the previous titles and to the game itself. Mostly. As of 2022, it is complete, at 282,400 words.

A fourth story, Eight, is a side story focusing on the humans that have fallen into the underground. It is currently ongoing, at around 12,000 words.

Tropes

• Abusive Parents: Of the emotional variety, for Sans and Papyrus.
• Alternate Self: HTSTW follows two versions of Sans, switching between chapters. One is struggling to adapt to life on the surface, while the other alternates between experiencing the game's numerous Multiple Endings and waiting in the Void between Resets. They are technically the same Sans, but they are out of sync with each other.
• Armor-Piercing Question: Papyrus delivers one in HTSTW after Sans returns from the mountain and explains the Resets to him.
  Papyrus: Sans, have I died before?
• Catapult Nightmare: Sans experiences this a few times throughout the series. The most notable example is when he wakes up from the Reset where Flowey killed Papyrus for the first time.
• Cry into Chest: Sans does this to Papyrus a few times.
• Cryptic Conversation: Gaster and Spooky, while discussing the true nature of the world. Sans deliberately asks them to keep it vague, for his sanity's sake. It doesn't last.
• Despair Event Horizon: Sans comes close to hitting it several times throughout the series.
• Driven to Suicide: Sans is brought to this low only once, after Papyrus is killed by Flowey in a cruel manner. All it does is allow him to skip ahead to the start of the next reset. He is appropriately horrified when he realizes what happened, and decides it isn't worth the trouble to repeat.
  • It's also revealed that Frisk came to be in the Underground because of this.
• Drowning My Sorrows: Sans, infrequently.
• Dull Eyes of Unhappiness: A variation with Sans's eyelights. While he can control them to a certain extent, they often go out on their own whenever he experiences particularly negative emotions.
• Eldritch Abomination: After the events of The Scientist, Gaster easily counts as one. However, even more terrifying is the Error Handling Message of all things, thanks to its body being composed of constantly changing limbs stolen from other characters, including Sans, its ability to No-Sell Sans's magic, and the fact that even Gaster is terrified of the thing.
• Fictional Disability: How Sans's low stats are viewed, to the point that monster doctors and his own parents doubted he would survive beyond childhood.
• Fling a Light into the Future: During the Queen Alphys Ending, she manages to discover that their entire world is made of computer code, and that it's hackable. Since she can't do anything about it at the time, she has Sans store her findings with her dad's Time Saver, in hopes that a different, better timeline will be able to make use of it. It turns out to be vitally important to Gaster's plans, and provides the first real source of hope for Sans in a very, very long time.
• Forgets to Eat: Sans does this, due to his memory issues, which causes him to collapse from a lack of magical energy.
• Foregone Conclusion: The first story inevitably ends with Gaster being scattered across time and space.
• Good Morning, Crono: A dark variation, as the standard signifier of a major Reset occurring is the phrase "Sans woke up in Snowdin", with various additional details depending on how the previous timeline ended.
• Guilt Complex: Sans and Frisk have some severe cases of this.
• Hope Is Scary
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Justified Trope. Gaster, Betas, and everyone else who falls into the Core, along with all of their accomplishments and the changes they made to the timeline, are wiped out of existence by the Reset, with only Sans remembering them (and even he has some trouble).
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: One of the reasons Frisk had to Reset even after reaching the Golden Ending is because Sans always disappeared after a few months, and they could never figure out how or why in time to stop him. As it turns out, in the most recent timeline, Sans disappears because Spooky forces him to remember how he lied to his brother about the deaths of their friends during the King Papyrus Ending, causing him to fall into a Herois BSOD and climb the mountain.
• Parental Abandonment: Heavily implied to be what Sans and Papyrus's parents did.
• Ripple Effect Indicator: The Time Saver invented by Alphys' dad, Dr. Betas, which protects small objects nearby from the effects of time travel, allowing Sans to leave himself messages and keep track of Resets.
• Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: After the Reset, Sans is the only one who remembers the old timeline.
• Trauma-Induced Amnesia