because. okay, look. the way that i’ve come to understand dess’s disappearance is:
she went into the bunker.
inside the bunker is another dark world. the “original” dark world, so to speak.
i believe she discovered the dark world on her own, after fiddling with and eventually breaking the lock on the bunker doors over the course of several days. she was just curious about what was inside. excited, she tried to bring asriel, noelle, and kris along to show them the amazing world inside the bunker. due to circumstances i’m about to get to, only kris and possiblynoelle made it in with her.
something went wrong, and only kris (and noelle, if she was there, and for the rest of this post i’m going to just roll with the idea that she was) made it out. noelle ended up repressing most of the incident, while kris retained enough of it to try to tell people about the world inside the bunker. no one believed them, but the place just… feels a bit haunted now. it was already creepy enough before it became associated with dess’s disappearance. i’m more or less certain that if snowy hadn’t interrupted them, monster kid would have said, “what if there’s really another world in there?”
side note: i think there’s a good chance that kris, until recent events, was starting to believe the world in the bunker was just a dream, too. but now they know it really was real. now they might know where dess is. (double side note:i don’t think kris is the knight who opened the fountains in the supply closet and the abandoned classroom. that was someone else. who? idk. they might have been the one who opened the fountain in the library, though.)
the night of the bunker misadventure just so happened to be the night of one of the worst blizzards hometown has ever seen.
the snow started coming down about halfway to the bunker. dess reassured everyone that they would be fine and could wait it out there; they just needed to hurry; she seemed so confident and so sure, that everyone chose to trust her judgement. unfortunately, the storm got worse very quickly. it became hard to see, and for little kris and noelle, it was hard to keep up in the wind. the group began to separate. kris and noelle ended up at the bunker with dess, while asriel got turned around and started walking back towards town, where he ran into the frantic search party comprised of all their parents, undyne, and some other adults.
i’m pretty insistent on dess’s disappearance coinciding with a snowstorm but not really having anything to do with it because, for one, it offers an explanation for noelle’s seemingly trauma-related response to the cold (that one customer in the store saying she sometimes just stands with the freezer door open, staring inside). and if there was a snowstorm the same night she vanished, then—well, it’s easy to declare the cause for her disappearance, isn’t it? it’s strange that a body was never found, but if monsters in deltarune turn to dust after death (i’m still not convinced they necessarily do), then maybe it’s not so strange. in the strong winds, her dust would have been long gone. or: who knows what wild animal could have gotten a hold of her?
that’s just the official declaration, though. that doesn’t mean everyone in hometown buys it. but that’s besides the point.
and mainly i insist on this because now we have a very interesting parallel to draw between her and berdly in the snowgrave route. both “vanish” in a terrible, terrible snowstorm. (i don’t think it’s a coincidence that the visuals for snowgrave look like a blizzard.) but i was thinking about it, and we can take the parallel further actually.
we are all more or less in agreement that it’s pretty damn likely that dess is stuck in the void/code of the game like gaster is. there’s a good chance that she’s the voice in the strings that’s calling for help. so, going off of how i interpret her disappearance—if she’s just in a dark world, that doesn’t make much sense, right? how did she get into the void from there? and even if no one believed kris’s story, the bunker would have been searched. like, the “world inside the bunker” bit sounds like a stretch, but any reasonable adult would conclude that the kids probably tried to take shelter in there. butif the bunker had been searched, then they would have discovered the dark world in there, right??
okay, well. what if the fountain had been sealed?
i’m not sure who/what/how. i’m leaning towards some kind of freak accident. it seems that kris’s process for sealing the fountains is pretty automatic, so maybe if they were just… brought too close to it. maybe this is where their issues with their soul started. i don’t know. what i do have an idea of is this: the two times we’ve seen a fountain sealed, it “cleans up” a bit. the lightners are brought back into their world in a way that makes sense, either to them (noelle and berdly thinking they’re waking up from an accidental nap) or to anyone who might walk in on them (kris and susie looking like they just hung out in the old classroom playing chess and old board games). it’s a combination of intent and whether the lightners believe the dark world is real or not. so when dess uses all of her strength to pick up noelle and kris and shove them out of the world that’s crumbling away into nothingness, at her own expense, they are quite literally shoved out of the bunker and into the cold snow outside, quickly falling unconscious due to shock and because they probably hit their heads, and the double doors of the bunker swing shut behind them.
and dess is swept away with the dark world. she’s now stuck in-between the worlds of light and dark. she exists, and yet, she doesn’t. she has gaster for company, and yet, she doesn’t.
the snowgrave route has raised the question of what happens when a lightner’s soul is stuck when a dark fountain is sealed. what if the popular theory for dess’s fate is our answer? i think berdly’s case would be different in a lot of ways, for a lot of reasons, but the core of it remains the same. he’s stuck between existence and nonexistence, able to be reached through what is—from our perspective but who knows what it is from an in-universe perspective—the code of the game.
perhaps because he is a lightner, he is a little more There, a little more consistent, than gaster’s fragmented self. dess has someone to talk to. someone who happened to be her little sister’s close friend, someone who can tell her about the person noelle has grown into over the years. someone, who can tell her that something is wrong.
could be interesting if, together, they found a way to tear through the boundaries of reality and broke into a future dark world. i’m not sure how they would manifest, because while i’ve settled on dess retaining her body, years in the void has caused her to become a little more..malleable. kinda like mr. goop-i-mean-gaster. and the idea with berdly is that because his body was frozen in the dark world, his consciousness/soul/self/whatever you want to call it was separated and thrown into the void. he’snot physical, at all. but all that just opens the door to some fun design possibilities, doesn’t it? :)
They have good reason to generally trust others - Kris grew up in Hometown, which has about 95% good-natured people, and 5% inscrutable assholes, which is much better odds than one gets in human towns.
But this trusting nature has gotten taken advantage of before.
so like…. no mercy au where instead of noelle being the one you use, its lancer instead???? idk if anyone else has done this. i call it the spades route :)
you have to choose the “no triple trucies” option and, instead of her joining your party anyways, she goes on ahead to the next room. this is where you start the run
lots more info + images below the cut :)
going into the following room continues a normal route and she joins your party, but if you stay in the alley and go into your KEYS to select lancer, his card pops out and he appears confused for a moment because despite his various amounts of dialogue in the normal game, there are a few rooms where he doesnt have any new remarks about plot progression, so this could apply as an area where he wasn’t paying attention for the past few rooms.
choosing “we split up” would cause lancer to return to your items because he thinks it would be easier to look for them with just kris going on foot, which immediately abandons the route.
you backtrack after this like you would in the snowgrave route. it starts out a bit slow because it follows the same mechanic of defending until you have enough tp; instead of iceshock, lancer casts SPADETHRASH, which immediately turns the enemy into a statue like lancer and rouxls do in the normal route later on. this is like a parallel to being frozen solid in ice; the description upon interacting with the statues would be brief and similar to the normal description for the iced enemies, stating that they’re “petrified solid.”
that’s all im gonna put in this post because im making more drawings/edits/etc for this but yeas. tee hee
