UnderAsriel

29 - Dear Old Grandpa

Chara walked ahead of Kel, poring over the open map. They didn't bother with telling her where they were going. They simply expected her to follow, as they led her through violet hallways and up violet stairs and across violet rooms and around violet corners, and that's exactly what Kel did.  Given her luck and Chara's strange intuition, she figured Chara had a much better chance of finding Frisk than she did. So she followed the child, without question, keeping a close few feet behind and wondering where, if anywhere, they were actually going.

Part of her still felt sick about leaving the freezing chambers. Despite abandoning her post, she was keeping a close eye on her phone, and Flowey had yet to say anything about starting the coup. If they were caught now, she'd have messed up the entire plan.

Then again, it didn't seem like they were going to be caught anytime soon. Kel had thought there would be tons of guards patrolling the inside of Asriel's castle - it was Asriel's castle, after all - but even after all the square footage they'd covered, all the rooms they'd traversed, they had yet to see a single soul. Either the palace was completely deserted, or Chara was just remarkably gifted at evading people.

Both of which she could believe. Chara seemed almost supernatural. And... she could understand why people wouldn't want to hang around this place. Asriel's palace was kind of a eyesore. Excepting the scattered paintings hanging randomly about, everything was purple, down to the walls and the long plush carpets. Even Royal Guards had to get sick of the color at some point.

Kel wondered what absolute disaster of an interior design artist had been hired to decorate this place. Wasn't like every palace down here was an eyesore. She remembered Sans's castle as being much more aesthetic, maintaining the classic Hamlet-esque fortress feel while still incorporating the royal color. He was obviously a much better decorator. Or maybe just much less obnoxious.

Though, now that she was thinking about it, she remembered seeing red rugs in Sans's castle. Not purple, though purple had certainly been represented as well. Red. The color of the Resistance.

Alphys's influence, or...?

"This way," said Chara suddenly, the first thing they'd said in over fifteen minutes of randoming around. They ducked through a slightly-ajar wooden door to the left, then stopped, just inside the room.

...Okay then.

Kel followed, peering curiously over their much-shorter head.

The acrid smell of paint hit her instantly. The odor was so bad, it was practically physical. She wrinkled her nose, resisting the urge to recoil, and squinted around the space, wondering what had Chara so suddenly interested.

There was no doubting that the room was something different. For one thing, it was extremely bright. Light was everywhere, and it wasn't the dark purple torchlight Kel had become accustomed to, but a bright clear light, like the inside of a classroom. For another thing, gone, finally, was the endless lavender wallpaper. The walls here were painted yellow, a pale, cheerful yellow that sang of buttercups and summer breeze. Asriel's awful design artist obviously hadn't gotten their violet-smeared talons anywhere near this room's decor.

For a third thing, the room was huge, much bigger than any of the cramped spaces Kel and Chara had traipsed through so far. It was the size of a ballet studio, or an indoor gym. And it was made even bigger by the fact that there was practically nothing in it. Shelves lined the walls, filled to the brims with pots of multi-colored paint and assorted brushes, but there was no furniture, nothing except a single easel set up in the center, and, behind it, a single stool.

And that brought her to the fourth thing.

Because the stool wasn't empty. There was a person sitting on it, painting the easel. Kel couldn't see their face - it was blocked by the huge canvas - but the canvas didn't block everything. Below the canvas were two striped pajama-clad legs attached to a pair of big, fluffy feet. To one side of the canvas was a thick purple-robed arm holding a palette, and to the other, the elbow of the other arm, moving back and forth in smooth, rapid strokes.