Name: Zero
DW username: n/a
E-Mail: arcaneswearwords [at] gmail [dot] com
IM: arcaneswearwords
Plurk: n/a

Other Characters: Alex Kralie (rosswood)

Character Name: Frisk
Series: Undertale
Timeline: After the True Pacifist ending
Canon Resource Link: right here



Character History: This is the entire game history so BUCKLE UP. Obviously it'll contain all the True Pacifist spoilers. It's worth nothing that Frisk is the player character and therefore meant to be something of a "blank slate," but it's only in the True Pacifist route that Frisk actually becomes their own character and decouples from the child the player has been playing as throughout the entire game. Due to the specific actions that need to be taken to achieve the True Pacifist route, that route is the only one that truly resonates with Frisk's nature and adequately describes them.

Not much about Frisk's early life is known. They're a kid of ambiguous age, gender, and race, but whatever kind of home life they had it was bad enough or forgettable enough for them to decide to wander to Mount Ebott, a mountain where it was fabled that people would disappear with a startling regularity, particularly children. In a not-terribly-startling turn of events, Frisk fell into the hole at the mountain’s summit and ended up in the world known simply as the Underground, where all of monsterkind was banished after losing a war against the humans.

Due to the nature of Undertale's world and the way certain characters and events occur, it's safe to assume that even by the time the True Pacifist route rolls around, this isn't Frisk's first time going through the Underground. They're implied to have done it several times and then RESET once they reached the end, starting at the beginning and mostly wiping everyone's memory to do so, either in hopes to find a better ending or out of curiosity as to what would happen if they did something different. The only route in which Frisk actually comes into their own and becomes separate from the player character is the True Pacifist route, which is the timeline related below, but I'll be assuming they have some memory of previous RESETs.

Frisk landed on a patch of golden flowers, and they didn't know it, but there was a SOUL that lingered there, sleeping in the soil. A child was buried there once, as filled with determination as the child that landed atop their grave. As this SOUL, this character awoke, they began to realize that this child, crossing through the Underground, was someone who, in their tumble from the mountain's summit, was irrevocably bound to them. And so this second SOUL would follow them throughout the Underground: as a guide, an advisor, and above all, a narrator. With this new companion, Frisk pressed on until they encountered their first monster: an unassuming flower named Flowey. He introduced them to the concept of EXP and LOVE, explaining (lying) that this was how monsters shared friendliness and affection, and immediately demonstrated by viciously attacking Frisk's SOUL - the culmination of their very being. Frisk was saved by a bipedal goat monster who blew away the bothersome flower with a burst of fire magic and introduced herself as Toriel.

Toriel led Frisk through the largely-deserted portion of the Underground known simply as the Ruins. Frisk bumped into a variety of monsters along the way, but took every effort to spare each one instead of fighting them, even befriending them. Toriel eventually showed Frisk to her house and unofficially adopted them. However, when Frisk asked how to leave the Ruins, Toriel became quiet and subdued, and then disappeared into the house’s basement.

Frisk followed. Toriel told them repeatedly to go back and live happily upstairs, safe and sound from the rest of the Underground, but Frisk persisted. The basement contained a passageway out of the Ruins and into the Underground proper, but Toriel blocked the way and told Frisk that they would have to FIGHT her to get past, and prove that they were strong enough to survive without her care. She had seen child after child pass through the Ruins only to die at the hands of a monster on the other side. She did not want to see it happen to another. But Frisk refused to fight. They refused to flee. They simply took Toriel’s attacks quietly, dodged them, and repeatedly SPARED Toriel until finally she subsided and let them pass on through.

They entered the Underground after briefly encountering Flowey, who taunted them for their pacifism, even mocking them for participating in timelines in which they watched Toriel die. Nonplussed, they proceeded to the edge of a snowy woodland, near a town known as Snowdin. They were greeted by a punning skeleton named Sans, who introduced them to his enthusiastic-if-somewhat-incompetent brother named Papyrus. They befriended both skeletons in short order, even going on a mock “date” with the latter, who then let them pass through Snowdin to the region of the Underground known as Waterfall. There they were actively hunted by the Underground’s local hero, the captain of the Royal Guard - Undyne. The power of a human’s SOUL was stronger than that of a monster’s SOUL, because human SOULs have the ability to persist after death through determination. With seven human souls, monsterkind would have enough power to break through the barrier separating them from humanity. They already had six SOULs, and Undyne had taken it upon herself to hunt down the seventh: by killing Frisk.



Frisk traveled through Waterfall and continued to spare every monster they came across. A little armless Monster Kid began tagging along with them in hopes of seeing Undyne, but by the time Undyne tracked Frisk down, the Monster Kid had tripped and was dangling off the edge of a tall cliff. Frisk immediately went to help them to their feet, and Undyne retreated. They finally encountered her properly at the edge of Waterfall, and Undyne insisted that she would have to kill them for the greater good of all monsterkind. She attacked persistently, but Frisk kept sparing her and telling her they didn’t want to fight, until finally they managed to escape and flee into the region known as Hotland. Undyne pursued them relentlessly, but the oppressive heat soon slowed her down and she collapsed. Frisk fetched her some water to get her back on her feet and, embarrassed and humiliated by her defeat, Undyne silently retreated. Frisk backtracked to her house and met Papyrus out in the front, who insisted that Frisk and Undyne “hang out” despite Undyne being thoroughly pissed off by her defeat at Frisk’s hands. He then “challenged” Undyne to befriend Frisk, who took up the challenge furiously, threatening to become “BESTIES” with the human who defeated them.

Thus began the most aggressive “date” ever. Undyne turned out to be an anime-loving dork who really sucked at cooking, but compensated by being PASSIONATE in everything she did. This PASSION ended up getting her house burned down while she tried to teach Frisk how to cook spaghetti, but Undyne finally conceded that Frisk simply reminded her too much of Asgore, the king of all monsters, who happened to also be a pacifist loser who didn’t like to fight. The two finally became friends, and Frisk could proceed to Hotland.

They entered a Hotland laboratory and were greeted by Alphys, the Royal Scientist, who’d been surveilling Frisk since they entered the Underground and resolved to help them. Unbeknownst to Frisk, Alphys’s “help” consisted of her enlisting her entertainment robot Mettaton to pursue them relentlessly so Alphys could always save them at the last moment. Most of the traps and monsters Frisk encountered in Hotland could only be disabled or spared with Alphys’s help - because Alphys had set it up that way as a means of feeling better about herself.



Eventually Frisk reached the CORE, the central powering unit for the Underground, and met up with Sans. He told them a story about how he was a sentry in Snowdin and used to tell jokes to a nice lady behind a door that led to the Ruins - who Frisk understood to be Toriel. She asked Sans to protect any human that passed through the Underground, and he agreed. He also told Frisk that if he hadn’t made that promise, Frisk would have been dead long before now. The abrupt shift in tone as he says it is...unsettling, to say the least.

At the CORE’s end Frisk encountered Mettaton one last time. Mettaton spilled the beans on Alphys’s manipulation of events and then locked her out so he could take Frisk down personally in a public broadcast showcasing his fancy new robotic body. Frisk kept sparing him until his ratings climbed to record-breaking numbers, and, out of battery power but grateful for their help in getting his ratings so high, Mettaton allowed them to pass before his battery power drained completely. Alphys burst in to follow Frisk to the entrance to Asgore’s castle, until finally she admitted that for a human to cross the barrier and escape the Underground they would need the power of both a human SOUL and a monster SOUL. Meaning Frisk couldn’t be a pacifist forever.

Meaning Frisk had to kill Asgore.

Frisk wandered the castle in search of Asgore while a number of monsters approached them to tell them a story about a human that once fell into the Underground, long before they did. The human was saved by the child of the king and queen, Asriel, and the royal family adopted the human into their family. But one day, the human committed suicide by eating buttercups to get Asriel to absorb their SOUL and cross to the other side of the barrier, where he could reap six more SOULs and set all of monsterkind free. But Asriel remained passive when he carried the dead child out past the barrier, and returned home without killing anyone, even when attacked by a crowd of humans who thought he’d killed the child. He died soon after. In a fit of rage and grief, Asgore declared war on humanity, and the queen - Toriel - grew disgusted with his plan and fled to the Ruins, where she buried the fallen child in a field of golden flowers. The same golden flowers Frisk fell onto when they first entered Mt. Ebott. The first fallen child, the human who had aided them along their journey, invisible but for their words and quiet knowledge regarding the monsters that lived Underground - it was only with their help that Frisk had made it out alive, on the other side.

* It's me, Chara.

Yet when Sans met them before they went to confront Asgore, he told them that EXP actually stood for EXecution Points, and LOVE stood for Level Of ViolencE. The fact that Frisk hadn’t gained a single EXP or LOVE the entire time spoke volumes as to their dedication to life.

So they continued on and met the king of all monsters.

Asgore looked at the human sadly, wishing he could offer them a cup of tea, wishing he could do anything but FIGHT them and take their SOUL, but knowing he could not break the promise he made for his people. So he lowered his head - unable to look the human in the eye as he fought them - and destroyed the MERCY button. Frisk talked to them through the entirety of the fight, telling them they didn’t want to hurt him, but they had no choice. They had to get his HP low enough to SPARE him.



But as soon as they showed him MERCY, something intervened. A circle of bullets plunged into Asgore’s heart and destroyed his SOUL, and out of the ground popped...Flowey. He had the human SOULs now, and used them to turn into a godlike eldritch abomination with all the powers to SAVE and RESET over Frisk’s own SAVE file. He abused every game mechanic in his attacks until Frisk was able to ACT and ask the human SOULs for help, which rebelled against Flowey and destroyed his massive form from within. But once the battle was over, Flowey withered and defeated and spitting at Frisk to end it, Frisk spared him. And spared him. And kept sparing him, over and over, until he ran away, unable to understand why they would spare something like him.

Frisk was transported back to the start of the battle with Asgore. But before they could confront him a second time, they got a call from Undyne, who wanted them to deliver a letter to Alphys. The resulting mix-up landed Frisk an impromptu date with the Royal Scientist, who then admitted her feelings for Undyne (much to Undyne’s delight) and decided she was done lying to everyone. She told Frisk to head to her lab. Frisk did so, and saw a door they’d never entered before. It led to an elevator, which took them to a dark, abandoned place known as the True Lab. There, they learned about the secrets Alphys wanted desperately to avoid: that some time ago she had been assigned to figure out how to make a monster SOUL as strong as a human SOUL, and that she did so by injecting “Determination” into monsters who were comatose. She even injected Determination into a golden flower, wondering what would happen if something without a SOUL gained the will to live. At first the Determination worked and helped the monsters get better, but it came at a horrible price. The monsters’ bodies began to dissolve and meld into one another, resulting in a handful of creatures known as the Amalgamates. Alphys locked them all in the True Lab, stopped answering letters, and didn’t tell anyone what had happened, not even Asgore. When Frisk was cornered by several Amalgamates, however, Alphys intervened to help them and resolved to tell everyone the truth and send the Amalgamates back home to their families. They might have looked different than they used to, but they were still lonely.

Frisk took the elevator back to the laboratory’s surface level, but something malfunctioned and instead it took them back to Asgore’s castle. Vines sealed the elevator shut and prevented them from backtracking. Once again they would have to confront Asgore. But this time, Toriel intervened - and so did basically every other monster Frisk had befriended on their journey. Between them they were all able to help Asgore and Frisk stand down.

And along came Flowey. Who seized the six human SOULs, along with every monster SOUL in the Underground, allowing him to finally reveal who he was all along:

The king and queen’s son, Asriel Dreemurr, who - thanks to Alphys’s experiments - had gained a will to live without a SOUL, in the shape of a golden flower.

He wanted to end the world and RESET it all. He’d lived through every possible iteration of the timeline as Flowey since he’d possessed Determination, the power to SAVE and RESET. He was tired. He just wanted it all to end. But Frisk reached out to him, again and again, and SAVED every SOUL they found in his possession by reminding them of who they were. One by one, Toriel and Asgore, Papyrus and Sans, Alphys and Undyne, all woke and recovered from Asriel’s control. And then Frisk reached out to Asriel once more - and with Chara's help, SAVED him as well. Because he was still just a scared kid who’d been deprived of the ability to love and feel empathy because he lacked a SOUL. But with the SOUL of every monster and six humans inside of him, he had the power to see how much they cared about Frisk and how much Frisk cared about him, and it left him wanting to do one thing to make up for all the pain and suffering he’d caused them.

With the power of every SOUL in the Underground, he tore down the barrier and set monsterkind free.

Asriel knew he couldn’t hang onto everyone’s SOULs forever. He would have to regress to being a soulless, cruel flower again. Before he let himself fade away, he asked Frisk to leave him behind in the Underground, and not to think of Flowey as "him". Yet he did something no other monster thought to do, during Frisk's journey: he asked them for their name.

In his last moments as Asriel, Frisk told him they forgave him.

When the Underground woke again, everyone’s memory of what happened was very hazy. They remembered that the human child they’d come to know through the duration of the timeline was actually called Frisk, even if it was only due to Asriel's query that they knew in the first place. They all proceeded to the surface and prepared to reintegrate into human society. Asgore asked Frisk if they would like to be the ambassador between humans and monsters. They said yes, and resolved to live with Toriel, since they found themselves preferring monsters to any human family they might have had beforehand.

Instead of going to live with Toriel, Frisk will wake up in Wonderland.

Abilities/Special Powers:

As a human in the world of Undertale, Frisk has access to the unique properties of Determination, which in this universe is the ability of one’s SOUL to persist after death. This gives them two special abilities that few other creatures in the Underground can boast: the abilities to SAVE and RESET. This allows them to a) access their SAVE if they should die or take a course of action they wish to remedy, and b) RESET the world entirely so no one remembers them and they can start their "game" over.

For the purposes of gameplay the ability to RESET will be nerfed completely (because that would involve them setting everything and everyone's memories back to the very beginning of their arrival and what is the fun in that I ask that would be intensely confusing and hard to finagle). Presumably the ability to SAVE will no longer rescue Frisk from certain death, leaving them susceptible to Wonderland's five deaths rule. Frisk will only be able to load a SAVE if they want to re-do a certain action. It's implied that no one retains straight memories of whatever gets lost when they reload a SAVE, though there are notable exceptions (such as the weird case of Sans), and a certain level of remembered bleedthrough can still occur. A SAVE will form if they become determined enough, and using the SAVE will both heal them and create a point from which they can load their progress. Frisk will not load a SAVE in a way that will affect another character unless I get OOC permission from the player of that character.

Frisk is additionally very good at dodging (you'd have to be, to survive the things they did) and they tend to be fairly good at befriending people (as well as, uhhh flirting with them). They're also, of course - filled with DETERMINATION!

Third-Person Sample:

The last time they woke like this it was on a bed of golden flowers, silk-soft and the petals still crisp with a long-dead magic. They strain for a whiff of memory, the bittersweet cinnamon-sawdust-y scent of an old spell woven deep into the fabric of the atoms in the soil and worms and rocks. Instead, the air is sharp with salt. There’s water nearby, lapping against sharp-edged rocks, and the ground they’re lying on is soft and cold.

Their hands sink into soaking white powder when they roll over. For a moment Frisk squishes the snow between their fingers thoughtfully, remembering Snowdin and the way the strings of holiday lights and the sign to Grillby’s emblazoned in neon almost made them feel warmer despite the ice and the slush.

They scrunch their nose in contemplation. They left Snowdin behind with the rest of the Underground once the barrier was...shattered. So why are they - ?

They scramble to their feet, limbs already numb and clumsy from the cold. They feel hazy, like they’ve just RESET, but they couldn’t have. They wouldn’t have. Everyone was finally happy.

Almost everyone.

Frisk tilts their head back, sucking in the cool air, studying the gray sky. No, no. They’re not underground anymore, so they couldn’t have RESET. Did they reach for their SAVE file? They wouldn’t think they’d have any need for those once everyone was free, but sometimes a SAVE would form without conscious effort. They don’t remember this. Their memories of Mt. Ebott, the Underground - none of them were like this, with a snow-covered beach and a sense of isolation so deep they begin shivering. Or maybe that’s just the fact that they don’t have a jacket. All they have is their striped shirt and the faint warmth of the heart-shaped locket nestled beneath. They paw at it unconsciously, warming the pads of their fingers on the soft red glow.

The other hand goes to their pocket out of habit, and Frisk startles faintly when their hand brushes against something small and blocky and unfamiliar. When they withdraw the object from their pocket they stare at it. It looks vaguely like the cellphone Toriel gave them, but subtly different, different enough for them to know that it’s not the same one. They thumb over the power switch and watch it hum to life.

The knowledge that they have a means of communication…

...it fills them with determination.

First-Person Sample:

[They almost revert to basic text, but that doesn’t seem like a good option for a first introduction. Audio isn’t an option, not for someone who never says ten words when two would suffice. So Frisk turns on the video, hold up the little device carefully so they’re fully in the frame, and addresses the network.

They’re just a kid, small and ambiguous in every sense of the word, and undeniably scared, and behind them is a backdrop of snowdrifts and icing-over water, their current location entirely vague.]

I fell. I need a way back.

[That’s it. It’s a simple message, seven words, and their voice trembles slightly toward the end of even that tiny sentence but they made it. Solid and direct, as is their prerogative. They communicated what they had to. Hopefully someone out there will hear them.]