I spent the rest of the night preparing for Princess Arianna's arrival.

Well, let me backtrack a bit.

I spent the first three hours after Gaster's screaming my throat raw and departure desperately trying to get the gummy, oozing, lingering feeling of his stupid fucking blessing off my gods-damned hand. I ran out of the building, rushed towards the closest shop after scaring the shit out of a few locals while trying to ask for directions, bought about six bars of soap and three different brushes and some other things and ran back to our hideout.

This was followed by forty minutes of vigorous scrubbing with soap in buckets of rancid rainwater. Went through two bars and five buckets before I felt remotely clean.

But the itchy, tingling feeling just didn't want to go away. While I was pretty certain that I accidentally took a few layers of skin off my hands and I was just regenerating them, I had to be sure. So back it was to washing my hands.

This lasted for another thirty minutes before I decided to burn it all away instead.

Holding my upturned hand above one of Gaster's emptied burlap sacks, I coughed up enough acid to melt away anything that might have survived the initial onslaught of lye, oil, water, and scents. Bits of my flesh sizzled and smoked from where they were contaminated. The pain was nearly enough to make me scream, but the thought of finally being clean again was enough to shut it out.

The air was mixed with flowery perfumes from the soap and the earthy scent of smoke from the burlap sack where I missed my hand and sprayed acid onto it.

No matter how much I scrubbed or melted or washed or anything the feeling lingered.

I was probably three seconds away from chopping my hand off and being done with it.

I had a few shards of sharpened glass stashed away in the crevices of my body, kept in place by my twisting vines. I could pull one out, take a few swipes across my wrist, throw the severed hand out the window, wrap up the stump, and carry on. Who would know? Who would even care?

Not I, that's for sure. It would grow back in a few hours, maybe a day anyway.