The first chapter of Inside Falls.
It seems like the apparent quiet town of Inside Falls, Oregon, is having a great summer. People are relaxing with their friends and/or family and everybody is having a good time... excluding two young girls using a golf cart to escape from a muscular bear-esque creature with an antenna on the top of the head. "Well, greetings. I am Chara. That one who is panicking from the depths of her soul is my twin sister, Frisk."
Chara starts to tell over the story of how she and Frisk reached that point. The two girls from Cave Junction were sailed to Inside Falls to spend summer with Pearl (whom the twin sisters call most of the time "Grauntie" Pearl), a greedy but actually a pretty lovable and motherly lady in her 50's-60's. Frisk is loving it, while Chara, who has a sour and bitter outer shell to anything new, is not. One fateful day, Pearl decided to choose one of her workers to the forest to hang up signs. Frisk, Chara, and Lapis Lazuli refuses (Asriel, the twin's adoptive cousin, accepts, but is turned down by Pearl), so Pearl decides to sing "Ip dip" and ends up selecting Chara. Chara eventually reaches a fake tree on the forest and discovers a control panel that makes the girl find a mysterious book whose cover is a cherry red gemstone of square cut and a cobalt blue gemstone of triangle cut, with a number three between them. This journal reveals the many secrets of the towns, but also the mysterious author leaves behind a little warning: "BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR".
Frisk's objective is to find new friends during summer, and her first steps are with four weird people with colorful hoodies and snow-white skin, and it already starts to create suspicions on Chara. Reading about it in the journal, she finds that they're possibly...ghosts! Asriel inspires Chara to find out Frisk's new friend's true nature, but Frisk just thinks her older twin sister is being paranoid. Chara almost gives up until she realizes that in one of the footages, things that look alot like antennas are poking out of the four guy's hoodies. Determined to save Frisk, Chara gets the cart key's from Lapis ("Just don't run over anyone."), while Asriel offers a frying pan as a weapon for her.
The new friend's of Frisk finally reveal themselves...as "Tubbies"/Slendytubbies, creatures with slight bear aspect, TV's on their stomachs and antennas on their heads. Frisk tries to break her ties with them, only for her to be captured. Chara saves Frisk just in time and the two escape, but the four first tubbies transform themselves into grotesque, titanic forms of themselves and start chasing the twins, finishing the circle. Unfortunately, there's no definitive weakness for the tubbies on the Journal and they can't find a way to stop them. But Frisk decides on a successful plan: distract the four tubbies while Chara drops a tree on them, weakening them enough. When the twins enter inside the shack, Pearl lets her two nieces pick up something from the Shack without an explicit catch (Chara picks a yellow-and-white hat with a buttercup flower while Frisk picks an umbrella). Chara finishes narrating the chapter re-thinking her early paranoia and concluding that maybe this town has something deeper waiting to be unlocked.
Tropes in this chapter:
- Batman Gambit: Frisk, the sweetest and most innocent of the duo, pulls one to make the Slendytubbies give up.
- Big Damn Heroes: Chara comes to Frisk's rescue in a golf cart.
- Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: The four Tubbies that tried to kidnap Frisk chases her and Chara in bigger and stronger forms, alongside the aid of smaller, armless fellows of their kind.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: Some aspects of the personalities of Chara and Frisk are slightly different if compared to future chapters (ex: Frisk is a bit more like canon Mabel).
- Frying Pan of Doom: Asriel gives to Chara a frying pan to use as a weapon. It ends up being actually effective.
- How We Got Here: The chapter is almost entirely dedicated to explaining how the two Dreemurr twins are having a summer so...different than the rest of the people.
- Hugh Mann: The four main Tubbies use hoodies to hide their antennas and Black Eyes of Evil. While Frisk easily falls for it, Chara starts to doubt them since the moment she lays her eyes on them, which turns out she had all the right for.
- Parasol Parachute: Frisk gains one from Pearl as a gift. The "Parachute" function wasn't used until 19 chapters later.
- Puppet King: Although the Tubbies were trying to find a leader while befriending Frisk, this was probably going to be Frisk's role in their society had all of them escaped from the consequences.
- Sequel Hook: "Our great aunt told us that there is nothing to worry about this town and that every mythical being is a myth. But maybe...there is an even darker secret, awaiting to be uncovered."
