With the subject of imminent death put to rest, Alphys managed to remind herself to pay attention to the rest of what this human - Frisk, that Frisk, she should really have known - had to say.
And what they looked like. They were a lot taller than Alphys, of course, but that was true of most people with upright spines. They had... how do you describe it? Human depictions rarely went into the details, you could see how they took the fine cell-tissue texture and the near-invisible coating of fine hairs and the puckering around the joints for granted, all the special features of human skin. Egg-shaped nostrils, tapered eyes with mobile lids, five (five, Alphys mentally confirmed) jointed digits on each hand with broad, flat nails, the clump-clump-clumping casual solidity of matter in their footsteps just now, the faint but palpable, palpable pressure of SOUL power permeating the air..
A human. Living, breathing, standing right here in front of her. Conscious, animate, sapient flesh. Not the disembodied SOULs they’d - well, maybe she shouldn’t be thinking about that right now, maybe she should go back to the topic before that.
“You’re amazing,” Alphys blurted, then rallied herself in time not to say anything else. Frisk had met... a version of her before, right? So they’d already know her, sort of, by this point, and saying anything more would just be retreading old ground, and anyway she wasn’t anything special compared to Frisk, oh, stars, Frisk who had helped design the device she’d given up on trying to grok after a few hours, Frisk who had broken another timeline’s Barrier somehow at the age of twelve or something if she remembered correctly, Frisk who -
It started to occur to Alphys that she might have been a little rude. And was being rude, right now, by staring wide-eyed and not saying anything.
“Um-um-um,” she stammered. “I mean. Uh.” Food. “Thanks! Thank you. Wow! That smells, that smells great, you didn’t have to, I’ll just... clean up the mess inside, ahaha, and - sorry about, sorry about that, by the way! About the mess.”
She glanced back inside, scanning for a place far enough from the edges of her semi-organised workspace. Only now did the fact that the food actually did smell really, really good. Homemade ramen? Right, that was a thing, wasn’t it? It just wasn’t the sort of thing that happened to her.
“Yeah,” said Alphys, as her brain, agonisingly slow as ever, caught up to the conversation. “Yeah, he’s, um, Wing Dings told me about you! We’re really happy for all your help. Really. Our plan - I mean, this timeline’s plan, I guess, haha - it’s all, um, a-all thanks to you, isn’t it?”
She did remember getting mentions of some sort of conversation back in her notes, but the details were jumbled and she was pretty sure she’d forgotten to record large chunks, and basically she wasn’t sure what they’d talked about at all. “I don’t really remember much about talking to you directly,” she summed up sheepishly.
“But, um, really, thank you for, for coming! I’m - ” she searched for the right words, then gave up - “I’m really, really happy to meet you. Not that you, uh, had to, or anything! I’m sure you, uh, have lots of stuff to do, as well...”
She trailed off, and shuffled towards one of the mostly-unoccupied corner tables, heaving it off to the side to make space for Frisk to actually get into the lab. “But, uh, if you want to, feel free to co- to come in!”
Was she being friendly? She really hoped she was being friendly.