Chapter Text
Tenna presses a button the the side of his casing in order to mute himself and curls around himself. He made his stature as small as possible without shrinking… SHRINKING! He feels like an idiot for not thinking of it before, but if Tenna shrinks, he can sneak around the studio no problem!!
He grows a little due to his sense of pride but then continues to shrink until he’s about the size of a TV remote. Tenna paces around a bit, knowing that his small size wouldn't cause the usual disturbance his stomping does. He contemplates his next move, and how good that TV dinner is going to taste thanks to pining after it this entire time. He grows a few inches at that, but briskly clears his mind in order to shrink back down to his desired height.
Tenna forgot that the smaller he gets, the harder it is to control his size, with his emotions fluctuating constantly. All he has to do is calm down or think negative thoughts. However, thinking negatively isn’t optimal for his productivity, so it's better to go with a clear mind.
His first task is to open the door without catching Spamton’s attention from the other room. Slowly, he increases his height to roughly 4 feet in order to reach the door knob. He pauses, awaiting the sound of Spamton getting suspicious; it thankfully never comes, so he twists the knob. He couldn’t possibly be any more steady with how drawn-out he is opening the door.
He glances down the corridor and focuses on Spamton's door in particular in order to detect any slight sounds deriving from inside. Nothing. Maybe Spamton took a nap and this is his chance! Still, not wishing to take any risks, Tenna slowly decreases his size again to his minimum height.
Tenna’s stomach growls, luckily at this size, it's hardly noticeable, unless you have super hearing, or are a foot tall.. Still, to Tenna, it's the loudest possible thing his body can produce while being on mute. He swiftly scampers to the elevator in order to get farther away from Spamton.
Okay, who the hell designed the elevator button to be this high.. Now he sees why Spamton always has him push it. Even at the mailman’s height of around 4,11, he’d have to stand on the tips of his toes to be able to press it. It wasn’t Tenna’s fault that his large stage presence requires a large size, and the studio was created with his height in mind.. Man, he should really do something about that for his smaller employees… Wow, look at him!! Always thinking of ways to help his staff, what a good boss!
Tenna erects 5 feet from his internal praise. He merrily taps on the elevator button, which he can now reach with slightly more ease. Once the buttons are hit, he attempts to keep a level head to shrink back down.
The elevator beeps once Tenna reaches his floor. Tenna curses internally about how damn loud the elevator is, but continues on. He's got to be speedy about this: the faster he finishes his microwave dinner, the better chance he has of the mailman not becoming alerted of his presence.
Tenna hurries into the kitchen, his concerns of his volume softening. He reaches the fridge, and swells to 4 feet or so in order to access the kitchen easier. Tenna grabs his TV-dinner from the freezer, and unwraps it, immediately throwing it in the microwave and waits.
2 minutes feel a hell of a lot longer when you're starving and on the verge of being caught by your business partner at any second.. The stress causes Tenna to pace again, checking on the microwave timer every 10 seconds to see if it's miraculously done early.
After the longest minutes of Tenna’s life, he hurriedly snatches the meal from the microwave oven and shovels it into his mouth. All of a man’s manners go out the window when he’s deprived from his TV dinner for an entire 6 or 7 hours.
Just when Ant was finishing up his meal, a faint humming could be heard from the next floor up; the room directly above him should be the green room. He listens carefully and deducts that it was some sort of music.
This is bad. He assesses that there's no other source the music could possibly stem from. This must be Spamton’s doing. Which would mean that he's awake and in the green room.. Which Tenna has to pass by in order to get back into his office..
He should really get back into his office, it's much safer than being out in the open in the kitchen, as Spamton is bound to get hungry some time soon. So Tenna shoves the greasy trash into his pockets, in order to clear the alleged crime scene, and scurries back to the elevator. He prays to whatever's out there that the elevator would be as silent as possible.
The elevator, of course, is the loudest thing known to darkener.. Okay, well maybe that’s a little bit of an exaggeration, but in terms of not wanting someone to hear him, he really wishes he installed stairs in this damn building. Lots of architecture regrets today he supposes.
Luckily, whatever entity he prayed to still has got his back on this one. The muffled music he heard before completely masked his arrival. However, the more he ascended, the less muffled it became, Tenna was now able to hear what he could only assume was Frank Sinatra or some other jazz music coming from the now extremely close-by green room.
The green room, which just so happens to have giant doors, swung wide open. Tenna has to run across…Undetected by Spamton, who could be staring right at him for all he knows!!
No problem really! Tenna can do this.. He just has to will himself to be as small as possible!! there's only one way to do that…. What’s the most upsetting thing Tenna can imagine? Well..
The first thing that rushes to his head is the sensation of emptiness; unable to speak or even move, the only option is to observe. Distant murmurs steadily swell into thunderous roars, Tenna acknowledges those disembodied voices as those of his precious family. The argument grows clearer, and the topic reveals itself to be one the CRT has dreaded for as long as he could remember.
“God dammit Torial, the kids don't need that fucking tv. You need to start doing your job as a mother and entertain them yourself!” “You honestly expect me to do everything around here? If anything, that tv is a distraction from these damn arguments, the kids dont need to hear all this. If you could just keep to yourself for one god damn minute, then maybe we’d have a happy household!”
Tenna had rehearsed those words again and again in the depths of his brain, The worst fight he'd ever seen, coming from his dear family. Toriel held back tears as she screamed out another insult. Kris and Asriel watched from around the corner, their bodies wanting to flee but their eyes couldn’t be pried from the scene unfolding in front of them. Just like Tenna, they were reduced to bystanders. As the harrowing quarrel began to drown out the TV’s thoughts, the voice began to shift into another, one that Tenna knew all too well.
“I told you I can't sign that damn contract! I Swear to [[Heaven or Hell]], if you fucking ask [[me, myself, and I ]] about it one more time, Im walking out of here! You'll lose all your precious viewers, we both know that [[You Need a New Stan-Vac Vacuum!]] me way more than I fucking need you!”
The mailman scoffed, carelessly turning his back to face Tenna. No matter how far the television extended his hand, he would never be able to reach him. Before he knew it, his senses numbed by that familiar sensation of emptiness: cold and unwelcoming, yet something he will have to embrace in the foreseeable future.
‘That worked a little too well…’ he concludes, tearing his mind away from the image he made. Now, he's only 6 inches tall, perfect height to sneak by undetected. He runs to the edge of the door and peeks around the edge. While he's here, he might as well look at what Spamton is up to. He reasons that it's good to know what his employees are working on!… even he knows that’s a shit rationale.
From what he can tell, it seems as though Spamton is surrounded by art supplies? Tenna would have never ever thought of Spamton to be some sort of artist. Honestly, Spamton usually seems to try and distance himself from stuff of the sorts. When asked to help with his creative processes, Spamton often shoots the idea down right away. The only time he seems the slightest bit interested is when he's drunk, “rattling off stupid segment ideas,” his words, not Tenna's.
If his antennae aren't deceiving him, Spamton is sitting on the green room couch, paint brush held in his mouth, canvases and paint tubes scattered on the ground. His primary focus was on the canvas sitting on an easel in front of him.
Tenna can't just leave it at that! His curious nature needs to know what Spamton is painting. Thus, he runs across the hall, all the way to the other side of the door, which is what he was aiming to do from the start. Except not getting caught isn't his mission at the moment, he just wants to know what Spamton’s art could entail. Tenna angles himself perfectly: antennas stretched as far as they can go in order to get a peak at-
A peak at what seems to be a painting of HIM?! An artistic masterpiece of Tenna himself, being painted by his cohost, business partner, and dare he say, friend.
Tenna reverts back to his usual height immediately. Spamton turns his head away from his art and almost- was that a scream?
“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING HERE?!”