Ninjago and Beyond (Beyblade Burst x Ninjago)

New Animatronic = New Beginning

Animatronics' New Ninjago Residence
Ken's POV
When I woke up, my face was smushed against something soft.

And my temples were pounding.

Wincing, I tried to roll over and discovered that I was being pressed against on all sides by numerous bodies, both warm and cold. For a split second I feared that I was in the middle of a murder scene and shot straight up. My head was fuzzy and bright light painfully assaulted my wide eyes, making me fall back down onto whatever I was using as a pillow to block it all out. When my head felt clear enough to take in sights without shutting down, I tentatively raised my head again and cracked open my eyes.

At first everything was blurry, but what I could make out made me confused. Why was Valt sleeping on one side of me with Freddy sleeping on the other? Why were they both dressed in Christmas garb? Why was everyone I knew sleeping in various positions all around me? Why were my parents sleeping on the couch? Why was there garland attached to the ceiling, and why was it the only source of light at the moment?

And why did my mouth taste dry with an aftertaste of cocoa and cinnamon?

As my tongue worked to wet my parched lips, my memories slowly came back to me. Shortly after I'd told PIXAL that I was "exhaustedly happy", I'd helped myself to a cup of hot cocoa with some sweets and tried to join in on the festivities. The sugar had given me a rush, but it had quickly turned into a crash. The stress of the past few days must have caught up to me, and I must have nodded off sometime after. I remembered laying my head down on what I thought was a coffee table - maybe someone took pity on me and laid me on my side?

I took another look at the room and had to gawk at the capacity. Was everyone involved with the party sleeping in here? It didn't look like there was a single free space on the floor. And when there wasn't any space, they made up for it by laying on other items, like chairs and side tables and each other. A lot of their positions didn't look comfortable, but they were still sleeping and snoring like babies.

Ya know. Flesh, metal, and plastic (I think) babies.

But something was off. Everyone looked like they were sleeping soundly, with no indication that they were waking up. So what had woken me up?

I carefully sat back on my calves, popping my back in the process, and evaluated my senses. No pain other than the typical post-nap soreness. No bad tastes in my mouth other than the hot cocoa I'd drank hours ago. No obvious disturbances in the room that could have woken me.

That was touch, taste, and sight. That left the other three senses.

I closed my eyes and listened with all my might. I tried to hear past the soft snores of those around me, past the natural sounds of the old building, past the sound of the wind outside. I put PIXAL's training to the test and tried to listen to what was in the shadows, what I couldn't see...

There! Someone or something was moving around in the kitchen, clinking together pots and pans. The subtlety of the sounds told me that whoever was in there was trying to be quiet, but with an unobstructed doorway, that was pretty much impossible.

That would explain what was being picked up by my fifth sense: smell. My nose could pick up a sweet scent coming from the kitchen; it was potent enough to overpower the scents still in the air from the Christmas party last night. Someone had just made it, or was at least in the process of making it.

Then my sixth and most secretive sense: my sense of Metal. An expansion of that sense revealed a large presence of metal in the kitchen, so it couldn't be Dani. But it seemed too... large to be a maintenance bot or an endo, or even PIXAL. Was it one of the animatronics? No, it couldn't be... I could see all eight of the main animatronics from my vantage point on the floor.