Okay so I realized that some of the description in the last chapter might not have given it away, but while writing the characters I've been picturing them as human design with animal motifs corresponding to their character. I've found some fanart that I'm basing them off of, and if I can find the original artists I'll include the works next chapter. Anyway, sorry if this design of the characters isn't your forte, but if you choose to keep reading, enjoy <]:^)
Sundrop apologised over and over, wiping Pitch’s tears and then hugging him when the technician broke down crying. He sat with Pitch in his lap like a child. Pitch was almost embarrassed. Once Pitch had calmed down, he stood from Sunny’s hug and fished out his cords and laptop from his bag. Sunny helped to connect them, and followed all of Pitch’s instructions to a T.
“Pitch, I’m so sorry. If I had any control over the situation I would have done so. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” Sunny removed the plugs once Pitch put his laptop away. Pitch closed the necessary panels and screwed them in where needed. Sunny needed extra security to make sure no children fiddled with panels and switches. Sunny stood up with Pitch’s bag, helping him to get it onto his back. Pitch knew Sunny liked helping with menial things, so he didn’t fight it. Sunny gave Pitch one last hug and walked him to the exit. Pitch promised to check the whole circuit before leaving that day.
“See you later buddy.” Pitch fist bumped him as he walked out the door. He plugged in his earbuds and made his way through the halls to Parts and Service. If Monty wasn't there then he would have to differ the consequences of stiff joints until Pitch cared enough to fix him.
Speaking of things he cared to fix, he hadn’t checked on his secret project in a few days. Monty could wait. Pitch was still adjusting to the idea that the alligator had seen him panic and cry. Pitch passed the Parts and Service room, poking his head in. Of course, there was Monty, looking around. Pitch kept walking down the stairs, floor after floor. He made it to the barely together pile of purple animatronic.
“Hey buddy, do anything fun this weekend?” Pitch sighed outwardly at his own terrible joke. Pitch crouched down next to the animatronic and connected the required clamps to the terminals on the power supply next to him. With a jolt, Bonnie raised his head and rolled his shoulders as best he could.
“Do you think I could put what's left of your casing on a new endo?” Pitch asked. “They haven’t been updated in a while.”
Bonnie shrugged. Pitch sat back on his heels, examining the robot like he had many times before. Aside from the separation of his upper and lower body, he was relatively intact. There were cracks in his casing from where he was seemingly ripped apart, but it was nothing that a bit of scrap metal and paint couldn’t fix.
“Oh, that voice box I ordered should be at my house soon, and with some trial and error I should get you talking again.” Hopefully it was as easy as Chica’s reinstallation. Speaking of, he really had to finish her up. The others were almost finished. It would be no fair to leave her semi intact while everyone else was perfectly rebuilt. He was just adding to his list of things to do before he left and it was almost noon.
Pitch tweaked a few things on Bonnie and had the bunny test the joints that he could. Pitch decided he would lose even more time in the day and went back up a couple flights of stairs to grab an endoskeleton. He took it down to Bonnie, and warned him before shutting him down again. He transferred the casing to the endoskeleton and sat it down so he could reach the head and put the important pieces in. He still needed a voice box and patching in some places, but for a basement rebuilding he looked pretty good. Pitch had spent weeks rewriting the functionality code for Bonnie, and piecing him together to make him work properly without the help of the Pizzaplex’s Parts and Service room. His eyes, joints and seemingly his audio processor worked.
Like he had with Monty, Pitch crossed his fingers and squeezed his eyes closed upon restarting Bonnie, hoping that he worked properly after all the computer parts had been transferred. Bonnie’s personality chip confused Pitch a bit when he scanned through it. Aggression was one of the traits he had been given, along with the rest that he shared with the other animatronics. Monty was also incredibly aggressive, but the level was significantly lower. Maybe that’s why Bonnie had been decommissioned. And maybe that part had something to do with the missing children from the Pizzaplex. It struck Pitch that maybe this wasn’t a good plan.
Something else struck Pitch just as he opened his eyes. A metal hand. Pitch was pushed against the wall behind him, a hand pushing hard against his chest. Pitch grabbed the arm and tried to pry it away from him, but of course was unsuccessful.
“What the fuck, Bonnie!?” he screamed. “I’m trying to help you!” Bonnie’s eyebrows creased together. Pitch realised then he had never called Bonnie by name, only ever calling him dude-bro nicknames. Bonnie’s grip loosened, but he didn’t release Pitch.
“I’m trying to put you back together, haven’t you figured that out yet?”
Bonnie glared at him. Pitch rolled his eyes. “I just put you on a new fucking endo. I’m ordering a voice box for you. It’s been five weeks of me working on you, dude. Now let me go, I have to get back to work.”
Bonnie looked at him for a minute more, then let him go. He went back and sat next to his old endo.
“I’ve gotta shut you down again, but once the voice box is in I’ll write up a diagnostic for you, okay?” Pitch explained, connecting a couple wires to Bonnie where he could. “Once I’ve got a diagnostic to run scans on you, you should be able to roam. Freddy talks about you all the time. It’ll be exciting to see you two together again!” Bonnie looked up excitedly at Freddy’s name. Pitch counted backwards from three as he shut down Bonnie after saying goodbye again.
Pitch made his way back up a few floors to Parts and Service. Almost surprisingly, Monty was still there. Surrounded by broken glass.
“What did you do?” Pitch asked frustratedly.
“It wasn’t me!” Monty defended in a loud voice. “The window was busted when I got here. I was trying to make your stupid job easier and find Music Man in here.”
“Music man got out!?” Music Man, not the same as The DJ, was a prototype being detained down in the Parts and Service room. Pitch had been tasked with fixing him. It was even on his checklist. Pitch sighed loudly.
“Get in the cylinder.” Monty did as he was told, followed by Pitch. It was a quick fix for his main joints, and a bit more tedious for the smaller ones. Pitch was glad he decided to do this part in the actual repair room. Having the automated assist to complete the other side of his adjustments was a life saver, even if it took him forever anyway. Pitch covered a yawn with his hand as he started Monty back up.
Monty didn’t say anything when he exited the cylinder. Pitch had him test out his joints once again. They all worked properly, better than earlier, even. Pitch said goodbye to Monty and began leaving the room after packing up his things. He halted when Monty didn’t move. He was looking up at the air vents.
“I think I hear the Music Man.”
“In the ducts?” Pitch asked incredulously.
“Well use your own fucking ears and listen yourself.” Monty crossed his arms and growled.
“Talk to me like that again, robot,” Pitch rebutted.
“Watch it, mechanic,” Monty said. Monty was right. Pitch heard movement in the vents.
“Help me up there.”
“No!” Monty protested. Pitch glared at him, wondering why he had been given the ability to not follow instructions.
“Fine, fuck you then.” Pitch pulled a box over to a vent opening, presumably the one Music Man was in. He unsteadily stood on it, reaching as far as he could with his arms, hooking his fingers over the edge. His sneakers slipped against the metal wall as he tried to pull himself up. His foot found purchase and Pitch finished pulling himself up. Once in the vent, he turned and looked down to where he had left Monty, not seeing him in the room anymore. Monty cleared his throat and Pitch looked directly down to where he had crawled up.
“Oh. Did you-” Had Monty helped him up? That must have been why it quickly became so much easier to climb up.
“Get over yourself. You looked stupid and I was getting embarrassed watching you.”
"Fine, then I won't say thank you." He turned without another word and began crawling through the vent. He didn't know where it let out, and honestly didn't care. A silhouette stood out against the gentle light coming through from the other end. If Pitch was quiet enough he could sneak up on Music Man and grab him before he scurried away. He was so relieved that it wasn't a wild goose chase through the vents to find him.
Pitch crawled as gently as he could, moving slower than he liked. He reached out his hand and grabbed it.
It was a shoe. A little red sneaker, not Music Man. Pitch pounded his fist against the vent floor in frustration. Then he thought for a moment. Why the hell was a child's shoe in the vent? Last he checked Music Man wasn't one to collect little things he found.
He kept crawling forward and kicked out the other end of the vent. He was in the main hallway. He held onto the shoe until he came across a lost and found bin. He tossed it lazily into the bin and heard scuttling around behind him. He turned fast and shone his flashlight. There was a kid with brown hair standing right next to the vent Pitch had crawled out of. Pitch rubbed his eyes and the kid was gone.
He needed to go home. He checked the time. Oh shit, he really needed to go home. He had a class at 2 pm, an hour away. He raced back to the break room to clock out of his shift and grab his bag. He packed all of his things together and wrote down his start and finish time, and all but ran back to his car, patting a Wet Floor Bot on the way out, as had become both a habit and a requirement in his mind.
“Have you seen the mechanic?” Monty asked as he entered Freddy’s room, not caring to knock. “He went into a vent and I have- what the fuck is that?”
“Watch your language!” Freddy cried, slamming his hands over a kid’s ears.
“Yeah watch your fucking mouth!” the kid shouted. Monty laughed loud while Freddy frantically looked between them, trying to figure out who to scold first.
“Gregory, that language is not tolerable in the Pizzaplex!” Freddy said.
“Does the mechanic know about him?” Monty asked, pointing at Gregory. Freddy shook his head.
"Well, that's not completely true…" Gregory trailed off. Freddy looked at him with concern. "I think he found my shoe." He looked down at his one socked foot. "And saw me."
"What?!" Freddy cried.
"I mean even if the little guy hadn't messed up and gotten seen, the mechanic is really observant and would have figured it out." Monty crossed his arms and leaned against the wall.
"You talk about Pitch quite a bit, Monty. Any new thoughts on him?" Freddy inquired. Monty glared at him and left the room, going to search for the only human that was supposed to be there.
“The mechanic's name is bitch?” Gregory asked, looking up at Freddy with a smirk.
“Watch it.”
Pitch’s class droned on, and he was practically falling asleep on his notes. When the class finally ended around six pm, Pitch packed up his things and checked his phone. Foxy was blowing his phone up, asking if they were still on to go out that night before Pitch’s shift. He had originally said yes, and felt horrible at the idea of cancelling, so he replied again with a yes. He knew he would regret it, but got into Foxy’s car when he got home that evening.
They ended up in a bar, par for the course with the two. Pitch didn’t drink, so he was the designated driver. He didn’t mind, and after he dropped off friends at around two am, the car was peaceful with Foxy passed out in the front seat. He was late to work, but wasn’t too worried, the animatronics weren’t going anywhere. He just hoped they weren’t in even worse condition when he returned. Oh god he would kill himself if they were broken again.
He pulled up to the building, and got out of his car. It didn’t seem too much worse for wear. When he entered the building the S.T.A.F.F bots were still on the fritz. He patted a Wet Floor Bot and lazily walked towards the staff room to grab his clipboard. He scanned it over and checked off the things he had completed the day before. Roxy and Monty were fine, he still had to check on Freddy’s damaged leg and finish fixing Chica. Their nightly scans, etc. etc., plus the things he had added on, like moving the generators to a safer place in the daycare and finding Music Man. He would also have to check up on all the actual devices throughout the Pizzaplex kitchen and arcade, and re-code Moon..
He had no trouble checking Roxy and Chica’s scans. When he got to Freddy's room, he knew he wasn't hallucinating a child the night before.
"Freddy, are you cheating on me?" Pitch asked, crossing his arms and leaning on the doorframe. There was a child with a screwdriver in his hand, working on the damaged joint in Freddy's knee. The kid shot up straight and ran behind Freddy, who shakily stood up and shielded the boy.
"Pitch- I- when was the last time you slept? Perhaps you-"
"Seriously dude? You're gonna try and lie to me? I saw the kid."
The young boy poked his head out from behind Freddy. He couldn't be more than nine or ten years old. Pitch crouched down to the kid's eye level and waved at him.
"Hey kiddo, where are your parents?" Pitch asked kindly. He was way too tired for this, but figured it was best to treat the kid like a scared deer. He didn't want to have to call Vanessa if he made a break for it.
The boy looked up at Freddy, then down at the floor, not making eye contact with Pitch.
"My name is Pitch. What's yours?"
"I know," the kid mumbled.
"Well that's a weird name, but alright." The boy smiled at Pitch's lame joke, and looked up at him.
"My name is actually Gregory," he said. Pitch nodded.
"Well Gregory," Pitch stood up, his knees starting to ache, "are you the reason I had to fix everyone last night? Chica still isn't fully intact." Gregory hung his head in shame.
"I'm sorry. I needed- well, Freddy needed the parts."
"You- Freddy's higher level diagnostics are because of you?!" Pitch shouted, thoroughly impressed. "Dude you're better at this than Frank!"
"Frank is the daytime technician," Freddy explained to Gregory. "He is nice, but won't take as much leniency on you being here as Pitch."
"Woah, woah, who said I'm gonna let this slide? Do the others even know about him?"
"Yes, Monty was the last to find out, I believe. Please, Pitch, he has nowhere else to go." Pitch looked at Freddy’s pleading eyes, Gregory's scared expression. He sighed. Whatever, he wasn't paid enough for this.
"If you get caught by anyone, I never knew about this. Do you live here now?"
Gregory looked at Freddy again.
"Yes."
"Alright. Fine. But when was the last time you showered? The smell alone will give you away."
"Hey screw you!" Suddenly the kid didn't seem so timid.
"Shut up, I'm trying to make sure you don't die of some disease from uncleanness."
"Boys. Stop. I'm glad that Pitch won't have a problem with you being here, Gregory, but you need to at least show him some respect." Gregory nodded.
"Tomorrow after my shift I'll take him to my apartment for a shower, and then to the drug store for a toothbrush. Sounds good?" He said to Freddy. The robot nodded.
"Now, I have a job to do, so Gregory, if you wouldn't mind- is that my fucking tool belt?"
"Language!" Freddy cried, exhausted.
Scanning Freddy took much longer than normal. Gregory was very curious as to what Pitch did, where cords went, what codes mean. It took an hour to run through Freddy's scans instead of the usual twenty minutes. By now it was already 4 am and Pitch was ready to collapse.
“I’m taking this!” he shouted at Gregory, snatching the yellow toolbelt from the floor. He went and knocked on Monty's door, hoping for a quick hand with moving the generators once he was finished with the gator’s scans.
“Hello?” he sang out. No response when he knocked again. He opened the door and flipped on all the lights. Monty was nowhere to be found. Pitch sighed. He really had to get the scans done. He turned back from the room, walking directly into a distracted robot.
“Ow, son of a-”
“Pitch! There you are! I was looking for you.” Monty grabbed Pitch by the shoulders to steady him.
“Aw, were you worried about me?” Pitch teased. Monty shoved him away and crossed his arms.
“Obviously not. I just didn’t know if I blacked out and something happened to you.”
“Sounds like you were worried.”
“Shut the fuck up and run the scans.”
Everything was going fine with Monty’s diagnostics, but he wouldn’t stop talking about how he wasn’t worried about Pitch leaving without warning, so Pitch turned off his voice controls. Monty looked very upset and actively ignored Pitch’s instructions to test joint mobility and vocal range once it was turned back on. Pitch stared at him for a second after the fourth time asking Monty to say literally anything. He turned to put away his laptop and tools, excited to no longer need to root through his bag for a single screwdriver.
“Did you know Freddy has a son?” Pitch asked, throwing his backpack over his shoulders.
“Yeah, he seems like an alright kid.” Pitch gave Monty a shit-eating grin. The alligator squinted and pointed at the exit to the room. Pitch did as he was told, making his way to the daycare entrance. He hesitated to close the door behind him, flashlight already in hand. He sighed loudly when the lights stayed on. He yelled out his battlecry. Sunny shouted it back, barrelling towards Pitch with excitement. No matter how often Sunny saw Pitch, he was always excited. Pitch was swept up into a tight hug by the animatronic.
Sunny was happy to comply, sitting down on the floor while Pitch ran his diagnostics, talking animatedly about his most recent interaction with the DJ. Apparently he had been playing some songs that weren’t child friendly while they were closed, and Sundrop requested that Pitch go talk to him about it.
“Well I mean, he’s allowed to play what he wants when we aren't open, but I’ll ask him to keep it between midnight and six, okay?”
“Thanks Pitch. I just don’t want that little boy that’s been staying here to-” Sunny slapped a hand over his mouth. He pulled out a cord by accident as well. Pitch plugged it back in patiently.
“I know about Gregory, don’t worry. I’m not a snitch either. But it’s good to know that I can come to you for secrets.”
“You can’t, I’m not a snitch either.” He airquoted around ‘snitch.’
“You literally just told me that DJ is playing good music.”
“Inappropriate music.”
“Good music.” Pitch closed out of Sun’s diagnostic page. “Alright, fun’s over.” Sunny frowned and nodded. Pitch said goodnight to Sunny as all computing parts were shut down, except for the one that caused ‘the switch’ as Pitch called it. Pitch walked over to the lightswitch and turned it off, lighting his flashlight and finding his way back to a deactivated Moondrop. He twitched a bit, which had Pitch stepping back, but ultimately stayed deactivated.
Pitch crouched down to his illuminated laptop. He opened Moon’s scans and immediately opened the personality tab from the sidebar. He stuck his flashlight between his teeth and typed with both hands to find the bug. He scanned through the code, reading each line carefully. There were no problems in the first six or so thousand lines. He shone his light up onto Moon’s face. There were no lights coming from his face, and Pitch exhaled. He was fine. Everything was fine. He and Moon would become best friends after this. He felt his eyelids getting heavy, especially in the dark. He could not close his eyes. He was only safe while Moon was deactivated. What if he fell asleep and hit the wrong button, booting a still dangerous animatronic back up.
He found the bug in line twenty-three-thousand. Right under the speech command was a wording that could easily be misconstrued by something without critical thinking and pure understanding of human life. Pitch read the line over and over, trying to come up with a better wording that still fit the coding instructions.
Moondrop.setMode(MODE_LINE_FOLLOW);
// start
Robot.fill(255, 255, 255);
if {put children to sleep};
Moondrop.rectMode;
Void line ();
Because the animatronics were equipped with every trace of knowledge on the internet, Moon most likely interpreted it as the slang term for killing someone. Pitch replaced ‘sleep’ with ‘bed’ in the small patch he had found. He hoped this was the final patching he would need to do on Moon. Hopefully he worked the way he was supposed to now.
Pitch read through a bit more in his functionality tab, and found the next issue. Instead of just children, his task was listed as ‘all.’ Pitch rewrote the code, staring at his laptop screen for what felt like hours, and it probably was. After figuring out phrasing that couldn’t be misconstrued, he decided on making sure Moon ran scans on ages before adding a child to the bedtime roster. Pitch rubbed his eyes, the corners stinging and watering with exhaustion. The corner of his laptop said it was just past eight am. He started Moondrop up. He held his flashlight out like a weapon. One of Moon’s eyes turned blue, the other stayed red.
“Uh, hi,” Pitch said, no immediate danger obvious. Moon cocked his head to the side.
“Hello,” he said quietly. “Is it naptime? Where are the children?” Those were odd questions, because Moon had never lost his knowledge of his job during previous software updates. Moon blinked a few times, lights in his eyes turning off. Pitch panicked, looking down at his laptop. A progress bar appeared, with a countdown. Moon was rebooting. Everything looked normal, none of the coding behind the progress bar changed.
The reboot took forever. So long that Pitch moved to rest against the play structure, scrolling through his phone and fighting to keep his eyes open.
“Pitch? Is that you?” Pitch shot up. Moon’s eyes were both blue now. The rewriting had worked!
“Hi!” Pitch said excitedly, jumping to his feet. “How do you feel?”
“Like new! I knew there was something wrong with my coding. I knew I wasn’t supposed to hurt the children,” he trailed off. “Or you.”
“Hey, it’s okay. It wasn’t even a bug like we thought, just some dumbass that didn’t realise that robots take everything literally.” Pitch began disconnecting Moon from the wires on his laptop, loading them all into his backpack and closing up the panels on Moon’s arms and sides. Pitch stretched his arms out and yawned.
“It’s past your bedtime,” Moon growled. Pitch snapped his gaze back, stomach twisting.
“Sorry, I guess that’s not a very good joke.” Moon had always been a bit awkward. Pitch made a mental note to make Gregory interact with him more. Pitch said goodbye to Moon, leaving the lights off for him.
He made his way back to the main entrance area, deciding on fixing the S.T.A.F.F bots. He managed to catch the one that was spinning around. He shouted when it kept spinning around with him on its back. He yanked on whatever wires he could reach underneath it’s faceplate. It stopped spinning around and shut down. Pitch climbed off and had to resist the urge to vomit from the rapid spinning.
After quite a while of resetting the S.T.A.F.F bots, Pitch had successfully fixed over a dozen. He was sitting on the floor, closing a panel on the base of the current one and decided he could close his eyes. He didn’t have to look to put in a screw.
When he opened his eyes back up, he was on a couch. He panicked, not recognizing his surroundings, until it clicked that he was in Monty’s room with the lights out. He checked his phone, it was well past one in the afternoon. He raced from the greenroom into Rockstar Row. Monty was dragging damaged S.T.A.F.F bots into two piles. From the looks of things, one was completely destroyed bots, and the other was repairable.
“And here I thought you were just a pretty face.”
Monty turned quickly, dropping the bot in his arms. He flapped his lips uselessly, ultimately producing no words.
“You were asleep on the floor. I always knew you had no dignity but you and I both know you’re above that,” Monty bit back.
“Thank you. For moving me, I mean.” Pitch looked at his feet, feeling his face heat up. No way in hell was he flustered or flattered by a robotic man with sharp teeth and an alligator aesthetic. At least he didn’t look completely like an alligator.
Didn’t make it any less weird.
“I tried fixing one of them,” he gestured to a busted bot with a screwdriver through the panel on its head, “but I didn’t really know what I was doing. Freddy said you’d been awake for over thirty-six hours, what the fuck?”
“Shut up. If you bent my screwdriver I’m tearing you to pieces and using them for spare parts.” The screwdriver was fine. Ignoring Monty, Pitch readjusted his toolbelt. There was loud knocking at the door, then the ring of the staff doorbell. Pitch groaned.
“It’s always something.”