I swear to god I used to be better at mini-golf than this.
Mini-golf isn't my number one choice for how I like to spend my time, but Monty was ruffled I didn't say hi to him yesterday, and coerced me into playing a 18 hole round with him and Freddy (whom I also didn't interact with at all yesterday.)
"This isn't fair.." Freddy mumbles under his breath, loudly enough to let us hear.
Monty is obliterating the two of us, by the way. Surprise.
"Well maybe if ya' stand the way I JUST showed you, you'd get some better shots." Monty is quick to retort. The passive aggression between these two has been considerably more entertaining than the game itself.
I've already done my first stroke of the hole we're on, so I'm off to the side, leaning on my club. Freddy is up to bat.
"I do not think the way I'm standing is going to reduce the 11 stroke lead you have over me." Freddy fidgets to align himself.
"You never know!"
"I think I do!"
Freddy's club collides with the neon, glow-in-the-dark golf ball. It travels half the distance it's supposed to. I don't think I've ever seen Freddy this furious before.
"You gotta hit the thing, Fred!"
"Why do they put grown-out fake grass across the entire course, you could never predict how far the ball is gonna go!"
"We're in a swamp! It adds to the atmosphere, and all that." Monty haphazardly swings his club around a little, mocking a warm-up.
"This. Is not. Fair." Freddy walks besides me, grumbling to himself. He looks like he's about to submit a 'formal complaint'.
"It is fair!" Monty calls back at Freddy. Monty's already started his swing, despite taking almost no time to align himself.
"How do they expect you to-"
Monty gets his 4th hole in one.
"SEE!" Monty points at the hole, visibly flexing his arm muscles.
"That's different, you-!"
"It's not different, you just-!"
I zone out and take hold of my club and approach my ball, which went further than Freddy's, but veered way the hell off to the left. Technically, it was Freddy's turn, but I think he's preoccupied right now.
By some stroke of luck - hehe, 'stroke' - my ball rolls politely into the 'green', and stops a few inches from the hole.
Freddy and I are quiet as Monty takes his turn. He takes a peculiarly long time to lign up his shot before he takes his stroke, and the ball narrowly skims by the hole, stopping an inch or two away.
"Shit." Monty mutters.
"Hey!" Freddy responds.
"Sorry, I've been tryna figure out how to hole-in-one this cursed hole.. Your turn Mikalike." Monty walks up and dinks his ball into the hole.
"Are you good at this because you practice, or are you programmed to be this way?" I finally chime in, taking my time to let the ball drop onto the starting area and align myself.
"Programming" - Freddy
"Practice" - Monty
I stay silent in hopes that one or both of them would elaborate.
"I refuse to believe you got this good on your own." Freddy grumbles.
"This is my area! I used to practice here every second of my life!" Monty responds
That was my theory as well, but Monty being programmed to be good at mini-golf wasn't an unbelievable proposition.
"How hard could it be to program the calculation for the trajectory of a ball?" Freddy skeptically adds. I think he believes Monty, but isn't willing to admit it.
Programming.. That reminds me of another question.
"So, you guys can eat, right?"
"Ha!" Monty slaps his belly "You think they gave me all this fat for fun?"
Monty is not fat. He's still built like a tank, but I did see a bit of a jiggle when he slapped his stomach.
Wait, really?
"You can get fat from eating?" I take my eyes off the ball to eye him curiously.
"Of course we can! Look at Freddy!"
"I'd punch you if I wasn't confident you could suplex me with zero effort."
Monty just snickers at Freddy's response.
"That's.. pretty incredible. How so?" I say, trying to keep on topic.
"We're almost biological, actually." Freddy intercepts. "The plans for us weren't thought up by the CEO, we recieved our blueprints from this big project the old CEO of Freddy's was hiding away."
My father. That can't be good.
"William created you?"
"Whossat?" Monty asks
"The old CEO, his name was William."
"Oh! Then no. He wrote our plans though, so in a sense, he kinda did. The current CEO tried to replicate the plans exactly, and almost did so perfectly, but there were small changes." Monty raises his finger up like he's giving an intelligent lecture.
"What kind of changes?"
"I 'unno." Monty immediately drops the whole 'intelligent' act upon being asked a question he didn't know the answer to. Freddy, however, was more than happy to chime in.
"Actually, our plans had our AI's written, but the plans never indicated that we would have any kind of internal mechanism, like endoskeletons"
"That.. Seems pretty important, what was the AI supposed to control then?"
"That's why the CEO made the change, the AI didn't seem to actually program anything inside our blueprints. The only thing that mentioned the programming was a line that said something along the lines of 'Insert AI when conversion completes'." Freddy shrugs as he says that last part. "The only other part of the plans we couldn't decipher was a substance littered around the whole suit that we weren't familiar with. Thankfully, it didn't seem to end up being important, as we ended up working without it."
That's a lot of information to take in, but it clicks pretty hard if you know what I know.
William created remnant as an attempt to create eternal life. Since souls could only link to inanimate objects with Remnant in them, William needed to create robots for the souls to inhabit. If the souls showed signs of being able to control the robot, William would know remnant worked as intended.
Once he figured out remnant was a success, he probably started working on making the plans for glamrock animatronics.
If this worked, human sentience would have been implemented into a (mostly) biological body, and William would have created the closest thing to artificial life that might ever exist. Maybe William was intending to inhabit one of these bodies in order to avoid death? I don't know.
Ha. If only he knew the souls could possess their own dead bodies.
The mysterious substance that they couldn't find was remnant. That means these animatronics physically cannot be bound to a soul. William probably thought that he didn't need an endoskeleton for these animatronics, since all he would need was a soul to inherit the suits.
tl;dr: These animatronics were built to link to a soul, but since remnant was never applied, they can't.
I guess, in a way, William succeeded in making artificial life. These guys are about as real as real gets, even if they don't even have a poor soul trapped inside them. He practically just.. created more living beings.
This does actually make me feel quite a bit better.. I wasn't absolutely sure that there was nothing sinister going on with these animatronics. Now, I know that they were intended to have a sinister purpose, but that purpose failed, so they truly don't have anything evil going on in them at all.
"Gonna hit the ball, hotshot?"
Oh shit, how long was I zoned out?
"Yeah, sorry, I was just thinking about something."
Monty recedes from my face once he realizes I'm still alive.
"Yeah? How 'bout you tell us what you were thinkin' about while you play the damn game?"
I chuckle a little at the banter.
"It wasn't anything important."
- tink -
Hey look, hole in one.
It isn't until around 3AM that the game ends. Truth be told, I had fun. Only a few days ago, the animatronics tended to avoid me, now they're actively inviting me to go do stuff with them. Feels kinda nice.
As I'm walking through the auditorium, I see Chica chasing after Trudge up on the second floor. Think I'll check that area using the camera's instead of going there personally tonight.
Another 3 or 4 minutes pass before I reach the animatronic's corridor.
I haven't physically been around the building too much tonight. I think I've vouched for checking EVERYTHING with cameras instead. An hour and a half of minigolf will do that to you, I suppose.
- pshh -
It takes me a minute to identify the steampunkian sound. Before I know what's going on, Roxanne and I are standing face to face.
"Mike!" She yelps, startled.
Roxanne's wearing a different getup right now. This uniform looks more like a mechanic uniform. It isn't too uncommon to see her wearing this, since her whole deal is being 'go-kart savvy', but she's usually only wearing it when she's working on one of the karts by the raceway.
"Hello Roxanne."
"What are you doing here-" She stops herself once she realizes that I work here, and very commonly walk this corridor.
"What are YOU doing here?" I retort before she can get a hold of herself. She takes the time to do so anyway, and responds with her normal sass.
"I live here, idiot."
"How come you're wearing your mechanic uniform all the way out here?"
"I was gettin' my clothes washed. You should try it sometime." She flicks my (admittedly very dirty and unwashed) hat.
"Sorry, I don't wash this hat very often." I reply honestly. I kinda deserve this one.
"What DO you wash, then?" Roxy puts her hands on her hips, looking down at me with contempt.
"Everything else."
"Really?"
"...Yeah?"
"And you're STILL purple?"
Oh boy. This again.
"I'm still purple."
"You ever heard of makeup, corpse?"
I swear we've had this exact conversation a million times.
"Yes."
She stares at me for a while, before raising an eyebrow with genuine curiosity.
"Are you wearing makeup that makes you look purple?"
I had to hold back a snicker. How legitimately she asked that question caught me off guard.
Roxanne caught me smirking though.
"What?" She says defensively.
"Nothing, sorry."
"No! What was that? Why was that funny?"
"I am not wearing purple makeup."
Now acutely aware of how stupid her question was, her cheeks light up a bit from embarrassment.
"Oh- you are such a jerk! I only asked because you're the only person I know who looks like that much of a freak!"
"Sorry."
"No you're not!"
"I am, a little."
"Ugh!" Here we are. I'm finally starting to get to her. This might be a new record for 'longest she's tolerated me'.
"Why don't you wear makeup, though." Roxy defaults back to putting a hand on her hip, and pointing the other at me.
"I don't feel the need to."
"Why not?"
"I don't even know how."
"What?" Roxanne glares at me skeptically. The thought of someone not being invested in makeup might just be foreign to her. "Don't know how to do what?"
"Put.. makeup on?"
"Why not?"
"I've never had to before."
That's a lie, actually. I had to lather myself in a decent looking skin-tone makeup once to secure myself a job at one of the Freddy's locations.
"It's not that hard, you know." She states matter-of-factly.
"I never said it was."
"So why don't you learn?"
"It's more effort than I'm willing to put into something. I don't feel an overbearing need to look nice."
"Spoken like a true hobo." She says, squinting at me.
"Thanks." This, clearly, was not the answer she was looking for.
"Jesus Christ, come here."
Unexpectedly, Roxanne takes me by the arm and starts dragging me along behind her.
"What? Why?"
"I'm not letting you look like a corpse while I'm around anymore. You're an eyesore."
She pulls me into her room, and forcefully sits me in her chair. She then immediately begins rummaging around in her dresser.
"Wait, I'm confused-"
"Would you shut up for twelve seconds?"
I do as I'm told. Turns out being flabberghasted does wonders for making someone shut up.
Eventually, I find my voice again.
"So, wait, am I-"
"It hasn't been twelve seconds yet." Roxanne rises from her dresser, marches over to the backdoor to her room, and wheels out another chair that she promptly places in front of me, and sits in.
I take my time to count an additional twelve seconds before speaking up again.
"Are you.. 'make-up-ing' me?"
"Yes, shut up." Roxy takes out all her bobbles and doohickeys before picking a small brush-thing and dabbing it in some skin tone.. dust? I don't know anything about makeup, nor its terminology.
"That color's pale- I'm tanner than that."
"You're purple, moron."
"Oh. right.."
I should probably just drop it and accept that defeat.
Here begins the magic, though.
Satisfied with the color on the brush, she uses one hand/paw to hold my chin still and position my face, and she uses the other one to start actually applying the make-up on me.
"The brush is cold." I subconsciously note.
"I wish I could express to you how little I care." Roxanne quickly retorts.
She keeps shooting down my attempts at conversation/banter. That's not great, as I'm trying to make conversation to prevent myself from having a sensory overload.
Roxanne is evidently extremely good at what she's doing. She's both super focused while also appearing to move off muscle memory. This is an incredibly odd sensation.
The feeling of the brush on my skin is weird, yeah, but nothing could compare to the other part.
Someone was.. WORKING on me. Every time I moved, Roxy would move my face back into position. As a result of being hyper-fixated on what she's doing, her face is also unnaturally close.
It feels like when you get hurt as a child, and your mom takes care of comforting you and treating the injury.
I haven't felt the experience of someone CARING about me in as long as I can remember. My father never did, obviously, and my mother didn't have much time to. Even if Roxy didn't actually care about me, and was doing this just to stop me from being an eyesore, the feeling was unbelievable. I'd never admit this to her in a million years, but I'm thoroughly relishing in it.
Roxy switches around the brushes from time to time.
"Close your eyes." She demands like an Egyptian queen.
"Mmkay."
I can feel the brush dance on my eyelids for a while.
"Open"
"Mmkay."
"Close again."
"Do you do Chica's makeup?"
"Sometimes. She can handle herself, though, unlike the fleshbag in front of me."
"Does anyone else need makeup?"
"Rarely - turn to your left - Freddy and Monty don't use makeup as much as they use stickers and plastic and all that - Jesus, don't turn that much."
"How much should I turn?"
"This much."
"...What?"
"This much!"
"I can't see wh- can I open my eyes yet?"
"No!"
She uses her hands to position me where she wants me to be facing. She does so a little quickly, though.
"Ow."
"Sorry."
"Did you just apologize to me?"
"..No."
"I'm glad we've gotten close enough that you can feel the slightest amount of empathy for me."
"Please, Mike, shut the fuck up."
She turns my head again, intentionally with as much force as before.
"Ow."
"..."
"No apology?"
"Mike."
"Sorry."
Another hour passes before Roxy is satisfied. She even took the time to do my hands and nails.. I let her paint my nails.. At that point, I was too afraid of what would happen if I said 'no'.
Right now, she has me sat in front of her mirror. She's towering behind me, admiring her work through the mirror.
"Does that look fine?" Roxy asks.
"What are you- a barber?"
"Dammit, Mike, does it look OK?"
I take a moment to look at myself in the mirror with attention to detail. She got.. Everything. I look normal. I haven't looked normal since I, yknow.. died.
"So help me god, if you get nitpicky with me-"
"No! No- its good!"
"Of course it's good. I'm asking if you want anything else done."
"What else could you possibly do to me?"
"I could always knock that attitude out of you, all you have to do is ask."
I can't believe I'm hearing this from Roxanne of all people.
I love it. I want to be snarky or sarcastic, but I never realized how much 'looking normal' would do for me.
"It's really good. Thank you."
"Yes, I 'know' it's good, I'm asking you-"
"No, I mean, I love it the way it is."
"You 'love' it? Trying to butter me up for something, corpse?"
"I mean it, no joking around this time. I think it looks amazing. Thank you Roxy."
Roxanne goes silent. I think by calling her 'Roxy', I enforced the point that I really meant it.
This isn't something I'd usually admit to someone like Roxy, but this really does mean a lot to me. I didn't think it would, but the combination of feeling 'cared for' and looking like a normal human being again felt really, really nice.
"Wh-whatever, what are you still doing here?" She finally responds.
"Oh shit, right, I work here."
"Yeah, you do." She spins the chair I'm sitting in to face the door. "Now get the hell outta here, and come back first thing every night."
"Fir- huh?"
"Dumbass. I did this so you wouldn't be an eyesore. Assuming you shower, the makeup isn't gonna last all day, so you're coming back here so I can do it again real quick."
Roxanne's trying to sound confident and demanding, but I can hear a little embarrassment in her voice. She knows she's basically telling me to interact with her first thing every night, even if it is strictly for the benefit of not having to look at me the way I normally look.
"I'd, uh. I'd love to, but I don't think I can spend an hour every night to do this, y'know?"
"It won't take an hour, dumbass! It just took longer this time because I've never had to put makeup on a purple freak before." She huffs.
I stay silent for a little while before sighing in defeat.
"Alrighty then.."
"Then get outta here!"
"I'm going!"
Before I go back to the office, I find myself stopping by the bathroom to look at myself. I can't get enough of it.
Y'know, I usually shower first thing when I get home..
Buuut, I think I might save it until I go to bed this time. Maybe I'll go on a walk today.
I can't help but grin slightly. I might be able to go to the part without anyone eyeing me like a freak. I gotta say, that idea's sounding particularly appealing.
But that's later, and this is now. And now, I haven't done my job yet, and I only have about an hour to do it.
I sit in the office and eye my laptop.
Not today buddy, I got work to do.