Strangely enough, after a few hours of learning to bowl, Dream was in a much better mood. Even though he'd only scored anything for about half of all throws. The rest somehow always missed the pins, and it turned from frustrating to just funny after a while. Bonnie, of course, nearly always struck a goal, though he was having more fun just bowling with someone instead of winning.

The crowd that gathered of course was cheering on the rabbit, though after a while some were cheering him out of pure pity- and it really was comedic after a certain point. He'd roll, turn around, and the crowd’s reaction would answer if he hit anything or not.
Not that he couldn't hear pins falling over.

Inevitably the games wound to an end, Bonnie's other duties catching up to him as they departed, a lot lighter than before. Did Dream bow to the crowd?
Yes. He was supposed to be dramatic anyway.
Unfortunately with all the attention came questions, a swarm forming to ask about him as soon as Bonnie wasn't there to keep them at bay.

Nightmare was bewildered at how Dream just handled it. He really shouldn't have been, this wasn't actually all that new to him at all.
Everyone adored the guardian of Positivity. It was a form of celebrity that was actually a little more exhausting than others.
Always begging for help in one way or another that he'd have to turn down because he simply can't help everyone. Especially with marriage proposals.

As it was, the crowd gradually lost interest as it set in that he was literally just a minor childcare bot. With the humans generally wandering off, Dream was free to.. figure out something. The day was almost over, and eventually- even if it wasn't today- he'd have to face Melissa. And quite frankly, neither of them wanted to do that.

So he just wandered around, exploring the pizzaplex until he recognized the closed off area that was supposed to become a racetrack. It was labeled for Foxy, but he had yet to meet the guy. There was just no talk about him.

“Oh hi, darling! Fancy seeing you here.” Someone greeted as he stared. Dream hesitated, but it was just Chica. He hadn't interacted with her much, nor had Nightmare.
“Hi. Didn't expect to find anyone here.” He admitted.
“Me neither, but I'm free and saw you heading over here.” She clucked out a short giggle before her face fell.

He didn't need to feel emotions to know she was sad to see the signs.
“Did.. something happen to Foxy?” He asked.
The chicken cringed, leaning on the wall.
“Yeah.. he has a habit of getting really damaged and tossed around by higher ups.” She smiled weakly.
Dream felt guilty, being unable to really make her feel better.
“Is he coming back?”

“Oh, Foxy?” She laughed but it wasn't quite genuine. “He always comes back! He's too important to the brand already. I think they're just remodeling him again. He was gonna come back to a racetrack and everything but it looks like they changed their minds. Again. I think they're starting construction over by that new daycare of yours? Put his face on it, anyway.” She crossed her arms, regarding the covered signs.

“I noticed that.” He nodded absently, thinking about what they were building over inside.
Chica went on. “I think they're making another animatronic for the track.”
He was suddenly at attention. “You think so?”
“Yeah. Been hearing talk between the staff. They don't say much to us directly, y'know?” It was said so casually, but he could hear the note of weariness in her voice.
“Can't say I'm surprised.” He huffed drily, glancing at the people wandering in the distance, predominantly in one direction.

“I think you're lucky.” She noted softly. Dream looked over in confusion, seeing the softness in her purple eyes. “In what way?”
“Your handler. She really seems to see you.” She looked forward again, somber. “She was always one of the nicer ones, but she seems to like you as a friend, y'know?”

Once again, he felt slimy hearing her talk. The only reason the human liked them was because they were just possessing an animatronic. Neither of them were AI like the Glamrocks thought. It felt.. wrong.
“...Do you think I can talk to her about the unequal treatment? Or even some of the other staff? They seem to respect me after the incident on the first day.”

The chicken squawked out a laugh at that. “Yeah, that was pretty great! Wish I could do that. We're not able to get violent like that unless someone's an active threat to people, y'know? I'm a little jealous.” She winked, before continuing.
“But no, I wouldn't want you talking about it. Don't wanna get between you and the good thing you got going on right now.”

It was quiet between them for a minute, Dream feeling guilty.
“... It's a permanent position.”
“Hmm?” She perked up.
“The handler thing. We actually prefer manager between us, but. It's permanent.” He looked over to see her bemusement.
“I think they realize it's important for young children to have adult human interaction even in a daycare, so Melissa isn't going anywhere.”

Chica shifted in place, thinking.
“I don't mind talking to her about disregarding the rest of you. I know she worked with you all before. I don't like being the equivalent of a new toy.”
He knew it wasn't like that, but on some level it was fairly close. The two of them were mostly a source of mystery to her that she wanted to solve.
“I don't think Mel sees it like that.” Chica defended.
“No, she doesn't. But it's not too far from the truth either, is it?”

The chicken hesitated again, uncertain.
“I just want her to see the same thing of you that she sees of us. You're people too.”
Chica blinked at him, but didn't say anything for a few minutes. It was only after an announcement came on mentioning she would be available for pictures in a few minutes that she spoke.
“Thanks for offering, at least. It's very sweet of you. I should be off, though. Good luck!” She pushed off the wall with a half-hearted wave before heading off.

They watched her leave, sitting against the wall beyond the entrance while thoughtfully regarding the shutter. Just debating going in or not.
Yet no one was around. They were unnoticed.
..The thought of something new was more enticing than talking to another animatronic or heaven forbid facing Melissa.

Eventually, more for a semi reasonable alibi, Dream let Nightmare take over just to lift and roll under the shutters, standing up to regard the mess that was managed by staff bots and a few construction workers minding their own business near the fringes.
The presence of people was entirely unexpected, someone pausing while walking by.
“Uh..”
“I'm security.” Nightmare deadpanned.
“Oookay then.” The human awkwardly accepted that, continuing on his way.

Preferring not to make their presence obvious, Nightmare made his way towards the low.. mound in the room, keeping to the shadows. He acted casual whenever anyone was looking his way, making it a game of sorts that irked Dream.

Still, it was strange that the closer they got, the more he felt a tug somewhere inside to somewhere underneath everything. Underground.
Dream couldn't feel it, odd as that was. Just Nightmare. It felt strange, for once there was something only one of them was aware of. Sure, he could sense something tugging at Nightmare only through the internal closeness they shared.

𝚆𝚑𝚎𝚛𝚎 𝚊𝚛𝚎 𝚢𝚘𝚞 𝚐𝚞𝚢𝚜? Melissa suddenly messaged, forcing Nightmare to pause just to glance through cameras. She was sitting uncomfortably at the security desk in the daycare, smiling up at a few others talking to her while glancing at her tablet.
Aɾҽ ƚԋҽყ αʂƙιɳɠ ϝσɾ υʂ? Dream asked as Nightmare resumed, already finding a trail he only could sense leading under the sort of mountain.
Like a miniature Ebott in a way.

𝚈𝚎𝚊𝚑 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚢 𝚠𝚊𝚗𝚝 𝚝𝚘 𝚍𝚘 𝚜𝚘𝚖𝚎 𝚎𝚡𝚝𝚛𝚊 𝚝𝚎𝚜𝚝𝚜, 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚢 𝚜𝚎𝚎𝚖 𝚠𝚎𝚒𝚛𝚍𝚎𝚍 𝚘𝚞𝚝 𝚋𝚢 𝚠𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝚢𝚘𝚞'𝚟𝚎 𝚐𝚘𝚝 𝚐𝚘𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚘𝚗 𝚠𝚒𝚝𝚑 𝚢𝚘𝚞𝚛 𝚎𝚢𝚎𝚜 She explained, typing rapidly.
𝔈𝔶𝔢 𝔠𝔬𝔩𝔬𝔯 𝔰𝔥𝔬𝔲𝔩𝔡 𝔫𝔬𝔱 𝔠𝔬𝔫𝔠𝔢𝔯𝔫 𝔱𝔥𝔢𝔪 𝔰𝔬 𝔡𝔢𝔢𝔭𝔩𝔶. 𝔚𝔢 𝔣𝔲𝔫𝔠𝔱𝔦𝔬𝔫 𝔧𝔲𝔰𝔱 𝔞𝔰 𝔦𝔫𝔱𝔢𝔫𝔡𝔢𝔡, 𝔡𝔬 𝔴𝔢 𝔫𝔬𝔱? Nightmare argued while scooting under a boarded up entrance.

ℑ 𝔞𝔪 𝔞𝔠𝔱𝔦𝔫𝔤 𝔞𝔰 𝔰𝔢𝔠𝔲𝔯𝔦𝔱𝔶. He clued her in to what they were doing, finding a rickety elevator and hesitating.
ℑ 𝔴𝔬𝔲𝔩𝔡 𝔞𝔭𝔭𝔯𝔢𝔠𝔦𝔞𝔱𝔢 𝔟𝔢𝔦𝔫𝔤 𝔞𝔟𝔩𝔢 𝔱𝔬 𝔠𝔬𝔪𝔭𝔩𝔢𝔱𝔢 𝔞 𝔭𝔞𝔱𝔯𝔬𝔩 𝔟𝔢𝔣𝔬𝔯𝔢 𝔱𝔥𝔢𝔶 𝔪𝔲𝔰𝔱 𝔭𝔬𝔨𝔢 𝔞𝔫𝔡 𝔭𝔯𝔬𝔡 𝔞𝔱 𝔲𝔰.
He took care to avoid it and just start climbing down the shaft, mentally watching her just say a few words and turn the tablet around to the group apologetically.
ℑ 𝔥𝔞𝔳𝔢 𝔞𝔰𝔰𝔦𝔤𝔫𝔢𝔡 𝔡𝔲𝔱𝔦𝔢𝔰 𝔱𝔥𝔞𝔱 ℑ 𝔴𝔬𝔲𝔩𝔡 𝔩𝔦𝔨𝔢 𝔱𝔬 𝔱𝔞𝔨𝔢 𝔰𝔢𝔯𝔦𝔬𝔲𝔰𝔩𝔶. 𝔜𝔬𝔲 𝔞𝔩𝔩 𝔰𝔥𝔬𝔲𝔩𝔡 𝔲𝔫𝔡𝔢𝔯𝔰𝔱𝔞𝔫𝔡. He tacked on, aware they were reading.

Eventually one of them turned around and found the camera, visibly frustrated. Behind them Melissa caught the gaze and meekly waved at it.
Nightmare was amused to find it was possible to move the camera, giving a nod through it as they landed amid strange ruins. There was a pit in the cement floor. He.. felt something there.

Drawn by the familiar pull, he clambered down the haphazard path, seeing dusty footprints that were partly familiar but mostly not. Down into the dark, like some kind of cave. Eventually he came to an abrupt halt, staring at something

It was black, dripping, shaped like a small tree that emerged from a pile of roots, but the textures were silvery.. and wrong. Like a series of tubes, mechanical parts tangled within it, knots in the trunk dragging metal shells of animatronic heads, eyes largely empty. One thick branch carried something loosely resembling Freddy's face, but pink and white and an almost familiar tar weeping down from its hollow right eye.

Nightmare? Dream was scared. Genuinely afraid, unsure of what this thing was supposed to be, only that it was morbidly familiar in all the wrong ways.
I don't know. He admitted, a little nervous himself.
Instead, he hopped off the ledge, landing silently as he regarded the tangled thing. A tree without leaves, crooked and infused with metal.

Suddenly, his foot clinked against a discarded sheet of metal, and the thing jolted. All in a matter of seconds, it was writhing, tendrils coiling, branches waving as the heads moved on their own, some endoskeletons grasping at the air as a few glowing red eyes blinked sightlessly. Only the branch head seemed to see, swinging around to regard them with a twitchy malevolence.

Then it opened up, operating on hinges that clicked together like some unholy creature as the head tilted the other way.
Out of nowhere, it lunged.
Nightmare vaulted away from it, and the thing kept lunging, but thankfully the resemblance to a tree was not just visual and it was too rooted into the ground to reach him. The thing let out a static shriek, branches flailing in frustration.
I don't know what that is. Nightmare reiterated, thoroughly unnerved by how familiar but wrong it was.

There was a minute of angry, helpless snapping before it calmed down, emitting a continuous growl as it glared. Still, he felt inexorably drawn to it, creeping closer even as it reached towards him, still twitchy but not as violent.
Hesitantly, he touched the tip of the longest limb, which immediately jolted out of his grasp from the shock of something between them.
Steam poured from several orifices as it hissed.

Dropping all pretenses, Nightmare stood up straight and held out a hand. The tree thing stared, likely distrustful, but the head cocked again, face opening and closing before the long tendril came back, stretching as far as it could reach. He wasn't stupid enough to get within grabbing range.

The tip flinched off his metal fingers a few times before trying to grip him, but it was not enough of one to pull him closer, and it seemed frustrated by that. Instead, he rubbed the pliable thing with a thumb, recognizing it.
That.. can't be it, right? Dream asked uncertainly.

This AU is a strange one. Nightmare quietly remarked, put off by the intense hatred he could now sense boiling from the entity now that he was touching it. Almost like part of him, but slightly.. tainted. Separate.
“What has made you so hateful?” He murmured.

Unexpectedly, he got a few flashing images and a word in response. Afton. It mentally echoed, accompanied by flashes of robot faces, of blood, of a human cackling, but every laugh was a different point in time, progressively more and more ghoulish as the man resembled an ancient corpse more than a human. Another robot, rotted, yellow-green, hints of rotted flesh and bone visible through the holes of its shell.

And fire. So much fire. Throughout it all was a rage unlike any other, boiling in darkness until suddenly something tinged with sadness lit up the miasma, and together this disjointed entity was awake. Awake and looking to hurt, because it was already hurting, nothing but pain and rage and vengeance and no sign of where to direct it anymore.

In a way.. Nightmare could understand. To be so completely blind with fury that it was all that could be felt, the all-consuming need to kill, to maim, to scream. The thing.. stared at him, single functioning mechanical eye flickering with red light, head tilted to the side. It could feel him too. The dark miasma was still there, but it seemed to suddenly exclude him.

The thing couldn't really feel anything beyond pain and suffering and hatred, but it was capable of recognizing him as an almost kindred spirit and thus not worth inflicting pain towards. Dream was agonized by it, recognizing something distinctly.. childlike in those echoes.

On some sort of impulse, Nightmare found himself walking a little closer. The tendril didn't grab him, simply falling limp as he ran metal fingers across its surface. Behind him, it lost detail and shape, partly liquifying into something more familiar. This thing functioned on hate and pain, but there was something more inside it, something holding the fragments together, giving them shape. It was that something that felt familiar.

Eventually he was standing in front of the trunk, that main branch curling in to look at him and hiss. Just because it didn't care to attack him anymore didn't mean it liked him. It couldn't like anything.
Still, his hand rested on the trunk of the tree thing.

After a minute, something.. shifted. Not just in it, but himself. Dream faded in and out of consciousness as suddenly darkness was closing in, making him feel weak. The mechanical tendrils writhed and bled together, forming a familiar tar that defied gravity as it crept up his hand, sinking into the gaps of the metal.

He forced Dream to stay awake, as out of it as the lighter twin felt, he needed him to witness this. There was no reason why, he just had to. His brother flickered in and out, barely hanging on as it reached more gaps in the metal, yet Nightmare felt.. stronger.
This was him. It was his magic holding this thing together. The physical remnants of his power combined with the fractured fragments of something once human. Likely multiple.

The black surface lightened to a dark, dark gray before he stumbled back, recognizing that Dream couldn't handle this. It was killing him, that fading wasn't to sleep, but the threat of death. A second death, almost certainly more permanent.
And as much as he once hated his brother.. he couldn't go through this alone.

So Nightmare stumbled almost drunkenly away from the beast, making sure to get out of reach before sitting down heavily to process what had changed.
It was a little strange, finally sensing beyond his own self. He could feel the unending hatred rolling off the entity in front of him, like a wrathful star with roots extending throughout the cavern around them.

But above, he could dully sense the everyday annoyance and frustrations of those in the pizzaplex. The sheer relief at having that back settled something deep inside him, and he almost wanted to lay down and rest awhile.

However, Dream wasn't doing so well. It seemed, even now, in this otherwise powerless robot body, he was still a being of positivity. Whereas before they balanced each other out, now there was a near oversaturation of negativity in the same body.
Nightmare almost felt guilty.
.. Almost.
…. He needed to get to the light.

Deciding that the entity wasn't coherent enough to bother speaking to, he absently nodded at it before climbing up the unsteady scaffolding, heading back into the pizzaplex. While he could ask many questions about the hows and whys of this creature and place existing beneath a mall, he chose to instead figure out what his own magic and power could have been inside it.

The most plausible theory he had was that somehow, it had formed around his remains and this entire structure was built over the ruins of a seemingly unimportant restaurant, or it had been intentionally fused with his remnants.
And it was still a bit of a shock knowing his own body had never even dusted. It seemed that it had just stayed, maybe seeping into the surroundings as a liquid until something came along that could use the dormant power somehow.
And that unsettled him.

He was back at the top of the elevator shaft, climbing out around it when he spotted a rippling shadow- freezing when he saw the source. It was, quite literally, a moving shadow. Familiar swaying tendrils behind his still very much robotic frame.

Nightmare had to rotate his head just to check he didn't have them again. Nope. Just the shadows. But like phantom limbs, he could twitch them around, reaching for things. It looked weird, being only 2 dimensional shapes on the floor and walls, but interesting nonetheless. The biggest disappointment was that he couldn't actually touch anything with them. What a shame.

He ended up moving on, inevitably emerging from under the mound and just casually walking out, squinting at all the workers that dared to stare at him in surprise. Many quickly hurried along, easily intimidated by the eternal smile and dead stare.

Dream was still out of sorts when he left the area, so he kept to dark and quiet areas as he somewhat reluctantly returned to the daycare.
There, the half dozen technicians were waiting, eager to figure out why his “optics” were the wrong color. How that could have changed.

Sure, he'll let them run their tests. He was in a good mood, able to sense their annoyance and frustration. It felt good to have that back.
And if he ignored Melissa smiling uncertainly at him, well.. that was a problem for later. Probably for Dream to deal with.
Yes, he was feeling fantastic.