2041 Continued

Business was booming, with two whole franchises running: Sprigatito's Diner and the newly opened Spriggy FazSprig's Pizza. Together, Liko and Roy had been able to take the hybrid suit idea and make it into a reality and, fittingly enough, it was symbolic of the partnership between these two business partners, a human suit designed by Liko that could become a freestanding Roy style robot. But because it was still new tech with kinks to work out, the rollout was limited, restricted only to the Sprigatito's Diner location.

All of this meant that Liko was busier than ever. She didn't have time to be a full-time parent. So she designed a nanny cam system where cameras and speakers were hidden throughout the neighborhood, as well as in her youngest child's favorite toy, a Sprigatito plush.

But since cameras weren't enough to raise a kid, Liko left childcare duties to her eldest daughter, Mira. There was just one problem with that, Mira was far from the best babysitter. She constantly bullied her younger brother by jumpscaring him while wearing an Eevee mask, and constantly left him behind at the diner. Liko saw it all through the cameras. Kids would be kids, and tomorrow was another day, after all.

Except Mira's torment didn't stop. Bitter, angry thoughts would run through her head. Why did she have to be the one to have to take care of her crybaby brother all the time? It just wasn't fair.

It was time for her to get even with her brother by playing the ultimate prank, a prank that just so happened to be on her brother's birthday. She and her friends would take him and make him do the one thing that he was terrified of doing: getting close to the animatronics. That would be embarrassing for the kid that was such an embarrassment to her.

Her brother screamed and fought, trying to get out of their grasp, but just as they were putting that small squirming boy up to Ducky's wide open mouth, it snapped shut. The sensitive mechanisms inside the animatronic had been triggered by the boy's frantic movements, and they immediately clamped down on his head.

The wriggling stopped. And the boy went limp.

"But it was just a prank. It was meant to be funny."

Her younger brother was immediately taken to the hospital and given an IV. Flowers and pills filled the nightstand next to his hospital bed, but the damage was too severe. He couldn't recover.

As the young boy's consciousness began to fade, he could hear Mira's last words to him, a small, flimsy apology. But his mother Liko's, through the voice of his Sprigatito plush, was a firm and committed promise to her dying son.

"You're broken. I will put you back together."

This would not be the end for him. No matter what, Liko's son would live again. It would just take time, time that, right now, she just didn't have.

Her son's heart monitor flatline as the boy faded into the inky unknown of the afterlife.

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In the aftermath of the tragedy, changes started happening around Sprigatito's Diner. Kids were now required to wear security wristbands to prevent anyone from getting outside without parental permission.

Any kid who approached the exit without permission would have to answer to Security, a large animatronic Banette on strings that could fly around on rails across the restaurant to stop kids in their tracks. It was Liko's idea, inspired by Mira constantly leaving the restaurant without her brother.

In the wake of Ducky's mechanical malfunction, all the hybrid suits got retired, locked away at the nearby Spriggy FazSprig's Pizza location. It was yet another tough pill for Liko to swallow after all the hard work that she and Roy had put into them.

Liko eventually buried her young son's small body in a remote location out in a clearing right alongside her drive into and out of work every day.

The death of her son sent her family spiraling. Her husband was so crippled with grief, that he could only sit and watch TV.

But her daughter Mira was far worse, complaining about hallucinations of a Sprigatito animatronic standing outside her window. She was so wracked with guilt that she was convinced that she was being haunted by the ghost of her younger brother, stuck inside the costume that took his life. The robot's three-toed feet digging into the wet earth. The words "SHE LIED" ringing in Mira's ears. Some nights, Mira would even go so far as to break out of her room to check the gravesite and ensure that her brother's body was still there.

As for Liko herself, she buried herself in her work and drinks. She spent longer and longer amounts of time at a local bar in Cabo Poco that wasn't far from her son's gravesite. The bar gave her a place to think to herself, to reflect on the past, stewing on how Roy had stolen her idea for a Pokemon-themed restaurant, and how he humiliated her by buying her out of bankruptcy.

But now, now there was her son. Roy had taken Liko's son from her. The robotic part was the part that failed, after all.

Liko ordered one more drink, but it was one too many. The bar turned her out and told her to go home.

Arriving home later that night, drunk and angry, she took her husband by the hand and dragged him into her car, driving him over to the restaurant, ready to give Roy a piece of her mind.

But just as Liko got out of the car, her husband tried to prevent her from entering. Instead, he pulled her to the side to attempt to reason with her, try and get her to open up about her problems.

But as they argued, Liko got an idea. A beautifully awful idea.

Roy had humiliated Liko all those years ago. He killed her business, and now his animatronic suit had killed her son. It was time for Liko to do some killing of her own.

Suddenly, she attacked her husband right outside the restaurant. And it felt good. She felt free. The years of resentment and bitterness finally unleashed on someone else in a moment of pure, unapologetic evil. She would make someone else hurt the same way that she had hurt!

And in that moment, Liko had become a killer.

She dropped her husband's lifeless body and drove home, forced to confront her daughter later that night. Appalled, but also a little excited by what she had just done.

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Her husband's death would remain on the books as a random act of violence. Though Roy had his suspicions about Liko, he couldn't find any physical evidence, nothing that could link Liko back to the crime.

In the weeks that followed, Sprigatito's Diner would close for good. Two high profile deaths with a grieving owner in such a short amount of time was just too much bad press to handle. Besides, Spriggy's FazSprig's Pizza was still open and it was the newer restaurant, after all.

All the equipment from the diner, including the two hybrid suits and Security Banette, would get retired to that location, and there they would sit for two uneventful years.

The next two years were spent quietly grieving. Spriggy FazSprig's Pizza and the new cast of characters were a hit, the tragic memories of their hybrid predecessors quickly faded.

Liko kept a low profile and buried herself in work and research, quickly reaching Roy's level of engineering and even surpassing him. And while Roy slowed down to grieve, Liko kept going, even starting her own company under her name, a place for all those pet projects that were a little too experimental for the regular operations of the pizzeria.

The first of these experimental projects was a secret workshop under her house, a veritable bunker which allowed him to work while still monitoring her kids via hidden security cameras. Two, zero, four, one. A passcode that served as a constant reminder of why the cameras were so important, why she was down there in the first place. This was all to fulfill the promise that she made to her son, right? "I will put you back together."

This was for him. All for him. Right?

But cameras weren't enough. Liko needed to solve the runaway Mira problem. She needed to keep her in the house. She couldn't have another one of her kids wind up inside of an animatronic suit, so why not run a little experiment on Mira?

All this work with Roy had gotten Liko to start learning more about life, robots, the human mind, and what a fallible machine we as humans were, our reality so easy to manipulate with a few sensory deceptions. Deceptions like sound.

With just a few sounds, Liko had discovered that she could alter a person's vision. She could transform smooth, plastic robots into lumbering, twisted monsters. Monsters far scarier than she could create with actual materials. They would appear organic and rotting. Putrid and terrifying.

These would be Liko's means of keeping her daughter in the house where she belonged. Was it extreme? Maybe, but then again, this was the daughter who had killed her brother. She would punish her.

And so Mira would grow up not only dealing with the memories of her own guilt, the hospital room, the pills, the flowers, the death of her brother, but also facing literal nightmarish monsters, illusions created by sound.