To Be Continued

Something felt wrong with Sprigatito's Mega Pizza Emporium, almost as if the entire building was haunted, possessed. Stuffed Banette plushies hiding on ceilings, behind walls, places that they had no earthly way of belonging. Helper robots with greasy tears down their eyes, acting like they were being puppeteered by some sort of nightmare. Even their sounds had the echoes of nightmares long past.

It was as though a guardian spirit of the past had refused to move on. As long as Liko was around, it too would linger. Only now it wasn't in just one body, but rather it was in the essence of the building itself.

Roy had heard stories of houses built on burial grounds getting possessed by angry spirits, but he had never assumed that it could be true. Then again, in a world of living spirit metal and mind-controlling viruses, who was he to be so judgmental? The whole thing was ridiculous. Why would this be the line that he refused to cross? After all, the Mega Pizza Emporium was built over the burial ground of angry spirits.

But it was the power cords that finally convinced him that something was wrong. Suddenly, the cords were striped white and gray, just like the Banette animatronic from generations ago.

The very foundations of this place, the materials and wires that constituted it, were rebelling against him, against Liko and her family, against the quest to bring them all together again.

And it was being helped by something else. Something slithering through the building. Maybe they were connected, Roy couldn't be sure, but a giant mass of living wires could be heard oozing through the walls, stealing pieces and parts of the old animatronics showcased throughout the building. Roy could only assume that it was a byproduct of all the souls he had collected. From Liko's testing, he learned that light and dark souls existed. One born from positive emotions, and the other created from anguish, anger, agony.

Perhaps this...thing was an amalgamation of all the darkest parts of the franchise's history, a collection of all the hatred still housed inside these defunct endoskeletons and exo-suits.

As long as it was left alone, it seemed to be harmless. But if any member of Liko's family (outside of Mira) got close, it would lash out wildly. Even young Tony. Looking to punish the family that had been complicit in its horrible creation.

Little did Roy know that Tony should have been his biggest concern. That bringing Liko's family together would have some unforeseen consequences.

Tony was normally the goodest of boys. Roy had literally built him that way. But lately, he had been disappearing more often, disobeying his orders...requests. Roy knew that he loved playing on the arcade machines once the Mega Pizza Emporium closed, being so good as to top the leaderboard on practically all of them. But lately, he was nowhere to be found.

Roy suspected that his absence had to do with Spriggy's failed performance the other night when he malfunctioned on stage, almost as though the core programming of Spriggy responded to seeing this rebuilt boy, almost like it awakened something inside of him.

Roy would have to make sure Chloe was on the lookout for him, but he would soon come to learn that Chloe wasn't enough.

Whether it was the influence of the nightmare Banette animatronic, or a reawakened hatred of animatronics seeded deep in Tony's code, something had caused him to rebel. To rip apart every animatronic in the Mega Pizza Emporium.

Bit by bit, this boy was tearing down the empire that Roy had so painstakingly built. Freeing Chloe from her mind control, destroying the remains of Liko in the basement, setting Spriggy loose.

As Roy's carefully created world crumbled around him once again, he began to plot his revenge.

He would have to bring them all to RUIN.