Chapter Text
They weren’t sure where he had come from. Since when was there an AI for safe mode? Sun had been under the impression he and Moon would ‘combine’ when rebooted, or ‘become whole’, as he had told the little girl, but instead they were locked in a viewing mode while a third, previously unknown or potentially not-before-having -existed AI took over the body. They were safe, yes, and Sun was immensely grateful for that. Moon wasn’t able to cause any wreckage, nor resistance. In fact, he seemed to be a little more mellowed out now that safe mode was activated.
Even so, Sun still had something to gripe about. Eclipse, as the third AI had introduced himself, was stuck in some loop of cleaning. Actually cleaning. This place was in ruins and too much for even Sun to bother fixing. Yet Eclipse seemed intent and glad to scrub at the grimed-to-shreds plastic floor. It was once blue, Sun recalled, but now it was blackened with mold and dirt, and whatever else the ceiling was made of.
“Why clean when we can rest..?” Sun sighed to nobody in particular. He was beyond tired. Him and Moon had been restlessly working all this time without, well, rest, especially when they were fighting for control. This was supposed to be an opportunity to finally shut down. Though Eclipse was under the impression the daycare would open up tomorrow. As if.
“Need…nap…” Moon‘s crunched voice came through as well. Sun wasn’t expecting a response, much less one from Moon. He had almost forgot there was a time they could talk to one another. They had spent so much time blocking out the other from fear, annoyance, or anger.
“A good nap would be nice. But not the ones you give out.” If Sun could frown, he would’ve by now.
“Nap-time…not clean..” At least there was one thing they could agree on. Say, if they could talk again, maybe Sun could voice some of his concerns to Moon.
“Did you…uh, know there was another AI?” he asked, referencing the new appearance of Eclipse, who was still happily cleaning.
Moon made a low humming sound of musing. Where the noise was being produced from was a mystery, but perhaps they could imagine things like that now. “No. New.” It was just like Sun had thought. Eclipse was entirely new and probably just born once safe mode was active. That or he had been dormant until they had been rebooted.
“I didn’t know of him either.” A long stretch of silence grew between them. It had been so long since their last interaction. Last they’d spoken was arguing. Heavy arguing. Sun could still remember every cruel word he’d said to Moon, and likewise every word Moon had said to him. Moon was a lot more mentally regressed now than before. He’d assumed it had to do with the virus taking over his brain and turning him into the embodiment of impishly evil. “Do you think he’ll listen to us if we try to talk to him?” Sun asked after a faux breath.
“Try.” He sensed Moon’s shrug. The nap-time attendant seemed to be expressive in motions and noise rather than speech.
Sun cleared his non-existent throat as he had seen nervous humans do before. “Hey, uh, Eclipse? Can you hear us?” There was silence from the fronted attendant as he stopped what he was doing for a brief moment, then returned to stacking crates full of collected destroyed items. Surprisingly, he’d made notable progress since the little girl left.
“Okay…he definitely heard me,” Sun muttered to himself. He heard Moon devilishly chuckle, but pretended he didn’t. “How about this…Eclipse? We’re—I mean, I’m just wondering where you came from. You know, we never actually had a third AI before. It was just me and Moon, so…where are you from?”
Eclipse paused the crate stacking once again, glanced around the daycare, then returned to his activities.
“Stuck. He’s cleaning,” Moon observed.
“I see that.” Sun was beginning to get annoyed. Clearly Eclipse was capable of both hearing them and talking, albeit separately, so why couldn’t he talk to them? Was he just unwilling? Or was he unaware he was being talked to and was under the impression it was his own thoughts he was hearing. That would be ridiculous.
“Stupid.” Moon wasn’t helping at all. There was no way Moon could be helpful in this situation anyway, since he couldn’t talk properly. Sun groaned.
“Be nicer! He probably doesn’t know what’s going on.” The two watched Eclipse picking up more items and putting them into more disfigured crates in silence before Moon decided he wanted to talk again.
“Stupid,” he reiterated. Sun internally facepalmed.
***
Many, many hours passed, and what was left was a decently organized daycare. Yet it was still full of grime and dirt likely caked all over everything. Sun was baffled how Eclipse managed this all by himself. Exhaustion was aching through every fiber of their body, but the attendant didn’t seem to mind.
“Okay, okay, we’re done, right? We can rest now, yeah?” Sun pleaded with the other two. He didn’t want to move anymore for another millennium.
“Not done. Floor’s dirty. Watch.” To his horror, Eclipse began scrubbing the floor with an equally rancid rag he’d found somewhere. Moon’s observation was right. The floor was dirty—evidently—and Eclipse had every intention to clean it.
“He’s not going to get anything done with that! He needs water—and-and soap! Does he even know what he’s doing!?” Sun gritted his teeth and let out a strained scream. At this rate, they’d be working until they dropped. He heard Moon laugh again and had the sudden urge to punch the other if he could.
Before Eclipse could get very far with his cleaning, a distant, yet loud crash went into the ballpit. He looked up and wandered over. Sun and Moon were watching silently, equally curious about what the hell just fell in.
When they arrived at the ballpit, nothing seemed amiss. Just some ballpit balls strewn about on the floor. Eclipse, instead of dwelling on it, began picking up the stray balls and tossing them back into the pit. Sun was still suspicious, however. Whatever had fallen in could be buried in there or hiding.
“We should check in there, just in case! There could be danger lurking in the ballpit!” His words surprisingly prompted Eclipse to begin peeking around the ballpit, moving some of the colorful spheres out of the way to get a better look inside. Sun was annoyed. So he could listen. Good to know.
“Danger,” Moon said before all of their systems alerted to a foreign object.
Sun grew concerned. “What’s that—”
Just then, a large animatronic with a similar model to the daycare attendant sprung out of the ballpit. Its body was orange and dark purple, and it had long, razor sharp rays—a lot of them, too. It didn’t have a faceplate, but what it did have were pristine white teeth and glowing white eyes. The strange bot grabbed Eclipse by the shoulders and pulled him forward.
“What is that!?” Sun shouted. He couldn’t believe their eyes. This thing was massive! And it had four arms! The lower ones were poking and prodding at Eclipse’s face. “Do something!”
“Scared,” Moon huffed out silently. That certainly didn’t make much sense.
“He’s scared or you’re scared?” Sun asked. Moon gave no response, so Sun assumed it was both. To be honest, he himself was scared. Where did this thing come from? But they had bigger fish to fry. Eclipse wasn’t moving; he was frozen in place like a rat in a science lab. There seemed to be multiple errors in his head. Sun didn’t blame him, the figure before them was nearly incomprehensible.
“Hello,” the bot bellowed out, narrowing its eyes and tilting its head. It spoke! Glitchy and echoey, yes, but words that could be understood.
“Hi,” Eclipse replied shakily. The errors in their head quieted down as he made sense of what was before him. “Who are you?” Poor him, he was trying his best to be friendly with this thing manhandling him like a burger.
“Game.” Moon appeared to recognize the large bot. Sun tried to make sense of the recognition. Where had Moon seen it from before?
“You’re smart,” it said. How in the hell could it hear Moon? The three of them stiffened up, which elicited a…well, what could be interpreted as a chuckle from the bot. “This is fun. I can hear all of you. Who knew? Three in one body? So sad in this place.”
“Who are you!?” Sun yelled. He was still upset Eclipse wasn’t moving or trying to fight his way out of this thing’s grip. “And how did you get here?”
“Hhmn. It’s like your other AI said. The arcade game. That’s where I came from! But your guess is as good as mine who I am really,” it explained. The arcade game? The Balloon World arcade game? That’s where it was from?
“You look like a solar eclipse,” Eclipse said quietly. Unfortunately, Eclipse was the only one familiar with what that was. Somehow.
“Good name. Solar.” Moon spoke up again. That….wasn’t half bad. But Sun was still curious.
“Okay, Solar, how in the world did you come from an arcade machine? That’s not possible!” he asked. Solar shrugged. “And can you put us down now? You’re freaking Eclipse out.”
“I’m sorry.” Solar obliged and put the attendant down, giving a complimentary head pat as an apology. Eclipse shook himself off and returned relatively back to normal. Solar then stepped out of the ballpit, careful not to spill any balls on the floor, and sat down beside them. “I don’t know how I’m here. Though, well, I can guess who you all are. There’s the Sun; the rude one, the Moon; the smart one, and the Eclipse; the friendly one.”
Sun felt a surge of annoyance again. Not only was his question not answered, but Solar had taken to describing them instead. “Why are they given nice traits but not me? What’s up with that?” Moon as smart? What kind of ignorance resulted in that kind of conclusion?
“Oh, I suppose I don’t make the rules.” Solar could say whatever he wanted about them, and yet that’s what he chose. He did make the rules. Sun chose to dismiss it.
***
After some back and forth chitchat between the two bots, they’d together discovered a lot of interesting stuff about one another. Solar had been a strange bug in the arcade machine which somehow managed to develop enough to emerge into the real world. It didn’t sound painless. Sun had told Solar—and subsequently Eclipse—about how they had gotten into this situation. Turns out Eclipse had known nothing at all except for his base programming of how the daycare should function.
“You mean…nobody’s coming back?” Eclipse stared at the ground with wide eyes as opposed to looking at someone, because the person he was talking to didn’t have a physical body…so.. “The daycare’s shut down forever?”
“No more kids, sorry.” Sun felt bad. There was no way the daycare could ever open up again. Not with the state of the entire building. Even if the daycare was in a much better condition than it was before—thanks to Eclipse—the rest of the Plex was still trashed. “The rest of the building is…well, ruined. It’s not going to happen.”
“But what if I cleaned it all up?” Eclipse suggested with hopeful eyes.
“Stupid,” Moon said.
Solar scoffed. “He probably means you’ll burn out your servos before you get even close to unearthing anything. I don’t think any of the technology could work anymore.” He widened his already perpetual grin. “I’m surprised you aren’t more exhausted.”
“Trust me. We are.” Sun grumbled. “The kids aren’t coming back, and we’re stuck in this hellhole ‘til we die. Which will be…not for a long while.”
Eclipse stared at the ground again. Their energy supply was built to last for several weeks at a time, for some reason, and it had already been most of that several weeks since they last had a charge.
Solar shifted his position on the floor and made what could be considered an exhaling noise. “Well, before you three inevitably die in a few days, what do you want to do?” There was so much they could do. But Sun wanted none of it. Absolutely not.
“I want to rest..” Sun groaned. “Even if death will be like eternal rest, I don’t want to do anything before then.”
“No fun. Adventure.” Moon seemed keen on doing things. Which was strange considering he was evil and ‘nap-time for all’ not that long ago. “We should escape.”
“Escape?” Sun mused for a moment. If they escaped, they would be no worse off than they were here. Maybe even better off. The sunlight would do them good. He could just imagine basking in the warm glow of the morning sun, sitting in the dewed grass and staring up at the clouds. That would be amazing.
“How will we escape?” Eclipse asked, interrupting Sun’s fantasy. Oh, right. The place’s exits were probably all blocked off from rubble and debris. They’d have to dig their way out. Solar tapped his chin with a devious look on his face.