The Pizzaplex never slept. Even in the deepest hours of the night, neon lights hummed, rides clicked faintly as they powered down, and the massive atrium echoed with mechanical breathing from animatronics going into standby. But all of it felt wrong tonight. Too quiet. Too expectant.

Glamrock Freddy didn’t understand why his systems wouldn’t settle. His diagnostics looped in circles, his power core pulsed like a heartbeat, and every time he looked at the small boy hiding in his chest cavity, something in him—something old, buried, human—twisted painfully. The boy had said his name was Gregory, but Freddy felt a strange familiarity that made his circuitry ache.

Gregory, meanwhile, held onto the metal frame inside Freddy’s chest cavity, listening to the whir of the animatronic’s voice coils. Freddy wasn’t like the others—he didn’t chase him, didn’t glitch and scream, didn’t try to drag him back to the security bots. Instead, he protected him, guided him, worried over him in a way no machine should.

And Gregory didn’t know why, but being near Freddy made him feel… safer. Warm. Like he wasn’t completely alone in this shining nightmare of a mall. Yet whenever Freddy said his name, or looked down at him with glowing blue optics, something in Gregory’s memory tugged painfully. Something he couldn’t explain.

Hours of sneaking, hiding, escaping corrupted animatronics, and sprinting through service tunnels led them deeper and deeper into the sealed-off parts of the Pizzaplex—places no guest would ever see. Pipes hissed overhead. The air smelled like mold and burnt circuitry. Far beneath the glimmering mall floors, the real truth of the place waited.

And they were walking right into it.

Freddy’s voice wavered when he spoke next. “Gregory… I am detecting a… presence. One that is… familiar to me.”

Gregory froze. “Familiar how?”

Freddy put a hand to his head as if in pain, his eyes flickering. “I… I do not know. But something down here carries the same… signature as… my father.”

Gregory’s breath caught in his throat. Father. There was only one man whose shadow stretched over all of this. One man whose voice haunted Gregory’s nightmares. One man whose face—no, whose mask—still clung to the deepest corner of his mind.

“William.” Gregory whispered it without realizing.

Freddy jolted—violently. His servos lurched, his eyes widened, his voice dropped into something raw and entirely un-animatronic.

“Gregory—how do you know that name?”