Asgore's bill passes with full support, and monsters are in an uproar of celebrations. Most monsters are quick to quit their shitty, easy jobs they all secured at the time and start applying to jobs actually in their skill set. Sans is on the phone with Siren from Waterfall for two hours as he congratulates the practically hysteric woman about her signing with a music company. It's a good time.

Sans, of course, is questioned about why he didn't jump ship from his job. Mainly from Toriel, who's seen firsthand how exhausting it is to Sans. Her sharp teeth are tugged into a concerned frown when the question leaves her snout.

Sans can't tell her the vast sums of reasons. That he's bound to this job until he decides to tank the company, and now the whole situation just became so much more complicated because now he knows the animatronics are children who are trapped, and he isn't sure what the hell is going to happen to them if he does manage to get the company shut down with what he has so far (which he's pretty sure still isn't enough, since the company has its hands in everything everywhere apparently. He can't risk just parts of it shutting down, he needs to sink the entire ship and make sure the lifeboats are all shot through. No chance of escape. Because, as research has provided to him, the company is slippery). Because, if the company is shut down, then the animatronics will be repurposed. And they'll likely keep killing.

So no, Sans doesn't tell her it's a clusterfuck right now. That he's trying to figure out exactly how much evidence he'll need to destroy the name Fazbear itself, and if he'll still be hauled off to jail or not with what they still have on him - he used his magic while it was illegal, and some courts give no shit on if it was later legalized or not. So that's a complete tossup. And that he's trying desperately to mentally debate about how to handle the haunted animatronics, and the fact that there's probably a lot more amongst their other establishments. Are those haunted as well? Are the restaurants going to be shut down officially if he reveals everything now, or just be sold? Should he help the trapped souls or just leave them to rot? Is that fair to them?

Safe to say Sans has no idea what exactly to do, and he's going a bit crazy.

"Just started figuring it out, and I had... fun, with the animatronics yesterday. Since I fixed them up a bit."

The lie is filthy in his mouth. It's sour and wrong, but he keeps a firm smile on his face as he speaks.

Toriel doesn't buy it.

"Are you sure?" She asks.

"Yes. I've got some... unfinished business there. Working on something right now. Don't worry about it."

From across the room, Grillby's gaze locks onto Sans. They don't talk at all that night.

Management sends out an email reminding staff to not overstay their shifts, and that Mangle is returning back to site at the end of the week, and the Puppet is returning sometime the week after due to delayed shipping.

When Sans walks in on Monday night to do his shift, he still isn't quite sure how to handle this anymore.

His old plan was completely trashed the moment the animatronics decided to be undead souls. Because how the fuck was he going to handle that? He couldn't just dance up to a courtroom and argue that the souls of likely children are haunting their robots and killing the security guards. He was kind of banking on the code for definitive proof. Sans does not have that.

The video Liz got was rather decent, but it only shows the animatronics walking the halls and trying to enter the room. The company can spin tales around why that was happening, despite her injured leg clearly visible in the video.

So, right now, the goal was just to steady himself upon the raft in the ocean he was struggling through. To get a grip on his situation and go from there.

On the first night, the animatronics don't interact with him much. At all. Foxy is just gone, hiding away in his pirate's cove. Chica keeps to the kitchen, Freddy never leaves the stage, and Bonnie paces up and down the hall. The night ends without either side making contact with one another.

At one point, Sans closes both doors and passes the fuck out for a nap. He has the power to do so. It's a nice nap, and one he desperately needs.

On Tuesday, it's Chica who approaches him.

Her voice is higher than Bonnie's, and she smells like rotting corpses when she approaches his office. Sans, true to his word, doesn't close the door on her face. And she doesn't attack him when she stands in the open doorway to his office.

"Fix?" She asks, cocking her head to the side as she gives out a small squawk. "Can you fix me?"

"Uh, yeah, let me grab my stuff."

And so, Sans finds himself in the main stage area yet again with his tools to fix a killer animatronic. Freddy, again, watches. Bonnie roams in and out of the room, unable to quite find a place to stay. He seems uncertain, ever since Sans has fixed him. Like he can't quite get used to his new body just yet.

Chica is a looming mass of metal, one covered head to toe in grease and food stains. He had an idea of it before, but now he's absolutely positive that Chica goes to the kitchen and rummages through its garbage cans to eat the leftovers. As Sans pulls out his tools, he explains in detail his plans. It's pretty much a carbon copy of Bonnie's plans. Remove the fur, soak, wash, and dismantle her object - a mechanical cupcake perched on a plate - and clean it as well. It's a straightforward process, and his experience with Bonnie comes in handy as he begins. Sans is just as tense as before when he moves forward to dismantle the first foot, but he's more swift and methodical than before. The animatronics are pretty much built the same.

But then, he finds out that Chica has an infestation. Literally. She's swarmed with cockroaches, picking away at the food chunks throughout her endoskeleton. It's disgusting.

Sans is a slob, but he has a limit. And he has reached it ages ago.

"Pizza?" Chica chirps out.

"Uh..." Sans is holding a cockroach as he glances up. She stares, unblinking, down at Sans as she awaits his response. "No."

"Food?" She asks again, a mechanical box whirling from within her beak.

"What?" Sans eyes the bug. "No. You can't - I mean, technically you can eat it, but it's not... food. Actually, you shouldn't really eat anything."

Chica stares, unflinching. Sans sighs, and manages to forcefully keep his hands steady despite the pounding fear under her intense gaze as he picks out one bug after another from wires and chunks of rotting cheese.

"You're an animatronic, and food isn't... compatible, with your parts," Sans says. At one point, he has to tug off one of his arms and hold it with the other to reach in deep and snag one of the bugs. Once he has it, he reconnects his arm to his torso. The magic snaps it back into place without much of a fuss, but the movement jostles his injured wrist, and he's trying not to think of Foxy chasing him down again. "All it does when you chew is the food gets stuck down here. Then it rots and attracts critters and bugs."

He pointedly doesn't mention the smears of blood and guts he finds in her chest cavity, either. He doesn't want to think about it.

Shit. Now Sans is thinking about it.

"Just don't eat food if ya can help it," Sans said. He pushes forward with a washcloth, wet with soap and water. "You can't digest it, so it just... sits. Best to avoid that, if ya can."

Surprisingly, Chica's endoskeleton is more stable than Bonnie's. He doesn't have to fix a thing, only has to clean them and remove the infestation. It takes much longer than Bonnie takes, and by the time Sans finally reaches Chica's head, it's five AM. Freddy hadn't looked away once, and Bonnie had rotated back into the room and was idly plucking at his guitar strings with his oversized fingers. He has to leave the fur to soak longer than Bonnie's, and he's gone through several entire bottles of soap in the cleaning process.

At one point, Sans is on the verge of vomiting. He swallows it down, but damn is the temptation there.

Chica's head is way worse than Bonnie's when he pops it open. Her eyes are fine, but her beak is littered with filth, and her voice box is smeared in old, decaying food. He spends the rest of his shift picking out chunks of pepperoni, uses a brush to clean the voice box, and dismantles her jaw so he can reassemble it to better hold the weight of her beak. It's cutting it close to the end of his shift, and he's backing away with a nod right when it hits 6 AM.

"I, uh, will be back tomorrow, same time," Sans promises as they all gather onto the stage. "I can work on the cupcake then if ya want."

Chica was a bit more talkative than Bonnie, but not by much. It's clear they don't talk often, and that Chica doesn't hold much trust towards Sans. Which he completely reciprocates, and is not offended in the slightest.

Sans goes home to vomit that morning. And when he wakes up from sleeping for a solid eight hours, he goes out and buys a beta fish from a local pet store. He spends the rest of his day trying not to think about everything that's happened and instead decorates the tank. It's a nice distraction, but eventually, he finds himself watching TV and flipping through channels, trying to ignore his bubbling thoughts.

They were definitely children when they died.

It's weird, knowing that he worked closely with possessed robot bodies and came back to tell the tale. He's alive. He's survived almost a week and a half of hell. And he's managed to build a truce with them. One that's fragile as hell, but hey, it's something.

His beta fish, named Toilet Water, floats boredly to his left. The fish is a bright blue, with a red colored tail. It's cute.

He digs his hand into his bag of chips and tries to turn off his mind for another hour.

Before he goes to work, he scours the internet and goes over all of his evidence again. It's decent enough, but all of it can only hold so much of a case. One being circumstantial. Accidental. The franchise has been careful up to this point with its publicity. That's why, even though the restaurant was shit and the history was questionable, they were still widely regarded as good places to host parties for children. The most solid piece of evidence is now Lizzy's recording and the phone calls he had downloaded. But that wouldn't sink the entire company.

Sans arrives to work the next day in basketball shorts, his usual saggy blue hoodie, and a shot of pure expresso in his hand. He downs it immediately when he sees that Chica is already making a sprint towards the kitchen when his shift starts.

Fucking hell. He hates them. So much.

Chica allows Sans to work on her animatronic cupcake while she disregards all of his previous warnings and gorges herself on more old, stale food tossed into the trash. The cupcake, as it turns out, is fully sentient as well. He certainly was not expecting it to hop off the plate and start sprinting towards him when Chica agreed for him to work on it, but hey, he only screamed slightly. So it's all fine.

Sans spends an hour and a half on it. When he wasn't picking out food from its wires and bolts, he was busy trying to keep the damn thing still. He tries to explain, he tries to go slow, but the thing squirms and bounces around like a disoriented toddler. Finally, he gives up and lets the thing chew on his car keys while he fixes the candle's wiring.

After that, he offers to fix Freddy, but Freddy just stares blankly until Sans gets the hint. Bonnie doesn't need any more fixing, Foxy is very much ignoring him (though Sans can swear he sees the fox glaring at him from around corners, like a child throwing a silent fit), and Chica is busying herself with the trash. So Sans doesn't really have anything else to do but sit at one of the tables, occasionally flip through the cameras, and watch them.

"Thank you," Bonnie says at one point. He's idly playing with his electric guitar, and his eyes are more full of life than they've ever been before. It's jarring, so much so that Sans can only nod in response.

Liz, at 3:30, texts Sans to make sure he's alive. He sends a thumbs up. She's been doing that every night since she found out the truth.

It's nice, to know that he can talk to someone about all of this once she's ready. She just needs to heal up decently first. With monster magic, she should be up and ready in a week or two.

Sans would love to get his hands on monster magic. He'd love to. But he'd have to either go to the hospital (which he cannot afford until he gets a few more solid paychecks in, and rent suddenly vanishes from his worries) or go to his friends. His friends would ask way too many questions. And his brother knew bone breaking. Sans could not offer a viable excuse for how he broke his bones, no matter how hard he strained for one.

Unraveling the bandages, he looks down at his injury. It's dyed dark purple and red, but it's stopped bleeding now, and the cracks are less thick than before. Unfortunately for him, though, it's perfectly shaped to a hand. He can maybe lie his ass off at a hospital. Maybe. His friends won't buy it for a second. They'll ask his brother for confirmation, and then they'll all be involved, and that's a problem.

Especially with the whole 'undead kids' thing now in the air. Sans still has no idea how to fucking deal with that.

He wishes he was Papyrus. Confident, charismatic, a bit awkward but always passionate. Willing to help whoever he could, no matter the price. Or like Toriel, level-headed and caring. He's not, though. Sans is just Comic Sans, the odd guy down the road who sold hot dogs, and puns, and was a bit of a witty guy.

He's not meant to deal with this.

Sans pops another pain medication and goes back to watching the animatronics and security feed.

Friday sees Sans fixing Chica (again) since she ate too much food. She's a bit more talkative than she was before, going over the entire Fazbear menu of their location with a chipper tone. Her favorites, she claims while Sans is scraping melted cheese off of her raggedy old fingers, are the pizza and cheesy chips. She likes cheese.

Sans wonders if they can taste in their new bodies or not. He also wonders if it'd be rude to ask something like that.

And, the entire time Sans works, Foxy glares at him from around the corner.

Sans goes home that day, takes a nap, and visits Papyrus and Mettaton's house for their dinner party. Spaghetti, of course, is the main dish. Thankfully edible spaghetti, as Papyrus has made leaps and bounds on the surface in his cooking endeavors. Everyone is able to attend, and it's a joyous night filled with chatter and eager laughter. Sans, for once, can relax. His hand isn't killing him as much anymore since it's been healing decently. He's been pumping extra of his magic into his wrist, but Sans isn't a healing expert, so it doesn't do much besides making it ache a bit less.

Everyone else seems to be doing well. Undyne is in charge of the Royal Guard, Alphys is doing great with her studies, and Papyrus and Mettaton's couple show is a massive hit. Toriel is officially Queen again, even if she and Asgore's relationship is never going to be what it once was. They're more so... co-parenting, just over the entire Kingdom. So now Asgore is less swamped with work.

Everyone is doing well. He's glad.

"And how about you, Sans, how is your job?" Papyrus asks him.

Sans immediately moves to hide his wrist underneath the table.

"Oh, it's fine," Sans answers. He takes a large bite of their dessert, brownies with a hint of pecans mixed into the batter. It's sweet, but not too much so. Tolerable for everyone at the table.

"Just fine?" Asgore asks.

"Oh, yeah, just fine."

"If you w-want," Alphys offers, perking up with her tail swishing gently behind her. "I can get you a recommendation interview at this star research center. It's a bit of a drive from your house, but I think y-you'd like it."

Sans really hates Fazbear Entertainment at that moment. He'd fucking love that job right now.

"If possible, can we put that onto the backburner?" Sans asks her, voice cutting a bit just below desperate. "I'd like that job, it sounds real cool Alph, but uh - I promised someone I work with I'd stick it out and keep the job."

Toriel blinks. "How come? Why would you stay at a job you dislike?"

"One of my coworkers - Liz, the receptionist - broke her leg Friday night. I was actually the one who found her and called for an ambulance. She's a sweet kid but got caught up in the wrong crowd, so I've been sticking around work to help her out while she recovers, and I'm going to help her with her schoolwork as well. Once she's on less thin ice with her grades and health I'll probably quit then. It's just convenient this way."

They buy the excuse, and so, the dinner continues without much hassle. At least, it does until Sans checks his work email and sees that the mangled animatronic is now on site. It just arrived, and the security guard is tasked with unpacking it, and the animatronic engineer will be configuring it.

Sans is both. He hates his life.

Sans makes a pit stop at the store before he arrives at work for his Saturday shift. He's armed with a few more tools that day, and he wastes no time before he drags the box of metal containing a likely living animatronic into the main party room. The faint sound of scratching against cardboard can be heard from the roomy box as he settles it down. Besides it, he sets down several crinkly plastic bags.

The animatronics are all staring again, but now Sans is pretty used to their intrusive stares. So he brings out his gathered objects and holds them up for the animatronics to see.

The fake pizza toy squeaks in his hand as he shows it to Chica.

"To chew on," Sans explains, tossing it towards it. The toy in question lands on a table nearby, squeaking with the impact. Her eyes hone in on the object like prey. "I figured that you probably can't taste the food you eat, since you sometimes eat rotting shit or inedible garbage. This is something yer can chew on to get the urge out. Feel free to try it."

There's an air of hesitation to the tall robotic chicken. Sans doesn't keep watching her, ducking back down into the bag to drag out more items. Some more tools to fix animatronics. Cleaning supplies. And air fresheners, because he finally was free of the putrid smell that seemed to linger near their suits, and he wasn't about to return to it anytime soon.

The squeaking of a dog chew toy is the only audible sound in the air from the animatronics.

Sans moves onto the box next once he packs away the cleaning supplies into a little cubby area below the stage, and he uses a small pocket knife to slice through the tap at the top before he jumps back. He's not risking any of that shit.

So, with the handle of a long broom, Sans reaches forward and lifts the box flaps.

Mangle, of course, is a mangled abomination of plastic and metal. He can see the original design inspiration of a white and pink fox, he really can. With thick plastic exteriors colored in bright, fun designs. However, the staff email included an explanation as to why Mangle remained a mangled hunk of items.

There is a clear change in material. The fur coatings on the others, obviously, stunk and stained very easily. So they likely took a different approach with Mangle. But what they didn't consider was how easy plastic coatings are to remove.

The only reason Sans is quick at removing the fur suits is because he's a studied man who is practically an expert in animatronics after the production hell that went behind Mettaton. Sans could very much attest to how fucking picky that damn pink ghost was when it came to his new body. Nooooo, the pink heels weren't exactly ninety degrees. Start over. Four days of work gone.

Sans will absolutely hold a grudge against Mettaton, even if he is dating his brother. Sans is allowed to.

But plastic coatings, long story short, are way easier to tug off. Which exposes the wires, cabling, and screws. Some parts of the animatronics are very, very easy to clip off if you can reach them. Like Freddy's hand.

And, for example, the entirety of Mangle's body if you take off her plastic covering. Which children very much could do. Especially if she's on a smaller stage than the main three.

What's left before Sans, as a result of leaving children unattended near a flimsy plastic-covered robot, is this mess. Mangle, other than her head and one of her feet, is completely void of plastic, leaving the endoskeleton out for grabs. Another endoskeleton, for some unholy reason, is attached to the body as well. Well, if Sans could even consider her to have a body instead of a clump.

It's disheartening to see. And it's even more sad to see when she moves, proving that she is very much alive like the others.

Sans stares. Both heads on the animatronic in the box lock in on Sans and then hiss.

Well. Okay then.

Then they lunge.

It's much the same as Foxy had done to break Sans' wrist. Thankfully, though, Sans is someone who is very much traumatized and immediately dodges out of the way. And, in doing so, he steps on a squeaking toy in a plastic bag to his right.

Mangle jolts, and she's looking at his right foot.

"I..."

Sans was expecting to have to talk his way down again. Was expecting to have to get help from the animatronics to talk her down, like they had done Foxy. And a quick glance to his right proves that they had been ready to enter. Specifically Chica, who looks a bit tense, and Bonnie is already a few steps forward.

However, Sans thinks there's a better solution. And he's proven right when he squeaks the toy by shifting his weight, and one of the extra arms on Mangle's body starts to wag. Like a tail.

"Huh."

He lifts the toy into his hands. It's a cheeseburger toy. Mangle's hand is wagging faster.

"Fetch."

Sans tosses it, and Mangle dives.

Next upload: November 23, 2023