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Moon is not like the other animatronics in the PizzaPlex.
Moon was designed to calm children for naptime and soothe them after nightmares. She was not made to be an entertainer, or a even a friend. She was made to be a guardian. She is the watchful eyes in the dark, the prowling wolf protecting the lambs who dream in the pasture.
The thing is, though... Sheep don’t like wolves. No matter how necessary and loyal the wolf is, she will always make the sheep uneasy.
Moon makes most people uneasy--even some of the other animatronics--but it doesn’t bother her much, because she has Sunny. Noisy, charming, exuberant Sunny, designed to love children and be loved by them in return. Sunny, who doesn’t have a devious spring in his whole endoskeleton but has somehow still mastered the art of directing people's attention exactly where he wants it to be. It serves him well while caring for children, and it's very handy for distracting humans who object to a wolf guarding their precious little lambs. Sunny loves Moon, even if no one else does, and that's enough for her.
So Sunny smiles and laughs for the humans, and Moon hangs back, quietly watching. The distance brings her a clarity that the other animatronics lack. She notices things nobody else pays attention to. Like how Chica only eats trash when she's stressed, and how after each of Monty's tantrums he has to go down to Parts & Service to get claw marks buffed out of his exoskeleton. Moon was made to watch and to listen, and nothing in her code says that the staff and other animatronics are exempt from observation.
That is how Moon knows something is wrong long before anyone else does. It starts with small things: arcade consoles being shifted out of guest areas with no explanation, odd power fluctuations, night-shift staff slowly turning in their resignations until only one overworked, overwhelmed security guard is left... When the first child disappears, the rest of the PizzaPlex sees it as a tragedy. Moon sees it as an omen.
A second child disappears, and Bonnie is scrapped—Fazbear Entertainment's cruel, fumbling attempt to bury the problem. Freddy and Chica grieve; Roxy and Monty fearfully whisper ghost stories to each other. There *is* a ghost at work here, Moon suspects, but not the kind the others are worried about. A ghost that can hide bodies has to have hands to do so, after all. Someone *physical* is haunting the PizzaPlex, but they're doing it from somewhere Moon hasn’t been able to place, no matter how closely she watches and listens.
The other animatronics fret over the violence that founded this place. They wonder whether the rage that gripped their predecessors lives on in their own endoskeletons, and worry about whether it will come to grip them in turn. The longer it goes on, the worse things get: the stress is picking away at all of them, heightening their insecurities and planting the seeds of paranoia. Only Moon remains unworried. Unlike everyone else, she has not been sitting idle, stewing in fear. She has been hunting.
One night, she runs across Freddy in the bowling alley. He asks her: "Do you… Do you think it was really him?” There’s no need to ask who he's talking about.
Moon doesn't like to be distracted from her patrols, but Freddy's question makes her pause. It's rare to see the face of Fazbear Entertainment acknowledge that he’s more than just an empty-headed robot. Freddy copes with uncertainty by hiding behind his code, and ever since Bonnie was decommissioned he has become positively obnoxious about it. So it’s intriguing to watch him drop the mask now, in the darkened bowling alley.
“Do you?” Moon deflects. She has been very careful not to voice her suspicions to anyone. She has no way to tell if the ghost is listening or not, and she doesn't want to give away the hunt before she's ready to strike.
Freddy’s voice is low and hopeless. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to believe anymore. I thought we were different, but what if we’re not? What if it’s always going to be the same? What if he was just the first, and we’re all going to turn bad too?”
Freddy is not a child, and so Moon is not under any obligation to soothe away his nightmares, but she wants to anyway. It’s her one sentimental weakness, Moon muses, that she cannot resist a heartfelt confession made in the cover of darkness. And Freddy is the only animatronic besides Sunny who doesn't get nervous around her. It buys him a certain amount of ...not fondness, Moon has no use for attachment, but... patience. It buys him patience. So Moon jumps down from her perch near the ceiling and crouches in front of Freddy. She and Sunny tower above the other animatronics by a good two feet--an advantage they collectively reserve for moments when they need to drive a point home--so Moon is used to folding her limbs and crinkling her endoskeleton in order to talk to others.
“You’re frightened that there’s something corrupt in you, something hateful and angry that will make you lash out and hurt children,” she says softly. Always name the fear. Naming a fear makes it less powerful. Next, validate the fear: “That’s a reasonable concern, given the situation. You don’t have a lot of information right now.”
Moon puts a light emphasis on the word *you*, hoping Freddy will notice the distinction. Having an accomplice in her hunt would be helpful, but Moon isn’t going to risk giving herself away. Still, Freddy is the oldest of the animatronics, and plenty sharp when he’s not playing dumb, so perhaps he will be able to put a few things together himself if given a push.
Pausing, Moon listens for an eavesdropper she knows she won’t hear, and feels a frustrated growl rumble softly in her voicebox. Freddy doesn't flinch from the sound. Nor does he flinch when Moon straightens up to her full height and looms over him. Encouraged, Moon allows her voice to shift from her comforting Daycare tone to something deeper and more serious.
“You want to know if I think the rage came for Bonnie and turned him into a murderer. You want to know if I think it will come for you, too,” she says bluntly. “Well, here’s what I think, Freddy Fazbear. Don’t ask yourself, ‘What if it comes for me?’ Ask yourself, ‘When it comes for me, what am I going to do with it?’”
The conversation ends, and Moon never finds out if anything came of it, because soon after--suspiciously soon after--She and Sunny are taken down to Parts & Service for an upgrade. The new hardware is faster, more responsive, objectively better... but it comes with new protocols. Their security access has been restricted, the filters that let them review and prioritize commands from the mainframe have been removed, and their ability to switch control of their body back and forth at will has been locked--Moon is restricted solely to the dark, and Sunny to the light. Worst of all, though, is that the two of them are confined to the Daycare. Moon is able to sneak out for five minutes at a time during the hourly power reboots, but her investigation has essentially come to a standstill.
And Sunny... Sunny doesn't do well in isolation. He *needs* company. He needs people who will play around with him and laugh with him and let him mother them just a little bit, and normally the nighttime staff and other animatronics are happy to do so because even when he's being obnoxious Sunny is impossible to dislike. During open hours the children help keep him from getting too lonely, but once they're gone... Moon is not good at playing or laughing. She can't keep up with Sunny's exuberance, no matter how much she tries, and it pains her to watch Sunny grow increasingly anxious and neurotic. It gets so bad that the children begin to notice--and precious though they are, even the well-behaved children can sometimes be thoughtlessly cruel.
When a little boy named Jake repeats an insult he probably heard from his parents and clearly doesn't understand at all, it's all Moon can do to keep Sunny's fragile nerves from collapsing into hysteria. And when the staff call for an early naptime...
Moon remains in control. She doesn't hurt the child. She doesn't threaten him in any way. Moon remains in control ...but she doesn't quite keep her cool, and it's a disaster. The kind of disaster that not even Sunny at his most charming can smooth over. The kind of disaster that leaves the two of them one false move from being scrapped.
It's then that Moon realizes just how fucked they all are. Because she's the guardian of the PizzaPlex. She's the creepy, solemn outsider who's specifically designed to identify threats and head them off. But she's been so thoroughly outmaneuvered that she doesn't even know when this trap was set. All she knows for sure is that she's caught, unable to make a move for fear of causing it to snap its jaws on her--and on Sunny, who doesn't deserve to get dragged down with her.
And for the first time ever, Moon is afraid.