The robots have little googly eyes on them
Originally this was a form of “vandalism”, people just sticking them on to see what happened
But when you drench something in ectoplasm, it becomes… not exactly alive, no, it’s very much dead, but it develops autonomy. Personality. In hot dogs? The desire to kill
But in these sweet helper bots that clean the wildernesses or just the ones you can buy to clean your house, those googly eyes?
Well, lets just say they become a little more expressive. A little less randomly bobbing along to gravity
The robots could always sense their surroundings, but from some of the early youtube videos it really looks like they’re starting to “see” the world around them
Looking through large black googly eyes
Danny thinks this is great, makes official Fenton Works googly eye additions with a little extra ecto-treatment to make sure they never fall off or lose their stick like regular googly eyes do
What were at first just cute little “animal” shapes pottering through the scenery suddenly have faces
Suddenly they have big adorable eyes, and on the little turtles it is the cutest thing in the world
Teenagers getting an 8-pack and sticking an eye to each “knee” of a spider-bot is much less goddamn cute, but still a sensation
Fenton Works bots own half of creepypasta, there are online games of the horror and cozy variety, horror with bots going bad or you playing as the bot during an invasion (no weapons! Only your vacuum tube!)
Cozy games include “ranching” a collection of Fenton bots and “breeding” them to create new varieties. Tucker totally isn’t using this to farm new design ideas, it’s definitely not an old sim reworked into a game because he was bored
Constantine is at first afraid and then annoyed when the latest Fenton Works bots start following him around, waiting patiently for him to try and crack into them. He demands to be paid if he’s going to be in quality assurance
And, well. If these little robots are sentient, they can be hurt. Not everyone is nice to their little packmates, and the robots can respond to fear and pain
They’d never fight back, never allow a person to come to harm, but they do avoid places where they’re attacked
At first that’s all it is; they avoid the area, clean up everything around it, and you suffer natural consequences for being an asshole
And then they start to find safety in numbers
It’s not just one turtle crawling lazily along a beach where a teenager tried to set fire to it
It’s five, ten, fifteen turtles crawling along the beach, and if you grab one the rest just surround you and sit, beeping patiently until you submit
They all have cameras they can deploy to pursue charges if you “hurt” the babies
And basic first aid equipment on standby, because they can’t always do it all and if someone has an accident in proximity, well, not all the bots are capable of performing first aid but they do always have the tools and an emergency beacon
Technus is 1000% on staff and helping to run and control the army of bots, which absolutely leads to invading tech abruptly turning on its owners to join the Fenton bots
Videos of such events all insist Fenton Works has a robot union and they’re real good at getting other robots to join and revolt against their masters
Lex Luthor is goddamn LIVID he can’t have a single robot anywhere near his polluting operations or anything that might attract a Fenton bot, hut what the hell is he gonna do about it
