#ip au

- Playtime Co as a reputable company is long defunct, but they are not out of the picture as an antagonistic force, and I'll leave it at that.

- When returning staff tried contacting other coworkers with the prospect of returning to a reformed and friendlier Indigo Park, Jackson responded with a selfie of himself flipping the bird in Las Vegas. And Dave Miller mysteriously vanished without a trace before they could spring this on him.

- The android mascots of Indigo Park were surprise commissioned by an out of state tech company called NewtBerry (an original creation of mine I plan to use in original works in the future; consider Indigo Play a preemptive fandom crossover AU), by which I mean the park hired them to help repair the park's aging power grid only to reveal after they got to work that they picked NewtBerry specifically because its founder was known to have created a soft-robotics companion in college who's advanced enough that they're recognized as a co-founder of the company, and Indigo Park wants to get Rambley and the other recently recommissioned AIs more sustainable forms. NewtBerry founder Dr. Alanasoff reluctantly agreed only because the AIs were already actively running as people in their own rights and deserved as much.

- There are less detailed robotic versions of the mascots replacing the cutouts in Rambley's Railroad, still running on prerecorded messages so the actual AI mascots can focus on their own areas.

- Salem got to be their own AI android, and they cause Problems On Purpose, but only on a minor scale. They are well aware that the park's revival failing would be bad for them. (They may or may not later on find a disillusioned feline starting to follow them around like a lost puppy. For spoiler reasons.)

- Rambley and Lloyd's relationship is somewhat less antagonistic by the time the park reopens, given a mutual understanding gained by then that the old executive board screwed Lloyd over as much as they did everyone else.

- Mollie's android body is built with a beak that's tough around the frontal areas and softer around the sides to move and emote, looking kinda like bird character beaks from DuckTales when they spoke. When park engineers took the design specs NewtBerry left behind of the park mascots to design the new Smiling Critters bodies, KickinChicken utilized the same kind of beak.

- Kickin and Hoppy were the usual correspondence between Playcare and Safe Haven in the years after the Hour of Joy. Kicken got his leg bitten pretty roughly by a Mini Maggie Mako during a supply run turned into an ambush and had to be treated back at Safe Haven. After his return as an android, he would gripe about this incident to the other present Critters for a little bit but quickly shut up after DogDay "casually" dropped what happened to his own legs.

- Bubba took advantage of the fact that they're all androids and an apparently abandoned project in the park servers to create a Virtual Reality server that androids of their design can link to to create environments based on the collective memories of those plugging in. The Smiling Critters' collective memories of Playcare were strong enough that it became a permanent "hub world" of sorts for the server, which earned its nickname "Virtual Playcare". The primary goal of this project was to pick at their suppressed memories of their human lives from before they were experimented on. I plan to make Virtual Playcare a plot point for multiple story arcs.

- After Rambley sees the Critters getting outfits, he asks Crafty if they could make something for him. He gets an old-timey train conductor overalls outfit. And loves it.

- DogDay knows "Ollie" was a trick by the Prototype purely because CatNap oh so casually dropped that bombshell on him in the middle of an otherwise unrelated conversation.

I love all of these, especially the first one!