I need a love reaction

Nick’s heart pounded in his chest as he dashed across the amusement park. His feet pounded on the shiny black stone floor, and he had to be careful to watch his step to avoid slipping on the edge and falling into one of the sand pits.

Gina was struggling to match his pace beside him. His hand was tightly clasped around hers as they rushed towards the end of the platform. There were only a few other blank spaces they could move to, and things were getting tight.

Why were they running so fast that it felt like their lungs were going to explode, and their hearts were going to burst out of their chests?

Perhaps because of the twisted, giggling voice playing over the loudspeakers as they ran through the dark courtyard, with the glow-in-the-dark sand illuminating their path.

“Hehehe… run, run, as fast as you can,” Andy’s voice crackled through the air. “But, you better be careful… there’s no telling where they might be coming from!”

“Gina,” Nick rasped. Even talking hurt him after how much running he had been doing for the last hour. “We need… to slow down… find… somewhere to hide…”

“I know,” Gina panted. “Do you think… I like this… either?!”

She felt like she was going to pass out. Which was very strange because this was a dream, so she shouldn’t be feeling that way.

Luckily, the fact that it was a dream meant that things could go her way with just a thought. And, in a moment, a large building appeared in the distance, almost blending in with the rock wall. Just the right size for the two of them to duck within and hide for cover from whatever it was that had been chasing them.

Nick was just happy that he’d have the opportunity to take a second and catch his breath. He needed to be careful, and vigilant, and he didn’t even know why!

He had no idea what was happening. But he knew who he should ask for clarification.

Nick took a deep breath, and collapsed on the floor of the empty, cavernous warehouse. Gina’s hand was still hot in his grasp. He could hear her desperate panting beside him, and he looked towards her to see her sweaty, desperate face peering back at him.

“Nick…” Gina mumbled. “What… what’s happening?”

“…Huh?” Nick stared at Gina in surprise. “That… that’s what I want to know!” He stammered in confusion. “Gina, this is your dream, isn’t it?! How do you not know what’s going on here? Weren’t you the one who came up with this place!?”

“I-I did,” Gina said, nodding. “So… in theory, doesn’t that mean I should be able to control it?” She questioned.

Nick nodded. It stood to reason. Which was why he was so confused about what was going on right now, with all this shit.

The more anxious he felt, and the more his breathing returned to normal, the more he began thinking about their circumstances, and how little sense they actually made when he stopped and considered them carefully.

“Okay… so let’s go over what happened,” Nick said, rubbing his forehead. He was starting to have a headache now, to go along with all the other aches in his body, and he wasn’t exactly a fan of it for obvious reasons.

“Right… we had just finished up lunch,” Gina said, nodding slowly.

“And then Andy appeared,” Nick recalled. “She said… what was it, again?”

“She asked if we had enjoyed our meal,” Gina clarified. “Which, yeah, the food was great, but… I don’t think that was the point.”

Nick couldn’t agree more.

“What was it she said? That she wanted to make sure that this was a memorable experience for the both of us?” Nick grumbled. “And she wanted to do something that would really make our Dream Alley date fun and stimulating?”

“I think the term she used was ‘heart-pounding’, actually,” Gina corrected him. “And… that’s definitely what I’m feeling right now. Heart-pounding.”

True. Nick’s heart was pounding, alright… pounding so loudly he thought it might stop at any moment, now.

“…So, this is what we’re dealing with, now?” Nick couldn’t believe it. “A situation like this… where we have to flee for our lives?! That’s what counts as ‘heart-pounding’ to that crazy woman you dreamed up!?”

Gina could only shrug in response.

“…Okay, that’s it,” Nick grumbled. He was done. “I am never trusting another redhead in black ever again!”

“Not even Sylvia?” Gina replied.

“Sylvia doesn’t have red hair anymore,” Nick reminded her.

Gina nodded. “But she could any time she wanted…”

“Okay, but I don’t think that we’re focusing on the relevant point here,” Nick said, trying to get back to the matter at hand. “We know why she’s doing it, twisted as it is, but what exactly is she even doing? I mean… …Walking animatronics?”

That was the whole host of the matter. As soon as Andy had proposed her plan, the amusement park came to life. And not in the fun way, either.

The walking animatronics, that Nick had thought were just odd and weird, and aesthetic, had suddenly come to life and begun coming after them, like something out of a horror movie! And now, the two of them were doing whatever they could to survive the twisted horde of attacking animated animals out for blood, controlled by the demented “mascot” of the theme park.

If Gina thought that this was the sort of excitement he wanted to have on a date, then she was definitely off base.

“I don’t get it,” Gina said, shaking her head. “This is supposed to be my dream! I should be able to control this place with a thought, but I can’t! Why not?!”

She was starting to get frustrated now that she could finally breathe again. Her date was getting ruined by this!

“Dream Alley must be glitching.” That was the only explanation Nick could come up with. Like with what had happened with Vivian on his date with her. Something was going wrong with the makeup of this place, or maybe Gina’s imagination was running away with her and she had lost control over the situation.

Which wasn’t a good sign.

The only other explanation he could come up with was that Andy had somehow gone rogue, and he didn’t know what to make of that. It didn’t even make any sense, given the circumstances! Andy shouldn’t have any sort of sentience in the first place!

If she did, what did that mean for Dream Alley as a whole?

“What should we do, Nick?” Gina looked anxiously at him. “We’ve just been running around, but it’s not like we could run away forever…”

“No, we can’t,” Nick agreed. “But… we probably don’t need to,” he pointed out. Maybe it was because the panic was wearing off, but he was actually starting to think clearly again, and he had a few thoughts about this whole situation. “We’ve been running because, well, if scary animatronic animals with glowing red eyes chase you, the first instinct is to run, right?”

“Right,” Gina nodded. “It’s like those demented video games.”

Nick looked at her. So, she wasn’t completely naïve. Maybe she actually WAS responsible for this mess on some subconscious level. But Nick wasn’t going to put that pressure on her right now, not when he didn’t need to. He just sighed and shook his head. “…It’s really not worth thinking about,” he replied. “Right now, we just need to focus on the matter at hand.”

Gina nodded again. She could agree to that.

“There’s no way these things are dangerous, right?” Nick pointed out. “I mean, they can’t be. Dream Alley is supposed to be fun for us, and devoid of consequences. It wouldn’t make sense for us to get injured.”

It was like when Kim had been playing around with those racecars back during his date with her. There weren’t really consequences in Dream Alley.

If the two of them had taken a moment to figure that out, then maybe they wouldn’t have ended up in this situation in the first place.

“So, what you’re saying is, we’ve been getting worried over nothing!” Gina’s heart raced with excited relief. “Oh, that’s great! Then we don’t have to freak out, we can just pretend like everything’s normal and go from there!”

Nick wished that were the case. He was saying that mainly because he wanted to believe it was true, not because it actually was.

The fact of the matter? Nick wasn’t sure one way or another.

“Everything I said makes sense if you look at it from a rational perspective,” he pointed out. “The problem is, our current situation isn’t exactly… rational.”

“Huh!? Well, no shit,” Gina muttered. “We’re being chased by the Teddy Bear Band outside, only they’re wielding chainsaws instead of folksy musical instruments!”

Nick didn’t even want to ask. Gina’s mind came up with some really weird stuff. “The point is, we shouldn’t be in this situation in the first place, because Andy shouldn’t be capable of sentience like this,” he reminded his friend. “Which means that we’re dealing with something that shouldn’t be possible, right?”

Gina gave him a sour look. “But you just said…”

“I know, normally, Dream Alley shouldn’t be dangerous,” Nick sighed. “But, normally, we shouldn’t be at risk of being attacked in Dream Alley, either! Right?”

Gina didn’t like it, but she had to admit- he raised a valid point. If she didn’t have control over what was happening, who was to say whether or not that the normal rules applied?

In fact, it was more likely that the normal rules DIDN’T apply, and that was precisely the problem they were facing!

“So… what are you saying?” Gina rubbed her forehead in exasperation.

“I’m saying that this could be a situation like when the holo-deck has the safety features switched off due to an anomaly, and now everything is real,” Nick explained.

Gina stared at him with all the understanding of a computer that just faced a system crash.

Nick sighed. “…Never mind. You wouldn’t understand…”

He needed to make sure to use references that Gina would be able to process in the future, because right now, that wasn’t working.

Gina sighed. “Right. Well, uh… I don’t really know what to say, other than… this isn’t going the way I hoped it would, so…”

“Oh? It isn’t?”

Andy appeared in front of them with a smile on her face, and the couple jumped.

“Andy!” Nick immediately moved protectively in front of Gina, which made her heart skip a beat. But Gina wasn’t satisfied just being protected.

“What are you doing!?” Gina demanded, stepping forward. “What’s the meaning of this!? Nick and I are trying to have a nice date!”

“I know!” The red-haired woman chirped, twirling one of her pigtails. “That’s why I came up with this fun little idea, once you two worked out all the boring drama stuff that nobody cares about. This way, we can enjoy ourselves and have a great time!”

Gina and Nick looked uneasily at Andy. Neither of them were quite sure whether or not they could trust what the woman had to say.

Since, you know, she had just sicced an army of killer robot musicians on them.

“This whole thing is one of the special features of Andyland!” Andy explained. “The Night of the Living Animatronics! …Or, you know, something that tests better with the marketing department, and isn’t so cumbersome and wordy. You know?”

Nick slowly turned to look at Gina with a questioning gaze. She just shrugged in response. What did he expect her to say?

“The whole thing was Gina’s idea, just so you know, I’m only following my programming,” Andy added, tattling.

Nick looked at Gina again. He was not amused.

“What!? No, I didn’t… …Wait, actually, now that you mention it, I did kind of think it would be a fun little game…” Gina scratched her chin and tried to remember all the stuff she’d thought up when designing her little park adventure.

“…I don’t believe this,” Nick groaned in exasperation. He rubbed his forehead and sighed, shaking his head. “Gina…”

“What? Look, it’s not my fault!” Gina groaned. “I come up with a lot of crazy stuff! You said it yourself, Nick, I’m a creative!”

Yes, he had used that term. And he was really starting to REGRET using it now, given what they were dealing with here.

“Gina-”

“Do you have any idea how hard it is to sort out all the ideas in my brain?” Gina whined. “It slipped my mind, okay? Today was a lot! But… I was just putting stuff down! I didn’t plan for this to happen ACTUALLY, it was just one of a bunch of ideas!”

“Right, but I figured that this would be the most stimulating,” Andy chirped. “You two, running for your lives, enjoying yourselves, doing all manner of fun things together, aren’t you having a blast? Getting along, bonding together as you run for your lives? …If there was any danger, of course. Which there isn’t. Mostly.”

Nick just shook his head incredulously. Was she actually trying to get them to believe…?

He didn’t even want to think about it at this point. He just let out a testy sigh and shook his head again. “Gina…”

“Stop blaming me!” Gina whined, cutting him off.

“No, I’m not talking to you.” Nick’s attention was focused on Andy. “Gina should be able to nullify this if she wanted to! But she can’t. So, what’s going on here?”

Andy responded by sticking her tongue out at him like a petulant brat, much to Nick’s consternation.

“Sorry, but that’s proprietary information!” Andy chirped. “Let’s just say that when Gina requested you two have a heart-pounding date, we at Andyland decided that wish should take priority over everything else, and implemented special protocols that made it so, temporarily, control over Dream Alley was relinquished from the dreamer. But just temporarily! Don’t worry.”

“Oh my gosh, it really is the robot apocalypse!” Gina shook her head. “Machines are taking over!”

“Okay, well, stop it,” Nick insisted. “We’re not having fun anymore. So, your goal of making this an exciting date has failed.” If this really was a “twisted computer” situation, maybe he could use logic to make the thing blow up.

It worked on that one show, after all.

Andy burst out laughing. “What? Are you serious right now? …No, no way!” She chortled, and shook her head. “That ain’t happening, sorry.”

“Why not!?” Nick protested. “You’re supposed to be making sure we’re having a good date here! That’s the whole point of Dream Alley!”

“Yeah!” Gina nodded. “And we’re not! This isn’t fair, it’s supposed to be my date!”

“Right, but if I do that, then it won’t be fun for me,” Andy pointed out, crossing her arms over her chest. “And don’t I deserve to have some fun, too?”

Nick couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “No!” He protested. “Why… why would we care about something like that, huh!?”

“Wow, you’re rude!” Andy looked at him in shock. “I can’t believe you’d say something like that to a sweet young lady like myself! And you’re supposed to be this charmer with a harem of women throwing themselves at him?”

She scoffed scornfully and rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I don’t think so,” she said, shaking her head.

Nick was at a loss for words.

“Where’s Echo?!” Gina demanded, putting her foot down. “I’d like to lodge a formal complaint about the service I paid for!”

She was normally the type of woman to let something like this go. But she’d grown more comfortable with standing up for herself, and Nick had encouraged her today to think in terms of deserving more for herself, too.

So, she wasn’t going to be satisfied with people treating her like she deserved to be looked down on and be treated as lesser! That wasn’t fair to her, and Gina wasn’t going to stand for it! No way! She wasn’t going to let her date go off the rails.

“Echo!” Gina shouted. “Come out and give me my money back!”

“My, there’s no need to yell.”

And all of a sudden, there were two evil redheads in the room with them. Andy reacted in surprise, looking at the host with wide eyes.

“You-?” Andy stammered out. “What are you-”

With a tap of her cane, Andy was gone. Echo turned to the two of them, barely concealing the smirk on her lips. “Well. It looks like you both have had quite a fun date,” she said with a chuckle. “Enjoying yourselves, now?”

“Not one bit,” Gina scowled, glaring at the host.

“We were having a nice date,” Nick replied. “Until Dream Alley went completely out of control, that is! What’s the meaning of this, Andy?!”

“My apologies,” Echo said. “A tiny little glitch in the system. Turns out, Gina overwhelmed things a little with all her crazy ideas. Drew a little too much processing power.”

She whacked her cane on the wall of the building a couple of times, and things returned to focus. “There we go. You should be in full control again, Gina. Enjoy yourselves!”

And with that, the host disappeared.

Gina’s face burned with sheepishness. “I guess maybe I got a little too creative and ambitious, huh?” She asked sheepishly.

“No, it’s my fault,” Andy said, suddenly popping into being. “An NPC isn’t meant to be so… animated like I am. My apologies!”

She turned to Gina and lowered her head. “I’m sorry that you’re so incompetent that you thought up a park mascot who is superior to you in every way. That must be difficult.”

Gina rolled her eyes.

“So, uh… what now?” Nick looked at Gina uneasily, not sure what to say. “It would kind of be weird to continue our date like this…”

Gina nodded. “Yeah, I know,” she agreed. “Definitely weird. But… it’s not like it would be impossible, or anything.”

She turned to Andy. “Change of plans,” she addressed her mascot. “Let’s do this whole ‘horror’ thing again, for real- only it’ll just be a game. No danger.”

Gina turned to Nick with a sheepish smile on her face. “I mean, if you’re okay with that,” she clarified. “Actually, I was kind of starting to have fun…”

Nick didn’t know what to say for a second. “I mean… if you want too, I guess I can’t complain,” he conceded. “As long as we know it’s just a game this time.”

“Absolutely!” Andy chirped. And the chase was back on!