Hello everyone! This is my first fanfiction, so I hope you can bear with me. Feel free to leave reviews/criticism in the comments below. I already wrote several chapters ahead and will post them as I can. Hope you enjoy!
You ran your fingers through your hair, exasperated. Sometimes you really hated your job. You got a lot of crap during your shift from customers, but it was just as aggravating being sent all over town for inspections. Make sure the electrical wirings meet company standards, make sure the water pressure in the building is high enough for the toilets to flush and the faucets to run, but won't make the toilets explode into the hallways. Being a safety inspector was a real pain in the ass sometimes, and the people you met with were just so wonderful.
"No sir, you need to hire contractors to fix your damaged stairwell because it's illegal to do it yourself and it's a major safety hazard."
"No ma'am, you can't sell this house until you replace the old drywall with something that is not asbestos-based."
"If you don't pay for an electrician to fix this, then you're going to have to pay a fine on top of hiring the electrician for unsafe business practices." Boy, they loved hearing that one.
The pay was good, and you were able to live comfortably in your apartment, but it was irritating to keep returning to the same locations because the owners thought they could save money by getting their cousin to do it or something and ending up doing a sloppy job. Not to mention the snotty upstarts that thought they knew your job better than you did, or the pompous rich folks that would try to bribe you into approving the site so they wouldn't have to sink more money into fixing the problem. The matter would be settled with a subtle threat of a fine or going to a higher authority, and you'd always leave with someone glaring daggers into your back, but you knew that people would understand needing to make sure a fire wouldn't break out due to faulty wiring, or something just as tragic.
You weren't sure if it was coincidence or downright bad luck that got your two best friends in the world running to you when they wanted to turn a building they bought into a haunted house for this year's Halloween.
You had gotten the email (and six missed calls, and four very loud and excited voicemails) earlier in the week, and it had taken a few days to get the time to yourself to properly look over everything. You had to contact the warehouse for the schematics of the building, call in some favors for the eventual inspection to make sure the place didn't collapse around your ears, and got the numbers for reliable renovation companies that had a specialty for haunted houses and Halloween-themed attractions.
Joy oh joy, you thought to yourself as you re-read the email and took a look at the building schematics.
According to the email, it was one of the buildings that belonged to the Fazbear franchise before the business tanked. Eric and Kyle were losing their little minds over the discovery. Again. A lot of the email was typed with the Caps Lock on so they were practically screaming their excitement about possibly "discovering" some things left behind to use as props. Not only was this building big enough to host a haunted house, it was dirt cheap because no one wanted to buy the building. No wonder, you thought to yourself. They probably thought it was cursed or something.
These two had been fanatics about this sort of thing ever since they were kids. They loved reading horror stories and watched shows about unsolved murders and disappearances, much to the chagrin of their parents, who thought it was a bad influence. The one they latched onto for the longest time was the stories behind the events that occurred at a chain of restaurants called Fazbear's Pizza.
Those two would surf websites for hours, reading every "first-person accounting" of what happened from Freddy's Diner to Fazbear's Pizza. They chased the stories, pestered their parents and adults at school with questions about what they remembered, and in high school they did a report about it (that they utterly failed and even got suspended for a week because of their "presentation" that terrified the classroom and made one girl puke. They had made a paper mache costume of one of the animatronics and painted fake blood around its eyes and mouth, and while it looked impressive, the principal and staff weren't amused). You were willing to bet their silly obsession with the stories freaked out potential girlfriends. Not that they ever noticed, of course. There were stories to chase and theories to theorize!
Not that you were ever really interested. You heard all of the stories from them, and you were really skeptical. Blood and pus oozing from the eyes and mouths of the animatronics? The murderer stuffed the bodies of the children into the animatronic suits so they were never found? It sounded like a load of crap to you. If the suits smelled as bad as it was described, people would have checked the suits and found the corpses if they had really been stuffed in them. And there'd be no way the murderer could commit five crimes while working for the same company, they would have left a trail of some sort. Having some sort of master killer sprouting from a kid's pizzeria seemed less than plausible. You humored them and wrote back that you would inspect the building with them that weekend when you weren't on shift, but you made sure to emphasize that just because they were your friends they weren't going to get a "discount". They bought the building, they're gonna damn well pay to make sure it runs properly.
You sighed, moving away from your computer and taking a look at the building schematics, unrolling them and laying them out on the desk. God, they're dusty, you frowned, grabbing some random items from the desk and putting it at the corners to make sure it wouldn't roll in on itself. You thought it was a bit odd how eager the man at the city warehouse was to hand them over to you. Taking a look, you could easily pinpoint the areas where the stage and main room would be, since they were the biggest areas on the map. Bathrooms down the halls, decent-sized kitchen, security office at the very back of the building...which was odd. It was also absurdly tiny compared to the other rooms in the building.
You leaned back in your chair, examining the layout. No doubt they were going to break down some walls to create the maze they would make the patrons walk through as part of the attraction. This building had been sitting in the same lot for over 30 years. It was amazing it hadn't been demolished yet to make way for something more practical, like a Starbucks or something. It's not like it had been built over a burial ground of some sort, unless the stories were to be believed, and it's not like Fazbear's Pizza was a beloved establishment, again if the stories were to be believed. Anything inside of it would have been moved into storage or sold, you thought, so what did the guys think they were going to find when they searched the building tomorrow?
With any luck, they don't find anything and the entire thing is a bust. A wasted weekend for you, and the boys are out a couple hundred dollars. You really hoped it would be as simple as that.