The reason that Mike Schmidt kept coming back to his job night after night was quite simply because he was suicidal. He had not had a good childhood. High School had been hell. College (what little he'd gotten) had been worse.
As things stood now, Mike was at the end of his rope. There were no jobs to be had; he was up to his eyeballs in debt, student and otherwise. His family had cut him off, his boyfriend had left him, and he was fast approaching mental breakdown.
His nights at Freddy's had served as a sort of catharsis. They'd made him feel alive, though definitely not in a good or healthy way. The whole thing was dramatically self-destructive, to tell the truth.
This particular day, however, things were a good deal worse.
Someone had hacked his bank account and stolen all of his money. It'd been a week today and the bank still refused to believe him. Rent was due in two days.
His house had been broken into. There hadn't been anything of value to steal, so the thief had pissed on his bed as they'd left.
That night, Mike went into work (overtime. He needed the money), to discover that he could adjust the AI levels of the animatronics.
Since he'd had that kind of week, he turned all of the levels up to twenty, expecting that he wouldn't live out the night, before folding his hands behind his head, not even bothering to check the camera feeds.
He wondered briefly, as the clock changed over to midnight, whether it would be Foxy or Freddy who got to him first.
Pounding feet down the hallway seemed to indicate Foxy.
For one brief second, Mike's hand hovered over the door button. 'Last chance,' he thought to himself.
He moved his hand back to his desk.
Foxy flashed into the office the next second and Mike gritted his teeth. On second thought, this was going to be incredibly painful. Maybe he should have just brought a gun...
But, instead of going for the security guard, Foxy had grabbed Mike's computer and then run back out the doorway, quick as anything.
Mike blinked. It was a few minutes before he could recover himself. Had that actually happened?
Curiosity got the better of him, and he pulled up the feed of Pirates' Cove.
All four animatronics were there. And huddled around the computer, which Foxy had plugged into the wall.
They stayed that way for hours.
Well, an hour at least, After that, Mike's circulatory system crashed off of its adrenaline high, and he fell asleep.
When his phone alarm when off at six am, he startled awake, to see the computer back on its desk and the animatronics back in their places.
Weird. Upping their intelligence must have made them able to recognize that he was a person and not a bare endoskeleton in need of an animatronic suit.
Go figure.
The next night, Mike had brought a gun, deciding to take matters into his own hands. He felt slightly better about the whole thing, knowing that he wasn't condemning his replacement to a painful death.
Plus, if he did it here, then he wouldn't have to worry about someone he knew finding the body. Management was probably far beyond used to dealing with corpses, anyway.
As he raised the gun to his head, Freddy came in.
Saw what he was doing.
And crumpled the gun up like it was made of tinfoil before taking the computer with him.
Huh.
After the aborted suicide attempt, Mike snorted in amusement, and abandoned his post. He left the building altogether and headed for the nearest bridge, fully intending to jump off of it.
As he stepped up onto the ledge, he was pulled back by an irate Chica, carried bodily back to Freddy's, and then deposited into his seat, while the other three animatronics watched, their expressions unreadable.
Mike stared back at them with flat disbelieving eyes.
Exactly what the hell was going on here?
