Los Angeles, Circus Baby's Pizza World, July 201-, 2:00 a.m.
Charlie had never really been told "no".
Not by her father before the incident involving an older prototype animatronic that killed him and sent her to live with Aunt Jen not long before her sixteenth birthday.
From there, the distinct lack of "no" in her life extended to her rather lackadaisical aunt Jen who let her do… whatever.
In high school and college, she was never hard up for a date –she always made sure they earned every second with her because her time was valuable.
While still a sophomore at Caltech studying robotics, she won back her father's company from Wolfram and Hart, and took over the reins. She'd cut staff and costs and raised prices while taking over the maintenance and upkeep of the stable of animatronics she'd inherited. If there was the occasional death after hours, it was merely the cost of business – it cost money to live in Laurel Canyon and drive the cars she preferred.
And when the whole mess went belly up thanks to a n unexpected Federal tax audit that led to decade's worth of creative accounting, it wasn't her fault. At least she'd managed to hide the off the book employees, mainly night guards, again, the cost of doing business in the City of Angels.
As for John, once her accountant, and Arnold her ten-year-old son, who needed them?
She'd lost track of those two deadweights once she could afford a house in Laurel Canyon and the ink on the divorce papers had dried. Child support wasn't her problem – that's what accountants on retainer were for. If John still blamed her for the divorce? Well, that was his problem!
He should have been a better husband.
And Arnold should have been a better son.
Anyway, Arnold with his embarrassing behavioral problems was John's problem, now. Not hers.
Speaking of problems, she now stood in the echoing remains of Circus Baby's Pizza World, ready for quick liquidation in tomorrow's auction, surrounded by assets harvested from the other restaurants in the chain of kiddie entertainment venues her father and a neighbor, Hank Afton, had founded back in the mid 1980s.
Chapter 1 Bankruptcy caught her unawares during the agonizing Federal audit - also not her fault. Beach houses and summers in Europe weren't cheap, so she'd sold her main walking assets off to a collector in Japan, only to have the money seized by creditors the second it changed hands.
Again, not her fault.
It also wasn't her fault that there had been a steady increase in lawsuits, insurance claims, and a sharp dropoff in customers once the unfounded rumors about what happened after hours got out.
Charlie walked up to the largest of the last of the unsold animatronics, Funtime Freddy Fazbear. She'd mothballed him and the four biggest troublemakers not long after… it happened.
She circled the battered pink bear with his loose, moronic grin, shabby blue bunny puppet, and top hat, the heels of her business pumps clicking sharply in the echoing empty space.
She reached up and flipped a hidden switch on the big lumbering goof's chest. With a rising, high pitched whine the animatronic's painted blue eyes opened, head swiveling back and forth, massive grinning jaws clattering open and shut, to stand at loose attention, staring down at her.
"You lied to us." Came a quiet male voice from the speaker in its chest, a voice almost drowned out by the echoing metallic rhythm of what could only be described as mechanical breathing.
"You wouldn't have wanted Fazcorp to be shut down if the world found out what was going on, would you? They would have taken you and your "family" apart to see what went wrong, right?" Charlie smiled up into Mike's painted eyes. "It would have meant you and the others would have been destroyed. I did you a favor by putting you all in storage."
The light tenor deepened, "If caught, we wouldn't have told as long as you left us alone after hours." Flickering like an old television, Freddy's clumsy body was replaced by a tall, muscular blonde man in his late twenties wearing the shabby remains of a uniform, one second that of a night guard, the next of a Marine in combat fatigues. "
"What's going on?" Moving ponderously towards Charlie, he gestured around them at the piled high tables of candy colored restaurant equipment and electronics.
"Party's over, big guy." Charlie shrugged, her back to the deactivated animatronics: a fox, a cat, a dog, and a hulking ballerina, "Everything goes. Including you guys – I hear the market for rare metals is up these days. There'll be a bidding war."
The man jerked to a halt, processing her words. Taking advantage of his confusion, Charlie stepped closer. After mothballing the whole lot of 'em, she'd paid to look into the background of what possessed Freddles and been stunned - God he had been attractive before he'd let himself go! John was tall and skinny with acne scars and a thinning mop of brown hair and easily controlled. Why had she even bothered with him when she could have done so, so much better for herself?
"You lying bitch! You promised we'd be safe as long as we kept our mouths shut and didn't try to contact the law." The illusion that was Mike now loomed over her – he had been nearly seven feet tall when he was alive – God, how did he and the others do that? Change their appearance, fool the eyes of the unwary? She'd opened them all up, ignoring what the core of each of them contained, looking for answers and finding none. "And now this?"
Whatever. Charlie didn't really care as Mike backed her across the scarred black and white tiles until she came to an abrupt halt against a displaced pizza oven, unable to run from what her mind told her was a piece of kiddie entertainment that occasionally killed and her eyes told her was a man with a face like something out of a high end men's magazine.
Eyes closed and sweating, Charlie raised her face to his, whispering with a grin, "I could remove you from the inventory. The others I'll sell. I've already had a scrap dealer contact me trying to cut a deal. But you? All you have to say is…"
A cold hand grabbed her face, lifting her out of her shoes. Whimpering, Charlie opened her eyes.
Face flickering somewhere between cheap cartoon bear and man, Mike glared down at her.
"No." he grated, and then he dropped her.
"You ungrateful bastard!" Charlie pulled herself to her feet by one of the oven's handles, reached up, flipped a switch, and deactivated what had once been a man.
She'd see to it that "no" turned into yes.