The "amusement park," so to speak, actually seemed more to be a run down carnival that ended up stuck where it was due to being too old and beat up to pack up and move on anymore. The fact that they were there after hours and everything was shut down only made it look more decrepit and creepy. Maka seemed unaffected as she wandered through with a ratty map they'd picked up at the ticket booth. Soul followed behind her, counting water and rust stains and wondering how the hell they could even keep the ferris wheel open when it looked like it might collapse under the weight of a pigeon landing on it. He was so busy internally cringing at the place that he nearly ran into her when she stopped in front of him.

"This is the place." She nodded to herself, looking back and forth a couple times from the map to the building in front of her.

Soul glanced up at the building. A simultaneously cute and somewhat "uncanny valley" creepy cartoon bear stared back down at him with a large toothy grin. "Fazbear's Fright? Seriously? Our target is an attraction at a horror exhibit-slash-haunted house? Isn't that kinda dangerous to just have out in the open like this?"

Maka shook her head and pointed at the yellow "caution" tape around the area that Soul had at first thought to be part of the attraction. "This isn't open yet. They're apparently still getting things together and ready to open, according to the guy out front."

"So where does that leave us?"

Maka grinned. "He said we were free to look around so long as we were either out by midnight or just didn't bother the guard when he comes in then. And obviously we can't really touch or break anything, apparently they were really going for authenticity so everything down to the wiring is over thirty years old."

"So what would a PK be doing in here now? I mean, aside from the wonderful atmosphere."

Maka's brow furrowed. "I'm… not sure, honestly. According to Shinigami-sama, this guy was a target thirty years ago for the murders of several children, but one day he just… vanished. And suddenly his corrupted soul showed back up, and moved here, four days ago. He seemed just as confused, but you know how he is."

Something pricked at the back of Soul's mind with that story, something long forgotten, but he pushed it aside and followed Maka under the tape.

That something immediately shoved itself back to the front of his mind the second he walked in. He knew this place. He'd never been there before because they all closed down when he was still a baby, but he'd seen pictures, heard stories.

"Oh my God… I know this place."

Maka turned back to him, confused. "You… do?"

Soul shook his head. "Not here, personally, but what this place is supposed to be… what it's modeled after." He reached out to poke a giant purple rabbit suit hanging on a costume stand in the nose before turning back to Maka. "Freddy Fazbear's Pizza. Some Chuck E. Cheese type place. They used to be all over the midwest, but they all closed down thirty years ago. Wes went there once as a kid for a birthday party. He told me all about it and had taken pictures. It was a pretty basic looking pizza place, but the cool thing was they had these free roaming robot animals that would serve you pizza and cake and give out prizes at the little ticket corner and stuff, it was pretty crazy.

"He had to leave that party early for violin practice, and was pretty bummed at the time, but in the end that was probably a good thing. He told me that shortly after he left, one of the animals snapped and bit someone's face off. Apparently the guy lived, but it was all over the news, and the bad publicity, plus the disappearance of a few kids at that and a couple other locations, eventually shut them all down. This place is like a museum almost." He turned a corner and saw a large window with a bear costume hanging beyond it, similar to the rabbit suit, which he now knew from Wes's stories to be Bonnie, and the bear to be Freddy Fazbear himself.

Both he and Maka jumped nearly ten feet when a speaker above them suddenly played a short "Hello!" in what sounded like a small boy's voice. After hearing a small chuckle they both whirled to the window to see a guy maybe a little older than their age in a costume made to look like a night security guard's uniform wave at them. Maka brightly waved back, Soul a little shakier, and they went on their way.

After a couple hours of wandering the exhibit, with Soul explaining what he could of the pizzaria's history, because he had thought it was such a cool place as a kid and Wes had told him a lot, when he noticed something out of the corner of his eye after their fourth trip past the "arcade."

"Holy crap. Maka, look at this."

Slumped in the corner behind two machines was another rabbit suit, but this one was yellow, and appeared to be mostly intact, albeit in extremely bad shape. Wires poked out of it here and there, and there were holes in the suit all over, exposing the metal beneath.

Maka squinted at it as they both moved in front of it. "I thought you told me Bonnie was blue or purple?"

Soul's eyebrows furrowed. "He is, I'm not entirely sure… oh wait! The very first location only had two robots, a bear and a bunny, and they were both wearable. Something about a crank and spring locks? I honestly don't know how it was even possible, but apparently it…. wasn't. They were discontinued and retired after some of them… failed with someone inside them."

"Wes told you that? As a kid?"

"No, I read it on the internet when I was like ten. He didn't know about them either. It was before both our times."

Maka turned back to the rabbit slumped in the corner, now slightly creeped out by the story behind it, when she noticed movement out of the corner of her eye. Soul was going off on something about some kind of creepy puppet that Wes used to scare him with pictures of as a kid, so she ignored it in favor of listening, until she noticed movement again, and looked back down at the rabbit. "Uhh… Soul?"

Its fingers were twitching.

Judging by the fact that Soul jumped back from the rabbit, he saw it too. Maka backed away a bit and stared as the twitch in its fingers seemed to travel up its arm and into its entire body. Soon the whole suit was spasming against the wall, looking like the animatronic skeleton was shorting out, and then it just… stopped.

And glowing white pinprick eyes focused on them.

Soul was in her hands in weapon form immediately out of instinct, but Maka wasn't entirely sure what to do other than hold him in front of her defensively in case this one decided to bite heads too.

Neither of them expected what happened next.

Its eyes rolled back and forth between Maka and where Soul had been standing before its head twitched again and its mouth opened, some garbled electronic noises escaping before settling into something much worse.

"Yooouuuuu," it hissed, its voice a garbled combination of a malfunctioning voice box and something directly out of a zombie movie, its mouth movements not matching up to the words at all. "Come baaack, haave you? Come to laugh some more?" Its head reared back and focused on Maka with its eyelids lowered in what could only be a glare. "You killed me before… what do you waaannt. You daamn kiiidssss…"

Soul's reflection in the blade looked nothing short of horrified. "Oh my God. I think we found our target."

The rabbit suit threw back its head and let out a shriek that didn't sound even remotely human before sliding up the wall slowly into a standing position. One of its legs didn't appear to be working right, and it staggered a bit when it finally made it to its feet. Soul told Maka to run, but she only managed to take a step back before there was a small "Hi" from another room. With a violent snarl, the rabbit's head jerked in the sound's direction before it limped off towards it as best as its apparently rusted over knee would allow.

Maka stood frozen, watching it shamble away, before turning on her heel and bolting back to the guard's office, Soul already having dropped his weapon form and running behind her.

The guard grimly looked up from staring intently into a monitor when they skidded into the office. "I see you've found Springtrap."

"Springtrap?"

The guard nodded. "The spring Bonnie… thing… they left in here. It's what I've taken to calling him."

Maka nodded, still a little too shocked to speak, and Soul spoke up, catching his breath with his hands on his knees. "What… what the fuck just happened?"

"I'm not sure," the guard replied, flipping through the cameras again and punching another button, this time triggering a small laugh in another room, before flipping the tablet down and opening a small laptop on his left, pushing a couple buttons, and closing it again. "But I think this place became horribly haunted the day they brought that thing in. He seems to be attracted to sound, so I've been using the Balloon Boy tapes in various rooms to keep him away, but he occasionally comes close. For some reason he just kind of shuts down at 6 AM every morning. I guess the old stories about the free roaming programming are true."

Maka frowned. "What do you mean 'shuts down'?"

Another "Hello!" rang out in some distant room as the guard continued flipping through cameras before responding. "Every morning at 6, he just… stops and slumps down where he's standing and never moves again until my shift the next night. Sometimes he's not up and moving until 3 or 4, but I can tell he's… conscious? I guess? Whatever room he's sitting in, he's staring at the camera when I bring it up. He's trashed a couple machines in the arcade and whenever he gets to a room where I've played a sound, well…" He turned the camera monitor so Soul and Maka could see the thing stomping around the room in what could only be described as a rage, throwing chairs and shoving tables, looking for the source of the sound. "He's not very smart, but it's pretty obvious he's dangerous. I don't know where you guys are from, but I've been told you deal with this sort of thing all the time. Otherwise I would have pushed you out the door the second I came in."

Soul watched the thing destroying the mockup of a party room in search of the little boy it thought it heard. "That was you. Back there. Thanks for the save."

The guard nodded. "I heard him scream. He only does that when he thinks he's caught something. I figured you'd found him while he was awake."

"You seem…" Maka trailed off, trying to think of how to phrase her thoughts. "Awfully calm about this."

The guard looked up from the small laptop and grinned sheepishly. "This is my fifth night here, I've been dealing with him for a while. He seems to be… getting more aggressive. If you're here to take care of him, you'd probably want to do it tonight. He… learns. And he's very good at hiding. The ventilation is really throwing a fit tonight, and I have to keep an eye on it a lot," he patted the laptop a bit before closing it again. "So I may not be able to draw him away if you get stuck again. Even if I can… he learns. He may ignore it. Be careful."

Soul was already in Maka's hands. "Thanks for the tip."

The guard blinked a little bit at the talking scythe where a boy had been a minute ago, but simply gave a shaky smile and a little wave before going back to the cameras.

Maka strode down the hallway with purpose towards the party room where they could still hear Springtrap making a mess. She stopped right before the doorway and flattened her back against the wall, holding Soul out just enough to see into the room through the eye in his blade.

"It's… not in there."

"What?" Maka pulled him back and walked into the room herself, carefully stepping over and around misplaced chairs and flipped tables. "We heard him in here. Where could he have gone?"

Thump. Scraaaape. Thump. Scraape. Thump.

Maka slowly looked up above her and ended up shielding her eyes as dust fell from the ceiling. She heard Soul inhale sharply as the scythe's eye shot upwards.

"Oh my God it's in the vents."

"The guard!" Maka made to turn and run back to the office when a loud bang was heard in the vent above them, followed by an angry snarl and repeated loud bangs that sounded like Springtrap beating on a wall before the scraping noises of him crawling through the vent started moving back towards them.

"I think he's on top of that," Soul commented. "But that means it only has one place to go."

Maka turned toward the vent in the back wall, the grate covering it lie on the floor beside it, twisted and mangled as if Springtrap had simply wrenched it off by sheer force. It probably had. One rabbit ear slowly came into view, the other one broken off halfway, before Springtrap jerkily grabbed each side of the vent to pull itself out onto the floor.

Soul scoffed. "It's rusted to hell and can barely move properly. Left knee doesn't seem to move at all, and its left elbow looks like it's shot, too. It should be open to attack on both ends, but wait to see if it will leave an opening on its own."

Springtrap heaved itself up and staggered a bit on its bad leg before jerkily turning its head to them. Maka dropped into a defensive position to follow Soul's advice on seeing what it would do, when it simply let out the same shriek it had in the arcade and lunged with more power and maneuverability than it should logically have. Maka was forced to leap backwards over an overturned table and use Soul as a blunt object to push him back, ramming the top of him straight into the thing's chest.

The force stopped its lunge and threw it a little off balance, but it seemed otherwise unfazed as it grabbed Soul, wrenched him out of her hands, and threw him to the side before lunging again. This time Maka was ready for it and dodged easily, grabbing Soul and running from the room.

"Okay, so what the hell was that?" Maka panted as she darted through several hallways before settling on a small alcove behind an oddly placed stack of presents. "Something that rusted shouldn't be able to move that fast."

"I'm not sure, but we were assigned to it as a pre-kishin, and the guard mentioned something about the place being haunted when it showed up. It probably has some freaky supernatural bullshit going on with it. If we were sent to kill it, it must have a soul. Can you see it?"

Maka blinked, wondering why that hadn't occurred to her, before reaching out with her perception, aiming towards the sounds of Springtrap limp-scraping down a hallway looking for them. Apparently it could attack quickly, but not move very fast. She vaguely registered the night guard walking out the back door by his office, and glanced down at her watch to see that it was 6:01 AM. She focused harder, listening for the clatter that must come from something as large and heavy as a seven-foot animatronic rabbit falling to the floor.

It was still walking. She could hear it in the next hallway. And now she could see its soul. A massive, purple tinted thing fueled entirely by malice and rage, and carrying a large form of patience. She quickly transmitted this over resonance to Soul, seeing what he could make of it.

"Oh, man," he murmured, voice shaking a little. "It hasn't been learning at all. It's been toying with him. It's like a cat playing with the mouse before it kills it. The damn thing is getting some sick enjoyment out of this!"

Soul clammed up as Maka turned to face the end of the hallway. With a garbled hiss, Springtrap poked his head around the corner before shambling fully into the hallway and shuffling towards them with an oddly calculating slowness, its good hand dragging behind it, fingers scraping on the wall.

Maka wasn't quite sure how to fight a giant robot rabbit, but she'd seen much weirder, and they were far from cornered in this hallway and could easily maneuver if they had to, but Springtrap had proven rather unpredictable in the party room, so she simply waited. It got about halfway down the hallway before the hand on the wall formed into a fist and it lunged again, but this time Maka was ready for it and she ducked to the right and shoved Soul into its side, using its own momentum against it to smash it into the wall.

She bolted for the party room again, glancing back to see that she hadn't done much damage at all, and it was getting back up to hobble after her, growling in an unnatural way. By the time she'd reached the party room and turned to wait for him, Soul raised, she realised he wasn't really growling at all.

"... thirty yeaaarrss. Those little brats haad it comiinngg… I'll find themm... I'll kill them… I'LL KILL YOU."

The last was roared as he stood in the doorway of the party room, eyes clearly focused on Maka, mouth wide open. She cringed at the sight, and Soul sounded like he was going to throw up.

"Oh God he's still in there… there's a dead guy in that suit…"

With Springtrap's mouth open as wide as it was, Maka could clearly see the gaping mouth and sunken nose of a mummified corpse inside its head. As if it knew what they were looking at, it snapped its jaw shut and made a sound that sounded unnervingly like a dark chuckle at their disgust. Maka dropped into a defensive stance again, ready for it to lunge, when it simply cocked its head at her, Reached up into the ceiling while still staring at her, and punched through the clay tiles, pulled down a handful of wires, and dropped them on the floor beside it. They quickly began to spark.

"Oh no. Maka we need to leave. Now."

"We have him here, we can get him! The guard said we may not get another chance and we were assigned this mission specifically, Soul!"

"No seriously. We need to leave."

Maka scowled as Springtrap seemed to grin maliciously at them while standing in the doorway. They weren't trapped, the back door was behind her, she could easily escape this room. Why was Soul so worried? "We've got this."

"Maka the wiring in this building is old as dirt and the arcade is on fire."

Maka blinked and whirled to the door behind them. The room across the hallway from the party room was nearly engulfed in flames.

"MAKA MOVE!"

She leaped forward towards the door and heard the loud crash of Springtrap hitting the ground behind her. Cursing herself for being so careless and turning her back on the monster, she spun back just long enough to see it climb quickly to its feet to fulfill its vow. Its bad leg had one tiny flame crawling up it. Somehow it had shorted out all the wiring in the building and the hallway they had come from was also on fire.

Maka bolted past the arcade and towards the exit at the end of the hallway, lunging at the bar before falling out the open door and to the ground, looking back to see Springtrap, his entire lower half on fire, gripping her ankle with his good arm.

"KIIILLLLLL YOOOOUUUUUU!"

Maka roared back at it before swinging Soul purely on instinct, severing its head before cutting its arm off at the elbow and running clear of the burning building. Firefighters were already outside the opposite end of the building, trying to bring the flames under control. Maka snuck out around the back before stopping to pry Springtrap's severed hand off her ankle, angrily chucking it back into the fire. The building collapsed shortly after. Maka thought she could see five little souls rising from the ashes, but shook her head and turned away, leaning on Soul's shoulder for support and limping away on her burned and probably fractured ankle to report to Kidd.

Neither of them noticed a firefighter placing a yellow rabbit head on a table with the few other goods they had managed to save.