Even as a child, I was pretty aware of how wobbly the animatronics became when walking around, particularly the blasted fox. Something was clearly up with how they balanced, but I was a child, and I blindly assumed that the adults knew best. It really seemed the only thing they knew about was frugality, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
I remember watching a pirate movie one year – one of those clichéd ones where the dialogue consisted mainly of 'Yohohos' and 'yarrgh me hearties!'. I was a child, of course I obsessed over things I liked. So one day, when I begged my mother to take me out for pizza, I decided not to watch the band like I usually did, instead I made my way into the separate pirate themed section, aptly named 'Pirate Cove'. The imaginatively named 'Foxy' was the only character on this stage, and I was excited to see him; as I heard that he told many pirate stories of the same ilk of that I had seen in that movie.
I remember running up to the stage, clinging onto the metal railing that stopped children from getting to close the animatronics encase something went wrong. I watched with excitement as the pirate themes animatronic staggered down the 'plank' to the front of the stage. I heard many other children crying out in happiness the second he appeared from the hull of his 'ship'. I was just smiling, keeping quiet so I could hear his tale.
As he came closer, his limbs became gradually clunkier, and I should have taken that as the cue to move away, but I was fine. I was behind the safety railing.
I mentioned earlier about how little money the place would spend, and it really showing in such an outdated piece of safety equipment.
The animatronic seemed to have some sort of mechanics failure in its leg joints, and it toppled over so quickly, that one moment it was stood, the next moment it was goring off my forehead.
The screams are a bit of a muffled memory, and the only thing that I really did remember about that part was that the arm I still held out now reached to the hinge of the jaw of the thing that was killing me and I clutched onto the greasy fur that just covered it.
The newspapers said that I survived with that bit of frontal lobe torn out of my head, and they were half right. My body was alive, but it was a vegetable. Just an almost brain dead hunk of meat attached to a life support system. I certainly wasn't in there. I was still at the pizzeria. I'd been torn from where I lay, chucked to the side, and had tools rammed into me that tried to disable me, tearing my chest open in the process, and then they threw me behind the curtain and told people it was out of order. That I was out of order. I don't remember what my name was originally, but I knew that I would much prefer it over 'Foxy'.