"Uh, hello? Hello, hello?"
Time couldn't move slower. Stan would swear that it had been days, but the clock only read midnight—three, four hours, tops, since they returned. Absolutely nothing had happened since.
"Uh, hello and welcome to your new summer job at the new and improved Freddy Fazbear's Pizza. Uh, I'm here to talk you through some of the things you can expect to see during your first week here and to help you get started down this new and exciting career path."
Nothing, except his brother's discovery of some old cassettes in the office. There must have been dozens of them, stuffed in the desk drawer, though only a handful had any sorts of labels; the labeled ones claimed to be training tapes. Ford fixated on them for a few moments as he debated on how useful they might prove—a process which, by itself, Stan could swear took at least twenty minutes. When he finally decided that, yes, he did want to listen to them ("after all, any information about how these animatronics ought to be functioning should prove useful in determining what behavior would be considered 'haunted'"), Ford refused to sit still until he found a player. The older twin tore the already disheveled office further apart until he found one. That it was sitting in the same drawer as the tapes and that Ford had overlooked it for half an hour were irrelevant facts.
"Uh, now, I want you to forget anything you may have heard about the old location, you know. Uh, some people still have a somewhat negative impression of the company. Uh... that old restaurant was kind of left to rot for quite a while, but I want to reassure you, Fazbear Entertainment is committed to family fun and, above all, safety."
The tapes played continually; Stan had stopped hearing the short pauses when Ford switched them at their end. All the recordings had been made by the same person, his metered voice either reading from a script or poorly improvising from a set of notes. As neither of them could discern any order from looking at the tapes, Ford played them at random, destroying any sense of coherency. Just a constant stream of corporate chatter and instructions.
"They've spent a small fortune on these new animatronics, uh, facial recognition, advanced mobility, they even let them walk around during the day. Isn't that neat? But most importantly, they're all tied into some kind of criminal database, so they can detect a predator a mile away. Heck, we should be paying them to guard you."
Once he'd found the cassette player, Ford dropped himself onto the sturdiest box he could reach, pulled out his junk notebook, and hadn't stopped writing. He must have been the only person to ever be excited about or interested in these training materials. Stan, however, had grown bored. There were only so many times he could look over the junk in the room—the crayon drawings of the characters done by the child patrons, the promotional posters that would make any employee cringe, the twenty-year-old fast food trash, the desk fan that he didn't remember turning on, the boxes of paperwork, and, the thing that had kept his attention the longest, the security camera feed.
In total, there were fifteen cameras; eleven of them showed the interior of the restaurant. The live feed could have been replaced with pictures without Stan noticing, for all the movement happening there that night. He'd hoped, initially, that something might happen—he didn't know what, exactly, but something—but time wore on and the static images in the monitor remained unchanged. He propped his feet up on the desk and leaned back in his chair. Maybe he could nap without Ford noticing.
"Uh, now that being said, no new system's without its... kinks. Uh... you're only the second guard to work at that location. Uh, the first guy finished his week, but complained about... conditions. Uh, we switched him over to the day shift, so hey, lucky you, right? Uh, mainly, he expressed concern that certain characters seemed to move around at night, and even attempted to get into his office."
Stan snorted. "Yeah, I bet."
Ford shushed him.
"Now, from what we know, that should be impossible. Uh, that restaurant should be the safest place on earth. So, while our engineers don't really have an explanation for this, the working theory is that... the robots were never given a proper 'night mode'. So, when it gets quiet, they think they're in the wrong room, so then they go try to find where the people are, and in this case, that's your office. So, our temporary solution is this: there's a music box over by the Prize Counter, and it's rigged to be wound up remotely. So just, every once in a while, switch over to the Prize Counter video feed and wind it up for a few seconds."
"What is he talking about?"
Ford stopped the tape. His frown was hard to read. "I…don't know. The animatronics, at some point, seemed to be not only able but allowed to roam the restaurants—"
"That's a law suit waiting to happen."
"—but I don't understand what he means about the music box." Ford glanced at the monitor over his brother's shoulder, adjusting his glasses. "Is there a feed for the Prize Corner? Or anything, anywhere, about a music box?"
Stan shook his head. "No. I didn't see one when we were walking around, and there's definitely not one on camera."
"What's this one?" Ford pointed to a feed showing darkness and, occasionally, static.
"Kitchen," Stan read off the monitor. "Camera's disabled, but I guess you can still hear sound out of it."
"Hm." Ford's brow furrowed. Toying with his extra digit, he dropped his gaze again to the cassette player. "Maybe the tape comes from a different site? A sister location in a larger building, with a different setup?"
Stan shrugged. "Could be."
Ford made a pensive noise and pressed the play button again.
"It doesn't seem to affect all of the animatronics, but it does affect... one of them. Uh, and as for the rest of them, we have an even easier solution. You see, there may be a minor glitch in the system, something about robots seeing you as an endoskeleton without his costume on, and wanting to stuff you in a suit, so hey, we've given you an empty Freddy Fazbear head, problem solved! You can put it on anytime, and leave it on for as long as you want. Eventually anything that wandered in, will wander back out."
"Wait, what about stuffing—?"
"Hush, Stanley, the tape's almost done."
"Uh, something else worth mentioning is kind of the modern design of the building. You may have noticed there are no doors for you to close, heh. But hey, you have a light! And even though your flashlight can run out of power, the building cannot. So, don't worry about the place going dark. Well, I think that's it. Uh, you should be golden. Uh, check the lights, put on the Freddy head if you need to, uh, keep the music box wound up, piece of cake. Have a good night, and I'll talk to you tomorrow."
The tape player clicked as it reached its end. This time, Ford didn't immediately replace it.
"There are doors to this room, aren't there?" Ford glanced to the place where there should have been doors. There were none visible—nothing hinged to the walls.
Stan leaned over to the wall, where the switch for the light was. There was another button above it labelled "Door" that he hadn't given much thought; he pressed it.
A steel door flew down, hitting the floor with a dense thud. Simultaneous shouts of "Holy Moses!" accompanied the metallic noise.
"Well, we have doors," Stan finally announced as he removed his hand from his heart.
After recomposing himself, Ford stood and shuffled to the door. He knocked lightly on it, examined it for a moment, then hit the green "Door" button again, watching the door disappear back into the ceiling. "Three-inch steel doors." He poked his head into the hall, checking around the doorway. "Only sealable from within the office." Back in the room, he sat back onto his box. "The last time I saw a room like this, I was in a prison in Dimension CR-82'5—it was the only safe room, meant to keep guards safe in case a riot got out of hand."
"Why would a pizzeria have space-prison doors?"
"That would be the question." Ford sighed. He popped the cassette out of the player, looking it over. It had no markings on the label. "At least we know this tape comes from another location. I wonder why it's here…" He scribbled something on the label, added the same thing to his notes, and looked to his brother. "This seems far more complicated than Afton let on."
"Yeah." The response was distant; at some point, Stan had stopped listening. He stared intensely at the monitor.
"Stanley?"
"We didn't walk by the restrooms, did we?" He didn't move his eyes from the screen.
Ford peered over his brother's shoulder, glancing between the screens, unsure which camera he needed. "No, we didn't."
Stan pointed at camera 7's screen. "There's footprints."
Two distinct sets of footprints tracked down the corridor: the first were clearly William Afton's, his sneakers left the same pattern across the rest of the restaurant; the second, however, were less identifiable, larger, with distinct toe markings. One of the animatronics had walked that hall at some point—either in the afternoon, following William's initial walkthrough, or earlier in the night, after William had locked them in.
"Did you see anything?" Ford leaned forward, scrutinizing the screens. Most of them were too dark to discern any real details.
Stan shook his head. "I've been watching them all night. None of 'em have even twitched, let alone walked around."
"Can we turn any lights on?"
Glancing over the security monitors, Stan found a remote light switch. The room in the monitor lit up dimly, dust refracting the light as it settled back to the ground.
"I don't see anything moving," Ford murmured, his brow knit. He studied the grainy security footage, searching for any indication of anything amiss. Interestingly, the camera indicated the correct date and time, as if it had been running for the past twenty years. "Do you see anything?"
"Nope." Stan's gaze had drifted from camera 7, shifting between the other monitors. He paused on camera 1a. "Ford?"
"Hm?"
"How many animatronics were on the stage before?"
Ford finally looked up from the camera. "Three."
Stan pointed to the monitor. "Looks like one of them went for a walk, then."
"Really?" Ecstatic, Ford followed his brother's gesture. There was indeed one animatronic missing—the rabbit. "Where did he go?"
An unsure noise caught in Stan's throat. "I dunno. I don't see him anywhere." His eyes flit across the different monitors, hoping to catch a glimpse of the animatronic. Nothing had been disturbed in any of the screens; the longer he searched, the less he was convinced he was watching a live feed of the restaurant.
"How could such a hefty machine move so quickly without making noise?" Ford's eyes also darted between the screens. The rabbit remained obscured, though he was able to find extra sets of footprints he hadn't noticed earlier: across the dining area, in the west hallway, and, albeit fractionally, in the storage closet. Bonnie may as well have evaporated for all the sense the empty monitors made.
"Hm." Stan frowned and finally tore his attention from the security footage. His hand reached out to the wall switches, hovering between the "Light" and "Door" buttons. When he finally accepted that he couldn't see through the blackness on his own, he clicked on the hall's light. There in the doorway stood the missing animatronic, silently staring into the office.
"Oh, look, Stanley, there it is."
Stan slammed the other button. The door crashed into the floor. For a moment, the twins sat stunned.
"Why the hell didn't he show up on the monitor?!" Stan glared out the small window at the rabbit. Bonnie stared back, unfocused eyes still glassy underneath twenty years of dust.
"Must be a blind spot in the security cameras," Ford murmured, mostly to himself, as he scribbled something in his notebook. Once finished, he leaned over his brother to better observe the animatronic in the window. "Why was it waiting there so patiently?"
"Who cares?"
"I'd like to call this a confirmation of a haunting, but the training tape would be a rather pointed source of disagreement." Habitually, Ford clicked his pen. "It did say that the animatronics were drawn to sounds. Strange, though, that all the internal electronics and mechanisms still work enough to allow it to ghost its way around the pizzeria—could that be evidence that it's haunted? Mr. Afton did say that the mechanics were, ah, weak—surely that must mean—"
Stan clamped a hand over his brother's mouth. "Can it, Poindexter."
Ford complained, his words only a garbled noise. His brother answered him in a hush.
"You said it's drawn to noise, right? If you shut up for a minute, it might go away."
Again, Ford protested, wanting to observe the animatronic in the window further.
"Shut up, Ford." Anticipating his brother's comment, Stan reached over and shut the light. The hallway was again cast in darkness. They waited, silent but for the hum of the desk fan, unsure if anything would happen. Stan hoped his brother had a backup plan; he already knew how well his punching plan would turn out.
Fortunately, they didn't have to wait long. Soft footsteps padded down the corridor, evenly pacing their way down the west hall. When he couldn't hear the animatronic anymore, Stan clicked the light on momentarily. Bonnie wasn't there. A quick check of the monitor revealed that he was in the dining area again, though not in his original position on the stage.
"I can't believe that actually worked." Stan removed his hand from his brother's mouth, using it to cradle his head. After a moment, a smile cracked onto his face. "At least those things aren't smart, huh?"
"Was that necessary, Stanley?" Ford adjusted his glasses, frowning. "It was right outside the office, perfectly positioned for observation."
"No, not really, just saving your life, that's all."
"You don't know that. Who's to say that the animatronics are malicious or violent?"
Stan groaned, throwing his hands up in frustration. "Why else would they be haunted?"
"Not all ghosts are malevolent spirits. Most of them, in fact, aren't—they're quite often more annoying than anything else." Ford dropped onto the box he had been using as a chair, turning his displeased glower to the security feed. There, in camera 1b, stood Bonnie, looking surprisingly lost amidst the dusty party decorations. Even through the monitor, there was something unsettling about those glassy, unblinking eyes.
Ford leaned back to retrieve his notebook. The sound of soft footsteps caught his ear. Curious, he glanced back to the monitor. Bonnie hadn't moved from his position in camera 1b.
"Do you hear that, Stanley?"
"Hear what?" Stan looked up from where he had slumped over the console.
"More footsteps." The excited lilt in his voice lowered to confusion in the last syllable. "But Bonnie is still in the dining area."
Stan's eyes flicked through the cameras quickly, pausing on the stage camera, before returning to his brother. "Try the light," he suggested warily. "I think another one went for a walk."
Altering his reach, Ford stretched to the east wall and clicked on the light. The bright yellow chicken appeared in the doorway, prompting the twins to yelp, startled.
"Shut the door, Sixer!"
"Nonsense." Recovering from the fright, Ford pushed himself to his feet and stepped around some of the office clutter to approach the motionless animatronic. He pulled the journal from his coat, flipped through the pages, and returned to the place he had begun drawing hours ago, during their tour of the building. "They've shown no signs of aggression so far; we have no reason to assume—"
Chica lunged through the open door, beak wide, teeth barred. Her assault stopped short with a metallic thud; Stan's punch sent the animatronic stumbling back a step, just far enough to allow Ford to slam the door down.
"I will cede that the animatronics may have some aggressive tendencies." Ford wrote the note in his journal and waited for his brother to finish swearing before speaking again. "Let me see your hand. Does it hurt?"
"I just punched a robot in the face—of course it hurts!" Scowling, Stan put his left hand out for inspection. "I told you those things were dangerous."
"Hm." Ford elected not to indulge in his brother's petulance. He instead carefully removed the brass knuckles from Stan's hand before the swelling could become a problem (the blood certainly helped, little though there was). Following a cursory inspection of the damage, he bandaged the wound and allowed his brother his hand. "Nothing seems to be broken."
"Good." Stan glared out the office window; Chica had disappeared. A quick glance at the monitor indicated that she was further down the hall. "Next time, I'm letting it eat you."
"Animatronics don't eat people—"
"'Bone and all,' he said!" Stan folded his arms. "It would've ripped you apart! How did you survive on your own for so long?!"
Ford shook his head. "We'll just have to be more careful for the rest of the night."
"Rest of the night? Why don't we just leave, like sane people?"
"Yes, the Pines family has always been the picture of mental health." The wry smile that had crawled onto Ford's lip disappeared almost immediately. Ford quieted his embarrassment with a cough. "About leaving…"
Stan waited.
"…Well…" Ford shifted. "We can't, frankly."
"Yeah?"
"The door is locked."
Stan snorted. "And me without my keys. Damn." Groaning, he flopped back into his chair. "So, what, we're just gonna ride the night out in the bunker?"
As Ford opened his mouth to answer, the office lights flickered, and the generator outside shuddered with a heavy clang. "I forgot about the generator." He clicked the wall switches, shutting the hall lights and opening the doors. "We must be using so much power. The generator can't sustain that for the rest of the night. We need to be more conservative."
Though still visibly agitated, Stan leaned back in his chair. "How hard could it be? It's just until morning."
