AN: Hey everyone. Sorry about the late delay. School has been hell and cause I'm in matric its gotten a little worse. But fret not, I haven't given up on this story and I will keep updating, if not a little slower.


CHAPTER 7

NIGHT 3 Part 1


6 P.M

6 hours until closing time

She arrived early at the pizzeria with her trusty backpack slung over her shoulder and completely out of her dress uniform save for the hat. The old sneakers she had decided to go with were surprisingly quiet and they allowed her to move well without slipping. She got some funny looks from parents as she struggled to drag the generator she had brought along through the doors. Having only one arm to work with tended to do that. She left it with the day guard in the entrance.

Steel knew that the animatronics were watching her as she stamped to the owner's office by the way they suddenly hitched in their song for no reason. She was not ready to confront them just yet. Her arm ached as in reminder under the cast. Mr. Fizgaurd looked surprised to see her even as she closed the door to his office and he nearly knocked his chair over as he jumped to his feet. She kindly asked him to sit back down.

"I can only assume that you are aware that the animatronics are killing people at night," She said taking a seat opposite the old desk. The old man gulped nervously.

"You can't quit until you've finished your five days," he said immediately and she scoffed.

"I don't plan to," she pulled an old photo from her pocket. In it a younger version of her stood surrounded by four far cleaner animatronics that smiled and waved at the camera save for foxy who held her in his arms. Fizgaurd paled. He looked from the photo to her and back at the piece of paper again and his eyes widened as he pieced everything together.

"Emiko," he said softly and she nodded, "you've grown quite a bit since I last saw you."

"I go by Steel now," she sat back and crossed her arms, "And growing comes with time. I guessed you can figure out why I want answers by now."

"I don't really know what to tell you," he looked down. He suddenly appeared far older than he really was, the rings under his eyes were dark and his skin had started to sag, "When those murders happened, it changed everyone. Hell darling, they thought you were dead when you disappeared and they found some of your hair in the room."

"I gathered that much," she said warily, "What about the golden one? Golden Freddy I believe?"

His eyes widened, "How do you know of him?"

"I'm not that bad with a computer," she explained. She stayed away from mentioning the dream she had the previous night, having had a feeling that the man would have thought her mad, "So what was his story? The net only mentioned him in passing."

Fizguard's gaze turned saddens, "He was this restaurant's legacy, the first animatronic I built."

"What happened to him?" she asked and her fingers itched in a familiar way that always ended in her taking something apart and fixing it.

"We got in three new animatronics. A rabbit, a chicken and a bear," he explained wiping the sweat from his brow as he handed back her photo, "the children loved them more than Goldie and they took over. It became too expensive to keep him running, so he went into storage."

"Where the murderer shoved five kids into him," she finished and he nodded, "The police tore him apart to remove study their remains."

"Yes," he ran a hand over his balding head, "None of the people I hired to fix him would step near him, so we put him back into the main hall where he used to preform and sealed it up. I couldn't bring myself to part with it."

"I understand I guess," she murmured, "But I have an offer for you. I am currently completing my masters for engineering, and maybe I could fix up the animatronics for you. Including Goldie. None of the reports showed how those kids were killed so no one would know any better."

"That would be splendid;" he said softly, "except the restaurant is sort of on its last leg. I wouldn't be able to pay you for the work."

"I'm offering to do it for free," she stood from her seat, "the money you could bring in if you reopened pirate's cove and Goldie's stage might be able to drag you from the ditch. It's been nearly 15 years since the bite of 87'; technology has gotten better since then."

"I cannot let something like that ever happen again," he stood with her as she headed for the door and she stopped just under the frame to peer over her shoulder at him.

"It won't," whispered, "Because what happed was my fault."

Then she was gone, leaving the man to ponder her words as she made her way over to the gang. She had thought about it all of the previous day after her talk with Mike. Bonnie and Chika had hurt her. There was no denying it and they probably would have shoved her into a suit if they could, but now that her mind was no longer clouded with panic and pain, she realized that there had been something wrong with the way they had acted around her. The way Chika had frozen when she had seen her and Freddy begging her to stay were some of the first to come to mind. And her talk with the boss had given her a slight insight as to why they had refused to believe it was her. The answer was simple.

They had thought she had been one of the victims.

She sighed.

In truth, that wasn't really much of a reason, but it was the only one her mind could come up with.


7 P.M

5 HOURS UNTIL SHIFT STARTS

She picked up the tab from the office once she had plugged in the generator and set it to run once the grid switched over, before she made her way out and jogged out of the restaurant. The building was older than she was and she took a moment to scan her eyes along the brickwork. She made her way around the back and noticed the way the brickwork had begun to crumble and break away as it aged. Briefly, she wondered how many secrets the place had hidden from her, but she shook it off as she paused by a broken window. None of the ones on the inside had been broken when she had toured though it previously, so she assumed it was a part of the old restaurant. The widow was nearly a meter higher than she was and her short height did not help any of the matters at all. First she needed a way in.

Steel peered around warily and spotted some sealed metals bins that lay against the far wall in the empty ally way. Their labels had withered away over time but she guessed from their faded colors that they had contained cleaning chemicals that the restaurant had used. Most likely when things had gone better financially she gathered as the faded smell from them waffered over. They had been some pricey stuff. Steel nodded and went to crouch next to them. She sighed and pulled some of the pins from her hair.

'I'll need to thank Emmitt for teaching me how to do this,' she thought as she made quick work of the rusty lock that held the barrels together and rolled one of them over to the wall by the window. She winced at the sound it made across the gravel and prayed that people didn't become curious as to what she was doing. They'd probably have thought that she was breaking into the place. She used the furrows in the wall to pull herself up onto the bin. It wobbled unstably but didn't fall and she still had to push herself onto her toes to see into the window. Inside was pitch black, but that was enough to tell her what she wanted. She carefully pulled the window open and heaved herself into the space with her good hand, gasping when she landed harshly onto the floor with a thud.

Her dream was no longer a dream. Steel stepped wide eyed across the dusted floor. She avoided the benches that still filled the room, but her sights were settled on the stage at the back of the pizzeria where the old almost exact copy of Freddy Fazbear sat in complete disrepair. The hair on her neck stood as memories surfaced. Of the screams of a child as he was forced onto the body of the previous one into a golden bear by the man in the golden suit. Steel shook her head. She made her way up onto the stage and kneeled cautiously by the broken animatronic. Goldie's fur was destroyed and forever stained in the blood of the innocents. His eyes were lifeless and were missing the optics that the other robots had.

"They really tore into you didn't they?" she asked pitifully when the light from her flashlight caught onto his CPU mainframe that hung halfway out of his head. She sighed and hung her flashlight from the shelf she sat under.


12 PM

SHIFT STARTS. POWER UNLIMITED.

When the phone rang, it startled Steel out of her wits. She had been busy scrubbing at the blood on the golden bear's suit after the stench of decayed flesh had caused her to loose what little lunch she had in her stomach.

'That was fun to clean,' she thought sarcastically as she dropped the cloth she had been using back into the bucket she had found in one of the closets, trying her best to ignore the way the water had turned black from the things that had built up in the suit. She peered up at the animatronic she had begun to take apart, but he showed no indications of life and sat missing most of his head and his left arm. Strangely enough he still had in his exoskeleton, which sat in her lap. Getting up, she left the stage with all her tools on the wood and walked over to the phone she had seen while searching for the bucket. It was on the table near what had once been a reception, but the building had been sealed up with bricks. She still wondered why all the stuff had not been cleaned out properly.

BEEP.

''Hello, hello? Hey you're doing great! Most people don't last this long. I mean, you know, they usually move on to other things by now. I'm not implying that they died. Th-th-that's not what I meant. Uh, anyway I better not take up too much of your time. Things start getting real tonight."

Steel shook her head. She turned up the volume on the recording and returned to her seat by Goldie's frame.

"Uh... Hey, listen, I had an idea: if you happen to get caught and want to avoid getting stuffed into a Freddy suit, uhh, try playing dead! You know, go limp. Then there's a chance that, uh, maybe they'll think that you're an empty costume instead. Then again if they think you're an empty costume, they might try to... stuff a metal skeleton into you. I wonder how that would work. Yeah, never mind, scratch that. It's best just not to get caught.

Um... Ok, I'll leave you to it. See you on the flip side."

She frowned and reached for the tab. Goldie would have to wait. He needed a lot of work but she did not have what she needed for the job. The animatronics' fur had to be scrapped and completely replaced. There was just no saving it. She would have to travel to the scrap yard to get spare metal to seal up the tears in his frame. As well as craft him a new ear, she mused noting that one was missing.

Steel shook her head. She needed to focus, regardless of how safe she was. Turning it on, she was surprised to find all four of the animatronics sitting in the party room with their heads in their hands.

"She's alive," Freddy had taken off his hat for a change, revealing a tuff of hair that she had always loved to play with as a small child.

"And we nearly killed her," Bonnie said completely surprising her when she saw trials of liquid that was running from his eyes.

"Do ya think she'd come ah back lads?" Foxy asked and her heart twisted at the pain in his voice.

"I doubt it," Chika whispered, "We hurt her very badly."

Their voices trailed on but she had put it away. The pain was too much. Her guess had been right. They had thought her to be dead, but Steel knew she was not ready to confront them. The hairs on the back of her neck rose somewhat. She could not describe it but it felt like someone had been watching her. A shifting noise drew her attention and she turned around to face Goldie's frame in horror. He still sat leading against the wall, but what was left of his head had moved.

And the pin prick like lights of his eyes was focused on her.

"Help me..."