Hello again, folks! Another chapter. This time it's the last of Adams' adventures against the Rat and his menagerie. I tried to kick some action in as well, but I also was trying to keep the chapter from going too long and crazy - there's a fair bit of ground to cover, after all. Let me know what you think!

Not really too much to go over this time, so on with the show!

Location CBAF

Night 5, 11:50 PM

Joseph Adams

This was it, the final night. I knew what I had to do, and where I had to go – I had the complete combination to get into the safe, and I knew that whatever I found inside it would be the final piece of the mystery. I took a few moments to go over everything I knew once more.

Faz had found something in Candy's. Something that he had tried to keep Alex away from – maybe it had something to do with that husk of a burnt-out animatronic we'd found in the remains of Fazbear's Fright. I could only assume it was another reincarnation of Golden Freddy; the letter Faz included with the package he sent me wouldn't make sense otherwise. Maybe he and the Rat had been allies, or maybe they were fighting against each other... Regardless, with one gone it seemed like the Rat was off the leash.

From what I've found since then, it seemed like Candy's had stolen a Fazbear Entertainment endoskeleton; one designed as a Ringleader AI's skeleton. Considering the similarities between the Marionette we'd dealt with in the 'improved' Freddy's and the one I'd seen in those videos, I figured it was safe to assume that it was the stolen one. They had turned it over to Uncanny Valley and asked them to try and make their own versions of that high-end AI. The Ringleader AI was defective and murderous – as many Golden Mile machines seem to be – and had killed an employee of Uncanny Valley, forcing them to hire that same shady cleaning company... Who probably clued Fazbear Entertainment in on where their missing Ringleader endoskeleton was.

That would have kicked off the massive legal fight between the two companies as Fazbear Entertainment tried to get Golden Mile to fight their battles for them, but in the end it came to Candy's vs Fazbear's. This essentially shuttered the former, but apparently the Ringleader AI was never recovered. Enter the Rat endoskeleton – odds were good the Ringleader just uploaded himself into the Rat. As for what had happened afterwards... I had a feeling Alex knew the other half of the story, but those secrets were locked away.

I figured I had pretty much the whole plot now – whatever the information was I was about to uncover, it would probably be enough to expose the whole plot. Golden Mile was shuttered and Uncanny Valley had moved to smaller scale things, but it would certainly be enough to wrap the cleaners up as well – a nice tight package to end this mess.

Hopefully it would also show where those potential 'AI Backups' that Faz mentioned in his letter were... I shook my head. Even though I wasn't as close to the band as Alex was, I still considered them friends. I'd seen how it had devastated him to lose them all. If I wanted to help him recover, I had to track down those backups. It all had to be in the safe back there.

I had a second goal, as well... I had to stop the Rat. It was clearly insane, and highly bloodthirsty. Once I left, I wasn't sure the research teams would be able to stop it from doing whatever it pleased. If I didn't shut it down permanently, who knows what it would be capable of – and we did not need a second Golden Freddy on the loose. To that end I'd done some research into Uncanny Valley's robotics. The good news was they didn't have any kind of remote backup technology; I wreck the Rat, it stays dead.

I entered the office once more, taking a seat. I wasn't going to have much time so I queued up the phone recording while I started sifting through the video files on the computer. I wanted to find as much as I could before the Rat became active.

"Hey, how's it going *sipping noise*. Oh, sorry, I have a latte here. Uh, anyway. I have one last thing to tell you. Um, alright, you probably noticed, uh, there's an extra door in the Second Party Room, um, which is Camera 9, I think. And it's, it's not on the map. That's because it's, it's really nothing special. It's, it's like a storage room. Um, we don't go in there much, like, I, I haven't even been in there myself, you know. I just wanted to inform you that you don't need to worry about it, and that's not a mistake that's not on the map, or anything like that. Uh, anyway, uh you've done a great job so far, uh, I talk to you next week. Uh, good night."

Well. That wasn't very useful. Maybe the video would be more useful... Slowly it began to play, and I saw the old, broken down Candy and the Blank animatronic laying on a conveyor belt. I squinted for a moment as it seemed to be cutting in and out – was that...?

I nearly jumped out of my chair as the Puppet jumped forwards in between static cut-outs, and I could faintly see lettering playing across the bottom of the screen. "A Mistake... My Mistake." It cut out again, and the screen was filled with nothing but the Puppet's face. "A Problem... Your Problem." And then it cut to nothingness. And then came back a brief moment later. My eyes widened as I saw the Rat also sitting on the same belt, near the old Candy and Blank. Slowly it sat up, looked into the camera, and walked away...

This time I really did jump out of my chair as the Rat's face came into focus, within inches of the camera and with those menacing looking eyes. I saw it staring with that horrifying, permanent grin on its face before the camera's feed cut out again.

That had to have been when the Puppet uploaded itself to the Rat. I didn't know how or why, but it made sense in a twisted way. Everything from then on I'd seen already – I knew how this story played out. And now it was time for the final chapter of this sordid story.

The clock struck midnight and I unlimbered a pump-action shotgun from my back. I'd loaded it with slug rounds, figuring they'd be heavy enough to batter and smash the endoskeleton underneath the Rat into pieces. I also had a second stun baton, as well as loading my .45 up again and making sure it was ready to go. I had a feeling I wouldn't just be dealing with the Rat; after all, it had remote access to the other animatronics, so it would be able to bring them into play as well. I slowly got to my feet, sneaking my way out of the office.

Sure enough, just as I got to the first party room I saw the Rat slowly leaving that 'storage room' he was hiding inside. I kept myself low, hiding in the shadows as he slowly began looking around the area. I braced the shotgun against a stack of boxes, leaning against them to steady my aim as he began slowly stomping and thumping his way out to the room I was hiding in. Slowly he turned to face me, and I took aim at that wicked grin...

He must have flicked on night vision just in time, because just as I squeezed the trigger and unleashed my first shell, he turned to dodge away and the slug buried itself in his left shoulder joint, hitting with enough force to tear the limb clean off. He let out an angry hiss, before retreating to another room. I pumped the shotgun, ready to give chase –

And that's when Candy and Cindy stepped down from the show stage, eyes glowing as they started coming at me. I knew I wasn't going to be able to deal with the Rat with those two chasing me down so I ran for it, going in the opposite direction as I slung the shotgun and pulled my pistol back out. Time to go to work. I ducked into a side room, waiting for them to follow as I took aim and put two shots into Candy's giant, grinning head. He staggered back, plastic shards falling from where the bullets had shattered his mask before screeching and charging at me. I dodged to the side before sliding across one of the party tables, taking that as a chance to fire a third shot into the back of his head.

And that's when Cindy came around, grabbed me by the ankle, and threw me off the table. I hit the ground and rolled with the impact as she came down, getting in my face and screaming at me. Seeing my opportunity I shoved my pistol in her gaping mouth and fired, the bullet tearing through her CPU core and coming out the other side. I didn't have time to celebrate as she went limp, though – Candy was coming back my way, and I could hear the Rat rushing towards this room. Quickly I rolled away as Candy tried to cave my skull in, getting to my feet and putting a bullet in his knee joint. He fell forwards, resting on his other knee before looking up and screeching at me again as I put the muzzle of my gun to his forehead and fired, executing him cleanly.

I had no time to celebrate though as the Rat threw a chair my way. I holstered my pistol, before getting the shotgun back out – no time to aim. I fired in his general direction, but the slug went wide and smashed into his hip. The right leg was now hanging by a thread, and when the Rat fell backwards from the impact it shattered off completely. I started approaching the Rat, ready to finish him off, when Chester sprinted and tackled me down, beginning to work me over with blow after blow to my chest and midsection.

I fumbled around, trying to dodge a few of his blows before grasping the electrified baton and blocking a punch aimed for my head. This gave me an opening to jam it into his neck joint and hit the charge button, sending voltage coursing through his endoskeleton once more. This knocked him offline, and I had just enough time to push him over before pulling my handgun out and shooting him neatly through the head. He fell with a loud crash of shattering plastic, and I turned to face the Rat again.

The scumbag was trying to scramble and crawl his way towards me like some horror movie monster. Dropping my pistol for a moment I pulled the shotgun out and pumped the action again, sending another hollow shell clacking to the ground. Taking aim I fired, knocking his other leg off with one clean shot. I worked the action again and tried to take him out –

Blank grabbed me in a full-nelson, ramming me face-first into a wall hard enough to have me seeing stars and tasting blood from a split lip. I struggled, using the butt of the shotgun to bludgeon against his body, sending shards of ancient plastic shattering and splitting off of him with every impact. He let go of his grapple and tried to pull the shotgun away from me, and we began to struggle over it. I knew I wouldn't win a straight test of strength against a robot, so when he pulled a bit too hard on the shotgun I let go, sending him sprawling backwards as I dove for my pistol. Blank got to his feet quickly, trying to take aim at me with my own gun as I brought my pistol around to bear.

He fired a half-second too early and I rolled to the side as fast as I could to get away, but it still nicked my side. I swore to myself and emptied the last three rounds in the magazine into his head, managing to knock him out of play. Quickly hitting the magazine release I swapped in a fully loaded one before rushing for the shotgun again. I grabbed it just in time as the Rat was attempting to crawl his way away from the party room with his one remaining limb. Another blast of my shotgun put that plan to an end, and I was ready to finish this fight when the old Candy rushed in and pulled it away. He'd been able to hear the scuffle... Then again, I was essentially fighting a blind machine as I ducked under a wild, flailing swing. I sidestepped an attempted tackle before standing over the old machine and double-tapping through his head, taking him out of commission.

With a moment to breathe I gathered my shotgun again, looking around to try and figure out where the Rat had gone. I saw him, being pulled towards the Parts and Service room by the Penguin. Did he plan to try and fix himself? I shook my head a bit before unloading my pistol into the squat animatronic. As it went still and the light in its eyes died, I felt SO satisfied. The little bugger was an annoyance, through and through. Holstering my empty pistol, I pulled the shotgun out and stood over the Rat. It hissed, snapping its jaws at me as it growled unintelligibly.

Alex would have come up with some clever one-liner, I thought to myself as I forced the barrel of the shotgun into its mouth. But then again, he was always better at those than me. All I really could do was pull the trigger and put this psychotic machine out of its misery with a 12 gauge goodnight.

After that, silence reigned in the abandoned restaurant. That had been... Easier than I expected. Guess the combination of age and being less well-built than Golden Mile robots had been a deadly combination for them. I slung the shotgun over my back, and headed back into that Service room. Knocking a few things off the wall I found the safe again, and tapped in the combination. 1-9-5-1.

It opened, revealing a folder labeled "SL", a video tape, and a note.

"This is the information I mentioned to you. Candy's got that homicidal endoskeleton from a sister Fazbear Brand location – apparently the place used to rent out animatronics for parties, but after some incident it was closed down completely. The place may still have animatronics, to boot. The location's in the folder, along with all the other dossiers I could find. You know how the one Candy's stole was some kind of puppetmaster? Well, apparently that tech was a beta version for a kind of weird collective-hivemind thing they tried to do there. Gives me the creeps. You've got to get this information out, bring the company down before anyone else gets hurt or worse!"

My blood ran cold for a moment. A sister Fazbear location? That didn't sound good. Not at all. Alex and I had dealt with enough of them to last us a lifetime, and with the company shuttered it was unlikely that place was any safer than the other ones. That would explain at least why Faz thought there were backups of the band available, but if there were still other animatronics... And if they had been trying some new technology...

No this did not sound good, I thought as I grabbed the assorted items before heading out the door, locking the restaurant up behind me as the sun slowly began peeking up above the horizon. This did not sound good at all...

Everything's finally tying together, folks. Adams has most of the puzzle, all that's really left is what's locked in Alex's mind. And speaking of which...

I hope y'all enjoyed the action scenes. I know the animatronics kinda went down quickly, but with Adams' focus on firearms I didn't have too many ideas to keep those spinning. The logic I went with was that Uncanny Valley's robotics are of lesser quality in the first place, and years of neglect took their toll to make them pretty easy to deal with by a skilled fighter like Adams.

One chapter to go before we wrap this one up, so read and review!