"You sure you want to come in tonight?" Xerxes inquired while scratching the back of his head. "I mean, it's not really necessary since the animatronics have been sealed up and we still did not manage to find Crona yet. I think you're pretty much done for the week so far."
"Yes, I'm positive," Macarona nodded as she sat inside his office to speak with him about tonight. "Crona helped me since the beginning of this job, so now it's my turn to return the favor. I want to find her or least some clue as to what the animatronics have done to her so everyone who knew her could have some closure concerning her fate." She pleaded with her boss as he thought about her predicament. "Please, Xerxes, I have to do this for her."
"Well, alright, I don't see why not," he easily relented while he finished gathering his stuff. "Your contract states you have two more nights left in the week, so I guess we'll stick with it for the time being and play it by ear if anything else comes up. Speaking of which, we haven't had an encounter with any spiritual phenomena today. I'd say the ghost finally passed on to the other side as a result of what you found. It probably might get boring for you staying here all night."
"Don't worry," his part time employee assured him, "I shall not succumb to boredom." She wasn't even joking about that either since her plan of action would leave her preoccupied for how long it took to find Crona. "I'm going to be searching the jewelry workshop where she last vanished and see what happened there. Crona mentioned something about a way to unlock the door merely by sliding her hand across the wall, so I'm going to try seeing if she's on the other side. Hopefully she is—worst case, her remains." That last part came across rather grimly.
"Okay, just be sure to check the cameras in the security office every so often. We've turned off the animatronics permanently and plan to dismantle them soon as I've said before. Still, we've got to be more careful now that we know there are actual hearts inside of those things. It's difficult to believe they were constructed with equipment designed hold hearts as power sources."
"Believe me, Xerxes, I felt the same when I learned of it," Macarona agreed as they both left his office and went to the elevator. "For all we know, their hearts might be decrepit and rotten at this point. Therefore, the only thing keeping them in this state could be their spirits even though we've only really seen one active around the museum."
"Well, in any case just be careful, okay," her boss cautioned her as he pressed the elevator call button to send it up for them. "We don't want another disappearance and death on our hands."
"I will," Macarona nodded as the elevator came up and took them down to the first floor a minute later. She checked her watch and noted it was seven fifty-nine, just a minute to eight when the animatronic characters would've normally come alive with the exception of the past few days. The young angel said her goodbyes to Xerxes as she went around turning off the lights before she returned to the elevator and went down into the basement where she repeated the process. Taking a brief detour to the security office to drop her lunchbox off, Macarona brushed some stray hair in her eyes away while checking each camera. Nothing was happening as of yet, and all was relatively normal—at least as normal as this place could be even with its secrets—but she flipped the switch.
Its past as a laboratory for animatronic weaponry was one thing which Etihw saved. Maybe this was also the location where Project Dynol Peiriant was begun, which explained its presence.
Taking the flashlight with her, Macarona clicked it on as she proceeded down the corridors and through the shutter door which she unlocked with the spare key on her person. Pulling the door up, she crossed the threshold and made a beeline for the jewelry workshop to examine where Crona was last seen on the footage. Macarona stepped inside and flicked the light switch, turning a set of fluorescent bulbs on before sauntering to the particular spot. Each of the boxes that were originally there were moved out into the hall during the investigation that morning so the forensics team from the castle could focus here. She didn't have the results of that examination, so she had nothing to work on—doubly so if they couldn't find anything on that wall like fingerprints to determine how to open the secret door. Perhaps it was such an intricate contraption that fingerprints could not be applied unless Crona didn't have any fingerprints.
Stepping closer to the wall, Macarona knocked against it to determine if it was hollow and found her suspicion to be partly correct since some areas had a different echo than others. Taking a guess as to how this puzzle worked, she casually slid her hand across the wall in several ways to better understand how the door worked. She wished those blueprints were around, but she heard from Xerxes that virtually nothing was recovered. Not the best lead to work with, but there had to be something, anything that could at least point her in the right direction. As she wasn't getting anywhere with this, Macarona believed it was time for a different approach.
"Maybe there's something else in the art records office," she casually commented to herself while heading over there, keeping the lights on for when she returned. Macarona walked to where the door was and tried the knob, smiling in satisfaction since it wasn't locked. Stepping inside for a look around, the young angel gazed at the several file cabinets and shelves of documents before examining them more closely. It was no use since the labels underneath indicated these were plain old files, though one spot in the corner caught her eye. An open drawer protruded from the wall it was installed in, the empty space inside a clear indication something used to occupy that spot. The blueprints for the hidden room which Crona discovered had once taken up that space just as those blueprints the demon found in another compartment in Xerxes office—which was also open from when they were removed. They were gone now, just like Crona, leaving Macarona with nothing.
Getting past this door was like trying to find a needle in a haystack. She sighed and pressed a hand to her forehead, deciding to return to the security office for now and think about what Crona would have done. There had to be some trick to open it, but Macarona didn't know what it was. It was proving to be very difficult from the onset of her search alone, though this was just the start.
As she walked through the halls and back into the security room, Macarona checked all the cameras again and closed her eyes in deep thought while reclining in the chair. Against her better judgment which told her not to think about last night because it would only dampen her spirits and frighten her, she recalled the events that led up to Crona's disappearance. Leonidas and Cleopatra kept the doors blocked while Germain was patrolling the storage rooms. Robin wasn't present on any of the cameras because she was in the vents. When she saw the mage after Crona vanished, he was standing in the center of the room. It would have taken him a minute to get from the room he was in to the jewelry room to attack the demon. Crona would even hear him coming too, so he couldn't have attacked her. That just left Robin as the culprit among the animatronics, but how did she do it? How did she attack without being seen?
Macarona's eyes jolted open and she snapped her fingers when the realization suddenly hit her. "Of course! The vents! That's it!" It was it; Robin traveled through the ventilation shaft. When the camera went dark for about a minute, Robin seized her opportunity to pounce. Yet she too was supposed to have been seen on the camera, and even her shadow would have indicated she'd been standing in the camera's blind spot. Where was the ventilation shaft for the jewelry workshop?
She raced back there and checked all the walls, finally locating the ventilation shaft opening on the other side of the wall just across from where Crona was assaulted. It was on the ceiling too, and the steel mesh was still in place—possibly because it was reattached to it. Yet Crona would've heard that too if the mesh was broken through, so that eliminated that possibility. Turning back to the spot where the secret door was, Macarona sauntered over to it and examined it closer. Nothing more could be gained from this alone, but that just provided her with another theory anyway. If an attack from within the room was impossible, surely an assault from the other side was plausible.
It was only made possible through one avenue of entry and escape: the ventilation shaft. A bit farfetched, but still possible. Macarona smiled as she finally figured out the secret behind how Robin was able to harm Crona. The archer was the only animatronic that traveled through the vents and now her path revealed a side entrance into the hidden room beyond the door. Now if only there was an open vent somewhere for her to open; it didn't matter where as she could've just as easily flown into one the similar way of crawling into one that was easily accessible without the means of flight. This was going to be a dirty experience since the vents were starting to accumulate some dust since they were last cleaned, but she would make the plunge anyway.
But not yet; first she needed a map of the ventilation shaft. There might be one in the office for art records, so she made a return trip there. Macarona distinctly remembered reading a label in there on one of the shelves inside, and her short term memory didn't fail her as she finally located the map in question. Clearing some space on a desk in the room, she laid the map across the surface and traced her finger along the paper. The legend over in the corner included a dotted line for the ventilation systems which she followed right away. There was no wrong answer regarding where she entered from, but a quicker route was through the jewelry workshop. Macarona decided to take this map with her so she could use a pencil from this desk to mark where the secret entrance was.
Just as she was folding the map into halves, she suddenly heard a sound come from within the vents. It continued for several moments as Macarona paused to listen to it, her ears picking up the sound of mechanical movement. "That can't be…" she murmured quietly, "those animatronics can't have escaped their crates." Immediately she rushed back to the security office and examined the footage for each storage room. There was one crate per room for the animatronics, and not any of them were open. There was even a glass door to show they were in those crates, so it could not have been one of them. Unless…there were two animatronics in the secret room that just woke up.
Macarona prepared her flashlight as she looked up at the steel mesh and sat down, keeping a close eye on that vent. She kept her ears open to listen for anything else, whether from above in the ventilation shafts or through the doors. Every so often she checked the cameras and saw not a thing on them until a couple hours of silent waiting passed when she finally caught something with a quick glance at the pottery workshop. There was a momentary pause of something gazing through the camera before it went away. Macarona knew it was an animatronic, but this one was different. This one appeared to have black hair and a slimmer body with red eyes full of malicious intent, an alternative build to the somewhat bulky constructs she'd been dealing with this past week. It looked a lot more agile than even Leonidas, and quite elusive as well like Robin because she couldn't find this one when she looked at the other cameras as if this one hardly existed. Where did it go?
Suddenly the sound of mechanical footsteps sprinting through the hall came from the right corridor and Macarona instinctively closed that door and pressed the button for the light. Nothing was there, but she didn't pause to keep a close watch because she wanted the other door shut too. With both doors down, the young angel averted her attention towards the vent and looked up into it, flashlight at the ready in the hope that this animatronic was routed by the same tactic she would normally use on Robin due to the same kind of glitch in the system.
Yet nothing appeared, giving Macarona a few brief seconds to check the basement cameras to find nothing aside from general things throughout the whole area. The animatronic was nowhere to be found; however, Macarona swore she could hear more footsteps as if the thing was running like Leonidas, though at a much faster pace which enabled her—Macarona assumed it was a she—to sprint by without getting caught. Macarona would have removed that tape to check the footage in another monitor, but one wasn't present aside from these and the tapes could only be taken out after putting in a password to remove them.
Then suddenly she saw it more clearly at one forty-six, dashing across the pottery workshop at such a fast speed that the number of frames catching it would be in the single digits of seconds taken to record the animatronic. It was definitely constructed to look like a female angel, and she'd also glimpsed the face of it clearer than before which revealed a row of razor sharp teeth perfectly aligned with each other. Her arms were also slender, though Macarona felt they also had plenty of strength. Appearances could be deceiving, so if she had a gripping strength of five hundred, what wasn't to say this animatronic was just as strong? How it sped through the basement was amazing because the animatronic angel looked graceful. That was the only compliment Macarona could give it since it was still a deadly weapon—she was quite positive of that—but she was impressed nonetheless with how it could maneuver so quickly.
It just had to be one of those two animatronics kept hidden in the room. If there was one, a second was likely to show up. The odds were fifty-fifty, though Macarona leaned towards the other option of it being absent even though she didn't expect that.
After that appearance the animatronic was gone, having vanished right away which worried her because of how agile and evasive it was. This kind of behavior definitely wasn't present within the others, so tonight was going to be a challenge despite there only being a single animatronic to worry about. Even so, Macarona welcomed it all the same as she finished her first sandwich. "You want to play hide and seek?" she inquired as a means of accepting said challenge. "Fine, I'm game. Just promise me you'll reveal your secrets once I win our little game."
As if on cue, the animatronic barged into the generator room by violently kicking the door down as Macarona instantly regretted those words when she watched it smash its hands upon both generators, destroying them instantly and killing the power while the doors opened up.
Macarona sighed. "Well, that sucks. Guess I might as well play anyway," she said, leaving the security office with the flashlight in hand. She could hear the familiar sound of footsteps in the sculpture workshop and rushed over to catch the animatronic, but it was gone instantly. Changing the battery was no good against an agile opponent like this because it could attack her then if those generators hadn't been obliterated to shattered pieces sprawled across the floor by their remains in addition to covering those remains as well. Her only option was to fight, and Macarona realized it instantly that she now had the freedom to combat the animatronics when they became deadly. They were being destroyed anyway, so she could defend herself to the fullest without the weight of legal punishment for her actions or other restraints. Now she could fight back on equal footing.
However, she wondered if this animatronic also realized that too, as if the ghost was in full control of its behavior and the old programming inside of it in a last ditch effort to escape this total imprisonment within the museum. It wasn't going down without a fight, and Macarona would give it one to remember and possibly be afraid of. This was a mere animatronic—albeit one more skilled than the others, it seemed—and she was one of the heroines who defeated Ivlis and saved the world from his invasion. She survived five nights without fail and not once fought back until tonight, so Macarona was more than well prepared for this conflict and she wouldn't back down.
Yet there was also the distinct possibility it was a stronger model than the others she'd been accustomed to dealing with. Even so, Macarona wasn't scared. She would fight, and she was going to emerge victorious for her world against an opponent who likely sought to destroy it like Ivlis, if for a completely different reason than the motive that devil had.
Sauntering into the sculpture workshop with the flashlight, Macarona focused carefully on the environment around her. Tables were lined up against the wall as plenty of sculptures were set upon them. The center was bare and there was some room to maneuver for a few quick attacks in close combat which was going to be difficult since she didn't want to destroy the art. It was a tactic Macarona refused to resort to, but the animatronic was not subject to that restriction and could probably do as it pleased in that regard. The sound of footsteps from the hall behind her made the young angel whirl around for a counterattack if this thing assaulted her from that angle, but then the sounds came from the vents in a short amount of time later—probably several minutes or so.
It dawned on Macarona that the animatronic could potentially flip the switch to unseal the main doors while she was in here, though the only recourse to get upstairs was to take the elevator if it still worked. She was pretty sure it wouldn't since the generators were smashed, but there was a panel up in the elevator ceiling that opened up into the shaft. If Macarona made it there in time, she could ambush the animatronic in the lobby and fight it there with more room to move.
Though her only issues with that plan included the switch possibly not working the proper way with the doors already unsealed. The second problem made itself apparent as Macarona made a quick turnaround again as she heard it approach from the other direction. The animatronic raised its arm and slashed at her in a horizontal motion while running towards her, but the young angel's quick reaction saved her as she responded by grabbing the thing's arm. Ducking past it, Macarona made a move that would have potentially snapped that arm's ligaments had it not been a machine, though the animatronic strategically fell to its knees for a split second and slid her legs underneath Macarona, causing her to fall to the floor as well. The flashlight had fallen from her grip and rolled to the side of their little arena as her opponent rapidly whirled around to face her, its teeth bare in a snarl as it attempted to bite down hard on Macarona's neck. Yet the young angel dodged this by positioning her head to the side and springing to her feet while thrusting her knee into the chest of the animatronic. That was when she caught a glimpse of a few severed parts in the arm she seized moments ago before the animatronic shoved her aside and leapt through the steel mesh with such speed that it broke through without having to pull it off.
Despite being out of breath from that encounter, Macarona dashed to the elevator. The door was shut tight, so she would have to find something else to open it. Luckily she noticed a crowbar in the painting storage the other day and knew it was still there because it showed up on the security footage when she checked that area before. Making a mad dash over to the shutter door, Macarona could hear the animatronic up in the ventilation shafts and knew it was following her from above in the ceiling. "Good, come after me!" she shouted with the expectation that it heard her voice and understood what she meant. "You'll get plenty more where that previous scuffle came from while losing more than you hope to gain!" Normally it would've been a foolish taunt, though now it was real as this was a serious battle for the fate of her world. Granted, the authorities could handle one animatronic like this one, but Macarona wanted to avoid any and all casualties it could cause.
She passed through the door without incident and made a sharp turn into where the painting storage was, nearly stumbling over her own feet in the process as she continued to sprint. The mesh covering the vent up in the corner broke and the animatronic resumed the assault again in a more dangerously calculated fashion. Instead of approaching her at close range, it shoved all the shelves in her path to try crushing the angel underneath one of them. Yet Macarona had emerged unharmed from all the commotion as she seized the crowbar and whirled around to smack her opponent with it. Unfortunately, the animatronic seized it and brought her other arm into Macarona, smashing into her side and knocking her afar into a painting which added onto destroyed art from the shelves.
Panting heavily from the blow while staggering to her feet, she coughed and doubled over in pain before narrowly avoiding a swift chop to her stomach as she tried grabbing the arm again. The animatronic saw through her strategy and pulled away, rushing forward in the next instant and kneeing Macarona in the stomach, causing the young angel to hunch over and gasp. Spit and a few drops of blood escaped her mouth as she quickly pounced on the animatronic, seizing it with both arms and purposely falling back to try and dash its head onto the floor. However, her opponent again saw through her attack and quickly recovered on its feet before attempting to crush Macarona with its foot by smashing her face. Unfortunately for the animatronic, the angel had also recovered from this attack as well and rolled over, seizing the right foot with both hands and yanking hard to make the animatronic lose its balance and fall back. Though it tried to get up after delivering what was considered a weak kick into Macarona's face—at least that intention succeeded—the machine found it couldn't and instead resorted to a spidery method of maneuverability.
Now the animatronic was faster, but Macarona luckily delivered her own sharp kick into a few teeth to propel it backward. The teeth her foot connected to broke while the blow made it fizzle slightly as the system tried to configure itself, but that gave her time to grab the crowbar and run. "Just try recovering from that!" she taunted coldly on the way out.
It didn't take long for her to reach the elevator, and Macarona didn't hesitate as she stuck the tool into the door and used what was left of her strength to pry it open. A bit of sweat trickled down her face as she panted for breath, finally succeeding just as she heard a mechanical screech from down the hall. The animatronic was approaching and she needed to move quickly, so without further delay she thrust the crowbar at the panel to knock it open while flying through the opening. Her wings nearly got caught on the way out, but she escaped her enemy's grasp just in the nick of time and rushed up to the first floor door. Macarona would've pried it open immediately had that animatronic not caught up to her, but it leapt at the wrong moment and got smashed in the face by the crowbar as the angel brought it down hard upon its head. That blow dealt quite a lot of critical damage to the face and head as more teeth fell out with the left eye while the whole thing collapsed and plummeted to the elevator, hitting its head on the edge and falling through the hole.
Now that she had more time to get that door open, Macarona jammed the crowbar in before it gave way and opened. Taking one last glance at the animatronic, Macarona saw it couldn't keep up the fight for much longer and watched it gradually struggle to stand on all four limbs, with one beginning to come loose and fall from the body. Its ascent was slow this time, but the intent to kill had not even decreased from its heightened state. With several deep breaths, Macarona took her time passing through the threshold and put a few fingers to her chin to check for signs of any more blood. She sighed at the feeling of it running down her chin, but none dripped from it as she looked at how much she wiped off. Macarona may have lost a bit of blood from her lower lip in addition to the bruises from fighting the animatronic, but she was okay. It was tough, but she was victorious and would finish it with one last blow to the head to end the animatronic for good.
She could hear it crawling up the elevator shaft and turned to watch it peek at her through the threshold before slowly emerging. The thing was malfunctioning now, and its system couldn't handle another serious blow like the ones it received. Its programming was severely damaged and would no longer serve its purpose anymore. This was the end for it, and Macarona made sure she followed through with one last strike as the animatronic weakly grabbed for her leg before the arm disconnected as the force of the crowbar's impact killed the machine at last.
Macarona stood towering above it for a couple minutes as she panted to regain her breath before sighing in relief. Dropping to the floor in a sitting position, she continued breathing heavily and leaned back while supporting herself with her arms, hands placed onto the floor. Her body was trembling, but only because she was starting to relax from the tense situation. "Finally…" she said softly through heavy breathing, coughing a few times while recovering. "I'm sure glad that's over and done with." It was finished, alright. The animatronic was broken and couldn't move anymore.
After ten minutes of recuperating by the mangled form of her opponent, Macarona figured it would be a good idea to examine this animatronic and dragged it over to the moonlight. It was a brief struggle since she was still in some amount of pain, but she pulled it to the center in just about a minute. "Let's see what secrets your remains hold," Macarona commented softly as she looked over the broken machine, noting that its form was flexible. Perhaps it was due to the materials used to produce it being designed for that purpose in constructing it, but a closer look at its eyes revealed red smudges that could only be seen up close. Well, the one remaining eye that was left since that other one fell out and landed somewhere in the elevator with the other teeth that came out too.
She pressed her finger there and rubbed the spots where it was, but they felt dry. Examining it further revealed similar spots around the joints as well. If Macarona didn't know any better, she would assume those patches looked like…blood. It definitely wasn't hers and it couldn't have been from another person either because it appeared this blood had actually leaked through the parts of the animatronic. Immediately she thought of Crona and dismissed the theory because this was not fresh blood; if it had been the demon's it would still smell fresh from last night. No, this blood was very old and the smell was gone, so it had to be from years ago.
Macarona looked around for some kind of switch to try opening the machine, realizing that it must be some kind of hybrid suit someone could wear. Maybe there were some parts inside too, and the discovery of a button on back could confirm it when pressed. Thinking about what would still be in there, Macarona took a deep breath and prepared for what might be the gory remains of an old corpse from the past before pressing that button. The suit fizzled slightly as it tried to open up, so she had to pry the rest of it with her bare hands. Once the suit revealed its disgusting contents, Macarona's face scrunched up in disgust as she gazed at the rotting carcass of what appeared to be a female corpse. There wasn't a smell from the outside, but now she could faintly make out the dying scent of decay wafting from the opening. It was going to take some work with forensics to analyze the body, though Macarona could tell it did not look like the individual the machine was constructed to look like. The identity of this corpse would remain a mystery for some time still.
For now Macarona flew back down to the basement and searched for an open vent to enter. First she needed the flashlight which she retrieved from the sculpture workshop and the map that was still in her pocket from earlier when she put it there on her way back to the security office. A quick glance at her watch showed it was three thirty-nine as she considered entering through that vent above her, but the closest was still in the jewelry workshop; however that one wasn't open as she recalled, so the one in the painting storage would suffice.
Heading over there, Macarona found the vent and used the crowbar to remove what was left of the steel mesh the animatronic broke through. It took a bit of effort since she was flying and had to keep the tool steady, but eventually she got it before climbing through. "Right," she uttered as she pulled the map out and looked at it, "let's see where this goes."
The crawl forward wasn't difficult and she discovered the broken wall where the machine supposedly entered from minutes later after making a couple turns, but Macarona was confident it was the way forward. This tight passage must have been constructed back when this building was still a laboratory for animatronic weaponry, and from the look of it, it appeared to be made for the animatronics in the hidden room which she found a couple minutes later.
Inside were a couple of black pods large enough to store two animatronics with buttons on the wall for each one. There was also a switch on the opposite wall which Macarona flipped to see the jewelry storage on the other side. It was an easier way out, and Robin must have activated it to attack Crona if the mechanism within the door didn't work. One of the two pods was empty, but a big surprise was printed on a plaque at the top. Clarabella's name was printed there, so Macarona realized she fought against an animatronic in the engineer's image. If that was the case, who was in the other pod across from this one? She checked the plaque, but it was illegible due to rust.
Then she pressed the button to open the pod and gasped at what was inside. She expected to find another animatronic, and she was right. She didn't expect it would look like Etihw.
The goddess' animatronic figure stood still for a few seconds as the pod opened, but it then fell forward into Macarona's arms as she caught it, accidently pressing the button on back. It started to open as she gently laid the suit down on the floor and gasped in shock as she saw who inhabited this particular suit. She thought there would be another corpse, though that assumption was proven wrong by the living individual discovered within.
"Crona!"
…
Well, that was quite a boss battle—not in the same sense as one from an actual video game. It's different from games since this is actually written out instead of being played. As boss battles in games may take longer depending on what kind of boss you're fighting, I had to set a specific limit to the fight and construct a format it would follow in the story.
And some of you may have guessed it, but yes, Crona's alive! I couldn't kill her off at all because she's essential to the story's plot and its lore. I bet you weren't expecting the way it ended, nor the fact that she was in an animatronic figure of Etihw. Yeah, Germain's been busy with Project Dynol Peiriant as you can probably infer from the chapter.
I've still got four chapters to go for this story. Next time I'll tie up some loose ends in the lore to connect everything, and then on to the grand finale: the long awaited seventh night of Seven Nights at Clarabella's! Afterwards there will be an epilogue to the tale before I wrap it all up with a bonus chapter that will be similar to the bonus rooms in Mogeko's games, but with something different as well since this is a fanfic.
I hope you enjoy reading this as I enjoy writing it.
Edit: I forgot to mention this before I uploaded it that the new animatronics in this chapter are meant to be like Spring Trap in Five Nights at Freddy's 3. You'll know what I'm getting at if you played the third game and listened to the phone guy's recordings. I wanted to implement the same idea in this story with the two animatronics of Clarabella and Etihw; though the latter was meant to not activate for the purpose of the plot.
