Late October 2014
"Whatever career you have in mind next, I only hope it's not radio broadcast," Nathan Faz said patronizingly through gritted teeth, leaning against the wall of the security office. "What is this, Take Six? One more time from the beginning, only this time we're not going to tell our next guard we're helping him 'survive' his first week. I think you can guess the legal implications that raises." Clyde nodded in reluctant compliance.
Faz motioned for him to attempt again to record the introductory message for future guards, but armed with only the roughest notes and resenting being monitored, Clyde stumbled over his words worse than ever, causing his boss to break into a scowl and impatiently thrust a sheet of paper in front of his face. I'm glad I'm not paying you extra for this, he mouthed silently before the guard read the legal disclaimer verbatim, flawlessly if somewhat woodenly. Wrongly assuming his worker was too nervous to think of deviating from the message they'd rehearsed, Faz could take no more and departed, wearily pointing to his watch.
No sooner had he left than Clyde stopped reading the disclaimer, which wouldn't help the next security officer anyway, and veered off into revealing the true dangers of the job. Hoping his boss wouldn't be technically adept enough to retrieve the recording, he nonetheless toed a cautious line between revealing too much, which could result in the message's deletion and the guard being left entirely on his own, and saying too little, which would leave his successor with a false sense of safety. The phone system contained an option to set a unique greeting for each day of the week, and in a gesture of faith Clyde set the message to play back just after midnight the following Monday, hoping he'd be training a new employee in person by then anyway.
On second thought, better safe than sorry, he thought, resetting the message to replay every Monday, just in case the next security guard didn't stay around any longer than the previous applicants had. Whoever eventually kept the job could delete the recordings once he no longer needed them.
October 31, 2014
The security office was silent, save for the buzz from the overhead lamp, the soft swish of the fan and the occasional turn of a page in the paperback Clyde was reading on Halloween.
"Wow, this is far out," he remarked, trying to make it through the assigned pages for his literature course before his shift began. He had long ago delayed, then put aside entirely, any plans to attend college after making the decision to keep what had been his high school job, but in more recent years he had taken some evening courses, feeling it was never too late to gain a broader perspective. Speaking to the band through the loudspeaker, he tried to share what he had just read, but to his frustration, he found the literature selections for the course terribly difficult to comprehend.
"This author - he was a yogi and a philosopher, and so help it, I've read this three times and it's still as clear as mud, but I think he was trying to say that machines can have a true life force." He broke into a reluctant smile. "Well, my mechanic insists that car of mine has a will of its own that's kept it on the road this long. Anyway, I thought you'd get a kick out of that, because it sorta sounds like it could apply to you guys, too, doesn't it?" Closing the book, Clyde knew he had waited long enough to tell the animatronics of his plans.
"This is hard to say, but...I'm going to have to leave you, and very soon. I didn't plan on this, but I need to take care of something else, something personal. I always thought I'd be able to stay here as long as Mr. Faz has, but I've gotten the message it's not to be." He regretted not being able to be more honest, but if Demon knew of his malady he would certainly use it against him. The entity had kept eerily silent lately, but he had to have suspected something when Clyde began training others for his longtime job.
"Two more nights, that's all I have," he continued, his voice wavering. "I'll come back to visit, though. Now listen, you need to be fair with the next security guard. I really think the right one is on his way, and I've been leaving him messages to help him out. I'll have you know I put in a good word for you, so treat him with respect and he should do the same."
Trying to maintain a positive attitude despite feeling like an agitated mess, he began taping another brief message for his successor. Whoever made it to his third night on the job to hear the recording would not have reached that milestone by accident; he would surely be the dedicated, calculating type who could not only survive the animatronics but continue where he'd been forced to leave off. Already feeling a little humbled at addressing "The One," Clyde bungled the message badly, trying to warn against the animatronics' increasing hostility but meandering into nervous and useless chatter. He sent the message to the phone system anyway, vowing to make up for it with a better pep talk the following night.
"Okay, buddy, you have one chance to redeem yourself," Mike called out, not entirely in jest, as the phone rang again. Clyde began by heartily congratulating him on reaching his fourth night, but his hollow tone was anything but convincing. Why did he sound so...defeated?
His unseen mentor followed up with a warning that he might be sending his last message, and Mike leaned forward in his chair, eager to hear what explanation Clyde might offer for quitting early after all. The insistent knocking that he recognized as Foxy's calling card could be heard in the background of the recording, leaving him impressed by the way the seasoned night watch didn't even bother to address the pirate. If you were really recording these messages while you were fending off the animatronics, you were more badass than I thought.
"Wait..." Mike cried aloud in protest, his voice catching in his throat as it dawned on him that the officer, his melancholy words interspersed with more frantic knocking from the fox, was openly admitting defeat. Biting his lip, he waited in anticipation for the sounds of a scuffle, indicating Clyde might have attempted to fight off the animatronics he had somehow let into the office, or even the sound of fading footfalls as he bolted from the room like he'd advised him to do, but instead the endangered guard timidly asked if Mike could "maybe, sometime" check the back stage room. For what? Mike wondered, not entirely grasping what he wanted him to do.
A raspy moan, reminiscent of the sound Chica's strained voice box had made when Mike had accidentally let her into the office two nights before, was audible, followed by a stoic expression of dread from Clyde. Then a menacing roar that he had never heard from any of the animatronics cut off the audiotape entirely, followed by a short burst of static.
"Noooo!" Mike wailed in denial, recognizing all at once what he had witnessed. The nearly-forgotten monitor felt unreasonably heavy in his hands and the screen had gone blurry, at least until he swatted hot tears from his eyes. I'll make it through this night for you, he vowed.
He grimly knew that with the passage of nearly two weeks' time since Clyde had been heard from, logic dictated that his mission once his shift ended would be a recovery rather than a rescue. No matter. He was far too late to save anyone, but he could seek justice for the lost security officer, force his boss to acknowledge exactly what had happened, and make sure nobody else would ever meet the same dismal fate.
Night of November 1, 2014
"What are you doing? You said you were getting a drink; the concession counter's that way," Nathan Faz called out suspiciously, striding across the dining room to catch up with Clyde, who was gazing up at the band from the foot of the show stage. His soon-to-be-ex-employee had arrived early for his shift and had immediately made a flimsy excuse to wander out to the dining area.
"No kidding, I just wanted to see the band up close one more time." Appearing startled, Clyde collected his nerves. "Still no bites on the classified ad? Well then, this has been eating me alive all week, but it's got to be said. There's only one right thing to do this late in the game; you've got to restrict these guys to this stage if you care at all about your new night watch." His words were met with a blank stare, but he pressed on, twisting his ball cap in his hands. "That wasn't a joke. If you reprogrammed them to stay in place up here - Foxy, too - around the clock, they could still sing and perform, but then they'd never go after the guard. I know you're worried about their servomechanisms locking up, but that would only affect the servos in their legs, right? They haven't walked these floors during the daytime in years, anyway, so how much of a loss would that be?"
Faz regarded his worker with an icy glare. "That's the worst suggestion I've ever had the misfortune to hear. You're really proposing I should reduce the band to some type of sideshow attraction when they're the stars of this theater, the very reason children beg to be taken here?"
"Are they, though?" the guard countered, his voice rising. "I love them as much as you do, but there's no denying business has been way down. Remember back in the 'Golden Era,' as you called it, when we held as many as six birthday parties at once in this room? You're lucky to book that many in a week now. These guys are all about celebrating, but they've sort of lost their sparkle over the years and they just don't impress kids the way they did a generation ago." He regretted the band had to hear his frank words.
Faz exhaled sharply in response; but Clyde had reached the point of no return. "You said yourself back at the dawn of the Eighties that you needed to change your business model and the roller rink was a tired throwback. Are you sure you're not overdue for another look at it? It's been thirty-four years, this place is vintage now," he admitted, regarding the worn and dingy fixtures throughout the building and the dated arcade games. "Nostalgia doesn't appeal to most kids, just us older folks." Suddenly aware of the way he was anxiously mauling his hat, Clyde fidgeted around, trying to straighten it while avoiding eye contact with his boss, who was now seething in pure ire.
"Are you honestly ordering me to alter this pizzeria's main draw, to cut out the band's dance routines and cripple my business, just because you're having some kind of mid-life crisis ten years too late and you've chosen not to be a part of this place anymore? Tell me this, if your idea was such a good one, why didn't you ask me to 'lock down the band' while you were charged with watching them? I will not intentionally damage my characters that way."
"But you won't do anything to help the new guy, either, even if you had no problem asking me to feed him a bunch of lies on the recordings!" Clyde replaced his ball cap over his receding hair, his desperation worse than ever. "For the record, I never really believed that whole 'servos-locking-up' business, myself. It sounds like a convenient excuse for someone who no longer wants to take responsibility for his animatronics." He stalked off to the concession counter, his boss speaking to his back as he walked.
"You know full well I can't reveal everything that's really going on around here to a new employee before I even know how well I can trust him," Faz countered. "If he stays around long enough he'll start to figure things out on his own, anyway."
"Sure he will, if they don't get to him first. It's fitting that the lights are faulty in here, because you just love keeping everyone in the dark! Almost everything I've ever found out about this place was by accident or pure dumb luck. I could kick myself for falling for some of the stuff you've come up with, but I guess when you work at a kiddie establishment for thirty-seven years, you drink plenty of the Kool-Aid." Clyde snapped a lid on his drink cup, which he had ironically filled with syrupy red punch, and raised it in a mock toast to his manager.
"That's enough. We're both just spinning our wheels and it's almost midnight," Faz said, positively fuming. "I am going to take the higher road here, admit we're getting nowhere and call it a night." Stepping forward, he placed his hands on his worker's shoulders, his eyes locked on his fiercely. "But let it be known, should you attempt to interfere with the characters' programming like I suspect you had intentions of doing when you darted out here, I will have you arrested for destruction of property and you'll be leaving your last shift in police custody." His hands tightened into fists, taking folds of Clyde's shirt with them, and the guard swallowed hard, trying not to betray his sudden fear.
"I'm done," Faz announced, releasing his worker, who stalked off to the security office. "Have a nice night," he called out after him, no longer attempting to hide his hostility. Clyde's rant had struck more than a few sore spots, and had they remained on better terms Faz might have leveled with him and admitted the business was perilously "circling the drain," with the situation looking so bleak that had Clyde stayed on just a little longer, he might have found himself out of work just the same.
Clyde told himself that what he was doing wasn't sabotage the way his boss would surely see it, but protecting his successor. At the very least, he felt assured his intentions were in the right place. Taking down some of the crayon drawings on the office wall, he scrawled intently on the reverse sides, pressing so hard the pencil lead wore down to a nub and with a secretive grin on his face the entire time now that he could finally and freely warn about the true dangers of the job. He paused only when he'd moved to the last sheet of paper available, trying to think how to make the paranormal forces that influenced the animatronics' behavior sound remotely believable.
Sighing, he taped all the sheets, finished or otherwise, back on the wall when his digital watch beeped on the hour, and prayed the new hire would find them early enough. His confrontation with his boss had roiled on so long he would be forced to record his next audiotape for the incoming security officer sometime during his shift rather than before as he'd initially planned, and that was a risky proposition because the early morning hours of a Sunday, which he'd long ago taken to calling a "seventh night," were excruciatingly hard to endure. The animatronics were positively ruthless, no doubt still carrying the spiritual memory of their historic murder sometime after the stroke of midnight, and he would finish the night with the scarcest amount of power remaining even if he monitored the cameras at a flawlessly minimal level.
"Okay, guys, I know my watch is cheap and it drifts a few minutes off, but it's time to call it a night," Clyde pleaded in bewilderment as Foxy struck relentlessly at his door even after the chime of the clock that indicated his shift was over. Not only had the quartet of animatronics converged on his office all at once, but in the last several moments they had broken from their usual preprogrammed routines, with Bonnie appearing at the window alongside Chica and Freddy as if to show off his new tactics. The guard froze as an inimitable but uncharacteristic laugh came from the bear, the first he'd heard from Demon in weeks.
"Give him a little time and fall back for now, he'll figure this one out," the entity urged the other animatronics, and the pirate obediently ceased knocking. Alone in silence, Clyde was stunned. He'd done okay, hadn't he? There was just enough power, he'd made it through the night, and it was six in the morning.
His eyes strayed to the phone. Recording a message for the new guard would require even more power, probably all he had, but he was slowly coming to terms with the likelihood that he wasn't going to be around for the end of their extended night anyway, whatever had caused them to prolong their attack.
"Do I need to spell it out for you?" growled Freddy impatiently from beyond the door, his mechanical fingers drumming on the window sill. The character's music box activated, the merry but tinny little tune strangely out of place. "Okay, I'll take it easy on you because you've had a rough few weeks here, and you've been so preoccupied with finding a new night watch. It seems that some fool picked a nasty fight with the boss last night, making him leave rashly without performing some very important annual maintenance." The bear broke into an open-mouthed grin, revealing not only his row of oversized peg-like teeth but the second, smaller set that belonged to the endoskeleton beneath the plush costume.
"No!" The rush of regret as Clyde realized his fatal mistake was immediate and crushing.
"That's right, it's still five in the morning," Freddy taunted the guard, who was now staring dumbly at his watch. "Daylight Savings Time ended at two, but your boss never reset the band to stop roaming after six hours. Sorry to say, I guess that makes the next hour a free-for-all." The two animatronics beside him leered at the officer through the window, left in an unspecified programming mode that freed them entirely from any preset routines.
Clyde exhaled sharply, took up the phone receiver in his hand and with a hopeless shrug, opened the door to ensure he'd have enough power to record his entire message. He could withstand another ten minutes at best with both doors closed or he could take back some control. Wasting no time, he'd already congratulated the next night watch for staying on the job by the time Bonnie and Freddy sauntered in through the open doorway. Foxy, outraged at being shut out, resumed his assault on the other door, dropping the power pitifully lower with each strike.
"It's-It's been a bad night here..." he admitted incredulously as the rabbit animatronic reached forward with his red electric guitar clutched in both hands, "...for me." ...And a really good night for them, he thought grimly as Bonnie pinned him against the wall with the instrument. The guard wrenched one hand free, locking eyes defiantly with the character and confessing out loud he was unlikely to be of future help to the other guard.
He wanted to leave his successor with useful advice that would outlive him via the recording, but when Chica slipped in through the doorway, Clyde's voice caught in his throat. Unnoticed by the other two but doubtlessly following their orders, she carried in her arms the same yellowed, decrepit bear costume he had seen in his waking nightmares. Though what he had always hoped was a terror-induced vision was now unmistakably real, it was no creation of his manager's but something left over from an earlier era, a long-forgotten relic from the murder scene. Something different entirely...
"Uh, hey, do me a favor?" he begged, trying to persuade the next guard to find some way to gain access to the backstage and the costumes themselves. Willing himself to remain calm as Chica advanced with the suit, he dismissed the imminent danger he was facing, not sure if he was trying to reassure himself or his successor more. In a failed effort to distract the animatronics, Clyde removed the ball cap he had considered a good luck charm, tossing it to the desk where it landed over the plush cupcake. At least it wouldn't get...ruined if the worst happened. In response, Freddy lunged forward, his music box playing again, and clutched his enormous paw so tightly around one shoulder he was lifted off his feet.
"Y'know," Clyde began, fighting for a breath. Tell Faz this wasn't his fault, he wanted to say, and don't let him take this out on the band. They can't help it. Instead, he uttered an expression of pure dread as Chica held up the headpiece of the costume, the empty eye sockets full of darkness.
"Oh, no." With both escape paths blocked, there was no chance to make a run for it, and attempting to fight off the animatronics would prove just as futile. Recognizing this, he gave up on struggling just before the band closed in on him.
1978, Fred's Fazstwheels Rollerena
A crowd had gathered around the most challenging pinball table in the arcade at the roller rink, watching with anticipation the skate monitor who had developed somewhat of a local reputation for his skill at the game. Their hero was about to top not only his own high score on the machine, but as far as they knew, the highest anyone had ever scored in the entire region.
"Oh, no," Clyde suddenly exclaimed, stepping back from the table and crossing his arms across his chest. The alarmed spectators leaned over the table incredulously as the last ball in play rolled directly into the drain, ending his game and chances of breaking the record.
"Why didn't you do anything about it?" a boy cried in disbelief, and the teenager smiled down at him apologetically.
"Sorry, kiddo, but that was a hopeless drain. I only saw it coming at the last minute and slamming the flippers wouldn't have helped for all the world. It came down dead-center and that was it. It's all right; you win a few and you lose a few."
Author's Note: Sorry that Mike Schmidt got shortchanged in this chapter, but he will be the action hero of the entire rest of the fanfic. A heartfelt thank you goes out to two fellow FNaF fans whose ideas and headcanons were used with permission in this chapter. Thanks to fellow author Antoine, who first made the "Kool-Aid" reference in a comment; that concept was too perfect not to use. The theory that Phone Guy sacrificed his remaining power to record a final message for Mike was the brainchild of Tumblr FNaF theorist Spacewaluigi.