"BB, please put that down! You're gonna break something!"

"No, I won't. Chill out, Toy Freddy!"

Crash!

"Oh Scott, what have you done?!"

Charlie sighed, stepping into the kitchen to avoid the chaos that was unfolding in the party rooms.

The door swung closed just as something caught fire.

At least, that's what Charlie could gather from her boss's distressed yelling.

"Man, did you go one some life-altering journey or something while you were gone? What's with the new look?"

Charlie turned to look at her blonde coworker, who was sitting atop the kitchen counter.

"I've been back for a while now, Toy Chica. Are you just now noticing I got a haircut?"

"Well, yeah. You've been full costume nearly 24/7."

Huh. She hadn't even realized.

"Yeah, I guess I have been."

"Why'd you cut it?"

Charlie shrugged. "I don't know. Wanted it to feel less in the way, I guess."

She supposed it just felt like something more convenient. Especially after all of the running for her life, bloodthirsty robots, murderers, and ridiculous stuff that seemed to be prevalent in her life lately.

Well, maybe now that it was over the convenience didn't matter as much anymore.

But y'know, maybe something else would come along.

Or maybe the same thing would come back again like it always seemed to.

Or maybe nothing would happen at all.

"Did you like, get in a fight and found yourself momentarily blinded by your long hair and left open to attack?"

Charlie squinted, not quite sure how that was the scenario Toy Chica had landed on.

"What do you think I do when I'm not here?"

The blonde shrugged. "I dunno man, you're always being all aloof and mysterious and disappearing off with weird groups of people. Like those circus people! I mean, they were nice and stuff. But like, they were also real aloof. What did you even get up to with them?"

"I don't think you would believe me if I told you."

"See? You're doing it now. So I'm just gonna assume whatever you did involved lawbreaking."

"It might have," Charlie muttered as she went to grab a water from the fridge.

Toy Chica nearly fell off the counter. "Wait, really?!"

"I- it wasn't lawbreaking just for the sake of it. We were trying to…" She paused mid water bottle opening. "Actually, don't worry about it. It's over now."

"If it's all over why do you seem so ready to jump back into action or whatever? Like, I'm getting serious 'ready to get up and go' vibes from you. "

"I… don't know. Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but things seemed to end a lot easier than expected. Especially for all the trouble that lead up to it. What if it's not over? What if there's something left? Things don't ever seem to end when they should. At least not from my experiences."

"Are you referring to that mission thingie you and your hometown friends went on a few years back?"

"Yeah, I just… it's like that. I've got the same feeling. Like something isn't right."

"Maybe something isn't."

"Maybe."

Maybe.

Maybe it wasn't.

Charlie abruptly slammed her water bottle onto the counter.

"I'm going out."

"Where to?"

"I'm not sure."

OOF

So that's the end of this book, I guess. But unsurprisingly, I'm not quite done with the story yet. If you for some reason want to continue seeing where this goes, you can find out in Deceptive.

Which uh, is already out.

So give it a look if you want.

Things get a lot worse.