Chapter Two – Isolation and applications
The Raceway was off limits to everyone except the work crews removing debris during the day. This was not an official thing, being enforced almost entirely by Roxy's insistence, though to her mind it really should have been. It simply was not safe in there, not as things stood.
The fact of the matter was that the surface of the track had begun developing cracks recently, even beginning to sag in places, and Roxy worried that meant further subsidence from the sinkhole the place seemed to be built on was likely to happen some time in the near future. Just about the entire attraction was affected, though it was far harder to notice toward the edges, where the cracks were thinner and the floor hadn't begun to sink yet.
Roxy herself, at present, was close to the centre of the raceway, in a room behind one of the mock-up garages that lined part of the track that she had converted into something of a personal hidey-hole. So far as she knew, every member of the band had found something of the sort – an unofficial space to call their own, where they could have some privacy, in contrast to the full window frontage of Rockstar Row, where the curtains could only be closed remotely by human staff. That had been fine for her up to a point, but since the... incident, it had only become more glaringly obvious to her how hollow the glitz and glamour of her Green Room was, and how much it felt like an aquarium.
Perhaps it was just due to how hyper-aware she'd become of the extent to which the Pizzaplex was a facade of clean surfaces and neon plastered liberally over a cheap, messy framework held together with duct tape and spit, something that felt like it mirrored her own existence on some level. She still wasn't sure how much of what she'd done during that night, stalking a small and mostly-defenceless child around the building, had been forced by the intrusion into her systems and how much had been done of her own free will, and for all her outward promises to do better going forward, it still felt like meaningless showboating done to convince the others she wasn't a liability. Deep down, it felt like regardless of how much she wanted to turn things around she had taken on a task far beyond what she was actually capable of.
Which was why she was here, in the middle of a possibly collapsing section of the building, trying to distract herself by tinkering with what she considered her special kart. It had never seen any use, of course, since the private room she'd made an attempt at turning into an actual garage of sorts was a recent development, and if the raceway survived long enough to see the place reopen using it in a race with anyone using a regular kart would be so ridiculously one-sided as to make the whole thing pointless. As much as she craved competition, or more specifically winning in competition, Roxy couldn't feel any satisfaction in something like that. It proved nothing.
So here she was, playing pretend with a stolen toolbox and a disassembled electric motor, like she had any further ideas on how to improve the thing any further, running on the sum total of the two or three kart maintenance manuals she'd swiped and a stack of worn racing magazines that were far more concerned with the minutiae of the drivers' lives and regurgitating vehicle specs than with any kind of useful information on what set a proper racing car apart from the rest. She'd been going in circles for an hour at least, getting exactly nowhere and failing completely to occupy her mind.
Then came a knock on the garage door.
It was too heavy to be one of the human staff, and Roxy immediately began scrambling to work out who it could be. She'd told none of the others about this place, not even Chica, who she considered to be a closer friend than any (though that was more down to knowing the chicken was not very good at keeping secrets). Moon was out of the question, since she couldn't hear the ticking that accompanied him, and the Mangle wouldn't have bothered to knock in the first place. Nobody had followed her, she was sure of that, and her locator signal was purposely switched off. The only way anyone could have tracked her here was to be watching the right cameras, and the only person who tended to lurk in security offices recently was...
"What do you want, Foxy?" A quick glance through the thick plastic of the shutter confirmed that she'd been right. There weren't any other band members with one hand missing, after all.
To his credit, Foxy didn't react with much surprise, simply muttering something to himself briefly before responding. "To talk, mostly. Ye mind if I come in? Bit bloody obvious standin' around out here."
Roxy thought about this for a moment, before reluctantly admitting that yes, letting the pirate loiter outside the door was going to make it very obvious where she was should anyone look on the cameras. "Fine. Use the door to the left of the rollers."
The door she had mentioned opened and Foxy stepped through, closing it quietly behind him. In the close confines, and with nothing else taking her focus, Roxy could see quite clearly how the motion was slightly awkward, like the ankle joint of his left leg had locked in place.
"Something wrong with your leg?"
This took the pirate off-guard, and he glanced down to the foot for a second, before returning his gaze to the various props that had been in the mock garage before Roxy moved in, most of which had been moved to the periphery of the room. "P'rhaps. No bloody idea what though. Can't move it, can't feel it, so prob'ly similar to the bloody eye." To accentuate the point, his eyepatch popped open to show the motionless, inactive eye underneath, staring sightlessly at the floor. "I'll let the techies know later."
That was a blatant lie, and both of them knew it. Foxy had spent six or so hours stuck in the protective cylinder, semi-conscious while in maintenance mode, while the Parts and Service crew tried everything they could think of to force his right eye to function, to no avail. He had taken the experience about as well as he could, and invariably brought it up when making digs at P&S. It had also made him far less willing to report his malfunctions, opting to brush them off and wait to see if they resolved themselves.
"Anyways, back to the point. Thought ye didn't want anyone 'cept the shipwrights wanderin' around in 'ere, and seein' all the cracks, I don't blame ye. So why're ye still comin' out here, even with the hull leakin'?"
"Thought you'd understand going down with the ship."
"Piss off, that's fer cruise liners an' the like. Ye got a real answer?"
The wolf sighed. "Fine, that might be stretching it, but... well, if I end up falling through the floor here it'll give whoever's planning the overhauls a wake-up call, underline how this place really needs work done on it." Assuming anyone notices, or cares, she added internally. I'm not sure I would, in their shoes.
"Uh-huh." The tone didn't give away whether he believed it or not, simply that he thought very little of that line of thinking. He didn't follow it up; just looked around the room, trying to work out what was usable tools and what was simply part of the set dressing for the faux garage.
Silence hung heavy in the air for a few moments before Foxy spoke again.
"Feels like ye've been isolatin' yerself an awful lot lately. Barely seen ye round, an' neither have the others." He dragged a box over, tested its solidity, and sat down carefully on it. "They worry 'bout ye, y'know."
"You'd know about that, wouldn't you." Roxy shot back with venom. She was becoming increasingly irritated with the fox's presence, not least because he seemed to be prying into personal matters a little too much for her liking. "Locking yourself in security offices half the night, and lurking in the tunnels the rest, because you alienate everyone around you. Let me guess, next you're going to try and play therapist, or recommend I waste everyone else's time worrying over nothing. Now, unless you've got anything else you wanted to talk about, get the hell out of my room!"
Clara stared at the printed sheet in front of her, trying to remember whether the application in question had come from someone she'd met previously. There was little about it that stood out to her, frankly, aside from an offhand note about 'liking animatronics', a phrase that could mean just about anything. Whoever this White guy was, if he'd worked at a Freddy's before and still liked animatronics... there was probably something wrong with him. Stockholm syndrome, at best.
The application went into the 'maybe' pile while she considered it further.
As it stood, the piles were wildly unequal. The largest by far was the ones she'd rejected, for reasons ranging from prior experience with the applicant through to the simple presence of one or two red flags. The maybes followed close behind, consisting almost entirely of the ones she had little to no opinion on – people who, in short, fit the criteria but didn't really stand out in any way.
There were a grand total of two applications that had really stood out to Clara so far, and one of them solely due to a false name that stood out to her like a sore thumb.
"Really, I don't know what you expected," she grumbled, reaching for one of the few remaining printed applications she hadn't looked through yet. "I'm not about to pass judgement on some guy off the street who's got the minimum of experience, it's not like they're here as fodder for a meat grinder. Most of the security types I remember from back in the day are either dead or have decided to open their own damn restaurant with animatronics that are decidedly not haunted, and the rest I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole."
Mangle, for their part, didn't show any sign of disappointment.
"that's fine," they said calmly. "this was more about filtering out the problem applicants if i'm being honest i really thought you would have caught on to that sooner."
This was met with a blank stare for a couple of seconds before Clara groaned and rubbed her eyes.
"Of course. That makes a lot more sense, doesn't it. Fuck me, I must be going senile already."
Of all the things that had been said, this was the one Mangle responded to with genuine discomfort, becoming suddenly fixated on the floor to one side.
"well yes i suppose that's possible but last i checked the average age for dementia onset was around 80 so you've got a decade and a bit yet..." They brightened up suddenly, changing the subject slightly. "i'm surprised you put the schmidt one into the maybe pile tho. guess the descendant doesn't measure up to the original huh."
"Hold on, what."
The 'maybe' pile turned from a relatively neat stack to a chaotic spread as Clara rifled through it, tossing the sheets onto the table as they were appraised and discarded, muttering to herself as she did so. Halfway down it she found what she was after and dumped the rest with their fellows as she brandished the stapled-together sheets triumphantly.
In retrospect, it wasn't too surprising that it had flown under her radar. It was inoffensive in the extreme, a finely-tuned exercise in ticking all the boxes for getting past algorithmic filtering for a dead-end job, and the only thing that jumped out at her on a reread was the name at the top of the sheet – Rebecca Schmidt. Clara wasn't sure what kind of relation she had to the stubborn bastard, but since he'd complain to anyone within earshot about the night shift given half a chance it was safe to assume that the presence of 'calm and collected when under pressure', 'excellent attention to detail' and 'committed to workplace safety' in this application could well be an implied 'I can keep myself alive when hunted by machines'.
That being said, it could also be her own suspicion filling in blanks that didn't necessarily exist. The address given on the form was fairly close, within easy commute, and as jobs with a low entry requirement went, this paid relatively well. It was just difficult to imagine that being the case.
"Damn. I really must be losing my touch." She dropped the paper onto the table with the stand-out ones. "Could be it's just nothing, coincidence, but... I'd like to think I've got a good gut feeling for ulterior motives, and this feels like one of those situations. How're they going about this anyway? Can't just be 'walk in with an application' like back in the day."
"grief no," Mangle replied archly. "there's background checks to be done an interview of some kind and a sort of trial night: the last one being your best bet for a little chat cause i don't think management are gonna let you carry out the-"
They stopped abruptly as the lights went out.
"...this overhaul better have replacements for the breakers included that's the fourth time this week."
It took less than five seconds for Moon to realise the power had gone out, sigh, put down the book he had been reading, and start heading for the door to his dingy little room. He was fed up with the regular outages, fed up with trudging down to the breaker room and figuring out what had gone wrong this time round. The darkness, at least, didn't bother him much. His night vision was excellent, and for all the faults with the rest of the building's systems, at least the emergency lighting worked well enough to prevent the utility tunnels from being pitch black.
As he walked onward he reflected on it further. A problem like this was bad enough now, when the Pizzaplex was for all intents and purposes closed, but once they reopened? It would be nothing short of unacceptable. Almost everything relied upon the power supply – the freezers and pizza ovens in the kitchen, the attractions, the elevators... oh, the elevators would definitely be a problem without power. Moon wasn't claustrophobic, and to his knowledge neither was Sun, but being trapped in an elevator with no power was something he had no intention of ever experiencing.
Then something caught his eye, an unexpected movement from something disappearing around the corner of one of the utility tunnels. For a moment he hesitated, weighing the importance of whatever it was against restoring power, then followed carefully, quieting his ticking and clinging to the ceiling.
It definitely had not been a Staff bot, and it had been far too drab to be one of the band members. A rogue endo, perhaps, but wandering endoskeletons generally didn't tread that softly. Definitely not a human, that much he was certain of.
The corridor ahead was clear, but again he could see the shape disappear around a corner. This felt wrong, like whatever it was wanted him to follow. Perhaps into an ambush. With that in mind, he mentally adjusted his route to skirt around and hopefully head off the unknown machine.
Quelling his ticking entirely and moving as swiftly as he could while making minimal noise, Moon moved to intercept. He could safely strike some of the passages off from potential routes for the intruder, as the Staff bots that habitually patrolled them would have little trouble spotting it, and he'd easily hear their alarms going off. If it was waiting for him near the corner he'd seen it go around, he'd catch up from behind, and if it was continuing to move at the speed he'd estimated he would be poised to intercept right about...
Now.
The intruder came into sight and Moon became intensely glad that he had made the attempt at stealth. Still clinging to the ceiling, he pressed himself as flat as he could, stored some pictures of it in his memory, and weighed up his options.
The problem now was that this wasn't a situation he could handle alone. He couldn't call any of the other band members or even the Staff bots, as with the power down the building's network had shut down as well. There was really only one option to call for help, though he didn't like it much – a direct broadcast on an encrypted channel officially intended for performance synchronisation.
What he was looking at was definitely an animatronic of similar design to classic Freddy's models, fabric rendered grey by exposure to the elements and accumulation of filth, padding softly along on all fours. It was an unknown, and what was to be done about it was likewise unknown.