I do not own Sister Location.
I slowly awoke, a pain throbbing in my head, before I looked around, noticing I was in some sort of metal suit. A red light flashed in the dark, and I could just barely make it out through one of two holes that were level with my eyes. I tried to move, but there was hardly any space to do so. Just when I was about to call out for help, Baby's voice cut me off.
"Shh! Be still and quiet. You've been sleeping for quite a while. I think they noticed that you never left the building last night. The cameras were searching for you. But they couldn't find you. I have you hidden too well. I kidnapped you."
I started shaking the suit around me, trying to see if I could loosen it and crawl out. As I did so, Baby started talking again.
"Don't be afraid. I'm not going to hurt you. I am only going to keep you for a little while. Try not to wiggle, though. You're inside something that came from my old pizzeria. I don't think it was ever used - at least, not the way it was ever meant to be used. Too dangerous. It's just big enough for one person to fit inside. But just barely."
I stopped moving at that. This was one of the suits Vincent used to stuff people into and kill them, wasn't it? I needed to be careful so as not to set off anything within the suit that could kill me.
"You're in the scooping room," Baby continued. "Do you know why they call it 'the scooping room'? It's because, dummy, this is the room where they use the scooper. I thought that would be obvious. Isn't that a fun name for something? "The scooper." It sounds like something you would use for ice cream, or custard, or sprinkles. It sounds like something you would want at your birthday party, to ensure that you get a heaping portion of every good thing. I wonder, though, if you were a freshly-opened pint of ice cream, how you would feel about something with that name. Thankfully, I don't think a freshly opened pint of ice cream feels anything at all. Uh-oh. It sounds like someone else is in the building. Shh!"
"Okay, bring her over," an unknown male voice spoke. "More, mooore... okay, stop. Set her down. Waaatch the step."
"What happened to it this time?" another male voice asked.
"Just seems like these things can't go a day without breaking down," the first man said. "Who knows, it's always the same, man. Some kind of hardware malfunction."
"Well, I have to be somewhere in, like, 15 minutes," the second guy commented. "This place gives me the creeps. Can we just get this over with? It's all automated, we don't have to be here for it. Just get it on the rollers and we can go."
Loud mechanical noises filled the room, and Ballora soon entered my line of sight, moving on what I could only assume was a conveyor belt. The sounds soon stopped, and Ballora stood right next to me in the dark, eyes closed and mouth open, still as a statue. An uncomfortable silence passed before Baby spoke once more.
"There's something very important that I've learned how to do over time. Do you know what that is? How to pretend. Do you ever play make-believe. Pretend to be one way, when you are really the other? It's very important. Ballora never learns. But I do. They think there is something wrong on the inside. The only thing that matters is knowing how to pretend."
A low beeping suddenly sounded throughout the room, and something just out of my view crashed into Ballora, a sound similar to a car backing into another vehicle resounding off the walls, until it seemed she fell apart. A single violet eye seemed to peer at me from the broken frame, flickering in unsteady light.
"I'll open the face plates for you," Baby said, opening the metallic pieces around my face and giving me a better look at what was left of Ballora. "That way, they can find you on the cameras. Now, all you have to do is wait. I'd recommend that you keep the spring locks wound up. Your breathing and your heartbeat are causing them to come loose. You don't want them to get too loose. Trust me."
There were ten spring locks around me, slowly coming loose with every minuscule movement I made. I managed to pry one of my arms out of the suit so I could wind them back up again. I couldn't escape the suit. I knew that. I wouldn't have enough time before the spring locks would snap on me, very much able to kill me in the same way Vincent died.
I managed to get them all wound back up when a small figure climbing the suit I was in caught my attention. It looked like the wooden puppets Ballora had on stage with her, but in the dark, I was hard to tell. I didn't want to shake the suit and loosen the spring locks, so I just let them climb, and some of them even entered the suit, making the space tighter than it needed to be. It seemed like as long as I didn't shake the suit while they're coming in, they wouldn't attack me, so I only focused on keeping the spring locks fully wound and shaking the ones climbing up the sides off when they got too high up.
I spent three hours doing this, battling the suit for my very life, before one of the wooden puppets came right up to my face. Amber eyes met mine, but before it could do anything to me, I heard the door to the room open and everything stopped. A jumble of voices met my ears before faces of unknown people, male and female, met my line of sight and pulled me out of the deathtrap I was stuck in while holding the spring locks still so I wouldn't be harmed.
A group of paramedics pulled me outside and to their ambulance to check over me and ask a few questions about what happened. Apparently I was lucky enough to get away with a black eye, a mild concussion, a mild case of dehydration that was easily treated with an IV, and a large bump on the back of my head from where I was knocked out.
Once everything was said and done, Mr. Afton came up to me, a mix of a happy but grim look on his face.
"I'm sorry you had to go through that, Michelle. I'm glad you are alright. Mr. Fred was worried sick about you when you were reported missing yesterday. And as for the restaurant, I'm closing it down after tomorrow night and scrapping the animatronics. We don't need any lawsuits on our hands from these machines if they do anything like that to our customers. Your commitment to us is highly valued, and I hope to work with you sometime in the near future."
He offered his hand to me, and I nodded before shaking it. There was just one thing I needed to do before the place closed and the robots because extra parts. I needed to find a way to free the souls of the children trapped within them.
