Can't Leave

by Chironex27

Prequel to Don't Leave the Office. In the games, the player sees through the perspective of the night guards, but this focuses on the perspectives of the spirits in the animatronics throughout the years. Big thanks to Reading a Pulse for help in characterization (especially with the Mangle) and advice on story. Rated T for implied violence against children.

16. New and Improved

By closing before there could be more investigations, Fazbear Entertainment had managed to save its reputation, but they knew that they had only done it just barely. This time, they couldn't take the risk that something was going to go wrong. They could not take the risk that someone like one of their former employees could cause another mess. For once, they had to make a serious effort to make the store safe.

Fazbear Entertainment began to install new animatronic technology into Freddy and his friends. One of the upgrades was advanced facial recognition software linked to the sex offender registry. The idea was that if for whatever reason a child predator was somehow able to get into the store, the animatronics would recognize the predator and alert the police. However, the facial recognition software was as far as the company got with improving the old animatronics before they decided that they were simply too ugly and smelled too bad to bother. It was also pointed out that many people had negative impressions of the store that were linked to the animatronics themselves, so even if they were fixed and cleaned up, many people would still be uneasy around them. Fazbear Entertainment needed a completely new slate, with new animatronics. The design team came up with new versions of the old animatronics, with a more streamlined, friendlier "Toy" appearance. Foxy in particular was given a complete do-over; one of the complaints that the parents had often made was how they felt uneasy with a robot armed with a hook hugging their children. So Foxy was rebranded as a clown, with clean white fur, something that the executives believed would be as nice, safe, and uncontroversial as possible. Bizarrely though, one of the measures meant to make Foxy a less frightening character resulted in one of the few controversies that the new store faced early on. In their redesign of Foxy, Fazbear Entertainment had changed the character into a female, believing that a female character would be considered safer by parents. However, the change wasn't entirely clear to everyone. While officially, Toy Foxy was female, employees of the company and previous fans had a tendency to refer to Foxy as a male, due to the fact that it was a replacement of a male character. Fans of the original Foxy the Pirate fox insisted that Toy Foxy was male, while newer fans of the franchise insisted that it was female (even though people didn't seem to realize that the character had no gender, as it was a robot.) This strange controversy resulted in a series of arguments and fights between children in the restaurant, convincing the executives to move Foxy into the new "Kid's Cove", a play area meant specifically for toddlers, who ideally wouldn't have those arguments.

To further improve on the old franchise, Fazbear Entertainment added a fifth animatronic. By this point, they realized that adding a new animal character would be too difficult and jilting to those who were still fans of the original characters, so they kept the design simple; the new animatronic was just a short, fat, smiling boy that would blow, tie, and hand out balloons to kids. While never given a specific name, customers and employees alike started to call it "Balloon Boy."

Frank Faz himself came up with another stroke of inspiration to implement to his store. Seeing the toy-like nature of the new animatronics, he finally found out a way to use the old Puppet, retrofitting it with an endoskeleton and installing it as a part of the new "Prize Corner". The idea would be that when the kids played the games and won, the Puppet would jump out of its box like a jack-in-the-box to randomly hand out a prize.

When the new and improved Freddy Fazbear's Pizza opened, it was an instant success. Fazbear Entertainment was doing a good job of making people forget the past. The old animatronics were kept out of site of the customers, intended to be used mainly for spare parts. When Faz locked them away into storage, he doubted he would be seeing them again anytime soon. After all, why would he need spare parts on completely new animatronics? While he was right that the new animatronics didn't need spare parts, he did eventually find a use for the old animatronics in a way that he would have never predicted.