Modest Beginnings
Saturday 7th March 2015, 16:34 PM
Caine knew that his first step needed to be to check the folder with the information found on Jack. Having this folder around the apartment concerned him; the discovery of it would either lead to any form of trust between him and Mike's friends to be voided at best, or it would cause Jack to reveal his true colours and kill someone at worst.
So, he decided to look through each page carefully, knowing that it would be his only chance to memorise it. Every sentence was read in his head several times. Each point was spoken to him, wrapped around in his head, reworded, and settled without any sort of confusion.
Even as he did all of that, it took a moment for him to accept just what it was. When it did, everything made so much more sense.
Of course, his gut feeling had been correct; Jack had been hiding something. Something big. When Caine had decided that, it of course had been the guesswork of just what it was and how severe it was. After all, it could've ranged from anywhere between an honest-to-God activist with a lot of enemies to bloodthirsty psychopath with a habit of killing his friends.
But somehow, the answer hadn't even been a thought in Caine's mind before he read the dossier. Of course, it answered quite a few things. The fact that Mike clearly knew about it, too. How Mike trusted him enough to work with him. Though true that Jack had been an unknown element, the likes of which made him a potential threat, that had more than anything just been his paranoia.
Now, however, Caine was certain on whether or not the middle-aged hacktivist was a threat. The only thing that remained was confronting him on what he had discovered. To hear it from the man himself.
After having gone through the entire dossier and memorising as much as he could, Caine nodded, satisfied. Stepping out of the room, he walked past Carl, still typing away on his tablet. There was a fireplace just in the living room, which someone had put on. Staring at the fire for a moment, Caine looked back at the dossier, wondering.
Then, he threw the dossier into the fire and it slowly burnt to a crisp in front of him.
"You find what you were looking for?" Carl asked, finally taking his eyes away to see what he was doing.
As Caine continued to stare into the fire and watched the pieces of paper char inside, he nodded. "I suppose so. It answers a few things."
"Do you think Mike knew?"
"I think so. The way he spoke about his friends…he did his research on them. Made sure he could trust them before he worked with them. Maybe he sought out 'Jack' because of it."
"I guess we won't know for sure," Carl mused, "until we find him."
"Which I imagine won't be until he wants to be found." Straightening, Caine looked back towards the room he had been using, "Just what is on the other folder?"
"I don't know for sure. It's something to do with Fazbear Entertainment and the Freddy's pizzeria. Some sort of ongoing investigation that was put on ice."
That made Caine raise an eyebrow, "I'm guessing that the only reason why they would be investigating anything was because it put them at risk. It must be important."
"Won't know for sure until we read it."
Agreeing with the notion, Caine went back into the room and sat down. He needed time to think about what he had discovered, but he knew that he had to cover all basis. Taking the files out of the folder, Caine started to sort them in what he could best work out to be the order of events and went through each piece as carefully as last time.
The files started with the mentions of an older pizzeria. When it was named, Caine's eyes widened as he remembered that name from his investigation all those years ago. Fredbear's Family Diner. Either a separate company that was eventually bought out by Fazbear Entertainment, or perhaps the prototype to what they would eventually create.
Seeing the antique pictures in the files, he decided on it being the latter. They depicted a smaller restaurant, perhaps half the size of the one that was home to the Fazgang. With more classic looking wallpaper and furniture, all of which were late seventies at best. Some parts almost looked like they took inspiration from old fifties era diners.
But it was the animatronics that stood out. Bulky and almost yellow, they looked like ornate pieces of furniture. They stood on their stage, which seemed more like a makeshift platform using tables than it did an actual construction. There were merely two of them, a bear and a rabbit.
The bear was wider looking, almost a Winnie the Pooh with a top hat. A black bow tie and hat stood on his yellow-brown frame, eyes smaller than the ones Caine knew. Not only that, but they were a much simpler colour, simply an off-white with drawn on irises and a glowing pupil. The rabbit looked much the same, than it was noticeably thinner. Compared to the animatronic named Bonnie, it had a wider face.
Something that almost unnerved Caine by the pictures was just how tall the two animatronics were. Though the Fazgang had certainly been taller themselves than anyone else—including the Fazcrew, all of whom had been no more than a head shorter—these two would have towered over them. The rabbit alone, with the ears considered, was around two meters. At least six and a half foot.
That was when a thought clicked in Caine's head. He had seen the rabbit before, at least in some form. Remembering the pictures that Ella had snapped of the building during their reconnaissance phase, he recalled seeing the pictures of the animatronic relic. Though it didn't seem it, the animatronic had been tall, even when hunched over.
Not only that, but it's degraded yellow costume and eyes had been eerily similar to that of the bear animatronic he was looking at. Though he knew it to be an easy answer, there was no doubt in his mind that the rabbit animatronic in the picture was the same animatronic that Reggie Wood had dug up from the pizzeria.
Going through the files further, he discovered more and more information about the animatronics themselves. Words like springlock instantly piqued his curiosity, so he looked further into it. These costumes had some sort of setting to allow a person to enter it and control it, like a performer.
But it seemed that the scheme ended after an incident involving multiple and simultaneous springlock failures. Judging by the words that he read, whatever this incident involved lead to bad press, so the company had no choice but to shelve the animatronics.
Which must have been what led to them eventually creating the Fazgang, Caine realised. Animatronics designed purely to be automatic, as to prevent any loss of life. This change must have lead to the Fazgang's creation and their era, back in the early eighties.
Considering this, Caine continued through the folder. There was nary any useful information about the era left, but there was still a lot to go through. The files went through the phase he had just be thinking about, when the Fazgang took centre stage. Alongside the remade Freddy and Bonnie came Chica and Foxy, the two of which seemed to be welcome and well-received additions.
But his eyes hardened as the files approached the next catastrophic event in the history of Freddy's; the Missing Children's Incident. Making references to the abductions of these children within the pizzeria, Caine recalled the words he and Mike had recovered from the phone message left by the late Spencer Schmidt.
Someone used one of the suits, Spencer had said with a panicked voice, We had a spare in the back, a yellow one, someone used it...now none of them are acting right.
The Purple Man, who had been the one to kill those five kids within the pizzeria the Toy Animatronics had once called home, had been the culprit behind the Missing Children's Incident. The Marionette had confirmed it. Not only that, but it had also been the Purple Man to kill the child outside of what Caine now believed to be Fredbear's.
Not for the first time, Caine wished that Spencer Schmidt was still alive. He must have known of what happened back in those days. A firsthand experience of it. Perhaps he could have answered some of these lingering questions.
But there was still something else about the rabbit that concerned him. As he continued to look between the Missing Children's Incident report and the pictures, he realised that the suit used by the spirit called Golden Freddy did not look like the bear from the picture. It lacked the five fingers which he assumed allowed the human user to comfortably control the hands.
So, he surmised, that means that the Golden Freddy suit couldn't have been the one used by the Purple Man. He must have used these Springlock suits.
If that was the case, had the Purple Man been working for the company as far back as the early eighties? Surely he must have received some form of training to safely use the suit. Even more, there was the fact that at least one of the suits had survived the years and was still around and moving, currently sat idle at Fazbear Frights.
Scowling, Caine pressed on. His failure to identify the Purple Man after all these years continued to frustrate him. But Fazbear Entertainment had a couple hundred employees even going as far back as the late eighties. He had spent some time trying to track as many of them down as much as he could, but those who weren't dead had simply disappeared or weren't of any help.
For all he knew, one of the executives who ended up with a bullet to the head courtesy of Dutch Lawson may have been the killer he had been searching for.
Turning the page of the files, Caine looked for any more important information, but found none that stood out within that section. The section which succeeded it discussed the events that happened in 1994, mostly to do with what Caine knew he and Mike was responsible for. It even had mentions of the attempted assassination that had taken place, alongside the partnership with Gregor Henshaw. All of it might have been of interest had Caine not personally witnessed all of it. Moving onwards, he opened the next section and saw the title of it.
1995 Incident Report
That made him pause for a moment. When he had been forced onto paid vacation and the Fazbear Conspiracy case had been officially passed on to Donovan's Law Department, it had been in the twilight weeks of 1994. Anything after that was something he was ignorant of, as he had taken his eyes away from Freddy's.
As far as he had been aware, the Fazgang animatronics had been taken away by the Government, likely to be dismantled and melted down. However, there had always been some doubt in that. Caine had occasionally checked in with some of his contacts in the area and they had never mentioned hearing anything about Government interference at Freddy's.
But then he continued into the report and the further he went through it, his eyes grew wider as the answers were thrust at him. He read the detailed reports, starting from the initial investigation after the incident. How a team had gone on their usual routines of checking for any security breaches within the pizzeria.
What they discovered were the dismantled corpses of the Fazgang, battered with blunt force. No sign of life inside of them, even after being jury rigged, merely displaying automated behaviour. How they had all been found within the same vicinity, dismembered. Reading the report sent a stab of strange pain into his chest as he recalled the robots he had such mixed feelings about.
Then the report went on to discuss the breach of a long-ago sealed back room, which had been sealed soon after the pizzeria was closed in 1985. Pursing his lips, Caine read through the rest of it thoughtfully, wondering. From what Mike had told him about what he had seen in the visions given to him by the Marionette, this back room sounded awfully too familiar.
Especially when he remembered that room they had discovered soon before their fight with Golden Freddy.
But then the report went a step further as it explained what the team found inside the room. Old arcade cabinets which had long since been stripped for parts, leaving them barren. Waterlogged wallpaper which had fallen to strips. A cracked tiled floor which lay with puddles.
Then Caine saw the picture of the room and near the corner, against the back wall, sat a gigantic figure. Stained yellow, it seemed to be dropping to pieces. It was hunched over, but Caine could see the large ears sticking out of its rotten head. A shade of a smile he assumed to once be endearing was splayed across its face.
He knew it to be the same animatronic that was found by Reggie Wood, as well as the same one from that Fredbear's picture, albeit in a worse condition.
But under the same photograph was a note, simply saying refer to section 5C.
So he did. When he found the section, he landed straight onto the page discussing the Missing Children's Incident.
His eyes closed. This was it. This was the smoking gun he needed. Spencer Schmidt had referred to an old, yellow spare suit used in the second incident. This was the costume the Purple Man used to lure ten children away for their slaughter.
But just as he was sure that there couldn't be any more to it, he turned the page past the image of that room and found the report about the CCTV footage captured and put on tapes, taken from the security cameras and the black box footage of the animatronics.
As he read the detailed analysis of the tapes, reported down by the team which had recovered and watched them, a heavy feeling overcame him and his felt like he was going to be sick. Putting the file down, he stood up, walking into the other room where Carl, now joined by Samantha, still sat at the dining table.
"You find anything?" Carl asked him, before looking up from his tablet. When his eyes fell on Caine's face, he paused, stunned.
Samantha, too, looked concerned. "Tom? What's wrong?"
"It's the Purple Man." Caine said simply, trying to keep his voice even, "The Purple Man is inside that animatronic."
They exchanged looks, confused, before Carl said, "Uh…okay. Care to run that by us again, Boss?"
Still trying to piece together his thoughts, Caine breathed in. "That rabbit animatronic Reggie Wood recovered is a Springlock suit. An experimental costume built to both be an automated performer and an outfit for a human performer to use. It was one of only two built. After an incident where at least one person died, they were retired."
"But the suit—the rabbit one, I believe—was used for something else. The Purple Man used a disguise to lure away his victims. Spencer Schmidt had told us that it had been an old, yellow one. For the longest time, I was sure it was the suit that Golden Freddy used, but it never made sense. How did someone use a costume clearly not built for human use?"
"But Fazbear Entertainment, they did their own investigation. Trying to hunt down the man themselves, I suppose. That was why they sealed away the suit in a back room after the incident in 1987. To stop him from using it again."
Carl seemed to be trying to digest those words, "Okay. So, he used that suit. That still doesn't explain why you think the Purple Man is…well, still inside the suit. How did that happen? Was he…trapped?"
"According to Ella and Jack," Caine continued, "the suit reeks. Heavily. Soon after we closed the case, he came back. I'm not sure why. He destroyed the Fazgang one by one, luring them away much like he did to them before. He dismantled them. But…something happened after he did. I think…something forced him back into that room. And he never left."
Though Carl seemed sceptical, something was bothering Samantha. She cleared her throat, "You said that Mike had been bothered by something when he was working there. Like…he was being targeted by something. You don't think…?"
"That the rotting animatronic, still possessed by a psychotic killer, has been hunting Mike ever since it arrived there?" Caine scowled, "Yeah. And that would explain why he's gone."
Even Carl was starting to look sick at the revelation, "He…he figured it out, didn't he? About the suit? Something made him lose himself."
"Ella said that they found some tapes at the attraction. In the files I've just read, it said that the team who were sent by Fazbear Entertainment to check up on the animatronics found them destroyed. They took the footage recorded from their black boxes and stored them on tapes for archive use. Somehow, Reggie recovered those tapes."
"Then…" Carl looked troubled, "then Mike watched them. He saw them die, didn't he?"
"More than that. He became obsessed with it."
"But if they found the animatronics," Samantha pointed out, "then they must've found the…what was it? Springlock animatronic? They must have found it."
"They did." Caine acknowledged, "And they were given specific orders to seal the room back up with it inside. Someone wanted the Purple Man to never be found."
Saturday 7th March 2015, 04:34 AM
Mike knew that he would not survive another expedition outside his office. After his last three attempts, it was clear that the Springlock animatronic had caught on to his tricks. That itself was worrying, and Mike had a feeling that he wouldn't be so lucky to be saved by the shade of the Marionette a second time.
Still not sure whether that had even been real, Mike knew he didn't have enough time to worry about it. With barely an hour and a half left until dawn, he needed to act quickly on the remaining two clues. It wasn't lost on him just how lucky he had been that night; he hadn't even been haunted by the hallucinations. At least, not in any severe way.
And they've appeared less and less the more I go through these games, he pointed out to himself.
Gazing at the next clue, which was a sequence of numbers with no other significant marker, he pondered on it. As far as he could tell, it was code; even if it was, he wasn't smart enough to decipher it. So at most, he could only hope that it was some kind of sequence, much like the one on the arcade cabinet.
But where could he input this sequence? There was nothing inside the office that logically could have a set of numbers inputted.
Think outside the box, he decided. None of the other clues had been straightforward, so he couldn't expect this one to be. Looking around the room, he decided on a heading: Rather than looking for something that could be used to put in a sequence, he knew he had to look for something that wouldn't made any sort of sense.
So he examined even the most mundane of objects, even the shards of the cupcakes on the desk. He searched the drawers, examined the walls, and the floor. Just as he was about to give up, he felt something unexpected when he touched the wall next to the desk, just below the window.
When he pressed on one of the tiles on the wall, it moved slightly. Curious, he pressed down onto the tile. It gave under his push, before stopping and then slowly pushing back out to its previous place, like it hadn't moved at all.
The discovery was perhaps the most befuddling he had made that night. For a moment, he was sure he had to be dreaming. There was no way he could really be seeing what he was seeing. But after pinching himself a couple times, he was bemused when he didn't simply wake up in his bed.
With a weary sigh, he tested the adjacent tiles and found that they made a nine-by-nine square of pressure plates. Considering this, he was reminded of an old mobile phone, back before touchpads became the norm. To enter a number, you would need to type in the number using the Dialpad. Much like the pressure plates, they used the same square.
So, with his notepad in hand, he typed in the sequence number like it was a phone. First the top-right as the number three, then the bottom right as nine, the middle for five, the top middle for two, the middle left for four, and finally the bottom middle for eight. As he pressed the last tile, he fully expected nothing to happen. For him to be left there kneeling, feeling dumb.
Naturally, when a tile two columns to the left of the number one opened suddenly, dust escaping from the new opening, he was pleasantly surprised that he was once more rewarded for his insanity. Reaching into the opening, he felt the familiar square form of a floppy disk and pulled it out. Gazing at it in wonder, he stood up.
As he began the process of putting the disk inside of the reader, he couldn't believe his luck on how he had managed to work out the clues as well as he had. Though none of them made any sense in hindsight, they still somehow matched up well with his thought process. There was a method to the madness, he supposed.
Once the game was loaded up, he prepared for whatever trip he was about to experience. At first, a single bar of text popped up on the screen, reading the simples phrase STAGE01. Below that text was a room, so much smaller than the ones he had roamed inside the other games. It was barely rectangular, with no entrances nor exits.
As a soft lullaby played over the game, Mike looked at what lay within the room. Clouds, likely decorations, hovered above the residents. In the bottom right, three children wearing green shirts stood, their arms on the air and happy expressions on their pixelated features. They stood staring with wide eyes at the two figures on the stage in front of them.
On the stage stood two animatronics, both a yellow that startled Mike when he saw them. One was a bear, not unlike Freddy, with a black top hat and bow tie. The other was a rabbit, so similar to Bonnie and yet so different. Though both looked ancient, they didn't seem frightening in any way.
The hardest part for Mike to digest was to accept that he knew them both. One was the physical form of Golden Freddy, the animatronic ghost that had tried to kill him so many times. The other was the animatronic inside that very same building he was sitting in, playing this game, who was also wanting nothing more than to bring him to a violent end.
Controlling the pixelated form of his old enemy, Mike moved the bear off the stage and into the crowd of children. Moving around against the walls for a few moments, he tried to figure out what to do from there. As he did so, he noticed a loud noise coming from the speakers whenever he pushed against it.
With little to lose, he pushed the character against the stage, jumping as he did. That loud noise came again as his character clipped into the stage. He fell out of the room eventually, drifting into the void, until he suddenly appeared back at the top of the screen. Quickly moving, he ended up at the top of the screen, standing above the room.
Confused, he jumped and for a moment, he appeared at the bottom again. Dropping down once more into the void, he fell against an invisible floor just below the room. With nowhere else to go, he moved towards the right, off the screen, and appeared just to the left of the room. This time was different, however. This time, just where he thought he originally had been standing, was an exit door.
There's more than one room, Mike realised. He hadn't been standing and moving around the one room; every time he had clipped out, he had instead been falling into another. Perhaps it was a honeycomb of several rooms? At least three, though he imagined there could be more.
Instead of walking to the exit door, Mike chose to jump upwards, trying to get into the room again. As he did so, his character seemed to grind into the wall, going straight upwards. Heading left away from the door, he leaped, hitting the top right corner of the room and ended up on top of it. Not knowing where to go from there, Mike couldn't help but wonder just what this was trying to tell him.
After some trial and error, he tried jumping upwards and was surprised when he glitched into the floor of the upper room, sliding all the way next to the Spring Bonnie sprite. He headed straight towards the wall to the right, and once more grinded into it upwards. Now on top of the room, he tried to guess the layout of this honeycomb, and couldn't help but wonder if it was a nine-by-nine square, much like the pressure plate tiles.
Once again trying that trick out, he glided upwards into the room above. Mike tried the right wall again, but nothing happened. Heading towards the left wall, he jumped into it, and this time it worked. Within moments, he was at the top of the room.
He tried jumping upwards again, but this time, he didn't see a room. I must be at the top of the game, he realised. Knowing that he had two directions left to go with, he decided to head right. Jumping, he hit the corner of the room and ended up on the top once again.
But something was different with that room. Gone was the stage and the moving sprite of Spring Bonnie. Gone were the three children. All that remained inside that room was the sprite of a grey, crying child. Pondering his next decision, Mike tried to jump down, landing on the room below. Noticing that the room there was very similar, but lacked one of the children, Mike ignored it and tried to glitch into the room with the crying child.
After his attempts failed, he grew irritated after realising he made a mistake. Redoing all of his previous actions, he ended up on top of that room again, trying to decide his next move.
Maybe through the wall?
Dropping down to the left of that room, he moved the falling sprite right into that wall and almost smiled when he glitched through. Now in the empty room, he approached the child carefully. Then, after reaching the child, another cake appeared. The child opened its eyes for a moment, before the game came to an end.
Then, like the other successful endings to the games, a single piece of text string appeared.
Hunt the Guilty.
Sitting back in his chair as the game came to and end, Mike could only wonder once more what the purpose of all of this was. But with only one clue left to pursue, he knew he needed to push on, in spite of all the risks.
TU4QU0I53T4IAN6L3: I have been making the chapters somewhat smaller than the others, mostly because I'm trying to keep the word count lower than the last one and I'm a bit worried about overexplaining too much when it comes to the games. In spite of my best efforts, it's not going great; at this rate, the story's going to go over 100,000 words. Hasashi certainly tried his best, but sometimes diplomacy just doesn't work. The games were always going to be something unavoidable, and you're definitely right on the money when it comes to their links to the ghosts. And for the Marionette, we never did see a body in the last story, so perhaps they barely managed to make it out of that pizzeria alive?
Four chapters remain. It's going to be a bumpy ride.
