Chapter 10: Fazbear's Fright
Damien sat at his new desk and stretched. William Afton had showed him around and then said he had important business to attend to and quickly left. The first week was uneventful and almost boring. He had nothing to do except watch the cameras in case somebody snuck in, and keep an eye on the systems so they wouldn't overheat, short out, or cause a fire.
The next week, however, he got a call from somebody he'd never heard before. He didn't even introduce himself, just started rambling about the leads they were following, and then started to play some old training tapes over the loud speakers into the attraction area. So far, the place wasn't even open to the public yet. They said they wanted to find a full animatronic before they opened. Afton had even hinted that he might do costume attractions if they didn't find anything in a week.
Damien switched through his cameras as the guy talked. Secretly, Damien nicknamed the caller Phone Dude, because he was definitely more of a dude than a guy.
But the voice on the tapes... it sounded familiar... it almost sounded like Afton, but younger. How old was Afton, anyway? He looked 50, but he also had dark circles under his eyes that could have been very aging. Maybe he was just a tired man.
Damien suddenly noticed something in a camera that made him sit up. A very familiar suit... It was partially covered in shadows, and he couldn't see it clearly, but it looked like a familiar golden bear. He considered getting up and checking it out, but he had to stay in his office in case the systems needed restarting. Besides, what Phone Dude had said earlier about the place giving you the creeps was right. Haunted houses never were his thing. He wasn't super scared of them, but he much preferred where he was seated now, in a lit office with a large vent blowing cool air right next to him and a huge window made of security glass in front of him, as opposed to standing partially in darkness, getting up close and personal with a horror attraction, let alone a horror attraction that may or may not have nearly killed him when he was four.
It wasn't until the second night of the second week that things started to get weird. Really weird.
Damien sat at his desk, coffee in his hand and a book, in case he got bored. There were no cameras pointed into the security office, so he wasn't being monitored by his bosses, and he got bored on the job a lot. As he settled in, Phone Dude's usual recording started to play, and made Damien freeze at what he said.
"We found one! A real one! Uh, it's there somewhere, I'm sure you'll see it on your monitors..."
Damien started quickly flipping through the cameras, searching. Who? Who did they find? Bonnie? Freddy? Foxy? Chica? Maybe Balloon Boy, or Mangle, or even the puppet?
Suddenly Damien saw it. Standing next to Fredbear's slumped suit, covered in shadows, with glowing eyes that seemed like it was staring through the camera right at him. It... looked like a rabbit... but it wasn't Bonnie... it couldn't be Bonnie. Bonnie was purple, and held a guitar, and had a bigger head and a bowtie. It definitely wasn't Bonnie, this rabbit was yellow, and very torn up. Withered, missing large chunks of fabric, which made it look even scarier. It reminded Damien of Foxy, how the crazy pirate fox had tried to tear itself apart. Fitting for a horror theme, he supposed.
There was still something strange about this yellow rabbit. Something oddly familiar, but also very sinister. Just like the other four furry animatronics, it had an air of being more than a robot. They almost felt... haunted.
Yes, haunted, that's how this yellow rabbit looked, but it also reminded him of Ming, although what didn't?
"Spring Bonnie... yeah, that was your name." He muttered, smiling. "You were Ming's favourite, you know. She even had you as a doll."
Damien could have sworn he saw the robot blink. The cameras were weirdly fuzzy, so maybe it was that.
Suddenly, the camera glitched out, giving Damien a mini heart attack. He sighed and reset the video, then returned to look again at the new animatronic, but when he did, the animatronic was gone!
Damien blinked a few times, then flipped through the cameras. Had he accidentally flipped to the wrong one? Was he seeing things?
Finally, at a camera pointing to the room across the hall from the other one, he found it again. He... must have been looking at the wrong camera. Maybe he thought he had seen Spring Bonnie next to Fredbear, and his mind had just filled it in like that? Well, he was looking at the yellow rabbit now, who was staring into the camera like nothing had happened.
Weird, but Damien just chalked that up to being tired... until he watched the robot, clear as day, tilt its head to the side.