A/N: After writing some intense, long chapters that required several minutes of video research, it feels good to kick back and write some filler for a change. But like I said before, UCN is coming up, and it will almost certainly be the next chapter.

Cryptid1998: Thank you very much for writing such an extensive review! I'm honored that you hold my fic in such high regard, and am looking forward to continuing to provide quality content for you and my other readers to enjoy! I'll probably do another FNAF song chapter at some point, though not right now.

DeathTheWolf: Really? I could have sworn Cassidy has cursed earlier than this chapter. I dunno, I don't really keep track of small things like that XD

Jack0Lanterns: It's been two years, they probably have at some point.

To those of you asking about Help Wanted and Special Delivery, I'm deliberately withholding from answering those questions because…reasons.

Chapter 96 – The Scaring Contest

After an exciting and wonderful Winter vacation, the next few days following the Schmidts' return home were a return to the routine and uneventful by comparison. At first, this wasn't necessarily a bad thing, as even ghostly children needed a rest after the intensity of the holidays and Mike needed to catch up on "adult business" that his kids wouldn't even pretend to understand.

But as more days passed and the ghosts settled back into their routine, they soon found themselves getting restless. The Marshalls had to go back to school (to everyone's collective annoyance) and Melody was busy with the reconstruction of Eisensteel, so neither of them had any time to drop by and visit. Add the fact that their favorite toys, the Rockstar animatronics, still hadn't been repaired yet, and the ghosts were starting to get utterly bored.

And even with their complete loyalty and love to their father, children were still children.

"Oh my God!" Fritz loudly complained as he tossed his cell phone onto the living room sofa. "I'm so BORED! We haven't done anything in over a week!"

"I know!" Susie sulked. "It sucks that Alex and Meghan have so many tests piled on them. They can't do anything fun with us!"

"Even video games aren't helping at this point," Gabe admitted. "There's only so long I can play that at a time by myself or with you guys, no matter what the video game is."

"Could we ask Dad to take us somewhere?" Jeremy wondered.

"After he just took us to Florida?" Liz asked skeptically. "I think he's probably happy to sit around home for now."

"At least we can look back at Disney World and Islands of Adventure," Charlie offered, "and remember all the fun times we had there."

Fritz's face suddenly broke into a grin. "That's it!" he exclaimed excitedly. He looked up at the ceiling in panic, before looking back at his siblings and lowering his voice. "We should do something like what we saw back at the Haunted Mansion, and mess around with the house a bit!"

"Fritz!" Charlie scolded immediately. "We can't mess around with Dad's house like that! You heard him back on the right, he wouldn't be happy with us if we did that…"

"I'm not talking about anything huge like in the Haunted Mansion!" the former Foxy inhabitant protested. "Just…little things. Like having his video games fly around the living room, like how the instruments flew around that green woman's head in the crystal ball. Little things like that."

"C'mon…" Susie added her own voice in. "It's not like we're going to mess up anything in a major way or, God forbid, hurt dad! This is just a little bit of fun to stop being so bored!"

An expression that looked like a combination between guilt and amusement appeared on Jeremy's face. "Honestly…" he admitted. "I kinda like this idea. I'm sure Dad wouldn't mind a little prank."

"Please?" Cassidy begged. "We'll just do something really small to start off with, and if Dad gets pissed at us we'll stop right away."

Charlie sighed.To be honest, she was feeling the same boredom that her brothers and sisters were. "All right," she conceded, to the kids' delight. "But something SMALL. And no messing with any electronics or dad's tools, those can be really dangerous."

"You know…" their father's voice interrupted them dryly, "…if you wanted to try and creep me out, you probably should've made sure that I wasn't around to hear your plans first."

"…Fuck!" Gabe cursed as Mike walked into the living room, holding a steaming coffee mug in his hand with a smirk on his face. "We didn't hear you come down."

"I gathered that," Mike replied dryly. "I'm guessing you guys are scheming all this cause you're bored?" The frustrated looks on the children's faces told him all he needed to know. "Okay, I can admittedly kind of get where you're coming from since we've mostly stuck around here for more than a week now. So I'm going to offer you a different proposal."

The ghosts looked up at him, immediately interested.

Mike smirked. "For the next thirty minutes, you can come up with whatever plan you can think of to scare me, Haunted Mansion style. And I'm not talking about weak shit like startling me, because by that logic somebody who pokes me in the back of my shoulder could count as scary. I'm talking about actually causing me to freak out."

"Ooh…" Cassidy gasped, looking excitedly at her siblings. "This sounds like it could be fun!"

"Some ground rules first," Mike continued, his tone all business. "You'll work in pairs, and those rules Charlie mentioned still stand. If I see my wrench and drill flying around, I will NOT be happy."

"Got it!" the ghosts immediately affirmed their understanding.

"Also, while I'm not going to be mad about things getting a little messy, whatever mess you make in the house, you clean up. So don't go overboard."

"That's fair," Liz easily agreed.

The man grinned. "So…let's see how spooky a bunch of ghost kids really are."

Minute Five…

"Okay, it's been quiet," Mike muttered as he sat back down on the chair of his study. "A little too quiet. Where are you, hmm? What surprise are you planning for me?"

The weather perfectly matched the atmosphere of their little game, as a thunderstorm raged outside, rain crashing down around the house with the lightning flashing from the sky every so often. In the back of his mind, Mike wondered if God, Nightmare, or some other supernatural being had brought the storm just for their own amusement. He would have been very impressed if his kids had been the one to call the storm, though given that they hadn't demonstrated anything near that kind of power level he highly doubted it.

As he opened up his laptop to send an email, the lightning flashed intensely outside his window and the lights suddenly flickered out. "And it begins…" Mike muttered as another bolt struck. This time, the lightning illuminated the few pictures that had been hung up on the walls of the study…and all of them had been transformed. The men and women, all smiling happily at various moments of Mike's history, had been replaced with undead versions of themselves, all leering ghoulishly at him from dark, corrupted backgrounds.

Mike stared at the pictures wordlessly for a few seconds as childish giggles echoed around him, before sighing. "This is based on that one hallway in Haunted Mansion isn't it?" he asked rhetorically. The giggles continued for a few seconds, then stopped. Mike stared at the picture closest to him, one of a now skeletal Oskar sitting on his couch in the fireplace.

"Well, if you tried to scare me, you failed," Mike commented dryly, his tone utterly unimpressed. "Should've done something more original." He gave the skeletal Oskar another look. "Welp, Oskar's dead, so this is technically accurate. Rest in peace, and all that."

He walked over to another picture, this one of himself at Ryan and Stella's wedding. Though all three continued to wear the same wedding attire as they originally had, Stella had turned into a ghoul covered in shadows save for glowing yellow eyes, and Ryan was now a ghoul with pale skin and sunken eyes. "An undead wedding, huh?" Mike tilted his head. "Actually, this isn't that bad of an idea if you want one of those weddings with a weird thing. Heck, I could actually see this being a thing in one of those Las Vegas chapels. A Halloween-themed wedding? Wouldn't be the weirdest theme." Mike's lips curled into a smirk. "Still kind of charming even as undead."

Mike turned his attention to the final picture, one of himself shaking hands with his boss, Mr. Santar. Both men had been transformed into skeletons, with the factory behind them transformed into a ruin with decayed and rusted machines standing lifelessly in the background. "You know, I don't look half bad as a skeleton," he mused, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. "But seriously, just a skeleton? Laaaaaaaaame. I'd be far more badass than just a skeleton. I'd be a Lich, or a Death Knight, or something so hardcore that nobody would fuck with me!" He scoffed. "Just a skeleton? Give me a break…" He shook his head. "Whoever tried to creep me out just now by fucking up my pictures, nice try, but you failed. Better luck next time."

Mike got up and left the door, deciding that he might as well try and scout out what his kids were scheming. As the study door closed behind him, Fritz and Liz appeared, looking disappointed.

"Dammit!"

Minute Ten…

"I wonder what's going to happen next," Mike wondered as he wandered down to the kitchen to get some coffee. After seeing the ghosts be such an active part of his life, it felt weird to see the house completely deserted for once, even though he knew intellectually that they were still around, just unseen and waiting for a chance to strike. As he took a sip of his coffee, he suddenly heard the sound something happening in his living room. Trying to think about what other scenes in the Haunted Mansion ride that could have inspired the ghosts, he suddenly groaned. "Please don't tell me this is what I think it is…"

Mike walked over to the living room…and promptly palmed his face as he saw all of his video games and DVD cases flying around the room crazily, creating a personal hurricane in his own house. "This isn't scary, you know?" he called out to whichever ghosts were causing the small cyclone. "It's just giving me a headache."

The jumble of video games and DVDs began spinning even faster, and the ghostly wails of two children howled from the depths of the storm. Mike suddenly found his mind blasted with the images of Freddy and Bonnie's heads, their eyes black as the void with blood pouring out of their eyes and down their faces. Mike swore he could hear the sounds of the Toreador March echoing in the background. As Mike tried to comprehend what he was witnessing, the twister of DVDs and video games whirled around even faster, and the images were replaced with the one of Freddy Fazbear leaping at him with his jumpscare, the animatronic's familiar scream blasting into his ears and assaulting his senses.

Mike chuckled. "Nice try," he called out. "I'll give you some credit cause the finish was stronger than the start, but other than that…nope. Not good enough." He turned around and left the living room behind. The DVDs and video games stopped floating around and fell gently to the ground, and Gabe and Jeremy materialized, looking just as disappointed as Fritz and Liz had been.

"Well that was a bust," Jeremy shook his head. "Really thought we'd get it with the bloody hallucinations and the jumpscare."

"I mean, Dad's a pro at this, we should've known this wouldn't work," Gabe replied. He looked around at the mess they had caused. "Also…I think we're going to have to clean this up after the contest is over."

Jeremy took one look at said mess and groaned. "Shit."

Minute Fifteen

Mike stared at the hallway in front of him. "Oh my God, what in the flying fuck is this?" he asked incredulously.

He had just climbed back up the stairs to return to his study, only to discover that the entire main hallway of the second floor…had turned into a massive clusterfuck. The pictures that lined the hallway had been tilted in all directions, the subjects' eyes either following his movements or spinning around frenziedly. The lights were flickering on and off frenziedly, casting only brief illumination that only added to the chaos overwhelming Mike's senses. The doors leading to the bedrooms were all closed, but Mike could hear someone thumping hard on them from the other side, as though something were trying to break it out.

But all of this was nothing compared to the walls themselves. The walls were drenched in blood and slime as though they were part of a grotesque canvas, a grisly scene that looked like it had been taken straight out of a horror move. As Mike stared dumbly at blood dripping from the ceiling, he heard the sound of two high-pitched giggles echoing ominously around him.

"What the fuck?" Mike finally found his voice. "Like, I'm not scared, I'm just baffled as all hell. Like, how is this even possible? How the fuck did you get all this slime and blood to mess up my walls with? Where did you even find it to begin with? There's no way. There's just no way you could've done all this in just 15 minutes without me hearing a thing! This can't be real…"

The man's eyes widened in realization, and the giggles suddenly cut off, along with the banging behind the doors, "…because it's not," he finished softly.

"Shit!" he swore he could hear Cassidy's voice swear faintly, which only served to heighten his suspicions. Mike carefully approached one of the gore-covered walls, raised his fist and, taking a deep breath, swung his hand into the wall. His hand made contact with the blood…and passed right through it, hitting dry, solid wall behind.

"Hah!" Mike cheered in triumph. "I knew it!" Even as he watched, the blood and slime vanished from the walls, and the insane eyes on the pictures returned to their normal appearance. The lights flickered back on, and the hallway looked exactly how it should have, all except for the pictures that were still hanging crookedly on the wall.

"Dammit!" a voice that sounded like Susie's grumbled. "We were so close!"

"I'll admit it, this wasn't a bad attempt," Mike offered his commentary to his unseen daughters. "I can tell you went all out, and that blood and slime illusion was actually a really nice touch," he admitted, before smirking. "But there were still some cracks in the illusion, and once I figured those out…well, it didn't take long for the whole thing to fall apart, did it?"

He looked at his watch. "More than half the time's gone by. Maybe you'll do a better job if you guys all work together? We'll just have to wait and see." As Mike entered his study and closed his door behind them, Susie and Cassidy materialized, both of them looking frustrated.

"Aww man!" Cassidy complained. "I thought we had it! I really thought we had it! That was the most I've ever done with my illusion powers, too!"

"I know, Cass," Susie agreed sulkily. "Even I was seriously creeped out by that."

"You guys haven't had any luck either?" Jeremy floated through the floor, followed by the rest of his siblings.

"Nope!" Liz sighed. "Dad just isn't scared by anything!"

"It makes sense if you think about it," Charlie pointed out. "Dad's been through a lot of scary shit even in his early life, some of which we put him through." The fact that only faint traces of guilt appeared on the ghosts' faces, a brief expression that quickly disappeared, was something that she found encouraging. "And even outside of that, Dad knows that we won't do anything to hurt him, and that he doesn't really have anything to fear from us. I don't think there's anything we could do faze him."

"We only have 10 minutes left!" Gabe pointed out. "We have to think of something!"

"But what, though?" Fritz challenged. "We've already tried all our ideas, and nothing worked. And I honestly don't think we'd have more luck even if we combined everything we did just now and did it all at once."

"Does anybody have any ideas?" Cassidy asked desperately. "I really want to win this."

"…I have one idea that might work," Charlie suggested slowly. All eyes turned to her, the only ghost among them who had not tried to scare Mike yet. "One that's kind of unpleasant if I'm being honest, and if it was just me I'd rather not use it. How badly do you want to scare Dad?"

"Dad was the one who wanted us to try and scare him," Jeremy pointed out. "At this point, anything goes."

Charlie took a deep breath. "Okay." She focused and transmitted a telepathic message to each of the ghost kids, their eyes widening as they listened to Charlie's idea.

"Wow…" Gabe whistled. "That is…dark."

"I definitely wouldn't have been okay with this a year ago, that's for sure," Jeremy remarked.

"If this doesn't at least seriously creep Dad out, I don't know what will," Susie added.

"So how are we going to act this out?" Liz wondered, part of her a little uncomfortable about what she was about to do.

"Well…" Charlie thought for a moment, "we can do it like this…or we can do it this way…"

Minute Twenty-Five

"Wonder what they're gonna plan this time," Mike mused as he typed an email to one of his friends in his study. "Their time is almost up. Can they come up with something working together? Seven minds can easily do something when two can't, after all…"

There was another flash of lightning, and the lights in the study flickered and died for the second time. Mike groaned. "Oh, great…" he muttered. "Not this shit again."

"Daddy…" a child's voice groaned in the distance. Mike's ears immediately caught onto the fact that it was Gabe's…and it sounded like he was in pain.

"Help us, daddy…" another voice pleaded. "It hurts so much…"

Mike looked around warily, genuinely nervous for the first time since they had started the contest. "What's going on?" he demanded. "Where are you guys?"

The ghost children slowly floated into the room, phasing through the walls…and Mike's jaw dropped in genuine horror at what he was seeing. They were no longer in the forms they had worn in life, but rather as the tortured, broken bodies he had seen when they had first declared their rage at the revelation of Mike's abusive father. Their eyes were now gaping black voids from which black ichor poured down their cheeks and stained their clothes, and the wounds that William Afton had inflicted upon them when he had ruthlessly butchered them were plain to see upon their bodies. Even after two years, Mike could clearly remember each and every one of them: the vicious slash across Gabe's chest, the stab wound in Susie's heart, Fritz's sliced-open neck. There were even new ones that Mike could have sworn he hadn't seen before – Charlie had several bleeding stab wounds all over her upper body along with multiple finger marks on her neck…providing some disturbing implications over exactly how she had died at the hands of William Afton all those decades ago.

But even this paled in comparison to Liz's twisted new form. Just like they had before, her eyes were glowing bright green, casting an eerie glow over the darkened study. And the first victim of Baby had many vicious wounds and stabs all over her body, a grisly picture of how her body had been utterly mangled by Baby's insides. And yet this was not the most grotesque aspect of her undeathly carcass. Looking at her sides, Mike shuddered as he saw that both sides of her abdomen had been crushed inward, the crush marks covered in blood with the faint outlines of Liz's insides just barely visible underneath. Out of all the ghost kids, her death could easily be regarded as one of the most brutal, made all the worse by the fact that Liz was clutching her sides in apparent agony.

"Daddy…" she groaned. "What's…what's happening to me?"

"It's all coming back now…" Gabe gasped out, black tears pouring out of his eyes. "All the pain…all the hurt."

"He did this to us, daddy…" Susie wailed. "He tore our bodies to pieces!"

"Help us, daddy!" Cassidy begged, her voice joining the chorus of agonized groans and pleas from her siblings. "Help us!"

"Wh…what the hell?" Mike exclaimed, a twisted combination of shock and horror roiling in his mind. Why did his kids suddenly look like the victims of brutal murders that they had once been, when in every moment before this they had appeared as perfectly healthy as a ghost could be? Why NOW all of times? Even when Nightmare had first attacked them, even when Nightmare Springtrap had escaped from the depths of Hell and attacked their home, the kids had been mostly fine? Had they somehow been wounded by that monster, and the results of that battle hadn't taken their toll until just now?

What was going on?

"Do something, dad!" Jeremy pleaded.

"You saved us before, save us again!" Gabe exclaimed.

"Make it stop!" Liz begged. "Make the pain stop!"

"Help us!" they all wailed. "HELP US!"

"All right!" Mike shouted frantically, his rational thought completely shut down as his mind went into autopilot. "You scared me, all right? You guys win! Enough is enough!"

And the moment he said those words, the atmosphere of the room did a complete reversal. Instantly, the lights of the study flickered back on, and the ghosts abruptly transformed into their normal, healthy appearances. The children grinned at each other, delighted that the plan they had formed together had worked.

"We did it, guys!" Jeremy cheered. "We scared Dad!"

"Damn, Charlie…" Cassidy whistled. "This idea was genius! Even I was creeped out by our performance!"

Gabe looked at the clock. "We almost blew it too, there was one minute left before the game ended and we lost."

"Yeah…we won…" Liz muttered. For some reason, she didn't feel as excited or as happy about their victory compared to the rest of her siblings. There was something about it that just felt wrong to her. She cast a surreptitious glance at Charlie, and judging from the expression on the teen's face, she didn't seem much happier about it either.

"Well, no shit you guys won!" Mike ranted, unable to hide the frustration from his voice. "I literally just saw you turn into bloodied corpses with God knows how many wounds all over your bodies! Not only that, you guys were screaming bloody murder crying for me to help you when I had no idea how! No wonder I was scared, I actually thought you guys had somehow gotten seriously hurt and I had no idea why or how to help you!"

The man's words wiped the smiles and grins off the ghosts' faces as quickly as they had appeared. They had been so focused on the game that they hadn't stopped to consider just how badly their appearance might have affected their father, or thought about how things might look from his perspective.

They might have scared him, true, but in their eagerness they had done so in the wrong way. The worst way.

"Oh, God…" Gabe mumbled, his expression clearly disgusted with himself. "We took this way too far, didn't we?"

"Shit…" Fritz shifted guiltily. "I didn't think about it like that."

"Oh my God, Dad…" Charlie breathed out, utterly horrified. "This was mostly my idea. I'm so, so sorry…"

"Don't worry about it," Mike shook his head and brushed the apology off with a wave of his hand. "I told you guys to scare me, and I didn't give you any restrictions. Anything was fair game, including this."

"Still…" Liz sighed. "This just wasn't right, doing what we did."

"Maybe," Mike agreed. "Maybe you did take things a little too far. But you know what? You're hardly alone in that. Everyone's made that kind of mistake at some point or another, including me." In his mind, he looked back at the battle he had waged against William Afton, and the horrific and outright demonic torments he had unleashed upon the murderer's soul long after he had been beaten and broken. Though he cared nothing for the monster's fate and wished William as much suffering as Nightmare could heap upon him in Hell, he did regret fully giving into his wrath and hatred when both his mother and his oldest daughter had been present to witness the depths to which he could sink. His eyes passed over Charlie, and from the understanding look in her eyes, he knew that she perfectly understood what he was referring to.

"We're not actually hurt or in pain or anything like that," Gabe commented, just to make absolutely certain his dad knew it was just a trick. "That was just some visual effects we did on ourselves. Kinda like how we accidentally showed what happened to us back when you told us about your past, only this time we had full control over how we showed ourselves."

"Speaking of showing…" Mike decided to change the topic. "How did you guys get so good with your illusions? Those were some of the best I've ever seen from you guys." He shook his head in amazement. "I mean, Cassidy, that was you set up the bloodied hallway and the crazy eyes on the pictures, right?"

Cassidy giggled. "Yep!" she confirmed. "It was one of my biggest illusions ever. I haven't ever made an entire place look different before!"

Mike whistled and turned to Gabe and Jeremy. "And you two…which one of you did the Freddy animatronic illusions?"

"I did," Gabe answered, "but we both did the tornado together." He suddenly remembered the mess he had left and groaned. "Aaaaaand we're gonna have to pick all of that up. Great."

"We had a lot of time to practice doing whatever we could think of because we were so bored…" Fritz explained.

Mike sighed. "Yeah, I know a lot of this month has been boring, but I needed the time to rest and catch up on things that adults have to deal with all the time." He smiled at them. "How about this? I'll try to finish all my work up as soon as possible for today, we watch a movie, and then tomorrow we go spend the day out of the house doing whatever we can think of. What do you guys say?"

"That sounds great, dad!" the kids chorused. One by one, they hugged their father, then turned to leave the room. Once they were gone, Mike's smile faded slightly and he let out a huge sigh.

"Yeeesh…" he breathed as he looked out at the thunderstorm. "Seeing them looking like that was creepy as hell, not gonna lie. But honestly," he mused, "I'd rather see that kind of thing now, when it doesn't mean anything, instead of earlier when that fucker Afton was running around my house."

He shook his head. "Fucking hell," he muttered, "if I ever see anything like that again, it'll be too fucking soon, that's for sure."

/

A/N: Well, that certainly took a bit of a dark turn at the end, didn't it? And those of you who are more familiar with my writing style are probably already wondering, "Oh fuck, what did he mean in that last paragraph?" Well keep in mind, if I DO have a hidden meaning in my words, it might not be the one you're thinking of.

I'll be honest, I didn't start this chapter until very late in my two week cycle. The first reason simply being that after writing the two very long and research-heavy amusement park chapters back to back, I needed a break to recover from all that work and prevent myself from burning out

The second, and probably more important reason, is that I have actually started picking up my drawing hobby back up again lately! And while I don't plan on drawing anything FNAF related for the most part (I can't draw humans and I can't draw FNAF animatronics worth a shit), I DO have drawn designs for the Shadow army that Mike summoned against William Afton, as well as both Dark!Mike AND Enraged Dark!Mike. I plan on making a Deviantart account soon and posting those up, at which point you'll be able to see just what I had envisioned for Mike's inner demons.

And that's all for now! The next chapter absolutely WILL be UCN, no question about it. Hope you guys enjoyed this little filler chapter in the meantime, though!