A/N: Interview season is underway, and my first interview went fairly decently for a first time. But that's not what we're here for, it's time for some more FNaF for you all!
Guest: If we're talking about the William Afton that tried to attack Mike and the family as Nightmare Springtrap and is currently roasting in Hell, probably not. As for Glitchtrap…that remains to be seen.
Jack Moseley: Well we're about to find out, aren't we? 😊
Oh Hey: I…honestly forgot about him lol. I need to remember to bring him back into the story soon.
Kellensills: I can't answer that because spoilers.
Jack0Lanterns: I mean, they knew that there was SOME connection. But they just figured that William Afton was mostly doing his own thing with CBEAR and that any connection was tangential at best.
RicAlbuquerque: Would you believe me when I say that I know next to nothing about any of those games? XD And I don't have time to look them up either because it's residency interview season.
FrostTheFrozenFox: Plushtrap is a Nightmare though, so that falls under the bigger problem of "how do I incorporate the nightmares in this version of VR Help Wanted?" I have an idea in mind but nothing firmly established yet.
Clown2107: Sister Location is a definite yes, Curse of Dreadbear is undetermined.
SuperDreadnought101: I can't answer that because spoilers. And as for your story, I'll give it a read when you post it, but I can't promise that I'll fully follow it.
Sonicflash78: I can't answer that because spoilers.
ThomasTheTank: Interesting scenario you've got there. I do agree that the realistic scenario would be the one that is most likely to occur; the "golden ending" is a little too out there in terms of the probability of it happening. Although there's nothing that any living person on Earth can do to harm either the ghost kids or William Afton physically, but that's not the point lol.
AlchemyWriter: You'll just have to wait and see!
Chapter 118 – VR Help Wanted Part 4
"Please tell me you're joking," Baby muttered once Rockstar Freddy finished explaining what he had seen. "You're telling me that Fazbear Entertainment somehow knows about Circus Baby's Entertainment and Rental?"
"They knew enough about it to make a plushie," Rockstar Freddy confirmed.
Circus Baby grabbed her forehead with her hand and sat down heavily on the couch. "You've got to be kidding me…I don't want people to know about that!" she exclaimed, her voice filled with agitation. "I don't want everyone to know about the kind of person I was like back then!"
"And we didn't tell Scott about this either," the Security Puppet added. "Back then, we didn't even know you were gonna be with us. We only told Scott enough to make three games."
"So how the FUCK do they know about CBEAR?" Baby shouted. "If Fazbear Entertainment finds out what they did about William Afton's fucked up experiments…"
"All right, Liz, let's tone it down…" Mike intervened, putting a gentle hand on her shoulder. "I don't think we need to worry about that just yet. Keep in mind, we knew that there was always some kind of connection between the Freddy Fazbear and Circus Baby franchises. I mean, both of them have a Freddy and a Foxy, for starters. And they had a certain psychopathic dickhead in charge of them both at one point. It makes sense that Fazbear Entertainment would at least have some knowledge of the Circus Baby animatronics."
Rockstar Freddy shrugged. "Maybe they ran out of animatronics to put in and decided to throw a few from CBEAR just because?" he suggested.
Mike snorted. "Could be. Was the Baby plushie the only thing you found in that game?"
"So far," Rockstar Freddy confirmed.
"Then I don't think we have too much to worry about…yet," Mike quickly added the last word. "We haven't seen anything about your past, especially anything about Remnant. Fazbear Entertainment might be corrupt and incompetent to the point that it puts other corrupt and incompetent businesses to shame, but they're an entirely different kind of evil from William Afton. Let's not worry about it until we start getting reasons to worry about it," he advised.
Circus Baby took a deep breath and calmed down. "All right..." she agreed. "Maybe I am overreacting." She wouldn't be completely convinced of that until they had gone through the rest of this game with a fine-toothed comb, but her father's reassurance would do for now.
"Like I said, let's wrap it up for tonight and start things up again tomorrow," Mike suggested. "We don't have to stay up all night, and trying to rush through things doesn't help us anyway."
"Sounds good, Dad!" the animatronics agreed. The ghosts departed from their metal bodies and went to their rooms to sleep for the night, Mike following soon after. The next day, they didn't waste any time in returning to their animatronics bodies to pick up where they had left off. As it turned out, Gabe had woken up a bit early and decided to play the Freddy level in "Parts and Services," since Jeremy and Susie had already done their respective animatronic levels.
"Going a little out of order, aren't we?" Rockstar Chica pointed out.
Rockstar Freddy shrugged sheepishly. "I kinda wanted to get it done too, you know?" he admitted. "Since you two already did your levels. I did find a Tape and two coins, so it turned out to be worth it in the end. Didn't get a chance to listen to them, though."
"Fair enough, but maybe you should wait a bit longer for your next turn," Rockstar Bonnie suggested. "Maybe we should let Fritz and Cassidy have their turns now."
"That's fair," Rockstar Freddy agreed. "They didn't get a chance to play the game yesterday."
"Yarrr…why do we be wasting all this time?" Rockstar Foxy interrupted. "I want to play the VR game!"
"Why do you keep saying things like Yarr and Ahoy in your sentences?" Rockstar Chica questioned.
"Because I'm a pirate, matey!" Rockstar Foxy declared proudly.
Mike resisted the urge to facepalm, although some of the animatronics didn't even bother to resist the urge. "You know what…sure, go ahead," he mumbled.
"Yes!" Rockstar Foxy pumped his free hand into the air and grabbed the VR headset, eagerly putting it on. When he found himself back in the main hub, Fritz made a point of completely ignoring the Spring Bonnie entity entirely, not wanting to give it the satisfaction of even acknowledging its presence. He went through the different games and levels on the menu, trying to find one that his siblings hadn't already done before and that caught his interest.
"Ooh, this looks fun!" Fritz pointed at a set of levels labelled Vent Repair. There were only two levels available, one of which was blacked out by static. The other showed a dark vent shaft with Mangle's head peering out of it. "And it features a different form of Foxy as the main animatronic? I'm down!"
He pressed the level and the world around him faded to black. When it returned, Fritz found himself in a very different environment compared to anything he was familiar with. Instead of an office, the former Foxy inhabitant was now in a small, cramped room. There were 3 metal doors leading to vents in front of him and to the left and right, with several pipes running above and below the doors. There was also a wall covered by a gray grate behind him, and another circular grate covering the floor.
"I don't remember seeing any of this shit before," Fritz muttered. In the back of his mind, he tried to recall everything he knew about the Freddy Fazbear's pizzerias of the past, both the 1987 and 1993 locations. But he was almost certain that there was nothing like this vent system that he had ever seen before. The 1993 pizzeria had been relatively simplistic in design, and Fritz was pretty sure it didn't even have a vent system to begin with. As for the 1987 pizzeria, while it did have a vent system, it was a very simplistic one, with just two vent passageways going from two of the party rooms to the office.
If there was a complex vent system running underneath any of the Fazbear Entertainment pizzerias, it sure wasn't anything that Fritz was familiar with.
Before he started, the former Foxy inhabitant decided to look around his small shaft to see if there were any secrets to be found. His vigilance was rewarded with a tape hidden underneath the bottom set of pipes underneath the right vent door, but otherwise he couldn't find anything significant. "I'll have to listen to that tape later once I'm done here," he thought.
With nothing else to do, Fritz reached out and pushed a glowing yellow button to his left near the entrance to the center vent. "Welcome to Vent Repair," a disembodied male voice greeted him. "Fazbear Entertainment prides itself on having the most comfortable facilities. Each facility is set to a perfect 72 degrees all the time."
"You're kidding, right?" Fritz deadpanned. "You're telling me that Fazbear Entertainment actually gave a shit about crap like this when they didn't give the slightest fuck about security for night guards or children?" He snorted in disdain. "Actually, you know what, forget what I just said. I can totally see their priorities being this fucked up."
"The four active indicator lights," Fritz noticed the panel with four green lights above the middle door and made a note of them, "mean we have a well-functioning ventilation system. Your head lamp should protect you from any critters who may have stumbled into the ducts."
"I'm guessing that's Mangle?" he guessed. He hadn't seen any other animatronics other than Mangle mentioned in the game.
"As a certified vent technician, you should need no instruction. However, in case of an emergency, it is important to remember that as the vent technician, you should never, under any circumstances…" the HandUnit voice suddenly glitched out and the lights shut off, plunging the entire shaft into darkness.
"Ah, shit…" Fritz muttered. He already had a bad feeling about this, a feeling that steadily worsened as the front vent door slowly slid open with an agonized groan. Only the edge of the shaft closest to the door was visible, with the rest of it being plunged in complete and utter darkness. The only thing that Fritz could see was a glowing yellow button on the ground. He reached out and pressed it, causing the button to turn green. Immediately, a switch moved out of the wall and into view, one that had a red arrow pointing to the bottom and a green arrow pointing to the top. Fritz moved the switch level up so that it faced the green arrow.
Up above him, one of the lights on the progress panel suddenly flickered back on. Fritz's head lamp also chose to flash on at this time, revealing Mangle in the vent shaft a few inches away. The redheaded boy yelped as the animatronic looked up at him in surprise, but instead of attacking Mangle quickly scurried away into the darkness. For whatever reason. it seemed that the broken Toy version of Foxy was scared off by the head lamp.
"Oh…" Fritz muttered. "I get it. I have to fix the mechanisms in the vents while making sure Mangle doesn't get the jump on me. All right, seems simple enough." He scowled. "or at least it would be if HandUnit had bothered to give me some actual fucking instructions."
His thoughts were interrupted by the same groaning sound from before, and Fritz quickly realized that the vent door to his right was opening. It was still mostly pitch-black, but Fritz could see some red gears grinding together at the base of the shaft near the entrance, and some sort of barrier blocking the rest of the shaft in the far distance.
Fritz was about to investigate around the vent to look for another mechanism when he noticed something in the gears. "Hey, is that…?" he reached out and grabbed something, which to his delight turned out to be a coin. The sound of cheering kids echoed around him and the coin vanished in a flash of light. Fritz grinned at his discovery, but his smile faded as he heard clanging sounds approaching him from the vent he had worked on before. Fritz whirled around and shined his head lamp into the shaft. Mangle had attempted to sneak up on him while he had been distracted with the coin, but once the light was focused on her she quickly vanished back into the depths of the vent shaft again.
"You're not getting me so easily!" he promised. He focused his attention back on the newly opened vent shaft, searching for any possible mechanisms he could work on. He finally found a switch partially hidden at the top of the shaft (which he only found after warding off Mangle again), and pulling it revealed another switch on the wall right next to the entrance. Fritz flipped this new switch and another green light on the progress panel flickered on. "Man, this is easy!" he thought. He looked around expectantly, waiting for the third vent door to open, but the only change he noted was that the barrier previously blocking the right vent shaft swinged open, alerting Fritz to the fact that Mangle would likely try to attack him from the right side now.
"Wait, why didn't the third door open?" Fritz wondered, confused, as he moved his head light back and forth between the two open vent shafts to block off any Mangle attacks. It wasn't until several seconds later that he noticed that a large plume of steam was billowing out from a set of pipes near the right vent door…right next to a wheel.
"Do I spin this?" he wondered. He reached out and spun the wheel, and was rewarded with the steam being shut off. "Yes!" Fritz grinned at his success, though his euphoria was short-lived as another plume of steam burst out, this time from a pipe near the bottom left corner of the mid shaft passageway. Knowing what to do now, Fritz turned the wheel on the pipe, shutting off the leaking steam. No more pipes started leaking, but this time a button flashed on near the progress panel. Fritz pressed it, and another switch appeared this time in the elevator shaft itself.
"That was a bit more complicated," Fritz admitted as the third light on the progress panel reactivated, and this time the third vent door on the left finally opened as he had originally expected. Fritz flashed his light into the new shaft and jumped as he saw Mangle again, who looked up in shock and quickly disappeared into the darkness of the shaft.
"What do I need to do here?" he wondered. There was a series of brightly colored buttons on the wall that lit up when he pushed them, but when he pushed all four of them it didn't have any effect. Scowling, Fritz looked around for anything else he could find and saw a large panel on the floor of the vent labelled with caution tape that had a handle on top of it. Fritz pulled it open and saw a red arrow pointing downward. Curious, he peered inside and saw a glowing circular light that cycled through different colors. Red, Green, Orange, and Blue, before finally disappearing.
"Oh, I get it!" Fritz realized excitedly. "I need to push the buttons in the correct order!" He was about to push them, when he heard clanging sounds echoing from behind him. His eyes widened in horror as he realized that he had forgotten to check on Mangle.
"Oh, FUCK!" the former Foxy inhabitant exclaimed as he swiveled around, but it was too late. Mangle leapt at him from the shadows, biting frenziedly at his head. "GAH!" he yelped as the screen dissolved into static and he found himself staring at the Game Over screen, which showed the message "Faz Fact: Kids Love Pizza!" on the TV screen. "DAMMIT!" he shouted, furious with himself. "I can't believe I fucking forgot to check on Mangle! I was doing so well and then I completely dropped the ball at the end. Fuck!"
Scowling, Fritz reset the game, determined to not make the same mistake again. Now that he knew what to do, the parts of the Vent Repair level that he had already done seemed to zoom by quickly, and in just a few minutes he was back at the multicolored flashing light in the left vent. This time, he made damn sure to check all 3 vents every time he heard even the faintest clanging noise, making sure that Mangle got nowhere near close enough to attack him. This time, the order of the colors had changed, going Green, Blue, Orange, Red. Fritz pushed the buttons in the proper order, and sighed in relief when the yellow power box above the buttons opened up and revealed another switch.
Fritz pulled the lever on the switch and the vent doors slowly began to close, the lights turning back on as the fourth and final green light on the progress panel flickered on. Apparently, fixing the vents had also fixed the lights and power systems in the process. "A perfect 72 degrees. Good job," the HandUnit praised. "See you next time."
"YES!" Fritz cheered as the shaft faded away. "I won! That was freaking easy once I remembered to actually keep an eye on Mangle!" He found himself at the Prize Won room that his siblings had visited earlier whenever they had won their games, and when he opened the gift music box he found a soda bottle with a red and blue label on it. "Foxy Cove Cooler…" he read the label, before shrugging. "Eh, at least it's a Foxy item, I guess." He raised the prize to his mouth in an imitation of drinking…and heard a large crunching sound. "Wait, did I just eat the soda bottle? That was weird…" he wondered as he returned to the main screen.
The second Vent Repair level had been unlocked, and Fritz jolted in the air as he realized what it was. Unlike Mangle, the animatronic in the second level was not anything he had seen before, but the former Foxy inhabitant knew what it was. He only had Liz's descriptions to go on, but even that was enough for him to recognize the tangled amalgamation of wires and animatronic parts, its face covered by a clown mask.
Somehow, Fazbear Entertainment had learned about the existence of Ennard…and knew enough about him and CBEAR to implement him into a game level.
"Oh, shit…" Fritz breathed, a sinking feeling in his stomach. "Liz REALLY isn't going to be happy about this…" He contemplated turning off the VR headset and telling Liz right away, but decided to wait until he was done playing his round first. He still wanted to do at least one more level since the last one had gone by so quickly, and he needed to listen to the Tapes that he and Gabe had collected this morning anyway. As he flipped through the different game modes and moved on to "Parts and Services," his eyes caught sight of one of the levels and lit up with delight. "Ooh, ooh ooh!" he exclaimed, jabbing a finger right at Foxy's level. "That right there, let's go!"
The world vanished around him, and he found himself in a dim room. Foxy was sitting in front of him, but the animatronic was missing his head entirely with sparks occasionally flying out of it, emphasizing his already dilapidated state in comparison to the other animatronics. There were two drawers, one on either side of Foxy, each with two dressers, one on each side of the animatronic, each with two sets of drawers. The drawer to Fritz's right had a Foxy plush on top of it, while the one on the left had Foxy's missing head.
"Welcome to Parts and Services!" HandUnit greeted him. "Foxy has been out of commission for quite some time. This series of simple repairs should return him to full working condition. First, carefully pick up and place Foxy's head on his endoskeleton."
Fritz scowled as he saw just how worn-down and disheveled his favorite animatronic really was. "Great…" he muttered. He honestly didn't remember much about how repairs for Foxy had originally went he was still possessing the animatronic, especially since Foxy had been left Out-of-Order in Pirate's Cove for an extended period of time. Still, it couldn't be that hard…right?
"First things first," he thought. "Look for any collectibles." Fritz looked around his little workspace, and was pleased to discover another Tape on the floor to the left of Foxy. He also discovered a coin hidden underneath the Foxy plushie, but couldn't find anything else. He was about to do as HandUnit instructed and put Foxy's head on the animatronic, when an idea suddenly popped in his head.
"Man," Fritz smirked, "I'm probably gonna get jumpscared for this, but I just can't resist!" He took Foxy's head and put it on his own virtual head, half-expecting for Foxy to attack him at any moment. To his surprise, however, the animatronic made no move to strike and punish him for his goofing off. His surprise only increased when a coin appeared on the drawer where Foxy's head had been seconds earlier. "No way," he exclaimed incredulously. "The game actually rewarded me for putting on Foxy's head?" He grinned. "Damn, that is just too good!" Still chuckling to himself, he put Foxy's head on the animatronic's endoskeleton, which had only one eye with a yellow iris on its left.
The moment he put on Foxy's head, the animatronic started going, for lack of a better word…completely apeshit. Foxy started moving crazily and erratically in all directions, his head swinging back and forth, his body twisting and turning from one direction to the other, his arms and legs moving up and down with no discernable rhyme or reason whatsoever. If anyone had ever wondered exactly why Foxy had remained out-of-order for so long…well, now the reason was abundantly clear. "What the FUCK?" Fritz exclaimed in disbelief. He definitely didn't remember acting like this back when he was still Foxy.
"Geez, Fritz…" he could already hear Mike drawl in his head, "even in this game, your animatronic is a dysfunctional piece of shit." Right then and there, Fritz promised that he would never tell the rest of the family just how crazy Foxy was in this level. He knew he'd never hear the end of it.
"Oh no," HandUnit interrupted his thoughts with his monotone voice, "it looks like Foxy's proprietary servo motors are malfunctioning. It is recommended that you keep an eye on Foxy at all times. You will need to place new control fuses in the exposed receptacles to continue." Fritz could see several empty slots that were marked with small lines of color throughout Foxy's body. Again, the ghost child couldn't remember them being on his original body, but then again he had never really paid attention to how his old animatronic worked.
"Retrieve the fuse from Drawer #1 that matches Foxy's leg receptacle," HandUnit instructed. "To avoid bodily harm, wait for Foxy's legs to stop moving before inserting the control fuse."
Fritz did as he was instructed and opened the drawer, revealing several fuses that were each marked with a different color line scheme. The receptacle in Foxy's leg was marked with orange lines at the plus side and blue lines in the minus side, and there was only one fuse in the drawer that matched that pattern. Fritz lifted up the fuse, but as he moved it towards Foxy's leg he suddenly dropped it.
"Fuck!" Fritz cursed as the room suddenly darkened. "Oh, shit…" he groaned, knowing that he had just fucked up. Sure enough, Foxy leapt out of the darkness, getting up into his face and screaming in rage. "Gah!" Fritz yelped as the room erupted into static and he found himself at the Game Over screen. "Dammit!" he muttered as he restarted the level. "I knew I messed up the moment I dropped that fuse…"
He went through the beginning of the level again until he found himself back at the same place he had been before. The leg receptacle had different colors this time, but Fritz was able to put the correct fuse in the receptacle without any difficulty. The moment he did so, Foxy's legs stopped moving crazily, signaling that he had regained control of his legs.
Fritz sighed in relief as he was rewarded with a congratulation message, though this was soon followed with another warning that a previous employee had placed an incorrect fuse in Foxy's chest, which in reality needed to be placed in Foxy's right arm. "Scrub…" Fritz thought. He did as HandUnit instructed, taking out the fuse in Foxy's chest and placing it in his right arm, making sure that neither of them moved as he did so. He was pretty certain that if he tried to place the fuses while those parts were still moving, he'd be greeted with another jumpscare. And the former Foxy inhabitant had no intention of letting that happen again.
"This isn't so hard," Fritz commented dryly. "Why the hell couldn't they have just fixed Foxy back in the 1990s if it was this simple?" Even with his clouded memories of the past, he was pretty sure he hadn't attacked anyone during maintenance repairs, only during the night shift, so without the danger of him attacking a repair worker this shouldn't have been all that hard to figure out. HandUnit proceeded to give him instructions to find the remaining chest fuses in Drawers #2 and #4, and place them in their appropriate positions.
There were two receptacles on Foxy's main body, one on the outer shell and one deeper inside his chest. Fritz could see the one on the outside clearly, but he had a little more trouble seeing the one on the inside. He was able to place the fuse on the outer chest receptacle easily enough, but he had to squint to see the inner chest receptacle. "Is that…" he squinted to get a closer look, "…green-blue-green? I THINK that's what it is?"
Fritz lifted up the suspected fuse and moved it closer to the receptacle, but he had mistimed the pattern of Foxy's patterns. Just as he was about to place the fuse in, Foxy's body swung back and forth…right when his hand was touching it.
"Wait, no, no, NO!" Fritz babbled in panic, but it was too late. Once again, darkness descended upon the maintenance room, and seconds later Foxy leapt at him again, wordlessly yelled bloody murder as he threw Fritz right back into the Game Over screen. "DAMMIT!" Fritz howled as he furiously pressed the restart button. "Not again! I was close!"
The former Foxy inhabitant plowed through the maintenance tasks on his animatronic with a vengeance, determined to make absolutely damn sure this time that he didn't make any mistakes. It took him several seconds in particular to properly identify the correct fuse that he needed to put in the inner chest receptacle, but eventually he was able to identify and put the right one in without any difficulties. With the fuses now properly in place, most of Foxy's body had stopped moving so frenziedly, and HandUnit confirmed that Foxy had now regained control over his body. "Good job," the mechanized voice praised. "Retrieve Foxy's eye from Drawer #3. When Foxy's eye patch is fully open, place his eye back into the eye socket."
"Should be simple enough after going through all those fuses," Fritz muttered. He opened the drawer and saw several eyes scattered in it, all with different colors. Fritz found the eye he was looking for to the left, an eye with a yellow iris that perfectly matched Foxy's left eye. He reached out and picked it up, watching Foxy carefully. He had to wait to make sure that both Foxy's head stopped moving and his eyepatch was open, not daring to mess up since that would mean another jumpscare and having to start the entire level all over again when he was so close. Fritz carefully placed the eye in the moment the eyepatch opened…and breathed a sigh of relief when it slid in without any further complications. Foxy was still moving his head back and forth and moving his mouth open and shut, but as far as Fritz could tell there was nothing more he needed to do.
"Well done," HandUnit praised, confirming Fritz's thoughts. "This concludes all your Parts and Services tasks. Pirate Cove can now be reopened."
"YES!" Fritz cheered as the sound of kids cheering echoed in the background. "Finally, I'm done! I would've been so mad if I screwed it up for a third time at the end…" he muttered as he was transported over to the victory room. His mood was further elevated by the prize he won from the gift music box, a Foxy action figure.
"A perfect prize after everything I've been through," Fritz smirked as he returned to the main hub. As he did so, he decided to take a look at the Spring Bonnie figure to his right. Was it just him, or did the figure seem a little closer than what his siblings had described? And the way it looked…the others had described it as being almost see-through with a pale green glow like a ghost, but it seemed a little more…solid…than what he had been expecting? The Spring Bonnie was still waving, so its behavior hadn't changed at least.
"I'll need to tell the others about this," he thought as he transported himself to the Tape Room. There were three new tapes now, bringing the total they had found up to 9. He took Tape 7, the one that Gabe had found earlier, and put it in.
"Jeremy complained of nightmares when he came in this morning," Tape Girl reported. "He wasn't talking about it like someone telling a friend about his dreams, though. He was pale. Looked like he hadn't eaten in days. He spent an hour talking in Dale's office. But it didn't look like he was given much sympathy. When he came out, he went directly back to the testing room. He doesn't even jump anymore. Nothing scares him. He just stands there like he's talking to someone. Sometimes he rocks from side to side. We were told to leave him alone. I knew I was in line to do the testing next. They'd been prepping me for it. I guess they knew that Jeremy needed to be replaced soon."
"…what the fuck?" was the first thing Fritz blurted out as soon as the recording ended. Whoever this Jeremy person was, it sounded like he had seen or witnessed something terrible, something that had shaken him to his very core. The guy clearly sounded like he was on the verge of a mental breakdown. And the way the woman had described the video game company's reaction…they clearly hadn't given a single shit about the mental health of their beta tester. At best, they were throwing Jeremy over to the wolves by firing him and forgetting about him instead of actually doing something about his well-being.
At worst, they knew that something was seriously wrong with this game…and didn't care.
"This whole thing smells rotten as shit…" Fritz muttered as he replaced the tape with Tape 8 and turned it on.
"You can always tell when a company is getting ready to fire someone," Tape Girl's voice echoed out again. "They start giving out written warnings for silly things, making sure to make a paper trail and make a case for firing. Things that normally no one would care about suddenly become grave offenses, all worthy of being written and documented. I guess it works two ways, because it also encourages a person to quit rather than be scrutinized so heavily. I think Jeremy was too far gone to consider that option though. The thing about it is, I don't think they were going to fire him because of anything he was doing wrong. They just knew he'd seen something. They needed to discredit him."
Fritz's scowl deepened. The more and more he heard, the more it sounded like either the video game company or Fazbear Entertainment knew that there was something fundamentally wrong with this VR game. And instead of trying to actually spend time and effort to solve the problem, they were trying to run away from the problem like the cowards they were by firing the one tester who had been seriously and mentally affected by the game and pretending that nothing was wrong.
And he had an ever-growing feeling that the problem had to do with a certain figure that looked like Spring Bonnie…
"More of the fucking same from those fuckheads in Fazbear Entertainment," Fritz growled. He also made a note to ask his dad about what companies did when they were about to fire someone. From what Mike and Melody had described about Eisensteel, it was a good company that treated its employees well, so Fritz wasn't sure if what Tape Girl was describing applied to all of them, or if it was just reserved for corrupt and incompetent ones like Fazbear Entertainment and anything related to it.
There was one more Tape to listen to, and Fritz put it in the recorder to hear Tape Girl's voice for the last time, at least for now. "There was something that looked like a Halloween mask on the floor. I didn't understand. Ink must have spilled. It was only then that I heard a shuffle from the room and realized that Jeremy must be in there. I went back and peered in the window. I couldn't see his face. He had a visor covering his head. He had ink spilled on himself as well. The front of his shirt looked black in the dark room. He turned his head in my direction, but I don't think he knew I was there."
"…Now this is just getting creepy," Fritz mumbled. He didn't really understand what was going on, but it sounded like this Jeremy had gone through a mental breakdown in this room and splattered ink all over the room. He didn't really understand the whole Halloween mask thing though…why would Jeremy bring that in the room? He hadn't heard anything from Tape Girl suggesting that this had happened during Halloween.
"Didn't somebody mention earlier that the Tapes were out of order?" he wondered. "Maybe I should ask about that to the others."
With nothing else to do at the moment, and knowing that Cassidy would be wanting her turn to play the VR game soon, Fritz left the Tape Room and exited the game. When he took off the VR headset, Mike and the rest of his animatronic family were waiting for him.
"Something is seriously wrong with this game, something that the companies who worked on it knew about," Rockstar Foxy began, not even bothering with the pirate accent or mannerisms, not when the topic was a serious matter. "And there's something else…"
He turned to face Circus Baby, who immediately felt a shiver run down her metal spine. "They know, Liz. They know about Ennard."
/
A/N: Well, things are certainly getting rather spooky, aren't they? And Liz isn't going to be happy that Fazbear Entertainment knows about Ennard. Granted, they just know that it exists, but still…
Given that Fritz has a bit of a reputation for being a Butt-Monkey when it comes to video games, I couldn't resist the urge to continue that time-honored tradition here XD. However, I didn't want to make him incompetent, either. I think that one mistake on the Mangle Vent Repair level and two mistakes on the Foxy Parts and Services level is a fair amount, especially since the Foxy level is probably the hardest one out of the four Parts and Services levels, at least on normal mode.
We've gotten through more than half of the Tapes now, and Fritz can already tell that Glitchtrap looks a little more solid and had moved closer than what he remembers his siblings telling him. And though they haven't been exposed to the full details yet, they can already tell that something is very, very wrong with this game.
Anyways, that's all I have for now. Enjoy the more frequent uploads while you can, because this isn't a state of affairs that will last forever. Hope you guys enjoyed!
