A/N: All right guys, time for the Mike's volunteer squads to deal with the rogue animatronics! They might have the advantage of multiple useful tools and competent leadership under Mike, and the animatronics don't have the ability to cloak themselves. But that's still about 15 animatronics lurking within the depths of the factory, and they're not gonna make it easy…
Also, I've heard rumors that might be permanently shutting down. If that is the case, do not worry. Because unlike with "The Phantom Hero's Realm", I HAVE prepared a backup on one of my computers that has all the chapters for "Mike's New Ghostly Family" that I've ever written, minus the music chapters. If the unthinkable does happen and shuts down for good, or if this fic gets deleted off for whatever reason, I WILL be re-uploading this story of AAOx3 instead.
Chapter 170 – Fight Against the Machine, Part 2
It was decided to split the volunteers into two teams of 6, with two volunteer groups going by themselves and one volunteer group going with Mike and his bodyguards.
As far as Mike was concerned, this was the most disciplined decision he could make with regards to the composition of the teams. Going as a full group of 12 might have been the safest option when it came to defending themselves, but in practice it would dramatically slow their progress, both with regards to navigating through the factory and also the time it would take to neutralize all of the animatronics. It was already in the afternoon, and Mike had an instinctual feeling that prolonging the hunt for the animatronics until the nighttime would be both very problematic and very dangerous.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, going as four teams of 3 would ideally maximize their speed and efficiency in taking down animatronics. Unfortunately, it would also leave all of his individual trios the most vulnerable to animatronic attacks, especially if they came from multiple directions at once. Having learned the hard way just what Fazbear Entertainment's incompetence and tendency to cut corners could lead to, Mike refused to make the same mistake and potentially sacrifice safety for expediency.
Two teams of six would provide a balance between speed and security, allowing them to theoretically destroy animatronics in a timely manner while leaving them with a decent measure of security and defense from multiple attacks.
It wasn't ideal by any stretch of the imagination, especially if one of those teams would be operating outside of his direct supervision, but fortunately Mike had a solution that problem.
"Charlie, Jeremy, Susie, and Cassidy," he singled out the three ghosts. "I have special instructions for you. I want you three to follow the team of six that isn't going to be with me. And I want you to provide support."
"Provide support?" Cassidy repeated, confused. "But we can't reveal ourselves to them, talk to them, or do anything!"
"No," Mike agreed, "but you can still provide backup in other, more subtle ways. You can distract the animatronics from attacking them, put obstacles in the way, or otherwise slow them down. All while staying invisible and not being suspicious. Charlie knows what I'm saying, right Charlie?"
Invisibly, Charlie nodded. "I get what you're saying, dad, and don't worry. I'll guide them on what to do."
"Good," Mike replied, more curtly than usual given that they were about to infiltrate potentially dangerous territory. "I would say that the most you should do is something like dropping a storage crate on an animatronic to stop them from killing someone. Anything more extreme than that might be considered supernatural and we don't want that."
"You can count on us!" Jeremy promised as he and his sisters began to follow the other team, keeping a respectable but still close distance to them from different angles.
"Mr. Schmidt?" a nervous voice interrupted him, and Mike's attention came back to reality and towards the volunteer who had spoken. "Are you all right?"
"Yeah, I'm fine," Mike reassured him. "Just making sure that I'm not forgetting anything that could make our jobs easier or even flat-out save our asses. Let's get going."
His team split up from the other team at the elevator, choosing to enter it and go up a floor while the other team stayed on the ground level. While there wasn't an animatronic waiting for them in the elevator itself, Fritz scouted out ahead of the group and quickly discovered an animatronic waiting for them on the upper level close to where the elevator would land. "We got another one coming up, Dad…" he warned, before giving a frustrated sigh. "It's another Foxy."
"Oh, great," Mike groaned internally. Given the information he had gathered, so far Foxy was likely the most dangerous animatronic by virtue of the fact that the pirate fox would rush at and even leap at his targets, instead of just marching up to them and leaving themselves easy pickings. "Get ready for anything," he warned.
The elevator doors split open…and right in front of them was the Foxy that Fritz had warned about. "Holy shit!" one of the volunteers shouted, and the animatronic seemed to be just as surprised as they were, his mouth hanging open as he stood there for a few seconds.
Those few seconds were all that Mike needed, and he wasn't going to give the animatronic a chance to leap into the elevator straight at them and potentially injure or kill multiple people at the same time. Mike immediately took out his own shocker device and blasted Foxy with it, with Colm recovering quickly and doing the same. Hector activated his electric rod, ready to deal the finishing blows to the animatronic just as he had done for the other Foxy that had narrowly missed a lunge on his boss.
But he never got the chance to use it. The effect of two shocker devices on an animatronic at the same time turned out to be much greater than only one, causing the animatronic to instantly collapse onto the ground, leaving him completely helpless to do anything other than writhe around and shriek in both pain and rage. Unlike the other Foxy, which had only been hit with one shocker device, the chance of recovery or resistance was nonexistent, and when a volunteer from the other team added his own electric attack from a third shocker device onto Foxy, it was all over. Sparks flew out of the animatronic's joints and endoskeleton and he fell completely still, his appearance just as dead as it would have been had Hector struck his weak spots with his electric rod. Mike, Colm, and the volunteer all stopped their attacks, with Hector giving the metal corpse a good kick a few seconds later just to make sure that the animatronic was well and truly destroyed.
Mike let out a breath he realized he hadn't been holding. "Well then," he commented, keeping his tone deceptively light, "I wasn't expecting to do this kind of experimentation during our raid, but I guess we managed to prove our earlier theory right after all." He looked down at the fried corpse of the animatronic. "Multiple shocker devices at the same time CAN kill an animatronic by themselves after all. Three for sure, maybe 2 if we keep them on for a while."
"Wouldn't it be safer to do this instead of risking getting hit ourselves when going in to attack with the electric rods?" a man asked.
"A good idea in theory," Mike answered with a frown. "The problem is that these shocker devices only have so much battery in them, and there's a higher chance of them running out of power if we use them too much. And good luck trying to fight an animatronic and hitting its weak spots with your electric rod if you can't disable them first."
Everyone, both living and dead, cringed at the idea. "As bad as being shocked was, I don't think anybody would have survived maintenance on Circus Baby or the other Funtime animatronics if they didn't have that kind of thing to protect themselves with," Liz admitted somberly.
Before any of her family members could give any kind of comforting reassurance, a door close to them slammed open and another animatronic stomped out, this one being a copy of the classic Chica, complete with her iconic cupcake in hand. The chicken animatronic had undoubtedly been attracted by the loud noise that Foxy had made during the throes of being attacked, and she trained her eyes on the team of counter-attackers, her eyes narrowed menacingly.
"Oh crap, already? We just finished killing the last one!" Gabe complained.
Mike smirked. "If what we've seen before stays the same, this shouldn't be too hard to deal with," he declared as he gestured towards the team of volunteers who had decided to accompany him. "Colm, Hector, we'll let these guys handle this one. Just stick around as backup in case things go wrong."
"Sure thing, boss!" Hector replied as they moved aside to let their fellow teammates get their own shot at defeating an animatronic. Chica advanced towards them, her purple eyes glaring at them like a predator that had found its prey. As she got closer, one of the volunteers panicked and put on the Freddy mask over his head. Chica stopped for a second to process the action, before dismissing it and marching even closer towards the group until she was only a few steps away.
"SCREEEEEEEEEEEEE!" Chica screamed as she prepared to attack, but that was as far as she got. While the first volunteer might have panicked and tried to defend himself with a tool that was completely useless for that specific situation, his teammate already had the shocker device in hand and blasted Chica just as she reached out her free hand towards them. The animatronic shrieked and stumbled backward, but didn't look like she was about to go down just yet. The man kept up the electric attack, eventually forcing Chica down onto one knee after several seconds.
"I'm ready!" the third volunteer shouted, holding up his activated and charged electric rod. The moment his teammate stopped the shocker device, he leapt at Chica with his weapon held high, striking at Chica's exposed joints and vulnerable areas just as Hector had done earlier during his demonstration. Unlike the simultaneous multi-electric attack on Foxy, it had honestly look like Chica could've potentially endured and recovered from the single shocker device, but the more decisive follow-up had rendered that a moot point. Chica took a few more attacks than some of the other animatronics they had battled to go down, but eventually she fell to the ground in a broken heap, the cupcake and plate falling off of her hand and landing haphazardly floor seconds before the animatronic's corpse. "Heck yeah!" he exclaimed with a triumphant grin on his face. "We did it!"
Mike stroked his chin thoughtfully. "You did," he commented approvingly, "but there were a couple of things you can improve on. The first and most obvious one is that you wasted time with the Freddy mask. I know it's easy to panic and put it on, but that mask doesn't work on the classic animatronics, as you saw just now. The other big criticism I have is that you took WAY too long to start firing that shocker device. Chica was literally standing right in front of you and was only a second or two away from trying to kill you. You definitely do NOT want to wait that long before fighting back, and the whole point of the shocker device is so that you can attack the animatronics WITHOUT needing them to be that close to you. If you'd been just a bit slower, Chica would've started attacking, and somebody could have gotten seriously injured," he finished warningly.
The man who had held the shocker device shuffled about sheepishly. "I, uh…I kinda froze during that whole thing," he admitted reluctantly. "I'm still not used to all this. Sorry about that."
Mike nodded in understanding. "I'll be the first to admit that this can be scary," he responded sympathetically yet firmly, "but you're gonna have to get used to this real soon. When we're fighting enemies as dangerous as these animatronics, hesitating for just a second too long can mean disaster."
"I know," the employee acknowledged, "and I won't hesitate again. This should get easier the more times I do it."
"Well, you've got us to help you!" Hector gave the man a reassuring grin. "If things go to shit, we'll show these piles of scrap who's boss!"
"There don't seem to be any animatronics right around us!" Gabe reported. While they had been fighting Chica, he and his siblings had flown into the nearby rooms to spy out any potential animatronics. "You guys should be safe to move down the hallway for now."
"Great," Mike telepathically replied, before addressing his fellow living humans. "I think we're in the clear for the time being. Let's start searching, but keep your eyes peeled and your ears open. And if you feel like the power's going to start running out in your shocker devices, don't keep it to yourself!"
Meanwhile, on the First Floor…
"Uh, guys?" Cassidy pointed at the ceiling. "I think we have a problem."
Specifically, the former Golden Freddy inhabitant was pointing at the Mangle that had crawled onto the ceiling from one of the doors behind the group of 6 volunteers. Mangle was stealthily pursuing the group, making almost no noise compared to the loud clanking footsteps of the other animatronics they had faced so far. What made things even worse was that Mangle wasn't making any of the static radio noises that had been one of her defining characteristics back in the days of the 1987 pizzeria…and that meant the team hadn't noticed her yet even as she sneakily advanced closer and closer.
"What do we do?" Susie asked nervously. "We can't just appear in front of them and shout at them to turn around, they'd freak out!"
"Well, we have to come up with something to do!" Jeremy shot back. "Otherwise they'll get attacked, and it'll be our fault since we just watched and did nothing!"
As Mangle got even closer to the group of volunteers, who had paused in the middle of the hallway to check another one of the doors, a piece of metal suddenly fell out of Mangle's body and hit the ground. Mangle suddenly stopped in her tracks, her eyes widening in shock as she processed what had just happened. The ghosts couldn't be sure if this was because part of her body had fallen out, or if it was because she had just potentially given herself away.
But it gave Jeremy an idea. He channeled his energy into a tightly clenched fist and hit the ceiling with it. As his fist hit the ceiling, it made a distinct thumping sound, much louder than the sound of Mangle's body part falling out. It also removed any doubt of something behind the team, who slowly turned around with a look of growing dread on their faces.
"Holy shit!" the volunteers screamed as they all caught sight of Mangle, who was still trying to process how a random thumping sound had occurred right next to her for seemingly no reason whatsoever. One of them took out his shocker device and blasted an arc of electricity at Mangle, causing her to scream in pain and fall off the ceiling, hitting the floor and sending more metal parts flying out of her body due to the impact of the collision.
But despite the damaged condition of her body, Mangle hadn't been destroyed or even knocked out by the collision. The situation quickly grew even worse when Mangle focused her gaze directly upon the shocker device and started emitting the radio static that the ghosts had expected, causing the shocker to start malfunctioning. Although Mangle's interference didn't disable the shocker entirely, it instead caused the device to flicker on and off, with its electric bolts coming out in short arcs that lasted only a second or two instead of the prolonged stream of lightning that it had been intended to produce. And unfortunately for the volunteers, these erratic spurts weren't enough to disable Mangle despite having her entire endoskeleton exposed.
"Shit!" someone shouted, and it was clear he was trying desperately not to panic. "What the hell do we do now?"
Mangle was already shrugging off the weakened shocker device's attacks, getting back onto her feet and crawling towards them with violent intent in her eyes, albeit more slowly than she had been before. "Well, hello there, stranger!" she called out cheerfully, before her voice became distorted, as though multiple voices were speaking at the same time. "Well, hello there, victim…" she hissed menacingly.
"Oh, hell to the fuck no!" another person shouted. Thinking quickly, he took out his Freddy mask and, bravely stepping in front of his friends, shoved it onto his face.
To everyone's relief, Mangle stopped in her tracks, her eyes turning blank as her innate sensors forced her to process the Freddy mask. This gave the volunteers the valuable time that they needed, and a bulkier man with a build not too different from Hector's leapt forward with a thankfully unaffected electric rod. He swung the rod on the animatronic's body, shocking her out of her stupor. Electricity crackled all around Mangle's exposed endoskeleton and she screeched in outraged fury, swerving her head around to glare at her attacker. The mangled animatronic raised her arm as though it were about to swipe at him…before suddenly collapsing onto the ground with a final cry, all energy and life disappearing from her spread-eagled broken remains.
"Holy shit!" Cassidy let out a huge sigh of relief. "That was a close one!"
"I did not expect that animatronic to behave like that at all," Charlie admitted, "it was a lot different from Toy Bonnie or any of the other animatronics that we've dealt with in the past."
Susie shuddered. "I don't want to think about what would've happened if Mangle had been the one to attack Dad that night instead of Toy Bonnie," she mumbled. "It's a good thing Dad was smart enough to buy that Toy Foxy."
The volunteers apparently had a similar opinion. "What the fuck was THAT?" a man wearing a work vest shouted. "That thing was completely different from the animatronics that boss showed us how to kill!"
"We got really lucky she fell off the ceiling and damaged herself," another man commented. "If that Mangle hadn't been in such shit shape we might've been fucked."
"Let's check to make sure that Mangle didn't attract anything else," a third man suggested. "It made a lot of noise."
"Noise…" Charlie repeated the word, and then her eyes suddenly widened as an idea came to her. "Wait, guys, I just got an idea!"
The three other ghosts turned their heads towards her. "Yeah?" Jeremy asked.
"We can make noise to alert the team where the animatronics are!" Charlie explained excitedly. "For example, if you see an animatronic in that room over there," she pointed towards one of the doors, "just go inside the room and make noise just like Jeremy did. It'll alert the team that something is behind the door, and the animatronic might get caught off guard too. The volunteers won't even think that something supernatural is going on, since they'll assume the animatronics were the ones who made the noise."
"Ooh, that's a GREAT idea, Charlie! We can support the team without them ever knowing we were there, just like Dad asked us too!" Susie exclaimed excitedly.
"Thanks for the tip!" Jeremy agreed, sounding just as eager as his sister. The three ghosts flew out to different rooms in the hallway near the volunteers, following Charlie's suggestion. Their efforts were rewarded immediately, as Cassidy found a Toy Bonnie in a room to the right. Mimicking Jeremy's earlier action, she channeled her energy and punched the wall, producing a thump that was even louder than Jeremy's thanks to her innate magical potential. As the former Golden Freddy had hoped, this immediately drew the attention of the team, who quickly prepared their weapons as Toy Bonnie stared at where she had hit the wall with confusion.
"This is for Dad," Cassidy thought vindictively as a volunteer wearing the Freddy mask swung the door open. Toy Bonnie's eyes widened in surprise, but he didn't have time to say or do anything as his inner mechanisms forced him to process and stop moving in front of the Freddy mask. To everyone's relief and satisfaction, Mike's instructions on how to fight animatronics worked exactly as he had intended for this Toy Bonnie, and the fight was over quickly thanks to the now-restored shocker device and the follow-up assault with the electric rod.
"Well that was a joke compared to Mangle," a man commented dryly. "So I guess Mangle's just weird in how she works, then."
"Speaking of which, we should probably contact Mr. Schmidt and let him know about how different Mangle is from the rest of the animatronics," another volunteer suggested. "We don't want his group to learn the hard way that the regular tricks won't work on Mangle. Does anybody have his phone number?"
"I got it," the first man was already taking out his phone. "Let's keep moving. We need to make sure that this area's clear of any animatronics."
"Hopefully they give themselves away like idiots by making noise just like this one did," the second man agreed, unaware of the ghostly children giggling around them as they continued to offer support both unseen and unexpected.
Meanwhile…
"So you're telling me that Mangle crawled on the ceiling silently towards you, only got caught because part of her body dropped out, AND she can fuck up the shocker devices with her static?" Mike asked, not even bothering to hide his incredulity. "Holy shit, it's a REALLY good thing that you caught her, cause otherwise she'd probably have tried to bite your head off or something. Also, how exactly did Mangle fuck up your shocker device?"
"She let out some radio static from her body or something," the employee explained. "It messed with the shocker, only let it shoot out a few weak bursts of lightning that lasted a second or two. It definitely wasn't enough to stun Mangle, and that thing had her entire endo exposed to us."
"Which means that if the shocker is jammed like that against other animatronics with full bodies, it's basically completely useless," Mike grumbled. This presented a whole new set of problems if Mangle was around another animatronic, not to mention if she was around multiple. "We're gonna have to assume that Mangle can jam all of the shocker devices if she's still around, to be safe," he commented with a sigh. "Was there anything else?"
"Yeah, her body was falling apart," the volunteer offered. "That's the reason why we beat her, in the end. She was surprisingly resilient, even when her endoskeleton was exposed, and she was actually about to attack the guy beating her with the electric rod before her systems gave out. So if you come across one, don't assume that she'll go down just because you're beating her up with that rod. On the plus side, we confirmed the Freddy Fazbear mask DOES work on it!" he added cheerfully.
Mike smiled. "That's good to know. Thanks for the update, we'll be sure to look out for any Mangles," he gratefully replied, before hanging up the phone. He called the team (and the ghosts) back, and quickly updated them on Mangle and how she worked. As expected, the team was not happy to learn that there was an animatronic that was more complicated and arguably just as dangerous as Foxy, if not so.
"I don't know why the fuck Fazbear Entertainment wanted us to make Mangle like that," a volunteer grumbled.
"Me neither, and I'm definitely going to be making a note of that in my report after we finish dealing with this mess," Mike promised. "But for now, keep your eyes on your surroundings at all times, including on the ceiling and behind us."
Granted, they had a couple of extra ghostly eyes for surveillance and security, but they didn't know that.
"Do these people even know what they're doing?" Liz asked, clearly disgusted. "Either they made Mangle like that on purpose, or they did such a God awful job at making her that she ended up like that anyway. And both of those options SUCK!"
Fritz rolled his eyes. "It's Fazbear Entertainment, what the fuck did you expect?" he deadpanned.
Gabe was about to make an equally sarcastic comment, when a loud "HI!" suddenly rang through the hallway. "What was that?" Mike asked, all conversation abruptly ceasing.
"That sounded like a Balloon Boy!" the former Freddy inhabitant identified, clearly surprised. "I haven't heard one of those outside of the FNaF games in like forever!"
"It's behind us!" Colm exclaimed, pointing down the direction where they had come. Sure enough, at the end of the hallway where they had come in, a Balloon Boy was standing there with his balloons in his right "hand" and his iconic sign in the other.
One of the volunteers snickered. "What the heck is this thing going to do?" he asked, clearly not taking the animatronic seriously. "He can't attack us!"
"I wouldn't be too sure about that," Mike warned as Balloon Boy waddled towards them. Unlike the other animatronics with their loud clanging noises, he barely made any noise at all with his footsteps. The team tensed, but right as it seemed as though he were about to approach them, he instead turned and entered a room to the right through an open door.
"Wait here," Colm instructed as he went to check in on the animatronic. Unlike the employees, he wasn't stupid enough to dismiss Balloon Boy as a threat, and approached the open doorway very cautiously, slowly extending his head towards the doorframe with his eyes.
A decision that proved very wise, as Balloon Boy turned out to be right in front of him, just beyond the line of sight where he could have been seen from the hallway. "HOLY SHIT!" Colm exclaimed in shock as Balloon Boy suddenly screeched just like a Toy animatronic would have, his eyes glowing unnaturally white. Only Colm's quick reflexes and natural agility allowed him to quickly pull back his head as Balloon Boy swung his sign against the doorframe where his head had been seconds earlier. As the sign hit the door frame with a loud CLANG, Colm took out his shocker device and zapped the small animatronic with a ruthless blast of electricity as his teammates rushed forward, realizing that something had gone horribly wrong.
"What's wrong?" Mike asked immediately.
"This little fucker almost smashed my head with his sign!" Colm reported with a combination of disbelief, outrage, and a hint of vindictiveness as he continued to shock Balloon Boy. "I thought you said he was harmless!"
"Well, he was supposed to be!" A volunteer protested. "He never acted like that before, even in our records from the previous establishments!"
"That's actually fair," Mike acknowledged, stopping the argument from carrying on and distracting them from the still active animatronic that Colm was zapping. After all, it was entirely possible, even probable, that Glitchtrap and his victim could have forced this kind of unnatural onto Balloon Boy. "Hector, do the honors, please."
Hector nodded and Colm stopped the lightning bolts, letting his fellow bodyguard have a clean shot. There weren't really any obvious weak points compared to other animatronics, but as it turned out, one clean and brutal smack to the head was enough to knock Balloon Boy's head clean off, and without its central processing unit the entire animatronic shut down and keeled over, comparatively undamaged compared to other animatronics they had destroyed but still very much neutralized.
Colm took a few seconds to take deep breaths and calmed down. "Thank fuck I was careful," he muttered.
Liz gave him a guilty look. "Was this our fault for not warning you about this and not scouting that room out first?" she asked nervously.
"I wouldn't say so," Mike disagreed mentally. "Colm moved too fast for you guys to react, and none of us were expecting Balloon Boy to actually try and whack Colm's head with his sign."
Gabe shook his head in bemusement. "I don't know whether to laugh, cry, or facepalm at the fact that out of all the animatronics we've fought in this factory so far, it was fucking BALLOON BOY that came closest to killing one of us."
"All three, bro," Fritz replied, equally as dryly, "all three."
Mike sighed and took out his phone. "All right, well, now I've got to contact the other team and let them know that fucking Balloon Boy is actually a threat. God, only my first day on the job and I'm already starting to hate my fucking existence…" he grumbled.
One Hour Later…
The two groups of animatronic hunters reconvened on the first floor in a lounge that employees could normally take breaks in, which was fairly close to the elevators. "Thanks for letting us know about Balloon Boy," a member of the team shadowed by Charlie's group of ghosts thanked Mike. "We actually stumbled across one and that thing would've caught us off-guard if we hadn't known how dangerous he actually was. We zapped that jackass and knocked his head off before he could do anything."
"Glad to hear it," Mike replied cordially, before adopting a business-like expression. "Now then, have you guys searched the upper hallways? We combed through the lower hallways that weren't part of the main storage areas or the main factory workplace multiple times, and we only found one or two animatronics that we quickly took down."
"That's about the same story for us and the upper hallways," a member of the other team reported. "Unless they found some really good hiding places, there isn't anything up there anymore." He scowled. "Granted, it's possible those animatronics might be walking into the hallways as we speak, but other than that…"
"Okay, so we've killed maybe a little more than 10 animatronics," Mike summarized. "In theory, that's about half of the ones that have gone malignant taken down. And like you said before, assuming that some of them aren't walking into the hallways, there should be a little less than 10 in the main areas."
"That's the hard part now," Charlie commented with a concerned look on her face. "Because they'll be all in the same place, and you can't possibly hope to fight all of them at the same time. Especially if there's a Mangle to mess around with the shocker devices."
"Well, first things first, we need to scout out those areas and see just how many animatronics there are left," Mike commented. "There's windows in offices that look out into the main manufacturing area, or we can use the balcony to get a view from high up where hopefully they can't see us."
One of the volunteers raised his hand. "Actually, Mr. Schmidt, I think there's a tool we can use to lure an animatronic towards us."
Mike's focus instantly snapped towards him. "Go on," he invited slowly and carefully, "you have my complete and undivided attention."
/
A/N: Mike and the volunteer teams' fights against the animatronics seems to be going pretty smoothly! No deaths or even major injuries have occurred so far. And it's all thanks to Mike's careful teaching, some extra support in the form of the ghost kids (who are playing a major role in stopping threats from reaching the teams undetected in the first place), and some dumb luck.
A lot of the animatronics behave the same way, and it would be hella boring if I just repeated the same sequence with which the teams could deactivate an animatronic over and over again. So that's where Mangle and Balloon Boy come in to…spice things up…shall we say.
Mangle's behavior is similar to, but not quite the same as how her game mechanics work in the Special Delivery game. In fact, her ability to mess around with the shocker device is arguably more dangerous here than in canon, since she causes a complete malfunction of one of the most important tools to fight back against the animatronics. As you can imagine, this is downright lethal in the face of other animatronics. She's also more vulnerable to damage, but also more resilient to pain thanks to her perpetually mangled state. Fortunately, the Freddy mask still works on her.
As for Balloon Boy, he's more straightforward but still more dangerous since he's a sneaky little fucker who will try to ambush you. Granted, a lot of his overall threat level is reduced since he can't cloak himself, but he can still ambush and catch people flatfooted when they aren't aware of how dangerous he truly is (though that matters a little less against people who DO know about his potential threat level now).
Next chapter will probably be the final one in this arc. Trying to take down a bunch of animatronics in a group is predictably much more difficult than taking them down individually…but fortunately for Mike and his volunteers, there's still one important tool that they haven't used yet…
Please let me know what you guys think, and I hope you enjoyed!
