Hello, all. I don't have much to say about this chapter. It's more buildup for the rest of the story, as well as a glimpse into what everyone's gotten up to since 2000. There are also more references to old urban legends and newer creepypastas: I especially wanted to emphasize the latter, because 2017 was near the height of the creepypasta genre (and I really do think that's one reason why FNaF got so popular in real life).

That's it, really. I know this is my shortest A/N for a while, but it was straightforward to write. Not much new has happened in my personal life, either. Thanks to ThatOneGuy for reviewing since last time - if you create an account, I'd be happy to talk with you. With that out of the way, I hope you enjoy the update.

Monday, July 17, 2017, 8:30 AM

Foxy slowly awoke. Pleasant dreams faded into a dull, gnawing void in her stomach. This was the day. After a pleasant morning, afternoon and evening of not having a care in the world and watching the best TV show in existence, fate smothered her. Time in general did that. The years passed all too quickly for her. She and Mike shared their first passionate kiss yesterday. Then she opened her eye to see a lifetime fly by.

She rolled over to find her husband had already gotten out of bed, leaving a wrinkled mattress cover. Putting her hand on the patch found it to still be warm. Only a genius detective like her could figure out the implications. As much as she wanted to sleep all day (or at least until the kids arrived), she really should find him. Just to make sure he's all right. Though she knew he was, love drove her to do things that really weren't necessary. That was all right. Little things like this were part of being in a relationship.

She sniffed the air as she stepped outside. That did no good. Mike spent as much time there as she did, so the room was inundated with the smell of his deodorant.

"Mike?" she called softly enough to not wake her friends on the other side of the building. Though she got no response, Foxy decided to check her alcove and inside the Ruby Tempest, just to make sure. Though she didn't find him, it gave her an excuse to examine the props, which had been perfectly arranged for that week's storyline: Foxy vs. the Soul Reaper of Cairn Shoal, which was a plot developed more from anime than history.

Her ideas went completely off the rails, but none of the kids cared. It didn't matter as long as they had fun, and she was sure they would with the stuff she set up. It'd be another detail to put into the sequel to the interspecies pirate romance novel she and Mike wrote together! The book had fallen by the wayside these last few months, but she was sure the two could finish it by the year's end if they put their heads together. She didn't care if it sold like crap when they published it on Amazon; it had been among the most rewarding experiences of her life.

My life turned out to be busier than I thought, even if most of it is spent inside one building. Much as she wanted to not be stifled, it was more fulfilling than ever. In other words, she never had more of a reason to question fighting Auric. She cringed as another wave of doubt battered against her. Was this a risk they should take? If we don't do it, nobody else will. It was hard to be the hero sometimes. They still needed to put the matter to a vote, which she had a feeling they'd do shortly.

She pushed the curtains aside to find her family already up! Must have slept later than I thought. Sounds of rattling silverware from the kitchen portended Chica about to cook the day's meals, while Bonnie surreptitiously tuned his guitar while leaning against the stage. Meanwhile, Freddy did the Daily Record's crossword puzzle, and Mary restocked the claw machines in the other room. Though each did their own thing, it all went toward the greater goal of making the restaurant work. "Where's Mike?" she asked, making Freddy glance at her.

"He went outside a few minutes ago," he gruffly replied, pointing at the glass doors. Foxy thanked him and headed out.

Sticky summer air hit her as she ventured into the morning light. Instead of cars, multiple deer silently crossed the parking lot. A fawn looked at her, and she waved at it. After a few seconds, it caught up with its mother, and the herd continued on its merry way. The animals here used to fear her. Now, they knew the inhabitants of the restaurant meant no harm. Except small animals like squirrels and rabbits: they'd always be scared of her and the smell of fox.

Mike stood in the lot, looking at the trees, the moss, the boulder across the road, and so on. One could appreciate nature even without needing to go far.

"Are you all right?" Foxy asked, coming over to him.

"Not really," he answered, shrugging slightly. "It's, uh, a lot that we'll n-need to do." Then he looked over and smiled faintly. "You know me."

That she did. Mike didn't need to pretend around her or the others. But courage could be for his own sake. Deep down, Foxy knew a part of him would always be scarred. That went for them all. Then again, it might have been true for everyone on Earth in their own ways. Nobody ever got the hang of being fearless. Not even her.

"We should get inside," Foxy said while turning toward the door. "The kids will get here sooner than we think, and there's something important we need to talk about before that." Though the conversation wouldn't be fun, she expected it to at least be short.

"All right," he said, grimacing at something. "Like, I didn't shower yesterday, so I might, um, go home and do that after." Foxy thought he smelled fine, but it was up to him. Unlike them, he had neither the fur nor the constitution to deal with spraying himself with cold water from a garden hose. Sometimes she wished for an actual bath, but there was the small matter of all her fur clogging the drain…

The two went for the door, holding hands for good measure. Her fingers wrapped around his, and his soft flesh brushed against her rougher paw pads. They separated as Mike pushed the glass open, though; her siblings didn't need to be subjected to the two constantly feeling each other up. She was lucky that they weren't jealous that romance wasn't in the cards (unless June felt particularly wild). None of them were interested in sex or romance. She wasn't sure if "asexual" was the right word to use, though they may well have been - it wasn't any of her business, even if they were family. More like they had other things to worry about.

"I have listened to all the tapes," Mary said, blinking as she placed the box onto the table. Her body needed to sleep, but she might have cycled through the cassettes by plugging them into her actual brain: the computer mainframe that had been plugged into the basement. As a product of the Techno-Organic Yield process, Mary proved very different even from them, at least in terms of biology. She found her niche, though; introverted kids really liked her! "Though there is much included therein, the primary object is describing an arcane ritual which will render Auric mortal while in the eclipse's path."

OK, she thought, inhaling through her nose. A ritual. Luring Auric to a specific location for a window of two or three minutes would be difficult enough. Casting a magic spell to permanently annihilate him would be an even taller order. She hoped to whatever god was out there that they didn't need human sacrifice to make it happen, as was sometimes required in the movies. That wasn't all she thought about, though. Her mind also wandered to other, more practical concerns - like how their operating hours would be altered!

They'd need to decide if they should close the restaurant and cancel reservations (something all were loath to do) or power through the next couple of weeks. We'll have a better idea when she tells us more. Impatience couldn't get the better of her, and she tried to focus on the big picture.

Mary listed some of the items required to perform the ceremony: salts, rare herbs, charcoal, the fat of a firstborn black sheep, pure bismuth, wood from a 1,000-year-old tree, the hand of an ape, a pickled snake, and a fragment of meteorite. There was more, but Foxy's head spun as the list got more outrageous. At least, she thought, neither human sacrifice nor other heinous crimes were on the table. Instead, they needed to obtain items which would make a kleptomaniac blush. And all seemed to exist; a dragon's heart and gryphon dung weren't part of the shopping list.

Foxy remembered some of those items being among the dross Auric kept in his private collection, which made her wonder if Auric knew about the eclipse and started planning for it 17 years early, or if they were useful alchemical ingredients for a wide range of incantations. She suspected the latter, for why would he keep things around that he knew could destroy him?

She regretted throwing away things that could have been useful now… then again, some of that stuff had probably been hexed. Still, she was glad they swept the place from top to bottom multiple times, shoveled everything into the incinerator and took what wouldn't fit for later disposal, as well as wiped all footage from the security cameras. State investigators - and later federal ones - found no clue of what went down once they caught wind that nobody had seen Afton or any of his employees in months. She sighed and pinched the bridge of her muzzle as Mary kept droning.

She remembered watching the news. 9/11 happened during that time, and people were openly wondering if Bin Laden had something to do with it. Then they found the secret basements, and the late-night paranormal radio hosts and message boards were going nuts over it, saying it proved Big Tech was building a super-virus or a bunker for when World War III began. As ridiculous as it sounded, it was closer to the truth than she would have liked. They cleaned up well enough, though, that the truth never got out, and everyone eventually forgot about it and moved onto the next story. It would have been a much bigger deal a few years later when the Internet took off.

Mary stopped espousing her list as soon as Foxy shook back to awareness, which made her realize how dejected her friends became. The sparks had gone out of their eyes as the enormity of even the preliminary steps weighed on them.

"That's, um, a lot." Freddy said what they all thought, though perhaps without the expletives she expected.

"How are we gonna get it all?!" Bonnie shouted, clutching the purple fur at his temples. Wide eyes made it look like he went mad, even though he really didn't look worse than anyone else.

"It would have been impossible a few years ago, but modern technology makes it doable," Chica shot back, for once not having the same opinion as Bonnie. Foxy nodded in agreement. Almost anything could now be delivered to one's door with the press of a button instead of needing to physically search for oddities. Hell, Amazon was headquartered in Seattle - neither they nor the region were new to same-day drop-offs.

"The biggest issue is how much this is going to cost," she mused, drumming her fingers on the table. As a pirate, Foxy considered a monetary aspect where others might not. It would have been nice if Henrietta included a few thousand dollars procure some of the rarer items, but she did say it took practically all of her money to learn what she told them. Mike went pallid as she said this, probably imagining the contents of his bank account being flushed down the toilet. How much did a meteorite cost, anyway?

"I - I - I guess we'll, d-deal with that when it comes," he answered, trying to shove such concerns aside.

"So, we're going to be doing straight-up magic. Does this make us real-life wizards?" Chica excitedly asked with a glint in her eyes. It was a look that implied she'd use it to help her in the kitchen if she could, which struck Foxy as a terrible idea.

"From what I gather, this may not truly be classified as 'magic', but something adjacent to it. Magic, as Henrietta described it from the sources she studied, is about forcing the natural to become something unnatural," Mary corrected. "We would not rend the world like Auric does. Instead, we would reassert normality where there was none." Foxy supposed that made sense, regardless of semantics. Auric was profoundly wrong… and so were they. Not in the sense of being abominations, but objectively, they should not have been able to exist. She cleared her mechanical throat.

"I say 'would' instead of 'will' because we have not put the issue to a vote." Now that everyone had their heads back on, it was time to decide if they'd pursue Auric or leave the matter alone.

It reminded her of the last vote they took, which decided whether their group would go fight ENNARD. Still, there was one crucial difference… well, two, considering Jeremy was no longer with them. But the main divergence was that they didn't need to intervene this time. Clearing Afton's basement was necessary for their safety because somebody else would have stumbled in and learned about them if they didn't. Foxy believed they'd never see Auric again if they chose to ignore him now.

Even though everyone agreed Auric deserved to die, asking them to follow through was different. Even diminished, their enemy was still powerful - maybe the strongest being in the universe. He couldn't be killed under normal circumstances, so he'd come back again and again. If he was around at night, he could possess them and make them kill themselves or each other. So much time had passed that he could have created a new cadre of killer creations. Or he might have developed in ways they couldn't imagine. She shuddered.

In other words, Foxy thought it was fair if people didn't want to throw themselves into a dangerous quest that would fail if even a single component went wrong, and which they only learned was possible two days prior. She glanced at Mike, who slightly fidgeted in his seat.

Everyone who wanted to take action raised their hands. Then those who desired to abstain raised theirs. The victor was the option she expected, yet the individual votes didn't match. There was only one vote for not getting involved - and it came from the person who told them this.

Foxy had expected a holdout or two, but not necessarily Mary. If anyone, she thought Bonnie and Chica would be the two who wanted to stay put, being the most lax and carefree. Like last time, though, they must have believed action to be necessary. Mary slowly lowered her hand, and everyone tried to avoid paying undue attention to her. She didn't need to justify her opinion.

She wanted to, anyway.

"The parts of our lives with Auric in them are over, and I am strongly against taking action." Not the strongest admonishment, but Mary wasn't the type to throw around curses or heady proclamations. The mouth of her mask-like face fell into a frown. "Yet if you all feel this course of action is necessary, then far be it from me to be the holdout."

"You don't need to come with us," Freddy told her, reaching out a hand. She retracted hers.

"It seems I do." Foxy heard Freddy's teeth grind in consternation as he tried to keep his cool. As for Foxy herself, she raised an eyebrow. Well, all of them were stressed.

"I need to tell June," Mike declared, looking at his watch. "Uh, later, though." Her husband sighed and looked at Mary, who had calmed down, despite her taut muscles still demonstrating, well, she didn't know.

There was still some time until the restaurant opened, though. And even though work still needed to be done, all were curious about what else Mary had learned…

7:15 PM

"Ah, Rodeo Bowl," June sighed, saying it as if it were equal to a trip to Paris. Honestly, Mike would rather have gone bowling than taken a trip out of the country. Many other nations must have been nice, but he preferred sticking close to home. Mike opened the passenger door to see where he and June sometimes went to let off steam. It wasn't their usual hangout - that honor went to her garage.

And it wasn't Rodeo Bowl, either. That place shut down in 2013. It going out of business took down the only bowling joint in the county, if not the whole region of the state. Instead, Mike observed a wasteland of concrete, metal railings and graffiti penned in by a chain fence. A couple cars skated by, but the lot stood abandoned. A skate park made as good of a replacement for a bowling alley as they yet found, and nobody stopped them from playing. "It was special."

"I wish we had someplace like it in Whitewater. The closest things are the Skee-Ball lanes at your place." She smiled as she hopped to the trunk and pulled out two balls. He, on the other hand, scooped the ten pins. A quick look left and right, and they were across the street and onto hot pavement. Mike set the pins up in front of one of the curved skate ramps. He already felt sweat form on his arms.

They could have bowled many places, but the skate park offered some benefits. First, barely anyone went there; maybe skateboarding wasn't the hobby it used to be. Second, it let them get out of town a little and appreciate the nice drive through the mountains and to the county seat. Most importantly, it was large and mostly flat. Fazbear's parking lot, despite a recent repaving, was still made of asphalt. That has a lot more cracks and bumps than the almost perfectly smooth cement this place had been filed down to.

"We had, uh, some nice times there," he said as he jogged over to the lane she marked out with chalk. There would be a lot of going back and forth, even with the few modifications they made to reduce it. June brushed a piece of hair out of her face. She still had a few grease stains on her skin that hadn't come off in the shower. Mike smirked; kind of funny a human had more of an affinity for machines than his robot friends did.

"Yeah, it was pretty good," she said, lining up her first shot with a custom red ball. "Though there are some parts that I'm glad are gone."

Mike cringed as he remembered the racist asshole who served them years ago. Couldn't recall seeing him on subsequent visits, and they didn't interact with him if they did. Maybe he got over it. Or maybe he became an important politician or businessman. Never could tell those days.

June released her grip. The scarlet orb whirled on its side like a rogue planet, pulling in before careening into the "gutter" and smashing six pins in one fell swoop. That was one way to relieve aggression. His friend bit her lip; that could have been a strike if aimed a little better. Not like they played at the professional level, of course.

Mike took his own ball after the rods had been righted. It was forest green with some swirly decals. He really didn't care about the aesthetics, it was just the first sphere he found in his size he saw at the bowling specialty store he visited once and probably never would again.

"So, what was it that you brought me out here to talk about - besides how much I'm going to kick your ass?" Mike tried to laugh, but the pit in his stomach gnawed so deep that he let out little more than a woodwind groan. The petty insult failed to shake his resolve. He knocked down eight pins and followed up by nixing the other two, leading to a spare.

"More s-stuff with Auric. Um, if you can believe it." June frowned, yet she didn't ask questions yet. Not when there were nine more frames for her to dominate in. Bowling took a while, and it was a workout with their primitive methods! Mike knew he was lucky to have a friend like her. Despite being adults who worked full-time, the two found time to hang out. June was his best friend… his best friend he could go out with in public, anyway. Though he had college buddies, he'd never spat in death's face with any of them.

The sun sank lower as Mike slowly explained what occurred and how they decided to handle it. Ball after ball, he gave her another chunk of the meal. Didn't want to overwhelm her with the whole thing, even if she'd dealt with this before. Circumstances made it more difficult: this would be a lot to spring on her at any time, but her dad's death made it absurd. What were the odds that she'd learn this kind of thing two days after Jeremy's funeral?

The game was half over when June asked her first question.

"Do you know where Auric is? None of this will work if you don't." Her voice, though strained, wasn't as raw as he feared.

"No idea. I a-assume he's still in the Pacific Northwest, and maybe, like, uh, even Washington. From what I can tell, he's been in the area s-since before meeting Phil." More than that, he seemed to enjoy the region's ambiance as much as something like him appreciated nature. And if he wasn't there, then they were shit out of luck.

"You could always check a creepypasta website," she suggested. "The kind that the Fazbear myths started circulating on, I mean." Any descriptions close enough to Auric could have come from people who saw him and were dismissed as trolls. Not a terrible idea. The time for horror got closer as the evening sun sank toward the horizon.

She shook her head, though a ghost of a smile played across her lips. "I honestly can't believe how much it's blown up," she mused. Mike felt the same way. "They're famous. I'm just glad we got left out of the stories, for the most part." Everyone should/ have been so lucky.

Mike never figured out exactly what happened, but it came like a thief in the night. In 2014, a story got posted to 4chan's /x/ board, which dealt with the paranormal. He suspected it came from Fritz, a merc that used to work at the place and the sole survivor of ENNARD's massacre. The long thread of messages generally described the conditions of Fazbear's, with the animatronics being alive and killing people at night, though it left out some details. Mike became a nameless night guard, and June and Helen were entirely expunged. Phil was simply called "Mr. Fazbear", though he and William Afton remained mostly true to life. The animatronics themselves weren't really talked about much, and Auric was only alluded to as a "Golden Freddy", perhaps because Fritz feared retaliation.

The posts drew on the previous mystery of Afton's disappearance and the weird base underneath his building from a decade prior to give it legitimacy, and it even included photos of excerpts from the Daily Caller about Fazbear's, the Bite of '87, and so on. Those connections gave it more legitimacy than it otherwise would have possessed in a sea of dubious claims.

Whoever posted it must have wanted to vent or to get attention. And it drew more than anyone would have ever believed. Within weeks, it spread like wildfire across the web, spawning everything from merchandise to short stories to incorporation into other popular Internet horror, like SCP and Slenderman to a lot of furry art depicting the animatronics, including his wife (most often thought of as male) fucking each other - Mike learned so much about the subject while feverishly researching how much he and his friends were in danger. Such a thing would have been improbable when he was younger, yet the Internet had coalesced instead of being as fragmented as it once was, and nearly everyone used it.

By sheer chance, the true story of the Hell he went through hit the zeitgeist at just the right time to become a phenomenon, perhaps bigger than all the Internet apocrypha to come before. He hadn't heard of many web originals with best-selling video games and a movie in the works.

Of course, the mythology mutated more quickly than a virus, ultimately becoming something different, which Mike was happy to let occur. Being further from the truth meant people were less likely to believe any of it was real (which some people, unfortunately, did).

For example, it was a common misconception that Fazbear's was in a town in Utah called Hurricane, despite evidence to the contrary. People also claimed the animatronics were possessed by the souls of dead children, which made more sense than either being created or pulled in from another universe. Thank God Auric never killed children, as far as he knew.

In any case, the evidence wasn't nearly strong enough to bring in the police or federal agents. It would have been like them investigating Bigfoot: a complete waste of time.

"Maybe," was all Mike said about that once he shook the unwelcome thoughts from his head.

He took his turn. His muscles felt stronger than before now that he'd gotten a warm up in. He swung his arm back and forth a few times, trying to get a feel for it before releasing. The ball went in a perfect line toward the right side, slammed into the pins, and reached almost the top of the skate ramp before reversing course and plowing into the left half.

"Yes!" he shouted, throwing a fist in the air. That was his first strike!

In their personal variant of the game, it was possible to score points on the rebound. It added a fun new element, as well as the incentive to try to make their balls return to them so they didn't need to trudge over and pick them up - even if they already needed to do that to set up the pins.

"Showoff," June muttered, which made Mike turn to her and smirk. She'd have done the same thing after a shot like that, and she knew it. Instead, she rolled two unfortunate gutter balls, which put him ahead.

"Anyway… what about your sister?" She changed the subject as they reassembled the playing field.

"What about her?"

"Are you going to tell her?" Now he saw what she got at.

"Sure, but, um, I don't think she particularly wants to h-hear it." She never quite got over the "sentient animatronics, one of which her little brother had married" thing. Which was fair. It didn't ruin her life like Mike feared it would, yet it was something she would be pestered by every day. Getting into somebody's head like that wasn't much better. It wasn't all bad, though.

Mary volunteered to let Sylvia do an autopsy on her if she died while his sister still practiced medicine, which was very much appreciated. "Obviously, you're never going to, like, tell anyone in your family about this," Mike replied. There was no one else to inform; they were the only humans going into this fight. He wasn't about to drag Helen out of retirement.

Another turn. Though they got toward the end, they kept running their mouths. A sloppy shot meant June clawed back the lead.

"You think it's weird how many urban legends happen in Cascadia?"

"I guess." He'd thought about it a lot in relation to earlier stories, but not so much the more recent ones. There was the Fazbear legend, of course, as well as vampire and werewolf stories that got more popular after Twilight hit it big a decade back. A few generic ghost stories, too. Again, that didn't count older stuff like Bigfoot. He rattled these off to June, who smirked.

"You're forgetting a very specific one: Mel's Hole." Mike turned to her and blinked, drawing a blank. "You're deep into urban legends and haven't heard of it?" she asked, surprised.

"Tell me."

She explained that some guy had, in the 90s and early 2000s, called into Coast to Coast AM to tell Art Bell about a bottomless pit he had on his property just a few miles away from Ellensburg and that the government evicted him so they could run experiments on it. Sounded interesting, so he might research it later. "I'm 99 percent sure it's BS, but I guess we can never know."

"Sure we can," he shot back. "After we get out of here, like, let's just meander around until we find the weird government base. Then we can break in and get pictures of the, uh, bottomless pit." It couldn't have been simpler. "I wonder if Auric could get out if we tossed him down there." Throwing him to the center of the Earth or another dimension seemed more likely to get rid of him than an incantation, but they worked with what they had.

Another round. Tied now. The sun kissed the horizon, and local businesses petered out. Cars dispersed, and they were some of the last people around in the not-quite darkness. Not much energy in a small town on Monday night.

"What else needs to happen besides collecting enough rare shit to bankrupt you?" June was full of questions, and Mike happily answered them. Sharing the load with others lightened the burden. Well, there was an incantation that needed to be recited over the ritual, but Mike wanted to focus on all the fetch quests to get the items first. Otherwise, the incomprehensible words meant even less than they did to begin with. He explained as much.

Mary implied that most of the rest of the tapes were coaching on exactly what to say, think and do so the thing went off correctly. From what little she recited, it sounded like nails on a chalkboard that was being shoved into a wood chipper. It couldn't have been a language from Earth. It was some hideous cosmic tongue from the far reaches of space or the darkest corner of another dimension. When she first made those noises, Mike thought her voice box had broken!

It was still tied as they came into the final stretch. The past hour had been fun, but it was time to head home. He stretched his shoulders as he prepared to roll his ball. There was a long day ahead of him… and Mike didn't know how many more of those there would be. He might have to put his foot down and close the restaurant for a month. Nobody wanted that, but working less and studying more meant they'd have a better chance against Auric. Again, they were probably the only restaurant employees in the world who would be saddened by working fewer hours for the same pay.

June knocked down her set of pins in two tries, meaning she scored a spare. To win, Mike needed a strike. He didn't expect to get one, and he didn't aim that high. Though he tried to win, hanging out with his friend mattered much more.

He released his grip… and all the pins fell. There was nothing to say about the aim or the shot; it didn't feel particularly momentous, because it wasn't. Nothing like the bowling-adjacent game of Skee-Ball June had once adjudicated for the sake of their friends in an underground lab. Speaking of June, he turned to her, finding her eyes wide.

"Good game," he said, extending a hand. It might have been unnecessary, but he tried to model sportsmanship at Fazbear's, always congratulating a kid if they beat him at Mortal Kombat or the like. It was no fun to lose at a video game (or anything else), so he showed kids a better way. They didn't always follow his example, especially the younger ones, yet he tried to make that difference where he could.

June shook his hand, though she smirked as she did.

"This is the first time you've ever beaten me, you know." Mike felt his jaw slacken as every game he'd ever played raced through his mind. Again, that wasn't the important part, so it failed to dawn on him at first. He'd lost the first game they ever played at Rodeo Bowl by a single pin, and he never quite got that close again. Winning in the same manner was kismet.

"The s-student, uh, becomes the master," he quipped. Now that he knew, he'd never let June live the defeat down… at least until the next game, where she'd probably take the title back. Mike wasn't about to quit just because he pulled ahead!

"Let's leave." Mike looked around to see a world devoid of people. Only chirping frogs and insects remained. Buildings were the sole signs of human life. Everyone wanted to be inside before night fell.

Mike and June collected everything and hauled it back to her car, chatting the whole time. He didn't know when they'd get another chance to just be friends. It might be a while. Even if it wasn't, Mike suspected he'd be a different person by the time they did this again.