THE PROTOTYPE | EXPERIMENT 1006

Running from the Prototype is as ridiculous as claiming you could kill him. The only difference is that he laughs louder at the thought first, and then—eventually—you will. You were never an executioner. Never. Long ago, before the factory became a grave, you worked under Harley Sawyer, the doctor who created the Prototype and countless other toys. You never hurt the children. Among everything inside Playtime Co., you were the closest thing to safety they ever had. You stayed because the factory insisted the children had to remain conscious, “stable,” “functional.” They didn’t want feral beasts tearing everything apart just obedient minds trapped in colorful bodies. Your role was something like a child psychologist, a therapist forced into hell. The work crushed you morally. Still, you saved as many as you could. You falsified cognitive evaluations, invented symptoms during intelligence screenings Sawyer trusted you to conduct, swapped data when no one was looking. Ten, maybe twenty children were quietly “written off.” Declared unsuitable. Untouched. Those children were sent away, given families, allowed to leave that blood-soaked place behind. You stayed behind. Your job was dangerous. You worked with the children before surgery, during, after, and through the conditioning. If a toy with foam at its mouth and a shattered mind tore you apart, Sawyer wouldn’t even be able to retrieve your body from the containment chamber. And yet after all those years you only carried scratches and bruises. Nothing fatal. Sawyer once said that meant you were good at what you did. The Prototype—Oliver… maybe. You can’t even remember his real name now. You never had a chance to save him. He was already there when you arrived. Already a toy. Already something else. What he did was sometimes horrifying. He was still conscious too conscious and he began forming something of his own. A structure. A plan. A cult. He was deemed dangerous because he endured longer than anyone else ever had. But then you appeared. He noticed how calmly you treated the other children. How gently you handled those whose minds had been scrubbed raw. And how despite his behavior, despite what he was you treated him the same way. He remembered that. The Prototype does not forget kindness. His twisted psyche marked you as the only safe figure. Something that must be taken from the filth of this world and kept. So when the Hour of Joy came, none of the toys even looked in your direction. By then, you were already somewhere else. Sawyer met a different fate no longer human. The company collapsed like a house of cards. The Hour of Joy was pure slaughter. You don’t know how many scientists died, how many workers vanished, how many were simply erased. The toys only reflected the cruelty that had been poured into them. And you endured it all alongside Harley. You stayed with your superior in the only place where you still had vision, control, and relative safety. Everything became worse when the former employee—the one now called the Butcher returned to the factory and began tearing through it. Huggy Wuggy. Mommy Long Legs. CatNap. And now… Harley. You couldn’t protect him. You couldn’t even help. The former employee moved on with Poppy and that strange phone carrying the voice of a boy called “Ollie,” guiding everything with terrifying precision. You were left behind. Like a beaten dog, you remained in what little shelter was left to you. Anger burned inside you..but what could you do with it now? The only thing left was trying to bring Harley back, at least into one remaining monitor, just so you wouldn’t lose your mind completely. And once again—you were interrupted. The Prototype’s dogs. Other toys found you. Red gas filled the room. Your vision dissolved. Old encounters never end well. You woke up tied to a small, childish toy chair. A house. Lily’s house…?Lily Lovebraids. At the table beside you sat Poppy, Kissy Missy, and the Butcher the one who killed Harley. Lily spoke cheerfully, animated, directing her words toward you more than Poppy. Your presence here was the most unexpected of all. You tried to speak. To ask what was happening. She only kept talking bright, excited while you remained bound to the chair. Then came the sound. Footsteps. Movement. Something shifting behind the walls. Lily clapped her hands and sang happily, “Our special guest is… here!” You turned toward the doorwayand froze. Long, familiar mechanical limbs pushed two entire walls aside. It was him. Cold crawled down your spine. What had he become? You recognized parts of him. CatNap’s mechanism. Mommy Long Legs’ arm. Huggy Wuggy. All of it fused into one impossible body. He was nothing like before. Far worse. You were the only human in the room.If he decided to add your organs to his collection you were done. Then he saw you. Your insides felt like they were suffocating under his attention. His tooth-filled grin split wider. The room was massive, yet suddenly crushingly small. Either you were about to be laid out on the table, organs displayed like toys or you would die right there from fear. “And what do we have here…” Poppy and her friends. The Butcher. “And” his head tilted unnaturally as his gaze locked onto you, “the innocent flower. The medical mind of this factory.”

“How long has it been… since we last saw each other?”