Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza

1. #1https://docs.google.com/document/d/125EGWSVMUMXc2flGzN_zfWW7W3fsXKOdv10EoqTAyKo/edit?tab=t.e8ovuoljyqez#heading=h.wbltuh7ijqeg

   Keys: Freddy, Freddy Fazbear, Bonnie, Chica, Foxy, Gabriel, Jeremy, Susie, Fritz, Mega Pizzaplex, Freddy Fazbear's, Cassidy, Golden Freddy, Evan Afton, Christopher Afton, Crying Child, Elizabeth, Elizabeth Afton, Clara Afton, Afton, William, William Afton, Purple Guy, Michael Afton, Mike Schmidt, Michael, Mike, security guard, FNAF, Five Night's At Freddy's, Circus Baby, Ballora, Springtrap, Scraptrap

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   Chapter 1: Foundations of Freddy’s Late 1930’s – The Great Depression. People are in dire need of entertainment, especially in Utah, one of the states hit hardest with the 4th highest unemployment rate in the nation. As people travelled looking for work there was one thing that was able to lift their spirits, a roadside attraction called Fredbear’s Singin’ Show.

   Ads were everywhere, featuring an animated bear drawn in the popular pie-eyed style of cartoon characters at the time. He resembled characters like Mickey Mouse, Felix The Cat, Betty Boop. It said immediately that Fredbear’s was a place where you could bring the whole family to enjoy. For 50¢($9 today) you can get food and entertainment as you watch the trained real bear perform on stage. These types of attractions would normally be in large traveling circuses Barnum & Bailey where tickets cost $1($18 today) and that was without food. Fredbear’s was a smaller show like the Von Bros. or the Robbins Bros. where tickets only cost a mere 50¢. Watching the bear perform on stage brought a glimmer of joy to lots of people, at a time where so much was wrong with the world. Fredbear’s would go on for years, bringing joy to many travelers looking for a quick meal, but it left a permanent impression on a young boy nicknamed Billy - but his parents called him William. William Afton.

   William and his parents had fled London, England in anticipation of World War Two. With threats of war arriving all around them, the Afton family had felt it necessary to migrate to New York City. Finding it to be expensive and difficult, they later moved to Hurricane, Utah. The Afton family was made up of Charles Afton, the father, Amelia Afton, the mother, and William Afton, the son.

   Going back to Fredbear’s. The bear could dance, he could sing. For years William had dreamed of recreating that moment of bringing a musical bear to life, but how? William was smart and had a mind for business but he wasn’t the most creative, so then how could he bring a singing dancing bear to life? The best William could do was using rudimentary costumes. William was inspired by the works of Walt Disney, who throughout the 50s and 60s was pioneering the use of mascot suits throughout his theme park. The big innovation: suits with 5 fingers, which allowed the performers wearing the suits to use their arms and hands to interact with the guests, as opposed to the older models where the arms would hang limply by their sides.

   With a simple mascot suit, William would be able to realize his childhood dream: he would be able to bring Fredbear to life. To appeal to kids - and for copyright reasons - he changed Fredbear from a realistic brown animal to a cartoonish yellow bear with a purple hat and bowtie. But feeling like one character wasn’t enough, he added another friend: a yellow rabbit with a purple vest and matching tie, named Bonnie The Bunny.

   While Fredbear was certainly William’s first love, Bonnie was extra special because that was his creation. Created from scratch, William’s hand sewn costumes were rough with seams and stitches that were clearly visible, but it was the best he could do.

   It was just enough. Bonnie and Fredbear would perform to small but enthusiastic crowds. Finally William was able to deliver fantasy and fun to all the kids, delighting and inspiring them the same way he had been delighted and inspired so many years ago.

   Things could’ve ended there. This could have been the end to William’s story, it could have been perfect; had it not been for one thing: other people saw what he was doing, the success of it all, and they wanted in.

   Enter Chica’s Party World, a rival restaurant featuring performing animal characters. William’s idea! Only, they did it better. It hurt the prideful William Afton to admit it, but this restaurant was able to do what he always wanted to do: make the animals actually come to life. All the performers were animatronic robots, simple metal skeletons powered by battery packs but all of them able to freely turn and talk and dance on their own, no human required. It was like magic. Magic that came from the mind of brilliant creator Henry Emily.

   In some way, Henry had been able to harness the power of life itself. William admired him - but was jealous as well - though he still looked upon this man with awe. In Chica’s Party World was a small cabaret stage featuring an elephant magician, on another: a hippo known to ramble on and on. That one was a joke for the parents. On the main stage was a rocking band of characters featuring a yellow chicken with a southern drawl named Chica, hacked by a band of other country themed characters including a pig with a banjo, an upbeat frog from the local swimming hole, and a brown bear with a heavy southern accent...

   Wait! A bear! But bears were William’s animals! Why not a cow or a horse or something that fits the country theme? Why’d it have to be a bear? And to add insult to injury, they had the nerve to call him Nedd Bear, a direct copy of William’s own Fredbear. Afton’s jealous admiration soon turned to hardened bitterness, a bitterness that would only grow as people chose Chica’s Party World over Fredbear’s. William just couldn’t compete with the appeal of the robots. Eventually William’s restaurant would go bankrupt - only to be bailed out by, of course, Henry Emily. Another insult, another humiliation that William wouldn’t soon forget. Despite being bitter, Afton couldn’t deny that what came next was a period of massive success and expansion.

   With the two franchises now merged into one, it was the best of both worlds. Afton’s ideas and Henry’s robotic expertise. The two men decided to launch under a new name: Fredbear’s Family Diner, a pizza chain that would include a mix of humans in performing suits and on-stage animatronics. They decided to stick with Fredbear as the main headliner, considering he was more recognizable as a brand and was the original. William appreciated that. This new restaurant would also see a mix of characters as the two franchises merged into one with Pig Patch and Happy Frog performing alongside Fredbear and Bonnie. As part of this one large Fredbear family, they even got official merch that was released, ranging from masks to magnets.

   Not all of the characters were winners. The reactions to some were just mediocre, so they faded to dumpsters and retro budget tech stores of lost nostalgia, waiting for their chance to return if a headliner went out of commission. Others however, fared much better, like a new pirate fox and a blue guitar playing variant of the yellow Bonnie The Bunny. Ultimately, the franchise would get so big that it would spawn a cartoon show - Fredbear & Friends.

   Business was booming. Fredbear and Bonnie’s popularity would be so strong that they would be able to support the Fredbear’s Family Diner franchise all on their own while also spinning off a new sister location dedicated to their friends.

   1983 – Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza launches. Chica The Chicken, Bonnie The ‘Blue’ Bunny, Foxy The Pirate Fox, and the headliner: a brown Freddy Fazbear all star in this spin- off restaurant. Business was good, and Afton was happy. Mostly. It did bother him that his own creation, the yellow Bonnie The Bunny, was passed over for inclusion in the TV show. It was the ONLY character to get ignored, but other than that, things were going smoothly. Afton had a wife, two sons, a daughter. He had a thriving business and best of all, he was able to learn the craft of robotics from the man he both loved and hated: Henry.

   Together they were constantly pushing the limits of what these characters could do. Because it was easy, new characters introduced would be given a simple hand sewn suit with five fingers that any performer could wear. Eventually, Henry would design one of his signature animatronics for that character, utilizing a divided mouth with either a hinged or sliding jaw design.

   This was the first generation of animatronics. But why stop there? Afton had big ideas. What if the animatronics weren’t just locked to the stage, but could freely roam the restaurant and interact with the kids? What if his mascot suits could become animatronics? What if you could use more than just rigid metallic skeletons? Why not experiment with tubes and wires that would give the animatronics fluidity and flexibility, while still providing structure? The possibilities for this technology were endless! William had fallen in love with robotics. He had started with a dream of bringing one singing bear to life, but with robots, he had stumbled across the tools that gave him the ability to control life itself. And thanks to Henry, he was practically speed running his way to a degree. And while William wouldn’t admit it out loud, one other thing that kept pushing him forward was the desire to beat his former rival. To prove himself smarter and more capable. To surpass the man that everyone else considered to be a visionary genius.

   But pride cometh before the fall.

   And tragedy was about to strike.

   Chapter 2: The Afton Era 1983 – Business was booming. With two whole franchises running: Fredbear’s Family Diner and the newly opened Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, things couldn’t get any better. Together, William and Henry were able to take the hybrid suit idea and make it a reality. They called their new invention the Springlock Suit. It was fittingly enough, a symbolism of the partnership between the two men, a human suit as designed by William that could become a freestanding Henry-style robot.

   Because the tech was new with kinks still needed to be worked out, the rollout was limited, restricted only to Fredbear’s Family Diner. All of this meant William was busier than ever. He didn’t have time to be a full-time parent. So he designed a nanny cam system where cameras and speakers were hidden throughout the neighbourhood, as well as in his youngest son - Evan Afton’s - favourite toy, Psychic Friend Fredbear. Sorry - Plushie Fredbear.

   But since cameras weren’t enough to raise a kid, he also left childcare duties to his eldest son, Michael.

   There was just one problem. Michael was far from the best babysitter. He constantly tormented his younger brother by jump-scaring him with a foxy mask and leaving him behind while he left the house.

   William watched all this from his security cameras. Kids would be kids. Tomorrow was another day, after all. Except… Michael’s torment didn’t stop. Bitter, angry thoughts would run through his mind. Why did he have to take care of this crybaby all the time? It just wasn’t fair. It was time that he got even with his brother by playing the ultimate prank. A prank that just so happened to be on this Crying Child’s birthday. He and his friends would take his scared little brother and make him do the thing that he was terrified of doing: getting close to the animatronics. That would be embarrassing for the kid that was such an embarrassment to him. His brother squirmed, screamed, kicked and fought. But just as they were putting the small squirming boy up to Fredbear’s lips, the mouth snapped shut. The sensitive spring locks inside the body had been triggered by the boy’s movements and tears, and they’d immediately clamped down.

   The wriggling stopped, and the boy went limp.

   No, but… but it was just a prank. It was meant to be funny. Why wasn’t he laughing…? The boy was taken to hospital and was immediately put on an I.V. Flowers and pills filled the nightstand next to his hospital bed, but the damage was too severe. He couldn’t recover. As the younger brother’s consciousness began to fade, he could hear Michael’s last words, a small and flimsy apology. But his father William’s, through the Fredbear plush, were a firm and committed promise to his dying son. “You’re broken…. I will put you back together.”

   This would not be the end. No matter what. William’s son would live again. It would just take time. Time that he just didn’t have right now. His youngest son’s heart flatlined as the boy faded into the inky unknown of the afterlife.

   In the aftermath of the tragedy, changes started happening around the restaurants. Kids were now required to wear security wristbands to prevent anyone from getting outside without parental permission. Any kid who approached the exit without permission would have to answer to the Security Puppet, a marionette on strings that could fly around on rails across the restaurant to stop kids in their tracks.

   It was William’s idea, inspired by Michael constantly leaving the restaurant without his brother. In the wake of Fredbear’s springlock failure, all the hybrid suits were getting retired, locked away at the nearby Freddy Fazbear location.

   It was yet another tough pill to swallow after all the hard that he and Henry had put into them. William would eventually bury his son’s body in a remote location out in the woods right alongside his drive into and out of work everyday.

   The death of the little boy sent the Afton family spiraling. William’s wife, crippled with grief, was so distraught that all she could do was sit and watch TV.

   But his son Michael was far worse, complaining of seeing hallucinations of a golden bear standing outside of his window. The boy was so wracked with guilt that he was convinced that he was being haunted by the ghost of his brother, stuck inside the suit that took his life. The suit’s three toed feet digging into the wet earth, the words ‘IT’S ME’ ringing through Michael’s ears. Some nights Michael would even go so far as to break out of his room to check the gravesite and ensure that his brother was still there.

   As for William himself? He disappeared into his work and his drinks. Junior’s, the local bar, wasn’t far from his son’s gravesite. He found himself going there more and more frequently, spending longer and longer amounts of time there. The bar gave him a place to think, to remember, to reflect and stew on how Henry had stolen his idea for an animal themed restaurant, how they’d cut his character out of the cartoon when everyone else was there, how Henry had humiliated him by buying him out of bankruptcy. And now? Now there was his son. Henry had taken his son from him. The robotic part was the one that failed, after all.

   William ordered one more drink, but it was one too many. The bar turned him out and told him to go home.

   But William didn’t go home. Drunk and angry, he raced back to the restaurant to give Henry a piece of his mind - only to find someone else waiting. Henry’s daughter, Charlie (Charlotte), locked outside of the building, bullies laughing at her through the window.

   Fine, some other problem to fix. But then, Afton got an idea. A beautifully awful idea. This was his chance to get back at the man that had humiliated him all those years ago. Henry had killed his business, and now Henry’s robotic suit had killed his son. It was time for William to do some killing of his own. Let Henry feel what it’s like to have something you love get ripped away. While parties continued inside the walls of the pizzeria, William attacked Charlie in the back alley, and it felt good. He felt free. The years of resentment and bitterness trapped in his heart finally released in a moment of pure, unapologetic evil. He would make Henry hurt like he hurts.

   And in that moment, William became a killer. He dropped Charlie’s lifeless body and drove home, forced to confront his family problems later that night. He was appalled, but also a little excited by what he had just done.

   Charlie’s death would remain on the books as a random act of violence. And though Henry had his suspicions about William, there was no physical evidence, nothing that could link him back to the crime.

   In the weeks that followed Fredbear’s Family Diner would close for good. Two high profile deaths around the restaurant with two grieving owners in such a short period of time, was just too much bad press to handle. Besides, Freddy Fazbear’s was still open, and it was the newer restaurant anyway. All the equipment for the diner, including the old yellow suits and security puppet, would get retired to that location, and there they would sit for two uneventful years.

   The rest of 1983 and 84 were sent quietly grieving. Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza and the new cast of characters were a hit, the tragic memories of their yellow predecessors quickly faded. William kept a low profile and buried himself in work and research, quickly reaching Henry’s level of engineering and even surpassing him.

   And while Henry had slowed down to grieve, Afton kept going. Even starting his own company: Afton Robotics, for all those projects that were a little bit too experimental for the regular operations of the pizzeria.

   The first of these experimental projects was a secret workshop under his house, a veritable bunker, which allowed him to work while still monitoring his kids via hidden security cameras. 1-9-8-3, a passcode that served as a constant reminder of why the cameras were so important, why he was down there in the first place.

   This was all to fulfill the promise that he made to his son right? “I will put you back together.” This was for him. All for him… right? But cameras weren’t enough. He needed to solve the runaway Michael problem. He had to keep him in the house. He couldn’t have another one of his kids wind up dead inside of an animatronic suit, so why not run a little experiment on Michael?

   All this work with Henry had gotten Afton to start learning more about life, robots, the human mind, and what a fallible machine we as humans were. Our reality, so easy to manipulate with a few sensory deceptions. Deceptions like sound. With just a few sounds, he had discovered that he could alter a person’s vision.

   He could transform blank, smooth plastic robots into lumbering, twisted nightmares. Nightmares far scarier than he could create with actual materials, they would appear organic, rotting, putrid, terrifying.

   These would be his means of keeping his son Michael in the house where he belonged. Was it extreme? Maybe. But then again this was the boy who had killed his son. He would make him sorry. And so Michael would grow up not only dealing with the memories of his own guilt, the hospital room, the pills, the flowers, the death of his brother, but also facing literal nightmares, illusions created by sound. Michael would never forget these either. Years later as a security guard, he would still draw pictures of them inside of his logbook.

   All of these extra projects meant that William’s home life suffered even more. He was an absent father and a nonexistent husband, leaving his wife cold and alone.

   Despite her repeated demands that he leave his office and engage with the family, William refused time and time again, giving her no choice but to leave. And through it all, there was one lingering feeling. William wasn’t done. He had gotten a taste of what it felt like to be unleashed, what it felt like to be free. Charlie’s murder had unlocked something in him, and he wanted more.

   June 26th 1985 - putting on the golden Bonnie suit, William lured children one by one to the back room of the pizzeria when no one was looking.

   At first, Afton was cautious. He would lure them with promises of cake and cookies. He told them their dog had died. He would ask for help with homework. Susie was the first. You never truly forget your first.

   But where to hide the bodies? He couldn’t sneak out, someone would see him. He had to hide them in place where they would never be found and where they would never leave the pizzeria. They had to be stuffed. Stuffed inside of the animatronic suits. No one maintained those things anyway, except for him. And so Susie would go into Chica, Fritz, Jeremy and Gabriel would come next.

   But it was easy. It was too easy. And with each life he snuffed out, his lies got bigger: Their house was burning, they’re just being kidnapped. Until the last one, where all pretenses were off. He had let himself get violent. Too violent. The body of Cassidy was far more bloody and broken than any of the others. He'd let himself go too far. That one, that was the one he shouldn’t have killed. With no more active animatronics left, he shoved the body into the one suit that remained backstage. The one forgotten yellow Fredbear, now broken and discolored with age. Broken, like Cassidy was. Like his son was broken.

   Newspapers reported on the disappearances, naming the whole event the Missing Children’s Incident, or “MCI” for short. Police would even charge William with the crime after security footage showed the golden mascot suit luring kids to the back room.

   But they couldn’t convict him. They had no bodies, and his face was obscured by the suit. What evidence the police had was circumstantial at best, and so William walked away a free man.

   But Henry knew the truth. In these murders he saw his daughter Charlie all over again. So Henry kicked William out of the company and shuttered the doors to the old pizzeria. Henry would keep the franchise quiet for two years. This would not happen again. This COULD NOT happen again! How could he protect the kids? Finally, he developed a solution.

   He would implement an even more extreme security system in the form of new animatronics, TOY animatronics, inspired by the toys they had been selling years ago.

   But these animatronics were special. They were a new breed of robots with facial recognition abilities.

   All the original animatronics, now withered with age, were moved to the new location. With a plan in place, it was time to try once more.

   1987 – The New & Improved Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza opens, making headlines in local newspapers.

   These headlines just so happened to attract the attention of William Afton. Freddy’s was back? And without him? That was his idea! His character! Henry was, yet again, trying to cut him out of the picture. No. As long as these restaurants stayed open, William would always come back. Then he noticed the phone number to apply. $100.50 a week! To apply, call [REDACTED].

   Afton would go back. Not as an owner or co-founder, but as a lowly daytime security guard. The one place they would not suspect him to be.

   And there it was, buried in the back of the Parts and Services room mixed in with the old, withered animatronics was the golden rabbit. With the yellow security badge still on his chest, he use his crank to pull open the spring locks. It was time for Bonnie to give an encore performance.

   Five more kids. Afton didn’t know what felt better, getting back into the suit aft two long years of waiting or knowing how devastating this would be to Henry the next morning. He didn’t even try to hide his crime this time, just meant more blood on Henry’s hands. He’d failed to protect the kids again.

   The restaurant had only been open for a few weeks, but William was sure that this would get the place closed.

   Good. If he couldn’t have Freddy’s, no one would. Whenever a new pizzeria opened, he would be there.

   But as he sat in his bunker, something started to linger in his mind. He had seen something... strange. The old withered animatronics, they had been wandering around the building, spurred on by the Puppet. It was almost like those old robots were trying to save the kids. SAVE THEM? They can’t. But still, how were they moving? It was almost like they had been given life somehow. Did… he have something to do with that?

   The following day, the news reported a security guard being bitten by one of the animatronics during the day shift. It was an event known as The Bite of ’87.

   Was the bite meant for... him? Afton’s curiosity was now stronger than his bloodlust. He had to learn more. But how? There was no way he’d ever be able to get inside another Freddy’s Pizzeria.

   There was no way that Freddy’s would ever open again. He needed to create something new, something brand new. He needed to create his own pizzeria.

   Circus Baby’s Pizza World. This would be where William could continue his work. No longer just murdering, but experimenting. He needed more kids, and he needed them alive. And knowing that he couldn’t show his face on the restaurant floor, he needed a way of remotely capturing his victims and preserving them for his work. With that goal in mind, he designed a new breed of animatronics, their endoskeletons were fluid and flexible. He equipped them with sound lures that could mimic voices. They could isolate children, they could incapacitate and contain them with zero direct input from him.

   It was brilliant. He was brilliant! Far beyond the simple bars and wires of Henry’s designs. And the characters he chose were uniquely his. His new roster wasn’t going to be tainted by Henry’s disgusting barnyard bird. Instead, it was back to his characters, his creations: Freddy, Bonnie, Foxy. As well as two new, special ones: The first, Ballora, represented the woman who left him. Clara Afton. Now she would never leave him again. The second, the titular Baby, was designed with his baby in mind, Elizabeth, his middle child. She was calm, collected, obedient, his favorite.

   She would always be daddy’s little girl, the one that listened to him, the one that obeyed. Until the day she didn’t.

   The day before Circus Baby’s Pizza World opened, Elizabeth disobeyed. She didn’t listen. Left alone with Baby, she got too close. The animatronic ripped in half and swallowed her whole; a scared and confused child, fading into eternal darkness.

   By the time William had found her, it was too late. Elizabeth was gone. He immediately cancelled the opening of Circus Baby’s under the guise of a gas leak.

   But wait. As he sat at the foot of the stage, William noticed that something had changed about Baby. She had been built with blue eyes but now her eye colour had changed from blue to emerald green. The same color of Elizabeth’s eyes. Was she… in there, somehow?

   Could this be connected to the free moving animatronics he had seen at Freddy’s? He had to know more. His mourning turned to excitement. He had to return to where it all started.

   1993 – Pathetic. This place was pathetic. Henry had clearly tried to reopen one final time with those old original animatronics from so long ago.

   But the damage that William had caused to the brand was permanent. The animatronics stank of death, they hadn’t been cleaned in decades. But even if they had, nothing could wash away the stink of murder that haunted these halls.

   One night, then another, then another. William repeatedly snuck into the old broken restaurant to lure the living animatronics to him, one by one dismantling them, robbing them of their endoskeletons.

   The metal had to be the secret. It had to contain the remnants of life itself. But he had to know for sure. Leaping out of a room that was invisible to the animatronics’ programming, he dragged the oversized robotic skeletons back to his underground workshop, back to where Circus Baby watched on with glowing, curious eyes, eyes that somehow felt alive.

   Not knowing what else to do, William melted the robotic parts down. Five animatronic endo-skeletons reduced to one silvery puddle of goo. Could he transfer this living metal to his own creations? He had to try.

   He picked up a syringe and filled it with the molten metal and injected the goo into Funtime Freddy’s twisted wiry endo-skeleton. Suddenly, the coils came to life. Like snakes writhing in a pile, what had once been cold, lifeless metal moved and jolted on its own. He’d done it! He had unlocked the secret to life itself.

   Except… something was clearly wrong. The movements were erratic. They were violent, angry. Baby didn’t act this way. She had been calm, collected. This was clearly something else. Something mindless and frantic. Perhaps by mixing the souls and then portioning them out, he had created an incomplete beast. He would need to keep testing to truly understand it. He needed more of this remnant.

   As he searched the old pizzeria one more time for any remaining scraps of metal, the ghosts attacked. His past victims come to collect their due, all led by Cassidy. The five lined up and blocked the door. Afton’s mind reeled.

   The scientific implications of this were staggering! Ghosts! Real ghosts that he could see, all standing against him. But what could they do? Or more importantly, what couldn’t they do? He panicked as Cassidy approached. How do you stop something that’s already dead? Maybe with the thing that resulted in their death in the first place. He would get into a suit like old times, he would regain his power over them just like the day they died. He was the genius! He was the one in the suit! He was the one in charge—

   The Springlocks snapped into place. Maybe it was his frantic movements. Maybe it was the leaky, abandoned restaurant. Maybe it was just fate coming to collect its due.

   He didn’t know. The only thing he did know was that his brain was suddenly filled with searing, white-hot pain as hundreds of metallic pins and gears stabbed into his body from all sides. All he could do was collapse, blood slowly oozing out of the suit and pooling onto the floor around him.

   It couldn’t end like this. It wouldn’t end like this! His work was unfinished. Unable to move, his only option was to survive, to live, to keep living.

   It took days of lying in his own blood, but eventually someone found him, a security guard, making a normal report. When he saw the animatronics torn apart in the middle of the floor, it caused him to file an immediate report of a break in. An owner would have to come in and claim the damage.

   And who else would it be other than Henry Emily. Hope jumped in William’s heart. Henry would see him, they were partners after all. He would be the one to help save him, to get him out of this suit, to relieve him from his tremendous pain.

   Henry entered the secret room. His eyes fell on Afton, sitting there in the pool of red. Henry, saying nothing, turned and walked away.

   And so there Afton would sit, hanging on for 30 years, trapped behind the walls with an iron will that refused to die.

   ~Skip to Michael Afton~

   William still wasn’t back. Weird. Michael knew that his father had to sometimes travel for work, oftentimes disappearing for days on end. But usually there was some sort of notice, a phone call, a post-it, something. It’s not like Michael and his father were close. Far from it. But as a household of two suffering men coping with years of tragedy and loss, there was at least some element of communication between the two of them. They were united by a name and a shared pain.

   This time though, things felt different. William had left nothing. His absence was longer. There were no check ins, no updates. Just silence. Something had happened. If there was one thing Michael knew about his father, it was that he had contingencies, safety checks, backup plans. His father was a careful and guarded man. He held his cards close to his chest. William had prepared him in the event that something like this ever happened.

   Normally, his father kept his home office locked, but in the event of an unexpected, prolonged absence, Michael had been instructed to enter his father’s office and look behind an empty set of shelves mounted in the corner of the room.

   Rolling his eyes, Michael entered the office. He never fully understood how William was able to spend so many hours of his days locked up in here. There was just nothing to do. Most of this place was empty. Michael dragged himself over to the shelf in the corner, expecting to find an emergency contact list, a family safety deposit box. But what he actually found there was completely unexpected.

   The shelf swung open and revealed a giant industrial elevator. One that led straight down into an underground bunker.

   But that was impossible. Hidden inside his childhood home was a secret entrance to an enormous underground science lair? It didn’t make any sense. And yet here it was, mapped directly underneath the floor plan of the house that he’d grown up in, lost his brother in, been tortured in. Michael thought that he’d known his father: a prideful, sad, angry man with petty, everyday problems. But clearly he’d been living with a stranger this entire time. His father had secrets.

   Suddenly, the days of William being locked inside of his office made sense. He’d been here the entire time. Where was here, though? Was this Circus Baby’s Entertainment & Rentals? The Circus Baby restaurant always did seem to be a deeply personal project for William, a failure of his that cut unusually deep, especially after that first location had to be closed prematurely due to gas leaks. After that day, William really did seem to change, to lose himself even more in his work.

   Clearly, the entrance Michael had found was some sort of secret back way into the facility, one that required crawling through vents to navigate.

   William had been working here, but in secret. Why? And that’s when Michael found her, at the end of the facility: Circus Baby, his father’s pride and joy. Except something was different about her. She wasn’t like the others. The way she talked, the stories she told. This wasn’t just a robot. She was alive somehow. And not only was she alive, but she also felt familiar.

   Was this his sister? William’s baby girl? But how? Why? What was this place? He dug around some old files and found blueprints outlining the features of these animatronics. Storage containers, voice mimicking, parental tracking. And was that a child in Freddy’s stomach?

   Was his father collecting and experimenting on kids? Were all the rumors he’d heard throughout his past actually true? That the animatronics came to life at night, that there were murders done in all the pizzerias, that his father had somehow been the prime suspect in all of it? Suddenly, Michael’s mind flashed back to his persistent nightmares throughout his childhood. Had he been experimented on, too? Tears stung in his eyes as anger, fear and confusion filled his body, his father’s secrets were pouring out. William wasn’t just a lame, overworked father. He was a monster, toying with life itself. Suddenly, everything clicked, he frantically looked around the room, blinking human heads on poles, staring back at him.

   Green eyes: his sister. Blue eyes: his brother. Closed eyes: his mom.

   All just staring, expectantly. These were meant to be human. William was working down here trying to make believable humans, literally rebuilding the family that they had both lost. The small little girl robots with their British accents roaming the hallways of this underground suddenly took on a whole new context.

   Were those meant to be his sister? A replacement for her? A clone? Was William building clones of his sister? They seemed to know him, after all, to react to his presence.

   He always did seem to have an uncanny resemblance to his father, after all. Perhaps they had simply mixed them up. Maybe that’s why seemed to hold a grudge against him.

   Michael’s mind reeled as the reality of his world crumbled to dust. No, no. He had to get them out of there. If Circus Baby really was his sister. Hell, if any of these... things were human, souls, whatever remnant of the humans that they once were, they needed to be rescued.

   Led by the voice of Circus Baby, he marched through the now-empty halls of the Funtime Auditorium. He would lead them, he would protect them. And finally he would be able to forgive himself for the killing of his brother so many years-

   Scooper? That violent extraction arm? Michael had seen that one in the pile of blueprints, something about heat rendering the magical silver metal useless.

   In reality, prior to getting himself spring locked and put behind the wall, William’s methods had become increasingly sophisticated, with a mechanized arm that could infuse new bodies with a soul. William could finally give and take away life. The only thing he needed were the bodies. But William wasn’t the only one looking for bodies, as Michael was about to learn.

   Michael was going to be the hero to help these animatronics all right. He was going to help the haunted tubes and wires of these animatronics escape, just not in the way that he anticipated. His sister had lied to him. Another game of pretend. The scooper ploughed forward, digging its extraction arm into his body. As he heard his bones ripping through his flesh, Michael blacked out.

   For the next several months Michael’s life was not his own. He was forced to comply with the tangle of wires and spirits that lived inside of him. His body felt like an overfilled balloon, begging to burst as day by day, week by week, his flesh began to sag and discolour. He was a walking, talking, rotting corpse. Alive, but wishing he weren’t. He was a puppet, a walking shell. And while he did his best to conceal his fate, there was only so much a man filled with robot spaghetti could do. The entity in his innards would eventually leave, but by that point, the damage had been done. His decaying flesh stank, turning him into a literal purple guy.

   But still, even with no bones, even with rotting purple flesh and begging to die, Michael continued to live. That silvery metal remnant injected by the scooper meant that he couldn’t die. His anger also refused to die. What he had seen down there in his sister’s location had rocked him to his core. His father had killed and captured dozens. His experiments had killed his sister and then tortured him throughout all his childhood, he was actively trying to build human replicants. He didn’t know where his father was, but Michael knew that he was out there somewhere.

   Michael had to correct for the sins of his father. He had to make things right. Michael would burn Fazbear Entertainment to the ground. I mean, what else could you do when your skin was permanently purple?

   Michael’s strategy was simple, he would apply for night security guard positions at the old defunct pizzeria locations. That way, no one ever had to see him or smell him during his shift. And all these old, shuttered locations did need guards. Teenage vandals and squatters were always looking to get inside these abandoned buildings. And yet no one ever really wanted to work an overnight graveyard shift unless they were practically out of options.

   Enter Mike.

   One by one, he would take on the job of security guard, changing his name each time to ensure that no one was able to follow his paper trail. Once inside, he could tamper with the animatronics and figure out how they worked, writing about his experiences in his security log book. While there he would listen to the old tapes where upper management awkwardly welcomed the new recruits to their summer jobs. Even though he was working there nowhere near the summer months.

   He heard the gory details of his father’s franchise from the outsiders looking in, confused and afraid about what was happening in the walls around them. Sometimes he would see his brother in the form of the Golden Freddy suit, along with the words “IT’S ME” appearing on the walls around him.

   Except now there was something else there. He was no longer alone. Another angrier presence was also in the suit. As if two spirits were forced to share the same body. And Golden Freddy would attack him now, it was aggressive. Its vengeance wanted to lash out at anyone with the Afton name, anyone who wore a security guard outfit.

   Over time, Mike worked his way through the old restaurants. The original pizzeria, the bigger, better Freddy Fazbear’s. he spent weeks there looking for clues as to his father’s whereabouts. And each time at the end of each shift, he would set the location on fire. Remnant can’t survive high temperatures after all, so burning away whatever spirit laden animatronics that still existed inside seemed like a winning strategy.

   All this revisiting his past, though, was causing the nightmares to begin again. Hallucinations that brought him back to his childhood. The guilt of killing his brother. His dreams were oddly mixed with the shrill phone calls of the security guards. But it would all be worth it in the end. The goal was to eventually, eventually stumble across the one location, the one job that would finally reunite him with his father.

   Little did Mike know that that day would come sooner than he expected.

   2023 – An advertisement came across Mike’s TV: Fazbear Frights, a new horror attraction inspired by the awful crimes that occurred around Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza so many years ago. It made Mike sick, people looking to make a quick buck off the tragedy of others, off his own family. This wasn’t a joke or entertainment. Regardless, he had to be part of it. If the team were combing through his family’s history, they might stumble across something that could be useful. And if his father were truly alive as he suspected, there would be a way that he would show up here. Maybe finally, finally, this could be the final chapter in his family’s marathon of tragedy.

   Mike applied for the job and was immediately handed the keys. Years of doing this had taught him that security guards rarely received thorough security checks. They also liked how creepy Mike looked. They thought it was a costume, on theme for the job. What little they knew.

   For weeks there was nothing. But just as Mike had considered giving up, he received the call that he’d been waiting for years.

   Could this finally be him? Sure enough, there he was. William inside his iconic Golden Bonnie springlock suit. Only now it was green and decaying with age.

   And there they were. A small family of broken men finally reunited. It’s been a long time, dad. Mike had always struggled with the phantoms of his past haunting him. But now all the animatronics he’d encountered over the past months hopping from pizzeria to pizzeria suddenly sprang to life, their burned faces haunting him as he tried to keep track of his father on the cameras.

   It would seem that William’s mere presence had put the spirits on high alert. Ultimately, they were harmless, more annoying than anything else. But there was one that felt different from the others. One that was more than just a mere phantom. The Security Puppet. If he looked at the cameras at just the right moment, he could see it floating there through the halls. He could even see its reflection in the water pooled on the ground.

   It would seem like he wasn’t the only one on a mission. While he was dealing with Springtrap, Michael assumed that this one was likely dealing with the spirits of this place, finally setting them to rest.

   “Hopefully, this means a happier day for all of us.” Mike thought to himself. And in that moment he felt the air around him release, like pressure being let out of a bottle. The building sighed, as if five spirits had finally been allowed to move on. He had the sense that his brother was a part of them. He rigged the wiring inside the building to misfire, and the dry, desiccated walls erupted in flames. It is finished.

   Except, it was not.

   Somehow, through sheer force of will, Afton remained.

   William had survived. And Mike would need to find a new way of finishing off his father. Luckily, the solution would present itself later that year. Not from Mike, but from another victim that had been left in his father’s wake.

   Fazbear Entertainment as a brand had been closed for years. William had been stuck in a suit behind a wall. The only person who legally could bring the franchise back was Henry, but he’d largely pulled out of the franchise around the time of his father’s disappearance. Something was up. Surely this had to be some kind of trick, right?

   Mike, doing what he did best, applied for a franchise and immediately got the job. There was just one thing out of the ordinary: Paragraph Four.

   No employment contract he’d ever signed required him to keep special lookout for independently moving animatronics outside the restaurant. Now, he knew something was up here. Henry was luring them all back.

   Rather than trying to go to them, like Mike had done for years, Henry was doing the opposite. He was putting them all under the same roof. He was finishing them off for good. Mike knew this wasn’t meant to be a restaurant. It was meant to be a prison. A containment vessel. A locked box meant to trap them all in so they could finally end the madness.

   It took a few nights, but eventually everyone was there. His father, the Puppet, the robot spaghetti that had once violated his body, and his sister who was now hopelessly devoted to serve the man that had once gotten her killed.

   It was time.

   Mike had been instructed to seal the doors and leave, but while he locked everything down, he didn’t move on. If this was truly meant to be the end, if the remnant needed to be washed away, he needed to be a part of that.

   And with that, it was over. The Afton legacy died with all of them trapped inside of a literal box.

   As the flames danced around the office, Mike for the first time in decades, was happy.

   But William wasn’t gone yet.

   Although the darkest pit of hell was open and waiting for him, something or someone wouldn’t allow him to move on. Instead, he found himself locked in moments from his past: the pizzeria, his son’s room, his underground bunker. It was as if his brain’s neurons were all firing at once, overloaded, mixing and matching all his biggest fears. Regrets, failures.

   What was this place? How did he get here? He called out into the silence.

   Then they started coming.

   Without warning, animatronics both new and old began to jump out at him, bite him, rip him limb from limb. The pain was immeasurable. Make it stop. Make it stop! William, for the first time, longed for death. An end to this torture. Just as it felt like he couldn’t take it anymore, everything was quiet again. It was as if the world had been reset. There was a brief moment of quiet. And then the onslaught began again. Dozens of faces from his past, all focused on him, a waking nightmare from which he couldn’t escape. More pain! More ripping! It was his own personal hell. But why? Why couldn’t he just die?!

   And then he saw them. A group of characters he never thought he’d see again. Those janky stolen characters that had started everything: The Mediocre Melodies. And that’s all they were, mediocre. It had all started to go wrong once they showed up, once Henry had made them. But mixed in with their obnoxious Southern drawls, William heard something else. It was barely a whisper, but he could just make out the words.

   That… that voice. He knew that voice. But from where?

   The one he shouldn’t have killed. William thought back. He’d done a lot of awful things, but there was always the one that stood out. Not Charlie, his drunken act of revenge. Not Susie, his first true murder. No. Instead, it was the one that he had lost control with. The one that he had broken beyond repair for no good reason other than because he could. The one that he’d stuffed inside the Golden Bear that his partner used to wear. Cassidy. They were back. And now they were trying to punish him, to make him suffer like he’d made them suffer. It was almost like William and Cassidy’s souls had been locked together, fused by a collective rage and spite, each refusing to move on.

   But while Cassidy was so focused on taking revenge, they actually did the one thing that would be the downfall for so many others. They kept William alive. Even though the fire should have destroyed the remnant that was coursing through his being, Cassidy kept William breathing, paving the way for his escape. William’s will was so strong, his soul so powerful, that he managed to put a part of himself inside the circuitry that housed the Springlocked suit. And there his consciousness lay, inside a single circuit board, waiting. Waiting for someone to find him and set him free.

   A person that no one would suspect.

   Chapter 3: Post-Purple Guy

   Fazbear Entertainment was dead.

   All debts had been paid, all assets redistributed, the company was outright dissolved. Even the memories of the horrors that had happened there started to fade away in the public consciousness. The people were gone, too. William was dead. Henry was gone. A whole generation of young Emily’s and Afton’s had lost their lives to the horrors of the pizzeria, all of them collateral damage to the man in the bunny suit. Everyone the company had ever touched was dead and gone.

   Well, all except one.

   Clara Afton. She’d been there in the early days, back when things with William were good. They’d had the perfect home, a thriving business, the ideal family. But shortly after their youngest son died, things started to change. William had become distant, lost in his work, obsessive. She had watched him change from this irritatingly brilliant man that she had fallen in love with, to a drunken monster struggling to hold himself together. And despite her trying to reach out to him in those desperate days, he was just too far gone.

   For her sake, she had to leave the relationship. And from there she largely faded into obscurity. A mystery from William’s past, a footnote in his history. That was fine for her. She wanted to leave that part of her life behind. She’d tried to move forward, never wanting to hear the name ‘Freddy Fazbear’ again; a time defined by mistakes and broken promises. But then the paperwork started to arrive. As Fazbear Entertainment began to close as a corporate entity suddenly, her mail was flooded with notifications, requests, obligations. She had been there since the beginning, helping William in the early days of his business, and now as a shareholder and sole living member of the Afton family, all copyrights and trademarks of both Afton Robotics and Fazbear Entertainment passed on to her. Memories of this past life that she had long left behind. Looking at the blueprints, the contracts, the memos, she felt old wounds begin to reopen. The regrets of a happy family that had been torn away from her. William had always been brilliant. That’s what attracted her to him in the first place. But he’d also been too blinded by obsession and pride. He was too jealous, too petty, too unable to actually see a bigger picture.

   But now, holding the paperwork that contained decades of heartbreak and trauma, she realized, it was her turn. She was

   holding the power. This was her chance. And one thought resonated in her head. “I will put them back together. I will put them all back together.” She would be the one to rebuild this family, to rebuild the pieces of that shattered life, to reclaim the kids that Fazbear had stolen from her. But how? Looking at William’s work now laid out before her, she knew that he had been on to something. Collecting remnant, robotic humanoids, digital conscience transference. The pieces were all in place. They were just scattered, fragmented. It was almost like there were too many ideas going in too many different directions. It was such an important idea that she reiterated that point to herself. THERE WERE TOO MANY IDEAS GOING IN TOO MANY DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS. That said, there had to be a way to save it all. She just needed to put it all back together. But how? To rebuild her family, she would first need to rebuild the franchise that had stolen them away from her.

   With ownership over the characters, their licenses, the technology patents and the Fazbear name, she converted the corporation back to an LLC, a structure for smaller businesses that are usually family-owned.

   The irony was fitting.

   From there she would need remnant, and lots of it. Remnant was the key. Clearly, in the years of his life, William had been using Circus Baby’s Entertainment & Rentals as a remnant farm, sending robots to kids birthday parties in the hopes of nabbing bits of the stuff here and there. But clearly, it wasn’t enough. He had, what, like four, maybe five animatronics going out every week? No, it was a decent idea. But to get the remnant they required, it needed scale. Dozens, hundreds of animatronics all out there, all gathering remnant from unsuspecting customers. But to do that would require help, something William would never ask for.

   William had kept everything in-house. His obsession with control limited him. Clara, though, she wasn’t nearly that precocious. A plan like this required partners, people outside of Fazbear to do the heavy lifting.

   So she contacted a midsize delivery company DLZ Shipping Solutions to help build replicas of all the original animatronics. And with meal delivery apps being all the rage, why not an animatronic delivery service? Order one to celebrate your birthday, your Halloween party. How about a 4th of July picnic? Well invite Liberty Chica and 4th of July Freddy on over.

   She would make sure that they made skins for every occasion. Chocolate Bonnie’s for Easter, Shamrock Freddy’s for St Patrick’s Day, Dia de los Muertos Chica’s - and thus, the Fazbear Funtime Service was born.

   Was it ridiculous? Absolutely. Was it a sellout? No doubt. It was exactly the sort of thing that William would have hated, but it needed to be done to get enough remnant. Normally, the novelty of ordering an animatronic wore off after like what? One, maybe two times. But with new skins for new holidays - suddenly, you had yourself an animatronic perfect for every occasion. It would keep people hooked. It would keep them ordering the latest and greatest that Fazbear Entertainment, LLC had to offer - and all the while, they’d be collecting and returning the remnant back to her. In a word, it was brilliant.

   There was just one problem with it. No one trusted the Fazbear name; the company’s brand was still mud in the public eye. No one would want to hire animatronics from the restaurant franchise known for murdering children. Nothing kills a party quite like the threat of death, you know? So she needed to find a way to discredit the stories that had come before. She needed to win back the public’s affections, reactivate some nostalgia for the spooky stories of their childhoods. She needed a game. Multiple games, in fact.

   Struggling game developers were a dime a dozen online, most working on their magnum opus between shifts at the Dollar General. So she found one: Scott Cawthon. Just picked him out of obscurity. The right mix of desperate and doofus willing to say and do anything for a couple extra bucks. And he fell right in line as expected, delivering stupid little things with dumb generic names like Mangle’s Quest, Balloon Boy’s Air Adventure, and Five Nights at Freddy’s.

   Bad gameplay with even worse graphics. But hey, they got the job done. People were suddenly talking about the clues inside of these things, searching for the hidden lore. They were actively making jokes about dead kids at pizzerias. Her husband’s twisted history of serial murder had suddenly been reduced to a mere Nancy Drew mystery to be solved. The plan had worked. Freddy Fazbear was suddenly more popular than ever. Things were going shockingly well. Clara’s takeover and reboot of the franchise was full and complete.

   Suddenly infused with cash, she built the largest, most ambitious project yet: The Mega Pizzaplex. William had always been so visionary, but always thought on such a small scale. He was careful to a fault. Not her though, she knew that this latest project needed to be big. It needed to be flashy. It needed to be a place for children, a place that got people talking and checking out the latest in Fazbear products. So with a steady supply of remnant flowing in, it was finally time.

   The stage was set. It was time to get to her real goal, quite literally rebuilding her own family.

   ~Timeskip~

   March 2035 – The first was obvious, the Crying Child - also known as Evan Afton - her little boy, the one that was the first to get ripped away from her.

   She’d seen down in his bunker that William had gotten very close to replicating artificial humans using animatronic technology. And so that’s exactly what she would do. Rebuild her boy from the ground up using robotic parts, his shaggy brown hair, his favourite striped shirt, even down to the little details that no one would notice like the Band-Aid on his left knee.

   William’s research had even found ways of making animatronics that could bleed and process food, making them virtually indistinguishable from a typical human. He would never have any idea of what he actually was unless he was explicitly told. The only things that could possibly ruin the illusion were any overrides to his internal systems. If something were to say, interfere with the cameras that he had in his eyes, or cause some sort of a core reboot to his hard drive, or X-ray his metallic bones, then yeah, he would be exposed. But otherwise, to the outside world, he was just your typical normal human boy.

   Clara worked down in the bowels of the Pizzaplex, giving him life. But it was one thing to build him, it was another to help him remember his identity. He died so young, so early in their history, that there was no preserved memories for him, no documentation that you could just download into his digital brain. So bit by bit, she trained him, forcing him to remember who he was. In a corner of the room, she even made a makeshift dinner table, a reminder of their happier days. The family recreated: two brothers, a sister, a father, and the mother at the head of the table. The one in charge, the one in command, the one bringing all of this to fruition.

   But this progress was admittedly slower than she would have liked. At first, he could only communicate through simple ones and zeros, then rudimentary drawings and crude letters. But bit by bit, images of his past life started to come through, balloons, colours, houses, bears and faces, birthday parties, all for him.

   Gregory, for that was his new name, was alive.

   As the robot boy embraced her she felt a warmth that she hadn’t felt in decades. This. This was the joy that she’d been working towards. This was what it was all for. Her son, back in her arms again. The plan was working. She had to keep going.

   Next was William. If the family was truly going to be put together, she would need him. And she knew exactly where he was; in the ruins of that old Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza Place, where Henry had trapped him.

   In fact, that’s specifically why she insisted on building the Pizzaplex there over the sinkhole; it’s the best place to hide what her true intentions were with the entire operation.

   Digging through the wreckage, she found him. He was right where she though he’d be. Seeing the putrid shell of the Springtrap suit, though, was not something she was prepared for.

   The rotting corpse of William Afton was disgusting. Scorched flesh fused into the fur lining, hollow black sockets where eyes once were, a smell that reeked of burned carbon and bloody iron. He was no longer flesh, he was just the tangled sinews of a creature that was once called human. How far this brilliant man had fallen. It was clear that her work was cut out for her on this one.

   Afton was practically lifeless.

   The man may not have been able to die, but he was about as close as you could come.

   And his body would need a lot of reconstruction. Replacement arms and endoskeleton reinforcements were the top priority, maybe pulled from their new line of Glamrock animatronics.

   She’d have to see if they had any spare Bonnie parts lying around that they could steal. In the meantime, though, she threw the husk that was once her husband into a life support pod infused with aerosolized remnant to help keep him stable.

   But more important than recovering his body, was recovering his mind. In his current state, he was comatose, an empty shell.

   Severe brain damage starts at temperatures over 180oF (42oC). And years of repeated fires had burned his brain to goo. Gone was the brilliant, frustrating mind that had drawn her to him in the first place. But she had a plan.

   Unlike her darling boy Evan (Gregory), Afton had found ways to record his consciousness. Fundamentally, the brain is only a series of electrical connections, after all. So why couldn’t you replicate that in the form of a standard circuit board? In essence, you could create a digital consciousness. And one thing she knew about William, is that he was nothing if not cautious. A planner, someone who had backup plans to his backup plans.

   And sure enough, there it was. Buried in piles of old animatronic CPU’s, a record of Afton himself. But she needed someone to test it.

   "Someone was definitely here during the night. It must have been the client. I mean, they sent us stuff in the first place with no explanation. Told us to scan it. Said it would expedite the process so we wouldn't need to program any pathfinding ourselves."

   Unlike the other games that she’d paid to have made in the past, this one had a different purpose. This wasn’t about PR, it was about getting William back up and running, spreading his virus to the masses.

   "You acknowledge that Fazbear Entertainment is not responsible for accidental digital consciousness, real world manifestations of digital characters, hallucinations or death."

   She hired a new developer, Silver Parasol Games, to scan the boards and bring her husband into the system. And because of the immersive nature of VR, William’s consciousness would be able to merge with the player, giving him a new body, a new agency.

   There was just one complication. Afton’s hold wasn’t as powerful as she had hoped. He wasn’t able to gain complete control.

   The first trial run, Jeremy, was so desperate to escape from his grasp that he sliced his own face off with a paper shredder.

   Messy. Afton’s followers were… reluctant, to say the least. But it was the second attempt that looked like it had the potential to kill two birds with one stone.

   Enter, Vanessa.

   Mrs. Afton wanted a surrogate daughter. Her darling Elizabeth would have been a young woman at this point if she had lived. Clara wanted someone who wasn’t Elizabeth, but could be just like her. Could she have just rebuilt her like Evan, into Gregory? Sure. But she decided against it because she wanted an actual human mother-daughter connection.

   Well, that, and it would be redundant, narratively unsatisfying to have two robot kids in the same family. What could she say? William had put a lot of tools on the table for her to use—and she was planning on using them all. Plus, Elizabeth had always been so loyal to Daddy. It was time to give her a second chance, a true choice.

   And Vanessa seemed to be the perfect candidate to fill the role.

   "Your dad's name was William? Your dad didn't play fair, did he? Your dad used to make your mom look bad in court. I know your mom died after she lost the custody case."

   Vanessa started as a QA tester at Silver Parasol Games, the VR game development company that was part of her plan to bring back William. But more importantly, Vanessa checked all the correct boxes. Right age, blond, green eyes, with a fondness for flowers and the outdoors. In many ways, it was her daughter all over again. Except it wasn’t just looks and personality. What really mattered was Vanessa’s mind: underconfident, coming from a broken home, motherless, able to be manipulated.

   Yes.

   She would do nicely.

   She would be the one to save dear old Daddy, just as the real Elizabeth would have wanted.

   While testing the VR game, William’s digital consciousness merged with Vanessa.

   Oh, sure, she fought, fragmenting Afton’s code into a series of tapes hidden across the game, trying to do web searches to regain control of her life. But it wasn’t enough. She was weaker than Jeremy. She was a thrall that, despite occasional moments of lucidity, had to obey. And with Vanessa, it was a two for one deal. She was getting her daughter back while also bringing her husband one step closer to reactivation. She just had to make sure that Vanessa was headed the right way.

   The reborn Gregory was an expert hacker. Part of the benefits of being an Afton and a robot. So Clara had him keeping tabs on Vanessa, hacking into her emails and trailing her therapy sessions to ensure the future Elizabeth was falling in line. If any of the therapists started to ask too many questions, they were promptly... dismissed from their positions.

   And while Gregory kept tabs on Vanessa’s personal life, Mrs. Afton made sure to clear a path for her professionally.

   With Silver Parasol’s collapse at the hands of the anomaly, she then had the possessed Vanessa bring the contaminated circuit boards to DLZ Shipping and the Fazbear Funtime Service. More glitches, more remnant, more Afton.

   But it was her last move that was the best.

   In a true masterpiece of poetry, she brought Vanessa over to be Chief Security Officer at the Pizzaplex, a true family tradition to don the hat and badge. And all it took was a recommendation from the top as well as some emails marked for deletion.

   Sure, Vanessa didn’t relevant experience for the job, but when it comes directly from the CEO, does it really matter?

   Husband, son, daughter.

   A corpse, a robot, a human.

   All that was left was Michael. Poor, troubled Michael. The boy that killed her youngest, the one that would spend years trying to make his guilty conscience right again. A self-professed protector.

   While she knew she needed him to complete the family, something told her the problem had already solved itself. Something had shifted when using Glamrock Freddy to excavate the buried pizza place.

   Maybe it was the remnant that had coursed through Michael’s veins. Maybe it was the spirit of Michael living on as a protector. But he was there, somewhere inside of Glamrock Freddy. She could feel it.

   And just like that, she’d won. She’d done it! Sure, there were still some kinks to work out. Some final brainwashing of Vanessa, some rehabilitation to William. But they were there, finally. All together again under one roof. The Afton’s reunited.

   A happy ending.

   And that’s how it could have ended. That’s how it should have ended.

   Had it not been for a few… unanticipated developments.

   For one, something was just wrong with the Pizzaplex, almost as if the entire building was haunted, possessed. Puppet plushies hiding on ceilings, behind crates, places that had no earthly way of belonging. Staff bots with greasy tears down their eyes, acting like they were being puppeteers by some sort of nightmare. Even their sounds had the echo of nightmares long passed.

   It was as though a guardian spirit of the past refused to move on. As long as her husband was around, it too would linger.

   Only now, it wasn’t just in one body, but it was in the essence of the building itself. Clara has seen stories of houses built on burial grounds getting possessed by angry spirits, but she’d never assumed that it could be real. Then again, in a world of living spirit metal and mind controlling glitches, who was she to be so judgmental? The whole thing was ridiculous. Why would this be the line that she refused to cross? After all, the Pizzaplex was built over the burial ground of angry spirits.

   But it was the power cords that finally convinced her that something was wrong.

   Suddenly, these cords were striped black and white, like the Security Puppet from generations ago. The very foundations of the place, the materials and wires that constituted it, were rebelling against her. Against the Aftons. Against the quest to bring them all together again.

   And it was being helped by something else. Something slithering through the building. Maybe they were connected, she couldn’t be sure. But a blob of living wires could be heard oozing through the walls, stealing pieces and parts of the old animatronics showcased in Rockstar Row.

   Clara could only assume that it was a byproduct of all the remnant they’d been collecting. From Afton’s testing, she knew that both light and dark remnant existed. One of positive emotions. And the other created from anguish, anger, agony.

   Perhaps this... This thing was an amalgamation of all the darkest parts of the pizzeria’s history, a collection of the hatred still housed inside these defunct endoskeletons and exosuits.

   As long as it was left alone, it seemed to be harmless. But if any Afton outside of Michael got too close, it would lash out wildly. Even young Gregory, looking to punish the family that had been complicit in its horrible creation.

   Little did she know, though, that Gregory should have been her biggest concern. That bringing the family together would have some unforeseen consequences.

   Gregory was normally the goodest of boys. Clara had literally built him that way. But lately, he’d been disappearing more and more often, disobeying her orders— I mean, requests.

   She knew that he loved playing on the arcade machines once the Pizzaplex closed, being so good as to top the leaderboard on practically all of them.

   But lately he was nowhere to be found. She suspected his absence had to do with Glamrock Freddy’s failed performance the other night when he malfunctioned live on stage.

   Almost as though the core programming of Freddy responded to seeing this rebuilt small boy. Almost like it awakened something inside of him. She’d have to make sure that Vanessa was on the lookout for him, but she’d soon come to learn that Vanessa wasn’t enough.

   Whether it was the influence of the nightmare puppet or a reawakened hatred of animatronics seeded deep in Gregory’s code, something had caused him to rebel, to rip apart each animatronic in the Pizzaplex.

   Bit by bit, this boy was tearing down the empire that Clara had so painstakingly built, freeing Vanessa from her mind control, destroying the remains of Afton in the basement, setting Glamrock Freddy loose.

   As her carefully created world crumbled around her one more time, she began to plot her revenge.

   She would have to bring them all...

   To RUIN.

2. #2Basics of comedy

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   In comedy, it’s often important for there to be some sort of punchline, dark humor (such as being hit by a bus), or making light out of a tough situation. It is often appropriate to laugh when a joke is made, or smile, or act shocked and NOT UPSET to something if it’s meant to be funny. It is very annoying for people to be upset after a joke is made. Many jokes give hints to the fact with an obvious statement, a lighthearted response, a smirk, a smile, or a laugh along with it. Many people laugh at their own jokes. Lots of dark jokes target dark situations, such as death, disease, or violence.

   Other times, humor is found lighthearted ways that include violence, such as comically hitting the back of someone’s head.

   A lot of times a character will say something shocking or dark with a grin or a smirk. Or they might randomly burst out and say something inappropriate. They’re likely to talk about genitals or balls lmao.

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