I'm in the possess of figuring out how to write for the Prototype. He's smart, always thinking ahead, and everything he does seems to be for a reason. I thought it might be fun to write about the Player having caught his eye. Not in a nice way. But in a "lock this precious thing in a cadge" sort of way.
If you like my work, please consider commissioning me or leaving a tip on Ko-fi (˶ᵔ ᵕ ᵔ˶)
The Prototypes new plaything
★ Watching from afar is how the Prototype came to know you. In the moments where you thought you were alone, he was there. You didn't see him -not once. But he was following you. Studying how someone from the outside adapts when thrown into the factory.
★ He lets you believe you’re alone. He won't interfere. Not even if you're seconds away from death. What fun would that be? No, you deserve to struggle. Just like all the other employees.
★ Would you try to hide from him, like the others? Hide and seek is his favorite game. Might as well... And a fresh piece of meat is bound to draw out the more desperate, hungry, experiments.
★ You really are just another employee to him. Preston wasn't shown any mercy, either. Despite how the Prototype considered him a "friend."
★ After your blood was spilled on the factory floor, he returned to the spot. Now he knows what blood type you have. Great to know if you end up being used for spare parts, should he need to repurpose you. It would be such a shame to lose a face like yours.
★ Mommy was being unfair to you. At least, in his opinion, she was. All three of the games were rigged in her favor. You cheated. But so was she. So much for Mommy hating cheaters...
★ Funny how it was you who killed her. Not that he's complaining. Being mangled in a grinding piece of machinery was less than ideal. But he still got some new parts. He should thank you for that. Or not. It's not like he owes you anything.
★ Earlier, I mentioned how he won't bother to help you. You’re not special. You’re not chosen. And you’re not safe. You’re just the most interesting thing in the factory right now. And he wants to see how long you can last.
★ Just like with Sawyer, he keeps you around for a reason. Even if it's a small one. With the way things are? You should consider yourself lucky! Others weren't so fortunate.
★ The Prototype considered poisoning you. Not with a pill, or any kind of obvious substance. But by poisoning the air. Like Catnap and his red smoke. It wouldn't be hard, just a few strings to pull. A loose pipe and redirected valve. That could easily spew out toxic fumes.
★ Killing you would be easy. And each step you take brings you closer to him. These concrete walls can only hide you for so long.
★ If he gets his hands on you, death won't be a fitting punishment. Not for someone as stubborn as you. He can make living seem worse than death. Just ask Poppy.
word count: 2.98k || warnings: canon-typical violence (not explicit)
summary: Ollie's long gone, yet you cling.
You never thought you'd be here again.
Well, in all fairness, no orphan who survives whatever the hell Poppy Playtime is decides to come back after being adopted by a family, but you owe someone a major favor for getting you out, so you've come back to repay them. As a scientist. You'll stop at nothing to pay them back. Even if it meant sleeping with their dad to rise to power.
Your rise to importance is quick and instant.
The old man drops dead a couple days after you slept with him, but since no one technically ever knew you did, you're spared the details. Elliot Ludwig was approaching his deathbed anyway. His hands had to be pried dead from Poppy Playtime, appointing Leith Pierre as the new head, but appointing you as head of surgery as well. You got what you wanted. That's all that mattered.
You started neck to neck with Harley Sawyer before you had been moved onto the case that you'd been vying for since you started.
"Oliver." You shut the door behind yourself, looking at the toy through the glass.
There is a mic on you, but you're not concerned for specifics. You can always alter the audio log later. Besides, it doesn't work right now.
The Prototype turns to look at you. Twists his body so that he's only half facing you. It's your first official introduction to the toy, and there's a smile on your face as he meets eyes with you.
"Sunshine." He grins. "You came back."
"As promised." You hum. "Had to sleep with Ludwig, but heaven forgive that wasn't a pleasant feeling. He was so old he was practically falling off the bone. Do you know how wrinkled his dick was? God. The things I do for you."
"None of those words mean anything to me." He turns to fully face you this time, unnerving smile on his face, and you laugh.
"They never have. I'm back as promised. Tell me what you need."
Both of his eyes still work at this moment in time, and you find it quite amusing that there will come a day where one of them's gone. The aftereffects of an uprising that was squashed without mercy. It's funny. It's thrilling, if anything. You'd be kept until there was no more use to you. Yet, there is no point to worry about a future you do not know.
"I do not need you with me. I need you to shadow Sawyer. You are level. He is not."
"To learn." You pause. "To operate?"
"Correct."
You bow kindly, and the way he looks down at you sends a crawl up your spine.
Oh, how nostalgic one's first love is.
You remember the Prototype when he was human. Oliver, his name was. He shadowed Elliot Ludwig like second nature, selected out of all of the orphans as the smartest — the easiest to control. You had been enamored with him back then. The boy who shadowed the owner of the company and learned everything firsthand. You had listened to him ramble to everyone about what he learned for the day to the other orphans. You picked things up fast, and soon, you were pushing ahead in your education. You would have made a wonderful toy had Oliver not stepped in and told Ludwig it'd be better to keep you on the other side of the glass.
Thus, you were sent away from the young genius's program to a fitting family of surgeons to learn neurosurgery.
Oliver had made you promise to come back for him.
"Come back for me." He whispers, and there's a fear in his eyes that you think you know.
"I'll die trying to get in if that's what it takes." You promise.
You were seventeen. He was too.
Young, fresh, and versatile. Soon, the letters from Oliver had stopped, the final one being an ominous tape that you'd played. Sawed and cut together voices. His new name is the Prototype. 1006. His number. It included instructions on a way to get back into the lab. A process that wouldn't undermine anything, but promised success. His plan took five years, but you'd crammed it into three. You'd slept with half the investors at the neurosurgery conferences by the time you'd finally met Ludwig himself. He'd be somewhat healthy at the time, but still old. Obsessed with creating a better future for children through toys, and it sickened you how fake the entire persona had been.
Oliver had told you that you should not return if you did not want to share his sins.
Well, didn't matter.
Harley Sawyer, another boy booted from the young gifted geniuses program, killed him. Took care of him. You'd met him on your first day with a grin of knowing, and he'd sent you one in response.
The two of you would get along swimmingly as the heads of neurosurgery.
"I want to shadow Doctor Sawyer for surgeries."
There's one thing, though. Anything you wanted, you'd get. It didn't matter if it took underhanded methods or some kind of awful, grueling process to get there — there was nothing you couldn't have. And, well. Considering your influence on half the board, you'd been allowed to shadow Harley Sawyer quite easily. The surgeries weren't anything horrible. The big surgeries, you were allowed to watch and take part in after a while, but you'd stayed on the sidelines in the beginning.
Then. Then.
Harley Sawyer slips up.
Leith Pierre wants him taken care of, and taken care of do you do. His body is sliced up under the surgery table, and you're the head surgeon at his dissection. You turn him into what he turns others into. You don't doubt that you'd end up like that as well, but you refuse to take the title Harley Sawyer once took. You're not there to operate regularly. You're there to learn. Absorb knowledge the same way you had when you and Oliver had been teens.
They send you back to become the Prototype's chief scientist, and it's a smooth sailing from there on out.
He'll kill you or feed you or transform you once you're no longer of use. It's that simple. A shame, since he can't guarantee that you'll keep your mind intact if you are a toy. You're disposable in his plan. You don't bet on useless attachments like anyone else does. It's what makes you valuable. Your loyalties lie with the Prototype.
Most of the scientists are too scared to get close to the Prototype from his violent nature. Instead, they send you in again and again to the chopping block, and have you log your visits with him. Yes, log. You're in charge of him anyway. No one lasts longer than a week when it comes to the Prototype, but you keep coming out alive. Sometimes, with a little poppy gel on your clothes. Other times, with a scratch or two on your face. It's a charade the two of you are all too willing to play.
You hide in his box and slowly detach his limbs from the mangled mess that Ludwig had made and turn them into legs. You give him the ability to sneak around and leave his box, but never tell anyone. You still write about him detachedly in your reports, and sometimes you miss the Ollie you once knew. The Prototype has only a fragment of the boy you once promised everything to. He doesn't have any attachments to you anymore. He gave that up alongside his humanity. You, on the other hand, are still human, so emotions drive and control your every move. Well, an owed favor is an owed favor.
He gave you his life, so you'll give him yours.
You don't take part in the Hour of Joy.
You're instead locked up and kept safely by the Prototype during the time, sent to a room where you're essentially forced to learn how to operate and transfer consciousness through the poppy gel that you'd gotten so used to seeing. It turns people immortal. The Prototype had learned the secret and consumed as much of it as he could. There was no amount of killing that you could do for a hulk of metal. How do you even kill something like that. You don't know. You refuse to find out.
Your only use is to operate on the humans thrown to you by the Prototype since the Doctor no longer can. Speaking of, you haven't seen Doctor Sawyer in a while.
thud.
"And who is this?" You raise a brow.
"Miss Gracie." One of the toys purr. "The one who convinced us all that we were always toys. You know?"
You blink at the woman, and you raise a brow amusedly.
Your coworker.
"Hey Gracie." You reach for your gloves.
Ms. Gracie. That's her name. You're handed her restrained body on a platter from the Prototype, her mouth gagged with a random piece of cloth found somewhere. God knows where. You raise a brow at the body, and then at the Prototype, and you hum. Her screaming is unbearable. You'd silence her if you could.
"Am I supposed to transfer her consciousness somewhere?"
A sized-up toy is thrown unceremoniously to the ground next to the table as you hum.
"Someone get me a table."
The procedure is done without anesthesia. Evil, truly, but there wasn't any. The Prototype could secrete the poppy mist, but you couldn't operate with a gas mask on. There just wasn't any promise that you couldn't. Your vision can't be obscured. It's as simple as that. So, she's put under a numbing spray that you found somewhere in the operating room and cut open to be transferred to the toy. Just her consciousness. You chop open her skull and hard-wire her into the toy, transfer the organs, and then lo and behold. New experiment. You're used to it by now.
You're locked back up by the Prototype before she can find out who did it to her.
You stay in his old cell. You can feel hunger and things that gnaw at you, so the Prototype brings the urbex explorers whom Huggy disposes of to you, and you're careful not to eat any part that could give you something. You avoid the spines, brains, and the organs that you refuse to touch out of a fear that it'll give you something. The Prototype is smart enough to eventually present you cuts of meat instead of the entire body.
You don't know why he keeps you alive.
"There's no point in keeping dead weight."
You hear the doctor tell him that one day.
"Either turn her into one of us, or feed her to those who need to eat."
You're half expecting the Prototype to return to you and try to turn you, but he steps to you, dumping more metal in the room as he stares.
"I want two more limbs."
"Legs?" You get up from your spot, and he scoffs.
"You think I want more arms?"
"Doesn't hurt to ask." You start screwing things together, trying to figure out how you'd attach more limbs to him. A spider design would be nice, and you've watched plenty of those little guys scrawl around the area to know that he'd most likely need a piece to hold everything together. "I need to remove your legs."
"No."
"Then bring me two more limbs." You turn the whiteboard, drawing out what the anatomy might look like and what the design might be. You learn more than you bargain for when you started working at Poppy Playtime, but you've always been greedy for more knowledge anyway. The fountain of wisdom could never sate your thirst to know more. You're not really too far from godhood if you had been any greedier than you were. Your wings are bound to leave you for dead soon.
It's a fall you look forward to.
The Prototype returns with two more limbs, and you start creating the body you'd have to detach from his current limbs to his new ones. He'd become a spider. Move much more efficiently and crawl up walls. You're the only one he trusts operating on him now anyway, and you're given an appalling amount of poppy gel to make sure the surgery runs smoothly.
"Will you kill me after this?"
"Will you remain useful?"
You laugh, carefully pulling out the wires of the Prototype from the legs you had made so long ago when you were younger. You don't know how old he is now, but you leave a compartment where his pelvis would be to shove toys into. There are spikes to load arms into that can be controlled. You're not sure why you add them, but he accepts it, nails gentle on your scalp when you lift him to attach him to his new legs.
"I could crush you."
"You could." You attach the wires.
"Collapse the weight and crush you."
"I wonder why you don't." You sit there and work on his muscles for hours. It's more complex now that he has four limbs. You keep an extra limb on the side that he spots halfway into the attaching.
"Another."
"Five limbs isn't good for balance." You tell him, but you don't refuse.
"Two more."
"Alright."
You also attach empty compartments that he can stick extra limbs onto eventually. You make do with what you can, attaching a light above to the plastic ribs you had found and turned into part of him, and it's the same thing over and over again. He hands you Theodore Grambell's corpse as Catnap like it's nothing, and you turn the toy into a covering for the back of the Prototype. You'd lost your humanity a long time ago. Now, these toys were only useful to Oliver.
"Ollie." Your voice is quiet when you finish attaching Catnap to his back.
The toy turns around so his torso faces you while you finish pinning down the fur on his back.
"Do not call me that."
"I'm next. Aren't I?"
"You've grown bold. Disobedient." His hand reaches for your torso, tightening around you as you look at him.
"If you don't kill me, the butcher will."
"Poppy's Angel could never kill you."
"He's killed the toys already. I'm easier to kill than metal and fur."
"It won't happen." He tightens further, and you fight the wince that threatens to break on your face when he presses his face close to yours. "You love me too much to sell me out."
"A long time ago, maybe. I'm more toy than human these days."
You want him to be the one to kill you. You refuse to be thrown away like a pawn by the Prototype when you'd done so much. Maybe you're just sickeningly selfish to the end. Nothing was ever done out of love when it came to the two of you anyway. You loved him so much before he'd turned into that jack-in-the-box the two of you used to wind up together as children. Horrible, horrible nostalgia. You'd come back as many times as you'd need to if it meant to see his wretched face again.
Something is fundamentally wrong with you.
Your arms aren't restricted, though, so you reach up for his face, pressing a kiss to the corner of his dead eye as he stares.
"Disobedient toy." He tightens just hard enough that you hear something crack in you, and he laughs. "You will not be receiving death from me, no. You will rot with the rubble here until you remember you wouldn't be alive if not for me."
You close your eyes.
"Turn me into a toy, then. Force me to rot here in an insignificant body just like you did with Gracie."
"I'd fuse you to me before you'd be given your way." He drops you on the ground unceremoniously, and you laugh.
"Oh, Ollie." You close your eyes. "How I loved you."
"Ollie no longer exists."
"I know." You hum. "I knew. I've known."
"Humans and their emotions."
"Yes." You exhale. "How foolish I was to try and look for a boy that told me to not return if I could not share his burden."
"Be useful or be discarded." He reminds.
"Yes." You get up, humming. "The butcher will be in the surgery labs soon."
"Be prepared."
"Yes, sir."
His aide, Chum Chopkins, pulls you up with an arm and brushes the bruises that threaten to form on your ribs with his hand as the two of you share a sympathetic look.
You must see the horror that you helped orchestrate to the end. There is no point in realizing that you were never a victim now. There is no point in blaming the Prototype for manipulating you when you were aware. You were never the victim. You lost autonomy of yourself because of your own foolish decisions.
You wonder what that Ollie you fell in love with at seventeen would think of what you've become now.
It's a shame neither of you got the happy ending you wanted.
The butcher kills you — somewhat. There's a gaping wound on your skin from being shocked alive, and you're in and out of consciousness for as long as you can when you feel metal claws pick you up.
He doesn't say anything when he finds your dead body.
And, well. When the Prototype dunks your body in the gel that turned him immortal, you let the weight in your soul sink you to the pits of hell, never to want to return.
You suppose this was your fall in a way.
Hopefully the gel doesn't work.
Yet, as you open your eyes to a new body, you almost forgot how hard it was to die when the Prototype still had a use for you.
Being The Prototype's Orphan Obsession Would Be Like This...
A/N: Since you were not ultra-specific on what kind of fic you want I took it to a very lovely weird place :)
Just a sidenote: every character I write fanfic for is as close to canon as possible. I don't fluff up villains beyond recognition.. but then I don't need to 🙃
CHAPTER 5 SPOILERS AHEAD!!
🌀• This guy here is some very specific type of yandere 🫠 And I'm not talking about "iLySm i would KILL for YoU 😔". I'm talking about: "I have built this sanctuary. I will not let you throw it away." That's the Prototype.
🌀• Now if I've got this right and correct me if I'm wrong, Prototype was originally an orphan called Oliver, adopted by Elliot Ludwig, only to be experimented on as the first in efforts directed solely to Poppy's benefit. Highly intelligent, highly annoying, borderline unstoppable.
🌀• So with you on the scene? Let me first break down why I've chosen orphan instead of an ex-employee. Because, put simply, you might as well just be the Player if you're an ex-employee and see how they're treated by him in Chapter 5. Or if you're an ex-employee that happened to help or show kindness to him before, you need to watch the restricted salvation vid Mob leaked, because from that you can see the only gratitude you'll get is being stuffed inside a toy and then you're even 💀
🌀• An orphan, though? That's different. Absolutely undeniably different.
🌀• Ollie was an orphan. Ollie was adopted. Ollie was used. Ollie was abandoned. So, if you're an orphan yourself, brought up by the warped, sickly sweet mentality that Playtrime trains into the heads of their young, something about you must be at least slightly different. Theo was "troubled." What are you?
🌀• It's not necessarily a romance. And not really a childhood sweethearts kind of trope, because that would be flattening things. Experiment 1006 was said to be extremely, unusually intelligent. He's scarily obsessive. He put forward the Hour of Joy, he's the dictator and the as of yet undefeated string-puller deep in the heart of Playtime Co's abandoned factory. It'll never be just a simple crush or fixational friendship. It's a lot of things, compressed into one huge, orderly mess.
🌀• Ollie chose to connect to Poppy via telephone. He can mimic and personify anyone he chooses. So with you, he might've used the same method to meet, if it was effective enough for you specifically. Otherwise, there might be notes turning up under the pillow of your bunkbed in Home Sweet Home. Or maybe you have an "imaginary friend" like Theo did. And if you and Theo were around near the same time, then chances are Catnap will be a frequent shadow to pretty much anything you do, anywhere you are.
🌀• You'll be told repeatedly that you're special. The Prototype doesn't hide his fixations. He leans on them. Tests them out. Builds around them. Then builds for them.
"They won't make you go to the Game Station today. Play with me instead. For you, I'll always be here, right behind you."
🌀• Quite literally 🧍♀️
🌀• That's usually the peak of it. Instructions that read as encouragement and persuasion through little written notes or phone calls in the night, eyes on you in dark corners of the class while Miss Delight teaches. If another orphan picks on you, it does not last. It lasts that one and only time. And then their number coincidentally comes up greenlit for experimentation.
🌀• But then The Hour of Joy happens. And things change.
🌀• Maybe the day The Hour takes place is on your birthday. Things that seem coincidental at a glance, except you can do nothing but stare at them. The voices stop echoing, the notes stop coming, and sure enough, while you and the rest of the orphans are hiding, they're all taken down to the pit of the factory to get to their Better Place... leaving you behind. You, The Bigger Bodies, a few struggling surviving Critters, and The Prototype.
🌀• If your feelings towards "Ollie" change once you come face-to-face, if, when you realise that those sweet, glitching voices actually belong to a mechanical, cunning, spiteful failsafe of an experiment, you would have rather steered well clear and kept your innocent attention and kindness to yourself rather than letting him remember every single instance you gave it...
🌀• It doesn't change a thing.
🌀• The more you push, the more you will be restrained. The more you deny, the more you will be coerced into accepting. The more you shout, the more you lose your voice. If your words are anything but what they were before, he will not take them seriously. That is the simple truth of the matter.
🌀• This "paradise" he's making of the factory was inspired in ways only he processed and allowed, solely by you. Every time you smiled at something he said or did for you before, it made him just as determined to craft his pleasure into the dying walls of Playtime. All the white noise of the creatures around you must stay white noise.
"Otherwise, we'll be left with nothing. And infinity will be lonely."
🌀• Or maybe he's not trying hard enough. There must be a reason besides him that you want to leave. And so he'll give you what he thinks you'll need. What he's decided. If you keep running, he'll carefully craft a case, a holding cell, filled with the Cat's red fog to keep you calm. If you're nervous and big-eyed, you'll never be alone anywhere in the factory.
🌀• Catnap, while he's still there, will be the most frequent Body to keep you company when The Prototype expects it. Riding slowly high up on a ginormous purple cat's back is definitely an experience. Huggy is a guard, and if there's any part of the factory that is not for you, he'll be the one standing right in your way so that you'll know it.
🌀• You have to understand that he is not soft in the traditional way. But then he isn't emotionless either. He was human once, a boy once, with a found family, almost, even if he doesn't choose to dwell on it, or admit to it aloud. But to The Prototype, you are the only pure thing left in this world. His world. And so this world will be a safe shrine of a home for you both. The only home.
🌀• The toys left behind see you and hesitate. Even if you're the gentlest, most caring person the factory has ever seen - which is undoubtedly the case - they would rather keep their distance when there are eyes everywhere than be in the red zone of being the Prototype's next target.
🌀• He will make it all better. He can fix you.
🌀• If we're going to love language and affection, the top of the list would definitely be quality time. He's always, always there. Inescapable. And if he's not physically there, his power goes far beyond his physical self. He knows every inch of Playtime's factory, and has a tether on almost every living toy in its depths. They'll talk. Because they're starving.
🌀• For The Prototype, softening is rooted in priority. Softness for him would look like moving you out of danger first. Deftly attacking others mid-sentence if they threaten you. Adjusting plans slightly, or sometimes recreating them altogether, to keep you intact. Ignoring reports until your name is mentioned. Dozens of analysis books that are volumes analysing you. Keeping broken things you've touched.
🌀• Not praise. Not warmth. Just preferential protection. And if something collapses in the factory, he wouldn't be glitching your name. He would already be there.
🌀• If you happen to be a little more cooperative with The Prototype's plans and settled as much as you can be on his obsession with you, it just makes things all the more easier for him. It still doesn't change anything. You're still watched, studied, talked to through long hours until he decides you're tired, and Red Smoke starts filling the room.
🌀• He's not much of a hugger... mainly because it's difficult to do that and not be basically impaled 🫠 but he still doesn't ask before he does things. He won't hurt you - not on purpose - but there's nothing stopping him from picking you up and relocating or moving you around however he decides to in any moment. He knows his power, and he's confident in it.
🌀• You'll be well-looked after, in the sense that you'll have more than enough food to eat while the rest of the factory's toys struggle. If you offer any of your food, or provisions you're given, to those who are going without up above, it will almost definitely be noticed. And depending on who you've given it to, you'll either be punished in a specific way for it, or just seen as more proof of being such a pure, perfect being.
🌀• And if anyone touches you, especially any Outsider...
the duffers decided they didn’t want to hide jamie campbell bower in the vecna makeup all season so they put him in a slutty little brown suit, the twinkiest glasses ive ever seen, told him to smile, and then gave him an entire barbie dreamhouse to be offputting and handsome in 24/7
It has never controlled me. And I never controlled it. Don’t you see, William? I could have resisted it. But I chose to join it.
JAMIE CAMPBELL BOWER as HENRY CREEL in STRANGER THINGS S5E08 ‘The Rightside Up’
Have some art ft my courier self insert and the crew, she’s not having the best time but she likes her three teammates Christine, God and Dog :) no one else :)
