She/They, massive nerd.
I come from Deviantart in peace. I am using this as a repository/archive for my art, as well as a space for any lore dumps that I may share. Art that pre-dates the creation of the blog is tagged by year. INFO: 24, programmer, artist, and writer at heart. LINKS: Art fight: https://artfight.net/~PaigeLTS05 DeviantArt: https://www.deviantart.com/paigelts05 AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PaigeLTS05 GameJolt: https://gamejolt.com/@PaigeLTS05 Toyhouse: https://toyhou.se/PaigeLTS05 This account is a repository of my art, so will be 99.8% my art and personal headcannons. Want to see my reblogs though? I have a side-blog for that. https://www.tumblr.com/the-widgets-stash-of-shinies See #PaigeLTS05'sFaves for my best works. See the tags #FNAFRenegadeAU and #RenegadeAU for my FNAF AU, The Renegade AU. And #RenegadeAUGuards for the guards of my AU.
All art in this post can be found here: https://www.deviantart.com/paigelts05/gallery/83638855/the-haunted-watch
Most of the art assets were made in and throughout 2021.
It follows the final 5 days of C location remaining open, following the night guard, Phone 'Krasnyy' Guy.
The game contains elusions to heavy violence, but only one ending (and it's the fake one) actually shows any blood.
It’s a little thing I made in RPG maker MZ, and whilst I can code in C++ and C# and have made some things in Unity, it’s just nice to not have the weight of physics and the movement system on your shoulders so you can just focus on making a story and somehow turning what should be a simple series of ‘if’ statements into spaghetti.
Total Dev time: approx. 120 hours.
The game is called…
The Haunted Watch.
Plot:
The year is 1997.
There have been many Freddy's locations, and each tried to emulate the methods of what transpired at Hurricane, Utah.
Whilst most have closed, the location in Chicago, Illinois, is still open, despite being noted as the failure of the bunch.
With a living phone guy, a reluctant purple man who may or may not now be colluding with the police, and a focus on electrical ghosts rather than remnant, this location was quite frankly deemed a mess, and now as the 10 year anniversary of this locations missing children incident approaches, the location cannot stay open any longer.
For the last week, the night guard on shift is Phone 'Krasnyy' Guy. As it approaches the 10 year anniversary of the missing children incident, the 4 year anniversary of almost getting murdered by Vincent Taylor on his 4th night also draws close, as well as it having been a few months since the animatronics made him their ‘voice’ (which entails him having to do as the animatronics command, since the animatronics realised that having a teammate not confined by circuitry would speed up the process of finding their killer).
All he has to do is survive one new final week. But the animatronics are not trying to kill him, but instead, are intent on pushing his sanity to its limits to find out when he will break again, as they’re not letting go of their final opportunity so soon.
Characters:
Main: Krasnyy Guy (the phone guy), Philip Guy (shadow Freddy), Vincent Taylor.
Antagonistic: Gerald Taylor (Golden Freddy), Felix Taylor (Foxy), Roy (Bonnie), Celes (Chica), Ferdinand (Freddy).
Make an appearance in the true ending: Mike Schmidt, Jeremy Fitzgerald, Fritz Smith, Danielle Schmidt (OC), PT (OC)
Gameplay CG's
Well, it's not really a cg, as these were all hand drawn. but here are the CGs you will find along the way:
1PlotCG SecondStorage
A story cg you must see! Wholesome hair floofing papa and son moment.
2022 art, meaning that this was redrawn from an older piece (about a week before the games release at that)
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1GEP_Cutscene Convo
2022 art!
Another of the images I redrew a few weeks before I finished making the game. It's for one of the conversations between Vincent and Krasnyy, and it's a requirement for the good ending.
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1ge_Final
Enjoy my file naming conventions yet?
ge - good ending
The art for the TRUE ending of the Haunted Watch.
Grab the plushies, talk to Vincent, and face off against the homicidal ghost of a 12 year old to truly beat the game!
2021 art.
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Fake ending images:
The following images are for the games two FAKE endings. The endings that are not cannon. The endings that were made just cos I could do some code spaghetii (and emphasise how dangerous Gerald Taylor is, which makes the Bloodied Journals and Gardener's Dairy make more sense). The glorified game-overs.
1BadEnd1 NoBlood
Secret bad ending image for one of the three endings.
Fake ending 1 - try leaving the building 50 times.
2021 art.
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1BadEnd2 CoveredInBlood
Bad end 2 image for one of the 3 endings.
Don't get closure on anything to get this bad ending.
2021 art.
Character portraits
The only portraits I used in this fangame that didn't belong to me are the two used for the arcade game characters. One came with the engine and the other was made using the in-engine character creator. But you won't see them here.
All of these are hand drawn:
Main: Krasnyy, Philip, Vincent
Krasnyy's portrait was the only one re-drawn in 2022, and he got a 'distressed' portrait to boot.
Antagonistic: Gerald, Felix, Ferdinand, Celes, Roy
Ending:
In the true ending, Krasnyy and Vincent get new portraits.
Even the characters who ONLY appear in the true ending have a portrait.
As mike appears in all endings, he also has a portrait.
And that's a wrap! I hope you play the game. It should take an hour, and DO NOT RELY ON THE AUTOSAVE (I didn't find the setting to switch autosaves OFF until after the games release and if I touch it again, it'll eat my time with overhauls).
Dr Ophelia Harper is the phantom Mangle that was present at the warehouse incident, and at Phoenix Douglas's Fazbear's Fright horror attraction.
She was neither the first nor last of the phantoms to form, having died in the early 2000's.
Due to her brutal demise - having been torn to shreds by the Nightmare Mangle animatronic that she used to operate during the 80's - she gets along better with Phantom Freddy, Foxy, and BB due to their violent deaths, whilst he does not really get along with Marionette or Chica because one died peacefully of an illness and the other isn't even dead.
Whilst she does know the names of her fellow phantoms, she tends to call them by the form of the ghostly animatronic that they take, because years of working on Fazbear's science team had her calling her co-workers by the names of the animatronics they operated out of a need for haste in their communications, and 'Freddy' was a lot quicker to say than 'Dr Andrews'. Now, 'Freddy' refers to a Conductor named James Gray, and she prefers this kinder yet confused Freddy to the stuck up scientist Freidrich anyway.
I don't have designs for all of the named MCM employees yet, I do have designs for the most important three of the Renegade AU. All three of these people left the employ of MCM before the company closed its doors, and each left for a different reason.
🛠️Stan📒
Stan is a very intelligent engineer. If he had the money, he would have never worked at Murray's, but he spent his teen years flat-broke, and college wasn't going to pay for itself. Whilst he was hired after the fallfest fire to replace some of the deceased employees, he always found himself listening intently to people reminisce about those who had passed away at or before fallfest: about the overworked teenager who smiled way too often but was slowly killed by the cumulative injuries from a series of accidents, the gruff guy who was rather brash but always dependable that went missing in the basement, and the kind woman who always helped others but died at fallfest, amongst the stories of other missing or dead employees. He almost feels like he knew them sometimes, and he wishes that he could have met them.
He also bore witness to many of his co-workers abruptly becoming ex-employees. Whilst most just up and quit, some died, others suffered life threatening injuries and couldn't return to work, and some just vanished without a trace. As the tallies of dead, mutilated, and missing persons increased, Stan always thought back to the overworked teen, the gruff guy, and the kind woman, and knew that he was one bad day from winding up like them.
So it's not wonder why he turned tail and ran off with enough blueprints to start his own machine shop as soon as it became clear that the company was thrashing under the waves, already being far under: he didn't want to become another statistic.
Stan was the face of the shop, and practically ran the place despite being the youngest. In his spare time, he looks into local cryptids and other urban legends, but he rarely gets the time to go out anywhere. Which made it all the more interesting when a rather recent urban legend - the snow technician - showed up at his machine shop's door on work business on behalf of one of the companies that Stan's Budget Tech was contracting for.
☎️ Ralph 🐺
Ralph has Disassociate Identity Disorder. There are three main sides of him: Ralph, who is loyal to a fault and is always far too trusting, Zero, who will go to any ends to do what needs to be done, and a child. The child has no name, and neither Ralph nor Zero are really sure that the child exists, but they do know that someone is there.
Ralph started working for Murray's after running away from home. It was how he was going to pay his tuition, and keep a roof over his head. That was all this job was supposed to be.
His mentor at Murray's was a teenager named Arnold who was barely a year Ralph's senior, and the two of them got along well from the start. Over time, the two grew even closer, bonding over the inhumane working hours and their similar living situations: just a pair of teenagers that had no parents (with Ralph having been disowned and Arnold being an orphan) trying to make ends meet. Whilst Arnold's accident prone nature worried Ralph, Ralph didn't mind fishing Arnold out of the aftermath of whatever disaster that he had gotten himself into: he knew that he'd be getting into that many accidents himself if he worked the overtime that Arnold did.
And then Arnold got into a series of accidents. A fall, an electrocution, and a springlock failure. None of these were fatal on their own, but when experienced back to back? Ralph only remembered dragging Arnold out of the costume - being grateful that the Murray's model of springlock suit was purely a costume and not part animatronic - before running into the car park with Arnold in his arms. He handed Arnold to the ambulance crew, and that was the last time he ever saw the Arnold that he knew.
Eduardo - the company spokesman - told everyone that Arnold had passed away in the hospital a few weeks later. Ralph was distraught, and he has few memories of MCM after. Zero wound up fronting more and more frequently as he begun searching for a way out.
As soon as a way out was offered, Zero took it. It was a shady deal, and involved stealing a list of names and contact details, but he considered it revenge.
✂️Fiona Muras 📍
Fiona is a very kind seamstress who found more than just work at Murray's: falling for Eduardo Muras, the CEO's 'brother', let her in on some of the company's most well kept secrets.
Was she shocked to find out that Edwin and Edwin's father were a facade? Personas played by Eduardo and his father in order to more easily assimilate into America? Not really. Whilst she never suspected that Edwin was a persona rather than a person, it did make a lot of things make sense in hindsight. Whilst she wasn't a fan of the whole fake persona deal, she understood why Eduardo's father would have created an Americanised persona, and why Ed would have kept up his father's charade.
Balancing work and the new persona of Fiona Murray was easy, and actually sort of fun. She felt like a spy in one of those over the top action movies as she helped Ed run the company from the shadows in plain sight.
A year later, she welcomed a daughter into the world: Davinia. Balancing a child on top of work was stressful, and even though she hired a babysitter, there was still more work than what she could now handle. She confronted Ed over it, but he seemed more fussed about creating a robotic babysitter and than actually chipping in to take care of their daughter himself. What made it worse was that Eduardo then adopted a second child, who he named David: a playmate for Davinia and a means to keep the illusion of the Murray family alive. Fiona was convinced that Ed had thought none of this through, but she took care of both David and Davinia as if they were twins.
Ed continued to focus more on the endoskeleton that he was creating than his own family.
She started focusing more on her work as Fiona Muras the seamstress and being Davinia's mother, and stopped really caring about the Murray-Muras lie: if anyone asked her where Fiona Murray was, she said that she was busy juggling work and childcare. Nobody ever asked further questions.
A few years came and went, and during the year that Davinia was turning three, Fiona had a horrible feeling about fallfest. The MCM team was supposed to be setting up some experimental showcases, and Fiona felt as if something would go horribly wrong if she wasn't there to stop it, so she dropped everything and went to fallfest. Her work on the experimental technologies and a more secret experiment helped keep everything running smoothly.
Until a fire broke out.
She wasn't sure what caused it, but as soon as the carousel went up in flames, she tried to disarm the experiment.
But the fire reached it first. The blast practically levelled the barn that she was in, killing her instantly.
She woke up as a ghost an undeterminable amount of time later and hitched a ride back to MCM by possessing an employee. Once she was back, she possessed the endoskeleton that Ed had been creating in hopes of taking it over.
She failed, and it trapped her instead, all whilst pretending to be her.
Full body references for the Renegade AU versions of Sammy Emily and Davinia Muras. I internally refer to these two as the discarded daughters because Henry abandoned Sammy (even if it was due to grief and whatever, he still abandoned Sammy), and Eduardo abandoned Davinia (look, in my AU, things get a bit weird but just know that the mimic was Ed's favourite child).
Sammy wears a pair of overalls, has a tool pouch around her waist, and wears a pair of sturdy shoes. Sammy dresses practically for her job as a robotics engineer. She unintentionally resembles her father often, with every single one of the outfits, hair styles, and hair colours that she wore always seeming to match up with one of her father's many 'faces'. She eventually settled on keeping her hair it's natural colour.
Davinia wears a green jumper dress over a blue underdress, long white socks, and cute slip-on shoes. Her outfit is coordinated based on the eyes of the white tiger plushie that her mother, Fiona Muras, had made for her when she was a child: it's one of the few things that she has left of her original family, and the only thing that she has left of her mother. She wishes that she actually knew what happened in her childhood, as most of what she 'knew' was her trying to thread her own patchy and repressed memories together with what she had overheard other's say. Prior to getting used as the core of Fazbear Entertainment's VR environment, she sometimes wore a bandana, and sometimes wore a hairband. It's only after getting used as the VR environment's core that she becomes wheelchair bound and starts wearing bandanas every single day to hide the massive scar on her head.
Jeremy and Gaz lead the offensive down in the staff cafeteria, leaving a hurricane of destruction in their wake, as even the least combat capable can survive with the right tools.
=°•.🌹 Story 🌹.•°=
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It all started with two emails.
An email addressed only to the security team stating that most of the security team was being laid off, and a notice that at the 11-something PM meeting today, more layoffs would be announced.
The email addressed to only the security team listed everyone from security who was being laid off, and every single name was there aside from one: Officer Vanessa.
The name Vanessa Sylvia Blake was not on the list, and neither was the fake name of 'Vanessa A' that she had been employed under.
Jeremy read his own name, and the names of many of his colleagues, but none of Sylvia's aliases were amongst them no matter how many times he read it.
"Gaz?" He said, feeling a creeping sense of dread so deep and sinister that it was only rivaled by what he felt during his 'incident' with 'Glitchtrap', "everyone from the security team has been sacked except Vanessa. They expect us to still stick around for the meeting though, but we're supposed to turn in all our company issue equipment beforehand."
"They can have it one of two ways: we drop of our equipment now and leave now, or we keep our equipment and stick around." Gaz replied, "they can't have thier cake and eat it too."
Jeremy nodded, unsure as to the course of action. Would they just wait around until the meeting? "So what do you suggest we do in the meantime?"
Before Gaz could answer, a manager walked in with Chica in tow.
"What the hell?" A tall guard said, clearly aware of the abnormal behaviour demonstrated by the animatronic chicken.
The manager spoke. "I would like to thank you for your employment at Freddy's mega Pizzaplex. Now, instead of severance pay, you will receive your… Eternal reward. We were saving this for the 11 pm meeting but we'll use it now. A little, test run, if you will."
A grim silence engulfed the cafeteria before a battle cry erupted.
"RIOT!" Gaz yelled, grabbing the nearest chair and lobbing it at a staffbot.
He had ulterior reasons to riot so abruptly at the first sign of danger: a knowledge of Fazbear Entertainment's bloody past does that to a man. But this riot was a cover for something more tactical. His uncle had died years before he was born, killed by animatronics whilst on duty, working at Freddy's. His father became an electrician after having to watch his brother die, yet all these years later, all roads lead back to Freddy's. His father had gone missing after heading down to the raceway this morning. The chaos that a riot would create was a necessary part in trying to figure out what happened and why his father went missing; make a cover, spread the memo, steal evidence before it can be destroyed. Giving Faz Ent bigger fish to fry was a priority to ensure that something remained.
Yet ensuring his and his colleagues survival against Chica was his highest priority.
Whilst a kid could easily out-fox that chicken, he knew that actually making sure that it wasn't able to take anyone down might be stupidly difficult depending on if everyone cooperated or not, because unlike the kids that had been known to get trapped in the megaplex after hours, he had more than just himself to worry about keeping safe. He hoped his colleagues would cooperate and make survival as easy as it should be.
Upon seeing a staffbot's head be severed from its shoulders, Jeremy had a different train of thought that led him to the same station. From the contents of the two emails alone, Jeremy knew that Faz Ent intended to kill everyone; thier intent could not have been more obvious even if they brandished it on a war pendant, which the manager had kind of done already with his short 'eternal reward' speech. There were hundreds of staffbots within the building, each just over the strength of the average person, but brittle to balance the scales. Horde tactics from the staffbots could kill the freshly fired staff in hours, minutes even, if everyone went every man for himself. But good tactics from the human staff could ensure the survival of everyone, and the premature elimination of the staffbots would spell an advantage that could be leveraged in favour of survival.
Reaching for a chair as his primary weapon and a FazCam as his secondary, Jeremy joined suit. His motive being far different to Gaz's own, yet the goal didn't matter: what mattered was causing chaos and a panic before the building went into lockdown; if everyone was alerted to the threat, they'd be more on thier toes to fight, and a fight was what was going to be on the table and he knew it.
As Jeremy flash-banged a staffbot before performing a swift disassembly using a chair as a makeshift executioner's axe, another guard asked him what he was doing.
"Rioting," he replied, "causing a scene. Giving Faz Ent a bigger problem than killing us. Killing the robots before they kill us."
"What!" The other guard replied, paling.
"Are you deaf? You've seen what the robots are capable of, and they're swarming the room right now! You were there when that kid jumped in the way of Freddy trying to kill Vanessa." Jeremy's tone was stone cold. This wasn't his personal reason for rioting, but it was a part of it, and one others could rally around. So it was as good as his. "If we don't do something, we'll all die."
"You gonna explain that leap in logic, wannabe Sherlock?" Another guard, fairly taller than the other, piped up.
"Well," Jeremy said, tilting his visor, "only us in the security team have received the email telling us who has been laid off, and that we are still to attend the meeting later where more layoffs are to follow. The messages via official channels mention naught more than the meeting this evening. Nobody asside from us knows that our employment has been terminated AND DID YOU NOT HEAR HIM TELL US HE WAS GOING TO KILL US! WHAT DO YOU THINK ETERNAL REWARD MEANS."
"I was at the back of the room. Man didn't have his mic on."
"Fair."
The ripples of chaos had thankfully already spread as other guards had already begun to fight, making use of FazCams, blasters, and flash beacons to blind Chica and the staffbots before picking them off one at a time. The sheer numbers of human staff was enough to ensure that the bots remained blind, yet this was going to be a numbers game, through and through. Time management, combatants, and reinforcements. It's all numbers in the end.
"So why don't we just… Tell everyone?" The shorter of the two questioners asked. "We could go for some backup right about now."
"Go ahead and try," Jeremy replied, "I've not had a chance to do that yet, seeing as," he punctuated his sentence by relieving yet another staffbot of its head.
As both of the other guards tried to send a message to the non-security human staff, Jeremy saw thier faces pale.
"Limited permissions?" The taller sneered as the shorter exclaimed.
So their devices were like his now. He'd been stuck on limited permissions since this morning.
"You can still receive messages, and I know Vanessa will use it to our advantage, but you can't use half the functions you could before," Jeremy stated as he clocked Chica with his chair as she blindly lunged about, "You can access cameras, send individual messages between yourself and an individual, but broadcasts are off the table." A smug grin then snaked across Jeremy's face. "So how do you want to get the message across?"
The shorter guard tried to run out of the door, but hit her head and bounced off of the locked door. Not the reaction he was expecting.
Jeremy watched as she checked her watch and shrieked "Clearance level one?!"
With all the guards in the cafeteria checking thier equipment and confirming that the highest security clearance amongst them was a 1 and that the clearance required to leave this room by any means was a three, murmurs of how to get out of the building spread.
There wasn't a way out.
Unless all the doors were broken.
A double edged sword in theory, yet in practice, the animatronics had maximum clearance, so if everyone could get down here, the better.
The tall guard tried the door as well, the last to confirm his lack of clearance, before storming back into the cafeteria and tearing a table out of the ground.
The shorter one got the memo and scurried away.
"Let. Us. LEAVE!"
An entire table flew through the air and broke through the cafeteria door, shattering on the wall that ran parallel. Two figures outside the cafeteria had lept back in shock before running across the corridor's opening, but nobody paid enough attention to see who they were in those short seconds.
Jeremy and Gaz took the offensive front, smashing the plastic carapaces of the staffbots with chairs as other guards provided an embargo of flash-bangs in various forms to keep thier enemies blind and immobile.
As staffbots fell, the human staff rallied strong, leaving the manager dumbfounded as cameras and flash beacons iluminated the room like a paparazzi ambush as one by one, each screw of the manager's plan came undone.
The only part of the manager's plan that stuck was that almost all the guards asside from Vanessa were stuck down here. Sure one door was broken, but basically every other door between here and any exit required either a security clearance above one to reach or required getting past cyclone fences in what was essentially a gauntlet, but they had more run of the building than they did before, and that was a step up for the guards.
Seeing the manager cower, the staff yelled, as even if an exit to the atrium via the elevator or loading docks was impossible, and leaving via the maintenance tunnels right now was probably a sign of a death wish, maybe aid could come to them instead. They just had to be loud enough to catch the attention of someone with enough clearance.
"Why are they leaving one person to take the whole night shift? Do the bosses even know how dangerous it is?"
"Poor girl, are they trying to kill her?"
"Probably. I didn't take the hush money so I'm GOING to bring up what happened not three days ago just to rub it in: Freddy killed a kid! She got in the way of Freddy killing Vanessa, so Freddy just stabbed the kid with his mic stand instead. And out of all of us, they force her to stay!"
"FOOLS! Did they think we'd just go down without a fight? Those of us on duty that night fought tooth and nail, did they think we'd not fight tooth and nail again?"
"I could have probably started this riot without the manager's timely entrance and convenient speech. But we take these where we can"
Calculated statements to try and catch the attention of the one guard who had the clearance to help them.
As robots numbers tended to naught, a particularly bold duo of guards were able to lure Chica out of the broken door with some pizza. Not too long after, they came back alive, presumably having locked chica in a storage cupboard.
"She's got all the pizza junk she can eat," one of the guards gave a mock salute to Jeremy, "I even threw some real pizza and Monty's mystery mix in. She wouldn't leave that cupboard even if I left the door wide open."
"Great work." Jeremy smiled, his grin somewhat unnerving as half his face was eternally hidden under a visor.
Gaz had just disasembled another staffbot, wrenching its head from its shoulders and tossing it at an approaching horde, and the returning duo rushed over to lend a hand.
Dispatching the oncoming bots was a breeze thanks to the teamwork of the gaurds and the doors acting as a filter for the enemy numbers, yet keeping this up would be a chore.
But probably not as much of a chore as dealing with everyone's unique and individual response to Faz Ent's mass murder ploy.
"What's going on?" An arcade technician walked in, and Gaz could hear the shake in the man's voice.
"Showing this hellhole what's what, dumbass. They just laid off basically the whole night crew, and they expect us to sit down and take it?" Gaz replied to the man before looking him up and down. This guy was definitely Officer Vanessa's sister's fella, Luis. "You're a technician, right? Why don't ya go pull out some wires?"
"I… Don't fancy touching any wires when at any moment I could have a chair in the back of my head," Luis replied. He seemed to open his mouth to continue, but canned whatever thought he'd had. It was probably something to do with Vanessa's missing sister anyway; she'd let it slip to him exactly once during the Raceway evacuation back in November, and then never again.
"Suit yourself," Gaz replied as he tossed a chair into the ceiling to break the tiles and give anything that may try to get in through the roof less of a chance at jumping anyone.
Gaz continued to keep an eye on Luis as the man eavesdropped in on a few more conversations before he finally pulled out a screwdriver and stabbed a staffbot between it's eyes.
'Atta boy,' Gaz thought to himself as he watched Luis leave. He had a gut feeling that that man was going to leave quite the mark on this place tonight, and not just because of his re-wiring job on the salon that management wouldn't stop gushing over (it was probably the only properly wired thing in this whole damn place now). Nah, that Luis fella was definitely on a mission more important than restoring the raceway. He just hoped the guy would be alive to tell whatever tale he had by the morning, cos it'd sure be an interesting one.
Under the barrage of lights, the staffbots were as helpless as the manager had hoped the human staff would be and were picked off just as swiftly. Even the weakest of the guards were playing a vital role, keeping the staffbots blinded, or driving a screwdriver into the shells of the stunned robots; it wasn't hard to shut down a staffbot for good, it just took the right tools and good timing.
A blur of chairs, tables, and camera flashes flashed by, and the entire wave of staffbots had been picked off. Staff - human staff - walked in and out of the cafeteria, so news was clearly being spread.
Everyone felt almost disconnected from the violence, with merely sprained wrists and shoulders and eyes burned from camera flashes to show for thier work, but they wouldn't have it any other way.
The coast was clear enough to check around for anyone in the locker rooms, so Jeremy headed out of the cafeteria to assess the situation outside and hopefully spread more panic in order to call to arms more staff for this riot and hopefully evacuate any employees if he could, or at least get them to a safe place if evacuation was off the table, and as he approached the locker rooms, he heard familiar voices.
"What happened?" A male voice that Jeremy roughly recalled spoke. It was Ness's fiancé, Luis, right?
"Nothing." He heard Ness's sister, Vanessa - no, Sylvia - reply. She at least needed the decency of her perfered name rather than the legal and fake name of Vanessa right about now, "I decided to give myself a cold shower. You know, try and clean all this away. But I overheard some people talking. They pity the fool forced to stay the night."
She'd heard the other staff trying to get her attention, but she didn't seem to clock their motives. She must be so stressed. He considered revealing himself, but he decided to wait and see for just a little longer.
"You're not a fool. We both came to work here for a reason, and we're so close to achieving that goal." Jeremy caught a glimpse of Luis's face as the guy spoke, and whilst Jeremy had only met him a few times, seeing his face confirmed beyond any doubt that this was totally Luis, and Luis was being really optimistic about this, all things considered.
"And then what." He heard Sylvia reply and heard a distinct shake in her voice, "Father isn't going to let me leave. Hell, he may even force me to take up her mantle. And besides, I was the second. Cass and I may have compartmentalised that thing whilst we thought of a solution to get rid of him, but clearly, even after she removed him from the game, he had already found someone to take over."
This was about the VR game and Glitchtrap - no, William Afton. Putting the real name to the threat made the situation feel more manageable. Jeremy knew that Ness had been essentially kidnapped; that's why he was here. He assumed that Sylvia got her job at the megaplex for the same reason, but unlike himself who had managed to land the job after Ness's disappearance, Sylvia had been more proactive, predicting that her sister would wind up in this place. But then why would management keep her of all people?
Did she have enough blackmail on the father - Bill Blake - whose title she spoke with enough vitriol to rival hydrochloric acid in order to have forced him to leave her name out of the layoffs?
Or was it as Sylvia feared: beyond the mutual blackmail going on, Faz Ent wanted to make her into a second Vanny. Plausible conclusion.
"So Cass was the third." Luis replied, his tone accepting and ernest.
Luis didn't question it. Good. After all, it was true.
"And Ness was the fourth. Jeremy sacrificed his face, Cass her eye. And what did I give? What did I give to be free? All I did was force him back and we split him up and forced him into Cass's tapes." Sylvia was yelling, not at Luis, but at herself. "If I gave nothing, did it even leave?"
Jeremy couldn't linger back anymore.
He had to reveal himself.
"It left you alright." He said as he walked up to Sylvia and Luis from where he had been snooping behind them. He could see that Sylvia was soaking wet and shaking, and that Luis was helping her with their shared goal of saving Ness. "Does it matter that you didn't have to give something? You forced him out."
Sylvia stayed quiet. He knew that she would conceed this point to him: he'd lost his face, so if he was telling her that it didn't matter that she didn't have to sacrifice a part of her body to get rid of Glitchtrap, then he knew that she knew that he wasn't going to back down on this point.
Because deep down they both knew that Sylvia had sacrificed something: her sanity.
Just because it wasn't a tangible limb didn't mean that it was any less of a sacrifice.
"Where's the tough girl I met in coding class?" Jeremy asked. Seeing Sylvia silent like this unnerved him: it was a sign that something was wrong: really wrong.
Sylvia remained paused for a moment longer before she made her reply, and her voice shook with worry as she spoke the only other question she had on her mind that she knew only Jeremy could answer. "Why are you here."
"Well, I heard you yelling from…" Jeremy paused for a moment. Sylvia was in a delicate state: her paranoia would likely completely overtake her if he wasn't careful. "… A while away."
"No, why are you here at all."
Oh. She wanted to know why he went to work at the Megaplex. Whilst it was safe to share this dangerous information with Sylvia, she seemed to have forgotten what locker rooms they were in.
So Jeremy lied.
"I needed the cash."
Sylvia glared at Jeremy over his obvious lie, and he just shrugged.
"I'd tell the truth, but I can't in here." Jeremy shrugged. Sylvia had already told him about the bugs, and he hadn't forgotten. Though it almost seemed as if she had forgotten herself.
Sylvia nodded in reply. Jeremy figured the stress of everything that had happened so far was putting her too on-edge to think clearly and that his comment managed to pull her to her senses.
At this point, it was clear that everyone was now on the same page.
Despite her hair still being wet, Sylvia tied it back in her usual low ponytail whilst everyone including her stood in mutual silence, waiting for someone to announce their departure.
Sylvia had decided to break this silence by heading over to her locker.
"I'll stay here. I think I'll freeze if I go out there, and I can't exactly return to my post if I'm drenched, can I?" She opened her locker and was looking for her second uniform. "I'll catch up with you after I change though."
"Alright," Luis replied, "I'll see if arcade cabinet 46-3 is working."
"I'll help you dry off." Jeremy added, "I've got a hair dryer in my locker that you can use, and someone's got to pass you things and take things so you don't wind up changing into an equally wet uniform."
As Jeremy grabbed his hair dryer, Sylvia stared at him with a dumbfounded look, and he could see the gears turning in her head as she realised that she was still soaked from head to toe. "Right," she nodded as she passed her second uniform and towel to Jeremy.
Sylvia then turned to Luis. "I'll send a message to your tablet once I'm done here." She gave Luis a nod before he left.
Luis nodded in reply with a "counting on it," before leaving the locker room to head to who knows where.
After Luis left, Sylvia spoke up. "We know about the riot already. What happened?"
"Don't worry about it," Jeremy replied. He could see that Sylvia was stressed, and he didn't want to stress her with the details, so he'd omit Chica's involvement until the crisis was over.
"What happened." Sylvia persisted.
"Management confirmed my suspicions, that's all," Jeremy replied, "I'll tell you more later, I promise."
Sylvia glared at Jeremy. She may have been exhausted and scared, but she could see through bullshit a mile away still.
"Look, we destroyed a couple of dozen staffbots - we were completely justified though!" Jeremy replied, his skin crawling from the intensity of her glare.
"You've got your reasons I'm sure. They want you all to stick around until the meeting, despite having been sacked prior to the rest. Doesn't take a genius to decipher thier plans. Your suspicions are probably the same as mine." Sylvia replied, her stare shifting to the floor.
"No but some of them needed some pushing in order to understand that they had to fight," Jeremy nodded as he spoke, "but then again, this is, at least hopefully it is, the only company out there in the world that would rather commit mass murder than have an actual mass layoff, so being expected to fight your former employer is… Not the norm."
"Neither is almost dying each shift." Sylvia tensed up: she was in pain, but the origin of the pain was hard for Jeremy to pinpoint as instead of grabbing a part of herself as you would grab your head for a headache or your wrist for an injured wrist, Sylvia just had a white-knuckle grip on the bench.
"Yeah. Let's actually get you dry. Maybe that'll help." Jeremy placed down Sylvia's spare uniform, and after seeing Sylvia struggle with the hair dryer and it's rather stiff sliders, he took the hair dryer and switched it on himself.
He could see her relax slightly as he blasted her with the hair dryer. He made sure to keep it moving as to not burn her, and they stayed silent the whole time.
Once dry, Jeremy looked away to give Sylvia the privacy to change clothes. When the changing rooms were crowded, Sylvia didn't mind changing alongside the random assortment of people: her body and scars would blend into the crowd. But it was just the two of them right now: he was already aware that she had gained some new wounds that she wasn't ready to share, just like how he still hid his own face behind a visor. Whatever injuries she was hiding under that uniform were her own secret to keep until she was ready, and when she gave the all clear, he looked back at her. She was still shuffling into her trousers, and hadn't even buttoned her shirt, but the scars she was trying to hide were evidently hidden.
"Feeling any better?" Jeremy asked as he watched Sylvia absentmindedly button up her work shirt like the too-thick buttons and too-small buttonholes were nothing.
Sylvia was silent for a moment before replying with "Not much."
Her gaze was fixed onto nothing, yet there was a hint of determination and worry in her eyes, like she was calculating something. And she didn't seem to like the odds of what she had calculated.
"You're worried about the meeting, aren't you," Jeremy asked as he sat back nearby.
Sylvia nodded. "We can't do for everyone what we did for Leo. Not enough cleaning trolleys. The loading docks clearance level is already jacked up beyond even what I've managed to get and the fire door up in the prize counter is locked via a VIP pass, leaving the lobby as the only way out. I suspect Dimitri is on the roof. Nobody's shift is scheduled to end until the meeting exactly. Only those not scheduled to come in today are safe… I'll inform anyone scheduled to come in later to not come in at all!" She grabbed her tablet and sent out a message. Jeremy received a ping on his phone.
Not his tablet, but his phone.
"I added you in the middle of the recipients list as a test to make sure it'd work," Sylvia said, her tone entirely monotonous, "and I have enough dirt on Dimitri to get him to scare away any execs who try to come in, and more than enough to force him off post at six AM. I can't stop him from doing his job, and whilst he's notoriously an injurer, I don't want to take any risks."
Jeremy hadn't seen her scheme this much since Leo's 'disappearance'. Sylvia always had a special way of scheming: one that put her in danger, dealing with animatronics or performing actions that could get her killed if an exec spotted her, whilst she got others to do safe tasks that aroused no suspicion, which usually entailed gathering the tools she needed to actually execute her plan; Jeremy had been the one to supply the 'tools' that Sylvia had requested that allowed her get get Leo out from the depths of the daycare theatre in one piece, and he was also the mystery guard who had kept watch over the secret room in the theatre whilst waiting for six AM, and he had also been the one to manipulate the camera positions so that Sylvia could smuggle Leo out of the building without being spotted. Though Jeremy was fairly certain that Sylvia hadn't recognised that he was the mystery guard; the welding mask he wore that day concealed his identity and their coordination had been entirely silent.
The only thing that stopped Faz Ent from trying to charge her with Leo's disappearance was the fact that it was obvious that she'd managed to get him out alive, even though Faz Ent had no idea as to how she did it or Leo's current whereabouts: she had dirt on Faz Ent in the form of Leo being alive somewhere thanks to her saving him from what would have been certain death if she hadn't figured out the trap that was being set for him. Other than Faz Ent being able to infer that Leo was still alive, Sylvia, Jeremy, Leo's family, and the officer who picked Leo up from the car park that night were the only other people who knew that Leo was alive, and only his family knew where he was. Though Jeremy was surprised that Faz Ent hadn't caught onto the fact that she smuggled officers like Carl and should-be-deads like Leo in and out of the megaplex on a basis so regular that it was routine. Because if they did, Sylvia wouldn't be standing in front of him right now.
"So what's the plan?" Jeremy asked.
"No employee, myself included, is getting in or out until six am, we know that for a fact," Sylvia stated, "Due to the meeting you just came from, the night staff are already here, and they're actually our best hope: each member of the night team is a fully trained anti-animatronic war machine, whether they think they are or not. As much as I hate to do this, I'll have to trust myself that I trained them well enough on dealing with the new threat to protect everyone."
"Your main problem with your plan is that you trained the guys you need to enact it?" Jeremy squinted and tilted his head.
"Yes - though they were already well trained; I just had to make sure they were able to handle the new threats that came along after William dragged my sister here, and I'm worried that I haven't let them in on enough. And with Daisy in the hospital, I'll have to evacuate the daycare." From the shake in Sylvia's voice, it was clear that the daycare attendant's attack on Daisy, code name 'Death Locust', or just DL, had scared Sylvia deeply, making her believe that the training she had given the night guards had not been enough. "I know for a fact that the staff there are exempt from the meeting due to there legally having to be a human on duty at that time of night - for now at least because even though he's not attending, the message is meant for him too - and I know that the chef gor the theatre there has skived every meeting so far and isn't stoping now, so people will be there."
"Your training on these new threats was enough." Jeremy attempted to give a rebuttal to Sylvia's insecurities, "The daycare attendant is just the biggest threat in this place-"
"No it's not!" She shot back, rage and fear in her eyes, "far from it."
Whilst this confused Jeremy, he knew better than to reply. She'd given him and the night staff a list of all of the animatronic threats. The daycare attendant was at the top of that list.
There must have been some machines she didn't mention on the list.
She had said something along those lines. 'There are other things are theorised to exist within the building'. Things she wasn't even sure were there so could not gauge. Things that she didn't want others to get too involved with. Things that would have gotten everyone who received the list shot if word got to management.
And a manager with a pistol definitely trumped the animatronics too in terms of danger, so there's that also.
"Look, I don't know what other things you think may be here that are more dangerous than the daycare attendant, and I know we're going to be up against people and they are more of a threat than that robot any day, but your training was enough. Everyone slips up, and nobody could have predicted that generator malfunction. But look at me," Jeremy placed a hand on Sylvia's shoulder - he was one of a single digit number of people who could get away with putting their hands on her without getting punched into next year - and tried to look her in the face. "She's still alive thanks to your training. You taught them all everything about those robots and their new behavioural quirks, so she was able to play dead after the generator blew up in her face to get the jump on the DCA."
"And it broke her arm!" Sylvia's tone was a mix of desperate sadness and gritty self loathing.
"But nobody died. She may have had her arm broken, and may have lost use of the other in the initial generator explosion before that, but she was doing her job." Jeremy replied, "And that's what you night guards do; put yourself on the front lines and prevent people from getting jammed inside mascot costumes. Isn't reducing casualties yours and her goal as night guards? Cos, she did a pretty good job at that."
"The animatronics haven't on-large tried the mascot costume stuffing method of murder since 97. Nowadays they just rip you to shreds and leave you in the open to rot." Sylvia couldn't seem to be able to face Jeremy, as she kept her eyes shut and face tilted away from him.
"But Daisy is alive and safe in the hospital," he reasured Sylvia before cracking a slight joke, "That's probably the safest place for any of us right now."
"A bit late to call in sick though. As if they'd let anyone out." Sylvia murmured.
"You could, maybe. But let's get to the point: helping people." Jeremy placed an arm on Sylvia's shoulder. "You still have me, GM, PB, and everyone else from the night team to help you get through this night, and you still have the clearance to get down and around here. You can get some doors open for us."
Sylvia nodded and stood up. "Got a screwdriver?"
As Jeremy handed Sylvia a screwdriver, he grinned, "when am I ever without one."
"Right now?" Sylvia smirked.
Jeremy shook his head with a coy grin and pulled out another screwdriver.
"Psh," Sylvia shook her head with a grin, "you better be coming with me for all this door busting."
Jeremy considered being coy or funny, but he knew why she wanted someone to travel with her.
There wasn't time for funny business.
"Remember the Raceway?" Sylvia said as she crouched by a door and begun to unscrew its hinges.
"Yeah," Jeremy replied, "it went down for maintenance a while back, opened back up shortly after you got here, and it hadn't even finished its opening celebration before it had that sinkhole problem that interrupted Des's kids party. The company's official stance is that that sector never re-opened. Whack quack if you ask me. You, Gaz, and some other guards ran the evacuation, right?"
"Yeah. That was a very long opening celebration. It was what? A week straight of splints and gurneys from all the kart crashes. At least nobody lost a limb." Sylvia nodded. She kept her eyes on her work in disassembling doors as she spoke, "anyway, when we were evacuating that place, I accidentally let it slip that to Gaz I was looking for my missing sister."
"It's Gaz. He's cool." Jeremy said as he removed the handle of a nearby door in order to get it open to access it's hinges, "If a member of staff is human and lower than management, they're cool. Even heads, cos you and Des might be head of security and head technician respectively, but…"
"We're still lower than management and just the guy who gets it in the neck if management has beef with our particular department." Sylvia completed Jeremy's sentence. Being head of security didn't mean much: just meant that she was in charge of training newbies and that security staff reported to her. It was basically one rung up from the bottom of an infinite ladder. She knew Desmond was the same boat: in charge of a lot of shit, with only a title to show for it. She recalled him mentioning once that he originally only got paid half a technician's wage, and was only bumped up to the full wage after taking the head technician role.
Yeah, 'head' just meant 'abused worker' here.
The only people to be wary of were those with the titles of 'manager', 'executive head', or 'executive'. And if you saw someone of a different yet grander sounding title, you were to run lest you be already dead.
"Yep," Jeremy replied, "You, Des, and the other 'head of's are like, three ranks below even the managers. Everyone knows that Faz Ent sticks 'head of' titles on anyone it wants to personally victimise. 'C location head of security': assassin in indentured servitude. 'C location head of training for security': young guard who traded performer duities for as much work in training other staff as they could legally saddle on a teenager after the poor kid got his arm mangled in the same death trap that killed his dad. 'Megaplex head technician': he's being financially abused to stop him from running and looking for another job. 'Megaplex head of security': shove as much work onto her as possible to stop her from investigating her sister's disappearance."
"Ouch. That hit close to home." Sylvia gave a sarcastic flinch at Jeremy's statements: they were all way too true. He recalled so much about what PI Jeremy said about his time at Freddy's that it was a surprise that neither Jeremy had been murdered over how much they knew yet.
"It's supposed to." A door clattered to the ground shortly after Jeremy spoke. A sign of a job well done.
Sylvia pushed over her side of the door that she had finished unscrewing and shook herself like a wet dog. "Ugh, let's just get more doors down."
As the two took care of many of the Megaplex's doors, they were approached by a kind old guard: Mr Collins. Jeremy felt bad about never being able to remember the man's forename, but because he acted like a grandpa to everyone, he just got called 'Grandpa'.
And the old guard was panicking.
"Have you seen my granddaughter?" He asked.
"Sorry, no," Jeremy replied. He hadn't seen Rachel today. "S….. Vanessa?"
Jeremy didn't know if Sylvia had told 'Grandpa' her middle name, her preferred name, yet. She was using her forename and a fake surname. It was her place to tell him.
"Sorry, I've not seen Rachel either," Sylvia replied. She was pale and shaking. If she wasn't already on her knees because she was unscrewing a door's lower hinges, she'd have certainly collapsed to them by now.
The old guard looked at Sylvia with sympathy. He knew that she'd seen Freddy kill a kid; a kid who had pushed her out of the way of a killing blow that Freddy had meant for her to take.
"If you see her, try to remain calm, please. For both our sakes. I know what you saw Freddy do, but we need you to remain calm. Please," 'Grandpa' asked of Sylvia.
"I… I will." Sylvia was still shaking, her breaths were still ragged, but she managed a nod. She wasn't sure if she'd be able to keep her promise or not, but Jeremy knew she'd try her damn best.
"Where'd you last see her?" Jeremy asked.
"Rockstar row," 'Grandpa' replied, "I've checked it up and down though, but she's nowhere to be seen. And neither is Roxy."
"You know how sometimes an animatronic will go into safe mode at night and be a help rather than a hindrance?" Jeremy smirked.
"Yes, I'm aware…"
Sylvia, Jeremy, and Grandpa all knew about Glamrock Bonnie and why he went to the gator golf catwalks. They knew that he was protecting a child. They knew that he was decommissioned there. They knew that Monty, having been stuck in that hyper-violent 'night mode' that night, was used as a tool to do so. Yet aside from a patch of carpet being replaced by the morning, there were no leads as to the fate of Glamrock Bonnie's body.
"I have reason to suspect that Roxy went into safe mode and is protecting Rachel," Jeremy gave the old guard a reassuring pat on the shoulder, "find Roxy, find Rachel."
After a moment of thought, the old guard seemed far calmer than before, knowing that his granddaughter was likely in safe hands.
"Alright," 'Grandpa' nodded, "though I do need to get back to the daycare. I need to make sure that all the kids are checked out of the building before 11:30. I know I've got a few hours, but even then, I don't think I'll be done before the meeting."
"Alrighty, see ya round!" Jeremy grinned as the old guard turned and dashed towards the daycare. He had a gut feeling that he'd still be there during and after the meeting. Jeremy didn't recall seeing him at the earlier meeting, so he was probably still in the daycare back then too. Turning back to Sylvia, he asked "what other doors should we unscrew?"
"I know it's risky, but we need to make sure the doors to the service tunnels are open. The way out to the lobby from here has no 'security checkpoint' so to speak as long as that fence is opened up, so as long as the door's open, we have a free route to the lobby…" Sylvia then grimaced, "but then any robots and execs would have a free path to here."
"Then that's our next door!" Jeremy smirked as he bopped Sylvia on the nose: an action that would have earned anyone she wasn't that close to a slap in the face, but Jeremy knew he was good enough of a friend to get away with it.
After heading over to the single door within the cafeteria, Sylvia unscrewed the lock and locking mechanism whilst Jeremy held it in place. Once the door was unlocked, it was tossed aside and Sylvia noticed that Jeremy had pocketed the screws.
"What're you planning with all the screws?" She asked.
"Budget caltrops. Sure, some if us might wind up with shoe soles full of nails, but they'll fuck up the staffbot's wheels good and proper." Jeremy replied with his usual coy grin.
Sylvia just rolled her eyes in response as she pulled a pair of bolt cutters out of her duffle bag and cut the chain off of a cyclone gate.
"They'll probably have this locked back up by tomorrow night, but who cares. I can jump this fence, and it only needs to be down for tonight," Sylvia said as she walked down the stairs, Jeremy close behind her. "We should probably make a stop at rockstar row to open those double doors."
"That's exactly what I was thinking."
The duo ran a meticulous circuit around the service tunnels, unscrewing every door from rockstar row to the lobby, dipping and diving into the individual zones and opening them up to the network of opened tunnels.
The doors all being open was no curse, as all staffbots, endos, and animatronics had a far higher security clearance than any member of staff bar the executives, so if anything, this just leveled the playing field.
The duo's route ended back at the locker rooms where they started, and with all the doors on thier path open, there was only one door left to go.
As the duo made it to the final locked door door that separated the locker rooms and loading docks, Sylvia and Jeremy had it off its hinges and silently placed on the floor before either of them could register that they'd just unscrewed most of the doors in the stretch of the megaplex that covered the service tunnels and the staff cafeteria. There were many doors still not unscrewed - the upper floors and patron facing megaplex bar the lobby doors being untouched by their escapades - but it was enough to ensure that employees could still get around without thier security clearance.
Sylvia checked the time. "11:29. Glad we got back here when we did. We should get going to the meeting."
"I'd be surprised if there was actually cake," Jeremy smirked.
"I hope there is," Sylvia smiled back.
"I thought you didn't like sweet things," Jeremy gave a playfully confused glance.
"Hey, just because I've been watching what I've been eating since I started working here doesn't mean I can't have the occasional treat." Sylvia pouted back.
"Just admit you're a tsundere about sweets." Jeremy poked.
Sylvia's pout cracked with a strong yet unreadable emotion.
"Ugh, fine. I'm a tsundere about sweets," Sylvia relented. This was far from the first time he's tried to make her say it. In fact this was four years worth of poking. She'd probably figured that actually saying it would take the fun out of it, but Jeremy just saw it as more material for thier later friendly jabs at one another.
As the duo walked through the doors, the air was tense.
There was a cake on one of the few remaining tables. Around it were Sylvia and Jeremy's colleagues, but they were not looking at the cake.
The head technician, Desmond Anadem, stood face to face against one of the execs. The technican's shoulders were tense as he daren't move, his fists were balled, and it was so silent that you would have been able to hear a pin drop if it weren't for the whirring of a wall of staffbots that had surounded the staff, seemingly waiting on an order to maim.
The exec was aiming a gun at Desmond's head.
That was about the only thing that the execs still had to give them any modicum of power over this situation.
Sylvia and Jeremy hung back. They hadn't been spotted yet, and Sylvia had a plan.
She could be silent when she wanted to be, so she crept up just outside of the execs peripheral vision. She was glad her colleagues kept thier eyes on the exec and didn't shift their gaze to her; she didn't want to find out what would happen if she was spotted.
Once she was close enough, she braced herself for a tackle.
The staffbots spotted her and sprung to life, but it was too late for the exec.
"MOVE!" She yelled as her body collided with the execs like a runaway freight train, knocking the man to the ground and the gun out of his hands, but not before a single bullet was fired. The lead technician thankfully heeded Sylvia's battle cry as he had dove out of the way, causing the bullet to merely brush past his face, grazing his cheek, before it embedded itself in the wall behind him.
Sylvia restrained the exec using her only pair of handcuffs.
Jeremy found her takedown of the exec to be elegant, but wondered why she used the animatronic grade handcuffs on him instead of using zip ties. Then again, knowing her, she'd find another pair somewhere if she needed to: her ability to rummage or even just glance around for things and turn up something useful was almost uncanny, but at least it had its uses for keeping her armed and dangerous.
The takedown of the exec signaled the staff to take up a counteroffensive against the staffbots that had surrounded them, and camera flashes illuminated the room as if it had been filled with professional paparazzi.
Almost everyone was down here, including those who had the layman's lack of fighting prowess. But that didn't matter: it just made it easier to select who was in the paparazzi group and who was in the combat group. People assigned themselves, careful to not overestimate their own skill sets, and before long, the known combatants were armed and ready with knives, brooms, wrenches, and screwdrivers, whilst everyone else was equipped with fazcams, fazerblatsers, and flash beacons, and usually multiple of each. Someone had even tossed an actual flash-bang, which made quick work of a group of staffbots on its own.
Jeremy joined the employees in flash-banging the staffbots with the standard issue flash beacon from his belt to aid in easy disassembly, and as endos joined the mix of foes, morale remained high as they were blinded just as easily as the staffbots and fell just as easily too.
Strength in numbers and prime positioning.
Even as new waves of endos and staffbots flooded the room, the machines were stunned by the flurry of flashing lights and were frozen to the spot by people's stares, however one pesky endo wearing a party hat didn't seem to mind the camera flashes or stares. He saw something he wanted and was going to get it.
As the other endos were stalled and eliminated, that one endo made its way to the cake and begun to gorge itself before swiftly getting curb stomped through the table by Gaz. Proof that the training that Sylvia had given 'Gas Mask' had paid off better that Syl had given herself credit for.
The insides of the cake looked foul — either mouldy or poisoned — and he was kinda glad that an endo had revealed that for him.
"I've got to head to the daycare. The usual guard for that sector is in hospital, and someone needs to make sure everyone still there is safe. I know grandpa is likely there as he's been covering for DL, but this is the daycare attendant we're on about." Sylvia dispatched a staffbot as she spoke, not even flinching as she snapped its neck, disconnecting it from the network.
"Don't worry, we've got this sector covered," Jeremy said as he eliminated an immobilised endo by pulling out a few wires and removing it's limbs with the speed of a trained technician.
"You better hurry," Gaz added, "with how the power's been tripping, there might be a blackout in the daycare."
Sylvia nodded. "I'll see you at six. Alive."
"Promise." Both Gaz and Jeremy nodded before they watched Sylvia bolt off towards the elevator up to the upper kitchens, carving a path of destruction as she went.
They knew she intended to keep her promise. The tough part was going to be keeping their promise to her.
Staff who had not attended the meeting flooded in between or with waves of bots, evacuating from where they had been hiding. Most were worse for wear with broken bones or bleeding out of gashes of varying severity, but the important thing was that they were alive. The adrenaline had kept them in commission long enough to pull through, and if they could hold a Faz-cam or flash beacon, then they could help keep the staffbots and endos blinded, but the fact that they were alive was more important.
Blinding lights flashed in a rhythm; frequent enough to keep all staffbots stuck rebooting, yet infrequent enough to ensure that the bots wouldn't get used to the bright lights. But bots seemed to be coming in thicker and faster every minute. The machines had to be slowed down; neither Gaz nor Jeremy wanted to think of the consequences of what could happen if they found themselves overrun with staffbots and endos. But with robotic reinforcements arriving quicker than the human staff could destroy them, things were looking dire.
There was a solution, however. As simple as it seemed, it was bound to be effective.
"We need barricades!" Gaz yelled, "stop 'em from flooding in."
As Gaz dispatched any endos that stepped through the main doors, boxes were shoved in front of the side doors to the maintenance tunnels to block off anything that couldn't clamber over them, whilst tables and construction barriers were pulled nearer to the centre of the room to make some kind of cover to obstruct any machines that may make it futher then expected.
People had stopped coming to the cafeteria since the last power redirect.
Jeremy doubted anyone else would show up, so he scattered nails on the ground outside of the barriers. In the chaos, he also grabbed a stool that had been torn from the ground: an upgrade from ripping out wires and popping out sockets barehanded to say the least.
And if someone did show up, the barricades wouldn't stop humans, as unlike those talking segways and those stupid endos, humans have a way easier time clambering over things (to Faz Ent's suprise; in a test, any given member of the adult staff could crawl a route hitting all the backup generators through the daycare play structures faster than any endo, and Jeremy specifically recalled this as he was in the top ten fastest completions) so as long as the remaining stranded people could bear the barrage of flashing lights that would take care of any robots tailing them, it'd be fine. Provided their work boots saved them from the nails. Jeremy had made sure those most perceptive to sound were stationed by those doors to aid with this. If someone was running or screaming, getting the drop early and readying up for a human to save instead of a robot to kill could mean the difference between life and death.
"INCOMING!" A female janitor yelled as a fresh wave of bots swarmed through the main doors.
This wave was smaller than the last, proof that their efforts were not in vain and proof that the horde was finite. The makeshift cover did it's job, tripping up most of the staffbots who managed to wheel through the barrage of flashing lights, and the nails jammed the wheels of the rest, making those bots an easy dispatch.
Endos were both the biggest threat and yet they were also the easiest thing to deal with. The paparazzi group also doubled as an anti-endo group as their gaze covered the entire room at all times; not a corner was unwatched by human eyes. Some staff even stared at the ceiling tiles - a job that seemed unimportant to the uninformed, but as they had been the ones to stop endos from literally getting the drop on everyone, it was the most important job of all. Endos were mostly immobile because of this, and therefore were ripe for the picking off.
But if one grabbed you, the track record of what these things had done to employees in the close past meant that you'd better make sure someone had your back to dispatch the machine before it could dispatch you.
A few broken or dislocated arms and a few almost crushed windpipes were a few too many for Gaz or Jeremy's liking, but at least someone had always managed to intervene in time. After all, a robot is at its most vulnerable when it's about to kill someone.
People had been killed in this building before. Unsuspecting staff had been murdered in the weeks running up to this riot, and Jeremy counted himself lucky to not be among them. Even though official records documented the victims as missing, Jeremy knew that they were dead. Call it a gut feeling or supernatural instinct, but Jeremy just knew: the scar he called the upper half of his face would burn and it'd feel as if needles had been pushed into his spine. Three weeks ago, he'd been all the way up in Bonnie bowl when he felt that distinct pain, and he'd initially chalked it up to lingering effects of cutting his own face off so he had made a note of it for his medical records, yet minutes later, a technician called him, terrified out of their wits: an endo had murdered their friend. A guard had been murdered by an endo all the way down in parts and service when they went to get parts for the technician, and the time of death lined up exactly when Jeremy felt that pattern of pain. It had been three weeks since that day, but he remembered every detail like it was yesterday.
And it turned out to not be a fluke.
He has told no-one, and likely never will.
But he has used this to his advantage.
He knew that Leo hadn't been bumped off after Sylvia snuggled him out of the building a few nights ago.
He knew that nobody had died tonight.
Emphasis on tonight.
He had felt practically sick at approximately 11 AM, and noted some missing faces who would usually be clocking out at mid day. Gaz's dad was amongst the missing, but this was all prior to the riot even being a thought in either his or Gaz's minds.
It was all minor information, but knowing who was dead or alive was a powerful thing, yet he was still worried. Just because someone was alive now wouldn't mean that they'd survive the night. Sylvia had definitely figured out that his 'minor hunches' whenever someone died was something more, and someone like her would hang on just so he wouldn't have that horrid feeling until it was safe.
The flashes of fazcams were only just able to keep him focused on the fight, but he couldn't help his worrying.
He hadn't had time to check his tablet, and even with the thinning hordes, every second was vital.
As Gaz launched dismembered staffbots parts at the hordes, he noticed Jeremy's distracted gaze.
"Things are cooling down. Check your messages," Gaz nudged Jeremy. He had a hunch as to why Jeremy seemed to be a million miles away, and it started with an S, and ended with a ylvia. "We need to know if she's found anything odd."
Jeremy nodded and fished out his personal phone and work tablet. His tablet had a message from Sylvia that had been sent some time around 2:30. That hour had long since passed. The primary recipient was Luis Cabrera, but everyone had received the message. It was a warning about the daycare attendant's behaviour, and that whilst she had been holding the robot back, it may escape that hour or the next, so to be prepared.
Jeremy felt fortunate that the daycare attendant had not made it's way down to the cafeteria during the 3AM recharge cycle. He knew that whoever it did find was alive as his scar had not flared up, but he hoped that whoever faced it was unharmed. But he didn't have time to worry, as they were in the midst of another cycle.
"Its from Sylvia," Jeremy stated the sender's real name by mistake, "There's been a blackout in the daycare. We need to be ready for it to attack during the recharge cycle." Jeremy paused, then begun to shake, "she's been fighting that thing all night… She's going to-"
"JEREMY!" Gaz interjected with a harsh slap to Jeremy's shoulders, "We're prepared for that anyway. Now you know she's been fighting them all night, we know that she may be forced to conceed ground and let it out of the daycare during the recharge cycle: fine, we are prepared. We have always been prepared. Even Daisy couldn't solo them all the time. But don't worry about Sylvia. She'll live, I'm certain of it."
Upon hearing Gaz say 'Sylvia', he felt himself freeze to the spot like a deer in headlights.
"Look, I already know," Gaz briefly glanced at Jeremy before taking the 'destroy-staffbots-and-talk' approach to this conversation, "It's fine. She's going to be fine."
Jeremy nodded and continued fighting. The only passage of time were the power redirects that were signalled well in advance by the personal alarms of his colleagues.
He disasambled an endo as he watched the head technician, Desmond, maim the shit out of the daycare attendant using only a Faz-wrench and screwdriver; Jeremy hadn't thought that the kind yet esoteric single dad had it in him, but he did. And so did the rest of the service team who seemed to be enjoying the destruction a bit too much. He didn't blame them though: he was enjoying this all a bit too much too. But he didn't care.
Faz Ent had tried to kill them.
Only eliminating the attacking bots was a mercy compared to the destruction he secretly wanted to wreck upon this company deep down.
Everyone was still fighting strong, and the next hours passed like the rest of them.
Soon night was almost up.
Everyone's weapons were battered, dented, or crooked: the chair Jeremy had been using fell apart in his hands after having destroyed countless machines.
Some of the ex employees were still unaccounted for, one of whom was the guard whose call sign was PB, but Jeremy felt as if he knew that they'd all managed to bunker down somewhere else safe and have been able to survive. Perhaps they had been the ones to deal with the daycare attendant at 3 AM?
He'd see them all soon enough.
He'd be able to ask them then.
"It's close to six AM!" Jeremy announced as an alarm he had set on his phone rang out. This alarm signaled in advance that the power would soon be redirected one final time. This alarm would give anyone anywhere in the megaplex time to run to an exit, or anywhere else the daycare attendant wouldn't kill you for being during this final recharge cycle.
"We need to get to the lobby!" Gaz yelled, his voice projecting across the entire cafeteria.
The waves of robots had quelled, with only one or two bots daring to encroach on this human controlled territory now. They had gone from being swarmed to being mostly in the clear, but with the concerning message regarding the status in the daycare that everyone had received near two AM and only had the chance to read about two hours later (he felt so fortunate that they had not been accosted by the daycare attendant this night; staffbots and endos were enough), Jeremy and Gaz both knew there was going to be one final obstacle: one that'd be the easiest to deal with if everyone got to the brightest room in the megaplex: the lobby.
Since Sylvia had sent messages about the status of what had gone down in the daycare and that she wasn't able to keep the daycare attendant at bay anymore, Jeremy had been sick to his stomach over the thought that maybe one of the people she was protecting had sent those messages on her behalf… Was she able to keep her end of thier promise? He knew deep down she was alive, but for how much longer.
He tried to shake the thought: he'd see her in a few minutes when everyone was at the lobby.
As the staff begun their sprint through the service tunnels, Gaz grabbed the service tunnel's fire axe, and got someone else to pick up the extinguisher.
There wasn't much time to think. All time was spent better running to the exit.
Gaz was carving a path at the front alongside a handful of other employees armed with prop swords, makeshift spears, chairs, and knives, whilst Jeremy was making sure that no one was left behind, bracing himself for hand-to-hand combat should it come to it.
Faz Ent's army of bots made an effort to try and prevent the escape of the staff, but Gaz carved through staffbots and endos, cleaving metal limb from metal limb with the axe he'd picked up, but when running towards your attackers, you're bound to encounter some issues. Many bots got clear shots at Gaz, metal hands brushing against his face and grabbing at his clothes, but the robotic limbs were hacked off before they could properly injure him, and he was thankful that his gas mask reduced the potency of the blows. The next endoskeleton that he charged managed to get a grip on his gas mask - and would have ripped it off too if a fire extinguisher hadn't taken its head clean off.
Gaz realised that he'd be dead without his mask.
Heart pounding in his chest and lungs screaming for air, Gaz kept on pushing onwards until he flung open the doors to the lobby and saw the dim light of the early morning already seeping through the cracks under the shutters.
Gaz watched as the other human ex-employees swarmed the lobby, and he staggered alongside them before collapsing to his knees in the open.
The only staffbot that would pose a problem had been eliminated already by someone else, so he didn't need to worry anymore.
Jeremy entered the lobby last, and set up a motion sensor at the door. If something or someone tried to come through, he'd know. He didn't want to barricade it, as people who had bunkered down elsewhere may also try to escape via the service tunnels, and he didn't want to accidentally get anyone killed. As he looked around the lobby, his heart sank.
Sylvia wasn't here yet.
The troupe that Gaz and himself had brought up from the cafeteria seemed the first ones here.
A second glance at the customer service desk at the entry gates told Jeremy that some people actually did get here before them: a group who had bunkered down in the lobby in the earlier hours of the night.
As more human footsteps echoed in the lobby, a trio made up of of a security guard, a child, and a staffbot wrangler walked out from the staff only door behind the customer service desk. He recognised the trio as Julian Guy (aka PB), Rachel Collins, and Patty.
"Hey Jeremy!" Julian grinned as he waved at Jeremy and the many other members of staff who had filtered into the lobby, "the kid's safe! V helped us bunker down in lost and found."
V was one of Sylvia's many nicknames.
"You've seen her? Where is she now!" Jeremy exclaimed in a panic. He needed to know if she was OK, and he needed to know now.
"No, she was helping us remotely, using the cameras to help us navigate around the animatronics. She said that she was in the daycare," Julian replied, recounting his interactions with Sylvia, "we then picked up some distortions on the cameras and some electrical interference, and it seemed to be coming from someone who was headded to the daycare theatre. She said she'd go check it out."
Jeremy's face dropped as he begun to panic. He was aware that Ness had been kidnapped by Faz Ent, and that Sylvia was doing her level best to free her. He was also aware that Ness had been using illusion disks to hide her presence. He was able to deduce that Sylvia had followed her sister into the theatre, but he didn't know why.
"Have you heard from her since?" Jeremy practically grabbed Julian's arms and begged for more information. "Is she OK?
"Chill! I don't know," Julian reeled back, "I've not heard from her since, but she'll be fine. Just chill out."
As Jeremy stood babbling and shaking, clearly about to collapse, Julian draged him to the ground. "Sit. Breathe," Julian ordered before inspecting his fellow night guard for any injuries that may have made him lose his composure so easily.
Jeremy obliged and let Julian check him for injuries. Whilst he knew that his current lack of rationality was not due to a head injury, he wished that he had such an excuse.
Julian gave a concerned hum as he checked Jeremy's head. "Nothing. No injuries. At least nothing that's bleeding or swollen yet anyway."
Jeremy expected as much.
"How about we get to patching up everyone else?" Julian suggested, hoping to put Jeremy's mind at ease, but Julian could see that Jeremy's gaze had shifted to over his shoulder, and he was looking at someone behind him.
As Jeremy broke into a sprint, Julian turned around to see who Jeremy was running towards.
It was Sylvia. She was alive.
Julian also noted that Sylvia was not alone. Her sister was with her, carrying a critically injured Luis, and Sylvia herself was dragging a man behind her.
Jeremy and Julian watched as Sylvia dumped the exec that she had been hauling along out of anyone's way but still in line of sight before heading over to everyone else. Sylvia's sister approached the group too, albeit temporarily in order to leave the critically injured Luis in capable hands.
Ness looked as if she'd been fighting against William for every step she had taken to get here, and was still fighting now.
As Julian begun to stabilise Luis, Ness had slipped away. Jeremy could see that Sylvia seemed to be aware of something that he wasn't, so he didn't press. The chances were that any plan that Sylvia or Luis had made to save Ness had failed, and that Ness had only temporarily took back control over her own body. Hence why Ness had gotten away from the rest of the human staff as soon as she'd gotten Luis to safety.
Sylvia sat down, likely exhausted, and Jeremy followed suit.
"So, how were you managing to hold up in the cafeteria for so long?" Sylvia nudged Jeremy to let him know that she was talking to him. It was an odd way to break the silence, but Jeremy was glad for it.
"Well," Jeremy smirked, "it all started when we all received that email you had a panic attack over. Management tried to sic Chica and a wave of staffbots on us, but we beat her back well before you got down to the locker rooms yourself -" he mimed punching something, "and we've had her shoved in a closet since then. She's been gorging herself on all the pizza favoured crap we shoved in there to keep her busy, but the door's still barred. And remember 11? You tackled that manager whilst the service team eliminated the staffbots. Bet the execs were banking on Chica as backup, but she was spared from our wrath cos she was still in the storage closet of shame. Cafeteria's been a safe haven ever since."
'Safe haven' was overselling it, but what Sylvia didn't know wouldn't cause her to freak out. He could save the full story for once she'd managed to save her sister.
Sylvia's face had become a visage of worry and glee part way through what Jeremy had said, but he didn't quite register it until now.
"Management sic'd Chica on you!?!" Sylvia exclaimed. Jeremy wasn't sure if she was about to spiral into a panic attack or laugh, "what?!"
"Yeah," Jeremy replied, "they said something about 'we were saving this for the 11 pm meeting but we'll use it now' or some crap, I don't remember. I just remember picking up a chair and going in swinging." Jeremy's memory was a bit fuzzy. It was probably just the fact that his body had only recently stopped slamming adrenaline through his system.
"Bloody hell."
"It was, if you were a staffbot." Jeremy giggled, finally finding the perfect place for a joke in all of this. "Most of the staffbots down there live in bin bags now. Well, they will if they get cleaned up. And seeing as we've all made it up here in one piece, you don't have to smuggle anyone out in a cleaning trolley again," Jeremy grinned, "well, I'll go see if Gaz is ok."
He'd hoped that Gaz would have gotten himself medical attention, but a quick glance told Jeremy that Gaz had been patching up others, but not himself.
"And I'll go evacuate everyone else who hasn't made it here yet," Sylvia said as she stood up, "I hope they're ok."
"Of course they'll be ok. They've had your guidance and training!" Jeremy replied.
Sylvia shook her head.
"I'm still worried it wasn't enough."
Jeremy wanted to object to Sylvia running off again, but he knew better than to question her. He knew she had a plan, and that even death would probably not be enough to stop her.
As Sylvia left to evacuate the rest of the Megaplex, Jeremy hoped that she'd return alive and in one piece.
An anonymous tip promises the truth behind the conclusion of the CL4 incident and the disappearance of Charlie Emily, so it's needless to say that investigative journalist Krasnyy, former Phone Guy of C location, has traveled a long way in search of the truth.
The easiest way out is usually the way you got somewhere, and this time is no different. One arrived by motorbike*, and two left the same way.
The graveyard on the edge of town was the closest outpost of the town, and given one of the cars that Charlie spotted in the car park, that was even more reason for the duo to part ways here.
Once Charlie was safely reunited with her partner-in-fighting-killer-robots, Krasnyy felt that it was high time to reunite with his own. Even though he didn't get a scoop to write an article over (if Charlie wants to talk about how the CL4 incident really ended, that was for her to break the silence on), he still managed to save someone, which was enough to make the ordeal worth it.
*it's missing enough parts to be legally considered a bicycle.
═°•.🌹.•°═
Fun fact, every character in this comic is acespec.
Krasnyy and PT are both asexual, with Krasnyy being aromantic and PT being cupioromantic and biromantic. The label of 'boyfriend/girlfriend' is one they use to stop people asking questions and hide the conflict de-escalator/bodyguard dynamic that they've got going on.
I headcanon Charlie and John to be asexual - and made it canon for the Renegade AU - because the clunky writing of their relationship in canon makes it feel like they care deeply about eachother in a way that does not fit into the dynamic of 'boyfriend/girlfriend', but those are the only labels that they have been told that can apply to what other people think they feel, so they awkwardly try to fit in.
Also, this is not the end of this comic, but it is the end of this arc. I have ideas for a second arc. But it may be a while before you see it as I've got Prelude of Ruin and a SOTM comic that I'm also working on.
Am I the only person who cares about the one-off characters from Security Breach's in-game messages? Probably. Am I also the only one going and linking these characters to Secret of the Mimic characters for no good reason? Absolutely.
Elsa Sockeye is always early to work. Be it a few minutes, or sometimes an hour. You can't predict the traffic, and she'd rather be early than late, and for as greedy of a company that Fazbear's is, she tends to get the feeling that her boss isn't a fan of her doing free overtime. Aiden, on the other hand, refuses to do any work outside of their specific scheduled hours, and yet out of themselves and Elsa, they're somehow the exhausted one.
After meeting eachother at work, Elsa the security guard and Aiden the general staff member initially bonded over their shitty jobs, and the fact that one of their grandparents each had an equally shitty job having worked at Murray's Costume Manor. After learning how the other's grandfather left the employ of Eduardo Muras (the Murray-Muras secret had been blown by the only surviving Muras - Davinia - years ago in a statement that provided catharsis and closure for a lot of the surviving ex-MCM employees, including Elsa and Aiden's grandparents), the duo cemented themselves as fast friends.
The two hung out often, both on and off the clock, and whilst Elsa wanted to be more than friends but was too terrified to ask, taking these fleeting moments during their breaks to pine and imagine a future with Aiden, Aiden - on the other hand - thinks that they have been dating for ages and feels safe around her enough to take a nap, knowing that Elsa will wake them up if danger arises, be it a killer robot or a hardass boss that doesn't realise that the duo are on break.
I'm having some technical difficulties regarding getting a decent photo of the last page of the first arc of a comic that I've been working on for way too long, but I had these distress signal doodles in the wings as a backup.
I keep drawing Arnold as he is in my AU in the two months after the events of SOTM: tired, half asleep, yet sleep deprived because he's terrified of falling asleep.
In the doodle on the left, Arnold has fallen asleep on the floor in Odette's grandparents living room. This happens a lot. After the first few times, everyone got used to it, because it's better than him locking himself in his room.
In the doodle on the right, he's curled up on the operating table with Jūrō sitting at his side. This is usually how they wind up at work when there's nothing in the team 13 task backlog. Whilst Fazbear's expects Jūrō to run experiments for them, because after all, Fazbear's started viewing Arnold as more of an experiment than a technician since he got possessed, Jūrō instead prefers to focus on Arnold's recovery over the Fazbear approved tests to find the limits of the 'Snow Technician'.
Genuinely, it was unnecessary for this to have been in person: the client didn't want to see the robots, and the client didn't even have any machines or tech that they wanted to show off. There was no reason for Anna and Luis to have taken the time out of their day for this meeting: the client just spent an hour talking at them, thinking that they can throw their weight around complaining about things outside of Anna and co's control as if it was somehow Anna's fault.
Anna and co barely survived Fazbears: she was not about to start putting up with a bunch of Fazbear wannabes.
The meeting left Luis knackered and Anna considering blacklisting the client and telling the bastards to pick their robots up tomorrow lest the sacks of metal get left on the curb.
Even Fazbear's wasn't this big of a diva, and they have plenty of other contracts anyway.
Blueprints. Fazbear Entertainment left behind so many blueprints after they cut contact with the contractors - the small company she works for included - and someone has to comb through them for anything and everything that may come in handy.
A lot of the blueprints were in the research and development stage - variants of the existing robots, 'costumes' that never saw the light of day - and Nora finds that ironic. Her job is primarily research and development. At a company named R&D because of the surnames of the two guys that run it. And the Fazbear contract had her in charge of Fazbear's research and development team.
William Afton? Contained.
The endoskeleton from the Ruins incident? The Anadem family and the remnants of Silver Parasol have that covered.
Fazbear Entertainment? On the rocks.
But Ness's computer? Still got that borderline malware tracking software.
Now that the software had outlived its usefulness - it had allowed Ness a back door into Fazbear's systems - she wanted it gone, and Mark is the right man for the job. A backup of the malware had already been made prior (just in case they needed the back door again), so all Mark really had to worry about was getting rid of that software. And unlike the 'virus' Adelaide put onto the systems, this program was far easier to eradicate.
A lot of work goes into repairing, servicing, and maintaining animatronics. Most of the hardware work falls to Raha and Dan.
With Dan being unable to use power tools, he finds other ways to be helpful. For a start, he is everyone's go-to if they need something heavy moving from A to B, and he's a wizz with manual tools. Even with his injuries from the Adelaide incident, he's still pretty dang good at his job.
Raha, on the other hand, spends most of the day doing any of the tasks that require power tools. Given that Anna gave her the authority to manage Dan, Raha tends to have him fetching the things she needs, so that once she has a power tool set up, she doesn't have to leave her post until the work is done.
Anthony got his nickname by how he tends to stare, completely unmoving, when things go wrong, and from how he always manages to kick Jūrō in the gut if Jūrō attempts to tend to the injuries of an unrestrained Anthony.
He is the second oldest technician of team 13, being older than Claude, but younger than Percy. However, he has been working for Fazbear's the longest. Having worked not just for Fazbear's, but for William directly, for so many years also means that he holds a few secrets — things he wanted to tell people, but was always too terrified of the consequences of spilling what he knew to share.
In order to take his mind off of everything that he knew but couldn't share, he tends to go out drinking at the same places that Percy does. Sometimes, Percy spots him, and they enjoy eachother's company. Other times, he goes home as alone as he arrived.
Having worked at Fazbear's since the before-days also means that he sometimes gets sent over to team zero, which means that he has to pull even more hours than his peers, and working in two technician teams also meant that he was never really able to form relationships outside of his circle of co-workers, but he doesn't mind. He thinks that nobody considers him their best friend, but he fortunately is aware that everyone in team 13 considers him a friend at the very least.
He died at fallfest shortly after the fire started. He saw the explosion, but he simply stared. Like a deer in headlights.
📝 Dispatcher 12 📝
Tracy Elwoods - the forger - is team 12's Dispatcher. Unlike most of the other dispatchers, there is nothing that immediately sticks out that makes her unique or distinct. At least at first glance. No apparent extra skills: just a divorced housewife who took this job in order to keep a rood over her and her twins heads after her husband left her. But she actually has one of Fazbear's most sought after skills: document forging.
In order to get away from her abusive husband, she forged divorce papers that were believable enough. So believable that she was able to gaslight the drunk into believing that he had gone to court, and in the proceedings, got the house whilst Tracy got the twins.
She found the opening for a dispatcher, and secured the job when her interviewer noticed that she had managed to perfectly replicate his signature and handwriting on a scrap of paper. The interviewer didn't question her ability to mimic handwriting or signatures; it was actually the exact sort of skill that Fazbear's needed.
At work, she tended to keep a low profile, and always followed orders, as a whilst a skill like hers was in hot demand, it could also get her in hot water.
For several years, she worked quietly as team 12's dispatcher, and as one of Fazbear's few document forgers. The technicians she directed were recovery specialists, so handled recovering salvageable parts from otherwise unsalvageable incidents, and making sure that suppliers followed up on delivering shipments, even if the supplier in question had gone under. Over the years, she grew close to her technicians, which made it worse when her team was sent to Murray's Costume Manor on a seemingly routine job.
She couldn't see much, but she saw and heard enough to know that they had been killed.
Only then was she informed by 11 that every dispatcher before her had sent a technician to Murray's, that none of the techs had returned, and that 13 was next in line. The mysterious disappearances of eleven technicians suddenly made sense.
Whilst the rest of the dispatchers were already making bets on the survival of 13's technician before the MCM job even hit 13's desk, Tracy quit. That morning, after losing her team and learning that Murray's was a suicide mission, she quit, and the girl that had been living in the HQ since shortly before 1 had sent his technician to the MCM facility - a child that she had been mostly taking care of anyway - followed Tracy out like a lost baby bird.
Tracy didn't mind taking care of a third child. She didn't mind that Davinia was a bit weird: it was better that she was taking care of the child than it would be for the child to grow up inside of Fazbear's HQ anyway.
💠 Dispatcher 14 💠
Flora Tenley - the psychologist - is team 14's Dispatcher. She is Jūrō's childhood friend, but on official documentation Jūrō's childhood friend was her cousin, Florian.
She went to the same prestigious all boys school as Jūrō. The two of them were close friends and made a promise to one another that they'd achieve their dreams - Jūrō's to be a surgeon and Flora's to be a psychologist. Whilst she was pursuing her dreams of psychology in college, she had a few back-to-back life altering revelations about herself, and the only people that she told were Jūrō and her Aunt. She was already estranged from most of her family except for her equally-estranged-from-Flora's-parents aunt, so they didn't notice when Florian went to live with 'his' aunt, and the aunt's 'daughter', Flora, resumed life where Florian left off. And at this time, Jūrō was going through medical school with plenty of support from his parents, so it wasn't suspicious for him to be purchasing various hormones and pieces of medical equipment 'for the sake of his studies'.
She graduated as a fully qualified psychologist at 22, and started working as a therapist at local schools, hospitals, and private companies. Then when her best friend graduated a year later, tragedy struck him and forced him to become a handyman for one of the companies that she had freelanced for. Seeing the opportunity, she wound up following Jūrō to work at Fazbear's, but unlike Jūrō, Flora started as a Dispatcher, but she also doubled as the on-site psychologist.
When the original dispatcher 13 disappeared, Flora was the one who suggested that Jūrō be promoted due to his own recent accident as well as his medical skills, and fortunately for both of them, Jūrō managed to get the promotion, allowing him to actually use his medical licence and allowing for both of these childhood friends to fulfil their promises to eachother.
Flora is a psychologist. And Jūrō is a surgeon. And that's all they wished for.
Both herself and Jūrō have a friendly rivalry, which looks a bit less than friendly to outsiders, and honestly, it serves them well. Stops people from asking questions.
I've been meaning to flesh out the deceased technicians of team 13 for a while now, and here are three of them. I could only fit three on one page.
🐿️ "Squirrel" 🐿️
Carmen got her nickname from how she stashes snacks everywhere, can climb just about anything, and is the only technician of team 13 who hasn't caused Jūrō any physical injuries.
She's an electrical engineering apprentice, and the youngest technician of team 13 and was hired during the timeframe between the original 13th dispatcher good missing and Fazbear's promoting '13' (Jūrō Sanjouba) to Dispatcher.
Finding unusual places to sit and eat snacks usually meant that she was often hanging out with Claude, and she considered him a close friend, but the title of best friend belonged to Odette, as the two initially bonded over being the only ladies in their team before becoming fast friends over their shared passion for ballets, operas, and electrical and mechanical engineering. The two of them went to a few local theatre productions of operas and bar function room ballets, and found that funnily enough, their favourite show one was the one that the other's name came from.
Died in the fallfest fire as whilst she was able to run to safety, she died of her injuries before she could receive any treatment, collapsing dead in front of the surviving members of team 13.
🐗 "Boar" 🐗
Percy Campbell got his nickname by being a bit of a brute, built like a truck, and squealing like a pig when injured. He also can get very violent when injured, which Dispatcher 13 takes as a challenge.
He's the oldest technician of team 13, and shortly before team 13 was formed, he went through a nasty divorce that led to his son - who was around Carmen's age - moving out as he didn't want to deal with either of his parents. Whilst everything was split 50/50 between Percy and his ex-wife by virtue of them both being equally insufferable, it did hit him hard.
He gets along best with Anthony and Jūrō, as they seem to be the only two willing to put up with the challenge that is Percy.
When Arnold and Odette started to get through their divorce proceedings, he tried to get close to Arnold, but actually wound up driving him away due to his assumptions surrounding their separation and him flat-out not knowing that Odette and Arnold's soon-to-be-ex were the same person. It doesn't help that Percy always invites Arnold out to drink despite the fact that Arnold keeps on telling him that he'd rather not due to his amnesia and the medication that Jūrō has him on for his injuries not mixing with booze, but Percy never invited Claude out to drink, despite Claude constantly stating that he is a perfectly capable drinking buddy, until Arnold and Claude directly confronted Percy about it.
Died in the initial explosion that started the fallfest fire.
🦇 "Bat" 🦇
Claude got his nickname from how he tends to climb whatever Carmen climbs in order to find the best napping spots, how he is impossible to sneak up on because he will hear you, and how he literally bites people when they agitate his injuries - even if they are actually trying to help him.
He is the third oldest member of team 13, being one year older than Jūrō, and many years younger than Percy. Since the day he became partially blind due to an accident as a teenager, people have been trying to 'help' him, and given that their help tended to do nothing but hurt him further to the point where his eyes can no longer even open, rendering him completely blind, he became averse to anyone trying to help him.
Finding unusual places to nap meant that he was often hanging out with Carmen, and he'd consider her a close friend. He also considers Arnold a close friend, as the two of them often vent about their various medical conditions (Claude's blindness and Arnold's amnesia), vent about Percy, and find catharsis in their shared experiences.
Died in the fallfest fire as it spread to the barn that he was working in before he could begin to run away, trapping him inside.
I originaly started drawing the FNAF AR charatcters as tarot cards last May, but I've now expanded to other characters within my AU.
To make the cards fit the modern characters, I had to substitute some things. Whilst typically, I replaced horses with rolling chairs, thrones with cardboard box thrones, and the pentacles are pentacle decals on the backs of devices, I went a bit more out-there with the substitutions for non AR characters.
As for backgrounds, I initially went with the idea of the card's backdrops being formed by some haphazardly placed standees that coincidentally looks like the tarot card's backdrop in order to mix the traditional tarot background with the contemporary characters, but for characters that wouldn't typically be found trying to photograph animatronics for promotional material, I got a bit creative with the sense of happenstance.
The cards I picked are the ones that Mina - a Medium, and she's the lady that survived Twisted Wolf - would pull if she was doing one of her one-card-summary-of-you readings for them, but in the case of the Anadems, it's also what Arnold would pull.
For Dispatcher 13, Jūrō Sanjouba, I picked the two of pentacles.
He's a multitasker, both a Dispatcher and a technician and a doctor. He juggles so many hats, yet only gets paid for one of them. His life is a balancing act, and he's here to put on a show. It takes a lot of effort to keep the act up, but he somehow manages.
