Work Text:
An ear-splitting shriek resonated throughout the apartment of Ryuko Matoi and Mako Mankanshoku. Springing into action, Ryuko leapt from her bed, grabbed the metal bat she kept in arm's reach, and raced out of her room and down the hall towards Mako's room.
Kicking the door open, she jumped in, looking for any sign of trouble, bat raised. "Mako! You okay!?"
"No!" came the squeaky, frightened reply of Mako. Ryuko looked around, but couldn't find the brunette anywhere. She set down her bat, scouring the tiny room for her friend.
"Mako, if you're not dead, clap twice or something." Her heartbeat slowed as she heard two claps. She followed the source and looked under the bed, finding Mako curled up into a little ball, hugging a stuff toad to her chest. "What're you doing under there?"
"I'm hiding from the Pirate Fox!" she shot back, hugging the plush amphibian tighter. Ryuko blinked. That was a surreal response, even for Mako.
"Uh...Pirate Fox?"
Mako nodded vigorously, her head appearing to blur for a second. "You have to keep watching him, or he'll escape and shove you into a suit! A painful suit full of wires and metal!"
"......Mako, did you have pickles before bed again?"
"No!" Ryuko frowned. "Okay, only two!" Ryuko quirked an eyebrow. "...Dozen..."
Ryuko sighed and eventually managed to coax Mako out from under the bed, only by promising to kill any 'hook-handed foxes' that broke through. She had no idea what the hell she was talking about, but she promised anyway.
After Mako calmed down to the point where she became relatively coherent, she explained the situation to Ryuko. It was the latest trend all over the net. An indie game by the name of Five Nights at Freddy's. The objective was to manage your dwindling power resources to observe a group of animatronics that wandered the halls of what looked like the Chick E. Cheese from hell, while making sure to lock the security doors if any of them got to close, lest they...
"...shove you into a suit filled with sharp metals and wires." Ryuko repeated in a deadpan.
"Yeah!" shouted Mako. "It's super scary! These evil animatronics can jump out at you at any second and kill you, and then there's the Pirate Cove Fox, and he's all whoosh super fast and he makes this screeeeeeee! noise and--"
Ryuko slapped her hand over Mako's mouth, the brown-haired girl continuing to chat animatedly. Through the course of this night of interrupted sleep, she had learned two things. One, that the internet was a far more deranged place than she ever thought. Two, Gamagoori, apparently, wasn't the only masochist in the girl's relationship.
"Mako..." Ryuko said, and the excitable girl finally ceased her blather. She took that as her cue to remove her hand. "If this game scares you so much, why the fuck are you playing it?"
There was a long pause before she answered. "It's fun, that's why."
It took Ryuko every ounce of self-control she had to not smack the girl with her own laptop.
-/-/-/-/-
"...and then she begged me for like twenty minutes to not take her laptop away, that she could play without screaming like a fucking banshee every three seconds." Ryuko paused to take a swig of her beer. "Anyway, that was last night. What about you?"
Satsuki stared at Ryuko from across the table in what could only be described as her version of surprise, namely her eyebrows were slightly higher than the baseline. "What did you say the name of this game was called again?" she asked, idly swirling the straw in her drink before taking a sip.
"Five Night's At Freddy's. It's the latest thing on the net, apparently. Why?"
"I believe I've played such a game."
Ryuko, who'd had her glass barely touching her lips, choked momentarily, attracting a few stares from the bar before composing herself. "You what!? Why the hell would you play something like that!?"
Satsuki, undaunted as ever, downed the rest of her drink before speaking. "Inumuta recommended it." She hailed the bartender for another drink, same as the first. "I believe he intended for it to terrify me. A foolish gambit. Animatronic creatures pose no threat to me."
"That's a sentence I swear I never in my life thought you'd say." Ryuko chuckled, imagining Satsuki staring at her laptop with a deadpan expression as she efficiently mastered the game, not even so much as blinking when one of the creatures performed one of the jump scares. "How'd Inumuta do?"
"He has accessed Night 7--"
"There's a Night 7?"
Satsuki frowned, irked at having been interrupted. "Yes. A bonus level, apparently. He's been on it for three weeks. The last I heard of him was he was complaining about 'level 20 being impossible' or something of that nature." The bartender handed Satsuki her drink, the elder sister taking it with a polite "Thank you." and taking a sip. "I worry for his mental state."
"What, he hasn't tried making an offering to the 'Freddy gods', has he?" chortled Ryuko.
Satsuki was silent.
"Fuck, don't tell me did. I don't wanna be an accessory after the fact if Inumuta gets arrested for trying to sacrifice kids."
"Not 'kids'...just Jakuzure."
A brief moment of silence before Ryuko's loud, raucous laughter burst through the bar. Gripping the table for support, she laughed, hard and long, until tears were forming at the corners of her eyes. "Oh, my f-fuck...oh that is...I think I'd have given my Scissor Blade to see that."
Satsuki allowed herself a rare smirk. "It was rather entertaining to see. His...'method' of sacrificing Jakuzure was to dress her in a clown costume and throw her into a ball pit, begging for appeasement from Lord Fazbear."
Ryuko burst into laughter again, this time falling to the floor and clutching her ribs. "Oh, Jesus Christ..." she wheezed, red-faced. "That may be the--oh fuck, it hurts--the funniest thing I've heard all year."
"A pleasure to have aided in your merriment, dear sister." came the elder sister's reply, which was Satsuki-Speak for "you're welcome."
"What about Uzu? Has he tried?"
Satsuki rolled her eyes, taking a sip of her drink. "You know how he is. He thought simply closing the doors and waiting out the clock would prove an effective strategy."
"And he got his ass kicked, didn't he?"
"Murdered by an animatronic rabbit before 4am." Satsuki paused. "Ah. I see what you mean about rare sentences."
Ryuko pulled herself back up into her chair, staving off the last of the giggles. "Please tell me Gamagoori got into this."
"There's actually a funny story about that."
"Do tell, dear sister." replied Ryuko in a posh accent, grinning from ear to ear.
"You're aware of how the reason the...creatures...are trying to kill you is because they think you're a metal skeleton without a suit?"
"Yeah?"
"And how being a simple skeleton is against the rules?"
".........Oh, you're shitting me." laughed Ryuko, gripping the back of her chair as she remembered how much Gamagoori was a stickler for the rules. "He didn't do anything?"
Satsuki shook her head. "Sat there and didn't so much as glance at the mouse. Never in my life did I think I would see Gamagoori stare down a computer game with full intention of losing."
"He fought honorably." smirked Ryuko, returning to her drink. "Did he cry? Please tell me he cried."
"Why would a winner cry?"
For the second time that night, Ryuko choked on her drink, and Satsuki would be lying if she didn't enjoy the sight. "What!? How the hell did he win!? He didn't do anything! You just said--"
"I believe my words were 'full intention of losing.'" Satsuki replied coolly. "I never said he actually did. One of the opening phone calls in the game mentioned playing dead to stay alive. In this case, not moving the mouse." A smidgen of pride flashed across Satsuki's face. "He actually won before Inumuta did."
Ryuko's jaw dropped.
"Yes, Inumuta was quite distraught. He sulked for two and a half hours."
"If you love me, you'll tell me what happened when Pinky tried to play."
Satsuki chuckled. "It was after the 'sacrifice' episode. Nonon threatened to forcibly remove the genitals of anyone who tried to make her play that, quote unquote, 'goddamned fruity-ass robot animal death game'."
"Except you, of course."
The elder sister grinned and took a sip of her drink. "Of course."
-/-/-/-/- Meanwhile...
Inumuta, eyes blazing red from exhaustion and irresponsible amounts of caffeine, glared at his laptop with killing intent so palpable the very air seemed to ripple. Slender hands worked furiously at his keyboard, coding faster than was humanly possible. Sweat stung his eyes and fatigued wracked his muscles, but he pressed on, lines and lines of code flashing across his eyes, much like that of a frazzled college student writing their term paper.
Finally, after hours and hours of grueling work, he was ready. He could do it. By night's end, level 20 AI would be his bitch. And then he could rub his victory in Gamagoori's face.
clatter Inumuta perked his head up, sunken eyes looking around for the source of the noise. The wind? House creaking? Perhaps spies, just waiting for the chance to obtain his great secrets and use them for their own insidious gains. Or maybe Inumuta was just irrationally paranoid from a combination of 67+ hours of no sleep, an irresponsible amount of energy drinks, and rampant jealousy.
Grumbling, he turned back to the screen, only to pause and look back at his door. His door, that he would swear on every last scrap of technology he owned, had been closed.
Getting to wobbly legs, he walked over to the door, reached out to close it--
"SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!"
Inumuta let out the girliest shriek the prefecture had ever heard, leaping about a foot in the air to avoid the swiping hook hand of the pink pirate fox that had come charging through his open doorway like a very rude Girl Scout, but with twice the murderous intent. He clung to the lamp for support, bawling his eyes out, too exhausted to fight back. He felt his grip slipping, and the sound of the pirate fox's snapping jaws filled his heart with unimaginable fear...
He fell from the chandelier, landing on the floor with a hard thud, staring up at Foxy wide with, despair-filled eyes. Is this how he would die? In the most ironic manner possible? Slowly, the fox raised its intact hand, and Inumuta quickly began sputtering out prayers in every language he knew.
pop went the fox's head as it was plucked off, revealing not a horrific mass of circuitry and metal, but instead the cackling, tear-streaked face of Nonon Jakuzure.
"The look on your goddamn face!" laughed the pinkette, falling backwards as Inumuta realized he'd been played. "Priceless!"
"Why in all the names of everything did you do that!?" snapped Inumuta in a croaky gasp.
Nonon replied by smacking him across the face with her hook hand, which was thankfully plastic. "That's for throwing me into a fucking ball pit in a clown costume, you asshole!"
"I said I was sorry!"
"Sorry's for stubbed toes and cumming early." hissed the pinkette, shoving her costume's head back on. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I have urgent business to take care of."
"Where're you going now?" huffed Inumuta, returning to his laptop.
Nonon turned to face him, and somehow, he could tell she was smiling beneath her costume. "Where else? Mankanshoku's."
END