Chapter Text
The plastic plaque on the door read SURVEILLANCE. Behind the door was a small office populated with a multitude of CRT televisions stacked floor to ceiling, a simple desk, and spinning office chair.
A younger, more innocent Phil Pepperman was seated at the desk, and in a sudden silent movement he closed the sketchbook he had been working in and stuffed it into his bag on the floor. He had developed a sixth sense for when his boss was coming in to check on him; a crawling of the skin that alerted him before he consciously registered the smell of tobacco smoke.
He had a few seconds to pretend to stare at the screens before they were masked by the glare of the hallway light. A stark white glare outlined the lanky silhouette of his employer, but only for an instant. Pizzahead wasted no time in closing the door behind him.
“Good afternoon, Philip. How has my little engine been running?” His loathsome presence was somewhere behind and to the right of Pepperman, where he always stood once an hour per shift, likely for the other security guards as well.
“Still fairly strong,” said Pepperman, careful to use language that would not be interpreted as negative while also not being too similar to the other scripts he had exhausted today. “We’ve got a couple of birthday parties going and… no one is idle that I can see.”
With the exception of Pepperman himself. His hands itched to draw if he was going to just sit on his ass in this stuffy office for eight hours, not that the room was conducive to creativity. If anything, it was actively hostile to it: there were no lights other than what the CRTs offered, his body protested at the lousy chair after only half a shift, and the mindless scratches on the decrepit desk were indicative of the two dozen unchanging views of Pizzaboy’s Party Pit being fit to make a lesser man lose his mind. Pepperman wasn’t so delicate, but he could still feel his potential draining with every tick of the clock.
He glanced at Pizzahead, who, predictably, did not give any indication that he heard what the security guard had said whatsoever. Little rectangular screens were reflected in his eyes as they lingered on each one for a good ten or fifteen seconds. It was a wonder why he didn’t just route the CCTV system into his own office if he enjoyed the spectacle this much.
Pepperman looked back at the screens. In one, a mother was trying to quell her toddler’s meltdown while her older child took the opportunity to dash into the ball pit. In another, two middle aged men stood awkwardly in the arcade area as the kids they were watching after continued to feed all their quarters into the most violent game they could find. Elsewhere a group of teens who were too old for this place loitered long after they had finished their oversized pizza, annoying everyone else with their general adolescent emissions. A fourth view showed a child lost in the overstimulating tackyscape beginning to cry at one of the animatronics, which occurred about once per visit per family.
In short, nothing was happening.
Without warning, Pizzahead lunged forward, setting a hand on the desk with a slap that made Pepperman jump. His posture arched as he brought his face closer to one screen in particular.
Pepperman looked at the screen, looked at his boss, back at the screen, back at his boss. What the hell was he looking at? Those two middle aged men and the kids they were with were complete voids of interest, notable only for being possibly the most boring people in the restaurant right now. Yet Pizzahead’s gaze was glued in place, his grinning teeth chewing at the mouthpiece of his pipe with repulsive glee.
He gave a few juvenile giggles, whispered something—it sounded like “gold”.
“Sorry?” Pepperman asked to his immediate regret. Whatever it was that had caught his employer’s eye stripped him of any semblance of normalcy he could have still pretended to have, and Pepperman never wanted a peek behind the veil in the first place.
“Gold, my dear Philip, I’ve struck—no.” Without once looking away from the screen, Pizzahead splayed the fingers of one of his hands, palm upward. “It’s like an immaculate diamond just up and walked into the palm of my hand.” He closed his hand into a fist, slowly but emphatically.
“Uh,” said Pepperman.
Pizzahead pointed at one of the men on the screen. “Look. No, get your book out. Draw.”
Pepperman hesitated a second before reaching into his bag. He never let Pizzahead see that he brought his sketchbook into the office with him, so how did he know it was here now?
Pushing that thought away, Pepperman opened the spiral-bound book to an empty page. He and his employer never spoke about anything not immediately pertaining to work, but going by the aesthetic cultivated in both his restaurant chain and his wardrobe, Pizzahead enjoyed cartoons of antiquity, and so Pepperman kept his classical studies and cubist doodling out of site. This job was paying for his degree whether he liked it or not, so he had to be a different artist right now, a different person.
With pencil and paper at the ready, the artist turned his attention to his employer’s object of interest. The man was exceedingly normal and the poor quality of the camera feed combined with the low resolution of the CRT screen made it impossible to discern any actual details. Pepperman squinted and questioned, What does the creep see that I don’t?
Human, white, balding. What was left of his hair looked black, and the darkness under his large downturned nose suggested a small moustache. He was the tallest among the people he was with, though probably of an average height. He was dressed from top to bottom in plain black clothes and his skinny legs served to make his gut look rounder.
Pepperman tapped the end of his pencil against his book, a thoughtless action that spurred a glance from his boss. He’s literally asking you to draw on the clock, don’t fuck this up. His artistic practice was almost exclusively concerned with technical mastery and self expression; he was already in his fourth year of a Bachelor’s degree in fine art with the skills to show for it. He was not a cartoonist or animator or whatever he sensed Pizzahead wanted.
The man on the screen fidgeted, frequently glancing at the screen and away again, as if he didn’t want his watchers noticing his awareness of them. He wrung his hands. Rubbed his chin. A glimpse of his big pale eyes as he looked at the camera again.
At last the faint whine of the televisions was joined by the scratch of pencil on paper. Pepperman’s arm moved with an excitement he never expected to find here; it remained true that cartooning wasn’t to his taste, but he would seize upon any manifestation of inspiration he could in this shithole.
He didn’t like how the first sketch was turning out, so he migrated his pencil to another spot on the page, and did so again, and again. He flipped to a new page. The subject began speaking to the other man he was with, and Pepperman copied what gestures he saw. Frankly, the man in black was incredible. The CCTV quality was so bad, the resolution of the CRT screens so low, and yet the man was so expressive and animated in his movements he was completely readable despite that. He already was a damn cartoon.
“Very good,” Pizzahead murmured when the pencil finally stopped moving. “What are we keeping talent like yours holed up in here for?”
“Thank you,” Pepperman replied automatically when Pizzahead finished his hollow laugh, and offered no resistance when his boss slid the sketchbook towards himself and began to flip through the freshly drawn pages. He did wince, however, when Pizzahead began tearing them out.
His employer exited the office with the drawings clutched to his chest, barely remembering to shout “Have a good night, Philip!” before the door closed behind him. Though his footsteps—was he skipping?—faded quickly, Pepperman waited a tentative minute or two before unleashing a loud, longsuffering groan. He wasn’t bothered about his boss taking the pages without asking, it was the contamination from having drawn them at all, from giving that hysterical voyeur with a god complex something he liked that took a toll on him. He almost felt pity for the black-clad stranger who sensed that he was being watched, but with no idea just how closely.
Pepperman looked at another blank page in his sketchbook with stationary hands, too drained to do anything with it. How typical it was that the fine artist with deep personal ambitions only ever had his worst work appreciated. To hell with it, he was going to demand payment next time. All the old masters had their wealthy corrupt patrons, now his turn had arrived to see how much Pizzahead truly appreciated his talent.
A yelp ripped through the tiny office. The artist had looked at the televisions again and there, on the same screen as the man in black, was Pizzahead, staring directly at the camera. He winked, then turned his gaze to his victim, beginning his approach with a gait Pepperman couldn’t help but read as predatory.
The security guard gripped the edge of the desk and fought to unfreeze his body. He had never once seen Pizzahead on the restaurant floor before, and as much as he bore a disgusting twinge of associative guilt, there was about to be something worth watching on these damn screens.