Chapter Text
‘So this is the place, huh?’
Alice slams shut her truck door, crossing her arms as she sizes up the rinky-dink pizzeria. It’s dark and drab by the light of the summer moon, all but for the flashing sign atop the roof that sports the glowing words of, Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria: Where Fantasy and Fun Come to Life! Bracketing the blinking lights and letters is a smiling bear with a top hat and microphone in hand, a smirking purple bunny with a flashy red guitar, and an open-beaked yellow chicken with an apron reading, Let’s Eat!
‘Creepy,’ Alice mumbles.
She crosses the empty parking lot toward the red swinging doors. She hasn’t met her boss face-to-face, but via voicemail, he told her to arrive at the location five minutes to midnight and locate the office. Then, all she’d have to do is listen to a telephone message that would explain to her what her tasks as a night guard would be.
The doors are unlocked. She steps into the pizzeria and slams the door shut behind her with a grumble. The place is pitch-black, all but for strobing white arcade game screens, blinking prize corner lights of pinks and purples and yellows, and dim, red emergency lights lining the ceiling of the dining area. Alice is immediately hit with the confounding scents of cardboard-like cheese pizza, vomit, balloons, and something burnt. Scrunching her nose, she walks past the desolate, yet lively prize corner and finds herself overlooking the pizzeria’s main dining area. Tables upon tables line the black-and-white chequered floors, draped in white table cloths stained orange by grimy child hands. Alice hates kids. That’s why she chose to work the night shift from midnight to 6AM, when the place is void of screaming, crying, puking children. She’d prefer the company of creepy old anthropomorphic animatronics any night. Also, if she doesn’t have to ever meet her boss face-to-face, it sounds good to her. Since her last gig went to hell, Alice isn’t too keen on meeting her new boss. Unadmittedly, she’s fearful of falling for another man who won’t accept her for who she is.
‘Where’s this dumb office, anyway?’ she mutters, stepping between the tables adorned in party hands, paper plates, and leftover confetti scraps.
She stops at the far wall of the dining area where it splits into two long, dreary halls.
‘Where fantasy and fun come to life,’ she scoffs to herself. ‘Yeah, right.’
She plunges into the darkness where the walls are lined with rot, grime, old newspapers, children’s drawings, and even pizzas that had been thrown around and stuck where they landed.
It doesn't take her long to find the office. Alice plops herself in the rolling chair in front of some retro monitors and a telephone. Whoever was the night guard last was a fatass, is the first observation she makes, because there are old pizza containers and red-and-white pop cups littering the desk, along with crumpled pieces of paper. She doesn’t even want to touch the underside of this desk, because she already knows whoever was the night guard last was a chronic gum chewer; she can smell it.
Clock strikes twelve, midnight arrives. The phone on the desk rings loudly. Alice, with a grunt, clicks the blinking red button to allow the message to come through and echo through the dim, crammed office.
‘Hello? Hello hello?’ comes the staticy, high-pitched voice of a nervous man. ‘Uh, I wanted to record a message for you, to help you get settled in on your first night. Um, I actually worked in that office before you. I’m finishing up my last week now, as a matter of fact. So, I know it can be a bit overwhelming, but I’m here to tell you there’s nothing to worry about.’
As the message continues, Alice pulls out a red nail polish bottle and lounges back in the chair, bare feet up on the greasy desk, as she savours the cold drafts of air whooshing through the two doors on either side of her and half-drones-out the phone guy’s irritating voice.
‘Uh, let’s see, first there’s an introductory greeting from the company that I’m supposed to read. Uh, it’s kind of a legal thing, you know. Um, “Welcome to Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, a magical place for kids and grown-ups alike, where fantasy and fun come to life. Fazbear Entertainment is not responsible for damage to property or person. Upon discovering that damage or death has occurred, a missing person report will be filed within 90 days, or as soon as property and premises have been thoroughly cleaned and bleached, and the carpets have been replaced.”’
‘Blah blah blah,’ Alice mumbles, softly stroking the polish brush up her big toenail.
‘Now that might sound bad, I know. But, there’s really nothing to worry about! Uh, the animatronic characters here do get a bit quirky at night. So, just be aware, the characters do tend to wander a bit. Uh, they’re left in some kind of free roaming mode at night, uh, something about their servos locking up if they get turned off for too long?’
Alice rolls her eyes and switches her propped foot to paint the other nails. ‘Great.’
‘Uh, now concerning your safety. The only real risk to you as a night watchman here, if any, is the fact that these characters, uh, if they happen to see you after hours, they probably won’t recognise you as a person. They’ll pr- They’ll most likely see you as a metal endoskeleton without its costume on. Now, since that’s against the rules here at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, they’ll probably try to. . . forcefully stuff you inside a Freddy Fazbear suit. Um, now, that wouldn’t be so bad, if the suits themselves weren’t filled with crossbeams, wires, and animatronic devices. Especially around the facial area. So you could imagine how having your head forcefully pressed inside one of those could cause a bit of discomfort, and death. Uh, the only parts of you that would likely see the light of day again would be your eyeballs and teeth when they pop out the front of the mask. Yeah, they don’t tell you these things when you sign up.’
Alice forcefully grabs the fan on the desk’s small black shelf, switches it on, and points it over her feet on the desk to dry the paint. ‘Yeah, thanks for telling me. Is this call almost done, or what?’
The message sounds to be coming to an end, at long last. ‘But hey, the first day should be a breeze! I’ll chat with you tomorrow. Uh, check those cameras, and remember to close the doors only if absolutely necessary. Gotta conserve power. All right, good night.’
The message ends. The only sounds in the office are that of the whirring cameras on the monitor, the vents blowing in the hall and behind her above the set of lockers, and the blasting fan.
‘Damn, his voice was annoying as hell,’ Alice says to herself. ‘So I just check the cameras and stuff?’
Alice yanks her grey socks back over her feet, now that the fan has dried her red polish, and swings around in the chair to poke her head out the left doorway. Flickering lights in the shadows. A toy carousel droning its creepy, dumb song from the dining area. Vents blasting air overhead and fluttering the papers stuck to the pizzeria walls.
She notices the big red button on the wall next to the doorway. Bringing her head back into the office, Alice presses the button with her palm. A heavy metal door clangs down to the floor, crimson lights flash erratically, and loud alarms deafeningly buzz. She punches the button again, gritting her teeth against the loud noise, and then the door draws back up. All is quiet.
‘There’s one door,’ she grumbles. She bets it’s the same on the other side.
Jamming her shoes back on, Alice pulls her chair close to the monitor and squints at the camera system.
She clicks between all the cameras, and they switch with static. Dining area. Washrooms. Pirate Cove with a freaky curtain. Supply closet. Backstage. Two cameras in each of the two halls outside her office. The camera in the kitchen doesn’t work, but the audio does. She monitors the stage camera to see the three animatronics portrayed on the outside sign standing on the stage, completely still and dull. There’s the big brown bear in the centre, the purple bunny to its right, and the yellow chicken to its left, all coated in shadows and staring emptily across the dining area. She hadn’t noticed them when she came in.
‘Cute.’
Alice, bored of flipping through the cameras, decides to get out of her chair and stand in the hall to take a smoke. She lights a cigarette and leans against the crayon doodles and newspapers glued to the slimy walls. It’s dark and eerie in the hall, but she can see the dim light of the office literally three feet away, so she’s fine.
She takes a drag and leans her head back against the wall, sighing smoke. She can’t stop thinking about her old boss, and what happened between them. She had no choice but to leave behind her old job and Toddly, for how could she stay after the rejection? But still, she misses the thrill of each shift. She was a prison guard before she became a pizzeria night guard, as of tonight. She misses beating the prisoners. She misses the scheduled smoke breaks. She misses the weekly raises for her outstanding performances in maintaining control in the prison. Most of all, she misses when her old warden, Mr Toddly, would talk to her, send her a flirtatious good morning, or offer her a free pack of cigarettes, maybe even a free coffee, to keep a close eye on Mr Inmate So-and-So.
But then she remembers how poorly it ended, and how she’ll never feel the thrill of being a prison guard again. Now she’s stuck on a boring ass night shift, staring at dumb robots for hours and getting paid crap.
Beneath a flickering light, staring straight at her at the hall’s end, is none other than the yellow chicken robot from the stage. Alice puts out her cigarette on the wall and turns to face the robot, cracking her knuckles and glaring it down.
‘They like to wander, huh?’ she chuckles. ‘Wander over here, and I’ll serve you the biggest beatdown of your life, big chick.’
The animatronic remains stock-still beneath the light, uncannily lit and cupcake on an outstretched plate. Alice untenses and stares at the chicken, bummed that it’s not making a move to come at her. She truly does miss her regular inmate beatdowns. A fight against a robot would surely be more of a challenge, but Alice is eager for any physical battle. Warden Toddly didn’t call her ‘Big Al’ for nothing.
Alice steps back into the office and sits down, flicking through the cameras and growing more and more bored by the second. She’s considering repainting the chipped red paint on her fingernails to spend her time less lamely.
Clang.
She perks up, rolling in the chair to the right-hand doorway and sticking her head out. The sound came from beyond the hall. Again, she hears what sounds to be pots and pans being chucked violently at walls.
‘What the eff?’
She rolls back to the monitor and clicks on the kitchen camera. Indeed, it sounds like the chicken animatronic’s tossing kitchen supplies around the blindspot like a mad chicken. She may not be able to see the kitchen, but she sure can hear everything through the monitor.
‘The phone guy said they wander, not play shot put with pizza trays,’ she scoffs, turning her attention to the main stage again.
The yellow chicken and the purple bunny are off the stage, yet the brown bear remains.
Alice decides to relax and accept that the animatronics will be wandering the restaurant all night, being weird and crap. Everything should be fine as long as they leave her the hell alone. Close to 1AM, however, the chicken in the kitchen’s pots and pans party irritates Alice to the point where she decides she’s either walking off the job to escape the noise, or she’s breaking the animatronic to bits.
Wondering where the purple bunny is, Alice checks the cameras but can’t find him anywhere on the grainy footage. Curious, she rolls in her chair to the left-hand door and flashes the hall light, but he’s not directly outside, either. She checks the cameras again and, there he is, hiding in the supply closet down the hall like a weirdo.
Shortly after 1AM, the phone rings, and it’s not a pre-recorded message.
She holds the phone to her ear, annoyed over who the hell could be calling the pizzeria this early in the morning; it has to be a prank call.
‘Hello! This is the night guard, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘Splendid! Well, I’m your boss, the Boss, and I’m just calling to check in on you on your first night.’
She wonders why he wouldn’t just escort her to her office for the first night and give her more of a run-down than panic-guy on the phone did, but then she presumes he’s probably chilling in bed at his home, or whatever.
Alice says nothing, as irritated by her new boss’s voice as she was by the phone guy’s voice.
‘Well? How’s it going?’ he persists cheerfully.
‘It’s great. The robots are wandering and crap.’
‘That is to be expected, yes. Some guards find it creepy. I’m taking it you don’t?’
‘More annoying than creepy.’
He laughs awkwardly, and Alice hears shuffling around on the other end. She wants this call to end, so she doesn’t have to listen to another voice and the chicken’s game of dodgeball in the kitchen. She’d prefer just listening to the chick.
‘Is that the only reason you’re calling?’ Alice finally asks, when he’s silent for more than three seconds.
‘Um. . . Yes. Oh! No, wait. Make sure you don’t damage the animatronics in any way. They mean a lot to the kids, you know. So, if any of them just, I don’t know, just happen to stumble into your office and seem threatening in any way, which they shouldn’t, don’t feel free to whack them with a crowbar or anything extreme,’ he laughs. ‘Just. . . shut the door. Just do that. Pretty please. I trust you got Jared’s message earlier?’
‘Jared?’
‘The former night guard. Guy with the ugly voice. He left messages for each night you work here, to help out future night guards like yourself.’
‘Oh. Yeah.’
‘Splendiferous! You should be all set! Good night and good luck!’
He doesn’t hang up. Silence. Alice is waiting for him to say something else.
‘Are you done?’ she asks.
‘Oh! Yes. You see, I didn’t want to hang up fir —’
Alice hangs up.
Sounds like I’m not allowed to beat up that stupid, loud chicken, Alice thinks bitterly, slamming the phone down on the receiver in sync with the chicken throwing a pizza tray against the wall, unless I want a cut in my already-pathetic pay check.
Seconds later, the phone rings again.
‘What the hell could it be?’ she fumes, picking it up and pressing the phone with white knuckles against her ear. ‘Who is it?’
‘Hello, Boss here. Again. You wouldn’t happen to know the names of the animatronics?’
‘Uh, no.’
‘May I enlighten you about them, so you know how to correctly refer to them?!’
This guy is an effing joke, Alice thinks, dragging a hand down her face.
‘What time do you go to sleep?’ she snaps.
‘Well, do you?’
‘What? Go to sleep?’
‘Do you want to know the names of the animatronics?’
Irked as hell, Alice hangs up again and slams the phone into the receiver so hard that the metal desk cracks a tad. She’s also pissed because, if any of the dumb robots decide to bombard her office, she’s not allowed to beat them to pieces, which she totally could, considering she just cracked a metal desk with her fist alone. She likes getting full pay. Hopefully her boss doesn’t cut her pay check for hanging up on him twice.
The phone rings again. It’s the same number that has called twice before: the Boss’s. She clicks the silence button and returns her attention to the monitor. Sucks that I can’t break those bots to bits, she thinks sourly.
A light on the phone turns yellow, indicating a message has just been left on this telephone. Alice sighs and presses the button, putting the message on speaker through the office.
‘Hello! Sounds like you cut out again — service really is bad out at the pizzeria, I know, we’re working on fixing that up — so I’ll just leave you a message. The bear is Freddy, the bunny is Bonnie, the chicken is Chica, and the fox is Foxy, if you were curious! Also, I didn’t happen to catch your name. I would love to know! Ha-ha. . . All right, then, uh. . . Good bye! Oh, and good luck!’
The message, thankfully, ends, and the office falls into silence again — except Chica’s party in the kitchen is still raging. Alice is not calling him back.
‘There’s a fox?’ she wonders aloud, voice flat and deep.
Alice checks the Pirate Cove camera to find the curtain has moved slightly aside to reveal the gleaming white eye and sharp hook of a pirate fox animatronic.
‘Hot,’ she breathes.
Clank.
That didn’t come from the kitchen.
Alice swings around in the rolling chair and punches the ‘activate light’ button next to the left-hand doorway. The light flickers to life, dim and faulty, to reveal the giant purple bunny looming directly outside, staring down at her with evil in its eyes.
Without breaking a sweat, Alice punches the big red button. The animatronic-proof door comes slamming down, alarms go blaring, and the lights in the left hall flash crazily.
‘“Shouldn’t be threatening” my ass. What the hell was that about?’
The chicken has gone quiet in the kitchen, so Alice rolls over to the right-hand door to see if Chica’s coming to pay her a visit, too. She flashes the light. There’s nothing there but dust motes, muggy yet icy air, and vent-blown, flapping newspapers on the wall.
Returning to the monitors, she locates Chica hanging around the restrooms. She’s clunking around with her stupid cupcake and poking her head in the men’s restroom.
‘You’re out of luck, sister,’ Alice says to the chicken, even though the non-sentient robot can’t hear her. ‘No boys in the building right now. Other than your furry friends, I guess. I can’t tell if they’re guys or not.’
She flashes the left-hand hall light again and looks out the small, dirty window. The bunny’s gone. The alarm and red lights are still there to peeve her, so she deactivates the ‘shut-door’ protocol. Checking the cameras, she sees that Bonnie has returned to the dining area. Everything’s in order.
Alice considers calling the Boss to ask why the hell the animatronic had a sentient light in its eyes and why it was trying to get into her office. Certainly not for funsies.
She vaguely remembers the number, since she had seen it three times before. After typing in (231)-184-5146, she holds the phone to her ear, weirdly hoping that he’ll pick up.
He does. At least, she thinks he does, at first. It’s silent on the other end, except for what sounds to be the Boss’s peaceful snores. There’s a mechanical whir, followed by the trill of a sweet-sounding, beeping robot, then the line goes quiet and the call ends.
‘Huh. Weird.’
* * *
Come 4AM, Alice is on her eighth smoke break and her second coffee; she found a coffee machine in the back locker of the office, half-full with some cold, stale stuff. Caffeine is caffeine.
The animatronics have been regular visitors to her office. She will spin in the chair, flash the right-hand hall light, and there will stand Chica, staring down at her like she has murdered her entire family and stolen her life savings. Alice fell into a smooth routine of checking the monitors, rolling to a door, flashing the light, checking the monitors, rolling to another door, flashing the light, et cetera. When either Bonnie or Chica was standing there, she calmly shut the door and sat back, watching the power bar on the monitor run down a few percentage notches.
She recalled how Jared said to conserve power. Not wanting to run out of power and risk getting money cut from her pay check, she has made sure to only shut the door for so long, and to only flash the lights when she couldn’t see Bonnie or Chica anywhere else on the cameras. Freddy and Foxy have been inactive all night.
Foxy, however, has been peeking out from behind his curtain every now and then, and consequently met with Alice sweet-talking him through the camera.
‘Nice hook,’ she would say, ‘I’d like to see what it can do outside that curtain.’
Then Foxy’s white eye would blink through the crack in the curtain, like the robot was conscious of her words through the camera’s speaker, and recede into the shadows awkwardly.
Alice crushes her eighth smoke on the cracked edge of the metal desk and shuts off the fan next to the monitor, casually flipping between the backstage and dining area cameras; Bonnie is backstage and Chica is roaming between the tables.
Clock strikes five. One more hour, and she can get the hell out of this creepy pizzeria. The animatronics themselves don’t scare her one bit, because she could easily crush their heads, but the prospect of them being somewhat sentient is what weirds her out. Servos locking up in the daytime? What an obscure reason to let the animatronics roam the place. From what I heard from the Boss, she thinks to herself, his weird demeanour is certainly reflected in the ‘quirky’ animatronics he’s in charge of.
Clank. That’s Chica stomping in front of her door in the darkness. Without having to even flash the light, Alice slams the door shut and crosses her legs, lounging in the rolling chair and slurping her cold coffee with strong, ashy fingers.
The rest of the hour goes by uneventfully. Bonnie keeps to himself, wandering the more central areas of the pizzeria. Chica’s a bit of a nuisance, menacingly visiting Alice every few minutes with her dumb pink cupcake and her gaping beak, like she’s asking, ‘Bro, let me in.’
To which Alice replies every time with a slammed door and blaring alarms.
Come 6AM, Alice’s shift is over and all the lights in the pizzeria slowly rise with the arrival of the new hour. She has finished the night with 13% of power left on the nighttime generator, which powered the lights, doors, and monitors. Thankfully, she didn’t ‘run out’, like Jared warned her of doing.
Lighting a smoke and straightening her tie, Alice leaves the office and bee-lines toward the door at an even pace. Bonnie and Chica have rejoined Freddy on the stage and are standing there motionless, waiting for the place to open up and for the kids to come running in at 11AM, when the pizzeria itself opens to the public. Alice wasn’t given any instructions to lock up the place, and the place was unlocked when she arrived.
At the swinging red exit doors, Alice is about to powerfully push them open and be on her merry way. However, both doors suddenly open on their own.
Two heads simultaneously poke out around either doors to reveal two identical young men. Their appearances are eerily identical. Spitting images of one another. Chin-length, wavy blond hair with impressive volume. Low-set, bushy, black eyebrows. Bulbous noses. Thin lips pulled in tight, mischievous smirks. Green eyes. Both are shorter than Alice and lanky; Alice notices how unnaturally long their fingers are, where they grip the red doors.
‘Hello,’ says the first one, grinning.
‘Night guard,’ finishes the second one, equally grinning.
Alice furrows her brows. ‘Who are you weirdos?’
‘We are the day guards,’ says one of the two.
‘The guards of the day,’ echoes the other.
‘Hah-hah-hah-hah-hah,’ they laugh in uneasy unison.
The twins join, holding hands, and slink past Alice with tame smiles. Indeed, both are wearing guard uniforms like she is, with the hat and nametag and everything. However, Alice glances at their name tags to see that both are the same.
One twin is called, ‘The Twins’, and the other is called, ‘The Twins’.
‘Whatever,’ she mutters, leaving the pizzeria at long last and plunging into the warm morning light.