Have you ever heard of animatronics? Quite an interesting field, if “I” do say so myself. Many a person have documented their assembly and existence thoroughly. You’ll even find the occasional hobbyist reconstructing their favourite model from 1982 in their basement online.
It had been abandoned in favour of more “new aged” forms of robotic entertainment, but every person above the age of 18 or so can probably remember the… things performing on stage and staring their soul. Maybe even past it, into their deepest, animalistic desires. Afterwards, you could expect a couple nightmares thrown in their daily life, for good measure. However, the average person, blessed with the ability to handle things that scare them in a grounded way, doesn't take that fear past the bedsheets.
Granted, the vast majority need not worry about the real deal actually killing them. Why would it ever be programmed to be able to kill someone? Unless some poor, unrecognized workshop worker decided a life in jail wouldn’t be enough to deter him from acting out his laden fantasy. And maybe he did, fully intending it to be shut off before anything could happen.
And maybe, a certain someone would come into possession of older restaurant franchises with said animatronic. And lets say, like a reasonable person, he knew that it could move on its own. And he, like anyone would, did not care. He couldn’t fill a night guard position in a restaurant that only acted as nostalgia bait. So fine! Let it get quirky at night.
Someone who would not share the same sentiment would be Bive.
She was an inhuman ball of fur and a being which could be considered a mockery of man, found herself in the corner of a security closet. Wearing a non-ironed, stolen trench coat. Not that you could have told by looking, as she crumpled, folded in on herself even more than what an iron could fix. If she found herself permanently stuck, she would fuse into the metal, melding and tangling endlessly within herself. Her hair was coarse and sticking out in countless directions. She didn’t care for it in the slightest, and you could tell. She didn’t want to risk ANYTHING. “Natural” was a RED HERRING and that red herring was DROWNING IN WATER. (Fish DON’T do that.)
Zooming out from this little scene, the closest itself was in a three room building resembling the shape of hell. The stench of rotten food and old children’s tears soaked the atmosphere. She continually tucked herself tightly so she could fit her contorted body into the corner. It looked like abstract art in a way. Her teeth crushed together while she clenched her jaw. Her glasses contorted and were on the verge of snapping. She had to strain her neck in three different directions to look for IT.
She had THOUGHT there was something essential to connecting the gaps in her head here. A document she could add to the increasing pile of evidence of everything around her. Into the makeshift grassroots detective station she had made in an abandoned building, the entrance far away from anyone could possibly recognize as inhabited. Solving the issue of minor tampering in the buildings meant for birthday entertainment served as a glimpse into the mind of those WATCHING her! A way to figure out how they played their cards before they happened.
A day prior, she had attempted to scout the area out of the guise of broad daylight and was blocked by a LITERAL CLOWN PARADE. It was MOCKING her in a way the general public wouldn’t care about!! (not that they’d been kind the few times she had BUT) They were ON to her. So she was desperate. Needed to move So Very Quickly. She broke in under the relative safety of the evening, through the window.
However!
And frankly, this is a rookie mistake,
She did not consider a semi-sentient aggressive animatronic as a threat!
Even in spite of her vast planning and knowledge and absolute ability to see everything and anything coming truthfully. She heard unnatural, long and heavy footsteps coming towards her when she had slipped through one of the looser windows.
And that's where she was. The thing, its head is red and circular, its eyes moved too humanly for something of its age, but its body too robotically to be anything else. Past the eyes, laid gaping holes of nothing but hollow, rotting machinery. Its movements, hypnotizing in fear and control attics. A demon of the building’s making, ready to destroy her from the inside out until she is nothing and she is everything that should not be. Wrong. Wrong. WRONG. She couldn’t. She couldn’t do that. She couldn’t let That Happen.
It moves in and out of the room. Jogging up and down in anticipation of a meal. It knew Bive was there. The room had old party tables folded up in the corner with the plastic coverings still clinging onto life long past their usage. Dust within lots of places dust need not stay, for fear of being instantly cleaned. It had long ago abandoned that fear of being kicked up, or even moved. The fear, no longer needed, clearly had leaked into the essence of the air. It would be a great torture room for someone with allergies.
She decided she attempted to get back to the window she came through in, but that all the movement had loosened her from that position. With how her head was twisted though, she panicked upon realizing the window had shut. She hadn’t brought anything with her that could pry it open from her side, either. It wasn’t one with those easy latches, because why would one need to open a window, anyways?
Looking up, its mouth opened and closed, with its voice box clearly not getting the cue to start up with it. While definitely not facing her, she felt every fiber of her being stuck up in. fear. Unknown intention of the worst kind. Maybe it had deafened her. Maybe the dust scattered around was actually crushed scopolamine. They FOLLOWED her in there and were waiting for it to kick in. They had figured out how to fit all of themselves in a single box in the opposite corner and we're watching her! She could feel their presence. She should have known the parade was a bad omen. A warning, along with a taunt.
But in the distance, a light turned on. She could barely see the lightwaves that peeked through the doorless hallway. Their suddenness caught its attention. Very slowly, as if it could go faster, but simply wanted to taunt her, it turned its back on Bive. She loosened. Making 100% sure it wouldn’t immediately jump her given the chance, she darted to the filing cabinet pushed up against endless health violations. This was what she came for and this is what she would get out of it.
There were two drawers. The top one was easier to reach at the angle the cabinet was at, but her hands did strain and shake as she filed through them. The first few files did not mean much to her. Payrolls and other meaningless garbage they were only keeping to HIDE the truth after them.
And to the good stuff, she got. A grimy, laminated article on new chemicals and their effects on food? That’s evidence by association! And she had her sweaty little hands on them. More files flew throughout her brain, and the air, as this became a literal goldmine. She, completely forgetting her surroundings, stuffed all sorts of papers into the waist pockets of her trench coat. They folded and creased around her notebook and pens. Bive was not one to be bothered to neatly shove something.
Oh no. She was stuck in here, wasn’t she? All of the Key information wouldn’t help her leave, exactly. Had she checked the corner? Had she checked for them? WHY didn’t she? She darted her eyes to the corners as she stood like a deer in car headlights. She heard a telephone ring as she jumped out of her little spot. If she was not so skilled in standing she would’ve probably gotten a concussion.
She couldn’t figure out how long it had been. She couldn’t figure out if time was even there anymore, to be fair. It felt like it hadn’t passed in what would have been days. The absence of time feeling like more time than it would otherwise made sense to her.
She had seen a door when she had scouted it out, now that she thinks about it. She would have to somehow avoid It, but she could rush out the doors. And unless they had brought lethal force, she would be out. She would run as fast as POSSIBLE to whatever scattered hiding place that was close to here. Although that lethal force was a horrifying thought, she would be even worse off in here with That. What It could do to her that no sentient being could. Possibly even STEAL ALL Of her being. Give it to the CLOWN MILITIA.
So, Her hands clutched her stuff in her pockets. Quickly peeking out the door to see if It was there (it wasn't ) she took a mad dash.
A cork board’s loose contents fluttered and some fell off as a black, ghostly blur booked it towards the doors. It was presumably in the other hall. As she was not dead yet.
She, looking ahead, noticed that the light at the end of the tunnel was yellow. That’s not how the outside works. It could never be YELLOW outside. The sun would have had to have been REPLACED! She would have stopped dead in her tracks, but that phrase was a little too literal for her liking.
Looking closer, she couldn’t make out a proper exit or even a glimpse of the outside world. A bell chime played. As her brain caught up with her eyes, a musty looking, light brown square of room. It phased into where the front door would have been. It felt innately wrong. Had the world been destroyed? That was ironically one of her more rational ideas, given what was before her.
But before Bive could substantially process anything, it was gone. Vanished. And she did in fact find herself at the entrance. Only for a mere moment, as she booked it into the early dawn. Which DIDN’T MAKE SENSE! Was this the real world? None of this made sense. Time was mocking her efforts to be able to observe anything at all.
“What was that elevator??? Was it a tool they used to spy on her? Was it its own thing completely ambivalent? Or could it show itself so unknowable so she wouldn’t understand it was spying on her??? A third entity to yet torment her more?
She, despite the horror brewing in her head desperately trying to piece together the scattered information, and the frayed connectors desperately trying to understand said information, kept running. She did have a hideout of her own, her office. Her perfect hiding spot. It also happened to be entered through an alleyway that looked like a dead end.
At a first glance.
That was good. That wouldn’t work long term but if someone was following her in the now.. most people wouldn’t ever figure it out. It was the outside hall of an abandoned building. A single crack through the left side was false, but it wasn’t really easy to tell unless you rammed yourself into it. And Bive did do that. The first time, Unintentionally.
It was obvious at the time nobody had used it in years. Rain water had leaked from the cracks that sprawled the floor and walls. They spilled into each other and even with Bive falling face first into a deep crevasse of it, the water remained still. As if it couldn’t move, or maybe as if it wouldn’t. The tense atmosphere lead any eyes to a desk left untouched, in the middle of something with red string strewn around. She shuddered, both in the past and in the presence. to think it was someone much like herself. But one like herself that was nonetheless FOUND. it was so OBVIOUS she was neither the first, nor the LAST. And she was so close to being the one next. And hell, what if she WAS the one who had created this place and they had simply made her brain contort and forget to “morally” stop her from finding out how they planned to ruin everyone and everything.
and-
her legs and ability to run had carried her there. she found herself in that alleyway. Great. She had let herself loose the tense of her body the tiniest bit. NOTHING they could take advantage of, but not enough for her veins to burst anymore.
Several piles of her own work greeted her. She had a delicate system of sorting it to be unreadable to any outside source. To her, it was GENIUS. A CACOPHONY OF DANCING WORDS SPEAKING NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH.
To any outsider, if one were to exist, it would be hoarding.
She kept her eyes on the entrance as she sat down on a cracking cloth chair. At a makeshift desk. Slowly creeping beneath its own weight. She glanced at the radio equipment she had managed to fashion out of the most outdated trash. Its components poked out, decorating the sound that came on when she would turn it on. FIN LTR ( and firgure out how the hbby works so people think im cool and awesome)
She knew, so many wanted her. She, in large, was a threat. Famous from those who didn’t want to be known. She envied when she dared dial her radio (outside of her selected stations) and they talked about petty paparazzi. NOT like she cared
Everything hit her all at once. Time itself had bent to prevent it before. Her hair had goosebumps, as her body became a field of anxiously shaking spikes. She shoved her shaky hand in her pockets and grabbed all of the papers. She threw them down in front of her in haste. Surprisingly, and as to a bird sitting on physics, none of them fell off of the table. She pressed the hair on where the temple of her forehead. It adjusted her glasses a little. She released the tension and glared down and actually read the text in-front of her.
“Within the residence of [TYPE BUSINESS HERE] a concerning amount of unsanitary incidence. We at [PRESERVATIVE] CO. Have just the solution for you!
Have you ever wondered what sorcery Wcanlds uses that attracts so many families? No, it isn’t the bribery of plastic and collectables [WE ARE NOT LEGALLY LIABLE FOR SAID ‘SLANDER’ TOWARDS WCANLDS OR ASSOCIATES] but it’s our Patented… “
She turned the page. To her shock and horror, something had slipped between the lamentation of unknown food poisoning reports. A newspaper clipping about an incident of… mass hysteria.
Bive didn’t believe in that word. Every time a journalist or someone who would consider themself an authority on truth used it to describe an event, it was NEVER THE CASE. It was never just the hyperactive brains of a few. It was always SOMETHING. REAL, or PHYSICAL BUT IT WAS SOMETHING.
But no, this misinformation for those too stupid to understand was not what caught her attention. It was the contents of said lie.
“MASS HYSTERIA POINTED TO HALLUCINATED ELEVATOR…“ The headlines struck Bive in the head with a bat. A bat with screws directly lodging themself into her brain. The headline was in past tense. As IF IT WOULDN’T HAPPEN AGAIN. as if it DIDN’T HAPPEN TO HER. Perhaps it wasn’t meant to only spy on her, but on the general public. Something that would simply be considered background noise by the general public. Clever. They, whatever mechanics of the mechanics of evil doom, certainly thought so. BUT THEY WEREN’T. IT WASN’T A HALLUCINATION.
It NEVER WAS.
Everytime in her extensive and immense career that she had encountered that phrasing it was an EXCUSE. An official explanation tying into Some almost understanding laymen had written articles about mass hysteria not being real, but the men in their pens had led them astray into a debate of doctor bias. NOT the fact the word was a code for “coverup” and “don’t read into our secrecy leaks.”
She knew, so many wanted her. She, in large, was a threat. Famous from those who didn’t want to be known. She envied when she dared dial her radio (outside of her selected stations) and they talked about petty paparazzi. NOT like she cared.
Being sure to be light on her feet, she paced back and forth, thinking. She remembered the rest of the papers she so hastily glanced through, as she walked back and towards. That scattered look through was unlike how she