Chapter Text
“Go forward again, Ballora is behind you. She is afraid of the scooping room, she will not follow you.” Baby semi-whispered into the darkness. There were no other sounds, apart from the echoing scraping sounds that had accompanied him throughout the journey.
Mike obeyed Circus Baby’s instructions, moving forward and keeping his breathing silent as he reached out to feel his surroundings for the umpteenth time despite another voice in the back of his brain screaming at him to do otherwise. This time, he hit something. He felt around again for any sort of handle. And luckily, there was one.
He entered the so-called “scooping room”. The metal build of the door made it heavy, and cold as ice. It slammed behind him when he let go, and he immediately felt cut off from the rest of the world, even more so than before, if that was even possible while also being underground.
He’d been here before, as well as being told before when he was in the suit that this was indeed the same room, he could almost.. recognise the ambience that resided in here. That same kind of chill to the air, and the smell of nothing.
“Warning, you have entered a highly dangerous area,”
HandUnit’s voice cut through the silence, “you have entered from maintenance hatch 1B, reserved for cleaning and repair of “the scooper”. Entering this side of the room is strictly prohibited by unauthorised persone-“ the robot-generated voice cut off suddenly and with a static noise that gave Mike a chill down his spine.
Dim lights started flashing, revealing parts of the animatronics that had tormented him these past nights. Torsos and heads were scattered about the place. They stared at him with their even more lifeless looking eyes, or where their eyes were supposed to be should they be in working order.
Most importantly, another, much bigger machine hung in front of him. The scooper. Mike’s eyes went wide. His first reaction was fear. Pure, blood-chilling fear.
Baby’s voice, only a few seconds ago a source of calm and something he thought he could trust, now seemed to be the exact opposite. She still spoke with that same tone when addressing Mike, and it built up a small bit of anger inside of him.
“You are in the scooping room now. Funtime Foxy has already been here today, Funtime Freddy has already been here today, Ballora has already been here today. Circus Baby has already been here today.”
Mike kept silent while she continued.
“I’ve been out before, but they always put me back. They always put us back inside. There’s nowhere for us to hide here. There is nowhere to go, when we look like this.”
He felt like he knew where this was going, and he didn’t like it one bit. Mike’s heart beat faster and faster by the millisecond, but still, he kept silent.
“But if we looked like you, then we could hide. If we looked like you, we would have somewhere to go.”
..Mike didn’t know what he knew anymore, but he felt, in that moment, that they were both in deep thought. If a robot could think, that is. But something told Mike that she wasn’t just a robot. All these one-sided conversations they had been having these past few nights, they didn’t feel like extremely good robot programming, it felt like… something else.
“The scooper only hurts for a moment.”
Mike was brought back to the present. He didn’t know why he didn’t run when a loud starting sound emanated from the scooper. Maybe it was fear that kept him still, maybe it was shock, or maybe, it was acceptance. The last thought he had before the thing lunged forward to do what it was made for, was that he’d never see the end to “The Immortal and the Restless”.
Mike didn’t notice the figure in the window when his vision, tinted with red, finally turned black.