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cartoonus-maximus · 2 months ago

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Notes and Observations on FNAF TFTP Vol 8: "B7-2"

Ya'll! We're here! We're at the end! I'm finished, and I'm so so so so so happy to be done!

And for some reason I thought this volume was called "Dittophobia?" I think probably because that story got leaked online and everyone in the theory community had things to say about it, but haven't heard as much about the other stories. (Which was great, btw! Allowed me to experience the first two stories completely blind, and I enjoyed them a lot more that way.)

These stories were… well, to be honest, none of them are my favorites, exactly. I ended up really liking the first one, but it's definitely got some issues that I can't easily overlook. But, whether I liked them or not, these stories are very lore heavy, and they seem determined to give us information about the greater world/story of this franchise.

Ugh. I hate hate hate the cover image. The damn thing gives me nightmares. Knowing that it's a character I already knew makes me feel a little better about it, but still… I'm so glad I don't have to look at it anymore.

... Y'know, we've never been told who the cover artist/s for these books is/are. Which I suppose suggests that it's still the problematic woman (whose name escapes me right now), but I guess it could be anyone.

And as always, these are just some of my notes and observations made while listening to the audiobook, which I borrowed from my local library. Fair warning: there will be spoilers. If you want the whole experience for yourself, you should skip this and go read/listen to the book yourself first.

Here are my observations on the other books in the series, if you are interested.

With that being said-- *cracks knuckles* --let's crack into the lore and finish this series, shall we?

(Rasta beanie by JamikeyShop on Etsy: link.)

"B7-2"

As it turns out, this story is a sequel to "B-7," a story from the second volume of this series. This struck me as odd -- "B-7" didn't feel like it was being written as part of a story, but felt like it was meant to be a whole story itself. The two parts of "the Bobbiedots" each feel like half of a story, with plot points that rely on those from its partner story to make sense, and with titles that actively tell the reader that these stories aren't meant to be read alone, labeling each one as "Part 1" and "Part 2." But this one doesn't do that for some reason.

(Genuinely, I'm not sure if these two "B-7" stories were always meant to be a two-parter. The first one feels self-contained, and the second one feels like the creative team's delayed response to backlash from the first one. But, whether planned or not, they both work together to tell a cohesive story, and they end up carrying a lot of lore related to fan favorite character Michael Afton, so we're just going to have to accept their existence and glean what we can from them.)

(Side note: if this is a sequel to "B-7," shouldn't it be "B-7.1" or "B-7 2.0" or something? Moving the hyphen like that doesn't make sense.)

Regardless, this story opens shortly after the last one ended. We pick up with Billy in the hospital and, just like the reader, he wonders how he's even alive. He remembers being crushed by the trash compactor. He remembers dying.

"How did I survive being crushed in the car?"

A nurse named Gloria realizes he's awake and starts to check his vitals and helps him drink a little water; while she's checking over him, Billy is startled to realize that he has an arm and a leg, since he'd previously had all his limbs amputated off. He's still missing his tongue though, so he can't really ask the nurse any of his questions.

The nurse leaves, and awhile later Billy is visited by Dr. Herrera, the surgeon who has been responsible for Billy's treatment. She explains that Billy was saved because the junkyard owner happened to notice blood leaking from the crushed car and alerted the local authorities; they managed to get Billy out of the car and, realizing that he was still breathing, rushed him to a hospital. Billy's been kept in a medically induced coma, and his body has been healing at a strangely fast pace.

Herrera explains that, while Billy was in the coma, she's been performing several surgeries on him, removing all of the "foreign" metal and plastic components that he had on and in his body; she not only removed his prosthetic limbs, but also the metal plates inside his face that had reshaped his facial structure, the black coloring from his eyes, and the synthesizer and speaker that was in his throat. She tells him that she "had" to remove the inorganic parts, and says that it's all in a storage drawer elsewhere in the hospital, presumably for future disposal or replications, since they're biohazardous at this point.

(And that's just… gross. Like, imagine you spent a lot of time and money altering yourself, whether that means transitioning or body modding or just basic cosmetic surgeries or something, then you get into an accident, and while you're unconscious and unable to advocate for yourself or anything, the doctor assigned to take care of you just decides "yeah, I think I'm going to undo all their hard work! They'll thank me later!" Terrible. Horrific. Literally non-consensual body modification. A very real horror for some people. No wonder that one reviewer I saw slammed this book for being pro-detransitioning.)

Anyway, she tells him that she removed enough metal pieces from him to build a full metal endoskeleton with, so clearly that's what the horror creature is on the cover. (I actually ended up becoming very fond of the endoskeleton by the end of this story, but uuuugggghhh I still hate it.)

Billy struggles to speak, but manages to admit out loud that he climbed into the car himself, and that he was planning on dying there. Herrera nods, and tells him that she thought as much; the police initially thought he's been attacked and put in the compactor against his will, and they ended up investigating Billy's home. They found paperwork and computer files that led them to the backdoor surgeon that Billy had had deals with, aka the guy who took Billy's money and performed all the weird surgeries on him in the first story. Following the paper trail, the police found and raided the abandoned facility that Billy met the sketchy doctor and had his surgeries at. In the facility, apparently they found multiple freezers filled with human body parts, including Billy's amputated limbs, and Dr. Herrera salvaged what she could. As a result, Billy now has one right leg and one right arm, both of which had a lot of work done on them to make them usable again. His left arm and left leg were either not found or were not longer viable for use.

The sketchy doctor hasn't been found. The freezers contained parts from several other people as well.

(Herrera also says that Billy's right leg, the one he still has, was strangely fused with pieces of the metal from his prosthetics, and she had to remove a lot of metal from it. It's healed up quickly though, and appears to now be a fully formed, fully functional leg again.)

Herrera gives Billy a handheld mirror so he can see what he looks like now. His ears are still misshapen from when he had them removed, his eyes look normal again, and his brown hair is growing back in on the top of his head. He has a lot of scar lines around his face from when Herrera removed the metal plates. He thinks he looks like his dad. (And that's the second time he's thought that, with the first time being toward the end of the first story. Definitely important. Very Michael-core of him.)

Billy has a lot of thoughts about Herrera after meeting her. He finds her beautiful, and clearly she's a competent surgeon, but he feels uncomfortable around her, and (obviously) doesn't like that she was cutting him open and removing parts of him while he was out of it, even if they were parts that he'd been growing to hate. He also can't help but notice that she's had some cosmetic surgeries done on herself, and he zeroes in on this fact, which seems to make him feel a little more comfortable around her.

(Also the text tells us that Herrera has an accent that Billy thinks may be Spanish. The audiobook narrator sure tries to give the doctor an accent, but I'm not sure she hit on anything that sounded like Spanish.)

Herrera tells Billy that he could be fitted for new, normal prosthetics to act as a left leg and arm. Billy emphatically says no, irrationally afraid that he'll slip back into acting like a robot again if he has fake limbs. (Okay, now we're having a weird addiction parallel, I guess?)

After only being awake from his medically induced coma for a day, Billy is already starting physical therapy. Within a single PT session, Billy is gripping things, standing on his own (with the aid of a crutch), and is even walking up and down the hospital halls with no further aid than his crutch. The medical professionals in this story keep commenting on how quickly Billy is healing. (Just… keep his super-healing in mind. I'll bring it up again in the theorizing section.)

Since files were found on Billy's home computer about how he's "really a robot," Billy has to undergo a mental health evaluation while he's at the hospital. We aren't told what the results of this evaluation are. What we are told is that the evaluator openly stares at Billy during the entire session, seemingly judging him based on his physical deformities. It makes Billy feel extremely self-conscious about his appearance. Nurse Gloria listens to Billy bemoan how much like a freak he looks because he doesn't have proper ears, and she later gifts him a crocheted Rasta beanie from a donations bin, which covers up a large part of his head. Billy likes the hat; he likes the soft texture and the vibrant colors. It becomes his new comfort item, and he wears it for the remainder of the story.

During Billy's hospital stay, Billy has a lot of time to himself to think, and he realizes that he's going to have to handle an adult life now, and he has little knowledge of how to be an adult. He's spent his entire life trying to be a robot, and he doesn't know how to be a normal person, and he doesn't have parents to ask for help anymore. He doesn't really feel like a robot anymore, but he also doesn't feel like a human yet either, and instead feels "strange and incomplete."

"He felt like he was missing parts of himself, and he didn't know how to find them."

Billy gets a lot of visitors during his hospital stay. His childhood therapist Dr. Lingstrom pays him a visit, as do his old classmates and childhood pals Clark and Peter, and then two grocery delivery people named Fran and Ned, who always handled Billy's groceries. 'Get well soon' wishes and a bouquet of flowers are bestowed upon Billy during this sequence of visitors, shortly after Nurse Gloria checks Billy's IV lines and reminds him of pills he needs to take.

Billy's final visitor is his own grandmother (who he has completely forgotten about and who I didn't realize existed until this moment; she wasn't a part of the first story). It's the first time Billy has seen her since he was five-years-old. His last memory of her is her showing up at his family's home to drag him to Sunday school and stressing the importance of church life on his father (who is her son, but he hasn't been to church since he was a child).

"Sunday school isn't optional!" (This line of dialogue made me laugh out loud. It's not factually accurate -- I'm a Christian and I grew up in the church, but I often hated Sunday school as a kid, so I can definitely relate to Billy and his dad trying to get out of it in this scene. But it sounded like something my own late grandmother would say, and it made me cackle.)

One night in the hospital, Billy is woken up by a soft, synthesized voice calling his name. He thinks it's a nurse at first, but he doesn't see anyone. He searches around his room and, finding nothing, grabs the crutch he uses to walk and leaves his room, following the voice out into the hall. The ward's nurse's station is empty, and there are no nurses or other hospital staff to be seen. Aside from the strange voice, everything is eerily still and silent.

The voice continues calling for him. Billy thinks it's coming from downstairs. He has a moment of thinking that he shouldn't be searching for the source of the voice, but he also can't help himself. So, he gets on the elevator, which magically opens for him and takes him down to the hospital basement. He sees a janitor down there, but the man just walks past Billy with a strange, blank expression, as though he doesn't see Billy at all.

Finally, Billy follows the voice into a storage room, and the door closes and locks behind him. He opens a silver storage cabinet (which he thinks resembles a body drawer in a morgue) and comes face to face with the rest of himself -- his robotic parts are lying in the storage cabinet, spread out and shaped like a corpse. Billy stares down at it, uncomprehending. A security guard appears out of nowhere and escorts Billy back to his room.

Later on during the night, back in his room, Billy gets the feeling that he's not alone in the room. He can't see anything, but he keeps hearing footfalls and a "clicking" sound, and he can smell both human blood and motor oil. He panics and rushes out of his room, trying to flee the hospital entirely and fighting with a hospital security guard when he's caught. A team of nurses and security guards get him back to his room, where they have to restrain him to the bed and sedate him.

Alone in the room again and unable to escape, Billy hears the synthesized voice calling to him again, and he recognizes it as his own voice from his own synthesizer that he had installed in his throat. The voice is now in the room with him, slowly approaching his bed, and pleading with Billy over and over to "let me back in." It approaches the foot of Billy's bed, the only place where Billy can see, and reveals itself to be his own removed robotic parts, shaped roughly like a person and held together by skin and muscle tissue that clung to it during the surgeries. It addresses Billy exclusively as "B-7," and begs and pleads to be "let back in," and promises to take care of Billy and love him forever if Billy will only take it back into himself. (It's like a vampire -- it needs permission to enter.)

"I only want you to be happy. And to be happy, you have to live your true life." (We are still not beating those trans allegory allegations. Andrea and Scott really made a "transness is an evil that needs to be purged" story and published it in their silly murder robot series for children! And then they did it again! Only this time it has lore about an important character, so I can't just throw it out! What fun! *rolls eyes*)

Billy falls under the sedative and doesn't wake up until morning. He's still restrained, with no memory of what happened during the night, and has to call a nurse to come release him. Gloria rushes in and fusses over him, and tells him that her coworkers told her that Billy had a terrible panic attack during the night. Since Billy doesn't remember what actually happened, he accepts this explanation.

Billy's endoskeleton partner has vanished now that it's daytime. And we actually don't see or hear from it again during Billy's hospital stay, even this the rules of this franchise and the genre both suggest that the endoskeleton should call out to him or visit him every night in a repetitive cycle. But it doesn't come back, and we don't see or hear from it again until the end of the story.

After some unspecified period of time, Billy is released from the hospital, and his grandmother takes him to stay in her home, a small country house just outside of town that has already been renovated to be handicap accessible. Her yard contains a lot of flower beds that are overfilled with flowers, resulted in a cluttered, quilted look that Billy finds overwhelming. The inside of the house is cluttered, stuffed full of old-fashioned furniture and appliances, and nearly everything has a floral pattern. Billy finds the entire house to be overwhelming, overstimulating, and claustrophobic.

Billy is given the guest bedroom to sleep in, and his grandmother tells him he can decorate however he sees fit, so long as he doesn't make everything grey and metallic like his old home was. His grandmother has arranged for some of Billy's clothes and other personal affects to be delivered to her house, but doesn't let him have his computer or television or cell phone, citing that such things are "evil" and "not allowed in her house." Billy's previous life was all online, including his girlfriend, and he is bewildered to learn that the only technology that exists in his grandmother's house is standard electricity and a single landline phone that is hooked up in her bedroom.

Billy doesn't really want to live with his grandmother, as the stern, uptight woman makes him extremely uncomfortable (she makes disparaging remarks about his Rasta beanie, and also about his late mother), and finds himself retreating inward in attempt to get away from her and the situation, but he doesn't have any better options right now. He thinks about returning to the hospital, but has a panic attack at the thought, and so decides to stick it out with his grandmother. Having no other course of action, Billy begins role-playing as a "dutiful grandson," and this role ends up being the thing that keeps him sane in this house.

His grandmother's house has a grandfather clock, and the loud ticking makes Billy anxious. There's nowhere in the house that Billy can go to get away from the ticking, and the sounds haunts him during the weeks he's living there. The constant ticking reminds him of his endoskeleton, and he remembers being trapped on his hospital bed while listening to it pleading with him, and this sends him into a panic attack.

His grandmother has a conversation with him about the clock one day. She tells him that the grandfather clock is a 200-year-old family heirloom, and that it will go to Billy's father when she dies, and that she'd like it to go to Billy one day. She shows him how to wind it and clean it, and understanding how it works and its symbolic importance to his family make Billy feel a little better about the constant ticking.

They talk briefly about Billy's father during this clock conversation. Billy hasn't really thought about the man since he left when Billy was a child, and asks if his grandmother knows where his father is. His grandmother rolls her eyes and sighs and says that her son was in Peru that last time they spoke (about a year ago) "working for one of those companies that's harvesting the rain forest." She isn't happy with any of her son's choices in life, but he's also her only child, and it's clear that she still cares about him, even if that care mostly comes from familial loyalty more than anything else.

(Unknown to Billy, she cares about him in a similar fashion. She's been diagnosed with terminal cancer, a fact that she keeps secret from Billy for most of this story, and has chosen to spend her last days helping her estranged grandson navigate his adulthood, even though they don't understand each other or have a proper relationship. Because of this and because of what she does later in the story, I found her to be a very interesting character, and I wish she'd at least been given a name somewhere in the text.)

The phone in his grandmother's room rings every night at 9:03, and his grandmother answers it every night. She speaks in low tones that Billy can't hear. Billy wonders if she's talking to his father or someone else, but doesn't feel like it's his place to ask, and she never brings it up in any way, so we spend most of the story in the dark about these strange phone calls.

Over the course of the first week, Billy learns how to perform most household chores with one hand, and readily participates in helping his grandmother around the house. He also learns that he's good at simple repairs. During the evening hours, his grandmother teaches him different ways to relax, encouraging him to read different books and teaching him how to play various board games. All of these lessons help Billy become more settled with himself, and he starts to feel a little closer to normal.

He still can't cook by himself, but he can help out in the kitchen when she asks him to. (Billy is also currently avoiding any white-colored foods like the plague these days, and has developed a great love for tomato sauce.)

On Sunday morning, Billy's grandmother throws him out of bed and drags him to church with her, despite his general lack of interest. Billy worries about being stared at or judged by strangers. Thankfully, this doesn't happen (unrealistic; no one judges you as severely as elderly churchgoing women). Instead, he ends up befriending an old man named Frank, who is friends with his grandmother and offers to take Billy out fishing.

Billy meets up with Frank for numerous fishing trips after this. It turns out that Frank is a retired author of mystery novels, and he talks with Billy about the writing process and about what sort of books Billy's been reading. When Billy expresses that he'd like to try writing himself, Frank gifts him an empty notebook, and tells Billy that a good place to start would be to keep a journal, writing down anything that he wants to in the moment and then re-exploring the notes later, refining them as desired. Billy takes to this task and starts keeping the journal; we aren't told much about what he writes, but we're led to believe that he mainly writes about his own experiences.

After living with his grandmother for several weeks, both Billy and his grandmother realize that he's fully capable of living alone and taking care of himself. The two don't really talk about it, but they both feel a sense of finality about the day. Billy makes arrangements to live somewhere outside of his grandmother's house. He even makes appointments to go pick up new prosthetic limbs (of the standard variety), no longer feeling overwhelmingly uncomfortable about the idea.

That evening, Billy's grandmother goes to bed early. Billy never hears the phone ring, something that has never happened the entire time he's been here. He passes by her bedroom door, and hears her talking to someone. He calls out to her to ask who she's talking to, but she doesn't answer him, and he worriedly opens the door.

Inside his grandmother's room, Billy sees his grandmother sitting on her bed, holding and talking to his own discarded metal endoskeleton. When Billy enters the room, his endoskeleton stares at him forlornly, saying "I'm supposed to be with you!" His grandmother explains that Billy's endoskeleton has been calling on the phone every night, searching for him, and she's been talking to it; she says she doesn't think the two different halves of Billy can make each other happy anymore, and encourages the endoskeleton to fuse with her own body instead.

Billy tries to intervene, but is ultimately forced to watch as his grandmother's body is split open, his discarded endoskeleton crawling inside and fusing with the old woman. But, once the thing is fused with her, it starts freaking out, trying to separate from her again. Billy's grandmother laughs and holds it in her, explaining to both halves of Billy that she's "been terminal" for some time now, and she had a feeling that she was going to die soon. Since she's already dying, she decided to take Billy's monster with her.

The metal endoskeleton begs Billy for help, at the same time his grandmother tells him "Don't grieve for me. It's time for you to live." Billy watches in horror as his grandmother dies, and the entire identity of B-7 dies with her. Feeling a great sense of both sadness and relief, Billy sits beside the combined corpse for the rest of the night.

The next morning, Billy calls Frank, who come to help bury the body of both Billy's grandmother and B-7. Frank also says that he'll handle Billy's grandmother's house, and gives Billy a drive into town. He wishes Billy luck with his attempt at a writing career, and the two part ways.

Outfitted with a new prosthetic leg and arm, Billy makes plans for his future. He's going to be staying with his friends Clark and Peter for a little bit, but then he plans to go to Lima, Peru, deciding that he's going to hunt down his father. If nothing else, he thinks he'll get to experience something worth writing about. . . . I have mixed feelings about this one. I really liked parts of it -- I like revisiting an earlier character, and I like the idea of him haunting himself at the hospital. But I don't think that both this story and the original "B-7" have a plot that's all over the place and doesn't know what it's doing, and it's very confusing to read.

It's also just a weird story altogether. Part 1 was very much "Billy wants to change his outward appearance to match how he feels and identifies himself on the inside and he's Wrong and Evil for doing that, and he's destroying his family, and he deserves to die for being such a Disgusting Monster." Which is… a horrible thing to say in general, and particularly horrendous to say when you know your audience is mostly impressionable young teens who are just now figuring out what their identities are. And Part 2 is very different but still bad, because it says "Billy's self identification was Just A Phase, Really, and he's totally fine and normal ™️ now! In fact, the part of himself that could be used as an allegory for transness was literally killed on-page by his old-fashioned, conservative, Christian grandmother, who by the way also thinks technology is the Devil's work and blames television for Billy's 'sickness.'" Ugh. Just ugh.

(Physically, I am at home, but mentally I am rolling up to the church picnic to square up with Scott, Andrea, and the rest of the team.)

(I'm renaming these stories to "Transphobia, Parts 1 & 2." They'll fit in just fine, because now the lineup will be Somniphobia, Submechanophobia, and Transphobia.) (Jk, but am I really?)

Okay, soap box aside, let's crack open the lore, because this is a story about Michael Afton.

This story is definitely about Michael after the events of "Sister Location," becoming more and more robot-like as his body deteriorates. In the first "B-7" story, Billy has a breakdown at the end of the story, culminating with him "shambling down the street" with his miscolored skin, blacked out eyes, and reshaped head, all while thinking about how he "looks like his father" and is now rejecting his robotic self and parts. To me, this sequence is a clear parallel to the cutscenes from "Sister Location" where we see Michael walking down the street over and over, becoming less and less human with each cutscene, and ultimately results in him apparently forcing Ennard out of his body.

This story is telling us that Michael rejected Ennard, and then had to spend some time healing and trying to understand everything he's experienced, before finally, after processing everything, he decided to get back up and go hunt down his misbegotten father (who abandoned him in his time of need).

It's called out multiple times during this story that Billy heals extremely quickly, and even heals from things that he shouldn't have been able to hear from. This tracks with what we know about Remnant, and also what we know about Michael (The line "I should be dead, but I'm not" from SL, and Michael being consistently portrayed as looking like a normal dude even post-scooping, like in both the "Security Log Book" and the short story "You're the Band.").

(Also Billy's full name is likely 'William,' so that makes him Afton-coded by default.)

There's also the house that Billy lives in with his grandmother. The house is talked about in detail, and it sounds a lot like the house from FNAF4: it's a small, two-story house out in the country (like we see on the FNAF4 game menu), and the inside is described as being decorated with lots of gaudy, old-fashioned-style pieces of furniture and decor, which matches the interior of both the FNAF4 house and living room in "Sister Location" cutscenes. It is also worth recognizing that the text of the story calls specific attention to the items of IV drip, pill bottle, and 'get well soon' flower bouquet, which are all the mystery items that appear beside the bed sometimes in FNAF4.

To me, this just reads as telling us that, after rejecting and expelling Ennard, Michael ended up returning to his childhood home (not the neighborhood he's living in during those walking cutscenes) and hunkered down to heal from his experiences.

This definitely changes the meaning of the line "What has followed you home?" from the original FNAF4 trailer. At the time, the implication was that the Nightmare Animatronics "followed you" from somewhere. Now, the implication is that Billy's former identity (and the metal parts that made up that identity) are literally stalking him for a time.

Billy's friends Pete and Clark are interesting, as we're told Billy's clearest recollection and instant association with them is playing "robot" with them in elementary school. If we're assuming Billy is a Michael-parallel, then these two guys could represent some of Michael's bully friends that we saw in FNAF4 (i.e., Bonnie Mask Bully, Freddy Mask Bully, and Chica Mask Bully). (Especially interesting given how those guys have been spotlighted in the fandom recently, with the fairly popular theory that Cassie's dad from "Ruin" is the Bonnie Mask Bully, and the suggestion that people have discussed about Oswald's dad from "Into the Pit" being the Freddy Mask Bully.)

"Old Man" Frank is also interesting. Maybe it's just because he takes Billy fishing and imparts wisdom upon him, but he gave me a lot of "Old Man Consequences" vibes.

There's also something to be said for it being called out so frequently that Billy only has one hand for most of the story, so he can only hold one thing at a time, and only one leg, so he spends a lot of time sitting and watching things around the house, and he has no tongue, so he doesn't talk much. It's very reminiscent of traditional FNAF gameplay, which involves your character sitting in a room for hours at a time, not talking at all, and seemingly only able to interact with one object at a time; the games were designed that way to make both development and gameplay as simple as possible. But, since it's commonly assumed that the player character in most of the games is Michael, and now we're being given a possible in-universe reason for those mechanics… I'm just putting this as another tick mark in the "Billy represents Michael" column.

And finally, there's Billy's writing career. Let me start by saying this: I read the entire "Fazbear Frights" series some time ago, and I had the repeating thought through a lot of the stories in that series: "These are all just re-imaginings of Michael's death, or they're exploring William's different identities -- father, businessman, monster, killer. I understand that those are big parts of this franchise, but we're spending an awful lot of time on them. And now 'Security Breach' is out, and we're being shown that these books exist in-universe. If you told me that Michael Afton wrote these stories as a way of dealing with his trauma, and then Fazbear's acquired and published them, I'd absolutely believe that to be the case."

Obviously, IRL those books (and these books) were written because there's a market for them. But, since the books also exist in the game's universe, that means there's also an in-universe reason for them, too. And if that reason is that they were written by Michael Afton, both as a way to make money and as a way to process all of his thoughts and feelings about everything that's happened in his family… I think that would be a pretty interesting reason.

And that's kind of what's happening in this story -- Billy processes a lot of his feelings in a journal, and says that he's going to write and publish stories inspired by his own experiences, including any experience he has while looking for his dad.

So, is Michael Afton the """""true""""" author of any or all of the FNAF books? I'll let you decide that.

"Alone Together"

This story centers around Travis, a boy in middle school (so he's probably around 12-years-old) who is extremely shy and mostly keeps to himself. He'd really like to make friends at his school, but his shyness seems to make him invisible to people. He has a woodshop class that he enjoys, and he really likes both building things and drawing designs for future builds.

Travis attends 'Brighton Middle School.' (Oh hey! "The Walten Files" reference! Nice!)

The story opens with Travis overhearing some classmates talking about going to the Mega Pizzaplex together after school. He thinks it would be nice to go with them, but he's too awkward to ask them, and he knows they think he's weird because he's so quiet and never talks to anyone. (This sequence gave me some very unhappy flashbacks to my own grade school experiences.)

Travis lives alone with his dad, and his mom left over a year ago. Before she left, there were a few months where his parents seemed to fight a lot, and neither one seemed to have time for Travis. Since his mom left, it's just been him and his dad, and the house has been pretty quiet; his dad works long hours and isn't home much, and he doesn't talk to Travis very much when he is home. Although Travis tries to engage with his dad as much as possible, his dad tends to not look directly at him, and, the few times his dad does talk to him, his words are vague and spoken in low tones. His dad doesn't help him with his homework anymore, or watch TV with him or take him on long drives the way they used to, and Travis often feels forgotten and neglected. His dad doesn't even pay for his school lunch anymore, and Travis ends up having to steal food from other kids if he wants to eat (not that he's hungry very often).

(This all sounds terrible, but, if you haven't guessed the twist yet, just trust me when I say Travis' parents are not bad parents.)

Travis would like to go to the Mega Pizzaplex, but he hasn't had the opportunity to do so. His life is pretty monotonous these days, only going home or to school and feeling snubbed in both places, so the Pizzaplex ads make it sound like a lot of fun. Travis is especially intrigued by the Daycare Attendant's "Sun" personality, who he refers to throughout the story as "the Sun Man" even he knows that's not what the character is called. (Despite Travis' interest in the character, this really isn't a DA-centric story. The DA is just referenced every so often, but he doesn't really show up at any point.)

There's a girl at Travis' school that he keeps running into. Her name is Marissa, and she's described as wearing all black every day and having purple streaks in her hair. (I thought it was going to be Millie from "Count The Ways" when I first heard the description.) Marissa seems to like spooky things and she likes to draw. She's not very friendly toward Travis, but she's the only one at school that doesn't completely ignore him, so Travis keeps trying to talk to her or befriend her in some way, becoming more desperate to talk to her over time.

Travis tries to visit his grandmother at the apartment complex she lives, but she isn't there. He also finds it strange that his father doesn't talk about or visit the old woman anymore, even though she's his mother.

The woodshop class at Travis' school is given an assignment to pick a project from a list and then work on building it over the course of the next six weeks. The list contains several basic or classic woodworking projects, and Travis is drawn to "the Mechanical Turk." He decides to recreate the Mechanical Turk with a wooden puppet of the Daycare Attendant sitting behind the cabinet.

(The Mechanical Turk, or the "Automaton Chess Player," is a real-life mechanism made of wood that was originally designed and built in 1770. Here's a link to the Wikipedia page about it if you're interested. For now, I'm just doing to explain the basics: a human-shaped automaton or puppet sits behind a large cabinet, seemingly playing a game of chess on a chess board that's sitting on top of the cabinet; the cabinet is big enough for a person to sit inside, where they operate the automaton's movements without being seen. The intention is to make it look like the automaton has been programmed with the necessary movements to play chess, when in reality they are being puppeteered by a human.)

As Travis researches the functionality of the Mechanical Turk and figures out his own design for it, he experiences a lot of deja vu, constantly feeling like he's read all this before, and he's drawn this before, and in fact that he's built this before. He doesn't understand why he's feeling this way.

Travis goes to bed at night, and has a dream about building the Mechanical Turk. In his dream, he finishes the whole project and then climbs into the cabinet. The cabinet closes on him, trapping him inside, and Travis ends up wandering through a black void. He comes across the "Sun" side of the Daycare Attendant playing chess against Glamrock Freddy. The two animatronics acknowledge Travis but mostly continue with their game. Travis can hear music playing from somewhere, and Sun is enjoying the music so much that he eventually abandons the game of chess, getting up and grabbing Travis to dance with him across the endless void they're in. When Travis tries to ask about what's happening, Sun cocks his head and asks him the rhetorical question "Why does this all seem familiar?" in a manner that seems to mirror the question that Travis keeps asking himself about building the Mechanical Turk.

"He wishes there was some switch he could flip to go from melancholy to joy."

Travis tries to visit his grandmother after school again, and this time she's actually at the apartment. She lets him in (and he sees lots of new furniture around the apartment that doesn't fit with his grandmother's sense of style) and they chat for awhile. She says that she's been spending time with old friends, and that she plans to visit them again soon. She asks what Travis has been up to, and he tells her all about the Mechanical Turk project, the weird feelings he's been having related to it, and his attempts to befriend Marissa. His grandmother suggests that he talk to Marissa again, but to be patient about it because "she's probably shy like you are."

As for his strange feelings about the Mechanical Turk, Travis' grandmother tells him a story about something similar that happened when she was a child. She tells him that a woman died decades prior on the property that became her family's farm, and sometimes the woman would appear as a ghost, haunting the property. As a young woman, Travis' grandmother searched the land for the woman's remains, trying to help the spirit pass on, but never found them, and so the woman's ghost lingered. She tells Travis that a haunting is a completely normal and natural thing that occurs whenever a deceased person's body goes undiscovered, and suggests that he's being haunted. She also gives him a list of indicators for a ghostly presence:

"You start to have funny dreams and flashes of memories that are not yours. It's like they possess your thoughts when they're near."

"You can feel chills or a tingle on your arms or back when they're around."

"There could be sudden movements of objects or sounds out of the blue."

"If they really attach themselves to you, sometimes you can hear thoughts in your head as if the ghost is talking to you."

"And if you're really gifted, and this is pretty rare, you might even see the ghost with your own eyes."

"Most ghosts linger around the place they died, especially if their remains are undiscovered."

After taking in all of his grandmother's information, Travis comes to conclusion that a student at his school tried to build the Mechanical Turk before, and may have died during the project and is now haunting him. His grandmother listens to him wonder what happened to this previous student, and encourages him to do some digging.

Travis comes home after visiting his grandmother to find his version of the Mechanical Turk half-built in the backyard. His memories are fuzzy, but he remembers his dad bringing the wood out there for the project and he remembers cutting out the parts for the cabinet, so he thinks that he and his dad must have built it together. Looking at the cabinet now gives him a weirdly claustrophobic feeling, and he feels like he's trapped somewhere. Believing those are the ghost's feelings, he dismisses them.

Travis sneaks back his school before it can be locked up for the night, and accesses a faculty computer. (How very Tony Becker of him.) He uses footage from a security camera that's mounted in the woodshop room to find when the Mechanical Turk was last built. The camera takes photos every few minutes, and he finds a few pictures from the end of a semester almost two years ago, where the students brought their 6-week projects in to show. One of the projects is the Mechanical Turk, with a Sun-inspired automaton that looks exactly like Travis' design. None of the pictures show who originally brought the project in, so Travis still doesn't know who the student was, but the following set of pictures show the Mechanical Sun sitting untouched and abandoned in the woodshop room for a week or so before school faculty members can be seen carrying it out of the room, presumably putting it in storage somewhere.

Believing that the ghost haunting him is attached to this earlier build of the Mechanical Sun, Travis decides to hunt down where the build is being stored. He prints out a map of the school grounds and marks all of the places used for storage.

The next day, Travis skips classes and instead wanders around the school to look through all the storage areas, starting with storage closets and other spaces in the main building. He runs into Marissa again and tries to talk to her again, but she makes it very clear that she doesn't want to be friends with him.

Travis goes home after school, and overhears part of a phone conversation that his dad is having with someone. He knows that his dad is talking to his mom, and he knows that they're talking about him, but he ignores the rest of the conversation, trying hard not to hear it. He thinks he might be in trouble for skipping classes at school. (We'll revisit this phone call later.)

Future punishments notwithstanding, Travis skips classes again the next day, searching through the school basement. He still doesn't find the Mechanical Sun. He gets frustrated, and light bulb explodes in a ceiling fixture above him. Thinking the ghost is upset with him, Travis freaks out and leaves the basement. Out in the hallways, Travis sees Marissa and tries to talk to her again, but she ignores him. Being ignored again like this is a sort of 'final straw' for Travis, and he ditches school, running out the building and off the school grounds. He wanders through the residential areas between his school and his home for awhile, the whole time wishing he was able to make friends, and wishing that he and his dad still had a good relationship. Finally, he heads for home, thinking that he should tell his dad about the haunting he's been experiencing.

When Travis gets home, he sees that the Mechanical Sun in the backyard has been destroyed, like an angry person attacked it with an ax. He assumes that his dad must have destroyed it as punishment for skipping class, and thinking about his father tearing his creation apart like that makes him cry. His dad isn't home now, and Travis, deciding to settle the ghost once and for all, takes a flashlight and runs away from the house, heading back for the school grounds.

"Then everything would be okay. Then [Travis' dad] would love him again."

In the dark of late evening, Travis begins searching through sheds around the school property. He reaches an old shed with doors held closed by a rusty chain, and the chain falls apart and falls to the ground as soon as Travis touches it. Travis moves several spiderwebs aside and steps into the storage shed, with is filled with lots of old, retired sporting equipment, among other things. There are old wolf mascot costumes. There's also a rotting scent in the shed, and Travis wonders if it's a dead animal or a human body.

After searching through the piles of old stuff, Travis finally finds the original Mechanical Sun, the big thing stuffed into the back of the shed. He pops the cabinet open and, like the dumbest protag in the history of dumb protags, climbs into the cabinet in order to figure out if there's a body in it. To no one's surprise, the cabinet door slams shut behind him, and he's unable to open it. Searching around inside, Travis realizes two things: 1) the cabinet door is stuck tight, and it's impossible to open, and 2) there is a dead boy's body inside the cabinet.

After screaming and panicking, Travis forces himself to calm down, and, assuming that the body belongs to the ghost that's been following him, he starts talking to both himself and the ghost, assuring the body that he'll figure a way for them to get out and everything will be okay. But, as he focuses the flashlight onto the body, he realizes that he and the body are wearing the same clothes (the same clothes that he's been wearing through this entire story). He realizes that he's not staring at some other student's body, but that it's his own corpse he's looking at.

"He was the ghost that haunted Brighton Middle School!"

Understanding that he's dead and that he's been dead for over two years floods Travis, and it breaks down the mental block that he's had for the entire time, allowing his memories to come back to him.

About two years ago, Travis built the Mechanical Sun for his workshop project, and brought the mostly finished build into the school on the due date. After school, Travis had gone back into the room alone, and had climbed into the cabinet to make sure he could fit. The cabinet door closed behind him and got stuck, and he ended up overheating and then passing out from lack of air, then dying inside the cabinet. He's never really processed his own death, so he's just been going on about his regular school day ever since.

Travis was reported missing. His parents never collected his Mechanical Sun, and the build went into storage on the school grounds, with no one realizing that Travis' body is inside. Months later, Travis' parents start fighting about what happened to their son and what they should do about it, and they eventually split up. Travis' dad still lives in the house, and he still talks to Travis from time to time. During the phone call that Travis tried not to overhear, his dad told his mom that "it still feels like Travis is in the house," and because of that he can't leave the house, not really ready to move on.

Travis realizes that Marissa is probably one of the rare people who can see ghosts, or maybe she just saw him because he wanted her to see him so much, but either way she saw a dead boy every time she looked at him, and that's probably why she never wanted to interact with him. He also realizes that the Mechanical Sun in his home's backyard was built entirely by his dad, the structure a product of a bereaved father trying to figure out what happened to his son, and destroyed in a fit of rage because rebuilding it wouldn't magically bring his son back to him.

We're then told that Travis' grandmother died a few years ago, a fact that Travis had forgotten until now. They're able to interact because they're both dead, but not very often, because she passed on properly upon her death, whereas Travis has been haunting his school and home ever since. His grandmother visits with him every once in awhile, and it seems like she's been trying to give him a little nudge every once in awhile, trying to guide him into understanding his death without directly spelling it out for him.

Travis thinks about his death, and realizes that he's been haunting himself, something that makes sense for him to do, given his tendency to talk to himself. He sits down beside his body and promises not to leave himself again. He curls his spirit protectively around his body and settles in, preparing to stay with himself forever. . . . I liked the twist of this story. Very "The Thing in Auntie Alma's Pond"-feeling. (Story I love by Bruce Coville, btw.) I just wish this story flowed better; it feels very long and says very little.

It's also a similar story to the "Fazbear Frights: Coming Home" story, with the main difference being that, while the audience is led to believe that Travis is a living child through most of this story, and which Travis believes as well, the audience of "Coming Home" was told outright that Susie is dead and haunting her family, a fact that Susie herself seems to forget throughout the story. In both cases, we're seeing children who are haunting their homes and families because they've forgotten their own deaths.

I find it interesting that this story is placed here between two very lore-heavy stories, while it doesn't feel very lore-heavy itself. I mean, yes, it's telling us information about how ghosts and haunting work in this universe, and it's telling us that people in this world can die without fully realizing they're dead. But what specifically is it supposed to be saying? Is it just general information for us about how this world operates? Or is there a character that we know who died awhile back but is still literally haunting the narrative, potentially unaware of their demise? And if so… who is it?

That's all I have to say about this story. But I've got a lot to say about this next one, so let's move on.

"Dittophobia"

Dittophobia -- the fear of repetition; the fear of repeating patterns.

(Not gonna lie, I was dreading this story. None of the theorist community would shut up about it after it leaked online, and I got sick of hearing about it pretty fast. But I girded my loins and I made it through, and y'know what? I disagree with those early theories. Let's talk about it.)

This story introduces us to Rory, a 7-year-old boy who lives in the FNAF4 bedroom. And it's made very clear to us that it's the FNAF4 bedroom, as it is described in detail several times over throughout the story. Every night at midnight Rory is awoken by scraping sounds, heavy breaths, and heavy footfalls as he is stalked and attacked in his own bedroom by the Nightmare Animatronics. He doesn't recognize them as animatronics, and instead refers to them as "the creatures" throughout most of the story.

Rory is described as resembling a little boy with pale skin, freckles on his face, hazel eyes, and messy brown hair. He also has big ears and pointy nose, and bags under his eyes from his nightmares and restless sleep. He always wears the same set of black-and-white zebra striped pajamas to bed. His daytime clothes aren't described with much detail.

We follow three nearly identical days in Rory's life, one right after another. They're monotonous, and little changes between them, so I'm only going to describe them once.

Rory wakes up in the morning in the FNAF4 bed. Sunlight streams through the high windows on the wall behind his bed, an air current "hisses" through the vents near the top of the walls, and he deduces that being attacked by "the creatures" during the night was just a nightmare. He also doesn't remember what he did the previous day, and every morning is a blank slate for him.

"Morning was here. The nightmare was over."

Climbing out of bed, Rory calls out to his parents, but receives no answer. He can hear the shower running in his parents' bathroom, so he assumes that his dad has already gone to work and his mother must be in the shower, so he doesn't expect a response from either of them. Sometimes Rory makes his bed at this point, and we're told that the quilt on his bed is from his grandmother, who made it for him. He gets dressed for the day, passes by several toys on his bedroom floor -- the smiling phone, the purple robot, and a rabbit toy (did Plushtrap replace the caterpillar thing?) -- and heads into the hall bathroom. (The bathroom contains a claw foot bathtub, and I'd like to know why these things keep popping up in this series!)

In the bathroom, Rory washes his face and tries to get his hair under control. He doesn't have a comb, so he has to smooth his hair out with his fingers, remembering that his mother doesn't like when his hair looks messy. He passes by his parents' bedroom and bathroom on his way to the kitchen, hearing the shower still running. Rory goes to the kitchen, which is part of an open concept "great room" space and shares space with both the dining room and living room. He eats fruit and bagels from the fridge for his breakfast, bypassing any plates or silverware entirely. The kitchen smells a little funky, like something in it is rotting, and the food Rory eats is always a little out of date, but it's never outright growing mold or anything so he doesn't think much of it. He eats his breakfast alone every day, and makes sure to clean up after himself, since he knows his mother hates messes.

While Rory would like to talk to his parents and spend time with them, he's not surprised that they aren't around during the morning. His dad spends more time at work than at home, and his mom is always thinking about her work (she's an interior decorator) and often doesn't seem to hear or notice Rory when they're in the house together; she also likes to take long showers, so the constant running of the shower doesn't register to Rory as odd.

Rory has a few distinct memories of different interactions with his parents, but they seem hazy and distant, like they happened many years ago and not as recently as he thinks they did.

Rory has a friend named Wade, who goes to the same school as him. The two boys are often picked on by their peers, and they have a secret clubhouse that they like to hang out in after school. Wade has an interest in ham radios and walkie-talkies; he gave Rory one of his walkie-talkies once so they could talk to each other over long distances, but Rory doesn't know where it is now.

After breakfast, Rory grabs his backpack and starts to head out for school. This is when Rory, having forgotten the day before, realizes that there's no front door, back door, or any other possible exit to his house. The windows don't even open, and every door that doesn't lead to his bedroom or bathroom is locked, preventing him from opening any of them. Rory begins to get really stressed out, and walks around his house in circles, searching for a way out and calling desperately for a mother that won't answer him. (I swear I read at least three creepypastas back in the day that had this same plot.) Sometimes, he realizes that the shower isn't running anymore, and he assumes that his mother has also left for work, abandoning him in the same way his father has already done.

"Why couldn't he find his way out of his house? And where was his mom?"

As Rory circles the house over and over again, his agitation slips away. His mind gets cloudy and his body gets tired. He loses track of time and soon the light coming through the windows begins to dim, as though the sun is setting. Rory gives up on his quest, showers, puts on his pajamas, and then goes to bed, making sure to close and lock his bedroom doors. Rory goes to bed, falls asleep, and a few hours later midnight rolls around, he's awoken by "the creatures" entering his room, and the cycle repeats.

"The bear with the top hat moved to loom over Rory, as if rising from a grave from beneath Rory's bed."

On the third day, when Rory is cycling through the house and becoming more and more stressed, he hears a "knocking" sound from inside the wall. He thinks it sounds like an engine misfiring, as the sound reminds him of a time when his dad's car broke down. Soon enough, the sound stops, as though this supposed engine has died. In the near silence, Rory can't hear anything except a hum from the kitchen, which he assumes is the fridge. He can't figure out why there would be an engine in the walls of his house though. And, since he notices the sun is setting, he decides not to worry about it, and just goes to bed.

Rory wakes up the next morning fully rested, and realizes that he had no nightmarish visits from "the creatures." He sits up in bed, and sees that his room looks different from when he went to bed -- everything is dirty and dusty, with wallpaper peeling off the walls, a carpet covered in footprints and scuff marks, and even the quilt on his bed is old, miscolored, and falling apart. Confused, Rory calls for his mother, but hears a man's voice come out of his own mouth, the sound startling him. He looks down at his body, and finds that he's much taller than he remembers being, with "furry" legs and hands that look huge to him. Distressed, Rory stumbles to the bathroom, where he stares at himself in the mirror.

"The image in the mirror gaped back at him."

Rory doesn't recognize the image in the mirror as his own reflection, but instead refers to it as "the guy in the mirror." He still has big ears and hazel eyes and messy brown hair, but his hair is very long now, going down past his shoulders. His face and body are both thin and bony, and the freckles on his cheeks have been replaced by large patches of acne and wisps of facial hair. For some reason, Rory comes to the conclusion that he must be around 17-years-old now, even though he has no memory of aging to this point. He worries that he slept for several years like Rip Van Winkle.

"Rory knew himself as a seven-year-old kid. But what he was seeing in the mirror was more like a seventeen-year-old teenager. How had he jumped ahead ten years?"

Rory calls again for his parents, and still gets no answer. So, wearing nothing but a children's t-shirt that fits him like a crop top, a stretched out pair of children's socks, and a stretched out pair of zebra stripe pajama pants, Rory begins to explore the rest of the house. The place is pretty disgusting and broken down, resembling a haunted house more than a place to live. There are ants crawling around in the kitchen, and the kitchen very distinctly smells like rotten food. Rory realizes that the "fridge" is actually a fridge-shaped vending machine, and that all the food inside it is old, stale snack packets and wafers, each item individually wrapped. The plumbing works, so after eating some stale wafers, Rory washes it down with water from the sink.

(The zebra striped pajamas are an interesting detail. On the one hand, it's a standard print on children's clothing -- although not a common one on boy's clothes here in the U.S. -- so it doesn't immediately raise any red flags. But, on the other hand, there's some visual connotations with that pattern. Zebra stripes look a lot like white tiger stripes, which is part of the imagery we keep seeing associated with the Mimic. And, by consistently calling out that Rory is wearing black and white striped clothes, the text is making it clear that he is a prisoner of some sort, bringing to mind the visual of old-time-y striped prison garb.)

Rory approaches his parents' bedroom and bathroom, but realizes that the two doors that should lead to those rooms aren't really doors -- there's just a section of wall painted to look like a door, and with doorknobs attached directly into the wall. He can hear what sounds like the shower running, but sees that the sound (a recording) is coming from a speaker high on the wall.

"If the doors weren't real, and the shower wasn't real, was his mom real?"

There are metal tracks embedded in the floors of the house, like miniature train tracks, seemingly starting at the foot of Rory's bed and winding their way all around the house. Rory follows the tracks around for awhile, and sees that one track ends at his bedroom closet, and the other three tracks end at different doors around his house, each door being a real physical door that he had previously assumed to be a storage closet. Forcing each door open reveals the Nightmare Animatronics, each tucked away and prepared for future use. They aren't actually animatronics in this story, as they seem to be more statuesque than anything, and Rory thinks they look like Halloween decorations. (So there are four closets holding animatronics, huh? Where have I heard this one before?)

Once again, Rory finds himself wandering the fake house, searching for a way out. The only functional doors in this place are the ones to his bedroom and bathroom, and the ones hiding the Nightmare Animatronics. He realizes that the fake fridge has to be restocked from outside somehow, and he ends up pulling the "fridge" away from the wall, revealing a passageway behind it. Rory grabs a flashlight, crawls through the tunnel-like passageway (like the vents you crawl through in "Sister Location"), and shoves open a metal door that's on the other side of the tunnel.

Outside of the tunnel, Rory finds himself in some sort of "concrete corridor," which is lined with metal racks full of air tanks. Labels on the tanks read "Danger: Compressed Gas," and a cluster of rubber hoses lead from the tanks to a pumping machine and then into the wall, going back into the fake house. Rory realizes that, whatever the tanks contain, he's been breathing it for some time. He turns to the pump and sees that it's not running, and rightfully assumes that it's the thing he heard breaking down.

There's a desk at the end of the corridor, with a clipboard and a stack of notes on it. Rory tries to the read the notes -- he can barely read, having not attended school past 2nd grade, but he understands enough to know that the notes are about him. The notes are dated as different days, and each say something along the lines of "Subject continues to react with fear to what he perceives to be creatures. Fear Level: 9." Some of the notes refer to something called "hallucinogens." One of the earlier notes says that the wafers in the "fridge" have been made to contain all the nutrients a growing child needs, and Rory wonders if that's really enough for his body to live off of anymore, given how bony his frame is. One page on the clipboard details the purpose of this experiment, labeling it as a "study of the ongoing effects of fear in children," and clarifies that the goal is to see how a child would behave if they were exposed to the same nightmares every night, over and over, with nothing else in their life to balance out the nightmares.

Rory doesn't really know what a "hallucinogen" is, but he knows a hallucination is something that isn't real, and he knows that he's been living in a fake house while perceiving it as a different fake house, so he understands that he's been lied to about his reality for quite awhile. He begins to wonder how many of his childhood memories are even real, since his present day isn't real either.

The most recent note is dated "just a month after [Rory's] seventh birthday." Looking between the notes and the gas pump beside him, Rory has the realization that he's been held prisoner and used for some sort of experiment for nearly a decade. He also assumes that, because there haven't been any notes made since, that both he and the experiment were abandoned nearly a decade ago.

Thinking about the kind of person who must have been using him for an experiment, treating him like an object to be observed and not like a human being, fills Rory with rage, and he decides he hates this unknown person. Then he remembers that they abandoned him, and he begins to hate them even more, deciding that being left behind is even worse than being mistreated. In anger, Rory unplugs the pump from its gas supply, preventing the thing from ever messing with his or anyone else's perception.

On the other side of the desk is a door exiting this corridor, and Rory opens it and steps through. He walks through multiple hallways lined with "metal snakes" (likely cables) along the walls, and thinks to himself that this space smells like an automechanic's shop. He reaches the end of these hallways and comes out in a small room that has large windows on all sides of it, leading out into blackness. There are brightly colored lights in the room, along with a control panel of some sort, but none of the lights are on and the machines are all powered down. He sees a picture of a robotic clown girl, but the image means nothing to him. (Obviously, he's in Circus Baby's space from "Sister Location," but he doesn't know that, and he doesn't understand any of what he's seeing.) Rory thinks this place must be an "observation station," and assumes that it's part of another "mean experiment," immediately feeling a kinship with whatever exists in the blackness beyond those windows. He moves on, leaving through another door.

Next he enters a dance floor, empty and unused and covered in dust. There are no light on in here either. He sees a "metal ballerina" standing frozen on stage, but she doesn't move or react to his presence so he walks right past her. (Is that really Ballora that he's seeing? Or is he seeing Ballora's empty outer shell, or a statue made to look like Ballora? The fact that she apparently doesn't move or respond to him is really strange.) On the other side of the dance floor, Rory finds a breaker room. He has a memory of watching his dad flip a breaker in their home, and he mimics the action, trying to turn some lights on in this place. It doesn't work though. Nothing happens, and no lights come on. Frustrated, Rory leaves the breaker room.

Rory finds a storage room full of unused animatronic parts. He thinks the workshop looks like a doctor's office, and the space makes him feel uncomfortable. After this, he finds a large room, just as unused and empty as all the other rooms have been. There's a lot of dining tables and chairs arranged around a stage, and a sign above the stage reads "Funtime Auditorium." He sees a "cracked and empty shell of a pirate fox animatronic" lying in a heap on the floor. Looking at it makes him uncomfortable, as it reminds him of the fox that's been haunting his nightmares. He leaves the room quickly.

After this, Rory finds another observation room, this one with a big fan and several clown faces on the walls. (So now we're in the main hub of "Sister Location.") He digs around in some cabinets full of paperwork, and finds blueprints for the building, labeling the entire space as an "Underground Testing Facility." Rory realizes that he's been underground this whole time, and gets mad that even the sunshine coming through the windows of his house was fake.

"He didn't know what had been observed, and he didn't care." Lmao, this guy is so done with Afton's bs.

Rory studies the blueprints for a bit, comparing it to the rooms around him, and finds the elevator (and it is definitely the same elevator we saw Michael ride down in "Sister Location"). The elevator seems like it's the only way out, but it isn't working since there's no power down here. Rory does some more searching around the abandoned underground facility, and he finally finds a two-way radio.

Drawing on all of his memories of watching Wade manipulating radios, Rory manages to turn the radio on and (somehow???) manages to contact Wade on the old walkie-talkie that Wade still has. Wade is happy to hear from his friend that's been missing for so long, and tells Rory that his parents are still looking for him, that they haven't given up on him, and that he has a younger sister that he's never met. He asks where Rory is, knowing that Rory ran away from home as a child and assuming that, against the odds, Rory is somehow in a safe environment now.

Rory explains to his friend about his kidnapping (which he knows must have happened, but he doesn't remember it happening) and about the experiment that's been performed on him, and about the underground facility that he's currently trying to escape from. The two boys brainstorm for a little bit, and then Wade points out that Rory's fake house still had power, even while the rest of the facility doesn't, so it must have its own generator that's separate from the facility's main power. Wade says that he's going to try to get help for Rory from the outside (as best as he can when neither boy knows where this underground facility is), and Rory disconnects the radio and heads back to the fake house, planning to look for the generator so he can try to hook it up to the elevator so he can escape.

Back in the fake house, the "windows" have gone dark, indicating that night has fallen. Rory watches as the various locked doors pop open and the Nightmare Animatronics file out and fly down their tracks, heading toward his bedroom. While they're gone, Rory checks in all their hiding spaces to see if there was a generator hidden behind any of them, but finds nothing. He then wanders through the sparse living room and dining areas, but doesn't see any place where a generator could be hidden. He can still hear the fridge humming in the kitchen, and then remembers that the "fridge" isn't an actual appliance, so something else must be making that sound, and he starts to follow the humming. He finds a generator inside the kitchen island, hidden and muffled behind a wall of soundproofing.

When Rory starts messing with the generator, he triggers a response from a connected mechanism, and a voice recording starts speaking to him through a speaker in the ceiling. Rory doesn't recognize the voice, but can tell that it's a grown man's voice, and assumes that it must be the person who was running this experiment. The voice addresses him by name and warns him not to move the generator, lest the entire house cease to function. He reminds Rory of how he ran away from home as a boy, reminding him of how lonely and unloved he felt as a child; Rory concedes that the voice is right, remembered how unloved he felt at home, and how cruel most of the other kids in his school were, and how unhappy he was.

"Rory's mom cared more about the way things looked than she did her own son."

Rory has a hard time connecting the image Wade gave him of his parents (loving, missing him, still desperately searching for him all these years later, still hoping that they'll find him someday) with the image from his memories (his father often being absent and neglectful, his mother being verbally and emotionally abusive, both constantly upset with him over minor things). The voice on the speaker tells Rory that his home life was so bad that Rory ran away from it, and, looking back on what little memories he has, Rory is prone to believe it.

The voice says that Rory "came here because [he] knew [he'd] be taken care of here," and assures Rory that he's been taken care of here far more than he ever was at home. He says that the generator is hooked up to a steady supply of gas, and that it's "always there" to "care for" Rory. As the voice speaks, Rory feels comforted by the voice, feeling complacent, and feeling as though the man behind the voice really cares about him.

"You've never been abandoned here." Well, that's a lie. The entire experiment was literally abandoned, and Rory with it.

The voice stops talking, and Rory has some time to think, and several fears begin to set into him. He doesn't really want to go home -- he's afraid that his parents will be unhappy with him again, and that his new sister won't like him, and he'll have a miserable home life again. He also thinks about how far behind he is in his education, and he worries that he'll never be able to catch up with his peers, and he shrinks away at the idea of being a social outcast again. Here, in the fake house, he knows he'll be provided for, and that he'll be provided with an imitation of care. He'll never have to second-guess himself or face another person's anger or judgement. The worst thing he'll have to deal with in the fake house is some nightmares (that he doesn't think can physically hurt him) and loneliness (something that he thinks he'll have to deal with if he escapes, anyway).

Ultimately, Rory decides that certain artificial love is better than uncertain real love, and chooses to resume living in the fake house. He puts the generator back in its hiding place. He climbs back out through the tunnel, repairs the gas pump and re-hooks it to all the gas canisters, and climbs back into the fake house, sealing the door up behind him. He replaces the "fridge" just as the gas starts pumping into the "house" again.

Within minutes, Rory is blinking in confusion, trying to remember why he's standing in front of the fridge in the middle of the night. He tries to remember if he went to school today but can't, then shrugs to himself and heads to bed. He walks back into his (clean and fixed up once more) bedroom, changes into his pajamas, and climbs into bed, promptly falling asleep. It's made very clear to the audience that the hallucinogenic gas is in full effect again, and that Rory is once again perceiving himself as a child, perceiving this house as his own house, and has forgotten everything about the last day.

In the mechanism attached to the speaker in the kitchen ceiling, a cassette tape in a player reaches the end, clicks, and then rewinds back to the beginning, "once again ready for the next time Rory wandered too far." . . . Okay, so this story is… a lot. Lot of "Plato's Allegory of the Cave" vibes. And, while I have nothing concrete to say for sure about it, I have a few thoughts about it.

My first thought was "none of those early theories about this story are correct." By which I'm referring to the popular (at least at the time) theory that the story was telling us that William was torturing and experimenting on Michael for years. Now, I understand where that theory is coming from, don't get me wrong! Over the years, we've gotten plenty of evidence that Michael has been in the FNAF4 bedroom, at least at some point, and we know from the "Security Logbook" that Michael has seen the Nightmare Animatronics, as he draws a detailed picture of Nightmare Fredbear from memory. This story is telling us that the Nightmare Animatronics were William's creation to torment someone, and if Michael has seen them, doesn't that suggest that Michael was the one William was tormenting? It seems pretty straight-forward.

However, that theory has never sounded right to me, and it still doesn't sound right even after reading this story. And I'm going to try to explain why.

First of all, what exactly are we being told about the Nightmare Animatronics? Yes, we're being told that they were created by William with the express purpose of tormenting a child. But we're also being told that they are physical animatronics that he built, and that they are in the "Sister Location" bunker, at least for a time. And you know who else is in the SL bunker at some point, who is sent down there with express orders from William to complete specific tasks, and who works at the time as an animatronic engineer and technician? Michael.

I'm going to posit the suggestion that Michael knows what the Nightmare Animatronics are not because he specifically was haunted by them, but because he's had to repair them for his dad before. Throughout the game series and in the "Security Logbook," we're shown multiple times that Michael can repair (or tamper with) animatronics, and that he's often willing to follow his father's orders, so why couldn't he have just seen the physical Nightmares at one point? "But he specifically draws Nightmare Fredbear in response to being asked about his dreams!" Yeah? They're called Nightmare Animatronics. They're meant to cause nightmares. He can operate on them and know what they are and still associate them with dreams, whether those dreams are his own or not.

There's also the fact that Rory doesn't seem to be a Michael parallel character. By this point in the series, most readers should have gotten familiar with characters that represent Michael in some way, shape or form. They often share physical and similar traits, so they're pretty easy to pick out. And our buddy Rory here? He doesn't check enough boxes to qualify.

Primary Michael representative traits are:

brown hair and/or blue eyes, with blue eyes often being the more important trait

tall

looks like his father

has Daddy Issues and/or actively thinks about his father throughout the story, usually with complicated but ultimately positive feelings

likes to draw

likes playing video games

good at building/repairs

bully (if child) / actively dislikes children (if adult)

seems to know more than he says

bad/morbid sense of humor and love of puns

Not every Michael representative character has all of these traits (and this is by no means an exhaustive list), but they tend to have a decent handful. Rory has brown hair, and he exists in some of the same spaces that Michael has been in, but that's where their similarities end. Rory simply doesn't resemble Michael enough for me to be okay with saying "obviously this is a story about Michael!"

There's also the fact that we're being told that this story takes place after the events of "Sister Location." The bunker is deserted. The Funtimes are gone. No one has been down here for years. Rory doesn't even have Hand Unit for company, he's that alone! Yes, he seems to see Ballora on stage in her gallery, but she doesn't move or react to him, and it makes me wonder if that was actually Ballora he was seeing or just like… her discarded outer shell or something. But, given the overall abandoned state of the bunker, I think it's safe to assume that the Funtimes have already left as Ennard, Michael is gone as well, and the place has been completely empty for awhile now.

"Okay," I hear you say. "So he's not Michael! But what about Crying Child? We've had that theory that William made the Nightmare Animatronics to scare his younger son away from 'Freddy's' for years, so what about him? Does this story prove that one?" To which I say… maybe? Rory shares a few similarities with Unnamed "Crying Child" Afton, as well as with some of the CC representative characters. For example, he

Is the same gender and similar age, size, and general appearance (small white boy with brown hair).

Exists in the FNAF4 bedroom, a space from the game where we were first introduced to William's younger son; the game has been slightly retconned here and there over the years, but the original implication seemed to be that you were playing as the Crying Child for the entire duration of the game, indicating that that is his bedroom.

Is kept in a constant state of fear, and is specifically afraid of the animatronic characters. And is especially afraid of Foxy, who he views as an even worse tormentor than the others (an interesting callout, since the cutscenes in FNAF4 show us CC being tormented by Michael who is dressed as Foxy).

Is observed passively and from a distance by William during the entire time when he's being constantly scared again and again; in FNAF4, Crying Child is observed and spoken to by a Fredbear toy he carries around, and we see the Fredbear toy on William's desk in "Sister Location," a speaker on its chest and microphone nearby, suggesting that William was using the stuffed toy as a nanny cam to watch and communicate with his youngest throughout the day (and it's also conveniently next to a set of monitors that William uses to observe the inside of the FNAF4 bedroom)

We've also had Crying Child representative characters before that were portrayed with hazel eyes like Rory has (Hazel from "Lonely Freddy" being the main one coming to mind right now), as well as freckles.

So yeah, Rory certainly checks enough boxes to seem like a stand-in for Crying Child! Except for the most important one: "is an actual child." Rory believes himself to be a child, but isn't. Crying Child doesn't live to adulthood, and even his stand-ins are almost always children.

But there's also two important details to take into account: William knows who Rory is, but Rory doesn't know who William is. And that destroys any assumption of Rory representing either Afton boy.

William knows everything about Rory. He knows Rory so well that he builds a fake house that replicates the house Rory's family lives in (and we know this because Rory distinctly remembers his mother walking around the house with him, explaining terms like "great room" and "chair rail"). He knows Rory so well that he has a recording talking about why Rory ran away from home as a small child, and how much Rory hated school, and several other details about Rory's life that we know are true. And he knows Rory so well that he knows to set up this recording in a way that Rory will find it, because he knows what Rory will do if the gas ever stops pumping.

But Rory doesn't know anything about William. He has no memory of being kidnapped. He only recognizes William's voice as being that of a man "about his father's age," but not a voice he knows. It's made very clear that William isn't his father or anything, because Rory remembers his father's voice and knows that this isn't it, and the voice elicits emotions out of him that his father's voice never did. (William's voice makes him feel safe and loved, but his father's voice always made him feel on edge and alone.)

There's also the fact that, based on the abandoned state of both Rory's experiment and the greater facility, William has likely either been springlocked by this point, or is simply in hiding somewhere as "Dave Miller" or something. Either way, he's not around anymore. And Wade specifically calls out that Rory's dad is still around and looking for him; and since Wade seems to be a trustworthy character according to the text, and we can believe what he says, we can see a clear contrast between "Rory's dad is still around" and "William has disappeared." If William were Rory's dad, Wade would have likely told us a different story, saying that Rory's dad vanished less than a year after Rory did.

Either way you slice it, Rory isn't Michael, and he's not Crying Child. So… where does that leave us?

I'm not sure. The fact that William knows everything about Rory but Rory doesn't know anything about William frustrates me. I can't make sense of that. William isn't really in the habit of knowing what his victim's bedrooms look like (aside from his own children), but it's made pretty clear (to me) that Rory isn't his child. And I don't know what to do with that information.

My best guess is that Rory doesn't represent anyone at all, and is just a brand new character that we've never seen before. And I have a couple of ideas for what this Fear Experiment is.

Fear Experiment Interpretation #1: My actual first theory was that Rory was a child that William kidnapped in order to recreate Crying Child's last days and eventual death, presumably with an end goal of figuring out how to bring Crying Child back in some way or other. I mean, William has already seen the effects of Elizabeth haunting Circus Baby by this point (presumably), so it would stand to reason that he tries to create a similar scenario for his other dead child, so that CC could come back somehow. William is just forced to abandon the experiment (and Rory) before he can finish it.

The problem with this is that we're directly told that the fake house is a replica of Rory's house, meaning that it's not meant to be a recreation of Crying Child's bedroom or life.

Fear Experiment Interpretation #2: My second theory is that this is what William did with all of his victims, at least at some point. I mean, this experiment space is right near where the Funtime Animatronics are kept, and we know they're meant to be used as kidnapping containers, right? And we know William has, at different points, tried studying the creation and effects of both Remnant and Agony, two different substances that come from dead people, with Agony being created when the person dies under extremely stressful circumstances (and leading to hauntings). So it would stand to reason that William was using the Funtimes to lure and kidnap children, having them delivered after hours to this space, and then running experiments on them in attempts to create Agony or something.

And Rory's character works with this theory, because while he doesn't really act like any of Afton's kids, he definitely acts like Afton's other victims. Despite not knowing the man, Rory has a strong love-hate relationship with William, something he shares in common with the MCI kids, who (in both the "Silver Eyes" trilogy and the in the movie) we see go back and forth between viewing William as their enemy/tormentor and as their friend/caregiver. William is very good at gaslighting and Stockholming his victims, and Rory, who decides to trust the voice on the recording above the voice of his real life friend, definitely exhibits that sort of behavior.

The main problem with this theory is that Rory has no idea who or what the Funtime Animatronics are. He's never seen them before. Circus Baby, Ballora, and Funtime Foxy don't hold any meaning to him, and he never encounters any form of Funtime Freddy at all. So it seems like that idea is out, or at least that portion of it.

This story is definitely worth noodling around, but boy is it confusing! Ultimately, the only concrete things that I can take away from this story is that William Afton has specifically experimented on children to observe their reactions to fear and stress, possibly with the intention of creating Agony and causing a haunting as the result, and that the FNAF4 bedroom may have been the primary location for those experiments. Valuable information, but it raises a lot more questions than it answers.

Other parts of this story that stuck out to me:

The FNAF4 bedroom existing in a fake house that exists as part of the "Sister Location" facility explains why we can see it on the electrical map when Michael is working in the breaker room -- it's plugged into the greater electrical grid of the bunker, but it also has its own source of power, explaining why it's visible but the player can't access it. (Are the Plushtrap hallway and the sidewalk path also underground experiment spaces? Are there other children being kept there, or are they areas that Rory was supposed to be moved to at some point?) (How much does Michael know about these experiments? He can see them on the electrical map, and he's seen the Nightmare Animatronics, so he's at least passively aware of them.)

Rory doesn't know who or what Circus Baby is, but he immediately relates with the empty room she used to be kept in, empathically assuming that she's the victim of another cruel experiment like he is.

FNAF4, like many games from Scott, is very imperfect and has some janky game mechanics. This isn't a bad thing! Many people think that's part of the charm of the FNAF games! But in FNAF4, while visual and audio cues around the bedroom during the main game tells us that our player character is a child, they don't always seem to be child-sized, and some players have said that the movements and POV of the player character looks more like an adult crawling on their hands and knees. While I think that's just a weird developmental error in the game, I think it's interesting that this story offers us an in-wold explanation, saying that the character is a young adult who believes himself to be a child, and so is still behaving like a little boy.

I think it's funny that, from Wade's POV, he's in a Mimic story. I mean, our man suddenly starts hearing static coming from an old walkie-talkie he's kept for sentimental reasons, and then his long lost / presumed dead childhood friend starts talking to him, saying things like "I'm trapped underground" and "I need help!" This is exactly how Cassie gets got in "Ruin!"

And speaking of the Mimic, it's finally time to wrap up the epilogue story!

"Epilogue"

We pick up right after Kelly's death. The Mimic has wandered off, but Lucia is still hanging around in her rat costume, staring at the puddle of blood that used to be Kelly and still in too much shock to move. After some time, Lucia finally calms down enough to start thinking and processing her surroundings again. But as she looks cautiously around herself, she sees more remains of more dead friends, and the reality that she's the only one left hits her hard. After sitting alone with her thoughts for a bit longer, Lucia decides that the Mimic needs to be destroyed or deactivated, and she begins to come up with a plan for how to do it.

"There was nowhere in this tomb of a pizzeria where Lucia could safely hide."

"There was only one way that she was going to get out of this place alive: she had to kill the Mimic."

Remembering the springlock jester suit in the costume room, Lucia decides that the best way to disarm the Mimic would be to trick it into wearing the springlock costume, and then triggering the springlocks to snap down on it. Since the Mimic keeps changing the costume its wearing every so often, Lucia begins to sabotage all of the costumes in the costume room aside from the jester costume, so that the Mimic won't have any other option the next time it comes in for a quick costume change.

"The yellow-walled costume room…" Bit of a "the Yellow Wallpaper" moment there.

There's an unnecessarily long section that just describes Lucia breaking off or otherwise ruining the zippers on all the costumes. I think it's just padding out the page count for this epilogue.

While Lucia is jamming and tearing out zippers, the costumes start moving, and she realizes that something has jostled the rod that they're all hanging on. She assumes the Mimic has entered the room, and she finds it in a gopher costume. With only three costumes left in the room (the jester costume, a lion costume, and the rat costume that Lucia is still wearing), the Mimic crawls out of the gopher costume and tries to climb into the rat costume.

The Mimic grabs the rat costume, peering in through the eye-holes and making eye contact with Lucia inside. It then opens the costume's mouth and starts to climb into the costume through the mouth, squishing Lucia against the back of it. Lucia manages to pull the back zipper down and jump out of the costume just as the Mimic climbs inside, leaving the Mimic in the rat costume and Lucia exposed.

While the Mimic is still re-configuring its body to fit into this new costume, Lucia grabs some rope off the floor and ties the costume's legs together. When the Mimic tries to grab or chase her a second later, it trips and lands on its face. Lucia ducks behind the jester costume, which is pretty big and conceals her almost entirely.

The Mimic is described throughout this section with such awesome phrases as "segmented worm," "expanding viper," and "pulsing, squirming snake." This thing is not in a humanoid shape right now, that's for sure.

Lucia positions her head against the jester suit, making it look like she's wearing it, and calls out to the Mimic. She ducks down as the Mimic lunges for her, and it climbs into the jester suit, clearly intending to kill her the same way it killed Kelly. Lucia picks up an unused metal rod from the floor and starts beating the Mimic like a pinata, trying to set off the springlocks. When this doesn't work, she ends up stabbing the rod right through the Mimic's mouth like a spear. This sudden action finally sets off the springlocks, and they all start snapping at once, crunching down on the Mimic. The Mimic starts flailing, and "viscous, black fluid" that smells like engine oil starts leaking out of the suit like blood. Lucia backs away to a hiding spot for a moment, watching the Mimic flail around in a pool of its own "blood."

"[The Mimic] was no longer the menace in control -- it was the victim!"

When the Mimic's movements have slowed down enough, Lucia approaches it again. Remembering what she read in the notebook, she begins searching and feeling around on the back of the Mimic's head, where she finally finds the power switch. She flips it, and the Mimic deactivates, falling limp in front of her.

Lucia escapes the Pizzaplex, managing to scale up the wreckage of the basement stairs and then busting through an upstairs window. It's now morning outside. A construction worker (described as a handsome young man with "gentle blue eyes") sees her and helps her out. He tries to comfort her when she bursts into tears, and tries to ask her what she was doing in the unfinished building, but Lucia can only cry and smile at him, both in relief and hysterics. . . . Interesting to "kill" the Mimic in the same way William is killed, with a springlock suit… Especially interesting since our first introduction to the Mimic (all the way back in the first epilogue) featured it having rabbit ears. And that we now know that Mimic AI (different from this Mimic, but connected) is portrayed as Glitchtrap in some of the games. Lot of Mimic/Afton parallels. Not sure if that means anything, but it sure is interesting.

Yay! Lucia survived! I honestly didn't think she would, but I'm happy she did. :)

And yay! The Mimic is gone! (For now, anyway…)

And most of all -- yay! I'm done with this series!!! Cue the party streamers and confetti canons! Hallelujah, I'm done!

#five nights at freddy's #tales from the pizzaplex #a brief analysis #my thoughts and theory noodles #my tftp analysis #tw eye contact #not normally a tag I use on these things but good grief that image is uncomfortable to look at

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