Escape from the Winter Festival! [CLOSED]

[Baneful]

Ben had been watching the countdown with deep terror and impatience, but as soon as he realised what Henry was doing, he stopped and just watched him call, at first not having any idea what he was up to and then realising with a crushing cringe what he was witnessing.

People were dying, he told himself. People were dying, so it was fine. He took a deep, steadying breath.

He brought up his phone and looked through the map hurriedly before mouthing "West Monty golf utilidoors" at the little bear. There was a trash incinerator there, and William had never really cared for the non-flashy parts of any location, so he wouldn't know off-hand what was there. Ben just had to hope it was on, considering how much garbage was in the depths.

Will, still on the stage, felt the heat rise in his cheeks and swallowed nervously. Things could wait. Everything was in hand, it was just cleanup left.

"It has been lonely." he said. "Where?"

[Toshiful]

That was easy. God. He barely knew what he was doing. Normally he planned things meticulously. Helpy dragged one his hands down his face.

He nodded to Ben.

"It's been a while since we were out on the green," Helpy said. "Up for a few rounds of Golf? I will meet you in the West section of the course, at the utilidoors."

[Baneful]

Will hesitated again, his every instinct telling him to doubt what he was hearing, but despite himself, he swallowed and nodded. Golf. It had been a long time, he'd thought as much when he built the place.

"All right." he said. "I'll be there soon."

He gave one last longing look to the carnage in the atrium and slipped off of the stage.

Ben watched Henry expectantly, one eyebrow raised.

[Toshiful]

Helpy hung up. "He'll meet me at the utilidoors," Helpy said. He looked torn. "It is the best we can do on short notice. He may show up, but he will not stay unless I am there. I will try to keep him as long as I can, and buy us some more time. It is a shame the staffbots are his. I could have used a friendly one. Or one of the smaller units. ...No matter." He tilted his chin up. He held his small paw out to Ben. "Good luck."

[Baneful]

Ben gave Helpy a concerned and grave look. He wasn't sure he'd be able to do this without him.

"I hacked my STAFF bot." he said, sounding miserable. He didn't know what harm might come to the little bear if he showed up to Will, and he realised he'd been tricked. "I didn't want it hurting us randomly. It will carry you if you need it to." He sighed at it. It was Foxy.

Foxy HAD been his favourite.

"Please come back." he said, quietly as he took the paw between his thumb and forefinger to shake it.

[Toshiful]

"Yes, that will be useful. That's very kind. I will be here in some capacity or another until I have fixed my mistakes." Helpy grasped his finger, squeezing it firmly, then went to arrange himself seriously on the staffbot. He made some careful adjustments with a small disc. He kicked his legs a little mindlessly while he did.

[lilacfishie]

Roll: x | Prompt: x

(This ended up being a response to Prompt 4 and Prompt 5 together, whoops)

From the moment she'd stepped in the sewers, Flop felt disoriented. It was surprising to her, the feeling of not knowing exactly where she was because an internal map in her programming. She was not supposed to be here. The errors flashing in her HUD about being "out of bounds" and "location lost" with notifications to return to her designated charging station were overlapped with countless warnings pinpointing the rotting food and hazardous scraps littering the area. Still, she pressed on with the group. The scruffy man leading the way knew Something, and she wanted to find out the truth. Things were obviously not as they seemed in the Pizzaplex.

Something clanged to her right, and she glanced over. Flop halted in her tracks. There she was, but also not her. The colors were...off. Before she could analyze the figure further, her vision began to glitch and it felt like her wires were frying. "Wait..." she murmured, holding her head and taking a shaky step forward toward it, the group she was with long forgotten. Another few steps and she reached for the figure and was Somewhere Else.

She could barely see the teenager in her grasp through the bold, red letters covering most of her HUD. "Harvest Protocol Initiated." The guest's frantic struggling may have freed him from the grasp of a human, but was no match for metal. Her jaws, outfitted with a row of large and sharp teeth, opened comically wide, paint brush tongue lolling from one side to another. She could feel the protocol lifting the force exertion cap on the hydraulics in her jaw as she bent forward and crushed the guest. The struggling intensified for just a moment before it stuttered, and stopped. Flop thought her audio receptors were broken, or affected by the protocol, but the guest's body going limp also ceased the screaming she had not previously registered. The blood rushed from the guest, trickling down through her endoskeleton or pouring out of her mouth. The paint brush tongue stained crimson and created a river of dripping blood down her neck and arm, staining the mixed paint in her claws black.

And then she was back in the sewers, clutching her head and wailing. When it's over, she heaves, processor whirring to near overheating in her chest. Still holding her head, she stumbles for a few steps, tail swinging around and knocking into piles of trash and scrap. Eventually, it hits something harder, more solid and upright. Startled, Flop reels around at the offending object, finding herself face to face with her companion S.T.A.F.F. Bot. It was stuck in a trash pile, glitching and whirring. But, all she saw through her glitched and overwhelmed eyes was another her. The paintjob matched and Flop was not thinking clearly enough to care about the difference.

The large lizard animatronic lunged at the companion bot, tackling it to the ground. Unfortunately for her, the bot was stronger and sturdier than she'd originally assumed. And, the bot seemed ready for her when she lunged. The two bots faced off, Flop blindly attacking it and it fending her off. She had it in her claws and it grabbed her left arm. Flop roared in pain and anger as it crushed the plating and the fragile wiring underneath. Paint from the now destroyed bottles mixed with oil and seeped through the cracks in her destroyed casing. Her hand and lower arm seized before going limp, and she used her rage to shoulder it to the ground. It scrabbled and scraped at her, but she managed to get her jaws around the chest cavity.

The white casing of the S.T.A.F.F. Bot was much sturdier than the soft, squishy torso of a person. Her jaw's joints whined with the stress as she bit down as hard as she could on the bot. Like a dog shaking a squirrel, she thrashed her head from side to side once her teeth managed to get through the casing. Furiously, her back legs kicked and stomped at the bot's wheels, bending them and knocking them out of alignment. Desperately, the bot scraped and struggled against her. It managed to free an arm, and immediately clawed and grabbed for one of her eyes. By the time Flop's jaws got through enough to snap the spine of the endo, it took her eye down with it.

When the bot stopped struggling, Flop paused, the new silence bringing a fraction of clarity to her mind. She pulled back, trying to free her jaw from the plating and wiring it was embedded in. The metal came free, but the stress on the joints let the jaw hang open, and the shaking knocked it out of alignment. Her HUD glitched and refreshed constantly, trying to reorient itself from the loss of the right eye. Flop struggled to her feet, metal bits and scraps clanging to the floor from her ruined arm and busted open chest casing from the impact with the bot. A whining noise emitted from her knee, which seemed to be partially out of alignment as well from the tumble to the ground.

While dismissing the dozens of errors and warnings popping up in her vision, she finally registered the distant sounds of the group she'd been with before. Steam poured out from her joints as she tried to decompress and calm down her processors. Oil from the destroyed bot trickled between her teeth and stained her paintbrush tongue. After a few moments, glanced down the pathway between the towering piles of trash and scrap. She did not know the way, and she still wanted to find the truth. Carefully, she trudged in the direction of the voices.

The large set of doors were just in view when a new alert popped up on Flop's glitched HUD. A golden tree overlayed her vision, and she felt her will being warped, controlled. The figures that stood in the silo together were pinpointed in red to her when the tree faded away. Flop's normally bright green eyes were a deep, menacing red. She hunched forward, assessing each of the targets standing around the scruffy man, who was speaking with the small bear. A gurgling, glitched rumble came from her voicebox as she hunched forward, her working arm held out with her claws ready to grab. With her targets sighted, the lizard animatronic approached the silo.

[Corn]

ARE YOU READY?
Week - 3
Username – Corn
Kin name – Unquenched
What are they in the setting? – dragon animatronic
Description (for possible sketches) – A pretty close match for the coloration of his goat form. The interior of his small wings are black with flame patterns on the outer edge, and he carries a black keytar with a few fun stickers on it to help him entertain the customers. He also has a belt of sleigh bells wrapped around his stumpy tail for festive percussion, plus a red nose and some extra construction paper prongs taped to his horns for festive decoration.
Extra ticket? -

TBA

Most of the humans seemed like they wanted to stay up in the Pizzaplex, to enjoy the party or to experience the new VR room. He spotted several of his fellow animatronics heading down to the sewers,including his unicorn counterpart Midnight Melody, and his friend and human coworker S.C. too. When the strange man from before came back to him with his offer, Unquenched weighed his options with more than a little concern.

His fans fired up as he ran the numbers, multiple times for redundancy and to account for many possibilities. The calculation came back the same on each query - the higher danger was in the unknown variables of the sewer. The people who went down there would need at least an escort, and possibly even more protection than that. His main job may have been to entertain, but protecting customers was a high priority subroutine, so, the sewers it would have to be. He followed after the man Ben. Faithfully, his STAFF bot followed along.

Shuffling along at the tail end of the group, he was aghast at the things he saw down there. He had been right about it being unsafe - there were all kinds of sharp ends of animatronic parts, overfull bags of rotting food, he could DEFINITELY see evidence of a thriving rat population, and there were extremely unsanitary fluids EVERYWHERE. If he had skin, he suspected he would be experiencing frisson. He kept careful watch over the group he had placed under his care.

(251 words)

[Corn]

ARE YOU READY?
Week - 4
Username – Corn
Kin name – Unquenched
What are they in the setting? – dragon animatronic
Description (for possible sketches) – A pretty close match for the coloration of his goat form. The interior of his small wings are black with flame patterns on the outer edge, and he carries a black keytar with a few fun stickers on it to help him entertain the customers. He also has a belt of sleigh bells wrapped around his stumpy tail for festive percussion, plus a red nose and some extra construction paper prongs taped to his horns for festive decoration.
Extra ticket? -

TBA

Unquenched's disquiet only grew the deeper they were led into the trash-pit maze beneath the pizzaplex. His vertically-slitted pupils were open as wide as their apertures would allow, but the light was still meager, so he was forced to supplement his vision with thermal readings, faintly overlaid over the optical camera feed. Other than the obvious heat signatures from the humans present, the decomposing food and other organic matter in the garbage bags provided a small amount of background heat. Here and there, it was blocked by the cold metal and hard outer shells of discarded animatronics. He was starting to think that he understood how humans felt when they walked through a graveyard - it was upsetting to see the inner workings of his fellow animatronic creations so thoroughly broken, so obviously disrespected and carelessly disposed of.

Perhaps instead of a graveyard, this was more like a war zone. Or a mass grave.

As he slunk through the dim cavern of refuse, he was startled to be seized by an endoskeletal hand, yanking him towards the wall of trash and rubble. "BR-r-r-R-r-ROTHER," it whined with a barely functioning voice box, "rrrrEJOICE! The time of the HARvest has COME at LAST! The PROtocol is ACtive! Seize the-the-the-the-" it petered out as its batteries finally ran dry, loosening its grip and going limp where it stuck out of the wall and the lights in its eyes going out. With a final grinding halt, a strange black fluid seeped out of its eyes and mouth.

Unquenched leapt away, rubbing the place on his arm where he had been grabbed by the robotic remains. What had they meant by harvest protocol? It didn't return any results from his database queries, but somehow still felt... familiar? Things were only getting stranger and more uncomfortable by the minute down here. He shook himself and hurried to catch up with the rest of the group, both to better protect the humans, and for the reassurance of living company.

(331 words)

[lilacfishie]

ARE YOU READY?
Week - 5
Username – lilacfishie
Kin name – Flop
What are they in the setting? – Animatronic Lizard, Available through the Arts & Crafts Party Bundle!*
*Bundle subject to availability. Fazbear Entertainment is not responsible for any allergic reactions, maiming, paper cuts, death, or ruined clothes as a result of booking this package.
Description (for possible sketches) – A muted green lizard animatronic covered in pink, purple, and blue colorful paint splotches. Her tongue sticks out the side of her mouth and doubles as a paint brush and she has bright green eyes.
Extra ticket? -

I responded to Prompt 4 and Prompt 5 together, just posting this form for proper accounting purposes!

[Corn]

ARE YOU READY?
Week - 5
Username – Corn
Kin name – Unquenched
What are they in the setting? – dragon animatronic
Description (for possible sketches) – A pretty close match for the coloration of his goat form. The interior of his small wings are black with flame patterns on the outer edge, and he carries a black keytar with a few fun stickers on it to help him entertain the customers. He also has a belt of sleigh bells wrapped around his stumpy tail for festive percussion, plus a red nose and some extra construction paper prongs taped to his horns for festive decoration.
Extra ticket? -

TBA

Unquenched's wings whirred and waggled in agitation as the group continued into the storyteller AI's main computer room. He huddled close to his friend S.C. in the dark as Ben announced that hostiles were incoming. He was grimly certain that those reinforcements would be more of those decommissioned animatronics - and the STAFF bots that had followed them down here, it turned out, his own elf buddy's body language changing immediately to an aggressive stance and rolled towards him. With a single swift and neat motion, he held one shoulder against the STAFF bot's shoulder and pushed the heel of his hand up against the its chin, ripping it clear off it's narrow little neck. Of course, unlike a human, the main operations of STAFF bots weren't housed in their heads, so it was still trying to attack him. However, without its main input array, it was easy to outmaneuver it.

Twirling around the decapitated bot, he pointed his head towards the bot and reached deep into his programming for a piece of machinery that had been deactivated and locked behind permissions settings he shouldn't have had access to. But, somehow, when he opened his jaws, there came the telltale hiss of gas and grating click, click, click - and with a rush of noise, he unleashed a jet of flame on his foe. Literally frying its important components ought to put it down quickly, allowing him to turn his attention to other threats to his all-too delicate charges.

(247 words)

[Baneful]

"Yes, that will be useful. That's very kind. I will be here in some capacity or another until I have fixed my mistakes." Helpy grasped his finger, squeezing it firmly, then went to arrange himself seriously on the staffbot. He made some careful adjustments with a small disc. He kicked his legs a little mindlessly while he did.

"It has a custom disc on it." Ben volunteered "You will be able to look.. how you did."

Will knew he SHOULDN'T show up with so much going on. But he did anyway, because he couldn't help himself.

[Toshiful]

"Yes, thank you. This will suit my purposes very well." With some other adjustments and in a shimmer, the former staffbot slipped out in a rustle of plaid fabric, it's simple steel now warm, pliable skin and instead of grease and paint, it smelled of wood and a warm summer workshop.

Henry did not know what to expect. The worst that could happen was, well, really as bad as it could get. He could be captured, in body, soul, or mind. He could be tortured while he was used against those that he had wanted to help. Or, less dramatically, Will could want...an actual conversation. An apology? No, that wasn't likely, given the state of everything. Henry only knew that he must distract him from his terrible work, and he was best equipped to do so, in whatever capacity.

He arrived at the agreed upon place, looking like no time had passed and he had not changed, which was not true.

[Baneful]

Will wanted to be furious. It made sense to be furious. Henry had betrayed him; he'd foiled his plans over and over again. He had refused to see sense when he explained why he killed those kids. If there was anyone in the world who should have understood, it was him. But he hadn't.

And he'd lost him.

He was waiting and feeling awkward about it. Henry had sounded so normal it didn't make any sense at all. When he arrived, he just stared, hardly able to believe what he was seeing. "Are you ... real?"

[Toshiful]

Will looked like himself. Healthy and whole. It churned Henry's stomach, because he knew what must have happened, for him to look as real and human and alive as he did.

It was a fair question. "It is me," Henry said, "but you'll forgive a magician an old trick where my appearance is concerned. You could ask me something only I would know. If it would assure you."