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For anyone who missed that, it's the fanfic of the Roommates fanfic.

Content Warning: Violence ", "writing": "Breathing in the Halls\n\nBy Litmauthor\n\n Apparently when the door was shut it must have been pretty airtight because there didn?t seem to be much in the way of dust inside and she couldn?t make out any footprints. Now some dust had been disturbed by her movement and was filtering down into the hole through the beam of her flashlight.\n\nIt?s a credit to experience that she did not simply leap down the hole. Instead Candy pulled out her text messaging app and snapped off a quick message to Rolf ``Hey, you won?t believe this, but I just found a crawl space I think the police never found.'' ~ Candy\n\n``...''~Rolfe\n\n``you remember when I said I sometimes wish I majored in journalism like you? Well I take it back.'' ~ Rolfe\n\n``I've been working for a law firm for 20 years and not once have I sent a text message that sounded like a prelude to a horror movie.'' ~Rolfe \n\n``Yeah, well you shouldn?t give it up for a comedy career either.'' ~Candy\n\n``Right, right, and now you?re going to tell me that you?re going to walk down there without any backup or weapon and you?re going to get stabbed by someone wearing a Halloween mask and with an excess of mother issues.'' ~Rolfe \n\n``Hey, I have you as backup, and I?ve got a stun gun. Besides I?m not going to go that far into it, if I don?t text you in 30 minutes call the police.'' ~Candy \n\n``You sure? You know they?re going to ask what you were doing in there?'' ~Rolfe \n\n``I?ll take doing time for breaking and entering over death by masked oedipal complex.'' ~Candy \n\n``ok, ok, I?ll call the mounties if you don?t respond in a half hour.'' ~Rolfe \n\n``Thanks'' ~Candy\n\n``...'' ~Rolfe \n\n``be careful, ok?'' ~Rolfe \n\nThe cell phone returned to service as a flashlight only after she double-checked that it was still ready to dial Emergency Services at one number and that the timer has been set to give her a five-minute notice before she?d have to text Rolfe. After that she slipped it into her pocket and slipped down to climb the ladder into the pit. When she was down there the first thing she did was pull the phone back out and Shine the Light straight down the tunnel. The quick and systematic methods she was employing helped paint a veneer of confidence over the earlier fear and discomfort.\n\nShe had expected the tunnel to be like a crawl space, cramped, featureless walls with exposed support columns, and a complete mess of wiring and piping. She only got one out of three, the tunnel was definitely scaled for the humanitronics and that meant there was more than enough room to comfortably stand and possibly for two normal-sized people to walk side-by-side. The walls were nowhere near featureless, instead they and the ceiling we?re covered in a mixture of wires and cables. The whole ran along a few feet before turning and running towards the rest of the restaurant. She couldn?t exactly see down it past the corner and the same part of her that had stopped to update her plan for help stopped her to pull out the stun gun and check that it was charged.\n\nWhen she peeked around the corner, stun gun and flashlight held at the ready in full expectation of mechanized death leaping out at her, she found a quite thorough mix of confusion and disappointment. On one hand the expectation of finding a dead body, a lurking killer, or a criminal Den loaded with evidence and nefarious plans was fully disappointed. On the other hand, the part that saw light turned on at the end of this length of hallway was confused both by the presence of the lights and by what they illuminated. Seeing no sprinting attackers candy stepped forward to look closer at the large machine that appeared Midway along the tunnel.\n\nThe machine itself looked almost like a doorway, if someone had assembled a doorway out of a hodgepodge of homemade Electronics. Many of the cables were plugged directly into the machine or into a small black panel on the wall that then connected to the machine itself. Judging by the small lights on the panel there was electricity running into the machine. This was confirmed by an ear placed cautiously against the panel picking up the fain hum of high-powered electrical equipment. The fact that a machine with no visible function had power running to it was almost as strange as the faintly flickering electrical lights down at the other end of the hall glowing around the corner.\n\nCandy waved her stun gun and then her arm through the machine with no more effect then the fur briefly raising with static electricity. Further examination showed that at least some part of the machine extended into the concrete, in the off chance that this was some sort of weight-based booby trap she gingerly stepped over it and through the machine. The entire time she expected to hear some Crackle of electricity or explosion that would precede an end to her investigation, that expectation too was disappointed when she stepped across with nothing more than a feeling of static fuzz washing over her fur. The machine almost looked like a doorway but lacked any slot or mechanism for moving and holding a door. In fact, the inside of the passage described by the machine was completely blank smooth metal. Which only made it even more strange and added to the molehill of questions slowly ascending to mountainhood; why would this part of the building still have power supplied to it, why would a machine that did nothing need a power supply, why was this all hidden below the restaurant, when had it been added, and similar questions about the strange place she was discovering. \n\nInternally the rational side of her found itself at war with the instinctively suspicious part. The former saw this and evaluated it as being the long ago promised but never revealed revamping of the bot Bay attraction. It maintained that they must have been rebuilding it as some form of haunted house type simulation. The suspicious part pointed out that this did not explain why out of everything in this building power was still being routed to the machines and cables in this area let alone who would have the idea of capitalizing on a negative reputation like that in the first place. Miss rational pointed out that maybe in that case it was some sort of emergency safety room with a generator and that she had yet to actually get a chance to talk to the mysterious Mr. Afton who was by all accounts a nutjob. This was promptly pointed out as not getting rid of the weirdness because that would still mean the generator had either been running for months on end or that someone had snuck in and powered up the generator and nutjob or not Mr. Afton was dead and keeping this place running and secret after death was stretching disbelief bad enough to threaten joint injury. That last part was a tactical error and the rational side jumped up and down on top of it while pointing out that clearly this explained everything, and she'd probably find someone who knew a little bit about the hidden tunnel if she only continued. Suspicions replied that this would be most likely to be a junkie rather than a mysterious informant, but they didn?t have their heart in the sentiment especially with actual answers so potentially close.\n\nThe internal argument had continued as she walked towards the corner and looked around, in a little less nervous and defensive readiness than she had the previous corner. Unlike the previous corner she was surprised more by what was there then by what wasn?t present. At the end of the hall was a storage room lit by some flickering light bulb with several objects resting on shelves that were the size and shape of heads. More specifically they were the size of the slightly too large and cartoonish heads of the humanitronics, designed to fit over the more skeletal robotic skulls, and the shape of more normal people. There seem to be an assortment of the same four heads repeated a few times across the room. The four heads being repeated were a bird with unnaturally bright yellow coloring, a purple rabbit, a bear wearing a top hat, and a fox wearing an eyepatch.\n\nComplete and utter bafflement rendered her speechless as she walked up to look at the heads, once inside the room and close up to them her first impression was confirmed. They were the hollow heads designed to fit over the endoskeletons of the robotic performers in the pizzeria. But they weren?t cartoon humans and instead seemed to be some kind of bizarre imitation of people. It was taking candy a few seconds to process this.\n\n``Alright,'' she whispered ``so less slasher movie more Invasion of the Body Snatchers.'' she took a step back and turned around to look at the rest of the room which, given the strangeness that had been directly in front of her, had managed to slip by in a little less detail then was good for her.\n\nEspecially more than was good for her heart which attempted to escape the situation by jumping up into her throat and out her mouth. The organ evacuation was attempted in response to her turning and finding herself face to face with a humanitronic dressed up in a bear costume complete with a top hat identical to those on the shelf. Complete shock induced organ loss was only prevented a few seconds later when she realized that it didn?t seem to be moving. Then again, and the thought brought her stun gun up to position for immediate use, they could be completely still up until they moved, they were machines and didn?t need to do things like breath or twitch. She reached out with the other hand and poked it in the chest. The chest was covered in some form of plastic imitation fur and it didn?t so much as creak at the prodding.\n\n She took a few steps back nonetheless and tried to split her attention between that and the other side of the room which seem to just consist of an open doorway. She probably looked ridiculous walking backwards holding a stun gun at a stationary and seemingly inanimate object but that was a hard argument to make given what she remembered them being able to do. There may have been some success in quelling her panic because it wasn?t moving that?s also possible that some of it was simply because it didn?t look much like the bots that had been haunting her nights for so long. \n\nInstead it reminded her of some of the animatronics she?d seen in other places in her childhood. Things like The Madam Zelda machine that had a chicken dressed in stereotypical fortune-teller garb that claimed through awkward and jerking motions to be able to tell someone their future. The appearance of the bear was prompting more feelings of nostalgia then of fear. It was also prompting a resurgence of miss rational who suggested that the earlier presumption about this being some new attraction for the pizzeria must be true. That it must have been some attempt to entertain children with a set up, new characters or perhaps some mock-up of a mirror-mirror world where Jeremy and his friends were real and the animals were fake. The thought made her visualize underpaid employees made to dress up in costumes as more ``realistic'' humans and she shuddered at the sheer imaginary cheesiness of it all. It was helped because, once in that frame of mind, the bear bore a certain resemblance to the old manager of Jeremy's, provided one filtered Mr. Fazbear through a layer of robotics.\n\nWhen her movement brought her to the doorway, she turned around halfway so that she could look out the doorway while still keeping her peripheral vision on the unmoving figure. It let out into a hallway that looked disturbingly similar to the hallways in Jeremy?s back when it was still open during one of the rougher stretches complete with the same low-level safety lights along the bottom of the hallway. These seemed to have been the source of the light she had seen in the crawlspace. The light was enough that she turned off the flashlight app. More strange than the site was now that she was not in the room filled with a smell of mechanical equipment and dust that she could smell the deeply ingrained odor of an operating pizza place. The smell of garlic and a few other spices, Candy wasn?t much of a cook and wouldn?t have been able to name then if she tried, was thick enough in the air to make her think it had only stopped operating a few hours ago\n\nThe wall next to the door had a sign that read ``Parts and Storage, employees only'' which her suspicious mind pointed out was an odd place for a children?s attraction to enter into. It would make more sense to have it enter into the fake restaurant through the front. However, when the rest of her demanded an explanation as long as her suspicions were going to shoot down their ideas suspicion folded its arms, Shrugged, and shut up. The wall opposite the sign however had some of the many decorations, most of which look like they?ve been designed by children, that littered the hallway. It was also ticked down as another item of evidence for the fake restaurant attraction theory as it depicted a crayon drawing of a small human holding hands with what she had to assume was a drawing of that fox character dressed as a pirate. Similar pictures were tacked up alongside it, one of which had ``My Special Day at Freddy's'' written on it in childish crayon writing.\n\nEven if this all turned out to be a red herring Candy intended to make sure she documented it and before she stepped all the way out of the door her free hand pulled out her phone and snapped a quick picture of the store room and the drawing. The timer said that she had only used a few minutes and had plenty of time before the alarm went off and she switched the camera over to video recording mode before deciding to search down the hallway in the direction she wasn?t facing.\n\nThe whole time she was walking down the hallway she was keeping an ear open for the sounds of moving mechanical joints behind her and sweeping the camera up at the walls to make sure that the strange mixture of drawings and decorations was getting recorded as well as the general layout. The decorations depicted a lot more of the fake animals then she had seen in the parts and service room, she ended up counting ten in total with two sets of bird, bear, Fox, and rabbit in slightly different color schemes, one that looks like one of the Mask people, and one that to her pushed incredulity over a cliff because it seems to be a crayon drawing of balloon boy. Rationality danced up and down in some corner of her mind while chanting the phrase ``Crossover promotional attraction'' repeatedly, which is not an enjoyable experience inside of one?s head. Luckily the layout was far more dull, the hallways she had entered into had been an L shape with the end she was walking down branching off into a few doors containing what looked like the small rooms they set aside for private functions. She peeked into a few of them and they seem to just consist of central tables, chairs, more of the omnipresent decorations, and in a few of the cases set places for guests consisting of paper plate, cup, and party hat. The rooms, on the more suspicious side where also completely absent of any dust or debris which was weird even given the nature of the sealed door she had passed through. A good door might keep out new dust, but it wouldn't do jack against the dust that had been sealed inside. That meant that someone had to have come inside this place at some time recently and cleaned the rooms. \n\nStrangely, not strange by comparison to the bizarre feeling of the place as a whole or by comparison to the idea that someone would actually want to incorporate balloon boy out of all the legend of Bob characters into their promotion, the lights all seemed to be on in an empty place. There also didn?t seem to be proper doors since she left the parts and service room. Even the doorway at the end of the hallway, a large one that seem to open to some kind of office, was just an empty passage into the next room. Candy wasn't an expert on feng shui, but it had always struck her as one of the more insanely suspicious parts of the whole Jeremy's fiasco that no one had ever put up safety doors for the guards even after they'd started getting killed off. \n\nBy the time she entered that room it had long since occurred to her that at the very least she was uncovering evidence of construction that was in all probability illegal. She was pretty sure that if they had filled out all the forms and gone through the legal process to build a huge underground attraction that some of it would have gotten leaked out or someone would have noticed the construction and excavation. The room she found herself walking into was clearly an office and clearly in use by someone who wasn?t particularly concerned with keeping it neat and tidy. The desk in the center of it had a thick covering of paperwork with some of it balled up for disposal, even more paperwork was haphazardly attached to the wall with a mixture of thumb tacks and tape, a few empty drink cups were scattered about with the paperwork and scattered underneath the desk, and there was a small plastic mask like one would find as a prize for small children depicting the face of the top-hatted bear. There was also a tablet PC on the desk which candy picked up and attempted to activate. \n\nThe tablet had power and its battery and turned on, this of course blew out the idly running generator idea that had been proposed previously. Someone had charged up the tablet and judging by the entry at the top ``you are signed in as Jeremy Security\" they had also signed in under an account designed to look like it belongs to some ``real life human\" version of the pizzeria's famous mascot. When the tablet had started up it had moved straight to an app depicting a layout that she assumed represented the attraction. she tapped on one of the rooms and it opened the security camera view to what was most likely the room indicated. These assumptions working confirmed when she tapped on the parts and services room and saw a view of the space she had been in before complete with the unmoving animatronic. She tapped quickly for the other rooms seeing that, if this was indeed a closed-circuit security camera system, the place did seem like a pretty complete Pizzeria. The only weird point was an option on the area labeled as a prize corner wear a button in the lower right-hand corner offered her the option to rewind a music box. Tapping it filled up an indicator on the screen and she began to hear a faint tune sounding off from somewhere else in the building.\n\n``Okay, so it?s some kind of attraction that lets the kids play at working for the pizzeria?'' the question had been asked out loud and directed at no one so Candy was perfectly comfortable with the fact that it didn?t get an answer. Really if it had gotten an answer she?d have probably jumped out of her skin. She exited out of the security camera application and found that the only other options on the tablet were an email system that she didn?t recognize and a program labeled ``animatronics_settings.exe.'' she clicked open the email and found a rather full inbox including several messages flagged with a subject of ``training audio.'' It would take a little while to process through all of these emails, so she checked her phone to see about telling Rolfe she'd need an extension. She was disappointed to see that she had no signal anymore but given that this area was underneath a building it wasn?t that much of a surprise. She also saw that she was down to less than twenty minutes before the alarm went off. She handled this by turning to the paperwork on the desk and looking through that to see if it too was just fluff for the imaginary world of the attraction.\n\nAfter looking at about four of the papers on the desk she was beginning to feel that the papers didn?t quite match with the idea of this being a simulation for children. While it was true that having a notice complaining about an employee's bad odor, a notification about a change to policy regarding time clock procedures, or an a printed out email regarding budget changes were all realistic paperwork to find in a business, even if the odor one might be considered a little bit unprofessional, they were so dull that they didn?t seem like something you would put into an area designed for children. When she found a corporate newsletter, which did identify the restaurant as Freddy Fazbear?s Pizza, she was now fully convinced that if this was indeed an attraction then the person who made it was evil if solely for an attempt to expose children to something as painfully boring as a corporate newsletter. When she moved to examine the papers attached to the wall she took a second to look at what seemed to be an open ventilation panel, which was an oddity in and of itself, and bent down to see if it wasn?t some sort of children access tunnel or playground component. Given the rotating fan down one end of it she?d have to assume it wasn?t.\n\nThe papers on the wall followed suit to those on the desk, that is most of them were standard and extremely boring paperwork for a fictional Pizzeria. Or at least most of them were, she stopped when her perusal of the papers brought up an email titled ``notice concerning the animatronics'' that had been sent out to everyone at the company. It described some sort of accident in exactly the fashion that lawyers and corporations always did, with ambiguous terms and a complete avoidance at describing the sequence of events. What it did clearly state was that after following the accident all Personnel were ordered to ensure that any children physically interacting with the animatronics where to be carefully monitored in order to prevent any dangerous play or manhandling of the animatronics. The email also mentioned a closure, by way of stating that the policy would take place with a reopening, which was presumably related to said accident.\n\nCandy pulled that email off the wall; it was strange enough that she felt it needed preservation and shoved it into her bag. She also stopped to check her phone, the investigation of those papers had taken a little longer than she expected and she only had a few minutes left before the alarm sounded off and she?d be forced to rush to somewhere where she had a signal and could send a text out. Figuring that regardless of anything else that could happen, especially if Rolfe went early or had his clock fast in the police would already be on the way, that it was probably the most useful thing in the room she put the tablet along with some of the more incongruous papers from the desk in her bag. When she did, she had looked up at the back of the office, which she had initially disregarded as being covered with more of the posters and decorations common in the hallway and froze on the only actual photograph on the wall.\n\nShe had Frozen because what was on the photograph couldn?t possibly be on the photograph. It consisted, in the abstract, of the typical employee team photo people enjoyed taking to try and erode somewhat at the well-earned apathy people in minimum wage jobs tend to develop. In specific it was impossible because the team in question consisted of human. Humans standing in front of an array of the animatronic characters and holding up a sign reading ``Freddy's Family `87.'' It had to be photoshopped, she pulled it down and stared at it, but whoever had done it had done the single best job at photo editing she had ever seen. The attempt to figure out why someone had gone through that much detail and work on a minor prop that have been almost buried beneath ``children?s'' drawings happened with little notice of the slowing down to the music she had started and even when it had stopped altogether.\n\nWhen the stupor did finally end it was to her shaking her head quickly in an attempt to dislodge the more fantastic of possibilities such as genetic engineering. She looked back at the bag with the tablet now inside of it and swapped it for the photograph. Once the tablet woke up, she saw a small warning sign in one corner mentioning the music box, she tapped the spot where the circle had been but got no reaction. Shrugging she brought up the small security map and looked at it again. The place seemed to have everything in the facility of interest over on one end by the entrance, which actually made a lot of sense. She put the tablet away and began walking back into the hallway and towards the front area containing the main area. \n\nAs she exited the main office, she heard a sudden rattling thump from the ventilation in the office that did make her pause to look at the square hole. But then it just made her laugh a little and keep walking, frankly the idea that the ventilation had been running for possibly years without maintenance and without issue was more disconcerting than the fan breaking down. However, when she resumed walking by the darkened party rooms a nagging feeling that there was something more to the noise as well as a feeling that she was being watched sent glances over her shoulder repeatedly. By the time she was rounding the corner into the more crowded front rooms she had resolved to go back and take a closer look after all of this.\n\nThe resolution slipped away from mind shortly after rounding the corner because the rooms ahead of her were far more active and filled with such an array of clashing neon colors that even in the low light it was distracting. Double checking that the phone was in camera mode and recording video she leaned into the room and scanned about while making sure as little of her showed as possible. The room seemed to serve the purpose of the main stage, arcade, prize corner, and main dining area all at once. Further beyond she could see a room with another smaller stage and the sort of slightly reduced color intensity people used for very small children to help reduce the dangerous impact of sugar and robotic cartoon characters. Fine detail was disrupted some by the figures standing on both stages, two were standing on the main stage and one on the distant stage. \n\nWhile the distant figure didn't show much detail than a pale white length of plastic on the side of the head, the other two were much closer and clearly recognizable as the blue rabbit and the smaller brown bear from the drawings. None of them were moving, none of them had that unsettling glow to their eyes, and they were far enough away to give her a running start or at least enough time to get the stun gun in position. So, the disruption from them was more reflexive fear than actual interruption.\n\nShe made sure to look back at them occasionally as she searched the rest of the room, starting with the prize counter. It looked like the typical prize counter, a huge load of plastic garbage that only the terminally bored would consider fun toys and some of the sugary candy product purchased in bulk and were not distinguishable from their packaging in terms of flavor stored in dividers beneath the clear plexiglass counter. Behind it was a wall with racks of toys that represented a sharp upgrade to the toys below. The sole abnormality was an enormous empty box, wrapped like a birthday present and with the lid leaning back on hinges. \n\nA temptation existed to look closer at the box and see if it was empty, but it was overwhelmed by curiosity at the door she found just past the counter. The door was wholly unremarkable in itself, a generic doubled glass door with a push bar, but what was behind it was jumping to the top of the list of disturbing sights in the room. Before she had thought that the degree of photoshopping on the picture had been too much, far too high quality for the place, but if that was the case then whatever was being used to project the image of a quiet city street outside the door was too high quality for the whole world. She walked up to the door, her mouth slowly gaping in wonder as more of it became clear. \n\nIt was beyond considering that it was more simple props and an artificial environment because the building across the street was almost six stories tall and had no sign of a break between prop and matte painting or screen. Candy had already begun pushing the bar on the door open before catching what she was doing. \n\nIf the door was locked then the lock didn't stop the push-bar from working, probably the only thing complying with the fire code in here, but it might keep her from getting back inside. So, she grabbed a plush bird off the prize counter and walked back to the door. A testing push showed that the door did open and brought a gust of cold night air rushing into her face. Her brain pointed out that they had a very good AC system running out there as she put the plush in place to keep the door open and stepped through the door.\n\nAsphalt crunched under her feet in familiar fashion and the air had the equally familiar buzz of nighttime noises; the quiet noise of cars on other streets, distant voices, and the occasional faint beat of music too far away to make out. Ignoring any question of why, if this was a fake parking lot then whoever made it had made the most realistic parking lot short of reality itself, right down to the small pieces of garbage you always found littering these places. Candy looked up, and the last arguments from the part of her working to find plausible explanations went quiet.\n\nAbove the buildings was a city skyline and above that a night sky with a shining moon just past the halfway phase. Something about seeing the sky drove home the point she'd been trying to deny, that this place was real. In a half-hearted effort to prove otherwise she pulled a pen out of her pocket and flung it as hard as she could straight up. The arc it described couldn't possibly exist in any area a dozen feet underground. \n\nThat realization caused a slight whimper to escape her mouth, as everything else fell into place around that one idea. If the place she had walked into couldn't exist in the world she had walked in from then this had to be a different world, some topsy-turvy place where the humanitronics and people had switched places. The first few steps back towards the door were taken without breaking her stare at the moon, the insanity of the whole thing was holding her in a stunned daze.\n\nShe only snapped out of it a few minutes after that when her phone began the Unholy raucous that was the alarm. Candy blinked and looked dumbfoundedly at the phone for a second before turning the alarm off.\n\nA reminder of the limited schedule for this visit set free several other ideas that had been held back by the safety bar of shock. While she was looking at the single most insane discovery in history she was also apparently in another world and no longer certain of her ability to return. So, the first thing she had to do was get back to the weird gateway thing and see if she could make it back home. \n\nShe had the papers, phot, and tablet so this wouldn't be an empty-handed return if it turned out she couldn't come back. Candy turned around, opened the door the plush bird had held for her and almost walked smack into a robotic rabbit.\n\nThe rabbit was the blue model from off the stage and was leaning down towards her as the eyes searched over her face as she shook, and her hand crept towards the stun gun. Her hand was barely in contact with the stun gun before the glowing eyes finished glancing over her and the robot straightened back up. Once back upright the animatronic nodded at her, took a step back, and turned slightly to the side as if inviting her to continue on her way.\n\nThough she wasn't letting go of the grip of the stun gun, Candy sidestepped past the rabbit, the eyes following her the entire time. Once she was clear of the animatronic, she began sprinting down the hall and back the way she'd came.\n\nWhile her body was running her brain began its own wind-sprints driven mostly by the fact that she now knew that at least one of the robots in this world was running. What she didn't know was why it had been so passive, the only thing she could think of was the strange excuse Jeremy's had made for their own incidents. If the humanitronics had attacked people because they didn't look like humans, then maybe these didn't attack her because they assumed her to be a normal and functioning animatronic. Given how unsettling the robotic animals looked, that wasn't an idea she found flattering, though it was intriguing. If these animatronics weren't hostile and if she could come back, could she get an interview with one of them?\n\nWhile thoughts of articles with titles like ``Interview with an Interdimensional Android'' and ``Robot Rabbit From Other Worlds'' painted their way across her imagination she came upon the ``Parts and Storage'' room. While she considered that this was probably the first time a title like that appeared outside of a tabloid, she sprinted past the brown bear looking animatronic, still standing motionless next to the tunnel entrance. She didn't stop running until she found herself under the trapdoor and leaning against the ladder. She panted and bent over while she looked at her cell phone and seeing she had a signal sent a message.\n\n``I?m still alive, you aren?t going to believe this'' ~Candy. She was a minute or so early.\n\n``Oh?'' ~Rolfe \n\n``Yeah, I?ll tell you more at the bar, there was a something you're not gonna believe.'' ~Candy \n\n``Really? In a crawlspace, it wasn't a dead body was it?'' ~Rolfe \n\n``No, something way more unbelievable, I think I'll go back and get a more thorough look. Unless you already called the cops.'' ~Candy. On the off chance that he had she began climbing the ladder anyways and walked towards the exit of Bot Bay.\n\n``Not yet, but isn?t it getting a bit late?'' ~Rolfe.\n\n``Maybe, I guess I could shut the trap door. Come back tomorrow night.'' ~Candy.\n\n``Cool, I think the bartender is becoming skeptical that I?m really waiting for a friend.'' ~Rolfe \n\n``So what?'' ~Candy \n\n``So he'll tell everyone and I won?t look popular and be one of the cool kids ;)'' ~Rolfe \n\n``Right, right, on my way'' ~Candy\n\nSilly as it had gone it had helped to know that she had returned to the world of sanity where her friend was still making sarcastic remarks. She had actually found that since walking down into the tunnel her head and chest were both feeling much better. Before she had gone down the scar on her head had been hurting so much that she wouldn?t have been surprised to find it splitting open with fresh blood now the only thing left was the faint sense aching that was usually a sort of echo to more severe pains. Candy chalked it up to the same sense of accomplishment that was leaving her spirit as a whole feeling much higher. She had no idea who had even built that weird device or where it had taken her, but it was definitely something that would make a story. When she was attempting to lower the trapdoor, which was turning out to be annoyingly heavy, without making too much noise she took the time to consider that maybe that tablet had something else stored on it.\n\nThe door slipped out of her hands at the last second to make a quiet but deep sound of rushing air and metal striking cement has it fell neatly into a groove cut from the tile of the floor. It confirmed what she had believed earlier as once the door was in place in the floor it was all but impossible to spot the seams unless you specifically knew where to look. She made a mental note to bring along a good-sized crowbar when she came back, as her own back wasn?t looking forward to the prospect of trying to open the heavy door with the smaller crowbar she normally brought along when she went forth to break into some place.\n\nWhen she got to the door she stopped and pulled out her phone to take a picture of the room. She then pulled the picture up on her phone and added a note marker onto it highlighting the position of the trap door in the floor. While she was doing this the sense of discovery and victory over a long-standing fear were both washed away in a sudden Rush of deja vu. It was much like the previous flashes of memory, a sense that the world she is in was being covered up with the world that had been. But this time the present didn?t bother to Fall Away. Her mind populated the shelves with their grisly trophies and flooded the room with the dull red light that had so long ago flickered out of the darkness next to the table where a rat working as a security guard had breathed his last. She could almost even see the bright yellow plastic skin coating the arm holding up the bloody pliers.\n\nThe feeling and the Phantom images felt so real that her breath started to come out only in gasps and the pain which had been fading away came back with a redoubled intensity. When she reached up to her scar which was now a fire with agony again the piece of information that had struck against her senses and prompted the flashback finally clicked into place. It was a small sound, as of idly moving hydraulics and gears combined with the feeling that you were being observed. The difference between that and the visions of the past rushing up in front of her was that the sound of a humanitronic standing behind her was present both in her memory of the past and her present.\n\nIn the past and the present she turned too slowly, her movements feeling like the thick molasses pace of nightmares, in her peripheral vision the red light of her memories and the small light of her phone screen reflected back off the arm and something metal clutched in the hand raised up to Smite her. The entire thing had been frozen in her memory with such a complete Crystal and clarity that she had never been in doubt of it no matter what a therapist might have claimed. Though her memory had held a perfect snapshot and her mind saw the present in the slow motion of pounding adrenaline the arm, bright red in the past and a moldy yellow green in the present was in fast motion bringing its weapon down upon her head. The first time the blow had not knocked her unconscious and she had lay on the floor stunned until blood loss and pain pushed her under. This time the descent was instantaneous and in place of a bright flash of stars or lights there was just a wet sound of impact and blackness.\n\nThe world didn?t come back in one piece. Instead her mind, or at least any thinking part of it that could be considered to actually be her, stayed down as the senses begin to feed it tiny pieces of flickering vague information that it continued to ignore. Occasionally the ears reported a beeping sound and occasionally they reported voices but there was nothing to interpret either of them. Sometimes the eyes said there was light beyond closed lids sometimes they said something with looming over her.\n\nThe first thing resembling an idea that dripped into her mind was the sound of breathing, it took her awhile to realize it was her own. When she did realize that her mind worked to force the eyes open because the last time she could remember, she had not been safe. The coherent, albeit painted with the same surreal sense that all dreamlike images receive, scene was of a children?s bedroom. That was weird enough by her verdict as she had never been in a bedroom that looked quite like this, though she had definitely been in a thin blue hospital gown like this before. At least, while she hadn?t been in such a bedroom that she could recall some of the toys did look a bit familiar and it was a bit too dark to make out many details. A brief Flash of memory over the last thing to happen before everything went black sent her hand groping across her forehead to feel for a new wound. Instead all that she found on her head was a new set of bandages.\n\nThe movement drew her attention to the fact that an IV had been run into her arm and ran up to what looks like a small bag of saline solution hanging from a metal mount on the floor next to a nightstand and lamp. The last thing she would be comfortable with now was the dark so Candy grappled with the task of activating the lamp via the convoluted flailing that was typical of the freshly awakened and recently injured. The light felt infernally bright and she threw a hand up over her eyes, squinting through the gap between her fingers, when it flared to life.\n\nAfter the requisite blinking and glowering at the light source the rest of the room came into vision. The room had three doors, if one included the folding wooden closet door, all of which had been left open a crack. She had on some subconscious level expected the Almost White but gentle pastels of the sterile hospital room decor and instead found a slightly off-white repeating wallpaper pattern with dark blue, bordering on purple, carpets and then only slightly lighter blue on the ceiling. In addition to the nightstand there was also a pair of dressers in two different sizes all of which look like they came from the same set of bright children?s blue furniture. In the light the toys no longer looked so familiar, except in the general sense that all children?s toys share a certain superficial similarity, large toy phones are pretty much Universal to the playrooms of young children from the right point in time even if this one did have a vaguely disconcerting grin on its face, a toy caterpillar and bright colors that one would never find in nature is equally common, and the only thing special about the child-sized purple robot was the fact that it indicated the bedroom was most likely meant for a boy. Her gaze had been sweeping around as part of this itemization and when it had crawled around the side it landed back on the bed and with a Yelp that bordered on a scream candy landed on the floor on the opposite side.\n\nThe object responsible for the scream and the rough Landing, which was now resulting in are trying to untangle herself from the IV line and its rack which had fallen on top of her, sat completely unmoving on the bed. This is of course the natural behavior of stuffed toys and despite this some plushies do manage to strike a certain chord of terror in the hearts of children. In this case however the terror could probably have been recreated with a decent photo as anything bearing the likeness of Jeremy human and sprung on her as a surprise moments after waking in a strange environment would have been able to scare her that severely. The breathing had escalated again but by the time the IV was no longer wrapped around her arms and legs she had gotten it back under control. It had helped that unlike the real thing the plushie was much smaller than her and it takes quite a bit to remain terrified of something you could punt across the room without too much effort.\n\nInstead of wasting effort on creating an airborne stuffed human she spent what may have been the same amount of effort climbing to her feet using the IV stand as a crutch.\n\n``Hello!?'' She called out, her throat and voice alike in the same dry scratchy feeling. She hadn?t been restrained and someone had bandaged her head and run an IV in her. All of those things together suggested that whoever had put her here didn?t have any active desire to injure her, though it didn?t explain why they wouldn?t have just dropped her at a hospital or police station.\n\nNo answer was forthcoming so she concluded that either she would have to find someone or at the very least find a drink of water to assuage her throat and possibly tone down the pain she has progressively becoming more aware of in her head. A random decision chose the right-hand door and she crept towards it managing to get an impressive two whole feet before almost falling on her face after trotting on a flashlight someone had left on the floor. The fall was only avoided by clinging onto the IV hanger for support but afterwards she bent down and grabbed the flashlight because from this angle the lamp light wasn?t penetrating much into the hallway and she wasn?t feeling up to confronting long, dark, and potentially not that empty hallways at the moment.\n\nWith the flashlight turned on and pointing ahead she opened the door further and found it opened onto what seemed to be red checkered walls with a dull white carpet and ceiling with the sort of general domestic decorations, a portrait of a small group of people and a small end table with a lamp from the same decorator as the bedroom on it, that were more commonly associated with a household than any sort of office or professional building. There were also two windows set into the wall, but when candy walked down the hall to shine her flashlight out of them, she found that they seemed to open onto nothing but inky blackness. They also didn?t seem to have any opening mechanism, she made a mental note to grab that end table and hurl it through those windows if it looked for one second like she might need to make an escape by way of defenestration, before continuing down the hallway.\n\nAs she had stepped further down the hallway, she began to hear loud and ragged breathing that got louder the closer she got to the corner at the end. She wasn?t certain that it wasn?t her own breathing, which had also been getting harder and heavier with each step until she was almost there, close enough that if she stretched, she could crane her head around the corner. Even at that point she was only able to separate the two because the breathing had abruptly shifted up to a volume that was physically painful to hear and was suddenly off-beat with her own ragged and pained intake of breath. She swallowed down a sense of panic that seemed to be rising from nothing but someone breathing heavily and was about to shine her flashlight around the corner when the circle of light reflected off of ragged plastic yellow digits that were clinging to the edge of a wall from just out of sight.\n\nThe chain of reaction began at her feet and moved upwards as she began running towards the door, she had used to enter the hallway. Between the rate at which the reaction was reaching her head and chest and what seemed an unnatural slowness to her running speed she got a good sight of the owner of the digits when they pulled themselves around the corner. It was the humanitronic Fritzine looming and glaring with piercing and glowing eyes. This was not the Fritzine of fact and experience, which was one of the better maintained of the characters, this was the Fritzine of her memory and Imagination which oftentimes feels significantly more real than their factual counterpart. The figure was easily ten feet tall and was practically hunched over to fit into the available space, the yellow plastic fingers had been sharpened into dirty talons that ripped furrows into the walls and floor, the coveralls and the fake skin alike were torn into ragged scraps that barely clung to the mechanical skeleton inside and which was visible through the tears and holes bye the light gleaming off of it, and easily atop the list of differences that were holding her rapt attention this version had a hideously distended jaw full of razor sharp metal fangs that scraped against each other and a Cascade of Sparks with each massive ragged breath that seemed to draw out of the figure.\n\nAll of this seemed far too clear to her, much as her movements seemed far too slow, as if the world was becoming trapped in sap that was turning to amber freezing things slowly in place while retaining a shocking clarity. A few sprinting steps away she felt the tug as the IV holder fell down, but she kept running. By the time her fingertips brushed against the doorway she could feel the wind against her back as the flailing arms of her pursuer swiped at her. When her hands gripped the inside of the door and tried to slam it shut, they did so on the face and one of the arms which jammed it open.\n\nCandy had started screaming at some point along the sprint, she didn?t know when, and she didn?t stop screaming as she slammed her shoulder as hard as she could against the door to close it against the limb and the glowering yellow visage. At some point in her panicking efforts the arm and face withdrew a bit and she was able to slam the door shut. She was just beginning efforts to slow her breathing and stop screaming when they started up again as she felt a violent tugging against the IV chord that was now running through the crack between the door and the doorway. Fingers scrambled at the tape securing the tubing to her arm and the instant it was no longer secured it snapped tight up against the door and the tugging stopped.\n\nShe laid there then, practically in a collapse, working with every ounce of will she could muster to repress the urge to scream again and to slow the terrified panting that was barely audible over the ragged noises of her attacker. She looked down at her arm where the IV had been installed, she noticed there was now a bare patch with a small dot of blood pooling from a hole and saw that something had torn at the blue hospital gown she was wearing. A rather intense strike was dealt to the will trying to repress a scream when she held it to the side and twisted to look at the portion of back under the torn gown. When those grasping talons had swiped at her they had torn a footlong rent in both the gown and in her side. Despite the massive wound there was no pain, blood, or gore. It was as if the part of her flesh that had existed had simply vanished into nothingness like it had never been there and the part of her that should have been next to it and revealed a hideous view of her bodies innerworkings instead revealed simply a pitch black expanse. When fingers were brushed tenderly over the gap there still wasn?t any pain, but they?re also wasn?t any sense of contact with anything else inside.\n\n``A dream, a dream,'' her speech was babbling, panicked, and garbled ``This has to be a dream.''\n\n``Oh,'' grated a hauntingly familiar voice from the direction of the bed ``so very close.''\n\nCandy knew what she would see before she even looked at the bed. So, she was not surprised to see that the only thing in that direction was the Jeremy doll. She was also not surprised to see that it was as twisted and monstrous as the thing in the hall had been. The doll was almost twice the size it had been, the plush mitten-like hands were replaced with articulated digits ending in pointed claws, the eyes were alight with some hellish fire, and the head was now split into a giant razor filled maw.\n\nThe gaping orifice moved slowly and out of sequence with the words that seemed to slip from it in a strange mechanical voice that nonetheless dripped with a barely contained sadistic glee ``so close, and yet so very far.''\n\nWhen the voice spoke again it was from a different part of the bed and she was startled to see another doll identical in monstrous nature had seemingly popped into existence at the foot of the bed. It too, had a jaw that moved open and shut heedless of the exact words it seemed to produce `` so very far from the answer, so very far from home, so very far from safety, and so very far from anyone who could help you.'' as it finished speaking both of the Dolls seemed to vibrate at place with such intensity that they blurred before they blinked out of existence and reappeared as one at a spot on the bed halfway between. The combined doll was twice the size of either previous individual and looked like some malformed attempt to sew both of them together. One head stuck out of the belly, an extra half sized arm stuck out from the neck, and a foot was poking disjointedly out of the knee.\n\n The disfigurement didn?t stop the moving mouths, but the source of the voice did jump again this time to the head of the bed as another identical doll spontaneously manifested on one of the pillows. ``You just kept coming back, ever so eager to sate your curiosity at whatever the cost.'' Candy was slowly crawling to her feet, rendered mute by the shock or by the strange and byzantine rules that governed nightmares as the dolls maintained their harsh monologues. ``We broke your bones twice and nearly took your life each time'' this time the blurring and merging happened mid-sentence without interrupting or distorting the words ``and now we have broken your mind which was all you really had left wasn?t it?''\n\n``You gave up your life to find out our secrets,'' The fourth doll was on the floor only a few feet from her ``funneling everything you could into an addiction for our secrets, and did it get you anything?''\n\nWhen they merged this time, it was not into a doll of any size. Instead, they had merged into a version of the real Jeremy humanitronic that was as twisted as Fritzine had been. The hulking humanitronic had formed from the combination standing on the floor at the foot of the bed and looming over her. This time the voice felt less warped, it felt more real, exactly as it had the last time she had heard it veiled through a cloud of pain and fading consciousness ``No, all it has given you is a collection of scars, a miserable handful of hints that you have no hope of understanding, and a much shorter life.'' \n\nThe Grim emphasis on that last one had coincided with her turning, scrabbling for the doorknob, yanking it open, and trying to sprint out into the hallway where she hoped she would at least have a chance to run away. Perhaps in the waking world she would have made her Escape even against the surprising speed of the humanitronics. But in this world flight happened under its own rules and her molasses slow movements were halted when Jeremy?s foot stomped solidly down on the back of her leg. There wasn?t any pain to go with the sickening crack, just more of the chilling numbness she had felt in the gash on her side, but she still found herself screaming as her attacker stood over her.\n\nDeja Vu paid an unpleasant visit as Jeremy pinned her down with one foot. This time though he did not crush her ribs as she struggled but bent down, Whispering as he did ``Oh do stop panicking so much, it?s just another day at Jeremy?s, you knew that place was dangerous from the first time you went in there, so many accidents that left so many `broken.''' his face was less than an inch away from her own and one of his claws had gripped her arm in an irresistible mechanical force when he finished the last word. He marked the end of that last word by wrenching the arm until it pried free of the joint with another scream that seemed to fade off into some sort of watery ambience. \n\n``It was even the first thing you heard from management wasn?t it?'' Two of the claws, possibly one of the smaller ones from the tiny malformed figures attached to Jeremy, reached up as he queried and began to tug sharply at each year ``That we can be oh so temperamental, especially when we see what might be a humanitronic with `after-market parts!''' this sentence too was punctuated with mutilation as the grips on her ears turned into twisting tearing forces that tore them off of her head. \n\nThe tirade and the torture continued in equal parts as a fading and seemingly eternal sequence that can only be found in the most bizarre of fever dreams until her world had been reduced to nothing but faint red vision before finally snuffing into blackness.\n\nThe Blackness lasted as it had before, the passage of time something unknowable and incomprehensible without a conscious mind to place the details. It may have been seconds or may have been ages before the senses began to filter in again with incomprehensible data sent to a mind unable to process them.\n\n``So, you aren?t pressing the charges then?''\n\n``No, but let me know when she wakes up, I?m worried that some confidential material may have been seen.''\n\n``no visitors in a while, we had her brother and a friend here during the first month but nothing for the past two weeks''\n\n``Amazing to see her surviving after the first injury, let alone a second one to the same spot''\n\nIt wasn?t words that became the first piece of information to hit even a faint flicker of brain able to comprehend its meaning. The first meaningful conclusion to develop inside was that a faint sound of bird song reminded her of spring mornings. Once one piece of information had made the journey more followed at increasingly high speeds. After a hodgepodge of sensory information that told her she was once more in a bed she began to pry her eyes open. The first sight was a fairly significant relief since it was the sight of a completely routine and unremarkable hospital room.\n\n........................................................................................................\n\nCandy hadn?t gotten to make a phone call until the morning of the next day. The first day after waking up had been spent mostly in a series of uncomfortable examinations and by the time they were done visiting hours and most regular Hospital operations were over. Besides, despite being in a coma for a few months she was remarkably tired and ready to collapse even after that little effort. When she had been given her cell phone her first call had been to her brother, then her editor Mitzi, and finally to Rolfe. The last of which had required a promise to make up for missing an appointment at the bar as well as for causing him undo worry. The first one had resulted only in a large number of well wishes and a promise to visit immediately. Unfortunately, the second had resulted in a prolonged chewing out with little regard for potential medical fragility but with enough of a note of curiosity that she was fairly certain she could get out of sleeping on the proverbial couch if her information turned into a good story.\n\nShe was just finishing up the third phone call and considering with some resentment the prospect of another meal made up of nutritious but bland and healthy hospital food when a nurse peeked around the door, told her she had a visitor, and then withdrew to let them enter. The Visitor was not her brother, in fact it was not anyone she recognized. They were a rabbit with fur of a dull green that was fading to almost brown and only visible where it poked out around bandages. If limited to only that candy would have guessed that she was looking at Ms. May's twin brother. However, aside from the difference in gender, her visitor had about a foot in height less than Ms. May and had a much thicker build. He was wearing a nice Plum suit with a matching tie in a slightly darker shade and though the bandages made it hard for her to tell he seemed to smile in a friendly fashion at her.\n\n``So, you must be the Ms. Candance I?ve heard so much about,'' his voice had the slick and professional friendliness that might have been associated with lawyers but had the slightly less humorless tone that suggested something more along the lines of some corporate executive.\n\n``Sorry,'' she explained as she pointed at the fresh layer of bandages around her head ``recent head trauma, I don?t think I remember you.''\n\n``Oh, well, we haven?t been formally introduced,'' he grinned as he stepped towards the bed, apparently taking the answer as some form of invitation ``my name is Henry Emily, but you can just call me Henry.'' Her heart sank a little as she remembered the name on the emails and anticipated a new set of legal complaints from someone affiliated with the new management of the restaurant. It dropped into a gaping bottomless pit when her ears caught a faint sound that was almost inaudible underneath his speaking voice. With each step towards her there had been a faint mechanical whirring noise that she had last heard when she had last been conscious coming from a few inches behind her. As she felt blood draining from her face Henry continued ``I?m the new owner of Jeremy?s, I asked the Hospital and the police to let me know as soon as you woke up. I wanted to talk to you about some things you may have seen and about some of my plans for the future and the new Jeremy Human's.''\n\n", "writing_bbcode_parsed": "Breathing in the Halls

By Litmauthor

 Apparently when the door was shut it must have been pretty airtight because there didn?t seem to be much in the way of dust inside and she couldn?t make out any footprints. Now some dust had been disturbed by her movement and was filtering down into the hole through the beam of her flashlight.

It?s a credit to experience that she did not simply leap down the hole. Instead Candy pulled out her text messaging app and snapped off a quick message to Rolf ``Hey, you won?t believe this, but I just found a crawl space I think the police never found.'' ~ Candy

``...''~Rolfe

``you remember when I said I sometimes wish I majored in journalism like you? Well I take it back.'' ~ Rolfe

``I've been working for a law firm for 20 years and not once have I sent a text message that sounded like a prelude to a horror movie.'' ~Rolfe

``Yeah, well you shouldn?t give it up for a comedy career either.'' ~Candy

``Right, right, and now you?re going to tell me that you?re going to walk down there without any backup or weapon and you?re going to get stabbed by someone wearing a Halloween mask and with an excess of mother issues.'' ~Rolfe

``Hey, I have you as backup, and I?ve got a stun gun. Besides I?m not going to go that far into it, if I don?t text you in 30 minutes call the police.'' ~Candy

``You sure? You know they?re going to ask what you were doing in there?'' ~Rolfe

``I?ll take doing time for breaking and entering over death by masked oedipal complex.'' ~Candy

``ok, ok, I?ll call the mounties if you don?t respond in a half hour.'' ~Rolfe

``Thanks'' ~Candy

``...'' ~Rolfe

``be careful, ok?'' ~Rolfe

The cell phone returned to service as a flashlight only after she double-checked that it was still ready to dial Emergency Services at one number and that the timer has been set to give her a five-minute notice before she?d have to text Rolfe. After that she slipped it into her pocket and slipped down to climb the ladder into the pit. When she was down there the first thing she did was pull the phone back out and Shine the Light straight down the tunnel. The quick and systematic methods she was employing helped paint a veneer of confidence over the earlier fear and discomfort.

She had expected the tunnel to be like a crawl space, cramped, featureless walls with exposed support columns, and a complete mess of wiring and piping. She only got one out of three, the tunnel was definitely scaled for the humanitronics and that meant there was more than enough room to comfortably stand and possibly for two normal-sized people to walk side-by-side. The walls were nowhere near featureless, instead they and the ceiling we?re covered in a mixture of wires and cables. The whole ran along a few feet before turning and running towards the rest of the restaurant. She couldn?t exactly see down it past the corner and the same part of her that had stopped to update her plan for help stopped her to pull out the stun gun and check that it was charged.

When she peeked around the corner, stun gun and flashlight held at the ready in full expectation of mechanized death leaping out at her, she found a quite thorough mix of confusion and disappointment. On one hand the expectation of finding a dead body, a lurking killer, or a criminal Den loaded with evidence and nefarious plans was fully disappointed. On the other hand, the part that saw light turned on at the end of this length of hallway was confused both by the presence of the lights and by what they illuminated. Seeing no sprinting attackers candy stepped forward to look closer at the large machine that appeared Midway along the tunnel.

The machine itself looked almost like a doorway, if someone had assembled a doorway out of a hodgepodge of homemade Electronics. Many of the cables were plugged directly into the machine or into a small black panel on the wall that then connected to the machine itself. Judging by the small lights on the panel there was electricity running into the machine. This was confirmed by an ear placed cautiously against the panel picking up the fain hum of high-powered electrical equipment. The fact that a machine with no visible function had power running to it was almost as strange as the faintly flickering electrical lights down at the other end of the hall glowing around the corner.

Candy waved her stun gun and then her arm through the machine with no more effect then the fur briefly raising with static electricity. Further examination showed that at least some part of the machine extended into the concrete, in the off chance that this was some sort of weight-based booby trap she gingerly stepped over it and through the machine. The entire time she expected to hear some Crackle of electricity or explosion that would precede an end to her investigation, that expectation too was disappointed when she stepped across with nothing more than a feeling of static fuzz washing over her fur. The machine almost looked like a doorway but lacked any slot or mechanism for moving and holding a door. In fact, the inside of the passage described by the machine was completely blank smooth metal. Which only made it even more strange and added to the molehill of questions slowly ascending to mountainhood; why would this part of the building still have power supplied to it, why would a machine that did nothing need a power supply, why was this all hidden below the restaurant, when had it been added, and similar questions about the strange place she was discovering.

Internally the rational side of her found itself at war with the instinctively suspicious part. The former saw this and evaluated it as being the long ago promised but never revealed revamping of the bot Bay attraction. It maintained that they must have been rebuilding it as some form of haunted house type simulation. The suspicious part pointed out that this did not explain why out of everything in this building power was still being routed to the machines and cables in this area let alone who would have the idea of capitalizing on a negative reputation like that in the first place. Miss rational pointed out that maybe in that case it was some sort of emergency safety room with a generator and that she had yet to actually get a chance to talk to the mysterious Mr. Afton who was by all accounts a nutjob. This was promptly pointed out as not getting rid of the weirdness because that would still mean the generator had either been running for months on end or that someone had snuck in and powered up the generator and nutjob or not Mr. Afton was dead and keeping this place running and secret after death was stretching disbelief bad enough to threaten joint injury. That last part was a tactical error and the rational side jumped up and down on top of it while pointing out that clearly this explained everything, and she'd probably find someone who knew a little bit about the hidden tunnel if she only continued. Suspicions replied that this would be most likely to be a junkie rather than a mysterious informant, but they didn?t have their heart in the sentiment especially with actual answers so potentially close.

The internal argument had continued as she walked towards the corner and looked around, in a little less nervous and defensive readiness than she had the previous corner. Unlike the previous corner she was surprised more by what was there then by what wasn?t present. At the end of the hall was a storage room lit by some flickering light bulb with several objects resting on shelves that were the size and shape of heads. More specifically they were the size of the slightly too large and cartoonish heads of the humanitronics, designed to fit over the more skeletal robotic skulls, and the shape of more normal people. There seem to be an assortment of the same four heads repeated a few times across the room. The four heads being repeated were a bird with unnaturally bright yellow coloring, a purple rabbit, a bear wearing a top hat, and a fox wearing an eyepatch.

Complete and utter bafflement rendered her speechless as she walked up to look at the heads, once inside the room and close up to them her first impression was confirmed. They were the hollow heads designed to fit over the endoskeletons of the robotic performers in the pizzeria. But they weren?t cartoon humans and instead seemed to be some kind of bizarre imitation of people. It was taking candy a few seconds to process this.

``Alright,'' she whispered ``so less slasher movie more Invasion of the Body Snatchers.'' she took a step back and turned around to look at the rest of the room which, given the strangeness that had been directly in front of her, had managed to slip by in a little less detail then was good for her.

Especially more than was good for her heart which attempted to escape the situation by jumping up into her throat and out her mouth. The organ evacuation was attempted in response to her turning and finding herself face to face with a humanitronic dressed up in a bear costume complete with a top hat identical to those on the shelf. Complete shock induced organ loss was only prevented a few seconds later when she realized that it didn?t seem to be moving. Then again, and the thought brought her stun gun up to position for immediate use, they could be completely still up until they moved, they were machines and didn?t need to do things like breath or twitch. She reached out with the other hand and poked it in the chest. The chest was covered in some form of plastic imitation fur and it didn?t so much as creak at the prodding.

      She took a few steps back nonetheless and tried to split her attention between that and the other side of the room which seem to just consist of an open doorway. She probably looked ridiculous walking backwards holding a stun gun at a stationary and seemingly inanimate object but that was a hard argument to make given what she remembered them being able to do. There may have been some success in quelling her panic because it wasn?t moving that?s also possible that some of it was simply because it didn?t look much like the bots that had been haunting her nights for so long.

Instead it reminded her of some of the animatronics she?d seen in other places in her childhood. Things like The Madam Zelda machine that had a chicken dressed in stereotypical fortune-teller garb that claimed through awkward and jerking motions to be able to tell someone their future. The appearance of the bear was prompting more feelings of nostalgia then of fear. It was also prompting a resurgence of miss rational who suggested that the earlier presumption about this being some new attraction for the pizzeria must be true. That it must have been some attempt to entertain children with a set up, new characters or perhaps some mock-up of a mirror-mirror world where Jeremy and his friends were real and the animals were fake. The thought made her visualize underpaid employees made to dress up in costumes as more ``realistic'' humans and she shuddered at the sheer imaginary cheesiness of it all. It was helped because, once in that frame of mind, the bear bore a certain resemblance to the old manager of Jeremy's, provided one filtered Mr. Fazbear through a layer of robotics.

When her movement brought her to the doorway, she turned around halfway so that she could look out the doorway while still keeping her peripheral vision on the unmoving figure. It let out into a hallway that looked disturbingly similar to the hallways in Jeremy?s back when it was still open during one of the rougher stretches complete with the same low-level safety lights along the bottom of the hallway. These seemed to have been the source of the light she had seen in the crawlspace. The light was enough that she turned off the flashlight app. More strange than the site was now that she was not in the room filled with a smell of mechanical equipment and dust that she could smell the deeply ingrained odor of an operating pizza place. The smell of garlic and a few other spices, Candy wasn?t much of a cook and wouldn?t have been able to name then if she tried, was thick enough in the air to make her think it had only stopped operating a few hours ago

The wall next to the door had a sign that read ``Parts and Storage, employees only'' which her suspicious mind pointed out was an odd place for a children?s attraction to enter into. It would make more sense to have it enter into the fake restaurant through the front. However, when the rest of her demanded an explanation as long as her suspicions were going to shoot down their ideas suspicion folded its arms, Shrugged, and shut up. The wall opposite the sign however had some of the many decorations, most of which look like they?ve been designed by children, that littered the hallway. It was also ticked down as another item of evidence for the fake restaurant attraction theory as it depicted a crayon drawing of a small human holding hands with what she had to assume was a drawing of that fox character dressed as a pirate. Similar pictures were tacked up alongside it, one of which had ``My Special Day at Freddy's'' written on it in childish crayon writing.

Even if this all turned out to be a red herring Candy intended to make sure she documented it and before she stepped all the way out of the door her free hand pulled out her phone and snapped a quick picture of the store room and the drawing. The timer said that she had only used a few minutes and had plenty of time before the alarm went off and she switched the camera over to video recording mode before deciding to search down the hallway in the direction she wasn?t facing.

The whole time she was walking down the hallway she was keeping an ear open for the sounds of moving mechanical joints behind her and sweeping the camera up at the walls to make sure that the strange mixture of drawings and decorations was getting recorded as well as the general layout. The decorations depicted a lot more of the fake animals then she had seen in the parts and service room, she ended up counting ten in total with two sets of bird, bear, Fox, and rabbit in slightly different color schemes, one that looks like one of the Mask people, and one that to her pushed incredulity over a cliff because it seems to be a crayon drawing of balloon boy. Rationality danced up and down in some corner of her mind while chanting the phrase ``Crossover promotional attraction'' repeatedly, which is not an enjoyable experience inside of one?s head. Luckily the layout was far more dull, the hallways she had entered into had been an L shape with the end she was walking down branching off into a few doors containing what looked like the small rooms they set aside for private functions. She peeked into a few of them and they seem to just consist of central tables, chairs, more of the omnipresent decorations, and in a few of the cases set places for guests consisting of paper plate, cup, and party hat. The rooms, on the more suspicious side where also completely absent of any dust or debris which was weird even given the nature of the sealed door she had passed through. A good door might keep out new dust, but it wouldn't do jack against the dust that had been sealed inside. That meant that someone had to have come inside this place at some time recently and cleaned the rooms.

Strangely, not strange by comparison to the bizarre feeling of the place as a whole or by comparison to the idea that someone would actually want to incorporate balloon boy out of all the legend of Bob characters into their promotion, the lights all seemed to be on in an empty place. There also didn?t seem to be proper doors since she left the parts and service room. Even the doorway at the end of the hallway, a large one that seem to open to some kind of office, was just an empty passage into the next room. Candy wasn't an expert on feng shui, but it had always struck her as one of the more insanely suspicious parts of the whole Jeremy's fiasco that no one had ever put up safety doors for the guards even after they'd started getting killed off.

By the time she entered that room it had long since occurred to her that at the very least she was uncovering evidence of construction that was in all probability illegal. She was pretty sure that if they had filled out all the forms and gone through the legal process to build a huge underground attraction that some of it would have gotten leaked out or someone would have noticed the construction and excavation. The room she found herself walking into was clearly an office and clearly in use by someone who wasn?t particularly concerned with keeping it neat and tidy. The desk in the center of it had a thick covering of paperwork with some of it balled up for disposal, even more paperwork was haphazardly attached to the wall with a mixture of thumb tacks and tape, a few empty drink cups were scattered about with the paperwork and scattered underneath the desk, and there was a small plastic mask like one would find as a prize for small children depicting the face of the top-hatted bear. There was also a tablet PC on the desk which candy picked up and attempted to activate.

The tablet had power and its battery and turned on, this of course blew out the idly running generator idea that had been proposed previously. Someone had charged up the tablet and judging by the entry at the top ``you are signed in as Jeremy Security" they had also signed in under an account designed to look like it belongs to some ``real life human" version of the pizzeria's famous mascot. When the tablet had started up it had moved straight to an app depicting a layout that she assumed represented the attraction. she tapped on one of the rooms and it opened the security camera view to what was most likely the room indicated. These assumptions working confirmed when she tapped on the parts and services room and saw a view of the space she had been in before complete with the unmoving animatronic. She tapped quickly for the other rooms seeing that, if this was indeed a closed-circuit security camera system, the place did seem like a pretty complete Pizzeria. The only weird point was an option on the area labeled as a prize corner wear a button in the lower right-hand corner offered her the option to rewind a music box. Tapping it filled up an indicator on the screen and she began to hear a faint tune sounding off from somewhere else in the building.

``Okay, so it?s some kind of attraction that lets the kids play at working for the pizzeria?'' the question had been asked out loud and directed at no one so Candy was perfectly comfortable with the fact that it didn?t get an answer. Really if it had gotten an answer she?d have probably jumped out of her skin.  She exited out of the security camera application and found that the only other options on the tablet were an email system that she didn?t recognize and a program labeled ``animatronics_settings.exe.'' she clicked open the email and found a rather full inbox including several messages flagged with a subject of ``training audio.'' It would take a little while to process through all of these emails, so she checked her phone to see about telling Rolfe she'd need an extension. She was disappointed to see that she had no signal anymore but given that this area was underneath a building it wasn?t that much of a surprise. She also saw that she was down to less than twenty minutes before the alarm went off. She handled this by turning to the paperwork on the desk and looking through that to see if it too was just fluff for the imaginary world of the attraction.

After looking at about four of the papers on the desk she was beginning to feel that the papers didn?t quite match with the idea of this being a simulation for children. While it was true that having a notice complaining about an employee's bad odor, a notification about a change to policy regarding time clock procedures, or an a printed out email regarding budget changes were all realistic paperwork to find in a business, even if the odor one might be considered a little bit unprofessional, they were so dull that they didn?t seem like something you would put into an area designed for children. When she found a corporate newsletter, which did identify the restaurant as Freddy Fazbear?s Pizza, she was now fully convinced that if this was indeed an attraction then the person who made it was evil if solely for an attempt to expose children to something as painfully boring as a corporate newsletter. When she moved to examine the papers attached to the wall she took a second to look at what seemed to be an open ventilation panel, which was an oddity in and of itself, and bent down to see if it wasn?t some sort of children access tunnel or playground component. Given the rotating fan down one end of it she?d have to assume it wasn?t.

The papers on the wall followed suit to those on the desk, that is most of them were standard and extremely boring paperwork for a fictional Pizzeria. Or at least most of them were, she stopped when her perusal of the papers brought up an email titled ``notice concerning the animatronics'' that had been sent out to everyone at the company. It described some sort of accident in exactly the fashion that lawyers and corporations always did, with ambiguous terms and a complete avoidance at describing the sequence of events. What it did clearly state was that after following the accident all Personnel were ordered to ensure that any children physically interacting with the animatronics where to be carefully monitored in order to prevent any dangerous play or manhandling of the animatronics. The email also mentioned a closure, by way of stating that the policy would take place with a reopening, which was presumably related to said accident.

Candy pulled that email off the wall; it was strange enough that she felt it needed preservation and shoved it into her bag. She also stopped to check her phone, the investigation of those papers had taken a little longer than she expected and she only had a few minutes left before the alarm sounded off and she?d be forced to rush to somewhere where she had a signal and could send a text out. Figuring that regardless of anything else that could happen, especially if Rolfe  went early or had his clock fast in the police would already be on the way, that it was probably the most useful thing in the room she put the tablet along with some of the more incongruous papers from the desk in her bag. When she did, she had looked up at the back of the office, which she had initially disregarded as being covered with more of the posters and decorations common in the hallway and froze on the only actual photograph on the wall.

She had Frozen because what was on the photograph couldn?t possibly be on the photograph. It consisted, in the abstract, of the typical employee team photo people enjoyed taking to try and erode somewhat at the well-earned apathy people in minimum wage jobs tend to develop. In specific it was impossible because the team in question consisted of human. Humans standing in front of an array of the animatronic characters and holding up a sign reading ``Freddy's Family `87.'' It had to be photoshopped, she pulled it down and stared at it, but whoever had done it had done the single best job at photo editing she had ever seen. The attempt to figure out why someone had gone through that much detail and work on a minor prop that have been almost buried beneath ``children?s'' drawings happened with little notice of the slowing down to the music she had started and even when it had stopped altogether.

When the stupor did finally end it was to her shaking her head quickly in an attempt to dislodge the more fantastic of possibilities such as genetic engineering. She looked back at the bag with the tablet now inside of it and swapped it for the photograph. Once the tablet woke up, she saw a small warning sign in one corner mentioning the music box, she tapped the spot where the circle had been but got no reaction. Shrugging she brought up the small security map and looked at it again. The place seemed to have everything in the facility of interest over on one end by the entrance, which actually made a lot of sense. She put the tablet away and began walking back into the hallway and towards the front area containing the main area.

As she exited the main office, she heard a sudden rattling thump from the ventilation in the office that did make her pause to look at the square hole. But then it just made her laugh a little and keep walking, frankly the idea that the ventilation had been running for possibly years without maintenance and without issue was more disconcerting than the fan breaking down. However, when she resumed walking by the darkened party rooms a nagging feeling that there was something more to the noise as well as a feeling that she was being watched sent glances over her shoulder repeatedly. By the time she was rounding the corner into the more crowded front rooms she had resolved to go back and take a closer look after all of this.

The resolution slipped away from mind shortly after rounding the corner because the rooms ahead of her were far more active and filled with such an array of clashing neon colors that even in the low light it was distracting. Double checking that the phone was in camera mode and recording video she leaned into the room and scanned about while making sure as little of her showed as possible. The room seemed to serve the purpose of the main stage, arcade, prize corner, and main dining area all at once. Further beyond she could see a room with another smaller stage and the sort of slightly reduced color intensity people used for very small children to help reduce the dangerous impact of sugar and robotic cartoon characters. Fine detail was disrupted some by the figures standing on both stages, two were standing on the main stage and one on the distant stage.

While the distant figure didn't show much detail than a pale white length of plastic on the side of the head, the other two were much closer and clearly recognizable as the blue rabbit and the smaller brown bear from the drawings.  None of them were moving, none of them had that unsettling glow to their eyes, and they were far enough away to give her a running start or at least enough time to get the stun gun in position. So, the disruption from them was more reflexive fear than actual interruption.

She made sure to look back at them occasionally as she searched the rest of the room, starting with the prize counter. It looked like the typical prize counter, a huge load of plastic garbage that only the terminally bored would consider fun toys and some of the sugary candy product purchased in bulk and were not distinguishable from their packaging in terms of flavor stored in dividers beneath the clear plexiglass counter. Behind it was a wall with racks of toys that represented a sharp upgrade to the toys below. The sole abnormality was an enormous empty box, wrapped like a birthday present and with the lid leaning back on hinges.

A temptation existed to look closer at the box and see if it was empty, but it was overwhelmed by curiosity at the door she found just past the counter. The door was wholly unremarkable in itself, a generic doubled glass door with a push bar, but what was behind it was jumping to the top of the list of disturbing sights in the room. Before she had thought that the degree of photoshopping on the picture had been too much, far too high quality for the place, but if that was the case then whatever was being used to project the image of a quiet city street outside the door was too high quality for the whole world. She walked up to the door, her mouth slowly gaping in wonder as more of it became clear.

It was beyond considering that it was more simple props and an artificial environment because the building across the street was almost six stories tall and had no sign of a break between prop and matte painting or screen. Candy had already begun pushing the bar on the door open before catching what she was doing.

If the door was locked then the lock didn't stop the push-bar from working, probably the only thing complying with the fire code in here, but it might keep her from getting back inside. So, she grabbed a plush bird off the prize counter and walked back to the door. A testing push showed that the door did open and brought a gust of cold night air rushing into her face. Her brain pointed out that they had a very good AC system running out there as she put the plush in place to keep the door open and stepped through the door.

Asphalt crunched under her feet in familiar fashion and the air had the equally familiar buzz of nighttime noises; the quiet noise of cars on other streets, distant voices, and the occasional faint beat of music too far away to make out. Ignoring any question of why, if this was a fake parking lot then whoever made it had made the most realistic parking lot short of reality itself, right down to the small pieces of garbage you always found littering these places. Candy looked up, and the last arguments from the part of her working to find plausible explanations went quiet.

Above the buildings was a city skyline and above that a night sky with a shining moon just past the halfway phase. Something about seeing the sky drove home the point she'd been trying to deny, that this place was real. In a half-hearted effort to prove otherwise she pulled a pen out of her pocket and flung it as hard as she could straight up. The arc it described couldn't possibly exist in any area a dozen feet underground.

That realization caused a slight whimper to escape her mouth, as everything else fell into place around that one idea. If the place she had walked into couldn't exist in the world she had walked in from then this had to be a different world, some topsy-turvy place where the humanitronics and people had switched places. The first few steps back towards the door were taken without breaking her stare at the moon, the insanity of the whole thing was holding her in a stunned daze.

She only snapped out of it a few minutes after that when her phone began the Unholy raucous that was the alarm. Candy blinked and looked dumbfoundedly at the phone for a second before turning the alarm off.

A reminder of the limited schedule for this visit set free several other ideas that had been held back by the safety bar of shock. While she was looking at the single most insane discovery in history she was also apparently in another world and no longer certain of her ability to return. So, the first thing she had to do was get back to the weird gateway thing and see if she could make it back home.

She had the papers, phot, and tablet so this wouldn't be an empty-handed return if it turned out she couldn't come back. Candy turned around, opened the door the plush bird had held for her and almost walked smack into a robotic rabbit.

The rabbit was the blue model from off the stage and was leaning down towards her as the eyes searched over her face as she shook, and her hand crept towards the stun gun. Her hand was barely in contact with the stun gun before the glowing eyes finished glancing over her and the robot straightened back up. Once back upright the animatronic nodded at her, took a step back, and turned slightly to the side as if inviting her to continue on her way.

Though she wasn't letting go of the grip of the stun gun, Candy sidestepped past the rabbit, the eyes following her the entire time. Once she was clear of the animatronic, she began sprinting down the hall and back the way she'd came.

While her body was running her brain began its own wind-sprints driven mostly by the fact that she now knew that at least one of the robots in this world was running. What she didn't know was why it had been so passive, the only thing she could think of was the strange excuse Jeremy's had made for their own incidents. If the humanitronics had attacked people because they didn't look like humans, then maybe these didn't attack her because they assumed her to be a normal and functioning animatronic. Given how unsettling the robotic animals looked, that wasn't an idea she found flattering, though it was intriguing. If these animatronics weren't hostile and if she could come back, could she get an interview with one of them?

While thoughts of articles with titles like ``Interview with an Interdimensional Android'' and ``Robot Rabbit From Other Worlds'' painted their way across her imagination she came upon the ``Parts and Storage'' room. While she considered that this was probably the first time a title like that appeared outside of a tabloid, she sprinted past the brown bear looking animatronic, still standing motionless next to the tunnel entrance. She didn't stop running until she found herself under the trapdoor and leaning against the ladder. She panted and bent over while she looked at her cell phone and seeing she had a signal sent a message.

``I?m still alive, you aren?t going to believe this'' ~Candy. She was a minute or so early.

``Oh?'' ~Rolfe

``Yeah, I?ll tell you more at the bar, there was a something you're not gonna believe.'' ~Candy

``Really? In a crawlspace, it wasn't a dead body was it?'' ~Rolfe

``No, something way more unbelievable, I think I'll go back and get a more thorough look. Unless you already called the cops.'' ~Candy. On the off chance that he had she began climbing the ladder anyways and walked towards the exit of Bot Bay.

``Not yet, but isn?t it getting a bit late?'' ~Rolfe.

``Maybe, I guess I could shut the trap door. Come back tomorrow night.'' ~Candy.

``Cool, I think the bartender is becoming skeptical that I?m really waiting for a friend.'' ~Rolfe

``So what?'' ~Candy

``So he'll tell everyone and I won?t look popular and be one of the cool kids ;)'' ~Rolfe

``Right, right, on my way'' ~Candy

Silly as it had gone it had helped to know that she had returned to the world of sanity where her friend was still making sarcastic remarks. She had actually found that since walking down into the tunnel her head and chest were both feeling much better. Before she had gone down the scar on her head had been hurting so much that she wouldn?t have been surprised to find it splitting open with fresh blood now the only thing left was the faint sense aching that was usually a sort of echo to more severe pains. Candy chalked it up to the same sense of accomplishment that was leaving her spirit as a whole feeling much higher.  She had no idea who had even built that weird device or where it had taken her, but it was definitely something that would make a story. When she was attempting to lower the trapdoor, which was turning out to be annoyingly heavy, without making too much noise she took the time to consider that maybe that tablet had something else stored on it.

The door slipped out of her hands at the last second to make a quiet but deep sound of rushing air and metal striking cement has it fell neatly into a groove cut from the tile of the floor. It confirmed what she had believed earlier as once the door was in place in the floor it was all but impossible to spot the seams unless you specifically knew where to look. She made a mental note to bring along a good-sized crowbar when she came back, as her own back wasn?t looking forward to the prospect of trying to open the heavy door with the smaller crowbar she normally brought along when she went forth to break into some place.

When she got to the door she stopped and pulled out her phone to take a picture of the room. She then pulled the picture up on her phone and added a note marker onto it highlighting the position of the trap door in the floor. While she was doing this the sense of discovery and victory over a long-standing fear were both washed away in a sudden Rush of deja vu. It was much like the previous flashes of memory, a sense that the world she is in was being covered up with the world that had been. But this time the present didn?t bother to Fall Away. Her mind populated the shelves with their grisly trophies and flooded the room with the dull red light that had so long ago flickered out of the darkness next to the table where a rat working as a security guard had breathed his last. She could almost even see the bright yellow plastic skin coating the arm holding up the bloody pliers.

The feeling and the Phantom images felt so real that her breath started to come out only in gasps and the pain which had been fading away came back with a redoubled intensity. When she reached up to her scar which was now a fire with agony again the piece of information that had struck against her senses and prompted the flashback finally clicked into place. It was a small sound, as of idly moving hydraulics and gears combined with the feeling that you were being observed. The difference between that and the visions of the past rushing up in front of her was that the sound of a humanitronic standing behind her was present both in her memory of the past and her present.

In the past and the present she turned too slowly, her movements feeling like the thick molasses pace of nightmares, in her peripheral vision the red light of her memories and the small light of her phone screen reflected back off the arm and something metal clutched in the hand raised up to Smite her. The entire thing had been frozen in her memory with such a complete Crystal and clarity that she had never been in doubt of it no matter what a therapist might have claimed. Though her memory had held a perfect snapshot and her mind saw the present in the slow motion of pounding adrenaline the arm, bright red in the past and a moldy yellow green in the present was in fast motion bringing its weapon down upon her head. The first time the blow had not knocked her unconscious and she had lay on the floor stunned until blood loss and pain pushed her under. This time the descent was instantaneous and in place of a bright flash of stars or lights there was just a wet sound of impact and blackness.

The world didn?t come back in one piece. Instead her mind, or at least any thinking part of it that could be considered to actually be her, stayed down as the senses begin to feed it tiny pieces of flickering vague information that it continued to ignore. Occasionally the ears reported a beeping sound and occasionally they reported voices but there was nothing to interpret either of them. Sometimes the eyes said there was light beyond closed lids sometimes they said something with looming over her.

The first thing resembling an idea that dripped into her mind was the sound of breathing, it took her awhile to realize it was her own. When she did realize that her mind worked to force the eyes open because the last time she could remember, she had not been safe. The coherent, albeit painted with the same surreal sense that all dreamlike images receive, scene was of a children?s bedroom. That was weird enough by her verdict as she had never been in a bedroom that looked quite like this, though she had definitely been in a thin blue hospital gown like this before. At least, while she hadn?t been in such a bedroom that she could recall some of the toys did look a bit familiar and it was a bit too dark to make out many details. A brief Flash of memory over the last thing to happen before everything went black sent her hand groping across her forehead to feel for a new wound. Instead all that she found on her head was a new set of bandages.

The movement drew her attention to the fact that an IV had been run into her arm and ran up to what looks like a small bag of saline solution hanging from a metal mount on the floor next to a nightstand and lamp. The last thing she would be comfortable with now was the dark so Candy grappled with the task of activating the lamp via the convoluted flailing that was typical of the freshly awakened and recently injured. The light felt infernally bright and she threw a hand up over her eyes, squinting through the gap between her fingers, when it flared to life.

After the requisite blinking and glowering at the light source the rest of the room came into vision. The room had three doors, if one included the folding wooden closet door, all of which had been left open a crack. She had on some subconscious level expected the Almost White but gentle pastels of the sterile hospital room decor and instead found a slightly off-white repeating wallpaper pattern with dark blue, bordering on purple, carpets and then only slightly lighter blue on the ceiling. In addition to the nightstand there was also a pair of dressers in two different sizes all of which look like they came from the same set of bright children?s blue furniture. In the light the toys no longer looked so familiar, except in the general sense that all children?s toys share a certain superficial similarity, large toy phones are pretty much Universal to the playrooms of young children from the right point in time even if this one did have a vaguely disconcerting grin on its face, a toy caterpillar and bright colors that one would never find in nature is equally common, and the only thing special about the child-sized purple robot was the fact that it indicated the bedroom was most likely meant for a boy. Her gaze had been sweeping around as part of this itemization and when it had crawled around the side it landed back on the bed and with a Yelp that bordered on a scream candy landed on the floor on the opposite side.

The object responsible for the scream and the rough Landing, which was now resulting in are trying to untangle herself from the IV line and its rack which had fallen on top of her, sat completely unmoving on the bed. This is of course the natural behavior of stuffed toys and despite this some plushies do manage to strike a certain chord of terror in the hearts of children. In this case however the terror could probably have been recreated with a decent photo as anything bearing the likeness of Jeremy human and sprung on her as a surprise moments after waking in a strange environment would have been able to scare her that severely. The breathing had escalated again but by the time the IV was no longer wrapped around her arms and legs she had gotten it back under control. It had helped that unlike the real thing the plushie was much smaller than her and it takes quite a bit to remain terrified of something you could punt across the room without too much effort.

Instead of wasting effort on creating an airborne stuffed human she spent what may have been the same amount of effort climbing to her feet using the IV stand as a crutch.

``Hello!?'' She called out, her throat and voice alike in the same dry scratchy feeling. She hadn?t been restrained and someone had bandaged her head and run an IV in her. All of those things together suggested that whoever had put her here didn?t have any active desire to injure her, though it didn?t explain why they wouldn?t have just dropped her at a hospital or police station.

No answer was forthcoming so she concluded that either she would have to find someone or at the very least find a drink of water to assuage her throat and possibly tone down the pain she has progressively becoming more aware of in her head. A random decision chose the right-hand door and she crept towards it managing to get an impressive two whole feet before almost falling on her face after trotting on a flashlight someone had left on the floor. The fall was only avoided by clinging onto the IV hanger for support but afterwards she bent down and grabbed the flashlight because from this angle the lamp light wasn?t penetrating much into the hallway and she wasn?t feeling up to confronting long, dark, and potentially not that empty hallways at the moment.

With the flashlight turned on and pointing ahead she opened the door further and found it opened onto what seemed to be red checkered walls with a dull white carpet and ceiling with the sort of general domestic decorations, a portrait of a small group of people and a small end table with a lamp from the same decorator as the bedroom on it, that were more commonly associated with a household than any sort of office or professional building. There were also two windows set into the wall, but when candy walked down the hall to shine her flashlight out of them, she found that they seemed to open onto nothing but inky blackness. They also didn?t seem to have any opening mechanism, she made a mental note to grab that end table and hurl it through those windows if it looked for one second like she might need to make an escape by way of defenestration, before continuing down the hallway.

As she had stepped further down the hallway, she began to hear loud and ragged breathing that got louder the closer she got to the corner at the end. She wasn?t certain that it wasn?t her own breathing, which had also been getting harder and heavier with each step until she was almost there, close enough that if she stretched, she could crane her head around the corner. Even at that point she was only able to separate the two because the breathing had abruptly shifted up to a volume that was physically painful to hear and was suddenly off-beat with her own ragged and pained intake of breath. She swallowed down a sense of panic that seemed to be rising from nothing but someone breathing heavily and was about to shine her flashlight around the corner when the circle of light reflected off of ragged plastic yellow digits that were clinging to the edge of a wall from just out of sight.

The chain of reaction began at her feet and moved upwards as she began running towards the door, she had used to enter the hallway. Between the rate at which the reaction was reaching her head and chest and what seemed an unnatural slowness to her running speed she got a good sight of the owner of the digits when they pulled themselves around the corner. It was the humanitronic Fritzine looming and glaring with piercing and glowing eyes. This was not the Fritzine of fact and experience, which was one of the better maintained of the characters, this was the Fritzine of her memory and Imagination which oftentimes feels significantly more real than their factual counterpart. The figure was easily ten feet tall and was practically hunched over to fit into the available space, the yellow plastic fingers had been sharpened into dirty talons that ripped furrows into the walls and floor, the coveralls and the fake skin alike were torn into ragged scraps that barely clung to the mechanical skeleton inside and which was visible through the tears and holes bye the light gleaming off of it, and easily atop the list of differences that were holding her rapt attention this version had a hideously distended jaw full of razor sharp metal fangs that scraped against each other and a Cascade of Sparks with each massive ragged breath that seemed to draw out of the figure.

All of this seemed far too clear to her, much as her movements seemed far too slow, as if the world was becoming trapped in sap that was turning to amber freezing things slowly in place while retaining a shocking clarity. A few sprinting steps away she felt the tug as the IV holder fell down, but she kept running. By the time her fingertips brushed against the doorway she could feel the wind against her back as the flailing arms of her pursuer swiped at her. When her hands gripped the inside of the door and tried to slam it shut, they did so on the face and one of the arms which jammed it open.

Candy had started screaming at some point along the sprint, she didn?t know when, and she didn?t stop screaming as she slammed her shoulder as hard as she could against the door to close it against the limb and the glowering yellow visage. At some point in her panicking efforts the arm and face withdrew a bit and she was able to slam the door shut. She was just beginning efforts to slow her breathing and stop screaming when they started up again as she felt a violent tugging against the IV chord that was now running through the crack between the door and the doorway. Fingers scrambled at the tape securing the tubing to her arm and the instant it was no longer secured it snapped tight up against the door and the tugging stopped.

She laid there then, practically in a collapse, working with every ounce of will she could muster to repress the urge to scream again and to slow the terrified panting that was barely audible over the ragged noises of her attacker. She looked down at her arm where the IV had been installed, she noticed there was now a bare patch with a small dot of blood pooling from a hole and saw that something had torn at the blue hospital gown she was wearing. A rather intense strike was dealt to the will trying to repress a scream when she held it to the side and twisted to look at the portion of back under the torn gown. When those grasping talons had swiped at her they had torn a footlong rent in both the gown and in her side. Despite the massive wound there was no pain, blood, or gore. It was as if the part of her flesh that had existed had simply vanished into nothingness like it had never been there and the part of her that should have been next to it and revealed a hideous view of her bodies innerworkings instead revealed simply a pitch black expanse. When fingers were brushed tenderly over the gap there still wasn?t any pain, but they?re also wasn?t any sense of contact with anything else inside.

``A dream, a dream,'' her speech was babbling, panicked, and garbled ``This has to be a dream.''

``Oh,'' grated a hauntingly familiar voice from the direction of the bed ``so very close.''

Candy knew what she would see before she even looked at the bed. So, she was not surprised to see that the only thing in that direction was the Jeremy doll. She was also not surprised to see that it was as twisted and monstrous as the thing in the hall had been. The doll was almost twice the size it had been, the plush mitten-like hands were replaced with articulated digits ending in pointed claws, the eyes were alight with some hellish fire, and the head was now split into a giant razor filled maw.

The gaping orifice moved slowly and out of sequence with the words that seemed to slip from it in a strange mechanical voice that nonetheless dripped with a barely contained sadistic glee ``so close, and yet so very far.''

When the voice spoke again it was from a different part of the bed and she was startled to see another doll identical in monstrous nature had seemingly popped into existence at the foot of the bed. It too, had a jaw that moved open and shut heedless of the exact words it seemed to produce `` so very far from the answer, so very far from home, so very far from safety, and so very far from anyone who could help you.'' as it finished speaking both of the Dolls seemed to vibrate at place with such intensity that they blurred before they blinked out of existence and reappeared as one at a spot on the bed halfway between. The combined doll was twice the size of either previous individual and looked like some malformed attempt to sew both of them together. One head stuck out of the belly, an extra half sized arm stuck out from the neck, and a foot was poking disjointedly out of the knee.

 The disfigurement didn?t stop the moving mouths, but the source of the voice did jump again this time to the head of the bed as another identical doll spontaneously manifested on one of the pillows. ``You just kept coming back, ever so eager to sate your curiosity at whatever the cost.'' Candy was slowly crawling to her feet, rendered mute by the shock or by the strange and byzantine rules that governed nightmares as the dolls maintained their harsh monologues.  ``We broke your bones twice and nearly took your life each time'' this time the blurring and merging happened mid-sentence without interrupting or distorting the words ``and now we have broken your mind which was all you really had left wasn?t it?''

``You gave up your life to find out our secrets,'' The fourth doll was on the floor only a few feet from her ``funneling everything you could into an addiction for our secrets, and did it get you anything?''

When they merged this time, it was not into a doll of any size. Instead, they had merged into a version of the real Jeremy humanitronic that was as twisted as Fritzine had been. The hulking humanitronic had formed from the combination standing on the floor at the foot of the bed and looming over her. This time the voice felt less warped, it felt more real, exactly as it had the last time she had heard it veiled through a cloud of pain and fading consciousness ``No, all it has given you is a collection of scars, a miserable handful of hints that you have no hope of understanding, and a much shorter life.''

The Grim emphasis on that last one had coincided with her turning, scrabbling for the doorknob, yanking it open, and trying to sprint out into the hallway where she hoped she would at least have a chance to run away. Perhaps in the waking world she would have made her Escape even against the surprising speed of the humanitronics. But in this world flight happened under its own rules and her molasses slow movements were halted when Jeremy?s foot stomped solidly down on the back of her leg. There wasn?t any pain to go with the sickening crack, just more of the chilling numbness she had felt in the gash on her side, but she still found herself screaming as her attacker stood over her.

Deja Vu paid an unpleasant visit as Jeremy pinned her down with one foot. This time though he did not crush her ribs as she struggled but bent down, Whispering as he did ``Oh do stop panicking so much, it?s just another day at Jeremy?s, you knew that place was dangerous from the first time you went in there, so many accidents that left so many `broken.''' his face was less than an inch away from her own and one of his claws had gripped her arm in an irresistible mechanical force when he finished the last word. He marked the end of that last word by wrenching the arm until it pried free of the joint with another scream that seemed to fade off into some sort of watery ambience.

``It was even the first thing you heard from management wasn?t it?'' Two of the claws, possibly one of the smaller ones from the tiny malformed figures attached to Jeremy, reached up as he queried and began to tug sharply at each year ``That we can be oh so temperamental, especially when we see what might be a humanitronic with `after-market parts!''' this sentence too was punctuated with mutilation as the grips on her ears turned into twisting tearing forces that tore them off of her head.

The tirade and the torture continued in equal parts as a fading and seemingly eternal sequence that can only be found in the most bizarre of fever dreams until her world had been reduced to nothing but faint red vision before finally snuffing into blackness.

The Blackness lasted as it had before, the passage of time something unknowable and incomprehensible without a conscious mind to place the details. It may have been seconds or may have been ages before the senses began to filter in again with incomprehensible data sent to a mind unable to process them.

``So, you aren?t pressing the charges then?''

``No, but let me know when she wakes up, I?m worried that some confidential material may have been seen.''

``no visitors in a while, we had her brother and a friend here during the first month but nothing for the past two weeks''

``Amazing to see her surviving after the first injury, let alone a second one to the same spot''

It wasn?t words that became the first piece of information to hit even a faint flicker of brain able to comprehend its meaning. The first meaningful conclusion to develop inside was that a faint sound of bird song reminded her of spring mornings. Once one piece of information had made the journey more followed at increasingly high speeds. After a hodgepodge of sensory information that told her she was once more in a bed she began to pry her eyes open. The first sight was a fairly significant relief since it was the sight of a completely routine and unremarkable hospital room.

........................................................................................................

Candy hadn?t gotten to make a phone call until the morning of the next day. The first day after waking up had been spent mostly in a series of uncomfortable examinations and by the time they were done visiting hours and most regular Hospital operations were over. Besides, despite being in a coma for a few months she was remarkably tired and ready to collapse even after that little effort. When she had been given her cell phone her first call had been to her brother, then her editor Mitzi, and finally to Rolfe. The last of which had required a promise to make up for missing an appointment at the bar as well as for causing him undo worry. The first one had resulted only in a large number of well wishes and a promise to visit immediately. Unfortunately, the second had resulted in a prolonged chewing out with little regard for potential medical fragility but with enough of a note of curiosity that she was fairly certain she could get out of sleeping on the proverbial couch if her information turned into a good story.

She was just finishing up the third phone call and considering with some resentment the prospect of another meal made up of nutritious but bland and healthy hospital food when a nurse peeked around the door, told her she had a visitor, and then withdrew to let them enter. The Visitor was not her brother, in fact it was not anyone she recognized. They were a rabbit with fur of a dull green that was fading to almost brown and only visible where it poked out around bandages. If limited to only that candy would have guessed that she was looking at Ms. May's twin brother. However, aside from the difference in gender, her visitor had about a foot in height less than Ms. May and had a much thicker build. He was wearing a nice Plum suit with a matching tie in a slightly darker shade and though the bandages made it hard for her to tell he seemed to smile in a friendly fashion at her.

``So, you must be the Ms. Candance I?ve heard so much about,'' his voice had the slick and professional friendliness that might have been associated with lawyers but had the slightly less humorless tone that suggested something more along the lines of some corporate executive.

``Sorry,'' she explained as she pointed at the fresh layer of bandages around her head ``recent head trauma, I don?t think I remember you.''

``Oh, well, we haven?t been formally introduced,'' he grinned as he stepped towards the bed, apparently taking the answer as some form of invitation ``my name is Henry Emily, but you can just call me Henry.'' Her heart sank a little as she remembered the name on the emails and anticipated a new set of legal complaints from someone affiliated with the new management of the restaurant. It dropped into a gaping bottomless pit when her ears caught a faint sound that was almost inaudible underneath his speaking voice. With each step towards her there had been a faint mechanical whirring noise that she had last heard when she had last been conscious coming from a few inches behind her. As she felt blood draining from her face Henry continued ``I?m the new owner of Jeremy?s, I asked the Hospital and the police to let me know as soon as you woke up. I wanted to talk to you about some things you may have seen and about some of my plans for the future and the new Jeremy Human's.''

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