Chapter 1: First Night Jitters
The security office wasn’t an office so much as a converted supply closet, jammed between the industrial freezer and a wall that always felt damp. Alex adjusted the stiff collar of her uniform, the polyester squeaking in the silent dark. The only light came from the bank of security monitors, each one a window into a different slice of emptiness.
The main stage. Pirate’s Cove, its curtain drawn. The hallways, lit by dismal, flickering safety lights.
And Freddy. Always Freddy.
Right now, Freddy was on stage, a colossal, shadowy figure flanked by the rabbit and the chicken. Their faces were frozen in perpetual, grinning celebration. But at night, the grins looked hungry. Alex shook her head, dismissing the thought. They’re just machines. Big, dumb wind-up toys. The manager had said the same, along with a mumbled warning about “technical malfunctions” and “staying in the office after dark.”
A metallic pop echoed from the kitchen, making her jump. Her hand flew to the old, heavy flashlight on the desk. Silence descended again, thicker than before. She exhaled slowly, her breath misting in the chill air. The place always got cold after hours, a deep, metallic cold that seeped into your bones.
On monitor three, something shifted.
Freddy was no longer looking at the imagined crowd. Her great, domed head had turned, just a fraction, toward the camera. The black glass eyes seemed to hold a pinpoint of red light deep within.
“Creepy,” Alex muttered to the empty room, her voice swallowed by the hum of the monitors. She reached for her thermos, her movements tight. This was her third night shift this week, hired for extra security during the “remodeling.” The money was good. Better than good. It was get-her-out-of-this-town good. That was worth a little creepiness.
Another sound. Not a pop this time, but a deep, grinding creak of a joint under immense pressure. It came from the speakers, not from the hall. Her eyes snapped back to the stage monitor.
Freddy’s head was fully turned now. The animatronic bear was staring directly into the camera, into her. The red pinpoints in its eyes were no longer pinpoints; they glowed with a steady, baleful light.
“Okay, malfunction number one,” Alex said, forcing a light tone. She tapped the side of the monitor. The image didn’t change. Freddy kept staring.
A new flicker of movement on monitor four: the East Hall corner. Bonnie the Rabbit, now positioned just out of full view, a purple ear twitching into the frame before vanishing.
Her pulse kicked up a notch. They weren’t supposed to move. The power-saving mode, the manager called it. They should be deactivated.
She watched, glued to the screens. For ten minutes, nothing. Then Freddy’s jaw lowered a half-inch and raised again. A silent, mechanical laugh.
“Stop it,” Alex whispered to herself, rubbing her arms. The cold was inside her now. She felt exposed, even in the cramped office. The camera angles were too close, too intimate. They showed Freddy’s worn velour, the speckled mold on Bonnie’s face, the grimy joint of Chica’s wrist as she too began to turn her head on monitor five.
Then, on the main stage monitor, Freddy moved. Not a twitch, but a smooth, deliberate motion. One massive brown paw came up, and the animatronic adjusted its bow tie. The movement was oddly precise, almost fastidious. The glowing eyes never left the camera.
Alex felt a flush creep up her neck that had nothing to do with fear. It was a different kind of exposure. She shifted in her chair, the uniform pants suddenly feeling too tight across her hips, the shirt pulling across her shoulders. Her body didn’t fit standard-issue anything. She was used to the glances, the whispered confusion, the sometimes-ugly words. Futanari. A clinical word for a very personal reality. Here, in the dark, she’d thought she was finally invisible.
But Freddy’s gaze through the static-filled screen felt more acute than any human stare. It wasn’t looking at the uniform. It was tracing the line of her thigh where the fabric strained, the breadth of her shoulders, the unfamiliar topography of her body under the dim, flickering light of the security office. She crossed her arms over her chest, a defensive gesture she hated.
A loud thump from the hallway right outside the office door shattered her paralysis.
She grabbed the flashlight, her knuckles white. The door was locked, she’d checked it a dozen times. But the thump was followed by a slow, dragging scrape. Metal on linoleum.
Creak.
Scrape.
Pause.
She held her breath. The sound was right outside. On monitor two, the West Hall camera showed nothing but empty hallway.
The scrape came again, closer. Then, a low, melodic hum vibrated through the door, deep and resonant. It was the first few bars of Freddy Fazbear’s Toreador March, distorted and slow, like a music box sinking into mud.
The door handle jiggled.
Not a rattle. A deliberate, testing turn. The lock held.
Alex was on her feet, flashlight raised like a club, back pressed against the cold wall of monitors. The screens cast a sickly, shifting light over her face. On every single one, the animatronics were in motion. Bonnie was by the storage room. Chica by the restrooms. Foxy’s curtain in Pirate’s Cove was now open, the withered fox animatronic gone.
And Freddy… Freddy was no longer on the stage.
The central monitor, aimed at the main dining area, showed an empty performance space. The dragging, scraping sound had stopped. The humming had stopped. The only sound was Alex’s own ragged breathing and the electric buzz of the fluorescents overhead.
She risked a glance at monitor one, the camera covering the office’s own doorway. It showed the back of her own door, from the outside.
Looming over it, filling the frame, was Freddy Fazbear.
The animatronic stood motionless, its snout mere inches from the camera lens, its face a landscape of stained fur and hard plastic. Those glowing eyes were now two crimson pools, fixed not on the door, but on the camera itself. On her.
A voice, not from the speaker but from everywhere, synthesized and staticky yet undeniably, terrifyingly present, grated through the silence.
“You are… different.”
The words hung in the meat-scented air. Freddy’s head tilted, a gesture of predatory curiosity. A single, enormous metal finger rose into the camera’s view and slowly, gently, tapped the lens once, twice.
“Let’s see.”