Paranormal Case 311087 - Ghosts in the Plastic Shells

As a paranormal agent, it's my duty to investigate odd occurrences and over the many years I've been at this, there's been many a strange thing and sight to behold. Some of us make dark pacts, others enlist the help of beings beyond mortal perception, and a few of us even get divine aid. Myself, I'm a man of Ronove, I've the gifts of polyglot as well as excellent negotiation skills. As an aside, I've also a mean artistic streak, to rival the entire Los Angeles art scene single-handedly, but that's hardly here nor there.

Tracking down a particular cult led me and my partner to a bizarre string of strange occurrences involving a children's entertainment company. You see, places of great emotion and lots of synapse firing tend to be popular energy wells for quite a few supernatural beings, none harder to harvest than the emotion of joy, as it's usually only found in small doses in this vast set of universes. So what better place than a kid's birthday party, right? Well, that's why we are pretty constantly checking the places, and most of the things this cult was sending around to harvest the energy were no-gos.

You see, what these clueless cultists were doing was setting up spiritual fly paper, in hopes of harvesting a great deal of energy for whatever they deigned their master. Zordo or Fleon, something bullshit and not recognized as a significant threat, especially since they got the signs of binding incorrect, as they were just lesser binding signs. We were... surprised to say the least when we found some of the fly paper to be filled to the brim.

One instance actually was entirely accidental, a cult of Elim, lord of Attrition, led a group of sports buffs to madness and ultimately killing one another at a sports bar. Some automatons there were filled up with rather uppity spirits. Another one got clogged when some poor woman choked to death on a condom, bought from a bathroom vendor, in the back alley of some other restaurant only to get haunted by some coin op parlor trick machine.

Then there was our problem subject. A Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria location, shut down years ago, but some reports that the machines were still moving about the empty building. My partner and I were sent to investigate, and what we found was a bit out of our league. Apparently the place wasn't torn down as scheduled due to these hauntings, but also the demolitions devices having severe issues. Typical poltergeists, but the fact that not even a wrecking ball could cave in a little bit of the wall was a bad sign.

Entering the building, we were immediately greeted by the usual traits of a kids' pizza place, the smell of grease and various types of soiling, as well as the stench of death and tokens. Everything about the place struck me as being unbearably awful, especially the aesthetic, as a pacter of Ronove. My partner's got some perception beyond mortal thresholds, and she was locked in a bit of a death gaze with the troublesome animatronic devices. Of course these specters were powerhouses, they were KIDS.

Do you ever wonder why one feels uncomfortable when a child says something unsettling moreso than an adult? With humans, it's that odd time between them gaining sapience in addition to their sentience, and having absolutely no moral compass. They're raw, unrefined, its staring at that unknown factor that reminds us at a primal level of when we stare at a wide-eyed predator eye-to-eye awaiting its judgement of us. Primals, eldritch, daemonic, umbral, archon, and many more forces in this universe love this sort of raw energy for a reason, because of its energy potential.

With lightning speed, the fox pirate thing was upon us, barely giving me time to draw my ZaPara-Ordnance pistol to fire at the damn thing, whatever killed this child initially must've really made them suffer to give them that much strength. My partner was packing a bit heavier than me, with an AK of the Covenant, trying and failing to fend off the chicken and rabbit robots. Fortunately, the void sigils we set around the perimeter of the building held up to keep the neighborhood from hearing the noise, or seeing the muzzle flashes, not to mention absorbing the stray and deflected ammunition.

We barely made it out of there with all the prep work and defensive measures we took, the bear had destroyed most of the ones that'd let us survive the hostile environment we'd set up for the spirits, so we had to flag the place as a Rank 9 threat. After some background research, it was a long string of murders, and the spirit of the kids in those four animatronics were not only getting their power from the intense emotions upon being brutally killed, but piggybacking even MORE power off of some sort of puppet master we failed to identify at the time.

We checked on the place periodically over the years, the robots seemed to have met their own ends somehow, but the place reeks of all that emotional energy. We considered the case closed, until a few more outbursts from these plastic and tin dolls arose here and there, and as time went on, that restaurant that was a Rank 9 was demoted to Rank 1 as the place was torn asunder. Picked clean by buzzards looking to make a quick buck off of the spooky incidents, only for the last vestiges to go up in flames.

On the bright side, we've got two new desk workers, a haunted penguin and a haunted wiener dog, though most of us have stopped bringing loose change and condiment packets to our office branch as a result.