Don't Poop on Floor

Don't Poop on Floor
a sequel to Don't Touch Freddy

Written for the Five Nights at Freddy's General Discussion Thread at /vg/.

---

All things being equal, I suppose there are worse ways to spend a night than crowded around a small table playing board games at four in the morning, even if said board games are being played with costumed robots that were trying to kill you just a week prior.

What frightens me the most now is how well I've adapted to this change. It seems like eons ago that I was climbing the walls praying to God that my power would last the night and now I'm sitting here casually tossing dice with would-be murderers.

"I have to say, you guys aren't at all like what I thought you were," I comment absently as I take a sip of my hot chocolate.

"Don't be ridiculous, Mr. Schmidt. We're human too, you know," Freddy calmly says as he shakes the plastic drink cup gently, tumbling two dice out onto the table. "Five and two makes seven, and I advance to Illinois Avenue. I'll be buying it," he adds as he moves the small pewter hat around a cardboard slab that's been destroying families since the 30s.

Freddy presses his colored slips of paper against my arm. "You ARE the banker, Mr. Schmidt. My deed, please."

"Sorry, what?" I reply in a stupor. "What do you mean by 'human too'? Are you like... cyborgs or something?"

Everyone at the table shoots me a withering look -- well, most of them do. Bonnie's still a little shy, surprisingly. Foxy, having gone bankrupt during his third turn, is currently sailing his battleship token around in a little puddle of orange Fanta.

"We're not cyborgs," Chica replies. "Here, look." She pulls her costume head off much to Freddy's protest. Underneath is her metal robot head -- her real one, not the bird mask that she wears. Seems the mascot costume is kind of like their "skin" for lack of a better way of putting it.

"Look down my suit, Mike," Chica insists. "How lewd," Bonnie murmurs from off to my side, shivering visibly. I reluctantly peer down her hollow torso.

"Err... what am I looking at?" I ask nervously, the meager amount of self-preservation left in me sincerely hoping it isn't some kind of trick. Surprise, Mike! We lulled you into a false sense of security but now you're joining our band forever and also on a completely unrelated note we're out of italian sausage for the pizza toppings so if you could just shred yourself a little as we shove you in that'd be great.

"It's just metal stuff, right?" she asks. "That's how you know I'm not a cyborg. Haven't you ever watched Star Trek?"

"What I meant by 'we're human' is that while we're indeed machines, we have feelings and original thoughts just like humans do. That's all there is to it, Mr. Schmidt. Consider it an... ...unfortunate slip of the tongue. Now, my title deed card, if you would please," Freddy continues.

Chica replaces her head as I exchange the card for Freddy's money. "Well, I'm not trying to rock the boat here -- believe me, I vastly prefer this to whatever the hell the last couple of weeks were about. But you guys just seemed very... mechanical back then. Moreso than you're acting right now, anyway."

"We ARE robots, Mike," Bonnie deadpans.

I groan. "You know what I mean! Rote, all of it -- you from the left, Chica from the right! Foxy running over and over and over again down the hallway! Freddy hiding as he creeps along, night after night! There wasn't ever any variety to it. I assumed you were all running on a script!"

The room falls silent, and I suddenly feel that I've said too much. I nervously gulp my soda down while Freddy and I quietly watch Chica take a large bite out of her own slice of pizza. She smacks and grinds the rubbery cheese up and down several times in her beak before simply letting it fall out of her mouth and onto her plate.

"Every bit as good as I remember it," she announces to nobody in particular before taking another bite.

Freddy turns back to me. "Our usual activity is on hold, Mr. Schmidt. This is just a temporary reprieve, a respite of sorts while we ponder new strategies with fewer loopholes."

I ignore the chill down my spine as I mull his words over. I really want to press him -- God knows I do -- but I begrudgingly accept his vague reply for the time being. Why the hell I haven't run out of here screaming all the way is beyond me. As I reach for the dice, I fight the voice in the back of my mind defiantly telling me that the Stockholm syndrome is already setting in.

"Doubles," I announce as I move my pewter wheelbarrow all the way to Go to Jail. "Oh," I mutter. "Don't suppose I get to roll again."

Bonnie takes the dice from me as Freddy shakes his head. "Of course not. Haven't you read the rules to this game?"

His words bring me back to what got this all started. It's Thursday night (well, technically, Friday morning) and ordinarily everyone would be on maximum attack mode trying to kick in my door (and subsequently my skull). Instead we're all clustered around a table enjoying ourselves, at least superficially.

"That reminds me -- do you still have that safety poster?" I ask. Freddy wordlessly reaches to his head and pulls his hat off, allowing the folded-up paper to tumble onto the table.

I pick it up and unfold it. "I'm not sure who wrote this or even what they were thinking. Some of these seem kind of redundant, like the ones about yelling and screaming," I say. Freddy shrugs. "It was a different time, Mr. Schmidt."

Bonnie draws his Chance card and mumbles dejectly as he too is sent to jail alongside me, much to Chica's amusement.

"Well, okay, that's fair -- but this is the one that I bet you guys have to get a lot of questions about. What's the deal with not pooping on the floor?" I ask with a curious grin.

Chica's sudden onslaught of laughter causes her to fumble her dice toss, landing one of them in Foxy's Fantatlantic Ocean. "Diceberg!" he cries as he swerves his battleship to dodge the offending cube.

Freddy rolls his eyes as he places his hat back on his head. "Oh, you would have to bring that one up," he grouses. Chica's face-down on the table laughing for everything her cold mechanical heart's worth, and even Bonnie's snickering quietly next to me.

The bear makes a show of meticulously sorting his money and title deeds in ascending order by value. "It's a long and frankly uninteresting story," he lies obviously. "Why don't we talk about something else, like the time we played a game of Monopoly together and Chica landed on my three houses on New York Avenue?"

"That doesn't count!" Chica whines. "One of the dices landed in that orange soda pool over there by Foxy!"

"Singular 'die', plural 'dice'," Freddy gently corrects. "And a roll is a roll. Don't be a poor sport, Chica."

I shake my head as Chica furiously forks over the hefty rent, reducing net worth to less than I make per week. "You're not weaseling out of this one, Freddy," I reply. "Gimme the details on this floor pooping thing."

Freddy squints at me as he tucks the money into his increasingly large pile. I'm pretty sure he's got more than the bank does by this point.

"It was before we opened this location up," he says. "Our previous store was much, much larger, so we had to downscale a bit when we moved into this building." His tone's notably bitter, and my face softens a little as I listen to him talk.

"When we were in the process of constructing the bathrooms at the previous location, apparently some... technical issues prevented the ladies' restroom from being able to, ah, flush their commodes at the same time as the mens'." I grin internally watching him struggle to delicately phrase what he has to say.

"While the restroom was under repairs, we converted the mens' restroom to a 'family restroom' so that all of our Fazbear Friends could use it."

"Fazbear Friends?" I interrupt. "That's what Fazbear Entertainment refers to our patrons as," Bonnie murmurs.

Freddy rolls the dice, then his eyes as he lands on property he already owns. "Hotels, please," he says. "Not going for another building shortage?" I mutter bitterly as Freddy elevates his plastic houses to plastic barns. He smirks at me but says nothing, passing the dice back over to me. I fail to roll out of Jail and pass to Bonnie, who glumly attempts the same with similar success.

"Anyway, one of our younger customers apparently was unable to use the restroom due to a policy we had in place only allowing one customer inside the restroom at a time -- for obvious reasons, I should hope." I nod. "Sure, if it's a shared bathroom that makes sense. Too many opportunities for litigation otherwise, I'd imagine."

Freddy winks. "Now you're thinking like a company man." Oh god, I am, aren't I.

"Well, the rest of the story should be pretty self-explanatory. Inhibition isn't particularly common in young children by human nature and as a result, nature called and he answered... in the main hallway," Freddy finishes.

I groan. "Oh, man, that's it? I was expecting some kind of payoff for that setup!" Chica rolls her eyes as she throws the dice. "Not every story has a funny ending, Mike," she says. "Ooh, a Chance ca-- Go back THREE SPACES?! But that'll put me on, ooohhh! Freddy, you sneaky jerk!" she wails as lands back on New York for a second time, Freddy's newly-constructed hotels suitably emptying her portfolio.

Freddy chuckles as he collects her remaining deeds and money. "I don't believe it," she sighs. "A wise person once said not every story has a happy ending," I smugly recount. "I said 'funny ending', not 'happy ending'," she shoots back.

I shrug. "Same diff. So have you guys seen the construction going on across the street? What do you think that's all about?"

Chica gets up from the table and peers out one of the dining room windows. "Looks kind of like a restaurant's going up," she replies. I squint at her. "You sure it's not like, a hotel or something and you're just biased because you live in a restaurant?"

"Please don't say hotels," she mutters dejectedly. "But no, I'm pretty sure it's a restaurant. Large parking lot, one-story building, big open space in the middle for a dining room... I mean, it's just the framework right now, but there's not much else it could be."

I frown. "Hopefully it'll just be something like a Mexican restaurant and not bad for business. The last thing I need is to get my hours cut -- or worse -- right here before Christmas."

"For everyone's sake, I have to agree. We're hanging on by a thread as it is. Those new home video game machines are slowly sapping our revenue, and we don't seem to have the same pull with the kids that we did back in the 70s," Freddy adds reluctantly before throwing the dice and drawing a Community Chest card. "At least I'm good enough for second prize in a beauty prize contest," he chuckles.

I shrug. "Is it really that bad? Last Saturday you guys seemed busy enough." I made the mistake of sticking around this place once during a weekend afternoon after my shift ended. The overwhelming amount of screaming children made me lose hearing in one ear for a couple of hours.

"We had three birthday parties scheduled simultaneously, so that was a bit of a fluke," Freddy replies. "We really aren't doing well right now. Management had to sell two of the arcade cabinets off last month just to make ends meet."

Somberly, I turn back to the table. "So this place is going under too, huh? Is that why you threaten to mangle night guards then, to chase them off so you can stick around a little longer?" I ask before I can stop myself.

Real smooth, Mike.

Freddy wordlessly begins picking the pieces of the game up and placing them back in the box. Technically he hasn't won yet, but neither Bonnie nor I move to stop him, our fates all but assured anyway considering the row of gleaming hotels awaiting us for when we inevitably posted bail. Even Foxy wordlessly hands the ship over to Freddy, who wipes the token clean before nesting it in the plastic tray with the others.

Placing the Monopoly box on the stack of other board games nearby, Freddy rises from the table, gently pushes his chair back in neatly, and wanders off in the direction of the backstage storage.

"Now you've done it," Bonnie mumbles, avoiding eye contact. I gaze at him apathetically as he nervously fidgets with his bow tie before finally muttering some excuse or another and heading straight for the broom closet.

I realize there's not going to be much to be had for conversation from here. I unhook my flashlight from my belt and sweep the restaurant with it lazily. "Might as well do the work I'm paid for," I mutter.

I walk around the relatively small restaurant before stepping outside into the cool night air. I'm not a heavy smoker -- maybe half a pack a week at the absolute most -- but a cigarette sounds good right now, and I indulge myself. To my surprise, Foxy follows me out to the back alley, standing just inside the exit door. He seems far different from his usual erratic self, but he's also the character I've had the least exposure to during our "truce".

I light up and step away enough from him so that he doesn't have to stand in my smoke, and not at all because I want to put distance between us in case I have to vault the fence and hide in a dumpster across the street. He falters for a moment before grinning nervously at me, all of his white and gold teeth gleaming in the street lights.

"Those things'll kill you, you know," he says.

I cut my eyes at him. "Ah, well," he backpedals. "Um... look -- there's something you need to know about Freddy. About all of us, really." "Foxy, this is the most lucid I've ever seen you in one sitting. I'm listening," I reply, taking a long drag.

He flips his eyepatch up and looks at me with an almost sad smile. "These sorts of moments are rare for me, so I have to make the most of them when they come," he replies.

"Anyway... about fifteen years ago, maybe a little longer -- it's been so long even I don't rightly remember when -- a handful of kids were... killed... at our old location."

"That's horrible," I finally manage, but it's more of a conditioned reply -- the same sort of reply when you hear that there was a shooting or robbery in the news, knee-jerk sorrow as people search your face to see if you're sincere or not. I can't be blamed, right? This isn't exactly anything unheard of -- people, even kids, are murdered all the time.

Horrible to be sure, but routine.

"Wait -- was this... the 'bite'?" I ask, remembering something the previous security guard mentioned during my first "training session".

Foxy shakes his head. "No, no, that was... something else," he replies. "The details are a little muddled, kind of lost to time. The police did a big investigation but never really got anywhere." He reaches into the pocket of his ragged pants and pulls out a slip of paper -- a news clipping. The article mentions a man having dressed in a mascot costume and luring kids into a back room.

"It says here the kids weren't found but the suspect was caught and convicted. I guess they got the wrong guy?" I grimly remark as I read it. "Five total went missing? Sick bastard."

"Yeah, the press didn't have all the facts straight. There were more than five, and some of the little ones were found... sort of." He closes his jaw for a minute, hanging his head low. "The man they thought did it was later exonerated so as far as the law's concerned it's just an unsolved mystery."

I exhale deeply. "As horrible as all of this is, why are you telling me, and what does this have to do with Freddy specifically?"

Foxy steps a little closer to me and lowers the volume of his voice box to just above a whisper.

"Freddy thinks a security guard might've done it. He witnessed one of the murders himself."


Oh.


That explains so much.


My hands start to shake and it isn't because of the cold. I fumble around for another cigarette and nervously light it up before realizing I'm not even done with the first one. "Oh god," I moan. "No wonder you guys hate us. It all makes sense now."

The erstwhile pirate lays his bare metal hand on my shoulder gently, which does nothing to comfort me. "It's kind of why Freddy's such a stickler for rules and guidelines now. I'm not saying what he does is right. What I'm saying is it's going to take you a lot more than a few games and exploiting loopholes to win Freddy over to your side."

He jabs his hook in the direction of the pizzeria. "The others blindly listen to what he has to say, but... truth be told, I got sick of watching innocent men get dragged off to the parts room a long time ago."

I nod slowly. "So I kinda struck a nerve earlier in more ways than one, then." Foxy smiles slightly. "Oh, certainly, but I also think he needs a good jolt every now and again to refocus him. Freddy considers himself responsible for what happened, but there was nothing he could have done to save even one of those children let alone the rest, and punishing the innocent makes him n-no betterrr."

He twitches a little, jaw involuntarily spasming. "Mmmm. Looks like my t-time's running thin f-for now. Just be p-patient with Freddy and be... ...clever in h-h-handlinnng him, Schmidt. He doesn't trust e-easy, but I think h-he knows in-in his... ...you're a g-good man."

"Thanks, Foxy." I tuck the newspaper clipping away in my pocket as he heads back inside the restaurant, humming to himself as he limps back to the cove.



Before all's said and done, I finish my third smoke -- a record for me in one night -- and tuck the pack away. Throat burning from the smoke and cold air, I seek out a beverage from the soda fountain in the kitchen.

Chica and Bonnie are seated in the dining hall playing checkers against each other. I wave to them and make my way to the backstage, where Freddy is absently arranging the spare costume heads. The overpowering smell of bleach in the room does little to abate my ever-rising dread, but I drink some caffeine-free liquid courage and push the door open.

Freddy turns to look at me and nods slowly, holding what appears to be a discolored version of his own head, faded from years of neglect. He tucks it back in a huge box and slides it under one of the shelves.

"I can always tell when Foxy's been going behind my back," he says as I produce the newspaper clipping.

"Don't take it out on him," I chide. "We all need to be on the same page here if you expect your legacy to survive, Freddy. Like it or not, I'm one of your crew now, and that means I need to know about the skeletons in the closet." I glance at the metal robot frame on the table and chuckle awkwardly. "No offense," I add, patting its leg.

Freddy laughs in spite of himself. "Well, if Foxy told you everything, then you understand my position."

I start to speak out in anger, but bite my tongue. "I don't agree with your methods, Freddy, but I certainly understand your distrust of the night watch, and I apologize for speaking out of turn earlier. That said, I would just like to point out I wasn't even 13 years old when this article was written. So unless you think a child was employed as a security guard at your previous location, I'm pretty sure that rules me out by default."

He pats one of Bonnie's spare heads with a rag, dabbing away at some dust and grime that's accumulated on its surface. "Of course I know that, Mr. Schmidt. You're also the youngest employee we've had in ten years -- most people aren't interested in working below minimum wage at a pizzeria night shift job unless they have a criminal record or can't otherwise find employment elsewhere."

Freddy sighs. "I guess I'm just holding onto some deluded notion that somehow, I can fix everything." He glances at the metal skeleton on the table. "But not every story has a happy ending."

I shake my head. "Actually, the saying is 'not every story has a funny ending'."

Freddy smirks at me. "Same difference, Mr. Schmidt."

I crumple the newspaper article up and toss it in a nearby wastebin in front of him. "You know, I'm not so sure about that anymore," I reply.

He clutches his shop rag awkwardly, buffing the fur on the spare Bonnie head until it's almost starting to shine.

"If you ever want to talk about anything, you know where to find me. Have a good night, Freddy."

I close the door behind myself, leaving Freddy alone with his thoughts.