Waiting in the Wings

[Alternative link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lwlyYCQ0NnG-1x8p4VY5D1YLgRt74Pcn3Q9lDlR53U8/edit?usp=sharing ]

Chica’s Party World was destined to fail.

Or so they thought.

 To spin off Chica--the least popular of the Fazbear mascots--into her own restaurant? The Imagination Station first thought the Fredheads had lost their minds. Alternatives like “Foxy’s Treasure Trove” or “Juan’s Jungle Jamboree” were cobbled together and pitched, only to be turned down. With those, they realized that whether they liked it or not, Chica was the “future” of the company.

The Station eventually relented, and began work on “Chica’s Party World”. After much gnashing of the teeth on what exactly a “party world” should look like, and several heated arguments on how to make Chica stand out as the head of the restaurant, a unified aesthetic that combined pastel and pastoral themes was settled upon, and blueprints were drafted. A month after commission, the foundations of Chica’s Party World were presented for approval.

They were returned with coffee stains and suggestions scribbled on the sheets. Most of them were written in blue ink.

“No tank legs”, someone wrote on Candy Cadet.
Another scrawled “Need eggs” on the egg-bound Chiclets’ blueprint.
On Mint Chip’s sheet was the profound question of “Be lumberjack?”

Most perplexing of all were the notes on Chica’s blueprint. A vague, rectangular shape was drawn in the center of her torso, and surrounded by crude arrows pointing inward. In black ink was “Oven=future,” tucked away in the bottom left corner.

After some arguing, Candy Cadet kept his tractor wheels and Mint Chip was allowed to remain an ice cream vendor, but the board wouldn’t budge on the oven, which soon developed into a major point of contention between them and the Station. As it turned out, someone was very, very passionate about the idea of Chica housing an oven rack for baking pizza inside her. As the days went on, the demand became two oven racks and then eventually three, once the practicality of one rack was called into question.

Reluctantly, the Station complied and replanned Chica’s animatronic. She would be considerably bulkier and more expensive than they originally planned, but she’d have the oven, and she’d have the racks, and she would be ready to be made.

Several months later, Chica’s Party World opened and was a smashing success, leaving the Station dumbfounded. Despite their expectations, it surpassed the opening month of Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. The site’s occupancy was reaching its limit each day, and the new characters quickly eclipsed Freddy and his friends. Candy Cadet’s story times and Porkpie’s mudpies were instant hits, as was the leading bird herself, who joked, sang, and played the harmonica as she baked pizzas, all on her very own stage.

“The Coop” was the formal name for Chica’s stage. It was decorated as a farm pen, lined with fencing around its perimeter and only accessible through a latched gate on the front that only employees were allowed to open. Chica was just too big to roam the restaurant, so everything she did was secluded to the Coop, day and night. To get around this problem, the pizzas would be prepared in the kitchen after she took the orders of three lucky audience members, and then someone would open the gate, hand them off to her, and close it as they leave.

On June 3rd at 6:38 pm, she was cooking a cheeseless margherita with extra tomatoes, a pepperoni pizza with shrimp and goat cheese on it, and last but not least, a pineapple, jalapeno, and mushroom pizza that was drizzled in barbecue sauce. She spent the time regaling the audience of the time Candy Cadet accidentally backed over Porkpie while sowing his Sweet Seeds. Porkpie wasn’t banged up too badly, of course, but if he sounded a little funny…

“Now you know why!”

The story was her best yarn of the night, so all noise in the Party Room was drowned out by laughter. The kids loved it. One kid loved it so much, in fact, that he threw his paper plate into the Coop, flicking it like a frisbee. In the chaos her anecdote had created, nobody noticed it fly through the air and land in front of the gate on Chica’s side. While Chica held for laughs, the Chiclets were transported on stage on their mechanical track for her next scene. At that moment, she knew a noise was coming, a noise she could never not say when its time came--

“Ding!”

Three racks slid out of her abdomen, piping hot and fresh as can be. That was the cue for Paulie, who had drawn the short straw that morning, to trudge back to the Coop.

Paulie was being a little slow to reach the stage. Maybe that’s why Chica took a few steps toward the gate--to make his job easier. There were a lot of maybes with this incident, and questions regarding the probability of a six-hundred pound robot losing its balance due to a piece of paper have been brought into question and debated.

What is certain is that Chica’s right foot found the greased plate, and before anyone could react she was out of the pen and on the floor, pulverizing Paulie to the horror of the spectators. Despite his parents’ best attempts to shield his eyes, the boy who had flung the plate caught a glimpse of Paulie as the audience scattered.

His head was like a crushed egg.

Amidst the trampling and the dry-heaves, the lids of three plastic eggs lifted up to expose hairless, saurian creatures whose heads were supported on frail stalks for necks.

Though the Chiclets were blind, they could hear everything that was transpiring in the Party room and began to cheep in distress. Recognizing that the chicken had flown the coop, they predicted a future most fowl.