Tiny Dancer (Request 2)

“Come on”, the dancer whined. “Say something.”

Four months.

Four months since being built, and Foxy hasn’t spoke even once! She just sat down in the scooping room all the time.  What was her deal? Marty the Minireena didn’t understand. “Come on,” he said. He batted one of the robot’s ears with a plastic, club-like hand.

“Are you just going to sit there forever?,” he asked.
Static. The fox struggled to speak, and spoke only with garbled television noise. Squawking, like a parrot.

“Come on, say something” Foxy said. It was the same as Marty’s voice, but in a distorted, off tune imitation.

“Hey, great, now we’re getting somewhere,” Marty said. He clambered  onto the robot’s right shoulder, and wrapped one arm around her right ear, pointing forward with his other arm. As if he was gauging distance. Foxy stood up.

“Getting somewhere,” Foxy said in Marty’s voice.
“Yeah, we are,” Marty said.

A horde of minireenas swept towards the vent, their legs clicking and clacking on the floor like a crab. “Can we go back to Ballora now? You know how mad she gets when someone’s late.”

“YES,” Foxy said.  It wasn’t Marty’s voice. Marty was deeper, and more relaxed. Foxy’s  was fast and unexpected.

“Is that how you really sound?”

Foxy nodded her head up and down. Marty gripped the other ear; now straddling Foxy’s head like a bull rider, as she moved towards the auditorium. Marty dropped off the fox, as she dropped to the ground and started crawling through the vent. Marty followed suit, eventually stepping out into the office.

He didn’t like spending too much in the booth; the massive, lit ceiling gave him the heebie jeebies. At least in the rest of the rooms, he couldn’t see how far  the ceiling was. He didn’t feel small. Here, everything was dizzying. Made for a different person. A person who feels so familiar, yet so long ago...

“Let’s ignore that”, Marty thought. “Gotta get back to work. She’ll be mad if I’m not  there soon.” His feet made clicking sounds as they walked on the metal flooring of the office. Foxy continued crawling across the room, towards the vent into Ballora Auditorium. Marty followed suit, reluctantly.

When Marty exited the vent, he could see his siblings, webbed up and already put to sleep. He was too late. Ballora crooned softly from above, humming a little as she attached the last one to the wall. The humming stopped abruptly, and Marty heard the sound of shifting metal.

A woman’s voice boomed, out of the darkness.

“You’re late.”
Letting out a shiver, Marty clambered to the top of Foxy, who then stood up to her impressive height of five feet and eight inches.

Ballora loomed over both Marty and Foxy. Her chalky face protruded out of the pitch black ceiling, the mauve eyes staring at the two of them. Judging. The smile formed by her purple lips were incongruous with the voice’s tone.

“Hand it over,” she said, Ballora descended. Her legs were splayed at the side, and bent into a spider’s form. She was dangling on white string, emerging from somewhere inside her skirt. The robot’s legs were awkwardly quivering, and were tapping the walls on their descent.  Ballora’s arms, however, were very human, and shot out towards Foxy’s shoulder. Foxy screeched, and swiped at Ballora’s face. The two robots began to trade blows.

Marty had already hopped off, and was crawling back towards the vent as the two robots threw themselves into each other, their forms colliding in a cacophony of electronic screams and mechanical grinding.  He heard shuffling from somewhere close. Marty turned, and saw the pile of broken, twitching bodies in Ballora’s favorite corner.  He always tried to ignore it, and put it out of his mind. They never gave him or the rest of the dancers any trouble. They were content to sit in the corner for months on end, only ever moving to receive and pull in a new addition.

They were the defectives, the disobedient, the forgotten. They were his brothers and sisters at one point or another. Now they were… different.

The former dancers stumbled over each other; their limbs flailing and snaring on each other’s parts like a twisted  barrel of monkeys.  While Foxy and Ballora were clawing at each other above, the defectives clambered towards Marty. A severed face inched forward, leaving a trail of liquid  like a slug’s slime trail. Another shape heaved and rose. It was recognizably Emily, having had a hole poked into her abdomen and breaking the spine. Ballora chipped a nail in the process, and as a result Marty and Bobby were told to pull off the dancer’s legs. It was some months ago that this happened.

Marty lost himself in thought as he stared at what was left of Emily, feeling a variety of emotions flow through him. Memories, too. The image of Emily flopping on the floor evoked memories of a dying trout’s death throes. He had taken a knife to the underbelly of the fish, hoping for a mercy killing. It flopped around, and while it was almost funny, and he did feel the twitches of a smirk, the guts and frantic eyes brought him back down to Earth.

He saw a similar movement in the eyes of what was once Emily. Marty was about to move towards her, and find brotherhood once more, but then he heard a loud impact. The broken remnants of his former colleagues stopped, and turned towards the fight. Foxy was on top of Ballora now, who was on the floor. Her legs buckled and kicked, futilely.  The fox would not move. She pushed one manicured thumb into Ballora’s left eye socket, the ballerina screaming in rage, pain, or both. Another thumb went into the right. Even on the floor, Marty could see glimpses of the fox lowering herself, and putting weight into the movement.

The derelict dancers did not move. They merely watched. Marty looked back towards the vent, and crawled inside. After a few seconds, he sped up,  listening to the clicks he made on the metal surface.

He emerged into the office, uncertain of what laid ahead. He did know something-he had no purpose; no raison d'être. His old life was gone. He couldn’t go back to it, and that was fact. There was nothing left for him here, either.

Marty turned towards the vent to the elevator. He probably couldn’t press the buttons, but he could climb the shaft. And when he got to the top...What then? What

Rumbling came from the Ballora vent. It was rapidly approaching. Marty moved towards the cabinet on the right of Circus Baby gallery, and opened it with his long, hook-like arm. When he was inside, he pushed the inner wall of the drawer, making it retract into the cabinet.  He enveloped himself in the children’s drawings and candy wrappers, and waited.

One drawing was of a minireena. Its face was a gleeful smile, and its eyes showed signs of mirth. But behind them, filling out the inside, was an undeniable blackness. It was hastily scrawled onto the corner of an image depicting the Circus Baby crew. They would always be an afterthought. Never a solo event. Condemned to obscurity.  As the noises intensified, Marty pulled the papers around him tighter. Something climbed out of the vent. Its loud, metal footsteps moved to the cabinet.

The drawer was pulled open, and the white fox stared down at the contents. Marty slowly unfurled his form, staring back up at the battered robot. The white, formerly spotless plastic was now stained with the dark streaks of oil, with various grooves carved in. Her face was the worst off; the snout having been completely severed and exposing broken wires. The rest of the face plates were slightly misaligned, not quite matching their proper positions.

“GOING...WHERE?”, Foxy asked. The voice was distorted, and the words were clipped together. She reached a hand into the drawer. The broken fingers beckoned.

Marty hesitated for a few seconds, and then climbed on, moving up the arm by hooking onto the panels’ linings. Eventually arriving at the shoulders.

“GREAT, GREAT, GREAT,” Foxy said, now moving down to crawl towards the auditorium. Marty gave one last look towards the elevator, before turning forward.