Realistic or Modern Furry Fuzzballs Funtime Arcade (and pizzeria)

[Sleipnir]

Morgan hummed as Warren answered her and, as she walked in, she stuck close enough to his shoulder to almost be touching him. She scanned the room too, listening to him talk about the possibilities. It felt awfully morbid to think of drug overdoses and allergy flair-ups, and the idea of children being involved made it that much worse. Disgruntled employees coming in and making statements of the violent variety… that made sense, too. “I don’t remember seeing anything in the news,” she told him, turning to watch him as he found the lights. “But…”

When he asked about the ball pit, he got a lovely view of Morgan’s round nose scrunching up before she turned to look at it. “It might be. But if it is,” she answered, “I think I’ll risk finding somewhere else. I’d rather not go home with pink eye.”

Morgan squatted down then to dig through the bag. The place sure was eerie in the dark. The silence was worse than the deafening squeals of children and sharp jingling of the arcade games, overlayed with yet more sound as music played over the sound system. It felt almost distractingly quiet, the way the hills of New Mexico or Arizona felt, or the slick rock when you got far enough away from the roads. Nothing but the wind over rocks.

But the wind here came from a low-running HVAC system, and over that, somewhere, she thought she could hear some sort of mechanical whirring. She wasn’t sure. There were lots of things that could be. So instead she focused on pulling out her red light and her EMF reader.

“Alright. Do you wanna grab the temp gun?” Morgan turned over her shoulder again to hand Warren his spirit box. She already figured he’d want it. Then she grabbed her parabolic mic and headphones for herself. She opened her mouth, for a moment meaning to suggest splitting up, but her voice died in her throat as she looked around again.

The hallways back behind the stage were pitch dark, she couldn’t see a single thing. The dim of the stage swallowed everything, and she could just barely make out Bunbun’s eyes and gaping, hanging mouth if she strained her eyes and stared into the inky darkness beside him. It felt like it was staring at her. Beyond that… she really wasn’t sure what was back there in the bleak darkness.

Morgan felt her stomach drop and she drew a breath as she stood up. “We… should take a look around together,” she decided. “That way if one of us misses something, the other might pick it up, right?”

 

[Hawke.]

"Temp gun is already grabbed." Warren said as he stood from the floor, he accepted the spirit box from her. "Might not be a good idea to get too far from each other here. I don't know where we'll hide and I don't like the idea of you being too far from me." He said as he glanced out to the stage, just able to make out the shapes of the animatronic performers.
He started walking then, one hand brushing the wall. They were sticky with years of built up grease and dust. Nobody was looking back here, why would they clean it?
Finally, the beam of Morgan's flashlight fell upon a set of switches. Warren pulled the one labeled lights and illuminated the stage, there stood the three performers, without the strobing, rainbow colored lights it was a lot easier to see the poor condition they were in. Patches of fur missing, strange stains all over the bodies.
Warren stepped out on the stage and a familiar, sickly sweet smell struck him. "....Smells like death." He looked back at Morgan, only then realizing how that may sound to her. "...Could be rats."

 

[Sleipnir]

Morgan nodded when Warren assured her he already had the temp gun, and she couldn't help but be a touch relieved that he didn't press her any about wanting to stay close. He had plenty of good reasons to want to, anyway, and she didn't want to argue against it -- not when she didn't particularly like the idea of wandering around in the dark alone anyway. It just made her feel a little safer, having Warren right there, knowing he was close. So she followed him and listened as he gave his reasons, and told her he didn't want her to stray too far from him.

She lifted her flashlight to illuminate the switches, and turned to look over her shoulder when Warren flipped the lights. Whether he could see it or not, the tension in her shoulders and back melted once she could see clearly -- the stained floors, the yellow-black lines of something leaking down the walls... her mind drifted back to Savvy having her party there. They'd prepared food in there. The sickly, rotten smell wasn't escaping her, either. It smelled like black puddles at the bottom of a slot canyon -- a smell so bad it turned her around and made her leave the first time. Since then, she'd waded through the stuff enough for it to be familiar.

As she followed him up on the stage, suspicious, she turned and looked around again. "...Could be," she told him, though she was a little reluctant to come to that conclusion. She felt like he was, too, whether he wanted to say so or not. It was just so strong. She kept her eyes skipping from one part of the building to another, right up until she could see lights in the back flickering two or three times. She pulled on her headphones and turned her mic on, then pointed the dome back toward the stage. "We can... we can focus on the rats later, let's try to find this ghost. Figure out if it's roam-y or not."

 

[Hawke.]

"That's what we're here for." Warren said flatly, he turned on his temp gun, humming a little as he turned his back on the animatronics. It was cool, the air was still and dry but it wasn't quite cold enough to be a ghost yet. Looking out from the stage Warren could make out the dimly lit shapes of the dining tables below them. "We don't have much to start with, just the... smell." Warren paused, skin prickling, he swore he heard gears grinding from the pink animatronic rabbit behind him. He turned around, brow furrowed, waiting for it to do that again. To do something. "You hear that?"
The robot didn't move again as Warren stared into its empty eyes, he swore he could feel it watching him. Suspect stains pooled on its chest and down its legs.

 

[Sleipnir]

Morgan jumped and whipped around, too, but the grinding was much louder in her headphones than it might’ve been for Warren. She stayed still for a few long moments, but in those heartbeats, there was no sound to hear except the deafening, artificial silence of her headset and Warren’s muffled voice. She eyed the pink rabbit, leering at the leaking fluids for a few more seconds before she shifted to look back at Warren. She lifted her headphones and set them back around her neck. “That wasn’t just you,” she told him. “Came through on the mic. Which… doesn’t mean everything, but something in there moved. Maybe it was just… Well, I don’t know enough about mechanics to say, but it might just… do that. Like the T. Rex on the Jurassic Park set, right…?”

She turned her head to leer at the rabbit again for a few long minutes. Then she grabbed her EMF reader and stepped over to shove it at the nasty little robot. The silence was cut by a low, penetrating keening as the light flickered up to a 2 reading. Morgan cocked her head and lifted her green eyes again to look at BunBun’s. “Well… somethin’ touched it,” she decided. “Nothing significant. But it’s interesting to see a ghost able to mess with an animatronic like that.”

 

[Hawke.]

Warren pulled out his flip phone then, taking a photo to put together their evidence later on. "I wish I'd been able to find something on this place. Even a police report... I wonder if it's attached to one of these suits..."
Warren pulled out his spirit box. "I'm going to see if I can get a response? Why don't you check the camera's in the office. See if you can catch any orbs? don't know if it'll respond with you in here too."
as he started to walk back towards the switches, it felt like there were eyes on him. He looked back down at his thermometer and noticed that the temperature was beginning to drop.

 

[Sleipnir]

Morgan had to bite back the argument that instantly found its way into her mouth: She couldn't leave, what if something happened? What if it separated them -- what if it cut the breaker? What if she was stuck in the dark?

She couldn't ask any of that, though. She just set her jaw, drew a sharp breath, and nodded. "Right," she replied. "I'll keep an eye out. I'll let you know what I see. The cameras'll be nice for DOTS too, actually." She turned and looked over her shoulder as she headed away from him. It felt wrong. That damn rabbit felt wrong, too, but there were lots of reasons for that. So she flipped the lights on as she headed down the hall to the security room. The floor pulled at her boots, and the walls looked greasy and traces of yellowish something dripped on the walls.

As she approached the security room, she almost wanted to examine the walls closer, figure out what this stuff was. But the idea of that made her skin crawl and she thought better of it. She grimaced and opened the door. She reached out to flip the light on and light up the pitch black room.

When she did, though, there was only a flash of bright light before it dropped to a deep red, and in front of her, there was that stupid hamster-bear-thing, plunging at her with a gaping mouth and black eye sockets. Morgan screamed and jumped back, reached out to shove the animatronic... But her hands met empty air, and the lights flickered back to blinding white. The sudden shock of it was almost as bad as leaping out of her skin.

But Morgan was standing all alone in an empty security bay. She stood still for a few seconds, breathing deep, trying to calm her wildly-beating heart and tense throat. As it slowed, she grabbed her radio with tingling fingers. "Warren, Morgan," she said quietly, her tone even and low. "Ghost event in security. Might be roaming."

It might be following her. That sounded terrible. The last thing she wanted was a banshee.

 

[Hawke.]

Warren froze, his heartbeat was loud in his ears as he heard Morgan scream and instinctively started running towards her, as he leapt from the stage he heard her voice from the radio. "Hang tight, I'm coming over there." And then everything went dark, even the security lights at the front of the arcade.
He was silent for a moment, "Morgan, can you hear me?" he asked, keeping his voice even for her sake. "I think it got the breaker."
He switched on the spirit box.
"Where are you?" In the dim light of the display he could see his breath. "How old are you?"
He started to move as he ran through his questions. The cold creeping through his carrhart jacket, a bone deep chill. He was making his way slowly towards the back hall where Morgan would be hiding. "Why are you here?"
A mist appeared in front of him, Warren stopped. He braced himself as it hit him, seemed to wrap around him. And then dissipated with a sharp hiss.
"Not an Oni." He declared over the radio.

 

[Sleipnir]

Morgan stiffened and froze when the lights dropped and the dark slammed down over her again. Her heart picked up in her chest a second time. Warren’s voice crackled through on the radio, though, and she stayed still. “I’ll be right here,” she told him quietly. It was hellishly hard to try to keep her voice from shaking. “…T-try not to take too long, yeah?”

Down the hall somewhere, she could hear him asking questions on the spirit box. She could hear the white noise of it crackling away. She flipped her flashlight on and cast its red beam around the room. She couldn’t just stand there cowering, waiting for Warren to come rescue her. She couldn’t see the fuse box, though. Not in the security room. She turned again when she heard the hiss of an air ball somewhere, and Warren assured her it wasn’t an oni.

Morgan started down the hall, moving her beam back and forth across the room. “Are you okay?” She asked. “I’m coming to you.”

She wheeled around the corner and lifted her flashlight to light him up. The fine mist of her breath, red in the light of her flashlight, billowed out in swirls. She didn’t notice the cold as much as she noticed the way her shoulders sagged when she caught sight of Warren. She stayed still for a second, then just tried to give him a crooked smile. “Got active fast, huh?”

 

[Hawke.]

"Pretty fast, yeah..." Warren placed a hand on her shoulder, both to comfort her and to steady himself. "Think we pissed it off pretty well, it sure knows we're here." Warren pulled his phone out again, flipping through the settings to turn on his flashlight. It wasn't very strong but he could at least sort of see in front of him, and that's all he needed. "Let's go back out to the car, we'll get the fuse box after we've taken a moment to breathe." His hand ran down her arm, he took Morgan's hand loosely and started to walk.
Holding her hand like that felt almost wrong, she often grabbed onto him when the lights went out though. It didn't feel like enough sometimes. "Did you see the ghost?"

 

[Sleipnir]

The instant Warren suggested leaving, Morgan’s first impulse was to protest. It came so naturally. There was a dozen reasons she wanted to get it done as fast as possible. The dark alone was creepy enough, and some shade lunging at her was more than enough to have her ready to take her bat to whatever was hiding around the corner. Running wasn’t on her list of things to do.

But then Warren’s hand was sliding down her arm and took hers, and she couldn’t find it in her to say a word about it. All she could think to do was tighten her hold on his hand. She followed him, and made her way up to walk with him and not being led. Besides that, Morgan wanted to be a little closer anyway. She shrugged with a sigh when he asked.

“I… don’t know,” she admitted. “It didn’t look like a ghost. It didn’t look like any I’ve seen, anyway, it was— it was— well…” she hesitated, squeezing his hand a little tighter. “It was the bear. I thought that bear was in there with me, Fuzzy.”

 

[Hawke.]

Warren glanced over his shoulder at her, giving her a troubled look. "Didn't think ghosts would change their appearance to inhabit the thing they're haunting..." He said as he guided her behind the stage again. "I guess it's not impossible some ghosts can shapeshift. Just makes me wonder if those things had something to do with this..." As they walked along the wall Warren found the breaker box, which he opened and flipped, turning the stage lights back on.

He froze, squeezing Morgan's hand tight, one of the animatronics was missing from the stage. He placed a hand on his sidearm as if that was going to make a difference.
"Maybe you did see that bear." He said quietly, eyes scanning the room, looking for any sign of the lost bear animatronic. "It can move them."

 

[Sleipnir]

"I mean... Obakes change shape from time to time," she answered thoughtfully. She stayed right next to him as they moved back toward the breaker. "I've never seen them take the shape of an object like that, though. I've never seen... anything like this."

She looked up when he squeezed her hand a little tighter, then turned to look over her shoulder when he spoke. He was right -- Fuzzy was missing. Fuzzy--? She glanced at a sign on the opposite wall. Furry. Furry Fuzzball. Her eyes dropped and she caught sight of Warren checking his firearm. Her stomach dropped a little at that, and she tried to push the feeling away. Warren was more than capable. She knew that. She didn't need to worry about whether or not what he was thinking or planning was a solid idea or not, because she could trust him. Hell -- the only reason she'd ever not gotten along with Warren was because she respected him. It was sure tempting to ask if it was an appropriate to grab her bat, though.

Morgan drew herself back, though, and took a breath, shifting just a little closer -- close enough then to brush up against him. "It must've moved it somewhere else, then," she told him. She pulled her parabolic mic off her belt loop and flipped it on. "The machine itself wasn't there when the red light stopped. I looked for it, it just... wasn't there."

She hesitated for a few seconds then. She needed both her hands to put her headphones back on. She didn't want both her hands, though. She squeezed Warren's one more time before she finally slipped her fingers from his to pull up her headphones and start scanning with the mic for sounds. Footsteps, voices... anything. All that came through, though, was a strange sound grating against her ears like sand. "...Umm..." She frowned, holding her mic steady. It was a sound she'd heard before. Then it hit her. "...I hear something moving. Metal. Like... gears or a timing chain."

 

[Hawke.]

"..I've seen them move mannequins before, I don't think I want to be there if they do attack with the animatronics." Warren had never personally seen it but he'd seen plenty of horror movies. Haunted dolls weren't an unfamiliar concept to anybody. "I don't know that having them shut off is going to help if that's the case either..."
Warren frowned at the comment about metal grating, he was quiet, barely breathing as he listened, sweeping his flashlight across the stage and dining area, the beam just barely reaching the edges of the arcade. Somewhere over there a pair of yellow eyes stared from out of the darkness, only there for just a moment.
But maybe he was paranoid. "...How are you feeling right now?"

 

[Sleipnir]

Morgan tensed and jumped just a little when she saw the eyes, too, but she didn't speak right away.

In the back of her mind, standing there in the dark, the exact same thought had crossed her mind. The exact same feeling had crawled up her spine. Can they possess machines...? She wanted to think that was silly. She'd pushed it down, but it sure sounded to her like Warren was thinking the same thing. And if he was thinking the same thing... Her eyes shot back over to her bat. Then they shot back to the nearest animatronic she could see, glancing it up and down.

...No, yeah. I could tear that shit up.

She drew a slow breath in and looked back over at him, weighing the question carefully. "Jumpy," she admitted begrudgingly. "Like right now, my first instinct is to kick these things' asses if they're gonna try and hunt us from a metal suit."

Morgan had done a lot of things and handled a lot of things in her life -- spriggans, boggarts, ghosts, cryptids... Paging back through it all, one thing was, most conspicuously, missing. "I don't think I've ever managed a possessed object before," she eventually decided. "I've... done a lot. But this'll be new for me." She wasn't the only one she had to worry about, though. Warren was still standing there, staring into the dark, fixated. She shifted over and hooked one of her fingers around one of his. "What about you? How are you doing?"

 

[Hawke.]

"...I'm fine, I think." Warren said, "I don't think we want to piss off the ghosts right away... Destroying the suits wont stop them from hunting us."
He pulled a crucifix from his bag and set it on the ground near the edge of the stage. “…I guess saying ghosts implies there’s more than one, we don’t know that either… what the hell happened to make one ghost in a kids casino? Bad food poisoning?”

Warren knew he wanted to delve deeper into the buildings history, and maybe the animatronics too. If he’d had more time maybe they would have had more of a lead…
he stepped over to inspect the animatronics again, peering into exposed machinery and dead eyes, from his bag he pulled his UV light and a small spray bottle.
He turned the UV light on and gave the faux fur of the rabbit a once over. Not much that stood out immediately.
but that god awful smell…
The smell was overwhelming.
He expected the stains to be oil. But his gut told him to use the luminol.
He sprayed at a spot near the rabbits mouth, saturating it heavily before doing another pass over the spot.

And it glowed.

Instantly they were plunged into darkness again. Warren felt every hair on his body raise in terror as every light in the arcade and on the stage surged back to life, ringing sounds and cries of “WINNER!” Resounded throughout the play space as bear trap teeth bore down on him, he tucked and rolled out of the way as the machine lurched forward with a mechanical groan.
Frantically he looked around for Warren, calling her name as he pulled his gun free.

 

[Sleipnir]

Morgan had been watching when Warren left her side, and in response, she inched back toward her own gear instead of following. She wasn't sure what drove her. Maybe it was the fact that things always seemed to happen faster and ghosts always seemed more aggressive when it was just her and Warren. She couldn't think of a time that even a deogen wasn't eager to hunt just the two of them. Maybe it was something in the air, some.. untraceable sensation that made her antsy. Something she felt in her teeth.

Maybe she was right.

The lights flickered off and her instinct wasn't to reach for Warren right then. Not when he was so far from her. The bat she'd brought with her, though -- her fingers found their way around the tape instantly and, snapping up a bundle of sage with it, she wheeled back around on her heels. She heard Warren's voice, but it was more instinct than real comprehension that told her he yelled her name. In another heartbeat, maybe two, she was at his side again to pull him up from the floor beside him. Her gut instinct said to fight. Even so, she resisted the urge to swing at the nasty, moldy metal bastard. "What now?" she asked, her voice low and close to Warren's ear. "I'll swing on it if that's what we want. We don't have to."