Mira

Liko still wasn't back. Weird. Mira knew her mother sometimes traveled for work, disappearing for days on end. But usually, there was some sort of notice, a phone call, a sticky note, something.

It wasn't like she and Liko were close, far from it. But in a household of two suffering women coping with years of tragedy and loss, there was at least some element of communication between the two of them. They were united by a name, and a shared pain.

This time, though, things felt different. Liko had left nothing. Her absence was longer. There were no check-ups, no updates, just silence.

Something had happened.

If there was one thing Mira knew about about her mother, it was that she had contingencies, safety checks, backup plans. Her mother was a carefully guarded woman. She held her cards close to her chest and as such, Liko had prepared in the event that something like this ever happened.

Normally, Liko kept her home office locked, but in the event of an unexpected prolonged absence, Mira had been instructed to enter her mother's office and look behind an empty bookshelf in the corner of the room. Rolling her eyes, Mira entered the office. She never fully understood how Liko was able to spend so many hours of her days locked up in here. There was just nothing to do, most of this place was empty.

Mira dragged herself over to the corner, expecting to find an emergency contact list, or a safety deposit box.

But what she found instead was completely unexpected.

The bookshelf swung open to reveal a giant industrial elevator, one that led straight down into an underground bunker. But that was impossible. Hidden inside Mira's childhood home was a secret entrance to an underground science lair?

It didn't make any sense, yet here it was, mapped directly underneath the floor plan of the house she had grown up in, lost her brother in, been tortured in.

Mira thought she had known her mother: a prideful yet angry woman with petty, everyday problems. But clearly, she had been living with a stranger this entire time. Her mother had secrets.

Suddenly, the days of Liko locked inside of her office made sense. She had been here this entire time. Where was here, though? Was this Stripey's Rental Service? Stripey's restaurant had always seemed to be a deeply personal project for Liko, a failure of hers that cut unusually deep, especially after that first location had to close prematurely due to the "gas leaks."

After that day, Liko seemed to change, to lose herself even more in her work. Clearly, the entrance Mira had found was some sort of secret back way into the facility, one that required crawling through vents to navigate.

Mira's mother had been working here in secret, but why?

And that's when Mira found her at the end of the facility: Stripey the Gothitelle, her mother's pride and joy. Except, something was different about her. She wasn't like the others. The way she talked, the stories she told, this...this wasn't just a robot. She was alive somehow. Not only alive, but also familiar.

Was this her sister? But how? Why? What was this place?!

Mira dug around some old files and found blueprints outlining the features of these animatronics. Storage containers, voice mimicking, parental tracking, and was that a child inside one of them?

Was Liko collecting and experimenting on kids? Were all the rumors that Mira heard throughout her past actually true? That the animatronics came to life at night? That there were murders in all the pizzerias? That her mother had somehow been the prime suspect in all of it?

Suddenly, Mira's mind flashed back to her consistent nightmares throughout her childhood. Had she been experimented on too?

Tears stung in her eyes as anger, fear, and confusion filled her body. Liko wasn't just a lame, overworked mother. She was a monster, toying with life itself.

Suddenly, everything clicked. Mira frantically looked around the room, blinking heads on poles staring back at her, expectantly. These were meant to be humanoid. Liko was working down here trying to make believable humanoid creatures, literally rebuilding the family that they had both lost.

The small little Fairy-like robots roaming around the restaurant suddenly took on a whole new context.

Were these meant to be Mira's sister? A replacement for her? A clone? Was Liko building clones of her sister? They seemed to know Mira after all, to react to her presence. She always did have a resemblance toward her mother.

Mira's mind reeled as the reality of her world crumbled to dust. No, she had to get them out of there. If this really was her sister, or any of these things were human, souls, whatever remnant of the people they once were, they needed to be rescued.

Led by the voice of Stripey, Mira marched through the now empty halls of the underground bunker. She would lead them, protect them, and finally, she would be able to forgive herself for the killing of her brother so many yea...

CRUNCH

...It was some sort of violent extraction arm.

Mira had seen that one in the pile of blueprints, something about heat rendering the magical silver metal inside useless. In reality, prior to getting herself crushed and put behind a wall, Liko's methods had become increasingly sophisticated, with a mechanized arm that could infuse new bodies with a soul.

Liko could finally give and take away life. The only thing she needed were the bodies. But Liko wasn't the only one looking for bodies, as Mira was about to learn.

Mira was going to be the hero to help these animatronics alright. She would help the haunted tubes and wires of these animatronics escape, just not in the way she anticipated.

Her sister had lied to her. Another game of pretend.

The extraction arm plowed forward, digging deep into Mira's body. As she heard her bones ripping through her flesh, she blacked out.

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For the next several months, Mira's life was not her own. She was forced to comply with the tangle of wires and spirits that lived inside of her. Her body felt like an overfilled balloon begging to burst.

Day by day, week by week, her flesh began to sag and discolor. She was a walking, talking corpse. Alive, but wishing she wasn't. She was just a puppet, a walking shell. And while she did her best to hide her condition, there was only so much a girl filled with robot spaghetti could do.

The entity in her innards would eventually eject itself, but by that point, the damage had been done. Mira's decaying flesh stank, brown and rotting. But still, even with no bones, even with rotting flesh and begging to die, Mira continued to live. That silvery metal injected into her meant that she couldn't die.

Her anger also refused to die. What she had seen down there in her mother's underground workshop had rocked her to the core. Liko had captured and killed dozens. Her experiments had killed Mira's sister, and then tortured her throughout her childhood. She was actively trying to build human replicants.

Mira didn't know where her mother was, but she knew that she was out there somewhere.

Mira had to correct for the her mother's sins. She had to make everything right. What else could she do with brown, rotting skin?

*****************************************************************************

Mira's strategy was simple, she would apply for nighttime security guard positions at all the old, defunct pizzerias. That way, no one else had to see her, or smell her, during her shifts. All these old pizzerias did need guards after all. Teenage vandals and squatters would always look to get inside these places, yet no one ever wanted to work an overnight graveyard shift unless they were practically out of options.

Enter Mira.

One by one, she would take on the job of security guard, changing her name each time to ensure that no one was able to follow her paper trail. Once inside, she could tamper with the animatronics and figure out how they worked, writing about her experiences in her security logbook.

While there, she would listen to the old tapes where upper management awkwardly welcomed new recruits to their summer jobs (even though she was working nowhere near the summer months).

She heard the gory details of her mother's crimes from outsiders looking in, confused and afraid about what was happening in the walls around them.

Sometimes, she would see her brother in the form of the old Ducky Quaxly suit. The words "SHE LIED" appeared on the walls around her. Except, something else was there. He was no longer alone. Another angrier presence was also in the suit, as if two spirits were forced to share the same body. The old suit would attack Mira now. It was aggressive, its vengeance wanting to lash out at anyone wearing a security guard outfit.

Over time, Mira worked her way through the old restaurants. She spent weeks there looking for clues as to her mother's whereabouts. And each time, at the end of her week shift, she would then set the location on fire. The souls couldn't survive high temperatures, after all. So burning away whatever spirit-laden animatronics that still existed inside seemed like a winning strategy.

All this revisiting of her past though was causing the nightmares to begin again. Hallucinations that brought her back to her childhood. The guilt around killing her brother. Her dreams were oddly mixed with the shrill phone calls of the security guards.

But it would all be worth it in the end. The goal was to eventually stumble across the one location, the one job that would reunite Mira and her mother. Little did Mira know that that day would come sooner than she expected.