Roy

The Spriggy brand was dead.

All debts had been paid. All assets redistributed. The company was outright dissolved.

Even the memories of the horrors that had happened there begun to fade away in the public consciousness.

The people were gone, too. Liko, along with her entire family, were dead. A whole generation of Liko's young children had lost their lives to the horrors of the pizzeria, all of them collateral damage to the woman in the Sprigatito costume.

Everyone the company had ever touched was dead and gone.

Well, all except one.

Roy was still around.

After he had set the last pizzeria ablaze, laying it to waste, he had largely faded into obscurity. A mystery from Liko's past. A footnote in the history of the restaurant chain. That was fine for him. He wanted to leave that part of his life behind, never wanting to hear the name Spriggy FazSprig ever again. A time defined by mistakes and broken promises.

But then, the paperwork started to arrive. As Spriggy's brand began to close as a corporate entity, Roy's mail was suddenly flooded with notifications, requests, and obligations. As a shareholder, and sole living business partner, all copyrights and trademarks of Spriggy stuck with him, memories of this past life that he had long left behind.

Looking at all the blueprints, the memos, the contacts, Roy felt old wounds begin to reopen. The regrets of a happy relationship that Liko had ruined. They had both been brilliant, but unlike Roy, Liko was too blinded by obsession and pride. She was too jealous, too petty, to unable to see a bigger picture.

But now, holding the paperwork that contained decades of heartbreak and trauma, Roy realized it was his turn. He was once again holding the power. It was his chance to make things right, and one thought resonated in his head.

"I will put them back together. I will put them ALL back together."

Roy would be the one to rebuild Liko's family, to rebuild the pieces of her shattered life, to reclaim his old business partner and her kids that Spriggy had stolen.

But how?

Looking at Liko's work now laid out before him, Roy knew that she had been onto something. Collecting souls, hyper-realistic robots, digital conscious transference. The pieces were all in place. They were just scattered, fragmented. It was almost like there were too many ideas going in too many different directions.

That said, there had to be a way to save it all. Roy just needed to put it all back together.

To rebuild Liko's family, Roy would first need to rebuild the franchise that had killed them all off. With ownership over the characters, their licenses, their technology patents, and the Spriggy name, Roy converted the corporation to an LLC, a structure for smaller businesses that are usually family-owned.

It seemed fitting.

From there, Roy would need souls, and lots of them. Souls were the key. Clearly in the later years of her life, Liko had been using her underground rental facility as a soul farm, sending robots to kids' birthday parties in the hopes of nabbing bits and pieces of the stuff here and there.

But clearly it wasn't enough. Liko had only four or five animatronics going out every week. It was a decent idea, but to get the souls they required, it needed scale. Dozens, hundreds of animatronics all out there, all gathering souls from unsuspecting customers. But to do that would require help, something Liko would never ask for.

Liko had kept everything in-house. Her obsession with with control limited her. Roy though wasn't nearly that precious. A plan like this required partners, people outside the company to do the heavy lifting.

So Roy contacted a mid-size delivery company, PKM Shipping Solutions, to help build replicas of all the original animatronics. And with meal delivery apps being all the rage, why not an animatronic delivery service? Order one to celebrate a birthday, a Halloween party, a 4th of July picnic.

Invite your new animatronic friends over.

Roy would make sure that they made skins for every occasion. Easter, St. Patrick's Day, Cinco de Mayo, etc.

And thus, Spriggy's Animatronic Delivery Service was born.

Was it ridiculous? Maybe. Was it a sellout? No doubt.

It was exactly the kind of thing Liko would've hated, but it needed to be done in order to get enough souls.

Normally, the novelty of ordering an animatronic wore off after one or two times. But with new skins for the holidays, suddenly you had animatronics for every occasion. It would keep people hooked. It would keep them ordering the latest and greatest that Spriggy's brand had to offer. And all the while, they would be collecting and returning souls back to Roy.

In a word, it was brilliant.

There was just one problem with this. No one trusted the brand. The company's name was still mud in the public eye. No one wanted to hire animatronics from the restaurant franchise known for murdering children. Nothing kills a party quite like the threat of death, right?

So Roy needed to find a way to discredit the stories that had come before. He needed to win back the public's affection, reactivate some nostalgia for the spooky stories of their childhoods.

He needed a game. Multiple games, in fact.