Chapter 3, Part One: The Missing
1986 was shaping up to be a really bad year for Freddy Fazbear's. To start off, the animatronics had been locking up, bringing entire shows to a halt and cancelling them for the rest of the day. The mechanic, Nathan, recommended not having the animatronics powered down at night, instead giving them free roam of the place, to wander around and keep their parts moving. Management agreed, and for about a month, everything was fine, and the animatronics were trusted to be left to their own devices. But then something would change everything. It began when Bonnie asked Nathan if they had hired another animatronic.
"It's a gold colored Freddy," Bonnie told him, "Is he for parties?"
Nathan wasn't sure, and just assumed it was a glitch in Bonnie's system making her randomly color blind, and assured her no. The situation became weirder when some of the guests saw him too, the kids especially. They said he was nice, and really loved to give hugs. Nathan told the day manager, and they searched around, but never saw him in person, and the janitor reported seeing nothing at night either. When the appearances stopped, everyone forgot about this "Golden Freddy" in favor of focusing on day to day operation.
Then those children went missing. No less than five sets of parents had frantically contacted the management one day, saying that they couldn't find their children. Their names were called over the loud speaker, and when none of them showed, the restaurant filed a missing person's report with the local police, and the place was locked up for the night. The next day, when the staff arrived to set the restaurant up for business, a foul odor hung around the show stage. One of the cooks went to investigate, following the stench into the backstage area. The rest of the staff wasn't sure what he saw, but the cook ran out of the stage, outside the restaurant and vomited into the bushes, and wouldn't talk to the others, just stared, shell-shocked. Spooked, the staff made sure the police were contacted, and investigated the stench. What they found was horrifying.
The stench came from corpses. Five. Small. Corpses. The missing children had been murdered, and the bodies hidden backstage in the maintenance closet. Management asked the animatronics if they had seen anything strange, but they just replied that Golden Freddy and returned, telling them that he was,
"Taking these children to a party," the bear said. Freddy was surprised, but nothing in him said that anything was wrong with it, and didn't question it further. The other animatronics figured very much the same, while Foxy never saw anything at all, opting to spend most of his time in Pirate's Cove.
The fallout from the murders was predictable, and a full police investigation was launched, with the restaurant closed until the perpetrator was caught. It had turned out to be an employee that had been fired nearly two years ago, for being a little too... "personal" with some of the younger patrons. He had spent the past two years making a golden version of Freddy Fazbear's suit as a disguise, but managing to avoid the human staff when he baited the victims. The animatronics didn't care, since they assumed all was normal. Once this was discovered, Management decided to have the robots act as guards at night, since the lawsuits left the company unable to afford professional night security. Nathan decided to instill a program that led the machines to realize that no one besides themselves were allowed inside the restaurant at night, especially if they resembled an animatronic. Confident that this would solve the problems, Management was forced to let Nathan go, reasoning that it was not practical in their current state to have a permanent mechanic. They would hire a temporary one if one of the robots were damaged. There hadn't been any problems for years, so it was assumed the sparkling maintenance records would persist.
Nathan explained he would always be on call for the company, as he had grown attached to the animatronics, and would gladly come back and work for less. He would be needed again in 1987.
