Deceptive

Bearer of Bad News

Charlie waited in the darkness of the building for everyone to show up. She elected to sit at one of the numerous tables, placing the small lantern that Foxy had left behind on the tabletop.

Repeatedly, she checked her cracked wristwatch. Another full minute passed by before the door to the back rooms finally opened again and everybody filed out.

Foxy, Ballora, and Freddy (with Bon-Bon) all dropped into seats on the opposite side of the table. Elizabeth decided to stand off to the side, barely even in the corner of Charlie's vision.

Freddy and Ballora both greeted her. Bon-Bon made some sort of noise that was somewhere between a cough and a gag.

Charlie greeted them back with a small smile that probably looked more like a grimace, pushing the lantern closer to the center of the table.

There was a small stretch of silence after that. All of them looked at her expectantly.

She did not meet their eyes. "Uh... alright, so, I ran into Chief Burke in town earlier today..."

"How is he?" Ballora asked when Charlie left an awkward pause, struggling to continue.

"He's... doing good. But he, uh... he stopped me because he had something... important to tell me." She started drumming her fingers on the table.

They all continued to look at her.

"This is gonna sound... I don't even know, but it was recently discovered that Afton's body was... well, fake."

Charlie watched the faces in front of her go through a variety of expressions. There was disbelief, and fear, and confusion, and other things she wasn't even sure how to interpret. Carefully, she glanced over to Elizabeth, trying to gauge her reaction.

But there wasn't one. There was nothing. Nothing at all. She remained locked on her usual expression, staring out one of the windows.

"Fake?" Ballora repeated after another borderline painful bout of silence, voice slightly muffled by her hand.

"Yeah, fake... Not a real body."

"It was definitely real when we saw it," Foxy said, looking around at all of them. "I mean, it was, right? I got a... clear... view of it. It looked real. It had to be. And, and, surely, when his... body was recovered someone would have noticed if it was fake. Especially after all the time that's passed. That doesn't make any sense..."

"Do you think the guy really faked his death or something? That he's actually still alive?" Bon-Bon asked.

"Well, there's one thing for sure... there's no actual corpse," Charlie told him. "Maybe... maybe he used one of those illusion discs to make one of a fake body look like him? I don't know..."

An uncomfortable silence filled the air yet again.

The room felt much darker all of a sudden. Charlie realized that the sun had gone down completely.