Deceptive

Broken Beyond Fixing?

Foxy pushed his hands through his hair. "This is great," he muttered, mostly to himself. Despite everything, he felt something that was almost a smile working its way onto his face. "This is really great! You know, I could hug you right now."

Elizabeth wiped some of the hydraulic fluid off of her face and onto her coveralls, stepping away. "Please don't... I don't want blood all over my clothes."

"But didn't you just wipe fluid on your clothes? Which is kind of like blood. I think?"

"One is something that I can purchase at a variety of hardware stores. The other is a liquid that circulates through the veins and arteries of various animals."

Foxy exhaled a laugh. "I meant that it's like the equivalent of blood for animatronics. Isn't it?"

Elizabeth frowned slightly. "...Not really?"

"Okay. I clearly know nothing. But either way, I'm sorry for ruining your eye and puncturing whatever that stuff runs through."

"Oh, it's fine. But you could give me one of yours to make up for it."

"I would, but I'm not really into the whole pirate look."

"You can't be sure until you try it out," Elizabeth placed her hand on the knife in her breast pocket before promptly dropping it back down to her side. "Only joking. You shouldn't apologize to me, I should apologize to you... I am sorry. It's finally clear to me how unreasonably I was behaving. Even if I can't possibly make up for the things I've done, I am still going to try. First things first, I'm going to find you all another ally."

"Another? Who else even is there?"

"What do you mean? We have her right here in the room with us." Elizabeth walked back over to Riley, who still had not moved at all.

Foxy felt a surge of disbelief, relief, and joy all at once. "Miles basically told me that she was a lost cause."

"He wasn't wrong at the time. I was finally fully past the point of convincing to him." Elizabeth began to disconnect a number of the wires feeding into the back of Riley's head and neck. "You know, I've never meant anyone quite as strong-willed and stubborn as this one. Father grew impatient waiting for her to break past the point of no return. So, in the end, he drilled holes in her head."

Foxy stared at Elizabeth blankly, the mental image of his friend getting holes drilled into her skull drifting in front of his mind's eye unbidden. He swallowed. "So... how did that make her listen exactly?"

"In very simple terms, one of these boxes hanging from her waists contains a list of commands. When one of them is uttered, the box will tell her what to do in response to that command."

"Okay... what do the other boxes do?"

"Some..." Elizabeth paused, seemingly searching for a way to word it that wouldn't confuse Foxy, "we'll say that they cloud her actual thoughts so they can't find their way to the forefront of her mind. The others, well... if I disconnect those, we can add another tally to the body count. Don't worry, though, I know what I am doing; I won't let her die again."

Foxy attempted to sound conversational when he next spoke. "...You sure do talk about death and injury a lot, huh?" Even with the current situation taken into account, it still seemed to come up a lot. She could have much more easily phrased things without bringing up the body count, but she did it anyway.

"Those things have a constant presence in my family. It's hard to not talk and think about them, unfortunately."

"Right. Well, we can work on that, I think."