I: Two Hundreds Bits
The bell outside the front door rang and Rust Bucket looked up from his morning newspaper. "Come in," he shouted, flipping the page to the comic section. Again the bell rang, yet the door remained closed. From somewhere above him he heard the hurried hoof beats of his daughter as she clambered from her room and down the stairs.
"I'll get it! I'll get it!" the little filly shouted excitedly. She bolted across the kitchen and wrenched the door open. Standing on the other side with a look of impatience was Rust's identical brother, Mortar. He smiled down at the filly who immediately ran to her father.
It had been five years since the brothers had seen each other, and there was still some bad blood surrounding their mother's death. At first, neither spoke—only stared—until finally, Rust stood up and approached the door.
"What brings you here, Mort?" Rust asked. He placed himself squarely in the doorframe, making it clear he'd rather not let his brother into his home. "Come to bury the hatchet?"
"You could say that," Mortar replied. "Do you still do the scrap business?"
"Dad's business?" Rust asked with more than a hint of annoyance. "Yeah, I've kept it going, why?"
Mortar seemed antsy, but he took a deep breath to collect himself. He slicked his greasy mane back and looked his brother square in the eyes. "I…have something for you. It's out in the wagon."
"What is it?" Rust asked with genuine curiosity.
"It'd be easier if I just showed you," Mortar replied.
Rust turned to his daughter. "Wait here, Bonnie. Daddy will be right back."
The filly nodded and remained under the kitchen table, staring out from between the chair legs. Rust closed the door behind him and followed his brother down the dirt path to the main road. At the gate was a big covered wagon with patches all over the canvas.
"So, are you still doing the security job?" Rust asked, trying to make small talk as they walked.
"That's why I'm here, bro. They shut the place down," Mortar replied, walking to the back of the wagon. "I'm sure you've read the news; all those colts and fillies that went missing. Hard to keep a place in business with that kind of stuff."
"Yeah," Rust replied. "That's why I never took Bonnie there."
Mortar opened the back flap of the wagon and motioned for his brother to look inside. "They had to get rid of everything, and with my seniority, I got to take these." In the back of the wagon were four very large, identical crates. Written in red letters on each of them was a name; Bonnie, Chica, Foxy, and Freddy.
"Those are the animatronics?" Rust asked in surprise. "Those are like, thousand bit pieces of machinery, and they just let you take them?"
"They let me take what was left of them," Mortar said cynically. "Night security guard snapped and bashed 'em up pretty good with a pipe wrench. It was the final nail in the restaurant's coffin." He let the flap to the wagon close and stepped back. "I figure you could get a few bits for the scrap metal itself. They're worthless to me."
"No, I know you too well, Morty, how much do you want for them?" Rust asked, looking at his brother through narrowed eyes.
"Fifty bits each," Mortar said without a second's hesitation. "Just enough to get me out of Canterlot and to somewhere a bit more secluded."
Rust mulled the thought over in his head. I'll be lucky if I get a hundred bits for the scrap, he thought, but if I can get one of those things working…
"I'll even help you unload 'em," Mortar said when his brother still had not answered.
"Deal," Rust replied. He could see the delight in his brother's eyes, and it made him question if he'd just gotten conned, though he couldn't see how. No matter what shape the animatronics were in, Rust was sure he could fix at least one.
The two stallions hitched up to the wagon and pulled it around back of the house where the scrap yard was. It was an eye sore, built up from years of Canterlot waste. As new technology had become available, the higher class always just threw their old wares away. Radios, motorized wagons, refrigerators—you name it—it wound up at Rust's Scrap Yard.
In the middle of all the piles of scrap was the workshop where Rust spent most of his time trying to salvage working parts for a living. It had been his father's business, and while Mortar had never seemed interested in it, Rust found it to be his passion. He was rather excited to finally have something other than a radio to tinker with.
They pulled the wagon in silence until they reached the big metal door to the shop. Rust pressed a red button next to the door and it slowly rose up, revealing a clean, organized work area. Every single tool had it's own hook on the walls, and there wasn't so much as a loose screw on the floor.
"Alright, let's set them up here," Rust said, unhitching from the wagon and walking to one of his biggest work benches. The two used their magic and levitated each box carefully out of the wagon and onto the ground.
The crate labeled Freddy was the last out of the wagon, and as they set it down, a slow, warped performance of the Troubadour March could be heard from within. It didn't bother Mortar, but it sent chills up Rust's spine.
"So," Rust said, turning to his brother, "I guess this is the last time I'll be seeing you."
"If all goes well, yes," Mortar said. He looked at the Freddy crate which was still making the haunting melody. He looked at it almost fondly, like the song brought back pleasant memories. A coin pouch hovered in front of his face and it quickly brought him to look away from the crate.
"It's all there," Rust assured him. "Two hundred bits."
Whether or not it was all there, Mortar took the coin pouch and tossed it back into his wagon. "Pleasure doing business with you, bro," he said, hitching himself up and turning to leave. He got halfway out the door before stopping suddenly. "Just…something before I go," he said slowly, like it pained him to utter more words than he really needed to. "Something tells me you're going to try to get those things working again. Don't. Just scrap them and move on. Melt them down into bars and just be done with it."
And without another word, Mortar trotted out of the shop, trailing the wagon behind him.
The music coming from the Freddy crate had finally stopped and Rust felt the hairs on the back of his neck finally stand down. He waited until he heard the gate to the scrap yard shut before returning to the house.
"Bonnie!" he called into the house, and his daughter was by his side in an instant.
"Daddy, who was that? He looked like you!" the filly said, staring up at her father.
"You're too young to remember Uncle Morty," Rust replied, patting his daughter's pink mane lovingly. "Come look what he brought me."
The filly followed closely behind her father as they walked through the scrap yard until they reached the door to the shop. They were less than ten feet away when something inside the shop crashed and the sound of screws rolling across concrete sounded from within. Rust held his daughter back as he rushed to look inside and saw one of the crates had come apart and the animatronic inside had sprawled out on the floor.
"What the…?" Rust whispered as he approached the pile of scrap. The crate had split from all four sides and the lid sat on top of the heap of wires and rods. He looked over the mess and immediately regretted thinking he could fix all four of the animatronics. He just hoped the other three didn't look as bad.
Using his magic, he quickly levitated over some gray bins and began placing all the small parts into them. The endoskeleton itself he laid out on his work bench and then turned back to his daughter.
"Is that a fox, daddy?" she asked, looking over the mangled animatronic. She hopped up onto the swivel stool and scrunched up her nose. "Ew, it stinks," she said, poking at it with her hoof.
"Don't touch anything, please," Rust said, picking up the broken pieces of crate to make sure he hadn't missed any screws. "And yeah," he said, looking at the lettering on the broken crate, "that's Foxy, I guess."
Bonnie hopped down from the stool and looked at the other crates. "Freddy, Chica, and—Oh! Daddy! This one's got my name!" the filly exclaimed. "Open it next! Open it next!"
Rust looked to his tools and levitated his pry bar from its hook. "Stand back," he said, not sure what to expect. The wood creaked and the front of the crate labeled Bonnie fell to the floor, revealing a mostly intact animatronic.
"It's a bunny!" Bonnie said excitedly. The purple animatronic rabbit stared out from the crate right at Rust, like it had been waiting to see him. One of the ears hung limply, held on by a few wires. Other than that, it seemed to be in okay shape, which was a huge relief.
Not wanting to risk mixing up any of the parts, Rust decided he'd keep Freddy and Chica in their crates until he could get the other two mostly assembled. Foxy, he knew, could take days, maybe even weeks.
"What are you going to do with them?" Bonnie asked, knocking on the Chica crate and listening.
"Well, I was going to try fixing them," Rust replied, hanging up his pry bar and grabbing nearly every other tool he owned.
"Can I help?" the filly asked with hopeful eyes.
Rust looked to his daughter and smiled though it pained him to do so. "Why don't you head inside? I'll be in to make you lunch in a little bit."
The filly wanted to argue, but knew it would do no good. "Okay," she said, putting her head down and trudging out of the workshop.
As much as he'd wanted to say yes, he couldn't. She was his daughter, and he believed she should be doing more with her life than picking through garbage every day just to scrape by a living. He didn't want her to end up like him.
Once he heard the door to the house close, Rust turned his full attention to the endoskeleton sprawled across his workbench. First, he tore away the tattered red fur that was barely clinging to the metal frame and that's when he realized what Bonnie had meant about the smell. Everything wreaked of decomp, like something had literally died inside the suit.
He fought back the urge to vomit and began snapping pieces back where they looked like they belonged. After a few frustrating minutes, an idea popped into his head. He turned to see the grizzly purple rabbit still staring at him from its crate and he walked over to it.
"Alright," he said, tearing open the fur on the chest, "let's see what it's supposed to look like." The same odor that had come from the Foxy endoskeleton was emanating from within the Bonnie suit as well, causing him to gag and step back.
Missing foals never found…
A snippet from the news article sprung from Rust's subconscious like a scream in a silent room. He tried to shake the nausea off, but it had only been intensified by the thought of dead foals stuffed into the animatronics he'd just purchased. "No, they would have found them. They would have looked," he said aloud.
He kept repeating the phrase "they would have looked" over and over to himself until he felt sure it was the truth. "Okay," he said, levitating over his flashlight and looking inside Bonnie, "that part connects there, and that's wired to that, and that screws in there…"
The light from the flashlight illuminated everything within the suit, and nowhere in all the wiring and rods did Rust see any bones. Other than the smell, there wasn't anything to hint there'd been anything in the suit other than what was supposed to be. Even the smell could be explained, perhaps, by the animatronics being force fed entire pizzas by rambunctious youths over the years.
Rust took a mental photograph of the mechanics and turned to apply what he'd learned to Foxy when the slightest movement caught his eye. Bonnie's head had sagged slightly, and now the glassy eyes were looking right at him. The rabbit stood taller than he would on his hind legs, so having it look down at him was horribly intimidating.
He took a screwdriver and used the handle to push the head back up so it couldn't look at him, but as soon as he turned away, he heard the neck turn back toward him. After several attempts, he gave up and said, "Go ahead, keep staring."
As he worked on Foxy, he glanced over his shoulder to make sure Bonnie was still looking his way. If he didn't constantly need the rabbit as a reference, he would have sealed the crate back up. After an hour of going back and forth, he finally managed to get Foxy's torso reassembled and decided it was time for lunch.
"Now, you stay right here," Rust said, looking at Bonnie from the door of the workshop. Its gaze was still fixated on the workbench. "When I get back, maybe I'll fix your ear."