Serial Saturday Upload
Did I miss an upload? I don’t know anymore. It’s easy to remember EVERY Saturday, but this biweekly thing is messing with my already extremely feeble sense of time. And it’s about to get even worse, because I’ve got a road trip coming up sort of soon. My father will be making the epic journey to see his family and wants to have company on the drive, which I totally get, and while he would I’m sure prefer to have all his children with him, I’m the only one without a day job or social obligations or, you know, a life.
But who am I kidding? I love road trips, so much that I don’t actually care where I’m going or what I’m going to do when I get there. No lie, I took a trip once to get surgery and it was one of the most fun vacations I’ve ever had. We drove around the Grand Canyon, stopped at various tourist traps, marveled at the wondrous diversity of the landscape and the wildlife inhabiting it, ate at sketchy diners and slept in skeezy motels, talked about our books to what non-book people would consider an obnoxious degree, and just had a great time. Yeah, sure, there was the whole stab-you-with-a-scalpel part in the middle, but the rest of it was lit as shit.
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The post-surgery painkillers may have been a factor.
The best part about traveling with my father is the music. The radio around here is pretty much evenly split between preachers and news, so I tend to just put on my playlist when I’m in the mood for music. Nothing wrong with that, except that it does mean I live in something of a musical bubble. I don’t have a whole lot of patience to go browsing for new stuff when I can just put on twelve hours’ worth of stuff I KNOW I like. Dad’s tastes, like mine, are fairly eclectic, so while I know I won’t like everything, I also know there’ll be plenty on his playlist to appreciate. I always come away from one of these trips with a dozen or so new favorite songs, and hopefully the feeling is mutual.
My father is a big believer in discovering new things. For the longest time (my father says), he had fallen into the rhythm of work/home/sleep, and like the rhythms of a song, the rhythms of life can be lulling. Even in a positive light, a routine becomes a rut too easily; too often, that routine comes to feel like a hamster wheel, running and running but going nowhere. My father says his routine was a fairly comfortable one, but there were certainly many years that he thought–comfortably–that his life at that time was just something to get through until he had reached a time of his life when he had more time to really enjoy himself. Instead, he retired and suddenly had no routine at all. He spent a few years puttering around the house, then slowly stopped puttering and just sat around the house. In his own words, he became “rather Entish”.
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I maintain my father’s beard is more impressive, however.
He credits his children with re-introducing him to the world, which is giving us too much credit, but however it happened, he has embraced his old philosophy with fresh enthusiasm. Life is meant to be a journey. Never stop exploring.
Anyway, although I can sit here and talk about my dad all night, I’d better get to the point of this blog post, which is that another chapter of my FNAF fanfic, Everything Is All Right, Part IV: New Faces, Old Bones has been uploaded and you can check it out at fanficiton.net or archiveofourown.org, whichever your preference. And as usual, I have a snippet here for those who like an appetizer before the entree. See you in a couple weeks!
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The next few days were not bad ones, just monotonous, unfulfilling, and slow to pass. Scouring the internet for information on animatronic technology brought her no new revelations since the last time she’d looked and within a few fruitless hours, she had to face the facts: The only hope of repairing the animatronics was to get the manufactory in Faust’s underground lair working again, and the only hope of doing that was to find the interface.
Maybe she should just ask him for the damn thing.
Yeah, sure, that would go over well. Just a few days after he’d asked her to kill his creations, she was seriously going to ask him for the device that would allow her to repair them? No, that wasn’t happening.
So what did that leave? Break back in, she supposed. Search the house, top to bottom. Try the safe again. She couldn’t remember seeing a device such as Freddy had described, but then, she hadn’t been looking for one either. And it might be in the mysterious double-locked box that the old man wanted her to open.
But there was a car parked in front of the glass mansion when she made the long walk back up the drive on Monday night, and through the windows, she could see Chad restlessly moving room to room. Looking for evidence he’d neglected to mop up or just looking for loot, she couldn’t tell, but his unpredictable presence made her own search impossible, so she bailed and went home. Tuesday night, one of Mammon’s world-ending storms blew in, and not only would it have been unpleasant to hike two winding miles up the canyon to the house, but she could not have avoided tracking mud in, and in any case, she got an early morning call from Shelly to go out and help clear a tree that had fallen over the only road leading out of town, so it was just as well she hadn’t gone burglaring that night.
She and the other poor bastards Shelly had rousted out of bed worked clean-up in the steady rain until the rest of the crew arrived back at the office and then they all topped off their coffee canisters and trudged out to the site of the future dealership to ‘start’ the work-day—muddy, sore and bone-tired.
So it was a long day, part-time notwithstanding. Some of her new crew were still a little sour on the subject of her promotion over every man who had been there longer, and Bisano in particular would not let the fuck up about it. Although Ana heard the mutters, she did not confront him. Instead, she put everyone on interior walls for the day, which had the dual benefit of keeping everyone dry and also in close quarters. After that, all she had to do was wait.
Within a very short time, the worst of it had been said enough times to get old and annoying to those who had to listen, even if they hadn’t been up since four, sawing stormfall alongside Ana while the guy doing all the complaining had been sound asleep in his bed. This was what Ana was waiting for. If she had even once told Bisano to knock it off, it would have never stopped. When Hageman bellowed at him to quit his infernal goddamned bitching before he put his whining face on the other side of his goddamned head, Bisano shut his mouth and kept it shut. He remained surly whenever circumstances forced him to interact with Ana, but she couldn’t care less if he liked her, as long as he did his job.
To celebrate the peace and quiet, she offered hot food on her dime down at Gallifrey’s after the shift was over and most of the crew took her up on it. It was the first real chance she’d had to sit down in almost twelve hours and the hard wooden seats of the diner’s chairs were almost heavenly, like her Betty Burger, her first plated meal since the eggs benedict in the hospital with Mr. Faust. No one went out of their way to include her in their conversations, but they didn’t exclude her either, so that was progress.
