Book Six, Chapter 6: The Summer Job

“This one is fine,” Cassie said as she cut off a piece of her pepperoni pizza with a fork.

“I’m having trouble understanding what you meant when you said the pizza was wrong last night,” Anna said. “Can you go into more detail?”

Cassie had a trope for detecting magical objects called It’s Speaking to Me. She did not, however, have much skill in describing what magic felt like. Maybe it was like describing color to a blind person.

“It just felt wrong,” Cassie said as she dipped her piece of pizza into her salad dressing.

“So, like, cursed? The free pizza was cursed?” Camden asked. “Like if we had eaten it, something bad would happen?”

Cassie shrugged her shoulders. She had practically maxed out her Moxie for her level, and yet her tropes still only gave her vague feelings and hints sometimes.

“The pizza was evil,” she said plainly. “Not like super evil, but definitely not good. I swear I’m not being thick-headed. I think the pizza is just kind of bad. Not super bad, but bad.”

“I am so sorry, ma’am, was there something wrong with your pizza?” an elderly waitress who had just walked behind us asked, sounding utterly concerned. Her name was Francesca on the red wallpaper. Just a normal NPC.

We were Off-Screen, so this was clearly a joke on us by Carousel.

“Oh no,” Cassie said, embarrassed. “I love this pizza; it’s so good. We were talking about the pizza we had last night.”

“Oh, okay,” Francesca said, as if she doubted the excuse and was deeply concerned about Cassie’s experience.

She walked away, muttering to herself.

“So the pizza was just sort of evil, is what you’re trying to say?” I clarified.

“Exactly,” Cassie said. “It wasn’t that I didn’t get a good sense of it; it was that there wasn’t much more to say. Evil but not the most evil. Does that make any sense?”

“No, but I do understand what you’re saying,” I said.

The pizza was sort of evil. It had its own cross to bear.

We had done it. We had gone to Pecatto’s Pizza to stake out the place.

After 30 minutes of staring in the windows, looking for some sign of danger, we decided to go inside.

It was a normal pizzeria, well, normal for the time period. And it was huge.

The walls were foam brick painted red. Throughout the restaurant, portraits of the various mascots were displayed. Fluorescent lights hung from the ceiling in strange stained-glass fixtures. Although there were lights everywhere, the restaurant was still dimly lit. I couldn’t understand that.

One room was titled Birthday Zone; another was Party Place. The owner could not decide on a singular marketing vision. So many different phrases were written here and there—some in chalk on a blank spot on the wall, others in neon lights.

“Piping Hot Pizza” was one phrase. “Slice Above the Rest” was another. There must have been a dozen that accumulated over the decades.

There were children, families, and teenagers filling the substantial dining area. The place was alive in ways I had never experienced back on Earth, because I wasn’t from the right decade.

An arcade near the entrance was packed.

Kids were playing pool and those racing games with those big mechanical motorcycles that let you sway from one side to another.

There was a pinball game and something that looked suspiciously like Pac-Man, except the exact reverse, where you were dropping off dots that the ghosts would have to run into to help sink their hit points.

There was a pizza-themed arcade game called Slice Invaders and another called Mushroom Madness. And, of course, all arcade fans would remember Soda Crush 2.

But, of course, none of that kept our attention.

Because the things that we couldn’t stop focusing on were the larger-than-life animatronics that could be found throughout the restaurant.

I had expected there to be some sort of stage with singing and dancing robots, but that’s not what we got. These animatronics all had jobs.

Poor things.

There was Tony the Tosser, who was in the front kitchen, placed in the corner. He was dressed the same as all the real employees, with a black shirt and apron, but his head was covered in dough, like he had tossed several globs of dough that had landed on his noggin, with only his eyes peeking out from the gooey mess.

His hands worked in a spinning motion, pretending to spin plastic pizza dough that spun while rising and lowering from the ceiling, suspended in air. He had lines that he would say occasionally, but because his mouth was covered in the pizza dough, all you heard was:

“Bah. Bah bah bah bah. Bah bah bah.”

Bella Mozzarella stood near him, forever grating a piece of plastic cheese in her left hand with a terrifying-looking metal cheese grater in her right. These characters were cartoonish, but ultimately humanoid, some sort of formed plastic, perhaps. Maybe metal, for all I knew.

She had her silly little phrases, like:

“Once I get done with this cheese, I’m gonna shred the lettuce!”

The Trash Twins had giant bobbleheads and huge mouths that would open to reveal the trash cans inside. They would say silly remarks like “This is why you need to stay in school, kid!” every time they opened up.

Hot Head was a giant head that also served as a functional pizza oven. It took a while of staring for me to understand what I was looking at. From the front, the oven door looked like his mouth, which would open periodically—either when he would say something or whenever the pizza makers needed to stick their long wooden paddles in to grab a pie.

It was when that mouth opened that I could see all the way through the oven to a secondary kitchen in the back, the one doing the real work. Up front, they did personalized pizzas. But in the back, they handled the deliveries and the pizzas that went out on the buffet.

And there was a huge buffet, all you could eat for 7.99.

Hot Head had two little arms on either side that would move periodically. Every time his mouth opened up, I would peer through at the employees in the back, who were loading him full of pizza from the back end.

Camden and I shared a little chuckle at the implication.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Occasionally, when one of the front-of-house cooks would leave his mouth open too long, a strange little animatronic would stick out. His name was Frankie the Fire Ferret, and he lived in Hot Head’s mouth. He got very upset if you let the door stay open too long.

We watched him stick his head out of the oven door once and say, “Tony, you left the door open!”

And then Tony the Tosser replied “Bah bah bah bah, bah bah bah!”

The Pizza Boxer was an animatronic that, as far as I could tell, was just designed to hold pizza boxes that had been assembled but not yet used. He had big red gloves because, of course, he was a boxer, and he spoke like Rocky Balboa, which told me a thing or two about the universe this storyline was from.

All he appeared able to do was raise and lower the big stack of boxes he carried and say little phrases like, “Yo, extra cheese for the champ!”

Honestly, it was kind of a fun place. I would’ve loved to have a birthday party here. The animatronics were more funny than they were scary, though that was probably because they weren’t chasing after me at the moment.

In fact, they didn’t even show up as enemies on the red wallpaper.

“Do you think it’s a trope hiding them?” Camden asked.

“Possibly,” I said.

Of course, we all assumed that eventually the animatronics would chase us, just like in real life, but without a Plot Armor level or an appearance on the red wallpaper, the question was when and how.

“Are you getting anything?” I asked Cassie.

She stared at the machines, then turned back to me and said, “Sorry.”

Camden and I looked at each other.

“There’s no way,” he said. “Why would they give her that cheese grater if she wasn’t going to use it?”

I looked back at Bella Mozzarella and physically recoiled at the thought of her using that giant metal cheese grater as a weapon.

“It could be possession,” I said.

Camden nodded. “That’s very inconvenient for our purposes.”

It was.

If the animatronics came to life through possession, it would make sense that they didn’t have any tropes or presence on the red wallpaper.

It wouldn’t quite be them that we were fighting; it would be whatever possessed them. Whether it be magic, or demons, or ghosts, or nanobots, or a lightning strike reprogramming them… well, the list goes on.

As much as we were watching the animatronics, we were also watching the employees, trying to get an understanding of things.

Avery was still doing deliveries, although because we were Off-Screen, she didn’t bother to actually do them and instead just reported them as done. And the NPCs went along with it because unless she was scripted to have a scene on that delivery, there was no reason for her to actually go.

There were little cheats like that you could do in storylines once you got the hang of it.

Isaac was behind the counter.

Even though it was the next day for us, within the story, it had been weeks, and Isaac and Cassie’s parents had returned.

Cassie’s character had somehow convinced Isaac’s character to take the blame for the broken entertainment center. Somewhere between having to pay his parents back for the damage and wanting to track Avery’s character down like some sort of lovesick weirdo, he had ended up with a job.

And it was stressing him out.

I swore the NPCs were messing with him.