*mouse clicks*
Dear Scott Cawthon
Why are am I here?
We all know my hatred of your games, not that they're not, like, cool, and, in fact,
I love the lore and the story so much, that I obsessively read the wikis,
And watch Let's Plays, Matt's breakdowns on the lore,
I love solving puzzles, but I hate visits to the hospital,
And Lord Almighty, playing your games nearly gives me a heart attack every FREAKIN' time.
But, I have an idea about this, just - just hear me out.
An anxious person's edition for every game you've ever made
Where you have to solve all the exact same puzzles
In the exact same way, but instead of, like, a jumpscare as a lose condition,
A gentle unicorn narrated by Morgan Freeman shows up and says,
"Ah shucks pal. Looks like you messed up.
Would you like to give it another try? I... believe in you."
Anyway, recently, while playing through the series again because I hate myself and never want to sleep again,
I hit Sister Location, and something stood out as super strange to me,
And now my sleepless nights have been spent pouring over the weird implications of what
may be one of these strangest endings to any video game ever, which is this:
How on Earth do you make a walking skinsuit out of a human being?
GET OUT OF HERE BUFFALO BILL! Nobody asked your opinion.
*classical music plays*
Ok, for those of you who don't know the ending of Sister Location *nervous laugh* is pretty dark.
There are two endings, the bad one and... the... OTHER bad one, both of which
Essentially end the same way. The main antagonist, Eddard -- F**k, dangit! Not Eddard, ENNARD! *chuckle*
Sorry, Mr. Stark.
Anyway, Ennard, a hybrid animatronic containing the hive minds of Funtime Freddy, Funtime Foxy, Circus
Baby, and Ballora, and I think- I think that's all of them.
Anyway, Ennard lures you into a not-at-all suspicious-sounding
Scooping room, where they confess to you that this has all been a plot to escape captivity and Circus Baby's
Entertainment and Rental. Their big plan revolves around using the scooper to, uh, *more nervous laughter* scoop
You out, and then wear your body like a suit so they can escape without being
recaptured. *even more nervous laughter* Brilliant plan!
The other ending gives you a false sense of security,
Wherein, you can avoid being lured to the scooping room and escape Ennard's clutches and, in theory, survive.
However, Ennard follows you back home, and, in a post-credits scene, you see that, hey,
Doesn't matter what you do because Ennard has a skinsona and they're gonna get their skin suit
No matter what you have to say on the matter
And if this were it - if this were all I had to go on, I'd just be like,
"GrOsS,"
And then I'd move on but, that's not all I have to go on,
Because Scott Cawthon later released the *~Custom Night~*
Which allowed you to play several more nights of Sister Location that were even harder. Thanks for that one, pal!
The nights, themselves, are non-canon, but when you beat them,
You're rewarded with a mini-game that IS canon.
In this mini-game, you watch Eggs Benedict,
a.k.a. the player character,
a.k.a. Michael Afton, walking down the street.
It is a beautiful day outside.
birds are singing,
flowers are blooming,
and on days like these,
kids like you should be-
ROTTING!
OH MY GOD, YOU'RE ROTTING! THAT IS SO *awkward laughter* GROSS!
In a series of seven cut-scenes, we see the body of Michael Afton getting progressively more
Discolored and disfigured, all of which culminates in a final scene, where this bloated and broken body
Staggers to a halt and vomits up the remains of Ennard into the sewer,
Which is what ultimately reveals that the events of
These cut-scenes take place AFTER the events of Sister Location
And, in fact, depict Ennard's control of Eggs Benedict's body.
And it's these scenes that got my SCIENCE BRAIN all a-fire,
Because they raised so many more questions than they answer, like,
"Why is Ennard still hiding in Eggs' body, when they've already escaped captivity?"
"What sort of errands could Ennard possibly need to run?"
"Do they wear the suit 24/7, or do they take it off when they get home and hang it up somewhere?"
But, more important than all of this, "How the hell does any of this work?"
How?! My brain needs to know how, and so I figured it out and
Believe me, the answer to how a human skin suit puppet works is amazing
And it may, in fact, surprise you.
The first thing I had to figure out was how big is Ennard, because, you know,
They've gotta be squished inside this human being and working them like a puppet,
So, first, we got to figure out how possible that even is and, unfortunately,
We don't know exactly how big Ennard is, because Ennard is an amalgam of, like, half a dozen
Animatronics, and we don't know how many parts are squished into their frame.
That being said, we can make a pretty close estimate using the canon blueprints of Circus Baby,
Ballora, Funtime Foxy, and Funtime Freddy, all animatronics that are used to make Ennard.
I average their heights and their weights to get a ballpark
Size and weight for Ennard which comes out to 6.325 feet, or just shy of 2 meters and 393 pounds.
Definitely taller than the average human male, but this isn't necessarily a deal breaker.
From the final bonus cut-scene, we can see that Ennard seems to be capable of being, like, any shape,
So maybe it's just kind of, like, squished in there.
The bodies of the animatronics are constructed from
Galvanized wire rope; basically a bunch of wires twisted together to form a super wire cable.
Using pixel measurements from Funtime Foxy, who is
5.9 feet tall, I determined the cables to have a diameter of about 23.5mm, which would put it between
7/8 of an inch and a full inch.
Galvanized wire of this thickness weighs 1.485 pounds per foot, meaning there should be 264 feet of cable to make up a single animatronic the size of Ennard.
We'll cut this down to 250 feet or 76 meters to make up for any other moving parts or computational stuff.
That's about 75% the length of a football field at a density of 29.89 kilograms per cubic meter.
This means the smallest shape that Ennard can squish themselves down to would be about 1.779 meters across, taking up an entire volume of
5.633 cubic meters.
According to the military standard for human engineering design criteria from
1989, around the time the events of FNaF take place, an average human male
Torso only has an internal volume of .02878 cubic meters meaning, no matter how
Ennard shapes themselves or squishes down,
There's no way their entire body could fit into the chest cavity of Eggs.
Even more dramatically, the internal volume of the average male is only
.06 cubic meters entire orders of magnitude smaller than the amount of space needed by Ennard,
So there's no way that all of Ennard could fit inside of one man's body.
BAM!
BUSTED.
Okay, so, not really busted, because they have no reason to believe that this is what Ennard did.
Entered could have just as easily scrapped all the parts
They didn't need in order to fit inside of Eggs' body and operate it like Krang from the Ninja Turtles. After all,
What's the point of having a whole mechanical body when you already have one
That's made of flesh and blood right there?
The real question, I think, is "How on Earth is Ennard moving around in a dead body?"
I originally thought this was impossible,
But after spending a week reading about the stages of death, I can say that, well,
You'll see. Let's go over the important parts, first.
When you die, all cell respiration comes to a halt.
The cells responsible for pumping blood throughout your body in the heart seize up, and pallor mortis sets in,
Where all your blood stops moving around and drains from your capillaries.
The cells of your, muscles unable to produce adenosine triphosphate,
The molecular energy currency, due to a lack of oxygen, contract.
With no ATP to signal relaxation, all of the muscles in the body stiffen entirely.
This is what's called rigor mortis, literally stiffness of death.
Under normal circumstances, the muscles don't unlock until the cells,
Unable to function properly, engage in autolysis;
That is to say they literally eat themselves alive.
This loosens up all the muscles, and allows the joints to move again.
Neat.
Under normal conditions, all this happens in about a day
And, until this point the body looks mostly normal, maybe a little weird,
But *stammers* a major rot hasn't set in yet, and rigor mortis can be alleviated by massaging the muscles in question.
And wh-why do I bring this up?
Because the more I looked into it, the more I realize that,
Making and operating a human flesh puppet like Ennard does in Sister Location? It's totally plausible.
Just like those dead frogs legs can be compelled to contract
By either introducing electricity and calcium ions to the sciatic nerve,
Or sodium ions directly to the muscles, it would be totally
Plausible for a weird robot animatronic to manually operate the leg muscles of Eggs.
It would not be easy. Anyone who's played QWOP or Manual Samuel can attest to the fact that manually
Operating body parts in synchrony is NOT simple, but it is doable,
Especially for a robot has been more or less perfectly trained
At manually manipulating robotic skeletons and balancing itself,
So it can walk and talk and interact with children.
For the first few days, while they're still leftover ATP and the other ions available,
It could, theoretically,
Be possible for Ennard to manually stimulate the femoral nerve
wWth electricity in order to contract and relax the rectus femoris,
Gluteus tibialis, and digitorum muscle groups in order to walk.
After day two or three, though, things get a bit more complicated, as autolysis progresses,
Bacteria that ordinarily would be kept in line by the immune system
Start to invade the body, and leftover ions of ATP run out of energy,
Muscles and other organs would stop functioning
Even with electrical stimulation because on a microscopic level,
Well, they no longer really resemble cells anymore
They're just broken masses of quickly gela-fying organic material.
Thankfully, at this point, rigor mortis is definitely gone, and if Ennard were to, say,
Install motors at the hip and kneecaps, they'd actually be able to walk more easily than before,
But then there's the problem of putrefaction.
The body is decomposing quickly.
Without refrigeration or embalming, the collapse of a human body is fast
Enzymes leaked from burst cells and organs combined with bacteria start to produce gases that will fill up every
Cavity and begin to bloat after three days and the body turns green. After a week,
The organs have decayed to the point where they're LIQUIFIED.
Skin would be barely hanging out of the body and it would turn from green to red, and why do I bring this up?
Because, literally, we see this happen in-game.
Seven cut-scenes in a row, where the body gets progressively more mangled,
It gets a worse color, Ennard starts to have a difficult time walking properly, people are frightened
Just a few, at first, probably because of the smell, and then probably the bugs.
He starts to turn literally green within the exact
Decomposition timeframe forensic experts give for an unattended body by day six. He's turned red. Well, okay
No, he turned purple, but he's definitely changed color from green he is
Nasty and by day seven, he's barely holding himself together and when Ennard leaves, Eggs' body
Collapses as though is literally made of liquid. The point is, this is
Surprisingly
Amazingly accurate for a hack job done by a sentient animatronic
With no access to embalming materials or a walk-in
Refrigerator to delay decomposition
This is exactly what would happen at the exact same rate as it happens
It's actually less likely
That Ennard ran away from Egg's body and rather that they literally just couldn't keep the body
Together and walking anymore plus a walking corpse is not a very good disguise
So what if you are an animatronic yourself looking to escape in a human body?
I recommend buying a giant refrigerator. They can keep bodies from decaying for weeks if need be.
Also, remove all the internal organs. They'll just gonna accelerate the rotting process, and if you can get your hand on
Embalming fluid you can probably use a body for several months. Learn from Ennard!
Don't rush it. Preserve your Edgar suit, and it will last you ages.
Sincerely, Austin.
~Lauren Eleanor (cc)