The night sky of Los Angeles was restless, littered with the faint glow of stars drowned by the relentless hum of the city. Neon lights bled against the clouds, police sirens echoed somewhere in the distance, and the city—so alive, so sleepless—seemed to be watching itself.
Olivia Ross watched it too, but not with the admiration of dreamers or the wonder of tourists. She studied it the way a predator studies prey: quiet, calculating, and certain of what came next.
She sat cross-legged on the floor of her apartment, a scatter of wires, tools, and fragments of glossy white plastic spread out before her like the remains of a mechanical body. Her hands were gloved, delicate fingers moving with precision as she tightened a screw into a piece of molded fiberglass. The half-finished mask lay beside her—a smooth, rabbit-like face, with hollow eyes that seemed almost alive in the shadows.
Vanny.
That was the name echoing in her head, stitched into her thoughts ever since she had played Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach for the first time. She didn't just play the games the way most people did—jump scares, nervous laughter, shut the console off and move on. No, Olivia absorbed them. She dissected mechanics, memorized dialogue trees, studied movement patterns. She could tell you every scrap of lore Scott Cawthon ever hinted at, every glitch, every line of code broken down into meaning.
But for her, Vanny wasn't just a character in a game.
"She's potential," Olivia whispered to the mask, tilting her head. "She's freedom."
At twenty-six years old, Olivia's life looked deceptively ordinary from the outside. She had no criminal record. She worked a modest but flexible job in IT support, which gave her both income and privacy. To her neighbors, she was quiet, polite, maybe a little strange—someone you could borrow sugar from, but not someone you ever truly knew.
What no one saw was the genius lurking beneath the calm surface. Olivia had an IQ high enough to intimidate even her professors back in college, though she dropped out after a year. "Too slow," she told her advisor before disappearing into her own projects. Since then, she had built software, solved puzzles, and deconstructed entire systems of security for fun. If the world was a game, she had long ago learned to hack it.
The mask stared up at her, and she stared back.
Vanny was the perfect vessel. Unlike Freddy, Chica, or Foxy, Vanny wasn't bound to animatronics—she was flesh and blood. A woman who put on the mask, slipped into the suit, and became something else. Olivia saw herself in that. A genius hiding in plain sight, a monster in a girl's skin.
The television flickered in the background, the muted images of the nightly news running alongside a dramatized re-run of 9-1-1. Olivia kept the volume down but read the captions: another building fire, another high-stakes rescue. Heroism playing out against the chaos of Los Angeles. She smiled faintly.
"They save. I destroy. Balance."
Her smile widened at her own words.
The costume was nearly finished now—white fabric laid across her sewing desk, stitched by hand with obsessive care. She had spent weeks ordering custom materials, some from cosplay shops, others from darker corners of the internet where no one asked questions about the strength of Kevlar threads or the conductivity of certain wiring. The ears were the hardest, but she solved it with reinforced foam and a hidden wireframe.
And inside the mask, she was building something more.
A small circuit board sat on the table, blinking faintly with a green light. Her personal touch. With it, the mask wouldn't just be costume—it would distort her voice, project static whispers, even sync with her phone to play eerie audio clips at will.
"You'll be more than fabric and plastic," she murmured, adjusting the board with a screwdriver. "You'll be alive."
Olivia wasn't just crafting a costume. She was crafting an identity.
Outside, another siren wailed, drawing closer before fading into the sprawl of traffic. She leaned back, brushing her dark hair from her face, and glanced toward the city beyond her window. Somewhere out there, firemen and paramedics rushed to save strangers, ordinary people fought to survive another day. And soon, woven into that same world, she would emerge—not as Olivia, but as Vanny.
Not cosplay. Not play-acting.
A predator with a mask.
She picked up the unfinished headpiece, turning it slowly in her hands, and for a moment, her reflection caught in its hollow eyes.
"Hello, Olivia," she whispered to herself through the mask, her voice warped into something playful, mocking, dangerous. "Or should I say… goodbye?"
The mask smiled back.