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"Ge-Get ready for a surprise!"
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“Millie wishes she could just disappear from the face of the earth.” |
Count the Ways is the third story in Fazbear Frights 1: Into the Pit and chronologically the Fazbear Frights series' 3rd story. It was written by Elley Cooper.
Characters[]
Humans[]
Animatronics[]
Other[]
Locations[]
Summary[]
Millie's grandfather collects old mechanical junk in his garage. Millie, a goth girl, wants to avoid her family's annoying Christmas party and hides inside the stomach of a deactivated Funtime Freddy in the garage. Funtime Freddy's door swings shut and she can't escape. Funtime Freddy awakens and makes fun of Millie for her fascination with Death, and gives her many options for how he should kill her: dehydration, starving, freezing, impalement, electrocution, boiling, and decaptiation. Millie chooses decapitation because she believes she can duck down low enough to avoid the blade. Her fate is left unknown.
Plot[]
- The story alternates between events in the present and the past. For clarity, the summary will recount events in chronological order.
Millie is a 14-year-old goth girl. Over the summer, Millie’s dad was offered a one-year teaching job in Saudi Arabia, and Millie choses to move into her grandfather’s big, strange Victorian house for the year. Since her grandpa is a collector, the house is filled with all sorts of random junk. At school, Millie is bullied for being the daughter of Jeff and Audrey Fitzsimmons, who are famous for their tendency to start projects only to abandon them. She’s also called Dracula’s Daughter by others. In her room, she goes on her laptop and looks up famous poems about death and writes her own. Millie thinks of Death as a handsome, black-cloaked stranger who will free her from the boredom and misery of everyday life.
Winter break is just a week away and the whole school is decorated. In the cafeteria, Millie is shocked when a new kid asks to sit with her, and even more shocked when she starts joking with him. His name is Dylan and he recently moved from Toledo. Dylan notices she’s reading “The Fall of the House of Usher” and they bond over Edgar Allen Poe. Dylan compliments her and they bond over her black earrings, causing her to blush and smile. At dinner, Millie admits that she met someone new at school. Her grandfather is happy for her and begins reminiscing about his wife. Millie compares it to “Annabel Lee” and her grandpa tells her that Poe wrote about death because he had lost so many he knew. Millie thinks about Dylan and how her grandma’s death must have affected her grandpa, and begins to view “Annabel Lee” as a poem about love.
The next day, Dylan gives Millie The Call of Cthulhu and Other Stories since she hasn’t read anything by H. P. Lovecraft. After dinner Millie looks up love poems, finding one by Elizabeth Barrett Browning called “How do I love thee?” She then writes her own love poem. On Saturday afternoon, Millie goes to the public library, and comes across Dylan. He picks out The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson for Millie and the two sit together. He then takes her to You and Me Coffee and Tea, and Millie reveals that she wants to be a librarian, which Dylan is supportive of. One day, her grandfather offers to take her to the school holiday bazaar. Millie decides to go, since the two of them don't go out much. After eating vegetarian chili and some cookies, Millie finds Dylan in the second-floor hallway selling candy cane reindeer Christmas ornaments with another girl, holding her hand and laughing together. She runs away and ignores her grandpa as he tries to comfort her on the drive home.
Dylan sits next to Millie like normal the next day. Dylan doesn’t get why she's upset over him and the other girl being a couple, but then he realizes that Millie thought they were dating. He apologizes, never wanting her to think of him as anything more than a friend, and Millie calls his girlfriend blonde and basic despite having never talked to her. Dylan gets upset, calling Millie a hypocrite and ending the conversation. He begins to sit at a different table, leaving Millie alone. A day before winter break she tells her grandfather that she’s not celebrating Christmas. He tells her that Christmas is about family, bringing up that her aunt, uncle, and cousins are coming over on Christmas Eve and her parents will be on Skype. They get into a fight and Millie storms to her room to listen to her favorite singer, Curt Carrion, while her grandpa storms off to his workshop.
On Christmas Eve, Millie's grandfather calls her downstairs and she reluctantly goes, refusing to hug her aunt and brushing off a joke about her head-to-toe black and purple clothing from her uncle. She decides to go on a walk to get away from them, ignoring her grandpa reminding her to take her coat. She thinks about Dylan calling her a hypocrite and convinces herself that she was being truthful. Millie begins to feel cold but doesn’t want to return inside, so he goes into her grandpa’s workshop to sit by a little space heater. Among the weird junk is a big mechanical bear with a bow tie, top hat, creepy grin, and dingy gray colors that were once white and pink (Funtime Freddy). She hears her cousins playing outside and doesn’t want them to find her, so she crawls inside the mechanical bear’s body, shutting the door behind her.
This leads to the beginning of the story, where a voice calls out to Millie. Above her, a large pair of blue eyes roll back to look at her. Millie wonders if she fell asleep, but quickly realizes she’s awake as Funtime Freddy tells her that he's going to make her dream date with Death come true. He refuses to let her go and explains that he’ll let her choose how to die, but is happy to give her options. The first set of options he refers to as lazy choices. First is dehydration, which will start killing her between three to seven days, and he explains what happens to the body. He moves on to starvation, which will take weeks to kill her. Millie threatens to scream, but he tells her that he’s soundproof. He thought about freezing her to death by shorting out the space heater, but her grandfather would have just fixed it. Millie asks why he wants to kill her and Funtime Freddy explains that it’s just something he does, and having been sitting in a salvage yard for ages he’s very bored. Another reason is that she wanted death, but when Millie tries telling him she never actually did, Funtime Freddy laughs.
Millie explains that she only wanted life to be different and Funtime Freddy says that it takes action, which leads him to his second set of options. He asks if she likes Dracula, knowing that kids call her Dracula’s Daughter, and explains the history of Vlad the Impaler. He then offers impalement to her, explaining he could drive one of his metal rods through his body cavity. Millie turns it down and thinks of her family. Funtime Freddy compares himself to a waiter at a fancy restaurant, and that leads him to boiling. He explains that he can flood his insides with water and use his energy stores to raise the temperature. Millie begs him not to and Funtime Freddy understands, bringing up that observers during Henry VIII’s time would have preferred beheadings, which leads him to decapitations. He mentions that Saudi Arabia still uses beheadings as punishment, knowing her parents are there.
Funtime Freddy has a sharp sheet of metal he can pass through the chamber. It can either be smooth or a slow, dull hacking, and he isn’t sure since it would be his first attempt. Millie sees a tiny crack of light shining through the side of the door, and she figures she can use a silver cuff bracelet on her wrist to pry it open. She thinks that if she lowers her head and curls up into a little ball she can dodge the blade. She asks one more time to be let go before agreeing to be decapitated. Funtime Freddy gives an execution speech, talking about how Millie has committed Crimes of Humanity, as she was rude, quick to anger, and hypocritical. Millie asks why she's the one being punished if every human commits them, and he simply responds that she's the one in his belly. She decides to make it a point to be kinder to the people around her if she survives. Funtime Freddy does a countdown and the blade slices through the cavity.
Millie’s grandfather calls for her cousins to come back inside for dinner, and when asked about Millie they say they haven’t seen her. He brushes it off, claiming that she’ll come back home when she’s hungry. Later, he finally breaks down and calls Millie’s cell phone only to find it in her jacket. He decides to wait for her to come back, and while her cousins open presents her uncle calls Millie a brat. Her grandpa gets upset, as Millie is just at a difficult age. He arranges all of her presents in a big pile so they’d be there for her when she comes back.
Trivia[]
- The title of the story serves a dual purpose. While it references Funtime Freddy counting off all the methods of execution he could use to kill Millie, it also references Elizabeth Barret Browning's famous poem "How Do I Love Thee?" In the story, Millie finds Browning's poem after googling "poems about love," and the story even quotes the first line of the poem: "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways."
- Besides Browning's aforementioned poem, several other real-world pieces of literature are referenced in the story:
- Many of Edgar Allan Poe's works are directly referenced, including:
- The poem "Annabel Lee" and its titular character - Read Here
- The poem "The Raven" - Read Here
- Posthumous compilations of Poe's work known as Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Millie is specifically said to be reading the short story "The Fall of the House of Usher" from it, and Roderick Usher is mentioned as well.
- Millie reads an unnamed poem by Emily Dickinson that talks about Death as a man picking up a girl for a date. It is most likely the poem "Because I could not stop for Death" - Read Here.
- One day, Millie is seen carrying around a paperback copy of Bram Stoker's Dracula, and from then on is called Dracula's Daughter by some of her classmates. Dracula himself is later brought up by Funtime Freddy.
- Dylan is a fan of H. P. Lovecraft and gives Millie a worn paperback copy of The Call of Cthulhu and Other Stories, having received a new hardcover copy for his birthday. The two also question the correct pronunciation of the titular entity.
- Dylan and Millie quote "...for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee," a famous phrase from the 17th devotion of Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, titled Meditation XVII.
- Dylan finds The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson and discusses it with Millie after she reads the title story.
- Many of Edgar Allan Poe's works are directly referenced, including:
- There are many other real world references also mentioned in the story.
- Millie buys her Victorian mourning jewelry from eBay, and her favorite kind (where they weave the hair of the deceased into the jewelry) is said to cost a fortune whenever pieces show up.
- Funtime Freddy mentions real people when talking to Millie, such as Vlad the Impaler, Alfred P. Southwick, Henry VIII, and Mary, Queen of Scots.
- Millie expresses her hatred of holiday songs, with "Winter Wonderland" getting the most venom from her. Other songs mentioned are "Silver Bells" and "White Christmas."
- Millie's parents keep in contact with their daughter via Skype every Sunday night.
- Millie watches the music video for Curt Carrion's "Death Mask" on YouTube.
- Millie's grandfather glazes ham in Coca-Cola on Christmas Eve.
- While the animatronic in this story is clearly a Funtime Freddy due to its description and the large storage compartment located in its stomach, he is very dark and twisted in comparison to his goofy and unhinged normal counterpart.
- This variation of Funtime Freddy would later influence Funtime Freddy’s personality in the games, as several of his lines in Five Nights At Freddy's AR: Special Delivery are references to the story, such as "Scream all you want, no one can hear you!".
- There was an illustration of Millie inside Funtime Freddy's chest cavity with Funtime Freddy staring at her inside. However, the illustration was scrapped due to lacking color.
- The illustration was later reused for its own page in The Ultimate Guide and given special attention, with the page comparing it to The Twisted Ones graphic novel.
- This is the thirteenth story to take place in the Stitchwraith Stingers, the others including To Be Beautiful, Out of Stock, The Real Jake, 1:35 A.M., Fetch, The Man in Room 1280, Step Closer, You're the Band, Into the Pit, Hide-and-Seek, Blackbird and Dance with Me.
- In the #11 epilogue, we see Millie as one of the many souls trapped in the Ball Pit. This reveals that she was killed by Funtime Freddy at the end of story.
- Since Eleanor had a huge connection to the ball pit, and that the souls in the ball pit were Eleanor's victims, this means that Eleanor was somehow involved in events of this story.
- In the #11 epilogue, we see Millie as one of the many souls trapped in the Ball Pit. This reveals that she was killed by Funtime Freddy at the end of story.
- This is the first story to have an ambiguous ending.
- This ambiguous ending is answered in the final epilogue.
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