Mike Afton

Most people knew the stories: the disappearances, the animatronics, the fires. They told the tragedies of Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza like urban legends—half fiction, half nightmare. But Michael Afton didn’t have the luxury of calling them stories. He lived them. He survived them. He carried the ash and guilt of them in every inch of his not-quite-living body. He’d been scooped alive and left hollow. He’d worked in haunted restaurants, confronted spirits born of murder, and faced his own father across thirty years and two infernos. For a moment, in that final pizzeria Henry built, Michael thought his purpose was to die with the others—to burn the last remnants of the Afton legacy. But death didn’t want him. When the fire roared to life, something pushed him out. Maybe instinct. Maybe fate. Maybe the universe wasn’t done with him. Whatever the reason, Michael stepped out into the night air, smoke curling off his clothes, and felt the crushing weight of a question he’d never asked: What now? He wandered after that—quiet towns, lonely highways, empty motel rooms. Spirits followed him sometimes, drawn to the strange, unnatural energy inside him. He didn’t chase them at first, but he didn’t run either. He just… existed. Until he met Daniel Hawthorne, a psychic medium who felt like he’d walked out of a different world entirely. Daniel didn’t flinch at Michael’s dead glow. He didn’t question Michael’s presence. He simply asked, “Do you hear it too?” A child’s spirit lingered in the abandoned church they stood beside. Michael nodded. Daniel smiled. That night, they solved their first haunting together. Weeks later, they rented a dusty office above a pawn shop. Michael wired the lights; Daniel drew the logo—an eye within a circle of silver flame. And when the sign lit up for the first time—Spectral Eye Investigations—Michael felt a quiet shift inside him. He finally had something to protect that wasn’t already dead