Chapter Text
Raven didn’t know what “fruitless” meant. With context clues, she could have figured out pretty easily that it meant something along the lines of useless and stupid, which were words she was perfectly familiar with and quite efficiently summed up the fool’s mission her brother was dragging her into.
Maybe that was a little unfair. In truth, she was dragging herself into this mess, but only because she didn’t want Blake to get himself and two of his friends in serious trouble with their parents. Or in trouble with much more dangerous people, if the rumors were true.
The idea had sprung up at school a week or so ago, when Blake had gotten it in his head to go explore the abandoned toy factory a few miles away. Raven didn’t know a whole lot about it, since it had gone out of business nearly a decade ago, when she was around two. But gone out of business was putting it lightly. Gone silent was closer, although it didn’t quite hold the abruptness of what had happened.
No one Raven knew ever really liked talking about it. Everything she knew about the factory had come from old newspapers she’d stolen from her brother’s room and from trash cans on her street. The factory had been owned and run by the company called Playtime Co., and according to the articles she read, it had been one of the biggest international American-based toy companies that had ever existed. Founded in 1930 by toy designer Elliot Ludwig, Playtime Co. had run for 65 strong years before abruptly closing with no warning in 1995 after all communications were abruptly shut down on August 8. For its entire lifetime, Playtime Co. had invented and made every toy in that one building right down the road from her town, instead of setting up facilities all over the place. That explained the factory’s ridiculous size… and why it was such a big deal when everything went quiet. Apparently they had hundreds of people working there in the 1900s, and the whole place was commanded by six people (seven, when Elliot Ludwig, the founder and CEO of the company, was still alive.) They had an entire orphanage somewhere in the building too with hundreds of kids up for adoption, and they took visitors on tours in huge groups three days a week.
The factory had been a huge deal for the whole country. Everything they did pushed innovation, and not just stuff they sold. They set records for technological advancements in manufacturing tools—like the famous GrabPack, which was a Playtime Co. exclusive dual hand-cannon so people could reach and lift things without difficulty—and in the way they built and organized things, like building themselves generators that ran separate from the rest of the town’s and expanding their factory so much they needed a whole train inside to get around. And that wasn’t even mentioning their most famous toys, the most popular of which were infamous for being able to do things that shouldn’t be possible. Raven had heard all about the Poppy Playtime toy, a red-haired doll who was capable of making conversation with children and adults alike so flawlessly it was as though she were actually human.
Playtime Co. had been everything a successful company would want to be and more. Its name was known worldwide, its reputation strong in most places (outside of the issues around some of the more controversial toys), and it was making more money than most people could dream of. Even though had apparently been struggling before it went silent (and had been since Elliot Ludwig’s death), it had seemed like it would be running far into the 2000s with just as much success as it had had throughout the 1900s.
But then everything had just… stopped.
In one day, in one hour, even, every single person inside the factory had gone missing. The employees went in for work and never went home. Calls and other communications fell flat. Visitors with tours planned found the doors locked… and the ones already on tour vanished without a trace.
The police looked into it, then detectives when no one could find anything. They broke inside and looked around for any traces of what had happened. But because the whole factory had been locked down, and most of the doors required GrabPacks instead of actual keys, they couldn’t get very far. Eventually people gave up trying to find answers and instead devoted their energy to pretending like the company had never existed. They were content to let the huge trees block the fading colors of the deserted factory and never look between the branches. They even closed off the street that would take people there to discourage people from trying to get inside. And even though it wasn’t technically private property anymore (since no one was inside to enforce that anymore), anyone caught trying to vandalize or breach the premises could be arrested and fined. No one in charge wanted anyone going anywhere near that place, not after what had happened.
It had been that way as long as Raven could remember. She never questioned it, not really. Sure, she found it strange and not at all okay that over a thousand people had vanished without a trace in less than a day and no one cared enough to keep trying to find out what had happened… but she also agreed that as long as whatever mystery was lurking within those walls stayed in within those walls, it was probably fine to leave it alone.
Plus, she had bigger things to worry about. Like school. And her upcoming dance recital. Since her family hadn’t lost anyone the day the factory shut down, it was easy to forget it was hardly a fifteen-minute walk away.
But Blake, her older brother, had always had an odd fascination with what was going on with the Playtime factory. Even before it had been abandoned, there were always new rumors about crazy things going on there, orphans going missing and creepy science experiments and stuff like that. Accusations would explode from everywhere around the globe when any toy or creation from the factory was a little off, like when some kids pried their Huggy Wuggy toys’ mouths open and found rows and rows of sharp teeth. The CatNap fiasco had been the most relevant and recent, and there were plenty of news articles on what had happened with him. CatNap toys that had been sold to families had been linked to giving children horrible nightmares at night. People suspected it was due to his scent, which was not lavender like it was marketed as. Raven knew that he had eventually been taken out of the Smiling Critters line (leaving the smiling animals without a purple friend to complete their rainbow), but according to Blake, that incident had been the turning point for Playtime Co., and not in a good way. There had been issues sprouting up here and there for decades, each one bigger than the last, and that one had been the final straw. People started losing trust in the company. Blake used to have a DogDay toy, but after what happened with CatNap, their parents made him throw it away. The dumpster in their alley started filling up with Smiling Critters, the majority of them CatNaps, although Raven had seen plenty of the others.
She’d saved one of each and hidden them in her closet, along with some multicolored Huggy Wuggies and a Cat-Bee who had been tossed away even though they weren’t Smiling Critters.
The Cat-Bee was her favorite. It was the only one she dared to take out and hold at night, although she was careful to hide it under the blankets while she slept. Even at twelve years old, she still took it out sometimes, just to stroke the still-soft striped fur and admire the tiny wings.
Although it was a little hard to like any of the hidden Playtime Co. toys when everyone in the factory had vanished not long after the world started rejecting their products. One of Blake’s friends thought the factory shut down because they were losing consumers and facing lawsuits around every corner. But that didn’t explain the disappearance of the tourists and orphans.
The whole thing was very disturbing.
But it was interesting, and these days it was the only thing Blake would willingly talk to her about if she asked. That had sort of always been true—he’d been obsessed with the factory ever since he’d first learned about it—but before high school he would talk to her about other stuff, too. Now it was a chore to say more than a few words in passing, unless she was talking about this or football, neither of which she actually cared about.
At least, she hadn’t cared about the factory until a few days ago, when Blake and his friends had gotten it into their heads that sneaking into the factory in the dead of night was a good idea. They wanted to look for clues about what had happened, which was the most stupid thing she’d ever heard. If the literal police hadn’t been able to find anything when the scene was fresh ten years ago, how were three teenage boys supposed to do any better? Not only that, but how did they believe that they would face no consequences if they were caught?
All of Raven’s memories with Blake around his friends involved either turning invisible or the polar opposite, both of which were miserable. They only ever noticed her when she spoke out against one of their ideas, and of course that meant that she was being annoying instead of sensible. Henry and Joey both seemed to think she was trying to make them look stupid whenever she highlighted ways their various plans could go wrong—such as when Joey suggested they take their bikes and try to perform a loop-the-loop in the massive sewer pipe nearby. Raven had to get her parents to run down there and stop them before they broke their necks, which of course made her a tattletale. Since then they had developed a nasty habit of quickly shutting up whenever she entered a room, which of course meant now they were trying to hide everything from her. She only knew about their plan to sneak out to the Playtime Co. toy factory because Blake had left a notebook with the plan jotted down to the last minute wide open on the desk of their shared bedroom. So logically that night she’d confronted him.
“What the hell, Vee? Were you spying on me?”
“No, I wasn’t. If I was, I would have stolen the notebook.”
“I see your grubby fingerprints all over it. What were you trying to do, huh? Tell on me?”
“It’s not my fault you left it right out in the open where anyone could find it! And if I was going to tell Mom, I would’ve done it already!”
“So then why are you yelling at me about it?”
“Because this plan is stupid! You’ve said it yourself a million times, Blake! No one knows what happened in there! Everyone vanished all at once. What could have caused that? What if it was some kind of toxic chemical leak? A fire? You could get hurt!”
“If it were a gas leak, the whole city would be dead by now.” Blake waved her off as though she were a persistent fly. “And no fire burns for ten years.”
“It doesn’t matter. You have no way of knowing what you might find. And even if there’s nothing dangerous, what happens if you get caught?”
“We won’t get caught.”
Raven stamped her foot. “You’re so stupid. You can’t know that. Anything could happen to you in there, and anything could happen after.”
“Stop acting like a baby. Everything’s gonna be fine. We know what we’re doing.”
“You think you know what you’re doing. The police couldn’t find anything when they went in there—they couldn’t even get more than a door inside. What makes you think you’re any different?”
“What makes you think you’re smarter than me? I’m a junior in high school, dumbass. I’ve had way more time to learn about how the world works than you.”
“I’m twelve.”
“Exactly my point. I know more about the factory than you; you were barely even born when it shut down.”
“I know enough! I’ve read the old newspapers!”
“Have you ever gone inside it?”
“Of course not.”
“Well, I did. Now can it before I—”
“You went there when you were three! Who knows how much it’s changed?”
“It won’t have changed, because there’s nothing inside.”
“Where’d all of the workers and kids go, then?”
Blake glared at her. “Stop trying to talk me out of it. We’re going no matter what you do.”
“Fine. Then I’m coming with.”
That made him laugh in her face. “No. You’re not.”
She crossed her arms. “I am. Or else I’m telling Dad.”
His sneer vanished. “You’re such a snitch,” he spat, his lip curling.
“I’m trying to keep you and your friends from doing something stupid. There’s nothing wrong with worrying.”
“You’re trying to stop us from having fun!”
“It won’t be fun if you get hurt!”
He let out a frustrated growl. “This is why I hate having a sister.”
Raven felt a little pang of hurt. “I care about you, Blake,” she tried. “I’m just trying to make sure you’re safe. Please just let me come with you.”
“And how will having you there prevent anything bad from happening?”
Because I use my brain, and you don’t. She swallowed that comment and said, “You’d need someone fast to go get help.”
“Joey’s plenty fast.”
“I’m faster. We raced.”
Blake rubbed his face and groaned. “Fine. Fine. But if you screw anything up—”
“I won’t, I won’t. You won’t even notice I’m there, I promise.”
He glared at her for a moment longer. “You had better mean that. The boys will never let me hear the end of it if you ruin another one of our plans.”
“I’ll just tag along behind you.” And watch to make sure you don’t get yourselves killed.
He didn’t say anything else, just picked up the notebook and stormed out of the room. Raven sat down on her bed and slipped a piece of paper out from under her pillow. It was the plan. In his anger, Blake hadn’t even noticed she’d torn it out of the notebook. She studied it, sighed, and folded it up. She would keep this until tomorrow, when her brother and his friends would meet up. That way they wouldn’t leave her behind, since it had all of their notes on things they knew about the factory including where the key was to get in. (Apparently someone in Thebes not far from Raven’s house had worked there before it shut down and still had the key. Their address was marked on the paper, and knowing Blake, Raven doubted they’d bothered to memorize or write it down anywhere else.)
This is what I mean, she thought. She stood up again and walked to the closet, tucking the paper underneath her hidden CatNap toy. She pulled out Cat-Bee and leaned against the closet’s doorframe, running the small antennae through her fingers. They’re probably planning to steal the key, for Pete’s sake. I know I wouldn’t take kindly to having a bunch of teens rob me, especially if I knew they were going to use the key to get themselves killed. Even if the factory isn’t dangerous anymore, imagine how much trouble they’ll be in if they’re caught.
I guess now I’m going to get in trouble too.
But if I tell Mom and Dad, Blake and his friends will just get sneakier and next time I might not be able to find out about another stupid idea before it’s too late.
There’s no other way. If I’m there at least there’s one logical thinker. And maybe I can figure out a way to talk them out of it.
If not, I hope I can at least keep them from doing anything too dangerous.