So another Halloween has come and gone with no Trick-or-Treaters here at the Smomestead, which means I’m stuck with five pounds of my favorite fun-sized chocolates. MmmMMMmm…I mean, uh, darn. How deliciously inconvenient.

Despite that, I had a great Halloween/birthday. I made mummy meatloaf…

This is the only way I make meatloaf anymore.

…and mashed potatoes cut into ghost-shapes with peas for eyes because I never outgrew the urge to play with my food. Me and my dad convalesced from our various ailments together watching The Nightmare Before Christmas, or rather, I watched it and he watched me sing along and act out all Jack’s lines. I tried to get him to paint creepy pictures with me, but he insists he’s not an artist, which I don’t see what that has to do with anything. Painting is to making art like sex is to making babies; sure, it CAN happen, but if we’re honest, most of the time, we’re just having fun (and sometimes, when it did happen, it was sort of an accident).

Anyhoo, here are my non-artistic just-having-fun-on-Halloween paint-doodles. Some of you may recognize the first one as being taken from one of the surrealist paintings from Sims 4. The other one, obviously, is from FNAF. I’d just like to add that I’m super-proud of how that kid turned out. I’m not good at drawing people, even less so kids, and that’s the first one I ever attempted to paint.

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What a great segue into my FNAFiction, Everything Is All Right! A new chapter just went up at fanfiction.net and archiveofourown.org, so if you’re reading along, I’m sure you’ll want to click on the link of your choice and get caught up. Hope you like that cliffhanger. Not too much left to Part III: Children of Mammon, and no, I’m still not quite done with Part IV, so the biggest cliffhanger of all may just keep you hanging more than a week. We’ll see. In the meantime, enjoy this excerpt! When last we saw our hero, she was tripping balls in quite possibly the worst place anyone would ever want to be high and hallucinating, on quite possibly the worst night.

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Ana ran forever through the night with the wind always against her, herding her with slaps of rain, but somehow ended up back at Freddy’s, falling out of the storm and against the playground fence. Did the dream end there? Maybe, but the dream was a nightmare and nightmares begin again. When she raised her head and opened her eyes, she saw the blind staring eye of a camera, aimed not at the sandbox or the swings, but at the broken plastic feet that were all that remained of Tumble’s twin brother, Rumble.

It was hard to see. There was no blinking red light with this one; it had long ago succumbed to the young snipers of Mammon, but although the lens was a dry socket and its body was pocked with holes, its apparent death was a lie. It was a machine, after all. Machines never really die.

Unreasoning terror washed over her, its chill immediately followed by a hot rush of rage. She climbed the chain-link fence, up and over, landing badly and skinning her knees, but that didn’t hurt and didn’t matter. The camera was all that mattered, but it was mounted just under the overhanging roof, well out of her reach. How to get there?

Lightning flashed, outlining the scuttled hulk of the pirate ship climbing toy with silver light.

There was no plan, only movement and sensation. The knotted ropes were wet and frayed, slippery in her hands even as they cut into her. The deckboards were rotten; if they’d been dry, they would have broken under her weight, but swollen with rain as they were, they only sagged. The mast was already leaning, its rusty base pulling up the boards around it as a fallen tree’s roots pull up the earth. It needed only a push in the right direction and once it was in motion, it could not be pulled back and set right again.

Ana pushed. The crow’s nest where brave children had once stood watch over the invisible seas that filled the desert smashed apart when it fell. The mast bounced, cracking loudly on each impact, and lay crooked on the ground. It was too heavy to lift, so she was forced to pull it around in a clumsy semi-circle, tripping over playground toys and her own boots, leaving a trail of soggy splinters as the wood crumbled in her hands. Once leaned up against the building, the top of the mast easily touched the overhang, but it lost several inches when she put all her weight on the first rung.

Ana climbed. Decaying rungs broke off in her hands and the mast wobbled and dropped with each step. She knew she wasn’t going to make it, but she almost did…