The Puppet Carver | Jump for Tickets | Pizza Kit
She'll always be inside of you.
She would not be sick. She would not call attention to herself. She would bake her pizza and eat it just like everybody else. The thought of eating the pizza filled her with a disgust more intense than any feeling she had ever known in her life. But she was going to do it. She had to do it.
Marley and Payton are best friends. Sure, they don't always make the best decisions, but they're teens. They're having fun. And they're popular. Payton will do anything Alpha Bitch Marley tells her to, if it means being accepted. So when Marley suggests they take a Home Ec class for an easy A, Payton agrees. When Marley suggests they sneak off during the field trip to Freddy Fazbear's Pizza Factory, Payton follows. And when Marley disappears? Well. Payton will not be blamed for what could have happened to her.
The twenty-seventh Five Nights at Freddy's: Fazbear Frights story, and the last of the ninth book, The Puppet Carver.
Tropes related to “Pizza Kit”:
- Accidental Murder: The Twist Ending has Marley end up becoming the perpetrator of this, as her attempts to reveal her survival to Payton end up causing the terrified girl to slip and fall off the roof where she had hidden, breaking her neck on impact.
- A-Cup Angst: Implied; when thinking about how Marley is prettier than her, Payton mentions that Marley has feminine curves, and she doesn't.
- All for Nothing: It turns out all of Payton's paranoia, bloody nightmares, and supposed cannibalism was pointless, as Marley was definitively alive the whole time.
- Alpha Bitch: Marley is one of the most popular kids in school, and everyone does whatever she wants.
- Animal Motifs: Payton compares her and Marley to a sparrow following a flamingo.
- Bad Liar: Payton wasn't used to lying before, and she struggles to keep it together as she claims she has no idea where Marley is.
- Bad People Abuse Animals: When the girls stop to feed the ducks, something Payton did a lot as a kid, Marley throws her feed just out of their reach and laughs at the ducks trying to find the food.
- Body Horror: One of Payton's nightmares has her convinced she's swallowed some kind of tapeworm and trying to pull it out of herself, like she'd seen on TV. Instead, she pulls out Marley's hand, and Marley tries to crawl out of her. When Payton swallows her, blood and flesh bursts from her orifices, knocking out her eye sockets and leaving her a mess on the floor.
- Bookworm: Abigail, who's always reading on her porch. Payton thinks about how they used to trade books as kids.
- Constructive Criticism: One of the reasons Mrs. Crutchfield's class is hard to pass is that she gives out very strict grades.
- Deadly Prank: Marley pretends to go missing for laughs after she falls out of view at the Pizza Kit factory, but this winds up causing her friend Payton to think that she's actually dead, which causes a domino effect of guilt, paranoia, and hallucinations that ultimately result in Payton falling off the roof of her house and breaking her neck.
- Destroy the Evidence: Payton convinces herself that, somehow, Marley was made into her pizza, and she has to eat it so that nobody can find out. The book goes into excruciating detail of how slow and disgusting this process is.
- Disney Villain Death: At first, it seems that Marley goes this way. Then, Payton falls from her house's roof, breaking her neck.
- Everyone Loves Blondes: Marley, the prettiest girl in school, has golden-blonde curls.
- Faking the Dead: After falling out of view at the Pizza Kit factory, Marley decides to go missing for the fun of it; meanwhile, her friend Payton thinks she was killed and made into pizza ingredients.
- A Friend in Need: When Marley falls, Payton could go get an adult and tell them what happened... but that would get her in trouble, so she decides against it, since Marley is probably already dead anyway.
- Guilt-Induced Nightmare: These escalate in horror as Payton becomes more and more paranoid.
- Hate Sink: Marley swiftly does everything she can to establish herself as a bratty teenager who cares only about herself.
- I'm a Humanitarian: Payton falsely believes herself to have become this due to her paranoia over Marley's disappearance causing her to think that her pizza contains Marley's remains, and she eats it to Destroy the Evidence.
- It's All About Me: Marley, who is super happy that her family will give her tons of attention after she comes back alive.
- It's All My Fault: Payton blames herself for not stopping Marley from falling off the catwalks, and then for not telling anyone what had happened, in case Marley could have been found and saved.
- Karmic Death: Payton thought that Marley had died from the fall from the catwalks; she then dies from her own fall, from the roof of her house.
- Meaningful Name: Marley's name could very easily be a reference to Jacob Marley, the ghost who appears to Scrooge to convince him to turn away from his sins. At the end of the story, a living Marley appears, but sanity-slipped Payton is convinced that she's a Vengeful Ghost and climbs onto her own roof.
- Meta Twist: Turns out nothing supernatural at all was going on here.
- Nerd Glasses: On Abigail.
- Never Trust a Trailer: Whether a typo or an intentional misdirection, the summary on the back of the book says that Marley is the one whose best friend goes missing.
- Nightmare Sequence: Two: one morbidly funny one where Freddy Fazbear dresses as a witch and cooks Marley in a cauldron, a second more grotesque one where Marley's flesh explodes out of Payton.
- No Full Name Given: Most characters actually get a surname, except for Marley.
- Not Quite Dead: Marley, who (somehow) survives her fall and decides to hide out rather than admit she's alive, just to see what will happen.
- Peer Pressure Makes You Evil: Payton will do anything Marley tells her, all the while thinking that it's something she wants to do, because Marley is so damn convincing. When Marley's pressure gets her in trouble, Payton locks up the truth of what happened rather than admit they'd done something wrong.
- Pink Means Feminine: One of Marley's identifying characteristics is her pink nail polish.
- Plot Hole: The entire crux of the Cruel Twist Ending is that Marley was alive the whole time... but how? She fell from a huge catwalk, apparently landed outside of the churning pizza sauce cans, was completely unharmed and uninjured, didn't even scream, and then... just left? Went to go hide and pretend she was dead at random? Where did she even go? Where had she been the last few days? They didn't find her in the factory, so she must have been somewhere else. She had to visit her boyfriend before Payton, so she wasn't with him. What was she doing? Where was spoiled, bratty Marley hiding out that could fit her standards? Could the police not track her phone? Did spoiled Marley ditch her phone? She doesn't seem smart enough to think that far ahead. And did the factory have no cameras that caught her falling or leaving? It just doesn't add up.
- Popular Is Evil: Payton ditches Abigail to fall in with the popular crowd, mainly Marley. Marley is much less caring than Abigail, and gets Payton into all kinds of trouble with no regard for her safety or mental state.
- Sanity Slippage: On Payton, who at first thinks that if she lies and says she doesn't know where Marley is, she can avoid getting in trouble. As the situation settles in, however, she becomes more and more paranoid that people are going to find out her involvement, resulting in her scrambling onto her roof to hide from the "ghost" of Marley, and slipping and falling.
- Shrinking Violet: Payton, who's a nobody without Marley.
- Stern Teacher: Mrs. Crutchfield, who is a hard grader and strict teacher. She does, however, care about her students, and is upset when Marley vanishes.
- Toxic Friend Influence: Marley is a horrible influence on Payton, encouraging her to get in trouble with both her parents and the school. When she sees Payton is afraid of the catwalks, she mocks her for it and disappears... then doesn't tell Payton she's alive, making her best friend think that she'd killed her.
- Unnamed Parent: Payton's parents go unnamed throughout the story.
