Jayla lost both of her parents in a tragic accident when she was 4 1/2 years old. The accident left her with plenty of cuts and scrapes as well as a fractured collar bone that would leave a scar after it was surgically healed. During her stay in the hospital, no family member came forward to claim responsibility of her, so she was sent to a one of a kind orphanage located beneath a semi-famous toy company's factory, and lived out the next few years with colorful characters and endless games to play, but things took a turn when Jayla’s friend attempted to escape the facility known as 'Playcare’ and got severely injured in the process.
One night while she was unable to fall asleep, before the use of the red sleeping gas, Jayla heard her friend Theodore talking to his ‘imaginary’ friend, Ollie. It wasn’t unusual to hear him from down the hallway occasionally, but this time when she went to ask if he would take a walk with her to help them both sleep, she saw the thing he'd been talking to almost every night for weeks.
A round mask-like face -or is it the other way around?- and a toothy grin that was stopped only by rosy blush on either cheek, which was all illuminated vaguely in the dark by a pair of orange glowing irises set into hollow black eyes, just like the Smiling Critters. She also heard the soft jingling of bells and scraping of wood as the thing moved carefully underneath Theo's bed frame, like it was trying to be quiet but was slightly too big for its hiding place. The only part of it coming out of the darkness from underneath the bed was a metal skeletal hand with long needle like fingers.
Theo was crouched down between his and the empty bed next to his, speaking in a hushed voice to this unnamed character underneath when its eyes abruptly shifted and met Jayla’s, a steady piercing stare that startled her enough to make her fall back onto the hallway floor and scramble back to her own bed as quickly as her legs would carry her, pretending to be asleep despite her ragged breathing.
Neither child brought it up the next morning and she never saw the character again.
After the horrifying events of the incident that nearly killed Theodore the next night, things began to rapidly change in and around Playcare. Theodore’s bed remained empty, more cameras were installed all over the place, strict schedules were enforced along with a curfew, conversations with the Smiling Critters and other characters who were allowed to freely roam inside Playcare were more closely monitored and/or stopped all together other than Catnap when he eventually arrived, and interactions felt more scripted than before. It started to feel less like an orphanage and much more like a colorful prison.
A few short years later in 1993, however, Jayla was adopted by The Player and taken away from Playcare indefinitely. Life after Playcare was an adjustment between living in 'the real world’ and the typical transition of an orphan into a new home and family, but with plenty of time, patience, and love it all started to feel like a real home.
When the factory/facility shut down suddenly because of the disappearance of nearly all of the workforce, miraculously not including The Player who had stayed home to care for their ill daughter, both received quite a bit of attention from the press and police during and after the several investigations that came up with nothing more than basic information about Playtime, getting them no closer to finding out what happened within those walls. No one who went there ever returned from that factory, so they stopped investigating altogether and left the place to rot.
The Player did what they could to protect Jayla from the publicity, but investigative reporters were relentless. Luckily, no one was going to believe a child, or any adult for that matter, that there were living toys roaming around an underground facility. Eventually, the reporters stopped coming. With no new ‘credible’ information to report, they moved on to other stories and events. Life went on.
After spending years in therapy and being told how it was impossible for toys to come to life, that it must have been her using an overactive imagination to cope with the trauma of losing her parents and a friend at young ages, Jayla decided to continue to use that same imagination to pursue a career as an illustrator of children's books, using her childhood drawings of the Playtime Co. toys and mascots.
The same night she tried to surprise her parent with the news of her first successful book publishing by showing up unannounced to their house, Jayla discovered that her parent had gone back to the abandoned toy factory because of a note with an impossible notion that employees survived Inside the building for the last ten years. To make things worse, their phone is turned off and police refuse to make a missing person report, joking with her that she may as well call a coroner instead.
Without help from proper authorities and no other options, Jayla decides that she will have to go after her missing parent herself.
