Here are a few things we know about the story of Sister Location:


What happens in between is more fuzzy. The common interpretation of SL goes something like this:

Elizabeth's soul is in Baby. The MCI remnant, which Afton collected in Follow Me, is haunting the Funtimes. Thus, when the Funtimes merge into Ennard, both the missing children and Elizabeth are present.



You may notice that something important has been forgotten, though. Yenndo? Possibly. But more importantly, Elizabeth's pieces. If she's only possessing Baby, how is she broken? Where are her pieces, and how exactly did Michael put them back together?

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In Puppy's video on remnant (which you should watch, if you haven't), she proposes that the situation is very similar to that of The Fourth Closet. In TFC, Carlton gets injected with MCI remnant, which causes him to wake up in a sort of dream space, where he can put the children back together using drawings. Afterwards, Carlon is going to die from the injection, so Michael Brookes (Novel GF's spirit) leaves behind a piece of himself, to keep Carlton alive.

Puppy's claim is that this lines up very well with SL. Michael gets injected with Elizabeth's remnant (from the scooper), which allows him to put her back together from the inside. Baby's "You won't die" shtick is her leaving a piece of herself to keep Michael alive.

I like this interpretation. It plays nicely with MoltenMCI, and it draws a smooth parallel to TFC. But it still leaves me wondering... Where were Elizabeth's pieces??

Let's quickly analyze how "putting someone back together" works. In TFC, the missing children were shattered across both the Funtimes, some weird clown dolls, and the original Freddy's endoskeletons, which are melted together. So, question: What happens to all these vessels when the souls are put together again? In the graphic novel, the souls converge on the original vessel (the melted Freddy's endos), and the others are abandoned. You can briefly see Funtime Foxy deactivating in the background. But in the text version, something more interesting happens. All the animatronics literally, physically conglomerate into one entity.

"Afton struggled to right himself as the wires and mechanisms scattered throughout the room all marched toward him to collect into a central mass, crawling up onto his body and threatening to engulf him."

This is also what happens with Afton in the Stichwraith stingers. Through sheer willpower, he puts himself back together, literally sucking all the garbage in the room into one big amalgamation.

"As it began to assemble itself, the being sucked in all the remaining junk and debris in the factory. [...] The moment the rabbit-shaped fusion of trash met Larson's gaze, Larson was able to accept what he'd known when he first watched the monster pull itself together. The thing was Afton."

Point is, in all but the graphic novel, putting someone's pieces together is a physical process, even if it's achieved by metaphysical means. So, again: Where were Elizabeth's pieces? The Bidybabs, maybe? But then, how exactly did they merge with Ennard, after it escaped the bunker? Or did they merge beforehand, offscreen?

All in all, I think this theory has a very good chance of being right. But I still think Elizabeth's pieces are important, and this theory doesn't seem to know what to do with them. It's worth exploring some other ideas.

~

Before hearing Puppy's take, I had already developed an explanation of my own. I find a lot of satisfaction in the idea that Elizabeth's pieces were haunting the Funtimes, meaning Ennard is the pieces put together. It plays well into SL's themes, emphasizing that this is the sister's location. It also leaves SL more internally complete, in the sense that you don't need to rely on future games to explain why the Funtimes are haunted. Under this theory, the story of Elizabeth's pieces is fairly elegant.



There's some evidence for this in Baby's behavior. Brokenness is associated with memory loss. On Night 2, Baby doesn't recognize Michael. On Night 3, she tells the story of Elizabeth's death entirely from the animatronic perspective, not seeming to understand that she's Elizabeth.

"I still hear her sometimes. Why did that happen?"

On Night 5, she becomes Ennard. Now, suddenly, she recognizes Michael (albeit incorrectly), and she knows that Elizabeth's soul is inside her.

"Isn't this why you came here? To be with her again?"

(In Elizabeth's voice)
"Isn't this why you came here? To be with me again?"
"Everything is ok. I'm still here."

It seems her memory comes back after she becomes Ennard, but before Michael is scooped.

The problem is figuring out how to work in the missing children. The most obvious idea is to just let everyone be in the Funtimes, together. Why not?



It's a bit crowded, though. Especially when you add ShatterVictim into the mix...



It's arguable whether this crowdedness is actually a bad thing. It certainly takes away the elegance I was so proud of a moment ago. But as a Networkposter, I'm also keen on the idea that everything naturally tends to agglomerate, the network tangling as its entropy increases. These conflicting feelings will surely eat away at me until I collapse under my own contradictions.

Anyway...

What if the MCI remnant isn't involved until later?

Henry's insanity ending speech was where we first saw the scooper blueprint. The reveal of MoltenMCI is side-by-side with the reveal that the scooper is a remnant injector. Is the intended implication that the MCI remnant is only put into the Funtimes after they're scooped, to become Ennard? It wouldn't simplify the diagram at all, but it'd at least leave Elizabeth alone in the Funtimes for most of the duration of SL.

It's also worth considering that the MCI remnant may not have gotten involved until much later, after Ennard has already escaped. We know Ennard did some amount of scavenging for new parts, just looking at Scrap Baby and Molten Freddy. Maybe, in the process, they accidentally adopted the MCI souls?

The main problem with this theory is that (as far as I can tell) there's no real implication of this happening whatsoever. Which is... a pretty big problem, theory-wise.

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It isn't a problem for an AU, though.

In my fan comic, Loose Threats, I vaguely hinted toward it. Here's a tentative diagram for that, leaving some ambiguity.



I named this new form of Ennard Salvage, by the way. It's unoriginal, but way too fitting to pass up.

~

I think that's all I have to say. I'll finish off with a big, final (speculative) chart.




UPDATE (2024/6/20):

Here is a bigger, better chart.