Mr. Burrows is a minor antagonist in the Five Nights at Freddy's anthology series Tales from the Pizzaplex, serving as the secondary antagonist of The Storyteller. He is the chairman and youngest member of Fazbear Entertainment's board of director who more often that not finds himself at odds with fellow board member Edwin Murray. He's the one responsible for connecting the Mimic to the Pizzaplex via the installation of Storyteller.
History[]
Not much is known about Mr. Burrows' past other than the fact that he got into college at age 13 and had an impressively high IQ. At age 35, he became Fazbear Entertainment's chairman of the board not long after the company's revival post-2023. He was key in decision-making within the franchise, managing finances surrounding the construction of Freddy Fazbear's Mega Pizzaplex and likely playing a part in overseeing development of The Freddy Fazbear Virtual Experience and the Fazbear Funtime Service. Ironically, Burrows never liked the Fazbear franchise itself, being more interested in its profitability than its stories.
Not long after the Pizzaplex's opening, Mr. Burrows decides to improve the company's profits by downsizing its creative department and replacing it with an AI story generator named the Storyteller. This decision was met with resounding approval from every board member except its oldest member, Edwin Murray, who believed that the stories were core to the brand's appeal. Regardless, the team set to work on constructing the Storyteller's tree while constantly ignoring Edwin's objections and suggestions and preventing him from getting a closer look at construction.
Eventually, the tree's construction would be finished and it was connected to every sector of the Pizzaplex. The last part to be installed was the Storyteller itself, which turned out to be an robot with the head of a white tiger animatronic. Edwin however caught a glimpse of that robot and recognized it from a traumatic incident from his past, causing him to become extra suspicious of the Storyteller. When he questioned Burrows, he claimed that the program running the mechanism was a simple story-recycling application for creating plots for video games, but Edwin wasn't convinced.
Edwin's suspicions only racked up when, after the Storyteller is plugged in, it started causing glitches and malfunctions across the Pizzaplex and exaggerated the animatronics' personalities to the point of being unlikable. He investigated inside the tree itself, only to find that the program inside it was named "Mimic1", immediately setting of a red flag for Edwin as he realized what he experienced before was happening again.
Burrows also took notice of these issues and believed that Edwin was behind them all. Upon discovering how Edwin was entering the tree, he used this to advantage and locked him inside it for a week. However, Burrows grew increasingly paranoid after noticing that Edwin didn't seem to be escaping from the tree from any other way. He entered the tree himself only to find Edwin's corpse as he'd drawn several symbols on paper strewn across the tree, including repetitions of the phrase "I'm sorry". Burrows tried to leave the tree but his exit point was cut off. Trapped, he tried to shut down and destroy the Storyteller, but to no avail. While the ending states that he was sure someone would eventually find and rescue him, it is implied that Burrows eventually asphyxiated to death inside the Storyteller's tree.
Trivia[]
- Mr. Burrows firing his creative team and replacing them with an A.I. story generator resembles how corporations often attempt to replace creatives with generative A.I in recent years.
