In the locker room at Monsters, Inc., Scarers and their assistants were getting ready for a day on the job. Sulley polished his horns, while Mike popped a contact lens the size of a hubcap into his eye.

Without warning, the door of Mike’s locker suddenly slammed shut. Mike gasped in surprise.

He opened the locker door. Again it shut with a bang. “What the…?”

Suddenly a large, purple, lizardlike monster appeared, seemingly out of nowhere! “Wazowski!” he hissed, showing rows of sharp teeth.

“Ahhhhhh!” Mike screamed, leaping back from the locker.

The scaly monster, Randall, chuckled. He’d been blending in with Mike’s locker like a chameleon. “Whaddya know?” he said nastily. “It scares little kids and little monsters.”

“Hey, Randall. Save it for the Scare Floor, will ya?” Sulley said, coming to his friend’s rescue.

Randall fixed Sulley with an evil stare. He began to wave his arms like a karate fighter. “I’m in the zone today, Sullivan—going to be doing some serious scaring,” he said threateningly, “putting up some big numbers.” At Monsters, Inc., Randall was the second-best Scarer, next to Sulley. He was determined to be the best.

But not if Mike and Sulley could help it. Mike put a thin green arm around his pal. “Wow, Randall, that’s great,” he said. “That should make it even more humiliating when we break the record first.”

Randall put a hand to his ear. “Shhh,” he said. “Do you hear that?” He paused. “It’s the winds of change.” Snickering to himself, he sauntered out of the room.

“What a creep!” Mike snapped as soon as Randall was gone. He turned to Sulley. “One of these days, I am really…gonna let you teach that guy a lesson.”

On his way to the station where he and Sulley worked, Mike stopped to pick up his paperwork. “Good morning, Roz, my succulent little garden snail, and who would we be scaring today?” he said to the dispatch manager.

“Wazowski,” the sluglike monster replied, “you didn’t file your paperwork last night.”

“Oh, that darn paperwork,” Mike said. “Wouldn’t it be easier if it all just blew away?”

Roz leaned in close to Mike. “Don’t let it happen again,” she said threateningly.

“Yes, well, I’ll try to be less careless,” Mike answered as he backed away nervously.

“I’m watching you, Wazowski—always watching.”

“Ooh, she’s nuts,” Mike muttered to himself as he walked toward the Scare Floor. “Slug.”

“All Scare Floors are now active,” Celia announced over the loudspeaker. “Assistants, please report to your stations.”

Mike and the other assistants got to work preparing their stations. The Scare Floor was the most important part of Monsters, Inc. It was where the Scarers did their work. When an assistant inserted a special card key into a slot, a door dropped into the station. These doors opened to the human world—right into children’s closets. Monsters, Inc. had one door for every child in the world. A Scarer’s job was to pop through one of these doors, frighten a child, and exit through the door back into the monster world. Meanwhile, special mechanisms attached to the closet doors collected the kids’ screams in yellow canisters.

“Okay, people,” a floor manager announced. “We got Scarers coming out!”

From the end of the hall, a line of scary monsters slowly emerged out of the shadows. They lined up in front of their doors. Their assistants lined up behind them. On the wall above them, a large scoreboard showed the scream totals: Sulley was in first place, Randall in second.

The Scarers geared up. Sulley cracked his knuckles. Another monster flexed his claws like a cat. An assistant handed a ferocious set of teeth to a monster with a shrunken, toothless mouth. The monster slid the choppers into place, then snapped his mouth open and closed.

Fungus, Randall’s assistant, yanked a patterned backdrop down behind Randall. Randall suddenly changed colors, blending in with the wood pattern. Fungus pulled down a second background, this time decorated with a sky pattern. Randall quickly turned bright blue to match.

A bald-headed monster put a finger in his mouth and blew hard. A line of spikes popped out of his head. An assistant brushed another monster’s sharp teeth with a giant toothbrush. A monster with no eyes grabbed a bunch of eyeballs and popped them into his face.

Then the floor manager began the countdown. The Scarers took their places.

Sulley looked over at Randall. “Hey,” he said, trying to be a good sport, “may the best monster win.”

“I plan to,” Randall sneered, and crouched into a starting position.