"Joey! Joey. I need you for a sec." Grant pulled Joey into his office, shutting the door behind him. "Listen Boss. I know this is sudden, but financially we're in a bit of a pickle." From his desk drawer, Grant produced a graph. "Bendyland Budget?" Joey Drew inquired to Grant, then looking back at the paper which had been handed to him. He noticed a sudden sharp downturn in the line graph, and a small pencil mark on the day the drop began. August Seventh, 1941. Then he remembered.
It was a sight to behold. A full carnival swing, over twenty feet high, and the two had built it by themselves. Tom and Bertrum patted themselves on the back for a job well done. A silence of pure awe stood between the two, broken by Tom. "You think it's safe?"
"I see no reason to distrust my architecture" Bertrum reassured.
"Should we go get The Boss?"
"Maybe once he sees this, he might finally start paying us more."
The two left the warehouse. From the shadows, another person saw this as the perfect time to strike.
"My God, Bertie. You really outdid yourself this time." Joey Drew observed the ride towering over him. "So, may I take this thing on her 'Maiden Voyage?'"
"I think I'd rather you not." Bertrum objected.
"Well see, I'm the owner of this company and I'm about to be the owner of this park, so why shouldn't I be the first one to ride?"
"Aside from funding, you've done nothing for this project. And by funding I mean cost cutting. You slashed even more of our salaries just for this single ride. I think it's only fair that I-"
"Bertie, let me stop you right there. This is a child's issue! We shouldn't be bickering over who gets to ride first, we're businessmen!" "Speak for yourself."
Bertrum walked up to his masterpiece of a swing, and boarded the nearest cart. He ordered Tom to start the ride. Tom flipped a switch on a switchboard and the swing slowly hissed to life. As the wing began to spin, Joey walked up to Tom. "Ya know, that guy looks like he's having the most fun he's had in thirty-five years." Then the two heard a creak. Tom spotted a bolt missing right below Bertrum's cart. Before he came to his senses, a deafening screech filled the room as Bertrum flew off of the swing and into the wall.
Joey snapped back to the present. "You zoned out there for a sec. I take it that you remember what happened. See, ever since Piedmont disappeared without a trace, the other investors smelled smoke. You're lucky the park was all planned out and the rides were almost finished when that all happened, 'cause we're not gonna see another penny from any of those people. 'Least not until we explain what happened to Bertrum." As usual with the delivery of bad news, Joey stood unfazed. "I'll tell you again Joey, you can replace people, but you can't replace money. Especially when it's venture capital money and not cartoon money."
Joey stood silently yet calmly, pondering his next move. In defense of his beautiful enterprise, Joey pointed out another graph sitting on Grant's wall. "See that graph over there? Now I might not be a math-y person, but that line looks like it's been going up over the past few months. Our cartoons have been doing better than ever! We'll make back the losses in no time!" Grant turned back to the chart with the investor money. "Look boss. 'No Time' has already passed. Yeah those cartoons are making us good money, but like I said we've got zero investors. And we sure as Hell made a lot more money when we had people paying us. See, in this safe I've got-"
"Lemme just stop you right there. Allow me to let you in on a little 'trick-of-the-trade' per se. The more you put in, the more you get out. See, if everyone puts all their hearts and all their souls into this next cartoon, we'll sell so much that we won't even need investors! Hell they might even start running back for us once they see just how much we made! Work hard, Work happy!"
With that, Joey spun out of the office in his usual overly-exuberant manner. Grant looked back to his safe, twisted in the combination, and pulled out yet another graph. His eyes glossed over the red lines slowly but surely creeping downwards. New York Stock Exchange, Joey Drew Studios (JDS).
"Now who in their right mind would invest in this?"
On any normal given day, the studio, like a massive mechanical hive, buzzed with activity from it's loyal workers. And days like these were nothing short of normal. The animators scribbled away at their pads, the band plucked at the same set for the seventy-sixth time, Heavenly Toys manufactured more and more stuffed Bendys, and the carnival rides clanked around and around so that maybe one day they could entertain more than the executives pulling the strings. Away from the chaos of it all was Jack.
The Sewer System, despite being less-than-ideal real estate, perfectly provided the all-important getaway an artist like Jack Fain would need. From his little desk at his little office-of-sorts, lit by little light, he alone wrote the lyrics that boys and girls all around the world would laugh along to. While the man's old bones creaked along with his age, his lyrics did quite the opposite. Not looking to to the copious amounts of editing he would end up doing as he did with other songs, his mind danced to the tune of his pen. For jack's young mind, this was playtime.
Jack's blithe hopping from lyric to lyric saw an abrupt halt as another figure sloshed through the tunnels he had been rigorously working in. A stony Thomas Connor trudged through the ink that clotted the endless tunnels of the sewers. Low, bulbous ripples emerged whenever Thomas moved his feet as he marched down through the crypt that Jack called his workspace. Seeing the little light Jack's desk lamp was putting out, he turned toward the old lyricist.
"Service elevator's this way, right?" Thomas asked grimly.
"Think so."
Tom sloshed on until he finally reached that ruptured tank of God-Knows-What that the Music Department had been complaining about. Turns out, the tank never really was ruptured. By some Lovecraftian physics, the pipe leading to the tank had just disappeared completely. Or at least until Thomas stepped on what remained of it, submerged in the flood of ink. Thomas reached downward and grabbed the broken pipe. By the looks of it, it hadn't burst, but somehow just melted. Tom mulled over how this pipe could have met this fate, eventually telling himself to think nothing of it and jotting down the dimensions he'd need for the replacement.
Just out of an intrusive thought, Thomas wondered how that toilet up in Sammy's Sanctuary was doing.