Yep, more Bendy fic. Once I started, I couldn't stop, haha.

Larry Bower is my OC, there's no reference to him in the game, but I figured at some point someone had to try to squeeze some money out of this failing studio.

UPDATED 5/24/2018

It was Larry Bower's first trip out on his own. After months of supervising more experienced people on the job, and then being supervised by them, he was finally out on his own. Of course, he was a newbie, so he was starting at the bottom of the pyramid, doing the work no one else wanted to.

Larry was a collections officer, and Joey Drew Studios was one client his boss doubted would ever pay up.

They'd been calling twice daily, and then half a dozen times a day, until the public phone number disconnected. They'd been sending letters for months now, enough that his boss had once joked that they'd spent more on paper than they'd ever get out of the studio. Finally, they'd decided they could spare a rookie to try and lean on the studio a little harder.

So of course, it got passed to Larry, and now he was standing outside the front door of Joey Drew Studios, trying to work up the nerve to knock.

He'd seen their cartoons; pretty much everyone had. They'd gotten a laugh out of him, for sure, even if the quality had been going downhill for the past few years. At this point, his boss was sure Joey Drew was using the studio as a front while he pocketed most of the money—there was no way an animation studio spent as much as Joey Drew Studios did on animation and had cartoons come out months after the advertised release date and with stiff, jittery animation.

No big deal, though, Larry tried to convince himself. Almost every business owner the collections officer had dealt with had been doing something shady if not downright illegal with the money they owed. Joey Drew was no different.

Larry squared his shoulders and knocked on the door.

"Ruthford Collections Agency!" he called.

He could hear scurrying behind the door, and then a frazzled-looking young man wearing a shirt stained with ink opened it for him.

"Here to see Joey?" he asked. Larry nodded, startled by the man's appearance. He could understand getting ink on your clothes if you worked with it all day, but this man looked like he'd had a bucket of the stuff dumped on him.

Still, he let Larry inside, which was more than he'd been expecting. A narrow hallway plastered with posters for Bendy cartoons opened into a larger room, with machinery whirring on the walls and a projector showing off rough animation that a couple people were murmuring over. There was an animator frantically working at a desk haphazardly placed in one corner, as if whoever was in charge of laying out the desks had run out of room elsewhere.

"You okay waiting in the break room? I'll have someone find Joey and send him over," the animator asked.

"Oh, uh, sure," Larry said. "I can wait for him."

"Great," the man said, taking Larry down a somewhat twisty path into the studio. He opened a door near the end of a hall and gestured down the stairs. Larry got a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach, but he wasn't sure if it was from the fact he was being ushered into a basement or from the simply awful grinding noises coming around the corner to the left of the break room door.

Still, this was his job. He didn't have much choice.

Larry began descending the stairs, and the animator headed on his way.

"Franks!" the animator screamed.

"What?" came a muffled shout from down the hall.

"Find Joey and send him to the break room!"

"That's not my job!"

"Well it's sure as fuck not my job either, and I've got a deadline!"

There were a couple other people in the breakroom, thankfully. One man slouched over in his chair, smoking a cigarette and scowling, while another stood near the wall doing some odd stretches with his arms. Both barely spared Larry a glance, keeping their eyes on the clock. Larry noticed a shiny new punchcard machine near the bottom of the stairs, with a poster encouraging employees to punch in. It seemed that Joey was quite demanding of his employees' time, so it didn't make much sense that the studio was in such bad shape for its budget—unless Mr. Drew was spending more on punchcard machines and similar waste than on his employees. How he ever expected to turn a profit like that, Larry didn't know.

It took a while for Mr. Drew to show up. The stretching animator punched back in and returned to work, and the smoker started up a new cigarette and put the old one out. He started scribbling at a piece of scrap paper, nonsense gibberish Larry couldn't quite make out. He began to wonder if that Franks fellow, or anyone else, was even looking for Joey Drew at all.

Finally, when the smoking man had finally gathered his papers and stormed out, Joey Drew showed up at the top of the stairs. He seemed confident, put together, and he wasn't short of breath—Larry fumed a little internally that he'd been kept waiting longer than necessary—yet his suit was rumpled and the sleeves were stained with ink up to his elbows as if he'd dipped his arms partway into a vat of the stuff. Larry wasn't quite sure what he had been expecting from the man, but this wasn't it.

"Sorry for the delay!" Mr. Drew boomed in a deep, loud voice—a showman's voice, for sure. "Ran into a few problems on the way, you know how it is when you're running your own company! Well, maybe you don't, but I'm sure you can imagine it's incredibly busy!"

Larry pushed himself out of his seat and made for the stairs. He felt nervous to have the man he was supposed to be putting pressure on towering over him at the top of the stairs, but as he came to the top he saw why; Joey Drew was on crutches, and obviously favoring one leg over the other. Health issues, one of the more common reasons to funnel money out of a business, and Larry had seen it half a dozen times at least. Still, he felt a little sorry for the man; Joey winced when he shifted his weight to free one hand for a handshake, and yet he was still on the premises, doing his job.

"Perfectly understandable," Larry said. "I'm Larry Bower, from Ruthford Collections Agency. You're Mr. Joey Drew, I trust?"

Mr. Drew's face paled a bit at that, but he nodded.

"That's me, all right," he said. "I imagine you're here to try collecting on some of the company's debts?"

"That's correct," Larry said, slipping into a more cool and collected persona. "Mr. Drew, my company has been sending requests for collection for over six months now, but we haven't heard from anyone at your company."

"Ah yes, well, paper letters don't tend to last long around here," Joey said. "There's all the ink, and it's only so long we can go without any of it spilling on them, you know."

"So you acknowledge you've been receiving the letters?"

"Well, yes, but they're usually illegible by the time I see them personally."

"And you didn't hire a secretary or mail handler to ensure that didn't happen?"

"We're in enough debt as it is without hiring another employee! We've had to cut a lot of costs lately, you know."

"Like your phone service?"

Joey's face paled again, and he shifted his weight and readjusted his crutches.

"That's the least of it, I'm afraid," he said. "But! I do believe we're on the edge of a breakthrough! Within the year, Joey Drew Studios is going to be back on top again, with cartoons like no one has ever seen before. Faster releases! Higher-quality animation than ever! So, with that in mind, I do think I will be able to write your company a check today. Not for all I owe you, of course, but a good chunk of it."

Larry didn't really know what to say to that, and he was fairly certain his surprise was showing on his face. No one, no one, had thought Joey Drew Studios would ever so much as pay its interest, and here Joey Drew himself was offering to write a check!

Joey laughed.

"Don't look so startled, boy! Half the trouble your company has had with me has been miscommunication! Now, I just need to fetch my checkbook. Care to come with me?"

Larry nodded, not quite trusting his own voice. If he missed this chance to get a payment out of Joey Drew, there was no way his boss would ever let him hear the end of it.

And of course, if he got the payment, he might even get a promotion. This was a nightmare account, and Larry was handling it like a pro!

Larry followed Joey as he made his way down the hall, back through the main room and down a hallway on the other side. They turned and took a set of stairs across from an old, abandoned desk covered in cobwebs and sheets of rough paper, and it seemed Joey wasn't kidding about needing to cut more than the phone if they'd fired an animator to make ends meet.

"Ah, that was Henry's desk," Joey reminisced. "He was one of our best animators, kept the whole department in line, you know. But when the money got tight, we couldn't afford to keep him around. I keep hoping he'll come back one day, and leave his desk; I've become something of a sentimental old man, I'm afraid."

Larry tried to catch Joey's face, because it almost sounded like the man was about to cry, but Mr. Drew's back was to him, pointedly looking at the stairs. After a moment, he ventured forward and started climbing them, an awkward affair with his crutches, as if nothing had happened.

Larry followed a few steps behind, wondering if he should be ready to catch the man if he tumbled backwards. If was hard to reconcile that the stubborn, extravagant Joey Drew was a man getting on in years who couldn't even walk without crutches. Why had it taken the agency so long to send someone out here and get this whole mess cleaned up?

They reached the second story, and Mr. Drew paused at the beginning of a long hallway.

"My office is on this floor, but it's a bit of a maze, I'm afraid. You don't mind following, I assume?" he asked.

"Of course not, sir," Larry answered, and Joey took off down what very much resembled an actual maze, hallways splitting and twisting. The building hadn't seemed as big on the outside as it was on the inside, and Larry hoped Mr. Drew would lead him back out again, because he was hopelessly lost.

"Just through here," Joey said, pushing open a seemingly random door, and Larry found himself on a catwalk overhanging an enormous machine suspended from the ceiling by chains. He couldn't help but gawk at the sheer size of it – it had to be taller than a person, and weigh thousands of pounds. An enormous, open vat of ink bigger than a bathtub standing on one end was hooked to one end, and the other dripped traces of ink into a bucket suspended above a deep pit in the wooden floor below.

This was where all the money went. It had to be. But what did an animation studio need with a machine like this?

"Beautiful, isn't it?" Joey asked, his voice momentarily tender. "This is the big project we've been trying to keep secret for a while now; the Ink Machine. It supplies all the ink the animators need, directly to their desks! And it does a few other things, too, but we have to keep some secrets around here!" Joey chortled, even though Larry didn't think he'd said anything funny, and then his tone grew serious.

"With this Ink Machine, we're going to revolutionize the animation industry - hell, the whole world!"

Larry took another look at the machine, this time doubtful. Sure, it was impressively big, but what use did it serve outside of animation? How many other industries needed ink delivered throughout a building so often?

"Take a closer look if you want, it's perfectly safe turned off like this," Joey said, gesturing for Larry to look closer. He decided it couldn't hurt, worst he'd do was stain his shirt, so he leaned over the railing a bit to look.

"If you look into the ink supply, you'll see what makes this machine so revolutionary. Think you can guess?" Joey asked playfully, like some of Larry's seniors at work when they were showing off new cars. Larry decided to humor him, trying to look at what lay in the ink tank, but he couldn't see anything past the solid black surface of the ink.

"I don't know, Mister Drew," Larry said. "It's hard to see with all the—"

But before he could finish his sentence, Joey lunged forward, all traces of limp and joint pain gone. He grabbed the belt of Larry's pants and, with surprising strength, tipped him over the railing of the catwalk, into the ink.

At first, all Larry could feel was how thick it was; thicker than any liquid he could think of. Maybe quicksand could compare, he thought vaguely as he tried to kick and claw his way to the surface to take a breath, only to get sucked deeper in. But with every passing moment, it pressed on him more, and he could feel the cold. It wasn't like ice, wasn't chilly or freezing; it was cold because it was sapping the warmth out of his body, swiftly and surely. Larry raised a hand for the surface, thought he felt air against ink-covered fingers…

Up on the catwalk, Joey winced as the gears snagged on Larry's body and struggled for a moment. They were built to work through thick chunks of pigment and goo, not human bones and organs, but after a little whirring and grinding, the Machine seemed to find its stride, and it worked through Larry's body in no time, spitting out a thick and gooey glob of ink before returning to gushing the normal liquid ink.

Joey flipped the emergency stop back off. It was regrettable, killing the man, but he couldn't have the studio collapse because of monetary debt of all things. Not when they were so close to success, to immortality.

At least he'd had time to disconnect the machine from the main pipe system. Saved Wally having to fix a clogged pipe later on, which could easily be a day or more of work for the man. He really should consider firing him... but no, he couldn't risk him spreading the Studio's secrets.

Joey climbed down the service ladder to the level of the machine and set about reconnecting the outflow pipes that supplied the studio.

As he worked, the thick bucket of ink that held Larry's earthly remains bubbled. Then it writhed. Finally, a shape broke the surface of the ink, a surprisingly human hand, and slapped onto the floor. Joey dropped the wrench he was holding at the sudden noise, and turned in awe to watch as another hand emerged, then arms, pulling up a torso and a head with a familiar face

"-ink," Larry finished saying, before he seemed to realize the change in surroundings.

First he looked up, at Joey himself. Then down, at the floor, and then at the base of his own body, which seemed to stop and melt into the inky contents of the bucket at his waist. He held his hands out in front of himself, flipping them over time and time again as ink started to drip and splatter off of them.

"No, no, no, what happened, what happened!" he muttered, flying into hysteria as the ink making up his body lost its solidity, started dripping. But Larry didn't dissolve into a puddle.

Joey watched, stock-still, his face unreadable. It wasn't anywhere near perfection, but it was an enormous improvement over his previous experiments with the machine.

"Larry, I do believe you've just solved an enormous problem we were having here at the studio," Joey said, an unsettlingly wide grin spreading across his face.

What was that saying, about two birds and one stone?