I forgot to include the disclaimer last chapter, so here: I do not own this game. I just created this story.

"Um, maybe we could talk this out?" Damn it! How had he managed to get cornered like this? The monster that looked like Bendy—provided that the cheerful cartoon had grown taller, become 3D, and melted his face off with ink—advanced another step towards Henry. The man closed his eyes. Damn it! He had come to the studio expecting to have a lighthearted chat with Joey, not get murdered by an ink demon! And to think he actually used to enjoy animating Bendy and his friends!

"Come on, do you really want to do this?" he tried nervously. Apparently the answer was yes. His mind drew a blank when he tried to think of some way to talk Bendy out of killing him. All he was able to think of was a list of possible fates that might be awaiting him. Maybe he was getting dragged to some giant pool of ink to be drowned in. Maybe it was something worse.

Much to his surprise, the place he got dragged to was only the room he had been in minutes before. Alice saw him and immediately started jumping up and down and waving excitedly like she had been doing when he had first seen her. "You brought Henry back! Yay! Yaaaaay!" she squealed.

"Um, Bendy, maybe you should put Henry down now," Boris said, looking less excited and more concerned. To Henry's immense relief, the monster listened to the wolf's suggestion. "I suspect that you have a few questions," Boris continued. "We have some for you as well. But you can go first, seeing as you're probably more confused about what's going on."

Edging away from the ink monster, Henry looked from the page to the hallway. It was a wide-open escape route, so he could get out if he ran, but curiosity overrode reason and he turned back to the two cartoons. He could escape if he had to, but why give up this chance to talk to a couple of apparently sentient drawings if there didn't currently seem to be any reason to flee? "Um, ok," he started, deciding what he was going to ask first. "How are you alive?"

Boris scratched his ear. "Joey had a book that gave the exact details of how life is created from ink, but the short version is that Mr. Joey Drew built an ink machine, did some rituals, and suddenly we existed. That that might not be the best explanation, I know, but I honestly cannot say that I know of a better one."

With that, the wolf expectantly waited for the next question. "Ok, um, speaking of Joey, is he anywhere nearby? I'm kind of waiting to see him."

The response was immediate and surprising. Alice's smile turned upside down and she looked away. Boris's ears drooped. The ink monster suddenly melted into a black puddle. As soon as it lost form, a cartoony (and much less threatening) Bendy appeared next to his two friends. "He better not come back!" he squeaked angrily. "We got rid of him and he better stay gone and he better not hurt us again!"

"Joey is, um, well, he's not as nice as you remember him to be," Boris explained, a dark blush slightly fading onto his cheeks. "Discovering that they have the power to create life can really change the way a person looks at themself, and it isn't always for the better. It's a level of control that's almost godlike, so naturally it has the potential to make a person believe that they are above others. When Joey first created us, shortly after the studio got shut down, I believe, he was a kind enough person. We were almost like children to him. As time went on, though, he got worse and worse. He started accusing us of not respecting him enough, saying that we wouldn't exist without him and weren't acting as thankful as we should for that. He…" Boris grimaced, "he hurt us. Bendy especially. We didn't know what to do. We were all afraid, but we couldn't hide or get away because we can only move on this page and where there's ink."

He sighed. "Eventually, I got desperate enough to try something ridiculous. I snuck into Joey's room and wrote a letter asking for somebody to come to the studio and hopefully help us. I signed it as Joey, of course, because nobody would take anything signed by a fictional character seriously. I sent it to the first address I could find, which turned out to be yours, and it managed to get picked up by the mailman before Joey found out what I had done. When he did, though," the wolf began to get choked up, "furious is not an adequate description of him. He…strapped me to a table and just started cutting until I was dead. He'd killed us all before, many times, but never this violently. It was...absolutely horrible."

"I saw what he was doing to Boris and finally just couldn't take it all anymore," Bendy took over. "I attacked him and we were fighting and he had an axe and then the floor started collapsing. He tripped. I checked. Joey's dead and I'm happy about it." The cartoon shuffled his feet, looking more miserable than joyful as he was saying he was.

"Boris came back, though," Alice piped up, trying to brighten the mood. "We always can come back as long as this page is ok. It takes more than a few falling anvils or explosions or boulders or even operations to kill a toon. So we were all ok. And then five minutes ago we heard footsteps and we got scared so Bendy went out to check it out. But it was you! You must have gotten Boris's letter and then you came and I've never been so excited in my whole life! Except maybe the day I was created but still, you're here!"

"Well, I guess that explains the letter. Joey doing all that, though, I mean, I knew he was a little controlling, but isn't every boss?" If I'd just kept in touch with him and not allowed him to become some sort of hermit living in a closed animation studio, things might have been different. The wind striking against the loose boards outside made a low whistling sound, making the silence in the room all the more apparent.

After a few minutes without speaking, Alice couldn't take to anymore. "Can we ask our questions now, please?" she burst out. "I'm almost thirty years old and Bendy and Boris are even older than I am and none of us have ever been outside. Please tell us what it's like!"

He barely even knew Joey as anything more than the person who told him what the next project to work on was and who handed him a well-earned paycheck at the end of the week. Still, the least Henry could do was find out if the deceased man had any family members and if so, give them closure on what had become of the person who must have vanished from their lives years ago. He would do that when he got home. Weeping over this wasn't going to do any good, not for himself, not for Joey, not for Joey's family, not for the cartoons.

"The outside is still the outside," he sighed, trying to appear less melancholy than he felt. "Business still happens, people still worry and act happy and everything."

"Is there still animation?" Bendy asked.

"Yeah, and I hope it stays that way or else I'm out of a job." He paused to let the cartoon sigh in relief that his world was still around. "Most people style there characters' eyes to look more human, though," he added. "And oh yeah, everything is in color as well."

"What?!" Boris's jaw dropped to his feet. Recovering, he still looked amazed, as did Alice and Bendy.

"I have some copies of the projects I've finished at my house. You can come and see them if you'd like," Henry offered.

The three toons looked at each other and then at the man. "Really?" Bendy asked, eyes a little wider than usual.

"Sure, just as long as you don't splash a bunch of ink on the carpet or anything."

Bendy and Boris nodded eagerly. Alice, on the other hand, only stared out the page with an open mouth. Then the sparkle in her eyes literally doubled in size. "We get to go with Henry!" She rocketed skywards on the page and darted around screaming in pure, hyper joy. Boris, Bendy, and Henry watched her for a moment of silence before shrugging. Henry's house was sure going to be a lot livelier with them there.