My interpretations of the BATIM characters – Bendy, Boris, Henry, Joey Drew, etc – are only just that: interpretations. They are NOT canon to the actual game or the history of the world it takes place in (or at least I don't think they are). This is just me having fun! ^^
If one were to ask anybody who had made the acquaintance of one Miriam "Miri" Besnick just what sort of woman she was, the answer you would receive would differ depending just who you asked.
If you were to ask her parents, they would tell you she was a rapscallion, a fool working towards a career bound to crash and burn, and bemoan how her teenage rebellion phase had started early, and then never ended.
If you were to ask her younger brother, he would either turn his nose up at the mention of her (whenever their parents were around), or declare with a huge grin that she was the coolest person on the face of the planet, even if she was a girl, and he wanted to be just like her when he grew up (when they weren't).
If you were to ask the professors at the art college she had attended, they would tell you she was a bit too quick to curse, but hardworking and easily one of the most dedicated students on campus.
If you were to ask her close-knit group of oddball friends, they would tell you she was one of the most strangely likable assholes they'd ever met in their lives, and would seem torn about whether or not they should curse themselves for having ever met the woman.
And if you were to ask Miri herself? Well, she would give you an impish grin, agree that yes, she was an asshole, then jerk a finger at herself and proclaim, with great pride and puffing out her chest, that not only was she an asshole, but she was also an animator.
Miri had her reasons for being so prideful of being, as one of her pals would put it, the "artsy-fartsy" sort. She had grown up in your typical high-end middle-class household, her father being a respected surgeon who saved lives almost on a day-to-day basis, and her mother a respectable woman who toiled day and night as a tailor, and whose skills with a needle and threat were always in demand. Upon being old enough to read, both of Miri's so-very-respectable parental units began trying to groom her into a successful little businesswoman, cramming lessons about various fields of study down her throat, along with their opinions of what constituted an "acceptable" job.
Unfortunately, at least in the eyes of her parents, Miri showed no interest in being a lawyer, tailor, secretary, or any other high-end, high-profit jobs that her gene donors wanted her to take an interest in. Instead, her interests had diverged long ago and gone down an entirely different path – the path of pen and paper, pencils and paints, the path of art. Fantastical characters, wondrous landscapes, fairies and unicorns – Miri drew them all, and the more she created, the more fascinated she became with it – until, one day, the dark-haired little girl she'd been had innocently asked her parents if she could make drawing her job.
Her father had immediately railed into her with an intensity that frightened the little girl out of her boots, and thus things had begun on a downwards spiral. Argument after argument, scolding and lectures – her mother and father simply refused to put up with the notion that their little girl might want to make a living as a "glorified finger-painter" instead of any career they personally recommended. And with every harsh word, Miri retreated further and further into her sketchbooks whenever she could, until one day her father decided to dump every last one of them she could find into the fireplace to make his point, and Miri fled crying into the night with a bag of what few art supplies she still had to her name.
She returned the next morning with her bag stained liberally with ink that refused to be washed out and subtly… different. She paid attention to their lectures, bit her tongue whenever they railed on her favorite hobby, and she kept quiet until her parents finally decided one day that she must have taken their words to heart, and started to go easier on her.
Needless to say, this was not the case. While little Miri obligingly read the books that were shoved upon her, and never seemed to buy new supplies to replace the ones her father had burned… well, if there was one thing that all the Besnicks were, it was stubborn, and Miri had inherited a double dosage of that stubbornness. She saved up her allowance one penny at a time, buying art supplies on the sly and bribing her little brother to hide them in his room. Only when her parents were out of the house did she retrieve them and draw as she wanted to, and when she did, gone were the girly stick-figures, and what was in their place was rubberhose cartoon characters.
Then, one fateful day almost eight months after that night she'd run off into the dark, Miri finally decided enough was enough, hid every last one of her meagre art supplies at her friend's house, and then irreparably shattered her parents' toxic hopes at the dinner table with one trembling but determined sentence.
"I'm going to make cartoons when I grow up!"
After that, the girl made it very, very clear that she no longer had any intentions of listening to her parents. She walked out on their lectures, threw away the books they tried to shove down her throat, and locked herself in her room in an effort to ignore her parents' ire. As she got older, and her posse of social rejects and weirdos slowly grew around her, thus giving her the support she needed, she became more daring in her rebellion. She walked out of the debate club her parents tried to sign her up for in favor of the art club where she was free to doodle her cartoons to her heart's content. She liberally splattered all of her "respectable" clothes with colorful paints and inks, and doodled on everything that wasn't splattered on. She created comic strips for the school newspaper, signed herself up for an animation class taught by a visiting animator. As her parents tried harder and harder to crack down on her behavior, so did Miri increase her own efforts not to be silenced. She painted her walls with images of a cartoon paradise, skipped classes to graffiti local buildings with her peers, posted mocking caricatures of her parents all over the house, and even helped her brother start learning to draw on the side, just to spite the two close-minded members of their family.
This never-ending war of attrition finally culminated in an eardrum-shattering shouting match, Miri vandalizing every last piece of clothing in her parents' wardrobes, and several buckets of neon paint being tipped over on top of her parents' heads. Needless to say, Miri was kicked out in short order, the last words she heard from her parents in years being "don't come back until you start working towards a real career."
Miri had then proceeded to flip the metaphorical bird at that statement by moving in with one of her friends, saving up money for art school, and then graduating with a masters degree with all A's, before beginning to crank out as many handmade comic strips and cartoons as she could whenever she wasn't working as a waitress at a local restaurant.
Obviously, she had yet to go back, though sometimes her roommate, one Briar Kern, wished that she had.
Take now, for instance.
For the fourth time in as many days, Briar was woken up by what sounded like someone trying to cave in his bedroom door with a battering ram.
"Hey, Briar!" Miri shouted. "Wake up, get dressed, get your coffee, we've got places to go!"
"Go?" He repeated blearily before burying his face in his pillow again. "It's too early to go . Lemme sleep."
On the other side of the door, hair pulled up in a messy ponytail, Miri rolled her eyes, pushed her glasses further up her nose, and kept knocking furiously until she heard a loud groan from inside the room, and her unfortunate roommate finally flung it open and gave her his best early morning glare.
His glare wasn't very intimidating, mostly because he couldn't seem to focus on her face for long enough to make eye contact.
"There we go!" Miri shoved a cup of coffee into his hand. "Now drink, and be ready to go in fifteen, otherwise I'm getting one of those kiddie leashes to drag you with."
The next fifteen minutes were a blur as Miri half stalked, half-dragged her friend around their tiny apartment, idly threatening everything from the coffee maker to Briar's very comfortable pillow in order to motivate him, until finally the man was stumbling about mostly dressed, and Miri bodily dragged him out the door and into the early morning sunshine.
By the time they were on the bus on their way to their unknown destination, Briar was awake and thoroughly regretting his choice in friends.
"So why exactly did you drag me out of bed at ungodly o'clock in the morning?" He demanded.
Miri grinned, leaning back, crossing her arms over her paint-splattered dress, and tapping a jaunty little rhythm against the bus's metal floor with her clunky combat boots. She seemed more amused at his displeasure than anything else – an unfortunately common occurrence after she'd developed her by now infamous mischievous streak when she was fourteen.
"What, you mean you're not an early bird? Why, I've been wrong about you for all these years, Briar dear!" Miri chirped.
"Cut the crap," Briar groaned, burying his face in his hands. "Where are we going?"
"Remember what I told you four days ago about remembering a place for that studio we've been wanting?"
He blinked at her. "… No?"
She snorted. "Yeah, yeah, I know, you didn't get your true love's first kiss yet. The point is, I told you about it." She leaned forward, clapping her hands together and positively beaming at her blonde roommate – an expression that was incredibly disturbing to anyone used to her usual smirks and snark. "Well, that's where we're going right now!"
Briar blinked slowly at her. Then he groaned again. "You're telling me you woke me up at this torturous hour because you wanted to have a house tour?"
"Hey, firstly, it'd be a studio tour, " Miri chided, her usual smirk returning. "Secondly, it's less of a tour and more like we're inviting ourselves in to have a look."
"What?"
"Well, it's not like the owner wants people poking their noses in," Miri shrugged casually, and Briar opened and shut his mouth like a fish a few times as he slowly realized that Miri intended for them to break into someone's probably private property. "So we might as well show ourselves around." She patted the black-and-periwinkle bag slung over her shoulder. "I managed to get Corvus to snatch us a copy of the blueprints of the place – it's why I didn't insist we poke around sooner, 'cause it took him ages to find them. Buried real deep down in the filing cabinets, if you get my drift."
"Miri. Miri. Please don't tell me you bribed Corvus into stealing classified files from the police, 'cause that's what it sounds like you did."
"Aww, c'mon, have a little faith in me, Briar Rose." Miri waved her hand dismissively. "I asked Alan first, but he couldn't find anything in the town hall – someone moved the blueprints. Not sure why they were in the police evidence lockup of all places, but hey, we have them now, don't we?"
"One of these days you're gonna get us sent straight to jail. We're going to end up on death row because of you."
"Ah, the everlasting trust of two bestest buddies," she mused. " Relax, Briar, we'll be fine. This was probably just someone from the police department playing a prank on someone, or deciding to be an ass, or both. Nothing dangerous – Corvus checked to make sure there were no big red exclamation marks to be had about this place, and apart from some skittish land owners claiming the place is haunted, nothing much is going on."
"Haunted?"
Miri rolled her eyes. " Relax, Sleeping Beauty. I checked with Jenn yesterday morning – she's done her research and apart from some weird disappearances a decade or so back, this place is clean of any suspicious activity, supernatural or otherwise. No-one's even been in this place for years."
Briar narrowed his eyes at her, deeply suspicious. "If this place is abandoned, then why the hell are we going there?"
With a grin, Miri reached for her drawstring pouch. Briar immediately leaned back, eyeing the little bag with trepidation.
Now, as laughable as it might have seemed to be wary of a drawstring pouch, every member of Miri's troupe of friends would vouch for having a very healthy, and slightly fearful, respect for that little ink-splattered bag. Miri claimed to have had it since she was ten, and always carried it with her, and as a result the entire group had borne witness to countless examples of the sheer impossibleness of what it was capable of carrying. While what the bag typically carried was normal, everyday objects, the number of things that it could carry was beyond what the laws of physics dictated the bag should be capable of carrying – and sometimes, Miri would fit the most ridiculous of items into the thing that had no business fitting inside, the most memorable occasion being when she'd pulled not only her usual lipsticks, pencils, and sketchbooks out of the bag, but also a three-inch thick hardbound book that the bag frankly shouldn't have had enough room for.
There was no way that little bag could carry so much, they had all agreed after the fourth time such a thing had happened, without it having something supernatural involved. In fact, they had so much faith that there was something supernatural involved that they had actually started a number of betting pools over the years – what was causing this strange phenomenon, what all Miri could fit inside of it without the bag splitting at the seams; someone had even bet once that Miri would one day pull a chainsaw out of the damn thing.
Luckily for Briar's nerves (and his wallet, since he'd bet against the chainsaw), Miri only pulled a folder of papers out of it today, and began rifling through them.
"I looked this place up the same day I remembered it," she told him cheerfully. "This place used to be an animation firm – Joey Drew Studios. They were in direct competition with Ross & Seegson during that glorious golden age of rubber-hose cartoons and wacky hammerspace physics. Mister Joey Drew himself was a real piece of work, started off as your typical kindly old man that goes on and on about dreaming and believing in yourself, and then went a little off the deep end after he somehow got into an accident in his own studio. No-one's one-hundred percent sure what exactly happened, but he was known to cut a lot of corners, so it might have been because of that. My bet is a beam falling on his head or something."
"Great," Briar groused.
Miri shushed him. "The adult's still talking, Rosie-dear."
"You're the farthest thing from being an adult on the face of the entire planet."
She shushed him again and continued. "Anyway, he cut a lot of corners, had an accident, and while he was in the hospital recovering from whatever happened the place went bankrupt. After a few years of trying to get the studio back off the ground again, he gave up and sold the place to the highest bidder. That guy lost his nerves somewhere along the way and decided that the place was haunted, and sold it to the next highest bidder, and then that guy had to deal with those disappearances ten years back or so, and shoved it onto the guy that owns it now."
"Great..." Briar groaned, putting his head back in his hands. He looked downright miserable. "Just great. You're taking us into a place where a spook might live. Why do I let you get away with this kind of crap, Miri?"
"Because you love me and would live a horrible no-good life without me being there for you?" Miri crooned sarcastically, wriggling her eyebrows. "Anyway, I already said Jenn checked this place out, remember? No supernatural activity, just a regular old abandoned building."
"Has she ever, you know, physically gone there to check?"
Miri shrugged. "Nope!"
"So this place might actually be haunted?"
"Oh, man up, princess." Miri leaned across the aisle and slapped his knee playfully. "Having a haunted studio would be awesome ."
"Says you. I actually have some sense of self-preservation left."
"Aw, c'mon, we both know that you'd totally fangirl over a ghost if you met one. Besides," she added, a shit-eating smirk stretching across her lips, "no real ghost could match the kind of horrors your brain comes up with at dark o'clock at night. Or did you forget about that little story you came up with where –"
"I was sleep deprived and I thought we agreed never to talk about that again," he interrupted her hurriedly.
"Pssh. You agreed never to talk about it again, I never agreed to anything."
"Miri!"
The property that now belonged to the two aspiring animators wasn't all that impressive. It sat in the middle of a quiet suburban neighborhood, a semi-abandoned looking lot that might have once been a parking lot, but was now nothing more than a garden of weeds surrounding a small building. The building itself wasn't exactly impressive either – it was only a single story tall, and, unlike in that odd dream-memory that Miri only partially remembered, it was covered in graffiti. Admittedly, most of the graffiti was a pretty cool-looking sort of graffiti, with a very low ratio of cuss words to pictures, unlike most walls that people emptied their spray cans on, but that was pretty much the only impressive thing about it, save the sheer quantity of wooden boards nailed over every visible window and door and the enormous faded billboard on the roof.
"Wow," Briar deadpanned, now considerably more awake than he'd been on the bus. "What a place. It looks fantastic."
"Oh, shut it." Miri shoved him, smirking at the scowl he shot in her direction, and then opened her folder of files and deftly removed several folded-up blueprints from between a few other pages. "Sure, it's a fixer-upper, but it could be worse, and it's the inside we're more worried about right now, right?" She unfolded the blueprints, scanning the drawings quickly.
"Okay, we've got some supply closets, some offices… and if I'm remembering correctly, there's still a bunch of equipment left inside. Some radios, some old drawing tables and projectors…"
She grabbed her roommate's hand, and, nose still buried in the closest things to maps her friends been able to find, dragged her increasingly put-out pal after her. "Looks like there's a couple of basement levels, too… oooh, a music department! Complete with an orchestra pit! We should call in Anna when we're done here, see if she wants to help us out. And it looks like there might be a black room, too… some offices…"
They turned a corner, and there stood an unblocked door. The door from Miri's dream, some of the nails from the boards still stuck in the frame.
Miri snickered. "Aww man, nobody even boarded up the door after me? That's pretty irresponsible of them."
"… you've been here before?"
She shrugged. "Broke in here after an argument with my parents. Probably made up half of what I 'remember' bout it, though. I don't think inky hellhole pits are actually a thing, after all."
"… will we even be able to get in?"
Still grinning, she strode forward, and easily pulled open the door, revealing a dark, dusty interior without a single lit light bulb in sight. It also let out a veritable blast of air with the distinct, pungent scent of rubber ink.
"Ta-da!" she said cheerfully.
She reached into her bag and pulled out a huge, bulky flashlight, taking a distinct satisfaction in how Briar's face scrunched up in that familiar "that shouldn't be possible" expression that always appeared when something big came out of the bag, and flicked it on, revealing scores of dust drifting in the air in the wake of the first breeze this place had felt in years, and a short hall lined with vaguely familiar posters, faded and unreadable with age. A small room was visible beyond it, though just barely – the dust in the air was so thick, and the room so dark, that it was difficult to see through, but she could make out what was probably a chair, and maybe a corner of that old projector – just like the one from her dream.
Miri took in a deep breath, unbothered by the inky stench and ignoring the odd skip in her heartbeat, and stepped into what had once served as a childhood sanctuary with a spring in her step.
I was originally planning to make this story take place in a more modern setting. The temptation to make Miri a snarky paid-by commission YouTuber was almost too strong, plus there were interesting scenarios involving Bendy and photo-bombing/skype-call-bombing that could have been entertaining.
In the end I kept Miri's personality, but made the time period closer to sometime in the 70s, with less technology and more of an old(ish)-timey feel. It's not going to be accurate to that time period, mind – I haven't done any real research – but rather something like a fusion between that decade and modern day, with some more modern slang and sensibilities alongside some more old-fashioned characteristics. That being said, I probably should do some actual research…
(EDIT: Chapter's been updated!)