A couple of weeks later Scratchy set up appointments with the Warners. Being the psychiatrist that he was, he wanted to know what made these strange children "tick".

Needless to say, Wakko and Dot thought this sounded really boring. And Yakko wasn't too keen on talking to Scratchy after the doctor was convinced that Yakko had had a steamy sex fantasy.

"I don't wanna go," moaned Dot, clinging to the couch as if she were being dragged.

"Yeah really," said Wakko. "P-sychiatrists are people you go to when you have problems."

Yakko sighed and rolled his eyes. "It's psychiatrists, Wakko. The 'p' is silent. Although I gotta admit that that has a nice ring to it. P-sychiatrist. But aaaaaaanyway, I don't wanna go either, but he did ask us and it would be rude not to."

"Fine, Mr. Manners," muttered Dot. "I'll go, but I won't like it."

…………

Scratchy's office was located on the far end of the studio. No one really knew why Scratchy had set up an office there anyway. Some thought that Warner Brothers was paying him extra to work as the studio's actual psychiatrist as well as be an actor. Others speculated he was just an insane doctor.

Hannah was filing some papers at the desk when the Warners shuffled in. She looked up and gave them somewhat of a dirty look. "Oh, you're here. Dr. Scratchinsniff wishes to see you first, Yakko." An unusual cold emphasis was put on Yakko's name.

Yakko immediately noticed it. "Look, about that incident—"

"Just—go…" Hannah interrupted, pointing to Scratchy's office.

"Don't even let me get a word in edgewise," mumbled Yakko. A bit dejectedly, he opened the door to the office.

"Oh, hello, Yakko. Sit down," instructed Scratchy.

Yakko sat down in a chair and immediately started to talk. "Look, Scratchy, if this is about that whole… somewhat dirty thoughts thing… well hey, I'm sure I'm not the only ten-year-old to be thinking about those kind of—"

"Yakko, please, be quiet. Zat is not vat I vanted to talk to you about anyvay. It is perfectly natural."

Yakko's face brightened. "Oh…alright then! So—" Yakko slouched back lazily on Scratchy's couch/bed thing, "vat did you vant to talk about, zen?"

"Very funny," said Scratchy a bit icily. "First off, do not call me Scratchy. Anyvay… vat I vanted to know about you is… vell, how you managed it."

"Managed what?" asked Yakko, perplexed.

"Raising yourself and your siblings single-handed, zat's vat. Perhaps you should start at ze beginning, ya?"

"Well, doc," said Yakko, his voice strangely quiet, "I guess it all started a few weeks ago, when I started having these strange dreams… this was about the same time my mother ran off with another man and left my father in the dust, and also when my wife—"

"Yakko…"

"Sorry Scratchy… I mean Dr. Scratchinsniff," apologized Yakko, grinning. "I couldn't help it. I think it was the couch."

"Shall we continue?" asked Scratchy, sounding a little impatient.

"Oh, sure," said Yakko. "Taking care of Wakko, Dot, and not to mention me, huh? Well… it wasn't as bad as it could have been. Most of the time, getting food was easy. Especially when we were younger. You know, evoke the pity of these poor saps. We'd put on our saddest faces, and say in these really sappy voices, 'Could we have some food? We're very hungry,' and they'd almost always give us something."

"So you don't remember your parents at all?" asked Scratchy.

"Well, I…" Yakko suddenly stopped talking.

Scratchy looked at Yakko. "I sense zat zere is something you have been vishing to get off your chest for a long time."

"Yeah," said Yakko. "If I tell you, you have to promise not to tell anyone. Not even Wakko and Dot. Especially not Wakko and Dot."

"I never tell anyone about vat goes on in here. Not even Miss Nurse. It is standard psychiatric policy."

"Okay," said Yakko. His voice was shaking slightly. "Whoa, do you have a glass of water or something? Anyway…I have these two memories. They're really faint… and yet they're real clear. I sometimes lie to myself, and say that they're just dreams."

"Do you think zat?" asked Scratchy.

Yakko took a deep breath. "No," he finally said. "I'm pretty sure that they're real. One's really short, but it's not pleasant at all. It's… it's someone punching and hitting me and telling me I'm worthless. And then the second one…" Yakko had to pause and take a couple of very deep breaths. "I'm sorry," he said. "Really, do you have some water?"

Scratchy went over to a sink and returned with a glass of ice water, placing it in front of Yakko. Yakko gratefully gulped it down. "Continue ven you're ready, Yakko."

Yakko wiped off the excess water from his lips. "Okay. I'm ready now. This one's really detailed. It's really dark and hard to see, but I'm holding Dot in one arm and with the other arm I was holding Wakko's hand… just like I did a lot when I was four or five. And there's someone saying to me, 'You have to run away, Yakko.' And I said, 'Why?' And he said, 'Because he's going to kill Dot, and probably you and Wakko too. You take good care of your brother and sister, you hear me?' And then I nodded, and I guess I ran away."

Scratchy nodded, furiously writing notes on a pad of paper. "So vat do you think zat zey mean?"

"Mean?" cried Yakko. "Are you kidding me? They mean that I was living with someone who wanted to kill me!" He paused for a moment. "That's enough digging into my past for one day. May I leave now?"

"Yes, you may leave," said Scratchy. "Thank you."

"Yeah, thank you too," said Yakko, leaving the office hastily.

…………

Scratchy didn't get nearly the dramatic details from Wakko and Dot that he had got from Yakko.

Slouching on the couch in much the same position that Yakko had been, Wakko was saying, "Let's be honest here, I had won twenty dollars, and I spend it on a hat? Think of all the more useful things I could have spent it on." He stopped and picked at a loose thread on the couch, apparently out of things to say.

"Vere do you think zat you came from, Vakko?" asked Scratchy suddenly.

Wakko shrugged, a bit surprised by Scratchy's question. "I don't really know. God has a weird sense of humor and was bored, and created us, I guess? Or our mother was a dog and our father was a human, or something… which is really gross, if you think about it…"

…………

Six-year-old Dot was even more bored in Scratchy's office than Wakko had been. "So I wanted this ice cream cone really bad, but I didn't have any money. So I started to cry, and I got it. That's how you get things that you want, you know. Cry."

"So Dot," Scratchy asked, "do you have any ideas on vat your parents were like? Vere you came from?"

"I have no clue," she said, flipping over and laying on her other side, facing away from Scratchy. "But I'm always worried that we'll find our parents someday and… I just can't get the idea out of my head that both of our parents were humans. And when they had Yakko, they thought, 'What a weird looking creature! Let's try again, and hope we don't get something like that!' And then when they had Wakko, they thought, 'We had one of these freaks again! If we don't get a human next time, we quit!' And then when they had me… I was the last straw and they kicked us out." She smiled apologetically. "Dumb, huh?"

"Not really," said Scratchy with a smile. "You may go now. Your session is over."

Scratchy watched the three siblings leave and race each other back to the water tower. So much alike, in their zany ways. And yet so different.

…………

It was now September 1993. The show Animaniacs was going to air for the first time.

"Could someone help me with these papers?"

Hannah "Hello" Nurse was holding a big stack of papers and struggling with their weight. The Warners immediately jumped in the scene.

"Helloooooo Nurse!" said the Warner Brothers. The Warner Sister Dot—now seven years old— sighed and shook her head. So did Hello Nurse.

"These are all of the scripts," she explained. "Mr. Spielberg wants them filed away neatly. And they're very heavy."

"Say no more!" said the now nine-year-old Wakko. He grabbed about a fourth of the papers from the top. Then Dot grabbed about a third of the remaining papers from the top. Then Yakko took about half the remaining papers from the top. Hello Nurse carried the rest.

Even with this division, all four of them still had a lot of papers to hold. Hello Nurse struggled a little to hold all of her papers. "Do you need any help with those, HN?" asked Yakko.

Hello Nurse smiled and said, "No, Yakko, I think I can manage." Over the course of a year, Hello Nurse had actually slightly forgiven Yakko and they had become good friends.

Wakko, though, had continued to be a nuisance to Hannah. He purposely drooled sometimes when she entered a room, and he often growled when she was there. But today, Dot noticed, Wakko was behaving very well. He wasn't even looking back at Hello Nurse. He was just going off to file the papers like he had been instructed to.

He opened the file cabinet and put his papers in the front. "Dot, you put your papers behind mine," he said. "Then Yakko, you put your papers behind hers, and Hello Nurse, you put yours behind his."

"Yes sir," said Dot, putting her papers behind Wakko's papers. "Wakko, could I speak to you for a moment? Privately?"

"Sure," said Wakko, looking a bit confused. Dot grabbed Wakko by the wrist and dragged him off to another room.

"Okay, Wakko, what's up with you?" demanded Dot once she had shut the door. "Why aren't you acting like a moron in front of Hello Nurse?"

"Oh, and you want me to?" asked Wakko, giving his sister a grin.

"Yeah, truthfully, it is an improvement. But why aren't you?"

Wakko's smile turned to one of pure secrecy and glee. "I can't believe that even you haven't figured it out yet."

"Figured what out?" asked Dot, a little confused.

Wakko just kept on smiling. "Look," he said, pointing to a window that looked in to the room that they had just been in.

Dot obediently looked into the room. She didn't see much, except that Yakko was taking Hannah's papers from her and putting them in the file cabinet. Then he closed the door of the file cabinet. Hannah gave him a smile of approval.

That's when Dot noticed something different. When Yakko smiled back, there was something familiar about that smile, and that look in his eyes. Dot sometimes caught Yakko looking at her or Wakko with that same look. She suddenly understood.

"Yakko's in love with Hello Nurse," said Wakko simply.

"Yeah, I see that now," said Dot. She grinned. "Didn't Yakko say once that he'd never fall in love?"

Wakko grinned back and nodded. "Yeah, looks like he's eating his words."

Dot sighed. "That is kinda sad, though."

Wakko looked a little confused. "Why is it sad?"

"It's unrequited, isn't it?"

Wakko understood. "Yeah. I don't even think that Hello Nurse knows about it."

"But if she did… do you think that she'd love him back?"

"I doubt it. Yakko's eleven years old. And how old is HN? Twenty-five, at least? I mean, come on."

Dot nodded. "You're right… it's still sorta sad though. Wakko? What are you thinking about now, you philosopher?"

Wakko frowned and remained silent for a moment. When he spoke, it was in typical short, to the point Wakko style, and yet it wasn't; it was frustratingly vague. All he said was, "There's something about Hello Nurse that I haven't figured out yet." He then left the room, and Dot quickly followed him.

…………

The next morning, Dot woke up even earlier than usual. She was usually the first one up anyway, but her excitement woke her even sooner than usual. The show started today!

She changed quickly out of her nightgown and dressed in a red T-shirt and a denim skirt, obviously not wearing the show clothes, as WB was afraid that she'd get them dirty or something. However, they let her wear the flower scrunchie, and she did, tying it around her ears.

Dot pulled out a cherry Pop-Tart from the cabinet and munched on it on the way down from the water tower, not wanting to wait for anything, for some unknown reason. But why not? This was going to be the best day of her—

SNATCH!

Dot didn't even have time to scream for help, as the first thing her captor did was stick duct tape over her mouth. Then he tied her hands and feet together with a poky, itchy rope. "I'm sorry, kid," he said to her. Dot threw him a nasty look, even though he actually did look slightly sorry. Tossed into the back seat in a way that left her laying down, Dot was unable to see just where she was being taken too.

She was almost glad of it.