Balyn tried to suppress a shiver as he stared straight into the gaze of his foe. He'd once been a Hunter, after all. He'd faced off against beasts, mad arcanists, ancient abominations of science, and eldritch horrors from the far reaches of the abyssal cosmos. He understood what it meant to stand fast against overwhelming, inhuman threats. Yet the enemy he faced today was perhaps the strangest.

Of course, in terms of pure killing power, this foe was nothing. Indeed, Balyn was sure that if attacked he could dispatch this enemy with little issue even lacking the supernatural resilience conferred by the Hunter's Dream. The threat posed was beyond mere carnal concerns. Rather, it was more subtle, the ability to strip from Balyn his hopes, his dreams, tear from him his very fate and consign him to a path of bleak, gray emptiness, never knowing what might have been.

Worst of all, though, was the sheer alienness of their thought patterns. What unknowable things did they yearn for? What incomprehensible standards formed their "right" and "wrong"? Even the Great Ones themselves had displayed sympathetic motives like the desire for a child or revenge on those who had wronged them, but this…

It was all Balyn could do not to quake in his boots.

The old man on the other side of the ornate, antique desk adjusted his pince-nez and glanced down at the paperwork before him.

"Mister…Balyn, was it? From my review of your financial documentation, it appears that you are not only near-destitute, surviving from day to day by taking on a continuous stream of temporary positions, but that you further owe a substantial debt to Iosefka's Clinic for outstanding medical fees, a debt that you have only been able to reduce by nine percent during these months since the Red Moon incident, despite the clinic's charitable practice of not charging interest."

"That's why I'm here."

"I appreciate that. However, what I am trying to establish is why the First Community Bank of Yharnam"—he did not call it the Blood Bank; that appellation was saved for use by those who had been unable to repay their debts and had become familiar with their creative collection policies—"would wish to offer you the loan you are requesting."

"Because this is a genius idea!" Balyn all but leapt from his chair with his enthusiasm, only to be skewered by a gimlet stare from the wizened banker that made him slump back down. "It really is."

"I have the summation here," the banker said heavily, running his palm over the stack of Balyn's supporting documentation, "and I fail to see the prospective return." Then, perhaps out of an unaccountable sense of kindness, or because he felt it might be more cost-efficient than buying a ticket to a music-hall comedy act, or because it was ten minutes until closing and he needed to kill the time somehow, he did not reach for his "DENIED" stamp. Instead, he said, "Why don't you explain in greater detail?"

Not willing to look a gift horse in the mouth in case the mouth was full of creepy eyes that looked back at him, Balyn leaned forward with eyes intent.

"I'm sure that you appreciate that we're living in uncertain times. Major civic institutions have collapsed. The Red Moon incident resulted in the failure of numerous commercial concerns as well. Entire patterns of life have been turned on their heads. Businesses fail for want of employees, while the unemployed can't find work because jobs in their fields have gone. And don't even get me started on the suffering of people allergic to pet dander. The plain fact is, the average Yharnamite's stress level is off the charts, and they can't even reliably drown their sorrows in liquor because the breweries are downsizing. Not enough people to bleed for them, I guess."

"And you believe this new product you have invented can change that? A mattress created from a…" He shuffled through the paperwork as if to verify that his understanding was indeed correct and not a hallucination induced by mold spores in the air from the crumbling books that lined his office walls. "A large rubber balloon filled with water?"

"Exactly! I call it the 'LakeBed.' Catchy, huh? And on page seven, there, you can see a sketch of the cute little spider I intend to use as the advertising mascot. Get a free plushie with the purchase of a child-sized mattress!"

Perhaps there really was something to the idea that the banker was some kind of unfathomable alien intelligence. After all, Balyn reflected, the look he was giving the ex-hunter was of the same bewildered incomprehension that he seemed to recall from a dream-like memory of an animated doll…

"I…see." The old man gave a little harrumph into his fist, clearing his throat, and some of the knowing expression came back into his face. "And you believe that this method of mattress construction will encourage restful slumber to the point that people will pay the higher cost, deal with the troubles of evaporation and leaks, to say noting of the risk of water damage if the rubber should happen to be actually punctured?"

"Of course!" Balyn said, as if this was the most obvious thing in the world. "After all, everyone knows that large bodies of water are a bulwark guarding sleep!"