Mickey and Henry stayed behind Allison and Tom, trying to make small talk, which began in failure.
"So, um. Henry, right?"
"Uh, yeah. Henry Stein." Henry smiled at the mention of his own full name, something Mickey deduced he hadn't heard in a while.
"Well, I'm Mickey Mou—Ooh, you already know who I am." Mickey stopped himself, physically waving away his previous intentions of an unnecessary introduction.
"Heh," Henry forced a chuckle, "Yeah, I do. What exactly brings the Mickey Mouse down here?"
"It's...a long story."
"Oh. Wait, so do you mean it's actually a long story? Or is it a story you don't wanna tell?"
'It's actually a little bit of both, but...' Mickey contemplated to himself, before answering.
"I'll...spare you the vivid details," the Mouse began, and Henry, along with Allison and Tom (though discretely) gave Mickey their undivided attention.
"There's these mines in...a certain world, where forgotten toons are sent to, and maybe around a month ago—maybe even less—these mines collapsed." Mickey paused, waiting for some kind of reaction, only to receive a feeble nod of attention from Henry.
"Nobody was hurt—er—fatally, but at the very bottom of the mines, there was this really old projector screen. Oswald...he...well, long story short, he was the only one who believed Bendy would come through the projector screen, and he did."
Henry's posture visibly changed at the mention of a projector screen. It changed from hunched over and listening, to straight, and tall. Maybe even alarmed. Mickey disregarded the movement, and continued with his story.
"—And well, we kept him for a little bit to ensure his recovery, researched his origins, and found Sillyvision, and Joey Drew Studios. After that we went to Disneyworld, and scrounged around Walt Disney's office, and found uh..." Mickey thought for a moment. Was it really a good idea to trust these people with confidential information?
"Found what?" Allison broke Mickey's train of thought, her voice startling the mouse. He immediately looked in the direction of Allison and Tom, to see their frankly dead looking eyes staring eagerly back at him.
Looking for a quick recovery, Mickey said rather forcefully, "Nothing! We found...er...nothing."
Now, Mickey Mouse was not liar, and he knew this, so when the angel and wolf nodded and turned a blind eye, he was very much surprised.
"So, what happened after that." Allison inquired, with her back towards the rest of the group, leading the way.
"Oh, umm...You guys know about Alice Angel, right?"
"Yeah, i'm guessing you didn't have a very pleasant experience with her." Henry finally answered when no one else would.
"Yeah," Mickey repeated, "She found her way into our world, and began...I don't know what she was doing. Using a syringe to inject herself with...paint. That's the only logical explanation, if there even is one."
"Did you say paint? So, not ink. Correct?" Allison began combing through her ponytail again, a sign that she was thinking.
"Paint, yes. Our toons from where we come from, aren't made of ink, which I thought I'd said—"
"You did," Allison interrupted, "But it explains a lot."
"What do you mean?" Henry and Mickey both said in unison, casting each other (almost) smiles.
"I mean, if it was ink, she would've grown more powerful, instead, she had to go through the machine. If it was paint, however, it would do some damage to her. It would be like a human, thinking they're injecting themselves with saline, when in reality, it's liquid asbestos. It's a recipe for an imminent death."
"She mistakenly mistook the Wastelander's paint for ink."
"Precisely—er, what's a Wastelander?" Allison asked.
"One of our people. Anyway, she did some serious never-before-seen damage! I don't even know if they'll recover!! That's why after Alice's—ahem—demise, we came here. We, as in my friends, and a group of detectives."
"Why did you come here of all places?"
"We thought maybe we could find some sorta cure? Antidote? I don't know..?" Mickey said, drained of any coherent thought left in his body.
"Wait-guys, look!" Allison exclaimed, pointing at a large double door to a room, labeled by the sign overhead; Joey Drew.
"I had no idea this was down here. We've never been this far into the studio." She continued, peeking her head around the doorframe.
"Is this...Is this Joey Drew's office? Like, the infamous Joey Drew?"
Henry laughed, "Haha, heh, infamous."
Allison ignored the retired animator, answering with:
"Yes."
"What is it doing all the way down here?" Mickey asked with Walt Disney's office in mind. Thinking of the extravagance, and even though old, it had its charm.
"Joey could never keep it in one place. Especially after the machine," Henry answered, taking a step in, "He was insanely strict about not letting people in. He was even picky about how close our workstations were to the machine pipes."
Mickey also went in, followed by Tom. The office was a mess, with papers strewn across the floor, and books open with pages torn. It looked like someone left in a rush.
"...Woah." Henry whispered mindlessly, as he picked up and examined papers and bills.
"What is all this?" Mickey asked.
"I believe that this is..." Allison continued talking, but Henry's thoughts drowned them out. He walked along the edge of the room, plucking out books from the bookshelf's on the walls, flipping through them, before setting them on nearby tables.
Henry did this until he reached the corner of the room, and his tired eyes laid on a certain dusty book. He almost missed it. It was stuffed deep inside of a half-way closed drawer.
He pushed open the drawer with effort, and it squeaked against the old wood. As soon as Henry was able to squeeze his hand through the crack, he did, and fiddled with the book until he was able to get a grasp on it, and lift it up.
It was followed by a cloud of dust, and Henry held back a sneeze to avoid the other's attention.
In the light, it was a brighter purple, a dark mauve. It was lined in soft felt, that smelled like mildew, and it was no bigger than his hand.
Of course, Henry flipped the cover open, to be immediately greeted by faded swirly handwriting.
'Walter E. Disney.'
"Huh..." Henry laughed to himself, and flipped to the next page.
There were multiple mini fauvist-style paintings, watercolor and acrylic, and all, even though faded, were bright, and cheerful.
He continued to flip through the tiny booklet in awe, until a certain pattern dulled his excitement. The paintings continued to get more, and more morbid, and the colors darker, and fuller. Paintings of vibrant flowers turned into dead ones, and clear skies were clouded with thunderstorms, and upon closer inspection, chlorine gas. It was until one certain picture of a dead field, swarmed with flies and that familiar yellow gas, that Henry finally drew the connection.
World War I had ravaged the earth until 1918, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief, until a new German contender entered the ring.
All in all, it was depressing. Henry, along with the rest of the world, never really put any thought into how the War affected the powerhouses of the world. They had it all. Wasn't that all they needed?
Henry almost didn't want to continue flipping through the book. It felt disrespectful, but alas, he had to finish what he started.
Nearing the end, the paintings were replaced with unreadable scrawls, in a handwriting that could almost be recognized as Disney's, but it was written like a mad-man.
And then suddenly he stumbled upon a row of lines and dots, and it took Henry a second to register them as Morse Code.
.----/..---/-----/----./.----/..---/.----/..---/----/----./-----/.----/.----/....-/
.----/...-/.----/...--/-----/.----/.----/---../-----/----./-----/...../
-----/..---/.----/...../..---/.----/.----/....-/-----/....-/.----/----./
"What in the good lords name.." This was definitely not something Henry had expected to find. If only he could remember something, anything from being enlisted in the army, but it'd been so long ago the tired, aging man had forgotten.
"Hey, Henry, what'd you find?"
It was Allison.
"I found this...old book."
"Oh, really?" Allison asked as she gestured around the room to the shelves littered with old books, "Who would've guessed?"
"I think..." Henry glanced at the mouse, who looked just as clueless as the other three, "I think this belonged to Walt Disney."
Henry lifted the book up for all the see, not breaking eye contact with Mickey.
"Wha—? What gives you that idea?" Mickey asked, reaching his hands out to the book for closer inspection, and upon receiving it, his eyes widened.
"This is...This is what we were..!"
"Wait, what is it, exactly?" Henry knelt down next to Mickey.
"This is what me and Ozzy were looking for back at Dad's office..!" The mouse exclaimed.
"Who's Ozzy—?"
"This...This code might be the passcode we were looking for! What...Why was it here?"
Henry shrugged.
"I dunno...Maybe Joey had other hidden gems in here. Do ya think Joey, erm, stole that from Disney?"
Mickey's eyes went back and forth, from the book, to Henry, to everyone else.
"Why would Joey do that? He had to have been specifically looking for this—" Mickey nodded down to the Morse Code, "Unless that's exactly what he was doing."
Mickey hopped up, and trotted up to Allison and Tom, followed by Henry.
"Wait, fellas! What if Joey already deciphered the code? What if...What if he wanted alter the toon's memory...oh golly this is too much..!"
"Woah, calm down there, pal! What is this about...altered memories?"