Sorry for the delay on this chapter! Hope you enjoy it!
UPDATED 5/24/2018

Joey Drew Studios went deeper than Larry ever could have imagined—deeper than he thought possible, even. It had a modest two stories above ground, but basement under basement under basement, tunneling hundreds of feet down into the ground with toy factories and other attractions the public would likely never descend to see.

And the ink was everywhere. Pipes for the Ink Machine snaked and tangled through the whole building, and the lowermost levels wound up drenched in the ink dripping from the dozens of floors above.

And here Larry had thought Joey had been pocketing the ridiculous amounts of cash the Studio spent. All the out-of-place construction and machinery debts that had seemed like fraud made perfect sense once Larry saw the ink-drenched labyrinth the Studio had become.

Not that he'd seen very much of it. Joey had been quick to scoop him into the bucket and hurry him down the stairs to one of the lowest levels of the basement before anyone could see him. He'd shut Larry into what was probably a storage room, half the room full of wobbly chairs, empty inkwells, and one drum with a rip in the side.

Mr. Drew had come back a few times since then, asking Larry questions and using a syringe to take samples of the ink that made up his body now. He never made conversation, though, and Larry saw what he was like underneath the cheery facade he had put on to lure Larry to his death. The man was ruthless, relentless in pursuit of his goals. He refused to let anything stand in his way: the law, other people's lives, the rules of reality itself. When Larry heard what Joey was planning, he figured he would have once called the man insane—bringing cartoons to the real world? That was impossible!

But look what the man had already done to Larry himself. Joey Drew's wild dream was closer to being a reality than he even knew.

The lights for the basement floors had gone out with the rest a little while ago - it was so hard to keep track of time around here, except to know when the Studio was open or closed, and right now it was closed.

And the lights didn't go out until everyone, Joey included, had left the building.

In the cover of darkness, Larry took a deep breath he didn't really need anymore and started melting.

His legs went first, as always. No matter how detailed he could get the rest of him, sometimes so close to human he could convince himself his body was there under the ink, his legs were the hardest part, and rarely more than lanky, dripping sticks with a simple knee joint, and they melted into a puddle with the slightest lapse in concentration. The rest of him went slower, thicker ink melting down in clumps to join the other ink puddled on the wooden floor. Finally, his head.

As always, there was a moment where Larry lost himself in the vast, empty void of the ink, his mind spreading in tiny pieces across the Studio, from the pipes in the music department to the inkwells in animation to the horrible vat attached to the Ink Machine.

But none of that ink was his, not in the same way his new body, thick with chunks of his old one, was. Using its gentle pull as a beacon, Larry gathered his scattered consciousness back to the thick puddle in the bottommost basement and started to move.

The storage closet would have been a fine prison for a still-human Larry, and it might even have worked for a Larry as solid as Mr. Drew thought he was. But, as Larry had found out and promptly kept secret, his ink was almost as liquid as any the animators used, and the storage closet had a gap of almost an inch between the floor and the bottom of the door. That gap was Larry's last hope for sanity; shut away in a tiny room, he knew he'd go mad sooner or later, but at least by sneaking through that gap, he could venture out into other parts of the Studio when no one else was around.

He'd considered making a break for it, of course, to leave the Studio. The problem was that no matter how detailed he could get his body, it was always the same glistening, deep black, with drips and ripples. There was no way he could even hope to pass for human, to go back to his old life. The best he could hope for on the outside would be experimentation in some kind of secret government lab, no better than how Joey treated him here.

He'd also considered at least calling the collections agency, to warn them not to try coming to the Studio again, but that would only have people knowing he was alive, and Joey knowing he could get out. He'd just have to hope that his sudden disappearance was warning enough and that the agency backed off.

There was nothing Larry could do to escape the Studio, or warn the other agents. During his brief escapes from the storage room, he would just wander the halls of the studio and try to find ways to occupy himself, looking over drawings and listening to the tape recordings the employees left during the day. He'd grown quite fond of the janitor, Wally Franks, despite never having met the man. He had a personality that could liven up even the most boring of Larry's aimless wanderings.

So Larry didn't really have any expectations for this night, though he was still startled when the operating lights for the stairwell clicked on, flooding the floor with half-light that was blinding after the darkness. Larry froze as he waited for Joey to storm the room and find him here, outside his prison, and shut him away somewhere airtight for God-knows-how-long.

But after a few moments, when Joey failed to appear and Larry didn't hear footsteps on the stairs, he figured it was a false alarm. The lights for the entire stairwell were controlled by a single switch, and most likely someone was on one of the upper floors; maybe an employee had forgotten a belonging or wanted to get extra work done.

Still, it wouldn't do him any favors to risk being found out. Cutting this trip short might be disappointing, but if it meant he'd be able to get out again in the future, he'd make that sacrifice. Larry turned to make his way back to his closet only to find that his legs had melted down into a puddle in his surprise at the lights coming on.

Well, he'd just deal with that later. Larry began pulling his torso across the room, back to the storage closet, and the puddled ink trailed behind him, leaving only the slightest trace of streaking on the floor. No one would notice it here, where the ink pipes burst and flooded the room regularly, he was sure.

It was humiliating, crawling across the floor like this, another reminder of everything that Joey Drew had stolen from him by putting him through the Machine. Not just his humanity, his life (in more way than one), but his very dignity, the legs underneath him. Larry had never considered himself a vengeful man, but he would make an exception for Mr. Drew, given the chance. To force that man to crawl because his legs were useless, unable to be trusted… just the thought of it brought a smile to Larry's face.

But he wasn't in a position to do such things at the moment. No, for now he needed to hide, to play at being docile, to wait for his opportunity to strike back. And so Larry slunk back to the storage room, reaching the door just as the lights flickered and a horrible scream came from above.

That didn't sound like an employee here to pick up a forgotten item. It sounded like… well, it almost sounded like a reaction to what Joey had done to him, if Larry had been able to scream as the Machine crushed his legs, if he hadn't been drowning in the ink.

Larry quickly let go of his solid form, slipping into a thick puddle to slide underneath the door. As usual, there was a moment where his mind melted as well, spreading out across all the ink of the studio.

This time, he found another mind there, waiting.

Curious, Larry poked at the other mind, as best as one intangible collection of thoughts could poke another. The other mind seemed familiar to him, though he wasn't sure in what way. Mostly, the other was confused, quickly sliding out of its tightly-pressed near-human density to slip out into the surrounding ink.

Through the ink in the room, in the pipes and spread across the floor, Larry could feel Joey's presence, malicious and moving, swiftly scooping up the new mind into a bucket and heading for the stairs.

The stairs to the basement, where Larry's body proper was still puddled on the floor. Larry quickly collected himself back into his own ink, sliding under the door and reforming his torso the way Joey had come to expect seeing it. He assumed a hunched pose, head bowed in apparent despair, as he heard Joey's footsteps clunking down the stairs.

Joey barely fiddled with the lock to the storage closet before flinging open the door, a wild look in his eyes and his lips pulled back from his teeth in such a way that Larry couldn't decide if it was a smile or a scowl. He threw the bucket he was carrying into the room with such force it hit the back wall with a loud clunk and then rebounded to the floor, rolling on its side in a circle. Then he shook his head, forcing a smile, though his eyes didn't calm any.

"Seems I'm not as close as I thought, Larry. Your friend here's no more a toon than you are. Any idea why that is?"

Larry stayed quiet, torn between snarking back at Mr. Drew and processing what he'd just said. 'Your friend'… who exactly was in the bucket? Larry couldn't bring himself to look.

Joey scoffed.

"Of course you don't know. You had such a small mind, such small goals. Money? Ha! Who cares about money, with the kind of revolution I'm going to bring to the world. I will perfect the process, no matter how long it takes, mark my words."

And with that, he slammed the door to the room shut, leaving Larry and his new companion in the dark again.

It took the newcomer some time to collect themself from the ink, piecing the scattered bits of their mind into a whole. Larry tried to help herd them back together, but even so, it was a few days before they were fully coherent again.

And no wonder Larry had thought them familiar—the newcomer turned out to be David Parson, his coworker from the collections agency. Even after Larry had disappeared on the premises, the agency had sent another agent to try collecting Joey's debt.

Larry felt pretty terrible for David; the man was ten years older than him, with a wife and a young child at home. Larry hadn't left anyone of importance behind, but David had, and the desire to return to them burned at him like hot oil, Larry could tell.

David explained that while he'd come during work hours, Joey hadn't dumped him into the machine straightaway, but forced him to write a letter to the agency, urging them to stop trying to collect, which he'd gone to deliver after the Studio closed for the day. Only once the employees had left had he returned, freeing David from the closet where he'd been bound and gagged to paint some strange symbols onto his skin and put him through the Ink Machine.

The mention of the symbols caught Larry's attention—after all, Joey had gone to no such lengths when he'd put Larry through the Machine. Then again, Joey hadn't been expecting Larry to come out the other side of it, either, while that seemed to be his intention for David.

Perhaps a bit rudely, Larry had pressed David for details of the symbols, which were nonsense when David drew them out on the floor in the ink of his own body as best he remembered them.

"He kept checking back to this weird book," David said. "I saw one of the pages, and it had some of these symbols, but with a bunch of normal words underneath, and they said something about shaping the form? I didn't get a good look, but it was like some kinda magic spell nonsense."

"Maybe not as nonsensical as you'd think," Larry said. "Look at the state of us, after all. It'd make sense if something supernatural's going on in this Studio, and if that book's got the explanations… Well, maybe we could do a little magic of our own."

"Get our bodies back," David said. "Get out of this place, warn people, call the cops or somethin'."

"Exactly," Larry said, smiling. "And finally give that Joey Drew exactly what he deserves."

Searching for the book became their goal, their hope for salvation. David managed to sneak out a note to his family, asking for help, but nothing had ever come of it. The Agency never sent the police to the Studio to investigate their disappearances, either. The book was their best, and only, chance of escape.

Larry showed David how to escape the storage room, how to puddle underneath the door and collect his mind afterward. The two of them made their way through the Studio with purpose on unsteady legs, hunting through every corner and hidden spot they could reach looking for the book.

They spent weeks trying to break into the locked room in the music department, sure something so secure would be holding something as precious as the book, only to find soup and a few scattered sheets of music spread across a stray desk. They wandered the halls, creeping their way up the stairs as they cleared every inch of the lower floors, making their way up towards the surface, towards Joey.

It was slow going, and absolutely disheartening every time they turned a floor top to bottom and found no trace of the book. Worse still was when Joey started up the Ink Machine again, and a new mind joined them in the ink.

The plane of his mind that Larry had once thought was infinite was quickly getting more crowded, the minds of the new arrivals bumping into each other without meaning to, unable to help it. Their minds turned liquid when their bodies did, and spread out so easily, even when those more established tried to help them. It was becoming trickier to keep everyone separate and distinct these days.

But they had made their way up to the floors that were inhabited, where Joey and the animators spent their days. The book had to be here, in Joey's office, maybe, or in the Ink Machine room.

They would find it, soon. They would find it, and its contents would tell them how to undo what had been done to them. They'd rebuild their bodies, return to the world outside. They'd be able to see the sunlight and feel the breeze against their skin. There would be no more hiding in dark corners, melted and spread into puddles to avoid attracting attention.

And then Joey, and all the other employees who had let this happen under their noses, would pay.