I frowned, seeing him split himself in two. “Well pull yourself together, bub!” I barked. “We ain’t got all day to solve nothing if you’re gonna split!”

I muttered to myself as he tried to pry his lower half out of the cement. “You want help with that? Usually it’s a gangster’s job to put a guy in a pair of cement shoes; not take them out! ”

-Smartass

“No, no, I got this,” he replied, producing a spoon. As he scooped up ink and smoothed it back onto himself, he realized something.

Still scooping up his lower third, he looked up and asked, “Wait, gangsters? I thought you were cops…”

He decided not to bring up any mention of “protection money,” or the fact the pink weasel still hadn’t noticed the ink-stains the Repairman accidentally left on his suit.

Stupid pressed on, “but why can’t we see them till they’re broken? And why don’t we bump into them if they’re everywhere?”

I was about to tell him to shut his pie hole….but Stupid actually brought up a good point for once; to get to the bottom of this, we have to understand what this little blob /does/, extractly as he does it.

“Yeah…,” I began. “How does this whole thing work anyway?” I asked, getting closer to the repairman, almost right up in his face.

“I’m curious about this. If we know how this works, we can help you better,” I added, trying to make this less stressful for him. Especially considering it was /us/ he was dealing with.

-Smartass

“Well…er…I…”

As he tried to answer the fat one’s questions, the Repairman forgot all about being stuck in a dried puddle of cement. This quickly became apparent as he tried to back up slightly, away from the pin-suited one, and the top two-thirds of him detached from the lower third with a quiet shlup.

Well, at least he could move now.

As the weasel tried to reassure him, the Repairman looked back in the cement, seeing if he could recover his ink.

“Oh, um,” he continued, still focused on digging the rest of himself out, “I think it has something to do with…metaphors…metaphysics…metagaming…erm…basically, you only see it as the plot demands it.”

He winced. He knew he’d have to clean that up, too.

“Same thing for working with it., I think. I mean, I could bump into it, but that’s my job.”

“We got friends in high and low places.” I say, with a slight smirk.

“It was easy for us to get the gossip from Toontown’s Underworld. Unfortunately, we can’t find out who started the rumor. We know a lot; but we don’t know everything,” chimed in Wheezy, blowing a puff of smoke into the Repairman’s….would you defer to that as a face? I guess…his face.

I said, “It’s tough, ya know? But we do what we can. And don’t you worry none about our work for Doom. That’s all in the past. We do good around this town for a hefty fee, and that’s all that matters to us.”

Still pacing, I light up a stoagie I had in my pocket. “No enemies, huh? You ain’t met anybody in your travels fixing walls that didn’t want you to do it?”

Stupid cut in, “I got a question! What’s a fourth wall made of?”

-Smartass

The Repairman, despite likely not needing to breathe, found himself coughing and sputtering from all that smoke. And, on top of that, the blue one’s actual breath…

He nodded, still uncertain, but he felt it best not to question that issue anymore.

“Well,” he replied, tentatively, “I have known a few, erm, ‘repeat offenders,’ but most of them were fine with me cleaning up after them…”

He paused to consider who might have wanted to stop him, and whether or not he should report them.

His train of thought was interrupted by the fat weasel.

“Oh,” he said, absently, “probably made mostly of cement, fiberglass, and electrician’s tape at this point.”

“Good!” I said, glad that you shut yourself up before I had to do it for ya. “Now, the first thing we gotta do in cases like this is pretermine if you got any enemies.”

Walking back and forth, completely in charge, I whipped around to the blob and asked, “is there anyone who don’t like your work? Anybody who constantly breaks the fourth wall and don’t clean up after hisself?” -Smartass

The Repairman nodded as he started tapping at the already-hardening cement with a hammer and chisel. He hated when that happened.

Constantly breaking the Wall and not cleaning up? he thought. That really narrows it down.

Out loud, he said, “…No one comes to mind…”

Oh, sure, he could name vandals, but he felt unclean implicating others to a Dip conspirator. Besides, he didn’t think any of them would want to frame the Repairman.

“Out of curiosity,” he asked, looking up, “how’d you get that report?”

I was taken aback for a second. How could this blob not know who we are if his own job was so important? “Lemme ask you this, chump…. You ever hear of the time a certain bunny got framed for the murder of Marvin Acme?” -Smartass

“A bunny….” he mused. “Hmm…”

The Repairman thought back. He didn’t pay much attention to… well, anything except the Wall for decades, but he did vaguely recall something…

“I remember talk of a framed rabbit saving Toonkind from a Dip conspiracy in the 40s,” he thought aloud. “A conspiracy caused by some kind of rubber-faced rotoscope and a gang of questionable…was it ferrets, minks, wea—”

His eyes suddenly widened, looking back at the weasel in front of him.

“Aha,” he said, slowly shrinking back. “I-I’m sure you had your reasons…”

“It’s just what we’ve been hearing, chump! Don’t shoot the messenger! But if you’re gonna get hot under the collar like that, I’m gonna have to take you downtown for assaulting an officer!” -Smartass

The Repairman hesitated, backing up somewhat.

“W-wait,” he stammered, more out of confusion than fear, “You’re an officer? Where’s your badge?”

He thought it best not to mention the ink stains on the weasel’s suit. It certainly wouldn’t help his case, either way. 

@los-angeles-toon-patrol​

“Well we’ve been hearing rumors all over that you’ve been breaking them to get more money to fix them. It’s just what we heard!” I barked. “Now, unless you prove otherwise……” I trail off. “You don’t wanna know what the rest of the sentence says. Let’s just say it involves pie in an unpleasant place.” -Smartass

The Repairman, having little to no discernible anatomy, could only stare blankly in response to the weasel’s threat.

He shook himself, and got right back to being offended. He dropped the bucket and moved inches in front of the weasel’s face.

“For your in-for-MA-tion,” he said, emphasizing each syllable with a hard poke in the weasel’s chest, “I don’t even get paid for this. So why would I willfully make my own job harder, hmm?”