The Narrator moved his mouth in the approximation of a grin. He looked suddenly uncomfortable. “Oh. No. I should clarify. I can’t really put us in immediate peril right now, because I…” The rest of his words were lost in an incoherent mumble. He pulled self-consciously at his tie and tried again. “Okay, this is difficult to admit, but for the sake of avoiding misunderstanding I should probably enunciate, ahem…”

He brought a hand to his forehead. “Okay, okay… full disclosure: I don’t have the ability to… to artificially engineer a ‘Big Bad’, even one that could potentially unite us.”

“Well, good,” the Repairman muttered, annoyed. “I don’t see why you’d do that anyway.”

He took a quick look around as he finished packing his tools away. Miraculously, he saw that his staples from before were still there. He just had to go further into the office.

If the human narrator would let him, that is.

“Um,” he started, awkwardly, “Could I just…finish this and go…? I know you don’t really want me here, but I have to do this…”

Damage control? thought the Narrator.

He cupped his hands around his mouth, looking aggressively childish, and said, “Who are you talking to?” His voice was muffled, distorted by the makeshift megaphone of his hands. Are you talking to yourself – or are you, perhaps, talking to the unnamed content-consumer, viewing our interactions from beyond the fourth wall?”

An idea seemed to strike him, then, and he crossed his arms and began walking around the limited space of the office. His leather shoes made a faint noise against the cheap carpet. “There’s conflict between us,” said the Narrator, thinking out loud. “Definitely conflict – what we need, if we ever wanted to form an unlikely partnership, is a larger, overarching evil that will unite us…”

“I was talking to you,” he said, pointing right at the Narrator’s chest, “And I’d appreciate it if my stay here was as short as possible, thank you very much.”

He turned towards a nearby desk and started to smear cement on a crack in the Wall. It was oddly close to one of the computers…

“You think?” he said, sarcastically. A bit here, a bit there…

He continued to ignore the Narrator, even as the latter began pacing. And then he said something that gave the inkblot cause for alarm.

“Wait, what?” he asked, turning around. “Why would you…I mean, you would be willing to destroy…Is there any other…What would…?”

He trailed off, still staring at the Narrator incredulously.

The Narrator watched as some sort of bizarre, cartoony creature seemed to spill out of the toolbox. Oh. It was that thing again.

“…hello,” said the Narrator. “You’re not going to try and fix that stupid wall, are you? Because it won’t work – that’s the nature of the game.”

The Repairman got up and dusted himself off.  He bristled at the Narrator’s comments.

Yeah, I’m sure a humanoid Narrator was part of the game too.

“At the very least,” he said aloud, “I can try some damage control.”

And with that, he began to gather his things back into the toolbox. He had work to do.

The toolbox seemed to move a bit, and – were those eyes peeking out underneath the lid? “Hmm,” murmured the Narrator. He sounded as if he very much wanted to walk into the room and poke the green toolbox.

And then something walked into the room and poked the green toolbox.

“Oh,” said the thing. It had the Narrator’s voice, and looked in every aspect like a human – like a man wearing a dark suit and red tie – but there was something indescribably off about the face.

“Oh – well, that was relatively successful!” said the man, spinning around once to gaze at his surroundings. “I’m human! Sort of. The Narrator, new and improved, 2.0, custom-tailored physical form! What’s this toolbox? Have I seen it before?”

Ugh, there was no escaping it. In spite of himself, he felt those old Toony instincts kick in. He just had to make a show of himself. He just had to.

As the human version of the Narrator looked around, the inkblot sank into the toolbox, shivering. He was trying to resist, trying to resist, trying to resist…

Of course, it was at this time he forgot about the laws of irony.

As he shook, the toolbox rattled and vibrated, until finally it toppled off the desk, sending the Repairman half-rolling, half oozing out onto the floor. Assorted tools fell out with him and scattered in an oddly clean manner.

The inkblot clutched his head, eyes still spinning. When they finally slowed, they focused on a trowel, which he enthusiastically picked up. And then looked up at the owner of the shoes the trowel was next to.

“Oh, er…hi,” he said, somewhat sheepishly. He hoped a week wasn’t too soon. 

For several minutes, the building felt strangely quiet. The ambient noise of the office building – the low buzz of the fluorescent lights, the hum of the computers – seemed muted.

A loud crackling sound shot through the silence like a bullet. “Gooooood morning, corporate America!” boomed the Narrator, his voice masked briefly by microphone feedback. There was a faint clicking as the Narrator presumably adjusted his sound equipment. “Good morning,” he said again. His voice seemed to issue from an invisible speaker in the ceiling. “Good morning. Testing, testing, one two three… oh, what’s this?”

A green toolbox was sitting on one of the desks.

“ghh…Huh?”

He had no idea how long he was out. All he knew was that suddenly, a voice was blaring.

Uh-oh.

The Repairman quickly came to his senses and remembered where he was. He was not going to have another fight with a narrator. Once this week was enough.

He lay still, hoping the toolbox would be able to stay unnoticed. The narrator seemed to be busy testing something.

He tentatively pushed aside a trowel, an instruction manual for a lawnmower, and a case of light bulbs so he could peek out from under the lid.

Unfortunately, he started to do this as the Narrator noticed the toolbox, but it was too late. After the voice said “what’s this?” two white, painted eyes emerged from under the lid. Only black could be seen in the toolbox.

Oh boy…

@tsp-narrator

The Repairman hoisted himself up to the window. After a quick glance, he saw that once again no one was in the office. And no narrator seemed to talk to him this time.

Carefully, he climbed in, carrying a slightly smaller toolbox with him. It would have been far too hard to lift the other ones, and he really needed to hurry and get this job done.

He carefully set the box on a desk and began to look for his trowel. Oh, where is it? He knew it was in here somewhere…

He dug deeper, pushing aside his staple gun, several nails, a few metal sheets, a block of printer paper, an inkwell, a roll of Scotch tape, and many other assorted items. All the while, he failed to notice that almost his entire body was in the toolbox now. And he still couldn’t find the stupid trowel.

The toolbox clattered and rumbled as the Repairman rooted around inside it, but it began to slow down. Gosh, it was warm in there. And dark. And this cushion was a pretty nice find…Come to think of it, he hadn’t slept for two weeks a whole year.

Nothing… the Repairman thought, yawning, nothing wrong with a power nap.

An inky hand reached up and gently closed the loose green lid. The noises of things being pushed aside soon ceased, only to be replaced by muffled snoring.

“Done with what?” asked the Narrator aggressively. “With repairing the fourth wall, is it? You can’t just come in here with that kind of singular purpose, that drive to do something ridiculously uncomplicated, that…” His words were growing confusing now, muddling together as the Narrator himself lost the detached calm in his voice. “You can’t… pressing buttons… You can’t just come in here and press buttons like…”

He stopped. His voice, small and quivering, seemed to rise from the floor rather than the ceiling. “Leave,” he said. “I’m – please, leave.”

“With repai– Yeah, but– Why no– It can be– Wha–”

The Repairman was having a hard time keeping up as the Narrator became more aggressive and incoherent, and so he had little chance of getting a word in edgewise. He lapsed into silence as the voice did.

He sighed. He really was botching this one, wasn’t he? It wasn’t like he was given any protocol for this kind of thing (then again, he had never gotten protocol for any aspect of his job).

He found himself slowly heading back to the door he came into, while uneasily saying “…Maybe I can come back to finish it off later…”

He covered the crack he caused in cement as quickly as possible as he continued back. He hoped that answer would satisfy the Narrator. He’d hate to have to sneak back in.

“Probably because doing so would break your precious fourth wall,” said the Narrator sarcastically. “Well, it’s been wonderful having you here, a real treat, but I’ll have to ask you to leave. If you haven’t already gathered, I don’t care about the fourth wall, and I don’t like having you cluttering up this office building.”

“—,” the Repairman started, then stopped.

He was used to others not really caring about his job, but the sheer snide of this voice…

He looked at the clutter he left around. Yeah, it was a bit much, but the inkblot liked to think he was good at cleaning up after a job well done. At the very least, he could move the stuff out of sight, and out of mind.

He silently pulled a bucket from his toolbox and began cramming the junk in there. It was a bit of a squeeze, but all the clutter fit in the bucket eventually.

Once he was done, he stuffed the bucket into his toolbox. His trowel and pail of cement came out, and the Repairman pushed everything further into the office.

“Don’t worry,” he finally said, as evenly as possible, “I’ll be gone once I’m done.”

He hoped that would be soon. He didn’t know when the trend of snarky or screwball narrators happened, but it really caused issues for him.

The Narrator fell silent. “Stanley,” he said finally – though it must have only been a few seconds – “was an employee who worked in this building. He liked to press buttons. Orders were issued to him from a monitor, dictating which buttons to press and for how long to press them, and Stanley relished every second of it. He was very comfortable with his button-pressing. Yes, he was comfortable and he was… happy.”

Suddenly he became aware of his moment of vulnerability and said, in a particularly snappy voice, “But that’s neither here nor there, possibly-fictitious repairman.”

Huh. Another relatively typecast character? Granted, the Repairman didn’t exactly enjoy all of his job, but still…

He didn’t devote much time to pondering this, though, as the Narrator quickly snapped at him.

“Hey now,” he said putting his hands up defensively. “I don’t ask about your existence!”