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Oogie’s casino had closed when we came into his care. Oogie had just gotten tired of running it, and so he let the Old Mayor (before Turn-Face) ‘close it down for the good of the public’. It hadn’t been very popular in the community and many were glad to see it close. Oogie had a lot of power then, mostly because he had money and the old Mayor was no stranger to bribes. Oogie knew nothing about being a parent, plain and simple. It wasn’t so bad though. Oogie was not a parent, so he let us do whatever we wanted. Spoiled is a good word for it. We weren’t very popular and other children were scared of us, probably because we bullied them. No one could say anything about our questionable behavior though because of Oogie heavy influence over not only the government but also because of his connections with the mob, gangs, anything illegal; you name it, he knew something about it. We could run amuck all we wanted and no one could do anything about it. We never went to school. Life was great until rising star Jack Skellington came along. After a very daring performance one Halloween, he was suddenly the biggest thing since the guillotine. The boss didn’t think much of it really at first. Figured his popularity was just a fad and people would forget about him when the next big thing came along. He was sooooo wrong. He was still popular when the next mayoral election came along. While Oogie as always supported the Old Mayor, Jack was supporting a new candidate who was less likely to take bribes (yes, Turn-Face). You probably know who won. Oogie was beyond angry, after all the money he’d spent on the old Mayor’s campaign, and he lost because the extremely popular Jack supported the other guy. At the time we didn’t quite understand all this; all we knew or cared about was that we got our way.
If we’d paid more attention, we may have seen it coming. The plan that ruined everything. Oogie, in a last ditch effort to regain the power he was losing rapidly, tried to take over Halloween by force. Jack stopped him. We lost everything. The money was gone, the political influence was gone, and Oogie would set up a new residence in an underground lair he decorated with stuff from the old casino. We lived in a tree house he had built in the tree over the lair. He would never visit the outside again, and we were forced- I say forced because we didn’t want to do it initially because we’d always done whatever we wanted- to actually start doing stuff. It wasn’t really that bad, we were just a bunch of whiners. People were still afraid of Oogie and that fear spread to us. People knew we were his boys (and girl), and were careful to treat us with ‘respect’ lest the he come after them—honestly I doubt he would have he’s too fat and lazy.
Okay, so time passes and Oogie starts getting kind of restless down there. He even started talking about leaving his lair. By that time we have gotten used to this arrangement. We thought we could do whatever before, as long as it didn’t interfere with what Oogie was doing. But now we could really do whatever we wanted whether Oogie liked it or not. As long as he was afraid to leave his house he had to depend on us so we had power over him. If he decided to leave his house we would lose that. That’s how we came to be known as kidnappers. You see, Oogie is one sick guy. We just brought him his victims. Usually just out of towners who wandered here by mistake. So Oogie didn’t leave and we continued as normal.
(To Lini [I know you are reading this]: Yes, we knew what happened to those people. You never wanted to believe that but how could we not know? Seriously, how?)
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