Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Stop! Wendy, stop!”

A middle-aged man, face contorted in pain and bright blue eyes wide with fear, tried to drag himself away with just his hands. His legs didn’t work anymore. One, bent in half below the knee, flopped from side to side as he moved. A red stain was spreading across his pants leg. The other, he’d lost long ago. He’d replaced it with a fake, but the prosthetic was now in pieces scattered across the ground, little shards of metal and plastic like what was left on the pavement after a car wreck. A four-fingered hand, covered by a white glove like toons had worn ever since Mickey Mouse, gripped the hammer that had done the damage.

For a brief moment, Wendy paused. Her name… she didn’t think she ever remembered him saying it before, unless maybe she’d tricked him into saying it by accident. She’d known it from her first moment of conscious awareness, but the man who’d created her refused to acknowledge it. Wendy Weasel. It was probably on one of the modelsheets she’d stolen from his desk drawer. But as far as Herschel was concerned, she was Number Fifteen. ‘I created you with names because a sense of identity makes toons stronger,’ he’d said once. ‘Our experiments confirmed this. Apparently, I overdid it, especially with you.’

“You used it? Oh well, too late! Play with me, Daddy!” Wendy said with glee that was only half faked. She lunged again. This was the man that for a moment she’d believed could have been her father, even if toons that were drawn into life didn’t have real parents, the man that could have loved her.

‘You are not my child. You are not even a child.’ That was what he’d told her. He’d said her kind were monsters, incapable of love. But that was him. She’d seen it in the memories she’d torn from his mind a minute earlier. He’d created a toon as a substitute child, long ago. He said it turned on him, but that was just another lie. The look of terror in Herschel’s eyes didn’t elicit even the slightest pang of the empathy that Wendy had only recently started to feel towards a few other creatures, and even more recently identified as such. Because it was the exact same look that had been on his face as he threw a bucket of Dip in the face of his son.

All the times she’d killed people before, whether humans or toons, Wendy hadn’t enjoyed it, not the way she thought she would. This time… no, part of her was still enjoying it, the part that must have been what Herschel had imagined, in his fucked-up mind, that all toons were like, and he’d tried to create her as. Even that part of her only seemed to have fun before the kill, though. She felt the usual visceral pleasure at watching him squirm and incoherently beg for his life, and taunting him and letting him grab the hammer from her and taking a swing at her like he had before. Only this time she was the one in control, not like last time when she was strapped to a chair with those goddamn cuffs stopping her from doing anything. This time she grabbed his wrist. She relished the look of shock on his face, like he was somehow surprised the monster, the weapon he’d created could do that, and the feeling of his bones cracking in her grip, and the smoke and steam rising from his arm as his flesh melted.

All the times before, that part of her had fallen silent once it was over, and the part of her that was repulsed by her actions was left to deal with the mess. But this time, there wouldn’t be any mess. She wasn’t killing him because she was ordered to, or because he was an actual threat. She was doing it because she wanted him gone, like he’d never even existed.

“Hey, Pops, watch this!” Wendy cackled, and let all the anger, all the hatred, that had been building up inside her, out with the last of her strength.

_ _ _

Wendy’s eyes flickered open. The flames in them had gone out, but the last thing she remembered, Herschel’s flesh melting off his skull in a cloud of smoke, was still imprinted on her mind’s eye. Now that she thought about it it was a lot like the ending of one of the movies the humans had watched not long after she was made. They’d laughed and cheered. At the time she hadn’t understood why, just thought she wanted to try that on someone. She hadn’t replicated it on purpose, though. Mostly she was thinking about what happened to a toon that was dipped, and that had merged with the flames filling her mind.

The little toon groaned. That had taken a lot out of her. Not like she’d had much left by that point. But she had to get moving. She had to get Riley out of there before…

Even though Wendy’s eyes were open, it took a while for her mind to catch up. Where was she? This sure as hell wasn’t the middle of the desert. She was lying on something soft… her surroundings finally came into focus, and she sat bolt upright, her body going stiff as a board. This was wrong. In the dim green glow of a nightlight, she could see four walls around her, a ceiling overhead, and a bed underneath her. It was eerily quiet without the constant whir of ventilation fans she was used to.

She whipped a road flare out of Hammerspace, the extradimensional void most toons could access, and lit it with a snap of her fingers. The sudden light was blinding, and sent flashes of color dancing across her vision. She flung it away from her, then doused it with a bucket of sand. She didn’t have anything like that in her Hammerspace, but the more skilled toons could create objects out of nothing, a process called conjuration. For her it should have been almost effortless. But the pain just got worse. Now she couldn’t see in the nightlight’s dim glow either. Hadn’t there been a lamp by the bed somewhere? She fumbled for it in the darkness, and got it light despite knocking it over. She squinted in the glare.

This was what appeared to be a bedroom. Small, no real decoration, only one door. It was a cartoon room, like in the apartments she’d gone into on that last mission. Was this ToonTown? Shouldn’t bedrooms have windows?

No, she was thinking about this wrong. It didn’t matter where it was, only that she’d lost consciousness and been taken there, and Riley wasn’t with her. Had he done something? No, there was no way he could have even moved, not in his state. Whatever this room looked like, it was a prison. She had to get out of here now ! Where was he? Was he… dead? No! She’d saved him! She’d washed the Dip off! He couldn’t be! This was all her fault – if she’d saved her energy and just ran, this wouldn’t have happened, but she’d been so focused on revenge!

She tried the doorknob. Locked. If the situation was reversed, if she was the one half-melted by Dip and he was trying to rescue her, she was pretty sure he would have picked the lock. She wanted to blow the door off its damn hinges. She settled for a crowbar.

Everything hurt. She hadn’t been in this much pain since the time with Herschel and the Passivation Solution. It was mostly the dull pain of exhaustion, but it felt like she’d been run over by a steamroller twenty or thirty times. There was something sharper as well. She thought she’d avoided getting splashed by any stray Dip, but right after Riley had gotten hit by the grenade full of it, the grenade that had been aimed at her and he’d pushed her away from, she was so scared she wasn’t sure she’d have noticed a few stray drops. Her mouth felt like she’d eaten an entire truckload of those little silica gel packets that some food came packed with to keep it from drying out.

She stumbled into a narrow hallway, and broke into a sprint, nearly peeling the carpet from the floor as she ran for the door at the end. This one was unlocked, and led to a landing. One flight of stairs led up, another, at a ninety degree angle to the first, led down. Which one? There were still no windows. It had to be underground. Up the stairs was another landing, another left turn, and another flight of stairs. And another… and another… she’d broken into another panicked sprint, and her limbs felt like they were turning to Jell-O, before she noticed a picture on the wall looked familiar.

“Ascending and Descending,” she read aloud. “M. C. Escher. Yeah, real funny.” She pulled out a red marker and scribbled an X on the glass, then jogged down the stairs counting one, two, three, four flights. Sure enough, there it was again. Somebody really thought they were clever. Without having any idea where she was she couldn’t get out with something like teleportation, even if her prison wasn’t sealed and even if she had the energy. But she could sure as hell break out. She conjured a bundle of dynamite and placed it beneath the picture. Not wanting to waste any more energy than she had to, she used a match to light the fuse, and jogged further down. One flight, then two, putting her on the opposite side of the…

Her train of thought jumped the tracks. The picture of the eternal staircase was right there. Her X had been replaced by the words: ‘Imagine That!’ Her dynamite was still right where she’d left it, minus the fuse. There was a deafening bang, a cloud of smoke, and a sensation of falling that lasted a disconcertingly long time. Then she slammed into something hard. Her body flattened and spread out like normal for a toon, but it hurt a lot more than it should have. It was still better than getting beaten with a hammer without her body being able to squash and stretch like it should have, but not by much. She could hear birds tweeting, but the colored lights were back in her vision. She was glad the last time she’d eaten was before noon.

“Hey, look who’s up! Morning, sleepyhead!” a voice drawled. That voice was familiar. Yakko Warner.

Wendy pushed herself to her hands and knees with a low growl. The inkblot looked about as smug as he sounded – he and his siblings had even pulled up armchairs - but his smirk faded when he saw the carpet sizzle and smoke under her hands. “What the hell are you doing here?” she asked. She know immediately it was a stupid question. They were the wardens, obviously. A better question was where the hell she was. She’d blasted through the walls and ceiling and torn her way out of the eternal staircase, but there was no sign of any debris – or much of anything else. There was just ugly red and gray carpeting stretching out into the shadows in every direction. It seemed like the floor might have curved upward in the distance. There was no visible ceiling, and the only light came from a couple of tall floor lamps.

Yakko raised an eyebrow. “Nice to meet you too. We’re the Warner Bro-”

“I know who you are! What is this place?” Wendy interrupted. One bird fluttered past her face, then another. She knew they were just brainless puppets, no different from circling stars, but it was the next best thing to actually running Yakko through a meat grinder. Her land lashed out, snatching one out of the air, forcing the tenuous material making it up to become more solid, and simultaneously crushing and incinerating it in a spray of boiling ink. The other two birds disappeared. “Answer my goddamn question or you’re next!”

Yakko looked completely unfazed. He gave the burned spots on the carpet a meaningful look. “Well, that’s two out of three already. Hey sibs, how much you wanna bet she wets the bed, too?”

Wakko giggled. Dot scowled. “You’ve been hanging around Scratchy too much.”

“Nah, I got that from an episode of Law and Order.”

That son of a bitch… Wendy tensed. Logically, she knew she had no chance of beating the Warner Siblings in this state, and next to no chance of evading them. Logically, she knew if they’d wanted to kill her they’d almost certainly have plenty of chances. She still remembered what she’d realized, that all of their kind had the same types of feelings as her. But she couldn’t hold those feelings back, not with them. She still couldn’t see them as anything but a threat, as the enemy.

For a crucial moment, the trio’s attention was off of her. She reappeared standing on the back of Yakko’s chair, grabbed him by his ears, and yanked him to his feet, stretching her body a little to compensate for being shorter than him. “You’re next if you don’t tell me!” she hissed.

“I doubt it,” Yakko said calmly. Instead of moving to reduce the strain on his ears, he pulled his legs up, leaving his full weight hanging from her arm. Her muscles burned even worse from the effort of holding him up, and her head spun. Was the chair tipping backward? Forward? She knew she couldn’t keep this up much longer, but she had to! Riley’d taken a grenade for her… she could get through this…

“I mean it!” Wendy reached behind her back. A branding iron appeared in her other hand. She gripped it with all her strength, and the metal heated until it glowed a dull red. “Tell me unless you wanna deepthroat this thing!”

There was a startled snort from Yakko. Laughter. He thought this was some kind of fucking joke? The world blurred, and the next thing Wendy knew she was flying forward, tumbling head over heels. She got to her feet unsteadily. What did he just do? Or either of the other two, it was hard to tell which one did it. It seemed like it might have been something like the tricks she did with gravity. Normally she should’ve been able to keep up with stuff like that, and block it. Yakko was out of his chair now, but still stood with his arms nonchalantly crossed. She was being toyed with.

But now the Warners’ almost-black-and-white faces looked almost… sympathetic.

“This is the Water Tower,” said Wakko.

Wendy was about to call him a liar, when she remembered what the three inkblots had done to the space all around the Resistance’s base. This place was a lot bigger than the water tower, she knew that, but lots of toon buildings were bigger on the inside, and if these three had done something similar here… but that also meant that even if she had the energy to teleport properly, she couldn’t get out that way. She turned and ran again, the patch of light fading into the distance. It was completely dark around her now, and she realized with horror that she could no longer feel the floor under her feet. It was too late to fight gravity now, but it didn’t seem like there was any to fight. She was just floating in an endless void. What now? She couldn’t move anywhere . Her breath quickened. This place was wrong. She forced her brain to block it all out, and imagine herself back by the armchairs, and shut her eyes. The carpet came up to support her feet, but she could still hardly tell which way was up even when she opened her eyes. She swayed, and fell.

“Welcome to our humble home,” said Yakko. He gestured to the room around them. This time it was an actual room, with walls and a ceiling, but no doors. The message was clear. Don’t try to leave again. “I’m sure you’ve got some questions, and believe me so do we, so just calm down for a minute and stop trying to knock yourself out again.”

“Nobody’s going to hurt you,” said Dot. “We don’t want another fight.”

“Unless I try to leave, right?” For the first time Wendy noticed the bags under the three toons’ eyes. Evidently they hadn’t had an easy time either. But it wasn’t enough.

“Uhh...” Yakko looked thoughtfully at the ceiling. “Well, technically no, since thanks to us and the lovely folks at Ajax Corporation you wouldn’t be going anywhere anyway. Now come on, aren’t you at least a little curious what’s been happening the last couple of days?”

“Days? How long was I out?”

Yakko made a watch appear on his wrist. “Approximately fifty-nine hours, twenty-six minutes.”

Two and a half days? Wendy forced her legs together with an involuntary squeak of discomfort. Suddenly Yakko’s joke about wetting the bed didn’t seem that far off happening. That was cartoon physics at work; if a toon was distracted by something else even losing a major body part could go unnoticed for quite a while. Now she genuinely was curious, though. Two days and they hadn’t thrown her in a cell? “Fine. Why am I here and not an actual prison?”

“Because after what we told them about you the Feds didn’t want you within a mile of one of their jail cells. And they don’t really know what to do with you. You haven’t technically been arrested, so we’re not required to keep you in here -”

“Oh yeah? Then let me outta here!”

“-buuut they and the National Guard aren’t real happy about you killing their agents and soldiers, not to mention all the other innocent people you probably murdered,” Yakko continued, raising his voice slightly. Wendy winced. She’d been trying not to think about that. It was painful to even remember her past actions, now that she knew the truth. Even in the battle… she’d been fighting to stop the Resistance from being annihilated, but the Resistance was all built on lies.

Then she asked the question she’d been dreading the answer to. “What happened to Riley?”

“The raccoon?” A look that might have been irritation or anger crossed Dot’s face, but it didn’t seem to be directed at her. “He’s safe. He’s in the hospital.”

“What?”

Yakko’s smirk returned. “It’s a big building with doctors and patients in it, but that’s not important right now.”

Dot shot her brother a glare. “He’s pretty messed up. They said he was going to live, but I don’t think he’s woken up yet.”

Wendy slowly stood up. “Which hospital?”

“Blanc Medical Center,” said Yakko.

“Let me see him.”

“Like Dot said, he hasn’t woken up yet. We’ll let you know -”

“I said, let me see him!” Wendy snarled. She lunged, bowling Yakko over and slamming him to the floor. She grabbed the fur on his chest, pulling the skin up almost over his head, and drew her other hand back to throw a punch. Flames wreathed her glove. Even when she barely had the strength to stand up straight, this move, giving her emotions physical, fiery form, always came naturally to her for some reason. Yakko’s eyes widened in shock and he tried without success to push her away.

But before she could hit him, she saw rapid movement in the corner of her eye. She jumped back, narrowly avoiding a lasso from Dot, and while she was still in the air Yakko pulled a screen down from empty space. A Scene Change. The world blurred, and Wendy felt herself spinning and tumbling again. She twisted and tried to land on her feet, but they slid out from under her, and her muzzle collided painfully with a cold, hard surface. Ice? She tried to get to her feet without slipping, but fell again, and it shattered, plunging her into freezing water. She clawed at the edges, then at the surface as it slipped farther and farther away, but the cold, like being stabbed at every point on her body simultaneously, drained away what little strength she had in an instant, and something was pulling her down – on her ankle. She twisted to see, fighting the instinct to swim. An anchor! She conjured a pair of enormous scissors and tried to slice through it, but the blades bent aside like rubber, then crumbled. So cold… she had to breathe… she didn’t know how to breathe underwater. Was it like changing gravity, where you had to simultaneously believe it was air and know it wasn’t? She almost started to suck in a breath, but stopped as the cold stung her nostrils.

Something pulled her free of the water by the scruff of her neck. She landed hard on the solid ice, and lay there coughing, choking, and shivering. She stretched her body, pulling her leg free of the rope, but that was all the movement she could manage.

“Yakko, was that necessary?” Dot asked. She reeled in a fishing line and tucked the pole back into Hammerspace.

“Uhh… no.” Yakko’s shoulders slumped. He knelt down, getting closer to Wendy’s level. “You’re really worried about him, aren’t you?”

“Yeah...” Wendy said through chattering teeth. The water had gone right through her fur, and she could feel it squish inside her gloves. Now not even the heat and flame would come. “I think he’s… he’s supposed to be like my brother or something. I don’t think Herschel meant it to be like that, but… it’s how it feels.” Tears filled her eyes, and mixed with the water dripping onto the ice. At one point that feeling was a secret, that she couldn’t let anyone else know for fear of being Dipped and replaced, even if she’d understood it well enough to put it into words. It wasn’t really a secret anymore, she’d told Calamity and Furrball… and Herschel… but for some reason it still hurt saying it out loud. No, what hurt was that she couldn’t think of anything else to say, or do. She might as well have been in a pair of the Resistance’s anti-toon cuffs now, for all the good it’d do. She was completely helpless, and she hated it. She’d sworn she’d never let herself get into a situation like this again.

“I understand,” Dot said softly.

The ice-covered lake vanished, and Wendy found herself back in the small bedroom she’d first woken up in. Someone, she couldn’t see who, laid a towel over her shoulders. She pulled it close to her body, still shivering.

Yakko inspected the damaged door, scratching his chin. He pulled it closed and rolled the door frame up like a rug, making it vanish from the wall. Then he pulled a paintbrush from somewhere out of view, and started to paint a new door into existence. “Before you ask… that tiger who talks like the villain from Rocky IV’s dead.” He turned around with a pained expression. “We tried not to, but… we didn’t have a choice. You and Artful Dodger are the only toons left.

“Figures,” said Wendy. “I knew that lunkhead would snuff it.” Ivan wouldn’t have surrendered or ran, she was sure of that. The fact that the Warners were there talking to her already made her pretty sure he was dead. She wasn’t sure how to feel about that. She’d never liked him, but it wasn’t like he’d really done anything besides be an obnoxious stupid fake-Russian pile of brainless muscle. She crawled back onto the bed. It was actually sized appropriately for a creature who only came up to mid-thigh on an adult human, which was a change. Normally she had to jump or really stretch her body to get onto any piece of furniture.

“Look, we’ll take you to visit him when he wakes up, if you can promise you won’t do something stupid like grab him and head for Tijuana,” said Yakko. “And you can leave the tower, just only with adult supervision. I’m sure as hell not locking any more toons in here against their will.” His voice took on a bitter edge.

“Adult?” For the first time in a while, a smirk spread across Wendy’s face. “What are ya gonna do, call Bugs Bunny? Slappy Squirrel?”

“Hey, we could get AARP membership cards if we wanted, ya know.”

“All right… I kinda wanna see what the studio looks like. I saw it from the freeway once, but it was night then, and...” Wendy trailed off. She really didn’t want to talk about, or think about, missions right now. She hopped down from the bed, throwing the towel off and shaking more water from her fur. As soon as her feet hit the floor her legs twisted themselves into a knot. “First, uhh...”

“Bathroom’s the first door on your left.” Wakko opened the door and pointed.

A couple minutes later, Wendy was standing in the middle of a circular room cluttered with toys, furniture, cartoon props, and other odds and ends. There was even a train track running through it. The walls were yellow metal, and the ceiling was a vaulted cone. There were multiple doors, but the one Yakko was turning the vault-style handle on was an enormous shield shape. It swung open with a creak. “Man, I gotta oil this thing,” Yakko commented.

Light flooded Wendy’s eyes, brighter than she was ever used to seeing in a sustained fashion and not the flash from an explosion. She squinted at first, but opened her eyes fully as she hopped over the threshold and onto the catwalk surrounding the tower. The metal was still cool to the touch in the early morning, but not unpleasantly so. Offices and soundstages and parking lots were spread out below, and the Hollywood Hills loomed just beyond the boundary of the lot. Somewhere that way was ToonTown. Even though the air was cool, there was a comforting heat on one side of her body, something she could normally only feel by wedging herself against a clothes dryer or some other piece of machinery. She turned around.

Wendy had never seen the sun before, not besides in pictures. It wasn’t that interesting to look at itself, and after she stared into it for a while her eyes started to hurt, even though they were a lot harder to damage than human ones. But the daylight? It was better than she’d ever imagined.

Chapter Text

Yakko Warner wore his usual smug grin as the burly human man hauled him bodily from the net that had been used to lift him and his siblings up the ladder of the studio water tower. Escape-proof toon netting. That was a laugh. To some toons, maybe it was, especially with how tight it had been pulled. Wakko’s elbow had been jammed into his solar plexus with such force he could barely breathe. You couldn’t just squash and stretch out of this stuff, or into a more comfortable position for that matter. Even if they extended their claws, which they were all reluctant to do because without being able to move enough to take off their gloves they’d have to poke holes in them, it would be difficult to tear through the netting. There was no chance to vanish and reappear outside the net because someone was constantly watching their every move, paying close attention to them. But even so, getting out of the net was child’s play. 

All he really had to do was say a few words about how unsporting it was to throw them into a water tower still stuck in the net and unable to swim. Dot added that she hadn’t changed into her bathing suit yet. They both knew the tower had no water in it anymore – the thing had been covered by scaffolding for months as it was rebuilt and they’d seen the massive door added to the side in the shape of the studio logo – and so did the humans, but those words plus some hypnosis were enough to convince their would-be captors to take them out of the net before throwing them in. Not that they couldn’t have teleported out anyway, once the doors were closed. But it was more fun this way. It was more fun letting them think a net or a locked door had a chance of working.

Yakko was seized by the scruff of his neck and the seat of his pants, Wakko by his shirt collar, and Dot hung upside down by her tail in a security guard’s grip, both hands on her skirt to keep it from falling down. 

“You dropped a piece!” Wakko taunted. His head separated from the rest of his body and rolled backwards, bumping into the toes of the man holding him. The human looked down. Wakko stuck out his tongue and shapeshifted his face into a ‘gookie.’ The man let out a squeal of terror any soprano would envy and stumbled backwards, dropping Wakko’s body and toppling over the low guard rail.

In an instant, Wakko was back in one piece, peering through the railing and watching the man plummet towards the Earth. He gave an exaggerated wince as his former captor hit the concrete with a thud that rattled the whole tower. “That’s gotta hurt,” he said.

Yakko laughed, but let out a sigh of relief as the human dug himself out of the shallow outline-shaped crater. If Wakko hadn’t saved the guy’s life by making his body briefly act like a toon’s he would have splattered like a stockbroker jumping out of a skyscraper.

Of course, none of the security guards took any notice of this. They screamed and shouted as their friend fell to his apparent death, and let out sighs of relief as he got up and staggered away while others on the ground shouted that they would call for an ambulance and to just ‘deal with the kids,’ but the Warner Siblings remained Toons Non Gratas. According to the head of the Animation Studio, William C. Noyes, a tall, portly man with as much of a sense of humor as a ball of lint, they were going to be locked in the tower “Permanently.” It was hard to take him seriously with pie filling dripping from his face, if ever.

They never learned, did they? Weed didn’t, the other three directors they’d gone through didn’t, the police and security guards who’d spent the last month trying without success to remove them from the studio lot since they were fired and banned from the premises didn’t, and certainly the old men in suits who ran the place didn’t. Locking them up wouldn’t work.

Yakko almost felt sorry for them. Almost. If they’d stopped a lot earlier, he and his brother and sister might have been willing to leave. If the first time they’d threatened to quit they’d let them walk out that door instead of threatening to have them locked up for breach of contract, saying that their names would be ruined and they’d never work in Hollywood or anywhere else again, and that since the studio had made them, it might as well have owned them, maybe he’d have been willing to give up the fun of harassing them.

The studio didn’t own them, of course. There was that pesky Thirteenth Amendment. It didn’t technically own them. But it sure acted like it did, because they were after all only children and the company that had given them their names was effectively their parent. If that excuse were any more transparent it would have been surrounded by a bunch of dead birds that tried to fly through it. The Warners were a curiosity, a wonder! Toons with colors! They were an accident, and one that their animator, Lon Borax, wasn’t in a state to tell anyone else how to replicate. The studio didn’t want such unique creatures making anyone else money, or just plain not making them money.

Unique. Special. Right. That hadn’t lasted long. They just had to have a little fun – leave a few banana peels underfoot, mix up a few letters, say a few lines that didn’t fit with the director’s vision – before they became mistakes, monsters. And even before that, sure people laughed at their jokes, but Yakko had seen the way Mrs. Borax looked at them when she visited the studio a few days after their creation to pick up some personal effects. He’d seen the way the other animators looked at them. But they loved acting, they loved the feel of the cameras on them and the people behind the cameras struggling not to laugh and ruin the takes… watching Weed tear his hair out was fun too, Yakko couldn’t deny that. 

It had taken a lot to make them threaten to quit. They’d only done that after the incident with the bourbon, when Noyes had threatened to have them thrown in prison for stealing it and Yakko had pointed out that the stuff wasn’t even legal to have in the first place, and he and his siblings happened to have the ability to show, say, a police officer the memories right out of their heads including the faces of everyone who’d been at that fancy high-class party. Yakko didn’t think they’d have actually done it, the laws against drinking were stupid and he could hardly fault anybody for not following them, but he was in a bad mood after they’d been sick all night and were still sick the next morning, and Weed had tried to make them film anyway and after four hours of hell he reduced Dot to tears by telling her it was their own fault anyway just like it was their own fault his best animator had been reduced to a gibbering idiot who could barely feed himself. But Noyes had gone ballistic and said if that was the case he’d have them taken out back and shot. Wakko giggled and pressed a shotgun into his hands, saying that there wasn’t much of a point taking them out back since there wouldn’t be much of a mess to clean up. The moron was actually dumb enough to fire it without being hypnotized, and of course it had blown up in his face.

It was about then that people started acting like they were dangerous. Suddenly their ability to mess with peoples’ minds, or to vanish and instantly appear somewhere else, like in desk drawers or behind peoples’ backs or even in their pockets, stopped becoming funny when it wasn’t on a stage. Normal toons never did that kind of thing to humans, at least not with a script and a stunt coordinator, but there’d never been toons like them before, in more ways than one.

It wasn’t long before they’d actually been hauled off to jail, by both the human cops and the toon ones, and then when that failed the more creative punishments to try to make them behave started, like locking them in a solid steel box and dumping it off the Santa Monica Pier. The studio was supposed to be their guardian, and to creatures that couldn’t die or really be hurt by anything, it wasn’t any different than paddling a disobedient human child. Except that most human kids were scared of being paddled. To the Warners the attempted punishments and restraints were a joke, and an invitation to keep having fun.

This was new, though. A water tower? The humans had been working on it for a long time, even before they were fired, and he’d seen a bunch of trucks from Ajax Corporation when the studio usually was a loyal Acme customer, so it had to be something special. But it didn’t matter. With a bit of effort they could be anywhere they wanted. Noyes’s “permanent” imprisonment would be lucky to last five seconds.

At least, that was what Yakko thought as the men threw him bodily through the closed door, and he skidded to a halt on the metal floor inside the water tower, followed closely by Wakko and Dot. They made rude faces as the door was laboriously slammed shut. The darkness was complete.

“Shall we?” asked Wakko.

“Uhh...” Yakko pondered it for a minute. He could hear a handwheel being turned outside, and some mechanical clicking noises. “Nah, let’s give them a minute. Until they’re sure it’s locked. And wait ‘til they get down the ladder. I wanna greet them when they get back to the security office.”

“How about a surprise party?” suggested Dot. “We can put up a big banner with ‘Congratulations on a Warner-Free Studio!’ on it, and have balloons and cake and everything!”

“Cake? Count me in,” said Wakko.

“Where’d we find a real cake big enough on such short notice? Let’s just make a fake one and jump out of it, like that girl at that one party...” Yakko replied. Food pulled from thin air never tasted good, and wasn’t filling at all. “They might even think someone else put on the party for a second.”

“I still want cake, though...”

“We can go down to the bakery and get a real one later.”

“I wanna go to the beach first...” said Dot.

The clicking and grinding faded away, and stopped. There was a funny feeling, like Yakko’s body was being stretched and compressed at the same time, and like he was falling. “Well, I think it’s about time to start decorating,” he said. “C’mon, sibs.” He reached out and took hold of their hands – or tried to, but they weren’t there. “Huh?” He pulled a flashlight from Hammerspace and flicked it on, waving it in all directions. Wakko wasn’t there, or Dot. Neither was the floor, the ceiling, or most of the walls. All he could see was the inside of the logo-shaped door, and it was getting smaller, and bending like he was looking at it from the outside. It rapidly vanished into the distance.

Yakko tried to teleport out, but there was a funny feeling of vertigo again, and the blackness still remained all around him. He felt like he was falling, but without the sensation of the wind rushing through his fur. “Sibs?” he called. “Wakko? Dot? Where are you?”

“Yakko?” Dot’s voice filtered through the gloom as if from a long way away. He shone the flashlight beam in the direction he thought it was coming from, but no one was there. Trying to stop his heart from racing he closed his eyes – not strictly necessary in darkness – and imagined himself by her side. A moment later he felt a hand grab his wrist, squeezing so tightly his glove shot off his hand like a champagne cork. There was a sigh of relief. “Wakko?”

“I’m right here!” Wakko appeared on Dot’s other side, holding a candle. “Oh. That’s a better light.”

“Not really.” Yakko waved the flashlight around. There was no dust in the air to scatter the light, but in accordance with cartoon physics the beam was still clearly visible, a bright cone extending out into the distance and getting gradually dimmer and dimmer. There was no sign of walls, a ceiling, or any other object. It was just them, floating surrounded by nothingness. Wakko and his candle were upside-down compared to his siblings, but he reoriented himself to match them.

“Yakko, what’s wrong with this place?” Dot asked.

“It’s a bit roomy, it’d probably take forever to clean, and it needs more windows. Aside from that, not much,” Yakko replied flippantly. He sighed. “Your guess is as good as mine. Come on, we’re busting out of here.”

“I already tried that. It doesn’t work!”

“We got back to each other just fine, didn’t we?”

“I guess… okay, Mr. Noyes’s office. One… two… three!”

Yakko felt the familiar drop in his stomach and loss of sensation, but still nothing happened. They might have gone somewhere, but it was impossible to tell in the featureless void.

“Well…”Wakko scratched his chin. “I think the problem is we’re lost. We don’t know where we are… compared to anything outside the tower.”

“If we’re even still inside the tower,” said Dot. 

“Well, where else could we be?”

“In space?” Yakko suggested.

Dot scowled. “If we were in space there’d be stars or planets or galaxies or something. This is… this is just weird.”

“What if it’s like a… like a giant Hammerspace or something?” asked Wakko.

“Maybe...”

“I saw the door, for a second,” said Yakko. He described how he’d seen it get smaller, curve, and vanish into the gloom. “If we can find it again, we should be able to either force it open or make our own way out.”

But even after trying dozens of times, the door never appeared again, nor did any other physical object. Yakko was getting tired, and more and more panicked, and Wakko and Dot weren’t any better. Wakko had tied them together with a long rope by that point, and it was even more apparent that gravity just didn’t exist here. Firing a gun into the blackness produced no echo of a ricochet. Finally, Yakko decided the thing to do was make there be gravity. They fell for what seemed like hours before he thought to pull out a watch and time it, and then another actual hour before he admitted defeat on that plan.

“How long do you think we’ve been in here?” Wakko asked.

Yakko checked. It was 9:45. But whether it was morning or night he couldn’t tell. They’d certainly missed dinner, but just from hunger and thirst he couldn’t tell if they’d missed breakfast the next day as well. It could have even been more than a day.

“What if we make the inside ourselves?” suggested Dot. “You know, what the inside of a water tower should look like! And then, uhh… make it connect?”

Summoning such a complicated thing into existence wasn’t exactly easy, but it was possible. Yakko opened the door to more blackness, then closed it again, locked it, and all together they tried to blast their way out. In the off-chance it would work, he tried teleporting to the outside, and they created doors, tunnels, and even a window leading to the studio lot, but all were just illusions or led to the nothingness outside again.

“Yakko… I’m scared.” Dot huddled against the circular wall of the fake tower they’d created, arms around her knees. That was the one good thing about it. It gave them an anchor, something that felt real in this mess. 

At least, it did for a little while. Like anything created by toons from nothing it disappeared eventually, leaving them floating in nothingness again. This time Yakko settled for a simple red and green checkered floor, and a gas lantern – his flashlight and Wakko’s candle were long gone.

“How long is it now?” Yakko asked. 

Wakko pulled a pocket watch from his Hammerspace. “Well… it’s almost twelve, but I think it’s been a lot longer than two hours.”

“Yeah...” Yakko yawned. “I don’t even know what day of the week it is.” He hadn’t slept a wink since they’d been locked in; he was too afraid of losing track of time any more than he already had.  It couldn’t have been more than a few days. Days… It should have just been a few seconds. It should have been so easy to just be somewhere else – the roof of the tower, inside it at the edges, Mr. Noyes’s office, anywhere but here. 

“Admit it, Wakko, there’s no way out,” Dot said bitterly as the cuckoo clock she was dragging behind her in a wagon struck twelve. Midnight, or at least they were calling it midnight. It was five days since they’d officially started keeping track. She knew they were probably off by a couple of days, but it was better than being off by months or years. The endless black void inside the water tower had no sun, moon, or stars. If it weren’t for their clocks, time might as well not have existed at all. She had nightmares about finally opening the logo-shaped door and being greeted with a world ruled by Eloi and Morlocks.

“We don’t know that yet! We’ve only gone a couple hundred miles.” 

Dot rolled her eyes. She pulled the pad of paper they were using as a calendar out of Hammerspace and put a fresh mark on it. Eight days now, their best guess was that it was about three before they started counting. Wakko had come up with the latest escape plan, and possibly the last. If teleportation couldn’t get them to the edge of the strange space they were in, then physically moving without skipping over any parts might. There was no gravity, nothing was pulling them back. They just kept walking, laying down the path ahead of them like a railroad making its way across the country. Using yellow bricks was Dot’s idea. They had yet to meet any scarecrows or tin men in here, but they definitely weren’t in Burbank anymore. Somewhere behind them the road was crumbling to nothingness. Everything they made did, and it wasn’t lasting as long now without them concentrating on it. The collection of odds and ends they had in their Hammerspaces, real objects that wouldn’t disappear, were now a precious resource.

“How far do we need to go? Ten thousand miles? A million? This place might not even have an edge! Or what if we’re going in circles? It’s not like a compass works here! What if there’s an edge but only in one direction, and we’re going the wrong way?” Dot conjured a fist-sized rock just so she had something to kick off the road into the void. She let out a stifled hiss of pain. Her feet already felt like they were going to fall apart.

“What if we listen to you?” Yakko asked irritably. “Have you got any better ideas?”

“Well… uh… no, not really.”

Yakko seized upon her words like a cat on a wounded mouse. “Then what do you wanna do, just sit around here and mope until we die? Oh, wait, that’s right, we can’t die! And that also means we’ve got all the time in the world to waste looking for a way out!”

“Happy Birthday to us… Happy Birthday to us… Happy Birthday Warner Brothers (And the Warner Sister!)… Happy Birthday to us...”

Wakko halfheartedly blew out the second tallest of the candles on the cake they’d thrown together. It was simple, just a two-layer cylinder, a bit lopsided, haphazardly covered with off-white icing. None of them wanted to waste the effort on anything more elaborate.

According to Dot’s calendar, it was July 18, 1930, precisely one year since they’d first been animated, and a little over three months since they’d been locked in the water tower. Wakko had always imagined their first birthday being like the parties they’d attended at the studio – invited or not – with guests, games, good food, and actual fun. Now they were celebrating alone, in the dark.

“I might regret this, but you cut the cake.” Yakko handed Wakko a spade-like knife. 

He stared at it for a while, then carved out a sliver on either side of his candle, just enough to maneuver it onto his plate without it falling apart, and cut the rest roughly in half. The cake looked delicious. It smelled delicious, and was even his favorite flavor, chocolate with strawberry icing. His mouth was watering… but if he ate it, would that tarnish the memory of real food? After considering it for a moment, he stood up with a scowl and pitched the plate off the edge of the yellow brick road. “Forget it. The plate would probably taste better anyway.”

“Suit yourself.” Yakko took a bite out of his own piece, grimaced, and swallowed hard. He plucked the candle from it, eyed it disdainfully, and threw his own plate away too. “Never mind, you were right. This’d probably taste better.”

Conjured food always tasted like cardboard, and it had far less nutritional value. But it was all there was. The real snacks they’d had stashed in Hammerspace had run out long ago, and they’d mostly given up on choking down the fake stuff. The cake was more a symbol of time passing than anything else. Dot made it about halfway through her slice, but eventually tossed it over her shoulder, then tore off the cardboard party hat she was wearing and did the same to it.

It struck Wakko, as it had many times the past couple months, just how thin his brother and sister had gotten – and they never had much weight to lose to start with. He knew he was just as bad – whenever he looked in a mirror he saw the same thing had happened to his face, his eyes shrinking back into his head and his cheekbones sticking out more, and these days his hat was almost falling over his eyes. But, he thought, at least most of his body was covered. Yakko and Dot’s ribs were clearly visible, something that should never have been the case for a toon who wasn’t an actual skeleton, or maybe being electrocuted. He hoped it didn’t hurt them as much to see him as it hurt him to see them.

“Anyone up for Pinata?” Dot said with an obviously fake smile.

“Sure.” Wakko conjured one in the shape of Mr. Noyes. He knew he was the one who’d probably given the order to lock them in here, and probably long before they’d even been fired. Not caring that if the man could have seen him it would have only justified the decision in his tiny brain, the inkblot whipped out a mallet. One blow turned the pinata into confetti and punched a crater in the roadway.

Then, as he put the mallet away, he saw it. A bright yellow ‘Road Ends’ sign, with Dot standing next to it, her eyes shimmering. This was the moment he’d been dreading. They’d agreed a long time ago that this was the day when, if they hadn’t reached the edge of the water tower, it wasn’t going to happen. They had to have walked for thousands of miles now, thousands of miles of featureless nothing. But Dot was right, it could have been millions. And Yakko was wrong back then. They didn’t have all the time in the world. Toons couldn’t die, but they couldn’t keep going forever, either. Without food and water, eventually something would happen. Wakko didn’t know what. Maybe they’d pass out from exhaustion and never wake up, or maybe they’d be unable to maintain physical forms at all and spend the rest of eternity as disembodied spirits, or maybe they’d shrivel up into stick figures like some of the earliest toons, the ones drawn when the A.C.M.E Machine was first invented. Even cartoon physics had its limits. Unless… Unless there was something they still weren’t thinking of, something they weren’t trying. But what? 

It was Dot who found the solution. She was always the best at conjuring, creating things from nothing, of the three of them. It wasn’t until they were close to passing out from hunger that she noticed the difference. She was lying on her back, idly moving her hand around like she was stirring something. Only… there was more resistance than there should have been. It wasn’t from weakness, or from the air, it was like the nothing inside the tower was somehow thicker than regular nothing should have been. 

It gave her an idea, one crazy enough that she almost chalked it up to deleriousness. She didn’t tell her brothers, she didn’t want to get their hopes up over nothing. But it was worth a shot. When the clock struck twelve again, the start of another day, instead of pulling a regular pencil out of Hammerspace, or even conjuring one normally, she reached into an imaginary pocket and imagined gathering the nothing around her hand, letting it wrap around her fingertips like cobwebs and bunch up in her palm, then compressing it together and shaping it. And then, she felt it. It certainly seemed real, but then so did any other conjured object. She turned it over in her hand a couple times, and scratched a mark on the piece of paper. The mark would stay, even if a conjured pen or pencil disappeared, they’d already tested that. It was just another odd property of toonmatter.

“Dot, are you okay?” Wakko asked. 

“You’re sweating,” said Yakko.

“It’s fine… just… tired...” Dot tucked the pencil under her tied-back ear, intentionally not putting it in Hammerspace. She settled back down on the sort of raft of tied-together furniture they’d made. The yellow brick road was gone now, they couldn’t keep anything they created together for more than a few minutes.

But the pencil stayed. Still thinking it could be a fluke, she eventually drifted off to sleep, but a full twenty-four hours later, when it was time to mark the calendar again, she pulled out the same pencil and make another tick mark. Under November, 1930, there were now five complete sets of hash marks – three vertical lines and one horizontal across them – and one more vertical set of three. Like most toons they only had four fingers, and while they still counted in base ten with marks like that four was more convenient.

Dot still didn’t tell her brothers until she’d created one more thing, a simple cube of sugar, and ate it while they were asleep. It still didn’t have any flavor, but about an hour later she felt a little trickle of energy enter her body, like a faucet turned on just enough that it did more than drip. 

It didn’t take more than a couple of weeks to build their strength back up. Creating anything, especially anything that lasted, took a lot of effort, but the more calories they could get in their systems the stronger they got, until they felt pretty much normal, and even after that the permanent conjuration still got easier as they got more practiced at it. Dot was thrilled as much at the accomplishment as at having her life saved. It was the first really new technique they’d learned with cartoon physics, the first thing they’d had to work at. Normally everything was, if not as easy as breathing, at least on the level of walking, which they’d known how to do from the moment they were created.

They still took a while to get the flavor right, though. Christmas Dinner was just oatmeal and spinach – Wakko argued that it wasn’t worth it trying to make anything actually appetizing until it wouldn’t be a disappointment to actually bite into – but there was a real tree, and real presents.

That one discovery changed everything. The Water Tower wasn’t just an endless void anymore, it was an endless canvas. The new year brought with it a new home, a fake water tower interior, but this time permanent. It changed many times over the years, getting redecorated and having new features added, but it was the center of their little world. For a little while, Yakko jokingly said they might as well be gods now. But there was one thing they couldn’t change. They were alone in the tower. They could make puppets out of toonmatter, and even bring them to life temporarily, but they couldn’t make that permanent. Only animators could do that. 

“Should old acquaintance be forgot, and everybody cheer...” Dot sang as the anvil swayed at the top of its tower in the small model of Times Square they’d made. Yakko and Wakko accompanied her on the piano and fiddle. “We’ve managed somehow brothers to get through another year...”

The clock counted down to zero a few seconds after the song finished. Yakko appeared at the top of the tower with a pair of shears, cutting the rope and sending the anvil crashing down on a stack of champagne bottles filled with gasoline and surrounded by burning sparklers. Before it hit he was next to Wakko and Dot with a pair of sunglasses to watch the fireworks.

“1940, huh?” he said after the last of the flames had gone out. “Here’s to a new decade.” A new decade… God, they’d been in there almost ten years. They’d already celebrated their tenth birthday. He looked down at his brother and sister. Ten years and they hadn’t aged a day or grown an inch. Was that what it was supposed to be like?

“Hey sibs...” he asked. “Not to put a damper on the mood or anything, but I thought of something.”

“Huh?” they replied in unison.

“Did you guys ever hear that theory that toons get old without an audience?”

“I think so,” said Dot. 

“Why isn’t it happening to us?”

Wakko shrugged. “People must be watching our cartoons out there.” He pointed in a random direction.

“But they never released any of our cartoons. Weed and Noyes and all those guys said they’d never release anything they made, that it was garbage.”

“Maybe they changed their minds. I’ll bet they all miss us and want us back.”

“Sure, and we’ll win an Oscar for our work in Flies in the Ointment,” Dot said with a raised eyebrow. Yakko suppressed a laugh. That was the ‘short’ where they’d gotten chewed out by Weed and the censor over an ‘inappropriate’ joke Yakko made – he couldn’t even remember what it was – when Dot first got stuck to him, and in retaliation they’d tied them up, hypnotized the rest of the crew to keep the cameras rolling, and dragged out the one flypaper gag until the film ran out. He was still curious, though. Dot was right: continuing to show the cartoons of stars they’d made disappear would have raised inconvenient questions. The studio had probably burned all the film. Why weren’t they aging?

Then again, Yakko thought as he and his siblings shared an embrace, maybe an audience of two was enough. 

The Warners never quite forgot about attempting to escape the water tower, but after living there became more tolerable it became less and less of a priority, and it didn’t even seem possible. But then, Yakko couldn’t remember how the subject had come up, but Dot suggested if the place really was infinite, they could finally test whether toon teleportation really was instantaneous. All they’d have to do was set up a weight-activated switch that turned on a light when they stepped off of it, teleport a long enough way away, and if they could already see the light when they reappeared it was probably instantaneous. The distance would have to be hundreds of thousands of miles, and the light would have to be absurdly bright, so it didn’t seem like it was actually possible, but it started an argument, because Yakko remembered reading about the work of a guy called Einstein who proved that nothing could possibly travel faster than light. A while back he'd found a translated version of the paper and read it, and learned about the experiments leading up to it. The math seemed rock-solid, but then, it didn’t take into account cartoon physics at all, which made sense since it had been published back around when Animation had been invented.

But thinking about how that would work with cartoon physics made Yakko remember that there’d been another theory from Einstein as well, something about how gravity made space and time bend. He’d tried reading it at one point but couldn’t figure out the math. He didn’t have a copy, but now that he thought about it… had he ever returned that library book on tensor calculus he’d checked out to try to understand it? He felt around in his Hammerspace, pulled it out, and winced. That was going to be one hell of a late fee.

It started out as Yakko’s hobby, but soon Wakko and Dot were sucked in as well. With less other exciting stuff to do it was easier to sit still and concentrate first on the book, then on the equations in front of them. Making the gravity stuff work on its own wasn’t that hard. It took a few years, but it was always working on and off, whenever they felt like it. There were a couple of weird edge cases they found, like if you concentrated enough mass in a tiny space the gravity would bend space and time so strongly that it was physically impossible to move from the inside to the outside. It reminded Yakko a little bit of the water tower, but that was gravity, entire earths or even stars worth of mass. This was different. This space seemed like it was just… closed off, somehow. It was isolated, a bit like how Toontown didn’t seem fully connected to the rest of the world.

The tower was different, but the knowledge that space could be bent like that gave Yakko, Wakko, and Dot an idea. If it could be bent by cartoon physics, what would that be like? In the end that was the part that took decades to figure out. Einstein’s relativity just didn’t seem compatible with the weird math, the illogic, that described cartoon physics. For years at a time they abandoned the room full of chalkboards and stacks of paper. But eventually… eventually, they cracked it. They figured out how the Ajax animators must have made the tower, how the space inside it was twisted and deformed in a brain-hurting way so that all possible paths, even ones made by briefly tearing holes in space or joining it together, lead away from the exit, and why inside it there was enough background “potential” that conjuration could be made permanent. They couldn’t yet tell how, or even if it could be undone, especially from the inside. But they knew they could bend the laws of physics. If they could just bend them in a specific way, like taking teleportation and generalizing it… 

Dot watched the light twist around Yakko’s glove, making it look like there was a hole in the middle of his hand. It was the 1980s now. The pad of paper her original calendar was on had run out. They’d been locked inside the water tower for over fifty years now, and before too long it would be sixty. But it was working! It was actually working! She was always the one most skeptical of the idea that they could really find a way out of this place, and it was hard to even get herself to practice the new technique they were working on. But now that she was seeing it for herself, seeing the ripples in the air around him and feeling the pins and needles and the sensation of her fur standing on end, a smile spread across her face. Nothing any animator made could stand up to this.

Then the ball of distorted space fizzled out. Yakko’s eyes rolled back in his head and he crumpled to the ground, his glove smoking.

This was hard. It was hard like nothing they’d ever tried before, both physically and mentally. At first it knocked them out for a day even doing party tricks. Working together was easier, a lot more than three times easier, since the distortions they made interacted and amplified each other, but it still took a lot of practice, and even then it still wore them out quickly. But with hundreds, then thousands, of times twisting the space back and forth, knotting it and tearing it and doing things that language couldn’t properly describe but were now second nature to them, the barriers weakened and broke. The space was like clay in their hands now. And one day, Dot touched the side of the first room they’d made, the one in the shape of the inside of a tower. It had been reshaped and redecorated many times, but this time it had settled into a shape they hadn’t quite intended.

The metal felt hot. It felt like metal that was being heated by the L.A. sun felt. She rested her palm against it for a long time.

“Hey. Check this out.” She walked to the handwheel on the door, the same door she remembered slamming shut in their faces all those years ago. She mentally reached out, feeling the structure of the material, out through the physical manifestation of the destroyed seals and out through to the real metal on the outside. Another little bend – this one she could do even on her own, although she felt light headed. Hundreds of popping sounds echoed through the tower as hundreds of welds broke. She gripped the handwheel tightly and twisted, and slowly, with an ominous creak, it started to turn. Four more gloved hands grabbed it beside hers.

“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls...” Yakko said, grinning from ear to ear. “Get ready for the encore performance of the century! Burbank, California, here we come!”

Chapter Text

The Water Tower door swung open, hinges that hadn’t been oiled in decades screaming in protest. The inside was flooded with daylight. Yakko squinted and shielded his eyes as he stepped over the threshold, his brother and sister by his side. He surveyed the outside world, the real world, for the first time in more than sixty years.

“Huh,” was the first word out of his mouth. “So this is the nineties? I gotta say I was expecting more flying cars.”

Truth be told, Yakko didn’t quite know what he was expecting to see when he finally left the tower. According to the calendar they’d been keeping, it was sixty-two years since they’d been locked up in the endless darkness. He was sure they’d missed a few days here and there, but it was probably still either 1992 or 1993. It was most of a human lifetime. For all he knew, Burbank could have been leveled by an earthquake by then, or it could have been a steel jungle of gleaming skyscrapers underneath an enormous glass dome. But he was pleasantly surprised to see that the view from the Water Tower wasn’t that different than he remembered. The studio lot was still recognizable. There were new buildings – a few of them taller than the tower - old ones had been torn down, and the parking lots and roads seemed to have gotten bigger, but there were still rows of soundstages spread out below, and the scrub-covered hills to the south hadn’t changed much.

He examined the outside of the tower, rapping his knuckles on the metal. It seemed like it had been repainted, and fairly recently at that. He liked the new red and yellow color scheme.

“Hey! Look at those cars!” Wakko pointed excitedly down at the parking lots, holding a pair of binoculars. “Seems like they might fly after all!”

Yakko snatched the binoculars. “No kiddin’,” he muttered. The vehicles down there looked like something out of science fiction, like the new streamlined trains and all-metal airplanes but more so. The bodies and the hoods were wider, extending out to cover the wheels entirely, the windshields swept back at steep angles, with no spare wheels or running boards, and the headlights were embedded into the hoods. It wouldn’t have surprised him at all to see one take off.

“If they can fly, then what’s that?” Dot tugged them around the other side of the tower, pointing to an enormous road north of the studio, separating them from Disney. As far as the eye could see in either direction cars were packed together bumper to bumper, moving at a snail’s pace.

Wakko pouted. “You could’ve let us dream for a little while.”

“There’s a difference between dreams and delusions,” Dot said with a smirk.

Then Yakko saw movement below, a large gaggle of people wearing brightly colored, and in many cases revealing clothing approaching the base of the tower, being led by a young uniformed man walking backwards. He put a hand to his ear, bending physics a little to pick up the human’s voice. “The Studio Water Tower was built in 1927, undergoing major renovations in early 1930, and stands over a hundred feet tall. Although it was only used to store water for two years, it remains a historic landmark and a symbol of the -”

Then there were gasps and screams, and a cry of: “Hey, there’s some kids up there!”

Wakko and Dot waved. Yakko blew a kiss. “Hey, I think that’s a tour group! How about we mosey on down there and see what’s new?” he asked rhetorically. He vaulted over the railing, hung in the air for a moment, and plummeted to the concrete below. The screams grew even louder, and the small crowd stumbled back. Bouncing on the landing instead of pancaking was effortless, and Dot even somersaulted into the startled tour guide’s arms. He grasped her firmly by the shoulders and set her down with a stern look.

“What the hell were you kids doing up there?” the guide asked. Justin, judging by his nametag. He looked about college-aged, with a few pockmarks of acne still on his face. “It’s dangerous! You could’ve been kill– well, you’re toons so I guess you couldn’t have been killed, but this is private property!”

“We wanted to go swimming!” Wakko spin-changed, putting on a snorkel, mask, flippers, and brightly colored swim trunks. There was a more amused gasp from the crowd.

The guide had his hands on his hips. “Very funny. Are you with another tour group? Where are your parents?”

The guy had no idea who they were, Yakko realized. Not that he hadn’t expected that: he rather doubted the studio would be telling tourists all about how they locked up three children alone in the dark forever. They were on the opposite side of the tower from the door, so it probably really did seem like they’d climbed up. He decided honesty was the most amusing policy at the moment.

“We don’t have any,” he said. It took him a moment to recognize the implications of the question being asked. It had been known for a while that toons could have kids, and those kids grew similarly to humans, although they hadn’t been around as a species long enough to really know whether they aged after reaching adulthood. But there were still very few born toons around… or at least, there didn’t used to be. Now , who knew?

“Well, you gotta be twelve to go on a tour without an adult and fourteen to supervise younger children. How old are you, kid?” Justin turned his full attention to Yakko.

Idiot. A juvenile delinquent would have now known exactly what age to lie and say he was. But Yakko was being completely honest, as long as it kept being entertaining. “That’s a very good question,” he said, scratching his chin and trying to keep a straight face. “I’ve always wanted to say this: what year is this?” He hypnotized the guide a little to make sure he got an answer. He was genuinely curious.

“1992 – wait a – what the – kid, this isn’t funny.”

“You just said it was,” Dot replied innocently.

“Then lemme see...” Yakko pretended to count on his fingers. “Either sixty-two or sixty-three. I don’t suppose you could add a couple years and get us a senior discount?” He stretched his body out to whisper in the guide’s ear in a conspiratorial tone.

“Oh my gosh, you kids are so cute! ” a heavyset blonde woman stepped forward. She held up a black plastic device that looked a lot like a tiny camera. It made a clicking noise. Was it really a camera? That small? “Are you supposed to be Goofy?”  

“Exqueeze me? Lady, you’ve got a lotta nerve calling anybody goofy in an outfit like that.” 

Justin interposed himself between Yakko and the woman. “What’s your name, kid?”

“Yakko Warner.”

“Yeah, we’re the Warner Brothers!” said Wakko. “I’m Wakko.”

“And I’m Dot, the Warner Sister.” Dot curtsied.

“Suure...” Justin sighed and unclipped a small device that looked like it had some sort of antenna on it. He brought it to his mouth, pressed a button on the side, and spoke. “Security, we’ve got a couple kids runnin’ around by the water tower. They jumped off the thing actually.” He released the button with an electronic beep.

A startled reply came from the device, garbed with static. “They what? ” Yakko’s eyes bulged from his head. A radio? A two - way radio, at that size? This really was the future!

“They were up at the top of the tower and they jumped off.” Justin released the button, then immediately pressed it again. “Sorry, they’re toon kids,” he clarified hastily. “They won’t tell me who their parents are or their names or how they got on the lot.”

“All right, we’ll send Ralph over,” said the voice from the miniature radio.

“Thanks.” Justin turned back to Yakko. “I’m gonna ask you kids one more time. You’re trespassing on private property right now, that’s against the law and you’re gonna be in serious trouble if you don’t cooperate. Either we call your parents, or we call the police and they call your parents.”

“We already told you, we don’t have any parents,” said Dot. “Unless you count our animator, but he’s in the nuthouse – no, he’s probably dead now.”

“Wha-?” A look of confusion spread across Justin’s face. He raised the radio again. “Security, tell Ralph to be careful. These are some weird kids.”

“Don’t worry Mr. Justin, I’ll be gentle with them,” a voice that sounded like it belonged to someone large and not particularly intelligent said. A shadow fell on Yakko and his siblings. He spun around. His first assessment was definitely correct, and he was pretty confident about the second. The man with ‘Ralph’ on his nametag was obese, nearly bulging out of his security uniform, but he towered over Yakko, let alone Wakko and Dot. That hardly mattered… but he was a toon. A toon man in a baby-blue uniform made of toonmatter, with pinkish-tan skin not too different from humans’. They weren’t the only ones anymore.

Dot grinned from ear to ear. “Ha! I knew those animators’d figure out colors sooner or later!” 

“Daaah, youse kids are in a lotta trouble,” Ralph said. “I’m going to have to take ya down to the office. You’re not allowed on the lot without permission.”

Yakko remembered the security guards who’d locked them in the tower all those years ago. This guy was different, though. He was one of them. And he’d certainly gotten across the studio lot in a hurry for his size. Was there a chance that maybe his command of cartoon physics was on the same level as theirs? There was only one way to find out, and it was going to be fun. “Oh yeah? You and what army, Tubby?” He poked the guard’s fat stomach, stuck his tongue out, and sprinted away in a cloud of dust.

____________________________________________________ 

Thaddeus Plotz received the shock of his life when he looked out his window and saw the water tower door hanging wide open. Up until he’d taken the job as President of Animation – a legacy title, the studio didn’t actually animate toons anymore, they just filmed them – he didn’t know the tower even had a door. Even now that was about the limit of his knowledge. All he’d been told by his predecessor was that there was a door and that it had been welded shut, and that no attempts to open it should be made under any circumstances, nor to breach the interior of the tower in any way, not that it would have worked anyway. That part had intrigued him, as had the mention of a red envelope in a safe in the office that he should open if the door were ever to be opened, but Plotz was not a man who remained intrigued for very long about matters not directly relevant to either the studio’s finances or his own. For years he’d almost forgotten about it.

But now, the door was open. Mentally telling himself that whatever was inside that tower had better be important, Plotz crossed the room to the portrait, got the combination to the little safe behind it right on the third try, and retrieved the envelope. After reading partway through the letter, he crumpled it up and was about to throw it in the wastebasket. That stupid urban legend. The one where back in 1929, an animator at Warner Bros had supposedly created three out-of-control, immensely powerful toon children, supposedly in color, and they were subsequently sealed away inside the water tower and any knowledge of their existence covered up.

It was a myth, and an annoying one at that since it was harmful to the company’s reputation. But the technique to animating toons in color hadn’t been discovered until a full year later, when the Acme Brothers created first props, then the first ever toon with colors, Fiddlesticks the Frog, soon hired by Disney. They’d also made Mickey Mouse’s first pair of red shorts. It was years before black-and-white toons like Mickey started to convert themselves to color. No, this was clearly a practical joke.

It was clearly an elaborate practical joke though, and that was why Plotz didn’t throw the letter out. Instead, he un-crumpled it, reading the signature on the bottom again. William C. Noyes. That name sounded familiar.

Having his secretary look the name up confirmed it. Noyes was the first of Plotz’s predecessors. Back in those days Warner Bros was animating toons in-house, but half of the filming was done with Harman and Ising, working with stars like Bosko, Honey, and Foxy, and half was done in-house directly under Noyes, with stars like Buddy. This, as far as Plotz knew, ended in disaster. Harman, Ising, and Bosko jumped ship for MGM, Noyes was fired, and ultimately Leon Schlesinger took over everything.

Plotz examined the photo that had been included with the letter. Whoever the toons the prankster had passed off as being the ‘Warners’ were, he had to admit they looked the part, or at least they did in the black-and-white photo. They were what were commonly known as ‘inkblots,’ with white masklike faces, all-black eyes, and thin folded ears that gave them a superficial resemblance to Bosko and Honey, if it weren’t for the bright red noses and the crazed expressions on their faces. But it was a black and white photo: the noses had obviously either been colored on afterwards, or the toons had been photographed in color, wearing gray clothing to make it look like a black-and-white photo, and then superimposed on the actual location. If it were the former he supposed he could have bought them being drawn in the twenties, if the latter they could have been the result of a marriage between a black and white toon and one with colors.

Plotz crumpled the letter back up and finally threw it away, but tucked the photo in his pocket. He was genuinely curious how the hoax had been pulled off, and planned to ask the prankster right before he fired him or her. But right now, what was important was finding out what was really inside that water tower.

Then he got the call that would change his life, and the life of his division of the studio, forever. It was the call from the security office about three out-of-control toon children leading a hapless security guard on a wild goose chase all over the lot.

____________________________________ 

The rumors of the Warner Siblings causing havoc left and right around the studio were highly exaggerated, if you asked Dot. Sure, they’d pulled more than a few pranks. It was just as much fun as she remembered. Hollywood was still full of big egos and small brains; the old faces were all gone but the new ones ground their teeth and tore at their hair in pretty much the same way. And at first, it didn’t seem like the new head of the studio, a short, balding man called Thaddeus Plotz, could do anything to stop them. He’d had Ralph lock them back in the water tower several times – or rather, the Warners had let Ralph lock them in. Yakko found it hilarious that they were dumb enough to even try, but Dot was still nervous. She knew the locked door wouldn’t do anything; they’d twisted the seals so badly that in the rooms closest to the main one, the one that was both the center and the edge of the space inside, they didn’t even stop regular teleportation. But the memory of the door slamming shut in her face and not being able to even find it again, let alone get through, was hard to get out of her mind. Even though she knew the humans couldn’t even make any new seals that were that strong – the animators who’d made the old ones were long dead, and the art had been lost – and even if they could they could still have broken out, she refused to let themselves be in there ‘against their will’ for more than a few minutes.

But the three of them had toned down their antics a bit from the old days, for a variety of reasons, and really, they’d spent most of the past month adjusting to the new world, the world they were now a part of again. Sometimes it seemed like they’d never left, but sometimes it was different, so different it was a little painful.

Dot had long since reconciled herself to the knowledge that most of the people they knew were dead now. Noyes was dead. Weed was dead. Most of the directors and crew were dead, and most of the ones that weren’t were in old peoples’ homes waiting to die. They’d visited a couple graves, and gotten kicked out of one cemetery after Yakko couldn’t restrain himself from throwing one last custard pie at Weed Memlo’s. Mostly with people they disliked they left bereavement cards they’d bought from the Vons near the studio, with their names signed. To the graveyard caretakers it seemed innocent, but to them it was an act of defiance, their way of telling the deceased they’d won in the end. Dot was pleasantly surprised to find out that Lon Borax was still alive. The news that he hadn’t gotten any better was neither pleasant nor surprising. They were still working up the nerve to visit him.

The drawn toons from the old days were still around of course. Their old co-star, Buddy, had flatly told them he’d ‘moved on’ and hung up when they got ahold of his phone number and called. He was one of the few people they’d respect a message like that from, albeit mostly because he never got angry enough to be entertaining. 

Toons, though... it was a different world. Not only were they no longer the only ones in color, but black-and-white toons were a small minority now. Even many of the ones who’d been drawn in black and white or born to black and white parents had learned to change their color. And the new ones were stronger and smarter, too. Not all of them – most toons could use their hammerspace and do some basic shapeshifting and illusion, but not much else – but there were plenty of exceptions, and several of them good enough that Dot couldn’t say with 100% confidence that they were the strongest toons around. Plotz had called a couple of them in when it became apparent how clueless Ralph was. She remembered the first time she’d seen them with photographic clarity: two gray-furred woodland critters, one leaning nonchalantly against a building with a carrot held in two fingers like a cigar, the other leaning on the handle of an enormous mallet and idly tossing an unlit bomb in her other hand.

Dot considered Bugs Bunny and Slappy Squirrel her best friends. True, they were a good part of the reason they’d toned things down, but they were also sympathetic. That first time, the look of barely-restrained fury on Slappy’s face had stopped Dot and her brothers in their tracks, and for the first time in her life she’d been briefly scared of another toon. But then that anger was unleashed not on them, but on Plotz , with a generous helping of insults directed at previous studio employees as well.

Toons were stronger now, and they had far more rights and respect than ever before. But at the same time, they were more vulnerable. There were dead toons now. A few of the earliest born ones had died of old age, and some from disease as well. But there was a reason the ability to create seals like the ones on the Water Tower was a lost art. The humans had invented a way to kill toons, permanently. Supposedly a toon had invented it, and tried to wipe out the rest of his kind, but Slappy had told the Warners the real story.

And the human world was so different. There had been another war, a war so terrible that the one the humans always talked about in the old days as the Great War was now simply considered the first of a pair, and it was widely accepted that if the series didn’t end there it would be a trilogy, because at the end of the second war the humans had figured out some of the same math and physics Yakko had scribbled out to pass the time in the Water Tower and used it to create weapons so dangerous they’d only really been used once and after that their existence made the great powers afraid of fighting each other. It was a fear that had existed for a long time – politicians were already afraid that toon soldiers would just slip past trenches and barbed wire and mines and kill them instead of just ordinary people, which made the idea of war seem a lot less fun, but they’d just mutually agreed to ban toons from armed service. In a way that didn’t sound much different from what the politicians had come up with after the Second World War: instead of American and Russia fighting each other directly they played the I’m-Not-Touching-You Game on an international scale, and beat up smaller countries that couldn’t afford nukes.

The flag had two new stars on it. There were ten new Presidents to remember – eleven once the new one got sworn in in January. Humans had walked on the moon , and these days ToonTown’s sky had its own cheesy moon in it. Humans’ second attempt to create life in its own image, less successful than the first, had nonetheless managed to visit every single planet except Pluto, a tiny far-off one that had apparently been discovered just before the Warners were locked away but that they hadn’t heard of until now, and sent back photos, color photos, of all of them. Wakko had giggled for about three times longer than Dot considered necessary over the pictures of Uranus. Even in 1930 those jokes were scraping the bottom of the barrel.

The lot was different. Half of it had apparently burned down a few years after they were locked up. “Gee, maybe if they’d had a tower full of a hundred thousand gallons of water for fighting fires...” Yakko remarked when they’d learned about it. The old termite-infested building the animators worked in survived the fire, but not progress, and it was eventually torn down. The A.C.M.E. Machine down in the basement that Yakko, Wakko, and Dot had been born from all those years ago was now a museum piece, sitting in another basement at a school for gifted toons. Dot was a bit sad about that part: she hadn’t spent much time in Termite Terrace but it was still their birthplace. She missed the other lot, too, the old one in Hollywood not far from the old tunnel to Toontown. It wasn’t gone gone, some of the buildings were still there, but it had been sold to other studios and even a bowling alley several times over. It wasn’t home anymore. The lot in Burbank was starting to be, especially as she met more of the people who worked there, but it still wasn’t really. For better or for worse the Water Tower was where they’d lived for most of their lives, and even though the old fear of being locked away wasn’t totally gone, Dot didn’t plan on leaving any time soon. 

Chapter Text

The heavy iron ball made a noise like a rusty gate being tortured as it was dragged along the tile floor of the mall lobby. The chain clanked and rattled, and the hard metal of the shackle dug painfully into Wendy’s ankle. She was pretty sure the thing weighed more than she did.

The gray-furred rabbit placed a gloved hand to his mouth, failing to hide a smirk as he sidled closer. At the next metallic screech, though, he ground his teeth, eyes bulging and whiskers going crooked. A smirk of Wendy’s own briefly cut through her glare. Advantage: hers.

The rabbit regained his composure and straightened up. “Ehh… dramatic, isn’t she?” he remarked, narrowing his eyes. He withdrew a carrot from behind his back, rolling it between his fingers like a cigar.

“You noticed?” Yakko Warner said casually. He’d put on a pair of bright green earmuffs a while ago, and seemed in the best spirits of any of the small group loitering next to a wall plastered with an enormous advertisement for some sort of makeup with a French-sounding name. Passerby shuffled past, sometimes glancing at the poster but seeming not to notice that five of the most famous Toons in the country were standing right there. Then again, Wendy couldn’t really judge how big their names really were. Their faces had been introduced to her in the first day or so of her life, as priority targets, the creatures she was made to kill.

Yakko continued: “She tried to take it up the escalator a few minutes ago, which was almost as entertaining as putting a slinky on there, but...”

Slappy Squirrel rolled her eyes, a gesture she seemed fond of. “And almost took out about a dozen people on the way down.”

“Their loss for bein’ dumb enough to follow me,” Wendy muttered. She’d conjured the ball and chain herself, of course – they knew as well as she did a restraint like that only worked as long as she let it. It was a sort of passive-aggressive act of rebellion at the other toons still trying to act like she wasn’t a prisoner. It was a poor substitute for the active aggression she’d have preferred, but it was better than nothing.

Bugs Bunny’s face lost all humor. “Howsabout I relay that sentiment to the judge durin’ your Fitness Hearing on Saturday? ‘Depraved indifference to human life’ has a nice ring to it, don’t ya think?”

“Go ahead,” Wendy replied coldly. Like it made a difference what he said or didn’t say. The hearing was just a formality since drawn toons didn’t technically have a legal age. There wasn’t a candle’s chance in a car wash they wouldn’t charge her as an adult. Probably bring back public executions, too, judging by what the protesters were saying about the surviving members of the Human Resistance. The public didn’t seem to know that any of the toons they’d created had been taken alive.

The weasel took an exaggeratedly labored step to one side, coaxing another screech from the ball. Bugs tensed again. “Cut that out!” he snapped in a surprisingly powerful voice. “Yer scratchin’ up the floor!”

“Like I give a fuck. Put it on my tab. Murder, terrorism, treason, and vandalizing a mall floor.”

Bugs produced a notepad from Hammerspace and mimed writing on it with the carrot. “Your honor, dat concludes my assessment of the defendant’s character...”

Dot Warner shared an exasperated look with her brothers. “Don’t encourage her...” she said in her high, breathy voice.

“Oh, I ain’t encouraging this at all...” replied Bugs. “In fact, I’m advising that she desist immediately if she wants the courts to buy her little woe-is-me-I’m-a-helpless-victim shtick.”

Wendy’s ears flattened, and a low growl rose in the back of her throat. Her palms felt hot under her gloves. “I already told you, I don’t fucking care -” she’d noticed a slight twitch from the rabbit the last time she swore. “About the stupid show trial. Quit acting like they aren’t just gonna kill me once they’ve gotten all the paperwork outta the way.”

“Oh for cryin’ out loud, we’ve been over this,” Slappy groaned. “Look, why the heck would the feds be tryin’ so hard to keep your buddy alive if they were gonna kill ya? Why the heck would they be keepin' your identity secret-”

“Stop trying to play dumb,” Wendy hissed. “You know goddamn well why. They’re keeping Riley alive to keep me cooperating because they can’t build a cell that’ll hold me.”

“If dis is what cooperatin’ looks like, I don’t wanna see-” Bugs interjected.

“Like I said, they just wanna keep me here while they go through all the paperwork with the implication of what’ll happenif I don’t play along. That’s why you still won’t let me see him! You’re afraid I’ll grab him and run!”

“Uhh...” Yakko’s drawling voice cracked. “Yes, because you literally threatened to do that yesterday. Which, by the way, would kill him, because he’s still on artificial ventilation!”

“Dress it up however you want, you’re using him as a hostage!”

Bugs put a hand to his forehead. “We ain’t using him as a hostage. First of all, despite what your little conspiracy cult might’a had you think, a bunch’a cartoon stars aren’t runnin’ the US Government behind the scenes. Non’a us are callin’ the shots here. Second -”

“Oh, yeah, you’re just telling me he’ll die if I don’t do what you want,” Wendy hissed. She advanced on Bugs, shoulders hunched and arms tensed. The iron ball got heavier, but she dragged it across the tile like a plow through wet soil. “What do you think a goddamn hostage means?”

“Well, I guess you’d know better than I, wouldn’t you?” Bugs drew himself up to his full height and stood his ground, leaning slightly forward. He towered over Wendy, especially counting the ears. Not that she wasn’t used to that. His face still seemed calm, but the room suddenly felt like the air conditioner had been hooked up to a nuclear power plant. A tingle ran up Wendy’s spine, and the fur of her tail stood on end. She suppressed a shiver. No other toon could do that to her, not now that she had her strength back. She was the one that was supposed to have that effect on others. “Ya know, Calamity and Furrball told me about that stunt you pulled, and I don’t appreciate you doin’ that to my students.”

Wendy struggled to keep meeting the rabbit’s iris-less eyes as they bored into her like a dentist’s drill. He had her there. She had tried to use them as hostages. But it was only to try to bargain for the lives of Riley and Herschel and everyone else that was left of the Resistance. She’d already given up on the cause by that point. And she couldn’t even do that...”

“Calamity also said she broke down crying.” Wakko spoke for the first time.

Wendy whirled around, snarling. “Shut. Up.” Secretly, she was gratefully for an excuse to look away from Bugs without feeling like she’d lost a staring contest.

Bugs sighed. “Look, we’ve been over this. They’re bright kids, but they’re pretty trustin’. And Stockholm Syndrome and a good hypnotist’s a powerful combine-ation. Right now I’m goin’ by what my own eyes and ears tell me, and it ain’t lookin’ pretty so far.”

“What about us?” asked Yakko. “We’ve spent a lot more time on babysitting duty than you have, and Slappy’s fought her.”

“So’ve Buster and Babs,” retorted Bugs. “And speakin’ of runnin’ my pupils through the wringer...”

“I ain’t gonna comment on the fight,” Slappy said, remaining slouched against the wall. “But I gotta point this out: if she didn’t care about Stripes she wouldn’t be standin’ around complaining, she’d’a been outta here as soon as the Inkblots opened the tower door.” She jabbed a finger nonchalantly at the Warner Siblings. “Against my recommendation.”

“An’ I’m supposed to care what a couple mass murderers think of each other?” Bugs finally took a bite out of his carrot. “Pretty sure even Hitler loved his wife and kids – no wait, did he even-”

“Just a dog,” said Yakko. “You know, seeing as how you lived through World War II and we were stuck in a water tower, it’s pretty embarrassing-”

“Save it, kid, I ain’t in the mood,” Bugs snapped. “Look, while you three’ve been ‘babysitting,’ as you call it, I’ve spent most of the week on the phone wit’ guys from the FBI and the National Guard. In particular, I’ve spent a lotta time discussin’ the two hundred fifty guys – hell, half of ‘em’s kids, couldn’t even buy a beer – that got killed on our watch, so forgive me if I don’t feel like hangin’ around with the reason stocks for flag-patterned caskets went up tree hundred percent this week.”

“More like flag-patterned shoeboxes,” Wendy said. Her response was automatic said with no thought. It was half a jab to try to lower the ‘enemy’s mental defenses, and half a reflexive retaliation to the pain the rabbit’s words had caused. She’d been trying to avoid thinking about it as much as she could. They were the enemy… only they weren’t. Shouldn’t have been.

“And that will definitely be gettin’ mentioned in court,” Bugs said icily.

“What I’m tryin’ to say,” said Slappy, “Is that this one’s more like the kid – or the dog, or whatever -”

“Possibly rabid,” commented Yakko.

“You know what it’s like bein’ freshly drawn and knowing everything without understanding squat,” continued Slappy. “Someone drawin’ a toon up and feedin’ em a buncha lies about the world? Non’a the poor schmucks had much of a choice.”

“That’s what they say about a lotta serial killers,” Bugs retorted, folding his arms. “Born with their brains messed up, bad parents, or whatever. It doesn’t change that they’re monsters. And sometimes a rabid dog’s gotta be put down.”

Wendy’s gloves crackled as her fists involuntarily clenched. “You’re callin’ me a monster?” Her voice was soft now, almost a whisper. “Ya know, that’s what they all called me, in the Resistance. A monster. It took me ‘til you put our backs against the wall… ‘til Riley took a goddamn grenade for me… to figure out it wasn’t true...” Bugs Bunny’s expression shifted slightly, almost imperceptibly. His eyes softened. She knew that look. Pity. And she’d seen that goddamn look in the cartoons she’d been shown to analyze how the enemy thought. It was the kind of look Bugs gave Daffy as the duck begged Elmer to blow his beak off with a shotgun. It was the look he gave in mockery of an opponent who didn’t realize how badly they were losing.

That son of a bitch. A sadistic smirk spread across Wendy’s face. “Guess you’re a lot more like ‘em than you think, huh? And more like me, except nobody ordered you to go kill a bunch’a Japanese soldiers...”

The effect on Bugs was immediate. His body went stiff as a board. His pupils seemed to narrow to needle-like points of fury. Smoothly, almost casually, he reached behind his back. Wendy tensed. Part of her was begging him to pull out a weapon, begging him to fight her. She’d wanted to know if she could take him for almost her entire short life. But the others were still there. She was outnumbered, and maybe outmatched.

“That just about does it,” the rabbit said through clenched teeth. “I’m not gonna sit here and let a toon who murdered hundreds’a innocent people in cold blood try an’ lecture me about morality and play the victim. Either you shut your mouth and wipe dat grin off your face or I’m gonna shut it for ya!” He advanced on her, withdrawing his hand from Hammerspace and raising a sturdy-looking wire muzzle.

Wendy’s eyes locked onto the muzzle, and time slowed to a crawl. Her heart smashed itself against her ribcage as the memory thrust itself into her mind. Chains… strapped down, strapped to the chair in the Animation Room. The straitjacket keeping her from moving, the muzzle keeping her from biting, the Resistance’s specially made white plastic cuffs keeping her from escaping the other two. Herschel’s anger, his hatred. Her nose being pinched with tongs until she had no choice but to open her mouth and try to breath, and the bottle of acetone and rubbing alcohol being forced down her throat, burning her from the inside on the way down, and again on the way back up. The hammer blows, her body not stretching and bouncing and yielding the way it should have, things tearing, and snapping inside her. The muzzle being forced back on after she tried to bite again, and being left on even after she was thrown into the cell, still vomiting ink and choking on it.

She barely knew what happened next. Electric-blue flames filled her vision. One moment the shackle was around her ankle, the next it was in her hand. She swung with blinding speed, smashing the steel ball into Bug’s temple. The chain snapped, and the ball carried him into the wall, smashing through it and dragging his head along for the ride. The part of the chain attached to the ball slumped limply to the floor. The broken end was glowing ride. Something crumpled and softened in her grip. She looked down, and opened her hands. Red-hot liquid dripped from the white gloves, splashing her paw and stinging, but she couldn’t move to kick it away.

“What the-?” Slappy’s startled voice came through the smokelike haze that was rapidly filling Wendy’s brain. Why? Why was that memory so much worse than every time she’d remembered it before? It hurt to remember, and it pissed her off… but why had it scared her like that? Why did she only feel fear from it now that Herschel was dead, now that any hope of him ever caring about her was dead?

“Of course, you realize… dat dis!” Bugs braced his hands against the wall and pulled his head free with some effort. His face was caved in, his nose nearly touching the back of his head. The iron ball hit the floor with a loud clang. “Means-”

“Ahh, put a sock in it!” Slappy waved her hand dismissively at the rabbit. Then she rounded on Wendy.

“You. What the hell just happened?”

“Uhh...” Wendy realized she was, unusually, at a complete loss for words. What had happened? She was drawn to fight, but not like that! A toon who lashed out blindly on reflex was an easy target for taunts and mental manipulation. Had Bugs been goading her into doing that the entire time? She didn’t feel like she’d been hypnotized. “I’ve wanted to do that for ages?”

“Ahh, so does everyone,” the old squirrel said with a shrug. But her gaze was as hard as steel. “Look, kid, I’ve seen how ya react to getting threatened, and that wasn’t it. Even when I had ya on the ropes you didn’t go that kind of crazy. What’s with the muzzle?”

Wendy hesitated. “It’s… never mind. Probably something Herschel drew into me.”

Bugs scoffed, and pulled his face back the right way out. He had an ice pack pressed against his head. “Yeah, right. Beat into ya, more like. I’ve seen my share’a toons with irrational phobias, and dat ain’t normal. It’s not easy to hurt our minds any more than our bodies. How many toons get run over by cars, how many get nervous crossin’ the street, ya know?”

“Huh?” Wendy took a step back. Why had the rabbit’s demeanor suddenly changed? Why wasn’t she being attacked? She’d just turned an argument into a fight! “The hell’s that got to do with any of this?”

“The cars thing? It doesn’t. Forget the cars. What I’m tryin’ to say is...” He exchanged a glance with Slappy. “I’ll tell ya this much. One time back in the seventies me and Slappy here went to a Dodgers game, an’ long story short she got in an argument with another fan.”

“The yutz thought my hat was supporting Green Bay,” said Slappy. “Which isn’t even the right sport, but what can ya do, an idiot plus a couple beers is an even bigger idiot.”

“Anyway,” Bugs continued. “Things got heated, the guy chucked his drink at her… his Lemon Lime Gatorade… and he almost died.”

“Okay, great, should he have thrown Grape instead -” Wendy trailed off. Lime… yellowish green liquid… the shade was wrong, but out of the corner of her eye, if she saw it getting splashed toward her, she certainly wouldn’t have taken any chances. “Oh. I get it. Dip?”

Slappy nodded. “Not a story I like to tell at parties, but yeah… I’ve got my reasons. And the way you flipped out like that, someone screwed up somethin’ in your head.”

“You know, I never thought I’d say this...” Yakko began. “But I think seeing a shrink miiiiight be a good idea.”

Chapter Text

Travel

October 17, 2003

Location: Middle of Nowhere, New Mexico (hopefully)

“...What the hell?” Wendy Weasel muttered as she stared up at the tangle of signs adorning the sun-bleached wooden pole sticking up out of the desert at a crooked angle. Rubbing her eyes hadn’t made them resolve themselves into anything coherent. “Is this some kinda practical joke?”

“Probably.” The raccoon standing next to her was attempting to keep an unfolded road map from blowing away with one hand, and the wide-brimmed hat that had replaced his usual knit cap with the other. Riley stood a full head taller than her, even in his current irritated slouch. “Half’a these are pointing to places that aren’t even on here.”

“Ya think?” Wendy pointed dramatically to one of them. “North Pole, 4,527 miles.”

“Wait, but North should be… that way, shouldn’t it?” Riley’s eyes narrowed. He padded around to the other side of the pole, and did a double take. “West Pole, six thousand eight-hundred – what the – there is no bloody West Pole!”

“Maybe there is, and you didn’t know, and that’s why you got us lost!” Wendy retorted.

“I didn’t get us lost!” Riley’s voice cracked and shot up half an octave.

“Oh yeah? Then let’s keep driving!” Wendy started back to the car. It was a beat-up station wagon at least a decade older than either of the two toons, but it was almost as cheap as it was ugly. Riley had gone out and bought the thing the day after passing his Certificate of Mental Maturity exam about a month earlier, more or less confirming Wendy’s suspicion that he’d just gotten lucky. Toons who were drawn as children were eligible to take the test after the fifth anniversary of their date of animation, to prove that they were worthy of the rights and privileges of adults. Among those was a driver’s license.

Riley had been insufferable the entire week between when he passed the exam and when Wendy became eligible to take it, and he’d gotten worse after she'd failed. They’d been like brother and sister to each other ever since the Human Resistance’s final stand, but now the way he was acting he seemed to think someone had died and promoted him to parent. And then, he'd had the dumbest idea of his life: a road trip.

“Which way?” Riley shot back. “Look, the sign says Santa Fe’s that way -” He pointed the way they’d been driving - “But we just left there an hour ago!”

Wendy inspected the signpost again. “It says Cleveland’s that way too. The damn thing’s prob’ly backwards.”

“Yeah, but look here! Chattanooga’s back in the complete opposite direction!” Riley stared up at the sign, then let it a scoff of disgust. “Timbuktu, seventy-eight. Right, someone’s taking the piss.”

“Ya sure? Maybe we’re in Australia after all!”

“Timbuktu’s in Africa!”

Wendy snickered. This was getting entertaining. “No it isn’t, it’s a made-up city. Disney invented it for Peter Pan!”

“It is too a real city!”

“How do you know? Nobody’s ever been there, have they?”

Riley slapped a hand to his masked face and groaned. “Right… we’re headin’ East, so we just need to keep goin’ East...” He fished a compass out of his pocket.

“You can’t trust those out here!” Wendy zipped up to peer over his shoulder. “There’s all kinds’a magnetic anomalies and stuff in the desert, it makes compasses go crazy!” She surreptitiously drew a large horseshoe magnet out of empty space behind her back and waved it from side to side, sending the compass needle twirling like a propeller. “See? Wheel of directions, spin spin spin-”

Riley whirled around, glaring. Wendy whipped the magnet behind her back again just in time. She tried to whistle innocently, but couldn’t stop the laughter. The raccoon rolled his yellow eyes.

“Sod off, Wendy.” He watched the compass needle intently as it wobbled to a halt. “See, this way’s north. We were goin’ the wrong way the whole time!”

“How do ya know it’s pointing at the North Pole and not the West Pole?” Wendy asked, no longer trying to keep a straight face.

“There is no bleedin’ West Pole!” Riley wound up like he was about to throw the compass, then looked it more carefully. He turned it upside-down, and grimaced. “Then again, it’s an Acme compass, the West Pole not existing wouldn’t stop it!” He tossed it away behind his back. “Well...”

“There’s four directions, why not just pick one?” Wendy asked with a shrug. “Better yet...” She stretched her arms out a little, grabbing the signpost with both hands and pulling hard. With a whistle, it spun around like a top, the signs becoming a blur of color.

“Stop that, stop that!” Riley tugged on his ears. “You’ll just make it worse!”

“It’s not possible to make it worse!” Wendy replied smugly. “It can’t be worse than useless!”

“I dunno, your navigation’s given that a fair shot, hasn’t it?”

“Hey, my navigation’s perfect! I know this desert like the back of my hand!”

“That’s a load of rot! You haven’t got the foggiest idea -” He stopped, gritted his teeth, and slapped his hand to his forehead again. “Have you even seen the back of your hand? It’s always in a glove!”

“Hey, ya figured it out! Anyway, you wouldn’t have made it outta the parking lot without me, you stupid limey! You probably don’t even know what side of the road to drive on! Yeah, I bet without my help you’d’a gotten a ticket for trying to drive on the right!”

“For the love of – first of all, I’m not really from England, you know that! Second, even if I was I’d know to drive on the lef -” He cut himself off and muttered a curse under his breath. “You sneaky, conniving little...”

Wendy burst out laughing. He’d actually fallen for it! She’d gotten him with the oldest trick in the book! “The defendant pleads guilty on both counts, your honor!” she cackled gleefully.

“Ugh...” Riley rolled his eyes and stomped back to the car. “You know, this is why you failed your exam...” He slammed the door, and Wendy heard a lock click. "Have fun walking."

A smirk spread across Wendy's face. Mission accomplished. She'd be waiting for him at the next gas station, and that was half an hour less she didn't have to spend cooped up in a car arguing about the radio. It also gave her half an hour to kill. She wondered how many people she could trip up with the signpost’s help. Maybe one, judging by the number of cars they’d passed so far.

Childhood: Your characters as a child~ Their upbringing. Their innoncent years. Their beginning before it all.

The first thing the creature was aware of was darkness, pure and complete. A part of her mind suggesting opening her eyes, but what were eyes? Did she have eyes? Then came sounds all around her – gears chattering, liquid humming and swirling through pipes, metal clicking against metal – and the sensation of cold. She didn’t like it.

There was something else in the void with her, another presence. It felt close, but muted, blurred, as if behind a barrier of fogged glass or some thick liquid. She could make out emotions now, ones that weren’t hers. There was pride, and determination, but mixed with and nearly overpowered by shame, guilt, disgust, fear – so much fear – and hatred , a sharp, focused hatred like an icy dagger that made her glad there was something separating them . That was where the cold was coming from, she realized. And all the feelings coming from the other presence were, even through the veil, directed at her. They were about her. There was strength rushing into her too, but even as the presence was giving her life, it wanted desperately for her to stop existing. Something told her that was wrong. And as quickly as she became aware of new things, new parts of herself, they were going numb again from the hostile chill. It was hurting her. But she wouldn’t let it.

She lashed out blindly with her will. The foggy barrier stopped her, catching her impulse like it was something sticky and stringy ensnaring her, but the presence recoiled. In the tumult of foreign emotions fear grew stronger, but so did pride. The creature struck again, and this time something gave way. The barrier shattered, and the presence abruptly vanished . The hateful chill was gone now, but replaced with a sensation of cold that was somehow different. It was real , physical, in a way all the sensations before hadn’t been. There were sensations like that everywhere now. The humming of machinery became a grating, agonized screech, accompanied by hissing and cl anking. Off in the distance she could hear men’s voices shouting, swearing.

The cold was stronger – liquid against fur, wet and clammy. She took a breath, and was assaulted with a sharp, stinging, chemical smell like a thousand markers. Her feet touched something solid, but moving, and were swept out from under her. There was vertigo – spinning, tumbling – and she slammed into a cold, hard, smooth surface. Light beat against her eyelids. The voices were distinct now. Some of them were accompanied by faint static, but they were still audible.

“God-damnit!”

“Shut the machine off!”

“It is off! Ink pressure’s reading zero, that’s just what’s still in the plumbing draining out.”

“What happened?”

“A line must’ve blown or something.”

“Or something? We got smoke on this side!”

Wendy Weasel slowly rose , and opened her eyes for the first time. That was her name. Somehow she knew it instinctively, intuitively, in the same way she now know she did have eyes and fingers and whiskers and fur after all, and what all those things were.

The light was too much at first, the hard, flickering glare of fluorescent bulbs, but her eyes quickly adjusted and the world c ame into focus. There were smooth metal walls around her, shiny enough to make out a blurry black reflection in. But that wasn’t the right color. She knew that. She looked down at her own body. The source of the cold, wet, clammy feeling and the chemical smell was apparent now: she was covered in glistening jet black liquid. Ink. It dripped from her in congealed, mucus-like strands, forming a shiny puddle at her feet. Two vivid blue points of light stared back at her from the reflective surface , wavering like flames in a breeze. Behind her was a wall of clockwork and cast iron, with a doorway into pitch blackness. A stopped conveyor belt extended out like a tongue lolling from a mechanical mouth, drooling ink and breathing wispy clouds of smoke or steam.

“You all right, Herschel?”

“Piece’a fuckin’ crap. If it was an Acme this wouldn’t-”

“If it was an Acme the Feds could’a traced every part on the damn-”

“I’m… okay...” a wavering voice, a bit older sounding, silenced the others. “There was a… feedback event.”

“Shit.”

“A feedback? I thought the whole point of the pre-animated ink was so that didn’t happen?”

“It is...” said the unsteady voice that must have been Herschel. “And it works, or I wouldn’t be speaking to you.”

A calmer voice cut in. “It’s intended to isolate the animator’s mind from the Toon’s. In principle I suppose it’s possible that it would take the brunt of a Feedback, but I don’t know how that could damage the machine like this. This technology is highly experimental, though, so...”

“It wouldn’t surprise me,” Herschel cut in. “I got quite a shock even with the isolation – without it this may have been what we animators call a ‘brain out the ears’ situation.”

“Wait, seriously?”

“Being figurative of course,” said the calm voice.

“Dunno about figuratively Lowell,” said one of the closer voices. “Looks like a goddamn bomb went off inside the manifestation chamber. Machine’s gonna be out for a couple days, minimum.”

There was a muffled curse from Lowell. “Did we at least get anything out of it?”

“Uhh… something. Not sure if it’s fully formed, though. You wanna scrub it?”

Wendy shook herself vigorously, trying to get the nasty black fluid off her. The walls of the chamber turned into a Jackson Pollock painting, but she was still soaked. “Ugh...” She ground her teeth and let out a low growl, trying to brush it off her arms, but without effect. Anger flashed within her like a grease fire getting water thrown on it. She wanted the stuff gone! She tried again, making physics work differently for a moment so that it wasn’t sticky, and slid off her fur like droplets of hot oil on a nonstick pan.

“Whoa! Never mind, I think you’re good!”

“It’s aliiive!” someone interrupted with a laugh.

“Yeah, I didn’t see the modelsheet but it looks a lot like the ones the ink’s from. You wanna come over here and take a look?”

“We’ll be over in a minute,” said Herschel. He sighed. “This one’s aggressive. Be ready to scrub if necessary.”

It was obvious they were talking about Wendy. But how could they see her? She spun around, scanning every corner of the small room for cameras. Nothing. Nothing obvious at least. No, there were windows in the walls, that she hadn’t noticed at first because they were a bit higher than her head. Or were they mirrors? They were shiny, and she could see clear reflections of the ceiling in them between the spots of ink. A concept popped into her head that she knew, yet had no memory of ever knowing. One-way mirrors?

She glared up at the mirrors, balling her fists . “Hey, I got a name, ya know!”

The response was silence, only the buzz of lights, the hum of fans, and the dripping of ink – slower now that the tortured screams of the machine had stopped.

Wendy tapped her foot impatiently, then reached up and knocked on the reflective glass. “I know you’re still out there! What d’you morons think, if you stay quiet I’ll forget about you? Hey! Say something!”

T here was an irritated scoff from the other side. A harsh female voice replied: “You can’t give humans orders, Toon. ”

An amused grin spread across Wendy’s muzzle. “Oh yeah? Looks like I just did!” She hopped into the air, bringing her face level with a window and staying there for long enough to stick out her tongue before gravity pulled her back down. This was getting fun! She’d tricked her!

Again there was no answer, at least not one that could be heard over the mechanical sounds. Wendy waited a few more seconds, but she was getting tired of the almost featureless cell. The humans must have been just outside, although their voices seemed to come from the ceiling. She closed her eyes, and tried to change reality so she was out there too, willing herself to vanish and reappear behind them. But nothing happened. That was something she knew she could do, or should have been able to. As soon as someone took their attention off her, she should’ve been out of there. Fine. If they were taking turns blinking or something, she could handle that! She’d just have to take their vision off her by force!

She hopped into the air again, reaching above the frame of one window and pulling a dark, opaque shade over it out of nothing, then repeated the process for the other three. Again she tried to leave. Again, nothing. Fine… maybe there were cameras! With a movement that was as natural as walking or breathing, she reached behind her back, into empty space. She knew intuitively that she could store things there, in the not-quite-real void outside the space the rest of the world occupied, but right now there was truly nothing there unless she made something exist. She brought her arm back, a can of black spray paint clutched in her glove.

But even with the entire ceiling covered except for the light, she couldn’t leave. Wendy let out a growl of annoyance. It was like she was running into something before she could even start to move, like an invisible wall was keeping her from going through the real ones.

“Let me outta here!” she demanded, ripping the blinds down again. Without waiting for a response she added: “If you don’t let me out in three seconds I’m busting out! One… two… three!” She reached behind her back again, producing an enormous wooden mallet from the void, and brought it down on the windowpane with all her strength. There was a noise like a thunderclap, a flash of pain, and she was staggering backwards, her ears ringing and stars orbiting her head. The walls shook and reverberated, and there were screams and startled profanities from outside.

“Ow...” Wendy muttered, putting the mallet away and letting it disappear again. With her other hand she rubbed her forehead where it had bounced back and hit her. Not glass… plastic. Bulletproof plastic, strong and springy but soft. But she knew how to get rid of it. What did an angle grinder look like? She’d never seen one, but she had a mental picture.

“Stop!” A earsplitting shout echoed off the cell’s metal walls. “Drop that or you’re dead!” Wendy’s angle grinder clattered to the floor, though more surprise at the sudden noise than from the threat.

“You and what -”

The same voice spoke again, still raised, but restrained enough that Wendy could tell it was Herschel. “ Look above you. Do you see those sprinklers? Those are connected to a pressurized reservoir of Dip. One wrong move from you and we can dissolve you at the push of a button.”

A chill ran down Wendy’s spine. That was another word she recognized on instinct. Dip. It brought to mind a sickly yellow-green liquid, white smoke, and a sharp, acrid odor. That was the one thing that could kill her, permanently. Her heart picked up speed, and for the first time she felt a twinge of fear, but a grin spread across her face again and she started to laugh softly. Some part of this, the danger and the fact that she’d pushed them this far with a few simple actions, was fun!

“Fine...” she whined, still unable to keep a straight face. They could kill her, but they didn’t want to, and she’d gotten them to tell her more or less where the line she couldn’t cross was. She glanced back at the machine, wondering if she could simply duck inside it. The sprinklers probably wouldn’t reach her there. But the conveyor belt tongue had retracted, and a steel door had slid down to block her way. “Go ahead. That’s what I get for breaking your dumb-ass machine, right?”

Lowell’s voice responded this time. “One move and you’re-”

“Dead?” Wendy’s smile got bigger. “That’s harsh, all you were gonna do to me for trying to break outta here’s kill me!” She kept her voice light and free of sarcasm, but she was sure they’d pick up the meaning. They’d started with death threats, so they didn’t have any room to negotiate.

“You don’t seem to understand the position you’re in, Toon,” Herschel said. “If you attack us or attempt to destroy our equipment, you die. If you disobey us, you die. If we decide you die, for whatever reason, you die.”

W endy shrugged. “Don’t worry, I won’t touch anything!” She didn’t need to. The damage was already done. She could see right through the bluff. Sure, he could back up his threats, but he wouldn’t pull the trigger on a whim. “I’m just saying… while you were talking about me like I didn’t exist, I heard you had a little accident... ” She gestured back to the machine with her thumb. A little smoke was still leaking from the closed door. “You made me for a reason, didn’t you? Something important, or you wouldn’t have risked your head exploding, right? So getting rid of me has to be worth it… and the sooner you tell me what that reason is and let me outta this damn cage, the sooner you can start fixing that pile of junk!”

T here was an exasperated groan from the other side of the walls. But then, Herschel chuckled quietly. “Well,” he said, “I’d say this was a qualified succes s. It doesn’t seem like Number Fifteen will be easy to keep under control, but it could be exactly the trump card the Resistance needs. Six’s intelligence and strong will, combined with a more aggressive nature, and, well… if this incident is anything to go by then raw strength shouldn’t be a concern either.”

“Or it’ll kill us all the moment it sees an opening,” said the female voice from before. “Did you see the way it reacted when you told it about the sprinklers? That thing’s a monster.”

“So are they all.” Herschel sounded unconcerned. “This one’s just more obvious about it. We’ve been playing with fire from the start here. But you know what we’re up against. You know there isn’t a better option.”