Work Text:
“You know Harold, life’s been kinda… dull, lately.”.
The boys are walking home from school. Today has been boring. Krupp yelled with his normal gusto, Erica was her normal amount of cryptic cool, and all the teachers were their normal style of cruel.
“Don’t say that George, our lives run on comic logic, so now we’re gonna get abducted by aliens or almost eaten by giant cats or something.” Harold cries. “You’ve cursed us buddy.”.
“I was just making an observation.” George defends.
“Uh huh.” Harold muses.
They’re now approaching George's house, although their real destination is his tree house. Harold walks with an air of direction, like he’s a dignitary on his way to make very important and grown-up decisions.
That’s only true if you can consider drawing cheesy superheroes grown-up business, which, to be fair, it often is nowadays. George is slightly behind him, head swimming with an oscillating roster of prank ideas/comic ideas.
At the tree house, our responsible-in-a-bad-way protagonists flop onto beanbags and get out sheets of paper and pencils. Harold stares meaningfully at his artwork, trying to decide if it’s the greatest thing since whoopee cushions or the worst thing since homework. George is scribbling and erasing furiously, brain spawning ideas faster than he can get them down.
An hour passes, and both are so intently concentrated, it’s scarcely noticed when a shadow steals all of their papers. They’re immobilized for a short period of time, until it sinks in that they’ve been robbed.
“Oh no, we have to get those back!” Harold wailed as he sat up. “I’m not done half of those!”.
They climb down the ladder fervently, and hit the ground running after a tartarean blob with a truly improbable amount of papers all stacked on top of it in a very orderly fashion.
“Should he get Captain Underpants?” Harold manages between breaths.
“Krupp lives too far away.” George dismisses.
The blob suddenly disappears, all the papers scattering in arbitrary directions. As they float back down, George and Harold rush into the cloud of art and writing to collect them all.
“You jinxed us pal,” Harold sighs “this is gonna lead to something, I just know it.”.
“It’s less so that I tempted the universe, more like this is just how things work for us.” George contests as he plucks as many pieces of paper as he can from the air.
Eventually, when everything’s reached the ground, it becomes apparent that these little buggers are no longer in Piqua.
“Did we always have pink trees?” Harold asks.
George walks up to one, and taps it cautiously.
“Either something’s rolled through the whole neighbourhood and made it all crazy and stuff, or we’re in another dimension.”.
“I hope it’s the last one. It’s always been my dream to go to another dimension.”.
“I thought your dream was to go to the Olympics for breakdancing.”.
Harold shrugs innocuously. “That was last week.”.
They walk around, surprised by how it looks so much like their town, but if it were Valentine’s Day themed and also had a bunch of screaming dogs running around. Oh, yeah, I forgot to talk about the screaming dogs. They might take me to Narrator Jail for that, and I really don’t want to go back. Anyways-
“Wow, those dogs are having a really bad time.”.
“This could be normal for them.”. Harold thinks about it more. “That might actually make it worse.”.
George approaches one and reaches out a hand to pet it, but he pulls his hand back when it starts screaming more seemingly in response.
“This bit of it kinda sucks. For one, it’s really hard to have a conversation when there’s a pomeranian screaming itself silly two meters away.” George laments.
They walk away from the street, and into an ominous forest. Normally, this would entail mysterious ghosts or an ax maniac, but we can't have that in a story that's (at least in theory)meant for the whole family, so instead all that happens when they walk in is a spontaneous glitter explosion. The boys scream, and run to the side. Despite their desperation, they are now destined to be finding glitter in their clothes and hair for years to come, and also after that.
“I wonder if there’s a way back to regular Piqua.” George idly muses.
“Maybe. Or maybe we can just hang out here.”.
“Yeah, sure.”.
They decide not to go in the forest because of the aforementioned glitter, and instead cut a path around the street they initially appeared on. Eventually, the concrete fades to soft, impossibly healthy grass. Little flowers can be seen if you strain your eyes sufficiently, but they’er nearly swallowed up by the long blades of grass.
“Are we in a fairytale?” Harold poses.
“I hope not. They make no sense, it’s like whoever wrote them was in a hurry and their kids wanted a story.”. He kicks playfully at a clump of grass. “If they made us the main characters, I think that would count as worker mistreatment or something.”.
“You there!”.
There’s a raccoon standing upright in a hole.
“Why are you in a hole?” Harold asks.
“That’s a very rude question to ask.”.
“Why’d you call us over?” George asks.
The raccoon waves her paws. “Less questions, please. Tell me, do you know if the cats are still in the woods?”.
They shrug. It’s not like they went in the woods much.
“Oh, that’s a very disappointing answer.”.
They continue walking around.
“I wonder if Captain Underpants would like it here.” George thinks aloud.
“For a little while, maybe.”. Harold snaps his fingers. “We should make a comic based off this.”.
“Totally.”.