Chapter Text
The day was Tuesday, seven-thirty PM, at the TV Time studio™.
The evening was greeted with half-empty hallways, the usual chatter of employees quieted by the late hour. Mellow jazz drifted through the walls, and all was like any other day in the seemingly-endless assortment of bright yellow walls and ever-on fluorescent lighting. An eyesore to late-night shift takers and, in more common cases, hungover darkners.
In a certain room hidden backstage, a small die was currently pinning up crumpled sticky notes to an over-flowing board of post-it notes and bright red lines. Across the deserted room, a shadowgal in a cat suit knocked about a ball of equally bright red yarn in the air — wondering absent-mindedly when the other would notice that his string was gone.
On the wall beside her, right next to the set of double-doors, a big sheet of paper was stuck up — a vaguely organized timetable of schedules mottled with shades of pink, blue, and green (the current timeslot, a scrawled “6:00-8:30”, was shaded in with glittery blue highlighter). Above the page read, in a cartoony font reminiscent of the studio’s extravagant host, “A Mike’s job is never done!”—a simple collage of text ripped up from old show posters, that nobody, insisted the sign’s maker, would notice were gone. It was a convincing enough forgery, atleast to the naked eye.
The time ticked on. It was now 7:44.
And as it was every other day, every other Tuesday at 7:45 PM, the room was quiet — the only noise being the soft batting of yarn against fur, and plastic pins stabbing through paper and into whatever those pin-up boards are made out of. All was on-schedule.
And then the door slammed open.
“Boss..?” A nervous voice called from the doorway.
"What is it this time, Jon?” The pippin huffed in frustration, not bothering to look away from his board of chicken-scratch, fraying string, and blurry photographs of nothing in particular. “I thought I told’ja to stop bothering me on-shift!” The zapper said nothing, and the uncharacteristic unresponsiveness was unnerving enough to make the die turn around. Before he could open his mouth to ask, his eyes widened first, as a soft coo cut through the air.
It was 7:48 on a Tuesday evening, and the Mike Room was completely silent.
There was no more shuffling of string and paper, no more rustling of fur, and even the sound of everyone’s breathing had quieted.
As if prompted by the lack of noise, the little blue lump in the zapper’s arms wiggled and beeped once more, before turning over and blinking the white line of their ‘eye’ open at them. “Jongler,” The die started slowly, eyes fixed to the tiny zappling in the other’s hold. “How did you get a baby.”
“Found it!”