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Tooned In

Written by Nitrinoxus, Jonas Belford and Throne Zwei
Edited and Formatted by Nitrinoxus

Chapter 1

Vancouver, the metaphorical 'Hollywood North'. Countless television shows and movies saw actors and stagehands bustling through the city by the thousands each day. Millions upon millions of people the world over saw the productions--both critically acclaimed and not. Some weren't aware what they watched came from this Canadian metropolis. Some recognized familiar environments--a particular patch of forest or city block--from show to show.

At its core, Vancouver was a hub for the creative. The inspired. The curious and the imaginative. Ideas and fantasies flowed through the studies like water. The intricacies of fairy tale or sci-fi worlds were discussed with the seriousness of diplomatic treaties. Across the city, apartments were jammed with artists looking to act, produce, or pitch. Two, in particular, were working with renewed fervor this fine afternoon. They had been given the opportunity their whole careers had been building up to: a pitch. In just a few days, they would be in a boardroom trying to convince network executives to take their pilot script. The excitement was electric. The tension was palpable. The thrill was immeasurable.

"Uh... let's see... gotta play up the reborn world angle a bit, I think. Earth as you know it is no more, but humanity's legacy remains..." The eraser of Ben's pencil tapped against the paper with an odd tempo as he mulled over his words out loud. He'd been working with his friend to pitch their Terica project for quite some time, and if all went well here, it might actually get produced professionally - and he was excited as he'd ever been in his whole life. The only thing keeping him from jumping for joy at the sheer chance was professionalism.

His colleague nodded, pencil clutched in his teeth as he ran a hand through his shaggy mane of hair. Mark was similarly psyched at the chance to get one of their projects out on the market where it could be seen, but his enthusiasm had been tempered and honed into an intense drive to make what they had absolutely perfect. He extracted the pencil from his jaws, twirling it about as he took a swig of his hot chocolate -- most writers might've preferred coffee for these brainstorming sessions, but he liked hot chocolate. "Of course, of course. And we've gotta make sure the audience gets a good idea of how the world's societies have changed, too. It's pretty different from what they'd be used to, but if we play it right it'll still be identifiable."

"Right... the polite dignity of the Walkers, commemoration from Longtails, so on and so forth... but at the same time, they still have families, love, hate, all that stuff. After all, they're descended from humanity. Hmm... like for the pilot episode, what if we show the Great Journey briefly, before cutting away to someone telling a story to Notchear before a Homecall or something? Or d'ya think it'd be better to show Alder busting a Aermast smuggling operation?" Ben ran his fingers through his black hair for a moment, deep in thought, before writing down a few potential ideas and concepts. He'd help draw them out a little later.

"Let's save the more action-y stuff for a later episode, focus on immersing the audience for the pilot," Mark replied. "Hmm... That story angle could work... maybe it's a story about the Journey? I mean, that's pretty much a legend at that point, so it'd make sense for one of the elder longtails to be telling a younger generation about it. I imagine one or two might've fallen asleep during the speech." He chuckled, starting to mimic one of the elders rambling on about how things were 'in mah day', stopping after a few moments of laughter. "Yeah, that could work..."

Ben chuckled and added a 'later date' notation next to the smuggling idea. "I think we have a winner! But yeah - leave some doubt at first in the audience's mind as to if this really was Earth, or just some made-up myth. Already got a good idea about how we do the reveal, too - just imagine. Some characters descending into a cavern... and finding Queens or the Bronx, just frozen in time almost. Untouched."

Mark nodded. "That's a good one, yeah. Of course, some places' names might be useful for dropping early hints, like the Grand Canyon has become the 'Great Chasm', or Mt. Everest has become 'Mt. Evers'."

"Hmm. Evers is a bit on the nose... might be a little too obvious at first. But we'll see what they think - think they'll love the mid-cycle concept art the most, I think. I know it's my favorite... magic and tech fitting together like chocolate and peanut butter."

"Or ham and cheese," Mark added. "Or grilled cheese and ketchup, or cookies and milk, or..." He stopped. "...Damn it, now I'm hungry."

As if on cue, Ben's stomach also rumbled, prompting a sheepish look. "We can grab lunch after that panel on sci-fi shows. Or before... think we have enough time if we hurry."

"Hard to pay attention on an empty stomach," the brown-haired youth said as he stood. "Let's get some chow, then hurry to that panel."

The closest Tim Horton's was a block from the hotel. Ben and Mark continued to toss ideas back and forth along the way. They were so distracted, they completely missed the kid in the fox costume rounding the corner. With a bmph and a "Yipe!" and several "Ack!"s, all three stumbled over, bounced off of, and promptly fell to the ground.

Ben's eyes went wide as he fell to the ground - he'd been so engrossed in chatting with Mark, he hadn't been looking where he'd been going! "Oh crap... sorry, kid!"

He caught a flash of orange before the kid ran off. Presumably to his parents.

Mark sat up, watching the cloud of dust the kid had kicked up as he dashed off dissipate on the breeze. "Okay, well... see ya!" he called after the fleeing youth, climbing to his feet and instinctively dusting himself off. "Well, that was odd."

"No kidding. Didn't say a word... hopefully he's okay."

"Well, he dashed off faster than I could run, so I doubt he's injured," Mark observed as he helped his friend to his feet.

As Ben got to his feet with the help of his friend, he nodded. That kid had taken off amazingly fast for someone wearing a costume. "Must be all the candy or something. Speaking of... I hear a chocolate glazed just calling my name."

A nod. "Wonder what the soup du jour is today."

XXX

The sci-fi panel seemed to fly by for those present, the two hours it encompassed packed full of thought-provoking questions and laugh-inducing jests about the often-absurd nature of the subjects they discussed; in what seemed like no time at all, the panel was ended, the audience filing through the narrow double doors in a chattering flood of color and flesh. Everyone was talking and laughing and discussing what was on their minds, drowning out the world around them as they tried conversing with their friends.

A rather heavy man had just forced his way through Ben and Mark, causing them to lose sight of each other. They scanned the hectic mass of attendees in confusion, trying to both reunite and avoid getting bowled over by the crowds. Mark was buffeted and knocked around by a gaggle of oblivious girls who were chatting away with each other. He turned, but was suddenly stabbed in the arm by something incredibly sharp. A minute later, the same thing happened to Ben. A slip of the crowd? An act of malice? They didn't know. All they saw was the flicker of a pencil before the mysterious source vanished into the masses.

"Yow! Sunnova... something just poked me in the arm!" Ben hissed in annoyance and pain at the apparent pencil stab as he looked for the source, but whoever had done it, they were gone. Why they'd done it was a mystery as well - he hadn't gotten into an argument, much less a fight, with anyone.

Mark shoved his way through the crowd, muttering a chorus of "Pardon me" and "Sorry" as he maneuvered towards a side corridor; once out of the flow, he rubbed the jab in his arm, looking through the crowd for Ben.

Once the crowd had thinned out somewhat, Ben quickly found Mark and sighed. "Don't tell me some psycho jabbed you with a pencil or something too! Gah... if I'd seen who it was, I'd be calling hotel security."

The young man nodded. "Felt like a #2 pencil to me. I've been jabbed with those before, back in grade school. Didn't see who poked me, though."

"Dang. Don't think it's bleeding, though... so thank heaven for small favors."

Mark grumbled his agreement. "Come on, let's head back to the room..."

The two returned to their room, both of them putting the rather odd assault on their persons aside. Ben had started imagining episodes and even sequels or spin-offs in his mind already, as a major creativity bug seemed to have wormed its way into his mind and wasn't letting go, and from the musings of his friend, Mark was feeling likewise. It reminded him a little of how they'd met, and how they'd started down this path, just spit-balling ideas and writing them out for the sake of fun. As he set the nub of a pencil aside, Ben looked nostalgic. "Remember when we first started writing? Just cooking up settings and characters like there was no tomorrow, and how ideas just flowed like water? Maybe that's what we need to do here, to figure out how to make this idea perfect. I mean... it got us this far, so why don't we try doing it more?"

Mark gave his colleague a surprised look, then chuckled and tossed his eraser-less pencil aside. "Sure, I'm game for that. Man, it feels like it's been forever since I put myself into one of my character's shoes." He closed his eyes and leaned back into the cushions of his seat. "Anything in particular you wanna try?"

"Hmm.... mid-cycle Terica, maybe some kind of train that runs over the continent. Like the Orient Express... might use it to demo a bat Therian I've had in mind."

With a nod from Mark, the two started, juggling ideas and visuals and jotting down conversations and fragments of thoughts. Before long, the brainstorming had shifted to outright roleplaying, with the two co-writers passing a document back and forth across the table on Mark's tablet and writing out a draft for a story as they had once done; one story soon yielded to another as the fickle forces of imagination bounced from concept to concept, the two following its path through alien cities overgrown with plants being explored by desert-dwelling cat-people, neo-noir sci-fi metropolises populated by 1920's-era gangsters running a drug called 'Mask' and Therian civilians going about their lives, and rolling fields of felt and homes made of building blocks in a world of lost toys. They were working their way through a story set in a toon version of Terica when they finally noticed it was nearly midnight.

"And then... oh man... midnight already? Wasn't it like seven when we started?" Ben had easily gotten swept up in the ideas they'd gotten out into the open, and the toon Terica had been especially vivid in his mind.

Mark chuckled, making a note next to his unfinished post and hitting 'Save' for the umpteenth time that day. "Time flies when you're having fun," he observed casually. "Man, that felt awesome. We really oughta do this more often, y'know? The excitement and the fresh ideas and..." He leaned back, a contented sigh escaping his lips. "Nice work, Ben."

"And you! We really should, though... think we got enough material to make at least one more presentation." A big grin was on his face as Ben rubbed his eyes. He was still feeling energetic, but they needed their rest. "Let's get some sleep. Should be time tomorrow before the panels start to get some more ideas out."

Mark nodded, kicking off his shoes and flopping onto his bed. "Sounds like a plan, man. See ya in the morning."

A nod as Ben slid under the covers of his bed, glasses on the nightstand. "See ya in the morning..."

XXX

The sun filtered through the blinds the next morning, its piercing glow bothering Mark awake as it penetrated his eyelids; he sat up, blinking blearily for a moment as his brain began to turn back on. Even through the distortion of the early-morning haze, the young man's mind was registering that the room looked... off, somehow. The colors looked brighter, more vivid and cheerful than he remembered, and the shadowplay around some of the bits of furniture made it look like they had an outline; his hand drifted over to the nightstand, fumbling around for a moment until they grabbed his glasses and brought them up to his...

He stopped. He didn't wear glasses. He used to wear glasses, but he'd gotten his vision corrected a while back; and yet, for some strange reason, his hand was holding a pair of rimless glasses like the ones he used to wear, wrapped with a brilliantly colorful bronze wire-frame and enveloped in the same inexplicable outline that his blurred vision could detect across the room. He shook his head, blinked a few more times to try and correct the blurriness, but it remained; with a sigh, he slipped the glasses onto his face, his vision clearing instantly as the lenses stopped in front of his eyes.

He immediately wished it hadn't.

His cleared vision had instantly fallen on the arm that had been stabbed the day before, the sight eliciting a startled gasp from the now-bespectacled young man. A splotch of pitch-black discoloration stretched from the stab wound across his arm, turning everything between his elbow and his wrist a shiny shade of inky black; he ran a hand across the ebon swatch, recoiling in surprise at the texture -- the closest analogy his groggy, confused mind could arrive at was that it felt like warm rubber, but could feel his touch as if it was his skin. On closer inspection, the patch of altered skin also bore the same immaterial black outline, somehow still distinct from the pitch-black skin it bordered; oddly, only that bit of his flesh bore the outline, as the odd black stripe stopped where his regular flesh began.

He turned his head to call over to Ben, but whipped it back with dizzying speed when his stomach gurgled ominously. He lifted his shirt, peering fearfully down as the skin over his gut bubbled and squirmed in sync with the gurgling; then, with a suddenness so great the youth thought he'd explode, his stomach thrust forward and out, the bed creaking and groaning as the weight atop it increased rapidly. Mark slammed his eyes shut, trying to block out the symphony of rips and tears as his outfit tore under the growing bulk of his body, trying to ignore the strange feelings of his body being stretched and inflated like a wad of hot rubber. A terrified minute passed, then another and another, until finally the youth chanced a look down at himself.

The first thing he realized was that his body was enormous, a vast expanse of shiny black-and-white flesh surrounded by the bizarre, untouchable outline; the bed was bent at an absurd angle beneath his immense weight, but did not break, a fact that would've seemed impossible were it not for the current state of the bed's occupant. He held up his huge monochromatic hands, poked his thick black-and-white tail, prodded his wide cetacean snout and yelped in surprise when it squashed into his head; he quickly withdrew his finger from the cavity it had created, watching as his snout popped back out into its normal shape, wobbling rhythmically up and down with a sproi-oi-oi-oi-oi-oing! He waggled his reformed snout, presently more perplexed at the cartoon sound effect it had…

…Waitaminute. “Ben?”

"M-Mark? Hahaha... you look kinda..." Ben's laughing fit was cut short as he looked at the wound on his arm - the bruise had spread, almost looking like a hairy, brown blotch on his arm. That was about as good a look as he got as it started to spread, alongside a thick, black outline around his arm. A quick touch confirmed the feel of fur, but it felt odd, alive and yet... not at the same time. But soon it rapidly began to spread, the rest of his arms and both hands gaining cartoonish claws of sorts, the black outline's progress almost like a loading bar on a computer screen.

Everywhere it went, changes happened and new replaced the old. He seemed to stretch larger as the odd feeling of bones and organs vanishing into nothingness gripped him, replaced with what could only be called energy, cartoonish muscles appearing on his brown chest. He was taller than before, but the changes didn't stop there as the outline started to trace its way through the air behind his shoulder blades, the outline looking like a pair of pteropine wings that began to fill in, as if an invisible child was coloring in a coloring book, lines representing the 'fingers' showing in as his outfit began to alter itself as well, into a white button-up shirt with a red tie and black slacks. Another outline traced itself out of his tailbone, a long thin tail being doodled into reality. His legs underwent the same treatment as the outline brought changes with it, his toes plumping out and merging into three overlarge toes. Soon, it reached his head, an invisible hand gripping his face and then pulling, tugging and stretching as the outline enveloped it. With a comically loud BOING-OING-OING-OING, it released his face, now a bat-like snout with long, brown ears enveloped by the outline. "Wha..."

Mark blinked, the wheels in his head turning -- audibly, in fact -- as he tried to piece together the shattered fragments of his perception of impossibility. He tentatively levered his monochromatic body off the bed, the springs of the mattress popping back into place with a cartoonish bounce and an accompanying sound effect; he should've been astonished at the fact that his boxers had reformed into a pair of blue wave-print swim trunks, keeping his appearance suitably PG, but his surprise had effectively reached saturation when he turned into a toon in the first place. "...How...?" was all he could manage.

"...I have no idea." Ben was likewise flabbergasted, as reflected by the pupils in both eyes looking less like pupils, and more like question marks. Almost experimentally, he grabbed onto part of his arm and pulled, watching in confusion as it was harmlessly stretched out before he let it go with a sound not unlike a rubber band snapping back into place.

The toon orca ran a hand across his smooth scalp, stopping when his thick fingers struck the edges of his glasses -- he could've sworn they'd've fallen off or snapped! He removed the seemingly weightless spectacles, noting that they, too, had been altered by his transformation; they were the same style and color, but were much larger than before, with the nosepiece replaced by a single wide pad that balanced improbably on his snout. A lumbering walk to his suitcase confirmed that his entire wardrobe had been swapped out, tee shirts and formal slacks replaced by Technicolor aloha shirts and flip-flops and more swim trunks and... Mark suddenly realized he'd stuck his head into a walk-in closet that was somehow crammed into his small suitcase. "Weird."

"You're telling me.... OOF!" Ben soon moved to his suitcase, which seemed to be bulging at the seams - opening it soon revealed why, as a rather large rack of suits had somehow been crammed into the case. The force of it opening sent the toon bat flying into the opposite wall, where he hit it with a rather loud SPLAT, the bat now rather... flat. "...Ow." Unnoticed by him, however, something was coming in through a crack in the room's door, equally as flat as he was now.

A bulge of orange was squeezing its way through the crack at the bottom of the door. It strained and squirmed until with a loud poip! it popped out into a fox head. The kid from before was staring around Ben and Mark's room. A huge grin was plastered over its equally inked muzzle.

"Oh, wow! It worked! And you guys got hunky, too!" he yipped happily. "Just--let me--hold on!--urrrrgh--" The fox continued to wriggle and strain until the rest of him popped out and into the room. Barely four feet tall, the fox gave a goofy grin as it stood up on a pair of large white paws and brushed some small dust puffs off a pair of poofy baby-blue shorts. A set of four-fingered white gloves adorned his hands and the biggest, brightest set of blue eyes Ben and Mark had ever seen shone as the creature looked up at them. "Hiya! I'm Spark!"

The whale blinked. "...Um... hi?"

"What worked? And I'd shake your hand, but... feeling kinda 2-D right now." He hadn't stuck to the wall for very long, the perfectly circular bat floating gently down onto the floor.

"Oh, I can help with that!" Spark bounced over to the cardboard-thin Ben. Ben felt a.... foamy... sensation when the top of his compressed head was gripped. That was suddenly the least of his concerns when his entire vision and sense of motion spun and rocked in place. Spark gave Ben a snap like a towel and he popped back into normal dimensions. "Ta-daaa! Good thing it was just a light one! Nice wings!"

"Uh... thanks. Spark, was it? Wait... have we met?" A question mark materialized above the bat's head as he got a good look at the small toon fox next to him.

"Yup! Yesterday! Bit of a tumble and then I was all grrr mad but then I got a really good vibe and knew I just had to try it out!"

"Wait, you were the one we bumped into?" Mark clarified.

Spark nodded. "Yuppers!"

"You're that kid in the fox outfit? Not even an outfit!" The question mark changed to an exclamation mark.

"And the one in the crowd who jabbed us with a pencil... that was...?!"

Spark whistled innocently. A small musical note floated through the air.

Needless to say, smoke literally started to come out of Ben's ears as his eyes turned red. "Do you know how much that stung?"

"Yipe!" Spark zipped behind Mark. "I didn't know it would!" he squeaked. "That was the first time doing it!"

"Sorry... but just... why us? Why out of all the people here?"

"Uhh.... it's sorta hard to explain." Spark popped out from behind the orca and made an odd wavy motion with his gloved hands. "You two felt... bright? Idea-ish? Imagerific?"

Mark growled, hopping into the air and coming down on the tiny toon with a cartoony SPLAT! "So you just decided to turn us into toons, izzat it?" he glowered down at the squashed fox beneath him. "You ever think to ask us first?"

"Mrrp!"

"Think you're sitting on his mouth, Mark." Ben didn't look overly upset, but still wanted to hear the fox out. Before shooting him out of a cannon... though he wasn't sure where THAT thought had come from.

The whale rolled his bright green eyes, pulling the flat Spark from beneath his rump and holding him upright -- he'd return him to his 3-D state in a minute. "Come again, red?"

"Err, I guess?" the flat disc of fox said as his tail curled sheepishly. "I dunno--been a few weeks like this and got bored and lonely and then you two just came along." He paused. "It seemed like a good idea at the time. Kinda still does?"

"So... were you human before this? Or... what do you mean 'like this'?" The question mark returned, though his eyes were still somewhat red in irritation.

"I dunno really--it was all kinda condensed and flat and sketchy. But one day I just popped out." Spark looked apologetic, though his current state made it hard to tell. "That's all I know."

"Sounds like you just popped out of a comic book or computer screen."

"Yeah, or a--" Mark stopped, an exclamation mark popping over his head as a realization struck. "...Ben, what was the last story we cooked up last night?"

Gears started grinding in Ben's head, literally, as a whirring sound not unlike a CPU fan soon kicked in. "...a transformation story. We were on a Toon Terica kick and...."

"Cool!" Spark chimed and tailwagged.

The orca slapped his wide forehead. "We turned into the characters our story-selves transformed into!"

"Oooh, story? Can I read it?"

"But... how? This isn't making any sense!" His eyes soon resembled spirals that were rotating inside of his eyes. Ben was quickly becoming lost in what was going on.

"Makes sense to me?" Spark offered.

"I'm glad it's making sense to you, because I'm not even sure I have bones anymore!"

Mark sighed, snapping Spark back into three dimensions in the same way he’d seen Ben snapped back. He dropped the fox gently to the floor, pulling out the tablet he'd been writing on last night and handing it to him... Waitaminute. He spun around, trying in vain to find where he'd pulled the device from, before sighing again and giving up the search. The tablet was different now, too... larger, more suited to his big toon hands, and colored much like a cartoon show might've colored a tablet computer. It even had the weird outline!

Spark seemed unfazed by the sudden shift in dimensions. He took the cartoonified tablet and began skimming through the story and notes. "Heehee--this stuff is great!" The fox giggled as he finished. "You guys must be famous!"

Ben sighed as he pulled up a chair, eyes literally bulging out of their sockets when he realized his arms were reaching half-way across the room before he pulled the chair over and sat down. "We're not, actually... this was... hopefully still can be... our big break."

"Yip?"

"We've got a presentation in a few days," Mark said, plopping onto the largely-toonified bed he'd been sleeping in. "We're trying to get one of our ideas turned into a TV show."

"The Terica Chronicles, we're calling it. Sort of our magnum opus."

"Don't worry!" Spark exclaimed as he leapt up onto his paws. "I know you two can do it! And you can count me as your biggest fan!"

A blue coloration crept into Ben's frame as what could only be described as a miniature storm cloud poofed into reality above him, complete with thunder, lightning, and rain. "...thanks, but... they probably won't take us seriously now...."

"But it's a great idea!"

"And they're expecting two human beings to present it, not two toons," Mark said gloomily.

"...exactly. They'll either think we're not taking them seriously or that we're kids."

"Now cut that out! You can be serious! You can be anything you want! You just need to break out of it all!" Spark looked surprisingly serious. He kicked open the bedroom door, grabbed each of them by the arm, and zipped out into the open city.

Description
Tooned In

Written by Nitrinoxus, Jonas Belford and Throne Zwei
Edited and Formatted by Nitrinoxus

Chapter 1

Vancouver, the metaphorical 'Hollywood North'. Countless television shows and movies saw actors and stagehands bustling through the city by the thousands each day. Millions upon millions of people the world over saw the productions--both critically acclaimed and not. Some weren't aware what they watched came from this Canadian metropolis. Some recognized familiar environments--a particular patch of forest or city block--from show to show.

At its core, Vancouver was a hub for the creative. The inspired. The curious and the imaginative. Ideas and fantasies flowed through the studies like water. The intricacies of fairy tale or sci-fi worlds were discussed with the seriousness of diplomatic treaties. Across the city, apartments were jammed with artists looking to act, produce, or pitch. Two, in particular, were working with renewed fervor this fine afternoon. They had been given the opportunity their whole careers had been building up to: a pitch. In just a few days, they would be in a boardroom trying to convince network executives to take their pilot script. The excitement was electric. The tension was palpable. The thrill was immeasurable.

"Uh... let's see... gotta play up the reborn world angle a bit, I think. Earth as you know it is no more, but humanity's legacy remains..." The eraser of Ben's pencil tapped against the paper with an odd tempo as he mulled over his words out loud. He'd been working with his friend to pitch their Terica project for quite some time, and if all went well here, it might actually get produced professionally - and he was excited as he'd ever been in his whole life. The only thing keeping him from jumping for joy at the sheer chance was professionalism.

His colleague nodded, pencil clutched in his teeth as he ran a hand through his shaggy mane of hair. Mark was similarly psyched at the chance to get one of their projects out on the market where it could be seen, but his enthusiasm had been tempered and honed into an intense drive to make what they had absolutely perfect. He extracted the pencil from his jaws, twirling it about as he took a swig of his hot chocolate -- most writers might've preferred coffee for these brainstorming sessions, but he liked hot chocolate. "Of course, of course. And we've gotta make sure the audience gets a good idea of how the world's societies have changed, too. It's pretty different from what they'd be used to, but if we play it right it'll still be identifiable."

"Right... the polite dignity of the Walkers, commemoration from Longtails, so on and so forth... but at the same time, they still have families, love, hate, all that stuff. After all, they're descended from humanity. Hmm... like for the pilot episode, what if we show the Great Journey briefly, before cutting away to someone telling a story to Notchear before a Homecall or something? Or d'ya think it'd be better to show Alder busting a Aermast smuggling operation?" Ben ran his fingers through his black hair for a moment, deep in thought, before writing down a few potential ideas and concepts. He'd help draw them out a little later.

"Let's save the more action-y stuff for a later episode, focus on immersing the audience for the pilot," Mark replied. "Hmm... That story angle could work... maybe it's a story about the Journey? I mean, that's pretty much a legend at that point, so it'd make sense for one of the elder longtails to be telling a younger generation about it. I imagine one or two might've fallen asleep during the speech." He chuckled, starting to mimic one of the elders rambling on about how things were 'in mah day', stopping after a few moments of laughter. "Yeah, that could work..."

Ben chuckled and added a 'later date' notation next to the smuggling idea. "I think we have a winner! But yeah - leave some doubt at first in the audience's mind as to if this really was Earth, or just some made-up myth. Already got a good idea about how we do the reveal, too - just imagine. Some characters descending into a cavern... and finding Queens or the Bronx, just frozen in time almost. Untouched."

Mark nodded. "That's a good one, yeah. Of course, some places' names might be useful for dropping early hints, like the Grand Canyon has become the 'Great Chasm', or Mt. Everest has become 'Mt. Evers'."

"Hmm. Evers is a bit on the nose... might be a little too obvious at first. But we'll see what they think - think they'll love the mid-cycle concept art the most, I think. I know it's my favorite... magic and tech fitting together like chocolate and peanut butter."

"Or ham and cheese," Mark added. "Or grilled cheese and ketchup, or cookies and milk, or..." He stopped. "...Damn it, now I'm hungry."

As if on cue, Ben's stomach also rumbled, prompting a sheepish look. "We can grab lunch after that panel on sci-fi shows. Or before... think we have enough time if we hurry."

"Hard to pay attention on an empty stomach," the brown-haired youth said as he stood. "Let's get some chow, then hurry to that panel."

The closest Tim Horton's was a block from the hotel. Ben and Mark continued to toss ideas back and forth along the way. They were so distracted, they completely missed the kid in the fox costume rounding the corner. With a bmph and a "Yipe!" and several "Ack!"s, all three stumbled over, bounced off of, and promptly fell to the ground.

Ben's eyes went wide as he fell to the ground - he'd been so engrossed in chatting with Mark, he hadn't been looking where he'd been going! "Oh crap... sorry, kid!"

He caught a flash of orange before the kid ran off. Presumably to his parents.

Mark sat up, watching the cloud of dust the kid had kicked up as he dashed off dissipate on the breeze. "Okay, well... see ya!" he called after the fleeing youth, climbing to his feet and instinctively dusting himself off. "Well, that was odd."

"No kidding. Didn't say a word... hopefully he's okay."

"Well, he dashed off faster than I could run, so I doubt he's injured," Mark observed as he helped his friend to his feet.

As Ben got to his feet with the help of his friend, he nodded. That kid had taken off amazingly fast for someone wearing a costume. "Must be all the candy or something. Speaking of... I hear a chocolate glazed just calling my name."

A nod. "Wonder what the soup du jour is today."

XXX

The sci-fi panel seemed to fly by for those present, the two hours it encompassed packed full of thought-provoking questions and laugh-inducing jests about the often-absurd nature of the subjects they discussed; in what seemed like no time at all, the panel was ended, the audience filing through the narrow double doors in a chattering flood of color and flesh. Everyone was talking and laughing and discussing what was on their minds, drowning out the world around them as they tried conversing with their friends.

A rather heavy man had just forced his way through Ben and Mark, causing them to lose sight of each other. They scanned the hectic mass of attendees in confusion, trying to both reunite and avoid getting bowled over by the crowds. Mark was buffeted and knocked around by a gaggle of oblivious girls who were chatting away with each other. He turned, but was suddenly stabbed in the arm by something incredibly sharp. A minute later, the same thing happened to Ben. A slip of the crowd? An act of malice? They didn't know. All they saw was the flicker of a pencil before the mysterious source vanished into the masses.

"Yow! Sunnova... something just poked me in the arm!" Ben hissed in annoyance and pain at the apparent pencil stab as he looked for the source, but whoever had done it, they were gone. Why they'd done it was a mystery as well - he hadn't gotten into an argument, much less a fight, with anyone.

Mark shoved his way through the crowd, muttering a chorus of "Pardon me" and "Sorry" as he maneuvered towards a side corridor; once out of the flow, he rubbed the jab in his arm, looking through the crowd for Ben.

Once the crowd had thinned out somewhat, Ben quickly found Mark and sighed. "Don't tell me some psycho jabbed you with a pencil or something too! Gah... if I'd seen who it was, I'd be calling hotel security."

The young man nodded. "Felt like a #2 pencil to me. I've been jabbed with those before, back in grade school. Didn't see who poked me, though."

"Dang. Don't think it's bleeding, though... so thank heaven for small favors."

Mark grumbled his agreement. "Come on, let's head back to the room..."

The two returned to their room, both of them putting the rather odd assault on their persons aside. Ben had started imagining episodes and even sequels or spin-offs in his mind already, as a major creativity bug seemed to have wormed its way into his mind and wasn't letting go, and from the musings of his friend, Mark was feeling likewise. It reminded him a little of how they'd met, and how they'd started down this path, just spit-balling ideas and writing them out for the sake of fun. As he set the nub of a pencil aside, Ben looked nostalgic. "Remember when we first started writing? Just cooking up settings and characters like there was no tomorrow, and how ideas just flowed like water? Maybe that's what we need to do here, to figure out how to make this idea perfect. I mean... it got us this far, so why don't we try doing it more?"

Mark gave his colleague a surprised look, then chuckled and tossed his eraser-less pencil aside. "Sure, I'm game for that. Man, it feels like it's been forever since I put myself into one of my character's shoes." He closed his eyes and leaned back into the cushions of his seat. "Anything in particular you wanna try?"

"Hmm.... mid-cycle Terica, maybe some kind of train that runs over the continent. Like the Orient Express... might use it to demo a bat Therian I've had in mind."

With a nod from Mark, the two started, juggling ideas and visuals and jotting down conversations and fragments of thoughts. Before long, the brainstorming had shifted to outright roleplaying, with the two co-writers passing a document back and forth across the table on Mark's tablet and writing out a draft for a story as they had once done; one story soon yielded to another as the fickle forces of imagination bounced from concept to concept, the two following its path through alien cities overgrown with plants being explored by desert-dwelling cat-people, neo-noir sci-fi metropolises populated by 1920's-era gangsters running a drug called 'Mask' and Therian civilians going about their lives, and rolling fields of felt and homes made of building blocks in a world of lost toys. They were working their way through a story set in a toon version of Terica when they finally noticed it was nearly midnight.

"And then... oh man... midnight already? Wasn't it like seven when we started?" Ben had easily gotten swept up in the ideas they'd gotten out into the open, and the toon Terica had been especially vivid in his mind.

Mark chuckled, making a note next to his unfinished post and hitting 'Save' for the umpteenth time that day. "Time flies when you're having fun," he observed casually. "Man, that felt awesome. We really oughta do this more often, y'know? The excitement and the fresh ideas and..." He leaned back, a contented sigh escaping his lips. "Nice work, Ben."

"And you! We really should, though... think we got enough material to make at least one more presentation." A big grin was on his face as Ben rubbed his eyes. He was still feeling energetic, but they needed their rest. "Let's get some sleep. Should be time tomorrow before the panels start to get some more ideas out."

Mark nodded, kicking off his shoes and flopping onto his bed. "Sounds like a plan, man. See ya in the morning."

A nod as Ben slid under the covers of his bed, glasses on the nightstand. "See ya in the morning..."

XXX

The sun filtered through the blinds the next morning, its piercing glow bothering Mark awake as it penetrated his eyelids; he sat up, blinking blearily for a moment as his brain began to turn back on. Even through the distortion of the early-morning haze, the young man's mind was registering that the room looked... off, somehow. The colors looked brighter, more vivid and cheerful than he remembered, and the shadowplay around some of the bits of furniture made it look like they had an outline; his hand drifted over to the nightstand, fumbling around for a moment until they grabbed his glasses and brought them up to his...

He stopped. He didn't wear glasses. He used to wear glasses, but he'd gotten his vision corrected a while back; and yet, for some strange reason, his hand was holding a pair of rimless glasses like the ones he used to wear, wrapped with a brilliantly colorful bronze wire-frame and enveloped in the same inexplicable outline that his blurred vision could detect across the room. He shook his head, blinked a few more times to try and correct the blurriness, but it remained; with a sigh, he slipped the glasses onto his face, his vision clearing instantly as the lenses stopped in front of his eyes.

He immediately wished it hadn't.

His cleared vision had instantly fallen on the arm that had been stabbed the day before, the sight eliciting a startled gasp from the now-bespectacled young man. A splotch of pitch-black discoloration stretched from the stab wound across his arm, turning everything between his elbow and his wrist a shiny shade of inky black; he ran a hand across the ebon swatch, recoiling in surprise at the texture -- the closest analogy his groggy, confused mind could arrive at was that it felt like warm rubber, but could feel his touch as if it was his skin. On closer inspection, the patch of altered skin also bore the same immaterial black outline, somehow still distinct from the pitch-black skin it bordered; oddly, only that bit of his flesh bore the outline, as the odd black stripe stopped where his regular flesh began.

He turned his head to call over to Ben, but whipped it back with dizzying speed when his stomach gurgled ominously. He lifted his shirt, peering fearfully down as the skin over his gut bubbled and squirmed in sync with the gurgling; then, with a suddenness so great the youth thought he'd explode, his stomach thrust forward and out, the bed creaking and groaning as the weight atop it increased rapidly. Mark slammed his eyes shut, trying to block out the symphony of rips and tears as his outfit tore under the growing bulk of his body, trying to ignore the strange feelings of his body being stretched and inflated like a wad of hot rubber. A terrified minute passed, then another and another, until finally the youth chanced a look down at himself.

The first thing he realized was that his body was enormous, a vast expanse of shiny black-and-white flesh surrounded by the bizarre, untouchable outline; the bed was bent at an absurd angle beneath his immense weight, but did not break, a fact that would've seemed impossible were it not for the current state of the bed's occupant. He held up his huge monochromatic hands, poked his thick black-and-white tail, prodded his wide cetacean snout and yelped in surprise when it squashed into his head; he quickly withdrew his finger from the cavity it had created, watching as his snout popped back out into its normal shape, wobbling rhythmically up and down with a sproi-oi-oi-oi-oi-oing! He waggled his reformed snout, presently more perplexed at the cartoon sound effect it had…

…Waitaminute. “Ben?”

"M-Mark? Hahaha... you look kinda..." Ben's laughing fit was cut short as he looked at the wound on his arm - the bruise had spread, almost looking like a hairy, brown blotch on his arm. That was about as good a look as he got as it started to spread, alongside a thick, black outline around his arm. A quick touch confirmed the feel of fur, but it felt odd, alive and yet... not at the same time. But soon it rapidly began to spread, the rest of his arms and both hands gaining cartoonish claws of sorts, the black outline's progress almost like a loading bar on a computer screen.

Everywhere it went, changes happened and new replaced the old. He seemed to stretch larger as the odd feeling of bones and organs vanishing into nothingness gripped him, replaced with what could only be called energy, cartoonish muscles appearing on his brown chest. He was taller than before, but the changes didn't stop there as the outline started to trace its way through the air behind his shoulder blades, the outline looking like a pair of pteropine wings that began to fill in, as if an invisible child was coloring in a coloring book, lines representing the 'fingers' showing in as his outfit began to alter itself as well, into a white button-up shirt with a red tie and black slacks. Another outline traced itself out of his tailbone, a long thin tail being doodled into reality. His legs underwent the same treatment as the outline brought changes with it, his toes plumping out and merging into three overlarge toes. Soon, it reached his head, an invisible hand gripping his face and then pulling, tugging and stretching as the outline enveloped it. With a comically loud BOING-OING-OING-OING, it released his face, now a bat-like snout with long, brown ears enveloped by the outline. "Wha..."

Mark blinked, the wheels in his head turning -- audibly, in fact -- as he tried to piece together the shattered fragments of his perception of impossibility. He tentatively levered his monochromatic body off the bed, the springs of the mattress popping back into place with a cartoonish bounce and an accompanying sound effect; he should've been astonished at the fact that his boxers had reformed into a pair of blue wave-print swim trunks, keeping his appearance suitably PG, but his surprise had effectively reached saturation when he turned into a toon in the first place. "...How...?" was all he could manage.

"...I have no idea." Ben was likewise flabbergasted, as reflected by the pupils in both eyes looking less like pupils, and more like question marks. Almost experimentally, he grabbed onto part of his arm and pulled, watching in confusion as it was harmlessly stretched out before he let it go with a sound not unlike a rubber band snapping back into place.

The toon orca ran a hand across his smooth scalp, stopping when his thick fingers struck the edges of his glasses -- he could've sworn they'd've fallen off or snapped! He removed the seemingly weightless spectacles, noting that they, too, had been altered by his transformation; they were the same style and color, but were much larger than before, with the nosepiece replaced by a single wide pad that balanced improbably on his snout. A lumbering walk to his suitcase confirmed that his entire wardrobe had been swapped out, tee shirts and formal slacks replaced by Technicolor aloha shirts and flip-flops and more swim trunks and... Mark suddenly realized he'd stuck his head into a walk-in closet that was somehow crammed into his small suitcase. "Weird."

"You're telling me.... OOF!" Ben soon moved to his suitcase, which seemed to be bulging at the seams - opening it soon revealed why, as a rather large rack of suits had somehow been crammed into the case. The force of it opening sent the toon bat flying into the opposite wall, where he hit it with a rather loud SPLAT, the bat now rather... flat. "...Ow." Unnoticed by him, however, something was coming in through a crack in the room's door, equally as flat as he was now.

A bulge of orange was squeezing its way through the crack at the bottom of the door. It strained and squirmed until with a loud poip! it popped out into a fox head. The kid from before was staring around Ben and Mark's room. A huge grin was plastered over its equally inked muzzle.

"Oh, wow! It worked! And you guys got hunky, too!" he yipped happily. "Just--let me--hold on!--urrrrgh--" The fox continued to wriggle and strain until the rest of him popped out and into the room. Barely four feet tall, the fox gave a goofy grin as it stood up on a pair of large white paws and brushed some small dust puffs off a pair of poofy baby-blue shorts. A set of four-fingered white gloves adorned his hands and the biggest, brightest set of blue eyes Ben and Mark had ever seen shone as the creature looked up at them. "Hiya! I'm Spark!"

The whale blinked. "...Um... hi?"

"What worked? And I'd shake your hand, but... feeling kinda 2-D right now." He hadn't stuck to the wall for very long, the perfectly circular bat floating gently down onto the floor.

"Oh, I can help with that!" Spark bounced over to the cardboard-thin Ben. Ben felt a.... foamy... sensation when the top of his compressed head was gripped. That was suddenly the least of his concerns when his entire vision and sense of motion spun and rocked in place. Spark gave Ben a snap like a towel and he popped back into normal dimensions. "Ta-daaa! Good thing it was just a light one! Nice wings!"

"Uh... thanks. Spark, was it? Wait... have we met?" A question mark materialized above the bat's head as he got a good look at the small toon fox next to him.

"Yup! Yesterday! Bit of a tumble and then I was all grrr mad but then I got a really good vibe and knew I just had to try it out!"

"Wait, you were the one we bumped into?" Mark clarified.

Spark nodded. "Yuppers!"

"You're that kid in the fox outfit? Not even an outfit!" The question mark changed to an exclamation mark.

"And the one in the crowd who jabbed us with a pencil... that was...?!"

Spark whistled innocently. A small musical note floated through the air.

Needless to say, smoke literally started to come out of Ben's ears as his eyes turned red. "Do you know how much that stung?"

"Yipe!" Spark zipped behind Mark. "I didn't know it would!" he squeaked. "That was the first time doing it!"

"Sorry... but just... why us? Why out of all the people here?"

"Uhh.... it's sorta hard to explain." Spark popped out from behind the orca and made an odd wavy motion with his gloved hands. "You two felt... bright? Idea-ish? Imagerific?"

Mark growled, hopping into the air and coming down on the tiny toon with a cartoony SPLAT! "So you just decided to turn us into toons, izzat it?" he glowered down at the squashed fox beneath him. "You ever think to ask us first?"

"Mrrp!"

"Think you're sitting on his mouth, Mark." Ben didn't look overly upset, but still wanted to hear the fox out. Before shooting him out of a cannon... though he wasn't sure where THAT thought had come from.

The whale rolled his bright green eyes, pulling the flat Spark from beneath his rump and holding him upright -- he'd return him to his 3-D state in a minute. "Come again, red?"

"Err, I guess?" the flat disc of fox said as his tail curled sheepishly. "I dunno--been a few weeks like this and got bored and lonely and then you two just came along." He paused. "It seemed like a good idea at the time. Kinda still does?"

"So... were you human before this? Or... what do you mean 'like this'?" The question mark returned, though his eyes were still somewhat red in irritation.

"I dunno really--it was all kinda condensed and flat and sketchy. But one day I just popped out." Spark looked apologetic, though his current state made it hard to tell. "That's all I know."

"Sounds like you just popped out of a comic book or computer screen."

"Yeah, or a--" Mark stopped, an exclamation mark popping over his head as a realization struck. "...Ben, what was the last story we cooked up last night?"

Gears started grinding in Ben's head, literally, as a whirring sound not unlike a CPU fan soon kicked in. "...a transformation story. We were on a Toon Terica kick and...."

"Cool!" Spark chimed and tailwagged.

The orca slapped his wide forehead. "We turned into the characters our story-selves transformed into!"

"Oooh, story? Can I read it?"

"But... how? This isn't making any sense!" His eyes soon resembled spirals that were rotating inside of his eyes. Ben was quickly becoming lost in what was going on.

"Makes sense to me?" Spark offered.

"I'm glad it's making sense to you, because I'm not even sure I have bones anymore!"

Mark sighed, snapping Spark back into three dimensions in the same way he’d seen Ben snapped back. He dropped the fox gently to the floor, pulling out the tablet he'd been writing on last night and handing it to him... Waitaminute. He spun around, trying in vain to find where he'd pulled the device from, before sighing again and giving up the search. The tablet was different now, too... larger, more suited to his big toon hands, and colored much like a cartoon show might've colored a tablet computer. It even had the weird outline!

Spark seemed unfazed by the sudden shift in dimensions. He took the cartoonified tablet and began skimming through the story and notes. "Heehee--this stuff is great!" The fox giggled as he finished. "You guys must be famous!"

Ben sighed as he pulled up a chair, eyes literally bulging out of their sockets when he realized his arms were reaching half-way across the room before he pulled the chair over and sat down. "We're not, actually... this was... hopefully still can be... our big break."

"Yip?"

"We've got a presentation in a few days," Mark said, plopping onto the largely-toonified bed he'd been sleeping in. "We're trying to get one of our ideas turned into a TV show."

"The Terica Chronicles, we're calling it. Sort of our magnum opus."

"Don't worry!" Spark exclaimed as he leapt up onto his paws. "I know you two can do it! And you can count me as your biggest fan!"

A blue coloration crept into Ben's frame as what could only be described as a miniature storm cloud poofed into reality above him, complete with thunder, lightning, and rain. "...thanks, but... they probably won't take us seriously now...."

"But it's a great idea!"

"And they're expecting two human beings to present it, not two toons," Mark said gloomily.

"...exactly. They'll either think we're not taking them seriously or that we're kids."

"Now cut that out! You can be serious! You can be anything you want! You just need to break out of it all!" Spark looked surprisingly serious. He kicked open the bedroom door, grabbed each of them by the arm, and zipped out into the open city.