Written by Nevuoliaa.
Light spreads across refined hand-drawn wood floors, rays of false sunlight melt into its creases. The artificial sun rose, with it morning came.
One of many identical houses sat slightly crooked over blooming hills. The windows of its top floor were one of the first lucky enough to catch the newborn sunrays; hand drawn strings of yellow paint softly bathed the clay-like landscape. And there he was, resting within the house’s safe embrace, lying down peacefully while cradled by soft cushions of something that wasn't quite a bed—an infamous, frantic feline animation: ‘Kit Whiskertoon’.
As the artificial gleamer spread itself over his snout, a set of cartoonish eyes bolted awake like clockwork. His tightening, anxious paw beans gripped the thin blanket covering him. It bent and folded beneath his claws, not quite right. Not quite like a blanket should. For a brief second, as quick as one forgets a dream, Kit’s claws clipped into the fabric. They sat right atop the fabric a second later, as if nothing happened.
“Morning.”
A feverish whisper slipped out of the animation. He talked to himself in the morning. It was normal. It was routine. He talked as if someone, or something, was meant to hear it.
One shaking toon-gloved paw itches its way to a groggy pair of eyes, not quite awake yet.
.
..
…
Rub, rub, rub.
.
..
…
But the static of Motion was a bit too dense today. Too heavy. An old TV that wasn't quite plugged in right played a soft, distorted tune in time with the sunrise. Perhaps even a second off tune.
“Good heavens…”
Whiskertoon mumbled, still groggy but not yet aware of the weird shift in everything surrounding him. But his body knew. His body sensed it. Years of living a loop didn't go to waste, for he unconsciously caught on to the fracture in the pattern.
One weak push lifts him up from his bed. The blanket, previously draped over his lower half, falls softly over the dark wooden floor. And then, in the blink of an eye, the fabric briefly intercepts the structural composition of the wood—they mesh and blend, like an AI quite not familiar with the physics behind a thin sheet of fabric meeting the floor. Kit’s vision, although still foggy, catches on.
But he remains silent.
Countless Animations and even the occasional wanderer noted his frantic behaviours. It wasn't safe to immediately jump to conclusions, for these visions could be the mere, expected aftermath of years of isolation. A slow shiver caresses the back of Kit’s body, triggering a slight twitch from his tail, a bodypart he did not learn to move in his early days.
Rationality wasn't an option. He was paranoid by nature.
“Have I finally gone crazy? More crazed than others already paint me as?”
Whiskertoon babbled to himself aloud, for it at least wrapped him in the illusion of company
“No. Breathe.”
Long.
Long..
Long…
Breath.
Deep, shaky. With the intent of stabilizing whatever paranoia arose today.
“Whatever. I-… I will just get myself some breakfast and everything will be alright…”
And with that, Whiskertoon dragged himself out of his room. A soft, pale nightgown gently cloaked the entire animation shoulder to knee. To match, a comically large sleeping cap, white fading to light blue ornamented with a blue pom-pom at its end. It swayed with every choppy step he took, too exaggerated to obey realistic physics. He didn't need it, but it felt right. The audience watching the cartoon finds it amusing.
Steps drag softly across wooden floors as he meets the stairs trailing down to the living room. He counted their steps:
One…
Five…
.
..
…
Eleven?
Not ten, not symmetrical.
Eleven.
“There's an extra step at- at the end of the sta-airs.”
A hushed string of words slipped from under the Toon's tongue.
“I can't be seeing things. No. Not again.”
With every word he spat, the swaying patterns of the wood twirled and danced in bizarre ways—it contorted into familiar faces. Chubby cheeks, long fluffy hair. A smile too sweet for the catastrophic environment. Then, it shifted again—this time a dollar bill, the greatest amount translated to paper. For a final show, it drew itself the face of a stressed old man.
Those patterns weren't there before either.
Clay-born environments were never this intricate.
Nor were animated scenes.
.
..
…
In a breath of time, the level mistook its original purpose for what it was trying to imitate; brown clay and fine lines became solid, varnished planks of wood. The white clay that rose from the ground in the form of walls solidified into white concrete. Everything, to the last detail from a fork to a teatime gown hanging from a coat hanger, became real. Not animated, not made of putty. The real deal.
But as fast as it came, it vanished and normalcy returned.
Gulp.
“I don't like the way this day is starting off. Everything is… different. The wor-world is bending into itself… This level- N-No. This reality is trying to mimick where I came from. World, you decided to play a c-cruel prank on me today?”
Kit fretted, words clipping into one another without logic—hurried, desperate to try and build a statement that held any sense to it.
He decided to try and, somehow, toss these observations aside. He brought himself closer to the dinner table and sat down between the arms of one out of seven empty chairs. This time, he didn't have to push himself upwards to sit upright. The chair was shorter today.
The chair wasn't always this short.
Not yesterday,
Not a week ago,
Not a month ago.
Today, for some reason, it decided to change.
Change. An earthquake below the tectonic of a world braided into itself for as far as eternity may go.
A nervous tail swayed frantically from between the gaping spaces of the chair’s back, softly grazing the floor.
That shouldn't happen either.
“I… I should've gotten my breakfast f-first! Silly me…”
But he did not dare stand up again. Instinct drove over him and, for the first time in countless years trapped within 94's confines, genuine, down to the heart fear rushed wildly through Whiskertoon’s veins.
.
..
…
In the animated world, everything moves. Reality is a play being displayed to countless of eyes watching from god knows where. You're in the spotlight now—you are the main character until you either leave, die, or learn to become animated as well. Everything is in constant motion.
.
..
…
Not right now.
A soft palpitation of a nervous toon’s heart stopped.
Then two.
Then three.
A glimpse of something beautiful shone drastically as the animation’s eyes shut down—It tore through the dark the same way the planes soaring the skies of europe did at 7 O’clock in the morning. It felt familiar, but not because the sensation had been looped every day, instead because it felt comfortable, like home.
He almost thought of himself as dead. Fear had never had this much grip on him before.
This wasn't just the usual paranoia, the fragile parasitic idealization that everything is going to go wrong—a frequency of thought that always rang through Kit’s psyche regardless of the situation. This was raw dread, something he hadn't felt in a while.
“This isn't real.”
Whiskertoon stated, a stand-out confident speech amidst nervous thoughts said out loud.
“And if it is, it's changing. Shifting.”
The frozen Animation broke out of his shell and dazzled towards the door, a flickering tail waving behind him. White-clad cat paws grab two door handles merged into one and, with a twist and a crank, the door opens.
The outside is naked before him now. Infinite, unwavering pairs and triplets of greeny grass hills.
With…
Flowers?
Those weren't there before.
Kit’s eyes instinctively draw to the floor
“Begonias.”
Confirmed the toon
“How long has it passed since I saw one of you? Tesha loved this particular kind of flower…”
Soft water beads threatened to spill out of his eyes. The view and the memories that came with it felt nostalgic, they felt like home, again.
One ear twitches with strange joy as a set of shaky knees twitch and bend. He picks it up, the flower strange and alien between hand-drawn fingers.
One petal duplicates itself.
Then another.
One of them breaks itself into two asymmetrical halves who twirl and braid into each other.
Its stem thickens
And then…
…The begonia collapses and disperses itself as dust in between Kit’s fingers.
…
A sad expression draws over the animation's caricature.
“Oh well.” — He gulps, again — “I guess they do, indeed, not belong here. They don't want to be here, nor do I want them here either. I want reality to go back to what it was, even if everything is nearly identical to yesterday, if I squeeze my eyes oh so tightly…”
Eyelids softly drape over Kit’s eyes.
His vision meets the vantablack, everlasting and eternal. The same black that sang him lullabies and helped him sleep. The passage train from the real world to the idyllic land of dreams.
.
..
…
But he wasn't alone.
The dark, it too blinked.
And in that half a second of pure nothingness…
A snake's maw was all he saw—leviathan of dimensions so large his brain could not replicate. It's jaw unhinged before Kit’s psyche.
“…!”
He still held the power to open the doors of the psyche. Sense and logic drove him to open his eyes, fearing what the black had just shown him—what he assumed to be the backstage of life. Life was a show-and-tell as well, it seems. The shockwave was sudden and merciless, blowing Kit to his core, even if what he saw was but a mere illusion hiding behind his eyelids.
Delirious in nature, the animation fell to his back into the hard bricks building the stairs he stood in, but he felt no pain. Cartoon logic saved him the trouble of dealing with bruises
His mind was instead drawn to what he witnessed
It felt strange; it wasn't another mirage this time, was it? Or had he simply bred the perfect environment for a level of delusion he had never faced before?
“…Lady Reverie. She has to know what is going on. She must know. She can't—”
He sighed, a futile attempt to try and tame his composure.
“…I have to hurry.”
Kit's feet shook slightly as he stood upright. His eyes, still wide from what he envisioned now locked aim into the Animated Castle sat above the glorious translucid hill—now foggy instead of crystalline. Determination bathed his being, head tilted upright with courage as he began running towards the general direction of the palace.
“I already gave this world too much of myself today. O’lord of toon, you better heed my call. I hope you hold the answer to this continuity gaffe in our story—and hell, you better not let that be the end of our book.”
Like usual, a road formed under his feet—yet it too disobeyed the laws of the world. Zigzags, impossible upright curves. The path that had never once dared not trail to the castle bent beneath the crushing weight of something. Something neither Kit nor the disoriented animations in their yards could comprehend.
The grey concrete roads that usually served as quiet guides to the castles’ gate now bent upright and downright, clipping into the far skies and under the skin of the level in a frantic dance without tempo. It was futile to use them as a guide now, but Kit didn't falter. His will to unveil the cause of the tilting equilibrium broke out of him through all means possible—it broke his cowardly shell, the newly set fear and even his own physical limitations; he was running faster than he had ever ran in his life.
It didn't take long until Kit was face to face with the castle walls after what had felt like hours of crouching and jumping over dancing roads. The guards, usually fierce even to a regular like him, sat down dizzy and disoriented; each leaned into a pillar guarding the gate with one last effort to stay awake.
“Is… everything alright?” — The toon questioned even if he knew the answer. Maybe they knew something that he didn't.
.
..
…
They did not reply.
One of them collapsed onto himself and fell face first into the cloud blanket lifting the castle from below.
The other merely let his jaw drop, drool slowly cascading from the corner of his lips.
Their color dawned.
It melted onto the floor, puddling around each one of them like candles melting onto themselves.
Gulp.
He left the guards behind, stepping forward into the opening doors of the castle.
Why did they open if no guard was there to pry them awake?
Kit didn't know.
And frankly, he didn't want to know either.
But the castle was still alive, it still recalled its purpose and, with perhaps the final drop of its vitality, it manifested Kit’s working uniform into his animated body.
How ironic that within the most lively organ of Daedos—what a frantic man like Kit labeled as “hell", he was not tortured but rather forced to endure the same routine the people he exploited did.
Under the guise of the frontrooms, Whiskertoon was not a coward, not a servant, but a King. Money built the pillars of the throne rising from the thorn apart society he had been born into. Pillars, they built on the misery of those living below them, never once dared shake under whatever crushing weight came their way. He had grown privileged. Fear wasn't an option in the menu of life.
And those memories had been tucked away in the back of Kit’s head as until now.
For some reason, they stepped onto the stage, now no longer dusting away behind the red velvet curtains of Whiskertoon’s mind.
They came back.
They never came back before.
Perhaps the world tried to shape Kit into something it wanted.
But now that its organs were collapsing onto itself, maybe the story didn't have to progress how it wanted to progress
Instead
It had to progress how it was meant to progress, art and motion too fight for survival.
If it meant to continue, it could no longer rely on actors playing roles
The stage needed real people
Not people playing pretend, people who had lived. Who had experience.
Who had memories.
“How ironic.”
Kit commented to the audience, not himself.
“Hell was never about pain, but rather an humiliation ritual.”
He paused
“No, a lesson. The problem with my view of this world, inside this limbo or not, is that I gaze at any inconvenience like a stone on my shoe rather than an opportunity to learn. But… Why think of that now? Now isn't the time.”
In a last ditch effort of saving itself, level 94 returned Kit’s memory, for it perhaps would be the only evidence of his existence to remain if, and only if, the pages were thorn.
Give an actor a sketch of a story board—the story won't go as it was meant to be, but it will still play, it will still breathe. Isn't that right?
Might as well let Whiskertoon learn a lesson before the world ends.
The castle was different today.
Kit was already familiar with the drainage of the cartoon effect preying on the castle's innards, but this time, it managed to win.
Its insides were no longer colourful and out of a childhood dream.
They were real.
Disgustingly real compared to the level’s stop motion nature.
It made Kit nauseous down to his gut, to his being.
Decades had passed since he saw something that broke out of cartoon bounds, and it made his head spin.
But he didn't think of that
He thought of something else
“This world feels… alien. It is alien.” — Paw beans swung and turned, a broom woven out of thin air in between them. — “And it might end right now. I get to witness the end of a world that isn't my own.”
.
..
…
“That doesn't matter.”
“If this palace is going to go down the drain—”
Now three steps deeper into the castle, Kit swung his broom above the velvet rug not with the intent of cleaning, but with the intent of caring. The sky was falling atop of him and he was all alone. Might as well care for what wasn't alive, give something else his final vow of love, than mourn himself until the eternal worm devours all that is.
“—It's going down clean. Cared for. I won't let this place be neglected even in its death.”
Against all that built his mentality, the task of a butler was no longer a chore. It was a duty, a life duty that would stay written in the last pages of the playscript of life.
“… Sweet mother of Pearl.”
He whined as he stood before a colorless hall—purely, ultimately stripped of its soul. But he didn't falter, not yet, not this time.
He kept walking
.
And walking.
.
..
And walking..
.
..
…
And walking…
Until…
The throne room, depraved and ripped out of its charm; the colorful dazzling walls, the bedazzled pillars of clay, paper and crafts.
It was all gone.
“Uhm… Reverie?” — His voice rose an octave, yet it felt as quiet as a whisper — “Sweet Bunny Mistress! Ever so dear Animated King, is anyone here?"
…
No one replied.
“Expected.”
“I'll take care of you one final time.”
He swore to himself and the motion as he swept the endless collection of trinkets belonging to the king.
He rubbed
Rubbed
Until it was squeaky clean.
So clean, it reflected—not the nervous cat that stood before them, but an old man with frail skin, nero-tinted hair adorned with silver money pieces. That is who he once was, now begging to be remembered.
He needed someone to remember him, so he resorted to a parody of himself.
“I haven't seen your face in a long time” — He demurred to his own reflection, static and almost dead in nature — “Back when we would climb our way to get ourselves something bigger than the sky.”
.
..
…
“But deep inside, all we wanted was something way more childish.”
A swaying motion took him somewhere else—the tea table. Where he, Reverie and the King laughed and played, where they wrote the script that kept motion in motion. Back when everything was normal and in place.
“The wish for something way more… Mundane. Gifts, presents. The gifts, regardless of how small, were given to us by people we took for granted. But at least we could hold it in our arms and know it's ours.”
A ball jointed doll twitched in place, its appearance strangely familiar. Ginger hair, a grin that could never be wiped out of the toon’s memory regardless of anything. In front of her was a name written in crayon—Tesha.
Kit twitched.
This trap, who had been strangely caring in its nature, decided to play with Kit’s mind one last time.
In its last breath, it allowed Kit to relive his previous life as best as it could recreate it. With the few scraps spared from a story willing to erase itself, it built a stage for Whiskertoon to act one last time.
Not as an animation, but as himself.
The actor left the theatre, he is going home now
Except there's no home to come back to
“But… Just how many more lies will I have to believe in to—”
.
..
…
“—Finally”
He blinked.
Careful, with the last remaining droplets of his real bravado, he brought himself to the mighty throne rising before him—now broken, fragmented into something depressing. Something lame.
…
“Turn this hell into somewhere I can be all done.”
.
..
…
“Somewhere…”
“…Like—”
He sat within the throne's arms, his body not belonging, legs crossed.
But it felt unnatural.
Kit decided on curling onto himself instead.
Not like the man he used to be in Italy.
Not like Tesha’s dear, caring husband.
Not like the successful businessman he was before the world broke below his feet.
Like the animation the plot shaped him to be.
His tail, puffed up with dread and fear, served as a cushion for the side of his face. It caught the tears that kept streaming down into the once velvet cushions of the throne.
“Home.”