Chapter 4 – Deadly Shadows
What I didn't know was that Coluv actually existed. That dream I had faded away like a distant memory even though it was fresh in my mind when I awoke this morning. Apparently, there was something he thought he needed to accomplish at Slappy's house. He arrived at the front door and knocked three times. Slappy, being inside her house, simply relaxing in front of the TV and watching a copy of her old cartoon show on video cassette. The knocking on the door came as an unwelcome interruption. However, she actually didn't have to get up at all when she heard her nephew call out, "I'll get it Aunt Slappy." The kid rushed to the front door to be greeted by the tip of a sword in his little gut. Barely realizing what had happened, Skippy first looked up at the man who had knocked on the door and then lowered his head to see what the strange feeling was in the pit of his stomach. When he realized that a long sharp piece of metal had been thrusted through him, Skippy slowly backed away from the blade and used both of his arms to cover the bleeding wound.
He slowly made his way back to his trusted aunt as his strength quickly faded. "Aunt Slappy?" He made an attempt to say. His voice had weakened and he was only able to say his words at half of their usual volume. Slappy noticing that there was something different in his voice, turned in her chair to look in her nephew's direction only to see him drop to his knees in pain and with a hole piercing through his gut and blood gushing out. Her first instinct was to rush to his aid to see if what she had feared was true or not. She quickly found herself holding the boy's head up as she spun him around to lay him on his back. "No, no." She said under her breath as she found her hand had slipped inside the wound. She pulled it out and her fingers were coated with his crimson blood. At this point, Coluv pushed his way through the front door and faced off against the distraught Slappy. Kneeling down to face her at eye level, he peered into her eyes and spoke to her in a dark, sinister voice that was drenched with blood lust and pure evil. "Where is he?" He asked the old grey squirrel. For once in her life, Slappy wasn't able to think of a solution gag for the situation. "Cartoons can't die. Cartoons can't die. Cartoons can't die." She repeated to herself out loud just at Coluv, rose his sword in the air. The sword was a slightly odd shape but, still resembled a Japanese katana blade. A diamond-cut ruby stone was embedded in the butt end of the hilt as well was kept in place by a gold ribbon. The actual handle was made of a clear, transparent material resembling glass and was hollow on the inside. The hand guard of the sword was oval shaped and had a knuckle guard that was shaped similar to a rose stem that ended around three fourths down the glass handle and was around a quarter of an inch wide. A right-angle-triangle shaped piece of gold connected the blade to the hilt. The actual blade was a dull silver color and extended about the average length of a katana. (Around thirty six to thirty eight inches long.) Skippy's blood was coating around an inch of the blade's tip. When Coluv finally brought the blade down, Slappy's agonizing scream could be heard echoing through the entire park.
When I returned to the park, I noticed a crowd gathered around Slappy's tree. Curious, I went and joined them to see what was going on. From beyond the crowd of people, I noticed that Slappy's entire property was quarantined off by police tape. Gazing in to the tree the best that I could, the only thing I could see was a forensics team and maybe a pool of what seemed like a blood trailing from the front door to the living room. "What happened here?" I asked myself out loud. Slappy and Skippy were nowhere to be found. Forensics couldn't even find a body for the pools of blood inside the house.
A few hours passed by and eventually the crowd dispersed back to their homes. Even I made my way back to the tree house that Slappy allowed us to stay in. When I arrived there, I entered the front door and called to my brothers realizing that they probably needed a reason to make fun of me and I preferred to get the hazing over with sooner rather than later. "Yakko? Wakko?" I called. There was no answer. At first I thought that they might be out causing havoc without me, until I noticed a piece of paper on the dining table. It was a note written by Yakko with a little map drawn on the bottom. The note read, "Hey sis, Wakko and I are gonna chill at the 'water front'. Meet us there if you can." Just to let you know, during the production of season two, the three of us wandered off of the set and got horribly lost in a nearby forest. We eventually found our way to a seventeen foot tall waterfall area that was somehow spring fed from the top. The waterfall emptied out into a seven foot deep creek that carved its way through the forest and made muddy shorelines during the fall and spring. It was a wonderful sight, though still unexplained. The wall the waterfall followed had two paths leading to the top, one on each side. In the middle of the top of the waterfall, a large rock protruded out around six feet and simply hung in the air. The waterfall itself was around ten feet wide and thus made the creek ten feet wide as well. The water was cool and crystal clear and the sound of the waterfall offered a stress reliever on occasions.
It took me a good chunk of time to find my way back to the 'water front', as we named it, and it was nearing late afternoon when I got close enough to see my brothers. The strange thing was, they were tied up and hung from the rock in the middle of the top of the waterfall with some rope. There were cloth gags around their mouths and they were mumbling repeatedly when they finally spotted me. "This isn't obvious." I said to myself. As I climbed up the left side of the rock wall that dumped all of the water over I called to them, "So who is it this time? Mr. Director, Hello Nurse, one of the other villains we've annoyed and..." As I reached the top, I felt a sharp pain tinge at my back. In a few seconds, the pain moved through my back, passed my stomach and the blade of a sword erupted out of my flesh. My crimson blood spurted some from the initial wound. However, as long as the sword didn't move much, my blood's flow was partially blocked. Suddenly, a large arm wrapped itself around my neck, holding my body up and keeping me from falling. Clenching my teeth together at the intense pain, and closing my eyes tightly, I never expected to hear a familiar voice whisper in my ear. "Where is he? I know you know where he is." The voice sounded just like Loc's voice. Startled I opened my eyes quickly and looked over to my right ear, into which the person had whispered into. It wasn't Loc, but Coluv from my dream, his black silky hair draping over his deadly green eyes as he leaned over to look at my eyes directly.
My eyes shifted, and I caught a glimpse of both of my brothers with horrified looks in their eyes, trying to cry out to me, but the scarves muffling their words. Coluv raised his voice with anger and frustration. "Where is he? Where is Vuloc?" With blood coming up my throat, I tried to speak and tell him that I had no idea who he was talking about, but all I did was choke. Suddenly, he took his arm away from my neck and quickly pulled the sword out of my body and I began to fall forward, my strength leaving me faster than I could think. The last thing that happened before I blacked out was watching Yakko struggle to pull the gag off of his mouth and around his neck simply to scream my name. I did black out seconds before Coluv flipped the sword around and thump the ruby into the wound he had just made in my body. By doing this he ensured that my body fell forward and I plunged into the cold ten foot deep water. The creek was moving at a pretty good pace somehow and I was quickly swept downriver of it and disappeared among the trees. Yakko, watching me be swept downriver with blood seeping out of my body and staining the water as it followed the current, was wrought with fear. Wakko, as well. At this point he would have chewed through the handkerchief gag and have and most likely said something off color or borderline obscene. However, with what just happened, he too was overcome with fear. "Why would you do that?" Yakko asked with a mixture of anger, fear, loss and despair in his voice. "What kind of person are you?" Coluv merely lifted his head and stared at Yakko with solely his left eye. "Perfection", was his only answer.
A half-mile down the creek, my body was washed ashore in the mud. Dirty, wounded and covered in my own blood, I was convinced that I was going to die where I was. The only regret I had was that I never got to go on that date with Loc. My vision fading and with hardly any strength in my body, I painfully shifted my head to the left as I thought that I heard rustling in the nearby brush and trees. The image I saw was horribly blurred and I couldn't identify whether or not it was a person or a wild animal. It didn't matter anyway, my eyes closed as the last of my strength gave out and I thought I was gonna finally escape all of this pain forever. My life flashed before my eyes and the one question that constantly ran through my mind was, "What's going to happen to my brothers?"
During my absence, that monster, Coluv, continued his hunt for the man called 'Vuloc'. Relentlessly pursuing everything that I had come in contact with since I first saw Loc. He even pursued the rest of our toon friends. His first stop was to Dr. Scratchansniff and Hello Nurse. He entered the front door, rounded up the doctor and nurse, and asked them the same question he asked Slappy and I, and when they couldn't answer, their pained screams were heard echoing through the movie lot.
Pain began to twinge through my body once again and my eyes opened up slowly. At first my vision was still blurry, but it wasn't long until it cleared up though. I shifted my head to try and see if this was heaven or not. It wasn't, I found myself in a log cabin that was only lightly furnished with random fixed up pieces of furniture. Nothing matched and most of it looked like it was hand carved with a pocket knife. I was lying on a bed made from the same wood and had only a twin mattress resting on it for comfort. The blankets that were covering my body however, were probably store bought and fairly warm. Feeling some of my strength returning, I decided to try and stand up. However, the moment I shifted my torso, the pain intensified and I was unable to move beyond simply lifting myself up six inches. I flopped back down onto the mattress and gasped for air and relief from the pain. Hearing me cringe, the person who rescued me came into the room holding a bowl of what smelled like homemade chicken soup. The moment I turned my gaze to look at him, I immediately recognized him. "Loc?" I weakly spoke out in shock. He shrugged his shoulders and replied, "Guess you've found my get away place." "I thought you had to work late." I said to him slightly irritated and yet grateful to him. "Yah that's the thing... I haven't been completely honest with anyone since I arrived on this planet ten years ago." It took a while to figure out that he said "planet" and not "city". I simply raised my left eyebrow to show him that I was confused. "I'll tell you the story after I heal you for now." He said. Now I was even more confused, but I didn't have much strength to argue with him.
He slid his hand behind my back and gently lifted me up to a sitting position. It was excruciatingly painful. After he sat me up, he gently rested his right hand on the wound in my back and his left hand on the wound in my stomach. He then closed his eyes and mumbled something to himself that sounded something like, "Kat Du Vastros". Suddenly, his hands began to glow a shining pearl color, the glowing slowly began to envelop my body. (Now would be a good time to insert jokes of your liking.) As the glowing got brighter, I started to feel my physical strength return to me and the pain subsided all at once. He continued this for around a half of an hour before the glowing began fading quickly. When the whole thing was over, my body felt more relaxed than after message sessions. "Sorry," Loc said slightly weakened. "It looks like it's gonna take a little longer to completely heal your injury." "Well that's alright but, how are you doing that? How did that sword injure me in the first place?" I asked him. "Well, looks like I'm gonna have to tell you my story...without tailoring." His voice grew sad and wishful as he told me the story of his people and how he came to Earth. "I'm not even human, Dot. I'm called a Valkyrian, I was born on a planet known as Valkyria." "What's it like there?" I asked out of curiosity. I thought at first that he might be annoyed with any questions that I asked during his story. But, it was just the opposite. He smiled as he answered my first question. "It is a beautiful planet, filled with wondrous creatures, water so clean you could see the bottom of every ocean, fruit that was both wonderful and exotic." He stopped and sighed at the memories of his home world. I could see a teardrop escape from his eye and roll down his cheek.
"But that all changed the day I took the sage's test." "What does that mean, Loc?" I asked confused and kind of needing a back story to catch up. Loc then straightened up his back and said to me, "My name isn't actually 'Loc'... It's Vuloc." I almost shot out of bed when he told me his real name. However, the pain came back as I moved. Vuloc then placed his left hand on my stomach and gently kept me from moving too much. "That man asked me where you were before he tossed me into the creek." I groaned. "So he is looking for me." Vuloc responded. "Who exactly is he?" I asked with my own frustration. Vuloc looked into my eyes before he answered, "Coluv. Its Valkyrian translation means 'other Vuloc'. It literally is my name spelled in reverse." I thought about it for a moment and said, so my 'other self' would be named..." And Vuloc interrupted, "Ssecnirp Anilegna Assetnoc Asiuol Acsehcnarf Ananab Annaf Ob Annab the Third." He said it as if he had been speaking reverse his whole life. Then he added, "But you can call her Tod." Just to be coy. I simply lay there dumbfounded at the ridiculousness of my name said in reverse. It was actually pretty funny sounding and I have no idea why I never tried to say it like that before. (Probably because I would have bitten my tongue something awful simply practicing it.) Then I asked, "What is Coluv, your evil twin or something?"
At that moment, Vuloc turned his gaze toward the floor near my bed, trying to avoid eye contact with me. "In a sense, he is me." Shocked and confused I had no idea why he would stab me, heal me with some sort of super power and then admit it to me. Noticing that he was rapidly losing my trust, he quickly explained, "It was the result of a spell used during the sage's test. Coluv was literally born from my shadow. We are separate but at the same time he is my dark half." Still confused, he suddenly blurted out, "I use to have blond hair before the separation of good and bad." "Oh." I said finally understanding that Coluv was Vuloc's living shadow. The image of Vuloc with blond hair suddenly made its way into my head and I thought to myself, "Helloooo Nurse!"
"Anyway, I found out that Coluv regarded himself as the perfect being and thinks he can govern the lives and existence of others. He destroyed my entire planet on that principal alone." "Why didn't you try to stop him?" I asked Vuloc. He tipped his head down even farther and now closed his eyes in shame. "Because, I'm a coward. Coluv was destroying my people and I just ran away." I knew how he felt since Coluv had been stalking me looking for Vuloc, I was afraid of him.