Fifi La Fume slowly opened her eyes - it was the first time she's been awake in over ten hours. "Le sigh," the skunkette yawned. "Augh!" She had a huge headache and realized she had been sleeping between two planks of wood. She jumped off the train tracks she had been sleeping on; scared for a moment that she was in the path of an oncoming train. But all the steam locomotives that surrounded her were idle - she was in a trainyard.
She looked around at the streamlined behemoths that filled the yard; they were unlike anything she had ever seen, especially since they all had "faces" - mechanical eyes where their marker lights are supposed to be and steel smiles on the front of their boilers. It gave Fifi a very eerie sensation to have the 16-foot tall pieces of machinery to be "smiling" with lifeless eyes, giving the false appearance of each locomotive being sentient. To add to Fifi's discomfort, she could not see anyone else present in the train yard; she was all alone in silence with the locomotives. But at least it was daytime.
Fifi began walking throughout the yard, a feeling of adrenaline that arose from being around these beautiful yet creepy machines prompted her to turn her walk into a run - she began to explore!
And as she went about her exploration throughout the trainyard, she saw that she wasn't alone in this desolate place; but she was pretty close to being so: Her and a gray coyote - Calamity Coyote - were the only two in the yard. Calamity was dressed in denim overalls, yellow gloves, a yellow trucker hat with a blue bill, and his usual pink high-top sneakers; he held an oil can which he used to service the pistons of a Southern Pacific GS-3 steam locomotive painted in red, orange, and black Daylight colors. Behind it were an oil tender and an auxiliary water tender.
"Ooh la la!" Fifi jumped up with excitement and hearts in her eyes. "J'ai such a zhing with these techno-whizz boys!" She jumped again, this time onto the handcar that was standing on the track right next to her.
Calamity was wiping off sweat from his brow when he could smell an unpleasant stench while hearing a squeaking noise - the squeaking of Fifi pumping the handcar rowards himbon the track adjacent to the GS-3 locomotive. He turned around and when he saw her, his jaw dropped in shock.
"Bonjour, monsier Calamity Coyote! It has been quite a long time since our days at zhe Looniversity, no?" She parked the hand car next to the coyote and the locomotive.
Calamity clenched his jaw while sweating buckets and his legs shivered; he had no idea what to say to such an attractive woman.
Fifi jumped off the handcar and warmly embraced him with her tail by wrapping it around his body as if it were a boa constrictor. "Of course, I am pretty sure you remember us being in a similar situation to right now zhirty years ago, don't you, my little playboy?"
As she began to hug him while kissing his neck, Calamity was now overtaken by the same stench he had already encountered - although this time it smelled much more intense. He pulled out the picket sign that read, "Skunk!" as he gasped for breath, almost suffocating under the sensation before finally breaking free from her grasp and breaking loose.
But Fifi gave chase, and she was bigger and stronger than him - and quicker than him for that matter. "Don't zhink you can outrun me, I want to taste zhat coyote cock of yours!"
After playing cat-and-mouse around the locomotive and its two tenders three times, the coyote had gone out of Fifi's sight. She looked around for a minute until a hiss of steam came from the cylinders. She looked up and can see Calamity in the engineers seat on the right hand side of the cab as the locomotive began to move forward with a lurch.
Calamity opened the throttle as wide as it goes to get away from the skunkette, but as he did, he was hit again with that awful smell. He turned his head over his shoulder as the locomotive continued to accelerate in speed; and once again, he was met with a jump scare to see Fifi was along for the ride with him. Shuddering in front of the burning boiler, Calamity had been cornered by her in the cab.
"Don't be so nervous, my little Mensa man," Fifi said excitedly as she covered her lips with lipstick and then slowly approached the scared Calamity.
Meanwhile, the locomotive they were aboard continued to climb speed. Twenty-five miles per hour...then thirty...then thirty-five.
Calamity was sandwiched between the courting skunk and the Firefox door to the boiler that contained the hellish fire that powered the engine; he was so uncomfortably close to it, he felt the tip of his tail was about to catch fire. He had only one thing left to do: He pulled a zipper on his back to reveal he was actually...
"Shirley!" Fifi yapped.
Shirley McLoon took the Calamity suit she was in and threw it out the window of the locomotive, which was now cruising at fifty miles per hour. "Yeah, yeah, I so totally know. It's me. I had to attract your aura somehow, and the the only way to do that was to dress up as a boy."
"Shirley! Who are you to manipulate me like zhat?!"
"Well like, you're totally easily to manipulate, my beautiful bimb, but that's why I love you!"
"And now you have us stuck on a speeding train heading to...God knows where!"
"I know; we're stuck together in such a dangerous situation. Isn't this like so romantic? If we died in a crash or a boiler explosion, we'll die together a happy couple; I would rather not be with any other soul. We can live out our next lives together! Whaddaya say, babe?!"
Shirley stared at Fifi with googly eyes and a smirk on her face while Fifi, true to her name, fumed with anger; steam came out of her noise with each heavy breath she took. Behind them, the speed-o-meter needle surpassed seventy miles per hour.
"Just...give moi a moment to recover from this moment to recover." Fifi turned her back to Shirley and took a few steps toward the tender. She took a deep breath before continuing "What are you doing here, Madame McLoon?"
"I am on a this train to-"
"Non! Why did we have to meet again? How did you find me in the ACME Bank parking lot? Why did you seek me out and court me? What significance do I still carry to you?"
"It's the Tiny Toons Reunion!"
"I don't believe zhat for a moment. Maybe if you were Monsier Babs or Madame Buster. But you, you know I told you never to contact me again, and yet you did."
"I wanted to take you back...and I still do! I've opened up my seven chakras since our breakup, and only then have I realized we were meant to be!"
"I'm afraid it's too late for zhat, especially since you were the one who decided you didn't want me in the first place. I am apparently not good enough for zhe great fortuneteller McLoon."
"But-"
"Now if you'll excusez-moi, I must find out which of zhese levers is zhe break so we can get this train stopped before-"
"AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!"
Both girls looked out the cab women on the engineer's side to see that the blood-curdling scream had come from the locomotive itself; it had become anthropomorphicised with a mouth grown on the front of its boiler in addition to its marker light eyes. Another train was heading on the same track in the opposite direction; a Southern Pacific GS-2 steam locomotive painted in a two tone grey paint scheme with matching passenger cars; a winged insignia painted on the front of each side of the locomotive's running boards indicated that the train it's pulling is called the Lark.
"Shirley, we gotta stop zhis here tr-"
The firebox door burst open to reveal a raging fire blazing inches from catching Fifi's tail on fire; she looked at the speedometer gauge to see that the needle on it was past the one-hundred-mile-per-hour mark. Then, the fire extinguished itself as she felt a force pull herself towards it. Fifi grabbed the engineer's chair to fight the force, but her resistance was futile as she was sucked instantly inside of the boiler into what was at first a black void. But that black void began to morph into a rectangular room wallpapered with stripes alternating between two shades of gray. Giant, fifty-foot paintings with textured, enamel gold frames lowered themselves into view so as to be hung on the wall.
Fifi gasped as she looked up and saw that there was no ceiling in sight, but rather the cosmos of outer space serving as a make-shift ceiling dozens of feet into the air. Illuminating the room was the locomotive's boiler head with the fire burning once more; it sat against the wall as a living room fireplace.
But of all the strange things in there to make the gape on the skunkette's mouth even larger, nothing came close to the amount of shock she got from seeing what the enormous paintings contained: Each one contained a picture of Fifi and Shirley together; each one drastically different from the others. One contained a picture of 18-year-old Fifi, Shirley, and Babs playing Spin the Bottle by the lit fireplace inside of the Slumber Party Mountain Cabin. She was once again pulled her off her feet by a force and sucked inside of the painting.
But now she wasn't just inside of the painting, she was now inside the cabin with Babs, Shirley, and her younger, teenage self.
"So how's the perfume business working out, Feef?" Babs said as she spun the empty beer bottle. "You're quite the prodigy, aren't ya, my skunk buddy? Opening a business as soon as you become a legal adult."
"Oh, Babsy, zhe business is going great! I've rented a location at the ACME mall and I've already sent out shipments nationwide." Fifi giggled when she found the bottle had stopped spinning and was pointing directly at her. "Ooh la la, Babsy! Monsier Bunny - no relation - is going to kill you for what you're about to do to me!"
"Eh, we still have no relation, so I might as well take advantage of that before we do have a relation." Babs raised her right paw to reveal a ring on her index finger.
The other two girls gasped in surprise.
"O-M-G! Looks like Ms. La Fume isn't the only one who got hit by adulthood like a freight train!" Shirley exclaimed as she began to spin the bottle.
"Well, Mademoiselle McLoon, je suis an adult now, which means I am now legally able to pursue moi dreams. I am a skunkette of action, and-"
Fifi watched her younger self freeze when she saw the bottle landed directly at her.
"Why I'd be getting much more positive vibes kissing you, Fifi, than a certain player mallard boy," Shirley commented snidely. "Now give me one of your perfumes so my breath doesn't close your chakras while our lips bond."
A few feet behind the action, Fifi's heart pounded inside of her chest as she was reliving one of the most important memories of her entire life.
"Apres all mes ans of chasing boys, I never thought my first kiss would be by a girl without any effort. Well, here you go moi finest bottle of Repression as zhat is zhe word zhat describes moi mood, maintenant."
"Jeez, don't be such a Kristen Stewart, there. It's just a game," Babs remarked.
"Yeah, you might totally like smooching us girls if you opened your heart like I have opened my chakras. After giving women a chance, there's now a very big reason I don't want anything to do with P-L-U-C-K-Y. Now I know how Furrball, Calamity, and Hamton feel."
"Now, zhat statement is uncalled for, Madame Shirley. Vous take zhat back."
"Only if you have the, dare I say it, balls to smooch me" - Shirley sprayed the bottle of Repression into her mouth - "Now pucker up, girlie."
Fifi's current self shuddered and sweated as her she watched the younger version of herself lean in and pucker up; and the younger Shirley did the same. Then, it happened.
Fifi quickly shoved her face and smooched Shirley's bill, but the loon wasn't impatient like her skunk friend, and she clung to Fifi's body tightly while pressing her own tongue against the skunkette's tongue.
Meanwhile on the sidelines, the La Fume of 2021 could feel the same emotions she felt on that very same day back in 1994. She watched herself reciprocate the kiss by warmly embracing her loon friends body with her arms, and Shirleys tongue with her tongue creating a lengthy French kiss. She savored the moment and as did Shirley; she did not want the kiss to end. But before it did, Fifi's scent started to come out and her eyes opened to reveal red hearts where her pupils were.
"Ewwww! What are you doing, Feef!?"
The time-stopping moment ended when Fifi found she had peed a little on Shirley, staining the bottom of her pink shirt.
"Je suis desolee, Shirley! I tend to go, how you say, wee wee when I get...you know, excited," Fifi ended that statement with an embarrassed smile and a blush.
But Shirley only held up a finger to Fifi's lips and said with a smirk on her face and her eyes half-closed, "Shhhhhhh. I never said I didn't like being peed on, babygirl! Whatever that was that just happened, I want some more of it!"
Fifi let out a scream of joy and pounced on Shirley as the two aggressively began to make out while moaning and losing complete control of their bodily fluids.
"My eyes!" Babs screamed, horrified. "Time for me to leave this cabin like my lunch is about to...HAUUUGH...leave my stomach."
Babs then puked in the fireplace, extinguishing the fire and causing the memory to fade to black; Fifi was immediately ejected back into the grand hallway with its fifty-foot paintings. For a brief moment she was floating between twenty and thirty feet above the red, carpeted floor. Then, she slowly found herself being sucked into another painting across the room from the memory she had just witnessed; this painting displayed the girls, now women, in their early twenties standing outside Fifi's abandoned 1959 pink Cadillac. The summer sun shined on its paint scheme causing it to gleam; it looked pretty chipper for a piece of scrap. Shirley stood right next to it waving to Fifi who walked away with two suitcases in each paw, and she bore her United States Army uniform for the first time ever. She turned around towards Shirley to wave back at her as sbe uttered her goodbye: "Au revoir, Shirley, mon petite potato du couch!"
"Goodbye, my sugary rainbow of nothing but the color purple!"
"Oh, Shirley! Mon babe. I love eet when vous say zhings zhat don't make any sense! And I'll certainly miss hearing zhose zhings along with sleeping avec toi! I'll have to settle for sleeping alone in a cold barrack!"
"Yeah, like, about that, babe! Don't you dare scissor any of the gals while you're there!" Shirley called with a playful wink.
"It might be tempting to do so! How else am I going to get moi daily dose of pleasure!?" Fifi responded with a playful wink of her own.
Shirley gasped and a look of shock took over her face. "You can't be totally serious right now, babe! After all our failed attempts to get me pregnant you want to try and make another girl pregnant!?"
"Ha! Vous etes one funny duckling, mon amour, but I submit to vous and only to vous! We're engaged, I got my citizenship and will now be serving mon new pays. We have lots of time to settle down. A bientot, mon amour!"
Fifi began to finally walk away while her girlfriend continued to enthusiastically wave from behind...
"Wait! Oh, Shirley!" Fifi dropped her bags right at the exit of the junk yard, turned around, and began to bolt back to where Shirley was standing. "Speaking of settling down - zhat reminds me!"
"Did you change your aura about leaving me for the next few years!?"
"Non, mon cheri...it's about zhe, you know, ozher zhing."
Shirley rolled her eyes with a smirk on her face. "Yes, honey. For the forty-fifth time, Fifi La Fume's Perfumes will be managed in the perfectly good, feathered hands of yours truly."
"And what is zhe Perfume Promise, again?"
"We believe in taking care of the Customer,
the Associate and each other.
We believe in hard work,
fair play, behaving professionally,
and winning.
And,
We believe each of us
is responsible for our
own business and our own behavior," Shirley said monotonously.
Fifi jumped in the air and clapped her hands while letting out a squeal.
"You know you literally just copied and pasted the Waffle House creed, right?"
"Waffle House produces food reminiscent of home! Maybe if zhey try a leetle harder, zhey can produce waffles half as good as La France and mes voisins, zhe Belgians."
"Well, I got your little copypasta down. Anything else, madame?"
Fifi's demeanor changed to that of being more serious. "You're first order of business is to change zhe storefront sign. It's Fifi La Fume, not Fifi Le Fume."
"Right, and it's Wingardium Leviosaaaa, not Wingardium Levi-o-sa!"
Fifi let out a high pitched giggle. "I knew you'd get me, mon amour!"
Shirley winked in response, and right after she did, the voices of the two girls saying their final good-byes started to fade into unintelligible echoes. Fifi could still make out herself waving, picking up her suitcases, and walking out of the Acme Junk Yard while the color faded away into black and white. Last thing she knew, she was sucked back into the hall; once again floating in the air of this strange, green room.
"Augh! What eez zhis place anyway? What eez going on? Why am I ici? And who in zhe hell would keep zees giant, magical portraits of moi et a girl I no longer - how you say - rendezvous avec!"
Immediately, the fire that lit up the room extinguished itself, and for a moment, Fifi sat alone in pitch black. Terrified, Fifi started to panic.
"What is going on!? Please, someone! Zhere 'as to be someone ici!"
Fifi's body trembled from her knees to her shoulders, while she sweat so hard that she felt as if she were bathing in her own sweat!
"Augh! What is zhat fowl stench! It smells like mon cat's litterbox!"
In the darkness, a thunderousvoice bellowed in response to her comment. "You know, I wouldn't be commenting on how bad the stench is when you're a skunk, young lady!"
The voice was unlike any voice she had ever heard; it sounded as if it were double-layered: two voices speaking as one; with a higher pitched voice and a lower pitched one speaking in unison from the same person. The insult it had uttered to Fifi was followed by a slow, solemn playing of the opening to the song "Grim Grinning Ghosts" on a pipe organ she wasn't aware was in the room. As the song played, a soft blue light dimly lit the room on gothic, three-lamp fixtures on the wall; it revealed to Fifi that all the paintings had been replaced to display the same, chilling portrait of a sad clown in a red, pointed hat and a yellow, polka-dotted bodysuit complete with a white, ruffled collar sat on a toilet. He also wore the largest frown Fifi had ever seen on his whiteface with a lit cigarette belching a trail of smoke into the air was pinched between his thick, red lips. A river of tears poured from his eye onto the brown ground that was home to dead trees and covered by an ominous, orange-grey sunset.
As the music continued to play, the song finally got to the part where a modified version of the original lyrics began to be sung by that same voice whom had insulted Fifi:
"When hinges creak in doorless chambers,
and strange and frightening sounds echo through the halls - "
A flash of lightning illuminated the room, and for a brief moment Fifi could see the pipe organ that was being played on the opposite side of the room from the fireplace - except no one was playing it. The keys were moving, playing the notes that were being played, but no one was pushing them.
" - whenever candle lights flicker, where the air is deathly still, that is the time when Boomer is present, practicing his terror with clownish delight."
The music paused, and as it did, Fifi had noticed something different about the sad clown paintings on the wall: the colors of the entire portrait had faded to blacks and whites. The clown's clothes had changed color from flamboyant, "circus-like" colors to white with black polka dots. But even more strange to the purple skunkette was that a single streak of real water was running from the clown's left eye down the portrait; it was almost as if some magical force brought his tears to life.
Lightning flashed again, and again, and again. The organ began playing in full forte, as Fifi could see the organ again, she could also see that someone was now sitting in front of it and playing it - someone with a bald, egg-like head wearing a polka-dotted bodysuit with a ruffled collar and oversized shoes.
As lightning continued to flash, and as the organ solo played dramatically, Fifi gasped when she saw what was now being displayed on every single portrait: A single, blood-red insignia of a clown face with a shrill, soul-piercing smile against a solid white backdrop with three splatters of blood in the exact same hue of red around the top of it. All around the room, each copy of the same insignia on every picture frame was smiling down on her; the insignia had nothing but the color white filling its slanted eye sockets that gave it the appearance of a devil's spawn. Each pair of "eyes" seemed to not just be staring down on her, but also at her, judging her with their soulless eyes and threatening smiles.
As discomforted as she was with everything, Fifi finally gained the courage to walk towards the person playing on the organ and yell, "Enough!"
The organ playing came to an abrupt stop.
"Enough with zhis madness!" she continued. "What is going on!? Why are you trying so hard to scare moi? Showing me flashbacks of me avec mon ex-girlfriend and everyzhing! What is zhe meaning of zhis!? Why are you here? Why am I here!?"
The organist rose up from the stool, revealing a tall, slim body at least six-and-a-half feet tall; but he did not turn around to show his face. He remained standing at the organ, and as he did, Fifi caught a glimpse of his gnarled, spider-like hands resting in front of the keyboard; with extremely long fingers that looked like the legs of a giant daddy long legs.
After a brief pause, he finally spoke in that same, thunderous voice.
"You know why so many people find clowns fascinating?"
Fifi mumbled something that was supposed to be an answer to the question, but the man continued to speak.
"It's because everyone wants to hide who they truly are from the world. Deep down, nobody really likes the person that looks back at them in the mirror. They want to be something else. Or they want to mask who they truly are. What better way to do that with a little greasepaint and a red nose? Of course, we go a little deeper than that here on the Polar Express. We aren't your everyday garden-variety clowns. We take the suffering and pain we've spent years bottling up and put it on display. With us, what you see isn't a smokescreen. The nasty, vicious façades we wear are a reflection of the darkness we all harbor inside ourselves. Every person you come into contact with wears more than one face. An evil clown face is simply the one we choose to show the world. If one of us is a cold-blooded killer and is responsible for the death of that girl then the face they put on display probably won't give that fact away."
Fifi gasped and her eyes widened in horror. "Quoi!? Death of what girl!? Who are vous talking about who has died!?"
But the man ignored her and continued his monologue as if she never interrupted. "You have to learn to look behind the makeup to see who the person truly is. But be warned, when a person let's down their guard enough to show who they really are, that's when they are the most dangerous. That's when they have the most to lose."
Fifi only cared about the part he said about the dead girl. "But s'il vous plait! Tell moi who is zhis girl who has died!? C'est someone avec whom I know!?"
At this point, she was hyperventilating in an intense panic, but all the man did was stand at the organ, once again silent. Then, his head started to shake as if something were boiling inside of it.
It was soft at first, but then it grew started to become more intense. The man's head started shaking faster and harder. The whole room began to shake along with it. All of the picture frames, the fireplace, and Fifi fell off her feet as everything she could see became absorbed in an earthquake.
The giant picture frames all began to fall of the wall, causing the skunkette to take cover by hurling herself towards the side of the room with the organ and the source of this man-made earthquake.
The picture frames all collapsed behind her into millions of pieces with a sound of magnificent volume.
And then, with the scream of a banshee, the man, now a mere feet from Fifi, turned around to finally show his face. In a single rapid, movement, his head simultaneously grew three times it's size to being fifteen feet tall. But all Fifi could see of his face were two, brightly glowing red eyes that accompanied his blood-curdling scream.
And that was the last thing Fifi saw before finally taking up in the backseat of her abandoned, 1959 pink Cadillac she called home in a cold, hyperventilating sweat and with a severe migraine. She breathed so hard that she felt as if she were to suffocate.
Even worse, was that a god-awful smell accompanied her. As Fifi got out of her "bed," she realized with a huge sense of embarrassment that she was still wearing the diaper she had worn the night prior...which was now soiled. With her face blushing, Fifi rushed over to the window, rolled it down, unstrapped the diaper, and chucked it across the freezing, snowy junkyard.
It was already nighttime again, and Fifi wondered how long she had been asleep, as well as who or what brought her home after she passed out drunk the night prior. But before she rolled her window back up to block more cold air from coming in, she noticed a letter sitting on the ground directly outside her car.
She opened the door, picked it up, and saw her name written on the envelope. But whay was stramge was that it did not have a stamp on it, meaning that it was not delivered by the post office. After shutting the door, rolling up the window, and putting on her purple robe, she turned on her reading lamp to open the letter. But before she opened it, that same feeling of horror she had during her dream pierced her heart as she saw that the envelope was sealed with sticker of a very familiar-looking insignia. An insignia she had been before - it contained a red, eyeless clown face with a menacing smile and three spatters of blood around the top of it.
.