Harpo sat on a piece of driftwood that had made its home snugly on the sandy stretch of beach next to one of the few permanent structures on Little Trouble Island: the Island Soul Grill and Bar. He wasn't exactly sure why all four of them had made their winding way towards the colorful, funky structure that was rumored to have no water, but he kept his mouth shut; something inside of him knew he'd know more than perhaps he wanted to very soon.

Buster was already on his second long island iced tea in the bar, and was telling Red, who was behind the bar scrutinizing the hotel's financial records under the new owner, dirty jokes he'd learned from the dregs of toon prison systems over the years. Wakko had been in town all afternoon trying to track down Dot and only now, as the sun began to set over the water, did he make his way back to the Island Soul. He silently declined a cold beer that Red was handing to him and instead looked down the beach and spotted Harpo.

"Any luck?" Red said, interrupting Wakko from his thoughts.

"Hm? Oh, no. No luck," Wakko said. He wiped his brow. "No one's seen her since you left, Red. They said she could be anywhere. You sure this is where she wanted to meet us?"

"Can't think of no other place," Red answered. He looked thoughtful a moment. "Yep, this is the only place it makes sense to meet."

"Well, if you think a Warner is going to do something purely because it makes sense, then you are sadly mistaken," Wakko sighed.

"Look, she'll be along. Dot takes her own sweet time with these things. Give her a day or two. She'll show up." Red smiled reassuringly at Wakko, who didn't return the smile.

"Hey Wakko! You gotta have one of these babies, they're incredible!" Buster said, a little too loudly, holding up the now-empty glass. "I venture a guess that Red is the best goddamn bartender in the Caribbean!"

"Whoa, buddy," Red said, shaking his head. "Obviously you've never had a drink stirred by Miss Dot herself. Why, she can make the tequila sun rise, and make a Bahama out of a mama, you know what I'm sayin'? People used to come from three islands over just to have a little coconut milk and rum shaken by her. Don't say anything about my skills 'til you've tried hers. Hey big bro, what'll it be?" Red said with a smile to Wakko. He pointed to the shelf behind him that was practically collapsing from the amount of liquor bottles perched precariously on the surfaces. "'Champagne, si, agua, no,' you know what I mean?" he laughed.

Wakko shrugged. "No, thanks Red." He grabbed a pack of cigarettes off the bartop and made his way down to where Harpo was sitting. "Hey kiddo," he said quietly, sitting down next to his son on the driftwood.

Harpo looked over at him in surprise. "Don't you even want to have a 'welcome to the Caribbean' drink, Dad?" he said earnestly.

Wakko kicked some sand at his feet. "I'm done with that stuff, Harp," he said. "It's not worth it anymore."

Harpo was astonished but didn't show it. "Good," he said with a somewhat relieved sigh.

"You want to walk?"

"Sure."

The two walked side by side down the beach silently for a few moments, soaking up the atmosphere and the sunset which almost seemed to have a supernatural quality to it. "You know, they always said the sunsets down here were incredible, but I guess I never believed it. Now I know why my sister loved it here so much," Wakko said.

"Dot's your sister?" Harpo asked softly.

"Yeah," Wakko said with a smile. "My little sister. I haven't seen her in fifteen years."

Harpo didn't know how a family could cease contact for that long; he'd only been away from Yakko and Babs for a few days, and although he left out of hurt, he was still missing them terribly. He tried to push this feeling to the back of his mind. If he wasn't wanted somewhere, there was no use in going back. He was going to have to get used to the Warner habit of losing family contact. "Why'd you let me come, Dad?" he blurted out all of a sudden.

If Wakko was surprised by that question, his expression didn't betray it. "I don't know exactly. I suppose if I were a good parent, I wouldn't have let you come. But you said it yourself, Harp. You're a smart kid. You're wise beyond your years and have earned the right to decide what you want to do. And also, I suppose, I never claimed to be a good parent in the first place."

"Why did you and Mom have me?" Harpo asked, swallowing hard. It was a question he'd pondered his entire life. "I was a mistake, right? An accident."

Wakko was silent for a moment before saying, "You want a fairy tale? Or do you want the truth?"

"The truth." With all that Harpo had been through in the last forty eight hours, a little more honesty wasn't going to hurt him.

Wakko sighed, turning his gaze towards the sun in its final moments of light. "Now I wouldn't call you either. If you had asked me seven years ago, who knows? Sometimes I felt that I would die for you. Other times I wanted nothing to do with you. There were times when I had to decide whether to feed you or my alcohol cravings. Sometimes I chose you. Sometimes I chose…well." He shrugged in a defeated way.

"But why her? Why Alballa? Why me?"

"Why God? Why life? Why Yakko, Wakko and Dot, why anything? I don't know, Harpo. I certainly didn't plan my life to be that way. That's just the way things turned out."

A moment of quiet passed between them. Then Wakko felt a hand squeeze his. He looked over to see Harpo smiling up at him. "I forgive you, Dad. I don't want us to hurt anymore."

Wakko felt as though Atlas' burden had just been lifted from his shoulders. He laughed and swung Harpo in the air like he used to when his son was small. He hugged Harpo tightly to him. "You're the best thing that ever happened to me," he whispered in his ear. "I won't let you down, kiddo."

They sat down right where they stood and watched the last of the sunset fade from view. Wakko listened to his son breathe and thought maybe the world wasn't such a bad place after all.

"What was Mom like?"

He was torn from his thoughts by Harpo's question. He laughed gently. "Constance. Haven't thought of her in years."

"My mom's name was Constance?"

"Yes. She was a waitress in Toontown when I met her. Things got too serious too fast one night when my regular date didn't show up, and well…we were kicked out of the store room by the manager, but the deed had already been done."

"I'm the result of a night of drunken passion…in a restaurant store room?"

"Yes," Wakko said slowly, praying Harpo wouldn't be angry. Instead, however, he heard hearty laughter floating up from the direction of his son. Wakko raised an eyebrow. "You think its funny?"

"Yeah, I do!" Harpo laughed. "God help me, I think that's hilarious!"

Wakko laughed too, more out of relief than humor. "She was fired for it. A while later we found out she was pregnant, and we moved to Alballa because that's where some of her family lived. I wanted to stay in Toontown, but she'd have none of that."

"But, Dad, I thought us toons had to be drawn by an animator. That's what Yakko told me."

This time it was Wakko's turn to burst into peals of laughter. Humans had the 'birds and bees' talk; toons had the 'ink and animators' talk. Both of them were equally ridiculous. "Sounds like something he'd say," Wakko giggled.

Harpo wasn't quite sure why his dad was laughing, but ignored it. "Was Mom a human or something?"

"Constance? No, she was all toon, too. Some toons are drawn by animators. We – my brother, sister and I, I mean – were drawn by an animator. But Harpo, the vast majority of toons you see on the streets are born the same way a human being is. Usually, when an animator draws a toon and thereby literally 'creates' them, it is for a specific purpose. Ours was to entertain. Most of the famous toons weren't natural born, they were drawn by an animator. But there's dangers in that – if the animator isn't equipped with the knowledge of things like kinetics, the toons they draw can just be a waste of a sentient being. I've seen toons that can't walk because their animator didn't know anything about fluid movement."

"How do you know so much about this stuff?"

"I had to know it. If I didn't, I could have been killed on our show. All of us could have been. Humans aren't so well versed in human physics, so I either had to have a working knowledge of what I could and could not do, or die in the process of making a cartoon. It's happened before."

"What do you mean, 'die'?"

"One of the oldest gags in the book is to have a fifty ton anvil fall on a toon's head, right? And the toon can bounce right back up and be no worse for the wear. All that stuff is written into the script, whether it looks accidental or not. A toon knows that anvil's coming. If a toon knows something like that is about to happen – that they're about to be smashed by an anvil, or hit with a mallet – then it won't hurt us. It can't. But if you take a toon by surprise, then we're as fragile as any human being."

"How can we be, though? We're just ink!"

"Not true. That's like saying a human is just flesh. Just bones. We're made up of different stuff, but we're definitely more than ink."

Harpo crossed his arms. "All right then, how do you explain toons having to get re-inked or face death? We can get a thousand anvils dropped on us, but if our ink fades away, then we're goners!"

"So? That's just the way we're made. If you spend your whole life trying to figure out why you exist, then you'll miss the whole point of existence. To live." Wakko smiled at his son.

"Wonder why Yakko never told me this stuff," Harpo said with a sigh, leaning back on the sand with his hands behind his head.

"Yakko's always been a little skittish with things like the facts of life," Wakko cackled. "He could talk blue on camera without flinching, but he's pretty modest off camera."

"If the people on your cartoon developed the show around your personalities, why are you so different off camera?" Harpo asked.

"Well, we're not so different. Let's see. If it had been strictly based on our actual personalities…Yakko would have been the egotistical, tight-lipped intellectual. I would have been the rowdy brawler. Dot would have been the one with the 'fuck the world' attitude. I don't know. Not such a great premise for a show, eh? But close enough."

"I guess I see your point. Sort of like the right idea, but the wrong details." He sighed. "Dad…I don't think I want to go back to Toontown."

"You never have to if you don't want to," Wakko said quickly. He touched his nose gently and felt a sharp pain. He still hurt where his brother had hit him, and thus he was in no hurry to return to Toontown, either. "Believe me, kid. You can go wherever you want and do whatever you want. The world is bigger and more wonderful than you and I can ever comprehend. That's the beauty of it. The world is open to you."

"Yeah…" Harpo said slowly, looking longingly up at the stars. "The whole wide world…"