Duncan was enveloped inside of it, the black tendrils wrapping their deadly grip onto his body. He had doubled over from the eruption, falling onto his back in surprise. A piece of his face was covered in the dark glitches, and it dripped down the centre of his eyes to his muzzle, melting into his toon flesh. The screams he let out were ear piercing, and painful. These weren't the regular comedic screams of a toon howling in pain; this was the sound of someone who was in pure agony.
He wrestled in its grasp, trying and failing to stand up and rolling into shelves frantically, his form gradually being melted into its growing mass. The scanners were jostled and fell off of the shelves as he went, breaking machinery and toppling shelves.
Sage screamed herself and ran for the hills, dodging to the side as one of the shelves collapsed onto the floor, narrowly crushing her. There was nothing she could do about Duncan. Already, his cries grew more desperate and weaker.
The Warners were following her out, terror written on their faces. They hadn't anticipated something like this to happen, she was sure. In each of their hands, they held a weapon. Yakko carried a paddleball, Wakko carried a mallet and Dot carried a small box.
They stopped her in her tracks by tugging on her shirt, and she nearly tripped over herself. Why were they stopping?
Reluctantly, she turned back around. The screaming had stopped, and only the remnants of Duncan's clothing and fur remained to be absorbed in. She felt sadness for the lost toon. He hadn't deserved a fate like that.
No one did.
"Why are we stopping? We need to leave, now!" Sage yelled, her voice cracking. "That thing just swallowed a toon whole!"
"That's why we need to stop it," Yakko said. "I don't usually play as the hero archetype, but this is important! And I have a plan."
Dot nudged him in the ribs.
"We have a plan," he corrected. "It came from a scanner, so we're going to destroy said scanner!"
The Warners held their weapons in action poses, looking determined.
"Have you lost your minds? It can't touch you!" Sage argued.
There was no time left. It had finished consuming its meal. The way it congealed itself more compactly said it had absorbed some power from the toon's life.
Steadily, it charged up and gained speed, coming towards them aggressively. The Warners dodged out of the way, climbing on top of the shelves with agileness a cat would envy. Sage was left in the middle to face the oncoming mass, and she sprinted to the right to avoid collision.
As the toons headed towards the scanner, it was distracted with her. Ignoring the shelves like they weren't there, it dissolved through the metal bars to reach her. The shelf Wakko was on came in the way, but he leapt off of it in time before it fell.
Sage threw the scanner she was still holding back with all her might, and it hit the mass square in its centre. It pulsed backwards for a moment, the scanner splashing into it like a pebble in water.
That created only a second of distance. It pursued on again, but then hesitated. The crashing of a hard force hitting something metallic rung behind it. The Warners must have reached the scanner after all.
The glitch shuddered, and an otherworldly wail released from inside of it. It sounded vaguely like a whale noise, if said whale was a demented creature from hell. Its form glitched, crackling and stuttering to stay solid.
Sage took this time to run around the shelves and head back towards the Warners to see what they were doing. Her survival instincts told her to leave them behind, but she had to see if they were okay.
Only the tail end of it was around the scanner, and the Warners had gathered a small distance around it so that it wouldn't touch them. They were hitting the scanner with all they got, Wakko's mallet doing the majority of the work. Dot had opened the small box, and inside of it was a purple alien creature that bashed onto the scanner repeatedly with its fists. The red ball at the end of Yakko's paddle made craters on the top.
It turned around to see what was causing the commotion, a wide maw of static opening up with the intention of swallowing them. Sage lifted a fallen scanner from the ground and hit the bronze one with it. Both of the scanners came apart, crumbling under the pressure. All of the shattered components inside fell from her hands as the casing came undone.
The glitch lashed out, struggling to maintain itself. It swerved to the left and right, trying to jab at them, but reeled back in pain before anything hit its target. Static was enveloping its form, and pieces of it were disappearing.
Wakko hit the bronze scanner one last time with the mallet, and it completely flattened. The raging monster squirmed around violently and pixelated out of existence.
Sage let go of the breath she was holding. It was gone.
They did it. Their plan had actually…worked.
The Warners cheered, throwing their weapons away as they held hands and skipped around a circle in celebration. She watched them with a weary smile, her body slumping as the adrenaline released.
A pamphlet on the floor caught her eye. It had a picture of the bronze scanner on its front, and looked to be some sort of instruction manual. She picked it up and unfolded it.
"With the new state-of-the-art Monospace G50, never again will companies have to worry about the long and weary process of frame-by-frame conversion to digital. Toons can be easily transferred from the real world to the computer for easy animating. It makes the entire animation process much less of a hassle!"
Underneath the text, a basic blueprint of the main components for the scanner was explained. There was one piece that stuck out to her among the usual display of digital chips and hardware. The use of the special toon ink. In the blueprint, it was labelled as "ACME black", which was a common official name used by Warner Brothers. It went by multiple from what she knew, referred to differently across animation companies. The blueprint showed an enlarged picture of the vial containing the toon ink, and underneath it detailed how it was put to use.
"Using the ACME black formula, toons that were once transferred to the digital plane and need to go back to the real one are assisted on their journey by the use of this ink. Without it, the toons could come out scattered or half-solid. It is important supplies for this are checked before use."
There was a yellow circle with an exclamation point inside of it on the top right corner of the ACME black picture, which Sage assumed marked the item as essential.
She felt something wet touch her shoe and she lurched back. A large puddle of ink had pooled around the scanner, pouring out from the large cracks in its sides. There was a lot of it, and she wondered if the enlarged picture on the blueprint could have been up to scale after all.
However, there was another thought that tugged at her mind. What if the special ink had something to do with the way that it materializes? It couldn't have been a coincidence that this scanner in particular was the one it had come out of, right? It aligned too perfectly. Regular scanners weren't supposed to have this ink. Now that she thought about it, the printer that had exploded on the seventh floor could have used it as well. That floor usually had people and toons running around to photocopy things. That was one of the floors that produced replicas of existing work in order to sell them.
She gripped the pamphlet tightly, her nerves and her epiphany at a possible lead getting the best of her. This was the first clue that could make sense. It wasn't much, but it was progress and that's what mattered.
The pamphlet was abruptly ripped from her hands. He reached out to snatch it back, but Yakko had already turned around so that she couldn't get to it.
"Hey!" Sage yelped in protest. Yakko ignored her, already nose-deep in the page. She wasn't sure if he was actually reading it or pretending that he was.
Wakko and Dot crowded around Yakko, wanting to see for themselves.
"Move you big galumph, I wanna see!" Dot whined, pushing on Yakko's shoulder. "I wanna see, I wanna see!"
"Not if I can get my hands on it first!" Wakko exclaimed, tugging on the pamphlet with both of his hands.
"Hmmm, boring, boring…uuuhhh this comic book has a lot of pictures, but I can't find a plot anywhere!" Yakko remarked. "How could you stand to read such a tragic thing?"
He turned his head to Sage, judgemental inquiry in his raised brow.
The pamphlet looked like it was about to rip from Wakko's tugging, and Sage reflexively reached to grab it out of their hands. Surprisingly, they let her take it. She clutched it tightly to her chest.
"That's because it's not a comic book! It's an instruction manual for that scanner," Sage explained, pointing down at the destroyed mess on the floor. "And you almost tore it apart when it's actually really important."
"Important how?" Dot questioned. "It looks as boring as the sports section of the newspaper."
"Hey, the sports section is the second best section to the comics!" Yakko argued.
"Yeah! Calvin just scored a homerun last Saturday," Wakko agreed, nodding his head.
"That was a sports themed comic in the comic section, Wakko."
"Oh. Well it was still exciting!"
"Guys! Do you want me to tell you or not?" Sage interrupted. She was getting tired of their constant banter.
"Oh right, right, go on about your "important" schtick," Yakko said, waving a hand in the air.
"Thank you." She sighed. "I have a guess at what is causing it to appear. This special ink," she opened the pamphlet and gestured at it, "is the source of the problem. Something about its properties is causing that monstrous thing to come out of wherever it's being stored. The printer back at Warner Brothers could have had it inside. I think it's the best lead we have."
The Warners had a look of realization. For once, she felt like they had truly listened to something she had said. They each held a hand to their chins in contemplation.
"So, what do you suppose we do with this information?"
"Well…" She paused. She hadn't thought about what to do with it yet. The Warners stared at her, awaiting her response. Instead of their usual goofy smiles, they had a slightly serious look on their faces. "We could destroy the scanners? It seemed to work here. If the vial and the scanner break, then it dissolves as we saw."
She winced slightly. She knew it was a bad idea, and completely unrealistic. There were bound to be tons of these models out there across the companies.
"I like the sound of that!" Wakko replied. "It's a good idea to me. We could destroy a lot of stuff and save the world!"
Save the world? Was this that serious of an issue?
The memory of Duncan being effortlessly devoured into its mass bulldozed through her. It did have the potential to be extremely dangerous if not kept in check. Who knows what could happen if it was let loose to run amuck inside of an open studio?
"I'm not so sure," Dot responded. "There's going to be a ton of these. How would we know if all of them got destroyed?"
"If it doesn't appear anymore, I guess," Sage answered.
"That's one hefty guess. What is this, a doomsday clock?"
"It might work, but it would take a lot of effort," Yakko added. "Mostly, a lot of research. I vote not it."
He raised a hand in the air to emphasize his declamation.
"Not it!" Wakko and Dot said simultaneously, raising their arms as well.
That left Sage remaining, which she was fine about. Her fingers were already itching to type topics into the Google search bar.
Wait, that's right. She didn't have a computer to use anymore. She'd have to stop by the library instead.
"She's it," the Warners decided, all pointing at her.
She shrugged. "That's fine by me. We should get out of this place."
"Well, it's still better than that place," Wakko replied, gesturing behind Sage.
There was a creepy funhouse entrance built into the wall with blinking lights and a couple of clown cardboard cut-outs around it. The wall was striped with red and white paint to imitate a circus tent.
When did that get…she decided not to question it.
"Sure. Let's not go in there and keep our sanity."
"What's that?"
"It's what you call someone who keeps themselves really clean all the time," Yakko explained.
"So, the opposite of Wakko's habits," Dot added.
"I take mud baths, those have to count for something," Wakko defended.
"Listen," Sage budged in, "you could sing another song and get us out, right? It was so easy for you before."
"Oh no, we said one free musical number was included. You'll have to pay for the next one," Yakko replied, lifting up an expectant hand.
"Are you kidding? I didn't bring my wallet with me. I didn't ask to be here in the first place anyways."
The Warners tsked condescendingly, shaking their heads. "Well in that case, we'll have to make it back by foot."
"What? Why?"
"If you can't pay up, then we have no choice. Did you think we do all of our gigs for free?"
Sage groaned quietly, putting her head in her hands. It's already been a long night, and now she was expected to walk back home? Right when she thought this night couldn't get any worse, she was proven wrong.
"Don't be silly! Now come on, I can't spend another five minutes in this dingy storage unit," Dot urged on.
She didn't reply, but she didn't have to. Dot grabbed her hand and led her to the far wall behind the shelves along with her brothers. They each pulled out a comically large spoon and dug quickly into the concrete floor, creating a huge dirt pile to their right.
After a minute of digging, there was a gaping dirt hole in the floor that led down into a tunnel, presumably towards the surface.
"Ladies first," Dot said. She shoved Sage forward.
With a moment of hesitancy, Sage crouched down on her hands and knees.