I was non animated when the truck struck me. I thought for certain I had broken something. It hurt like hell.
The physics of this little collision did not make sense, but you probably already guessed that. Instead of being flung a couple yards and flattened by the truck, I became a human cannonball, zooming through the air until I hit the glass window of a bottling company.
I shot through it too fast to see much of the place, but it was basically a bunch of machinery pouring chemicals into other vats of chemicals, the absence of natural ingredients suggesting it was the Fanta company, maybe Vess.
The background music was, of course, Powerhouse by Raymond Scott, played on an endless loop, just like any cartoon about a factory.
I landed in a tank full of bubbly brown liquid, wherein I was bent, spindled, folded and mutilated by stirring arms, compressors, and a host of other machinery.
I must have gone animated at some point, for my skeleton certainly wouldn't have survived the Taffy Puller, the Squisher, and other unpleasantries.
I found myself being poured into a bottle stoppered with an impossibly tight cap. Again, no human skeleton would have survived.
A mechanical arm slapped a Coo-Coo Cola label on my bottle, and I got shuffled down a conveyor belt. I tried to scream, but, of course, I was bottled. Realistically, I should have suffocated, but I was a doodle.
The music kept looping. Up ahead, I could see the machines that would package me and other bottles and take me away to be distributed somewhere. I didn't want to find out where.
I guess if I hadn't killed the Rescue Rangers, they might have rescued me.
I did the only thing I could think of. I shifted my weight back and forth until the bottle rocked and toppled off the conveyor belt.
I hit the concrete floor with a tremendous smash, glass scattering everywhere.
To my chagrin, my body still retained a bottle shape. I waddled awkwardly across the floor on one hand and one foot, rolling my cylindrical body sideways just in time to avoid an overzealous mechanical hand, and a generic Little Red Riding Hood with a broom.
The factory crawled with generic fairy tale characters and robots. I saw at least three versions of Pinocchio, the Three Little Pigs, and Goldilocks, basically anything fairy tale related that wasn't Disney, except possibly the Little Mermaid, because she commits suicide in the non-Disney version.
I rolled under a big square machine to hide from Mama Bear, falling through a crack and dropping down a diagonal slot in some machine or another, rolling at high speed through another crack, until I landed in an underground prison, a row of small metal cells, about the size of the kennels they make for large dogs.
Most of them contained unfamiliar cartoon characters, and suspicious ones at that. In fact, one of them was an ape Amanda infected with leprosy.
I didn't want to know what was going on in there, and I didn't care. I shook myself several times, like my limbs had merely fallen asleep, and somehow I regained my human form with a loud pop.
I did a double take. Not all the prisoners were doodles.
In the cage directly ahead of me I saw another noid, a man with a long nose, large ears, and short dark hair, a perpetual smirk on the corner of his face. He had on one of those baggy shirts that he always seemed to be wearing in the movies.
I'm standing in front of a celebrity, dressed as a French maid.
Not a total loss, really. In my opinion, the guy's films were hit or miss. I recalled several parts of his movies in which I would just stare at the screen instead of laughing. In fact, when I watched Eight Crazy Nights, I wanted to get my money back.
"Chocolate wasted," I said.
"Nice outfit," he replied with a grin.
I rolled my eyes. "Shut up."
"Look," he said. "As you probably have guessed, I'm Adam Sandler, and they need me back at the studio. You've got to get me out of here!"
"They don't really need you at that studio," I said. "They might want you there, but I don't. In fact, I think you should probably stay here, until you can figure out how to act."
"That was cold," said Weird Al Yankovic, also a prisoner.
I didn't feel like rescuing that man, either. I figured a forced retirement would be good for him, especially in light of his performance on Galavant...and his lame Offspring parody.
Fearful of being captured and forced to endure the two of them singing a duet with Sandler's perverted lyrics, I hurried to the staircase at the end of the prison.
"That's right!" I heard Sandler yelling. "Go, fairy! We don't need your help!"
"Actually," said Al. "We really do kind of need your help! You see, there's a key in the office upstairs..."
Instead of listening to the rest, I whistled Peter and the Wolf, marching up to the next floor landing.
Amanda was right. This kind of failure was a turn on. A getting ripped off by my own tax office turn on.
I found a fire exit, which, pleasantly enough, did not feature any puns, or alarms.
Enough screwing around. Extra needed help! I shoved the door open, dashing down a fire escape.
Okay, so I had been delayed, and had no idea where to go.
Yes, I knew the place was called C.C. Knickknocker, but it would take awhile to find it, by which time someone would be grinding Extra's beak down to nothing.
I jumped from the fire escape to an alleyway between the an employee smoking area and...Acme Anvils, judging by the traditional Anvil Chorus clanging out the open window. Next to a dumpster, was a fenced in `butt hut' where Generic Sleeping Beauty and a dwarf puffed cigarettes, complaining about unreasonable metric quotas and manager Pinocchio's nose getting longer every day.
I hurried down a parking lot to a street where cars would probably hit me the moment I set foot on the pavement.
It seemed Extra was in the habit of selective molting, for he had left a trail feathers.
It could have been a different bird, but I felt fairly certain that any bird in the vicinity would be going to the same place, wherever it was, as long as I didn't anger the gods of irony by verbalizing this reasoning.
The gold feathers were easy to spot on the dark pavement. I hugged the curbs of the factories I passed, making a supreme effort to avoid trucks and the street at all costs as I followed the trail.
I thought I was doing okay until Big Bird tried to cross the street and a truck hit him. Gold feathers everywhere.
The gods of irony had struck.
For a moment, I lost hope.
But then, as I sunk into despair, I a gray object came flying at me.
Well, not really flying. Gliding. It looked very tired.
A shriveled gray bird with a white mustache and no beak had bumped into my stomach. I caught it just a moment before it fell to the ground.
It climbed up my dress, nuzzling against my neck.
"Whoa. Hello?" I said.
"Are you the one who weeps for birds?" the creature whispered in my ear.
"On occasion," I muttered. "Have you seen a big golden bird?" Then, remembering the recent hit and run, I added, "Answers to the name Extra?"
"You named my son!" No Beak cried.
"Uh, sorry," I said. "I didn't know you guys already-"
"No, no," he said. "I am grateful. Which is why you must rescue him. You have A Listed him. He does not deserve to suffer in that sweat shop among the unknowns."
"If what I heard is true, no bird deserves to work in that place. Where is this sweat shop, Mack Daddy?"
"So now you name me," the creature chuckled.
"You and Extra are family. I just thought I should. I know it's kind of lame, but it's kind of a spur of the moment thing."
"It is a great name." He pointed his wing ahead. "Keep going straight. I'll tell you where to turn."
A few blocks later, I found it. It looked like a saw mill. Giant logs rolled in from a river into a massive square building that continually belched smoke and sawdust.
The rear of the building didn't have a sign, but an immense wooden kookoo rotated endlessly on the roof, its wraparound logo reading `CCKK'.
As an animated little kid in drag, I marched up to that rear door with my fists clenched.
It was locked, of course.
Conveniently, it opened with a button code, a combination of tones (which Mack Daddy provided) that sounded like Grandfather's Clock by Hank Snow.
"Ninety years without slumbering, tick tock..."
I slipped through the newly opened door. Mack Daddy took one look around, then dove into my bodice to hide.
To my surprise, I didn't hear Powerhouse. Instead, the ambient music was Circle of Life, though it appeared to be more for the purpose of torture than theme music.
Scratch that. It was always for the purposes of torture.
This is generally how the assembly process went:
Giant logs dropped into a machine, then spun around in a giant lathe, which shaved the logs down to smaller logs by means of a dozen woodpeckers clamped to machine arms.
These smaller logs were then sliced into blocks using a large saw, made of woodpeckers clamped to a spinning wheel with their heads and beaks pointed outwards. Someone had braced their little necks and bodies so they couldn't move an inch, except to saw.
The smaller blocks rolled down the various rows of conveyors, where birds, with their feet in chains, would chisel out wooden objects with their beaks. Kookoo clocks, table legs, bowling pins, chairs. I even saw an assembly line for baseball bats, where, I presumed, Extra's aunt was imprisoned.
As I crept over that way, Mack Daddy chirped like a regular bird, and another gray bird, one with a dull but somewhat intact beak, shook her head violently, hissing, "You should not be here! Go!"
And then a machine pressed her beak into a block of wood, shaving it down into a bat.
I heard one of the birds musically call out, "Ooooohhh!"
A bird on the Kookoo line cried, "I...was...!"
"...Slippin' into darkness!" sang a bird working the bowling pins.
All the birds performed Slipping Into Darkness by War.
"They do that," Mack Daddy whispered. "It's all they can do to stay sane."
"Where's Extra?" I said.
Mack Daddy pointed to a corner of the factory, where a gang of chained bluebirds, and baby bluebirds, pecked small blocks of wood into toothpicks.
A group of ugly looking goblin slavemasters guarded the birds. Tall, warty sorts of creatures that reminded me of the basketballer villains from Space Jams.
I surveyed the scene, checking for exits, and ways to overpower the guards.
Faceless blue men clad from head to foot in blue patrolled the factory. From a glance at their heads, I couldn't tell if they could see me or anything, but then again, I couldn't tell what they couldn't see.
I wandered around, they appeared to just ignore me. A couple would march around a corner to observe, or not observe me. I asked Mack Daddy about it, but he just shushed me.
My hopes of a rescue were dashed when I felt a tap on my shoulder.
When I turned around, I saw Miss Terious, her butler (currently wearing a tutu), and a gang of blue men.
"Mmyes?" said Sleez.
"What are you doing in my factory?" the woman demanded.
"Quality control," I blurted. "These...floors are very dusty."
"I'll tell the janitor," she said indifferently. And then, with a false pout, "You're not here because of some poor little birdies, are you?"
"Oh no!" I said in a facetious tone. "I was just wondering why you didn't use more child labor..."
She tapped her chin, looking thoughtful. "Why indeed!" She took a notepad out of her exoskeleton bikini, jotting down the idea.
"Look. This is a great evil business and all, but you took my friend prisoner and I'm going to have to ask you to give him back."
She frowned. "I have to admit you A Listed him, but you're a half doodle, so I'm going to have to ask you to leave."
If that wasn't bad enough, she quickly added, "Oh, and you're going to have to give that old mustached thing back. We don't have any use for him, but he knows the code to the door."
"Due to the inconvenience to myself, I wasn't going to bring up this point," I said. "But have you thought about simply changing the code? I mean, I know the code too. I could just take Mac Daddy home, to a nice bird shelter..."
"You're right." She nodded to the goblins. "Kill them both."
In real life, they probably would have just shot me and saved time. Instead, I get chained to a log next to No Beak, and guess what? The log was on a track ending in an actual non bird powered circular saw that could more than likely slice me in half along with the log I'm chained to.
The saw started up, the blade moving closer and closer to my head as it ripped through the pared down tree.
All of a sudden, I heard a weird noise: "Who-oo-oo!"
A puff of smoke exploded near the roof of the warehouse, and then a `twip' sound as something hit a wall, clattered uselessly to the floor, and whipped back to the roof again.
This happened two more times, then I saw a cable embed itself in a nearby pipe, spraying water all over the floor.
After another "Who-hoo-oo" I saw her:
Owl Woman!
A woman in a bird costume. Apparently modeled after a barn owl, her suit was feathery like a Mardi Gras costume, with charcoal leggings and Tabi boots with grappling hook claws. She had a giant O on her chest.
The mask looked ridiculous. Giant ringed eyes, a gray nose appliance and an open lower face like a Bat Suit.
Like Batman, she used the cable as a zip cord to cross the room quickly.
Unlike Batman, the handlebar thingy broke off in her hands at the halfway point, wherein she fell screaming to the floor.
A moment later, she was trussed up on the log below my feet, ready to be sawn in half along with me.
Craning my neck, I looked down at the figure in gray, with her ridiculous plastic bird beak and said, "My hero."
Owl Woman just glared. "Shut up."