Drew

00000

I could barely move. I had never known beak pain, but now it was tremendous. I leaned against the foot of the Planters idol I had been forced to carve, attempting to rest and recover my strength. Whiskers bird gasped and panted next to me, also exhausted.

Although I still wasn't sure I wanted to sleep with Cupcake, this experience galvanized in me a firm belief in animal rights, particularly those of birds. While it might have been true that `no good deed goes unpunished', I now felt the rightness in what I did to Miss Terious's sweatshop. After all, I shared their plight.

Evil Cupcake made tsk sounds as she looked down upon me. "I had such great plans for you, but it seems you just want to be another one of my mindless servants." She shrugged. "Pity."

She picked me up, shoving me into her underwear.

I tried to climb up to her waistband and hang from it like a balcony on a boat or something, but she slapped me, and I slid into the abyss.

It was infinitely more pleasurable to her than it was to me, bumping around her interior, bouncing off her labia like a projectile in an X-rated Angry Birds game (and actually once as Spherical Bird Chewbacca) as the various muscles tried to choke me to death.

"Now I know what a tampon feels like," I muttered.

It seemed like I was in there forever. I really don't know what was going on all that time, except I could hear Evil Cupcake chanting creepy occult sounding spells...when she wasn't moaning with pleasure.

Somehow, I managed to wiggle my way out of her vagina, squirming out a leg hole in her panties, which, incidentally, wasn't easy, because the material wasn't elastic.

Once out in the open again, I at last got to see what she had been doing all this time.

Evil Cupcake had not limited her terrible power to merely transforming humans into birds. All along the streets and sidewalks, I saw the large green glowing pentagrams she had created, shafts of glowing light exploding from their centers as demonic beasts materialized into the real world, overturning cars and smashing store fronts.

As I watched this happening, Evil Cupcake struck the ground with her trident, creating another.

It was hopeless to argue against her, so I flew far away from her as I possible could.

"Where are you going, Drew?" I heard a voice in my head saying, but I ignored her, focusing my thoughts on all the bad depressing things that had happened throughout my life, and sang Paint It Black, trying to be real as possible.

My feathers took on a dark, realistic shade, but I didn't turn human. I did, however, manage to put more distance between myself from her.

I found Whiskers Bird perched on a tree branch.

"What are we going to do?" I said.

"There doesn't appear to be anything we can do, Drew. That creature can hear everything we say because of her birds."

"Didn't you help my dad save the world last time?"

"That was different. Holli didn't turn Jack into a bird. He was able to use his own half doodle form to overtake her and put the Spike back where it belonged."

I sighed. "So what now?"

"I don't know. We can only pray that she doesn't go to the Union Plaza Hotel and grab the last spike."

In true cartoon fashion, evil Cupcake had whipped back to my location. "What a great idea!"

A second later, a large green hand clamped down on my body, and I found myself staring at her face. "I'll give you a choice this time. My breasts or my panties."

"Breasts," I blurted.

She stretched out her waistband, dropping me back into her underwear. I could only shout in protest as I slid back into the depths.

0000

Jessica

0000

I waved my arms all around, trying to swat the swarms of birds away, but they were like flies. I staggered backwards.

The Copy Cats resorted to stuffing them in their mouths, pulling out butterfly nets and shoving them into cages.

They were the most unusual cartoon birds. Some shouted for their children. Some seemed very upset, yelling about how they needed to get down to the bank or the dealer lot in five minutes so their vehicle didn't get repossessed, or they wanted to call the tow truck and get the police to take care of the accident they had. Not very happy.

A couple of them didn't even seem to be paying attention to their situation, the male bird arguing to the female that he was shouldering all the weight in the relationship, and how it's not working out, the female sobbing uncontrollably and yelling back how he's never there for her when she needs him. They didn't even care that they were parakeets, with wings. The guy even tried to slam a door, but there wasn't one available. Ugh.

And then the unhappiest bird of all lands on my shoulder, a weird oddly familiar looking robin with black hair.

"Jessica!" it cried in Drew's voice. "Thank God! Listen, you've got to help me! That thing out there has the Spike, and it's turning everyone into birds. You've got to do something!"

I picked him up, spreading his little wings.

"You're so cute!" I cooed, tickling his belly.

"Hey!" he cried. "Can you stop fondling me and help me? Before the whole world becomes a giant demonic birdhouse?"

"I thought you liked being fondled," I said with a smirk.

"I might," he said. "But now isn't the right time for that."

Typical Drew.

He pointed a wing tip at the spikes poking out of the pipe organ. "How secure are those things?"

The answer was "not very." The moment he pointed a feather that way, a kestrel clamped onto one of the spikes and yanked it out of the organ.

A crow grabbed the next one, then a sparrow came along for another.

Misty dug out several pieces of anti-bird artillery, giving some to me, Master Blaster, and Chad to use on the menace, but they didn't accomplish much.

"Stop them!" I shouted to Drew, but he said, "I can't! Evil Cupcake has power over all birds! She can make me do whatever she wants!"

I sighed in frustration.

The cats leapt at them with their nets, but the birds just chirped merrily and flew above their heads, zooming through the the screen they'd entered.

I grabbed one of the cats' handguns, firing at the monitor, but, being a magic screen, more or less, the bullet went right through, accomplishing nothing.

When we tried to chase after them, a cloud of flapping wings thwarted us.

The portal on the monitor turned into a tiny dot, then disappeared, leaving us trapped in the Flipside.

"Damn," Drew and I said in unison.

All the birds suddenly fell to the floor, hopping around with agitation and confusion.

"What's that about?" I asked.

"They're out of range," Drew said. "I feel it too."

Misty smirked. "Well. At least I have something to rebuild my factory with. In fact, I think I'll start with you."

"What! These are real people!" Drew shouted. "They have real lives and families! You can't just enslave them all!"

I only chuckled. "Drew, there's too many people on the planet already, with too little in terms of resources. Converting a quarter of humanity into revenue producing cartoon birds is a wonderfully humane method of solving the problem."

"How wonderfully Malthusian. The next thing you know, there'll be railcars taking these birds to little shower facilities flooded with poison gas."

Misty looked troubled, but said nothing.

I rolled my eyes. "Drew, we're talking about large factories populated by little birdies, not wholesale genocide. We're not actually killing anyone. There's a difference."

"He comes to us for help?" Misty asked. "After everything we went through?"

"The enemy of my enemy is my friend." Then he did a double take. "Wait. Are you Miss Terious's daughter or something?"

"Let's just say it's something and leave it at that."

He didn't care to ask for an explanation. "Listen. Do any of you have any devices to turn people into birds and back again?"

I glanced at Misty.

"No," she said. "But I do have a device that turns doodles into one eyed alien birds. Would that help?"

"No," Drew groaned. "Can you at least...find me a ship that can take me over to dad's old rental property?"

"What do you expect to find there?" I asked.

"Whiskers had a device that can change people back."

I shrugged. "I don't know. We don't have any spikes."

"During my first experiments with the spikes," Master Blaster said. "I accidentally broke a piece off on a mirror. You can use that one."

"Really!" I held Drew bird up to my face. "Would that work for you?"

Sure enough, there was a portal to the Deebes property.

I brought Drew to it, just to be nice, but when I approached that particular pane of glass, Misty stopped me. "Wait. We should move the portal to that hotel first. If that creature gets the last spike, there will be no point in doing anything else. She'll be unstoppable!"

I frowned at Drewbird. "I'm sorry. She's right. I can't help you."

"Fine. I'll go alone." And then he shot through the mirror.

"Fatcat," Master Blaster muttered. "You're not very strong, and I don't want you to get hurt. Why don't you go after the little birdie, maybe try to help him out, and stay out of trouble?"

"Yes, your kindliness," the cat said.

"That's a good idea," I said to Chad. "Why don't you go too?"

"But Jessica!" he said. "Already I have protected you from much danger."

I smiled a little. "I know. And I thank you for that. But Isosceles needs to be safe, and so do you. Besides, the Deebes place isn't that far from the hotel."

"All right," he groaned, and he also disappeared through the mirror.

"Okay, Blasty," I said. "Which one of these mirrors goes to the hotel?"

He directed me to the one on the far end, but as Misty followed me to it, a jewel studded spiky bone boomerang embedded itself in the mirror frame.

"Miss Terious!" a familiar voice shouted. "We have some unfinished business to attend to!"

We both turned and stared at the visitor.

It was Cupcake from the National Baby Farms, but she looked a bit...different from how I saw her last.

For one thing, her wardrobe looked bizarre, like she stole a costume from a Mad Max or Conan character.

For the top, she had on a sort of tattered leather biker jacket that stopped at the midriff, with a couple one eyed animal skulls for shoulder pads. At the waist, she had another one eyed skull, hanging from a chain, which held up a canvas-like loincloth. For jewelry, she had necklaces of animal teeth and claws.

She was still blue, but paler, her eyes a solid white color, her hair now a lighter sandy brown, puffing out in a ragged sort of bob hairdo.

She had been glaring at Misty, but now she scowled at me. "Actually, I have unfinished business with both of you!"

She whipped out a long staff with bones and a cyclopean goat skull attached to one end, whirling it around like a kung fu master.