A stinging sensation awoke Ralph from what felt like a deep coma. He groaned in pain and tried to sit up, only to find he couldn't move his body. Glancing around, he tried to take in his shadowy surroundings while his head was still recovering from the cloudy fog that hung over him.
He appeared to be in some sort of laboratory, though it was questionable how legitimate it was. The machines around him seemed to barely function, running on very old hardware. Most of them suffered from rust and water damage. There were a couple of large active Tesla coils sparking in one corner of the room. Whoever owned this laboratory was the cheapest scientist to ever exist.
Ralph gained more feeling in his body and tried to sit up again. His limbs wouldn't budge. He looked down and found his wrists and ankles firmly strapped to a steel table. He panicked and began to sweat.
"Hey...! Hey! What's uhhh going on here?!" He called out into the darkness.
It was silent. Nothing but the quiet hum of machines.
Ralph gazed around, looking for anything he could use to escape. He saw a table about a foot away from him filled with sharp tools. One thing that particularly held his interest was a strange glowing blue crystal balancing precariously on the edge of the table. He had no idea what it was, but it wouldn't help him get out.
Using all of his weight to move, Ralph managed to get the cheap metal table to crack and shift. The table was old and starting to give. For once, he was thankful for all the extra donuts he had eaten the other day. Another violent shift of his body made one of the legs of the table crack and give partially, tilting the table up to where he could almost stand. He would have continued this method if he didn't notice the three white faces staring at him from the dark.
"Hello, Ralph." Said the eldest Warner as the three stepped from the shadows, "Having fun?"
Ralph tried to not look guilty, but the beads of sweat on his brow gave him away, "I... Uhhh... What are yous guys up to?! Where uhh am I?!"
The last thing he remembered from the Warners was meeting them face to face in the old sound stage. Then it went dark and...
"We kidnapped you!" Wakko said a little too happily.
"To be exact..." Yakko added on, "We've selected you!"
They suddenly linked arms around his table and did a sort of frenzied ring-around-the-rosies dance while singing "Selected yooouu! Selected yooouu! Selected yooouu! To be our test fooool!"
Ralph was more confused than anything, "Selected mes?"
"Selected yous!" Yakko called back in a sing-song voice. He stepped back as Wakko grabbed a lab coat off the wall and handed it to his brother. Dot also reappeared, carrying with her a pair of black rubber gloves and goggles, passing them off to Yakko. While Yakko busied himself with his new costume, Wakko and Dot tossed around and carried varying other dangerous equipment: syringes, bone saws, scalpels, and more of those strange blue crystals. Ralph didn't like seeing them handle those incredibly sharp instruments so carelessly.
"Dot? Do you have my bone saw?" Yakko asked his sister sibling.
Dot responded by handing him a comically oversized bone saw that was nearly as large as he was tall, "Right here!"
"And Wakko? The Warnerium?" Yakko looked to his brother sibling, only to see him crunching on the unknown ore. Yakko sighed in annoyance and grabbed Wakko's jaws, prying them open and grabbing the half chewed ore from his teeth. "One day you're gonna turn into Warnerium if you don't stop eating it!"
"Smelly, rough, dangerous if you stand too close... Are we sure Wakko isn't Warnerium already?" Questioned Dot, a sarcastic grin crossing her face.
"Hey! Yous uhhh haven't answered my question!" Ralph cried, his anxiety rising as he saw Yakko cleaning off the bone saw with an old rag.
Yakko gave a slightly unhinged chuckle, "Patience, patient! You have nothing to worry about. In fact, when we're done with you, you probably won't have the capacity to worry!"
The Warners all gave a maniacal laugh. Ralph was shaking with fear.
"Wait a minute," Yakko interrupted the round of crazed cackling, "We're forgetting something."
Wakko panted hungrily, "Dinner?"
Dot piped up, "Oh I know! We need the model sheet!" She ran off to another part of the laboratory. Her brothers followed her, briefly taking their eyes off Ralph. Ralph took this opportunity to try one last time to pry himself free. He violently shifted his weight one more time, breaking one of the front table legs free and causing the table to topple over. The parts of the table that were strapped to Ralph broke off, still attached to his wrist and ankles. However, he could now move freely aside from the pieces of table still stuck to him.
"What was that?!" Yakko's voice rang from the other room. He and his siblings poked their head into the main laboratory, only to find Ralph getting up and running off, "He's escaping! After him!"
Ralph sprinted as fast as his short legs would let him. Though he was slowed down by the broken table bits still attached to his body, he still managed to put some distance between him and the Warners. He escaped down a long cinder block hallway. It was dark, damp, and smelled strongly of mildew. It started to occur to him that the Warners hadn't taken him to their usual hideout in the Warner Brothers water tower. This was somewhere entirely different.
"Come back!" Called Dot.
"We don't wanna hurt you!" Wakko added.
"I was gonna give you an anesthetic too!" Yakko yelled.
Ralph dared to look back. The Warners were just a step behind him. Their crazed, rabid stare fixated on him, their teeth bared and their tongues hanging wildly from their mouths. Yakko brandished the comically large bone saw above his head, laughing with fiendish glee. Ralph screamed and booked it, hoping to find an end to this long and nightmarish hallway. Finally, he saw a door. With no hesitation, he slammed the door open and shut again, locking it, and barricading it with whatever was around: a chair, bookcase, and a desk. He heard the Warners banging the door on the other side. He appeared to be safe for the time being.
Ralph quickly investigated the space for an exit. He appeared to be in an old office of some kind. To his horror, there were no doors or windows. The only way out was the way he had come in; the way currently blocked by three bloodthirsty puppy toons.
What was wrong with them? They had always been a little kooky, but now they had gone as far to kidnap him. And from the looks of it... Do something violent and unspeakable to him.
Something from across the room caught Ralph's eye. It was one of those cork boards with lots of pictures of people and places connected together with red string: like the ones you would see in cheesy detective shows. Making sure the door was still barricaded, he approached the board to get a closer look. There were pictures of people he recognized; Warner Brothers employees. They were connected to pictures of cartoon character model sheets he didn't recognize with notes written out about body parts and something about replacing and restructuring. There were pictures of Wakko holding more of those weird blue rock things and one where he was eating it while running away.
Ralph's blood ran cold. There in the middle was a picture of him standing guard at the studio front gate. The Warners had snapped a candid picture of him at some point without him even noticing. His picture was connected to a model sheet of what appeared to be another Warner toon creature. Except... Unlike the others, this one was very familiar. He had a similar body structure to Yakko, but lacked his signature slacks. His face was a sickly yellow and his eyes were a creepy dead blue. A little blue bowtie adorn his neck, as if that would make his unsettling appearance cute and appealing. At the bottom of the sheet read:
"Yakky Warner, 1926. Copyright Warner Brothers. REJECTED MODEL SHEET. Revise and resubmit."
What was more horrifying was that the Warners had scribbled out parts of Ralph's body and had strings of the missing parts connected to parts of the cartoon character. His eyes slowly shifted to a crude sketch of what appeared to be him... But with cartoon character parts stitched on to his body.
Ralph stepped back in shock. He had no idea what any of this really meant... But he wanted absolutely no part of it.
"Oh Ralphyyyy!"
Ralph yelped and whipped around. The Warners were now somehow in the room with him, despite the barricade being untouched. They were practically foaming at the mouth as they stepped closer, backing him up against the corkboard.
"You shouldn't have run away like that, you naughty man!" Dot sang, her cute voice only masking her unhinged malice.
"Now we're not gonna be so nice!" Wakko sang along with her, licking his lips and baring his teeth.
"You should have just gone along with it," Yakko added, stepping forward and pointing the oversized bone saw at Ralph, "You studio hacks have gotten away with too much. And my siblings and I won't stand for it any longer."
"Yeah!" Wakko promptly took a seat to prove his brother's point, "We won't stand for it!"
"Of course, our fight isn't with you," Yakko continued, backing Ralph against the wall as far as he could, "We just needed someone to be the first guinea pig!"
"We just wanted to chase you for a change!" Dot gave a crazed cackle, "Ironic, isn't it?"
Wakko and Dot grabbed Ralph's arms and dragged him out of the room with Yakko following behind.
"Wh-what was uhhh all that stuff on the walls?!" Ralph asked in a panic, "What yous gonna do to me?!"
"Oh it's not anything I'd expect you to understand, Ralph," Yakko replied in a condescending tone, "My siblings and I took an interest in certain scientific procedures while we were gone. It's incredibly complex. Nothing for you to be concerned with. It should be quick and painless. Or long and agonizingly painful. Who knows?"
The sinister joke prompted the Warners to cackle again. They were having far too much fun terrorizing the poor guard.
Ralph was dragged back to the room he had first woken up in. Yakko snapped his fingers and pointed to another table in the opposite corner. This one was bolted to the ground and had steel restraints. There would be no escaping from it this time.
"Get him strapped down," Yakko commanded, "I want to have this finished before the studio opens tomorrow morning."
Ralph's panic was rising. Adrenaline coursed through his clogged arteries. In a blind panic, he lifted his right arm, the arm Dot happened to be holding back, and threw her into the mass of machines on the other side of the room. She collided with the active Tesla coils, causing them to short out and blast electricity all throughout the room. Yakko and Wakko yelped and ran to turn the coils off, leaving Ralph unattended yet again. Once the coils were off, Dot dropped to the ground, an electrocuted mess. The air now smelled strongly of burnt fur and ink.
Wakko lifted up his sister, now charred black and with her hair sticking out at all angles. They both turned to Ralph, their worry morphing to rage. Ralph gulped.
Yakko took a full syringe from his belt, gritting his teeth in a fit of blind fury, "Oh, you'll pay for that."
Ralph tried to get up and run away, but Yakko was already on him. He jumped on the large security guard and stuck the syringe in his neck yet again. He emptied all the contents into his blood stream before pulling it out and jumping off him. Ralph fell to the ground with a thud.
Wakko came over with Dot still slumped in his arms, "Yakko, I don't think she's breathing!"
Yakko looked between his sister and the security guard, who was slowly slipping into unconsciousness, "You go secure the big lug. I'll handle Dot."
Wakko gave Yakko the electrocuted Dot. He ran off with her to another room while Wakko started dragging Ralph over to the table.
"You know, you didn't have to do that." He said to the half conscious Ralph, "Now you just made me and Yakko upset!"
Ralph could hardly speak. He was losing feeling in his body rapidly. Through fading consciousness, he could remember Wakko strapping him to the table none too carefully, since he was rather angry. Ralph wasn't sure how long it had been before Yakko returned, now appearing even more enraged.
"Is Dot okay?" Wakko asked.
Yakko took his goggles and slid them down on his eyes, "It's not a concern right now. Let's cut to the chase." He pulled out the oversized bone saw yet again. Despite having said a stupid pun, his scowl did not fade.
Ralph soon faded into unconsciousness, his last memory being of the two angry puppy boys looming over him with the comically large bone saw.