20. "Childish Things"
You know, it was weird. As much as Double-D detested Eddy's idea to manufacture fraudulent identification cards with the express intention of profiting off adolescents looking to illegally procure alcohol, he did harbor some perverse admiration for how Eddy had stepped up his game. It wasn't another scam where they'd be vending items made from things they got out of the trash or selling experiences that they would be more or less making up on the fly. It actually had required him to save up and acquire capital. The fox had had to clean his family's gutters just to get his dad to let him borrow his credit card so he could buy the laminates off the internet, and Double-D knew Eddy had to repay his father with interest to inspire him to not ask questions about what the hell exactly he was buying.
That money he repaid his father with had come from their only major scam that spring, which also wasn't too amatuer itself: they had found two old lawn mowers in the junkyard and chop-shopped them into go-karts. The quality of the vehicles wasn't that bad, but the fact that the scheme had made any money at all had been a miracle. For one thing, the only time they could operate it was during Spring Break, because the only time and place they could run the karts was in The Lane during the days the adults were at work but the kids were out of school. But it took several days of experimenting with adjustable seats and engine displacements to figure out how to configure the damned things so you could stick someone of nearly any size or species behind the wheel and make the car drive the same. By the time the karts were finally ready to go, it was already Wednesday, but Ed, ever the creative type, insisted on painting them to look like NASCAR stock cars with decals advertising Chunky Puffs and Montezuma's Free Range Manure, physically restraining Eddy from touching the vehicles until he was done customizing them, at one point picking up Eddy with one hand and throwing him without looking over his shoulder and leaving a huge dent in Eddy's garage door. So on Thursday they were finally good to, but because Easter was in March that year, that meant Spring Break was, too, and the temperature was in the mid-forties and it just wasn't the best weather for racing go-karts outside, but after overhearing the Eds testing the cars outside all week, the other kids in the cul-de-sac had their interest piqued. Sure enough, they all drove like maniacs, but nobody wrecked the cars irreparably and nobody got hurt, which was itself a miracle because they didn't have any way of crash- or safety-testing the karts before unleashing them, okay come to think of it nevermind Jimmy did total his kart and get hurt, the poor dumb bunny wound up with his retainer somehow hooked over a lightpost, but this was Jimmy we're talking about, he doesn't count, he got hurt all the time, injured was his natural state of being, Jimmy could walk up to you with his arm suddenly in a cast for some reason or an eyepatch over his eye or his leg amputated and you just wouldn't even question it, you wouldn't even blink, the twentysomething pothead paramedics were openly calling Jimmy a "frequent flyer" and at least one ambulance driver had compared Jimmy to Kenny McCormick, but besides Jimmy, nobody got hurt, it was just good clean American fun, and those go-karts lasted two entire days before all that beatin' and bangin' finally made them certifiably FUBAR (incidentally the accident that resulted in Jimmy getting wrapped around the streetlight was the one that did them in), allowing the Eds to make a sizable profit on a venture that was actually pretty well-received. For a moment, the neighborhood kids didn't totally hate the Eds.
But then Eddy had done something weird: he said he'd take the boys to the candy store, they'd buy one and only one of their respective favorite flavors, and then save the rest of their profits for a bigger plan Eddy had cooking for when Summer Vacation rolled around. And although it seemed to Double-D that Eddy was going through withdrawal-type symptoms for much of April and May (whether this was due to being deprived of jawbreakers or just not being allowed to spend the money was unclear), Eddy stuck it out. As far as Double-D could tell, Eddy didn't cave. And as much as Double-D was disgusted by Eddy's greed, he could commend Eddy for the restraint he showed in order to feed that greed in the long run.
But this one seemed… sloppy, for want of a better word. It seemed like a two-steps-forward, one-step-back sort of deal. It maintained the elevated level of work ethic but the artistic vision seemed to be blurred.
Eddy had arrived at his house last night with two big plastic bags from RadioShack; he had once again spared no expense and proved he was willing to spend money to make money. At first, Double-D could not fathom where the money came from, and he was convinced Eddy had stolen it; when Eddy pulled the receipt out of his back pocket, the wolf revised his hypothesis to say that Eddy must have robbed someone who had just left the store (perhaps inspired by their field trip with the strangers from the woods the day prior) and then worked backward to think about what he could make with whatever happened to be in his victim's shopping bag. But Eddy again had a rebuttal: who in their right mind would be buying this quantity of these items? Eddy did admit, however, that the product idea was indeed inspired by a specific event that had transpired involving the Merry Men yesterday.
But Double-D's skepticism wasn't entirely unfounded. Seeing what Eddy's idea was, Double-D couldn't conceive of who would buy such a thing. For such a risky business decision, it almost would have been preferable that Eddy not go for fresh-out-of-the-box electronics to ruin and retool instead of used goods he probably could have purchased for pennies on the dollar from that one sleazy pawn shop on Boyd Street run by the mongoose with the thick accent who could often be heard grumbling to himself in Malayalam from the back office and whose front counter was manned alternately by that older goth wolf chick (who come to think of it was probably somewhere around Robin and John's ages) who had no bones about telling the customers that she'd rather keep working retail her whole life than abandon her counterculture wardrobe, or by that ocelot who was in Eddy's brother's high school graduating class and was doing pretty well in NSU's engineering program before he got expelled for academic dishonesty (and for snorting coke in his dorm, both infractions reported by his disgruntled roommate after the ocelot trashed their room during a bender, but that would have made the school look even worse than regular old plagiarism so on the official record it was just for cheating) and now could often be seen behind the cash register playing Madden or 2K on an old 11" TV monitor, often playing at an inappropriately low difficulty setting and completely bumslaying the computer teams because virtual curbstomps were the only thing that made him feel like he had some modicum of power in his life anymore; that would have seemed like a wiser place to procure capital from for such a shoddy idea.
But Eddy said not to worry, leave the marketing strategy up to him, just make the devices, Sock-Head, and to reward him for his loyalty, Eddy presented Double-D with a Peru-flavored jawbreaker and tossed in another half-dozen quarters to go along with it; payment in advance, Eddy said. But wait, Double-D remarked (through slurps of saliva, as he was merely mortal and had already stuck the sweet in his cheek), where on earth did the money for this come from? Eddy coyly chuckled at the question, saying he regrouted the bathroom floor the other day, and as for the quarters, he had been saving up for a long-winded long-distance payphone call to his brother and had a few coins left over.
Double-D still wasn't convinced that Eddy had gotten the money through legitimate means, but regardless, the goods in the bag he was holding were purchased legally, so they were no contraband and he need not worry about harboring them. Plus he had already been paid in advance and Eddy was walking away saying he'd see Double-D on Thursday, so fine, whatever, he'd do Eddy's dirty work once again.
At present, Double-D was tinkering with the items, trying to figure out the best way to combine them and make them into something that somebody might have the faintest impulse of buying. Hey, that was another thing: if someone bought one of these, then someone else would have to buy one, too, or they'd have nobody to use it with. That probably was going to make it an even tougher sell. Then again, if one person bought it, maybe all the kids in the cul-de-sac would want in on it. Okay, he could start to see what Eddy had in mind in terms of marketing. But the product was still fundamentally stupid and unnecessary. He didn't know why this would ever be the case, but the thought briefly crossed his mind that perhaps Eddy wanted this scam to fail.
And though this thought distracted him from his work, he welcomed it. In fact, he so welcomed distractions at the moment that he had invited Ed to come over and just play around in his room as he worked. Ed messing around in his room as he ruminated on Eddy's motivations as he worked on this Frankenstein's-monster of an appliance - perfect, three layers of distractions to keep his mind occupied so he didn't think about… them.
"Double-D, what's this one's name?" the bear asked, pointing to one of the specimens in the wolf's ant-farm.
"We've been over this, Ed," Double-D began, "they have no na-" But then he thought of a sunnier answer: "They have no names yet, Ed, but you may name them whatever you wish!"
"I can!?"
"Christen them, Ed."
"Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy!" Ed exclaimed, and he got right to work on naming the ants, 4,837 in all as the label said. "You can be Aldo, you can be Jim-Joe, you can be Heathcliff, you can be Evil Veronica, you can be Lucio, you can be Ed Junior, you can be Yo-Yo-Yo Serpico, you can be Gilbert, you can be Amy McJamie, you can be Lightfoot, you can be Brettland, Bringer of Light, you can be…"
Excellent. As long as Ed didn't break anything, he ought to be good to plow through his work with this background noise keeping his mind from wandering toward the absurdity he had witnessed two days prior. He had already wasted a day of his life yesterday just stewing on it; he couldn't afford to waste any more time pondering how queer it was that those two men not only were wanted criminals living in the forest preserve, but that they had established themselves as legendary local heroes after successfully following the formula set by the characters in a 10th-century English folktale.
Double-D had been so flustered by the revelation that Robin was indeed inspired by the story of Adam Bell that he didn't catch exactly whether Robin was just inspired by the legend in general or the Sidney movie specifically. In the end, though, he knew it was probably a little of both; on the one hand, the fox was an actual Englishman, and if anybody in the modern day could hear the name "Adam Bell" and not immediately think of the cartoon movie, it would be those who were born and bred in the British Isles, but on the other hand, it was the Twenty-First Century, and the Sidney Corporation had its pawprints on everything, so even if Robin didn't consciously follow the blueprints of the animated humans running around Inglewood Forest and the city of Carlisle, he was likely doing it unconsciously on some level.
And as he tore away the thin paper casing from the flimsy plastic contraptions, he pondered how they could ever have arrived at the conclusion that Adam Bell and company were characters worth emulating. Maybe it was an English thing. And a Southern thing. The Englishman had been told his entire life that Adam Bell was a national hero and likely never questioned it, and the Southerner was from a part of the country that prided itself on the fact that it would rather secede from the United States than cease to enslave mammals from Africa, so he probably grew up with the idea that reckless rebellion was an inherently good thing. The poor fools. They had no idea.
He picked up his screwdriver and started undoing the chassis. He really did expect better of the Englishman, though. Yes, a cynic could accuse Double-D of falling head over heels for the fox's distinguished accent, but even if he sounded like a Cockney stereotype, he still conducted himself like a well-bred gentleman, and that's what Double-D would insist was what convinced him he was a good guy. Well, whoever raised him to be like that clearly never took care to clarify to him that no matter what the story of Adam Bell seemed to preach on the surface, vigilantism was something that was only to be admired in the abstract and not actually carried out in real life, where laws are not necessarily meant to be broken and good and evil were not black and white as they were in the popular folklore.
Come to think of it, he no longer resented that his parents had never let him get that movie from Blockbuster when he was younger. While his parents usually steered him toward entertainment that was educational on some level, cartoon movies and TV shows were a special treat they allowed him to sometimes indulge in, but Adam Bell was one video he never got to rent. His parents had respected his intelligence enough to tell him exactly why not: it glorified violating the law and distrusting authority for the sake of it, and they said that all the kids who watched it grew up to have behavioral problems, and that it was a big mistake that the Sidney company made it (which he believed for the longest time, as evidenced by how rarely The Sidney Company acknowledged that film compared to its more seminal works). While Double-D loved his parents and respected their judgment, he wasn't incapable of being frustrated with their decisions, and one of those frustrations had always been that they didn't trust him enough as a little kid to understand that Adam Bell was a work of fiction and that you're not actually supposed to go out and start a violent insurrection; that said, after meeting Robin, he forgave his parents, now seeing that it was absolutely possible for someone to otherwise be an upright citizen of the world and still maintain the childish notion that there were times where breaking the rules was justifiable in the name of good.
Of course, that forgiveness was contingent on his deciding once and for all that his parents' beliefs on law and order were correct. And while he did lean toward them being correct, he had been paying more heed to the opposite argument for quite a while now, and while he was still leaning toward them being correct after meeting Robin and John and seeing them in action, it was pushing him closer toward contradicting them.
"Double-D, which came first? Pluto the planet or Mickey Mouse's dog?" Ed asked. He had moved on to ogling at the model of the solar system hanging from the ceiling, which with Ed's height was right in front of his line of vision.
Double-D gathered his composure and turned in his chair. "Uh- th-the planet, Ed. Although they were named around the same time! In fact, anecdotal evidence suggests that Milt Sidney named the dog character Pluto in celebration of the newly-discovered planet!"
"Cool!"
"Cool, indeed, Ed. Now, have you finished naming all the ants yet?"
"Oh! Sorry, Double-D! I was just thinking of new names."
"Well, perhaps you could name one of them Pluto!"
"Ooh! Great idea, Double-D!" Ed said as he jumped back over to the ant-farm. "You can be Pluto, and you can be Pot Shot, and you can be The Former Missus Lindsay Mendoza, and you can be Ping-Pong, and you can be Astro Boy, and you can be Harriett…"
Phew. Double-D thought he handled that pretty well after being thoroughly spooked by the reference to The Sidney Company. Of course he knew offhand that Pluto the planet and Pluto the dog were both named in short succession in 1930; he had done as much research on Sidney history as he had on outer space. That's what happens when you start getting curious about the children's movie that's the forbidden fruit for the whole of your youth.
As he undid the casing for the other half of this technological abomination he was tasked with creating, he found himself having trouble brainstorming how he could wire the two ingredients together, unable to stop dwelling on the regret of all that time he'd wasted investigating that godforsaken cartoon movie. It had started innocently enough. It was almost two years ago, during Thanksgiving Break of seventh grade. Ed had had the flu and Eddy was grounded for trying to get 100% on a test by smearing chapstick all over the scantron, so Double-D had to occupy himself for a few days. As he ate his breakfast grapefruit that Monday morning, he was flipping through the TV Guide to see if there were any good documentaries on. Those TV Guides were printed for nationwide consumption, so the channels were listed alphabetically rather than by what their channel number was in a given market, and what should happen to be listed right below The Science Channel but The Sidney Channel? They were marathoning a bunch of Sidney Classics that week since kids across the country were out of school, and Adam Bell was slated to come on at 2 p.m.
All throughout his childhood, he'd been curious about what his parents had withheld from him, but that curiosity had mostly remained dormant as he came to accept that he was too old for such a film and furthermore too old to think it was a good idea to circumvent his parents' will. But his parents weren't going to be home for a long time, and the only other people who would conceivably call upon his presence were incapacitated. He had nothing better to do, and now there was nothing else he wanted to do but to investigate what all the fuss was about. So he went for it.
He almost missed the beginning of the movie, not because he was preoccupied in any tangible way, but simply because the anxiety that he was about to disobey his parents just to watch a children's movie weighed heavily on his mind. Eventually he did get the nerve to turn on the television, tuning in literally less than three seconds before the opening credits rolled.
It started innocently enough. It opened up with a live-action storybook sequence being narrated over by the same American actor who played ever-loyal William of Cloudsley; the old bear had been a B-list comedian and bandleader back in the Radio Era who was pushing seventy by the time Adam Bell came out and had already been in a few previous Sidney flicks for apparent lack of anything better to do with his time in that stage of his career, and while kids in the late Sixties and early Seventies sure seemed to love hearing his voice in the cinema, one couldn't really say that his name had been forgotten by modern audiences because most denizens of the Twenty-First Century would likely have never known his name in the first place - Double-D, of course, only knew his name and his career because of all the research he'd done, just like how he knew the little-known detail that the film was originally going to be a musical and the narrator was supposed to be a separate character voiced by a then-popular country singer, but the company was broke and reeling after the death of Milt Sidney in 1966 and the music budget had to be cut drastically. The narrator explained that while viewers surely had seen and heard many different renditions of the tale of Adam Bell, in the mono-species world of humans, they had their own version, and it went thusly.
So far, it was going well. Double-D's later research into the real-life legend of Adam Bell had indeed yielded copious amounts of contradictory details. In some versions, Adam had been a nobleman who rejected his status to serve his conscious and live a life of crime, and in others he had been raised poorer than dirt and had nothing to lose; in some versions, he was a control freak who demanded his followers go to their knees in his presence, and in others he took egalitarianism to its logical extreme and his band of men could be described as sort of resembling an anarchist commune; in some versions, he did what he did out of a pious sense of moral obligation and he was borderline obsessed with the Virgin Mary, and in others he was a godless man who didn't even actually give to the poor. But all of those would have been inappropriate for a children's movie, of course. So they went their own way where they kept the ugly details vague; okay, so far, nothing objectionable.
The first real scene of the film showed Adam, William, and Clym of the Clough having witty banter as they patrolled their wooded home, before happening upon an aristocrat who the film goes to great lengths to clarify is unambiguously evil. So the trio disguise themselves and rob him silly in a most slapstick-y manner, but not before Adam himself - voiced by an Englishman whose species Double-D couldn't remember, who was unknown back then and even more anonymous now, having always preferred the stage to the screen and having very few other Hollywood credits - gave his men a quick pep talk. He reminded them that people in Carlisle were starving, and although there were certainly easier and more legal ways to ease their plight, nobody in a position of power was willing to do that, so the three of them had to take it into their own hands and do it the hard way - which, ergo, made them the good guys. The speech was peppered with small jokes from William and Clym to temper the seriousness of Adam, who was not portrayed in the film to be a boring old fuddy-duddy by any stretch of the imagination but certainly someone who was not afraid to temporarily turn off his jocular side and be straightlaced when the situation called for it, this quality implied to be a key reason why he was the leader.
And Double-D was shaken by how well they had framed that speech. It wasn't too serious, it wasn't too silly, and most importantly, it argued its point well, and that's what bugged him the most. He had been led to believe that this film had literally pushed the narrative that violent rebellion was a good thing in and of itself, and that it chose a terrible example of that; as he had understood it, the style and essence of rebellion that Adam Bell portrayed was less "George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Hancock" and more "Che Guevara, Adolf Hitler, and Maximilien Robespierre." But that was not so, and they had done well to clarify that the characters were operating under a relatively sound moral code all the same. And he would be embarrassed to admit it out loud, but as much as Double-D knew of the tale of Adam Bell from simply being a citizen of the world, he actually had never bothered to learn the fine details, and while all throughout his research into the Sidney movie he had seen people on the internet and elsewhere posit that the movie was made for even younger children than most Sidney movies (the scene where they stop the action to carefully explain that they only break the law as a means to a righteous end often being cited as evidence of this), Double-D was glad that they clarified that they robbed the rich to give to the poor, because after being forbidden from hearing the story all his life, he honestly didn't know.
That first time he watched through the movie, he had some slight trouble paying attention to everything after that opening scene. He still got the gist of it: the rich people in Carlisle and environs are getting sick of being victimized by the Inglewood Forest Gang and are doubly sick of how the impoverished locals adore them; their more and more elaborate attempts to capture Adam and his men aren't working, and if anything he's getting wise to them; it's insinuated that they keep sending for help from the (unnamed) king, but their pleas go unanswered, probably not helped by the fact that Carlisle is probably as far away from London as one could be in England; one of the rich barons gets the idea to use his hot daughter (who's roughly Adam's age, which is to say vaguely between eighteen and forty-five) as a lure by having her pretend to be a poor woman who's his biggest fan; it works too well, as not only does Adam fall hard for her, but she starts developing feelings as well (keeping it all G-rated, of course); she comes to believe in Adam's noble mission and reveals her true intentions, but decides to use this to help him and his band strike back against the rich at her father's castle where they all congregate; they do, but their plan is leaked when the over-excited townspeople can't stop talking about it, so the rich people's defenses almost do them in, and just as the love interest's father is about to finish Adam off, whoopsy daisy, someone left the door unlocked, and in walks the king, having been made privy to the classist oppression occurring in Carlisle and none too pleased with the aristocrats; the outlaws get pardoned and Adam and Eve (get it? because they're humans?) live happily ever after. Double-D still got all of that, but he was distracted, still thinking of how he had been misled by his parents into thinking this film exalted acts of evil.
Whether his parents were consciously lying to him or whether they just didn't know themselves, he may never find out. But this was nevertheless one of the first times in his life that he felt like he couldn't 100% trust his parents' judgment. And all over a forbidden Sidney movie of all things.
And that was how the obsession began: conflicting feelings over a children's movie. After his first viewing of the movie - and at present as he fussed about with the gadgets - he still mostly sided with his parents. He still believed that the real world was too complicated to morally justify the vigilantism of someone like Adam Bell, whose actions only worked in a fictional world where good and evil were clearly spelled out. He still believed that any rational person would come to the same conclusion and that it was a bit alarming that Mr. Hood and Mr. Little had no apparent qualms about what they were doing.
But then again, what else were his parents not telling him? To learn, one must have not previously known something, and if Double-D was thirteen when he was first introduced to the idea that there can be righteous reasons for breaking the law - not necessarily that there were but that there could be - then perhaps in nearly five decades of life, his parents still had yet to learn that themselves, not because they were stupid but because they just didn't have the opportunity to be exposed to such a well-spoken argument.
And when Double-D wanted to learn more about something, he sought to find out all that he could about it; even incidental details that might not immediately answer his question, because they might help paint a bigger picture in the end. And so his research began. He strained his eyes more than he was proud to admit learning all that he could about Adam Bell, and when he learned all he could about the original legend, he turned his attention to the Sidney movie, and since that was a much more recent part of history, there was infinitely more to discover.
And in his search to find if there was anything he was missing that would push him one way or another on the debate of the morality of Adam Bell, any wisdom that he had not yet been exposed to, he left no stone unturned. He looked into the actors and the animators and the writers and the composers and the entire Sidney company itself in the years leading up to Adam Bell's release; did they agree with its morals, or were they simply selling this famous tale to make a buck? Evidence pointed more toward the latter, but hey, this project still had their names on it, right? Surely they must have espoused this sense of morality on some level. He looked into contemporary reception for the movie; did audiences at the time harbor the same skepticism that his parents did? It seemed that the movie didn't do too poorly, but it didn't do too well either, so while it wasn't the most forgotten Sidney movie by any means, it certainly wasn't one that you would see frequently celebrated by The Sidney Company thirty-odd years later. Furthermore, critics at the time seemed to all say that the movie was… eh. It was harmless and cute enough, they said - which Double-D found strangely offensive; did none of these people notice how oddly profound its underlying philosophy was? And he looked into what the film's modern legacy was in present day; sure enough, just more adults remembering the movie fondly but not actually saying what specifically they liked about it, just that it was a fun movie with age-appropriate humor and action scenes that kids would indeed get a kick out of, but again, none of them noticing the moral debate it posed, let alone chiming in on that moral debate.
At least that was most people's thoughts on Sidney's Adam Bell. There were, however, those outliers who cared very deeply about the movie, and for very different reasons.
"RAWR!"
Double-D flinched and looked to his left to see that Ed was puppeting the replica human skull that usually sat on his desk.
"GAH! Ed! Don't!" Double-D hollered as he swiped the skull out of the bear's paw. "Uh, p-pl-please don't touch Simian."
"But Mr. Skull wanted to talk, Double-D! And I must speak for those who cannot speak for themselves!"
"Uh, g- hm- ...Have you finished naming the ants, Ed?"
Once again, Ed sprang back into action. "Sorry, Double-D! I'll be right back on it! You can be Sisyphus, you can be Daystar, you can be An Ant Named Antoine, you can be Ballykissangel, you can be Potato Bob, you can be Glorious, you can be Baba O'Riley, you can be Rip Van Winkle, you can be Sousaphone, you can be Gigolo Joe, you can be…"
Double-D put the skull back in place. Once again, thank you for the perfect transition, Ed. The skull wasn't a real one - would it even be legal to get one's paws on a real one? - but it did hold a sentimental value for Double-D. Although originally acquired as a nifty knickknack in remembrance of a long-gone species, in his head it now served as his closest connection to those creatures for whom he now had discovered a strange affinity, all because of that infernal children's movie.
Even long before that Sidney movie rocked his world, Double-D had found the real-world story of the humans to be a damned fascinating one. For one thing, it was only in the last few centuries when archaeology became more sophisticated that humans were even proven to have actually existed. Before then, the scant evidence of the human race was attributed to deformities of other ape species - considering what was now known about the humans and their evolution, that answer wasn't entirely incorrect.
He stared at the gutted electronics that lay before him, thinking instead of that hound dog friend of Robin and John's who he had met two days prior. Double-D wondered if that man would have appreciated the skull. After all, for generations, the dog peoples were the main proponents of the theory that the humans did indeed once exist when all other species believed they didn't. They were the ones who maintained faith in the legend which other species regarded as pure poppycock. They were biased, of course, as they were themselves characters in the humans' story. Hound dogs, German Shepherds, Great Danes, Saint Bernards - they all told similar tales that their ancestors had been close allies with the humans. Even though there had been no genetic science to prove it, millennia of dogs and wolves procreating made it clear as day that the two species were cousins, but the dogs all told stories that elaborated on how this schism happened. They said they evolved separately after their ancient wolf forebears had made the tough decision to abandon their respective packs and go make friends with those hairless apes who seemed to be making great technological advancements incredibly quickly and who seemed to be good people to have on their good side - which they were, until they all froze to extinction in an ice age. This narrative was shared with excruciatingly similar details by every dog subspecies from across the Eurasian supercontinent - although, curiously, the first confirmed human remains were found in modern-day Ethiopia, so apparently those humans really got around.
Every separate subspecies of the dog community privately mourned the loss of their friends for tens of thousands of years straight on through to the present day, and the way that they adored them for centuries despite no hard evidence of their existence was not unlike how many hold a reverence for angels. It was also notable that in a world where everybody thinks their species was the first and foremost - saying that their people were the first to discover fire, that their people were the first to develop speech and language, that their species was the first one created by God Almighty - if you ask a dog, they'll almost never claim that dogs nor their wolf ancestors were those primitive pioneers; they'll invariably say it was the humans, and the rest of mammalia followed their lead.
Indeed, if Double-D lived in a less intellectual home, the idea of a wolf owning a replica human skull would have been scoffed at. To many wolves, the scientific significance of such a thing would be tainted by the association with the dog/wolf rivalry. A human skull would be regarded as a relic that only a stupid dog would value, a sign that they still pledged their allegiance and voluntary subservience to another species that they thought were godlike but every other species thought never existed - until it turned out they did. Perhaps more simply put, if Uncle Ward ever came back and saw Simian sitting on his nephew's desk, he'd probably remark that the boy was some sort of race-traitor.
Or he might call him a baby. One way or another, stories about humans came to be regarded as something juvenile. If you want to make it clear that a story is for little kids, make all the characters humans; it would be on par with having a story comprise of talking birds or fish or reptiles, except a lot easier to draw in a cartoon or storybook. There was another practical element to this: in the last half-century especially, efforts had been continuously made not to over- or under-represent any species in children's media to ensure that kids didn't get the idea that any species was more or less important than any other, and the easiest way to circumvent that problem entirely was to simply have all the characters belong to a species that did not functionally exist. But even long before the Civil Rights era, children's stories sporadically would use humans as characters, because there was just something fantastical about what might as well have been a fantasy race. Suffice it to say that the present-day dog community hadn't been too pleased that the species they admired were treated as childish things, but seeing as it was still bringing their memory back into mainstream culture in some capacity, they weren't complaining too loudly.
Those were simply the facts of that lost species and their impact on modern mammalian society. He already knew those before that fateful November day when he sat down to watch the forbidden children's movie. But things got a lot more interesting when he started doing his research into the film populated by cartoon humans.
It turned out that there was an entire expanded mythos to the story of the humans. Or, rather, there were several thousand versions of this expanded mythos and everybody who cared enough about the mythos had their own version of it, but they all had a number of common characteristics, and it went something like this:
In the real world, for the above reasons of species egalitarianism and the stigma that humans were reserved for children's stories, many Abrahamic religions in modern day taught the story of Adam and Eve to children using humans as the main characters. Some took this concept and ran with it, combining it with what the dogs had been saying for eons: humans were indeed the original species, and the ones who got the best start out of the gate, discovering fire and speech and agriculture and tools and society, and then they got too big for their britches and fell from grace.
Except for those who really love this fictional narrative of the humans, the part where they fall from grace doesn't happen. Instead, they continue to pull ahead from the other species, and they wind up living in a society much like our own, with all the modern luxuries and much the same history. Furthermore, all the other species of the world, long ago left behind in the humans' dust, still inhabit the world in their primitive state: no clothes, no sapient thought, certainly no equal status to the humans, no nothing. (And in some versions, just to throw the dogs a proverbial bone, some add the superfluous detail that those primitive dogs are the humans' prefered pal in the animal kingdom, and in addition to all the extant subspecies from the real world, the humans even bred hundreds more types of dogs, including some as small as Barbie dolls, just because they could.)
Alright, so for all intents and purposes, society only comprises of one species, so there should be no conflict, right? Nope! After spreading out all across the world, humans in different regions started looking dissimilar, and some of these dispersed peoples found their local geography gifted them with certain resources that gave them an arbitrary advantage over their cousins, which they then proceeded to abuse horrifically, and they had no qualms about it because the differences in phenotype combined with an utter dearth of scientific knowledge and the advantages and disadvantages different peoples had been given by their geography led many to believe that different types of humans were unequal. Fast forward a few centuries to their equivalent of our modern society and the humans have (mostly) come to realize that that was a supreme error in judgment, but the rifts of the different peoples' histories with one another still remain, and they keep arguing about how to fix what is broken, and they argue about what is broken, and they argue about how to argue, and every people seems to hate every other people on some level and feels justified in doing so because they believe that those other peoples hated them first, and it's just a whole big mess. Add in that they've also gone through the same conflicts in gender, creed, and nationality as the real world has, and one can see the message clear as day: you don't need to be very different from somebody else to find a difference you can start a never-ending conflict over. This extended mythos of the humans served as the perfect allegory for the nature of conflict in the real world, for as much as human characters were considered childish, their story could contain some profound truth if one was willing to do some philosophical digging.
The people who cherished this extended story of a human society were semi-colloquially known as skinnies. Or, rather, those who cared about the story were considered part of the larger "skinny" community. There were plenty of skinnies who didn't care to think too much about the deeper implications of an all-human society; they were in it for other things.
Double-D had run into that community countless times during his research into Sidney's Adam Bell and he still didn't have a completely clear idea of how to describe them. The impression he got was that there were many different kinds of them and it would be a logical folly to try to paint any individual as wholly representative of the group. The only inherently common trait was that they had an affinity for human cartoon characters, and in that community, Adam Bell was widely regarded as the father of the fandom, having brought the concept of "skinnies" into the mainstream - while many in the community preferred other, later "skinny" franchises and intellectual properties to the 1973 Sidney film (indeed, most of them seemed to have other favorites), Adam Bell held a place of respect among them for laying down the first brick. Beyond that, there were as many different types of "skinnies" as there were skinnies themselves.
Some of them kept their love of human characters under wraps and reserved it for online message boards, while some of them publicly wore their hobby on their sleeve like a badge of honor. Some of them dressed up in elaborate human costumes, while some of them were more than content to admire in the third-person. Some of them just wanted to consume their favorite media over and over again, while some of them were inspired to create their own - and among those, some of them made illustrative or literary reimaginings of their favorite human worlds with their favorite "skinny" characters while some of them conjured entirely original works. And while some of them simply and innocently thought the characters were cute, some of them took their transfixiation with these characters to its logical extreme in a most explicit way that made Double-D and a lot of other outsiders squeamish, to say the least.
Come to think of it, that was another thing they all had in common: there were those who knew of the community and thought they were depraved as a whole, not knowing or not caring for any distinctions between the factions; the whole of the community bore this ire together. Never mind that such adulterations of children's media was far from the group's main goal (well, for most members, at least); an outsider who discovered "skinnies" almost always discovered the "mature" side to the community shortly thereafter, and almost always interpreted this in the worst possible way, and almost always found the entire community offputting. While this prejudiced phobia of the community was not as widespread in those days as it would become in the following years and decades, it was still present, and it was assumed that anybody who knew of skinnies but was not themselves a skinny would be disgusted by the concept of skinnies by default.
For his part, Double-D discovered all of that by accident. He had seen some people online mentioning that Adam Bell had essentially birthed the skinny fandom, inspiring him to do some Googling in hopes to find out what that community thought about the moral message of the film. When he executed his search, he was hit with countless articles and exposés discussing the dark side of the community. While he was not interested in being part of this dark side, he felt it was his intellectual duty to learn about anything tainted that may be associated with that damned cartoon movie that had become the center of his attention. While scrolling through a forum post that seemed to just be a cavalcade of people expressing their unexaggerated loathing for skinnies, he saw someone leave a comment that was nothing but a URL. While many of the other commenters had been crassly dismissing the skinnies as a bunch of creeps who were so perverted that they wanted to copulate with a species that didn't even exist anymore and might as who well be regarded as having a fetish for cavemen, this particular forum-user had previously left comments that - while still maintaining the same attitudes as their compatriots - were certainly more intelligently written than the ones surrounding it. Therefore Double-D thought he could trust the URL, believing it would lead him to some scholastic data or a first-person investigative story about the community and how they expressed their love of human cartoon characters; instead, that would become the first time Double-D had ever seen pornography. If he had just scrolled down the forum thread a little farther, he would have seen other users admonishing the one who had led them to bear witness to such accursed images.
Thank God his parents weren't home to hear him scream. The things he saw there not only compelled him to delete his browsing history, but to also run several different antivirus applications, research how to wipe his DNS logs, and contemplate calling his internet service provider to report his computer hacked, lest they see any strange data on their end of the records.
And yet, if he were to be completely honest, he found it all fascinating. Not the art itself - the fact that the art existed. Because at first, he was too paralyzed by fear to even click away from the page, but when he gathered his composure, he figured that since he would never be able to bring himself to return to this site, he might as well see what it had to offer while he was there; he was still there to research the public opinion of the Sidney film, and in the quest for knowledge, one must leave no stone unturned, not even the dirty ones. And he had to admit, some of it wasn't that bad; yes, there were some that portrayed acts that would get winces from passersby even if two consenting adults did it in the real world, but there was also some very soft stuff, not even necessarily softcore, but PG-13 stuff like characters making out or just standing around giving each other bedroom eyes, and some that were just the characters smiling at the viewer, drawn far more handsomely than they had been in their original iteration. And while he would certainly describe some of it as downright depraved, as a whole, well - it would depend on whether one put more stock into the object of desire having a familiar anatomy or whether one put more stock into that object of desire having the mentality of a sapient adult. For posterity, Double-D did not see very many pieces involving characters from Adam Bell; again, while the community seemed to respect that film's importance to their fandom, it was hardly many members' favorite. Honestly, the fact that he couldn't grasp how anybody could find 90% of these images attractive had less to do with the fact that they were humans and more to do with that fact that so many of them were so poorly-drawn; when his later research suggested the idea that some artists of these pieces created them not for their sexual appeal but purely for shits and giggles, those artists being fully aware of their community's reputation as a bunch of perverts and deciding to toy with the concept, Double-D took a deep breath and told himself that there were far worse avenues for self-expression.
These thoughts came and went over the last two years, and as he warmed up his hot-glue gun, they returned once again. He knew that if anybody found out that he was privy to the existence of the skinny community, they would expect him to denounce it. But he didn't know if he could bring himself to do it.
For one thing, it was another case of his empathy being problematic: he was willing to defend a people who he had been told did not deserve to be defended. Just like how he couldn't have assumed Eddy had been right about Robin and John being the bandits when they matched the vague description, he could not bring himself to condemn that entire community when so few of them had actually done anything damnable. He knew that some would see this refusal to condemn them as a damnable offense on his part, but as he thought through these thoughts once again sitting at his desk, he told himself to take a page out of Robin and John's book and follow one's own moral compass no matter what others may think; he just hoped that was the right move.
There was also the way that their existence made him feel better about himself. It wasn't a "wow, I'm better than these losers" sort of thing (although he would certainly feel that way about some specific members he encountered), but more that he felt less weird knowing he wasn't the only one upon whom a children's cartoon movie had a profound effect. He could now tell himself that art marketed toward kids was still valid art and was allowed to make an emotional impact just as much as art intended for adults - hell, if anything, if may have been more impactful because it could be appreciated by children as well as adults.
But he could also relate to the skinnies. In all his observations of them, intentional or accidental, he had come to form the theory that on some level, consciously or otherwise, the skinny fandom was a form of escapism for all involved. Whether it was simply escaping a hectic day by drawing characters they thought looked cool or going so far as to indulge in an elaborate fantasy of an entirely different world, everyone needs to get away sometime. Double-D didn't hate real people by any means, but there were certainly days where he wanted to throw his hands in the air and resign himself to never understanding how the rest of mammalia ticked. And over that most recent Winter Break, when he again was home alone with his friends out of commission, this time Eddy having the flu and Ed being grounded for stealing some of Sarah's dolls to practice voodoo, Double-D caught another re-airing of that blasted film on The Sidney Channel. Now having a few years' familiarity with the forbidden flick, he was much more at ease as he sat through it once again. He went into it intending to look for more clues to help him decide once and for all whether his parents' philosophy of morals and ethics was a philosophy worth emulating or if he needed to start formulating his own, paying special attention to everything past the point that he zoned out in introspection during his first viewing. But he was still a bit nervous; not nearly as nervous as the first time, but enough to be distracting. Then he had a weird idea: he hit the mute button and just started watching the closed captionings. And suddenly he was overwhelmed by a strange feeling of calm. And it was strange indeed, and he zoned out again for a few minutes as he tried to determine the cause. Then it hit him: by muting the voices, he had removed the last proof to his subconscious mind that there were real people in this film. He could pretend that these characters did not only exist as pencil scratchings on art cells; he could pretend that he was staring into a window into an entirely different plane of existence. And he liked that idea. He liked pretending that there was another world besides this one. He liked playing with the idea that he could one day go there; he liked hoping that perhaps there, life would make sense. It sure seemed like a nice enough place on the screen - sure, they were dealing with abject poverty and they were living in a time with limited education and nonexistent hygiene and near-universal illiteracy and backward social structures, but they were also living in a world where good defeats evil and the good people get along instead of fighting with one another over which of them is the most good and goddammit people there just seemed nicer, and he would honestly consider sacrificing his modern comforts if he were somehow granted the opportunity to go to a world like theirs where people would like him for once in his life - perhaps not for a lifetime, but certainly for a moment. He was a man of science and he knew this was purely a childlike whimsy, but for as much as his parents had encouraged his creativity, they had always encouraged it within the confines of reality, and had always tacitly discouraged playing around with logical absurdities. But much like the movie itself, the chance to lose himself in juvenile fantasies was something he didn't know he'd been missing all these years. He did notice more details during this second viewing, but he was still thoroughly distracted by the unprecedented euphoria of his daydreaming, and suffice it to say that every week when the new TV Guide arrived in the mail, Double-D would check for if he would have a feasible chance to squeeze in a third viewing.
...Was he one of them? He nearly hot-glued his fingers to the plastic, distraught by the thought. He knew that he certainly didn't consider himself one of them, and he also knew that he would much rather not have people think he was one of them; he didn't want any more people hating him without hope of reconciliation. But he was terrified that if anybody found out that there was a "skinny" children's movie that crossed his mind every single day of his life, he wouldn't have much of a choice of who he was perceived to be; the fact that he had originally only started dwelling on that film in the hopes to help him develop his own feelings independent of those of his parents' about the nature of law, morality, and justice would probably just have made his case look even worse. And the feeling that he got was that that community would likewise claim he was one of them whether he had the balls to admit it or not. Sure, fine, he was originally only obsessed with it because he felt the need to learn all he could about the piece of art that was forbidden from him, and sure, fine, he only willingly maintained this obsession because that blasted film came to represent a strange continuing coming-of-age phase where he was forcing himself to think critically about whether he actually agreed with what his parents taught him or if he only thought he agreed because that was what his parents taught him, and sure, fine, it was the only "skinny" thing he held such a deep affinity for and he really didn't care that deeply about any other skinny movie or television cartoon - true, in the intervening years since he finally popped his "skinny" cherry, he had found himself having a new appreciation for animated works he came across featuring human characters, but he didn't really care about them nearly as much as he did for Adam Bell, and furthermore it was none of their business and they didn't need to know that. But he'd encountered enough of them to know that they would be the first to say that there was no finite quantity of ways that one could find themselves in the fandom, and his journey was completely valid; he also knew that many of them would say that if he wasn't a card-carrying "skinny" yet, he would get there in due time. And if anybody on either side of this cultural argument found out that he had a history of watching that skinny flick and catching himself consciously realizing he was enjoying it specifically because it featured human characters, that would be it, end of story, case closed.
He had tried so hard for so long to gain the reputation of being an intellectual wolf who had no time for such silly things as fiction and fairy tales, and he feared that could all be undone if anybody ever found out that he had such a strange relationship with a Sidney movie, and who knows what damage may ensue if someone got the impression that he was in it specifically for the human characters and made the logical leap to assuming he was really only in it for the risqué underworld associated with it. People tabbed as perverted man-children don't get into Harvard, nor Yale, nor Stanford, nor MIT, nor Penn, nor the University of Chicago, nor Northwestern, nor William and Mary, nor Johns Hopkins, nor Duke, nor Tulane, nor Vanderbilt, nor Cali-Berk, nor USC, nor UCLA; hell, if such a fate befell him, he'd be lucky to get into Miami of Ohio - he might even have to settle for a diploma mill like Arizona State.
He tried to reassure himself that if, heaven forbid, such information did become publicly disseminated, he should use it as the ultimate opportunity to test his strength. It would be a challenge of the utmost difficulty, but one that would reap great rewards if he succeeded: the challenge to clear his own name and to destigmatize a niche community whose members had (for the most part, at least) never hurt anybody in the name of their hobby. But it was a challenge he was not exactly up for, and one he'd certainly rather never face; he knew as well as anyone that the old adage that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger wasn't always true, as it could still leave someone battered, broken, and crippled if they weren't truly prepared for the test, and often did - and even this was conveniently ignoring that the hypothetical what doesn't kill you could still indeed kill you.
He would love to have the resolve to do what he felt was right and not care whether it aligned with anybody else's moral compasses other than his own, just like Mr. Hood and Mr. Little seemed to do. But as it was, he still disagreed with their methods, both in their principle and their sheer efficacy. Perhaps his further time spent with in the world of Adam Bell would inspire him to change his tune, but as he sat there tinkering with the electronics, he had not yet gathered enough evidence to disagree with his parents on the notion that it would be more civil, more righteous, more mature, more rewarding, more palatable, more safe, more sane, and simply more effective to work within the confines of the law to fix the problems they were trying to fix. And if they were going to keep evoking the name of Adam Bell - a name which, for better or worse, Double-D found himself feeling a connection to and having a strange sense of ownership of, and as embarrassing as it would be to admit, he felt overwhelmingly uncomfortable and a tad bit violated when somebody else mentioned that character, whether they were referring to the Sidneyfied version or not, just like he had felt uncomfortable in the junkyard the other day - then he definitely would not be joining them in their merry adventures. And as far as he knew, Eddy (and by extension, Ed) were on his side with this one. I mean, Eddy had to have disregarded their invitation, correct? Why else would be be asking him to help in this scam by designing -
"YEEEeeeOOOWWWwww!"
"Ed, what's wrong!?" Edd asked as he turned in his chair.
"Jim bit me! JIM BIT ME!" Ed bellowed as he held out his right arm, jumping from leg to leg in pain, Jim the Cactus hanging a few feet off the ground as its spikes were dug deep into the bear's paw.
"Oh, dear, Ed! I've told you time and time again that Jim likes to have his personal space!" Edd chastised as he walked Ed over to sit on his bed.
Double-D retrieved the first-aid kit he had ready to go at the end of his bed and got a pair of latex gloves shortly after that. The wound was not a pretty sight, and Double-D felt a bit queasy looking at it. As he tended to the injury, he had the thought that if Robin and John were to ever question his bravery and his drive to face his fears to help people, he would cite moments like this as how he was brave in his own way. He would really rather not have looked at all that blood and flesh, but he made himself do it to help his friend.
When forcing himself to confront such an unsightly scene, he typically did one of two things: he either envisioned things that he found pleasant to look at to take his mind off his present reality, or he envisioned things that he had seen which were much more unpleasant to look at as a way of contextualizing that he had successfully willed himself through seeing much worse. But with all the recent thoughts of Adam Bell and the skinnies, something in his brain must have short-circuited, because he envisioned things that could be described as both or neither. He had visions of that one time a year and a half ago when he clicked that link and was bombarded by obscene images, many of which he would agree were indeed sinister. And this part of the memory frightened him. But he also remembered some of the images that were actually quite well-drawn, images he did not find viscerally objectionable, images that disturbingly did not disturb him when he thought of them then and still disturbed him by not disturbing him as he thought of them now. And this part of the memory frightened him even more.
"Are you okay, Double-D?"
Edd snapped out of it and realized he had stopped working on Ed's paw, having opted instead to come to a complete standstill and stare into space. "Uh- y-yes, Ed, why do you ask?"
"You stopped making Jim stop biting me."
"Oh, yes, um… sorry, Ed." He got back to work. He dignified them, but he didn't want to be one of them.
"Are you sure you're okay, Double-D?"
"...I will be Ed." And he hoped he was right about that.
