How I'm Living Now

Oh, do I have a tale to tell you….

The final day of my life, at least as I had known it up until that point, was a Sunday, which nowseems appropriate, if not a bit ironic.

The previous Friday, after work had been completed for the day, a group of us had set out, in a
caravan of sorts, directly from our city office, to the massive, modern beach house that we had
collectively chipped in to rent for the first weekend of the summer.

What followed that night, and into the following Saturday, was a non-stop marathon of drinking,
drug use, and wanton hook-ups of the heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexual kind. Yes, we were
(mostly) all too old to be partaking in this sort of thing, but at the same time, our ages, and the
all-too-predictable feelings of insecurity that had come with them, were probably in part fueling much
of this debauchery to begin with. In some way, maybe we hoped it would help us at least feel
young again, even if literally turning back the clock was still beyond the reach of even us professional,
urban, Master-of the Universe-types.

Then it was Sunday. I had always hated Sunday, from when I was a child. I loathed school, and so
every Sunday was spent dreading the sure-to-be agonizing week to come. As an adult, the object of
my foreboding had simply shifted to work, which I had grown to hate almost as much as I had hated
school. But there was something else at play too, and I had never been able to put my finger on it until
that fateful day in question.

But we’ll get to that later.

That final morning, a group of five of us had gone out to a spot further down the beach for a
picnic, while the rest of our colleagues were still back at the house, recovering from the night(s) before.Our group consisted of myself; Tim, our boss and CEO; Katie, the head of marketing; Alice, the head of
HR; Jeff, a senior software engineer; and Bill, a project manager (whatever that means).

In truth, it wasn’t really a picnic, as no food had actually been brought along with us, by
anybody. Instead, everybody just kept on drinking, though it was mostly wine, which seemed more
appropriate for the setting than the beer and liquor that had deliberately been left back at the beach
house. Some cocaine made an appearance as well, probably the last of it, and provided by Bill, who had
decided to bring it despite the danger of the ever-present wind forever scattering it among the
surrounding almost-white sand.

I wasn’t partaking. Truthfully, I had reached my limit back on Friday night, but had kept on going
the previous day. Implicit peer pressure was perhaps to blame, the same that had likely caused me to
agree to this whole excursion in the first place. Understandably, I wasn’t entirely excited about spending
the entire weekend away with my coworkers, but I knew it was an important part of staying in the good
graces of the in-crowd at the company, especially once I learned the CEO was going as well. His presence
was why I had tagged along on this “picnic” too, despite being more tempted to hang back at the beach
house and rot with everybody else.

But now, I was really tapped out, and not just physically, but socially as well. As a result, I foundmyself zoning out while the mini-party continued around me unabated, thankfully in no way deterred

by my lack of participation. Tim was currently holding court, as he was want to do in really any setting,while the rest of them pretended to be as enraptured by the sound of his voice as he himself was.

It was then, in this moment of inner quiet, having nothing else to occupy my mind with, and
thus finding myself simply observing the natural world around us, that I was finally able to understandwhat had truly bothered me about this particular day of the week for all of my life. That is, besides the
obvious dread I had always felt about the immediate, though always ultimately banal, future.

The sea was a bright, Caribbean blue, and the sky above it was just as vibrant, and literally
cloudless. The sand that surrounded us was free of any detritus and debris, and was so pure of color it
almost reflected the sunlight back at us. Even the heat wasn’t so bad: despite the lack of cloud cover, it
couldn’t have been more than 75 degrees. And yet, there seemed to be something downright sinister
at the edges of what, by all accounts, was a perfect, painting-esque scene. Not just sinister, actually: but
evil, actively malevolent. Hateful, as strange as it is to say.

Just as the promise of another week of tortuous school or work had hung above the nominally
relaxing and fun activities of the previous Sundays in my life, without fail serving to stain and spoil them,I sensed that something even worse was lurking about us now, in the background of the very fabric of
reality.

But whatever this “thing” was, it was just out of the reach of my perception, it seemed. Between
the grains of sand, or behind the reeds that surrounded us, I almost thought I could see it, whatever “it”
was. But then the light would shift in some subtle way, and I would lose sight of it again.

My anxiety began to rise. This wasn’t a beach, I was now convinced. This was a spider’s web, or
the bioluminescent light hanging off a female angler fish (I remembered reading an article in a men’smagazine about that). A trap, in other words, and we were the prey. We just perceived it as a
beach, as that was the closest approximation our feeble human minds could make to what it really was.

I wanted to run. I wanted to scream. But how could I explain myself to these people? My boss
was among those present. How would it look if I started to freak out now, without even being able to
articulate why? I’d be a pariah. I’d lose my job. I might even be blacklisted from the industry. I wouldn’t
be able to afford to rent my very expensive apartment in the city anymore. Everything would be ruined.
A lifetime of sacrifices would be wiped out, in an instant of panic and irrationality.

Amidst my terror, I first spotted them. At this point, they were just four lumbering forms,
coming from the direction of the beach house. At first, I assumed they were some stragglers from our
group who had managed to overcome their hangovers and decided to join us after all. But
something seemed off about their shape, and the way they were walking. As they got closer, I realized
something else: they were too big. Not too big to have been any of my coworkers, I mean: they were too
big to be human.

Now another hypothesis formed: I was still feeling the effects of the drugs I had taken
over the previous two days. Hell, I wouldn’t have been able to confidently say what I had consumed, and
even in what specific quantities. Pill, powders, tabs – it all blended together into a multi-color haze. This
could all very easily just be those same drugs still percolating in my system, and causing some residual
effects. At the time, this idea actually offered me some comfort: yes, it was just the drug abuse that was
to blame! Nothing more!

Fortunately, there was a simple way to test this theory.

“Is anybody else seeing this?” I said aloud to the rest of the group.

I had to ask multiple times before I had everyone’s attention, and this was followed by a
frustrating amount of pointing to get them all actually looking at the four ever-encroaching
silhouettes I was referring to.

“Are they in costumes?” asked Tim.

This triggered a flurry of conversation that resulted in, what seemed to be, a likely
explanation: some of our friends had rented and smuggled animal mascot costumes with them on the
trip, which they had now adorned themselves with as some sort of … prank? If it was a prank, nobody
could agree on what the joke was supposed to be. But that’s what this had to all be, right? What else
could be going on here? An alien invasion? Alice and Tim actually chuckled a bit, albeit nervously,
pretending like they not only “got” the elusive point of all this, but actually found it amusing.

As the quartet approached, the idea that these were human beings in costumes seemed more
and more unlikely. Yes, they were humanoid animals: a pink elephant, a blue bear, a yellow tiger, and a
green chimpanzee. But they looked like cartoons.

That aspect of their appearance is hard to really describe. But, yes, they looked like cartoons,
that had somehow been ripped from some old, cheesy children’s TV show and placed into our reality.
But how that jelled with the very real environment around them …like I said, it’s difficult to explain. I
couldn’t even look at them for more than a few seconds at a time, actually, before I started to feel light-
headed, and would have to look away. Alice and Katie complained of headaches, and Jeff even warned
he might throw up.

Still, we remained fixed to the spot as the…things approached, out of a potent mix of terror andcuriosity. I think we were still hoping against hope that this would all still be revealed to be a big farce.

A few feet away from us, they stopped. If there was any doubt these were people in costumes,
it was gone now: they were blinking, and their wide, exposed chests rose and fell with their breathing.More concerning was the unmistakable expression they each wore on their faces: they were hungrily
leering at us. The lion actually lipped his lips.

Tim, bravely, approached the elephant, which, like its friends, was several feet taller (and wider)
than any of us. To this day, I still don’t know what Tim was thinking. He was our boss, so maybe he
thought it was his responsibility to get to the bottom of this quickly escalating situation, despite how
insane and beyond any norm it obviously was. He had saved the company several times in his short
tenure already, from scandals financial and sexual both, so perhaps he thought he could protect us here
as well.

But before he could say anything, the purple elephant sucked him into his trunk with an
exaggerated slurping sound. His outline quickly moved through the elephant’s trunk, then down histhroat, and finally settled into its enormous, round belly, from which sprouted an outie belly button the
size of a basketball.

The elephant then let out a deafening belch, and gave its stomach a satisfied pat.

“Hey, didn’t we eat enough of dese stiffs back at da house? Da last one just stopped kickin’ a
few minutes ago, fa’ Pete’s sake!” the chimp said to the elephant. By their deep, gruff voices, it was
obvious they were males.

Next to me, Katie gasped. Her husband had stayed back at the beach house. I suppose she still
loved him, even if she had spent most of the previous day being gang-banged by the entire ProductDepartment. Then again, her husband was part of the Product department, so maybe everything was
still copasetic.

It strikes me now, now that I’m far past the immediate danger and horror of that day,
and thus able to more calmly assess, how darkly ironic it is that these people, with all their collective
education history, family pedigrees, social capital, and wealth, ultimately ended up as nothing but basic
sustenance for our tormentors. They served no greater function for them as a potato chip would for one
of us, for example. That was the ultimate culmination of their lives, lives that many others would have
literally killed for (and probably had)!

But I digress. Sorry, my mind wanders a bit more now than it used to. And it’s not like I have toeat any more anyway…

I tried to move. We all tried to move. To run far, far away, even if it meant abandoning our
fearless leader to be broken down by stomach acid. But when we looked down, we found that allour feet had sunken into the sand, and now could not be extricated, no matter how much we all
struggled (and struggle, we did).

I leaned down to better investigate. Had we somehow been sitting on top of quicksand this
entire time (that was only active now, for some reason)? The grains immediately around my ankleslooked different. Was it a different shade of beige? I got even closer. My stomach dropped. The sand
that had enveloped my feet looked like it had been drawn into the beach itself.

It was cartoon sand.

How could this be happening?

“Aw, stop ya belly-achin’ and get to woik, ya bum!” said the elephant to the chimp. He burped
again, even more loudly this second time. This was followed by a long, loud fart, that made them all
laugh.

“Oh, dis asshole’s gonna give me some indigestion, I can feel it now!” he complained.

The chimp approached Katie, who had begun to scream and cry hysterically. The trauma of the
past few minutes had broken something inside her mentally, along, no about, with the terror of what
was still to come.

“Hey toots, hope this is as good for me as it for youse!”

He placed one huge hand on Kate’s head, and roughly pressed her into the sand. With the
other, he effortlessly ripped off her designer panties and skirt, and tossed them carelessly aside into thesand. Then, he lowered his own polka-dotted, size-XXL shorts, revealing a gigantic, human-like green
penis, that had already begun leaking yellow-tinged pre-cum in savage anticipation.

We stared in horror as the chimp began to assault Katie. But, with each thrust, Katie began to
change too. Her feet started to melt into the chimp’s enormous testicles, while her arms shrank
and receded into her torso. At the same time, her head was changing shape as well, becoming more and
more like the glans of the same penis that was still inside her (and no doubt causing profound internal
damages). She was also beginning to turn green. It was a light green at first, before darkening to match
the skin tone of her rapist.

“Help me!” she screamed, before white cartoon cum began leaking from her mouth, and any
further speech became impossible. But what could we do? Our feet were still stuck, and even if they
weren’t, it was obvious the creatures could easily overpower any of us. All we could was watch. Our cell
phones didn’t even have any service here (we had all checked at one point or another during the course
of the picnic, and again when we had first spotted these monsters walking towards us).

Her hair fell out and was blown away by the wind towards the direction of the sea. Her clothes
became the thick, black public hair of the chimpanzee. Her eyes closed for a final time and her eyelidsfused with the rest of her increasingly smooth face. Before long, Katie was no more. She had merged
with the chimp’s already-absurdly-large penis and balls, making them, somehow, even bigger.

The chimp began to stoke his new penis, and let out a satisfied roar as he ejaculated what
seemed to be a gallon of cum all over Jeff, who had been the one unlucky enough to be standing closest
to Katie before her demise.

He tried to wipe it off of him, but then began to scream as his skin sizzled and popped. He wasburning.

The chimp’s semen was causing him to melt.

The animals laughed again.

“Damn, dat shit is potent!” the lion exclaimed. The chimp and bear high-fived each other.

He didn’t suffer long, thankfully. A few seconds later, and all that remained of Jeff,
who I had just seen having a threesome with two of our hottest female coworkers the night before (who
potentially had been eaten by the chimp himself, what a coincidence that would be), was a
bloody, slimly mess, mixed in with the semen that had just been some part of Katie, all resting atop of
the patch of cartoon sand that had previously held him helplessly in place.

The chimp tried to put his shorts back on, but found they could not contain his newly-enhancedgenitals. He let out a short, dark laugh.

“I can’t even get my fuckin’ pants back on, dis ding is so fuckin’ big! Oh, well, I know da ol’ ladyback home will love it anyway! I can’t wait ta’ give her da monsta’ fuckin’ of her life when we get back!”

He turned to look at the blue bear.

“Speakin’ a’ which, isn’t dat why youse came along on dis here lil’ expedition in da foist place?”

The bear grunted affirmatively, and began to approach Bill and Alice.

Everyone knew Bill and Alice didn’t like one another. Alice was the head of HR, and that made
her the natural enemy of the often offensive Bill, who enjoyed using inappropriate humor as a way to
“liven up” his day-to-day back at the office. This had all seemed to come to a head two nights ago,
when, both completely naked, they had begun to argue over the last of the ecstasy pills (and who would
get to imbibe them).

Alice had ended up winning that particular fight, and Bill had retaliated by hooking up with the
young HR rep that Alice had just hired the previous winter (and had taken a particular shine to,relishing in having assumed the role of her “mentor”). He then loudly bragged about his conquest to
Alice, and showed her a video of the two fucking in one of the beach house’s bathrooms as proof.

Now, Bill and Tim were close, so Alice wouldn’t be able to do anything to him. But her new
hire? She’d be out by Labor Day. All it would take was finding the right excuse, which an HR rep as
seasoned as Alice would have no trouble crafting.

That is, she would have been out of a job if she weren’t already being digested in the stomach ofone of these obese mutants.

So I guess it was all a moot point now anyway.

Alice reached out her hand and grasped Bill’s. Admittedly, I had never been found of either of
them: Bill, with his obnoxious crassness, and Alice, the smug, false confidant, who we all knew was really
just looking out for the company at the end of the day, and not really for any of us. But this gesture,
which Bill eagerly reciprocated, actually made me soften towards both of them a little, even though I
knew this would likely be their final moments.

But then again, I knew these were mine as well.

The bear looked down at their entangled, trembling hands.

“I sees youse bot’ are eaga’ to get started, den? Dat’s good, because my fuckin’ balls are full!”

He placed one humongous blue paw on the side of each of their heads, and then smashed them
together with a thud. Alice and Bill yelped in pain, but this was quickly followed by a more prolonged,
painful yowling. They had tried to move their heads away from each other, but had found themselves
unable to do so. This was because their heads were merging. Their hands too had fused into a single ball
of flesh, which along with their conjoined skulls, was now serving to bring the rest of their bodies closer
together, despite their desperate struggle to prevent that from happening.

First, their shoulders met and became one, followed by the rest of their arms, their torsos, and
both sets of legs. The pained screaming, once distinctly male and female, now synced and brieflybecame androgynous-sounding, before turning female again, though wholly different than Katie’s
previous high, shrill voice, that had once struck so much fear in us back in the office.

Their twisted clothes began to morph into pink fur, as the conjoined form began growing
upwardly and outwardly at the same time. Katie had been narrow hipped, and only had modestly-
sized boobs. Whatever she was becoming a part of, however, was almost hyper-sexualized in contrast:
not only did it sport two absurdly round, ample breasts, but its hips were wider than the two people
that had previously made it up standing side by side.

At this point, the screaming stopped, and the new head began to take shape. I wasn’t surprised
to see that it was the perfect counterpart to its creator, the blue bear. Katie and Jeff had been fused and
combined to make a pink bear, a female companion for the blue. The skin of the creature finally stopped
swirling and shifting, and the fully-formed pink bear now stood where Katie and Jeff, the halves that
had made up her whole, once had just moments before.

She batted her eyes suggestively at the blue bear, the long, exaggerated eyelashes almost
generating a breeze through their movement alone, and approached him slowly, but confidently. Once
she was close enough, she began to stroke his penis through his striped shorts, causing it to
become erect. In response, the blue bear began greedily kneading her globe-sized, furry ass cheeks with
his paws.

“How’s it goin’, hot stuff?” she asked the blue bear in a seductive voice.

“Oh, you are fuckin’ poifect!” the blue bear responded.

“Oh, shut up and show me how much ya love me, ya big fuckin’ lug!”

They began to make out, then, their thick tongues joining and wrestling like two boa constrictors locked in a fierce battle over the same prospective meal.

The yellow lion rolled his eyes, cracked his knuckles, and began to walk towards me.

It was my turn.

“Never mind dem, sunshine,” he growled at me.

My mind was racing, trying to guess what he had in mind for me. Would he simply consume me,
like the elephant had Tim? Unlikely, since they had just eaten, and the lion wasn’t as big as the elephant,
and thus probably wasn’t hungry yet.

That seemed reasonable.

The lion reached out towards me with his right paw. I was to be transformed, then. But into
what? Would I be fused into the lion’s body, like Katie and the chimp? Or would he make me into hismate, like the blue bear had done to Jeff and Alice (They were now rutting wildly, if the noises coming
from that direction were any indication, though I dared not take my eyes off the lion to confirm)?

Maybe he’d turn me into an article of clothing, or some sort of tool or weapon? The possibilitieswere endless and terrifying, and, worst of all, I was helpless to prevent any of them.

But then, in those final few seconds before the lion’s hand reached me, an idea popped into my
head. A gambit, really. A mad gambit, that I had no reason to believe would have any effect whatsoever
on what was about to happen.

But, if nothing else, I had always been strong-willed. I had always managed to persevere through
those dreaded school and work weeks after their painful Sunday prologue had finally passed. I had even
managed to rise in the ranks in an industry, and with people, that I really didn’t care for on any level. So,
maybe – possibly - I could leverage that same force of will to withstand the assault this awful thing was
about to inflict upon me.

No – to withstand it wouldn’t be enough. If the transformation failed, it stood to reason they’d
just eat me, or fuck me to death, or something even worse. I had to direct it, to somehow favor me in
such a way that I could escape them and survive.

The yellow hand was getting closer. I put my own hands up to block it, but he easily swatted
them away. I didn’t think that would really work anyway, but I hoped a physical act would help reinforce
the mental ones that would follow. I screamed – not in pain, or terror, but in anger. As the paw finally
reached the side of my face, I bit one of the wide fingers. It had no effect – the creature’s hide and fur
were far too thick to inflict even the smallest amount of damage upon it.

The lion chuckled.

“Heh, dis one’s a foighta’, ain’t he? I like dat!”

The chimp was too busy stroking his engorged penis again to respond while the elephant slepton his back, snoring loudly. The bears were somehow still going at it, by the sound of it.

Pain shot through my body. It was happening, whatever “it” was.

That meant it was now or never.

I flooded my mind with sounds and images both. At first, I thought of my family and friends, but
quickly stopped. That wasn’t right. That wasn’t enough. I didn’t need to resist this forceful mutation, I
needed to appropriate it.

I shifted tactics. I replaced the sentimental with the powerful. Memories of triumphs bothprofessional and personal. This grade, that resultant diploma. This promotion, that resultant speech.

  Outside the confines of my mind, I could feel my body shifting, and not in the way I had hoped.

Don’t ask me to explain, but it was obvious I needed something stronger.

  I redirected my thoughts again: now I considered people and things outside of my immediate
experience that I associated with “power”. A sports car, driving 120 miles per hour down a deserteddesert road. A fighter jet breaking the sound barrier. An aircraft carrier in the middle of the Pacific
Ocean, waves breaking against its mighty hull. A tank, firing at the unseen enemy beyond the horizon.

Soldiers. Firefighters. Police Officers. Professional athletes. Olympians. The Mayor. The
Governor. The President of the United States. The Great Men of History. A nuclear bomb, exploding. A
superhero with a red cape, flying and weaving between skyscrapers.

I was grasping for anything that could prove useful.

The Sun, but not as I could see it now, coldly and indifferently illuminating this horrible
spectacle. No, I pictured it close up, in space. Serene despite the countless explosions that dotted it’s
surface. Safe from anything short of a black hole.

The Sun. Sunday. It was Sunday, wasn’t it?

“What da fuck?” I could hear the lion say.

It was working. My body was still shifting, but differently than before.

Again, don’t ask me to explain.

The lion removed his paw from the side of my face. I opened my eyes (I didn’t realize I had ever
shut them in the first place). The lion stared at his paw, obviously confused that whatever he had
intended to happen with it, hadn’t.

I looked at my own hands. They were still recognizably human in shape, but my skin… I
searched for the words. A term from my childhood, back when I still had the time to waste on videogames, now came to mind: low-poly. As in, low-polygonal. Meaning, computer-generated, but at a
primitive, unsophisticated level.

So, I had still ended up as a cartoon. But a very different one than what I was supposed to havebecome, I could guess.

Now the lion was looking at me, his mouth hanging agape in dumb disbelief.

“What da fuck?” he repeated again, louder this time.

This finally got the attention of the chimp, who stopped abusing himself to finally pay attention
to what was happening around him. The elephant, too, was beginning to stir from his brief nap due to all
the commotion.

The bears, conversely, were still having sex.

I continued to stare are my hands. My transformation hadn’t stopped. My skin was changing,
becoming more detailed and textured. Whereas before they had looked like those of a character from a90’s video game, they next began to look like they were from an animated movie from the early 00’s,
like the one about that funny green ogre.

My skin changed yet again, and now appeared to be of the same quality as the CGI in that weird
movie about the blue aliens that I had seen with my ex-wife, that everyone had made such
a big fuss about at the time.

I reached the final stage. My hands now looked identical to how they had before the lionever touched me.

Photo-realistic CGI.

The elephant was now sitting up, blinking rapidly to get the sleep out of his eyes.

“Uh, did you mean ta’ do dat?” he asked the lion, stupidly.

“What do ya think, ya fuckin’ putz?” he replied angrily, without ever taking his eyes off me.

The bears roared and screamed in pleasure as they reached orgasm simultaneously.

Despite my outward appearance, I could sense that there was something else under this human-like shell. It felt like electricity was coursing through my body. Pure, rippling power.

My transformation now occurred in reverse: my skin lost fidelity as each layer stripped itselfaway, before revealing the core of what I had become: a being of pure energy.

“How did ya fuck dis up so badly?” asked the chimp to the lion.

“Babe, I’m scared!” The pink bear, that had once been Alice and Jeff, was now standing and
huddled close to the blue, her hand placed upon his broad chest. He had one paw placed on the small of
her back, resting just above her nub-like tale, which was wagging furiously in fear.

“You betta do somethin’, dumbass!” the blue bear shouted to the lion.

The lion began to approach me again, though the look of devious intent he had had before wasgone, replaced instead with nervous trepidation.

I had no intention of letting him ever touch me again.

I directed my energy outwards, towards the lion. In an instant, he was completely annihilated,as if he never existed at all.

But then again, he shouldn’t have.

The elephant was trying to roll over onto his front. He never had the chance. With a merethought and a reflex, I erased him from existence, too.

The blue bear charged me, bearing his teeth and claws, and growling angrily, obviously eager toprotect his new lover.

But I was the monster now. I took them both out in the same blast.

I looked back over at the chimpanzee, who was now trying to awkwardly run away. His
gargantuan penis and balls, however, were proving to be quite the impediment: he stumbled and
tripped, finally falling back onto the sand.

I smoothly floated over to where he lay. So this is what flying felt like, I thought. Pretty cool.

“Now-now let’s be reasonable!” he stammered.

“Can you turn her back?” I replied. I looked down at the sickly-green genitals that had oncebeen Katie.

“S-s-stricly speaking, n-no,” the ape managed to say.

I raised my hand. I supposed even at the time that my energy could be directed from anywhereon my “body,” but I wanted him to feel properly threatened.

“Hey, I’ll do youse one betta’!” he pleaded. “You must really hate us, right? Well, lookie here!”

A few feet away from us, a portal appeared. Through it, I could glimpse the edge of their
“home”: a parallel, two-dimensional universe, awash in neon color. I could even hear loud, discordant
music flowing through.

If I had eyebrows in that more abstract form, I would have raised them at him.

“I thought you said you had a wife?” I asked.

My voice sounded mostly the same, I noticed, but seemed to have a few layers “underneath” it,
if that makes any sense, that lent it an air of authority, power, and etherealness that no human could
ever aspire to.

“Well, yeah! A couple a’ kids too! But fuck dat slut! I know she fucked my brudda! Hell, da kids
probably ain’t even really mine! Come ta’ think of it, dey don’t even look like me! Listen, let me live, and
I promise I won’t cause no trouble here! I won’t even rape nobody or noth-“

I made the chimpanzee stop talking, permanently.

Before I entered the portal, I glided back over to the patches of cartoon sand that had held us all
in place previously. With my newfound senses, I could focus my vision to view them on a near-
microscopic level.

This allowed me to see that they were “alive” in a fashion, and each had an individual face. Andvoice too, annoyingly.

“Ya think ya so tough, don’t ya?!?!”

“C’mon, give us ya best shot, ya bum!!”

“We ain’t afraid of youse!!!”

A thousand squeaky voices, shouting variations of the same challenges and jeers.

I destroyed them too, along with the pile of cum that had once been Katie and Jeff.

I also evaporated Katie’s discarded clothes, and the remnants of our ill-fated picnic. If you didn’t
know better, you wouldn’t think anything had happened here at all. Nearly an entire office, including a
Titan of Industry, Tim, will have appeared to have been swallowed up by the Earth itself. Christ, what
would people think? Many of these people had children. They’d be left to wonder what happened to
their parents for the rest of their lives, perhaps. For once I thought of myself as lucky to not have any
family left of my own, beyond some cousins I hadn’t seen in 15 years. Them, and an ex-wife that hated
me enough that she’d probably be happy to hear of my disappearance.

Podcasts, documentaries, maybe even a TV series or film … an entire cottage industry couldsprout up around what happened here, and none of it would even come close to the truth…

I couldn’t think about any of this now, though. With no more loose ends to take care of on thebeach, I hovered back over to the portal, and went through it.

One small step for man…

…

You may not believe me, but my intentions weren’t at all genocidal at first.

Okay, I realize how that sounds.

But really, my purpose in visiting their world was just to assess just how big of a threat
they posed to the rest of mankind. Obviously, the individuals I had already encountered couldn’t have
been allowed to live. However, I reasoned, it may have just been the case that, like with the human
species, the lion, elephant, chimp, and bear were the rare deviants of their society, while the rest were
(largely) decent folk.

Once on the other side, I disguised myself as a fat cartoon rat, like the inbred brother of Chuck
E. Cheese. I could probably make myself look like anything I wanted to now, and I intended to return to
my human form once I was done there. I still considered myself a human male, all things considered.

But we’ll get to that later.

…

I was wrong. The lion, chimp, elephant, and bear weren’t rare on the “other” side at all. Theywere, in fact, all too typical of their kind.

The other dimension, for lack of a better descriptor, was cartoon hell.

I inspected every inch of it, so I know I’m not mistaken. I didn’t just “miss” the good areas. There
were no tree-lined streets with single-family homes and white picket fences in their world. All I foundwas a vast, slum-like metropolis, where the red-tinged, polluted skies prevented their sun from ever
really shining through. This was an urban, Day-Glo nightmare, an eternal orgy of sex and violence.

 Oh, the things I saw in that place….

I saw anthropomorphic baby “toons” (their term for themselves) come out of the womb, age-
up to adulthood in a matter of seconds, kill their fathers with an “Acme”-branded ax (that they
somehow pulled from behind their back), and begin to have sex with their own willing mothers.

I saw monster toons 10-stories high crack skyscrapers in two, before shaking out their
inhabitants into their open, cavernous mouths. Crowds would form whenever this happened, and
they’d cheer on the destruction. It wasn’t uncommon for an orgy to spontaneously break out, either,
in the rapture of the moment. It also wasn’t uncommon for the monster toons to then squat over the
frenzied crowd, and bury them in a pile of fresh excrement.

I saw bigger toons use smaller toons as living clothing and sex toys. I saw vast tar pits in the
bowls of the city where toons would encase their enemies (and sometimes even their friends) up to
their shoulders, and leave them there immobile for eternity.

Sight after horrible sight, but the worst were the cages. Because in these cages were humanbeings. Adults and children.

Have you ever wondered where missing persons go? The kind where the victims
seemingly just disappeared into thin air? Well, apparently many of them had ended up here, where
toons could purchase and use them for whatever sadistic ends they desired.

I learned from observation that “slaver” toons would regularly make excursions into our world
to capture particularly isolated humans (like say, campers in remote locations). Then they’d
bring them here for auction.

I surmised that the bear, chimp, elephant, and lion were four such overseers, and were looking
to enjoy a trip into our world under their bosses’ noses. Just for fun, I suppose: their demented idea of a“Boy’s Trip” (it does not escape me that one could argue it with a funhouse mirror counterpart to our
own degenerate excursion).

I decided to start there. I destroyed it all. Every living building, every brown, dead blade of grass,
every molecule of false air. Every last toon, big and small. Even their sun, moon, and stars (which were
all “alive” too, of course) could not withstand my onslaught.

When I was done, all that was left was myself and the huddled humans that had been taken there against their will, including those I had found still alive and in one piece scattered across the toonworld, “serving” in various obscene roles.

Everything else was a featureless white void.

What were they standing on (I could hover now)? What were they breathing (I no longer neededto breathe)? The wonders never ceased.

In any event, I led them back through the portal.

We had no more business left there.

...

I was back on the beach, along with the hundreds of captives I had saved. They watched in awe
as my body rendered itself back to its highest level of fidelity. But my old, casual clothes somehow didn’tseem appropriate anymore, so I materialized stylish white robes for myself instead of the simple polo
and board shorts I had had on when all this began.

When I was done, I again considered the people I had rescued. To my shock, none had left,
despite their newfound freedom, and the terror that I, understandably, might still have inspired in them,
despite being their emancipator.

But I understood: they were looking for me to guide them. To lead them. I had saved them from
one world, only to release them back into another that now felt just as alien. They were my “flock”
now, I realized, and I was responsible for them.

This made me laugh, albeit internally. I had always wanted to be in this position, had dreamed
and fantasized about it more times than I could count. But I had imagined myself as a mere corporate
executive or president.

This was something else entirely. This was much, much better.

I again thought of the cartoon hell that I had just escaped from. What exactly was it? How did it
form? I still didn’t know. Were there more places like it, other pocket dimensions filled withnightmares beyond human comprehension? Maybe, and it was probably my responsibility to deal with
them now, too.

It was sunny, I finally noticed. I looked around. The sea was a bright-Caribbean blue, and the sky
above it was just as vibrant, and literally cloudless. The sand that surrounded us was free of any detritusand debris, and was so pure of color that it almost reflected the sunlight back at us. The heat … actually,
I couldn’t feel the heat anymore. I doubted I ever would again.

I could still see the beach house. I focused my hearing. Music was coming from it. I guess the
disappearance of our entire office hadn’t stopped it from being rented out to other vacationers.
Mortgages still have to be paid, I suppose, but such matters were no longer any of my concern.

I wondered if it was Sunday. How much time had passed? It had felt like years on the other side,but who knows how that translated across universes?

But I did know that the terror I had once felt was completely gone. I had come face-to-face withthe unknown “it” that I had been able to sense all of my life, but not perceive, and emerged victorious.

I looked up at the Sun. I could stare directly at it now, and feel no pain or discomfort.

This was my day now.