After Many Months

[captainryan]

"Thank you so much for coming," says the dottery old caretaker as she escorts them inside. She must be in her seventies at least, though Ryan's going more on scent than sight. It's hard to tell ages when the faces are animated. "You don't know how much I appreciate it."

"Are you kidding?" Ray gushes. "For the chance to visit the original Walt Fleishman Studios, I'd do just about anything!" Ryan refrains from asking for examples. He really doesn't want to know.

"Yeah, same here. I grew up on his cartoons; they were fantastic!" Winston's grinning as broadly as Ray is, and Ryan wonders again why he hasn't heard of Fleishman if he's as famous as they're making him out to be. He eyes the lithographs on the walls as the caretaker goes on about the cartoonist's genius and his disappearance, half trying to recognize the characters in them, half trying to figure out what makes them cartoons in an animated world.

"The sounds were reported coming from here," the lady informs them as she lets them into Fleishman's private studio. "Terrible sounds, moaning, groaning, shouting, chains rattling--"

"Could be MTV," Venkman cuts in.

"Or a long latent paranormal surge. Might even have something to do with Walt Fleishman's disappearance," Egon says thoughtfully as he scans the room. "Strange, though, that I'm not getting anything on the PKE meter."

"Well, then, I'll leave it to you. If you find anything, do let me know." With that, the caretaker's gone, leaving them to their own devices.

Once she's gone, Ryan takes a good whiff of the air. "I don't smell any ozone either."

Comments

[gone_byebye]

Peter seems to feel the same way, judging by the look on his face, although Ray is raving about characters with names like Dopey Dog and Conqueror Duck. Winston, for his part, just shakes his head. "I don't know, guys," he says, "I don't see anything unusual."

Ryan, on the other hand, may well notice a sudden change in the environs. Certainly Egon's PKE meter starts reacting to something.

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The sharp tang of ozone fills his nose unexpectedly and Ryan sneezes before he has a chance to look for its source. He isn't surprised when he sees something, though ghosts tend to be visible only when they want to be.

"Hang on, I've got something," Egon says, eyeing his meter.

Ryan points. "There's a door behind Winston." And an odd looking one at that.

[gone_byebye]

You'd think Egon would know better than to do what he does next. "I wonder where it goes?" he says, reaching for the knob.

Almost before he has time to grip the knob properly, it turns- and as the door opens a near-cyclone-force wind whips up every paper and loose object in the room. The yawning void of the other side- what else could create that kind of chaos?- is not to be denied; for all that the Ghostbusters and Ryan might try to resist, the howling wind swiftly gets too strong, and they're pulled through into a thunderous void of blackness.

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They fall for what seems forever but what must only be a few feet, judging by how hard they hit the floor. A cellar of some sort? The room is dark and even Ryan can't see the walls in this place. It all stinks of ozone, and he wonders just what they're up against this time.

"Hang on! I found a light switch," Winston says and suddenly the room is aglow. Except it doesn't seem to be a room, rather a large empty space of pink, yellow, and blue swirled together.

"What is this?" Ryan asks, mostly rhetorical. He doesn't expect anyone to have an answer for him.

Nor does he expect a muscle-bound, sword wielding, bipedal duck to go racing past shouting, "Gangway!"

He's just going to stand here and go 'bzuh?' for a bit, 'kay?

[gone_byebye]

So is Ray.

So is Peter.

Winston's the one who identifies it as Conqueror Duck. "What's he doing here? He's a cartoon character!"

"True," says Egon, "but as of this moment, so are we. When we fell through that cartoon door, we entered a cartoon world. Look around you. Everything is empty. No ground, no sky, a blank slate."

And he's right, for all that Peter seems to think he's gone over the edge- although when the giant roach in the old jalopy shows up a moment later and asks after a duck in a hard hat, it's Peter who answers.

And promptly jumps into the sky, screaming, entirely by accident.

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"How can you tell?" mutters Ryan as the roach drives up. It receives an odd look of its own, but in the end, it's really no worse than the rats of Milliways.

"You could never jump that high in real life!" Egon calls up to Peter, who's still falling up. "Only in a cartoon. Now do you believe us?" Cartoon physics? Is that the only difference? Well, that and anthropomorphic animals?

"That's fine, guys, but how do I get down?"

Ryan has no clue. He hasn't watched cartoons since he was a boy. "Think of falling?"

"I got it! Think about a cliff, Peter!" Winston yells. A moment later, Venkman's slammed into the bottom of cliff and Ryan winces in sympathy. That looked like it hurt.

[gone_byebye]

Then he's slammed into the ground. "you couldn't say 'think of a pillow', could you, Winston?" Peter grumbles as the cliff disappears.

It's mutually decided that they've got to find their way out, of course. Ray says, thoughtfully, "We should be all right as long as we remember that real logic doesn't apply here. Only cartoon logic."

Some time later, as the group is walking single file across the blank and featureless landscape, Winston says speculatively, "You know, Ray, I was thinking... if we're in a cartoon, where's the audience?"

Ray frowns a bit, then points with his left hand in a direction that seems no different than any other. "I guess they're over there," he says. "Take a look."

What Winston presses his face against is a mystery for the ages, but there's a distinct sound of glass under his knuckles as he raps at the air and calls, "Hello? Anybody there?"

"Well?" says Egon upon his return.

"They changed the channel."

Before Peter can make a remark- and it's obvious he wants to- a hoarse male voice cries out "Help! Somebody help me..."

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Ryan muses on the improbability of being trapped in a cartoon world of a cartoon world, complete with audience (apparently) and decides his brain hurts from just trying to comprehend it. The look on his face seems to be stuck on disbelief.

At least until the cry for help. If it's someone tied to the train tracks, so help him...

But he needn't worry. The voice came from a town that's appeared in the distance, and from a smoke spewing factory in particular. The five men run towards it and peek through a window to find...a human? Being spoken to be a werewolf? No, he reminds himself, just an anthropomorphic wolf, and a villainous one at that.

But is the human a real human, or just a drawing? He'd ask, but Egon's hushed them all, and it isn't until they back away that he gets his answer.

"That's Walt Fleischman," Ray says, sounding awed. "He's still alive after all!"

[gone_byebye]

"If you can call that living," says Egon; the wolf's speech is periodically interrupted by bouts of cackling as Fleischman gets dropped through trap doors or has objects dropped on his head. Since the wolf's been considering a lengthy scroll every time it happens, it doesn't seem likely to stop any time soon.

"Looks like what we came here for," says Winston. "I say we rush in there, blast them, and get Walt out of here."

"Simple," says Peter. "Concise. I like it." Then he sighs. "Which probably means nothing good can come of it, but what the heck. Ready?"

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There's only the wolf, as far as Ryan can see, so...

"Be wary of traps," Ryan cautions as they approach the door.

"And now for trapdoor number 3,642," the wolf grins as he reaches for a button on his armrest, but the doors crash open before he can reach it.

"All right, buddy, show's over!" Peter yells.

"Oh no! It's the Ghostbusters!" the wolf cries as they make their way inside. Ryan watches the floor for seams. "I cannot hope to defeat them. There is only one thing I can do," the wolf prattles on, tone nearly mocking. Ryan looks up sharply as the wolf reaches for a button, but as far as he can tell there's nothing above nor below. What's he up to?

The button is pressed and quite suddenly there is no floor beneath the heroes. There's no warning, no whirring, no clicking, it's just gone. The men hang there a moment before plummeting into the darkness below.

[gone_byebye]

BANG! WHUMP! THUMP! KA-WHOMP! Down through the pipes in the factory room, then into the open empty darkness, then-

WHOMP.

Welcome to the desert, and to the wolf's distant voice cackling about how they're going to be there a long, long time...

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"Son of a dog!" Ryan snarls as he gets to his feet. There were no signs of the trapdoor! How di--

Wait, what did he just say?

"Dog? Heck. Darn. Oh, that's just bloody charming, that is." Well. At least he can still use bloody.

"Bloody cartoon," he growlingly mutters to himself before he takes a chance to look around. A wide open desert, it seems. He scents the air, but all he gets is that ozone smell, which only serves to improve his mood even more.

"Now what?"

[gone_byebye]

"Now we start looking for a way out, I guess," says Winston, who doesn't sound happy about it.

Ray, by the look of him, has another opinion. "If this is Walt Fleischman's cartoon world, where are all the heroes? Where's Dopey Dog?"

"Dopey Dog, Ray?" says Egon, in a voice simultaneously laden with incredulity and scorn.

"No, really! In the cartoons, he said all you had to do to get him to help you was-"

We advise that the more sensible among the audience cover their ears and look away from the screen at this point. Calling on Dopey Dog's assistance involves a song that anyone over the age of seven would be embarrassed to sing- and a dance that makes the I'm A Little Teapot dance look like precision marching drill.

On the other hand, it does result in a bolt of lightning that yields up a caped, red-pyjama'd, one-eyed dog, who smiles and says, "You called?"

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Ryan, for his part, is firmly convinced that the heat has gotten to Ray.

At least until Dopey Dog actually shows up. His look goes from surprised to blank to glower. Despite the sudden source of help, he's really starting to hate this place.

"Dopey Dog, can you help us get Walt Fleishman away from Winchester Wolf?" Ray asks hopefully.

"That's a pretty stupid name for a wolf."

"You have my permission to tell him that, Peter," Winston says.

"Please," Ryan grumbles, "allow me."

"It's a long sad story, my friends," Dopey Dog begins, explaining how Walt somehow created the cartoon world so he could film the characters instead of drawing them, and the creation of the evil Winchester Wolf who, too powerful to be controlled, captured Walt and trapped him in his own world for forty years. Ryan paces while he listens, still aggravated.

"Why not stop him?" he asks the dog.

[gone_byebye]

"I'm a cartoon, my friend," says Dopey. "It's one thing to play at being a hero. To actually be one-"

"Well, we're not cartoons," says Ray suddenly. "And we're not staying! We're gonna find Walt and get out of here!"

"Yeah," says Winston, "and nothing's going to stop us!"

Except, maybe, the big blue and green landscape painting FALLING OUT OF THE SKY- or the sudden arrival of Conqueror Duck- or the massive cliff that erupts out of nowhere under Winston, Peter, and Ray. Not that the cliff lasts long, thanks to Conqueror Duck tipping it over as Egon stares, aghast-

"just one chance, my friend!" says Dopey Dog, looking at the painting over his shoulder. "We've got to move the lake!"

"I beg your pardon?"

"This is a cartoon, remember?" says Dopey Dog, gesturing towards the painting.

"You cannot pick up a lake and move it! It's illogical!"

"DO WHAT HE SAYS!" the falling Peter yelps.

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"This doesn't make sense, and I don't believe any of it," Egon insists stubbornly even as he, Ryan, and Dopey Dog start dragging the lake out of the painting and over to where the others' shadows are steadily growing on the ground.

"You're the one who pointed out this is a cartoon," Ryan annunciates flatly as Ray, Peter, and Winston splashdown. Winston is glad to be alive, if soaking wet.

"Just walk out of frame, my friend," Dopey Dog says cheerfully. The men do, and when they come back, they're completely dry again. "Works every time!"

"That does it, I'm leaving," says Egon firmly.

Ryan arches an eyebrow. "You're only deciding this now?"

[gone_byebye]

"That'll be a good trick, Egon, considering we don't know how to get out of here- or where Walt is," points out Peter.

"Hm," says Dopey Dog. "I may be able to provide a solution to both problems, but we'll need help. We've got to go to the very edge of the cartoon world, and it's very dangerous."

"Hey, I live by danger," says Peter. "I might as well die by it too. Lead on."

Dopey nods and sets off at a run, from the desert straight into- farmland? Farmland. Yeah. They're gathering up animals of all sizes and species with every step of the trip. By the time the motley crew returns to a line of cliffs overlooking the desert, Winchester Wolf's moved his venue. Walt Fleischman's tied to a pole in the middle of the desert, flinching in vain as an automated monstrosity beside Winchester's throne flings pies at him one after another. Winchester's allies- Ricky Roach, Conqueror Duck, and an assortment of other beasts- seem to be enjoying the show.

"Ready, everyone?" calls Dopey. "Then let's go, my friends! For the Walt Fleischman Studios!"

And the cavalcade of animals goes charging down the slope, with three very intent Ghostbusters and one Ghostbuster so thrilled with the situation that he's fit to burst, charging after them. As the animals join the melee, the humans draw their proton throwers and-

"You know," says Egon at the sight of the rather lame fireworks falling from his thrower, "I probably should've thought to test these to make sure they work in this world."

"Nice timing, Egon."

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Ryan would say something, but they being approached by the animal villains not yet fighting. Instead he starts growling as reholsters the thrower, gladly stepping forward to release some frustration. He should probably be at least a little wary of his opponents, but it's difficult to be afraid of a simple cartoon.

"If they haven't had their shots, I'm in serious danger of cartoon rabies," Venkman says as they finish with the villains.

Ryan stalks up to Walt as a glasses-wearing mole finishes chewing through his bonds. "Let's go," he half snarls, roughly grabbing the man. He's in no mood to be polite.

"Now, my friends, do it for Walt!" Dopey Dog shouts as he restrains Winchester Wolf, keeping him from stopping the other animal heroes as they start pulling up the ground like a sheet of paper, revealing a black void beneath.

[gone_byebye]

"No!" shouts Winchester, trying to lunge away from his captor. "You're ripping the film! You're tearing the edge of the film! Stop it!"

And sure enough, the cartoon world gives way to a thunder-dark sky and filmstock rolling under foot, and sprocket holes along both edges stretching over an unimaginable void, and-

"There it is! The edge of the film! Those are the sprockets, and beyond, home!" says Dopey Dog as Winchester Wolf swells into immensity.

"What about you?" says Ray.

"Don't worry about me, my friends! Jump!"

The wolf lunges for the Ghostbusters and Ryan and Fleischman, hands flailing, but they've gone insubstantial. "You're killing us!" screams the wolf. "I can't exist without you! We had a contract! We had a contraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaact!"

And then there's a door, and a slam, and four Ghostbusters, one werewolf, and one bedraggled cartoonist are tumbling across the floor of the Walt Fleischman studios in front of the shocked-looking caretaker from that morning.

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Ryan? DOES NOT CARE.

"I hate cartoons," he states flatly as he climbs to his feet yet again. "I'll be in the car." He stalks past the caretaker as she exclaims over Fleishman's reappearance, more than willing to let the Ghostbusters handle any remaining details.

He needs to hit something. He may decide to search out a mugger or two on his evening run.

Those poor, poor muggers.