Ta-ta-ta-taxon! Where everything is sweet!

[skinandbone]

The sun rises on Taxon, but this is a different sun. It's brighter. Yellower.

Lemony-er.

Specifically, it's a big slice of candied lemon, shining through pink and white drifts of cotton candy clouds. Wherever the golden light of dawn lands, surfaces are left sticky with a thin glaze of honey. Mercifully, this soaks in quickly.

The buildings are different, too, made of gingerbread and decorated in icing. Windows are panes of glassy sugar, shot through with wavy bands of bubbles.The streets are paved in hard candies, and, for alien reasons, the sidewalks are pancakes, light and fluffy and squashy underfoot. Inside, furniture is made of chocolate, and the faucets dispense everything from lemonade to simple syrup. The homes of all the real people of Taxon have been gathered together and arranged into a cheery little village set a short distance from the sugar-glittering city. Everyone is neighbors now, and isn't that great!? They can all borrow cups of sugar from each other!

The changes have extended to the citizens, turning the Extras into a pastel rainbow of sugar people. Off to the east, there is a new bit of landscape: a mountain made of massive slabs of cookie and cake. A river coils down from it, shimmery pink and foaming with scoops of rainbow sherbert.

Everything is bright and colorful, over saturated and – this is a telling detail – outlined in heavy black lines that are always at the edges of objects, no matter how you turn your head. In such cheery surroundings, surely the newly candied people of Taxon will wake with joy in their hearts and a snazzy group song on their lips.

Look, the Extras have already started.

“How do you say good morning
To a hundred different friends?
How do you give a good wish
That never ever ends?

Ta-ta-ta-taxon! It's the city that can't be beat!
Ta-ta-ta-taxon! Where everything is sweet!
Ta-ta-ta-taxon! Making friends is work that's never done
Ta-ta-ta-taxon! Where learning can be fun!

And for five disturbing seconds, bubbly, cheerful credits flick across everyone's vision. Your chief writer for this episode is Tinae Crice, Taxon.

LOGO! The word Taxon flares, then vanishes in a shimmery puff of sugar crystals and tumbling candies. Another beautiful day in Taxon has begun, so let's all get to learning, sharing, and just plain having FUN!!

Comments

[Location: Candy Taxon village!]

[personaldemon]

Jason Blood is used to bad dreams.

It's an understatement, really. He's so used to bad dreams he's gone through bad, horrific, traumatic, nightmarish, and come out into the other side where you dream about things like being trapped in a Yugo for eternity. (Okay, that was only the once, but still).

But (barring the Yugo) the dreams are not usually.... ridiculous.

So he sits upright in bed for a full four minutes, absorbing, absorbing, waiting for this to end, waiting to wake up, waiting for Etrigan to do whatever Etrigan is going to do in his subconscious-- have vipers erupt from the spun-sugar bedroom curtains, or have the Fruit Roll-Up sheets start to strangle and choke him, or... whatever.

The minutes keep ticking by. There's music coming from somewhere. He's not waking up.

Jason rubs at his face with his hands. And then he looks at his hands.

Each finger has been replaced by a smooth, jointed, perfect cylinder of.... peppermint candy. Candy-cane sticks. White and red and glossy.

Further inspection reveals this is all over. Arms. Body. Face-- a smooth, candy-white sphere molded into a simplified version of a human face-- red striations in the candy form shadows and lines, mouth and eyes. There is no possible way that the face he sees in the bathroom's mirror (an oversized bottlecap, polished to a high sheen and hanging on the wall) could possibly function as a face, that the eyes could be giving him visual input, but.... it is; they are.

"What. Did. You. Do."

I'm really not-- nhm-- sole cause
Of all your woes and pains and flaws
Look outside. A moment's pause
Will show you all, thru sug'ry gauze.

Jason scowls at his reflection (in the mirror, red streaks rearrange themselves on his face), then stalks for the front door of a cottage that is not the house where he went to sleep. (Tunk, tunk, tunk go his candy-cane-stick feet against the floor.)

He wrenches it open, and stares out into the transformed Taxon. And stares. And stares a little longer.

Then, Jason Peppermint turns on his heel, fully intending to go the fuck back to his Fruit Roll-Up bed.

Re: [Location: Candy Taxon village!]

[skinandbone]

There is a pink house across the way, each tile of the chocolate roof edged in a flier of sugar. The garden is a wonder of sugar flowers that gleam with glassy dew, while banks of crunchy silver balls and gleaming candy pearls wave and shed sweet mists of powdered sugar.

The windows are dark being the spun sugar curtains, and no one is awake. But the minty been leaves stir, and a little collection of chocolate covered pretzel sticks comes trotting out and across the street. It pauses in front of him for a soundless meow, then tries to rub against his leg.

[personaldemon]

The glory of the pink house and garden across the way is quite lost on Jason, who gazes at all of it with dull hatred.

He is pulling back to slip inside when-- a thing-- registers in his peripheral vision, coming up to his leg-- he aims a kick at it out of pure, reflexive something unknown is entering my personal space.

Candy legs aren't good for kicking with. Jason misses the pretzel-cat and chips off a chunk of pepperment by barking his shin against the doorjamb.

"Bloody fuck. Get-- go away--"

[Location: Candy Taxon village]

[trojanhorst]

Horst Cabal wakes to a sight he's only seen once in years, and hadn't hoped to see again -- the bright, yellow vibrance of the sun.

His bed is four-poster, with peppermint-striped pillars supporting a thin canopy of spun sugar. The daylight's streaming in through a skylight overhead . . . but no, popping excitedly out of bed, Horst discover's his skylight is in fact a huge hole in the ceiling, cut in the shape of a gigantic comical imprint of human teeth. Someone has taken a giant-sized bite out of Horst's gingerbread house.

He runs down the stairs and flings wide the graham cracker door, intent on seeing what's going on almost as desperately as he is on seeing the simple beauty of the morning sun.

He finds confusion and disappointment and . . . a hell of a lot of candy.

The sun in the sky is not a sun. It's a lemon wedge, bright yellow pie sections glowing unnaturally against the fluffy pink and blue clouds. And it's not just the sky. Everything, in fact, is candy.

Everything.

The street, the grass, the houses, the fences, the cars.

Even Horst --

Well, no. There's an exception.

Horst Cabal -- Horst Gumball, more like -- is not made of candy, with the exception of the two blue gumball eyes he can't, himself, see. He's made of used popsicle sticks, facial features marked out in sloppy pink stains, with his hair and clothes made from used candy wrappers: gold foil, crumpled plastic, torn and sticky wax paper fashioned into the rough and ugly shape of a man.

And he hungers. He hungers desperately, as a vampire has always hungered.

For corn syrup.

It takes Horst about fifteen seconds of willpower before he starts discreetly attempting to break off a piece of his lollipop mailbox between his flat wooden fingers.

Re: [Location: Candy Taxon village]

[skinandbone]

Metody recognizes the Cabal's house, but she doesn't recognize the thing coming out of it as Horst. Horst is attractive, and let's face it, if either if the brothers deserves to be made of trash and not candy, well, it isn't Horst, now is it?

On the other hand, all the people are candy, so maybe this isn't a person at all. Maybe Johannes finally succeeded at his demon bothering. So Metody isn't going to let go of her lollipop.

"Hello?"

Re: [Location: Candy Taxon village]

[trojanhorst]

If he knew, Horst would be pleased by the assertion that he didn't deserve to be made of trash (and of course, vain creature that he is, delighted by the assertion that he's attractive). Unfortunately, Horst can't read Metody's mind, nor even recognize that the person calling out to him is Metody Greeen, so he settles for something more neutral.

'More neutral' is snatching his own (smaller, mailbox-flag-sized) lollipop out of his wooden mouth and hiding it behind his back guiltily. No, he's not eating his own home. Definitely not. He definitely would not do that.

(Johannes is going to have a fit when he sees. Actually, where is Johannes? This entire candy situation is absolutely going to slay him, and come to think of it, Horst would very much like to see that.)

The effect of Horst's candy consumption is immediate, even if Horst himself can't see it. Having slightly rebuilt his precious corn syrup levels, a small amount of ice cream has begun to form on his face, shaping itself into facial features. Melty facial features, probably not yet recognizable as Horst Cabal, but at least a slightly less unnerving face than the one that had only been stained onto a flat wooden stick.

"Hello! It's Horst -- I was the tall fellow helping to lead the meeting? I'm afraid I can't tell who you are."

[skinandbone]

Metody's room is shimmery and pink, frothy with billows of lace and vases of flowers. She wakes slowly, and does not bother with mirrors or opening her eyes until she is in the shower, and so she does not notice the change until she has showered herself with a tasty mix of cherry and blue raspberry froot jooce.

In true cartoon fashion, the startled screech of outrage can be heard all across the city.

Moments later, Metody emerges from her pretty pink cottage. The trip down the stairs started off as a stomp of anger, and quickly turned into mystification. She is well into the clouds of uncertainty and breaking through into the bright sun of more anger when she steps onto the peanut brittle tiles of her garden path, and sees how close her neighbors are.

Metody does not have neighbors. Metody specifically chose her house to not have neighbors, and why is everything so....cute?

She's cute, too, a living doll with a candy-paste face, hard sugar hair and a fluffily modest cotton candy nightgown, and it might be a while before anyone realizes the barrette that holds back that hair is a pretty rosette of fly wings. She stands on her front walk, trying to gather her wits and decide if she's more angrier about her body or her garden being changed.

[hasaheart]

There are mornings when Wyatt Cain quite fervently wishes he didn't have to wake up at all, and could just sleep through the day.

None so fervently (nor as loudly) as this morning.

Not too long after the credits roll before everyone's eyes and the Taxon logo disperses in the air like so much a piñata, the macaron door knob attached to the candied popcorn door of the chocolate cigar cottage rattles.

Then it pops right off its marshmallowy hinges, and out bursts a cacophony of a man. For one, he's screaming bloody murder.

For twos and threes his torso is made entirely of metal buckets filled with water (and dozens of bobbing apples), and his head is not entirely unlike one of those disturbing fruit bowl faces that some nutjob painted who knows how long ago - only his face is made entirely of apples: whole apples, halved apples, apple slices for lips and wedges for eyebrows, apples of all shapes and sizes, and all of them covered in a delicious caramel. He perfectly glistens in the bright lemony sunshine.

"AAAAAAGGGGGHHHHHH!"

His arms wave about in frantic motions, made from start to finish by apple cores and segments and chunks, glued together by more toffee, more caramel - the same for his legs, with the sole exception of his apple pie feet.

Over here, by his right-hand torso, much like the credits rolls a name through the air. It says, pure and simple, ~CANDY CAIN~

Look at him run!

[skinandbone]

Metody's morning is going just as badly as everyone else's. Though not so badly, perhaps, as Cain's is about to go, because the young woman has only just ventured out of her crystallized garden and onto the sidewalk, just in time to see a...a...shiny...glazed....monsterman screaming down the sidewalk.

She screams back, and at the same time, she rips one of her pocky fenceposts right out of the ground and swings it as hard as she can for his center of his mass.

"YEEEEEEE!"

[hasaheart]

Monster Man sees Little Doll Monster, and doesn't stop screaming (though he takes on a slightly more baffled pitch) as she raises a makeshift weapon at him and--

The clang bounces and skips between the many sweet, tasty houses all grouped together into one cohesive candy village. When the dust settles, Candy Cain isn't so much a cohesive toffee apple monster, as an array of different things scattered on the pancake sidewalk and beyond.

Three metal buckets no longer filled with water, three dozen apples scattered across the ground; his legs over there, and what amounts to his arms, neck and head over here.

Why no, he's no less frantic now. In fact, the panic is only ramping up by the second.

"--my legs I can't feel my legs please don't kill me what did I ever do to you alien *beeeeeeeeeeeeep*?!"

[bloodandrhetoric]

Possessed of a remarkable amount of sangfroid, Rosalind Lutece has adjusted to her new life in Taxon without much fuss. Thanks to the efforts of Taxon's new helpful android, David, she's nearly completed the necessary renovations to her laboratory that she'd anticipating spending weeks on, and has been able to focus her energies on stabilizing her small Lutece Field Generator and assembling ingredients to brew a test batch of Infusions. Taxon's other citizens have, according to Rosalind's own view, recognized her as their natural best authority on scientific matters, a distinction she accepts as merely her due. With the exception of some continuing shortages of materials, and rapidly dwindling funds, things are going rather swimmingly.

Thus, were Rosalind Lutece to wake up one morning to a jaunty theme song and a gingerbread house in a city of candy cartoon adventures, and find herself transformed into a small, cutesy candy lady, she might not take it too badly. She's learned a bit about this particular city and its eccentricities from its other residents. Events like this are the nature of the beast, as it were.

Unfortunately, all of this is all well and good for Rosalind Lutece, who went to sleep last night in her soft warm bed last night on the second floor of Lutece Labs, but none of it is any use whatsoever to Robert Lutece, who is entirely new to Taxon and all its delights.

New arrivals often have the benefit of appearing in Taxon in the quiet sterility of the Sanctuary, and as themselves, giving them an opportunity to catch their breath and reorient themselves before venturing out into their new world. For Robert Lutece, Rosalind's alternate other half, this is not the case. The last thing he remembers is Elizabeth Comstock murdering Booker DeWitt, and then a second later he's sitting in a bed of marshmallow fluff and he is candy.

And he is candy.

Robert staggers out of bed, clumps of fluff clinging to his shoulders and backside, and makes his way uneasily over to the mirror.

The man that stares back is made of red and black licorice, with sprinkled sugar freckles accenting his cheekbones beneath chocolate chip eyes. With the exception of the metal bracelet around one wrist that he tries unsuccessfully to rip off, he is entirely made of candy. A slow stream of chocolate syrup drips from his licorice nose.

He is candy. Robert is made of candy. Of all the possible outcomes of wiping out a line of realities that he and his sister had theorized, not once had either of them uttered the words we could possibly become candy.

The Luteces have seen many realities in their time -- many strange cities in strange worlds. This is a first.

Robert puts on what candy clothes he can find: a molded caramel vest with green gumdrop buttons, and puffy orange shorts of a weirdly gummy material. He's already wearing a shiny green sugar bowtie. It does not prove detachable from his person.

Now dressed -- well, 'dressed' -- Robert ventures out of the perverse little candy house and onto the candy street.

More candy. The sidewalk unnervingly squishy underfoot. The smell in the air so rich with nutmeg and cinnamon that he nearly sneezes.

The Luteces are normally characteristically calm. They normally do not run from person to cartoon candy person, grabbing them by the candy lapels and demanding, "What in God's name is this place? Who the devil are you people?"

But Robert Licorice is having a very, very bad day.

[[OOC: Rosalind's alter ego 'twin,' Robert, is a recurring glitch for her, the two of them periodically switching places in Taxon. For him, Taxon is brand new (and candy! Candy!!!), so please feel free to have this panicked licorice stranger accost your character on the street. <3]]

[smecker]

Hi, Robert. Welcome to Taxon. PTSD is a not-uncommon reaction. In this case, so is diabetes.

Paul Smecker notices the licorice-and-chocolate man (with a silver bracelet) shaking a Candy Extra (Candextra? Filler candy?) and furrows his brow. Okay, no, he doesn't, he doesn't really have 'brows' anymore, but if he still had 'em, he'd furrow them.

He's been playing match-up on the candy people he's seen so far. Some of them are easier, some of them are harder; this one he's not sure.

(None of this is to imply Paul Smecker is taking this all well. He had his freakout. He had it silently, sitting in his candy treehouse that is on top of a candy tree in the center of the candy village. He had it with slow, building horror and then some savage pummeling of his candy bed. Which accomplished nothing. He's entered the state on the far side of freakout, now.)

Paul stares a little longer, then decides to cheat and use his tablet. The man before him is.....

..... Robert Lutece? Oh jeeze, they've got two people in Taxon who switch gender without the necessity of needing to tuck, stuff, and plump?

"Hey," Paul calls out as he walks closer. "Calm the hell down. You are supposed to be a scientist, aren't you?"

Paul Smecker does not, at first glance, look to be made of candy. He looks to be made of cigarettes: something decidedly... adult for this cutesy, colorful world. At least, until one realizes that he's giving off little puffs of powdered sugar from his over-sized cigarette arms and legs with every step.

Paul is smoking a regular-sized candy cigarette, as well.

His clothes are made of Sweet Tarts-- a pastel pink shirt and pastel green trousers, formed of hundreds of small, sugary discs carefully threaded together.

And finally, two coffee-flavored Werther's rounds form his eyes.

[bloodandrhetoric]

Robert takes in the candy cigarette man at a glance: colorful candy clothes, candy white body, some manner of candy eyes . . . God, what's the point? The man's candy, he's just. Candy. What more is there to notice? He's candy. Robert's going mad.

It is unfortunately difficult, in this candy form, to emote properly. Robert can only assume the 'look' he gives back to the other man conveys his sense of consternation at being asked to calm down in this situation, being accused of being 'supposedly' a scientist. Robert Lutece is the scientist so far as he thinks most people should be concerned, and while his reaction at the moment may be characterized as . . . emphatic, he for one has decided to deem it entirely appropriate for the enormity of the situation.

After all, he has somehow been transformed into candy. Surely any sane human being would find this a startling turn of events.

"I am supposed to be a human being," he says flatly -- but to Paul's credit, he does seem immediately calmer than he was, given someone to direct his egocentric disdain onto. It's funny the things that help in these situations. "Are you claiming you know me?"

[skinandbone]

The candy people laugh as if this is ask a happy game.

"Why, I'm a Gingerbread Man!"

"I'm a lollipop girl!"

"I'm a honey bunny!"

"Metody, I'm Metody - s-s-stop, you're- " she's feeling doubly rattled now, so she grabs his wrists in a bid to make the shaking stop. "Who are you? I can't - I can't -"

Candy people do not have bones, as such. This it's turning out to be a very bad day to be Metody

[infinitelystranger]

As Robert goes by a somewhat horrific-looking humanoid figure (also with a silver bracelet around one 'wrist') turns its head to watch him go. This one is entirely unrecognizable: just a tall, long-limbed individual apparently made entirely from strings of Smarties looped together into arms, legs, hands and feet and a torso and a head, with strings of black liquorice hair itself and a pair of bright blue Jolly Ranchers for eyes.

"Well, that's different," it observes mildly in a solid, posh, human-sounding baritone, and then, "You're not Rosalind Lutece."

As if that's the first order of business here.

[bloodandrhetoric]

His conversation with Paul Smecker having calmed him down somewhat, Robert has now turned himself to the task of looking for some kind of off switch for this deviant display of -- of what? Perversion of nature? (No, not really a concept he believes in, that.) Medical monstrosity?

Well, whatever it is, he isn't in a state to be able to sit around and enjoy it. He's still candy, and he's still reeling. Robert turns to face his accuser, who has rightly named him not Rosalind Lutece.

A fellow countryman, by his accent (or former countryman, Robert should say, though he's technically never been disenfranchised as Rosalind was, as he had no citizenship in that England to revoke, and never did anything to put him especially on the wrong side with his own England before his departure). The man's otherwise unrecognizable, not least because he's made of pastel candy. He's tall, lanky, and -- like every damned person in this eerie place who isn't Robert -- taking his life as a member of the candied race appallingly well.

Robert can't share that sentiment, but, well . . . he does still have his dignity. And that means something. So rather than voice his extreme distress over the situation yet again, he pretends at a much cooler demeanor.

"I'm not sure how different it is," he contends. "I'm frequently not Rosalind Lutece. Are you?"

[empty_vessel]

Jimmy has.. slept through the credits. He's rolling over in his sleep as "JIMMY NO-CRACK" floats over him. The *CLANG* from Metody and Cain finally has him waking up and shuffling out of bed. It takes him a bit to really wake up and brain to get working before he realizes that Things Are Different.

Jimmy's first thought is 'I'm gonna end up in therapy forever.' Waking up on a chocolate bed with mattress and pillow of marshmallow fluff, with a cotton candy comforter? This is Grade A Weird Shit. Especially once he figures out that the flowery wallpaper got turned into Scratch & Sniff stickers. Most of the labels he doesn't recognize, though. 'Snozzberries? What the hell are those?'

And it only gets worse when he checks himself out in the bathroom. He's... glass. It's him but made out of sugar glass, colored appropriately (including the stripes in his blue flannel jammies.) There's a tiny bit of space between each 'piece' where the joint would be, so he can actually move, but it's surreal as hell. It's looking like a cardboard cutout of himself, if he doesn't think too hard about it.

Getting dressed is even more of an adventure. It ends up being similar to dressing paper dolls, where he just picks up what he wants to wear and puts it over what he's wearing now. They switch places, and Jimmy's wearing clothes. Sort of. Different colored bits of glass anyway. If he doesn't think about it too hard, he's good.

He's not going anywhere near the shower. Just in case.

Once he gets outside, Jimmy explodes in lensflare like a thirteen year old's first DeviantArt account. He's... surprisingly okay with this. He's been possessed, stabbed, shot, killed twice, played God with an insane angel, and unraveled into a horde of monsters in a reservoir.

Being turned into candy ain't so bad. He walks down the lumpy powdered sugar path down his front yard, past the plastic Easter grass and wonders what particular color of acid the Aliens have been dropping, because he could probably do with a hit right now.

[imperial_long]

[ooc; deciding what character to throw at you but this was delightful]

[electric_sheep]

From across the street comes a repetitive boing-boing-boing, which is getting closer. The noise quickly proves itself to be a giant Pez dispenser, hopping along the gelatinous sidewalk on one foot with a series of over-chipper boings that suspiciously resemble a TV stock sound effect.

The Pez dispenser has a relatively realistic, plastic human head on it, which is not really doing much for its general appeal. It hops by on the other side of the street, then appears to notice Jimmy and starts (the motion causing a little boing itself) and blinks.

Today David is finding himself in a number of foreign situations: including being at a total loss. He stares for one blank, discourteous moment (not that it's easy to tell the difference on a Pez dispenser) before he remembers his manners.

Robbed of the ability to wave, David settles for jumping up and down several times and plastering the friendliest smile he can manage on his plastic face. The effect is of a hopping, inexplicably grinning head on a stick. This doesn't especially occur to him.

"Good morning," he ventures.

[empty_vessel]

Jimmy turns towards the boinging and has to double take. Because even with all the candy? Giant Pez dispensers are not what you expect to see. Especially hopping across the street towards you.

His first reaction is still to shake hands, but that's easier said than done, when your hands are glass and the other guy's are formed out of the same plastic as his base. It doesn't look (relatively speaking) like anybody he's met. Not enough hair for Jeremy, not British enough for Spike, too caucasian for Bagoas.. So this person is new. And a Real Person, judging by the silver band and lack of a song & dance number. (Well, a musical number, at any rate.)

But above all else, he's still trying to make a good impression, so he smiles and does his best to be polite and civilized and regular people. "Good morning. I'm Jimmy. Just got here a few days ago. And you are..?"

[personaldemon]

And here's a peppermint man, striding down the street with the brusque, business-like one gait of one doing his damndest to pretend his legs are not currently candy-cane sticks.

He seems to be in a hurry, and he's got a squirming Cadbury bunny in his arms.

He nearly runs Jimmy right over, in fact.

Depending on how 'grace' operates when you're candified, this guy feels weird. Like maybe... an awful lot of Red Hots. And sinfully dark chocolate, which is nowhere near evident on his peppermint body.

[electric_sheep]

Dawn breaks over Ta-ta-ta-taxon, and David-8 finds that he is, in fact, a Pez dispenser. This is only slightly less upsetting an experience than Robert Lutece's.

David doesn't sleep, exactly--okay, he doesn't sleep in any respect whatsoever--so he happens to be polishing a bar counter when: the sun rises, he wakes up in a previously nonexistent cotton-candy bed with his plastic head on an entirely unnecessary cotton-candy pillow and discovers that his arms are missing. Not only are his arms missing, actually, but any of the usual components of his physical body: craning his neck to stare down at his body, there appears to be a simple plastic chute and lever in place of a titanium-steel-cyberskin chassis whose basic specs he has to have recited at least six times by now. David is a Pez dispenser.

Something has gone horribly wrong with his firewalls.

David stares at the condition of the world, which can only be blamed upon a fiendishly imaginative computer virus designed to ruin his perceptions of everything and in a particularly diabolical way, but supposes there's not much he can do about it without running an antiviral scan. He's not sure that would do anything, either. He's not even entirely sure he can run any kind of scan at the moment.

Demonstrating one of the chiefest differences between a human and a robot mind, David supposes there is probably very little he can do about it, then, and he may as well go about his day. He swings his glued-together Pez feet--foot?--and hops out of bed rather easily. He then hops downstairs through his inexplicable house and outside onto the sidewalk, still extremely disconcerted but taking a matter-of-fact hopping path towards the Sanctuary.

Candy Extras wave hello to him. He can't really return the gesture. He makes his way in a series of industrious hops, topped with a plastic, glassy-eyed replica of his head and full of Pez.

[kings_fool]

"Woah. You're Pez."

This brilliant observation comes from a man ('man') who is sitting in his candy-grass front yard, inspecting an eight-foot long, oblong, vanilla wafer. (A thin piece of pink wafter juts out perpendicular at one end.)

The man himself is composed of roughly equal proportions of chocolate, graham crackers, and marshmallow fluff-- in short, he is a S'more-- and a few dribles of chocolate drips from his upraised hand as he shades his chocolate-chip eyes to look at David from beneath a mop of chocolate-shaving-curls.

"I used to collect those."

[genequeen]

Madelyne gets out of bed without noticing anything wrong at first. She's not having her best morning because it isn't until she looks down again at her feet that she realizes something is horribly wrong. Her feet are red.... and gummi? A soft squeaks escapes her as she sees the stubby little feet.

"Oh God." Wait. Does she sound like that? She sounds like she's in some sort of cartoon, with those weird magical bears or something. Looking at her hands, they're made of the same material that her feet are. Heading outside, she looks around and just stops with a frown on her face.

She's trying to figure out what, exactly, has happened to the world. If anyone else comes along to find her staring at the sky, they'll see a very large (about three feet high) cinnamon bear staring open mouthed at the lemon sky.

[personaldemon]

Jason (peppermint Jason, all red and white and stripey from his hair down to his toes!) walks by and does not, at first, register that the three-foot cinnabear is one of Taxon's residents. Everyone he's run into so far has been roughly person-sized.

But Etrigan (so kindly) points out the flash of a silver bracelet and Jason stops, turns around, and stares for a long moment at the red gummi bear.

"....miss Pryor?" he says at last, with unusual hesitation in his tone.