I wake up to heat.
Not the cozy, blanket-warm kind. The aggressive, sun-punching-you-in-the-face kind. My eyes snap open and immediately regret it. Bright blue sky. No clouds. No shade. Just sand. Endless, smug-looking sand.
My brain fires off in the correct order:
What.Where.How.What.
Then, finally, the only thought with the proper emotional weight:
Where the fuck am I?
I sit up—at least I think I sit up. The motion feels… elastic. Like my spine briefly forgets what vertebrae are and then remembers at the last second. I freeze, forcing myself to breathe. Panic is useless. Panic gets people killed. Or worse—embarrassed.
Okay. Calm. Think.
Desert. Daytime. No landmarks. No memory of traveling. Last thing I remember is going to sleep. No pain. No warning. Just… sleep.
I run through the options.
Kidnapped? No restraints.Dream? Too vivid. Too hot.Hallucination? I'd know. Probably.Afterlife? Weird choice of décor.
Then the option that keeps getting louder the longer I sit there:
I must have died in my sleep and reincarnated in who-knows-where as who-knows-what.
I sigh. Out loud. It comes out with a faint squeak at the end, like my lungs added punctuation without asking.
"…Yeah. That tracks."
I lift my hands.
They're wearing gloves.
White gloves.
Perfectly clean. Four fingers each. Rounded. Iconic.
I blink.
I look at my arms. The colors are… wrong. Too solid. Too smooth. No pores. No freckles. No scars. My outline is outlined. There's a faint, almost imperceptible wobble to me, like I'm not entirely sure which frame I'm supposed to be on.
My heart doesn't race.
It boings.
For some reason, the gloves are what do it. Not the desert. Not the reincarnation theory. Not the fact that I look like I've been drawn instead of born.
The gloves.
"Oh," I say. "I'm a toon."
I say it flatly. Statement of fact. Diagnosis delivered.
Okay. New ruleset.
If I'm a toon, then physics is optional. Biology is a suggestion. And if there's one thing every toon has, it's—
"Hammerspace."
The word feels right the moment I think it.
I reach behind my back without looking and pull out a hammer. Wooden handle. Metal head. Classic. I blink, toss it aside, and reach again.
Blowtorch.
Again.
A nuke.
I stare at the nuke in my hands. It's small. Cartoonishly small. The label on the side just says BOMB in block letters with a radiation symbol someone clearly drew freehand.
My mind, helpfully, produces a single thought:
Toons eat bombs.
"…Sure."
I swallow it in one go.
There is no pain. There is an explosion. I balloon outward, my body swelling like a parade float, my outline stretching absurdly wide. For half a second, I'm convinced I can see my own thoughts bouncing around inside me.
Then I snap back to normal, lean forward, and burp.
A thick green cloud pours out of my mouth, coalesces into a screaming skull, yells directly in my face, flips me off, and dissipates into the air.
Silence.
Then I start laughing.
I don't chuckle. I don't snort. I laugh. Full-bodied, wheezing, knee-slapping laughter. The kind that echoes. The kind that makes your ribs hurt even though I'm fairly certain my ribs are decorative at this point.
Because yeah. That was funny.
And because if a toon does something funny, you laugh. That's just how it works. And now that I'm a toon?
I have a feeling I'm going to be laughing a lot.
When the laughter finally dies down, I wipe a nonexistent tear from my eye and straighten up.
"Alright," I say. "Let's get moving."
I spin in place.
Literally spin. The world blurs, colors smearing together, and when I stop, I'm wearing a miner's outfit. Helmet. Headlamp. Overalls. I'm holding a massive drill with a comically oversized bit, hooked up to a bicycle pedal assembly.
I grin.
I point the drill at the sand, plant my feet, and start pedaling like my life depends on it.
The drill roars to life, chewing into the desert as if sand had personally offended it.
As I descend, I can't help but wonder aloud:
"Now… which way is France?"
I pause, consider, then shrug.
"Or is there France? Who cares. I'll toon my way there and punch any dictator I find."
I grin wider as the drill pulls me down into the earth.
"I am a Looney Tune."