The Sketch Survivors: The Secret of Lint Corp

Waiting

The helicopter has been chopping over the seawater for hours now. The sky is brown and yellow with the smoke of a thousand factories. The flying machine is glad to have found land- it swerves and swoops to reach the shores; it is running low on fuel.

Looming before it is a cross of two giant flat swathes of rusty metal; towering into the sky. Around it are many more cube-shaped buildings. The helicopter finally slows and lands on a landing pad on a perch high overhead. This platform sticks out from the cross, which turns out to be a building, and its blades are still slowing when its doors burst open.

A boy on a glamorous stretcher is being held by two lab-coated men wearing gas masks, the same ones who took him away from their American facility.  The boy is unconscious, but even the hurried movement of the men isn't enough to wake him.

Another lab-coated man with a light beard and scraggy brown hair pushes open a glossy door and steps onto the outdoor platform. The two other men stop moving to greet him.

"Flynnlecke," one says with a deep voice,  "it is a pleasure to see you at this time. We have another Un-Character. His Sketch is right beside him... he wouldn't let go of it in the case."

"Well, that's a bum," Flynnlecke twiddled his grimy fingers. "I'll take that." And he briskly walked right up to the stretcher and sharply yanked the crinkled, yellowing paper out of the boy's hands, jerking the body a little.

"He seems strongly attached to this," Flynnlecke studied the paper. It depicted the heads of four childish, fantastical characters: a scaly brown dinosaur, a golden tortoise, a bloated-beaked gull, and, the main focus, a bird with a long, banana-shaped tan beak and downy brown feathers.

"I remember when Gulley gave this one out experimentally in February," one of those carrying the stretcher remarked. "He wanted to see what would happen if there were at least three Un-Characters in a Sketch at one time. Apparently, it seemed unnecessary; but he just dropped in a little smudge of Articulus just to get him going."

"And he's sure going to be proud when he finds it was a success," Flynnlecke smiled, and stuffed the Sketch in his pocket. "Follow me, and hurry. New Un-Characters are coming in all the time. We need to be up to the times. You know where to go."

The two men, breathing heavily, burst the double doors open from which Flynnlecke had entered, and hurried down a sickly blue corridor. Flynnlecke followed, and slammed it shut behind them.

*     *     *

Soal gradually awoke, his eyes failing to keep up with his surroundings. "Uuugh," he moaned as he sat up. "Ugggghhhh...."

He soon realized he was stuck in a tiny stone cell. He was wearing black and yellow prison garb, as well, and had absolutely no connection to the outside world. He slumped against the wall and a tear escaped his eye.

I've come all this way, he leaned his head towards the bright light bulb hanging from the ceiling.  Come all this way. All this way to be jailed by Lint Corp. Lint Corp. Watched my friends die, leave them forever, faced total destruction. Become a hero to so many. So many. And they won't even let me go back...

Soal was entirely depressed. He felt like he had spent his entire life with the kiwis. Those one to two foot tall birds who inhabited the Sketch World. They were all nice to him, and treated him with great respect. Of course, there were exceptions. Mervis. Beak. They'd all been bewitched by the influence of Arkonnus and Articulus. Now that Articulus was dead for good, they wouldn't have to experience that carnage again. He wondered where they were now and how much they missed him.

He was sure Moth had also abandoned the Sketch World for good. Now that his identity had been revealed, or at least to Soal, he should have no reason to return- that wandering traveler, the Voltale general who'd come across the Volcano one day. He'd become so much wiser from his times with Soal. And Soal had reflected on all those times too. The kiwis' wonderful victory at Flameberg... the Magical Hands' last-minute rescue at the Gardens of Scright. The heroic defeat of the Dark Lord, Articulus.

There were also the little moments. Swift's lust for order. Martin's friendship. Moth's confession. They saddened him to his core. He loved the kiwis' world. If only he could go back... if only... if only...

The mark the Writer Hands had left on his forehead was probably permanent. It was always there. It seemed that Lint Corp had stolen his pack of things. All those things inside, like Retna's portrait he had drawn.

Besides his mark, he had no proof that he had ever been to the the Sketch World. All his Interloper and Pure Light powers were gone, and he couldn't move as nimbly as before. Obviously, his scars and bruises would be there to the end of his days. But no one would ever trust him... if he ever was able to escape from Lint Corp's grasp.

Soal only slept when he thought it was dusk and awoke when he thought it was morning. He was deprived of so many things in that cell, like sunlight, and company. Meals were pushed in from a minuscule door at the foot of the wall, and Soal couldn't hold it open fast enough to let himself escape.

Every night he dreamed about Swift and Retna and Martin and everyone who had died. Their spirits surrounded him, and when the former Un-Character tried to reach them, they vanished into wisps of smoke. Then Soal would weep himself awake.

Other times he had nightmares about Articulus coming back. Once, he dreamed he was commanding a legion of kiwis back into the Infestation, on earth. He was so glad that it symbolized Articulus not being able to go to the Genesis Stories; he was dead, of course, but he hated war now. He hated all of it. He felt the same grief as Wultzen, that general from World War III in the 2050s, and his loss at the hands of his enemies. The consequences formed a whole new country that took a chunk out of the USA and Canada. Of course, eventually that whole New World area would be controlled primarily by Lint Corp.

Days and nights passed. Days became weeks. Soal, in his desolation, was so deep in thought one day about his past journeys that he hardly even noticed the man standing before him.