Kitten's perfect, welcoming, safe world turns upside-down. Not only does he lose his friend, but it's as if the very fabric of reality itself is ripped open. After what feels like an interminable period of noise and nonsense and chaos, the universe tilts back into place and finally settles...Kitten and all the other residents of Animal Village blink and look around themselves in dazed confusion...and wonder why, if their village looks the same, does everything feel so different?
And then...Turtle comes home.
Kitten is overjoyed to see his old friend again...yet uneasy about the change in his demeanor, as well as the strange story he tells. Turtle was never lost, he explains...he simply reached the Outside. That which TRULY lies beyond all that the Animals in their tiny village know. He can show Kitten and the others the truth, if they want it...but it will fundamentally alter their understanding of their actual place in the universe. And once they find out, they can't take back the truth.
Kitten wants to know what this is that mattered so greatly that Turtle gave up his life in the village just to find it...yet he also wants his old life, before the Chaos, back. He wants his old innocent childhood friend. Yet Turtle has changed, and he knows that if he joins him, he'll change, too. What does he do...?
STORY DETAILS
Storyline Creation Date:
Idea: 1980s
First known writing: circa 1980s
Stories:
The Animals & Misbehaving (WIP)
CONTENT WARNINGS
Generic warnings: Mild violence.
DISCLAIMERS
Loosely inspired by The Smurfs. Black Rabbit is loosely inspired by January Q. Irontail from Here Comes Peter Cottontail. Benjamin Bird and the character now known as "Tiger" were once based on Benjamin Franklin and Neil Diamond. (I loved listening to his 8-tracks back then.) The designs for most of the Animals and Mrs. Cow's tree were taken from various toy figurines; Black Rabbit and the Easter Bunny, from inflatable Halloween costumes.
STORYLINE HISTORY/INSPIRATION
"The Animals" was a favored childhood "storyline" of mine. Whereas other children played with their friends, I was lonely and isolated outside of school, and so spent much of my time playing with stuffed toy animals, and little toy plastic animals. The former group is informally known as the Bed Toys; the latter are known simply as The Animals.
The Animals were very loosely based on/inspired by The Smurfs, which I watched religiously. The animal characters were miniature creatures who lived in the Animal Village deep in the forest (Mrs. Cow lived in a tree toy of mine, the Kenner Tree Tots Family Treehouse), and were always being threatened for some unknown reason by Bad Guy and his minions, Merganser, Black Rabbit, and a woman whose name I no longer recall (I call her simply "Woman" for now). (Fun fact, I only just now remembered Black Rabbit, who was a ripoff of January Q. Irontail from Here Comes Peter Cottontail.) Over time, probably well after I'd stopped playing with the toys, I attempted coming up with an explantion for their existence, and concluded that they were some sort of friendly brownies (small household beings from Scottish folklore, though my Animals weren't specifically Scottish).
My play with The Animals ended some time after I lost Turtle, one of the main characters, for the final time (he had a habit of going missing yet showing up again). Multiple cleanings of my messy room never resulted in me finding him. For a long time, for some odd reason, I had an intuition that he'd ended up in our basement, in a specific area directly under my room, where an unused kiddie pool full of my junk long ago was. Over the years the basement which I used to play in flooded repeatedly, had a sewer leak, was taken over by spiders and pests (a frog lived down there for years), and then my dad did his woodwork down there so sawdust coated everything. When he recently died, I crept down to the basement for my first look at it in years. It wasn't as bad as I'd suspected, but was still in poor shape. The area with the kiddie pool was now full of wood and junk and inaccessible. Relatives arrived to clear everything out. I hoped they would retrieve a few relics of toys and belongings of mine that my dad stored improperly down there years ago, some of which I'd rescued but some of which were lost, yet there was almost nothing left to be found. In an old preserves room/root cellar I'd never explored before (and had recurring dreams that it led into hidden tunnels, crypts, or even to an outdoors land), I did find one thing: the remaining part of the old Kenner Tree Tots Family Treehouse.
I got my first look at the cleared-out basement. It had never been that empty in my memory (over forty years). The entire area beneath my room was now cleaned out. I peered into the far corner where my imagination had repeatedly told me Turtle would be found. Alas, he was not there. He's still gone. Two interesting details emerged, however. Firstly that the heating vent to my room had come loose. Secondly that there were spaces visible around a cinderblock in the wall directly under the corner of my room; I could see daylight through them.
What if Turtle fell down my heating vent long ago, and did indeed end up in the basement corner below my room, like my imagination kept telling me?
What if he escaped through the cracks around the cinderblock?
What if he's still out there...?
Not long before my dad's death, I started digging into my genealogy. I'm largely German through my dad's side so far, though other branches are sadly lost for now. I traced my surname back through the Pennsylvania Dutch to 1500s Hessen. With the clearing-out of the basement, and learning at last that Turtle is not down there, The Animals popped back into my head. I'd bought replicas of these toys online previously and found that my set was incomplete or else others had been lost over time. I'm feeling a nostalgic urge to resurrect the childhood story that brought me so much comfort in my loneliness long ago. While I do have Scottish ancestry through my mother (I found my gateway ancestor through the Dutch and Scottish), maybe The Animals are not actually brownies. Maybe they're German household spirits known as kobolds. And maybe their "forest village" isn't quite in the forest at all, just that the toy treehouse convinced them it was. Maybe the treehouse is evocative of something else much older and more mystical. Maybe The Animals' existence isn't quite what they always thought it was. Maybe Turtle didn't go missing, maybe he went in search of the truth...?
I'm not sure of all the details yet but here are my budding efforts at taking another peek at this childhood story almost lost to time. Everything is very rough, tentative, and open to change.
I miss my dad.
RANDOM OBSERVATIONS
Love, loss, grief. Remembrance. Perseverance. Bonds that are never broken, friendship that never dies.
Character InformationCharacter profiles and brainstorming infodumps.
Storyline InformationEssays and info.