Since I decided I was getting over-obsessed with JoyTech, and since Aurora and I are friends again, I’ve been walking around like a bit of a slap-happy idiot, toonifying kittens and flowers and shit.

Yesterday, we finally made it to see The Dark Knight. Wow. Definitely the second-best Batman movie ever. Maybe the best.

Even if I couldn’t figure out why (spoiler!) Gordon faked his own death.

And when they revealed Harvey Dent’s face, Aurora screamed and hid her face against my shoulder. Thank you, film industry.

Not surprisingly, my favorite part was at the end when Batman realizes that to protect Gotham, sometimes he’s going to have to play the villain.

Speaking of which, we’re leaving the theater, and Aurora’s going on and on about Heath Ledger being dead, and she’s just sad enough that I’m practically obligated to put my arm around her, and she says, “Oh Nemo,” and kind of leans into me, and then who’s standing right in front of us?

New Guy.

Oh yeah.

“What’s up, buddy?” I grin at him, my arm still around his girlfriend.

“Screw you, Green,” he snarls at me, and I remember that the last time we were face to face, I dumped popcorn all over him and started a giant food fight. I looked at the bag of leftover movie popcorn in my hand thoughtfully, but before I could react, Aurora was stepping between me and him. And she’s mad.

Bwahahahaha.

New Guy just stands there while she lays into him: “What are you doing here? Did you follow me? I’m not going to be monitored, Kevin. We talked about this.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t know we were talking about giving you ‘space’ to mess around with this bozo.”

“Mess around? You jerk! Nemo’s like my brother, okay? How many times…”

The conversation went something like that, anyway. At that point, I decided to slip off into the night, as it were. Mostly to avoid hearing about how I was Aurora’s brother.

If only she could see that New Guy is stupid Harvey Dent, and I’m Batman.

Or maybe she does see that, and she chooses Harvey.

So, last time I posted, the sun was coming up behind me, and I was flinging myself through my bedroom window.

I land, as planned, on my bed, but not as planned, right on top of Aurora. Luckily it’s dark, so I have time to whip off my mask and throw it into a corner piled with laundry, while she’s flailing to get out from under me.

“Nemo, get off!”

Again, I’m glad it’s dark, because I know her eyes are looking murder at me, and for one second, with the adrenaline of the chase still pumping through me, I have a crazy urge to keep her pinned under me for a second. Just to see what would happen.

But I know what would happen. Never mess with a girl that just missed her Batman fix because of you.

To appease her, I rolled to the side, hooking her legs so that she ended up on top of me. I could see her glare now as my eyes adjusted to the darkness of the room, and for a second, I thought she was going to sock me.

Let her.

I rested my arms behind my head. “Sorry about Batman.”

“Sorry?!” Furious, she pummeled my chest with both her fists. “You have no idea what I went through to do this with you!”

Me and Aurora always used to go see the new comic book movies together, but now that she’s practically married to New Guy, she has to sneak around to do stuff with me. And I knew that.

After we worked together on the animal thing, she sort of apologized for saying we couldn’t hang out anymore. She admitted that she just didn’t want New Guy to feel ‘betrayed’ by our friendship.

There were a lot of things I didn’t like about that, but I did like that Aurora could potentially be ‘betraying’ New Guy with me. It made me sound like…competition.

So this movie was supposed to be our big reconciliation hang out, and I had forgotten about it completely.

“I’m really sorry.” I moved my hands to her hips, because I wanted her to get it, that I felt bad.

“You’re a jerk.” She jumped off the bed and wandered over to my desk.

Toon-Photo was open on my computer, and she started fooling around with it disconsolately.

That’s when I knew she was going to forgive me, so I went and sat beside her and we played with the Toon-FX stuff for a bit, taking pics and tooning, just like old times.

It’s nice to have Aurora back around.

When is it time to admit that your behavior is getting pointless and obsessive?

Me and Mrs. Brisby have gone back to the JoyTech plant every night this week. And every night it’s the same thing. I jump the fence. I climb across the roofs of outbuildings. At the main building, sometimes I sneak around the outside. Sometimes I hit the air ducts and clatter around in there for a while.

Some nights I find a new room, but it’s always the same thing: computer labs, science labs, offices. Last night, I came across a big room with no lights on, but all the computers were humming, and at every station an employee sat, doing data entry.

What kind of data entry needs to be done at four in the morning?
I know there’s something going on here that’s way bigger than the recycling thing, and even the animal thing. I’ve just got to figure out what it is…

Except, I can tell that I’m losing focus, for two reasons.

First: when I was leaving the plant last night, I heard a couple of security guards coming around a corner towards me. But instead of ducking out of sight, I kept walking towards them. Mrs. Brisby tried to make me stop by tugging on my ear with her little teeth, but I just paused long enough to make sure the meeting would be surprising.

As soon as they were almost on top of me, I rounded the corner and walked smack into the guards.

“Oh, sorry guys. I didn’t see you there.”

In a split second my hands were behind my back and cuffs were going around my wrists. The guard that didn’t have a hold on me was on his radio, talking rapidly.

“Damn, you guys are good! But I can’t stay. Hang on, Mrs. Brisby!”

Using the guard’s hold on me for leverage, I managed a couple of bouncing steps and then I ran up the wall of the plant, flipping back and over my captor. We both fell down in a heap long enough for me to wrestle away from him and jump up, running.

My recently dislocated shoulder burned from the rotation of the flip, but I had to keep running. As I ran, Mrs. Brisby scurried down my arms and somehow got the cuffs off my wrists. I could hear the guards pounding the pavement behind me. I prayed these guys weren’t part of the gun-toting JoyTech thug squad.

And then I was up, and over the fence. I heard the guards’ radios crackling as they shouted into them, but I didn’t look back. I ran all the way home with Mrs. Brisby chittering angrily in my ear.

Into my backyard. Home free. I grabbed my bedroom windowsill and launched myself up, pulling myself through the window to the safety of my bed, which happened to have a warm body in it.

“Mmmmphhh….Nemo!”

Second reason I can tell I’m losing it: I forgot I had plans with Aurora to go see a midnight showing of the Dark Knight. She had been waiting, for hours, in my bedroom, in a pissed-off state, for my return.

Here’s another full comic. Images tooned, as always, by Toon-Photo!

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Tooned these baboons with Toon-FX. I’d like to think the JoyTech animals are somewhere like this now, but maybe it’s all a cartoon fantasy…?

Monday came and went with no word from JoyTech. In fact, it wasn’t until Wednesday that our rep from the Conurban Council was contacted by a JoyTech lawyer who told him very politely that Dr. John Barr (I guess he was a scientist, too), along with his entire team, had been fired for carrying out animal testing that had never been approved by the JoyTech Board of Directors.

The good news is that the facility is being shut down, and our Council rep was asked to oversee the transfer of the surviving animals to proper care homes.

The bad news is that JoyTech wins again. They used the same ‘hands-off’ strategy they used with the recycling scam to absolve themselves of all responsibility.

THEY didn’t know what was going on. Of course they didn’t. THEY can’t be blamed for the work of one maverick scientist with a sinister personal agenda.

A tiny piece ran in the Daily Ringer yesterday about Dr. John Barr – the mad scientist working ALONE on his evil schemes in a remote basement on the edge of the JoyTech plant.

HA!

I was there. I saw different. I’m glad the animals are safe, but if JoyTech thinks this is over, they’re wrong.

I could tell Aurora was seriously curious about the origins of the photos from inside the plant, but I tried to divert her attention from the sneaky, sneaky truth of my nighttime adventures by focusing on the problem at hand.

Lucky for me, she’s easy to focus when she gets mad.

Aurora’s been working with grassroots activist communities since she was old enough to carry a protest sign, so she called every single person she knew who has any sway in politics or business in Ring City.

Eventually, she got a group together of about six people that could make serious trouble for JoyTech, including a member of the Conurban Council, and a reporter for the Daily Ringer who doesn’t see eye-to-eye with the editor where her cozy relationship with the JoyTech CEOs is concerned.

The group set up a meeting with this guy, John Barr – none other than the pencil-pusher I overheard arguing with the scientist guy the other night!

Basically, they laid all their cards on the table for him: they had pictures of JoyTech’s animal testing facility – never mind where these pictures came from – they were pictures that made the animals’ living conditions seem cruel and unusual, at best. They would go public with the photos unless JoyTech offered full disclosure on what was happening in the facility.

If you remember the conversation between John and the scientist, then you know he already knew that sh*t was about to hit the proverbial fan. He asked for the weekend to speak with the JGIC lawyers and make a decision on how to proceed.

This was on Saturday. At the time, me and Aurora were stoked. We figured there was no way JoyTech could get away with this one.

Once the public saw and heard about what was being done to those animals, the insane experiments would stop, and the plant itself would be run out of town on a rail! Right? Right?

Wrong.

Okay, so here’s all the crazy stuff that’s been happening:

Getting to know Mrs. Brisby last week made me realize that I couldn’t let animal testing at JoyTech continue to be so out of control. But I couldn’t just bust in to the facility and ‘liberate’ all the messed-up animals, either. So I decided to go talk to Aurora about it.

This was a major pride-swallowing moment, because last time we talked, ‘we’ decided it wasn’t such a great idea to be friends anymore. But when I texted her and asked her to meet me at the Banana Bar, she got back to me right away. And when I went there to meet her, she was already waiting for me.

She was sitting at a table by herself. When I saw her, for some reason, it seemed like it had been a million years since I saw her last. I had to stop and just see for a minute. Does that sound weird?

Anyway, like she knew I was there, she turned around and saw me, and got this huge grin on her face, which was so cool.

Actually, it was kind of too cool, because suddenly I got all nervous, so instead of sitting down and saying hi, I just stared at her shoes and started babbling about what was going on.

I didn’t tell her the whole truth – that I was sneaking around JoyTech in a gasmask costume – instead I said some friend of Jerry’s was working as a janitor there, and that he had taken all these pictures of the animal testing facility that really freaked me out.

Aurora looked at the pictures for a long time, especially the ones of the little monkeys with no eyes or mouths. She looked at them so long that eventually I said her name.

“Aurora?”

She looked up at me like she had forgotten I was there, but when I saw the expression on her face, I knew that everything was going to be alright. Aurora Lively – the only real superhero I know – was about to kick some serious ass.

More tomorrow…

I wanted to post quickly to let you know that Toon-FX redesigned their site, and it looks freakin’ awesome. They’ve got a super easy, cool, FREE version of the toon-photo app up there that you basically HAVE TO TRY. It seems like they’re coming out with new stuff all the time these days, hope that means they’re doing gooooood.

But I’ve gotta run. So much is going on right now, it’s insane. I’ll post all about it tomorrow, for now I’ll just say everything is working out for the friends of Mrs. Brisby, thanks to someone who masquerades as a regular person, but is really a superhero – I’m sure you can guess her name.

Check this out. Toon-FX now has this app that lets you toon video! It’s super simple to just take regular video clips and turn them into sweet animations. Mrs. Brisby thinks it’s cool, anyway, which is why she agreed to star in my first tooned vid.