No wonder he was so afraid. Kevin was in hiding because he thought I was out to kill him. Me. An escaped mental patient. And from the way he was talking, it seemed like this kind of thing wasn’t totally out of the ordinary in his life.

Here I was, interrogating the guy I had pictured as the mastermind architect of all my problems, and suddenly I felt this overwhelming urge to explain to him what was really going on. I shoved my hands in my pockets and Mrs. Brisby bit one of my fingers. She’s kind of like my conscience in that way.

The next thing I knew I was turning around, walking up the stairs and out of the basement. Kevin was calling after me, “Hey! Where are you going! Don’t leave me down here!” but I had to get out. Blow off some steam before I did something I would really regret.

It was only when I got outside and saw the groups of kids running past in costumes that I realized it was Halloween. I had been about to pull off my mask, but now I kept it on, and joined the crowds on the sidewalk. I jogged slowly out of the remote Palm’s Reach neighborhood.

As I moved through the city, getting closer to my neighborhood, not really knowing where I was going, I started noticing these flyers. The first one I saw stopped me dead in my tracks.

An Environmentally-Friendly Halloween With JoyTech? I had a moment where I felt like they must be going out of their way to mock me, personally. Instead of letting your kids run wild in the streets, bring them to JoyTech where they can eat JoyTech candy, wear JoyTech costumes, and play JoyTech games. And at the end of the night, get a little printout showing you how much you can help the environment by buying everything you own from JoyTech.

Again I didn’t have to think to know what my next move would be. I called Meegan.

“Nemo?”

“Is your band playing a show tonight?”

“What? No.”

“How about a last-minute gig at JoyTech?”

We met in the parking lot just in time to pay off the family-friendly act that had been hired for the evening. Meegan and the guys in her band did their best not to look like gore-metal savages as they set up their equipment in the JoyTech cafeteria that had been converted into a ‘House of Horrors’ using enough cheap paper and plastic props to create a seriously spooky landfill come morning.

Meegan and her band got some weird looks, but they convinced the event organizers that they were just in costume for the occasion.

I had long since taken off my mask. It was too familiar a face to show around JoyTech, but I was letting Mrs. Brisby ride on my shoulder so she could take in the scene. The room quickly filled up with tiny kids, soccer moms, and doting grandparents.

“What do you think, Mrs. Brisby? Is Kill All Humans going to freak these people out or what?”
Mrs. Brisby sniffed at me, and call me crazy, but it seemed like almost a contemptuous sniff, like she thought my prank was pretty lame.

“Think you could do better?” I asked, and she cocked her head, like she was thinking about something. Then, I swear, my rat’s eyes suddenly flashed bright blue, like there was a little LED light in her brain.

Before I could take a closer look, the lights dimmed, and a voice said, “Is everybody ready to boogie down to the Monster Mash?” The crowd cheered, and then Kill All Humans started playing.

Meegan wailed like a banshee, and a guy in a leather vest and diaper spit fake (?) blood onto the crowd in front of the stage while the three guitar players competed with the drummer to see who could make more terrifying noises.

It didn’t take long for the crowd to start stampeding for the exits, but it was only once they got there that the real screaming started. Suddenly, people were climbing up onto table and chairs, kicking over apple bobbing games and candy bowls to get off the floor.

I craned my head over the crowd to see what was going on, and heard Mrs. Brisby squeak happily in my ear. Hundreds of rats were streaming in through every entrance to the cafeteria. There were so many you could actually hear them over the music, and the screaming. The scene was utter and total chaos.

As rats ran in a polite circuit around me, I looked down at Mrs. Brisby. Could I add ‘summoning other rats’ to her list of talents? “Did you do this?”

She squeaked again, then stretched one paw out and yawned hugely. Boring. No big deal. “I concede defeat, lady,” I said to her. “You are the Halloween prank master.”

Sometimes I forgot that no one had a bigger bone to pick with JoyTech than Mrs. Brisby. She had spent her life as a test subject in one of their labs until I rescued her. Obviously, she hadn’t forgotten.

People ran around me screaming. Meegan’s band continued playing in chaos-induced bliss. I grabbed a glass of punch that hadn’t yet been knocked off the table beside me.

Happy Halloween, Mrs. Brisby! Happy Halloween, readers! Happy Halloween, Toon-FX - thanks for the cool pics!

Oh, and Happy Halloween, JoyTech.

With one eye on the Shovel and Burn bozos (wish I had more pics to toon of THEM!), I ventured deeper into the caverns that formed the base of the JoyTech smokestacks. There were maybe a dozen pools in all, some bubbling, some still.

I’d already guessed that this must be some sort of geothermal energy project. Halogen lights were strung up along the ceiling like someone had put time and effort into setting them up like that. Each pool was equipped with pipes and sensors going in and out.

Actually, they kind of reminded me of Aurora there, in that white hospital bed, all hooked up to machines and tubes.

The other thing I couldn’t help but notice was this rumbling noise, and a vibration coming from beneath me. I figured there must be levels below this one, but then, at the far end of the cavernous area, I came to a truck supporting some kind of machine. I can only describe the machine as looking a hell of a lot like a drill, only small and futuristic, like something out of Armageddon (lame ref, I know!).

I was still staring at the drill when the GeoTherm team clocked in. All of a sudden, a sliding metal door at the far end of the cavern opened, and a team of science-types in white lab coats spilled in, arguing noisily amongst themselves.

Not wanting to waste the element of surprise, I ran at them, reaching into my jacket as I did. Suddenly, I had six scientists calming pointing handguns at me.

Now I know why the Shovel and Burn guys are so jumpy.

I skidded to a stop in front of the group, producing from my pocket one very scared white lab rat.

That got their attention.

“Where did you get that rat?” One woman demanded, and then they were all talking very loudly, firing (excuse the pun) questions at me and arguing with each other. Who in their right minds would give these people guns, I wondered.

Then one man’s voice stood out among all the others. “On the ground!” he was screaming. “Get on the ground!”

Ah crap.

Mrs. Brisby began scrambling up my arm towards my pocket. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t let these scientists take me down, or get their hands on Mrs. Brisby. I needed answers, but how could I fight six hysterical people with guns?

“Hit the dirt!” yelled the guy who watched too many movies. He glared at me fiercely through his safety goggles.

I shook my head, “Can’t do it.”

That’s when I got shot in the foot.

For some reason, I reached into my pocket for Mrs. Brisby – maybe I did it just to freak them out with my pet rat – but immediately, they both jumped back.

“Don’t shoot us!”

“Shoot you…” Slowly, I pulled my hand out of my pocket, leaving Mrs. Brisby behind. “You guys won’t have anything to worry about, as long as you answer some questions.”

“Anything!”

The guy who had tried to run turned to his partner. “I told them! I told ‘em I wasn’t getting paid enough to deal with this shit!”

“Shh!”

“Shut up!” I realized I had to get control of the conversation fast. “You,” I pointed at the jumpy guy. “Stay shut up. You,” I pointed at the other guy, “tell me what you do down here? What is this place?”

The guy I was questioning raised his hands defensively. “It’s like I told the last one, this is just the Dump. All we do is shovel garbage.”

“Shovel garbage? What are all these pools and pipes for?”

The guy looked guilty. “Would you believe I have no idea?”

Before I could respond, the guy who couldn’t shut up interjected angrily. “We’re not on Geotherm! We’re just Shovel and Burn! I’m not gonna be…throttled again for some business I don’t know nothin’ about.”

“Throttled again?” I took a deep breath. “I’m not going to throttle you if you…wait, who’s throttling you anyway?”

“The last one of you came down here asking questions. What’d she say? That we were ‘violating the sanctity of mother earth,’ that ‘the Coal Mouth Hot Springs belonged to her family,’ and that we was thieves!”

“Thieves,” the second guy echoed.

I took in my surroundings with renewed interest. “The Coal Mouth Hot Springs?”

I’d never heard of any hot springs in Ring City. “Alright,” I said to the jumpy guy, “you talk.”

He glared at me for a minute, then began reluctantly. “All this used to be Indian land before it got absorbed into the Conurbation thing. These here are natural caves, and these pools were like, the Indians sacred area or whatever you call it.”

“So how did JoyTech get their hands on it?”

The guy snorted. “Man, I don’t know why you people don’t come down here when Geotherm is on shift. They’re the ones got all the information you’re lookin for. I told you, and I told the “Throttler” or whatever her name was – we shovel garbage. End of story.”

I decided to ignore the Throttler thing for the time being. “Fine. So when does Geotherm come on?”
“Not for another couple hours.”

I nodded. “Then I’m just gonna hang out here til they show up, maybe poke around a bit. And if you guys try anything stupid, I’m gonna get you worse than…the Throttler did.” I made as if to reach inside my jacket pocket again.

They both jumped again. I couldn’t believe how well the whole fake weapon thing was working. Much thanks to the creepy mask. I stared them down a bit longer til they got back to shoveling garbage. Then I went exploring.

I’ve been messing around with Toon Video a bit more, and I turned one of my recent comics into a mini-movie. I’m actually kinda surprised by how well the tooning software works with videos I’ve made myself.

Check out the part near the end where I’m swinging up onto a narrow platform. That’s one of my favorite ways into JoyTech.

Unfortunately, after a couple days of trying to forget about it, the question of what JoyTech is doing here in Ring City is back in my head. I’m gonna call Aurora about it right now. She’s the expert on all this emissions control stuff.

The music in the video is by Stefan Ternemar. Check out his MySpace.

No time for tooning today. I recorded the conversation between the scientist and the suit on my cell, and here it is, transcribed FYI. Read my last post if you’re lost.

The first speaker is the scientist:

“John, do you have a minute?”

“What is it, Barry? What time is it?”

“I just found out – from maintenance – that the entire R9 group died within the last 24 hours. But that can’t be true. Because you ensured me that I would be informed…”

“Barry! Is there any way we could not do this right now? With everything we’ve got on our plate, a handful of dead rodents and chimps hardly…”

“A handful of dead…John, two years of research, thirty million dollars in development capital down the drain! And they’re telling me we don’t even have enough data to assess whether cause of death was testing or extraneous factors!”

“Not this again.”

“Yes this again! How many times can I make the point that regular maintenance staff cannot be safely relied on to care for the animal testing facility! The dogs in R6 died from being fed chocolate, for Crissakes!”

“Barry, our research clearly indicates that a dedicated staff under these circumstances is inadvisable at best; at worst, disastrous…”

“Disastrous! You don’t call the deaths of our most successful round of subjects thusfar disastrous? This is completely unacceptable, John. We’re all working under impossible caseloads, there’s zero communication between departments, and now I’m seeing my life’s work slipping through my fingers. At my age, John. This is not what we discussed when I was recruited. I’m done.”

“Barry, be reasonable.”

“I’m done being reasonable. I came here from a nonprofit that barely had two cents to rub together. I thought JoyTech’s money would get me what I needed to complete my work, but this is nothing more that a bloated mess of a multinational with so much money they think it can just be flushed down the drain. And fine, do what you want with your money, but not with my time, and not with my work!”

[Long pause, maybe whispering?]

“Okay, Barry, okay. You’re right. Let me tell you what – first thing tomorrow morning, we’ll get all the department heads together, we’ll get the attorneys on the phone…”

“The Spencers, John. I want to talk to the Spencers.”

“I’ll do my best, Barry. You know I can’t…”

“The Spencers. In the morning. Or I’m gone. And you can call down and get me an escort to the ATF(?) right now, because I’m spending the rest of the night with my animals, and that’s all there is to it.”

“Sure, John. Whatever you say. You know we don’t want to lose you.”

“You could have fooled me.”

Nothing good ever lasts. That stupid old saying is true, isn’t it? Every time you think something’s going to be different, it’s not. Every time you think someone’s going to change, they don’t.

Every time you’re convinced that the evil multinational corporation you’ve been trying to take down is going to do something good for a change, they wriggle out of it.

No rest for the wicked. Not even the toonified wicked.

The Conurban Council formed this special committee that was supposed to be in charge of independently overseeing quality control at the JoyTech recycling center, but as it turns out, there is no quality to control.

What the special committee found inside the center was a big warehouse filled with boxes. Nothing like the pictures supposedly taken by the Daily Ringer when they did a big editorial on the place.

Predictably, JoyTech blamed the whole thing on the same ‘independent contractors’ that were supposedly at fault for the Blood River dumping. Said contractors have managed to disappear, unnamed and without penalty.

Now the recycling center is closed until further notice, and the worst news is that everybody in Ring City is jaded about recycling now, like they think that because of what happened, recycling doesn’t work!

Yes, let’s just let the city turn into a bit toxic waste dump. It will look pretty, in a post-apocalyptic wasteland kind of way.

FYI: All the images in this post were toonified using Toon-Photo…

Home safe. Just barely. I had to ditch Jerry’s truck and hide out around the school for five hours before the coast was clear to move. And I’m not crazy, because from the roof of the gym, I could see them in their fake riot gear cop suits combing the neighborhood.

Bad, bad, bad. Because that means they know what area I live in. I don’t even want to imagine what Jerry would do if he caught on to some JoyTech thugs sneaking around the house.

Last night was another sleepless night. Not as successful as previous nights.

I started out at the recycling plant to make sure there wasn’t any unusual activity, like extra security or anything. Then I followed the trucks to the river, and while they were busy, I started bagging garbage.

There’s so much down there, it’s unbelievable. And the water near the banks has started to take on this weird, oily look, like all these toxins are leaching into the water, or something.

Anyway, I got a lot done, because I couldn’t start returning the junk until the truckers were home safe in their beds.

By the time the trucks stopped coming, it was after 1 am. When I took my first load to the plant, it was completely dead, dark, nobody around, I swear, and no cameras, at least not visible ones.

Second load, same thing. I was racing, though. I didn’t have long til dawn, but I’d bagged a lot of recycling while the JoyTech trucks were dumping.

On the third load, I roll up like usual with my headlights off, just in case, and I jump out of the cab, and the next thing I know these guys in riot gear and facemasks are coming OUT of the pile of garbage I made.

At first I thought it must be the cops, but these guys were all silent, they didn’t shout anything at me, and they didn’t have flashlights or anything. Then, instead of running at me, this one guy puts his finger to the mouth of the mask - shhhhh.

I knew then that they were definitely not cops.

So I jumped back in the truck – thanking God I kept the motor running – and I drove straight at them. I don’t know what I would have done if they didn’t get out of the way, but they did, and it didn’t seem like they were going to chase me, so I stupidly drove like crazy back to my neighborhood, and ditched Jerry’s truck out at his buddy’s wrecking yard.

I figure I’ll head home on foot, but about a block away from the yard – and it’s dead silent predawn – I hear this static. Crackling. And all of a sudden, right in my ear, a voice, whispering.

That’s when I ran like hell. Off the street, through backyards mostly. I wasn’t even thinking, so it was a fluke I ended up at school, and I thought I lost them, but I took the fire escape up to the gym roof anyway, and two minutes later I see six of these JoyTech guys run by, stop, and mill around just past the fire escape like so.

How the hell did they find me? How the hell were they following me that far back?

This is me, sighing heavily, inside having a heart attack.

The rest you already know.

I’m not really sure how to start this post. Maybe just by saying what I saw. But I keep thinking that I must have seen wrong, or misunderstood what I was seeing. It’s just so cliché. So predictable. So exactly what I expected from JoyTech.

Okay, so shut up, Nemo. What’s going on, right?

I finally got up the guts to head over to the JoyTech recycling center last night. And I don’t really know what I was expecting to find. Maybe some evidence that they were throwing out more stuff than they were recycling.

Every recycling program is different, but it happens a lot that they don’t have the time or resources to recycling materials that aren’t properly sorted, so a huge percentage of recycling ends up getting trashed. I wasn’t going to let a big rich company like JoyTech get away with that.

Turns out the situation is about a million times worse.

When I got to the ‘recycling center’ last night, there were a bunch of trucks lined up outside the building – the kind they use at construction sites to haul away rubble. The trucks were going into the center’s loading bay empty, and coming out full. I couldn’t really see what was in the trucks, but it was easy to guess, so I hitched a ride on the back of one, thinking I’d follow them to a landfill, and take some pics of how much recycling JoyTech was getting rid of in secret.

Except we didn’t go to a landfill. We went to the Ridge, a spot where people party over the widest, deepest part of Blood River. Blood River got its name because the mud around here makes the water this dark reddish color. Some people think the color of the river means it’s polluted, but it’s great for swimming and fishing in the summer. Or it used to be.

One by one, the trucks backed up and dumped their loads of ‘recycling over the edge of the Ridge. In the dark, all the tons of junk disappeared into the water.

The trucks all drove away, but I stayed at the lookout a while, watching the water rush past below me. I imagined all the rivers in the world connecting to each other, and all of those rivers flowing out into the ocean, and the ocean, deep and huge and secret, and the world’s biggest garbage dump.

It’s all so horrible. I’ve got to figure out what I can do to fix things.

Here’s what I’ve been thinking:

The whole problem with JoyTech started when we got the Conurban Council. We got the Council because somebody needed to oversee the building of the highway around the conurbation area, but once it was built, they just stuck around. Everybody thought the Council would be good way to help the towns and cities get used to being one big megalopolis.

But all the Council did was let JoyTech come in and take over everything, and some people are happy about it, and some aren’t, and now there’s even more fighting between the different areas.

According to Jerry, Ring City needs somebody to:

1. Stop JoyTech from turning the whole area into a wasteland.
2. Get all the different neighborhoods together, and feeling like one big city.

That’s what Aurora wants too, but the way she’s going about it, nobody’s ever going to listen.

Somebody needs to take action, and I’ve been thinking really, seriously, why not me?

Everybody loves the idea of JoyTech’s recycling program, but the truth is that recycling is the LEAST we can do to stop the environmental apocalypse. In kindergarten, they teach kids, “REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE.” Recycling comes third because it’s basically a last resort. Reducing is first because obviously, it’s better to just USE LESS than to have to reuse or recycle.

JoyTech wants to start a major recycling program to clean up Ring City, but they must think we’re idiots if we don’t see that a giant plant in the middle of everything is going to create more waste than ever. Recycling doesn’t help when you’re just increasing production. Why would the Conurban Council let this happen?

Predictably, Aurora is writing a letter to find out.