Hi everybody who reads this blog,

My name is Aurora. I just found out that this blog existed, but from what I’ve read, I’m guessing you know all about me.

So you know I’ve been in the hospital for a while. I’m out now, although I have to go back most days. Anyway, all that stuff is really boring.

I’m kind of freaked out and mad that Nemo’s been writing this whole blog about me secretly, but I don’t care about that, either, right now.

All I want to know is what happened to Nemo after he left JoyTech on Halloween. As far as I can tell, no one’s seen or heard from him since then. It’s like he totally disappeared.

I feel like when I was in the hospital, the world ended or something. Kevin’s gone. Nemo’s gone. Jerry – I think he’s in his house, but he won’t answer the phone or the door or anything.

I found this girl Meegan and talked to her. She said that she went to the Blood River lookout to drink after the show at JoyTech, but that Nemo never showed up there. Not that he would, anyway.

I read Nemo’s last blog, and I got my mom to drive me to Kevin’s place. I couldn’t believe that Nemo would ever do some of the stuff he was talking about – blowing up Kevin’s car? Taking him hostage?

But it was true what he said – the house was completely shut up.

The only strange thing was that all the basement windows were boarded up with plywood, like they had been smashed.

I don’t really know what to think about any of this. I’m really scared, and I don’t know if any of you know anything or can help.

I just want my friend back.

(P.S. - Sorry about the lack of cool pictures in this post. If you like the stuff that Nemo was doing, you can check out the tooning software that he uses here.

I got up this morning and realized I could walk pretty easily on my shot foot, so the plan of the day was to go see Aurora. She’s still in the hospital. Still in a coma. No change, which is getting to be worse and worse news.

Usually if someone doesn’t come out of a coma within the first couple of weeks, they stay that way.

I felt guilty for not visiting for so long. Aurora’s mom even called, if only to ask me if I knew why New Guy wasn’t coming around. I almost shouted at her, “He disappeared because Aurora found him out for the fraud he is!” But I restrained myself, and I promised her I’d be around soon.

I was heading out the door when Jerry reminded me that I was supposed to be going down to the cop shop to give a statement. About Aurora’s ‘accident.’ But what was I supposed to say? “Oh yeah, officer, it was someone I call the giggling man, who hit her to punish me for fucking with JoyTech, or maybe to punish me for messing with her boyfriend, who was secretly a JoyTech spy. You see, this all started because I’m in love with a girl who will never hook up with me…”

And then I didn’t want to go to the hospital anymore. I didn’t want to sit there with Aurora in a hospital bed while whoever had hit her was roaming around free. And I didn’t want to talk to the cops about something they would never understand.

Suddenly, I felt more than just guilty. I felt massively, unbearably guilty. I should have been doing more for Aurora. Focusing on protecting her instead of getting all caught up in this fight with a company that I couldn’t even make a dent in. Going there, thinking I would, what? Storm the ramparts, draw the giggling troll out of its lair, and destroy all evil?

Trying to somehow punish JoyTech for what happened was like hitting my head against a brick wall. What I really needed was a soft spot. Somewhere I could apply pressure, somewhere I could pour out all this fucking guilt, and frustration, and ANGER…

If I wanted revenge, if I wanted to draw the giggling man out, there was only one thing I could think of that fit the bill, and that was stupid Kevin Joy’s stupid face.

Look out, New Guy. You’re about to become un-disappeared.

Here’s my idea of pretty, in toon form, of course. It’s always been my idea of pretty, since we were eight years old.

Meegan looks nothing like Aurora. She dresses in combat gear, for one thing. And her face beneath her mask was smeared with dirt.

She has crazy hair. Dyed reddish-pink, half dreadlocked, and cut at all different lengths, some going almost to her waist. Her face is covered in piercings that look like wounds and make her hard to look at directly.

She has thin lips that look made for screaming, although I didn’t know why I thought it at the time, and I don’t know what color her eyes are, because she has in colored contacts, one blue and one red, that make her look fiercer than she already is.

I wouldn’t call her ugly, but the Throttler is definitely no Aurora.

I had this thought, then regretted it, because the way she was examining me made me realize that I was no prize, either. And why would it matter anyway? It wasn’t like this was a blind date.

My foot throbbed unpleasantly.

“Hmm, you’re younger than I thought you would be,” she said.

“Sorry.”

“You’re still in high school, aren’t you? At least we don’t go to the same school. That would be, just, embarrassing.”

“Sorry,” I said again. Why was I being such an idiot?

“Do you recognize me?” she demanded.

I shrugged. “I dunno. Why?”

Meegan made an annoyed sound, and her grandma came to my side and whispered, “She’s in a band! She’s very proud about it.”

Suddenly I remembered posters I’d seen plastered all over town all summer. Posters of a girl with pink hair. Screaming.

So that’s where the screaming mouth came from.

“Oh. Yeah. Um,” and then I pulled the name out of nowhere, “Kill All Humans, right?”
Meegan actually looked surprised. “Wow. Did you see any of our shows?”

“Nah. I just remember the name because it’s ripped from Futurama.”

“Hmph. Well, you’d probably hate us, anyway.”

We glared at each other.

And that’s how I became friends, or maybe a better word would be “allies,” with the Throttler.

Check this out.

I realized that in my last post, I didn’t say anything about what Meegan’s situation is. And it’s actually weirdly connected to mine.

Obviously, she decided to find a way to take down JoyTech, but the funny thing is, she didn’t decide what she was going to do until she went to this protest (ring any bells?), and saw this guy in a gasmask start a riot!

Holy *@#!

She said that. Serious. She said that I was who inspired her to take action, and that I was her big hero or something, until she snuck down into the cave and saw me get shot in the foot.

She asked me what I do to train and I said, “huh?” and she rolled her eyes.

And then she made a big point of saying how totally unimpressed she is by me now.

And then we were sitting there staring at each other, and I realized that we both still had our masks on.

Talking to people when you’re in a mask is really weird, because you don’t know if you should take it off or not. It’s strange and kind of embarrassing talking normally when you’re wearing the mask, but you can’t just reveal your identity out of the blue.

So throughout our whole Q&A, we’re both firing questions at each other in these masks, and grandma is puttering around the trailer like nothing unusual is happening.

And then there was this lull. We’re both totally exhausted and I think I’ll probably pass out in two seconds, and I notice that Meegan’s gasmask is a lot more modern than mine.

Mine is, I think, from the Crimean war, but hers looks like it’s straight out of the Gulf War. And I’m checking it out more closely, and I guess I kind of leaned in towards her, because suddenly she raised her hand and made as if to pull off my mask.

My first reaction was to jolt backwards, but she followed me with her hand, so then I caught the strap behind one of her ears, and pulled at her mask.

We both hesitated for a second, like we were waiting for the other one to be ready, and then the masks came off.

It’s a credit to how easy Toon-FX is to use that I managed to post this while shot in the foot.

Visited Aurora in the hospital for the first time today. I tried to go before. I couldn’t make myself walk down that long hallway into her room. She’s in a coma, the docs say, which means her brain is hurt.

But it’s weird. I thought that she would be all cold and still. Instead her lips are almost always moving, at least on the ‘level’ she was in when I saw her. And every once in a while she lifts up her right hand a bit, like she’s about to reach for something.

Her mom told me that the doctors say its good she’s exhibiting signs of awareness. It means she could come out of it in weeks or even days. They say it’s actually pretty rare for people to stay in a coma forever.

Still.

It’s like Aurora’s trapped in some tiny dark space at the back of her mind, and I’m the one who put her there. What was she going to tell me? What if I never hear her voice again.

I have no interest in being one of those superheroes that lives out his days tortured by loss, and motivated by a desire for revenge. Batman, The Punisher, Constantine, Spawn, Elecktra, Swamp Thing, the list goes on and on and it sucks.

I should have listened to New Guy when he said I’d get her hurt.

He hasn’t been to the hospital. He hasn’t been to school this week. Aurora’s mom keeps asking me where her ‘boyfriend’ is.

But now I know that New Guy was right. Maybe he was never anything but a spy for his parents’ company, but he was right. I got Aurora hurt.

And maybe I know I need to back off, but all I can think about is going and doing the one thing the giggling man told me not to do.

I’m gonna find New Guy/Kevin Joy, and he’s going to answer some questions: About JoyTech, about Aurora, about everything.

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.

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.

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 get home last night and Jerry is having kittens because – get this – New Guy’s mom wants to talk to him about our ‘scuffles.’ Ha. Maybe she should read my toons. They’d make her feel better.

Not Jerry, though. He starts going off about how could I hit another kid, and since when do I start riots at football games? Since when do I even go to football games?

At first I was pissed at him for freaking out, but then I just started feeling really, really sh*tty, so I took off and walked for a while.

Am I actually becoming a different person? Somebody who acts all psycho over a girl that doesn’t even like him anymore?

It’s hard to explain, but sometimes, even when I’m not wearing my mask and hood, I feel like I’m still in disguise, and I feel…invincible.

I kept going over the last few days again and again in my mind. It was dark and late, and my feet took me down Blood River to the bridge. I wasn’t even thinking about where I was going until I realized I was walking the edge of the JoyTech plant property.

When I realized where I was, I stopped and looked up at the massive barbed wire fence surrounding the plant.

It was right then that everything got very clear. Stuff seemed messed up because I wasn’t focusing. It had been almost a week since I decided to snoop around the plant, and I spent the whole time avoiding Aurora or looking for Aurora.

So here’s the plan. As soon as I post this up, I’m going back to the plant. I’ll get a sense of the layout, and try to find a way to move around the buildings. Hopefully, I’ll find a way to get inside the main plant, totally undetected.

Main objective: DON’T GET BUSTED!