I came up out of blackness that wasn’t sleep into a nightmare, so I couldn’t tell at first if I was awake or dreaming.

Again I opened my eyes to the bare bulb swinging above my head. The cell-like basement room equipped with moldering hulks that might have been racks and stocks or relics of a bygone industrial era.

And the mocking voice filled the room.

“A warning, only, Suspect 7. Not my idea. My employers only want you to know that they bite back. How many deaths will you be responsible for on this crusade? How many friends are you willing to lose? A warning only, Suspect 7. Not my idea…”

My eyes finally settled on the speaker in the corner of the room, and confirmed that I was alone.

I began to struggle, but this time I was not tied down. The voice droned on. How many deaths…How many friends.

It couldn’t be. It wasn’t possible. Aurora was hurt. She was not gone. Not possible.

I reached for my shirt pocket and Mrs. Brisby bit me very hard on the hand. She was scared, but she wasn’t hurt.

Slowly, I crawled to my feet. My head throbbed. Felt like I had been hit by a truck. But I don’t think it was a truck. Maybe a van, like the one they used to bring me here the first time.

Aurora hitting the big window, painted with the day’s sashimi specials.

I threw up on my shoes.

Then I thought, could she (I wouldn’t think ‘body’ but all I could think was ‘body’) be here, somewhere in this building? I didn’t know how much of it was this labyrinth of dugout tunnels and cells, but I’d search the place top to bottom.

And if I found the giggling man, I would throttle him.

The desire to hurt someone was very strong in me, with the image of Aurora shattering through the glass superimposed across my eyelids.

Then my phone rang. It was Jerry.

“Nemo! Where in Christ are you? Aurora’s in the hospital. Everybody’s looking for you. They’re telling me you were in some kind of accident? You hit Aurora with a car or something? Nemo, I know you’re off doing your own thing right now, boy, but I’ve got to draw a line some…”

The phone dropped out of my hand. I don’t know how I ended up back on the ground, on my knees, but I felt like praying. Aurora was in the hospital. That meant she was alive.

FYI: This was all done using Toon-FX.

All images in this comic were tooned using Toon-FX!

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Okay, maybe it’s just me, but it seems like there’s an almost anti-planet-friendly hysteria building up in Ring City right now?

I don’t know if it’s because people like to argue, or because they don’t want to change their lifestyle, but more and more I’m hearing “global warming doesn’t exist,” and “there’s no proof that we created the holes in the ozone layer,” and “looking for alternative fuel sources is a waste of time.”

No kidding!

In Ring City, first it was this “recycling doesn’t work” thing, and now there’s all the trouble surrounding the JoyTech plant. All in the space of a week. WTF?

Some background: When all the towns and cities that got surrounded by the Ring Road became the Western Conurbation Area a,k.a. Ring City, there was all this green space in the middle that divided a few of the bigger cites, and only had a few small towns (or ‘neighborhoods’ as they’re now called) in it.

I live in one of those towns.

The Conurbation Council originally promised that all the green space would become protected parkland.

Then the JoyTech Global Improvement Company came to town.

They bought up a huge chunk of land between my ‘neighborhood’ and the urban center across the Blood River, and built the plant, outbuildings, and sprawling parking and warehousing areas surrounding it.

So much for green space, and so much for clean air.

The JoyTech plant belches black smoke 24/7, viololating “every CO2 emissions standards law in existence,” according to Aurora. Standards which, Jerry is quick to point out, are already pathetically low.

The point of all this is to say that Aurora has somehow miraculously mobilized this big protest, planned for tomorrow in front of the JoyTech plant, and we just found out that there’s going to be a counter-protest to protest Aurora’s protest!

They say the air quality in the area hasn’t gone down, and that the original protesters are just left-wing nutjobs that are trying to destroy the industries that built this country.

It seems like everybody is missing a simple truth here: the planet is fragile. Our ecosystem is not indestructible, and the nicer we are to it, the longer it will take care of us.

Show me all the facts and statistics in the world to prove that a problem doesn’t exist, you’ll never convince me that what we’re doing to the ecosystem is without consequence.

Anyway, we’ll see what happens tomorrow. I’ll be going as my regular self, because something tells me they’ll have some thugs on crowd control that might recognize my mask.

As usual, all the photos in this post were tooned using Toon-Photo.

They chose St. Rose Park, which is just a couple of blocks from my school, as the location for the new JoyTech Recycling Center. Aurora got a big petition going against it. She got hundreds of signatures, but they cut down the trees and dug up the ground and before we could blink, they’d thrown up this big windowless concrete building that’s accepting “ALL TYPES OF RECYCLABLE MATERIALS.”

Aurora never even had a chance to present her petition to the Conurban Council.

The Council said that preserving the green spaces left in the conurbation area was a priority, but it seems like all they care about is making room for JoyTech. I asked Jerry why a company that creates almost 6% of the world’s industrial pollution would care about recycling, and he said that it’s what’s called GREENWASHING.

You’ve seen greenwashing before a million times, even if you didn’t know it. Most companies do it these days, and it boils down to a scam marketing strategy. Businesses are under fire for being polluters, so they make a big deal about how eco-friendly they are to please consumers. But they’re really not doing anything for the environment, they’re just spinning their PR to make it look like they are.

Corporations throw around terms like ‘eco-conscious,’ ‘green,’ ‘organic,’ and ‘all-natural’ to sound like they care, but most of the time, they’re just trying to cover up all the damage they’re doing.

And it works. Like right now, nobody cares that St. Rose Park is gone, because they’re so excited about JoyTech’s recycling program. They’re even forgetting what was so bad about JoyTech in the first place.

But I don’t trust them. I can’t. First chance I get, I’m going to head over to that recycling center and do some poking around. We’ll see if they’re really on the level.

Jerry was right. People are idiots. And the people at my school are the biggest idiots in the world.

They’re all convinced that JoyTech is great for creating jobs and promising to clean up Ring City. Everyone listens when Aurora talks, but even on Earth Day, they don’t want to be bothered to really THINK about what we can do in our own city to help the planet.

On Monday, I left a stack of pamphlets in the caf for people to check out. Then yesterday, I see none other than New Guy drop the whole stack in the mud outside the smoking doors. Which everyone thinks is hilarious, of course.

WTF? Man, I knew that guy was jerk from the first second I laid eyes on him. But the worst is that Aurora totally defended him on it, and said it was an accident. Yeah. An accident.

I hate everybody.

Over the weekend, Aurora wouldn’t shut up about explaining to people that you have to do more for the environment than just recycle. She’s mad because JoyTech wouldn’t give her a straight answer about their waste creation problems.

Normally, I just nod while she goes off about this stuff, but even I have to admit that there’s something seriously messed up going on. Plus, Aurora’s usually too busy on the weekends to hang out, so how could I resist when she asked me to help her make some pamphlets, and hand them out at school?
Jerry said it was useless, but we’ve got a secret weapon.

I thought that if we could show people what’s going on, by telling a story, like they did with Jericho, or like Alan Moore did with V, then they’d understand, so I used this program called Toon-Photo to turn Aurora’s writing into a kind of mini-comic. All you have to do to get people to listen is make the information entertaining, right? It took me all weekend, but it was worth it.

Wish us luck!