The Playground Wars

Chapter Twelve

Cuddles kicks General Cheese towards the wall. He starts laughing and heads towards the broken window to leave. Personally, I never knew General Cheese as a cog who will leave from a fight. The environment is tense yet awkward when we both enter the elevator. It's more relaxing once we leave the quiet elevator into the control room. My eyes are still wide open from the thought of Cuddles being right here, right now.

"How did you escape?" I ask hesitantly. If she could escape Flippy's new HQ, other people could have too.

"I prefer not to talk about it...." she says quietly. Her voice is much more different than it was before when she wasn't captured. It's more vulnerable, yet independent, not as fun and outgoing. She turns on the engines of the airship and sets our course towards- an island? Or what seems like an island on the GPS screen.

A shake and vibration echo throughout the ship, signifying the Airship's startup and before I can speak, we are flying.

"Where are we headed?" I ask. She turns to look at me, dark circles around her eyes like she was beaten.

"It's what all of the prisoners talk about," she tells me. My heart aches at the thought of how the prisoners lived. I wonder what happened to Doug, the pig I met in the Cog Airship, after our separation. I just hope is that he is still alive. Then I remember about the toons in cages downstairs. I head towards the elevator to go to the first floor where I can free them, but before pressing the button to go down, Cuddles gives me the keys to open the cages.

It's awkward when you're surrounded by toons in cages. They all look at me the same way Cuddles did, gloomily. It's as if I am their hope for freedom, and that Flippy could possibly be stopped. I don't want them to think of me as a leader though. I'm weak, and Flippy is too powerful. Plus, if I get a lot of attention, it'll eventually attract the attention of Flippy, who would be more eager to make me disappear from the face of Toontown.

The only problem is that there is no Toontown anymore. At least not the united Toontown it was before.

I walk up to the nearest cage to me. The toon inside of it is a purple bear. Her bow on her delicate, shiny hair is barely recognizable, and a scar goes across her right eye. When the cage finally opens, tears start filling in her eyes. She screams and drops to her knees onto the floor. She covers her face with her palms and her sobbing echoes throughout the entire airship.

One by one, I start unlocking the cages as fast as I could. Out of their cages, their wish for freedom has been granted at last.

This is what it must feel like to be free, I think in my head. I can't feel the same way as these toons. I'm never free as long as Flippy lives and if I'm within Toontown. Such a place that is far from Toontown doesn't even exist. Most likely, I will never be free for the rest of my life.

All the toons then look at me like they want me to tell them what to do.

"The food is in the, um," I say nervously. I'm not one who can bravely talk in front of a lot of people.
"It's in the room towards the left." I'm just looking at the map and the locations where things are at. Being hungry myself, I walk with the crowd of people into the food storage room, but to my disappointment, it all turns out to be oil and gears. Cog food.

Toons groan all around me; some start to cry. I don't want to let these people down and starve. Immediately I walk into the elevator wanting to reach the control center, which is the top floor of this four storied airship. When the elevator opens, I push the doors and walk towards Cuddles.

"We need to get food, and fast," I tell her. She nods her head, and changes the course on the control panel. I couldn't do it with all of those strange and unique buttons, but she does it precisely as if it were a skill.

I walk to the elevator, and once again, press the button to go down to the toons. When the doors start to close, Cuddles runs towards me.

"Oswald, wait! I need to tell you something!" She says urgently. I try to push away the high tech elevator doors so they can open, but it's useless. They close immediately, leaving me feel like I always feel after I have those dreams with that voice that sounds like Flippy talking to me: confused

As I am about to press up so I can hear what she wants to say, the whole airship violently shakes. The elevator lights flicker, and the elevator stops. I look around for an emergency button, but to my dismay, there isn't any. Without even noticing, I find myself grabbing tightly onto the railing outlining the inside of the elevator. 

Another rumble follows after something from, what I assume comes from outside the airship, impacts us. This time it's more aggressive than the last.

Roars of screams come from below the elevator floor. My heart panics as the noises around me leave me to believe this an attack. Suddenly, the floor below me starts to shake really hard and even more violent. It cracks and shatters to pieces. I can barely hear myself scream with all of the noise going on at the same time. I grip the handlebars on the walls tightly, afraid to let go, too terrified to hold on. The pressure of the air,is forcing me to lose grip every second. Within moments, I'm falling through the hole in the elevator ground to the first floor of the airship. The screams of the toons around me send chills through my bones. 

There's that violent rumble again. I could feel the impact even more than last time. I try to keep my feet on the ground, watching the toons I just freed give into the demands of the air pressure and fall out of the airship, gone. Forever.

A wall far from me tears apart, making the room's temperature drop drastically. Toons all around me begin to lose control and get sucked into the hole in the wall. Some toons close to the wall freeze solid. I try to walk to something to grab on, but the only thing I can grab on is the wires of the ceiling above. Some of the walls tear down and get sucked into the open hole. The airship is bound to crash and I need to get out now. 

To my dismay, the airship begins to tilt, and at the rate the airship is moving we would soon be upside down. To make things worse, a cage begins to head towards my direction. Its impact on me is enough to knock me off my grip, and begin to slide off the airship and into the hole leading to the bright abyss of the sky.

Instead of trying to get back up into the airship, I try as hard as I can to get off the airship. I know that soon, if not now, the airship will explode. Toons around me scream in pain. It doesn't have to be this way, though. There doesn't have to be pain, loss, and war. Death doesn't have to be waiting for more victims to claim as his own. Can't there be another solution?

The hole in the wall sucks me in and within moments I'm falling from the airship as the air hits my face. I try to close my eyes and relax, but once I hear a loud bang, I'm immediately horrified. I was right. The airship would explode. Rubble comes raining down as I fall. I become more aware once pieces of sharp glass slip by my chest. I'm screaming for this nightmare to stop but not even I can hear myself. I didn't even notice but I'm falling with my back facing the ground. I turn my body around in the air, and I look down to see pure woodland and trees. The heavier parts of the airship fall down faster than me. Time flies, and soon, I'm already 15 feet off the ground.

"Cuddles," I say, wasting my last breath before the hard impact of the ground knocks me cold for a few moments before I can get up and realize the attack is not over yet.

"Search for any survivors!" a cog says without any mercy in his voice. It echoes throughout the sky, and it appears to be coming from a speaker in another airship. From what I can see, Toonbots begin to fly down towards the rubble around me. To be honest, if I go hide in the woods, they will eventually find me like last time. If I give myself up, Flippy will be sure to be even stricter than last time. The only thing to do is hope the best for the future, even though I know nothing good will ever happen.