CHAPTER 20 - THE COLOR CATASTROPHE
Michaelah woke up and she was blue. Not just a little blue, but covered in it, from her skin to her clothes, to her hair. Blue hair! She was mortified but also it looked kinda cool. She stood up on yellow, blue, red, and violet. Everywhere she looked colors were splattered together. Koji stood up and rubbed his head.
“What happened?” he asked.
Michaelah laughed are him. He was yellow, red, and orange everywhere. He barely looked like a bear. This was the strangest place they had been to yet. It felt like a whole new place to them. Michaelah wondered if they were even still in Pandamonium. This felt other worldly, well other other worldly. Could this be closer to home? To her it felt like they were slipping even farther away. As cool as this place looked it was also terrifying in nature. They immediately started looking for a way back.
There was not much to look at besides colors. Every so often the ground would begin to slope, up or down, it did not matter, either way it tripped them up because they had no idea what they were dealing with or what they were looking at. This world was like one big illusion. A trick on the eyes. The colors didn’t just splatter everywhere, they felt alive. Michaelah stared at the splatters for too long and could swear they were moving. Something about the chaotic arrangement of colors messed with their sense of sight. They could not tell up from down, left from right. They walked in a world of color where all the rules were different.
Koji stepped into a puddle of pure black and for a second he turned back into his normal self, purely black and white fur, all in the right spots. Once his foot stepped out of the black puddle he returned to his crazy red, yellow, orange design. Michaelah tried to do the same thing but when she stepped in the black puddle, nothing changed. She tried but nothing really worked. Then they came upon a white puddle. When Koji stepped in that puddle he once again regained his normal form. And when he released his foot the crazy colors took back over. Michaelah tried stepping in the white puddle and couldn’t even get into it. She merely walked on top of it like it was ice.
Koji picked her up and stepped in the puddle and that did the trick. She returned to her normal colors in their normal places just like he did. Koji stepped out of it and they went back to color chaos.
“Can we try it again, but this time you hold me upside down?” asked Michaelah.
“I guess.”
Koji held her by the ankles and stepped back into the white puddle with one foot. They returned to normal form again. Michaelah reached out, which meant down in her case, and cupped some of the white liquid in her hands. She pulled it up and drank it.
Koji squirmed at the sight of Michaelah drinking the white water. When he had enough he stepped out and placed her back down, right side up. He turned into his chaos colors but Michaelah remained normal. She had cracked the riddle. Koji copied what she did and drank from the tasteless white liquid as they stood in it.
They were now the right colors. Problem solved. Oh wait, that wasn’t the problem. No, they had totally gotten distracted. The problem at hand was getting out of the color catastrophe, but at least there would be no long term effects now, if they escape.
“How are we going to get out of here, Michaelah?”
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She could feel the worry in his voice. This was different from any other adventure they had been on, as terrifying as losing their bodies. Michaelah tried to think out loud.
“What makes this place so different from all the other places we've been to?” she asked.
“I don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Well sure, but none of the other places made much since. I mean, the Goo Zoo? C’mon.”
“Yeah, but with every other place there were people from that place who explained things to us.”
“That’s right, Koji. You’re a genius! We just need to find a loveable color character.”
They smiled and laughed and danced all around with each other. Michaelah felt like skipping. They ran around looking for anything out of the ordinary, well ordinary for this place. Everywhere looked the same. They might have been going in a circle for all they knew. After that didn’t work, they both tried talking to random splatters and puddles. It made Michaelah feel kind of ridiculous but that was okay. Strange places call for strange behavior. Nothing was talking back. Again, Michaelah doubted if this place was even a part of Pandamonium.
“What are we going to do now?” asked Koji.
“I don’t know,”answered Michaelah, “I’m running out of ideas.”
“If we get stuck here, I’m glad its with you, Michaelah.”
Michaelah smiled and hugged Koji. She felt the same way. It was okay if she never got home. It wasn’t the end of the world if she didn’t get to have a birthday party. And then she remembered, the whole reason why she was trying to get back. Was it still her birthday? She couldn’t stay here forever, even if it was with her best friend, she had a sister and family that loved and needed her. Michaelah had to get home and so did Koji.
“You have a family that needs you too!” she explained to him. “Now let’s find a way to get back.”
“I don’t see how. This place is way too weird.”
“Its all about colors. And we were able to get our colors back by matching your fur and a white puddle. Maybe white is like the wild card, it can be used for any color, and if we want to get out of here we have to make it happen.”
“What do you mean?” asked Koji.
“I mean literally make it, we have to paint something.”
“Using what? I don’t see any paint brushes lying around.”
“Our hands, I mean paws, I suppose, oh boy,” she scratched her head staring at Koji’s giant panda paws, with claws and pads. “I can work with this.”
Michaelah began running around and grabbing different colors, a finger for each primary color. She found a mostly blank area between the splatters and started painting a picture of the beach.
“Its the easiest thing I could think of. I already mixed the beige color for sand here,” she pointed to a puddle. “You can go nuts with that on your paws and I will get to work on making two different blues for the ocean and sky. After that we add some white for clouds and make a yellow sun.”
“Sounds like a good plan, Michaelah!”
The girl and the panda hand/paw-drew a mural out of thin air. The colors seemed to really enjoy their creativity and dedication. They moved, slowly to the human eye, like glaciers, and flooded their landscape with detail and shadow, slowly bringing it to life. Once they finished the beach and ocean, Michaelah got on Koji’s shoulders and painted the sky. Splatters of all different blues, whites, blacks, and browns were attracted to her resplendent sky. They inched forward into the mural and became birds.
The more the two painted the more the Color Catastrophe came to life. Michaelah could swear she heard singing, or faint echoes of it. They finally made it to the sun. Michaelah saved one spot on her palm for the yellow she wanted for the sun. As she drew it in they could both feel the heat it was generated, much like a real sun.
Yellows, oranges, and reds came forth and swirled into Michaelah’s sun, giving it depth and tone, popping it free from the canvas to rotate like the actual sun. Suddenly, everything else popped as well, including Michaelah and Koji. They were no longer standing in a white void, a blank canvas with color splatters everywhere. No, now they were sitting on a very real beach, with the ocean in front of them. Michaelah could feel the sand between her fingers. She could smell the ocean on the wind. Where ever they were now, it felt like they were back in Pandamonium.