Playing Possum

It had been a simple matter for her to penetrate the so-called security that surrounded the building.

What they called security, anyhow.

Against her kind- who could and did hold such measures in contempt- any use of the ways and means they felt were the “best” turned out to be extremely pathetic. And the current generation, particularly the politicians, was too stupid and stubborn to think that any “special” measures were needed to handle this “special” kind of being, and thought that there was one way, and one way only, to deal with any predators at their door.

They still believed that measures of this nature could be solved solely by the presence of actual human beings. That only human beings could deal with other human beings, and that only human beings could stop the deeds of the kind she had committed, or was going to commit- or, at the very least, prevent them from happening again.

They denied the humanity- the very existence- of her kind, presuming that they were not worthy of being negotiated with.

Spoken about.

Tolerated.

That was where they made their mistake.

She was not a human being.

*

Yes, she had the outward appearance of a young, middle-school aged kid, with the unruly dark hair, pale skin, blue eyes, and outwardly small and soft appearance to suggest that. Even the clothing- the jeans, the fuzzy sweater and the heart-shaped locket many of those kids wore often and well.

But she was not a being created by God- or any other immortal deity, for that matter.

That would have made her not only physically immune to all human disease and pain (which she was), but also morally and emotionally pure, thinking of herself as far above the madding crowd in this regard (which she wasn’t, by any means).

Rather, she had been birthed, what seemed like many moons ago, on the equipment of a motion picture studio in the city of Los Angeles, specifically in the fabled neighborhood of that city known as Hollywood. This motion picture studio specifically specialized in the often mocked and misunderstood art form of animation, once the art of what appeared to be pen-and-ink drawings move, but, increasingly, the less cumbersome but also less artistic practice of making computer generated facsimiles of pen-and-ink drawings go through the same practices to lesser effect. What none who viewed these films and was amused by them could understand and comprehend, however, that there was a large and complicated history behind all of this. Specifically, that the “drawings” of human and other similar beings were not drawings at all, but living creatures, who were recruited, used and exploited in much the same fashion as human actors. But worse, since they had no union of their own to protect them, and none of the human unions would have them.

Our heroine was one particular case of this exploitation at its worst.

After finishing her dramatic training in Anthropomorph, the land from which all of her kind originates, she had, like many of her fellow citizens, slipped across the border between Anthropomorph and Earth in order to gain steady employment. Employment was certainly gained, but not in the length of time or remuneration she had hoped for or desired. She had been used prominently- once- in a part in a long-forgotten television series, and, then, when her work was done, they gave her a small amount of money passing for pay, and sent her packing out the studio door. Unknown, unloved and forgotten, like so many others.

But she wanted more. And she had the skills- plus the all-important determination- to get it.

*

She had, she claimed, the skills and abilities of an opossum in a human body. It was said she was raised by a family of opossums in Anthropomorph before being “discovered” when the family she was living with had been “treed”- and subsequently destroyed- by a group of dogs. Grief-stricken, she vowed to use what she had learned to her advantage, and take vengeance on whomever wronged her, no matter how high up in the world they might be.

She could, as most possums do, fake death to ward off predators, if there were any. However, there were none to be found around the studio, this being a supposedly “civilized’ place. Not that other kinds of threats didn’t also exist. But she’d done her homework. Consequently, she expected and got opposition. And she dealt with them exactly as she would any other being- or, more specifically, any being who hunted and tormented the possums. An eye for and eye, a tooth for a tooth. If humans lived by the inner code of violence to suppress those they didn’t think “mattered” for anything besides food, so could she. And the results were evident on the clean flowing red liquid that decorated the bodies of those who had foolishly tried to stop her.

A gun rested safely in the pocket of her red dress, but she had mostly gotten her way by making vicious scratches with the nails she’d honed into sharp claws, and severe bites with equally finely-honed teeth, after leaping at the throats of much larger opponents. Their own attempts at trying to stop her came to nothing, for the bullets of their guns flew right through her body, and frequently into themselves, with chaotic and fatal effect.

Though her body appeared solid to the eye, it was transparent in just the right places to prevent the internal organs, particularly the heart, from injury. It was a method of self-defence honed by her race in the days before the invention of the motion picture camera, and remained the key to their self-preservation to this very day.

By this method of execution, she made her way upwards through the chain of command of the company, finally arriving at the door of the organization’s CEO.

Here was her intended target. She knew the CEO controlled everything of importance within every Earth company, not just this one. Get rid of him, and everyone in the world, not just the company, would pay attention.

This particular CEO was calling for her to react because he held the careers- and lives- of the Anthropomorphians- in his hands. Through expansion of the company, particularly mergers and acquisitions, he had only enhanced his power over the foreign dimension in recent years. At his word, “cartoon characters” (as they were still contemptuously known on Earth) could gain work, and all that this entailed, within the Hollywood sphere. But he could also take away, for, also at his word, series could be cancelled, and, with that, only displacement, emotional devastation, and financial ruin resulted.

But the most humiliating part of this was the fact that he- and all at the company, and all in the country and world- refused to acknowledge that they were “real” beings at all. They were considered, under the arcane and dated human legal system, to be merely “fictional” characters, to be manipulated at will by those who held their “copyrights”, with absolutely no consultation or even acknowledgement of the fact that the lives and works of sentient beings were involved at all. It was a galling and enraging situation for all in the foreign dimension who found themselves stranded and cut off from the only worlds they knew once the series they were part of came to their ends (after what were often brief and humiliating turns in the spotlight). And there was no point going to the courts. As far as the Anthromopomorphians were concerned, they were “rigged” in favor of those who held the “copyrights” and against them. They would not be either the first, nor the last, in American history to feel this way.

Therefore, if they wanted the world at large to understand and recognize what they were going through, they had to think, and act, big. Young Possum, who had been denied far more than what she felt was her rightful share, felt even more of a desire to act big than any others (who, at least, had money to live on when their series came to an end, for the most part).

The deed had been motivated and contemplated already.

Now, it was to be done.

*

The door of the CEO’s office was closed, but that meant little to Possum. Through a show of strength one would not think on first glance she possessed, the door was reduced to kindling, and the enraged girl confronted the man at the desk in the center of the room. The unexpected and unprecedented incident provoked outrage in him, but, even more so, it provoked fear. He needed only to look in her big, dark and blazing eyes to understand the position he was in, and know that, for once, there was absolutely nothing her could do about it.

It was hard, for her, not to notice the disparity in their situations. She, the animated cartoon working stiff, having nothing to show for her work, driven away from the only situation in life she had known with no means of being able to prepare for any kind of future at all. He, sitting in a room laden with gold embossed everything, expensive wood desks and carpeting, displays of capitalistic wealth flowing out of his clothing and other body accessories. It was an asymmetrical display of the great disparity of wealth in the American film industry personified, the 1 percent against the 99.

And it was equally hard, for him, in spite of his fear, not to feel some sort of contempt for her ragged appearance, and make it known in his voice and manner.

“What do you want?” he demanded.

“You. Dead!” was the response.

“And how do you propose to do that?” he asked, with mockery. For he had not seen what she was capable of doing. Yet.

“Like this!” she snapped.

Before he could respond, she had grabbed his face and slashed it with a claw. He attempted an answer of outrage, but she curtly told him to shut up. When he persisted in trying to speak, she told him to go fuck himself, and he yielded.

After which, to his astonishment, she lifted his desk above her head and dropped it and its contents, upside down, upon him, raining down pain of the likes he had never known, and thought he would never in his lifetime experience.

“You want to know why I did that, you bastard?” she shouted. “It’s because I know what it’s like being used and forgotten and powerless. Not like you. A guy like you never has to think about that for a damn moment. Especially not with me and my people. All you can think of us as is as the products of some goddamned fairy tale that your overworked and underpaid animation staff seemed to “come up with” out of nowhere. Well, that ain’t how it really is.

"Sure, those folks earned their bread, and the ones calling themselves the “creators” deserve some sort of credit for organizing everything and everybody so smoothly like they did. But, fella, we live and we breathe same as you. We worked hard for what we did and what we thought we were worth. But you decided to cut us out of the most important part of the profits, and when we said we wanted what we had earned, you just LAUGHED! 'Why should we have to pay those goddamn fuckers anything? The fucking law says we don’t have to'.”

"So we got shut out of our lives, and you profited off of them! You think you can use the people who built your damn company and forget we were ever here? No, goddamn it!

“If you knew how to treat us fairly, and not write us off as goddamned “fictional characters” so you wouldn’t have to pay us, and not let us belong to the unions, and have decent housing, and all that kind of crap, none of this would have happened! If you’d only treated us the same as everybody in your life you care about and value- and not just the ones you value for how much MONEY they can make you- then this whole thing of us rebelling against you, and hurting your people and all, we could have avoided all of this. But you made your bed, so it’s too late now.

“I know: you didn’t start this thing, and neither did I. So why should I do this to you?

"Simple. I get rid of you, people notice. And they understand what we’re capable of, and we’ll come to some sort of understanding with you. Granted, it may take a while, but we can wait. Anything you try to do to us don’t hurt or kill us at all. Only we can decide when we’re gonna kill another one of us, or, forbid that, take one of our own lives. So we aren’t going anywhere. And we are not going to be treated like we never "existed" anymore. Understand?”

He managed to mumble something about her being bitter and ungrateful.

“Bitter?” she said. “I am bitter, yes. But not ungrateful. I’m glad I had the chance I got, as much as it was, to make even a small difference in someone else’s life. But I had the potential to be a star, and that got taken away from me. You know how much I could have been successful if I was one of you “real” humans? Plenty, I can assure you. And not just being a dumb actor, either. I had my heart set on being one of those self-help guru types, using what I know to help other people deal with the crap in their lives constructively. There was a chance for me to get a lot of attention and make a lot of money in showing people how the ways of the possum could benefit them.

"But look at me here. I’m not talking to somebody who’d benefit in any way, shape or form from what I could offer the good, honest folk of your world. No way. All I’m talking to is a son-of-a-bitch asshole who puts money ahead of PEOPLE! YOU and your kind put me in this place, dig? But you aren’t gonna keep me in it like you do with the rest of your so-called “copyrights”. No, sir.

“But this isn’t just about me. This is about all of us beleaguered Anthropomorphians who got shafted because you didn’t they were making enough bucks for the mother corp. All of us huddled masses yearning to be free but can never be free because we’re apparently not good enough to be considered your fucking fellow CITIZENS! All of us Disney and Warner and Viacom ‘toons have had ENOUGH of you spitting us out when you don’t need us no more. You know how much crap we go through trying to keep people “entertained”, on and off “screen”. Too much! And not nearly enough pay and RESPECT to go with it!

“I know you think you’re irreplaceable. That everyone, especially the damned SHAREHOLDERS, worships the ground you walk on, and they’ll keeping doing it as long as you keep the company high up on the NYSE. But let me tell you something: you’re NOT. They’ll just find someone else to put in your chair. But me, and all the other ones of us, each and every one, we’re one of a kind. Nobody will ever replace the one-of-a-kind ‘toon folk!”

Finishing her speech with that dramatic statement, Possum undressed the man by cutting open his clothes with her claws. Once his throat was exposed, she cut the jugular vein with a fine and clean stroke, and he died, as the blood sprayed her in the face.

When the body had spent his source of life, she picked his body up as easily as she had brandished his desk. She threw his naked body out the nearest plate glass window.

Then, she proceeded to ransack his wallet and the room, taking all of value she could carry neatly. Which amounted to quite a bit.

“This won’t even begin to repay all the stuff we lost, and that we never had,” she observed. “But at least it’s a start.”

And then, as she heard, and irrationally feared, the sound of footsteps coming from the other side of the door, she dived out the hole she had created in the building.

To what she hoped would be her long contemplated and much desired freedom.