Part One
It was an ordinary day in Elmore (“ordinary” being the
irrelative term). For a world full of inanimate characters that were animate in
nature, there was really nothing “ordinary” about it.
Take Elmore’s resident hobo, for instance.
No one knew his real name, because he chose not to give
it. All anyone really knew him as was just “hobo” or “hobo dude.” Always seen
in a torn and dirty trench coat with his shaggy, overgrown brown hair (all over
his body), he kept to himself most of the time…until he needed some spare
change for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It was his lot in life – to beg for
money, in order to put food on the cardboard table.
And then, on that fateful day, luck shined down on him.
In an alleyway, he happened on a boxful of sunglasses in
pristine condition.
“How ‘bout that? Hey, I can sell these and make tons of money off ‘em,” he told no one
in particular (he tended to talk to himself quite a bit).
Sampling his future investment, he tried on one of the
sunglasses.
That’s when he received the shock of his life: the world
he knew as Elmore became different…a hidden reality within itself.
Stunned, the hobo took them off. Everything went back to
normal.
He looked to one billboard advertisement for Joyful
Burger – Elmore’s hottest fast food restaurant/chain. Putting the weird
sunglasses back on, the billboard read only one word against a white
background: consume.
“What dah heck’s goin’ on?!”
A man in a suit brushed past him, looking the hobo’s way
to apologize.
The hobo shrieked. Through the sunglasses, the man’s face
was missing; only eyes, teeth, and muscle tissue remained, resembling a zombie.
“Sir? Are you alright?” the man asked, but the hobo was
too terrified to answer.
He ran from the businessman until he found himself
swarmed by several others who appeared the same way, both men and women. Each of them caught on to
what he saw of them with those odd sunglasses, drawing suspicion to himself. As
such, they alerted others, speaking into some kind of wristwatch communicator.
Before the hobo knew it, he was
surrounded by a multitude of the horrifying alien humanoids, dragged away into
the shadows.
-----------------
The afternoon was quiet in the neighborhood where the Watterson household resided; at least until a heavy humming, grinding noise reverberated through the air. It was accompanied by the strange manifestation of a tall, black rectangular solid on the Wattersons’ front yard.
Gumball and Darwin stepped out to the welcoming sight of
their house in front of them. “Darwin, we made it,” Gumball told his brother.
“Elmore 2011!”
Darwin raised an eyebrow in question. “I thought it was
2017 when we left.”
“Meh,” Gumball shrugged. “We change up continuity so
much, I can’t even tell the difference anymore.”
Their Time Lord hostess, Cara, was the last one to step
out of her T.A.R.D.I.S.
She was delighted to see that they arrived at their
intended destination. After a short trip through Japan in the mid-21st century
of an alternate reality, where she was fitted with a cybernetic hand to replace
the one she lost in 1982 Antarctica, she finally brought Gumball and Darwin
home.
“How long have we been gone?” Gumball asked her.
“Just seven hours,” Cara said. “You boys didn’t even have
to go to school.”
Gumball and Darwin cheered at this. “Seven hours isn’t so
bad,” Darwin said.
“Yeah, I figured we were gone way longer than that,” Gumball confessed. “I mean, it felt like months since we’ve been away from here.”
“Yep, I’m just that good,” Cara pretentiously praised
herself.
“You wanna come inside, Miss Cara?” Darwin invited. “We’d
love for you to meet our sister, Anais, and our parents, Mrs. Mom and Mr. Dad.”
Cara hadn’t anticipated such an invitation.
It touched both her hearts to know the Watterson boys
cared so much about her that they would even consider introducing a crazy woman
like her to their family. She could hardly find the words to express her
gratitude. “I…I…I’m flattered,” she managed to say. “B-But I can’t.” It hurt
her to see the disappointment in their faces. “I don’t want to integrate myself
in your lives more than I already have. You boys have been a blessing to hang
with. I’m gonna miss you two.”
“So will we,” Gumball tearfully said.
The three friends shared a long, warm group hug.
Cara departed in her T.A.R.D.I.S. afterward, leaving
Gumball and Darwin to return to their lives, which seemed so average after all
of the adventures they had been through with Cara.
Funny how it all started with Tina Rex chasing Gumball
and Darwin earlier that morning, right into Cara’s T.A.R.D.I.S. From that point
was where things snowballed out of control, meeting superheroes and killer
robots, including shapeshifting aliens, and fighting in a war.
All those thoughts went through Cara’s mind while in the
infinite D.C.
And it was those thoughts that made her turn the ship
around, returning to the Wattersons’ front yard.
She couldn’t just let Gumball and Darwin go like that,
not after everything.
Rushing right up to the front door, she happily knocked.
A woman who looked like an adult female version of
Gumball (who could only be his and Darwin’s mother, Nicole Watterson) answered,
her face twisted with fury. Before Cara could wonder why, Nicole delivered a
roundhouse kick to Cara’s chest with so much power behind it that Cara flew
clear across the front yard.
Dazed and in a great amount of pain, her body sprawled
out on the grass, gazing up at the cloudy blue sky. Gumball and Darwin soon
appeared at opposite sides of her field of vision, looking down at her
apprehensively.
“Yeeeeeah,” Gumball dragged out a
syllable. “Turns out we weren’t gone for seven hours. We were gone for seven months.”
-------------------
Nicole’s anger towards Cara was justified. Her boys turned up on her doorstep, having been declared missing for seven straight months, along with a strange woman who was the reason for their disappearance.
Cara, Gumball, and Darwin offered a lengthy explanation.
Of course, the more forward-thinking members of the
Watterson family – Nicole and Anais – didn’t buy into time-traveling, parallel
dimensions, killer robots, or even assimilating aliens.
Cara knew of only one way to convince them and that was
by bringing them into her T.A.R.D.I.S. To witness the dimensionally
disproportionate interior baffled Nicole and betrayed every law of physics
Anais studied and believed in; but it was enough evidence to back Gumball and
Darwin’s story.
“I am so sorry,
ma’am,” Nicole told Cara. “You kept my little boys safe and protected them with
your own life. Is there any way I can repay you?”
Cara nursed her bruised, throbbing ribs. “You can let me
lie down for a bit,” she grunted, settling down on the living room couch.
Gumball and Darwin sat beside her. “You came back,” the
latter celebrated.
“We thought you left for good,” Gumball said.
“I couldn’t just leave you lil’ rascals after all we been
through.” Cara smiled through her pain. “And I’d like to get to know your
dimension a bit more. Before you two came into my life – and my T.A.R.D.I.S. – I’d
been here for just a few minutes to recalibrate the space-time circuits. Now I
have a chance to really see your
amazing world.”
“Well, there’s no better place to start than the magic of
television!”
Gumball followed this transition with the press of a
button from the TV remote.
The Wattersons’ living room analog TV set buzzed to life,
displaying a newscast detailing a bank robbery in Downtown Elmore. Doughnut
Sheriff and the rest of the edible
Elmore police force had the building surrounded. Live surveillance footage
showed the robbers to be a tall, lanky old man with grey-blue hair in a white
lab coat and a young teenage boy with short brown hair in a yellow shirt and
blue jeans. Both of them donned sunglasses.
“Oh, no,” Cara gasped at the footage.
“You know those guys, Miss Cara?” Darwin inquired.
“I sure do, sweetie,” she confirmed. “Morty Smith and my
ex-boyfriend, Rick Sanchez. What are they doing here?!”
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