While you keep thinking of ideas to try out on the pencil, you’re too overwhelmed to settle on what to do first, until a thought strikes you. When you were a kid, you were obsessed with your favorite cartoon character, Vivi Vulpes. You practiced drawing her all the time and could easily call up her image from memory. You know that the pencil could alter your body or other objects, but could it go even further? Could it draw something that couldn’t normally exist?
There’s only one way to find out, you suppose. You pick the pencil up and focus on an empty portion of the room. You quickly get an image in your head of the anthropomorphic fox woman that you want to draw, and to your encouragement, the depth sinks out of the space in front of your eyes. You’re still not quite sure how this will work, but you start drawing anyway.
Surprisingly quickly, you reproduce the image in your head with far more deftness than you’d ever managed before. In moments, In the empty space in your living room, a perfect sketch of the cartoon fox hovers in the air. Satisfied, you lower the pencil and wait to see what happens. As you do, your vision shifts and flows as depth returns to it. Except, the area where you sketched doesn’t go through the same process.
Instead, the sketch is filled with color as browns, oranges and reds fill the appropriate areas. The lines that you drew thicken and combine into solid outlines just as you remember Vivi looking on TV as a child. But the drawing continues to look flat to you.
However, this doesn’t stop it from moving. As the changes finish, the fox blinks and looks around in confusion. As she turns and moves, details that you didn’t draw appear naturally where they should be. In fact, as she takes a few unsure steps and steadies herself on the arm of a chair, she seems to move and interact normally with the world. But no matter how you turned your head as you watched, you still got the impression that you were looking at a flat image, not someone occupying 3D space. It was a bit disorienting.
“Where am I? How did I get here?” she finally asks you, looking around in bewilderment.
You find yourself at a loss for how to explain this all. You hadn’t really thought this far ahead.
“Oh, uh. It’s kinda strange. You’re in my house. Um, because I drew you here,” you answer.
She looks you up and down with a raised eyebrow.
“Look, you’re cute enough and all, but don’t flatter yourself too much. I think I would have remembered that,” she says dismissively as she turns back to the chair she’s leaning on, examining it with a puzzled expression. “Also, your house looks… wrong. Seriously, what’s going on?”
“No. What? Wait… oh. No. Not like that,” you splutter. “I literally drew you. I bought this pencil today, and apparently, it’s magic. It can actually draw things. Like not pictures of things, but the thing itself.”
She crosses her arms and frowns at you in disbelief. You can’t really blame her.
“Okay, fair. I wouldn’t believe me either, but watch.”
You flounder for an idea of what to draw for a moment, settling on the chair that Vivi leans against. You quickly sketch up an exact copy of it to her other side. Her eyes widen as she watches you work. Once the sketch becomes reality, she walks around the chair, prodding it and glancing back at its twin for comparison.
“Okay, wow. That’s impressive,” she says approvingly.
“And that’s not all it can do!” you say, caught up in your excitement.
You wanted to try this anyway, and now was a perfect time. You focus your sight back to “drawing” mode. You then turn the pencil around and rub the eraser all over the chair. Just as you suspected, the chair disappeared beneath, revealing the floor and wall that the chair obscured.
After watching all this, Vivi frowns.
“So, you’re saying that you did that with me? Who am I? Is my name Vivi? Where did my memories come from?”
This is portending to be a lot less fun and a lot heavier than you originally imagined.
“Yes. But, well, no. Not all of that. You’re a cartoon that I liked. Your memories are yours, I’d assume. I guess the pencil somehow transported you from your world to ours? I don’t know how any of this works. I’ve only had this thing for a couple hours!”
“Transported with a few additions, I’d say,” Vivi says, clutching her chest. “I guess you must have really liked me.”
You realize that you’d drawn her a bit more voluptuously than she’d appeared in her original cartoons, likely pulling a bit from some of your more pubescent illustrations of her. She wasn’t obscene looking or anything, but she had slightly more feminine curves than would be expected of a children’s cartoon.
“Oh, whoops,” you say, looking down with a blush. “I can, er, fix that for you if you’d like.”
She laughs at your reaction. “Ha! No, I kind of like it. Besides, I have a lot more to worry about than that right now. First things first: however it happened, I’m here. The big question is what we do now.”
You both consider for a moment before…