"Hey... er... 'Joey', what happened to the other bellhop? The..." John started lamely.
"The human?" Joey finished, waggling his eyebrows mischievously. "I'll let you in on a little secret, mate." He glanced around conspiratorially before plunging a hand into his pouch and pulling out the decapitated head of the other bellhop!
Carrie let out a startled 'squeak' and John jerked away from the severed head before he noticed the way it hung limp from the kangaroos grip, the eye and mouth holes hollow and gaping. "It's a mask!" gasped John, pointing.
"That's right, fella." Joey laughed, slipping the mask onto his hand and flapping the mouth in time with his words like a particularly macabre ventriloquists dummy, "You may have noticed that the area around the portal to your world is a little mundane. That's because we like to ease tourists into the whole concept of our universe. It can sometimes be a little hard to grasp. Like culture shock times one hundred! "
John and Carrie watched dumbfounded as the head began to fill out, becoming more and more life-like as the roo droned on until finally it took a moment for them to realize that the voice was coming from the head itself, and that Joey was merely smiling knowingly.
"That's amazing..." said Carrie, reaching out to gently brush the cheek of the human head sitting where a kangaroos hand should have been. She gave another little squeak and pulled her hand back, "It feels so real!"
"I should hope so! Or I'd be asking fer my money back!" The roo boomed with laughter, joined by the head, who added, winking at Carrie, "you got that right sweetheart, and if Joey here would bother slipping the rest of me on I could show you just how real I am!"
Carrie blushed and John stepped between Joey and his wife, "Now you look here!"
Joey, still chortling, waved his hands in a placating manner, the head complaining loudly as he was swung back and forth, "It's alright, mate! No harm done, just having a bit of a laugh."
He took a handful of the heads hair and, with a startled gasp from the head, gave it a sharp tug. The head seemed to sag inwards then flop off the roos hand, a mask once more. Joey stuffed the mask back into his pouch and waggled his fingers, showing his toony paw to be completely restored. "Usually I'm not allowed out of my human disguise during work hours but it just gets incredibly stuff. I dunno how you can manage."
"So you're saying everyone who works at this hotel is an animal?" asked Carrie.
"Sure! The clerk at the front desk is really a great big rat, the head maids a lioness, the cook used to be human, but now he's a croc disguised as a human! Animals are the most common type of toon, you know."
"That's incredible." John breathed, reeling from the revelation that the middle-aged clerk that checked them in was actually a giant cartoon rat. But Carrie seemed distracted by something the roo had mentioned in passing: "Did you say the cook used to be human? Like, a human from our world?"
"Ayup!" Joey chirped, picking up the luggage he had deposited by the door and hopping it into their room, "we get those sometimes, humans who have so much fun they decide they don't wanna leave. The more the merrier, I always say!" He chucks the bags onto the bed, they sink several feet into the mattress and then bounce back up. "He makes a better croc than a bloke anyhow!"
John looks at his new wife and catches a strange gleam in her eyes, "Joey... Could we... Me and John... Could you turn us into toons? Temporarily of course!" She quickly ads, catching Johns surprised expression.
"Well, not me specifically." Says Joey, rubbing his chin with a paw, "For something temporary-like you'll probably want one of the costume shops in Outer Toonworld!"
"Costume shops?" Carrie asks.
"Yeah, like the one who done mine," Joey smiled, patting his pouch where his human disguise, and presumably all other manner of thing, resided. "Though they do toon suites for the tourists and the like."
"'Outer' Toonworld?" John asks.
"Yeah, mate, like I said, this stuff," he gestures around the room, "is all still trying to make you feel at home. Comfortable-like. Out there- In the real Toonworld, that's where things really get weird!"