The last thing Marcus Chen remembered before everything went spectacularly, catastrophically, and irreversibly wrong was the disappointing taste of gas station sushi.
It wasn't even good gas station sushi—if such a thing could be said to exist in the philosophical sense. No, this was the kind of gas station sushi that sat under flickering fluorescent lights in a cooler that made concerning grinding noises, the kind that had a "50% off" sticker slapped over another "50% off" sticker, the kind that practically radiated salmonella and regret in equal measure. The rice had achieved that special texture somewhere between rubber cement and paste, and the fish—if it could legally be called fish—had possessed a grayish tinge that should have sent every survival instinct Marcus possessed screaming into the night.
But Marcus had been hungry, broke, and exactly three hours into a Reddit argument about whether or not a grilled cheese with tomato in it was still a grilled cheese or had transcended into melt territory (he was firmly on the side of melt, thank you very much), and his judgment had been impaired by hunger, stubbornness, and the desperate need to prove user "GrilledCheeseGod69" wrong about sandwich taxonomy.
He never got to post his devastating rebuttal.
The sushi—or whatever unholy combination of ingredients it actually contained—had hit his digestive system like a biological weapon. The room had started spinning in a way that rooms generally shouldn't spin unless one is either very drunk or currently aboard a spacecraft experiencing catastrophic system failure. His vision had blurred, his stomach had staged a full-scale rebellion, and then—with all the ceremony and dignity of a wet fart in an elevator—Marcus Chen, age twenty-seven, assistant manager at a struggling GameStop, owner of three cats, and someone who had exactly four dollars and thirty-two cents in his checking account, died.
He died on his bathroom floor, clutching his phone, with his pants around his ankles and his last conscious thought being a deeply embarrassing concern about who would find him like this and whether they'd delete his browser history before his mother found out about his extensive collection of ironic fanfiction.
Death, as it turned out, was not the peaceful void of nothingness that atheists promised, nor was it the pearly gates and divine judgment that the religious folks advertised, nor was it even the quirky waiting room that certain fantasy novels suggested. No, death for Marcus Chen was a sensation of falling through an endless expanse of colors that shouldn't exist, sounds that hurt to hear, and the overwhelming smell of burnt cotton candy mixed with ozone and existential dread.
He was tumbling through what could only be described as the universe's most aggressive screensaver, all geometric patterns and impossible angles, Escher-like architecture made of solidified nonsense and crystallized confusion. Voices whispered in languages that predated language itself, saying things that were simultaneously completely incomprehensible and deeply, personally insulting.
And then, just as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped.
Marcus—or the thing that had been Marcus, or the thing that would never be Marcus again, or perhaps the thing that was more Marcus than Marcus had ever been—opened eyes that he didn't remember closing.
Except they weren't his eyes.
They were wrong.
They were too large, too round, too white, with pupils that were pinpricks of absolute darkness that seemed to contain the void of space itself. They were eyes that belonged in an old cartoon, the kind of exaggerated, expressive orbs that allowed for maximum comedic potential and emotional range. But there was something fundamentally off about them, something that whispered that these weren't the friendly, harmless eyes of Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny, but rather something that had crawled out from the dark spaces between frames, the errors in animation, the corrupted files that should have been deleted but somehow achieved sentience instead.
Marcus tried to scream, but what emerged from his throat—did he have a throat? Was it a throat or something pretending to be a throat?—was not a human sound. It was a noise that started as a cartoon whistle, warbled into what might have been a train horn filtered through a broken speaker, and ended as something that sounded disturbingly like laughter played backwards at half speed.
He looked down at himself.
That was his second mistake. (The first had been the gas station sushi, a mistake that would go on to define his entire existence across multiple planes of reality.)
His body—and he used that term in the loosest, most generous sense possible—was not human. It was not even humanoid in the way that most alien species in fiction maintained some basic bilateral symmetry and familiar anatomical features. No, what Marcus had become was something that existed in direct violation of several laws of physics, biology, and good taste.
He was tall. Impossibly, cartoonishly tall. If he had to guess—and guessing was difficult when your sense of spatial reasoning had apparently been replaced with something that operated on dream logic and fever hallucinations—he was somewhere between eight and twelve feet tall, though his height seemed to fluctuate depending on factors he couldn't quite identify. Perspective? Mood? The cosmic joke that his existence had become? All of the above?
His body was black. Not brown, not dark-skinned, but black. The kind of black that was less a color and more the absence of color, a darkness so complete that it seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. His form was vaguely feline—there was definitely a cat-like quality to his structure—but it was a cat designed by someone who had only ever had cats described to them by a person who had once seen a cat in a dream they couldn't quite remember.
His limbs were long, too long, grotesquely elongated like taffy that had been stretched by a child with no sense of proportion and no adult supervision. His legs bent in ways that suggested multiple joints, possibly in places where joints had no business existing. His arms—and he had arms, thank God or whatever cosmic entity was responsible for this mess, he had arms—were similarly distorted, capable of reaching distances that should require him to actually walk closer to objects.
And his hands.
Oh God, his hands.
They were gloved. White gloves. Cartoon gloves. The kind of simple, four-fingered gloves that every cartoon character from the 1930s onward had worn, the kind that had no business existing on something that was clearly meant to inspire primal terror. The contrast between the pristine white of the gloves and the light-devouring black of his body created a visual disconnect that was deeply, profoundly unsettling.
His feet—or paws, or whatever the hell they were—were similarly oversized, rounded, with a slight squash-and-stretch quality to them that suggested they operated on animation principles rather than biological ones.
But it was his face that truly completed the nightmare.
Marcus reached up with one impossibly long arm, those cartoon gloves moving with his intent, and touched what should have been his face. What he felt was fur—or something approximating fur, something that had the texture of fur but felt like it might be made of solidified shadow or congealed darkness—covering a skull structure that was definitely feline but proportioned in a way that was aggressively wrong.
His muzzle—he had a muzzle now, that was his life, he had a muzzle—was broad and pronounced, filled with teeth that he could feel with his tongue (which was disturbingly long and seemed to have more mobility than any tongue should possess). The teeth were white, perfectly white, arranged in a smile that was frozen in place whether he wanted to smile or not. It was a wide, stretching grin that exposed far too many teeth, all of them shaped like they'd been drawn by an animator who wanted to imply menace while maintaining that classic cartoon aesthetic.
It was the smile of something pretending to be friendly. The smile of a predator that had learned to mimic prey behavior. The smile of every creepypasta, every piece of cursed internet horror, every "childhood character but make it scary" piece of artwork that had proliferated across the internet in the late 2010s.
And then, with the kind of horrifying clarity that only comes when you're experiencing a complete psychological break, Marcus recognized what he had become.
"No," he said, his voice emerging as a sound that was part cartoon character, part broken record, part something that should not have vocal cords. "No, no, no, absolutely not, this is not happening, this is the sushi, this is just food poisoning, I'm hallucinating on my bathroom floor and any second now I'm going to wake up and—"
But he knew he was lying to himself.
He had become Cartoon Cat.
Not a cartoon cat. Not some generic feline character from a children's show. He had become the Cartoon Cat, that specific creation from the mind of a certain internet horror artist whose name Marcus's brain was frantically trying not to recall because remembering would make this somehow more real. That entity that had briefly captured the internet's attention as part of the analog horror trend, that creature that existed in abandoned malls and forgotten places, that thing that was simultaneously a cartoon character and an incomprehensible monster, that being whose entire existence was predicated on the uncomfortable marriage of childhood nostalgia and existential terror.
"This is..." Marcus began, his frozen grin making the words sound bizarre and distorted. "This is copyright infringement. This is definitely copyright infringement. Can you get sued for becoming a character without permission? Is there a cosmic DMCA? Do I need to file paperwork for this?"
He was babbling. He knew he was babbling. But babbling was better than confronting the reality of his situation, which was that he had died from gas station sushi and had apparently been reincarnated as an internet horror icon in what was—he looked around properly for the first time—definitely not his bathroom.
The space he occupied was impossible to fully comprehend. It was an alley, or it had been an alley, or it was pretending to be an alley. The walls were brick, but the bricks were drawn in a style that suggested a cartoon background from the 1940s, all simplified shapes and strategic shading. The sky above—visible through the gap between buildings—was a blue that was too blue, a color that had never existed in nature, the kind of saturated, oversaturated blue that only existed in animation cels and heavily filtered photographs.
There was a dumpster nearby, green and metallic, but it had that slight outline to it, that thin black border that cartoon objects possessed to separate them from their backgrounds. A fire escape zigzagged up the side of one building, casting shadows that didn't quite match the light source, shadows that moved slightly when he wasn't looking directly at them.
Everything had a quality of being both completely real and utterly artificial, like he was standing inside an animation that had achieved three dimensions through sheer force of will and a concerning disregard for the laws of physics.
"Okay," Marcus said, his permanent smile making the word sound almost mocking. "Okay, let's... let's think about this logically. I died. That happened. The sushi killed me. RIP Marcus Chen, killed by California roll from a Gas-N-Go off Highway 42. That's going on my tombstone. That's my legacy."
He began to pace, his too-long legs carrying him back and forth across the alley with a gait that was disturbingly smooth, almost gliding, like he was animated on twos rather than actually walking. His movements had a quality to them that was profoundly unnatural—they were too fluid, too smooth, lacking the micro-adjustments and slight imperfections that characterized real movement.
"Then I... what? Fell through space? Time? A Photoshop filter? And I woke up here. Wherever here is. As Cartoon Cat. As a character that shouldn't exist outside of creepy drawings and YouTube videos with text-to-speech narration. This is fine. This is totally fine. I'm fine."
He was not fine.
He was the opposite of fine.
He was experiencing a level of psychological distress that shouldn't be possible without prescription medication and a trained therapist on speed dial.
"Think, Marcus, think," he muttered, his voice doing that disturbing thing where it occasionally skipped like a damaged record. "What would a protagonist do in this situation? Assess your abilities. Figure out where you are. Make a plan. Survive. That's what you do in isekai stories, right? You wake up in a new world, you check your stats, you—"
He stopped mid-pace.
Stats.
Game mechanics.
This was... this was like those web novels he'd read during slow shifts at GameStop, wasn't it? Those stories where someone dies and wakes up in a new world with video game mechanics and special powers and—
"Status," Marcus said experimentally.
Nothing happened.
"Menu?"
Still nothing.
"Inventory? Character sheet? Skills? Help?"
The universe remained disappointingly non-responsive.
"Well, shit," he muttered. "Guess this isn't that kind of reincarnation. No helpful system messages, no floating blue screens, no convenient tutorial. Just me and this..." He gestured at his elongated body with one disturbingly long arm. "This whole situation."
But wait.
If he was Cartoon Cat—and the evidence was becoming increasingly difficult to deny, what with the whole being a giant cat-shaped monster situation—then he should have... abilities. Powers. Cartoon Cat wasn't just a regular character; it was an entity that existed outside normal rules, something that operated on horror logic and nightmare physics.
And more than that...
Marcus's permanent grin somehow seemed to widen slightly, which should have been impossible but clearly wasn't.
If he was a cartoon character, then he should have access to the most broken, overpowered, absolutely ridiculous ability in all of fiction.
Toon Force.
The ability to bend, break, and completely ignore the laws of physics, reality, and good sense in favor of whatever was funniest, most convenient, or most dramatically appropriate. The power that let Bugs Bunny outsmart gods, that let Tom and Jerry survive things that should have converted them into their component atoms, that let cartoon characters pull objects out of nowhere, survive impossible falls, and reshape reality based on comedic timing.
And Cartoon Cat—the horror version, the creepy version, the version that was specifically designed to be an old cartoon character but wrong—should have that in spades.
"Okay," Marcus said, his voice taking on a manic edge. "Okay, let's test this. Let's see what I can do."
He looked at his hand—his gloved, four-fingered, cartoon hand—and concentrated. In cartoons, characters could pull things out of nowhere. Hammerspace, fans called it. The ability to reach behind your back or into your pocket and withdraw objects that had no business fitting there, objects that appeared purely because the scene required them.
Marcus reached behind his back, into a space that definitely didn't exist, and pulled.
His hand came back holding a comically oversized mallet.
It was perfect. The handle was wooden with a slight grain texture, the head was massive and metallic, and there was a little star-shaped shine effect on it that glinted despite the inconsistent lighting of the alley. It was exactly the kind of mallet that Harley Quinn might use, or that would appear in a Looney Tunes short right before someone got bonked.
"Holy shit," Marcus breathed, staring at the mallet. "Holy actual shit, it worked."
He let go of the mallet, expecting it to fall, but instead it simply... stopped existing. The moment he released it, it popped out of reality with a cartoon sound effect—an actual audible sound effect, a little "poof" that he could hear despite having no visible source.
"This is insane," he said, reaching behind his back again. This time he pulled out an umbrella. Then a sign that read "HELP" in bold letters. Then a rubber chicken. Then a ladder that extended far longer than the space behind his back should have allowed. Then a full-sized anvil that should have weighed hundreds of pounds but felt light as a feather in his grip.
Each object was perfectly rendered in that cartoon style—real enough to interact with the world, but with that slight visual quality that marked them as not-quite-real, props in a animated production rather than genuine physical items.
"I have hammerspace," Marcus said, his permanent grin now feeling slightly less horrifying and slightly more appropriate. "I have actual, functioning hammerspace. I can pull anything out of nowhere. This is... this is the most useful ability anyone could possibly have. Do you know how many problems you can solve with the ability to just have the exact object you need at any given moment?"
But that wasn't all, was it?
Cartoon characters could do more than just pull objects from nowhere.
Marcus looked at the wall of the alley, a solid brick structure that should have been completely impassable. Then he began to walk toward it. Not run, not jump—just walk, as if the wall wasn't there, as if solid matter was merely a suggestion rather than a rule.
His body phased through the brick.
It wasn't intangibility like a ghost might have. It was more like the wall simply ceased to exist for him in that moment, like reality had briefly forgotten that walls were supposed to stop people. He could feel the bricks passing through him, or him passing through the bricks—the sensation was deeply weird, like walking through a curtain made of static electricity and vague suggestions.
He emerged on the other side into another alley—or possibly the same alley from a different angle, the geography here was confusing—and turned to look back at the wall he'd just violated several laws of physics to bypass.
"Okay, okay, this is good," Marcus said, his mind racing. "I can ignore walls. I probably can't be trapped. What else? What else can cartoon characters do?"
Falls.
Cartoon characters could survive falls that should turn them into paste.
Marcus looked up at the building beside him. It was tall—maybe ten stories, maybe more, the height seemed to shift when he wasn't looking directly at the top. A fire escape provided easy access to the roof.
Before his human mind could talk him out of it, before common sense and self-preservation instincts could kick in, Marcus scrambled up the fire escape with speed and agility that his too-long limbs somehow made natural. His movements were exaggerated, almost blurred, covering distances in single bounds that should have required several steps. The fire escape groaned and creaked but held, despite the fact that his weight distribution made no sense.
He reached the roof in seconds—and that was another thing, wasn't it? Cartoon characters could move fast when the scene required it, could cross distances in impossibly short times, could go from standing still to a blur of motion without any acceleration period.
Marcus stood at the edge of the roof, looking down at the alley below. It was far. It was very far. It was the kind of far that turned people into crime scene cleanup jobs and closed-casket funerals.
"This is stupid," he told himself, his voice steady despite the insanity of what he was about to do. "This is monumentally, incredibly stupid. If I'm wrong about this, I'm going to die again, and I don't know if I get a third chance."
But he wasn't wrong.
He couldn't be wrong.
He was a cartoon character. Cartoon characters didn't die from falls. They hit the ground, created a character-shaped crater, peeled themselves out, shook off the impact in a cloud of dust and stars, and walked away with maybe some comedic injury like an accordion-compressed body that would pop back to normal after a beat.
Marcus stepped off the roof.
The fall was almost peaceful. Wind rushed past him—or something approximating wind, it had that quality of being animated, of being drawn in motion lines and speed effects rather than actual air resistance. The ground approached rapidly, a surface of concrete and cartoon logic that was about to test whether his theory was correct.
He didn't flail. Didn't scream. Just fell with his arms slightly out, like a cartoon character who had just walked off a cliff and hadn't looked down yet.
The impact came.
And it was wrong.
Marcus hit the ground with a sound that was part crash, part comedic boink, part something that sounded like a xylophone being thrown down stairs. His body compressed on impact—actually, visibly compressed, his entire form squashing down into a flat, accordion-like shape that was maybe six inches tall.
There was no pain.
That was the important part.
There was no pain, no broken bones, no internal bleeding, no death.
Just a moment of being extremely flat, his oversized eyes bulging out comically from his compressed form, and then—
POP
He expanded back to his normal shape like a balloon being inflated, his body springing back to full height with a sound effect that came from nowhere and everywhere simultaneously.
Marcus stood there, completely unharmed, in the center of a small crater that his impact had created in the concrete.
"I'm indestructible," he whispered, and then louder, his voice taking on that manic, broken quality again, "I'm actually indestructible! I just fell ten stories and I'm fine!"
He laughed, and it was not a human sound. It was something between a cartoon character's exaggerated chuckle and the sound of reality glitching, a noise that made the air shimmer slightly around him.
This was real. This was actually real. He had died and been reborn as Cartoon Cat in what was presumably some kind of alternate universe, and he had honest-to-God toon force, the most overpowered ability in all of fiction.
He could pull objects from nowhere. He could walk through walls. He could survive falls that should kill him. And if the rules held consistent—and God, he hoped they held consistent—he could probably do so much more.
Cartoon characters could reshape their bodies. Could run on air for a few seconds before looking down. Could produce mallets and anvils and sticks of dynamite from hammerspace. Could survive being flattened, stretched, burned, frozen, electrocuted, and blown up, always returning to their normal shape after a comedic beat.
They were functionally immortal as long as the joke required them to survive.
And Marcus—no, not Marcus anymore, he was Cartoon Cat now, that was his existence, his reality—was apparently bound by those same rules.
"This is insane," he said to the empty alley, his permanent grin and cartoon voice making the words sound almost cheerful despite their content. "This is absolutely insane. I'm a cartoon character in a real world. I'm an overpowered cartoon monster with toon force in what is probably some kind of realistic universe. I'm..."
He trailed off as a thought struck him.
What universe was this, anyway?
He'd been so focused on the whole "died and became a monster" situation that he hadn't stopped to consider where he'd ended up. This clearly wasn't his original world—the physics were all wrong, reality had that slight cartoon quality to it, and he was currently a giant cat monster, which generally didn't happen in baseline reality.
So where was he?
Marcus—Cartoon Cat—whatever he was calling himself—looked around the alley with more attention, searching for clues. The architecture was urban, American, probably a major city based on the building heights and density. The style was modern, or modern-ish, not futuristic or obviously historical.
And then he saw it.
On the side of one of the buildings, partially obscured by shadow and grime, was a faded advertisement. The kind of old painted ad that covered entire walls in older cities, remnants of a time before digital billboards.
The ad was for Stark Industries.
Marcus's cartoon eyes widened to impossible proportions, his pupils shrinking to pinpricks.
"No," he said.
The ad showed a sleek piece of technology, some kind of advanced circuit board or power core, with the Stark Industries logo proudly displayed. The text was partially faded, but he could make out phrases like "cutting edge" and "tomorrow's technology."
"No, no, no," Cartoon Cat continued, his voice rising in pitch.
He spun around, searching for more evidence, and found it immediately. A discarded newspaper in the gutter, soggy and partially dissolved, but with a still-legible headline: "AVENGERS DISBAND: Team Splits After Controversial Sokovia Accords."
"Oh God," Marcus breathed. "Oh God, oh fuck, oh no."
He was in the Marvel Universe.
He had died from gas station sushi, been reborn as an internet horror icon cartoon character, and had landed in the fucking Marvel Universe.
The universe with gods. And aliens. And super soldiers. And genius billionaire philanthropists in power armor. And a giant purple man who collected magic rocks. And the actual, literal embodiment of death. And cosmic entities that could reshape reality. And—
"Okay, okay, calm down," Cartoon Cat told himself, his too-wide grin making it impossible to tell if he was actually calm or on the verge of a complete breakdown. "This is... this is fine. This is manageable. So what if you're in a universe where alien invasions happen every other Tuesday and gods walk around in human form? You have toon force. You're basically indestructible. You can pull objects from nowhere. You can ignore physics. You're actually pretty well-equipped for this universe."
He paced again, his elongated legs carrying him back and forth in that disturbing gliding walk.
"The question is... what do I do now? What's my goal here? In all those isekai stories, the protagonist has a goal. Defeat the demon king. Return home. Build a harem. Something."
Cartoon Cat stopped pacing.
What did he want?
In his previous life, Marcus had been nobody special. An assistant manager at GameStop, scraping by on minimum wage and spite, living alone with three cats in an apartment that smelled faintly of old carpet and broken dreams. His hobbies had consisted of arguing on the internet, reading web novels, and occasionally playing video games he got through his employee discount.
He hadn't been a hero. Hadn't been particularly kind or generous or noble. He'd been a regular person trying to survive in a world that seemed designed to grind regular people down into dust.
And now he was here. In a universe of heroes and villains, of grand conflicts between good and evil, of earth-shattering battles and cosmic stakes.
He could be a hero, couldn't he? He had powers now. Incredible, overpowered, reality-bending powers. He could join the Avengers, fight the bad guys, save the world, do all the things that comic book heroes did.
But...
Did he want to?
Being a hero sounded exhausting. It sounded like responsibility and sacrifice and constantly putting yourself in danger for people who might not even appreciate it. It sounded like trauma and PTSD and watching people die despite your best efforts.
Okay, so not a hero then.
What about a villain? He certainly looked the part—giant monster, permanent creepy grin, presence that radiated wrongness. He could lean into that. Use his powers for personal gain. Steal things. Fight heroes. Monologue about his tragic backstory.
But that sounded exhausting too, just in a different way. Constantly being hunted by heroes, always looking over your shoulder, ending up in super-prison or getting punched into orbit by someone with super strength.
Plus, Marcus had never been particularly ambitious or cruel. He'd been kind of a dick online sometimes, sure, but actual villainy? Hurting people for personal gain? That wasn't him.
So not a villain either.
Which left...
"I just want to have fun," Cartoon Cat said aloud, his cartoon voice making it sound almost innocent. "Is that allowed? Can I just... exist? Have fun? Do whatever I want without worrying about hero or villain categories?"
The more he thought about it, the more appealing it sounded.
He was a cartoon character. Cartoon characters didn't have grand ambitions or complex moral frameworks. They existed to entertain, to cause chaos, to follow their own internal logic regardless of what anyone else thought.
Bugs Bunny didn't fight crime or conquer the world. He just did whatever was funniest, whatever served the scene, whatever made the cartoon more entertaining. Sometimes that meant helping people. Sometimes that meant tormenting Elmer Fudd. Sometimes that meant dressing in drag and kissing villains. The point was the entertainment, the chaos, the fun.
And Cartoon Cat—the horror version, the creepy version—added an extra dimension to that. He could be funny, but with an edge of danger. Helpful, but in disturbing ways. Chaotic neutral with emphasis on the chaotic.
"Yeah," he said, his permanent grin now feeling less like a curse and more like a declaration of intent. "Yeah, I'm just going to be Cartoon Cat. Not a hero. Not a villain. Just... me. Doing whatever I want. Having fun in this universe. Trolling people. Helping out when it's entertaining. Causing chaos when it's funny. Just existing on my own terms."
It was selfish, maybe. Irresponsible, probably. But Marcus had spent his entire previous life being responsible, following rules, trying to fit into society's expectations, and where had it gotten him? Dead on a bathroom floor from gas station sushi.
This was his second chance. His do-over. His opportunity to live—if you could call this living—on his own terms.
He was in the Marvel Universe, a world of wonders and dangers, with toon force powers that made him effectively unkillable and reality-bendingly versatile.
And he was going to enjoy every ridiculous second of it.
"Alright," Cartoon Cat said, stretching his too-long arms above his head until they extended far beyond what his proportions should allow, then snapping back to normal length with a sound like a rubber band. "First things first. I need to figure out when in the timeline I am. That newspaper mentioned Sokovia Accords, which means this is post-Age of Ultron, probably around Civil War era. Good to know."
He reached behind his back and pulled out a smartphone from hammerspace—because apparently, he could just do that now, could pull out modern technology from nowhere, which raised all sorts of questions about how hammerspace interfaced with technology but he wasn't going to examine it too closely because that way lay madness.
The phone worked, because of course it did, because cartoon logic said he needed a phone so hammerspace provided a phone. It even had battery and somehow connected to local networks despite having no service plan because toon force didn't care about the practical limitations of technology.
A quick search confirmed his suspicions. The Sokovia Accords were recent news. The Avengers were fractured. Tony Stark and Steve Rogers were on the outs. The world was in that uncomfortable period between major crises.
"Perfect," Cartoon Cat muttered, scrolling through news articles with his oversized cartoon fingers that somehow had no trouble with the touchscreen. "Things are chaotic but not currently apocalyptic. No alien invasions in progress, no infinity stones being collected, no reality-warping events. Just standard superhero drama and the occasional enhanced individual causing problems."
He could work with this.
The question was: what to do first?
He was in New York—the articles and his surroundings made that clear. New York, the center of superhero activity in the Marvel Universe. Home to the Avengers Tower, the Sanctum Sanctorum, Nelson and Murdock's law office, and countless other locations he recognized from movies and comics.
Cartoon Cat could go anywhere, do anything. His powers made him mobile and nearly impossible to contain. He could walk through walls into secure facilities. Could survive attacks that would kill normal people. Could pull out whatever tool or weapon he needed from hammerspace.
He was, for all intents and purposes, one of the most powerful beings on the planet right now, and nobody knew he existed.
That was a heady feeling.
"First priority," he said, thinking out loud, "I need a place to stay. Somewhere I can retreat to, store things if I find anything worth storing, maybe set up a home base. Second, I should probably test my limits more thoroughly. Figure out exactly what I can and can't do with these powers. Third..."
He trailed off, his cartoon eyes glinting with something that might have been mischief or madness or both.
"Third, I should probably introduce myself to this universe. Make an impression. Let people know that Cartoon Cat exists. Not in a threatening way—I'm not trying to be a villain—but just... establish myself as a presence. A factor. Something that exists in this world."
The question was how to do that without immediately getting on S.H.I.E.L.D.'s radar as a threat. The last thing he needed was Nick Fury deciding he was a problem that needed to be contained.
Although, a small part of him thought, meeting Nick Fury could be fun. Imagine the look on that one eye when confronted with a giant cartoon cat monster that could walk through walls and survived falling from buildings. That would be worth the hassle alone.
But no, better to be subtle. Establish himself slowly. Let rumors build. Become an urban legend before becoming a known quantity.
Cartoon Cat grinned—not that he had a choice, his grin was permanent—and began walking out of the alley. His movements were smooth, gliding, that characteristic cartoon walk that covered ground without seeming to take proper steps.
He emerged onto a street—a real street with cars and people and the ambient noise of urban life—and immediately realized his second problem.
He was an eight-to-twelve-foot-tall black cat monster with a permanent grin and cartoon proportions.
People were going to notice him.
In fact, people were already noticing him.
A woman walking her dog had stopped mid-step, her face frozen in an expression of confusion and growing horror. The dog—a small terrier—was barking frantically, that high-pitched alarm bark that dogs reserved for things that fundamentally violated their understanding of reality.
A man in a business suit had dropped his coffee, the cup falling in slow motion—or maybe that was just Cartoon Cat's perception of time shifting, it was hard to tell—and shattering on the sidewalk in a splash of brown liquid and white ceramic.
A teenager with headphones had looked up from his phone and immediately stumbled backward, his mouth opening in a silent scream or shout.
"Uh," Cartoon Cat said, his cartoon voice not helping the situation, "hey there. Nice weather we're having."
The woman with the dog screamed.
That seemed to break the spell of frozen shock, and suddenly everyone in visual range was reacting. More screaming. People pulling out phones to take pictures or call 911. A car swerving as the driver caught sight of him, nearly hitting a parked vehicle.
"Okay, this is going worse than expected," Cartoon Cat muttered.
A police siren wailed in the distance, growing closer. Because of course someone had already called the cops. Of course his first thirty seconds on a public street had resulted in a police response.
Cartoon Cat made a decision.
He reached behind his back, pulled out a sign that read "SORRY FOR THE DISTURBANCE" in cheerful letters, held it up for the gathered crowd to see, then stepped backward into the nearest shadow.
And disappeared.
Not teleported. Not ran away. Just... ceased to exist in that location, his body merging with the shadow like it was a doorway to somewhere else, his form dissolving into darkness and cartoon physics.
Because that was another thing cartoon characters could do, wasn't it? Especially cartoon characters from horror media. They could hide in shadows, merge with darkness, exist in the spaces between light and dark.
Cartoon Cat emerged from a shadow in a different alley three blocks away, his body reforming from the darkness like he was being drawn into existence frame by frame.
"Okay, note to self," he said, slightly out of breath despite not being sure if he actually needed to breathe, "public appearances need more planning. Can't just walk down the street looking like this. Need to be more subtle. More mysterious. Build the legend before revealing the reality."
He could hear sirens converging on his previous location, police responding to reports of a giant monster. They'd find nothing, of course. Just confused witnesses and some scattered coffee.
Cartoon Cat felt slightly bad about scaring people. That hadn't been his intent. He didn't want to terrorize civilians or cause panic.
But he also couldn't help feeling a little thrill of excitement.
This was real. This was actually happening. He was a cartoon monster in the Marvel Universe with reality-bending powers and the freedom to do whatever he wanted.
The adventure was just beginning.
And Cartoon Cat, formerly Marcus Chen, dead from gas station sushi and reborn as an internet horror icon, couldn't wait to see what happened next.
He looked up at the sky—that too-blue cartoon sky that seemed to shift between realistic and animated depending on his perspective—and laughed. That same disturbing laugh that was part cartoon, part glitch, part something that made reality shudder slightly.
"Alright, Marvel Universe," he said to no one and everyone. "Ready or not, here I come. I'm not a hero. I'm not a villain. I'm just Cartoon Cat. And I'm going to have SO much fun."
His permanent grin stretched impossibly wide, his cartoon eyes glinted with mischief and madness, and somewhere in the distance, a police scanner crackled with confused reports of a "large cat-like entity" that had vanished without a trace.
The game had begun.
And Cartoon Cat was absolutely going to enjoy every ridiculous, chaotic, reality-bending moment of it.