Work Text:
Tuesday, April 14th, 2011.
Somewhere in the Suburbs…
You’d think with a name like Gardenview, one would expect to be face to face with a garden center, or a big floral shop, or something of that sort. It’s somewhat logical thinking, considering many places have self-explanatory names.
Well, that wasn’t the type of building Xavier had found himself standing in front of the doors of. If anything, it looked like a big, abandoned mall. But a job was a job (even if this was only a job listing), and around 22 dollars an hour just to go clean up this place a bit was a surefire steal for the disgruntled gig-hopping janitor and his roommate.
Anything was better than the measly 16 dollars an hour that his other job was giving him.
The listing itself wasn’t too specific; just appear at the location of the building at 11:00 am, most if not all of the proper cleaning tools would be provided for Xavier at the entrance, and to clean it up the best he could under the buildings… shoddy conditions. Maybe avoid the possible broken parts & holes in the flooring as well. But for the most part? This seemed like a simple job for him! Besides a possible sprained ankle from the floor, what could go wrong?
Xavier sighs to himself, fidgeting with the collar of what’s essentially his work uniform.
A muted, dark blue dress shirt and pants, stained darker in some areas from years of hard cleaning. He’d get a new uniform, but as long as this one didn’t have any big holes in it, that wasn’t happening anytime soon.
About time to head inside, Xavier thinks to himself. He grips the handles of one of the entrance’s doors, and with a few good pulls, opens it and heads inside.
Just off to the right of the entrance is a closet filled with whatever he’d need to do his job. One of its doors is fully open while the other is rusted and slightly ajar. Looking pretty good so far; as great as a mystery job listing could get. If anything, Xavier wasn’t getting scammed out of a great pay with how this was playing out.
He grabs a mop, a corresponding bucket seemingly already filled a little with fresh water, and a broom with a dustpan ‘clipped’ to it. A nice selection of tools to start off doing this with, before he moves on to the windows… whenever that’ll be.
Carefully, Xavier navigates his way through the abandoned building, stepping over broken floor boards and casual holes in the floor along the way.
The walls, which had once held brightly colored paint and wallpaper, had dulled, chipped off and peeled over the years. Moss and vines had begun to make their home within Gardenview’s dusty rooms, ironically owning up to its once glorious namesake. Some exposed piping hung out of open spots, half rusted and half dripping a mystery black liquid onto the floor.
The aging of this once bustling place had hit some of the rooms worse than others. Take the main entrance compared to the main room, for example. The former had little damage done to it, save for a few small holes here and there. Meanwhile, the main room had been hit much worse; the large tree in the very middle of the room had lost most of its leaves, and the bench in front of it looked irreversibly broken.
Rust, holes and outside plant life had overtaken certain parts of this room. Probably wouldn’t be much of a stretch to assume at least a few rats or birds have made their home here as well!
Cleaning this place the best he could was starting to look. . . more difficult than Xavier thought.
He groaned to himself, grabbing a broom and dustpan and beginning to get to work.
At least an hour and a half or maybe two hours, it was hard to tell since he didn’t have a way of telling the time. The clock in this place was broken AND non-functional! It was STUCK showing the same time forever; 10:26 pm to be exact. But anyways. . . .
Time passed as he swept the aged floors clean from lingering dust, leaves, and whatever else was left to rot on the ground of this place. It didn’t help much in making the place look better, especially with all the disrepair practically EVERYWHERE. However, it was a start without the non-hole based aging on the floor.
Xavier went to put both broom and dustpan back in the closet, but stopped once he started to pass by one of the halls. Empty rooms lined the halls, themed around the various ‘characters’ that once lived in the long abandoned building. Some pipes stuck out the ceiling, rusted, bent and leaking fluid onto the floorboards. Though the pipes weren’t what Xavier was focused on in this hall, however.
It was the fact that he swore he could hear voices coming from down there.
Voices that Xavier swore were the kind that could only come from a kids cartoon of some kind. They all sounded like they were all… having fun? Having their own little conversations with their friends, echoes of a past of good times that were long gone for them. Reasonably for ANY human, it freaked Xavier the fuck out.
He’d turn around and book it out of there immediately, but that part of Gardenview was still dirty as sin. That 22 dollars an hour total paycheck was calling out to him like a perverse money siren. And there was NO way he was missing out on such a thing.
So on he went down into that room-filled hallway, shivering a little as he did.
The voices down this hall only got louder as he stepped into it little by little, clutching his broom and dustpan ever tighter. What was just indistinct, wordless murmurs started to evolve into bits and pieces of words Xavier could comprehend with his ears.
Then, the clusters of words he could hear got steadily longer as he made it further down. Until close to one end of the hall, just above the end of a broken pipe, he could actually make out full sentences. Enough to parse out what exactly these strange, ghostly yet cartoonish voices were even talking about.
You know what? Forget the good paycheck, he’s getting the FUCK out of here before whatever supernatural thing that’s in here decides to make a move! Xavier drops his equipment and whips his body around, preparing to bolt the other way. Though before he could, however….
*FSSSSSSSSSSHHHHH!*
That pipe above him suddenly became active and spewed out a good liter of that mysterious black liquid.
Right.
Into.
His OPEN MOUTH.
Xavier coughed and sputtered as he stepped out of the way of the pipe, trying to get the liquid out of his mouth. It tasted like a mixture of car oil, rotten banana and. . . dead fish! Probably has some rust in it from the aging too! God, it was so GROSS; no wonder it stayed in those damn pipes.
However, as Xavier tried to get the taste of the liquid out of his mouth, something utterly nonsensical began to happen.
The tips of his right hands fingers began to feel numb and tingly, as if TV static was a texture instead of a visual. A pure white, paint-feeling color appeared on his fingers and spread down them in uneven splotches. Once fully covering the fingers, something extra happened to them.
Every finger, excluding the thumb, started to form a webbing that made them hard to separate. Said webbing got thicker and thicker until Xavier wouldn’t be able to tell which part was just thick webbing or otherwise. Inside the strange webbed. . . cocoon thing, the four fingers started to meld together, bone, muscle and all.
Forming a singular, bloated thing that bent like a normal finger would, but without its dexterity. Kind of like a fleshy oven mitt attached to the ends of his arms, however morbid that may seem. As they finished fusing together, the thumb grew a bit bigger to adjust to the new hands anatomy.
And the exact same thing would happen to his left hand as it too felt the static-y numbing feeling. However instead of turning white, it darkened all the way down to a dark-grey, almost black coloration.
Besides that, every change that went on there was the exact same. From the fingers morphing and fusing into one large mass with the same joints as one, to the thumb growing bigger in proportion. With both hands finished up, both opposite pigments began to race each other to climb up to Xavier’s body.
His arms started to slim down a little as both colors crawled up them.
The sleeves of his dress shirt started to fizzle off into nonexistence, revealing their shoulders in midst of changing. Something that Xavier immediately noticed, yelping in shock as he backed up from leaving the building.
‘Dear God, what the FUCK was in that damned liquid?’ Xavier thought in a panic, feeling the fabric of his now sleeveless shirt deepen all the way down to pure black. It began to grow closer and somewhat ‘tighter’ on his body, sticking to his skin like tape. Soon, it fused with his torso and became a fabric-textured part of his body. Once fully dyed black, it stretched and extended downwards to cover his waist.
But speaking of his waist, Xavier felt his crotch smooth over into nothingness. His shirt had even extended to surround where it would have been. Considering this place seemed to be for kids… Well, when it didn’t look like it was destroyed in a riot, the lack of. . . . reproductive organs tracked quite well. Not that it made Xavier feel any better, as he felt his torso finish changing up, ready to move on to another body part.
Their legs were next to be altered, as the white and dark grey coloration that sat evenly beside each other on his body spread down his legs.
Both legs slimmed down and simplified as well, the hairs on them being cut off from the roots and disappearing into nonbeing. His pants, instead of only getting rid of most of the legs, started to fizzle out entirely. Again, there wasn’t anything naughty down there to cover anymore, AND their shirt covered his waist. So why even bother having them anymoooore….
‘Gaaahhh!! That doesn't even make sense, WHY am I thinking like this?!’ Xavier’s thoughts spat out in between bouts of incomprehensible and internal panicking.
His changes wouldn’t make these thoughts much better, however. Inside his soon to be missing shoes, Xavier’s toes all merged together in a similar way to his hands. Webbing covered them in their entirety, morphing them inside and out into a simplified, ovular shape. Completely featureless, just like most of his toonified body.
…Annnnnd now his shoes were gone, phased into nonexistence. Fucking GREAT.
Now he could see his blobby flipper feet clearly, and that was NOT gonna help him calm down in the middle of this situation.
A strange, clothing feeling made itself known around his neck, subtly connecting to it without Xavier knowing. With the changes beginning to spread up his neck, Xavier internally dreaded that the changes were going to get worse.
So. Much. WORSE. And unfortunately for Xavier’s panicked thoughts, they’d be right to dread the coming alterations.
The skin on his neck simplified and flattened down to a red fabric-esque material, long and warm like a living scarf. Despite how ridiculously flat his neck now was, it could still hold his human head as if it was still normal. The scarf now making up his neck tied itself in the front into a permanent knot.
‘Entirely illogical!!’ He thought as his mitten hands felt at his neck, ‘HOW is this flimsy thing supposed to hold up my he….’ Xavier was snapped out of his thoughts by a now-painful feeling.
An unbearable headache pierced him, making Xavier take his hands off his neck and move them to his head. It felt so bad, it was almost as if he was taking a blunt axe straight to the middle of it. Slowly cutting it open like a grotesque, bloody and brainy egg; A metaphor closer to the truth than Xavier would like it to be.
Sickening wet CRACKs echoed through the empty Gardenview building as his head started to force itself apart. Splitting cleanly in half from the top of his head all the way down to his altered, scarf-y neck. The hair Xavier had maintained well just for this job in particular fell to the rickety wood floor, pooling around his toony body pathetically. He continued to clutch his head in pain, partially in a futile attempt to keep both halves of it from ripping itself in two.
With an off-puttingly clean sounding SNAP noise, Xavier’s attempt to keep his head in one piece was rendered inert.
It split into two perfectly even halves, regenerating their respective lost parts once both necks inched further apart by a few inches. They flattened down into thin porcelain masks with horn-like points held high. Getting rid of many of his human features in favour of a smooth, curved and simplified mask shape. A certain part of this change (somehow) caught Xavier by surprise; the formerly left half of his head kept his mind, while the right half didn’t. It stayed slightly slumped over, motionless as it changed.
His left side brightened from tannish skin to a pure porcelain white with dark grey circular ‘cheek blush’. While the other side deepened to dark grey, a curved line in white appearing under its eyes to represent tear streaks. Both their eyes grew bigger and more rounded, their sclera turning a pitch black and subsuming their pupils.
Gradually, Xavier’s height started to be drained from him. Losing centimeters upon decimeters as the ‘ruins’ around him slowly grew in size (well, in his eyes).
All the while his head began to spin, vision becoming blurry and bright. His ‘original’ mind grew more optimistic and feeling friendlier, slowly pushing control out of his body. The gloominess and mild-mannered anxiety of Xavier’s own self was being transferred straight to the right head, in turn making said negativity a part of that head’s personality. It rose up out of his slumped position, as if awaking from a deep slumber.
More height was drained from their body until it finally capped off at around two and a half feet tall. Xavier’s own mind was quickly losing its battle against the strange new identity trying to replace him. He couldn’t even bother panicking anymore, only praying for the changes to be over.
In a few seconds, he was thrown into the back seat far into his mind. Allowing the eager new identity and whatever was up with the other head to take control of what was once his body.
“Uuugggghhhh….” He groaned before feeling his control be overthrown. Both new personalities opted to finish his ‘sentence’ for him in the meantime…
“... What fun!!”
“Oh the misery…”
Where Xavier once was, now stood a theater-based twin headed toon named Razzle and Dazzle. They wandered the expanse of the abandoned Gardenview carefully, awaiting the return of all their friends. No matter, he had company in himself in the meantime…
~~~~~🎭~~~~~
Around two months later…
….. Uggghhhhhh. Xavier’s head spun as he finally came to. His vision was a little blurry, but he could tell that he wasn’t in that weird Gardenview mall place anymore. Instead, he was… back home? Laying in his freshly-made bed, his bedroom looking as if he had never left for that DAMNED job posting.
The door to his bedroom swung open, the figure of his roommate coming inside.
“Xavier! I thought you’d NEVER wake up!” Robin said exasperatedly.
“Huh?! Rob? What the hell happened….?” Xavier asked just as exasperated, as well as confused.
“I– I don’t know, man. I was worried sick just looking for you!” Robin began to explain. “Then I found y-you passed out outside that ‘mall’, and took you back home.”
The mere mention of Gardenview, even not by name, made Xavier curious. He sits up in his bed and grabs his phone off the nearby nightstand as Robin's nerves slowly became less tense at Xavier’s awakening.
Xavier types the name of that abandoned place into Google, hoping to get answers to the fuckery he had stepped into all the way back in April. Various articles appear at the top of the page, confirming that it had been refurbished and was reopening soon. However, a certain character in the place’s cast lineup caught his eye.
A two-headed… mostly black and white theatre mask-based humanoid with a black sleeveless shirt…. a red tied up scarf for a neck/accessory, and….. named Razzle… and Dazzle…
‘Oh my Fucking god,’ He muses in this thoughts, pinching the bridge of his nose in sheer disbelief.
Stupid building, should’ve known that pay was too good to be true. Maybe next time, he’ll just take a job at one of the local bakeries downtown.
At least there’s no foul black goop in their pipes.