DANGER MOUSE:

THESE KINDS OF TRACKS

WRITTEN BY ZARIUS

(Based on an idea by bravekid)


"Squawkentry#15789.

Yes, don't let the appearance fool you. This is still me.

Never mind asking how I look, or asking if I've seen better, ask me how my day was.

It was impulsive. Quite impulsive. And it isn't over yet, by my calculations the effects of the mind transference should have worn off by now. The fact they haven't ought to be troubling me.

And yet it isn't.

Perhaps God loves me?

'Scarlet' is still passed out in the back. Or rather to everyone else's perspective I am.

Oh, but of course she fainted. There were cameras around; she wanted it to be a dramatic a moment as possible.

What moment do you ask?

Perhaps it's best I go back to the beginning.

The powers behind the Danger Agency once again set their sights on staging tours of its facilities, much to my annoyance. Much to the Mouse's amusement and much to my favourite pen's apprehension.

Only this time it wouldn't be open to lucky lotto winners, or members of the public, no, this time it would be celebrities.

And with celebrities comes press, with press, come cameras, with cameras, come exposes, with exposes come the spilling of vital secrets to the general public, and from there, the underbelly of society catches word, catches details, and catches people who share those secrets with noone so they can make use of them for their own nefarious ends.

You can tell why I have such a disdain for the press.

The Agency decide to play it safe and have someone already familiar with the agency to kick start this tour and make their favourite social circles in Hollywood more at ease when it comes their turn to tour...they went with that most demanding diva Scarlet Johamster, Penfold's occasionally off and frustratingly on again squeeze.

My mother always taught me to respect people on these different kinds of tracks, common vs class, privileged vs. poor, but she's the kind of damsel who tends to get tied down to far too many of them

I don't know what it is that Penfold sees in her, but all I ever see is the kind of trouble those tracks on the railroad lead to. The grind of movie production threatening to derail relationships over the period of weeks, months and years, wearing them out, steamrolling hearts, derailing them, until all that's left is a whisper of 'so long'.

I told Penfold that much, no, I warned him as much, when reading him his current favourite bedtime story, the script for Sleepless In Seattle.

Yes, he told me that was HER choice for what should be the bedtime story. He never wants her to read it for him. Always me. Scarlet would only ever do it over Skype and it'd never be the full thing. Only extracts. Pretty much the only bits she covered were all the sequences she had used for auditions to get her noticed in acting schools or short bursts of entertainment on YouTube.

Back to the lab again yo.

She touches everything of course, thinking the whole lab is rigged to explode, she wants that thrill, the feeling of it all going awry, then it all going away, so she can bright as bright as the stars and never burn out. That's what she's afraid of you know, burning out.

She also hoped her beloved would swoop in and save her. He would, but he hesitates at the slightest firecracker sometimes.

She ended up putting her feet up in a seat attached to what she assumed was some sort of hair styling apparatus.

And she left it running for what we would label in the lab a 'three minute warning'

As soon as those minutes clocked in, the extraction of her brain waves would take hold and be stored in stasis, ready for transfer to another body.

And because the apparatus was still in its infant stages of test development, there was no guarantee the patterns would be sustained in the stasis lock for a lengthy duration.

So I had to gather them all up as they were extracted, and exchange them with the tracks from my own brain, essentially switching places with Scarlet.

Penfold arrived and picked me up in his arms almost as soon as he saw me, or what he perceived

Danger Mouse glared at the unconscious body of Scarlet, or rather my own body, who had feigned a faint for the cameras in reaction to her new situation. Luckily my work colleagues stole the body away and put good distance between themselves and DM, as he'd resorted to that unhygienic habit of poking a stiff body with a stick again to determine if they were comfortable. Rigour Mortis never entered his trained thoughts...he was always instructed to expect death, but to never see it arrive.

Not that Scarlet was dead, not that my body was death, but she wasn't about to put up with her end of this little drama, the script just didn't appeal to her, so she would remain comatose for as long as this event played out.

I knew Scarlet would be well looked after, allowing me to take real good care of Penfold.

I suggested the final scene of Sleepless In Seattle to him as a romantic getaway.

"Whatever you say, however you act" Penfold replied.

I was taken aback

Had he put two and two together so early?

Did he somehow know this wasn't his Scarlet?

Did he even care?

He told me that what I'd said had made him most suspicious...I'd suggested a romantic moment from the film.

Whenever Scarlet read it to him over Skype, it was never the romantic bits.

Perhaps he meant that I, as Scarlet, was searching for a new part to play, something that brought them closer?

To be continued?

I'll leave that up to whatever Cupid says.

For now, I'm content to blur the lines between these different kinds of tracks, the lines between elite and earnest, on poor and privileged.

The lines between stars and science.

And whether I can live in between those lines.