Anthropomorphic

Norwegian Forest Cat 

Character Portrait

Frødrik Frødrikson

In the synaptic circus of Anthroxville, where the sky burns bright with the colors of irradiated disarray, and the abject dons the cloak of the everyday, an anomaly of unprecedented mystery seized the collective psyche. It began as a mere pothole; the kind Kingsley Throttle might momentarily curse under his breath as he hurtled over it, en route to his inaugural multi-car pile-up of the day, before dismissing it from his mind entirely. As far as potholes went, it was fine: uneasy enough on the eye, farcical, bothersome even; but the truth was that nobody really paid it all that much thought or attention, for it was one among thousands of other wheel-bucklers in Anthroxville, and with such fierce competition pockmarking near every stretch of road, this unremarkable pothole was easy to overlook in favor of its more formidable counterparts. Hardly the villain in anyone's daily commute saga, this dinky little number was no scene-stealer; unlike some of its showstopping peers, it wasn't casting vehicles into aerial somersaults or absconding with bumpers in a grand gesture of asphalt conquest. Its presence was simply too muted, too mundane, too frigid to spark tales of tire-over-tarmac romances or to become the star of any roadside fable. As Binky Pettifogger, Julian Jodhpur, and Nina Glücklich were all quoted in Spencer Godwottery’s publication, Well Magazine, as saying, it was, quite simply, “just another pothole.”

But then, something happened: it came of age, undergoing an overnight transformation of such brain-bending proportions, that it would challenge the town's already precarious grasp on reality. It widened, deepened, and ultimately gaped—becoming a vertiginous maw in the fabric of Anthroxville’s existence. This metamorphosis was as sudden as it was inexplicable. No longer a piquant cavity in the roadway, it now appeared as though the earth itself had opened its mouth for the mother of all dental inspections; a monstrous portal to the profound; stark and inordinate, which turned Anthroxville into the unwitting epicenter of an enigma as deep as the void itself. President Clint Bigot, whose tenure had been marked less by crisis management than by crisis magnification, promptly summoned a motley crew of experts in a bid to unravel the mystery and find out exactly what the hell they were dealing with here.

First to arrive on the scene were the geologists, their hammers and hand lenses at the ready, closely followed by a posse of seismologists, with their seismographs and gravimeters twitching in the anticipation of cracking the code of this terrestrial conundrum, and then the topographers, maps in hand, eager to chart the uncharted. Yet, despite their expertise and enthusiasm, the collective response was stupefaction. This Hadean jumbo defied all known geological, seismic, and topographical logic. “Holey moley!” they cried out, eyes popping out their sockets, hands clasped on their heads, with some even falling to their knees as they tried to fit the sheer scale of this monstrosity into their conception of the world. The situation escalated as President Bigot, incensed by their inability to provide any explanations, branded them a bunch of frauds and phonies. He decreed that they be stripped of their professional credentials and banished from Anthroxville by day’s end – a characteristically drastic response to their supposed failings.

In the aftermath, the mantle of hope was passed to the speleologists. With their headlamps slicing through the darkness, painting ghostly silhouettes against the chasm's unseen walls, they ventured down into the abyss. As they descended, their voices became mere whispered “holeys” lost in the vast emptiness of “moleys.” However, as they delved deeper, it became apparent that the ambition of getting a fix on how far down this bad boy really went was to be curtailed – not by their valor or resolve, but by a more unconquerable foe: the impossible depth of the hole itself. Their ropes, the slender threads tethering them to the surface, reached their terminus with no sign of the chasm’s end in sight, forcing an acknowledgment of their physical limitations, and they emerged back into the light of terra firma to join the ranks of the dumbfounded. They too were swiftly excommunicated from Anthroxville.

In a final move, Bigot called in the unlikely heroes of the hour: the proctologists, headed up by the infamous Dr. Ralph Whiplash himself. Speaking from personal experience, Clint could attest that if anybody knew their way around a quandary, it was these guys. After all, expecting the unexpected had long been the guiding principle of the gallant craft. With a clinical detachment, they approached the void as they would any other cavity, armed with an arsenal of anoscopes, aprons, and forceps at the ready. However, their fearless foray turned out to be futile and they eventually concluded that this gape was beyond the reach of even their expertise, and they’d seen some real whoppers in their time. Unlike their predecessors, the President showed them more clemency, and having just battled his way through an ill-advised Nuclear Nightmare at Edison Upskirt's Upskirt Nosher eatery the evening prior, instructed them to return to their original posts and remain on standby until further notice.

As the tale of the hole’s unfathomably infinite and perplexing nature rippled through the streets of Anthroxville, the townsfolk found themselves ensnared in the grip of a particularly virulent strain of existential angst. Most, if not all, had long been under the impression that they’d already hit rock bottom in their shared saga of misfortune, and while better days may not exactly be waiting up ahead, things surely couldn’t get any worse, could they? Now, pinning down the precise moment when Anthroxville's fortunes took a nosedive was a matter of personal taste and trauma—Bella Imbroglio might curse the disastrous morning she stumbled into Oskar Knullruf’s life as her point of no return; for Johann Underbelly, it was what had become known as The Underbelly Fiasco, when the steamrolling flat-earth fundamentalist Pat O’Plateau, publically declared a flatwa (an open call to splat on sight) on him and his colleagues; and for Hercule von Hooter, it would probably be the afternoon he got inadvertently trapped on the absolute wrong side of the river Ting-Fam, where he has remained, thanks to Roy Bibbowski, ever since. Despite these diverse tales of woe and lament, there lingered a general consensus that at some juncture, they had all, without exception, bottomed out. 

Yet, this revelation of the bottomless pit introduced a horrifying new dimension to their plight: the possibility that their collective despair might well be an eternal feature, with no end credits in sight. The prospect of no definitive endpoint, of no rock-bottom, was enough to short-circuit the town's philosophical wiring—existence, morality, purpose, hope, redemption, all suddenly firing blanks, plunging Anthroxville into a state of intellectual free-fall, where even the firmest grip on reason seemed to fall by the wayside. Consequently, Anthroxville's flirtation with nihilism shifted into a full-blown love affair. "On what basis?" became the mantra, a rhetorical question that floated through bars and bedrooms, leaving a trail of existential crisis in its wake.

However, others such as the fearless swashbuckler Frødrik Frødrikson, resolved to take it upon themselves to reach the elusive all-time low and find that desperately sought after wake-up call Anthroxville was in such dire need of. In the absence of the supposed pros, who had all, baring the proctologists, being banished, the anthropomorphic Norwegian forest cat summoned a ragtag operation of hobbyists, hopefuls, and have-a-go homies, to reject despair and craft a brazen counterattack against the gaping maw that had dared to yawn open at their city's core. Bridget Kookold along with Mitzi Midriff were...