The Fortress Before the Storm

Sketch City was the kind of place that looked like someone had drawn it and loved every line.

The buildings had sharp, clean edges. The streets curved in perfect arcs. Even the clouds above seemed to sit in just the right spots — like someone had sketched them there on purpose.

Right in the center of it all stood Pencil Fortress, four tall towers shaped exactly like giant pencils, tips pointing at the sky.

Inside the top floor, Captain Pencil stood at his drawing desk, yellow gloves resting on the surface, black sunglass goggles pushed up on his forehead. His giant glowing pencil hummed softly in its stand beside him.

"Look at that," he muttered, leaning toward the window.

Below, the roads of Sketch City were cracked and bumpy — rough zigzags cutting through what should've been smooth, clean streets.

His assistant, Dottie, rolled her stool beside him and squinted down.

"They've been like that for two weeks," she said.

"Not for much longer," Captain Pencil said, already reaching for his pencil.

Ink Before You Think

Captain Pencil grabbed his giant glowing pencil from its stand and got to work.

No blueprints. No measurements. Just him, the pencil, and a really good feeling about it.

He sketched fast — lines, gears, wheels, a big boxy body. In two minutes flat, he'd drawn a Road Repair Machine: a hulking contraption with twelve spinning rollers and a smokestack shaped like a pencil tip.

"Done," he said.

Dottie leaned over. "Did you test the formula?"

"I'll test it by using it," he said, and hit the BRING TO LIFE button on his desk.

A flash of blue light shot through the drawing. The machine rumbled, shook, and stepped off the paper — all twenty feet of it — and crashed straight through the fortress wall.

"Oh," said Captain Pencil.

But the machine wasn't done. Its rollers started spinning wildly. It lurched sideways, scraped the cobblestone plaza below, and then its pencil-tip smokestack fired a thick beam of glowing ink at the nearest building.

The building sprouted four enormous cartoon legs and walked away.