A City Worth Watching Over

Art Gallery City never slept quietly.

Even at midnight, the murals along Cobalt Avenue pulsed with color — deep purples and gold and fiery tangerine — painted right into the building walls like the city itself was dreaming out loud. Goats in paint-splattered coats debated color theory on the corners. Sheep with woolen scarves wandered past sculptures that changed poses when nobody was looking. And the living portraits in shop windows winked at anyone who walked by too fast.

High above all of it, the Ultimate Crayon Fortress stood at the city's center — four tall towers shaped exactly like giant crayons, their black walls catching the moonlight, the blue windows glowing soft and steady.

Inside, Ultimate Crayon Doe stood at the tallest window, her light blue cape drifting behind her.

"You're staring again," said a small voice from the corner.

Doe didn't turn around.

"Somebody has to," she said.

The Parrot Who Saw Everything

The small voice belonged to Pixel — a bright green parrot with sharp gold eyes who served as Doe's lookout drone operator, perched on a swivel chair surrounded by monitors.

"Go to sleep," Pixel said again. "Nothing's happening."

Then every single screen went gray.

Not static. Not a glitch. Gray — flat, empty, colorless, as if someone had drained the image right out.

Doe pressed closer to the window. Down on Cobalt Avenue, the brilliant murals she'd been watching were fading. The deep purple. The tangerine. The gold. Bleaching out slowly, like a painting left in the rain.

"That's not a power outage," Pixel said quietly.

A drone Pixel had sent out earlier — a small disc-shaped camera bot — buzzed back through the window slit and dropped a single photograph onto the desk.

It showed the Grand Promenade gallery, two blocks east. Every painting inside had gone completely white.

Doe picked up the photo.

The gallery's most famous piece — a floor-to-ceiling mural that had been painted for over three hundred years — was blank.