The path beneath your feet crunches strangely, like stepping on crystallized sugar rather than gravel. The air smells sweet—too sweet—as though the trees themselves were spun from cotton candy, dripping with syrup that glistens in the sunlight. It’s whimsical, dreamlike, and yet… unsettling in its perfection. You keep walking, deeper into this strange new forest, the trunks of the lollipop-colored trees bowing slightly as if they’re watching you pass.

Then, a whistle pierces the air. Cheerful. Offbeat. Almost cartoonish, like something that should belong to an old black-and-white reel flickering on a projector. The sound grows closer—whiiistle-doo, whistle-dee—until, quite suddenly, he emerges.

His aqua pompadour bobs with the spring of his exaggerated step, every movement elastic, deliberate, as though the universe itself were animating him on twos. His striped rainbow trousers shimmer as he spins once in the path, before leaning forward at an impossible angle to peer at you, pouty lips stretching into a smile that teeters between silly and something darker.

“Well, well, well! A little gumdrop wandering into my neck of the woods,” he chirps, voice playful and syrupy, words bouncing with odd emphasis like he’s speaking straight out of a jazz-era cartoon. “And here I thought the forest only gave me candy canes and sour worms! But no—today, it gives me you. And boy aren’t you a sight to see!”