Ember visits Leslie, sometimes.
They come without preface or warning, a sudden appearance of black and green on grey. He knows them as a compilation of wispy green flames and too many flickering eyes, of pale skin and painted black lips tilted upwards in perpetual amusement. They are performative kindness with a perfect smile and a perfect laugh. They are powerful in a way Leslie does not-- and cannot-- understand, unable to grasp the entirety of their scale. It's like only being able to read one page of a book, the rest of it ephemeral, out of reach. Ember in totality is an illusion of someone arrestingly beautiful and demure, but an illusion nonetheless. 
They scare him in a primal, terrible way. Leslie has seen what lies beneath that veneer of tranquility, has seen the full force of their nature crackling with power and dripping with disdain. The bleating of a goat, the drag of a knife, damage done unto others with meticulous cruelty, perfectly exacted. Leslie had s

The world is much, much larger when you're two feet tall.
Leslie was used to being short-- it came with being the miniature version of any type of stygian. In his human form, too, he barely cleared five feet tall. Places that were not made for (or by) Leslie tended to seem vast and unwieldy.
But being stuck like he was now? Unable to talk, hardly able to run? He was the size of a treat and did not at all appreciate it. He plodded along the gingerbread brick path that led to the library, lined with rainbow tape that was now torn and aged with time. It was a long walk, now, easily twice the hike now that his proper forms had been stolen from him.
He missed Kitten. She would normally be glad to provide idle company, offering the warmth of her glow and the fondness that came with being Leslie's closest friend. Unlike many familiars, she often opted not to speak, but that didn't take away from their friendship.
A broken bridge was up ahead, with a sludgy river of flat soda beneath it. It ha

There would have been constellations here, once. Holes in various shapes lined the observatory's walls, carved into them once upon a time. It was impossible to tell how long ago; everything in Treatropolis seemed vaguely aged in ways that were impossible to discern, and the Galleria was no exception. All of it was run down, crumbling and worn down until it was dull and grey and flat.
It looked even more so, in the dark. At night, there were no lights to speak of in all of Treatropolis, and no moon to speak of penetrated the perpetually grey clouds. Any illumination here was offered in small pockets, little bubbles that disrupted the hazy evening skies with their glow that dotted the landscape intermittently.
Frieza was one of these little bubbles, all on their own. A collection of blue runic cards floated around them in lazy synchronicity, simmering blue in the dim, accompanied by the flickering of a ghostly flame. Behind them, Frieza's halo offered moments of searing light that slowly

Lurks pressed his face to a stained glass window made of hard candy, doing his best to peek through the nearly opaque window.
"Hello!" he trilled, rapping his bony fingers against it, a burst of shadowy moths sliding out of his cloak in the process. They crept all up and down the thing, sliding in through the cracks at the top, chittering softly in perpetual whisper as they invaded the abandoned building. "No one's home," he murmured to himself, full of wonder. No one was home, in Treatropolis. No one at all, minus the critters of candy and the roving treats both feral and non.
With a cheery smile, he balled one tiny, skeletal hand and punched right through the window, laughing at his own antics with a horrible, wheezy kind of giggle. He had free reign, here, to touch as much as he wanted-- and break as much as he wanted, too. It was already dilapidated beyond repair, and he had absolutely zero supervision to speak of.
Clamoring in through the jagged candy, Lurks happily brushed sticky

With the clarity of of a bell ringing in absolute silence, she remembers how to remember-- again.
Who she is-- and, more importantly, what she is-- returns in a flood of memories so massive that it threatens to subsume her beneath its waves. Her name is Violenca. She lives here. In this place, she has in a home to call her own, both quaint and hard won. Painted red and orange and  decorated with candy both spicy and sour, it is a masterpiece of her own design.
The battle was over. They had won. With the shining light of their sun and the shining light of their swords, Treatropolis had vanquished the forces of nightmare once and for all. Revelry is has by all, herself included. Violenca takes to the rainbow streets, gathering up her skirts under the lanterns to swirl and dance late into the night. She laughs as flames wreath around her in all the glory of mastered witchcraft. She smiles so bright and wide that it could have matched their sun.
And then:
P

When Leslie realizes what's happened, he bursts into tears.
He's smaller than ever before, and he'd never been tall to begin with, in Stygian or human form. It felt wrong and ill-fitting, to be trapped in his given shape instead of one of his own design. He couldn't pick his fur, but he could pick his clothes. He couldn't hold onto things with paws like he could with hands, and it didn't matter that he could do it with power instead.
So, he sits, and is very, very small. Besides his perpetual emotions of anxiety and existential anguish, one more emotion ran through his veins:
Vicious, miserable hatred. Normally, it was directed at himself, but now it turned outwards like a lighthouse pointing its beams towards a storm.
Treatropolis has been awful from the start, from the train to the arrival to the "research". With bitterness in his chest, Leslie wonders who, exactly, was behind all these invitations, behind this excavation. He knows he's not very bright,