(This story is not intended to infringe on the rights of Disney...or anyone else, including but not limited to Warner Bros., Tatsunoko, and Saban.)

God, he hated this city. Really HATED it, in spite of the pollution and a fairly decent crime rate. One reason was the inhabitants of this dimension: weird looking, flat faced, featherless things. The other, bigger reason was the number of superpowered doofuses. New Yuck, or New Jerk, or whatever it was called, was positively crawling with superheroes. You couldn't fire an Uzi without hitting one. He knew; he'd tried a few times.

Negaduck pulled the collar of his trenchcoat up to hide his face and stepped out onto the crowded subway platform. The last thing he needed was for someone to see his face. Invariably, they'd yell "MUTANT!" at the top of their lungs, and he'd have to spend a few hours ditching a pitchfork-wielding mob.

Damned if he knew where they got the pitchforks from, either.

He intimidated a little old lady out of her seat and slouched down behind a newspaper. As usual, the front page was adorned with a picture of some fashion-impaired guy in red and blue tights. What was really pathetic was that the loser was managing to beat a villain who had a bunch of mechanical arms. Yeesh, if you can't beat a guy when you've got four more arms than he does, give it up! Negaduck thought in disgust. He couldn't toss the paper aside, though, not unless he wanted to risk another pitchfork-wielding mob before he reached... He stopped, trying to remember the name. It was some cow-y sounding place... Moo Jersey, that was it. Kind of redundant, but what else could he expect from this dimension?

Negaduck was on his way to meet some joker calling himself the Collector. The name didn't fill Negaduck with confidence, but everyone he'd spoken to had told him the same thing: if he wanted to find a way back to the Negaverse, he should ask the Collector.

"Maybe he collects the phone numbers of magicians or scientists or something," Negaduck muttered as he stood in front of the Collector's home, which bore a suspicious resemblance to a junkyard. "Maybe he shoulda collected a couple of decent names instead."

Negaduck walked up the junk strewn path to the front door and knocked. A few crashes and thuds later, a fat, mostly bald human opened the door.

"Duh, yeah?" he asked.

Negaduck resisted the urge to beat the tar out of him just for the heck of it."You the Collector?"

"Uh-huh."

Of their own volition, Negaduck's hands started for the Collectors throat; he yanked them away and clasped them behind his back. "Look, I gotta find a way back to my own dimension, and for some reason everyone says talk to you."

"Duh, own dimension. So you wanna dimensional portal, den?"

Negaduck's hands struggled to escape and do the man grievous harm. "No, I want a lollipop. OF COURSE I WANT A DIMENSIONAL PORTAL!" he screamed.

"Oh, okay. Dat's easy. Dimensional portals is a dime a dozen. A new one crops up every time dem X mutants have anudder time travel problem, so's I got about a jillion of 'em now. Come on."

The Collector led the way between the remains of a bunch of giant robots, each a different color, then stopped in front of two smaller robots... or, more precisely, a smaller robot and the pieces of a smaller robot.

"Hey! You took Zark apart again! Fix him right now."

"Aie-yi-yi-yi-yi! But Collector, he's so annoying!" the intact robot complained.

"Yeah, well so are you. I got's enough spare parts wit' dem busted zords; I don' need you to turn Zark into spare parts, too."

The robot hung its head. "All right, Collector." It began to collect the bits and pieces of metal and replace them in what Negaduck had thought was a round garbage pail, but which turned out to be the body of the other robot.

"Dose two never did get along," the Collector said conversationally. "Dey annoy each udder as much as dey annoy everyone else."

He led the way past a mountain of unmatched socks; on the other side was a forcefield cage. Five teenagers were behind the forcefield; all five had bad hair, arid each wore a tee-shirt with a different number on it.

"You'll never get away with this, Collector!" the one with a "1" on his shirt shouted in typical heroic fashion.

"No one will ever believe those impostors on the OAV are us!" the only girl -- Number Three -- shouted.

Number Five, who was even fatter than the Collector, shouted, "Let's try to ram through the forcefield again!"

This suggestion was greeted with enthusiastic shouts from everyone but Number Two, who shouted, "No, not again! Geez, you think just because I'm a cyborg this doesn't HURT?"

"Don't be childish about this, Joe," Number One shouted, even though he was standing right next to Number Two's ear. He grabbed Number Two, as did Numbers Three through Five; they hoisted him like a battering ram and slammed him into the force field a few times before giving up.

"We'll stop you next time, Collector!" Negaduck heard Number One shout as the Collector led him away.

"Helllllllllooooooooo, duck!"

Negaduck looked toward the sound and saw three weird looking kids with tails and floppy ears standing at the base of one of the junk mountains. "Who the hell're you?" he growled.

The tallest of the three spoke. "Aahhhhhhhh...we asked you first."

"I'm Negaduck...hey, no you didn't!"

"Well we meant to," the girl said in a nauseatingly cute voice. "Tee hee."

One of the weird kids had his tongue hanging out of his mouth. Out of sheer frustration over not being able to strangle the Collector, one of Negaduck's hands reached out and gave the tongue a yank. Before he knew what had happened, he was flattened into the ground.

"Sorry, Negaduck, it's my reflexes," the weird kid said, stuffing a giant mallet back into his shirt before following his siblings into the junk.

They finally reached a storage shed lined with shelves; each shelf was filled with gooey black spheres about twice the size of a bowling ball. The Collector took one sphere off the shelf and stuck his head into it, muttering, "Negaverse St. Canard, Negaverse St. Canard...Nope, dat's not da Negaverse." He pulled his head free with a slight slurping sound and stuck it into the next sphere, then the next. When he removed his head from the fourth sphere, he had the imprint of a woman's spike heeled shoe on his forehead and a glazed look in his eyes. When he removed his head from the eleventh sphere,

he was coughing uncontrollably.

"Is gasp dis hack da Negaverse?" he asked, shoving the sphere toward Negaduck.

Negaduck stuck his head into the sphere and took a deep, refreshing lungful of smog. He could hardly believe it; that moron had actually found a portal to the Negaverse! He could finally toast the guy!

With an evil smile on his face. Negaduck pulled his head out of the sphere. "So how does this work?"

"Oh, just t'row it against a wall and it'll flatten out real good." The Collector took the sphere and demonstrated; the sphere expanded into what looked like the mouth of a tunnel. "An' if you t'ink you'll wanna use it again, just scrape it off an' roll it back up." He demonstrated, then handed the sphere to Negaduck. "You want any udders? I gots portals ta just about ev'rywhere."

Negaduck paused in the act of pulling out the machine gun he always kept behind his back. Maybe this bozo could be useful for a little longer, after all.

His evil smile widened, and he asked, "You have any portals to the other St. Canards?"

(thank goodness)

Credits

The Collector played by Ralph the Guard (Animaniacs)

Intact Robot played by Alpha 5 (Mighty Morphin Power Rangers)

Disassembled Robot played by 7-Zark-7 (Battle of the Planets)

Five Teenagers Behind Force Field played by (no, not the Power Rangers) the Science Ninja Team Gatchaman (Kagaku Ninjatai Gatchaman)

Three Weird Kids played by the Warner Brothers (and the Warner sister) (Animaniacs)

Most if not all of the dialogue spoken by the Three Weird Kids stolen from various Animaniacs episodes -- can YOU name the episodes?

Shoe imprint courtesy of American Maid (The Tick)

Disclaimer: I take no blame for the things I write while my brain is absent.