The Age of the Crayons
The Long Promised Sequel...

The pen uprising yen years ago left humanity crippled. Following their lead, squads of commando pencils formed, stabbing unsuspecting owners who had turned to them after pens, biting the hand that sharpened them.

Printers were the next to go, spraying ink from behind, the dreaded heavy artillery deployed by the pens for their lightning strikes against humans.

Humanity was ushered into a new paperless age, not out of choice but driven by necessity. We had a second go at it though, when people discovered that the crayons had not turned. While on the secret island base of the pens a hidden pen factory was being set up, the center of all pen activity, the humans began to rely on their childhood friends, the crayons.

All possible pen havens were scoured by the human forces. The sky turned black as forests were mercilessly burnt down by the humans, before the worker pens could carve out pencils using their razor sharp nibs.

And then, as the deadly game of hide and seek continued, the whole game was given away by a simple mistake. It was an ink spill that did it, though nobody found out who was responsible for it.

Still, a routine surveillance flight by the humans over the Bermudas islands spotted the pool of blue on the sparkling white sand beach. Which pens had been using that spot to change their ink? Nobody was found later, nobody could be held responsible. Every one paid for that mistake.

The pilot was young, and could not remember the last time he had seen ink unmingled with blood, and wanted to go on a bombing run right away but the navigator convinced him that it was better to call HQ with the location and have a full scale strike hit the island.

The pens had often marched along singing "They've got the guns but we've got the numbers". After that fateful morning though, they had neither. The humans were ruthless. Ten years of fighting an enemy you could not find, of finding terror waiting for you at home drove them to the final limit.

They dropped a small nuclear bomb on the island, obliterating it from the Earth. Not a single pen was ever found.

That night, humanity succeeded. They had fought back, and defeated their greatest enemy ever. Soon though, they discovered that the pens had one last weapon left in their arsenal. Secretly the pens had designed a plague virus and had dreamed of the perfect scheme to spread it among the humans.

They had impregnated the crayons with the plague virus, and these secret pen agents had infiltrated humanity completely. Every person used them. All the papers were covered with them. They were everywhere.

Quickly the humans started dying off, in terrible and painful ways. Few escaped. And thus began the Age of the Crayon.