Cartoons have existed as long as humans, living beside them as a separate ink‐born species, but because they didn’t age, healed too fast, and behaved in ways humans feared, they were pushed into segregated districts and eventually forced out of sight. Over generations, humans forgot they were real and began drawing “cartoons” based on fading memories, believing they had invented them. Tired of being hidden and mistreated, the toons used their ink‐shaping abilities to create their own realms—bright Toontopia for the hopeful and grim Ink Blot Grotto for the rejected—until they eventually rediscovered how to cross back into the human world, bringing with them the old, dangerous rule against crossbreeding, born from a long‐ago hybrid whose unstable existence nearly tore reality apart.