omg i'd be picking your brain for theme park insight if i was currently drawing it. altho he's operating 1988 era machinery, who knows what that looked like, i remember looking up old control panels on forums. and ty, i'm very fond of the expo88 au and the amt of time i spent workshopping it with @push-and-hold doing research on it

that's so cute, i love that big perry mascot. lovable rectangle. thank u for the message <3

this is really nice to hear. thank you. i felt enchanted learning about the time and place and i'm happy to share just a little bit of that feeling in my art. <3

also this is the work i did to ensure the moon was in the correct place in the sky relative to the characters on that night in that scene. i think i got it right but idk, maybe a moon expert knows better

hey, i didn't intend to but i wrote a little scene set in my expo 88 au. a getting together. hopefully legible to someone who doesn't have much knowledge of the au, i don't know if i succeeded at that. but i wanted to get it out.

heinz the ponytailed 22 year old and perry the backflipping platypus heartthrob in facepaint. can they make it work?? this is the fic description.

rated T for tipsy, and tongue. 4950 words

1988/6/23

It’s a night at the park. They’re both worn out from a week of Expo explorations up the street, so they decide to stay local, beers and bar food at the Galaxy, bad Australian disco thumping into the late hours after the park shuts its gates. Heinz and Perry ping pong off each other in the crowded space, riding waves of dance and conversation. Most of the Fun Park crew have changed back into their street clothes but a few are still wearing bicolor server outfits, or hanging half in and out of them.

A restaurant girl with her pink-purple sleeves tied in a belt appears, right as Heinz and Perry reconvene. Her hair’s spilling out across her shoulders and the rest of her’s spilling out of a tight white tee, and Heinz is too dumbstruck at the sight to mind her tugging Perry away for a dance. He flashes him an apologetic grin.

Which is fine, Heinz thinks, tipping back his 5th can of Foster’s. He loves these nights where the dance floor heats and the night air cools outside, in Brisbane’s weak excuse for winter. They were fun nights the month he worked at Expo, ducking out of his shifts early for drinks at the Festhaus, slapdash cocktails on the upper decks of the boardwalk, boys and girls hanging over the bannisters in confetti colored polos.

And the nights are even better now with Perry, the first friend he’s made in years, met in six days, which feels impossible, precarious. The nights are better than they were with those replaceable pavilion girls, even if Perry’s not as much of a party fiend, too smart for it, or (he’d never say) too short. Even if a certain melancholy hits as he watches Perry dancing, bouncing on bare duckfeet as that girl tugs his arms back and forth.

Heinz hates mapping the weird topographies of his sadness. When he tries he feels out the shapes of tall trees, his brother, Charlene. Beer helps fuzz the edges, even this weak stuff. He shakes the can. They call it “piss”. Sounds about right.

When Heinz emerges later from the gent’s he gets a face of bleached frizzy hair.

“Oh my god, I’m sorry, was I blocking it?” the girl laughs, turning. “Oh hey, rollercoaster Heinz. Hans?”

“Heinz,” he says, “And you’re good. Uh.” It’s the girl who works the ice cream booth, who fills the cones he brings to Perry, he tried committing her name to memory the other day. Coney? Creamy? “Hey, have you seen Perry around?”

“Perry?” Her face is entirely blank for a beat, then “Wait, the platypus? Oh my god, you missed it,” back to laughing, pink and pitchy like she sucked down a balloon. “Donna kissed him. On the beak and everything. I think it was serious too, like not kidding. That girl’s off her rocker, love her.”

The beer buzzes loud in Heinz’s ears. “Wow,” he says. “Where is he?”

(:

it's. an AU i haven't posted a good summary of yet but would like to. sometime. i just keep hashing out more and more details with @push-and-hold . but in short, it's an au where heinz and perry both meet working at the 1988 Brisbane World Expo Fun Park, where heinz is 22 and works with the rides and perry is 10 and works as one of the park's performing mascots "shuttle t. platypus". these are real world places and things which is why the au has been so much fun, doing all this research, digging up rare snapshots of the park from old people's facebook accounts and vintage vhs transfers. also it's basically all i've drawn or written since 2026 started. i'm having fun

negotiating asymmetry

people credit echidnas as the other egglaying mammal(s) and like yes it is true that they produce eggs. but they keep the egg in a marsupial-style pouch on their tummy. which is kind of cheating, imo. only platypuses keep it real with warm nest, warm tummy, warm egg. that's what i'm talking about

people just say things about platypuses. it really gives me vertigo. like the first time i saw the "no stomach" thing it was some fanart where ferb is saying this as a platypus fact. and i thought it was funny because i thought the joke was that ferb was disseminating MORE incorrect platypus facts, like that time he said they're the only egglaying mammal. and it was funny. then i learned people really say this about platypuses. and i had to dig in the literature just to un-gaslight myself

that’s the whole draw for me!! human and a little mute animal, ostensibly this vulnerable little victim but instead perry’s the unquestioned perpetual victor, the dom, utterly adored by the human who is theoretically out to kill him but worships the ground he walks on. pnf may be a goofy cartoon but they were cooking with these ingredients which is why i’m still here. thanks for the ask, really, i continue to be very invested in exploring the parameters of perry’s animalness, including in the new au i’ve been workshopping with pushandhold (older perry, younger heinz.) it just keeps giving and, same, i’m not really interested in a perry who is no longer an animal, that’s everything that makes him fun and interesting and empathetic and hot (AND heinz by connection, it's so important that heinz is the secretly normal weirdo who's in love with a tiny mammal.) it’s awesome to also fetishize it though, lmao, the interspecies kink is what gives it kick for me. but then again i need all of my ships to be fucking nasty all the time. what can i say, they are Very Compatible. <3

notes from this morning, not gonna do anything with them so might as well post

apart from fucking around with ppl's ages and locations i do really like an au as an excuse to give perry a furry tail