Flash fiction prompt:
You have learned how to draw in the air! It looks a little like a cartoon — cell-shaded, flat colors, and so on. What is your first day with this knowledge like?
Detective Calhoun had seen a lot in his time on the force; there were gristly murders, white-collar crimes, no shortage of trumped-up parking violations, but he'd never quite seen anything like this.
As the CSI techs laid out strips of tape emblazoned with "DO NOT CROSS" across a small platoon of road cones, he drew closer to the scene of the crime, circling the offending object with a furrow in his brow deep enough to catch rainwater.
"How do you think the perp did it?" asked his assistant, a wiry young state trooper name Vasquez, "Aerosol, some kind of... drone?"
"Ain't a drone on earth that can do... this," replied Calhoun, "It's too clean, too free of noise, nothin' to project it onto. Can't call it a mass hallucination either, not when you're stone-cold sober and I've only had a whiskey"
Popping open his flask- full of said whiskey- the Detective took a long pull, baggy eyes locked on the scene before him, scanning, as they always had, for anything amiss. Hell, the whole thing was amiss, but that wasn't doing him much good. The colors were bold, the lines clean- even as he turned to face the object from a different angle, it seemed to follow his eye, always at the best possible angle for viewing. Whoever the perp was, they had wanted this to be seen, but... why this?
"Do we think it's gangs? Or... targeted, I mean... it looks like... well..."
"Yeah," the Detective rumbled, "It's targeted, all right. Too much in common with the business here, but..."
"Why this business?" Vasquez said, finishing Calhoun's thought. The grizzled old cop nodded after a moment, pocketing his flask and running his free hand through a receding hairline. Stepping back to take in the whole sight, he set his jaw, then shook his head.
"Whatever the reason, on thing is clear," he finally muttered.
"....We've got a real sick son of a bitch on our hands."
As the two police officers shared notes, the object before them simply hung silently in the air, offering no answers of its own. Floating before the well-regarded Bluefish Sushi restaurant, it simply was- a statement, a signpost... perhaps a curse: a simplistic, almost cartoonish floating picture of a potato-shaped skunk... enjoying a roll of sushi.
Feytato is CANON