They had all a great past, and an even grander future. The box from which they all came said it loud and clear:"Certified Non-Toxic * Brilliant Colors" and most importantly: "Never Dries Out!". Perfect.
Each one of them made it to be an elephant, a monkey, a bird, a car, a thing, a man, a dog and then again some sort of other monstrous thing. New shapes every day, new adventures.
They all came from the same box, there were mixing instructions on the back (right next to those "how to make a turtle" instructions,) but they never actually "mixed". They remained in their "Richer, Smoother Colors!" state. They changed shapes, they did not become one.
The white piece seemed most afraid of being crushed into the others. It somehow had this weird idea that it had some extra kind of shape, even when it did not, well, that was funny for a few days or so, but then it just became annoying. Even now, the white piece was claiming to be an elephant. Comoooon, what kind of elephant is that, where is the trunk?, where are the ears? It maybe used to be an elephant, maybe a few days ago, but they all had been all sorts of things since. Just to avoid the argument, the other three agreed, that white was an elephant... he had to promise not to make elephant noises though... and yes, whale noises also counted as "elephant".
Dark green had a very different issue. She somehow read somewhere that she was not even supposed to be part of the box. She had been manufactured to roam free, to climb up walls, maybe go into standup (work as silly-putty.) That was obviously a pretty strange idea to her three siblings. She was the same thing as theys, just got a bit more dye after (after!) they had been manufactured, following the same(!) recipe. She did not want to hear that, tried to escape several times, now carried the scars of these attempts, the pebbles, the dog hair, the who knows what, the dust, supposedly even a quarter. (Nobody had ever seen the quarter, she just claimed that it was a california one... oh well...she saw it as "savings to be used for her later life", the others just saw it as a figment of her imagination...)
Bright green was a bit of a name dropper. Who the hell wanted to know about somebody called: Fra Luca Pacioli, Giorgi or this guy Brunelleschi... Then came some talk about Platonic Solids, Kepler, Rudolf Steiner, R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz...
When light green started about Carlo Suares and some anthropocosmic ideas they were still able to bear it... Claiming that Copernicus had been wrong and that "Light Green" was in fact the center of the "known universe", seemed so outdated and bizarre that the others just hoped for the day somebody would just step on light green and turn him into a two dimensional object...
Beige wanted to be less than that. Beige imagined himself as a moebius strip at first... an elegant one, thin, almost translucent.
He then dreamt of turning himself into something even less dimensional... maybe a moment in time, a dot, a blip, a spark of a thought, a distant memory?...
He was also the one who somehow foresaw that not only would they all end up as a grayish, plump piece of modeling clay with some enclosed dirt, well, they would probably end up being mixed with the toy soldiers, which they would then slowly by surely dissolve, since "Never Dries Out" meant that they had this hidden, quite destructive superpower of greasing and softening their surroundings.
He hoped that maybe some of his ideas of self removal would survive, once they turned into a dirty, hairy, forever soft boulder...
Maybe this was the solution... if they just turned into dirt, maybe they could just mix with some potting soil, turn into nutrient... die?...
No... death was unfortunately not really an option. They were created to be "moldable" forever... somebody would probably find them in a few hundred years and shape them into something that was going to prove this person's theory about the current times, the thing all four of them called "now" (at least for now)... "Never Dries Out" meant being moldable forever, slaves to the good and more often really bad ideas by others, others who even though barely ever really born were always allowed, had the privilege, to actually die.