story

At the end of the story of "Sharkman Frank Tribute: Friendship is Magic," DJ Bluebeard and Redford Saint Barth combined the blue orb and the red orb. This turned them into a KRA - one of the mysterious multi-beings with extraordinary powers - so that they might puncture a hole in the membrane separating their world from others. The current location of DJ Red Kra is unknown.

Now, beneath Fishouse, there exists a wall where the membrane is decidedly weaker than it used to be, and where one might find portals occasionally opening up for no known reason. The Icepunk Queen guarded this wall before she was defeated by the newly-formed KRA. Some brave fishes determine to venture into other worlds via this wall for reasons known only to them. Our protagonist, FISHBOI 1, now wishes to use the portals to find his presumed-dead long-lost friend, who was sucked into one long before Kra opened up the way to other worlds. After falling face-first into a portal at the gravesite of FISHBOI 23, FISHBOI 1 finds himself in KRANTON.

Long ago, KRANTON was created to contain the spreading, sprawling forces of Dark and Light that met in a battle with no end. Highly electrified crystal facets were created to capture and merge the dark and light forces. These forces, or aetheric beings, are distributed randomly across the surfaces, similar to static electricity. The movement of these beings across the surface generates LIFE within the faces.

The creatures that live inside the facets, ignorant of the battle that once took place, perceive life, matter, and time as a sequence of events occuring in 3-dimensional space, unaware that they are not the only world, and unaware that their existence is a flickering 2-dimensional image on the side of a crystal. The only way to know this would be to step outside one's own facet.

These facets pulse across the surface of what seems to be a large ship, or perhaps a being, almost like a clock displaying different worlds attached to the ends of rythmically-moving hands. This is the sort of barrier that FISHBOI penetrated (but from the other direction). Now that FISHBOI is outside of his own world, he has forgotten how to breathe, or why to do so.

KRANTON is not just a list of facets, nor is it only the ship / clock / large organic superstructure beneath them. KRANTON is also a person, or a voice, or a highly- but incompletely-embodied force, who seems to get along swimmingly inside of KRANTON... inside of Himself! He is the crown jewel of the entire system, the unknown, autonomous, self-regulating force that appeared when the great King was killed by seditious rogues three thousand years ago. This ultimate being now takes note of FISHBOI 1, aware as he is of all the goings-on in his person-world. Perhaps comprehending the intentions of FISHBOI 1 and the whereabouts of his friend, KRANTON teaches him to Swim through Air, and shows him the way to the land of Shadowbrush.

Fishouse is close to another facet of KRANTON called Shadowbrush. The properties of this place are a little different from the other facets. When one is safely inside any of the other facets, that world is real as long as one is inside of it. Shadowbrush, instead, is the world inhabited by those vagrants who were clever enough to learn how to navigate the aetheric substance of the crystal lands. Shadowbrush sits on the outside of a number of realities - along their edges - and is something like the combination of a facet and the eternally-outside, aetheric non-world of KRANTON. Shadowbrush is the land of glitches and of twilight, the land that has quite nearly perfected philosophical Idealism. However, their ties to previous worlds keep them from adapting fully to this way of being. Fishouse is adjacent to it, as is the planet Earth, which, like other facets, has no idea that other places exist so fully and persistently right next to it.

Shadowbrush is unique in its total awareness of the different facets outside of themselves in KRANTON. Because of their awareness of what they are, they have embraced their 2-dimensionality, as well as their narrativity - they know they're in a story on a flat screen but have mastered the art of tasteful META.

Those who travel to Shadowbrush find themselves in a Forest. The inhabitants of this Forest are called FAE (Farcical Autopoietic Entities). The beings take many forms - humans, animals, aliens, and shadows - but they are all FAE. Everybody in Shadowbrush can fly, including humans. In Shadowbrush, all humans are seemingly fated to slowly turn into fairies, perhaps because that is what they think they ought to be once they learn to fly. Suggestibility and belief is important here, which, when unchecked, can lead to radical changes in personality and form.

Of all the creatures, the spiders are the most clever, and they are the most socially and politically prominent of all creatures in Shadowbrush. One ambitious spider, whose name is IKTOMI, has plans to enlarge the borders of Shadowbrush into other worlds. He, with his fairy friend from the planet CRINOID, are launching a campaign to deploy a technology, which they call "the Web," in order to leverage the natural imaginative power of Shadowbrush denizens into a greater force which can be used to "peacefully encroach" upon other facets in order to subsume them and obsolete their sovereignty.

IKTOMI is married to Samara, a human who wants to be nice but is too immanently snobby to do so. She is proud to be married to somebody so important and she's happy to have the money.

Their daughter is IKTOMA, the fairy-spider halfling. She wants to make her father proud. She dislikes her mother. She uses her charisma to gain political advantage. She is the first to see and befriend FISHBOI 1 when he washes up on the shores of Shadowbrush. She wants him to help her develop the web.

FISHBOI 1 is enthusiastic at first, but learns that this will basically erase the other facets, including friends and family, and ultimately end the struggle of KRAs across all dimensions in a very unsatisfying way. He must convince Iktoma to help him in stopping her father. He also finds out that CRINOID is the Shadowbrushian word for Fishouse. The fates of these two worlds, it seems, is interconnected. It also means... Iktomi's partner from the planet CRINOID is actually Fishboi 1's long-lost friend FISHBOI 23.

Story