“‘A Black, basically euclidean abyss’, that is what the fatman once told me it was”. The Scotsman tried in futility to convey to an operative of the Coast Guard his reasoning for retreating to such a remote place as the far-flung depths of the submarine domain. Unfortunately for our trans-temporal retrospecting friend, this particular member of the coast guard had recently ceased to exist in any meaningful way after the very boundaries of time and space themselves had been altered by an anomalous quantum event orally transmitted by the time-traveller in a desperate attempt to avoid pneumatic mutilation at the vacuum-nozzles of a small army of marauding apemen.
This particular Coast Guard operative seemed somewhat unusual to the Scotsman’s sensibilities; not only due to his peculiar temporal fixation, but also due to the simple fact that, instead of a human body, the officer’s corporeal form seemingly consisted of little more than a system of hollow tubes of nodular insight immersed in a conspicuously lime-green aura. The sea the Scotsman looked out upon was not any earthly water-sea, but instead a boundless sea of syrup, energized by pleasant silhouettes; for he had arrived in a section of an alternate plane of reality known as Austral Hyperspace. The officer with whom he had failed to communicate with was, in-fact, a lightcomber; a member of a breed of transdimensional entities who rely upon optic-waves leaking into their home realm from other parts of the multiverse in order sustain great cities of two-dimensional, balinese shadow puppet-like buildings...
After what should have been several months of travel-- if months had still existed-- the Scotsman finally arrived at another ocean somewhere else in the cosmos; this one, it appeared, actually contained water...
Far, far below; hidden amidst the eternal gloom of the watery abysm, lay the deepest oceanic trench in all of existence; known by a name which could easily strike fear into the hearts of even the bravest of hominids...Curtis’ Folly.
Surely such an inaccessible location could serve as the perfect place for the Scotsman to seek asylum from...whatever it was that he was fleeing from in the first half of the story...honestly it has been like three weeks since I wrote that part and I have seriously forgotten what it was about but anyway; moving right along then...
The Scotsmen couldn’t actually be left in peace in Curtis’ Folly; this was primarily because this stretch of seafloor had already been laid claim to by one bad dude. The Trenchmaster, beset in fiery, intricate clown-makeup; he lives in a bubble of green light and forever travels liquid space in search of overly-self-assured schmucks like the Scotsman, for whom a worthy comeuppance would sometimes be given.
Several ∅ays later; our protagonist arrives in an undisturbed colony of sea snails, Neo-Disco Snails to be exact. The colony was a peaceful place, completed unspoiled by the ravages of war or capitalism; it had eerily beautiful fields of bioluminescent seagrass in the endless night of blue glow and greenish darkness; and wild, raging, hermaphroditic orgies fueled by a cocktail of blind lust and psychotropic isopod venom. The Scotsmen spent what should have been a very long time with those hedonistic mollusks; but ultimately, an event of immense singularity brought him into upheaval once again. A submersible from a far flung realm arrived in Curtis’ Folly, catastrophically meeting it’s end just beyond the Disco Snails‘ village; Its pilot--a frogman--emerged from the wreckage with a copper valve embedded in his skull; a valve through which the shimmering, ethereal essence of all his thoughts dreams ebbed away silently into the lightless sea; truly a tragedy for all those involved. The only survivor of the crash was a chrome-plated hydrocollection robot named Siegfried; who emerged from the gloom to lay claim to the undersea world.
The Trenchmaster, refusing to accept the robotic newcomer’s unwavering bravado, challenged Siegfried to a game of Ketchikan Pickup (a form of solitaire); but, as Siegfried pointed out, solitaire is not a particularly appropriate sport for more than one persona at a time; so the Trenchmaster settled for a brawl instead.
When the Scotsman finally found the two surreal morons two μonths later, they had ended up reconciling over a slice of ambient cake; no epic battle, no universe shattering struggle, this just isn’t the time nor the place for such things. The Scotsman begged the duo to help him return home, to banish the sinister jibblymen back to the hellish future from whence they came and to aid him in regaining his own forgotten past.
“You say many wise things for someone so small, my caledonian comrade; but truly, your journey has barely begun, reach inside your heart and I am confident you shall find all the answers to every question that you ask.” said the Trenchmaster. Reaching inside his heart the Scotsman pulled out a large, parasitic abyssal isopod larger than his head; and looked about himself regarding his surroundings with some confusion; for where once had been the dark chaos of Curtis‘ Folly now instead lay a well appointed country manner on the better side of the astral plane.
You see, as it so turns out; the Scotsman is in fact none other than the Superintendent of Dreams--a character that I ripped off from Mark Twain and somehow made scottish--and the whole life he thought he lived; with the whisky plantation, and the cabin, the psyberwoods, and the jibblymen, and the trench were all nothing more than an elaborate dream-within-the-dreamworld triggered by the psychoactive secretions of a baneful crustacean that had grown in the Superintendent’s hot tub because he didn’t use enough chlorine...
Problem solved...
