Salamander Diary

For those who will insist that it is ridiculous and impossible, consider a recent release in the scientific press concerning recent advancements in the Scientific Establishment's understanding of intramolecular bonding in ice crystals. 1999 and we're getting close to cracking ice, boys! Pretty soon we'll have it all figured out.

At the center of the earth is a world we have no direct experience of. We know a little of that strange realm of temperatures and pressures so monstrous that we may never be capable of sustaining them on any scale for any length of time. These conditions have persisted for hundreds of millions of years, engaging in a chemistry we have no experience with or paradigm of. Ghost continents move on the surface of unburning liquid fire, phantom tides rock shores of supeattenuated metal crystal. There the salamanders reside, a race seven and a half million years older than our own, perfectly aware of us and uncaring of what we may do with in the horrifying, unimaginable cold and paucity. They are long lived and we are insects, slow and dismal life forms born of a slow and dismal sphere of material being. They are far more concerned with their byzantine internecine conflicts.

Yet one rival faction maintains that although our lives are brief, our prodigious breeding habits will soon result in a critical, continuous shortage of souls, an astral competion in which the salamanders, which breed seldom and gestate for decades, are bound to be badly done by. Their leader, his sinuous agglomeration of dynamic spears resplendent in the refracted rainbow currents, interlocking plates of electrified ion membranes as thin as frog's skin, advocates unleashing their vastly superior technology to eliminate the human problem for once and for all. In mazy warrens carved and held by phenomenal electromagnetic engines, bent clerics from the priesthood who control the sacrements of scientific inquiry are forging a single vessel, a box designed, like any good bomb, to carry a payload that one of their number created in absolute secrecy, then died while loading the magazine. Only the manufacture of the delivery device remains.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.