anachronauts by stefan gagne - witchipedia

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The Fae Encyclopedia
(For Curious Humans)

Kraken

On old fairy tale maps, the authors would line the edges of the world with "Here Be Dragons," because it gave them room to write future stories, and a legitimate reason for keeping the world contained. If some sick bastard is running the show here on Earth, that explanation would make sense here, too.

Shortly after the Pandora Event screwed up global communications, attempts to reach America's allies by airplane and boat were made. And those folks sent out never came back. Soon after, shorter range exploration into international waters was made, and that's when the first confirmed recordings of the kraken were taken. Until then they were just the subject of scary sea shanties.

If you bred a killer whale with a great white shark (and if rumors are true, a wyvern) you'd get a kraken. They're leviathans, pure and simple. Sea monsters. They've got some means of detecting vessels in the water, and hunting in packs... not that they really NEED to hunt in packs, since one of these beasts is enough to take down most ships. If the attack happens close enough to shore, then sometimes survivors escape in smaller craft, ignored by the kraken while they systematically destroy and devour the larger ships. That's where the half-crazed stories come from.

You may ask "Well, okay, so ships are out. Why not airplanes, then?" and I'd say "The airplanes never came back. You wanna go out there in a jet and figure out why?". The rumors claim these things have a heck of a vertical leap out of the water. It's not a rumor I care to test, myself. Eastusa gave up on that approach a long, long time ago, especially given how hard it is to manufacture an aircraft these days. You can bang together a ship using the shipyards that already existed when Eastusa was isolated, but airplanes? Heck of a resource drain just to send them off and never hear from them again.

Fortunately, there seems to be a safety range in which they will not attack, which means shipping is open for port cities all up and down Eastusa -- it's the safest means of transport, given the unstable nature of roads through the Fringe. For unaligned or deep-Faerie-turf communities like Twin Cities, those roads are the only avenue they have, though... no direct ocean access.

We don't know if kraken exist only in the Atlantic, or in other oceans as well. Westusa is no man's land, so the Pacific's out of the question. If there's one thankful thing, they don't seem to enjoy the Gulf of Mexico very much, so the carribean isles are still open for business -- although information about them is scarce.

And no, nobody knows where the kraken came from. There are of course ancient myths and legends about them in Earth fairy tales, but there are similar myths and legends in, well, Faerie tales. Odds are they came over from the Land of Faerie during the Pandora Event and found something in our oceans that made them flourish. I'm hardly a xenobiologist, though.

EDITOR'S NOTE: I've seen pictures in children's books of these sea creatures. I think they're kind of majestic, in a horrific man-eating sort of way. Still, there's plenty of 'world' here in America to deal with, and I've got no burning urge to go explore the rest of this planet. They can swim about for all I care. Just as long as I'm not cruising a beach hittin' on bikini wearing chicks and I hear that old familiar string section going "Daaaa duum..."