“In Ice-a-Roo did Kublai Prawn/ A stately Silverglobe decree . . .”
1 the Shrimp
So, your friend and mine, Flewyn Hael,
a simple man who keeps his eyes to the ground, and, so doing, stumbles across the occasional shining ornament half-submerged in flowing water, was removed of one such trinket, an anachronistic perspicillum, by this jerk:
a sometimes comrade in arms, “Fish Face” Ishfael.
Flewyn, unchivalrously ambushed, beaten, and left for dead face down by the riverside by said snake, in the same manner came into contact with those alien intelligences David refers to as “psionic freshwater shrimp,” but who refer to themselves as the la Malacostraca Nostra, the bastardized Latin appealing to an inter-terrestrial crustacean’s sense of high theater and meta-humor.
The shrimp sang Flewyn such sweet songs about their icy homeworld that he recovered from his all-but fatal flogging within the month and wound his way back to town, head full of starshine. After catching up to his cronies (minus Ishfael, who had in the interim run afoul of the group and met an appropriately grisly end), Flewyn got back to work. And was shortly rendered quiescent for a second time (by trap-triggered poison gas) whereupon the translucent shrimps continued their narrative about the most expansive continent of origin, Ice-a-Roo.
Contained then herein are those things that Flewyn learned of Ice-a-Roo, although the names, decoupled from the semigraphic language of a hyper shrimp, land decidedly closer to a lexicon out of Flewyn’s own experience. Dead associates aplenty. Lost romantics such as poor Argyros.
2 - the Sphere
Argyros Matellis, surveyor-priest sent from Anatolia to collect distant waters and return them to the great library of Tythys (“from whom the gods are sprung,” per Homer).
Slain by an animated statue, his hulking body borne away by giant ants to feed their funguses.
It was Argyros who first drank water from the enchanted fountain wherein the hyper-shrimp were confined, and, although he preferred to keep them in a pool of his own making for further study, who ultimately acquiesced to those psionic voices intoning, “Free us! Release us into the river!’ and so carried over his shoulder a barrel full of said shrimp and poured them forth.
After Argyros is called (in Flewyn’s retelling) that great floating sphere-city on the shores of the Open Ocean Ophioneus (to a hyper-shrimp, the warm currents which sunder the ice and reveal the sky above are as the sea to you and I). Approximately equidistant to Lost Bombilcar and the Dread Castle Castellanides, to Pyr and the Triple Metropolis Frigus, it is Argyros (the city) to which shrimp from across the under-ocean bring their commodities. The city’s periodic surfacing allows facile trade with those terrestrials who live over the ice.
Fair Argyros, bobbing like a beach ball on the frigid ocean. Marvelous within the water, dismal haunted gray without. There’s a sale on at the Markets 6+d6 though, so get to them before they go full zone epipalagic once again! Don’t get caught in a tide pool waiting out the next time the Twining Hands lower half the city back into liquid. Remember how the Blue Lady was stolen and rescued, but turned a different color in the Above and her rabbits subsequently refused to recognize this interloper’s authority? The same will happen to you if insisting on reckless emergence.
3 - the Ships
Hyper-shrimp live in swarms beneath the ice of Ice-a-roo and stick mostly to their cities, citadels, and other sanctuaries. It’s not safe in the open water abundant with carnivorous horrors. (George Miller showcased the state of a shrimp without a city in the midst of some otherwise pretty clunky CGI in Happy Feet 2:
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orXqt7W7SQA,
and although Flewyn cannot entirely endorse the Flat Earth message purportedly contained therein, it does track with his basic cosmography which is decidedly pre-Ptolemaic).
For a shrimp to make its way anywhere outside a sanctuary, it’s best to team up with, oh, say about 5 other shrimp and make a boat (6 other shrimp if you use the much-derided expansion volume Ricercata Uprooted that adds an additional characteristic to every ship, Grace). There are probably some others on board too, but the movers and shakers that give the thing its fundamental character go something like this, 3d6 in order:
(Str) Hull Quartermaster
(Int) Guns Gunner
(Wis) Butter Boatswain
(Dex) Speed Helmsman
(Con) Range Engineer
(Chr) Skipper Captain
You get any number of these krill-ships together, and you’ve got you a TROUPE that might be able to get somewhere without being eaten up yum yum, the dreaded Total Calamari Plate (as you can imagine, the term TCP is both catastrophic and insulting to your basic brain-shrimp who are not fond of things with tentacles, which tend toward hunting them - some shrimp-scholars even go so far as to use the cumbersome portmanteau Krillamari instead, and sometimes swap the letters around a touch for euphony).
Of course, a troupe might easily experience less-lethal misadventure, such as crash-landing in some other-dimensional pool with no recourse but to manipulate several simpletons into bearing them elsewhere in earthen jars.
