Ah, what a nice day it was!

The trip across the entire treehouse village of Ghebville took a long while, but luckily there was a local train station attached to a particularly large tree at the edge of the village (situated up in the air, sort of like the Disney monorail but less outdated and lame) and they only had to make two transfers in a one-hour trip to get where they were going.

And when they did, it was so nice.

Being in the treehouse village of Ghebville in the middle of the deep jungle meant that sunlight did not often breach them in any meaningful way; they had to live by torchlight, candles, and the illumination of television sets. When they left Ghebville for a day trip, though, they experienced the blue skies and warm, pleasant breeze that humans were generally meant to experience (though it was never necessary, of course).

All three young men (and let me stress just in case this is relevant in the future if I get enough reader demand for R-18 bonus chapters: all three of them are absolutely over the age of constent in Ghebville, and the land of Alabaster as a whole, and the entire world of Wuweizi, and in your local municipality, and just to be safe I will say that all of them are at minimum the age of eighteen, but honestly even older; Kiwi is actually pushing thirty even if he acts thirteen because he is the quirky fun boistrous one of the trio group) were very happy about the sun.

“I like the sun,” said Xi Guo Lao.

“I, too, like the sun, hehehe, lol,” said Kiwi.

“I like the sun but it’s actually pretty obvious that a sun as powerful as this would completely ruin our planet, seeing as we live on a flat plane surrounded by a giant ice wall on all sides,” said Budou in all his available intelligence. “We’d be trapped in a sort of greenhouse effect where all the heat would be stored in our bit of land and sea while the ice wall would completely reflect all of it, and global temperatures would rise into uninhabitable levels very quickly. The carbon footprint of the icewall is too small to allow for things like that.”

That was absolutely not at all how science work, but neither Xi Guo Lao nor Kiwi knew that, so they were mostly impressed that Budou could say so many sciency words without any hesitation, which probably meant that it was true.

Soon, the train stopped at the riverfront that had one giant pier and one mediocre seafood restaurant, at the town known only as Long Yan. What a Yan was, or why it was long, nobody knew, but everyone knew that this was the best place to catch fish during the Carp Festival, so they gathered here each year in order to hunt carp.

“I can’t wait to hunt carp and have a really fun fishing trip!” Kiwi shouted with absolute glee.

“I’m afraid you won’t be doing that this year,” said an unfamiliar voice. The three men turned and found a really short police officer dressed up like a British constable and holding firmly in his right hand one of those weak-ass night stick things.

“Why the hell not, you bastard?” Budou asked.

The police officer brutalized him with the night stick in an uncalled for, but ultimately narratively justified beating. It was unclear whether or not this was supposed to be commentary of any sort, but luckily the tone of the scene was comedic enough that most people merely dismissed it as commentary-free silliness and moved on.

“Ow, ouch, ouchie, my bones,” whined Budou. “Ow, ouch, oof, my bones hurt.”

“There ain’t no fish,” the police officer said. “All got eaten.”

“Eaten?”

“By the Giant Red Carp,” he explained.

“The... WHAT?” Kiwi shouted. “I love red things! Because I’m red and I love things that look like me!”

“Well, the Giant Red Carp is a once-in-a-millennium event, and you aren’t likely to do anything about it. It’s such a giant fish that it could swallow all of us whole and not even notice. You’d best stay away from it, even if its Soul Crystal is surely so immense that capturing it would give you immediate strength, and even if it’s just down-river from—“

Before the police officer could explain further, the three young men sprinted down-river, chasing that Giant Red Carp.