Sawfish Tapped for Kraken Challenge

Clearing Way for Eventual Abyss Navigation?

Tasked with finding a method by which surface and submarine vessels may safely ply the waters of the various unnavigable Erden Watery Abysses, the Mt. Palomine Institute of Mysteries is exploring the application of schools of trained saw-fish to clear shipping lanes through zones of Kraken. If the method works, surface ships and submarines may be modified to haul cargo and passengers (although it's unlikely many would care to travel that terrifying way!) directly across the Abysses. At the moment they are restricted to coastal waters, the shallows between closely spaced islands, and the Bering Straight (Nippon, however, has been exploring the use of supersonic hydrofoils able to outpace even the fastest of the enormous and deadly cephalopods). The Abysses extend over more than 3/4 of Erde's Surface--the Polykneesional Abyss alone occupies nearly half of Erde--but these unimaginably vast regions remain largely unexplored to this day due to the Kraken menace. Several isolated inhabited areas, such as Cthululand, are only accessible by air or orbit. [Histofactoids: Attempts to navigate the Abysses through history have invariably ended in tragedy and disaster. In 1490, Christobel Colombo led an armada of enormous spiked iron vessels armed with primitive electric guns and orgone depth charges and attempted to sail to Aztekia, till then only reachable by dirigible. Two of the twenty-five ships, the Pinta and the Jubjub Vogel, reached the Aztekian port of Neuschleswig, badly battered and with almost 80% of their crews missing. Survivors reported seeing a raging Colombo hauled from the flagship, the Santa Klarharn, and devoured by an estimated five-hundred-meter-long Kraken. In 1939, a determined tribe of Kraken broke through the titanium Kraken nets at the Pillars of Hercules and gained access to the Roman Inland Sea. This action resulted in the Second Great War, a cephalopod-human conflict that lasted four years until the Sunbomb was developed and used operationally. The Roman Inland Sea, to this day, is still darkened with Kraken ink]