#dimensionalrift

“Explore the Boundless Skies of Caelum: Where Magic Meets Mechanism in ‘Shadows of Tomorrow'”This captivating scene sets the stage for our AI-driven saga, unfolding in a city where the extraordinary becomes everyday. Join us as we delve into a world crafted by the unseen hand of technology, promising a journey of discovery, intrigue, and wonder. A Unique AI-Crafted Fiction Series Hello readers,…

The good people of Zabkowice had solid experience in the torches-and-pitchfork-routine. Since centuries. There was the plague in 1606. 2,000 died. All because a bunch of maniacs. They had established a vigorous trade in poisonous powders, mixed from corpses and were in dire need of supplies.

When the story leaked, the Zabkowicians got their pitchforks and scythes, formed the customary mob and smoked out the whole fine lot of them.

Then that loopy chap from Ingolstadt came with his outlandish ideas of animating dead matter to life. They burned the castle where the morbid bedlamite had settled down with his retorts and generators and what not. The 8’ tall thing that had haunted the surrounding woods, arisen from the said doctor’s lab back then, was barely sufferable, but the whale sharks simply weren’t.

The Zabkowicians simply knew that the tale of the meticulously dressed, portly little Teuton with his neatly parted hair and the perfectly annoying habit of clicking his heels while introducing himself as “Doktor Ambrosius Wanzenbock” would not have a happy ending when he moved into the castle ruins with his dynamo-electric machines, antennae and diesel engines.

Then the weather freaked out. And cattle disappeared. And returned. Changed. From having green coats all of a sudden to sporting additional tails, legs and heads. Isolated cases, granted, but as soon as the skies ripped open on Walpurgis Night and a school of whale sharks glided through the rift over the village, the Zabkowicians had it.

Especially, when one of the giant brutes suddenly began to flap frantically with his pectoral fins and crashed on the village’s high street. And destroyed the tavern. Not funny at all. While the rest of the fish glided towards Breslau, folks flocked together and burned out the Wanzenbock. The beached whale shark was transported to an abattoir in Glatz and manufactured into fish meal and codliver oil. The children of the region hated Dr Ambrosius Wanzenbock and his jumbo fish with a vengeance. For years.

Depicted below is the unfortunate whale shark that was lured from another dimension by Dr Wanzenbock, with at least the children of Zabkowice still happy about the occurrence, being still too young to be part of the wrecked local tavern’s customer base. The photo was taken by the US journalist Sanford Griffith, in the region for the New York Herald in 1921, but never published.

An adult whale shark is a bit large for an exhibition at the #wunderkammer , but a taxidermied 32’ specimen, caught off Fire Island, New York, in 1935, that had wandered quite off course can be wondered and marvelled at here:

… the #wunderkammer contents itself with Griffith’s photo and the wondrous tale of artificially produced dimensional rifts in Silesia.

- Dimensional Rift -