The Real Growlerville 7: The Camouflage Disaster
(A first hand account by investigative journalist, Mr. E)
I Am Still at the Growlerville Museum... just wandering about the Hall of Disasters. Slightly stunned and overwhelmed a mite bit.
I wander over to the Camouflage Disaster. It's a life size, 3 dimensional display of a typical garage. The plaque reads: "Do you see any of Grandpa Huhu's equipment in his garage?" I can't see anything other than the walls and the door, and a grease mark on the floor.
The plaque changes to: "One drop of Camouflage was accidentally introduced into Grandpa Huhu's garage. Over time, it consumed the visibility of everything he stored there. Please use the provided viewers to see first hand the effects of Camouflage."
The viewers look like safety goggles for a chemistry lab but with microcircuitry laced across all surfaces. I put them on and am astounded to see that the garage is so full of stuff that nothing else will fit into it!
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I am spellbound as I read about Camouflage. It's a purple liquid that smells like grape juice and comes in a tiny bottle which was specially designed as a containment vessel.
Camouflage can climb out of normal receptacles by itself. It's an encrusted substance, so the concepts of traditional physics do not apply.
This disastrous stuff was originally developed from Geologic sources by ancient Huhu shaman practitioners to help their kin hunt game. When it was first introduced, it was so successful that prey populations fell precipitously. But after a short period of time, it was abandoned, not for ecological reasons, but because hunters started losing their belongings.
Camouflage was so potent and effective an agent that anything that came in contact with it was lost forever, camouflaged so well it could not be seen. And this is where the potential for disaster turned to reality. Unknown to its shaman creators was the fact that once outside the containment vessel, Camouflage would move from object to object, slowly devouring the visibility of anything in its path.
And to make things worse, once released, there was no way to recapture it. Many citizens lost their homes, family members, some lost everything.
It was a disaster of major proportions.
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Many, many moons passed before a solution was found, which explains why this disaster grew so far out of control. By then, whole portions of what we now call Growlerville were no longer visible, and a huge number of citizens had been reported missing.
The solution consisted of a super clear liquid known as "100% Visibility." Camouflage could not resist it. Containment vessels baited with a tiny amount of this liquid, and designed so that Camouflage could enter, but not leave, soon recaptured all the fearsome encrustation. And a simple application of 100% Visibility restored to normal anything whose visibility had been compromised.
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I wander toward the entrance hoping to see Doan, but instead find a small crowd, huddled around someone's portable radio. The locals are very upset to learn that the Huhu Authority just voted to ban the harvesting of shadows until further notice because of environmental concerns.
Trading in EverCool stock has just been halted, and I'm getting the creepy feeling that Growler Louise was right.