Bob, Fred, Ethel, Pat, Squirm, and Poochie lived on Sandpiper Drive atop a bank overlooking Maebaleia’s seemingly deepest sinkhole. Called Sink X, because it was the 10th found and also, perhaps — especially long term — the most mysterious and relevant to our present story.
Also on the lip of the sinkhole was the town itself: Pipersville, named after the same avatar that founded Sandpiper Court a little later on. So the court and its 3 houses can be seen as a type of suburb of the town in my mind. Sink X links them together, large to small.
I’ve changed my mind. Let’s start in town instead. Cindy A., Jim A., and Todd A. conglomerate at a popular Pipersville watering hole.
Some nights they discuss this very subject: the Maebaleia sinkholes, which one is most mysterious, which one is even the deepest, and, sometimes, on the darkest of nights, they talk about the Crabwoo disaster associated with the 13th and last one. Some try to relegate that particular sink to a bowl, a Super Bowl they grant, but still a bowl and not a sink proper. A professor of Sinkology at a nearby university came in one evening and attempted to straighten out each and every one of them while downing pint after pint of delicious, locally brewed Stigman’s Quarterly, an IPA with an alcohol content of 11.6. Almost wine strength. Well, he looked at each and every one of them in the eye and stated, plain and clear as he could, that Satori, aka Maebaleia — and he straightened them out on the *name* of the continent as well — no, this *Satori* contains no sinks proper and that only Jeogeot (where he was born and raised, by no coincidence) and Corsica contained legitimate sinkholes, like the wide, deep Chasm Deep for the latter and, obviously, the most famous sink of all, Big Sink, for Jeogeot. “These depressions in *your* continent are either too shallow” — and he gave the stereotypical Finsteraahorn-Dammastock example here — “or too close to the coast to count. Like this so-called Sink X.” These were fighting words, and indeed Professor Suckaluck was beat to a pulp later that night by town thugs and sink fanatics alike, then tossed over the edge of town, eventually rolling and rolling and then resting, dead as a doorknob, at the bottom of the sinkhole he had earlier dismissed as irrelevant and mistermed. Certainly relevant to him now.
re-creation: death of Professor Suckaluck.
Sunklands 