The World of Nero

A Guide to "Journey Through Nero"

The world of Nero is rich in various forms of life, including single-celled organisms. Leaving aside information about numerous bacteria and single-celled algae, let's talk about amoebas, or rather, one of their varieties: gish.

Gish are giant marine amoebas, on average the size of a cat, or even a dog. Despite being a single, highly overgrown cell, it is quite adapted to life (in particular, the cytoplasm does not completely leak out of it due to cuts, as one might think). Of course, like any single-celled organism, it is completely devoid of the ability to think, and for most of its life, gish spend their time performing Brownian motion in the ocean, trying to absorb everything they encounter with their pseudopods (judging by the fact that gish have not yet become extinct, they still encounter things they can eat quite often). Rarely, one can encounter terrestrial gish, which have adapted to periodically crawl onto the shores of islands in warm regions to encounter everything in sight there (although what difference it makes to them where exactly they encounter something, the scientists of Nero have not yet figured out). This terrestrial variety of gish still has to return to the ocean during division, but since they do not know how to purposefully return anywhere, about half of them get stuck on land until the next division period (one old fellow, who recently celebrated his ninetieth birthday, told us that he has been observing a gish for eighty-one years, which has not been able to get to the ocean all this time).
Many legends have been created about these amazing creatures, the most famous of which tells about a giant gish attacking ships. In folklore, this gish is nicknamed the Kraken; it is said that even its smallest pseudopod is longer than the mast of a military galleon, and the ships it has sunk number in the dozens, if not hundreds. Of course, the legend provides many examples of sunken ships and heartbreaking stories about how this terrible event occurred, in all the details, and at the end, it invariably adds that no one on those ships survived. Fortunately, this is nothing more than just a legend...