the waters run gray in sleepytown, and in the drains they carry gray water into the black, and with an angry hiss that nobody hears they disappear into places that nobody sees. and after a time, the waters, that were once rain, and once gray, settle like the sediment in a place so black that the shadows lose and forget themselves. and in this place, in the depth of a pool that has forgotten the taste of light, lived the first kappa.

what's a kappa you ask? if you asked him, he wouldn't know. the kappa was a name given to him by the first people who had spied his kind, the japanese. and to them, he was something halfway between a ridiculous joke and a nightmare. they depicted him in waterbrush scrolls, a monkey-child with a bowl pate, doing mischief with foxes and badgers. and in ghost stories, or cautionary tales, they spoke of him in hushed voices, of how his kind crept out of dead pools at night, hungry for the livers and offal of children and women, sucked out through their anuses. a creature between dread and laughter. some thought him a myth, but then again, cryptozoologists claimed he was real, and a lost evolutionary link, broken, and dropped into the midnight places of the world...