Don't Eat Sloth's Fish!

But if you look at the fish that you catch, you will find them to be very strange beings, hardly looking like the sea creatures of their names. Liquid, stones, and even bakery products float about in the pool, claiming to be fish. If that isn’t strange enough, the more peculiar - and somewhat sickening - side of this issue is how the fish are classified. They’re Food items, which means that you can feed them to your pets.

Fish as food! The very idea! Could any pet enjoy eating something that is staring up at them with those huge, bulbous eyes that all the fish have? The fish are even quite alive when you catch them, as anyone who has caught a Landfish knows, since those peculiar critters will try to run away as soon as they’re hauled out of the water. I don’t think I could bear to feed my pets one of these odd and amazing sea creatures.

But if the idea of fish being food doesn’t seem so out of the ordinary to you, just look at the kinds of fish you have to choose from for dinner. Rockfish, Blandfish, Breadfish, and other unappetizing species line the menu. Well, maybe the Breadfish sounds more appealing than the others, although I assure you that it won’t look so tasty after you reel in a soggy loaf of living dough that’s been lying at the bottom of the lake since who-knows-when. Fish caught at the underwater fishing hole are not fit to eat; it defies common moral and sanitary codes!

A fish may look like just another harmless cheap food item to feed to your pets, a bit like the omelettes and other free food that you get, but I have reason to believe that feeding a raw fish to a pet is highly unsafe.

The origins of this argument go back all the way to the origins of the fish, which I believe were made by none other than Dr. Sloth. (Sooner or later, almost every conspiracy in Neopia comes back to him, doesn’t it?) Sloth has a knack for making huge armies of evil monsters with which he intends to take over Neopia. This time around, he decided to step away from his usual line of work in machines, robots, and technology, and take a more organic route to world domination. He decided to make new, evil species of fish and distribute them among unsuspecting Neopians, calling them food items. Little do the fish-eaters of Neopia know that he implanted each fish with a formula that will brainwash the consumer into becoming a Sloth minion!

Does this theory sound farfetched, and perhaps a bit cliché? Well, just look at some of the fish and you’ll see that Dr. Sloth is leaving his mark. How do you think the Mechafish and Radarfish came to be? Not naturally, that’s for sure, and who in Neopia has the technology and the evilness to meld modern electronic devices with living creatures, but Dr. Sloth? It’s him, all right! The fish are his latest scheme to take over Neopia!

Here’s how I think this worked: Dr. Sloth came up with the idea of slyly infiltrating Neopia via his secret fish agents. So, using some of his many evil potions and morphing rays, he put these brainwash thingies into the fish, which don’t hurt the fish, but will turn anyone who eats them into evil minions. I don’t know exactly how this process works, since I’m not about to get close enough to someone eating an evil fish to actually see if this theory is right or not. For all I know, the brainwash doodads are contagious, and I definitely don’t want to become a Sloth follower. But this is my theory, so let’s move on and I’ll tell you what I think Sloth did next.

After Sloth turned the fish into evil contaminated food items, he loaded them all into the cargo hold of a spaceship, along with thousands of machine parts, bakery products, and other assorted items he had lying around. Then he and a bunch of his Mutant Grundos flew to Mystery Island. There, Dr. Sloth ordered a couple of Mutant Grundos to kidnap a few young Kougra cubs and tie them up deep in a jungle. This, of course, brought the Island Faerie rushing to save them, and her cooking pot was left untended.

The rest of Sloth’s Mutant Grundos unloaded all of the fish and other junk, while Sloth stood outside of the ship dazzling the crowd with his brilliant smile and handing out his avatar to people to keep their attention away from the strange items that the Grundos were carting out of the spaceship. Between all of the avatar collectors and Sloth followers on Mystery Island, it wasn’t hard to keep them distracted.

Sloth then dropped his fish and other weird items into the Cooking Pot, two at a time, and mixed them up to create a new fish/item crossbreed. Sticks of butter and fish became Butterfish. Loaves of bread and fish became Breadfish. Spotted Paint Brushes and fish became Lesser Spotted Fish. Various machine parts mixed with fish created the peculiar mechanical varieties of fish that would be Sloth’s giveaway.

Why did Sloth bother to mix the fish with other items? He wanted his fish to stand out, to look like no other fish in Neopia. That way, people would want to have them. If only Sloth had thought to create a FaerieQueenDollfish, he wouldn’t have been able to distribute them fast enough; but of course Sloth isn’t smart enough to have thought of that. He thinks that bread and butter is more appealing than a glittering and kind toy with fins. Honestly, what a simple mind. He could have at least come up with a Jellyfish so that you would be able to have a sandwichfish.

After Sloth had made all of his evil new species of fish, he zapped everyone with a ray to make them forget that they’d ever seen him there (but left them with his avatar so that they would have a lasting reminder of his smiling face), loaded his spaceship with the new, evil fish, and flew off before Jhuidah came back. He went to Neopia Central to try to bargain with the Food Shop shopkeeper to sell his fish throughout Neopia, but the Chia was suspicious and didn’t like the idea of his shop being overloaded with smelly hybrid fish, so he turned down the deal.

So, Sloth had no choice but to distribute the fish himself, which he didn’t much like the idea of when he could better use his time to be plotting new evil. When he happened upon a dry cavern with a lake under the sea, he thought he’d found the perfect solution. He dumped all of his fish in there, and then came up with a perfectly evil-looking new avatar to entice the rest of Neopia to go there and fish up the members of his newest dastardly army.

The fact that the cavern is full of all sorts of other junk and sea plants that occasionally get caught on fishers’ hooks has slowed down Sloth’s plan a bit, since his fish are not being reeled in as quickly as he’d like. Even so, the fish are spreading all over Neopia, overflowing people’s inventories and jamming up their Safety Deposit Boxes. Many pets have eaten these fish, thinking that they’re just another free food item, little thinking that they will follow Sloth forever after that day.

This is all just a theory, of course, but don’t you think it makes more sense than trying to pretend that Breadfish grow naturally? Someone had to bake the bread! Besides, you always knew that there had to be something more going on at the fishing hole than just a bunch of pets having a relaxing day with a rod and reel.

So, for the sake of Fyora and all things good, don’t fall for Sloth’s evil scheme and feed your pets the fish! They don’t look very tasty to me, anyway. Hopefully now that you understand the danger of these sinister finned creatures, you’ll stick to omelettes for your food needs.