Atlantis
From The Encyclopaedia Expurgatia
Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
It has been said that one should learn to crawl before one walks. If this is true, then one should wait considerably longer before attempting to swim. But then, homosapiens were never all that good at following standard logic.
So they built a city. That within itself wasn't such a bad thing to do. But they built it in the middle of nowhere. Specifically, they built it in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
The city itself was all right, by human standards, anyway. Structurally and buoyantly it was sound. In fact, architecturally it was rather pleasing as well. The marble pillars rose magnificently into the clouds and the sanded coastline was made up with diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and sapphires. Statues were carved into the stone walls and huge arenas and coliseums were constructed to accommodate the vast population and bring it together for what seemed like a little harmless entertainment.
That was where the problem began: the entertainment consisted of large warriors entering the turf of a lion to do battle. This always turned out in one of two ways.
First, the warrior would attack the lion, who really wanted no part of the battle to begin with, and hold it off with sword and shield until the lion wore itself out enough to be stabbed in the ribs. Thus, the lion would die and the warrior would emerge victorious.
Second, the warrior would enter the lion's grounds and attack. But, instead of wearing the beast out, he would make a fatal error in timing or slip on a small rock or develop third degree sunstroke or something, and the lion would pounce upon and consume the intruder. Thus, the warrior would be eaten alive and the lion would die. The lion would die for crimes against man. No trial; no jury; the lion would simply be sentenced for immediate execution in the spirit of upholding the law against anthropophagous homicide.
Felicide never occurred to the resident homosapiens of Atlantis. But it did occur to the cats. It occurred to the cats that these homosapiens were killing them off, one by one, with a scandalous set of doublestandards.
And so the cats sentenced the homosapiens.
Carefully, bit by bit, they tore away at the roots of Atlantis, causing it to lose, day by day, more and more of its buoyancy. When they were convinced that it wouldn't float for more than another week, they left, lightly joking about those big, dumb lizards they'd deposited on Mars some sixty-five million years before.
Roughly a week later, Atlantis sank.
