In Empyrean, nothing must disturb the rabble. Excitement weakens the heart, the mind, and the moral fibre. This is why our national sprots (aka sports) are bonsai trimming, raking Japanese rock gardens, and low-stakes cribbage. Cribbage is an outrageous accommodation made for a particularly aberrant group of old-timers who wouldn't be quiet about the lack of card games. To counteract the possible excitement that may result from a card game, all Cribbage players must be on heavy doses of the Elephant sedative Etorphine so that they pass in out of consciousness and are not able to be excited. This would be horrifically dangerous.
To be clear Empyrean is a flotilla surrounded by Northern Atlantic sargassum, in an old submarine graveyard. The main staple is fish and deep-sea kelp. Deep sea divers fish with remora fish with wire tied around their fins. Sometimes, the remora's tale is removed and implanted with a metal device to hold the wire that the divers use to cast the remora fish. The remora, with its sucker lips, is quite adept at catching small fish.
Fish-men are criminals who opt for (are forced do under threat of death) a xenograft of fish tissue to essentially become a fish. They attack large fish with harpoons and nets while the deep sea divers trundle along the sea floor in small deep sea continuous-track tanks, stepping out of the tanks to snag a fish with a remora. It's an amazing sight.
Most divers are transgressors or penitents, guilty of excitement of the rabble or trying to cook the abundant sargassum into a psychoactive drug called "Sludge." Mining is also very important, man hacks leading down into the shadowy seafloor. This is a punishment reserved for people who have eaten grapes. Grapes degrade the moral fibre.
People who are beyond these crimes are given cement shoes because they should take a walk on the ocean floor to think about their acts. Obviously this punishment is reserved for air breathers, not fish men. Fish men are simply furnished with a nice hole in the head. The local police force puts these laws into place and puts these holes in the heads.
No religion is allowed that affords any fervor at all. Belief in God is outlawed but a belief in a vague, bland image of a higher power is allowed if it placates the soul. Otherwise, Etorphine or a strong opiate can be given to provide a substitute for a stifled soul and an overbearing belief in the unimportance of earthly achievements. If one believes in the afterlife, motivation for living can decrease significantly. Religious ideologues thenceforth become vegetative, like stupid roots quenched by stupid lie-water, sitting comatose in the hot, loamy earth. They contribute nothing. Just how we like it. Thusly we believe in what we call Gosh. God is such a harsh, ejaculatory word. "Gawd" shouted by a Pentecost between gritted teeth, writhing on the floor. Gosh has no inspiring grandness or historical context. It's a neutered God. We worship Gosh at a Calvinist-like church, modern and staid that is on a separate island attached to the flotilla.
Empyrean has music as well. Usually, Tibetan throat singing is listened to, although it was thought to be too inspiring and aggrandizing. Bosun's whistles, textile mill sounds, creaky timbers, the sound of a full broadside salvo on the USS Minnesota, and Dobermans barking in a dirt-patch backyard in Stroud, Pennsylvania, was then added to Empyrean Music, titled “Drivel in the Key of F***all.” This is usually what Empyreans listen to. It's piped into every room from 8:30 in the am to 765:562 in the pm.
There are no arts besides the Empyrean Arts Expo and resident artist Zeeb Ray. He encases grains of sand in lucite. Every once in a while, an unruly fish-man (usually dead) is included within the lucite. Aerosolized tranquilizer is dispersed in the gallery. Once a man had a violently passionate reaction to a single grain of sand suspended in the large acrylic “Zeeb blocks.” He got so excited, he went hopping mad and died on the spot. This is because Etorphine and the aerosolized tranquilizer used in most parts of Empyrean weakens the heart. Not only does excitement weaken the heart, but the deterrent to the excitement that Empyreans so thoroughly avoid turns the heart into an anemic, shriveled thing that will sputter to a stop if any excitement is felt. Thusly, tranquilizer is barely needed, if only to stop people from dying of excitement-induced heart attacks.
The language in Empyrean is slurring. Not slurring as in offensive, unprintable speech, but slurring as in unintelligible speech. Empyreans cannot articulate their lips as they are too doped up to do so. A conversation goes as such in Empyrean: “Slowwwwppppp? Deemed nawwyouuuuufinddddddtheeeeeeeerrrplaccceeeekkk?” A man sidles over and then falls on the floor, busting his nose, “Gurgleeeeeee, slappbuttterrrfindhernooooo.” The man on the floor was unaffected by Etorphine since he was a reformed “Sludge” fiend. So he got a mandatory icepick lobotomy. He is the guinea pig for a new experiment. Since tranquilizer costs so much to buy from world governments and shady drug-selling elements, the Empyrean Polity, run by the smartest man in the Virgo Supercluster, Jebidiam Clumpett, decided to start experiments on the brains of penitents. They figured out that they could throw out every part of the human brain except for the lizard brain. This left them with a perfectly un-seditious and happy Empyrean that couldn’t tie it’s shoes or figure out a Rock-a-Stack.
As for Jebidiam Clumpett, he makes all the decision and is biologically immortal (maybe,) a voracious sex god (based on hearsay,) strikingly handsome with a face hewn from a handsome kind of rock (apparently,) and probably entirely non-existent. The non-braindead, including some higher-echelon divers, supposedly visit him every thirteenth SaturThursday of the month at 67:890000 in the am/pm.
Empyrean expels the old world way of thinking. Why strive for greatness if the middle of the road is the most peaceful place to be? Art is a folly, seditious and wasteful. Artists are elevated to the titles of “great people.” Doesn't matter if they would sell their nan for smack; if they painted angsty blues and reds and went at Sotheby's for a squillion clams, they were great people. What is art? It’s name-branding. Zeeb is just as much a name-brand as Man Ray and Mark Rothko. Just like “Prelude to a Broken Arm.” It’s a snow shovel with Duchamp’s name written on it. And everything else is impersonating your favorite dead person. Not many people are new and dangerous as artists. If they’re new and dangerous, they’re calculating a cold commercial scheme to make them look like moody and firebrand druggy people addled with crippling alcoholism and deep-seated childhood trauma. Some people had good ideas and they happened to lead sad lives. People took it as the sad life and pain bringing the genius into fruition. Heroin made Bird Bird. No, it did not. That is dead god damn wrong. That’s why Empyrean’s live happily. They don’t have the brainpower to make art, to find soaring meaning, to fall madly in love, to revolt, to smile at great moments in life that are being etched into your memory as you live them. This is all hokum. Everything within this paragraph. Hackneyed as all hell. Wouldn’t it be better? Wouldn’t it be better if it hadn’t been said? No, but it’s not any better now that it has been said. It’s like Guido Contini says in “8 & 1/2” by Fellini. He says, “I have nothing to say but I want to say it anyway.” Then why just not say it? All the ideas are taken. You can’t put smoke back in the cigarette, you can’t put notes back in the horn and you can’t put letters back into the pen. That is also bunk. Go to Empyrean! Get your brain taken out! Sip apple cider out of a very long silly straw! Stay inoffensive! Never broaden your ken! It’s safer!

*Editors note: After everybody went through mandatory lobotomies, they all forgot to breathe. Everybody is dead. Do not come here.