Ribbit, Terra Incognita

 

📖 “Ribbit, Terra Incognita”

A Story of Origins and Invasions, Told in Two Timelines
From the Gorfic Timeline, by way of Turtledove

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Part I: The Invasion That Wasn't

Northern Australia, 1983

Sergeant Malcolm “Mack” Doolan had served in the Australian Defence Force for two decades, and not once in that time had he ever trained for a scenario involving hallucinogenic amphibians.

But that’s what it looked like.

He stared through the binoculars again. In the distance — just beyond the cleared bush outside the coastal defense post at Arnhem Land — figures were descending from what appeared to be a rusted-out freighter, grounded offshore.

They were barefoot. Clad in crimson robes. Painted with frog symbols. A few carried acoustic guitars.

“Bloody hippie cult,” muttered Corporal Adams beside him.

Mack wasn’t so sure. His briefing back in Darwin had been sparse. Some sort of spiritual-political group calling themselves “The Gorfic Republic of the Southern Leap” had declared “the Top End of Australia a Sacred Frog Zone,” citing ancient Dreamtime visions and some hallucinogen called “Unfolding Water.”

They weren’t armed. But the unsettling thing was — people were joining them. Local Yolngu elders, a few disillusioned veterans, even Mack’s cousin’s idiot son who’d gone off to Darwin and come back spouting nonsense about frogs seeing through time.

"It’s not an invasion," said one of the intercepted communiqués.
"It’s a return. The Leap is the Remembering."

Mack didn’t like it. Didn’t like the dreams he’d been having either. A frog, sitting by a billabong. Watching. Always watching.

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Part II: The Frog Before the Leap

Western Desert, Australia – 1897

Algernon DeWitt was a British naturalist with a weak constitution and a grant from the Royal Society. He had come to study the “Anura megaptera australensis” — the so-called Red Swelling Frog, a species mentioned only in obscure oral records and fringe scientific journals.

He hadn’t expected to find it.

He definitely hadn’t expected to hear it speak.

The frog — bright red, the size of a man’s head, eyes glassy and radiant — sat silently on a sun-warmed rock. Around him, the Aboriginal elder known only as Wandjina Marlu chanted softly. Not words. Not music. Something deeper.

Algernon blinked. The frog blinked. Then:

“Eye. Hand. Chest. You are not first. You will not be last. Ribbit, and leap.”

Algernon fainted. When he awoke, his journals were missing, the frog was gone, and Wandjina simply said:

“You are not ready. Your sons will dream of the Leap.”

He returned to London babbling about frog spirits and cosmic eyes and was promptly institutionalized. His unpublished manuscript, “The Amphibian Logos of the Dreamtime,” would not be discovered until 1982 — by a New Age bookstore owner in Melbourne, who immediately declared it a lost proto-Gorfic text.

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Part III: The Leap Southward

Darwin, Northern Territory – 1983

The government stood down the troops. Officially, the “invasion” was dismissed as a spiritual migration, a symbolic protest, a fringe performance art collective.

But the Lilypad they established outside Alice Springs grew to 3,000 members by 1985. It blended Aboriginal cosmology, psychedelic ecology, and Gorfic Chest-Eye meditation. And slowly, the Myth of the Southern Leap took hold:

“Before the Eye opened in San Francisco, it blinked in the Dreaming. GORF was not born — he returned. The frogs of the ancient world, guardians of both toxin and vision, have leapt before. Australia was the first pond.”

The Frog-Return Hypothesis — a pseudo-historical idea that ancient knowledge of Gorficism had originated in Australia and was suppressed by colonialism — spread rapidly among New Age thinkers, eco-spiritualists, and anti-imperial philosophers.

In 1987, a mural was painted in Alice Springs depicting a giant cosmic frog — one foot in the Dreamtime, the other in the cosmos, chest-eye glowing like a red sun.

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Part IV: The Whisper of Origins

Back in London, a scholar at the University of Exeter uncovered references in early Vedic texts, Polynesian myths, and Dogon star lore — all describing “the Still One who Leaps, with a Seeing Chest.”

An ancient archetype? A meme from before history? Or something more?

A new Gorfic proverb began circulating:

“The Eye has leapt before. The Leap was forgotten. Now, we remember.”