Forklift Yacht Club: The World So Far

Forklift Yacht Club: The World So Far

Forklift Yacht Club began as stories about cats working, traveling, fixing things, getting into trouble, and occasionally finding themselves somewhere they absolutely did not intend to be.

Over time, those stories started connecting.

Not through one continuous storyline, but through a world that keeps appearing from different perspectives.

Some records are workplace stories. Some are broadcasts. Some are flight recordings. Some are accounts of storms, strange ships, unusual weather, or events that the people involved don't fully understand.

The albums aren't necessarily presented in chronological order. Some happen alongside one another. Some occur much later. Some contain references to events that appear elsewhere in the archive. Others seem completely unrelated until a familiar name, location, transmission, or incident appears again.

And occasionally, the records don't quite agree.

That's intentional.

The people living in this world don't have access to the complete picture. They only know what they personally experienced.

The audience gets to see more.

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Warehouse Sessions

Warehouse Sessions is one of the most grounded parts of the Forklift Yacht Club world.

It focuses on the everyday working environment: the warehouse, the people who keep it running, the personalities that develop around the job, and the strange situations that become completely normal when you've worked somewhere long enough.

There isn't necessarily a grand mystery behind every shift.

Sometimes the problem is simply getting through the day.

Equipment breaks. People improvise. Procedures become questionable. Coworkers develop their own ways of doing things. What starts as ordinary workplace life occasionally provides details that become useful elsewhere in the wider world.

Warehouse Sessions establishes the ordinary side of Forklift Yacht Club—the world that exists before anyone has reason to wonder whether something larger is happening.

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Shift 03 Broadcast

Shift 03 Broadcast expands the workplace side of the universe through recorded broadcasts and communications.

The focus is still on the people doing their jobs, but the wider world begins becoming more noticeable through what they hear and report.

The broadcasts provide another way of experiencing the same world: not necessarily through a narrator explaining what happened, but through people reacting to events as they happen.

Some information is routine.

Some isn't.

And some details make more sense when compared with records from other parts of the archive.

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Aisle Blue

Aisle Blue explores the retail side of the Forklift Yacht Club universe.

Aisle Blue is an ordinary part of the world from the perspective of the people working there. Customers come and go, employees deal with the usual problems, and the store operates as part of the same larger society seen throughout the other albums.

The importance of Aisle Blue isn't that everything happening there is extraordinary.

It's that the world continues functioning while extraordinary things are happening elsewhere.

The people inside the store don't necessarily know what is happening outside.

And that's one of the recurring ideas throughout Forklift Yacht Club: everyone is living inside the same world, but nobody has the whole story.

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Whiskers and Wonders

Whiskers and Wonders steps away from the larger mysteries and spends more time with the characters and their lives.

It's a reminder that the Forklift Yacht Club universe isn't built entirely around anomalies, storms, strange ships, and unexplained events.

People still have ordinary lives.

They have jobs, relationships, hobbies, arguments, routines, and ridiculous problems.

Those ordinary stories are important because they give the stranger events somewhere to happen.

When something impossible occurs in the middle of an otherwise normal world, it becomes much harder to dismiss.

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Laizer Air

Laizer Air follows Laizer Beam and her airline adventures, beginning with what appears to be a fairly ordinary passenger flight operation.

Laizer is a pilot, and her attitude toward flying is considerably more relaxed than the people around her might prefer.

The flights connect places such as Exit 9 and Pawpoint while introducing another part of the world: airports, passengers, crews, cargo, weather, and everything that happens between takeoff and landing.

What begins as an airline story gradually becomes connected to the larger atmospheric and storm-related events appearing elsewhere.

Laizer doesn't necessarily have the information to understand those connections.

She's busy flying the plane.

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Catto Weather Radio

Catto Weather Radio takes place through broadcasts rather than a conventional narrative.

Weather reports, emergency communications, atmospheric observations, distant voices, and fragments of other transmissions create a picture of a world that is much larger than any one character can see.

Some transmissions sound routine.

Others don't.

Occasionally, a voice or phrase seems strangely familiar.

Some broadcasts appear to overlap with events documented in other albums, but the exact relationship isn't always clear.

Catto Weather Radio is one of the places where the audience can begin noticing that the records don't always seem to agree about when something happened.

The people making the broadcasts aren't necessarily aware of that.

They're just reporting what they're receiving.

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Catnado / LYRA-9

The Catnado / LYRA-9 stories move the universe into much stranger territory.

What begins as atmospheric and storm research develops into something involving unusual weather, experimental aircraft, strange atmospheric conditions, and the increasingly important phenomenon surrounding catnip and the storm.

Bianca and Claudia become involved in the research surrounding LYRA-9, while other characters experience the storm from completely different locations.

The storm affects more than weather.

It begins connecting people, places, broadcasts, and events that should otherwise remain separate.

The crews involved manage to solve immediate problems and survive situations that could easily have ended much worse.

But surviving LYRA-9 doesn't mean understanding it.

There are still questions about what the storm actually is, what it has changed, and why some of the things encountered during it don't behave quite like they should.

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Dramática

Dramática is where the wider universe becomes significantly harder to understand.

The ship's crew are dealing with the Blink Drive, deep-space operations, the lower decks, the reactor, and the consequences of a technology that doesn't always appear to treat time the way everyone expects it to.

The crew's problems are often very practical.

They have equipment to repair.

Systems fail.

Supplies behave strangely.

The ship has to keep functioning.

And the crew has to keep working even when something about their surroundings doesn't quite make sense.

The records surrounding the Dramática contain some of the most significant inconsistencies in the archive.

Events appear to repeat.

Equipment can behave differently after apparently identical circumstances.

Memories don't always seem to agree.

Objects can have histories that don't quite fit the available records.

The crew finds ways to work around these problems.

They don't necessarily understand them.

And that distinction becomes increasingly important.

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The Dramática's Lower Deck Records

Some of the strangest details come from the lower decks, particularly the areas surrounding the Blink Drive systems.

Jacques, the ship's bartender, spends an unusual amount of time in this part of the ship because of his responsibility for the liquor storage.

To everyone else, Jacques is simply very particular about his inventory.

He keeps records.

He knows which bottles to serve.

He knows which ones have gone bad.

He occasionally appears to drop bottles for no apparent reason.

He has a habit of returning to the storage room and coming back with another bottle.

There are explanations for some of these behaviors.

There are also explanations that Jacques has never shared with anyone.

His ledger is particularly strange.

Each bottle receives its own page, with times, numbers, and repeated observations that don't resemble a normal inventory system.

To anyone else, it looks like a bartender recording how much liquor was consumed and when.

Jacques is tracking something much more specific.

The audience may eventually figure out what.

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Parallax: Echo Log

Parallax / Echo Log shifts attention toward the consequences of the strange events surrounding the Dramática and the wider universe.

Rex's broadcasts and observations provide another perspective on events that are increasingly difficult to place.

The records deal with echoes, transmissions, the storm, the ship, the reactor, and the strange phenomenon surrounding catnip and its transformation.

Some information appears to come from somewhere else.

Some sounds familiar.

Some records seem to describe things that shouldn't yet have happened.

Rex is trying to document what he can.

Like many of the characters throughout the universe, he doesn't necessarily have enough information to understand the entire picture.

He can only record what he sees.

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How These Albums Exist Together

The easiest way to understand Forklift Yacht Club isn't as a single straight timeline.

It's an archive.

A flight can be happening while a weather station is broadcasting about the same storm.

A warehouse crew can be working an ordinary shift while a research aircraft is investigating something unusual overhead.

A bartender aboard a deep-space ship can be keeping records of an event nobody on Earth knows happened.

A later broadcast can contain a reference that makes an earlier album suddenly seem important.

Sometimes the connections are obvious.

Sometimes they're subtle.

Sometimes the only connection is a location, a name, a transmission, or a detail that appears again somewhere else.

And sometimes two records appear to describe the same kind of event differently.

The characters don't have a master timeline.

Neither should the audience.

At least, not at first.

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The Things Nobody Has Quite Explained

Across the albums, certain patterns keep appearing.

Why do some transmissions seem to arrive at the wrong time?

Why do certain events feel familiar to people who shouldn't remember them?

Why do records sometimes contain details that don't match other records?

Why does the Dramática appear to experience recurring circumstances without every event occurring exactly the same way?

Why do certain objects and systems sometimes behave as though they have a history nobody remembers?

Why does Jacques occasionally seem to know something is going to happen before anyone else notices?

And why do some characters seem to recognize pieces of events that, according to their own memories, they have never experienced?

The characters have explanations.

Some are reasonable.

Some are guesses.

Some are simply ignored because there is work to do.

But the archive tells a larger story.

The reader may notice it before the people living through it do.

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The World of Forklift Yacht Club

The important thing to remember is that these albums aren't separate universes.

They're different windows into one increasingly complicated world.

The warehouse workers don't necessarily know the pilots.

The pilots don't necessarily know the researchers.

The researchers don't necessarily know what's happening aboard the Dramática.

The people aboard the Dramática don't necessarily understand what is happening to themselves.

And the people broadcasting into the darkness may not even know who is listening.

But they're all part of the same story.

Forklift Yacht Club is a world where ordinary life keeps going while something much stranger is happening underneath it.

The albums document what the characters know.

The gaps between those records are where the real mystery begins.