#two of them with rowboats and one with a fricking AIRCRAFT CARRIER

[marsmarvel02]

As one so interested in fiction, I have seen media that is lost but not forgotten, and media that is forgotten but not lost, but never before have I seen a story that is both. Something that would be completely lost to the world, if not for the accident of a Google search algorithm.

Okay, it's time to drop with the haughty, poetic prose, because this all started when I was looking up sentient tugboats. No, really; I was wondering if there were any more shows like TUGS and Theodore Tugboat, so I typed the phrase "sentient tugboat" into Google and let it take me places.

I know, I know, I'm weird. But, after a few pages of bad metaphors, a glitch from a video game, and Tappy from KAPUT! (a horrible costume, but I have the feeling it's supposed to look ridiculous), I got this.

The first problem is that this link is to a Google Search snapshot of a list of stories in the order that they were posted, which is now very much out of date. About two months out of date and counting.

The second problem is that I tried looking up "Tugboat" on RoyalRoad and I couldn't find anything.

The second problem is that, ever since Google stopped letting you view caches, there's no way to look at a Google Search snapshot. So I had to get clever- I restricted my search to RoyalRoad and used very specific terms to tease out the fact that this tugboat story was posted between GUARDED, which came out on August 19, 2021, and A Demon's Requiem, which came out on... August 19, 2021. Some further searching pretty much confirmed that this tugboat story has since been deleted from RoyalRoad, and that the only memory of it appears to be in a snapshot by Google.

Despite searching around on the Wayback Machine for quite some time, I couldn't manage to locate any more traces of this story, so it fell to me to extract all of the information I could from the Google Search.

Here is, to the best of my ability, everything about the tale saved by Google.

I'd wax poetic about the fragility of stories and the tragedy of forgetting, but, well, this is a cruddy isekai with tugboats thrown in.