The Next Wave in Text Formatting

Now that physical books are dead, how about we color words to indicate characters you're supposed to remember, ones you aren't, and the same for locations and concepts? Get people used to it first, then the subversion. I think green for memorable characters, blue for locations, and gold for concepts. For the throwaways, brown for characters, purple for locations, and red for concepts. The underlying scheme is that there isn't any and people who can't learn arbitrary rules don't deserve to read.

The Too-True Meaning of Christmas

One winter, the priests of Wessario and the people all joined together in supplication, chanting, "Great Farden, the sun in the day and the sun in the night, the bridge across every chasm, the inventor of what is good and imprisoner of what is improper, answer our prayer and our question."
Farden stepped among them, glittering, and said, "What is your question, mortals?"
Everyone knelt except those who fell prostrate. "Great Farden, this wonderful celebration, this Christmas, what is it? Why do we celebrate it?"
Farden smiled at their simplicity. "Christmas is simply the day we choose to commemorate the birth of the Savior, the Son of God." "You have a son, O Farden?"
"Uh . . ."
"Where is he? What is his name? What are his powers?"
Farden looked upon the radiant faces of the mortals as they pressed closer and closer. He gulped. "Uh, well, you see . . . Here, drink from this flask. Be merry and whatnot."
As the people passed around the miraculous flask Farden gave them, they forgot all about that stuff he really, really shouldn't have said. He listened to a bunch of carols later and hoped Santa wouldn't mind a little memory-erasing, though the bigger problem was probably reaching other worlds like his in the first place.

Merry Christmas!
Finis

The Internal Ocean

No one went to an Otthe Evanfor demonstration with any prediction as to the subject or results, not after one or two experiences. The gallery spectators settled themselves and waited for the latest thing.
"The latest thing! This is it! I have invented a fish." Otthe Evanfor moved among the blackboards and jars of the experiment theater, pointing, waving, and poking. "A special fish that swims in a special ocean: the ocean of memory. That's right."
The audience thought perhaps he wanted it to gasp, and it obliged him. After all the entertainment he had provided, how could it desert him then?
"Yes, it swims in human memories, and for its food? Especially tasty memories. The kind you can't stop remembering. Look!" He pointed at the only other person who had been allowed in the theater proper. "The first subject! Tell us your experiences! Are you remembering anything right now?"
"Well, matter of fact, right now what's coming to mind is a time when, you know, we were all enjoying ourselves . . ." The nervous man turned red, but he was being paid. "I enjoyed myself a lot, and when I went back to my room to, uh, well, I did feel like there was an ocean in me, but not in the memory part."
The audience laughed, but the presenter glowed. "Yes? And then?"
"And then I realized I wasn't in my room. I was in somebody else's house. What a day. They asked me to leave, but I needed to do something before I did."
More laughter. "And you still have this memory? Not for long, I think."
"Sure I do. Only now I remember a fish in the toilet, which I don't think is what happened."
So much entertainment.

The entertainment turned into something else when the dictator heard about the invention and arranged to have fish trail likenesses of himself behind them into every citizen's memory, but such is the delayed price of amusement.
Finis

Reminder

Your latest story does have a sewer section, right? I'm sure it does, but things get busy around this time of year and people forget things.