I have so many more ideas for things than I’ll ever get around to. Here’s one:

Okay, so it begins with mass suicides of bankers. But it turns out that they’re actually being kidnapped by aliens who drag them into fictional worlds and use their combination of rationality and trauma to be used as weapons against other aliens, essentially firing bankers out of banker cannons. This leads to the collapse of the world financial system, but it also leads to people exploring and tracking the aliens. It turns out that there is a type of energy in fiction, that collective consciousness does actually create an energy field that is much weaker than gravity but very constant and, more to the point, capable of treating 3d space like 2d. The aliens travel, essentially, by rotating the psychosphere until two points are adjacent, then stepping through.

Eventually, though the aliens are gone, humans discover the transport system they used to get there. The only thing to do is to send lots of teenagers into the system to let them explore it and try to figure out what’s going on. Teenagers that survive and return with useful artifacts are given enormous bounties.

The story needs a Jeff Goldblum hippy professor who explains it all while whacked out of his gourd on Yage or something and a main character whose main characteristic is that they never, ever panic. That’s how Kit Carson was so good at pioneering things, he never panicked.

Actually, you need Daniel Boone and Squire Boone in there too. It can mostly be about how shitty and insane pioneers can be. You could get a couple chapters out of wacky pioneer stories happening in Grant Morrison-space.

I bet religion would have a whole different meaning out in the Phlogiston. People would have to literally build Belief Beacons so they could navigate.

So the main story is about how these characters, let us say Hot Teenagers #1 -#5, representing all five genders (because gender constructs would definitely be a tangible thing in the Phlogiston) use their wilderness perspective to actually tangibly discover whatever the fuck is wrong with people. Out there in ideaspace they discover a device that actually detects evil. So they come back to earth, and they detect the most evillest conspiracy they can — Halliburton. And they instantly discover they can’t bring it down (I assume because Halliburton kills a few of them), so what one of them does is use their inside information to construct oodles of evidence that they themselves are in on the conspiracy, then trick the police into getting caught and revealing all their accomplices.