Prosaic.

Prologue

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Every single person had a different beginning.

I'm not talking about how or where they were born. I'm talking about their new beginning: their rebirth after the floods began.

There was a lot of controversy as to why. Why did this happen? What was the purpose? What was the cause, the motivation behind it? Some said it was the wrath of God. He had finally come to collect us. Others, like the meteorologists and scientists working behind the scenes, believed the excess amount of water came from a combination of excess heat in the poles of the globe, likely due to some sort of carbon emissions, leading to a rapid pace of melting Atlantic and Arctic ice, and combined with a meteor shower that occurred no less than a day before the floods began. No less than a day before the floods began, everyone was out of their cars, houses, and together to watch a magnificent display of shooting stars streak the sky. The mountains of 6 foot long boulders ended up mostly in the oceans around Australia. Being a hotter location with warmer ocean temperatures, it was a logical assumption to assume all of the ice on the asteroids would melt. Unfortunately, the entirety of the meteors WAS ice, with very, very little alien rock. Although small enough to not cause much disruption despite a low-grade tsunami on one of the shores of Australia, the meteors brought with them an enormous amount of excess water via ice that the earth could simply not hold. And thus, it began to rain, and it never stopped.

Now, the world was under the largest flood in the history of humankind. And, well, quite possibly the only flood in the history of the earth to such an extent.

I digress; when the floods began, those who survived the initial cup-filling would have to be reborn, in a metaphorical sense, in order to survive. Some were well-equipped to survive the new barren and vastly expansive underwater world, such as sailors, fishermen, doomsday preppers (specifically those with skills and supplies necessary to survive, and with bunkers that were waterproof and could be sustained underwater for great periods of time), those in the military (not only for their skills, but because most governments around the world gave high-ranking military and government officials a chance to survive in military ships and submarines), those who were on a cruise at the beginning of the floods and who are presumably still safe on said cruise, those with planes equipped for water landing, and those who were rich enough to afford a large boat. Ironically, professional swimmers were not on the list of those most likely to survive the situation.

However, among those who survived the initial floods were outliers: regular people who somehow managed to stay afloat long enough to live past the initial heavy rains and chaos as civilisation collapsed. However, these outlier survivors had virtually no skills and no preparation to allow them to survive any further into the disaster, and many died off after the first two days. Despite this, there were outliers of the outliers, those random persons with no skills and no resources who somehow managed to survive longer than the first two days after the entire globe was flooded. Not rich enough to buy safety, not skilled enough to create safety, and not important enough to be given safety. A large group of average civilians whom were entirely on their own.

Felicity Atlas was of the unlikeliest of candidates to survive the floods. Being only 14, they did not even attempt nor intend to survive the initial flooding. As the water rose higher and their family's once small, comfortable home turned into an underwater prison in Atlantis, Felicity and they's family collectively decided to simply not try. It wasn't necessarily a lack of will, but more of a lack of the ability to find a way. With nothing but ocean over 70ft in depth for miles, covering a suburban area, stranded with bands of unfriendly neighbors and a community very uncivilly fighting for limited resources, the Atlas family very swiftly decided that even if they somehow managed to fight and survive without casualty or terminal disease or injury, the quality of life they would live would simply not be worthy of such a battle. And thus, the nuclear Atlas family, consisting of two parents, an oldest daughter, a youngest daughter, and a genderfluid middle child, held each other close and came to peaceful terms with their unfortunate but humane demise.