New Atlantis

Chapter 1

Circa. 2109 Sun

The early morning sun peeks into my eyes as I wake before my wife. The light begins to immediately warm the room as we had fallen asleep with our windows open to enjoy the cool breeze from the waves that enveloped the city each night. Saerinia rolls over as the warmth reaches her under the thin blanket that our species uses to rest and sleep under. Her gills covered by shoulder length hair often found on most women in our village. Other places of the city have their own styles they wear but the women of our small area including myself prefer not having too much hair and leave it at shoulder length.
My name is Eona. I am one of the daughters of the leader of our village. Choosing to watch over the little fyramercha that we raise in order to make money. My beautiful wife and I have raised these cute little fireballs since I was a little fishling. Our species comes in four different colors specific to the wing of the city we are born in. My skin just under my gills is a light purple almost a faded lavender color whereas my face has a darker purple hue to it. Saerinia comes from a different part of the city. Her skin resembles a darker emerald which is a sign of the most eastern parts of the city. Her hair is light blue in color as mine is a dark red per the women in the southern areas of the city all have different hues of red in their bloodlines.
When I was younger, my mother was killed by a shark that our fishers had brought in. we all had thought it was dead, however when we had brought it home it was found that it was still very much alive somehow and we were too late to save her life when we heard the blood-curdling scream from across the yard. This is why I have chosen to wake up so early. My youngest has made a small gift to place at my mother’s grave and I promised her that the three of us would travel so my mother could finally meet her granddaughter. Samantha has an incredibly unique ability to speak to the ones that have passed on before us. However, few are aware of her as she was born without gills, yet she can still breathe in the water just as her mother and I can. If she was found, we would lose her due to the leaders of the city wishing no one different walk among us.
Samantha isn’t in her room when I walk down the hall to wake her. Normally she waits for one of us before she goes anywhere for the fear of being found my angel created synthetic gills that allow us to take her to the bigger events that we cannot keep her from. After calling out for her a few times, her mother thinks she might be with the flock. The problem is that the fyramercha are living lava balls. Extremely hot to the touch unless they themselves choose you. The molten rock they feed on is just as hot as they are and often more times than not has injured saerinia and me even when we are incredibly careful.
Opening the door to their habitat, I realize my wife was right and our little one is sitting in the dead center of the flock with them just lounging around her as if she is one of them. Many of our species that we raise are very territorial and they choose who they let come close to them. A few of them are resting on Samantha’s shoulders like the many species of sea birds that frequent this side of the city. Both her mother and I are in awe as we watch her petting them as if they weren’t as hot as a small sun. I suppose we could let her take the ones closest to her tag along with us. It might raise our sales of the species as a whole the more we show the people.
We have packed a small picnic basket with her favorite foods as well as food for us, so after we walk to my mother’s grave we can eat before coming back to the house and checking to see if our other pets have had their litters and eggs. Both are frequently having to be checked and gathered before the parents destroy them. Everything ready and packed, we start the two-hour hike across the outer parts of the city to where my family allows the dead to rest. The metal guardians in the city are ever watchful as we travel along the closest areas to the water keeping our daughter on the land side so she doesn’t accidentally drop one of her little friends in the water as it would instantly kill the flames inside the fyramercha body that allows it to remain alive and afloat.
The graveyard is empty other than a few families visiting loved ones they have lost. My mother’s grave is across the first part. Samantha often tells us that she is waiting for us. Her abilities mirror a few of mine, however, to see the lost souls of family is not among my own. Being only seven years old, she shows considerable bravery when dealing with spirits. In order for my mother to relay anything to us, we have to depend on Samantha’s courage and abilities. Often times most messages are pleasant, we can only hope that this one is the same as normal. This is the first time she will see my mother herself. Times before she has remained home when we have come to this place.
I took one of the little flames as she called them from her, she gets ready to introduce herself to the grandmother that she never got to meet. Her other mother has already begun to set the blanket down and get ready to set our lunch out for us as Samantha finds the words to be able to tell us what my mother needs to say. In our species the dead will only come back if there is a vital message to be given to our elders or the leaders of the villages. Unabashed she goes to my mother and talks to her. The clouds have begun to gather as they always do around this time of morning, but I can sense that there is an eerie urgency to their movements. Others have sensed the same and dove into the water as a means of protection from whatever they sense the clouds mean. We may have to wait until the storm passes in order to travel back home and care for the animals for the day and make sure they are all fed and watered before the main rains of the storm hit our home. The way it is built allows the rain to harmlessly wash away into the water below the cliffs.
After a while, the rains started to come down too heavily for us to make the trip back home. The three of us ended up huddling together for at least an hour until the rain let up enough for us to safely walk home. None of the creatures that we keep and protect were out of their enclosures, so when we made the rounds, we knew each of them had safely gotten out of the rain and remained dry and healthy. The worse part of the storms was how dense the rain became when it passed through our shields that protected our city from the outside world.
To most passing by our corner of the planet, all they saw was cliffs and canyons. Our technology allowed us to hide along the coastal cliffs and hid every part of the city from the normal humans that hiked the coastal regions. A failure would announce our kind to the world, and we were not quite ready for that to happen just yet. Most humans couldn’t understand our society or even our species. We did not hide in fear. We hid to protect our beliefs and our children from the judgement of the human world. Very few traders from unusual places were allowed to walk among us as long as our laws and rules were enforced, and they did not break any of the statures of our community.
As we neared our house the fyramercha must have sensed our approach. The house immediately warmed up from the cold sea air from the passing storm. Now began the task of feeding our little pets and flocks while my daughter and wife made our small family dinner. There was an eerie calm to the night air as I busied myself with the few tasks to make sure every species was fed, as well as the cages and habitats were protected in case the storm decided to pass over us again.
Once everyone was situated and resting, the neighborhood became quiet. The lights started to dim in our wing of the city. I couldn’t help feeling that something worse than the constant storms that could sheer the skin from a Ryberzarias was about to happen. Something deep inside the city began to whine and scape, I felt it sensed the same thing that I did.
That night, sleep refused to come. There was something about the way the city groaned that irritated me. A kind of foreboding fear from deep within the tunnels under the city, but from what I understood only sea caves and a little land was under the city. The fact that kept me awake wasn’t what caused the groaning but what would become of our city if any type of cataclysmic event were to happen. The reason we were so hidden from everywhere else in the world, was so that our people could live peacefully and not have to regard the outside world or its troubles. How very wrong those thoughts would be in the future months. If I had only known what would befall our beautiful city, maybe then I would have been able to save everything I held dear.
In hopes of saving what knowledge I could in case of my death, or the death of the city, I decided to go to the library under the main town square and secure my will and testimony for any that might come after the city falls and long after my family has vanished from the planet. My only hope was that our species and our pets would somehow escape our fate whatever it be and whatever might come our way.
Tomorrow I will take Samantha and saerinia with me and perhaps find a way to figure out if the noises we are hearing are natural or if they spell doom for our city. If the latter is the case then the most advanced city in the history of our planet will become nothing but empty ruins and skeletons of what we have strived to build and protect for our people. Perhaps though that will be a thought for tomorrow, I suppose I should at least try and sleep. I can only hope in the days to come that I can protect my family.
Sleep overtakes me as I feel my wife’s embrace pulling me closer to her. I pray to the Goddess that I will not dream tonight as the noises fade and dreamless sleep takes hold. The fear of losing everything fades into the darkness of what is to come, but for now I will do what I can to preserve my family if nothing more.
Circa 4501
Carefully setting what I have collected in one of our many storage containers, I believe it is time to wake the rest of the camp. As I move to wake the first few one of the scrolls seems to have a mind of its own and rolls to the ground partly uncurling as I see a name that I have only heard from the elders. I wonder if I should keep these items secret until I have a chance to read them before going to the elders about my discovery. Softly picking the scroll back up I slip the rest into my personal carrier, I made sure they were safe from the prying eyes of everyone else in the camp. They always wish to steal everything I find for themselves.
After my bedroll and camp space is clear and packed, I walk around the rest making sure to wake everyone and get them food for the journey to the next part of the city as more of the shield fails. It had become dire to hurry before the sharks find the bigger holes and begin picking us off one by one at their leisure. Satisfied that everyone now knows the shields are failing, the smaller tasks of helping the little ones better and getting them ready to swim for their lives if needed, a small spark catches Zaria’s eye enough that she calls me over to help her find what it is.
Sweeping her off her feet, we go to where she thinks that she saw something shining. Instead of jewels or sea glass as I thought it might be, a small creature floated over to her. I can feel the heat of it as I hold her in my arms. It resembles a fireball and has enough heat to singe our scales yet to both me and Zaria, the burn doesn’t come. Instead, it floats down and nestles in-between me and Zaria seeming to wish to cuddle. There are a few others hiding where this one came from. I can only softly offer them space in my arms for safety. They remind me of the fyramercha that I have only heard about in the stories my mother has told me. If they are the same species, then when that shield fails, the water will kill them almost instantly. I will not have that on my conscience. Together Zaria and a few of the other little ones created a small place for the four fyramercha to stay as we travel. I will try to find food for them as well if possible but for now I need to make sure everyone has packed up and we are on our way. The buildings between us and the shield generators we have placed should slow the water flow down when they fail but the sharks are another matter altogether. Too many times I have watched family and friends be killed and eaten with no real way to help save them.
As we walked through the decaying buildings, the little ones ran up ahead collecting little things like flowers and sea glass that caught their eye here and there in between the buildings and foundations. I could not help but wonder if there were any more of the small fyramercha left from whatever housed them in the past decades. Perhaps we could use their heat to warm the small tents every time that we stopped to collect and gather what little the city had to offer us. The little ones that Zaria had found seemed to stick to either me or her the entire time and didn’t want anything to do with the rest of the group. I had guessed it was a trust issue as they didn’t know who would harm them or who wouldn’t.
The shields had long failed from where we had been just a few hours go, and you could hear the rush of the water and the harks trapping the fish below where we were walking. The easiest way to travel to where we had been headed was to walk over the fallen buildings and reach the higher areas in order to escape the sharks and any other creature that would wish to pick us off for lunch. Many of the buildings were covered in more of the same flowing lichen that I had seen on the building I found the scrolls in. this gave the children a better use of their time as they could collect the flowers for either hair wreaths or different necklaces. Zaria had a knack for flash freezing different materials into beads for almost every type of jewelry imaginable to our species as a whole. These beads ranged from anything from small pieces of lichen and moss to the few budding trees and bark. Put together with either sea glass beads or fresh pearls from our tanks, it was one of the only means of trade that we had if we managed to come across another group of scavengers. So far however, it was still only our group down here in what many considered the forbidden city.
They feared the cold empty box that everyone knew was the source of destruction of this massive city that we had been setting different fields up in order to expose the buildings and not have to swim in fear of the fauna that wanted to devour us at every turn when our shielding was off. The good thing about having two sets of lungs was the fact that unlike the sharks, we could easily survive for long periods of time on the land and any dry surfaces or caves that we came upon when we decided to go out further and explore even more. Having no weapons, our only source of safety was dry land for however long the shielding decided to stay in place.
Whatever this city had once, was long gone but the shielding somehow stayed operable, and we took every chance to use that fact to our advantage whenever we could. They generators that many think would long be dried we found used the exact water that they kept at bay, a quart of two could last us about two weeks before they started to fail. As part of the reason, we came to explore Atlantis, was to find technology like this in order to try and bring the city to life. In my heart, I knew if we could get to the heart of the city, reactivate the box somehow and bring power to the city, we could raise the fabled city again and begin to build our once perfect civilization using the very thing that our ancestors couldn’t decipher and use the fabled pandora’s box as a soon for good and as a beacon to the world that even after millennia of decay anything can rise to be once again great. Among the buildings, we began to see more and more species emerging from the dark as our synthetic suns warmed the buildings and the shielding appeared to be well cared for regarding maintenance. The silver and other stones that they were built from seemed to be well cared for and stronger than anything that my small group of wanderers could do.
The creatures that were coming out of most of the buildings, were not anything that I have ever seen. Many years of darkness and sea water had mutated them into unrecognizable species. Many had traits that could be recognized but I figured that if we were to find out who or what they were, we had to take a chance to communicate with them. As we neared one of the closer buildings, the fyramercha became active and jumped out of the safety we made for them and floated to the buildings. More appeared welcoming them back. From the look of it, the building that they huddled around was some type of cryogenics lab. Seemingly the only fully working building so far in the city that we had come across.
A creature that bared an eerie resemblance to a ryberzarias, welcomed us to the building showing that they were in a way like we are. Many of the rooms that weren’t connected to the cryo labs, had many diverse types of ancient weapons and items that one would find in a common household room. Items such as old television screens, devices that held fruit and other foods, plates, even silver wear that they had come across was on display. Among other rooms, were the bigger artifacts that many of the same species, or what I assumed were the same species, began studying and trying to learn from an ancient past that even to them seemed too far away in our history to understand how many of the items worked. I wondered as our guide led us around, how did she see? I noticed quite a few others were like her. She had lost her sight due to the many years in total darkness. How did these mutants, for a better lack of term, continue day after day to see in front of them when their sight had failed them, and their eyes had left them?
Many of the other species watched as well in the same manner, without eyes how did they even know where we were walking and if they were in our way or not? Even at this rate echolocation would not help the buildings were too close together to provide accurate sonar. I had heard many of the species similar to bats could see via echolocation but with so many items in their paths how did they cope without tripping over each other or over everything else?
One of the labs that our guide walked by drew my interest in what it housed. Ember as I found out her name was, was a cross mutation between a fyramercha and what my mother used to call a Hexie. A humanoid bee that could stand to about eight feet at their matriarch stage. Like a common bee these giant women had an empire like hive mind. The queen at the top, one or two princess heirs, then came the layers, the soldiers, the workers. I wondered if ember had a full hive even down here. Was she the one that took such good care of the machina laying around the cryogenics lab and the other buildings?
As we walked around the cryogenics labs, I couldn’t help but notice that quite a few of the tanks in operation had species that I had heard about but had never thought that I would see in my lifetime. I suppose I should get to that aspect later due to the fact ember was corralling us to the more recent additions they included such as the kitchens and the residential housing that one could tell was made from the surrounding machina and items that one would find while diving into the waves.
It had been quite a while since my group had eaten a real meal, most requested the kitchens almost right away. It gave me time once everyone was settled to look at the scrolls and see what was so important that someone felt it needed to be recorded. It had been centuries since anyone found anything that might have shown how the ancient life once was before this city was thousands of leagues under the waves. I was hoping for some time alone so I would be able to look at the ancient writing. Nothing would have prepared me for the many nights of reading that these few scrolls held. I hoped that before our time was done and the next exploration team relieved us that I would be able to find more scrolls and lose myself in the ancient city of Atlantis even more then I already had.
Meanwhile, on the surface the fated one had been busy. David was destined to prove his colleagues wrong and find the fabled city. Unbeknownst to him and the ones his path would soon cross, he was the key to unlocking the box.
I had managed to secure a submersible after walking a ways from where the geo-location had signaled to enter the water. I was able to talk the crew into being able to hire them in order to secure route to help me investigate below the sea where no smart human would venture. It belonged to a high standing research company who was forced to stop the project they had started to find the city after the investors pulled their funding.
My international credentials had made it easy for me to persuade the company into starting their research into the city and allow me to use the submarine as much as I needed. If this panned out not only would they receive their funding back they would make history and all the benefits that went it. They allowed me to hire a full crew that came complete with a bald-headed navigator who had every inch of his visible skin covered with tattoos reminiscent of the ancient tribes of long ago who would assist me during the duration of the undersea exploration.
The navigator wasn’t the only one that was with me who had a physical appearance that was noticeable. Each member of the crew seemed to have one attribute that made them stand out. Some had unique colored eyes that I had never seen before in humans, others had fang like teeth that reminded me of what old humans called vampires and others had claws. One member of the crew in particular stood out. She was a short woman who appeared to be barely more than a child. She had light blonde hair that was tied up into two cinnamon swirl type buns that rested on either side of her head. She was a lot quieter than the rest of the group, appearing to be very timid in nature.
The submersible was exceptionally spacious and was filled with a maze that seemed to sprout rooms at every corner that I had turned. After handing the navigator the coordinates that I had spent years to narrow down, I decided to do some investigating. The navigator did not have a very personable personality. He seemed reluctant to accompany me on the mission and gave me the feeling that he did not appreciate my presence. I needed an excuse to escape his unnerving presence. Anyway, if I was to be conducting my investigation in this place, I had to know my surroundings. The best way to do this, was to explore the entirety of the submersible.
Shortly after I started exploring, I ventured into a dimly lit room. There was no solid light source so I had to squint in order to make anything out. In the process, I almost collided with a steel table that was bolted down to the floor in the center of the room. Steadying myself to stop myself from stumbling over my feet, I lent one hand against the tabletop. I pulled up my hand and felt the layers of dust that had been on the table for Goddess knows long. I had only been touching the table for less than a second, it made me wonder how long this room had been abandoned.
It took a few more minutes for my eyes to adjust to the light and I noticed that there were old computers. I believe the ancients called them laptops. They were smaller than the bulky computers back in the older days. Resting on the tables in one corner of the room, were two of these ancient machina. I had often read about these laptops; however this was the first time I saw one in person. Now I had access to two of them in literal perfect condition. I thanked the Goddess for this miracle.
Surprisingly, considering they had been sitting dormant for an uncounted number of years, I was able to turn one of them on considerably easy. There was a battery shaped icon in the bottom that glowed in bright green. If the historical accounts were accurate that I had read in past weeks, this meant that the computer was running on full battery charge. Luck was on my side right now.
I was just about to try to decipher the passcode on the laptop, when in the surrounding light coming from the screen, I took note of the details surrounding me in the better light that I could not see when I first entered the room. I was surrounded by different machina computers and databases from across the millennia.
Among them were cabinets and folders stacked with papers. It appeared that I had stumbled across some kind of archive. Perhaps it was notes from the investigation that was being conducted before the funding being pulled, caused it to come to an abrupt and premature end. What exactly were they investigating here? There looked to be literally thousands of years of research and notes in this small room hidden in the bowels of the submersible.