Stralia - Ocean's Depths
#4 of Stralia
_ Stralia - Ocean's Depths ~~SnowDragon
Doooon't even ask me what's with the title of this one, I don't know. It makes sense to me, somehow. Anyway, I come to you again with the fourth installment of Stralia, this time it's with Ocean's Depths , which continues the story of Senia, the falcon living in after a Collision of two worlds. Next chapter I take aim at my comma useage, while it all looks above board I can't say I like how many I throw down, so we'll work on that. Anyway, I hope you guys like it and the way the series is going so far!
Without further ado, I present Stralia - Ocean's Depths. Enjoy!
Writing Time: (Started 1:35pm 15/08/13. Finished 9:21pm 15/08/13) Length: Digital Copy Only; 7.9 A4 Pages Soundtrack: Crysis 2 Main Menu OST
Magic is the most dangerous threat faced by mankind since the invention of the nuclear bomb. ~Office of the President of the United States of America, Collision Year ----_
Thursdays she had off, it was a good arrangement, even if she had very little to do with it's inception. It gave her time to get her studies in order, complete any tasks for her mother or classes that she had avoided until that time, but it also gave her time, a rare time should she desire it, to wander the city in it's lessor occupied state, when most were working or as for those of her age, learning. It meant town was quieter, traffic was diminished and perhaps most importantly of all, there were fewer eyes wandering odd places in and around the city itself. She would have been able to pick just about any location she felt like, from parklands to the libraries themselves and find them mostly abandoned as workers scurried to their respective roles of employment. From what the falcon understood, it was not entirely like this so many years ago on Earth alone, but rather more flexible. In the many years since Intergration, the not-often used term to define the end of the Collision war, when the United Nations forced both parties to the table and allowed the mixing of two cultures together, Erildisans had slipped into cities, towns, a sight that had become normal. And while the ever present ranks of the Civil Pacification Unit roamed constantly looking for trouble, not all the unrest had settled. It was in her culture, to work for an entire day, from sunrise to sundown on the lands, on the cattle, on the books, with little breaks nor any arguement about pays. Their ability to work for such seemingly long hours without complaint had frustrated human workers when it became apparant that her world worked much harder, much longer, had no interest in distractions and would very rarely complain about payment, something the Earth companies had learned quite quickly.
So instead of the general bustle and slow movements and long lunches, mankind was still on the backfoot trying to justify their positions in the companies they worked for. Aside from the high start up costs in training falcons, eagles and the like to work with computers, with the langauge and the general human customers, they produced a much higher profit margin compared to standard human workers. The honeymoon was over, as she had heard the saying go, and now humans had to work just as hard and for just as long as her kind did in order to avoid being replaced. And while there were, apparently, laws in place to stop that kind of thing from happening, it continued to happen anyway, which kept tension, which kept riots, which kept the Civil Pacification Unit on the governmental payroll, with their vehicles and their aircraft and their soldiers replacing normal police, which in turn only made things worse in a lot of cases, as the level of control they could apply ranged from opening fire with special, non-deadly, weapons that inflicted huge pain on their targets to employing chemical warfare. It had been the Pacification Unit which had been, and still was Senia's biggest fear, for it had not yet passed from living memory how dangerous and deadly dragons had been. The battle in what survived of the Empire's capital, Yican, which had violently mixed with the city of Los Angeles was still a bad taste on the tongues of all parties involved, her race and the humans who were trying to defend their lands from what they couldn't understand, perhaps what turned the humans to genocide when the oriental dragons Pi and Neshal incinerated ten thousand troops between them and most of the city around them which drove the earth forces back, until they bombed what was left of both cities to dust with massive aircraft in some sort of... scorched land tactic which to this day left most of the city as nothing more than a collection of smouldering ruins and wrecked military hardware, from both sides.
One didn't stop to think about what the Earth government would do, but she could not hide what she was... or what she had become from her own mind nor from herself. It was like breathing to her, or at least the closest thing she could put it down to. The ability to shift into the form of the dragon, becoming the creature Humanity feared the most, a creature with such beauty, grace and intelligence. Even as she took the bag she had been given from the library, this time not filled with books but rather some small items for the rest of the day, given she had no intent of returning home until after the outing with her friends later that night. A change of clothes, a blanket, a lightstick the humans called a torch, change of shoes incase the pair she wore were damaged and a snack or two incase she grew hungry, as unlikely as that may have seemed. Living this close to the Yelo Range Forest had it's advantages, but in this case, they were purely supplementary in nature. She didn't eat much to others, which made sense, her form was quite slim and lightweight, perhaps only fifty-five kilograms thanks to hollow bones and lighter muscles that lent her the ability to fly, though she was yet to lay eyes on a weight measuring device in this mixed world. But the truth was, she ate a lot more than anyone else realised, rather a voracious hunger that she was able to hide by hunting the fish of that little secret spot she had uncovered all those years ago. Human children were warned away in almost all cases as the forest was Erildisan in nature, and held all of their natural creatures. In particular, perhaps the most dangerous of all was a massive canine creature called a Sax. Adults stood as tall to Senia's stomach, equipped with razor sharp claws, teeth capable of biting through chainmail armour. Completely blind, they saw through echolocation, like dolphins, allowing those who didn't hear their shrill cries to avoid them, if they could stand completely still long enough for the critters to lose interest, something human children were unable to do. Smart enough to avoid leaving the cover of the forest thanks to too much movement outside of their domain, only her kind dared enter, and even then, only with a very good reason.
Some still hunted traditional prey for their families, the combination of mostly docile human creatures combined with those of the Erildisan ones often made for good hunting, but her world's fish had never been well catalogued, even as she moved in between the trees, watching the sun through the trees and the leave cover increased. The forest in itself had become a marvel of nature, a mixture of human and alien plant life which always ensured the forest was a brilliant painting of colours in every direction. In the winter, the Erildisan plants bloomed purples and blues, fluroscent greens and yellows and during spring and summer they were complete opposites, while the Earthy plants provided solid air cover to the nectar drinkers from overhead aerial predators, who were forced off to find different prey. The scrub cover underneath housed flightless birds and the grazers. Her lake was twenty minutes in by walking pace by her watch, surrounded by a small clearing with thousand year old trees that had survived the trip over. One had not, it's elder trunk having collapsed completely over the body of fresh, cold blue water, the bottom of which she could not see, it's leaves branches hanging in the water, devoid of leaf cover so many years after it's death, but wide enough that once could sit comfortably upon it and rest of one's belongings, but she prefered at the grassy base of one of the elder trunks, the springy green stuff almost like a matress, except more pointy in one's lower back and limbs. Looking to the water with some desire, she cast off the bag across her shoulders, dropping it to the grass where it then lay, taking a moment's worth of caution to observe the tiny cracks of light filtering through the thick overgrowth, protecting this clearing and herself from view from above, and making sure no creature, human or otherwise had seen her attend this location or could still lay eyes upon her. With nothing insight that could be possibly defined as alive enough to report back to someone else, she threw caution to the wind, and engulfed herself in the power that made her bigger, stronger and covered in smooth, hydrodynamic scales.
No longer bound to the feathered, mortal coil, she stretched muscles she so rarely had the chance to stretch, her normal afternoon dips were quick, rushed, just long enough to extend her fins, to feel the rush of power, and maybe snatch a quick bite before returning home to whatever work she was required to do at the time. Not today. Today, she knew as she arched that long back of hers, whipping that tail this way and that, popping muscles and limbs back to full awakening, roll-shaking her muzzle until she felt awake and Alive again, letting out a barely contained growl as the true meaning of existance washed through her form. She wanted to part those jaws lined with the deadly teeth for rending flesh from bone and roar until every creature in the forest knew what she was, but logic won out over instinctual desire in the end, and she bit her tongue, not literally... that, she did not want to try with fangs as sharp as these. So putting such thoughts aside, she walked to the lake, dragging that long bladed tail, coated in a natural vemon and sunk into the water's surface like an eel, disappearing from sight leaving only ripples in her wake. This lake was far too small to have contained fish of any real size on her world, that much she was certain of, but snaking her way down and snaring her first catch, a Silvervein, named so for the silver arteries and veins that ran so close to their golden skin, the length of her falcon forearm and just as thick, long red misty trails making their way through the clear water, the ripples of sound as she declared her catch barely noticable by the time they reached the surface, but nevertheless, fish like he had somehow been able to make their way down this far from the ocean. Which probably meant that this lake had smashed into part of an underground cavern that had broken into the ocean as well. There would have been a very long, dark collection of cavern networks that would eventually link up to the wide open sea, even attemping to find such caverns, where-ever they might be at the bottom of this lake might normally have been a suicidial idea, but her power opened other options... But she still had problems like how she would navigate and not get lost in the underwater catacombs... once down there, there was very little chance of finding an exit that was not the way she came in or the way out.
But just finding the caverns was her main goal today, something she wanted to accomplish before she started to draw a map from memory to paper. Well, perhaps her second goal, as she snatched the second fish right out the fluid she breathed, not even lending the creature warning before her fangs plucked it from out in front of her. For all her knowledge of the area, she had never actually visited the forest she had made her personal hiding spot, nor the mountain range that it used to border onto. How had the little clearing formed, she had wondered so long ago when she had first found it, but the room allowed her to stretch her spine and her limbs, though she didn't dare trust the area just yet, even after all these years to allow herself to sun in the grass like an oversized lizard, she would definately fall asleep, and the last thing she wanted to do is wake up caged, or worse. Those emerald eyes blinked out of their own accord, tracking to something she had spotted at the bottom of the lake. No longer accelerating, now drifting slowly deeper as the light faded, growing more and more green with every moment... Rocks. Not just any rocks, but rocks used for castle building, like scattered debris from a structural collapse. Intreged, she further slowed her descent, forelimbs fanning out to catch as much drag as the scaled creature could, adjusting her direction with a flick of the tail. It was much wider of an area than it was on the surface, not exactly unusual from the books read on the subject, for it was entirely possible anicent currents carved out the rockface beneath the ground most walked upon... how deep underwater did that make her?
Deep enough to see the muddy bottom, finally, and that was not the only thing at all beyond the towers of floating seagrass beneath the water's surface so far down as was she. The falcon turned seadrake turned her attention from the surface recently found to the rubble and wreckage that sat upon the dirt. Though distorted as her vision was, the outline of a collapsed building, more than likely upon its side was clearly evident. As she shifted closer, touching her left paw to the cold, solid stonework, most of the structure still intact... had it fallen into the lake during the Collision, or was it always here and the water had followed in afterwards? The building itself looked mostly intact aside from the structual issue of being on its side, mashed up against the rockface. Definatly a building of her world, which led the falcon-turned-dragon to the notion that it had always been down here, and that this lake and hole in the ground filled with water it was was an Earthy thing, and not part of the forest itself, which would explain the clearing, the trees were annhiliated as soon as the two words became one, and then the building down here was exposed to the full force of all that water being forced out of the way to make room for it, it would have been crushed completely, floors shunted out of allignment and souls within crushed if they were lucky, drowned if they weren't. It was a tower, she taught, more or less making an aquatic landing on the lakebed, taking a series of long, exgerated steps across the muddy surface, those paws of hers sinking an inch or so into the mud that she minded nor cared, staking around the outside of the structure, struck with an alarming curiousity to to the building's purpose. If it was indeed underground as she thought, it would have taken them years to tunnel out a cavern large enough to build this thing down here... unless the building itself had been the struts for the cavern in question but... not, it was definately a proper structure and not just a big beam of stone.
Ah, there. RIght at the very end, where the fallen tower gave way to a messy field of stones left right and centre, the gap between side of the lake itself and the lakebed growing short enough she had to press herself low to the mudbed in order to get any closer, snaking that muzzle of hers the larger form provided into the wrecked structure, peering within. Through the floating dust and the innate lack of light down here, even her eyes couldn't see a thing. With a shake of her head she was about to give in and turn about when she remembered the directed lightstick in the bag up on the surface. Filled with renewed vigour, she turned around and swam for the surface, clearing the distance in half the time for her velocity, the reality above her head growing clearer and clearer until she burst from the surface like a dolphin and came back to earth with an echoing crash, denting the soft top soil, snaking that head back this way and that to check for witnesses before she went for the bag, nosing the flap off the top, and taking the black stick between her jaws and turning for the water, still rippling violently from her rapid escape, adding all the more to it as she sunk deeper into the waves once more. What possible reason beyond this would a lightstick need to be waterproof, anyway? Maybe there was more to humans than she had orignally thought and they were all waterbreathers. Pushing such thoughts aside from her mind she sank to the lakebed and resumed her previous course. Delicately balancing the lightstick between her jaws and turning the switch with her forked tongue snapped the white beam of aritifical light into existance which provided her some light to see by in the murky gloom. Pressing herself as small as possible, the drake slipped between rockface and wrecked stone construct.
Furniture lay on it's side, some of it floating at the 'ceiling', trapped by the stone preventing it's escape and revealing what was truely at the bottom of this lake to practiced eyes like hers. The heavier stuff, or at least those with things held in drawers were kept to the bottom, pressed against the stone, and more things still were smashed beyond recognition by the force of the water rushing in. Weaving the light from left to right in sequence she looked for anything of note, noting furniture and other items she might want to take a look at later, but for now moved forth towards a sort of stairwell, or what was left of the frame of one, wooden planks would have been used and even if they had survived the initial force in Collision, many a year underwater didn't do it any favours. Luckily the water made moving through the wrecked structure much easier, and the next floor down had more items to her interest. Her snout bumped against a metal table and she recoiled, only to see what looked to be an ahlcemy table float away curling in the water before it bumped off the floor and came to a slow rotating halt. The symbols upon the upward face were... strange, instructions for mixing different liquids, and seperate tables were always used for different things in case of accidental mixing with leftovers, which could cause all sorts of nasty things to happen, least of all painful deaths, but in this case the symbols were something her eyes didn't recognise at all. Books to the left of her in a shelf on it's side, still standing the right up way up, assuming it was supposed to be pointed up at the roof standing on it's legs on the floor, but sadly, not a single one of those books would have been in any condition to read, even if she could have picked up the hides without completely destroying them. More lost knowledge...
But perhaps the thing that really caught her attention was a golden cube, about the size of her new muzzle, perhaps the largest item of non furniture still intact. It floated near the ceiling, so must have been sealed full of air but... she tilted her head upwards to bathe it fully in the light before reaching out fully with paw to snatch it. The box itself was veey lightweight, but the water made it deceptively so, the creature had almost completely forgotten that the water was the element she was currently it, having had half a mind to fade back into her smaller falcon form to work the box with more dexterity. It looked to be some combination of a lockbox and a puzzlebox, requiring both a combination and a key to obtain access, but in this case the key required was already slotted into the lock, like someone had shut it in a hurry. Their haste had been able to preserve whatever was within from the ages and from the water itself, but the falcon turned drake knew not the combination required to get access to the box itself. Well, now she had to return home, if only to place this somewhere safe until she had the time to take a proper look at it. Her relaxation and potential lounging forgotten, questions on her mind she wanted answered, and so she turned on a point, curling that form into a ball in order to turn without actually moving and heading for the stairwell she had come through, emerging into the lighter water, and heading for the surface. She rose slower this time, peeking that muzzle from the water beneath the shadow of the fallen anicent tree and checking all around before slinking over to the shoreline and prying herself up onto it, safely placing the box down in the grass as it dripped. Arching that back of hers and shaking those scales dry before closing her those emerald orbs and forcing her form to shrink back down with deep regret that she couldn't just hold the form to walk home, that she had to be terrified of what she had the ability to do, that she had to hide like she did.
The box was almost too big to fit in her bag, but with a lot of forcing she was able to make room enough for the stuff to all fit, strapping it down tightly so the whole thing wouldn't burst apart explosively, taking one last look back at her lake with a soft sigh before with the bag in hand instead of slung she turned back to the direction she had come and started her way out. As the overgrowth thinned down, she was able to see clouds gathering that were not there that morning, the sunny day turning quite gloomy, rain threatening which helped keep what few people who weren't preoccupied with their day off the streets which meant that when she finally broke cover from that of the forest and remerged onto the streets, there were no funny looks and not a single question to be asked of while a 'child' was running amock within the dangerous forests. She had quite a few answers for them but it was always quite the much more prefered when no one was around to ask or spread rumours. Rumours, no they were harder to kill than Saxes. She made the path to home a jog, just to avoid getting rainwater in her feathers the only traffic the occasional passing car or larger armour plated jeeps in Civil Pacification colours, the ever present olive drab green with white text across them, numbers, letters, all of it except for those three words were meaningless to just about everyone, save for those actually in the vehicles. She made the right call, for the second she got within the building of her home, the skies opened up and started bucketting rain down all around. With a soft little sigh, almost amused by her want to not get soaked despite having spent just about every second of her morning swimming in utter freedom.
She cringed though, remembering her earlier engagements. They would have to make other arrangements for getting there. Time to use that computer. She headed upstairs, discarding her shoes neatly on the rack before stepping swiftly, silently up the wooden material and shutting the door behind her. Opening the bag to carefully place the golden box down on the floor of the inner wall storage area, placing a pair of thick blankets over it to prevent it from being seen before sliding the door closed and stepping over to her bed, sitting down upon the matress and sinking right down into it, getting the on button with a toe and waiting for it to come to life, like trying to wake a tired younger sibling, it merely took time and patience. Once the beeps started sounding that seemed to alert her mind that the thing was online, she brought up one of the programs and started sending messages to Sarah. Neither her nor Qui's parent shad access to a, vehicle, but hers did, being human which would still allow this night to go forth. Within a couple of minutes, quicker than she had expected, she had a reply. Be ready at seven. With a quick word of warning not to use the vehicle's warning horn, she signed off and rolled over, reaching for the written record of 496PS' theoruim discussion.
And began to read.