Atlantis

Image "mermaid" by pascalblanche

Merpeople are not quite what we imagine.

They sink, whether from density or some magic or some other property of their species, norther man nor merpeople's science can tell. They survive in very high pressure, and breathe the water down there, though it is very low in separated oxygen. They do not need to eat, or even commonly (they eat as if they were smoking cigarrettes, or cigars, or a pipe: some frequently, some infrequently, and some not at all. Eating falls in and out of fashion), though they still have mouths, and there is some speculation among modern scholars (no one famous for anything legitimate. These are people who study mermaids and mermen. They are laughed off stages and scoffed at, especially when they cannot produce bodies of these merpeople,) speculation that their bodies were or are capable of splitting water molecules, using the vast energy from the splitting to fuel their bodies and minds and their magical powers, and perhaps even to survive in such high pressure conditions, whether through passive magic or through body pressure or however else. There's the problem of where the carbon comes from, but these aren't really the kinds of scientists to answer for flaws in their thinking, and no one else goes into it for fear of their career. If they see a merperson, they don't tell anyone.

Men to them are a myth as much as merpeople are myths to men, but from time to time, a man dropped off the side of a boat with a cannonball, or some other method of very quick sinking, or a merperson who died while suppressing their sinking washes up on shore, and someone brings it in, and no one believes him because the gods make sure the body is gone within the week, perhaps sooner if there is danger of trust developing. If men and merpeople were to meet, they would simply be too powerful, understand too much. Before merpeople, Man had needed to be separated from magic, for he was becoming too powerful, but the gods could not take the magic away, for they had nowhere to put it. They made merpeople, who were not so ambitious, and loved to explore more than men, but not to build, and while they warred, they did not see any reason to escalate war, and they had an easy enough time understanding that an arms race was more evil than nearly anything else, so they did not build advanced weapons. Ambition was tied to wanderlust and antisocial sentiment directly in the merperson psyche, so that anyone who was particularly ambitious could not hold down a job very well, and had no interest in society, disliking society so much that they refuse to steal from people or hold them up, or bother them, and became travelers who worked to acquire as much valuable things as they could, and they became something of a myth even among merpeople, because they had time and need to become good at all types of crafts, arts, and thinking, though they did not add this to society, finding the things of a Wanderer, or the tracks or really any mark of a wanderer, was quite interesting and amazing to the person who found it -- a kind of "once in a lifetime" opportunity, even for those who lived in the country on the edges of civilization.

When a merperson found a man, sunken from the surface for whatever reason, not much heed was paid. There was some minor question of where they came from and what they were for, and when someone discovered that they fell from the sky, that was of interest, but they were pretty obviously dead, and had probably not done it to themselves. The merpeople, for the most part, did not wish to find out about the men, and even those wracked with wanderlust could not survive for long near the surface, and did not have the civilized methods required to invent a method to exit the water.

Eventually war games took the place of war, and one of these war games was a single player war game. The merpeople had built nations under the sea, and these nations held war games whether there was disagreement or not, and if there was nothing a winning nation wanted, they took something good for anyone -- a bit of luxurious food(the merpeople still eat, they simply no longer metabolize food, only digesting it,) or some entertainers, or something nice to wear or build with, or the ability to host more of the games the next year. No nation took more than was fair, or enough to cripple anyone else, and the games were very nearly fair, and when one year they were unfair to one nation, another year they were unfair to the nation they had just been biased towards. The lower ambition kept them from being cruel, and it kept them, for the most part, from being unfair towards eachother. Honor was not tied to ambition, and having a system of living which honored political leaders, and working in general, helped to offset the less productive nature of an ambitionless society.

The single player war game was unique in that it was an exploration game in addition to a fighting game. A dungeon, actually, with a treasure, but with dangerous traps and various types of guards made specifically for this game. Those with the ambition and wanderlust to be adventurers and the honor to remain part of society chose, sometimes, to become dungeonwalkers, so that they could contribute without bein social. People trained their entire lives for this, and though usually war games were the method, occasionally private corporations ran games to raise money, and there was honor in these as well.

Skreecheek was a competitor in those competitions, the war games, and she, with her jellyfish familiar, had a rudimentary control of magic, a keen eye for traps, and swift legs for the running and swimming parts of the challenge. She had a good, long run in the competitions, and then she was gone. Dust in the current, so to speak.

"Atlantis" Flash Fiction © Ben Clardy V

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

P.S. This was a setting sketch, not really a story, but that's the nature of 500-1000 word inspiration: sometimes it does not make a story. I am considering doing setting/topic/character/plot revisits by requests on Saturdays if I get any requests. If I don't I will simply write nothing on Saturdays! (Or I'll build up my backlog so I can post on days when I don't get to it!) Post number 2 for this week. Post number three up very soon! Will try to do 4 and 5 tomorrow!