Submisions: The Borealis Enclave

Prompt #1 - The Borealis Enclave

"The Borealis Enclave is a massive city tucked in an underwater gorge that stretches for miles across the sea floor. The city is lit with beautiful teal and gold light from bioluminescent corals that are attracted to the warmth of the merpeoples’ homes and structures. There is one main thoroughfare through the city that is often packed with merpeople swimming or riding sea creatures. Draw or write your character in The Borealis Enclave. Your piece must feature an ocean, your registered character, and an underwater city."

 

Okay, so the whole portal incident? Sucked. But you know what else sucks? Being under the sea. No, really. Aza’s not an ocean person, this whole tail business really doesn’t help either. Though, maybe he can find time to do something fun while he’s down here.

 

Yes, we all almost experienced mass portal problems forever (and that would have SUCKED). But that’s not the point, you’d want to mellow out too if you fell through several portals in the span of like three days.

 

Aza himself isn’t really a bad swimmer, though he’s also not the best, the merperson tail at least helps a little bit. He explores the city using the buildings as leverage to push himself further every so often. Trying his best not to touch anything that could possibly be living off the side of these buildings. He has to turn his head quite a bit around corners to try and avoid swimming into anyone.

 

In fairness his missing eye does make it considerably harder to see where he is going, it’s not usually this bad on land but surrounded by ocean it does get much harder and he has to keep the eye closed in order to avoid having water in his empty socket, in turn making his depth perception overall not the best down here.

 

At least merpeople aren’t actually just sharks, sharks seem to think Aza is a snack and he doesn’t enjoy fighting sharks. Though he probably looks like he could have fought a shark and won based on the bite scar on his shoulder that is highly visible without his coat. He holds his head up at that thought, as he should. Because at least if anything he looks cool as hell.

 

He continues on his way for quite a bit of time, before entering the thoroughfare and trying his best to stick to the side as to avoid swimming into anyone. In the event that he does swim into someone he lets out a “Sorry!” or an “Excuse me!” or even a “Pardon me!” before taking a deep breath in. Just keep avoiding eye contact and no one will ask you to do anything for them he thinks.

 

Though the merfolk do seem relatively understanding, at least he hopes. He thinks maybe they’re secretly judging him. But he’s not really in much place to actually care about that.

 

As he keeps swimming he eventually has a thought that makes him chuckle, his sister would hate it here. Having a mermaid tail or not Lyra can’t and wouldn’t swim and is irrationally afraid of the ocean alone. Honestly it’s quite funny to Aza sometimes, though he never really asked her why. Maybe he’ll have to do that some other time. Next time he sees her perhaps.

 

Eventually he stops to investigate the ocean life that has attached itself to buildings here, it is quite pretty when you really look at it. Starfish, corals, algaes, bonus points when they glow!

 

Aza’s mother often talked about things like these before, more in a fairy tale sort of way but she may have sparked an interest in things like these when Aza was younger. Maybe at some point Aza could go to a world where some more glowing things his mother spoke about live? That would be lovely, he thinks. Next time he would like to go find ‘fireflies’ they seem like they’d be quite cute.

 

Next stop on the list of things to see and places to go, somewhere to eat. This is a city there has to be somewhere to eat, somewhere around here right? And sure enough, after around an hour of searching, stopping, looking, swimming. He does find a fairly cute little place to stop and eat. Whatever merpeople eat, that is, he’s not entirely sure what it is or if it even looks good to eat.

But really can you be picky about what you put in your system when you made the active decision to visit somewhere new? Not really, and with that Aza eats his food, whether he thought it was good or not is a different story but at least it didn’t taste like charcoal. Don’t even ask, he doesn’t want to talk about it.

 

Honestly? Wasn’t that bad, could have been worse. Could be better, but could be so much worse. So it seems like a win to Aza.

 

For a moment he thinks of possible things he could go do for the rest of his time here, honestly he’s not 100% sure. Going any further down into the ocean seems like a death sentence, leaving the safety of the city seems like a death sentence, overall exploration seems like a bad idea. Aza’s trying to take an off day; he's not here to discover the biggest hidden mysteries known to man. Not today, anyways. Maybe tomorrow, or the next day, or the next. But certainly not today.

 

Though he can’t really help but to wonder how much of portal posi’s scrap material she used in her portal experiments got left behind in every world. It shouldn’t be very much he doesn’t think, but she also had so many robots that it doesn’t seem unlikely to find anything at all hidden in the worlds. Maybe less likely here considering all the ocean, it wouldn’t hurt to look, right?

 

And that’s how Aza spent the rest of his day off doing overtime, granted it was much more entertaining than sitting around for the rest of the day. He’d look in back alleyways and corners all around the city, explore much more of it than he would have otherwise. And collected some pretty neat seashells along the way. Don’t worry, he made sure they were uninhabited seashells with no signs of life living in them. And the ones that did have life in them he put back down. He’s an evil character, not a monster.

 

Which, brings him to taking a break and thinking about his own morality. Is he really a bad person? Do bad people, do good things? Does he really think that he is in the wrong for the things he has done in the past? The things he had done in retaliation to the things that were done to him? We’re those really his fault?

 

Is he just like portal Posi or is there a difference? What is “good” and “evil” aside from a black and white line that grays ever so slightly down the middle. Maybe he’ll never know, he certainly won’t know today. It’s his day off, and he’s not paid to think about his own morality. Especially not on his day off.

 

Word count: 1111