Jack Stocker
I do a lot of stuff. Mainly though, I write.
An Introduction to Terrans
From inside the dome, it's a different world. If you were to keep your eyes at ground level, you might convince yourself you were in any regular city. But when you look up, you'll see that vast, perfectly moulded glass curving up and over the sky itself, encompassing the cranes and skyscrapers, as the sunlight shines weakly through the water outside. You'll see the jellyfish, dolphins and sharks gliding around and above the boundaries of the city. Even the occasional whale will drift past, momentarily casting a magnified shadow over entire streets at a time.
Of course, none of this innate natural majesty means much to the Terrans. The fish, like the sea around it, are all just machinations of the Earth's design. Ah, this is hard to explain. Look, they don't technically worship the Earth, although they acknowledge its supremacy - like Christian beings regard the Devil. Not a god as such, but a sentient, massively powerful force, constantly plotting the demise of all not directly aligned with it. Their aims are to survive the coming apocalypse at any cost, even if it means excluding weaker elements (read: literally any other sentient species) from their underwater haven. Even with all their desperate survival measures, most believe that the End of Days is upon them already, and everything they do is simply a delaying tactic. They don't even really trust their dome, nor the sea around it, to shield them from destruction.
Despite this, they're far from nihilistic - their will to live isn't in question. The Terran philosophy is 'make the most of it'. Terrans think quickly, talk quickly, and act quickly, because they believe that every second is their last. They are intellectual and logical, but not cold-hearted. Their paranoia, though deeply ingrained, doesn't extend to kin. They value nuclear family units, and the importance of friendship. Their society is similar in many ways to those on the surface. The only major difference is a total lack of currency - they favour a barter system instead. Everything a Terran owns is important to him, since at any one time, he believes he's about to be buried with it all. Currency itself is meaningless, so they've cut it out. The barter system is so integral to their way of life that those breaking it (thieves) face strict punishment. Namely death.
And that my friends, is where your favourite Elf steps into this particular narrative.
(Yes of course it's me.)
Terrans always fascinated me.
I think it's probably something to do with the fact that their philosophy is so uniquely opposed to ours. Elves commune with the Earth - we give as much to it as we take. We breed as many animals as we eat, we plant as many trees as we harvest, and we keep the rivers clean. And many of us like to spend long days, weeks even, spaced out of our skulls, tripping balls on the greatest natural hallucinogens Mother Earth has to offer us. With a few exceptions, (such as myself) pretty much all Elves unconditionally worship the Earth, basking in its immeasurable power. The Terrans share that same awe.
They just think it's going to destroy them.
I would call them environmentalists, but they gave up on that centuries ago. It's not uncommon to hear the belief that everything has its time, and everything must die. The Terrans are no different - they just believe that our 'time' was several days before yesterday. According to legend, there was a time when the Terrans lived above ground, but if that's true, the details of it are forever lost to history. The only concrete evidence to support the theory is that despite the fact that their current habitat, the Terrans clearly are not naturally aquatic creatures. All their known means of survival are entirely artificial, which though advanced, are not the products of biological evolution. They have never been observed without their blue omni-suits, which are tinted so can blend perfectly into the murk of the water. The suits are known to survive extreme temperatures, and can resist a fair bit of blunt force trauma. I'm not talking about their military - every single Terran on the planet is permanently outfitted like this. They live in their armour.
And sweet Jesus, what armour it is. A Terran's omni-suit sports two small green matrix-lights on the left side of the breastplate, which are speculated to control some sort of defibrillator. A small black cylinder fused to the right shoulder houses a powerful torch, in case they find themselves in uncertain surroundings. A miniscule but deadly firearm is concealed in the wrist of the same hand, and a straight blade can extend from the other. An oxygen mask obscures the face, with two long dark ovals carved into the places where their eyes would be. Their short snouts end in a square black filter, composed of four interlocking diamonds, which themselves intersect into nine smaller diamonds. There are thirty six filters in all, and Terrans only use about seven of them - the rest are guards against the most unlikely of liquid or gas attacks. Their long, rabbit-like ears are encased in the same material that make up their omni-suits, and hang down from below army-issue Brodie helmets. They move with an eerie grace, enhanced by their long, spindly limbs. Like the Elves, they are generally a small people, none standing over six foot tall. All in all, they look like well-armed subterranean Bugs Bunnies, as viewed on mescaline.
Over the years, Terrans have maintained an impressive cloak-and-dagger aura around their entire society, and still relatively little is known about them. No one knows how they got the material for their omni-suits, nor about the material they used to create their artificial habitat - the great dome known as the Letuposis. (That's a cannibalised amalgamation of the Latin words for 'death' and 'place' - quite literally, the place where they die. Cheerful bunch.) From the outside, the Letuposis looks like colossal snow-globe. Blinking lights and flashing colours flicker through the preudo-glass material, and their straight, solid structures are so rigid that they look almost as if a child had built them out of a gigantic set of Lego.