Tales of PulchraGea, Vol. 1

14: The Air I Breathe (Final/2473)

"I have a cousin in Bay City," Katherine Greyson said. "He's a marine biologist who studies Coreala migration patterns."

"How does that help us?" Doug asked.

"Because that's where the map shows the stone to be," Crystal assured him.

We were gathered in the cockpit of a UTPod bound for Bay City. Until now we'd been making educated guesses based off Alex Shepherd's itinerary, notes, and more often than not, pure intuition. Now we had the map, with a rough location of each keystone. The problem is that we didn't have a closer proximity. It could be anywhere in the area, and there were no local legends, no clues, no anything that could help us find it. Hence Katy's idea to draft her cousin into the search.

"There's minimal activity out on the bay," Katy explained. "Almost all of it is situated near the Sail Center and Coral Veranda."

Doug nodded his head knowingly, but he still wasn't grasping the full implications.

"Kermit's out on the bay on a regular basis," Katy said. "He's bound to know more about it than nearly anyone else."

"It's a bigger lead than we had," I admitted. "We're not exactly losing anything by trying."

***

"So you want me to help you search for a cave in the cliffside?" asked Kermit Hall.

He was roughly the same height as Katy, about twenty years old with chocolate hair and sepia eyes. He was dressed in what might be construed as a Hawaiian-style shirt, pocketed swim trunks, and flip flop sandals, all in some shade of blue or green.

Katy confirmed his question.

"It's kind of important. My dad..." Katy's voice broke subtly, almost imperceptibly, with emotion.

"I want to find it for him before he has to go."

Kermit ran his hand through his hair and sighed.

"Do you have diving gear?" he asked wearily.

Doug held up our rented dive gear and swim shoes.

Kermit made a face that said 'not bad,' as if he weren't expecting a bunch of teenagers to be so prepared.

"We're not exactly amateurs anymore at this point," chimed Crystal.

Kermit sighed deeply once more before waving us down the ramp of the submarine into the cargo bay. Doug stowed our gear in lockers while the girls pulled off their cover wear to reveal their swimsuits. Kermit ambled lazily into the cockpit and started the engine. The ramp in the ceiling closed up as the sub sank into clear water of the bay.

Submarines in PulchraGea aren't exactly designed like those on Earth. Same basic principals, just a different execution. Kermit's sub looked somewhat like a flattened squid. The Cockpit was a small bubble in the front not unlike that of Storm. The cargo bay behind him was mostly empty, but consisted of a locker-room style with a hatch that dropped from the ceiling to form a ramp and a small diving hole in the very center covered by a permeable energy field. Behind all of that is the engine and rotors, sticking out well behind the sub like flat squid tentacles.

Several hours of scanning the cliffs for decently sizable caves later, we had made no progress. The last rays of the sun's light filtered through the crystalline water in rainbow colored motes as it set beyond the eastern horizon. We had found nothing. We decided to call it a day. We'd return to Bay City for the night and come back at first light.

Except on the way back we received a sensor ping we'd missed before. I looked into the cockpit over Kermit's shoulder. A holographic representation of what the sensors saw floated in the air. The invisible scanning beams of the sub's sensor package had missed the crevice because it was digging into the rock at an angle.