Dream Journal 001: The Sea People | Ocean's Gaia (Part 2)

[Part 1 of this narrative can be found here.]

Holy heck that was a lot of text. Arite, let's finish this off~

[Transcript copied from Discord logs. Please excuse irregularities in capitalization and punctuation.]
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Date: 2017-08-07

So I resurface with the dude and have enough brains to heal him so he can breathe again, but not gain consciousness and thrash around like an idiot when he sees this seemingly-teenage girl coming to his rescue

OFC i have no idea where to go so i decide to follow the life raft with the other 2 humans in secret minimizing my noise at the same time since well, water is my element]

as it turned out we're not far from shore at all (thankfully) since the human caretakers of our sea people cave would have to get home frequently but as it also turns out the liferaft humans have no idea where we are because this mass of land doesn't exist anywhere in their known realm of human geography also their compasses don't work

and yes, as it turns out, this is the territory of the very same human country who destroyed the sea people civilization 400 years ago i guess you can call it a modern-day Avalon since the people are removed from the rest of human society most of the populace seem to be garbed in fashion from the 1500s and the economy is mostly based around agriculture the ethnicities of the people, curiously enough, make up a good mix of the world as a whole

there are what people of our world would call caucasians, african americans, asians, etc etc the cultures are just as much a mix-mash of them, but everyone seems to get along well

so the liferaft soldiers and their injured comrade are looking around weirdly on the beach when i get on shore behind them with my dude too then suddenly there's a force that knocks them onto the ground before the sand itself starts moving the raft forward, like one of those flat escalators you see at airports

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as it turned out, the humans were never able to successfully replicate the high speed travel ability of the sea people, but they somehow managed to inject the organic uh...tech? genetics? body parts (ew) of the sea people into the land itself so that the land acts as a telepathetic transporter that takes people where they want with a simple thought or with a thought from the leader of the territory, etc

the life raft dudes are hanging on for dear life to the edges of the raft, with their injured comrade inside meanwhile i'm lugging my unconscious victim behind me and decide to join the sand escalator for fun because that looks a lot easier to travel

somehow friction isn't really an issue because we're kinda...slightly floating above the ground itself? (like those electromagnetic trains) and we quickly move past beaches, a long stretch of desert and hilly terrain to finally chanced upon a wide expanse of grass surrounding a beautiful garden with trees and flowers and a large lake

this ends up being the center of this particular stretch of land there are people just milling around, walking in the park and a group just gathered on a hill surrounding what looks like (wait for it) an old Daoist cultivator dude, complete with white robes and beard

anyways once our land conveyor belt comes to a stop, various people come and take the 4 soldiers into custody to treat their injuries and whatnot they leave me alone because by now i've somehow managed to blend into the populace by adopting some of their clothes (i think i generated them myself? don't know how that works but it did) so i just walk away and have the people assume i was the one that helped these soldiers out of the goodness of my heart (well technically i did)

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the Daoist dude seems the most interesting because he's talking the loudest, so i walk up the hill to him and his students somehow i end up walking next to one of his students who is trying to climb the hill the other students are all looking our way because apparently it's the middle of a lesson

so the Daoist teacher dude is giving instructions to his student, like "jump!"

"stop!" "float!" iono, some sort of instruction to make the student defy gravity and etc

and i have no idea how the student does because he's behind me but i do it just fine because of Trait #2: buoyancy in water and air and think oh, that was fun before i end up floating in the air just for the heck of it

and the rest of the students stare at me while the Daoist master goes on lecturing about the ancient art of cultivation and how it relates to humans now etc etc overall the structure of this place is quite strange, no real leadership but everyone exists relatively peaceful in a semi-utopia exchanges of different ideas and etc

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anyways there's a real lack of...hierarchy in the society beyond having the young listen to the old the concept of families still exist, as do clans, but everyone gets along peacefully exploration is a regular hobby, where citizens go out exploring the unknown eventually i join up randomnly with a family one day and live with them for a while generally boring slice of life stuff happens here but the dream fast forwards through them only thing important to note that the patriarch of the family is young and probably in his 20s he runs some sort of market business selling goods dug up in the wastes/deserts surrounding the main area of the country/world and he has a team of bodyguards to help him i end up being one of them, and make friends with two girls about the same age who are equally competent in fighting, though less in floating etc etc

blah blah stuff happens there's a rainstorm that causes a flood in the local river some kid falls in and an adult jumps in to save them while their organic land system erects a dam made out of wood to stem the water flow but then the water overwhelms the dam and sweeps both the adult and child away so i end up jumping in myself to save them but not before we get swept like hundreds of miles down river

so this man who saved the kid was basically my boss and the kid his little brother or something and now we're stuck outside the country because the flood was a freak force of nature that washed us right past its barriers to the outside world, which is now post WWI uh...i dunno what we did to survive but i know i used my skills and he starts up a trading system of his own we can't go back to the isolationist country because we have no idea where it is now, past the barriers)

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buuuuut eventually my best friends/fellow bodyguards find us and we get along pretty well boss then makes preparations to go back to his old country since they (the bodyguards) know where it is, apparently

almost done

we do get introduced to modern (1920s) society where we are seems to be either england or america, i'd say england for the murky rainstorm weather And things like movies and tile floors and pollution (?) actually i start to weaken a bit here because my species primarily draws strength from nature and all this filtering out of bad stuff isn't good on the body still, it doesn't affect me too much beyond making it harder to heal things than before

however, my friends/fellow bodyguard girls are acting strangely and seem more affected finally i take a day to heal them when they start feeling unwell and then come upon the revelation that they too, are sea people but part of the first generation who escaped the destruction of their clan AKA they betrayed their people to hide/live amongst the humans

even though it's been 400 years they still more or less look the same (because hello, aging) and through my healing they realize that i'm of the same species (which they've always suspected, given my excellent abilities that the humans in the isolationist country now attribute to cultivation) but more than that, a royal of their own species (because i still retain their abilities even after entering this pollution-filled world, while theirs has been weakened or fading)

after which they pledge their loyalty to me as subjects to their princess ofc i'm like "wut princess" and they describe the injustice that happened to our people, conveniently glossing over how/why they escaped and basically butter me up as the last royal while quietly denouncing land humans in their speech

meanwhile i'm comparing their words in my own head to how nice our bossu is and wonders if they're wrong about some details (namely the royalty part) but then one day we're doing business with boss in a place somewhere and i happen upon an artifact that's actually one of the few treasures taken from the long-decimated sea people clan namely a golden hairpin decorated with a clam shell and a pearl that used to belong to (dundundun) the queen, aka my grandmother

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and within the pin contains more memories and experience from the long line of sea people royalty than anything these two "friends" (traitors) of me would know so i guess i somehow get a better perspective from that

the pin ends up being a focal point for the two other sea people because they recognize its aura of...power/royalty whatever...and try all sorts of ways to take it for themselves, not realizing the consciousness of the late queen already uh...shared its info with me i play dumb so on the night they plan to betray/kill me and steal the pin/powers/privilege, i catch them both

and restrain them with the inherent Imperial Privilege that should be enough but....enough human doctrine has gotten into me that i still prioritize protecting them over our own people so i reason to myself that for the sake of humanity's safety, these two should be eliminated and will them into non-existence by having their bodies self-destruct

after which i feel an abject sense of loss as two of the only remaining people of my species have died apparently as royalty, the deaths of your people resonate with you and then....i woke up

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never did get to finish dreaming about those loose ends ORZ
it was still the 1920s when I work up

the sad thing now that I think about it is that she'll end up living the rest of her life alone because eventually her human boss will die Unless she finds the other sea people children and free them Maybe that'll happen once she tracks down the lost country again

She was crying when I left her ; u ;

sad but numb...? Their species apparently don't feel as strongly as humans but she grew human enough to understand those emotions more

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[Credit for title goes to Discord user Chronos. Thanks, d00d. See below for post-narrative commentary.]

Spoiler

[The next Dream Journal starts here.]​