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Chapter 1

Roger
March 23

If there's one thing that I can promise to myself, it's to never be married in the future. The majority of women are a death sentence and cause nothing but serious trouble. They're as bad as they are good; they either offer one great night in bed or a horrible migraine headache the morning after. There's a reason why they were first tempted to take the apple; they are nothing but sheep-in-wolves-clothing, sinful, misleading, inconsistent devils who always think they are the ones right.

Call my claims extreme-- which perhaps they were-- but my circumstances were beyond the last straw. I had been stuck underwater in an airtight room for hours with a woman whose complete nature was the opposite of her namesake.

The blonde in her pink miniskirt sat on a desk a few meters way in the interior of the room. She was lighting a cigarette, the lighter producing a rare temporary bit of illumination. And then it was gone, replaced by the end of a glowing butt. If there was thing I could not stand, it was smokers. I hated the smell of nicotine. I was not a Private Investigator.

"Why do you deliberately foul the air in here?" I said from my position on the old couch.

The window offered me great views of the city ruins. The panorama of it all fascinated my mind; either that or the ceiling which was very dilapidated and revealed broken wires. It looked like it would fall any second on us and yet something still bonded it together.

"I'm smoking because I can't stand the air in here. It gives me creeps," she said. She had been staring for some time at an invisible target in the darkness for at least an hour.

"I consider it a small blessing not to mention impossible that we even have air in this room at all. And I also realize there's no telling how long it'll last."

She forcefully ground the cig out on a rusted ashtray, sighing. And then she turned to me. "So, Mr. Smart Aleck, how are we gonna get out of here?" she yelled, her angry voice echoing loudly throughout the vast room.

Above me I saw a cockroach crawl on an expired light bulb.

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Roger
March 20

Just because you are all alone with a woman who calls herself 'Angel' doesn't make it a honeymoon. It all began just a couple of days ago.

It had rained the night before near the docks. The salty air overwhelmed me in the shantytown. The roads were slick with muddy puddles and the temperature was significantly cooler.

"Ya mean to tell me you kin even negotiate to bring down the price of fish?" the middle-aged man in the shade challenged as he chewed on the thin rigid bones of his last meal, his barefoot heels relaxed on an empty crate. Not far from the yellow rapid shelter stood his small fisher's cabin.

"Of course I can," I said behind my shades as I stood beside the wharf watchman. "As long as its a legitimate case. There's been an unusual increase in fish prices for two weeks now. Do you think that people outside the dome should only eat synthetic cereals?"

"Eh. I don't have any fish to sell. It's the retails sellers that are doin' the price-fixin'."

"You're saying that there aren't anymore fish to catch?"

"Oh, yeah. Sure. There are fish to catch. It'd a-take three-thousand years to catch all the fish in the sea with all those reefs." He briefly looked up at me from under his black trucker-style hat.

"Alright. Why then?"

"Because there ain't nobody who will go out and catch 'em critters. All the fishermen refused to go out to sea. Yep. They're all too scurred."

It was true. Along the dock floated empty, abandoned ghost-white trawlers-- trawlers which used to head far out miles into the ocean and bring ashore a trail of hungry hawking seagulls.

"What are they scared of?" I pressed on.

"They're scurred of the sea titan," he said as he lowered his hat. And that was the last of our exchange.

Sea titan. For a moment I was no longer by the dock but at Electric City, reliving everything again. The cold snowy night, the strange mysterious wail that plagued the river, the black tall creature that rose out of the water and had the seemingly magical ability to harness power, die, and resurrect a brand new beginning for the residents who had only known darkness.