For those of you who don't know, there was a movie titled 'Captain Nemo and the Underwater City,' where a version of Nemo founded an underwater society in a city called Templemer. The name is the same, but my version is different, just so you know. I don't own anything of the characters or the Nautilus.

Please let me know what you think.

Foundation of Templemer.

Captain Nemo sat in the Salon of the Nautilus, pouring over the charts he and his crew had been making of the seafloor for the past three years. After their escape from India, where he and his men had been lucky enough to escape the destruction of the Sepoy rebellion and escape with the majority of their allies and their families - some of them had lost their families to the English, Nemo among them, but some of his followers had been lucky.

They had escaped to an island in the Pacific. Along the way, the Prince, fuelled by his growing hatred and disgust for the outside world, had immediately begun drawing up plans for a submarine boat after visiting Europe and America where he had learnt of the mechanics of such vessels.

Modelled using the shape of the Blue, Minke and the Sperm whale, the submarine was designed to be as part of its natural element as possible, and

using methods that would be known and understood one day, the Prince had used hydroelectricity gleaned from the alternating temperatures of the oceans, with the secondary system of water rushing over wheels akin to the ones he had seen during a visit to England in his youth, which turned the turbines to generate electricity, while batteries stored the energy accumulated so nothing was wasted and would provide for emergencies.

This submarine boat would not be put into harbours, would have no contact with the land, and would be large enough to contain and provide for his crew and for their families if needed to create a subaquatic community living off of the oceans. The seas, rich in plants, fish, mammals, and other needs such as clothing were more than enough for the Prince and his people.

This satisfied Prince Dakkar's strongest desires for he had no desire to return to the civilised world ever again. On the launch of the submarine boat, he named his vessel the Nautilus, called himself Captain Nemo and let go of his former identity, and he disappeared with his people beneath the seas.

He had made many mistakes during the Sepoy Rebellion.

He had gotten too big, and his family had paid the price as had the mother country. India was still in the grip of the British oppression and they were in no position to do anything to relieve their home country of that.

The Nautilus proved her worth as the ship of ships, but as time passed with everyone on board including families and children, Captain Nemo realised something was wrong. While he didn't feel ashamed for taking the children and their families through the oceans, exploring the wondrous depths of the world and educating them to a new way of life, it did not take long for the former Prince to recognise many of the families were not happy.

They wished for stability and being on a mobile submarine was not what they called stable. Many of them didn't feel it right they be on board a ship of war, either. The Nautilus was not a warship, a ship of the line, but Captain Nemo had planned on using the Nautilus to further his agenda in getting revenge on the British, to attacking the weapons of war, to mine the English Channel and make it physically impossible for the British Navy from leaving Portsmouth harbour. At the same time, he would keep himself under arrest for what was happening in the outside world, to see if there were any major changes - he wasn't hopeful, but it was good to keep in touch. Using secretive forays into places such as New York, Paris, Berlin, Hamburg, and Rome, the Nautilus community knew much about what was happening on the surface.

And with each rebellion, Captain Nemo was always on hand. He made use of the Nautilus's diving suits and airlock facility to pluck gold and jewels plucked from the bottom of the sea from shipwrecks, such as the treasure ships lost in the Spanish Main and in Vigo Bay, but at the same time, he made use of the blacksmith facilities to pick up gold and silver ore and manufacture ingots on his former island base to fund the rebellions. The treasures would be used to buy resources, the materials for weapons and ammunition and to create spy networks. On his islands, Nemo would be able to manufacture weapons ranging from bows and arrows, guns, armour, and he delivered them to the causes he supported.

But at the same time, he knew many of the women on board the Nautilus would prefer to form homes somewhere else. In fact, when he had constructed the Nautilus, Captain Nemo had been in two minds about having the children on this ship. On one hand, he knew the Nautilus would sometimes find itself in dangerous situations and the crew would need all of their concentration to focus on the repairs to the ship.

The solution was obvious.

He would have to form some kind of community for the families, and anybody else trying to escape the surface worlds horrors, and as he sat at the table in the Salon with a piece of paper and his whale-bone pen with the bottle of cuttlefish ink nearby for him to dip it in, Nemo was going through his plans for the community.

The easiest kind of permanent home that could be built on an island was instantly out because of the dangers of security, although it wasn't entirely impossible to use one as a permanent colony. He had not constructed a submarine only to frequently return to an island, and while Captain Nemo and his men had taken the Nautilus from one sea to the next, especially within the Pacific which was littered with unpopulated and uninhabited islands that were far from the shipping routes to create bases and secret harbours in case the Nautilus was badly damaged and they needed the time to repair her. While he preferred repairing his ship at sea, there would be times where that was not practical so he had decided to find bases.

Nemo lifted his gaze at the thin book with the black hardcover only a foot away from him, resting on top of a collection of Pacific charts. The book contained all of the surveys of his island bases and the ones he had visited which didn't contain the right properties and facilities one of his bases needed, and for the last couple of hours, Nemo had been flicking through it to decide what to do about his current problem.

The best and most ideal solution would be to build an underwater city. His people were used to living within the Nautilus and so living within an underwater city shouldn't be an issue. On top of that, it would be impossible for the surface world to storm the city and attack them should their enemies discover their presence beneath the waves. They would have to find it first and the oceans were too vast and deep to really discover such a city. So they would have some kind of security. After constructing the Nautilus which travelled beneath the waves, an underwater city was relatively easy to conceive even though it opened up a host of other problems for Nemo to solve. One of the biggest issues with the construction of the Nautilus was how best to supply the ship with air. Since the ship was designed along the lines of the Cetaceans and Nemo had used them as a springboard to help him design the ship, Nemo had decided to simply surface the Nautilus after a period of a few days and replenish the air supplies and store the surplus within air tanks which would be released over a period of a few days. It wasn't perfect, but it was the best thing he could do without worrying about chemicals. He knew one of the component gases to water was oxygen, and while electrolysis existed Nemo hadn't made use of it because he preferred the more natural method that real whales used.

But the underwater cities wouldn't be able to continually rise to the surface. No, they would need to exist on the seabed, and they would need to be self-sufficient, truly self-sufficient. While he had no problem with that and he understood how electrolysis worked, Nemo knew it would take him time to discover the right way to construct such an underwater city. But he could do it. He had studied architecture, and while it wasn't his main interest he knew enough of the basics to make such a program work. The only issues that Nemo had were where such an underwater city would be constructed.

Ideally, the city would be constructed in a part of the ocean depths where they would have access to supplies of food, byssus to make clothes and other supplies. There were dozens of locations around the world where that would be possible, but the current problem that Nemo had was how he would fabricate the buildings of the city.

For a long moment, Nemo sat back in his seat and thought about the matter. This was but one of a number of issues with the underwater city problem he needed to deal with in the initial stages of the planning. Would he build some kind of central dome, or was that a bad idea? As the thought occurred to him and he had a few moments to picture the image of a large underwater dome covering a number of buildings in his head, Nemo instantly discounted that idea. In case of a flood, the entire city would be compromised and everyone would be killed. No, the simpler the city, the better.

Nemo pictured a number of small buildings spread across underwater plains, each one self-sufficient but powered by electricity derived in the same way as the Nautilus. Each building would be self-contained, containing the equipment needed to supply that part of the city with oxygen and electricity.

Nemo could work with that without any real trouble, but his mind went towards what the city would be designed like. His mind travelled back to his time in Peru, to Lake Titicaca. During his time in the region, Nemo had been fascinated when he had heard stories of a local indigenous people who lived on floating reed islands. He had been fascinated by the idea of floating lands. Floating islands were common enough, but as Prince Dakkar the beauty of such a natural phenomenon had intrigued and fascinated him greatly. Rather than construct a city fixed firmly into the ground - actually he didn't know if it was possible to build foundations - Nemo could create a free-floating collection of buildings that floated like immobile submarines anchored into the ground.

But where would he build it?

There were dozens of islands listed within the book, especially within the South China sea where his people could settle down and fabricate the dwellings. They would likely have several anchorages. No, the South China sea would likely be the wrong place to construct the sections of an underwater city. They would need plenty of flat ground for the construction of warehouses, to construct the sections of the city. He would also need to experiment with building materials - metal was good, but Nemo believed more practical materials for buildings existed for underwater habitats.

Picking up his pen and reopening the book containing the information of his islands, Nemo skimmed through the pages looking for suitable places he'd visited where a city could be founded and there was enough flat ground to build sections of the city, and he began writing down a list of things he would need to do, and while he was at it he began sketching out practical rough plans.

X

As he stood in the control room on the Nautilus, watching from the viewports as the submarine slowly and carefully pulled the first circular section of the city. Thanks to the concrete construction of the buildings on the circular pad which reminded him of a lily pad, Nemo thought about the last two years of struggle and research. The crew had been surprisingly happy about the prospect of building a city even an underwater one, and he realised many of them had actually been hoping for a permanent home. In the end, Nemo had returned to the island where he'd constructed the Nautilus; the fire which had destroyed their former works was easy to replace and to begin work on researching ways of building the underwater city.

Nemo had been inspired by the shape of lily pads which went with the inspiration of the Uros people's floating islands on Lake Titicaca, and he had designed his underwater city along those lines. He had tested the design and the construction materials, much like he had with the Nautilus. There had been many failures, many successes until he discovered the right way of building the segments which would be towed back out into the open sea where they would be anchored and submerged near a coral reef and seaweed forest they'd found and surveyed.

Near him, his second in command and one of the navigator crew were talking quietly together.

"We're at the location, Captain," his second, Vishwa said.

Nemo nodded. "Stop the Nautilus. Send the light signal to the pad. They'll do the rest."

"Aye, sir."

Nemo watched quietly as Vishwa set the light signal through the aft viewport. The pad section shone an affirmative light back. On the sides, the large anchors dropped into the sea, into the depths of their new and permanent home. Once the anchors were fixed the ballast tanks were flooded, and the pad slowly began to submerge. It was 900 ft to the bottom of the sea in this part of the ocean, and he had calculated the size and the flotation of the ballast tanks.

Nemo watched as the top of the buildings on the pad submerge before he turned to the bridge crew. "Prepare to dive," Nemo ordered.

"Yes, Captain. Prepare to dive. Diving stations," Vishwa bellowed through the speaking tube to the rest of the ship. The diving bell sounded the warning.

"Trim forward ballast. Open the vents," Nemo ordered.

As the water bubbled around the viewports, Nemo watched the slow descent of the first section of the new underwater city carefully. While he was confident in his design and his building work, he was vigilant in case of anything going wrong. Sensing Vishwu's presence next to him, Nemo didn't bother to turn.

"Are the rest of the testing team ready?"

"Yes, sir. The diving bell is prepared. They await your presence. How long will you and they be inside?"

Nemo considered. "A week to test the systems. If it works then come back and we'll tow the second piece out."

"Understood sir. If I may say so, sir, this is a great triumph for us."

"Yes, it is. The start of a new civilisation."

The underwater stay in the habitat was more than successful. When the Nautilus returned, Nemo confirmed it was safe and he personally supervised the towing out of the next pieces of the city. When one was anchored into place and tested, another came through, and then another, and then another. All in all, there were 14 pads containing buildings and they were soon joined together by transparent travel tubes for easy access.

As he watched from the Nautilus Salon, Nemo watched in total satisfaction as the final pad was slowly lowered into place. In a few hours work would begin at once to connect the travel tubes. When Vishwu returned from the work, he found Nemo still in the Salon. The Captain hadn't moved from that spot for four hours, leaving the work to the others.

"Here is our new home on the seafloor, Vishwu. I shall name this place….Templemer," Captain Nemo declared.

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