Under the Elements

The ocean was a quiet and bubbly place, densely packed with many little sea critters in its depths. My goodness, they were plentiful!

Marek was easily keeping up with me as I swam down gracefully toward the bottom of the sea floor. I felt like an angel mermaid, just without the tail.

The weight of all that water above us was crazy heavy. We had to be about 100 meters down so far, and it was a real difference. At this depth, I was worried that Marek would have issues breathing, or literally be flattened like a pancake cooked without egg yolk. But I think Mella’s magic jellyfish was keeping him safe from the pressure. That didn’t mean he was enjoying this.

We swam past some coral reef shelves, which were lit up by all sorts of colourful glowing lifeforms. It was as pretty as all the documentaries made them out to be. I tried to point those out to help ease his anxiety a little. It was a shame that this wasn’t where we needed to be, because it was fun to explore all the weird looking aquatic life.

The funny part was that my sensors were registering coral as animals. I always thought they were plants!

“Yalda, how much further do we need to go?” Marek asked me over the comms.

“Another 130 meters.”

“Alright...”

He didn’t sound very happy about having to swim another hundred plus meters, but we really didn’t have any other options.

It was getting dark, so I activated my high beam spotlights.

-Eye spotlights active! High Beam lights set to : ON-

Everything brightened up very nicely. I kinda felt bad for the fish though, since they all got really scared of the light and swam away.

The moment things brightened up, I could see bits of wreckage all over the sea floor.

This wasn’t the same ship. It was similar, but definitely not the one we sank. That didn’t give me a good feeling. You could say it gave me a ‘sinking’ feeling… *BA-DUM-TS!*

Anyways, it was looking like our theory of the boat disappearing when it was destroyed might have been correct. We still held some hope that maybe the key was a corporeal item we could find.

Aside from the ship, there was something else that I was picking up on too down here. It was metal, and a very high concentration of it just under the wreckage.

At first it looked like my sensors were malfunctioning, but then I saw something shine when my high beams hit it.

“Do you see the shiny stuff down there?” I asked Marek.

“I do. But what is that?”

We touched down on the seafloor. I immediately started to dust away all the seaweed and sand to discover a metal surface. It was made of a Ferronium alloy, which was an occulat element I knew well.

No way were humans producing this occulat element. It was way too complex of a material for them to synthesize in this massive quantity. So I had no doubt that this must have been part of the root structure for the beam tower.

I was getting a very faint radio signal nearby. I swam over to where my sensors were picking it up, but all I saw was a ton of sand, coral and seaweed.

“Aren’t we supposed to be looking for the key in the boat?” Marek asked.

“I think I found something else. You can search while I take a look here.”

I didn’t want to make him do all the work, but whatever this was had to get my attention.

“Yalda, I can’t see anything down here without you.”

Oh, that’s right. I needed to use my high beams so he could see.

Alright… I decided to tab my curiosity for a moment so we could inspect the boat, but I had my doubts.

We swam further into the wreckage. Most of the boat had completely deteriorated by years of being underwater, but the parts that hadn't been eaten away held up fairly well, all things considered.

We swam into what we assumed was the captain's cabin and found a vault. I tried to turn the wheel to open it on my own, but it wasn’t budging. Then Marek came along and easily twisted it around like it was nothing.

He’s so strong…

The vault door opened. Water rushed inside the unsealed box. We saw a few items float up. There were three Pier Tokens and an old pirate pistol among some now waterlogged trash.

Marek took the pistol, but I took the coins. Nothing really of interest from the looks of it.

“There isn’t a key in here…” Marek commented as we searched a little bit more.

It meant we’d probably have to keep searching around to see if we could find another clue to a key, assuming there was one down here at all.

“Should we go check the signal now?” I asked.

“Yeah. Let’s go see what it is.”

We both swam back to the Ferronium structure where I detected the radio signal. The signal was coming from something buried under a lot of stuff…sea stuff. I had an idea to clear it all away quickly.

I activated my sonar and set it to sonic wave mode. My hands had the same ability to produce sound waves as my feet, so I set them up to fire off a sonic blast.

*WOOOV!*

The sonic wave rippled through the water and cleared away all the sand, seaweed and coral! I felt kinda bad doing that to the sea floor, but nature would have to forgive me.

“Sorry, nature…”

Now with all the sea stuff cleared away, we saw what looked like a control panel. It lit up blue and some information appeared on it in Nazalian. I switched the language to Euron so Marek could read it. Turns out it was some kind of puzzle.

Dad for some reason set up a lot of puzzles like this to deter people from going into places they shouldn’t. So this was definitely his design.

This puzzle was weird though. I saw a few icons representing things appear. The icons were : Fish, whale, boat, cloud, turtle, and anchor. That’s what they looked like, anyways.

Then below those symbols was something written in the order of : Fish, Turtle, Whale, Fish.

Marek didn’t have any idea what this meant, neither did I.

Then on the screen below we saw a ton, and I mean a TON, of boxes show up. They were all laid out in a grid. The boxes weren’t numbered, but I counted out exactly 118. The symbols from before were sprawled out through the whole thing. The fish, turtle, and whale only appeared once each. The fish was in box 10, the turtle was in box 78, and the whale was in box 92.

“What do you think about this?” I asked.

“I don’t know, it looks like ancient pictographs.”

He was right about that. But this wasn’t meant to be unsolvable, since there was a line to input something. So dad would have made sure it was understandable by me at least.

Let’s see… If there were 118 boxes, and the pictures from before only appeared in 3 places, that meant that those particular boxes must have been important, while the others were just pure sensory overloads. But why was 118 boxes important for this? What was it denoting?

“Marek, any idea about why there’s 118 boxes?”

“Is there something important about that number? Maybe it marks a date or time, no?”

Day 118 of this year was the 28th of April, and as far as I knew, there weren't any holidays then. And 0118 hours in military time was 1:18 AM, which was way past my bedtime, but didn’t mean much otherwise.

Good ideas, but nothing fit the bill.

We had to think about this a little more like dad might have. Daddy was a scientist. What would a scientist make a puzzle like?

Wait…118… There were officially 118 elements on the periodic table at this time, bar the occulat elements, which would have doubled that count. If that was the case, that meant the fish was on neon, the turtle was on platinum, and the whale was on uranium.

So, what did that mean? I brought it up to Marek, then he took a moment to think about it.

“Do the numbers mean anything?” he asked.

10, 78, 92… All together that added up to 180.

I did a 180 and turned around, thinking a clue might have been behind us… But nothing.

Maybe it wasn’t the numbers… But the letters?

Neon was Ne, Platinum was Pt, and Uranium U. NePtU…Ne? Neptune?

I turned back to the screen and input the respective letters under the symbols.

-Access to external entrance way granted-

-Welcome, Mistress Yalda-

That was it! A blast door under the reef started to open up. We both swam to it, but the door was stuck. Marek used his super strength to push the door open enough for us to get inside.

We saw a ray shield protecting the inner part of the doorway. I stuck my hand through it and on the other side was a chamber filled with air. Next went in my head, and I saw this was a small underwater hanger.

When I waved Marek in, we both completely entered the hanger bay. It smelled fishy in here, but maybe that was just the big pools of water meant for dropping submarines into, which were hanging on the ceiling.

“Marek…” I spoke from my mouth now. “This must be another way into the tower.”

“I think so.” He nodded, his voice muffled by the jellyfish. “Before we explore, why don’t we go back to the others and tell them what we’ve found, no?”

That was a good idea. If this was an alternate entrance, we may be able to use it to get into the tower.