Abella Danger's Coral Crusade

The door creaked open.

“Abigail, are you awake?” My mother asked as she looked through the door. “Oh, there you are. I didn’t know where you had gone off to since it was so late. I was beginning to worry.”

I sat up and pulled the covers over my shoulder.

“I was just down in the library reading about history,” I replied.

She smiled and walked over to the edge of my bed, pulling the blankets from me before brushing a strand of hair from my forehead.

“You have your father’s curiosity,” she said as she sat down on the edge of the bed. “He would spend hours reading when he was your age in this room too. I had never seen someone so entranced with books as him. It made him such a good scholar later on in life. Do you miss him Abigail? You haven’t really talked much about him lately…”

I looked away from her and down to my feet. Her words echoed what I had been thinking for months now; that I did not remember much about my father but knew he had been an excellent swimmer who lived in this underwater colony called Pacifica in 17th century Britain.

It was hard to imagine my father living in a time where people used horses and swords to fight wars but it was even harder to believe that Pacifica existed at all, let alone beneath the ocean where there is no land to stand upon and breathe oxygen from the sky. The notion was absurd and almost laughable but nobody ever laughed at it because they knew it wasn’t a joke and that our lives were not a dream or hallucination we would wake up from one day after falling asleep during an anatomy lesson, like most people assumed our lives were.

What was even harder to believe however was that deep inside me I felt like I belonged here in this colony more than anywhere else on Earth; not England or America where I grew up and spent most of my childhood or even Europe where my mother and grandmother both came from, but here in this underwater paradise with its strangely familiar culture and traditions that had nothing in common with our past encased by landmasses, oceans and continents.

I loved Pacifica for being beautiful and peaceful but most of all for being different; for being unique and special in ways that no one could ever understand, not even me, which is why I went out into the night alone to read history books about it instead of keeping myself busy by doing other things like reading stories with my mother or playing with my friends like normal 16-year-olds would do after dinner with their families.

But there were nights like tonight when I felt differently; when I wanted nothing more than to go back home to England where everything made sense, where life made sense – both past memories and present ones – because they all existed on land instead of below sea level without any explanation except for the word ‘magic’ being thrown around as if it explained everything but really meant nothing at all because magic did not exist at least not in our age nor did anything remotely close to it like telepathy or time travel or human flight without technology or… well literally anything that turned dreams into reality without any effort on our part whatsoever except for those rare occurrences known as miracles which usually involved God entering our lives for some reason so we could learn more about ourselves than what we did already know instead of learning more about Him because obviously He knew himself quite well already – which was fine by me because there were many things about Him that needed no improvement whatsoever although perfect is boring so there are always some things He could improve on otherwise He wouldn't be God anymore now would he? Either way, those rare occurrences were hardly ever exciting events worth remembering except at Christmas when Jesus Christ tended to enter our lives for some reason so we could learn more about ourselves than what we already knew instead of learning more about Him because obviously He knew Himself quite well already - which was fine by me because there were many things about Him that needed no improvement whatsoever although perfect is boring so there are always some things He could improve on otherwise He wouldn't be God anymore now would he? Either way, those rare occurrences were hardly ever exciting events worth remembering except every December 25th when Jesus Christ seemed to enter our lives for some reason so we could learn more about ourselves than what we already knew instead of learning more about Him because obviously He knew Himself quite well already - which was fine by me because there were many things about Him that needed no improvement whatsoever although perfect is boring so there are always some things He could improve on otherwise He wouldn't be God anymore now would he? Either way, those rare occurrences were hardly ever exciting events worth remembering especially when you couldn't remember them…