Riveting Writing Prompts #9: People of the Deep

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Hey guys, it’s been a while since I have done one of these, but here is another Riveting Writing Prompts:

Earth’s most intelligent species has been hiding in the vast unexplored oceans all this time. In fact they tricked us into looking to the stars for intelligent life to distract us from their existence.

The prompt was written by u/Crazy_ManMan on Reddit.

Without further ado, here is the story:

While it is true that humans have conquered the land, the oceans are a much different story. Far from the shores of any continent, and much below the view of any random passerby, at the intersection of the global west and the east, there lives a group much older than humans, and yet miraculously not yet seem by them. While the land above was being ravaged by war, poverty, corruption and the likes, these beings are living out a much more peaceful existence.

Known only to the land above in legends, the Aquiatic people live near the ocean’s floor, in specially built houses that allow them to stay perfectly still, even while underwater. During their long history, the group has also gained the ability to breathe underwater, as well as swim just as well as any other sea life. Just like the humans above them, of which the Aquiatic people are distant relatives, they enjoy a diverse range of food collected from various parts of the ocean. The society of Aquius is run in a fairly similar fashion to the great democracies of the human world, with an elected body, a president, and courts.

However, they developed this system long before humans ever realized a system like that was even possible. Around the time of the Alexander the Great was conquering much of the world, while Aquius was being transformed into a more democratic society, its rulers realized that the day humans discovered their society existed, that would be the day everything ended. So, as part of a plan to protect their great society, the ruler at the time, King Zarius, sent a group of trained spies on a mission: to infiltrate human societies all around the world and make them believe that the only intelligent life existed beyond earth.

Zacari, one of the spies assigned to trick the human population in Asia, became famous among the people of Aquius. Every day he would talk to hundreds and hundreds of people, working tirelessly to convince people that intelligent life existed beyond the stars. Eventually, though, the people he talked to became afraid. They came to see him as a dangerous outsider, corrupting the minds of their fellow citizens, and so they killed him. Soon after his death, Zacari became immortalized as a statue in the country’s capital city Ozium.

While it is true that the people of Aquius fear their human relatives above, they do not hate them. Much like the worm does not wish to become the food of a bird, they to did not wish to be dug out of the hole they have built for themselves.

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