She'd lived here at the bottom of the ocean, on the silt and organic slurry that made up the bottom as long as she could remember. It was very solitary; once she could feed herself, her parents had moved on and left her to her own devices and territory. There wasn't much bigger than her down here, and she was an apex predator in the ridiculous jumble that was this ecosystem's food chain.
It was a simple life; hunt and feed and sleep and hunt and feed and sleep. Time didn't exist down here, only an endless night. She'd never seen the sun; her own bioluminescence was as bright as it ever got under the sea. She would've been content to exist free like this forever, but things were changing. The feeling it brought on was new, like her hunger. Almost like when a bigger predator was around, the sense of unease and something-was-wrong gnawed at her.
The prey was gone.
Anglerfish, Tuna, Mackerel, Eels and viperfish, Rays and even the sea cucumbers that ate the slurry of the bottom layer- they'd all disappeared without a trace. It had been many, many sleeps since she'd eaten anything at all, and while hunting was always opportunistic, there were no more opportunities. The lack of food had happened before, but never this bleak...
So after gathering herself, she'd gone to the dead metal whale that was her home, opening the rusty door and gathering up the few things she wanted to keep. A tortoise-shell mirror, a bag of doubloons, a fork, and the metal stick that had come off one day in her grip.
She closed the door on the dark interior and lingered, her hand on the bar that served to open it. The metal whale hadn't always been here; she could follow it's trail through the deep, scraping the bottomo of the sea until it had gotten wedged here. She put her hand under the U-396 near it's head and patted it before she gathered herself, blinked, and left on her journey without a look back. Her kind didn't form permanent homes, but her time in it's orderly steel stomach had been calm and good. If she could have, she would have stayed there, but she had to move on.
So far below the surface that the water pressure was close to seven tons per square inch, she sat on top of the shelf she'd hiked to and blinked. Her eyes were very sensitive, and she could still see her footprints breaking up the monotony of the bottom landscape. Her own lights flickered and softly shone around her, as she grappled with the melancholy and pensive feelings she'd never had before.
Eventually she got back to her feet and set off once more, heading higher and higher, closer to the surface world without knowing it.
