The Dominant Species
Chapter 1

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1

Good day, my loyal subjects. Well, you’re not exactly my subjects, are you? My subjects are all merpeople. You seem intelligent, so I’m guessing that you can tell from the fact that I have a purple tail that I’m a mermaid. I also have brown hair and blue eyes like my mother. I live at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. And not just anywhere, but in a castle.

Hence, the whole loyal subjects stuff.

I’m a princess. My name is Clara. My parents, Michelle and Hector, are the king and queen of our kingdom of millions of merpeople. Every kingdom of merpeople has a population of a few million.

Now, for a lot of people being royalty means being powerful and living in the lap of luxury. And in some ways, it is, but it also means a lot of responsibility and a lot of things to learn. I always had some responsibilities to attend to because I was helping to run an entire kingdom. This was difficult, especially since I was not good at school.

One day, I was sitting in class with my best friend Giselle and all the other nineteen- year-old merpeople from my year at our school. The teacher was going over what will be on our final exam. I was a little happy knowing it would really be our final exam because we were graduating in a few months. We were going over the history of merpeople.

“How long have merpeople been on Earth?” the teacher asked. I cursed myself because I could never remember the answer. Giselle raised her hand.

The teacher picked her.

“Four-hundred million years,” she answered.

“Right,” our teacher said. “And it took us a million years to conquer the world and build structures everywhere, even on land.”

Giselle raised her hand again to get his attention. “Yes?” he asked.

“But there is still plenty of land that we haven’t conquered or even explored,” she added.

“Yes,” the teacher agreed. “Seeing as we can’t walk on land, it’s difficult to explore it. But we are familiar with most of it.”

I was a little jealous that Giselle was a better student than I was. But I pushed that down as far as I could because I didn’t want to resent my best friend. I was happy that one of us was a good student and I was proud of Giselle. She wasn’t doing anything to upset me. I just wished there was one area where I was the best because I felt like I was surrounded by talented people, while I didn’t have any talents of my own.

My heart was heavy.

But there was still a small part of me that said I could find something where I was the best.

Once class was over, I was relieved like I always was. Giselle and I left the classroom and tried to figure out what we would wear during graduation. Merpeople didn’t wear anything on their tails because it made swimming harder. It made us less agile. But we did wear things to cover our upper bodies. A lot of people were experts at making tops for merpeople, but, honestly, it was never a career that interested me or Giselle. I was so glad to find someone who felt the way I did, even though it was not a career I disapproved of. How could I? Should we swim around naked? But I usually wore purple tops because that was my favorite color.

After Giselle and I had finished talking about graduation we practiced magic. Merpeople could cast spells by waving their hands and thinking about what they wanted to do. I thought I was good at magic and I wanted to be the best I could be. The more merpeople practiced magic the more powerful they became. I didn’t think I was great. Everything Giselle did seemed great. I praised her for how good she was and I meant those praises.

Merpeople were the dominant species on Earth. We were the only species that had its own civilizations and we were spread throughout seas and oceans all over the world.

Yeah, there was no escaping us.

We have conquered almost every situation on Earth and explored most of the planet. But there was so much to explore and Earth has changed much since we first appeared that our findings have also changed. We’ve had to adapt to a million different circumstances since we first started evolving. The continents were once one continent called Pangaea, then it split up into other continents. Some of our cities had to be destroyed and rebuilt somewhere else as the continents shifted.

It was even possible for us to explore land.

You’re probably thinking we’re a great species.

I agree.

There was a lot less land for us to explore, but still a ton. Because it was impossible for us to walk on land there was still a lot left for us to explore. We’ve still managed to build pools in midair and in the ground. We had tubes filled with water that led to these pools and then back to the seas and oceans. We wouldn’t have been able to build that network without magic. It was an extremely complicated network that took a million years to plan and build because it had to cover most of the land on Earth and all of the seas and oceans. All of the merpeople had to agree on whether or not to build it and how it would be built.

Again, because the continents had shifted the network had to change and in some cases get destroyed and rebuilt. The current network has been around for thousands of years. There were still sections being added to it today.

We are hard workers.

Giselle and I were among the many merpeople who were constantly swimming through that network.

You don’t know how many exciting things we saw through that network. Let me tell you.

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