Carissa’s skin tingled. She curled up tightly. Long reddish-brown hair flowed gently behind her before it was sealed in. Darkness. Warmth and a presence. Her arms and legs began to cramp. Then she stretched her body out as a thin film broke open and a pure warmish liquid rushed over her body as she was directly exposed to the deep, warm depths.

Water.

Survive.

The oceans were bright and transparent and despite being under the surface her body bobbed in a steady position, neither rising to the surface of sinking further but remaining several meters below.

The remains of the once bubble began to stick over her naked skin and hair turning from luminescent white into Grey as it rapidly enveloped her waking form. Parts of it broke off and attached themselves to her legs, chest and lower back as it shifted and covered.

Her reddish-brown hair was enclosed as the pale mass of transparent jelly-like matter stuck to her mouth, nose and eyes before moving to cover the rest of her body. A small electrical jolt stimulated her unconscious body as it began to breath in and out and her limbs twitched.

Her face rose up before falling once more, her mind trying to wake her up. Implants once active and genetic alterations failing to activate, shut off, powered down and all personal and unconscious control removed.

Empty.

Weak.

Hollow.

A gradual pressure reached forced itself across each inch of her body, her form no longer naked but covered in a skin-tight grey suit. Another electrical jolt shook her entire body and Carissa’s eyes opened despite her nictating membrane refusing to emerge in unconscious response.

Liam.

No.

Freedom.

Struggling to awaken another electrical jolt went through Carissa and she immediately forced her eyes open, one hand rising to her mouth and the other to her eyes. Her legs kicking instinctively to drive her to the surface but her body remained in the same position despite her best efforts.

Endless blue in front of her eyes, water clearer that she had remembered even as a girl swimming on her parents’ boat. There was a filter in front of her eyes that enabled her to see clearly, the sunlight from the surface clear enough for her to understand that she was only a relatively short distance from the surface.

The darkness shouldn’t have been an issue as her eyes would have made the necessary adjustments but given the relative abundance of light it didn’t concern her presently.

Her lungs failed to ache, full of air but Carrisa experienced a tightness around her body as though a second skin had been put over her. Similar to her the suit of her own design which she had prepared for use on board the viewing chamber.

The chamber!

Liam!

Having free dived before Carissa was no stranger to finding herself under the surface of the water, there was no weight on her legs or anything holding her in place stopping her movements.

Her nose and mouth had no sensation of liquid on them and she decided to risk it and open her mouth a fraction. Even if water rushed in, she could easily hold her breath for another twenty minutes if she applied static apnea to herself and restricted all unnecessary movements. Releasing beta blockers into her bloodstream would further increase the time but she knew there was something wrong with her body.

A sensation of sheer emptiness and weakness. Her mouth opened a fraction and she breathed air in, although the process was similar to breaking through a thin piece of fabric. Stifled and difficult but perfectly usable, a new type of filter which she had little knowledge of.

Not entirely comfortable but enough for her not to have to worry about a threat of drowning in the short-term. She’d researched gills but found the concept of them aberrant when they needed to be built into her skin around either her chest, back or neck.

Carissa had wanted her skin to be pure and unmarked, scars would heal and installing a respiratory organ into her body would have taken away resources from other areas.

Touching the surface of her mouth and nose found that there was a covering over it, she looked down at her arms and legs.

Despite not treading water she wasn’t sinking but maintained a steady rate of buoyancy. The water was far clearer regarding visibility for her eyes than it should have been. In the near distance there was a vague white shape, large enough to be a threat to her but it stood there unmoving.

Bobbing, similar to a jellyfish, but without tentacles, a shadow form within.

Not a threat.

Not yet.

Below her grey covered feet, she saw a white sheen reminiscent of the outer layer of a jellyfish skin except on a massive scale, part of it remained attached to her foot and Carissa lowered her hand to touch it.

This water is wrong.

Around her mouth and nose she was breathing perfectly normally and regularly as though she was standing on land. The sensation was one of gently floating while underwater while her body performed regular functions.

The white sheen was near a light pearl colour and when Carissa touched it, she realised that her hands were covered by the rest of the material covering her entire body, her hair had been sealed in. Resting down her back, not tight but comfortable enough.

With a mental focus the skin-tight grey material slid itself from her hand allowing the water surrounding her to touch the bare skin on her fingers as she gently played with the remnants of the materials. A slight stinging sensation brushed her but vanished almost immediately as the remaining left overs streamed up her body.

Carissa realised that her skin tight suit had the purposeful function of protecting her, enough to stop her from drowning and maintaining a steady rate of buoyancy that would stop her sinking further.

She didn’t yet know how it would fare with enhancing her own natural swimming ability nor how it would fare against predators but she still preferred her own suit. The sensation of the warmish waters on her fingers gave her a tingle when she had made her suit retract.

Gathering her thoughts, Carissa thought it likely that she had been retracted within the viewing platform, captured and then brought to a government or company held facility and then examined before being dressed and placed into this situation.

The message on the phone had been from a private group which had identified her as a candidate for their own experimentation. She had been as cautious as possible when purchasing her own materials and research subjects and had used various shell companies and intermediaries to hide traces of her own tracks but business had never been her strong suit.

Spreading her arms and legs out, Carissa gave a few kicks and pushes to see if she could manually override the controls on this suit. As far as she knew this level of technology didn’t exist or was only theoretical, it certainly wouldn’t be available for public or private usage.

Carissa had relatively free movement although it was akin to wearing a wetsuit, or one of sufficiently more advanced design.

The entire suit felt like a second layer of skin that enveloped her entire body, and it had successfully disabled both her conscious and unconscious control of both her internal implants and physical alterations. Running her tongue across her own teeth, Carissa touched on the sharpness of each one.

Her teeth functioned at least. They didn’t decide to rip them out of her mouth or decided that she they provided little serious threat to their own experiments. Her body was weaker she knew, she would be unable to control the surrounding temperatures of the water if her implants were entirely non-functional but if her teeth weren’t removed then other genetic alterations had only been suppressed.

Unless they had the technology to clone her original baseline body and switch her into that then she would need to understand the treatment needed to fix it.

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The suit.

The suit is suppressing me.

Carissa willed the suit to remove itself from her entire body as it had done with her fingers but the best that she was able to do was reduce her fingertips. Whoever controlled this either remotely or program wasn’t going to give her easy access or quick answers.

The words on the security phone message were stranger to her but she knew that it also provided her with an answer for the name of this experiment. Ocean Gateway Protocol. Either that or someone had finally caught up with her and decided to punish her. There was no way that Liam would have agreed to put her in an experiment.

Gently kicking her legs, while floating in the water beneath the surface, Carissa experimented with her range of movement. She was able to move her head and legs as long as she wanted but her body refused to rise up towards the surface or sink deeper.

Twisting her body, she moved around to see several more of the vague white shapes, far more than she had originally thought but spread out across distances. Several of them opened and dissipated and she could recognise movement even if gradual.

The same.

The same as me.

The experiment or study that Carissa had been thrown into wasn’t an accident if she was called a candidate. That meant that where would be others alongside her who would also be experiencing the same, but in her case, she was used to being underwater inside specialised isolation tanks to adapt herself to the loneliness of a life in the oceans.

My necklace.

Carissa needed her necklace. The comforting touch of the shark tooth on her bare flesh and the pain that she experienced would relieve her. There. It was under the suit, but she couldn’t touch it. She focused her mental thoughts on the suit moving away from the area of her upper neck but it refused to obey.

Pain.

I need to feel pain.

Failing other options with her body in near lock-down floating Carissa considered biting her tongue with her sharpened teeth, the taste of blood and saliva would be her own but it wasn’t the type of pain relief that she wanted, needed to feel.

The ritual of the shark tooth had been hers since she had been a teenager, a way to express her emotions through digging into the flesh of her arms or by her neck. Even her hands in an emergency.

Liam had been the one who had convinced her to try and express her emotions and switch to more positive channels but with his continued absence from her life Carissa had lapsed back into old behaviours. And here she was, stuck underwater in an experiment as a candidate by an unknown captor in a body of water that she was unfamiliar with.

Carissa flexed her hands, curling them tightly as she struggled to keep her breathing steady and in a steady rhythm. Although, breaking air through the suits covering was possible it wasn’t comfortable and the fact that she was becoming emotionally distressed was making it worse.

Her lack of control and her constant awareness was becoming an issue.

Focus Carissa.

Adapt. Learn. Survive.

When she had run her own experiments as a scientist and through her own research, she had run variables on her own animal test subjects and finally herself. There was always a series of stages, this would only be stage one. Either the suits or monitors in the water would be checking on the physical and emotional states, they would even be checking on Carissa.

And when this first stage ended, she would move onto the next. And eventually there would be group testing. Of course, she knew that this depended on the ethical constraints that they were following. There was a strict reason that Carissa had only experimented on herself and done her own surgery over time, she had her own issues she knew that, but she wasn’t going to torture other sentient beings for the purposes of research.

Kill them if they tried to steal her notes yes, but not torture. She had limits, which she was going to need to break if she wanted to get out of this experiment. Carissa would not be a subject, even an experimental one. She would become. Become more than human.

Beautiful mermaid.

As she continued to flex and open her hands while gently remaining in the same position, neither sinking or floating in spite of her best efforts a voice resonated within Carissa’s head shutting off all other immediate thoughts.

Dark coloured words with the appearance of flowing water appeared before her eyes. She was able to make out the text after blinking her eyes several times. To her senses the lenses or covering inside this advanced sea protection suit offered the option of text.

The next stage begins.

[Ocean Gateway Entry System Initiated. Registering Candidate Number. Verifying Health Status…Present Status: Not Dead. Further message shortly. Remain calm. Carissa]

If Carissa had a single regret at being trapped in her underwater suit prison, it would be that she was unable to scream out or vent her frustrations. The monitoring control did in fact know her name, and her status as…not dead. This meant the suit acted as a health checker, not her mental state but her physical one.

Again, the words Ocean Gateway. The name of the project, group or research team that had kidnapped her and brought her here. She was certain that she had failed to activate the tether release on the viewing chamber, the fact that she had been forced to unconscious as she was going to make her own descent meant that she had been watched. Likely through the security device. It hadn’t been Liam after all.

Stuck alone with her thoughts for company Carissa wasn’t prepared for the next message to flow into her vision, still in the shape of watery dripping text.

[You have been selected as a candidate by the Ocean Gateway Entry System. Introduction and Tutorial Removed due to increased difficulty level. Temporary water filter system is in place. HTS mode is engaged. Please wait for imminent surfacing. Candidate. Do not restrict your suit actions for your own safety. Carissa. Survive.]

The pressure of the water finally began to act on her and slowly she was regaining freedom of movement in her limbs despite the suit clinging tightly to her skin surfaces and hair. Counting the seconds that it took for her to rise towards the surface and the distance that she was from the sunlight, Carissa estimated that she had been stuck underneath the water around ten to fifteen metres with twenty metres at most.

She had previously free dived further than that, without equipment enjoying the pleasure when she reached past those limits and began to sink deeper rather than being pushed up again.

In order to maintain a steady presence at this relatively shallow depth was in her mind not realistically feasible only wearing a suit, either the water had been altered somehow or there were other forces that she wasn’t aware of.

As she rose up, Carissa decided to tuck her limbs in, given her freedom of movement and tightly hugged herself. She had spent enough time underwater previously to know that her first breath when she reached the surface would be an experience.

Like being born again.

The breath of life.

Carissa tried to slowly release breath, an old habit when free diving to avoid damage to her lungs when pressure was decreased. She counted down the seconds, the warmth of the sun on the surface of the ocean beginning to reach her form.

Soon.

Three.

Two.

Breath.

Carissa surfaced, her body moved by an unknown force or through the external control of the suit. She didn’t know which.

As her head broke through the top of the water the sealed portion in front of her face and nose peeled backwards and from her eyes allowing her to take a deep breath. The sensation of fresh air on her face was nearly overwhelming to her senses.

She spoke aloud, even if to hear to the sound of a human voice after being submerged.

‘…. Hello? Is anyone there?’ she called out.

Carissa knew that it was a stupid thing to say, but if she was being monitored it would be the expected result. Humans would depend upon one another for support, especially in crises. And if she found that anyone was a threat to her immediate safety then she would react accordingly. Life had taught her this.

She spoke again. This time raising her voice. Her body simply floated on the surface without any need for her to thread water. Her hair remained covered but her face stayed dry despite the splash of the light waves around her.

‘Hello! Is there anyone there?’ called Carissa.

Looking around she saw no signs of any wreckage of boats or planes or anything. Just an endless blue sky above her head with the sun shining and an entire ocean of water.

The burst of words in front of her eyes surprised her given that the lenses that had covered her eyes underwater had peeled back with the rest of her suit. She read the text several times to memorise it.

[Player-Candidate Number 5428119402 you have been provided with randomly chosen basic starter equipment.

-Warning: Due to Illegal Body Modification (Disabled) basic starter equipment removed.

-You are (Classless)

-First Goal: Survive for 10 hours.

-Bonus Goal: Find other Starter Candidates and Survive as a group for 10 hours

-Reward: Basic bone-based weapon, Fishing Line, Bonus Goal: Harpoon with Leash, additional HTS mode enabled.]

Carissa felt disappointed that this time it didn’t end with her name but a number instead, but this time she had a better clue of her situation.

‘A test subject. I’m being turned into a bloody test subject.’ she said muttering to herself.

With full movement and the suit stopping her from sinking into the water, Carissa chose a random direction and began to swim breaststroke.

‘A little exercise won’t hurt me at this point. Time to find another candidate.’ said Carissa as she tried to conserve her energy.