Chapter Text
my·ce·li·um /mīˈsēlēəm/ noun: mycelium; plural noun: mycelia
the vegetative part of a fungus, consisting of a network of fine white filaments (hyphae).
“A mycelium is a network of fungal threads or hyphae. Mycelia often grow underground but can also thrive in other places such as rotting tree trunks. A single spore can develop into a mycelium. The fruiting bodies of fungi, such as mushrooms, can sprout from a mycelium.”
Our world has been in a chaotic order of events since humanity existed. Twenty years ago, my home city of Kelisa had been trapped into a bubble, completely contained away from the rest of the world. While theories were tossed around on how the bubble came to be, the only one that they all agree on was that it all started in the underground mines. Though, the people do have their own stories about the bubble.
My parents are blunt people, and since I was young, they have told me their stories of the bubble coming up, giving more and more gruesome details as I got older. I guess it is their way of protecting me, by drilling into my head that I shouldn’t ever get close to the bubble.
My mother’s story has, and is probably the most tragic version of the story I have heard, she always gets this distant, misty look near the end…
Three years before I was born, the bubble emerged, and it caused destruction way before it started to go through the ground, into the air. The whole city felt an earthquake, nothing they had experienced before. Soon after that, a few buildings sunk into the ground as something… something started to cleave through the pavement, the dirt, the cars… even through people. It became gruesome quick, anything that came in the way of the bubble was cut through like a hot knife with warm butter, a bit too easy for comfort.
My mother was outside when it all happened, in the suburbs visiting family, when she saw some buildings falling into the ground she started to run toward the city, in fear and worry, she was worried about her apartment, her neighbors, the people in general. Her family followed her, trying to stop her, and her father grabbed her wrist and pulled gently. Then she heard his screams of agony. She turned around faster than she has ever done before. My mother saw her father clenching his wrist. His blood spilling onto the ground. He’s crying, screaming. With her father’s decapitated hand still on her wrist, she screamed as the bubble rose, higher, higher, and higher…
At this point of the story she breaks down crying, rocking herself in her stiff chair, trailing off into a babbling child, but from there I knew the rest of the story. While her father pulled her, her heel got cleaved off like her father’s hand, people were screaming, she was in agony, and luckily there were a few sane people out there, one was my father. While he himself was a witness of tragedy of his own, his first wife, who was pregnant at the time, getting crushed by one of the collapsing buildings, he decided to start helping people at the bubble’s edge get to safety. My mother was one of the people he saved, but if he was a few minutes later, she wouldn’t be just without a foot right now.
When the ground settled and the bubble completely around the city, there was only a few minutes of peace. Anarchy happened. People tried to break down the bubble, ramming cars into it, pounding on it, shooting it, and someone even created bombs to throw at it. But nothing worked. Not only was the bubble attempted to be broken down, the mayor got killed. Women, men, and sadly to say, children, were raped. It was heartbreaking to the ones who lived it.
Ever since then, the bubble has been adapted into our daily lives, and for twenty years we haven’t had contact with the outside world.