🌊Water World🌊

The sky is a toxic, pale yellow as the noon heat beats down on the open ocean. There is no wind, and the water is dead calm—the worst nightmare for those who live on the drift.Captain Rotwood kneels on the rusted iron plating of the barge, his hands covered in black grease. He works furiously to patch a split seam in the hull with a mixture of tar and shredded canvas.Captain Rotwood: Hand me that scrap plate, Axel. Fast! The bilge is already knee-deep in brine and we can't afford to lose another drop of our fresh water to the leak.Axel drags a heavy, jagged piece of corrugated metal across the sun-bleached deck. His face is caked in salt grime and sweat as he drops the metal beside the captain.Axel: This is the last good piece of metal we salvaged from the floating junk-heap yesterday, Captain. If this patch doesn't hold, the whole raft is going under.Misty stands at the edge of the raft, peering down into the clear, terrifyingly deep water through a cracked glass lens. She sifts through a bucket of floating debris they dragged in with their nets.Misty: No wood, no iron, no edible kelp. Just more dead-world plastic. If we don’t hit a trade route or find a rain-catcher flotilla soon, our rations won't last the week.Ember sits on a crate made of bound driftwood, carefully cleaning a rusted harpoon tip with a piece of rough shark skin. She stops and looks out toward the horizon where a distant cluster of junk-towers glints in the heat.Ember: Complaining won't fill the barrels, Misty. We still have our spears, and we still have our lives. Let's see if that scrap-city on the horizon is friendly before we start counting our final days.