Afterword
Themisa
Themisa Station, A report from the Archon 5.
"We arrived at Calliba two weeks behind the Apathy’s Maw and discovered parts of the ship planetside, based on scans. A black box recovered had some garbled information about Essedi Maranda, and experiments, and a scientist and tridents. The only difference we saw on that plant was small form life. Some fish maybe. The thunderstorms around the area that would let us drop to look at them forced us to continue. We offer this as a flag to ask that someone investigate and lay to rest the Apathy’s Maw. Long may she fly, wherever she is,"
The statement read was met with gasps of sadness, tempered only by the recovery mission that had brought the vaccines. One scientist stood at the back, a slight smirk on his face. "Axios," he muttered. "Mermaids." he breathed.
"...and in other news. A refugee ship sent via Calliba, from Themisa, quarantined by plague has miraculously avoided all defences and crashed into the earth, somewhere near where the island of Hawaii used to be," the reporter said impassively into the camera. " We recommend transit near Old Earth be avoided, and the system from Earth and its moon, are now in complete quarantine. Pictures obtained by our crew though suggest three limbed, fishtailed creatures, frolicking in the waves. If this is not an elaborate fluke, some genesis seems to be in progress on Earth. For better or worse. For InterPlan 1, this is Adriana Holloway, reporting from Mars, at the edge of the new quarantine zone.”
She pulled her mic off, and, padding through to her room, she opened a channel. "James. If you're still out there. Something came from where your ship was lost. Signal back if you hear me. I miss you and love you, brother."
Adrianna Holloway will return in "Earth's Reclamation," coming soon on https://reclamation.kaielloryviola.com
About the Author
Ever since she was a child, Kai has always liked to create, to tell tall tales, to entertain and to share. In the real world, she's an infosec professional, training for her Combined STEM degree (mostly maths), and then wants to find a way to merge STEM, information security, psychology and language. A passionate linguist, she often does unexpected things.
At 41 (2020), she's decided that by November 2020, she'll be living up to being 42, and 'life, the universe and the meaning of everything,” (Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) and resetting her life onto an even keel. For that reason, she's also rebooting her blogs, and combining them.
Beyond a passion for stories and language, she plays music, games, RPGs, knits and takes photographs. A mother of two, herder of two cats and in a long-term relationship with her fiancée of 15 years, Kai was so confident they'd marry that she took his last name for her pen name in 2004. They've been together since a gaming convention in 2004, the year after her first NaNoWriMo.
Kai is also an ML with NaNoWriMo and will be remaining with them, with luck, through to her 20th year. NaNoWriMo changed her life, and she believes in the power of helping others experience the same. Kai tries to be active in the writing community and helped co-found one of the oldest indie writer groups on Facebook, the Indie Author Group (https://indieauthorgroup.com), and writes on blogs such as HorrorTree (https://horrortree.com), IndiesAllYear (https://indiesallyear.com) and other sites, including her own. She runs a hosting and formatting business with a friend. She loves to serve the community with a core group of other friends, some of whom can be met at the Publishing League (https://publishleague.com).
Her final passion is mental health, which is why the story touches on mental health. Kai intimately understands mistrusting what is seen, and mental health problems, as she has CPTSD, bipolar disorder and anxiety. She feels that living and showing that you can move on with your life, no matter what you face, is an essential message in fiction, both as a theme and as something we can take from stories. And if escape is a need, Kai feels like she should be providing that as best she can. Her passion project, and first blog on the web, is 17 this year, at https://bi-polarbears.com - to run that, she learned to host, design and edit, which leads back to her degree, infosec and language. Now she's learning about meditating and journaling, so the next adventure can be met, full-on. Not only so that she can do it herself, but so she can offer other creatives advice. At the heart of who she is service - her personal motto is 'I hishe mahe' - I live to serve, in the language spoken by Aofie, one of her characters from Ancient times in her newest series 'All my Friends are Reapers'.
Her next release is the first book in 'All my friends are Reapers', "Opposition Existence" from her press at https://kushkapress.com
You can find her at https://kais42.com, https://himynameiskaiviola.com
Thank You for Reading!
Mermaidia: A Limited Edition Anthology Page 84