Chapter Text
To the east of the Tierra del Fuego Province, past South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, in the deep pitch black bottom of the South Sandwich Trench lay a small blinking yellow light coming from an even smaller piece of australium. The golden rock was lost, intentionally, to all civilization; thrown carefully into a deep trench away from society by a woman who wanted nothing to do with it for the rest of her life. For a year, it stayed like that, alone, defiant. The light hummed and dulled, buzzed and brightened, until it attracted a small oceanic species unidentified by any living human being. The creature tasted it, trying for food, and found it tasted repugnantly sweet, like metal blood. But the creature did not lose interest; instead, it became infatuated by the light. Within a week, an entire species located itself around the yellow rock. The small, unidentified creatures protected the australium with their lives, even as it made them stick out like a sore thumb on the dark ocean floor. Predators approached and were driven away; those unfortunate enough to make contact had their bodies scattered on the jagged ground, laid out over the rocks and preserved skeletons from time long past, turning to dust or dying flesh. But as the predators died and the food chain shifted, the trench floor changed rapidly. Plantlife began to grow despite the depth and tangled around the stationary block. Soon, an ecosystem formed. Larger creatures passed by over the light, small critters scaled the ocean floor around it. The original species stayed constantly next to it, seemingly defying any law of aging. And then, after only two years of trench life, the small piece of australium brightened and burned, blinding like it never had before, and exploded suddenly into a flash of explosion before caving in on itself and disappearing. With it, the ever-so-small rock took 18 unidentified species–never to be found by humanity, lost to the trench– and a chunk of the South Atlantic Ocean’s tuna population. The only records of this phenomenon lay in a newspaper report made by a researcher staying in the Isla De Los Estados, after he was told by multiple fishermen that there hadn’t been a single tuna fish catch in days. For half a week, no new tuna went into South America. But then, oddly enough, the tuna population built itself back up, and the newspaper was treated as fake news.
The news of the tuna's disappearance would never reach the ears of the woman who indirectly caused it, but another disappearance from the same day would. The australium, along with the fish population, took a human with it. A 27-year-old man who was marked missing, last seen the day the australium imploded. A man by the name of Jeremy Willis.