Wrenn Journal Entry - "The Anchored Castle"

It was not breaking away from my quest to stop and see a castle on the way! I can’t pay for the fastest ships, so the travel takes a while. Just being on a spacecraft going somewhere for a long time can cause fatigue, I’m fairly sure that’s been proven. Sometimes normal people need to not be in space.

Personally, I never feel really full without the way food sits in my stomach under real gravity.

With that in mind, I can’t think of a way I’d want to spend a necessary day planetside more than something like this. Well, not offhand. People basically know this planet for being where the Mer-Maidens are from. I could care less about that subject.

Or I could not care less? I can check the difference tomorrow. The point is, I’ve never been on a planet that’s mostly water. I’m not even from close to the sea! It smells amazing.

More importantly, not all planets have them, and old castles are inspiring. I know there are modern space fortresses, and stuff like that. They’re boring. Most of them just float in a vacuum being really big hunks of matter that people can tuck spaceships and weapons inside. That’s very strategic, but it’s only strategic.

A real castle is a work of military engineering and art and architecture and all that good stuff. You don’t have to romanticize a castle, because its very existence says things about war and politics, and generations of people who were pretty sure that someone was going to show up at their home to try to kill them. A castle is a saga.

So. What was I saying? Oh, the Cape Castle on Aquarioon is different-looking than castles on most planets that have them, but the ideais the same. It floats, but nothing like a fortress in space does. It floats because almost everything on Aquarioon hasto. There’s only one continent that’s what you’d call ‘land,’ and everything else is just a buoyant island on or below the surface.

To make a permanent base, these sea-dwellers had Cape Castle (it was probably originally one of those islands) anchored with these insanely big knotted cables of local “Murder-Thorn Kelp.” They’ve been there for millennia now, and they just grow stronger on their own all the time. They even support their own ecosystems like an artificial reef. They’re several times thicker now than when they were built, in the days when the locals had to regularly hide from megafauna “monsters.”

The castle got carved into a sphere so that it could turn aside impacts from any direction, and there’s buoyant stuff in there too that keeps it right-side-up no matter what.

If I pass back this way again when my task is done, I’ll try to do more history touring. The population is kinda low on Aquarioon, so most people only even know this planet exists because they have an outsized impact on interstellar entertainment. But… there’s also some kind of deep ocean tour, to hot trenches where there are fossilized beasts slain in ancient days.

That definitely sounds a lot more interesting to me than some kind of aquatic dance review, like their main cultural export involves. Mom and Dad have seen the Doll-Fins, because that’s a Mom and Dad kind of thing to like, but I’ve seen the serious side of this planet. And I liked it.