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Wonderful Wandering of the Aquarium

Linリン
7
chs / week
The average realized release rate over the past 30 days is 7 chs / week.
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Synopsis
A young boy, specifically a shut-in high school drop out, suddenly gets transported to an aquarium and eventually he’s given a camera and tasked with using it to capture the wonders of life. Cover made by me (Lin).
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Chapter 1 - Transportation to the aquarium

I feel sick. Sick of myself, sick of society, sick of this world. I lay staring at the ceiling, for the millionth time this month. I wonder when the last time I'd gone out was.I wonder where it had all gone wrong. Suddenly, a large gust of wind knocked my unlocked windows open as a blinding light shone inside. My vision turns to black and I fall unconscious. When I regain consciousness, I appear to be in an aquarium's cold hallway. An odd thing is, all the glass on the tanks are broken with water leaking out onto the floor and dead fish scattered all over the place. The fishy stench of their decomposing corpses is overwhelming and the water on the ground is seeping into my socks as I don't have shoes on. Not knowing what else to do, I walk fowards down the hallways, trying to avoid stepping on any of the fish. Eventually, I reach a door, a glass door. On the other side appears to be a water filled room with fish swimming around. Upon closer inspection, the door appears to have many cracks with water slowly seeping out of them. With nothing else to do but wait, I stare at the cracks in the door, watching it crack more and more. After around 15 minutes of watching, the door bursts open with the water completely flooding the room in a strong current. I've never learned to swim so as I struggle to get up to the surface of the water, the current pushes me down until I seemed to have drowned. I open my eyes again to the same hallway. Not knowing what happened, I wander down to the door again, avoiding stepping on the fish. This time, there's no water behind the glass door, only what appears to be a luscious field of grass and flowers. Instead of water seeping through the cracks, there's some form of plant I can't recognize growing in them. I open the door to be greeted with a strong gust of wind and the warm sunlight that contrasts the cold hallway. I look around seeing fish. Fish swimming in the sky. Interested, I walk around the area, eventually making it to a small village next to a large lake with fish leaping in and out of it. I walk up to the village, flowers brushing against my ankles. I see a man, looking around in his 30s with shoulder length brown hair and a medieval-like outfit. I look around, thinking back and forth about whether to talk to him or not, before deciding that I really have no other choice. I walk up to the man before nervously asking, "Hello uh- uhm- would you happen to know where this is?" The man turns his head towards me and looks at me with slight confusion, "Young lad, what do you mean where is this? Why would you have come here without knowing your destination?" I fidget with my fingers before responding with, "I went unconscious and ended up near here." The man then stared at me blankly before yelling over at another man behind him, "James we've got another one. It's the third time this week." This man named James, who seems to be in his 40s with short black hair and a long beard, hurries over from where he was to here. "Another one you say? These poor kiddos keep poppin' up out of nowhere," responded James before stepping towards me and puts his hands on my shoulders. James warns me with ominously vague words, "Listen here kid, you need to hurry and leave here. This place ain't safe at night, especially because of those damn women," James pauses before continuing, "The last three kiddos to come down here were sacrificed by them." I look back and forth between everything strange surrounding me; the fish, these two men, and the village in front of me. "Alright, I'll leave," I say before backing away and running off awkwardly. I glance back to where the village was but in its place was an extended lake, like the lake from next to it had swallowed it whole. When I turn back to the front of me I've returned to what appears to be the same aquarium as before. This time, I seem to be in a different part of it, a large room with one big tank in the center. The tanks don't seem to be shattered and the fish are in the tanks instead of dead on the floor. The room has four glass doors with each of them leading to what seem to be more flower fields. I decide to stay in the aquarium this time, forgetting hunger exists as I eventually grow hungry. With no food with me, I think of breaking a tank to eat a fish but that's a horrible idea for multiple reasons. First of all, I have a high chance of getting food poisoning and second, I don't want to flood the room. Out of options, I select a random door and open it to see that the other side didn't in fact contain a field but a hallway with an arch of water over it. Walking under the arch nervously, I eventually end up in a pure white room. The room had white flooring, white walls, and a white ceiling with a singular wooden table in the center. As I inched closer, I noticed that the table was actually plastic with a wood pattern printed onto it. On top of the table laid a camera, a photo album, a bag, a couple slices of bread, and a note. The note says, "Use this camera to capture the wonders of life to be given a second chance at it from the beginning." Staring blankly for a moment I think out loud, "A second chance? From the beginning? This is… This is too good to be true," I pause before continuing my thoughts here in my head. A second chance would be perfect and it's not like I have any other choice. After eating all the bread then picking up the bag and shoving everything else inside, a wooden door, wait no actually another piece of plastic with a wood pattern on it, appeared in front of me. I open it to a strong gust of wind in my face and the scenery of a coral reef.