New Terra: A Journey Born

Chapter 1

Avi loved the sea; she loved riding on the one-hundred-foot fishing boat that her Uncle commanded and took out every three months, filling its internal stores with enough fish to feed their community for four months. The other three on the crew hated the smell, the rough working conditions during the month-long operation, the salty air, and the turbulent times in challenging waters. That is until Avi arrived on the boat, and she doubled up the cheesy excitement and almost pirate-like approach to the entire affair; it helped she could do much of their work. Like her brother and two other children in their community, she had a special gift that made her existence seem off just to be as it was.

Ever since she was a baby, Avi had to approach handling anything and everything with a bit of thought; otherwise, she would crush something or hurt someone. When she was just seven, she got angry and kicked a bolder, and while doing so did scratch up her foot and bent back a nail. The boulder got the worst of it. It was six stories high and nearly thirty feet wide, and her foot shattered its center and sent the edges flying over a mile off the island and another three miles into the sea!

Once she showed she had some control over her strength, her Uncle Victor promised her some freedom, the lack of which sparked her anger that day. That promise met the challenge from her mother, but he convinced her, and so when she turned twelve, she was trained on the boat for a year by him whenever it was not out on its fishing tasks. And at thirteen, she was allowed to join them, which made her considerably less stressed.

She could pull up an entire full net on her own and, without dragging it, bring it to the vent where it was released into the next ready storage container. Moving ropes and heavy equipment above deck was just as easy for her, making the workload practically stress-free except whenever sea serpents attacked them. But Avi quickly got pretty efficient at handling those, too, though her Uncle often noted that the Baron Isles didn't have enough big game for the serpents in the area to grow larger than their three-hundred-foot adolescent size. Avi often dreamed of the day she'd get to face a full-grown serpent, with her Uncle telling her stories of ones that were seven hundred to a thousand feet in length.

The crew always got a kick out of listening to her telling her dreams and how she took down serpents, Vagrian bats, or the rumored dragons! As the island came in sight and the conclusion of this cruise was in sight, she was right on the edge of the bridge walkway, giving one her stories while the others prepared for docking, giving her lean muscles a break. Not that they needed one; seeing her tired was something no one could claim to have done.

"And there as it thinks it has won! With me nearly two miles in the sky and it was roaring towards me, ready to spread its jaws wide. I turn within a hundred yards and reveal my mighty sword spread wide before me across the length of my chest. His big eyes widen as I come straight down with my sword leading me and split the dragon down from the edge of his throat to his ass!"

"Hey! Dragon Slayer! Get down there and help them before I whoop you from throat to ass! And watch the language before your mother kills me for giving you sailors mouth." Victor roars from his seat behind the controls.

Avi jumps from the walkway down to the main deck about two stories and rushes over to help one of the Jacklyn brothers, Randall. With her help, they ring the heavy tie-down ropes into their preset knots and place them at the predetermined spots to throw them out to the dock once they arrive. Randall sweated and grunted with each movement, growing red as his blood rushed from the top of his body to the bottom to keep him going. Avi kept her boyish and happy smile with her cheeks flushed underneath her freckles, but the smile slowly retreated with each yard they passed towards the dock.

"Ready to get a break?" Randall asks between a moment of forming knots.

She shrugs and tries to continue without revealing anything, but it doesn't matter. She didn't like the isolation they lived in and wanted to get out and see the world was not a secret; she often had arguments with her mother about them and yelled so that everyone knew.