Lucia

Lucia preferred the tranquility of the underwater world to the hectic, more populated surface. She'd worked with the Ocean Reef Group, helping to maintain Nemo's Garden, an agricultural experiment off the coast of the Italian Riviera that grew samples of land-based crops in underwater greenhouses called biospheres. But after storms & the pandemic cut off access to the project for months, the team was pared back to a skeleton crew, & she was cut loose. Not long into her hunt for a new job, she was contacted by a company called Reprion & recruited to work on their research submarine, the Thalassa. Eager to get back underwater, she didn't ask as many questions as she probably should have. Multiple months & dives later, she was still not entirely clear what, exactly, Reprion intended the sub & its crew to research. The sub itself was unlike any other she'd known; the tasks she was required to perform on an average day often seemed unrelated to each other, to anything the rest of the team was doing, or, at worst, to the cause of science entirely. She was presumably gathering data on newly discovered forms of aquatic life, but in her estimation, there was too much data, too many new forms of life discovered too quickly, too easily. Unlike more familiar sea life, many of them were not at all skittish, rather, they swam right up into the sub's moon pool as if happy to see her. Perhaps strangest of all, her contract stipulated that while on board, she must wear a seemingly random piece of jewelry, a smooth black ring, at all times. She still could not determine if the ring was glass, metal, ceramic, plastic… She doubted she'd ever know, unless she tried to destroy it. And despite the strangeness of her purported mission, satisfying that particular curiosity was not worth losing another well-paying gig that kept her underwater.