Elias

Greetings to everyone, the following story was inspired by the digital art of @xpilar, I invite you to visit his blog. The picture that motivated this story is the following.

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Source

Elias

Elias, who had been born in the middle of a farming community in Dionysus, under conditions he came to believe unlucky and with limited opportunities to lead a normal life. Today, thirty years later, he was here in Pandora, the largest underwater city in Triton, leading the podium of winners of the Underwater Derby for the sixth consecutive time. Not only was he the first to achieve such a number of consecutive victories, he was the first unborn Triton to win the contest.

His life had been different from that of a normal child, since his birth he had been diagnosed with a strange condition; product of a mutation in his genes, Elijah's pulmonary alveoli had developed abnormally, allowing him to breathe only in a liquid environment such as that existing in his mother's womb.

Elias' respiratory system did not allow him to deal with the scarce pressure of any atmosphere and assimilate from the air the oxygen necessary to keep him alive, however, before the pressure generated by the liquid filling his lungs, he was able to filter from it the precious gas.

Obviously this condition deprived him of a normal life, being confined first to live in what he would describe as a fishbowl, while he was a baby and then to carry on his face, a kind of mask, by which he was pumped perfluorocarbon and a couple of tanks full of it in his back. Obviously, Elijah would almost immediately learn to swim, while he had to wait until he was three years old to start learning to walk.

One of the most fortunate and strange consequences of his condition, which was discovered after he turned fifteen, was that, unlike all humans who could easily absorb the oxygen dissolved in perfluorocarbon and breathe in a liquid medium; thanks to the high solubility of this gas and the carbon dioxide in this hydrocarbon; Elias could also deal with liquids in which these gases were less soluble, including water, so as long as adequate oxygenation of this fluid was maintained, Elias was able to breathe water.

It was at the age of twenty-two, when while practicing a physical conditioning circuit designed by him and built with the help of his father, he was observed by Edgar Rivera, a well-known trainer of Triton underwater trial circuits, who was invited to the home of Elias' family, through one of his relatives.

Edgar observed the great physical capacities of Elias, who, not having a social life as active as the rest of the young people of his age, had dedicated a good part of his adolescence and youth to training, first as a way of keeping busy at home and then by the passion he generated in him for posing physical challenges and overcoming them.

Today, almost ten years after that moment, in which he was proposed to train professionally for this type of competitions, he was once again able to achieve victory in the most complete and famous underwater trial circuit, where, before him, only the natives of this planet had achieved victory.

Text of @amart29 Barcelona, Venezuela, July 2019

Other stories from the Time and Space series

• Los Bosques de Perséfone / The Forests of Persephone
• Osiris / Osiris
• Metamorphosis
• Hastio
• Paradox
• Decay
• Under the influence of the Pleiades
• Anniversary
• Memories
• Core
• Uoke
• Cerberus
• Underwater Companions
• Ultraviolet Visions
• Obstacle Race
• Stranger
• Trackers
• At the Mercy of the Elements
• Typhon's Great Regatta
• Immersion
• Elias

I can only thank @xpilar for allowing me to use his digital art in my publication and for motivating my creation. Thank you very much @xpilar

Thank you all for visiting my publication, I hope your comments and I appreciate your support, until next time

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