At the beach the water was dark and looked thick, almost like motor oil. The moon above was full and bright, but the night was brisk. Tyra and I waded into the water until it was about neck high. All I could think about was why I was swimming in freezing cold at 6 AM when I could be sleeping, when I should be sleeping. Tyra took two breathers out of the pouch in her bag, and handed one to me.


"Just put it in your mouth, and chew on it. After a while blow a bubble, and that's it. Oh, and don't touch it because it comes off really easy in the first five minutes." She instructed, popping one into her mouth.

I did as she said, and blew the bubble. The bubble was a darker pink for me then when Tyra blew one last night. As it grew it started to tingle and burn faintly. I panicked when it slid back around my head, flailing my arms wildly in the water and going under a few times.


"Calm down!" Tyra hissed at me. She was calmly treading water with her arms as she waited for her breather to work.

Once the bubbles had gone around our heads Tyra dived under, and I followed. The breather things really did work! In the water, I didn't suffocate at all, it was just like above water, well after I got past my initial panic and relaxed. Apparently Tyra had studied the map from the bottle, because she knew the way exactly.


The weirdest part of the trip was that I couldn't feel anything. I could fell my arms and legs and all that, but I couldn't feel the cold. It had to be at least 10 degrees, or less, but I couldn't feel the cold anywhere except on my finger tips and my toes, the rest of me was toasty warm. The other thing was the pressure. These propellers were designed to push you down ten feet per minute, and we had been down way longer than five minutes. The pressure anywhere more than 40 feet is enough for you to start feeling majorly squeezed. Oh well, I guess that's the magic of Atlantis.


As we swam I saw a whole bunch of spectacular sea animals. We passed angel fish and butterfly fish, red-backed sea turtles, and sting rays, and some coral reefs of a multitude of colors. We even passed a few sharks, they were small ones though and only whale sharks. Then the bubble came into view.


"Ha! I told you I was right. I told you it was real. And if you hadn't of come, you would have missed out on all of that," Tyra breathed pointing at the bubble awestruck.


"Yep, you were right." I admitted staring at the bubble trying to take it all in as if it could suddenly vanish out of sight.


It was beautiful. The glass was super thick; I would say twenty-four inches thick. The glass, it appeared had absorbed the salt water instead of the water wearing at the bubble, which made the glass seem to shimmer even this far down. It also kind of glowed, a faint blue stretching off of it towards Tyra and me. Within the bubble you could see the city. There were towering buildings a pale, but dark blue. There were no street lights visible from this distance, but I could see glowing lumps drifting around the bubble, in the city.


"Jeanette!" Tyra suddenly squeaked grabbing onto my arm, "What is that?"

I looked where she was pointing and saw in the distance a dark object hurrying swiftly toward us. It was getting bigger, quickly, and looked as if it could be a shark. I grabbed on to Tyra's arm and we screamed for our lives. The figure seemed to quicker their speed. It finally reached us and we screamed again, "AHHHHHHHH!"


"Shut up!" it hissed when it finally reached us, "You'll attract sharks if you do that this deep."


"W-we thought that you w-were a shark," I stammered the fright not having worn off yet.


"Hardly," she snorted, "I'm Victoria Voxen, the one from the letter, and it's about time you came. I sent that bottle up two weeks ago." Victoria was not much older than Tyra and me, and she also had a breather on. She had very pale skin, almost transparent, and dark bluish hair, but I guess that's what you would expect if you lived underwater 24/7, without ever seeing any sunlight. "Come on. We don't have any time to waste. You need to know exactly what's going on before you can help us." She said pulling us to the city.


As we got closer I noticed the glass had several hatches on the side similar to the ones on space ships. They had one door that opened up to a short tunnel that led to another airtight door with a wheel for a handle. Once we got through the first door, Victoria pushed a button that activated a vacuum type thing, which shot all the water that had gotten in the tunnel out through little flaps that opened up on the door.


Victoria told us quickly about Atlantis's problem, the bottle, and about how the scientists were trying to make a new glass that wouldn't break, all while she ushered us to her backyard. She also said that she had a plan to save the city, but that she needed outside help to do it.


Victoria said, explaining her plan to us, "I think that what we need to do is-" That's when it happened.

The bubble around Atlantis started to crack, and not all the short cracks that Victoria had told us about. This crack split right through the center of the glass and spread slowly across. The loud cracking sound was like running over a bag of chips and sitting on a hundred balloons multiplied by 300 then again by ten, and all we could do was stare as it spread faster.


"Come on Jeanette, we've got to get out of here," shouted Tyra right in my face.


But somehow, I couldn't move. I was frozen to the spot, and I could barely breathe. A wet feeling was spreading across my feet, I looked down and my feet were being covered in water as it squeezed in through the crack above. I knew I had to get out of here then, if this place was filling up with water then that meant we couldn't stay for much longer. The bubble would fill, the glass would break, and the pressure would kill us.


"Come on!" Tyra urged me.


This time I reacted. We ran for the stairs, on the side of the bubble that led up the closest hatch. We reached the top of the glass and stopped. Somehow we had sunken lower into the ground, for the hatch which used to be about 25 feet above the sand outside was now only about 15 feet above. Why would we have sunken lower, the water all has the same density...


That's it!