The Diving Belles ascend in silence, their mutation affords them no solace. Adorned in ritual white, their virginal uniforms are untouched by time, but cinched with antiquated machinery that hisses and ticks with the precision of a quartz crystal in vibration, relics of a past, and equipped to last a millennia.
Beneath the city’s underworld, they were engineered to perform at the whim of the Overseers, no one who knows dare speak of it. The Diving Belles each wear a uterine monitor, not for protection, but for control.
The Overseers demand control. The Overseers also demand purity, and the Belles have learned to smuggle secrets in their silence and retreat.
Over the years, rogue bands of Diving Belles have splintered off into units of hundreds of like mutations. Spoiled, they are no longer of interest to the Overseers, but still captive by their limited adaptability closer to now needed resources above ground.
To us, they are revered, pitied, feared. Truly the stuff of nightmares.
#midjourney, #GPT 4o