New developments:
I have decided in the light of the new information on what Cyan wants from us to redo the story on this age.
I know a couple other people are thinking about ages that serve a function whether culinary or otherwise. I do think that we can easily adapt our ideas, it is just that we will have to make them more updated.
So with that in mind here is the new story.... (written as a rough journal)
As a new initiate into the Guild of Writers, I decided I wanted to create my own kind of sanctuary from the cavern. As I gained enough help from other writers, we were able to create a place that was particularly self sufficient. That is, as long as you enjoyed fish.
We had heard that writing any kind of mechanical or human made objects was a bad idea, so instead I simply wrote into the area I wanted to use, most of the raw materials I would need. Any thing else could be linked over. Thank goodness I watched a lot of discovery channel, and had a good working knowledge of metals and construction.
So I began writing the age. It was a beautiful world full of everything that life would need to flourish. It has one giant ocean that covers 95% of the planet. Every piece of land is an island. In some cases the inhabitants know nothing about other denizens on other islands. Some have developed ships and have explored much of the vast sea. I have, nor probably never will see any of them.
My place is deep under the ocean. It started out as a small volcanic eruption. To much pressure from the sea above stifled it from becoming another island, but it did manage to get quite big. As the cone raised, another eruption 30, 40 miles away basically stripped all the energy out of it. It also caused the collapsing cone to suck in a lot of sea water creating caverns.
So now after many centuries, my link is established to these caverns. Miles below the ocean, and flooded with sea water. There is however one pocket of the caverns that is not rock nor is it sea water. It is filled with co2. Not exactly hospitable, but better than my lungs being crushed to death by seawater as soon as I linked in, regardless if I had an oxygen tank or not.
Many problems here. I linked in. Wearing a small air tank, I searched around for the whole hour I had with it. I found a reasonably comfortable spot to put a linking book out for emergencies, and left. I was a bit disappointed. It would take a huge amount of work to make that cavern livable. Most of the materials I would need were below the water level of the co2 cavern. I needed to get fresh air down here, and I needed to do it in a way that I wouldn't disturb the inhabitants of the surface. I needed an air tube. Straight up to the surface. It would need a strong pump to keep the air moving. Plus it would have to be perfectly sealed or I risk loosing everything as the sea water swallows it all up.
Figured some things out. One. The air pocket will be stable as long as I don't drill through the top. It's like a dome of trapped gas. luckily the rock above is practically solid and thousands of feet thick. SO my pipeline straight up is out of the question. We will need an airline going down first than up.
OMG! I am so stupid! I could have died! I didn't think about pressure! Why am I not dead! I need to test this, what is going on here?
There is no significant pressure change deep under this ocean! I can't believe it. Even in the pocket of co2 my lungs should have just been crushed. I have no idea why at the moment, but I believe it has to something to do with the fact that I sink like a stone in the water too. Luckily I have brought plenty of rope, grapples, and re breathers.
Gas. This age has a ton of it. Well gigatonnes of it, and it is being released from under the ocean at a surprising rate. As a matter of fact, a lot of the gases being released have a good amount of oxygen mixed in........
I can't believe how deep I am getting into this. I have a few other people helping out now, and we have (quite easily) normalized the air within the smaller cavern. It was simple once we found the right gas "springs" near the cavern. Setting up pipes to get it to us happened in a few days once we got the equipment in there. It took about a couple weeks for the air to be breathable, but if I had to reach the surface to do it, it would have been quite a mess. Not to mention a risk of being discovered by the natural inhabitants.
Things are going well. We have found that without the threat of large pressures, building sealed rooms and draining the sea water out is pretty easy. We have decided to begin analyzing the sea life a bit. I sent some of the meat from about a dozen species to a lab to see if they had any poisonous or toxic properties. Not a single one was shown to be harmful. We tried some of them once we got the results back. Most of them tasted terrible. One actually tasted like how skunks smell. So I see what has become the preferred way of dealing with predators.
One fish was halfway decent. Of course this was the hardest to catch. It seemed a small miracle to catch two of them (one shipped of to the lab, one we ate). We needed to set up a lab in the cavern. I wanted to find a way to make the fish more palatable, and perhaps find out how they became so gross.
We have a lab now. Crude as it may be. I managed to get a computer in there too. Luckily I have found some friends who are interested in chemistry, and biology. What they found was startling. The fish taste bad because they swim in the ocean, and it is inundated in areas with foul smelling gases. I should have guessed. They are breathing and absorbing those gases, gaining the acrid tastes of them. We also discovered that almost every fish has a much larger air bladder than fish on earth. I guess with such aerated water, they need it to be able to keep upright and not sink to the bottom. It seems unless we build some kind of large inflatable submarine, we will not be able to get to the surface of this age. That's alright with me, but some of the team have expressed a desire to see what's up there. I guess this has become more than just my sanctuary, and I can't over rule them if they try.
It took over a year, but the place is looking pretty comfortable. It isn't a five star hotel, but I could live here if I wanted. There are about 10 rooms now. Two barracks, kitchen, mess hall, laboratory, fishing room (more on this later), diving pool (has tunnel to ocean), two facilities, with working plumbing (don't drink the water!), and a large storage area. The barracks are nice as they both have a living room kind of space plus the bunk beds. The water is completely undrinkable unless filtered. We haven't quite got the filtering figured out yet. There seems to be a bacteria (as far as we can tell) that causes severe stomach aches. Normal filtering methods do not seem to bother it either. The aches go away in a couple days, but unless you are diening of thirst I wouldn't recommend the water. This puts a severe hindrance of living here for extended periods of time.
The fishing room. Here is where the lab has really paid off. We have figured out how to attract the more pleasant types of fish to eat. Yes, there are more than one kind that seem to be able to metabolize the gases and expel them. We have set up a tube that can mimic the scent of their food reasonably well. It more of just amplifies the smell that we have found a way to bottle and preserve. You can set the tube to close automatically once a certain amount of weight is achieved. The fish don't even notice what's going on till you open the top hatch and drain the water out. I will set up a chart with the names and descriptions we have given the fish.
We have found a type of seaweed that doesn't grow near the gas springs. It is palatable. I doubt we are going to try to make sushi here, but the seaweed is a nice way to get vegies. Maybe we could try planting some of them more near by.
The storage facility has been our makeshift shop, power room, and general mess for quite some time. I think we should begin to try and neaten it up.
Discovery. While cleaning up storage, we found some mold. I know pretty impressive right.
Seriously, on a whim we ran some tests on it. It eats bacteria. It eats the bacteria that has been making the water undrinkable. We have began building a new room, devoted to desalinating and filtering the water for drinking. We are going to need to find a way to power this place better. The generators are barely able to keep up, and taking them in piece by piece is a hassle. Not to mention getting rid of the exhaust and the constant need for gas.
The answer was right in front of us the whole time and we overlooked it. The gas springs! We found one coming out of a reasonably hard rock formation. Plenty of pressure. reasonably non-flammable gas. Tearing apart one of the generators wasn't to much of a problem, and while it was gone we had strict rules on power consumption. Now the question. Should we pressurized tubes to the spring, and keep the generator in the facility for easy repair, or do we build a water tight facility out at the spring ensuring that there is no pressure loss to the generator? We went with the latter. We have plenty of scuba equipment and with a small airlock we could do repairs out at the spring.
OK! We have no more need for gas powered generators! Our new system now relies on gas pressure. It is pretty simple design, and I'll keep my notes on it's design on file in case we need to repair them. I am amazed with how much gas this planet holds. There must be enormous caverns under the surface just bursting with gas. perhaps this planet is hollow and the pressure of gravity is causing all of this gas to constantly be pushed to the surface. I imagine at some point there will be a time when the surface becomes to thick for the gases to escape anymore, but that would take billions of years. I hope anyway.
It seems my nudges to forget about the surface of the ocean have been ignored.
I had tried to tell them that we may be miles under the ocean, and that it would be dangerous to try for the surface. No one listened. A couple guys have built what looks like a bell jar with a raft attached. it has some propellers on the bottom to keep it stable as it rises. Not a bad design but, I still won't test it.
Problems. An earthquake has damaged much of our facility. People are leaving. They say they are not coming back.
I got the lab back in order, and fixed the air pumps. I set up a warning system since I have no one to monitor them anymore. Red your dead.....well in a couple days anyway....
Fixed two of the generators that broke. Place still ran OK with one generator. The backup was only needed right after the earthquake.
I am the only one left. Two more quakes, and no one wants to risk it. Some people are saying the whole planet is going to collapse on itself. I don't think that way. I have modified much of the rooms to handle quakes. None of the windows are leaking anymore, but they are the weakest points. If this place flooded the storage room would be the only place dry. The generators now can withstand small quakes, as does the air pump. The water facility is gone. It never had a chance to work. I sealed it off.
I feel a bit bitter about it, but I am leaving too. I'll come back for visits to maintain the air pumps and generators, but I have no desire to stay here anymore. My sanctuary has become a truly lonely place.
I came back today. Everything was still running. Something wasn't right. Someone was here. I activated the locks everything I could. I had to be a bit creative for other stuff. This isn't a place to just hang around in. I made a list of people who had kept a linking book.
Xept... Im wondering if that would Infringe too much on cyan's storyline, u know, we're sposed to be writing new ages, but other than that it looks reely kewl 
