What are the Deeps?

I have two answers for this. The Deep Sea, and Deep Space.

You see, these two environements are simultaneously very alike and very different. Both have a pretty inhospitable set of circumstances, crushing pressure, or a lack of pressure period. This is two very opposing corcumstances that ultimately under standard physics leads to the same thing. A painful if possibly quick, death for most creature portrayed in a protagonist way.

Other things in common can be just how unknown and mysterious they are. There is potential in the reaches of space for alien life. And we know so little about our own depths of the oceans that for all we know, this too is the truth.

But that's the glory of using them in a story. You have so much potential. The Genesis of the world! I wonder how many of you have heard, played, or watched an lp of Soma, it was a very interesting horror game. And it took place deep under the ocean. But that's not important that it was a horror. Or even anything about the mc. Although that was a twist and a half.

Moving on, you have so much capability with an understanding setting. You have verticality, and floating things. Like... Oh let's go crazy and build a town around a mine. Just a floating mine set deep in the ocean, just on the edge of where the phototropic layer ends. And all these little sea creatures have gained sentience after a nuclear war has wiped out humanity. And so they grow scaffolding from coral, and many of the creatures that can't outright swim climb the bouyancy chain, which has been set with a pathway. The irradiation of the ocean causing a bloom of evolution into intelligent life. Even if some of it is horribly mutated closer to land.

Think... James and the giant peach, and you've got a pretty good idea. And that's just a hub. One single hub. Maybe the turtles mutated to be larger, and while some are intelligent, some few specific species... Like maybe box turtles, others are not. It made them live longer, and slowly their population may grow, and others become transient towns. With amphibian dwellers that live upon them in towns along the front edge. Turtles gotta turt and lay eggs too. But these turtles are so massive, even that front crescent of town is enough for many denizens. And they have little floating towns that get harnessed to the turtles and they drag them back under the waves when breeding season is done. The currents of the world we're shifted and now all the seven seas have cyclic currents and offshoots to one another, creating a giant oceanic highway, full of these town turtles and their cargo. A fleet of houses where deep sea denizens congregate and communicate, a hub of news and trade. Stories untold of the lands now assumed dead, of the deeper seas and their own residents.

And yet who is the hero of this? Who is the wanderer who shows the wonders of this world? Why, it's none other than a mutant variation. Kin to the shrimp that can close it's claws to superheat water. But four armed, with tiny triple claws that allow for better grasping. A bit of bioluminescence, and a working oceanic degree in coral growth control.

But onwards, to outer space!

For what do we behold in space? Emptiness, millions of light years of asteroids, planetoids, stars, comets, and debri. Possible alien life forms, colonies of large or small beings, dominating a solar system. Traveling the stars, surviving the oxygenless depths of space, WHOLE NEW SPECIES OF LIFEFORMS THAT AREN'T CARBON BASED!? an entire planet, in a slightly warmer orbit of a blue star, the entire planet is covered in sand, and growing from this silicon soil is a crystalline flower, as the sun sets and rises it shifts through out the day, growing taller, feeding on veins of magma that run just below the soil, drawing in raw silicon and nutrients of the planet. Fields of these silicon flowers bloomed across the surface, gently swaying in the sand laden winds.

A rock stag, like a deer covered in igneous plate armor, slowly making it's way through the field, munching on flowers, the sound of grinding stone and crushed glass echoing across the glade, trees with slowly pulsating veins of lava running up their trunk, little balls of rock clinging to their Stony bark, chittering as they scampered up and down the tree in search of the heat proof insects that plagued the trees, scaly little insects, colder blooded by biology, burrowing into veins and killing the tree for the sake of warmth, eating away at the brittle tree that remains after death. An entire ecosystem based on the heat of the core, the radiation of the star, the very materials upon which the planet was based.

Space is full of adventure, just as much as the sea is of rain. And attached it needs is an author to show off that one story to bring the environment to life. :3