Oh, nifty - the world needs more squidmaids :D

I wholeheartedly agree. 😇

My main question is how Antony ended up in the middle of the ocean.

Neither he nor Ocean know, at least not at this point.

(Realizing I left that detail out, actually, so thanks for asking.)

Wow. That was a really amazing story with some interesting ideas!

Thanks for reading! I’m having a lot of fun with this planet…

It was honestly really nice reading this and picking up just how much this felt like a reiteration of what you had previously explored with Forest, only to get to the end and find out that hey, turns out it was actually related this whole time! That's a neat little feeling, seeing puzzle pieces like that click together in real-time. :D And calling it "The Living Planet"....just feels like a very fun idea to keep exploring.

I do like that there wasn't as much "character death" in this one with Antony's transformation into Gardener as there was in the Forest ones and a couple of your other stories. Not a bad trope by any means and you have pulled it off well in the past, I'm just personally not fond of it, and I like seeing the continuity of Antony growing from a man so willing to sacrifice himself for service into part of this greater being where that drive to serve is circled back into a form of love. You've continuously been extremely good at that, not just in writing love and relationships but in writing different kinds of love across different kinds of relationships.

The only question mark, and it's something you bring up in an earlier comment, is how Antony got into the Ocean in the first place. There is enough from the flashbacks to imply that his former company put a hit on him for whistleblowing...but then the question becomes just what kind of work was he doing in the first place? XD;

Overall very nicely done, as always. :)

Thanks so much for reading! I do try to shoot more for identity shifts over death, but you’re right that the continuity is much stronger in this one.

As for how he got there… 😇

I will mention: his (former) employer has nothing to do with him showing up in the Ocean. They fired him (technically laid off so it wasn’t retaliation per se), sure, which is where his “forcibly retired” comment comes from.

It’s probably something boring like small-time commercial real estate. As much as I’m sure lots of them imagined putting out a hit on Antony, they didn’t actually follow through.

That's probably more fair, lol. Might have been a bit...dramatic on end, though it doesn't help that there's, like, zero details on what the actual job's like (understandably so, it's not relevant to the Ocean parts) so it made it really easy for me to imagine it as being like a government or pseudo-government kinda thing.

It also doesn't "help" that Harris and Julia actively stumbled into Forest while Antony being plunged into Ocean here is more sudden and random. Though maybe that's the thing in this setting, maybe there's just multiple ways for people to become part of these living ecosystems like that. Certainly leaves the door open for taking different possible routes in the future. :)