None Is Bred That Is Weaker Than Man

None Is Bred That Is Weaker Than Man is the first episode of Ezekiel Elsegood, Priest in Circean Cove, serving as the series premiere.
==Plot==
An acrid stench hangs heavy in the skies above this particular night, more than usual.
Its scent sulphurous and vitrolic against the unadjusted noses, does the lost city that goes by the name of “Circean Cove,” once a bustling metropolis riding along the coast line, emanates with the toxic glow of the sickly green skies that exceed far beyond the heavens, bleakly sterility sprawling and stretching as far as the human eye can perceive. The acceptance and compliance towards the relentless clutches of polluted invasion has transformed it into such a mesmerizing spectacle, the inorganics and organics interlocked in hateful harmony, a grotesque dance of concrete, mildew, reinforced steel, and algal growths that reach around every known corner and crevice. Everything caked beneath layers of fungus and salt, the world itself seems to rhythmically pulse from the foragers and scroungers nestled deep into its cuts and gashes.
The once vibrants streets more so resemble that of desolate canyons, the asphalt cracked and shattered, then refilled and reclaimed with intrusive kinds of vegetations, oozing with their poisonous perfume and scaling up the sides of forgotten fire hydrants and scorched street signs bordering along its blighted paths, while the dilapidated monuments, skeletal remnants of themselves, haphazardly jut and emerge out of the contaminated pools of corrosive waters, like the rotting fingers of a long-forgotten corpse drifting within the empty ocean. The manner which such crumbling reminders of the influence of man looms like monoliths, rendered inert as stricken with rigor mortis, despite looking like they were left petrified during the midst of total collapse, leaves behind an incomplete skyline that abruptly stops midway through, like the image had been neatly cleaved in half right down the center.
Amidst the cracking walls, sagging roofs, and fading graffiti blemishing the shortest of buildings across the lowest of regions lies the rudimentary complexes that sporadically clash and conflict against the backdrop of the crooked giants locked within their eternal temptation whether they were to plummet and crush them. Make-do shanties and ramshackle shacks, from tattered tents to corroded shipping containers, dot across the extremely infectious landscape like a patchwork quilt pieced from corrugated metal, broken wood, and cracked glass, each together perched precariously as if intended to be the last bastions of social structure despite resembling one massive scrapyard full of little signs of life, like tiny sentient bacteria living off the fly ridden fat of the land, only to dissipate altogether upon reaching the farthermost regions that were the city harbor, for nothing lingers let alone flourishes there, save for the haunting whispers of the wind, and the muffled groans of deformed sea creatures lurking below the murky depths.
In the dead center of the metropolis lies the most perplexing structure of all, a massive industrial building, looking as if a gigantic metal block had been dropped from the skies above and embedded into the ground deep below. Such a structure was “Bronze Cube,” the facility, the shelter, the heart, the pacemaker, and any other relevant life support of the city itself, functioning as the home of its most treasured of its more intellectual minds, not only the source of the inklings of power that still flow through the city despite how compromised its internal infrastructure was, but the ones behind every single cure behind the debilitating malformations of its populace. Even through the dampened surfaces of seaweed, encrusted coral reefs, and impromptu waterbodies which have opened up across their fissured streets, closer to rubble than rows, mankind lingers, for the stench of seawater eventually becomes a mere inconvenience after enough time, given one finally sheds away their orthodox guise, all in favor of the fishiness, in scent and stature.
Shielding its lonesome inhabitants from the foreign dangers that may lurk outside its boundaries, barriers and barricades created from the unusable and unsalvageable materials far too broken for the purpose of finite reconstruction, shield the fallen city from all sides but the harbor, one massive semi-circle wrapping around the whole dystopian civilization, thus preventing most things from getting inside, and most things from getting outside. A particular limestone bank, completely covered in mutated polyps, ascends straight up towards the dark skies and covers the stretch of highway which it sprouts straight from, once serving as the city entrance, leaving behind pillars of tarnished metal and twisted traffic signs. The city limit sign lays somewhere amongst the severely unleveled mass, its surface having been so physically degenerated from extreme oxidation that whatever kind of name the city once held has instead disappeared altogether.
With the sun hanging low across the murkiness, painted in eerie hues of greens and blues, as if reflecting off the tainted seas that have claimed man’s land for itself, leather boots drag themselves straight through the thick carpet of slimy kelp squishing and squeezing beneath them. Through the ear-splitting squawks of man-sized seagulls squawking and squealing across the skies, and the tattered remnants of torn billboard signs flapping within the faint breeze, while their sluggish pace remains fixed from how deep their own weight embeds themselves into the floral path, the noxious fog thins enough that the city plaza spans out before them, terraformed into a surreal landscape veined with plant tendrils. Steadily marching straight from the harbor with large nets of freshly caught fish over their shoulders, humanity still finds a way, even if it may be the most archaic manner imaginable, the consequences of their unfathomable circumstances.
“Let’s pick up the pace back there, not unless you want to miss first pickings tonight! The more you work, the more you deserve to eat!” Seraphina “Fifi” Swinburne, leader of the foragers, reminds the rest of her exhausted brethren how much that the skies’ swamp green sunshine has so far disappeared behind the faded skyline of several shattered skyscrapers, approximately only a little over two hours before the first wave of moonless darkness blankets over them. Even though their dwindled numbers appear as if they are the few signs of life for who knows how far the desolation sprawls outwards, does their haven exist nothing higher than a few more miles from their current position in one of the emptiest sections of the city. With their abrasive skin hardened into scaled patches, discolored with colder hues, and marked with long parallel recesses reminiscent of unformed gills, does it remain short of miraculous how anyone still up and about are still not another decade off from fatally drying out on the lands once reserved for their species.
Out with “Stale Mankind” and in with “Fresh Mankind.”
Fifi herself appears as a prime example of the successors, with her nose coming to a wide tapered point and cartilaginous protrusions emerging from between her shoulders and elbows, with each curved growth standing several inches in length. Snouts and fins, although uncommon facisimiles, are a dime a dozen given one has keen enough eyes, and while scales and gills are extreme frequencies of the full-blooded majority, on the more extreme spectrum of sea change instead exists along the lines of osseous quills and extremities, mucous orifices and pores, and excess fat like insulated layers of blubber. Across small pools of stagnant water collected within the large cracks and gaps creening through the streets, shimmering with oily sheens that dwindle as time goes on, as if reminders that nightfall approaches, in the nick of time does the last lingering glints and glimmers of moss colored dawn light their path towards the testament entering their reach, with the amber glow of manmade heat contrasting with the overgrown vegetation before them.
“Right on cue!” Fifi utters under her breath, motivated towards moving forward in contrast with the fatigued groans and grunts emanating from the scroungers sagging and dragging their feet behind, sounding as if they are all about ready to rather let their collective yield collapse and crush them. As much as her spirits remain high, and her strength not waver whatsoever, with the closer they encroach towards their intended destination, once enough mist clears from the clouded entrance, does her expression soon drop once her eyes adjust themselves through the haze. In spite of the guards that stand outside the entrance and stop anyone with uncertain intent from slipping straight into their core of their cobbled together civilization, not only are the faces which she has familiarized herself with absent altogether, substituted with the audible ambience of mechanical rumbling that she and the rest of the settlers know all too well.
“Well, well, well, speak of the devil, and to think I was starting to believe everyone had already bunkered themselves down for the night!” The leatherclad motorcyclist stands up straight and steps towards them the moment the frightened foragers make themselves known past the mistiness, as if he himself remains oblivious towards their apprehensive expressions and cautious stances. “Cutting nature’s timer a bit too close for comfort there, if I were to say so myself. Half a mile slower than that, and by the crack of dawn comes in the morning, it might as well be like the lot of you never even existed.” His large flattened facial features, stretched about and hollowed out, emerge through the murk the further that they step, with eyes sunken so deep inside their sockets, nose pushed upwards and receded back so much so it sits horizontal against their countenance, and a rectangular metal plate over their chin like a partially prosthetic jawbone.
“Where are the guards? Why aren’t they stationed here?” Fifi retorts as soon as the ruffian finishes their introduction, disregarding their efforts towards unsettling them with the knowledge that time ticks closer and closer towards twelve hours of total darkness, which the motorcyclist merely scoffs at the question, rolling and shrugging their shoulders in ignorance whilst puffing the crumple cigarette dangling from their cracked lips, another uncomfortable detail apart of the assemblage of their skeletal visage, the exact face that most if not all settlers have come to known to be bad news incarnate, and even worse should they be the brunt of misfortune and end up stumbling into them without another soul in sight. “There is no toll that we need to pay. We’re not fools. That is considered thievery, and punishable by-”
“Oh, please, and what would I gain from stealing fish of all things?” The motorcyclist holds their cigarette between their fingers whilst erratically gesticulating towards them, with their elongated expression having sloughed down their skull into visceral contempt, before then reaching inwards into their leather jacket as if intending to elaborate. “If you pacifist pansies want to keep on popping like tar bubbles at the slightest confrontation within those walls there, then it seems I’ll have to settle with stopping folks like you right at the gate instead.” He tightens his grip around its broken length before holding it outwards for them to see themselves, that being an odd accessory in the form of what resembles a makeshift necklace assembled together from aluminum wire and miniature sharklike teeth. “Have you happened to spy a sorry schmuck who would’ve worn something along these lines?”
“What is that, tentside merchant jewelry? I’ll have you know that I can say that I have, because that goes for the hundred or so settlers that I’ve seen wearing them themselves!” Fifi scoffs as soon as she spots the strand of threaded bone fragments hanging from the confines of his clenched fist, invoking an exasperated exhale from the cyclist amidst the uncomfortable faces of the foragers before him. “In all honesty, those do in fact go for a pretty penny though, so I wouldn’t imagine you found that lying on the ground of all places.”
==Noteworthy Events==
===Major Events===
*TBA
===Minor Events===
*TBA
==Characters==
===Protagonists===
*Seraphina "Fifi" Swinburne (first appearance)
*Manning Meriwether (first appearance)
* Luke Lake-Oceane (first appearance)
*Eden Pond Church Chirosytes
*The Great White Yonder (mentioned)
*The Bellman In Peat Brown (mentioned)
*The Preachers In Peat Brown (mentioned)
===Neutral===
*Ezekiel "Brother Eviscera" Elsegood (first appearance)
*The Deep End Dialecticians (first appearance) 
**Head Researcher Zedekiah Zilberschlag (first appearance, cameo)
**Co-Head Researcher Obadiah Orenstein (first appearance, cameo)
**Researcher Lydia Lorimer Bleibaum (first appearance)
**Researcher Solomon Stålhammar (first appearance)
**Researcher Nathanael Nickolai (first appearance)
=== Antagonists===
*The Skeleton Crew (first appearance)
**Immanuel "I.M. Marrow" Baines (first appearance)
**Thomasina "Tomahawk" Hawkings (first appearance)
**Rickie "Ribeye" Eikenboom (first appearance)
**Porter "Porterhouse" Von Grimmelshausen (first appearance)
** Fitzroy "Filet Mignon" Milburn-Gagnon (first appearance)
==Aliens Used==
*TBA
==Trivia== 
*Immanuel and the rest of the Skeleton Crew were initially planned for another series, Investigation Neon, although were scrapped feeling as if they would have hard to incorporate into the plot after difficulties writing an episode draft centered around them.
Category:EEPICC