My vision had fluttered back to some countless amount of time later, meditation flowing back to a present time and space. I tried to give a long, contented sigh, but gasped in surprise with air bubbles escaped my short muzzle, bubbling up some distance before losing sight of it against the sight of my home city’s inverted skyscrapers, complete with it’s flowing, glowing alien architecture. The sight had been enough to shock even me, (considering it wasn’t THE present time and space that I had been before) gazing at the sight of the brilliant, bright, artificial floating city from the seafloor of the ocean it floated high over.

This must be what Earth birds see, I thought somewhere in my mind as I let my webbed footpaws push me off the floor enough to float suspended neutral just above, Though, up has less meaning when you’re underwater.

There was no ‘Taking a moment’. I felt my gills working, but was too fixed on every detail of the city above me. The city center was dense, but no real part of New Cydonia was very “Vertical” in terms of traditional skyscrapers. The center of the city had a few though, though it was often hard to tell if buildings were all one vertical skyscraper, or a dense amount of individual buildings floated vertically and tethered to the island (the existence of which was very immediately clear upon closer inspection). Very little about the city could be considered completely uniform, and all manner of neptunian podhomes can be seen tethered or floating alongside the city with a number of similarly sized or smaller dwellings or businesses of unknown topic and origin. It wouldn’t be a surprise to many to hear that New Cydonia started as a roaming group of podhomes and an idea that grew to be a port city floating on Halcyon’s natural currents

The center of the city’s underbelly was made clear by a huge dome devoid of much else but a beach/park (not that New Cydonia was devoid of greenery, with the luminescent kelp forests abundant and preserved all around the city, hanging bright from the island’s underside). The buildings on all sides of the domes start about as tall as the dome, and create, visually, the effect of the buildings themselves doming over to form the heart of New Cydonia’s undercity. Across the vastness of the island, one can see many smaller domes of park space that also double as entry points from the topside of the island. 

Rail-lines flow throughout the city for transport and sun shines through the one-way mirror island, creating a breathtaking effect to provide sunlight the undercity (though the city at night is equally breathtaking). Even relating the place to “a city” in the Terran sense seems only possible because of the domed center-structure that gives it that possible association. Even a Terran denizen’s would explain the city better as a megastructure of interlaced communities, cultures, and subcultures even discounting New Cydonia’s status as a port city. 

In Neptunian fashion, the undercity of New Cydonia could only be succinctly described as “Terran ‘Burn culture’, but large, Neptunian, and literally on the underside of a floating, neptunian-made island.