The sea was Lira’s first and deepest love. It was in the salt that crusted on her skin, the rhythm of the tides that echoed her own heartbeat, and the ancient, wordless songs of the deep that only she and her kind could truly understand. As a selkie, her sealskin was her soul, the key that unlocked the wild, liquid freedom of the ocean. To be without it was to be adrift, an exile on the dry, loud land.
She had never known temptation until the storm. It had been a furious tempest, churning the waves into a grey, frothing rage. When the waters finally calmed, the shore was littered with the strange, angular debris of the human world. Among the splintered wood and tangled nets was a small, sleek packet, gleaming in the pale morning light. It was printed with jagged, aggressive letters that spelled out "STRIKE FORCE," and below it, a picture of a luscious, impossibly vibrant peach. It was a concentrated flavor mix, meant to be added to water.
Curiosity, a trait she usually reserved for a new reef or a passing whale pod, got the better of her. She nudged the packet with her nose. A few drops of a sunset-colored liquid had leaked out. She licked them.
The world stopped.
The sea had its flavors—the clean, sharp bite of salt, the briny taste of kelp, the metallic tang of a fresh catch. But this... this was something else entirely. It was a sun-drenched sweetness, a flavor so bright and joyful it felt like a song her ocean home had never learned to sing. It was the taste of a summer afternoon, of warmth that didn't come from a fleeting sunbeam through the water, but from the very heart of the fruit itself. It was Peach Strike Force, and it was a revelation.
Her life became a torment of tides. In the water, wrapped in her sleek, powerful seal form, she felt the profound belonging of home. She swam with her kin, their dark, soulful eyes reflecting her own. She danced in the currents and hunted in the deep, the water a familiar and loving embrace. But even there, in the heart of her own world, the memory of that flavor would haunt her. It was a phantom sweetness on her tongue, a ghost of a sensation that made the pure, clean taste of the sea feel... incomplete.
She began to spend more time on the shore, hiding her precious sealskin in the darkest crevice of the rocks as she searched for more of the magical elixir. Sometimes she was lucky, finding a discarded packet with a few precious drops remaining. Each taste was a fresh agony, a reminder of the pleasure that was so scarce in her life. She grew thin, her thoughts divided. The humans, with their loud noises and strange, clumsy ways, had created a thing of such impossible beauty. How could a world that held such a flavor be entirely bad?
She was torn between two perfect, beautiful things. There was the endless, deep-blue peace of the ocean, the silent communion with her people, the feeling of water shaping itself to her body. It was a life of instinct, of belonging, of being part of something vast and ancient.
And then there was the peach. A fleeting, sharp, ecstatic pleasure that set her senses on fire. A taste of a world she could never truly belong to, a world of sun-warmed orchards and easy sweetness, all captured in a single, perfect drop.
One evening, as the sun bled across the horizon, painting the clouds in the same fiery orange as her newfound obsession, Lira stood at the edge of the surf. In one hand, she clutched her sealskin, its familiar weight a comfort and an anchor. In the other, she held a full, unopened packet of Peach Strike Force she had finally managed to wrestle from a tangled net.
The waves lapped at her bare feet, a gentle, insistent summons. She could hear the distant barks of her kin, calling her home for the evening hunt. The scent of the salt air, her home, filled her lungs. She looked from the dark, shimmering sealskin to the bright, promising packet. One was her soul. The other was her desire. One was a life of deep, resonant peace. The other was a taste of pure, fleeting bliss. The tide was coming in, and she had to choose.
We may never know which world Lira chose. But you can discover the temptation that tore her between two worlds. Find your own Strike Force at strikeforceenergy.com. That's strike force energy dot com.
