Ask Ms. Jessica Issue 38 – The history of Port Solei

(The content for Ask Ms. Jessica comes from real questions from real people sent to AskMsJessica@gmail.com)

Dear Ms. Jessica,

Can you tell us a little bit about Port Solei? You mention it a lot, but where is it and what is it like?

Ahahaha I feel like I’m becoming something of a jack of all trades with these questions. Maybe I should take up a new position as a professor in another subject. I’m stealing my fellow professors’ work!

Anyway, have you heard of Vatican City? It’s…. a complicated part of Italy. It’s a city, but it’s also a country. It’s a city-state, so to speak, completely surrounded by Rome. It has its own representatives and laws an all sorts of stuff like that.

Port Solei is similar, we are not really a country, not really a state, not really a city, but kind of a combination of all three. We aren’t governed by any other country. Instead we self-govern and have our own representatives at the U.N., though some countries don’t actually recognize us as our own independent country. It’s complicated. Like I said, a professor of history and government would probably be better at answering this question than I would be.

Our history is a bit complicated. We started as a place where mutants were sent to be exiled from society. It was, for all intents and purposes, a prison colony. However, the U.N. stepped in pretty early on and deemed it inhumane. Unfortunately, lots of mutants from all over the world were already displaced here, and with no resources to their name had little way to get back home. So they just started settling there.

The location was chosen because it was remote. We are a port location, very mountainous, close to the equator. It’s not the most inhabitable place. The original colony buildings were built right into the sides of the cliffs.

However, as more and more mutant settlers came, we eventually gained a diverse population with a diverse set of skills. Mutants aren’t superheroes, but they do sometimes have traits that make them more suited to certain jobs than normal humans. It helps to do construction on a cliff side when you have a worker that is as big as the cliff itself, you know.

We did a pretty good job of terraforming this place. We extended the cliffs out to beaches, built ports for trade on our shores, built housing along the bay, made a complex series of roads and tunnels to get around and connect to other lands. Give us a few decades and now we have the beautiful Port Solei that you know and love.

We are the only city-state in the world entirely governed by mutants. We don’t have an exclusively mutant population, but mutants and people with dormant mutant genes tend to migrate here. For a while people thought there was something in the air here that made people mutate more often. On the contrary, mutants just wanted to move to a place where they were more understood. People with dormant mutant genes would come here before they mutated for their mutation, which made it seem like something was causing mutations.

It’s understandable why. Our government provides quite well for its people. We have universal healthcare and extensive facilities for our mutant populations that specialize in mutant medicine, mutant adjustment, and mutant integration. We have schools and universities that teach mutant studies, special government services that help people to find jobs that their mutation won’t interfere with, and mutant discrimination of all types is forbidden. Also, it helps to be close to the equator. We are sunny practically year round! Though I do miss the snow sometimes.

Anyway, we welcome anyone to come and enjoy our port city. We are very happy of our way of life. Maybe you’d like to try it sometime. Bring a swimsuit!