“They were going to shoot you if you didn’t,” Luisoix says, “besides they already targeted The Noc by the time you called me up. Pretty sure they could put two and two together.”

  The Captain shrugs, the long black trail of black sand steadily finding its way back to him. “It is what it is. We don’t have much in the way of ‘impact shielding’ but I doubt we’ll come up on any long range radar they have.”

  “You sure?”

  “What would they detect? Are they going to fire on every ‘large moving object’ in The Eversea?”

  There’s a pause. “Fair enough,” Luisoix says. “So what? We just gotta lie low for a bit?”

  “Relic first, relaxing later.”

  “I mean, we don’t have to get it, we can just kill the slug guy and-”

  “Oh, you don’t think we’re actually giving it to him, do you?”

  Luisoix hums. “Okay, so you want The Mermaid’s Tear.”

  The Captain straightens his cap. “I do.”

  “Might I ask why?”

  “You’ll find out,” he says with a mild tone of complete evil.

  “Huh. Yeah you’re a creepy dude sometimes.”

  “If that’s how you see someone who knows what he wants, then sure, I wouldn’t blame you.”

  Luisoix scoffs, and is about to snap back, but Grancis flinches.

  “Welcome back,” The Captain says.

  Grancis wheezes weakly through her mic, but only after a few seconds her breathing becomes steady. “What… was that?”

  “Humans and their precious air do not always mix the way it’s supposed to,” The Captain says through her speaker, “especially when high-pressure environments are involved.”

  “Colette, is she okay?!” Grancis flips up from her weightless position and peers into the over diver’s lens.

  “Yes, Mister Ketiere is just fine. He’s a little more… pardon me. He’ll be a moment longer than you for various reasons.”

  Grancis peers at the face of Martaine Vangair a moment more, a wave of compassion overcoming her. Her body hardly hurts anymore.

  “Captain.”

  “Yes?”

  “How is Martaine doing?”

  The Captain nods off Luisoix and Estradia for a moment. “Mister Vangair is in a… very stable condition right now.”

  “So he is alive?”

  “I believe that would imply such, yes?”

  “… Hey, also, what happened to Colette’s body?”

  “That is his body,” The Captain says, glancing down at Martaine’s body.

  “No I mean… the girl.”

  The Captain shrugs. “Probably threw it out. Far too much damage.”

  Grancis winces and retorts icily. “Probably?”

  “It’s been a little while and I’ve had a lot on my mind. Either way if you’re wondering if the spirit you understand as Colette is going to be back in its previous body, then the answer is no. It simply cannot be medically done.”

  Cole, lapsing between a paralyzed, conscious nightmare, and a dull, gray sleep, finally jolts to his sense. He starts up from Grancis’ arms carelessly, smacking helmets together briefly before he writhes up to something resembling a combat ready stance.

  “Captain, what the actual f-”

  “I’m glad you could join us, Mister Ketiere.”

  “That hurt!”

  “But does it hurt still?” The Captain asks, speaking like the present situation really made up for the past.

  Cole stutters, and then sighs. “Well… well yeah, I feel fine. What was that?”

  “Something involving human beings and pressure.”

  “What?”

  “You know, water has a weight.”

  Cole shrugs like it were obvious, though he still doesn’t understand. “Yeah?”

  The Captain rotates his hand in enunciation. “So you’re surrounded by a whole lot of water.”

  Cole looks up, looks back to The Captain, and does his very best to snap his fingers under his diving suit. “Ohhhhh.”

  “Yesss, how fascinating!” The Captain says with enough sarcasm that even Cole picks up on it.

  “Wait,” Grancis starts folding her arms together, “So was that supposed to be ‘the bens’?”

  “The bends, and yes, probably,” he lies, not really caring enough to find out a straight answer; it’s not like they put humans in the water every day, if even every decade.

  Grancis looks aside in thought. “That’s doesn’t sound right… Are you sur-”

  “Does it really matter? You’re okay now.”

  She hums. “Well, I suppose so, I just thought it was worse then that.”

  Cole scoffs. “Worse then that?”

  Grancis shrugs. “I don’t know, I just read a book from my dad about divers once.”

  “Whoa, Eversea divers?” Cole asks, immediately surprised that such a hard core book would exist.

  She shakes her head as best she can in her suit, which is barely at all. “No, like… normal diving.”

  “You know those aren’t real.”

  Grancis sighs. “I don’t know. The book sure seemed like it.”

  The Captain chuckles. “Maybe one day we’ll run into one. I’ll let you go for a swim.”

  “Whoa, no way.”

  “That would be a horrible idea,” the two youths respond.

  “Well, that said. Get your heads right, because we’re going right back.”

  Cole flinches his gaze right at The Captain. “We’re going back?!”

  The Captain hops a little on his single leg while more and more black sand clumps onto his wounds. “We most certainly are!”

  “But, the O.E.L.!”

  “I don’t care.”

  “I do!” Cole shouts. “Those dudes had real guns down there!”

  “Yes, and in this case our harpoon guns are far better… Oh, Boris you sly crayfish.”

  Cole and Grancis share a weirded-out glance. “Uh, what’s that, Captain?” Grancis asks.

  “N-nothing,” The Captain says with a curt shooing motion. “We’ll remount in five minutes. Get your heads right!”

  “That’s bullshit! They’ll shoot us to bits!”

  “Unless you’d like to stay with the ship on deck,” The Captain says, glancing out past the railing and into the dropoff.

  Cole sighs, and only needs to cut a sliver of his peripheral vision to see something that he doesn’t want to see. Grancis looks too, but the looming figures don’t really worry her.

  “Okay, fine,” Cole says, keeping his gaze solidly in the direction of the sea cliff.

  The Captain nods pleasantly. “Wonderful! Five minutes and we go. I’m going to grab a replacement for Dunklestein.”

  Cole pauses a second at the thought. “Is he okay?”

  “Probably,” The Captain says with his usual mysterious humor.

  “Okay, so couldn’t we get like, Marcus to help us out?”

  “No. He’s for emergencies only.”

  “This isn’t an emergency?”

  “Oh, please. It’s only a high-tech, inter-dimensional empire. They’re not that bad.”

  Cole rolls his eyes. “Fine, so who are we taking along?”

  The Captain hums.

  Well at least it’s Not Jim

  “Oh boy! Oh boy oh boy oh boy!” Cluton mutters with an ecstatic shake, “I can’t believe I’m going on a mission!” he says into his mic, clipped uncomfortably under his gills, though he doesn’t mind if it’ll help his team coordinate to complete the task at hand.

  “Great,” Cole says blandly.

  “Wow, a real harpoon gun!” Cluton exclaims with a triumphant, adventurous excitement.

  “You do know how to use o-”

  “What’s this one d-”

  Without thinking much of anything, Cluton applies just the slightest amount of pressure to a small latch-slide on the rifle. A string of harpoon bolts zip out, the last one grazing The Captain’s head and tearing off his hat.

  There’s a heavy, dim silence, and then The Captain sighs.

  “It’s gas powered,” he says, “it’s capable of bursts.”

  Cluton trembles with a shudder. “Right. Whew! Good to… to know!”

  Another silence, The Captain goes ahead and takes off his glasses. “Do you have any other questions about how that weapon operates?”

  “No, sir,” Cluton whimpers, although with a smile. “I think I’m good now.”

  The Captain nods upon finishing his rebandaging, gives a smooth wave to Luisoix, and waits for Douglas, the Nocturna sailor with a constantly furious moray eel in his left eye socket who just so happens to be a crack shot, to aim up the large line harpoon emplacement to the very top of the reef.

  “A little more to the left,” the eel whispers to Douglas, who makes the correction.

  He fires, and a harpoon trails out a steady, strong line connecting the ship to their destination.

  “Up we go,” The Captain says with a brisk, sweeping tone of adventure.

  With nervous steps, Cole approaches the line shot from the harpoon emplacement, glances uneasily back at the line on his back doubling with his oxygen, and he start up, with Grancis right behind him. When crashing down with The Captain, he didn’t have enough time to think he was going over the open water, but his curiosity gets the best of him.

  He looks down, far along the sheer drop off, and peers into the abyss.

  It looks back, and he raises his eyes immediately, freezing in place.

  “We should go back,” Cole pants.

  Grancis looks down, and sees nothing too horrible to her. She looks up, at first with impatience, but once she sees the look on his face, she calms down. “It’s fine, Colette.”

  “It’s waiting for us. We can still get back to the shi-”

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s not going to do anything. We have the suits on, remember?”

  “Didn’t Luisoi-”

  “I don’t care what he said,” Grancis snaps, inching along the line with her hands and closing the distance between them. “Look over there.” She nods up along the cliff face, and Cole turns to look.

  He expects a monstrosity, and it is, but not the kind he was expecting.

  Floating up gracefully like an angel ascending to heaven, The Captain’s tattered body rises matching their pace with perfect calmness. He looks like something both of the young adults would prefer the ocean be filled with; calm things, wondrous things. It is a simple rule of thumb that looking up and seeing something above in the water is generally less-threatening to the viewer than seeing the same thing below. There’s a psychological boon to looking up, seeing the sun, and seeing something wrapped up in that light, rather than the abyss. Being bathed with the surroundings of the sun and the surface are somewhat comforting, and being shrouded in the trappings of the endless deep are far less so.

  Cole’s grasp tightens around the line and continues forward.

  “There we go,” Grancis says with a proud tone.

  “Is there a problem?” The Captain asks, looking down at the two while Cluton catches up.

  “No.”

  “I’m fine,” the two humans respond.

  The Captain just looks back up to the heavens, the surface, floating upward with a full, confident expectation that he’s going to get to where he’s going, no matter what’s in the water around him.

  “How the hell is this so easy for you, Gran?” Cole mutters through his teeth.

  “I dunno,” she responds. “It’s kind of refreshing if you think about it.”

  “I hate it,” he grumbles, ever the shining light of optimism.

  “Well you don’t have anything to be worried about. The Captain wouldn’t make you do something he knew you couldn’t.”

  Cole doesn’t believe it at all, but it does sound much better coming from her. “O-… yeah, okay.”

  The four ascend, either by floating, swimming, or skimming across a line, up to the reef. Cole has to watch his feet as the drop off wall comes alive near the top, outcroppings and small caves coming alive with eyes and mandibles. He lifts his legs more than he needs to, and makes touch-down at the same time as The Captain.

  “Glad to you see you’ve made it,” The Captain imparts with a tone that makes Cole want to punch him.

  “Were you unsure?”

  “Whatever was down there definitely seemed interested.”

  “Captain,” Grancis says plainly.

  “I’m only joking, Mister Ketiere.”

  “You better.”

  “Now let’s get on with this,” The Captain orders.

  The group heads forward at a faster clip than before, but still including a few unpleasant meetings with the various lesser, still dangerous creatures of The Eversea drink.

  In only a minute they find themselves back at the clearing, but this time The Captain’s taking his time here. With Cole and in a smaller capacity the less-experienced Grancis and Cluton, the four cut small slices of sight out from the view behind their cover, because once they step out, they won’t have time to get back to safety. Upon hitting he middle of their scan, they stop at the sight in the center.

  “Boris?!” Cole spits.

  The Captain erupts out from his concealment and pokes out his head. Nothing seems too wrong, with the exception of Boris standing out in the clearing, now with the sand deeply unsettled and curled about.

  Picking up a small, screeching, many-clawed thing, Boris picks up their presence and looks over with the practiced speed of an apex shoal predator.

  “OH, YOU ARE OF THE BACK!”

  “We certainly are, Chef Boris,” The Captain says, taking his time to meet up with him. “Do you know where our daring Dunklestein’s gone off to?”

  Boris points with his eye stalks over to a rock, where a shark man is aiming down with a harpoon rifle and a shaken gaze. “HE WAS NOT OF THE LIKING HOW I WAS OF THE HANDLING THINGS WITH THE LIBRARIAN MEATS.”

  The Captain searches the surroundings, his head barely moving but his entirety still seeing everything. “So you cleared them out?”

  Boris nods, thrusting his claw up, to seize a small, swift plankton creature and stuff it into the sack.

  “Dead?”

  “OH, NO. THAT WOULD BE OF THE MESSY.”

  “As if you were against messes,” Cole mutters.

  The Captain makes yet another sweep, this time without his rifle trailing his movements. “Retreated.”

  “THAT IS OF THE RIGHT. INTO THE CAVENING. THEY WERE VERY OF THE AFRAID OF ME ONCE I FOUND A FRIENDING TO BE OF THE CHASING OF ME.”

  The Captain raises his rifle again at the ready. “This friend of your-”

  “IT’S ALREADY BEEN OF THE LOSING MY TRAIL. WE SHOULD BE OF THE SAFING NOW.”

  The humans and Cluton share an uneasy glance. The landies will admit: out of all the seasorts, Cluton is among the least weird.

  The Captain scoffs, as if completely in on it. “Glad I wasn’t wrong, just make sure this doesn’t change.”

  Boris snips with an authoritative snap, the compression actually making bubbles from the force. “THAT WILL NOT BE OF THE HARD. I HAD TO PUT MUCH OF THE EFFORT TO BE GETTING IT OF THE OUT.” Boris looks over to the rock where his cartilaged companion is taking cover. “JUST AS YOU MUST BE OF THE PUTTING EFFORT IN THE GETTING HIM OF THE OUT.”

  “Well at least he’s safe,” The Captain says, trotting over to Dunklestein. “You can come out now.”

  The shark man trembles from behind the scope of his rifle, still scanning about for any movement. “You didn’t see it, Cap.”

  “See what?”

  “Boris… what he can do… he’s not human,” Dunklestein mutters in pitiable shock.

  The Captain stares at him a moment, looks over to Boris, who waves pleasantly, and then he looks back to Dunklestein.

  “Oh no! Boris isn’t human?!” The Captain says in mock surprise.

  Dunks snaps his rows of teeth in dejection. “You know what I mea-”

  “What an unexpected turn of events!”

  “Cap, it was fuckin’ huge!”

  “Size isn’t everything, dear friend.”

  “Wh- Can you at least take this seriously?!”

  “Maybe when you’re worth it.”

  The shark man scoffs incredulously, groans, and steps out from the rock. “Well I’m not going back over that clearin’.”

  Cluton is the only one of the three in the self-composed “mostly-acceptable personality club” who hears this, as it’s no problem listening to other sea sorts under water.

  “Yeah? Why not?”

  Dunklestein looks at Cluton like he just asked for the name an unspeakable eldritch god. “You don’t want to know.”

  “Was it cool?”

  “Kip, I swear on my mother’s sacs that it’s not something you want to see. It was so close… it could be listening to us right now….”

  The Captain snaps up on his tip-toes in a brief, awkward movement. “Alrighty then. Let’s get into that cave!”

  “The cave?” Cole asks, glancing to the miserably black hole, consuming light the moment it enters. “Ahh, right, the cave.”

  “Now, don’t be afraid. I’m certain those librarians are already dead at the hands of whatever’s defending The Tear.”

  “Whoa, cool!” Cluton exclaims, brandishing his harpoon rifle at the ready.

  “So… who first?” Cole asks, peering down while the group gathers around the hole.

  “Time for a little reconnaissance,” The Captain says, scooping a little black sand from inside his bandages and sprinkling it into the hole.

  Cole, Grancis, and Cluton again share weirded out glances.

  “So that is how that works!” Cluton says with an “eureka” tone of sated curiosity.

  The Captain nods. “In that I am an extension of myself, sure.”

  “Yeah, but I can’t sprinkle my blood everywhere and see down places with it. What are you, anyway, Captain?”

  “Don’t even,” Cole says.

  “I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know himself,” Grancis adds.

  The Captain scoffs at the thought. “Don’t know what I am, bother it all! Of course I know what I am.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes I’m a…” The Captain thinks a moment, looks briefly at Boris, who just looks away, and then back at Grancis. “I have decided not to tell you for now.”

 

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