“Ahh, but you definitely know, though,” Cole comments snidely.

  The Captain clears his throat professionally. “Of course, Mister Ketiere, and I’ll have you watch your tone, young man…. Hrm.”

  “What is it?” Grancis asks.

  “That can’t be right,” he mutters, stroking his chin while looking down into the hole.

  “Come on, Salt. What’s up?” Cole asks in turn.

  The Captain shakes his head. “Chef Boris.”

  “IS IT AS I WAS OF THE FEARING?”

  “Your deconstruction of the threat was spot on, as always.”

  Cole jolts back with Grancis. “What deconstruction of the threat?” Cole asks.

  The Captain shrugs. “Boris and I talk about this sort of thing often before missions. Extended briefing and intelligence-craft; leader-stuff.”

  Cole looks to Grancis for reassurance, and she just shrugs.

  “So what exactly is the matter?” Cole asks again.

  “The relic’s influence isn’t contained, in fact it’s completely unchained and has extended its presence to about twenty meters down this hole.”

  “I have no idea what that me-”

  “He means that the relic can do spooky shit once we hit that mark,” Dunklestein explains, making good and sure to skirt along the side of the coral to stay as far away from the sand as possible. He looks to The Captain. “So those librarians are probably-”

  “Yes.” The Captain nods. “The chances of them being alive at this point without an occult kit are slim to none, their technology be damned,” he says, reaching about his jacket, or perhaps within his bandages, to fish out a wooden box; it has a weird symbol on it, of an octopus entangling what looks to be a staff or a rod of some kind.

  “What’s it this time?” Cole asks with a scoff, “you gonna dash some fairy dust on us and send us down?”

  The Captain opens the box, holding a few objects, but namely an old, very medicinal-looking bottle with a label that’s too tarnished to read. “It’s not so far from the truth, but I’ll definitely be going down first.” The Captain opens the bottle and, taking great care not to let water in, inserts the small dropper through the air-tight syringe shield to take a full squeeze of the gross-looking, deep brown liquid. “Take this,” The Captain offers, presenting the fluid-filled dropper to Cole.

  Dunklestein chuckles immediately, and nudges Cluton, who doesn’t have a clue what’s in the bottle.

  “And this is?”

  “An order,” The Captain says. “Enjoy.”

  Cole’s not one to stand up to peer pressure, so he does as he’s told and, after finding the pressurized vent and much, much awkward fiddling, is able to transfer the dropper to the inside of his suit, pull his hand out from the suit’s own arm, and deliver the dropper to his mouth. He winces immediately.

  “Ick!”

  “What a shame, poor child,” The Captain says with a patronizing tone.

  Cole presents the dropper and bottle to Grancis next, but The Captain takes it up before she reaches it. “She won’t be needing it,” The Captain says, packing the syringe and bottle back into the case. “I’ll go in first, wait for my signal via radio and do not enter unless it sounds like my voice.”

  “Whatever,” Cole mutters next to an exceptionally weirded out Grancis.

  Without so much as a breath for preparation, The Captain tucks his body into a straight line and enters the eerie closeness of the cave. In only a second, he’s gone into the blackness.

  “Rest in peace,” Cole says with a smirk.

  “Rude,” Grancis adds.

  Cole shrugs it off, and steps over to Dunklestein. “Yo, so what exactly did he make me take?”

  The shark laughs, his rows of teeth shining brilliantly, and he says something Cole can’t quite make out. Cluton, however, jolts in utter, not-so happy surprise

  He opens the mic line again. “Cluton, did you get that?”

  Cluton nods. “He said you just took three milliliters of fortified occult laudanum. Don’t know what the heck that is, though.”

  Grancis’ face goes pale while Cole hums.

  “Huh, laudanum? Is that like, a drug or something?”

  “I dunno,” Cluton says with a shrug.

  “Oh gods,” Grancis mutters in disgust.

  A Drug or Something

  “Is anyone else burning up in here?” Cole says with a good-natured laugh a minute in the wait.

  “No, Colette,” Grancis mumbles. “It’s definitely not hot.”

  “Heh, neh,” Cole says, his gaze becoming increasingly positive, confident, and unstoppable. “Not as hot as you.”

  Grancis keeps her gaze away towards the proximity of the clearing. Her father mentioned laudanum briefly during his discussion with her on narcotics. “False godhood in a bottle” he called it.

  Cole waits for her to respond, gets nothing back, so he just shoves her playfully, but with that specific, wiping, almost stroking motion to suggest a sexual connotation. “Whatever, you idiot. You wonderful idiot,” he says, crassly turning back to his own spot on the lookout.

  Grancis sighs, and Cluton hums. He turns around to Dunklestein.

  “Hey, Mister Dunklestein,” the clownfish boy starts, holstering his rifle at his back and reaching into his gills to click off his little direct-vibration waterproof mic.

  The burly shark is enjoying the show from Cole, but he hasn’t let his guard down from the clearing. “What?”

  “What is fortified occult laudanum, anyway?”

  The sharksort grins “Oh, kip, you for real?”

  “Yeah, I have no idea,” Cluton admits with wide eyes.

  Dunklestein shrugs. “Landies usually can’t deal when an eldritch try to get into them with its ‘presence’ bullshit. They usually try to tear out their eyes or smash open their skull to get it out.”

  “What’s it feel like?”

  Dunklestein sobers up a moment. “We had a sailor by the name of Yornick. Real nice guy, but a landy, like one hundred percent landy like Cole here.”

  “Ahh.”

  “He got stroked by some snail spirit’s brain, and before long he was screaming up the bay at night talking about how his skull was its shell. Snails are weird, man.”

  “Yeah, way weird,” Cluton says with a shudder. “You know what isn’t so bad, though?”

  “What.”

  “Anemones,” Cluton says, this being about the only sea creature that he’s an authority on.

  “Shut up, kip.”

  “No, I’m serious, they’re super friendly!”

  “To you, maybe.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Dunklestein groans. “Don’t make me say it, kip.”

  Cluton huffs with instant offense. “You’re not implying that anemones treat some seasorts better than others, are you?”

  “In that they literally don’t murder and swallow them whole? Yes.”

  “Wh-wh-” Cluton is incredulous. “What a ridiculous idea! You’ve just never met an ane-”

  “I’ve met a few.”

  “Yeah?”

  “They tried to eat me. Killer figures, though. You clown kips are some lucky basta-”

  Cluton turns about bitterly. “Right, so… snail guy.”

  “Yeah. He told one of the other sailors to smash open his head to get it, but of course The Captain wouldn’t have it, especially considerin’ there was nothing in there. Laudanum, or some other heavy narc with mystical properties are just th’ thing when normal landies wanna get around in other dimensions.”

  Cluton starts back with a weirded out gaze. “Wait, another dimension?”

  Dunklestein nods. “If it’s under a sea god’s presence, it counts as another world. We’re going to see some messed up shit when we’re down there… that is if The Captain ever calls us down.”

  Cluton crosses his arms with a worried look to his round, rather cute face. “Okay, so if Cole had to take the laudanum, then why not the girl?”

  Dunklestein glances over sharply. “Your mic’s off, kip?”

  He glances around briefly. “Yeah?”

  “She’s a freak.”

  Cluton laughs. “Well we’re all kind of fre-”

  “Like a ‘Captain-level’ freak,” Dunklestein adds.

  Cluton draws back in surprise. “Oh… well she seems nice enough. What’s wrong with her?”

  “I don’t know, and The Captain won’t talk about it. ‘Pparently Estradia and Boris know too, but their contracts are way tighter than ours if you get my drift. Not sure about Luisoix and Doctor Slash, but they probably know too,” he says, Boris pleasantly acting like he doesn’t hear him.

  Cluton spots over to Grancis, who can practically feel his gaze. She doesn’t look back, and just focuses her energies on ignoring Cole.

  “That’s pretty cool, I guess,” Cluton says.

  Dunklestein shrugs. “All I know is that she acts like a human but her soul-reacts like an eldritch, or something that isn’t human, by any rate. Not even sure if she has a soul, really.”

  Cluton smirks, his rare, endearing hooligan streak popping up. “Maybe we could borrow one of those signature lenses from the infirmary, eh?”

  The shark scoffs. “Do you have any idea what would happen if The Captain caught you with one of those?”

  The clownfish hums. “Yeah, I guess that’s a good po-”

  “Wet Alpha this is Wet One. Come in,” The Captain’s voice rings in through Cluton’s gill, just as it rings through Cole’s and Grancis’ suits.

  “Uh,” Cole mumbles, “This is Wet Four to Wet One. What’s up.”

  “It’s addressing station first, Mister Ketiere,” The Captain says in correction. “You’re good to make your descents. I’ve secured the area and prepared it for human travel. Have Boris come last, and remember to turn on your suit lights. It’s pretty dark down here,” he finishes.

  No one but Boris notices the very, very slightly altered inflection on The Captain’s voice, but by this point he knows they have to go in anyway so he decides not to mention it. That, and The Captain would never say something as paltry and overbearing as “prepared it for human travel”. How cheesy. There is one thing the master chef can do to put the opponent off its game, though.

  Boris dives forward, his exoskeleton contorting horrifically to accommodate the small size of the passage.

  “BORIS WILL BE OF THE FINDING YOU, CAPTAININGS!” Boris cries triumphantly like the leader of the cavalry charge.

  “Wh-” Grancis mutters to stop him, but he’s already in. “He was supposed to go last,” she notes.

  Cluton turns his mic back on. “I guess Boris is doing of the wantings of whateverings he is of the… doing.”

  “Nice try,” Grancis responds with a smirk.

  Cole laughs and throws a smooth punch through the air. “Well you heard the man. Let’s reel ‘er in!” He says this in about the most face-punchingly confident tone one could imagine for someone, but somehow the increased vitality and lack of social blowback has made it even worse. He grips the edge of the hole to the cave, and goes in without even a blink of fear in his eyes.

  Grancis looks on with surprise. She’s not appreciating any part of this, but she will admit she didn’t think a little bit of fluid could make someone so ballsy.

  Cole drops in with an enlightened grin, and the others follow suit.

  What they encounter is a steadily descending set of rocky shelves, where each group member has to lower themselves to almost a crawl to push their feet through to the next section. The especially nervous part of this, is that every diver’s experience descending is ever so slightly different, even though they’re all apparently taking the same passage:

  Cole encounters a bumpy pair of rocks along the third shelf, and he has to raise his body higher over it.

  Grancis finds a fairly tight squeeze that she just manages to get past after a few seconds of frantic wriggling through.

  Dunklestein spots a luminescent algae colony flourishing along the side and leading off into various cracks along the cave.

  Cluton, the poor lad, has to pass his whole body in front of a moray eel’s den, its razor-toothed inhabitant eying him viciously the entire time.

  It’s not that the four noticed different parts of the cave when the others didn’t, it’s more so that by the very second they lapsed into the darkness of the passage, they have all been moved to singular, personalized paths. No one noticed the lack of oxygen lines in the path right away, but once they did, it was too late.

  In only a few minutes of crawling Cole finds himself out of that unpleasantly enclosed passage, and into… a dead end. It’s a small, bowl-shaped opening, with just enough space for to turn around in. It takes Cole a moment to register what he’s looking at, and then it sets in.

  “The… hell?” he mumbles to himself, looking at the broad ray of light produced by his suit hitting against the cave wall. It works perfectly. There’s simply no way he missed a turn. Cole scoffs, realizing he’ll have to crawl back.

  He turns right round, but only sees the cave wall. With a frantic gasp, he turns again to one corner, and then another, and then another.

  It’s only when he realizes he’s somehow merged into a coffin of cavestone, that he does remember he’s connected to an air line. He looks at it, and finds it sheared cleanly off along with the tow line, but cut so cleanly that it looks almost deliberate.

  He doesn’t suffer from anything resembling depressurization sickness, but he doesn’t have air, and he’s definitely trapped inside a horrible hollow of rock fifty meters below the surface.

  Cole feels something akin to utter terror, the looming expectation of death, and also the excitement of merging through all lines and becoming one with the universe. He slowly, miserably runs out of air, banging against the rock surrounding from all sides while his bulky suit and rifle inhibit his free movement. His vision grays, and then, all at once, he is grasped by enormous, hideous claws. Surely, this must be the end.

  All four of them eventually find their way to the entry of the caven’s massive air-pocket, the pressure of the water so low that it only creates a small pool for them to dive up through. Eldritch trickery, they’re certain. Each member of the team emerges into the open, stale-dirt-tasting air in the cool dark, but each of them perceives it in entirely different ways.

  All Roads lead to Death

  “CAPTAINING!” Boris yells triumphantly through the open air of the mysteriously-oxygenated cave section, rushing up to The Captain while holding Cole like a recently-hunted morsel of food.

  “Ahh,” The Captain says. He’s impaled on a jagged stalagmite and slowly pulling his body out off while bandaging up the damage. “Well that’s one.”

  Boris slams down the wildly convulsing Cole with an excited plop. “IT LOOKS LIKE THE LAUDANUM ISN’T OF THE WORKING.”

  The Captain looks over Cole, who is simultaneously laughing and drooling while flailing on the ground. “Is his line working?”

  Boris looks to the oxygen and tow lines, gives them a little wiggle, then looks over to Cole’s suit to read his gauges. “THEY CERTAINLY OF THE ARE.”

  “So it must be the eldritch… hmm.” The Captain pauses a moment, recovering himself to open up his box of anti-occult goodies.

  “WHAT IS OF IT?”

  The Captain inspects the bottle he used for Cole. He opens the bottle and squeezes a bit along his bandages for a taste. His mummified face squinting perceptively only a moment, he jolts back, pushing his upper torso along the stalagmite a bit. “Oh, Estradia you slithery little…” The Captain sighs. “This definitely isn’t just occult laudanum.”

  “WHAT IS OF THE IT, THEN?”

  The Captain gestures Boris over, just in case. Boris steps over, and The Captain whispers against his shell.

  There’s a short pause, where the two fight back the laughter from the sheer inconvenience of the situation.

  “WOW, THAT IS OF THE REALLY BAD!”

  “Indeed. The eldritch haven’t even started their physical attack it seems, he’s just tripping out and he got misdirected by them: doubly disturbing to him, I’m sure.”

  The giant lobster looks over to Cole, who’s grinning under his helmet lens. “WILL HE BE OF THE OKAYING?”

  “Of course, it’s not like he didn’t literally die at Irefall’s. Now go find the other line and get Grancis. It’s going to be a pain to find the two sorts, so we should get the other easy one out of the way first.”

  Boris fires off a quick salute. “OH CAPTAINING MY CAPTAINING!” Boris races off, following the other line into the swallowing, obviously supernatural darkness.

  The Captain sighs, and gets back to work on unimpaling himself from the stalagmite.

  “Clever bastards,” he whispers to himself with a bitter tone.

  Elsewhere, Grancis feels like she’s getting pursued, but it’s difficult for her to take it seriously.

  Some squirming monstrosity compiled out of a million vomitous, pale worms are heading right for her, bursting through the door in the dark hallways she’s found herself in. She would be horrified beyond words, but she sees through it. She doesn’t know why, or how it works, but she can just tell that it’s not real.

  The army of writing horrors encompasses her, and suddenly the beast, and the castle she was supposedly in, disappears.

  Out of what seems to be a natural intuition, she glances back, behind to where she would have ran if it were all real. A sharp, crooked rock outcropping with its point is sticking in her direction. Had she fled, she would have slammed right into it. It doesn’t worry her much, though; because it only seemed as real as a flame; as though the illusion were innately obvious and barely even warranted attention.

  Truth is, a normal person would have been killed by that illusory beast, obliterating their capacity for pain through further hallucinations, so either way they would have met an end from the ghost or the crop of rock.

  She shrugs, and starts shining her light around. Everything’s so much heavier now that she’s out of the water.

 

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