[Player Log Start!]

[Log Holder: Michael Kapok]

[Level: 2]

Magic was the most convenient thing Michael had ever encountered. If it had a physical form, he was tempted to kiss it.

Even at the bottom of the ocean, with thousands of pounds of pressure invariably weighing down on him, he was protected by a joint Force Field Shield and Oxygen Replenisher spell. Though how long that would last, he wasn’t looking forward to finding out.

The tentacle around his body squeezed tightly around his ribs, the pain reminding him of how serious the danger actually was. How close to dying he would be if he didn’t handle this perfectly.

Now if only these creatures could speak English as well as the corvids. So far, there hadn’t been enough time to establish communication and see how they communicated. All Michael could do was keep his mouth shut and let himself be brought into the city, which was fast approaching.

He worried for Verity, who had tried to help get him back at risk of her own safety. She should have reached the surface again, if she hadn’t tried anything stupid. Now he had to face the truth of what he had sentenced himself to.

With the speed of a bullet train, the squid rocketed forward, plunging into the city. It was surrounded by a thick wall of some sort of gel, so dense that it felt like he was being squeezed like a toothpaste tube, until they were forced out to the other side. Where the water was lighter. The pressure was much lighter than it was outside. Not as light as regular atmosphere, but easier for his heart to keep pumping in.

He would sigh if his Oxygen Replenisher wasn’t perfectly calibrated to account for his breathing, and any excess breaths would knock the system out of whack.

The initial surprise at the pressure change was enough to distract him from the view of the actual city. But now he took the time to appreciate it, as they glided above it. His impression of a coral reef wasn’t far off. The structures really did resemble them. Except the growths didn’t look as much like the images he’d been shown by Terry and salvaged books in the Hygeia library. They looked smoother, and less porous. Had these creatures synthesized their own form of cement?

He never got the chance to ask, as the squid swiveled around to avoid the traffic of more tentacled creatures of various sizes, colors, and shapes. A faint glow of light radiated off the buildings like moonshine, and some of the octopi and squids had bioluminescence that highlighted that change.

It flipped him around, spinning in circles until he couldn’t keep track of their path any longer, all the colors blending into one sickening acid trip. A series of chirping and clicking conversed around him, as he struggled to not throw up the contents of his stomach into his air bubble.

The swirling light was muted by darkness, and the dull sound of water being pushed aside by a thousand giant beings died out, too. They must be moving inside one of the buildings he had seen before. Yet the clicking did not subside.

Finally, the tentacle that had wound around his midsection, choking the life out of him, relaxed, leaving him to float into a wall that was cool and solid, yet completely transparent, except for the heavy distortion, so he could see into a hallway, bedecked by frilly plants.

He turned away, to look back at his captor, and whoever it was talking to. He was met with more distorted glass. Looking up and down in a panic, he realized that he was in a glass bubble, with a few circular windows built into it, to pluck him out if needed. They were easy points to target if he wanted to escape. But escape was the last thing on his mind.

His first reflex was to breathe, now that his lungs could expand properly, but he had to remind himself that he didn’t have the oxygen for it.

Except even the less-pressurized water of the city started to drain out of the glass bubble he had been put in, leaving the air pocket around his head to vanish. Was this a vacuum? Were they planning on killed him by sticking him in this empty, airless chamber?

A hiss started up from above him, and oxygen, salty, stale oxygen, coming not from his spell, but from a nozzle fixed to the top of the chamber. He forced himself to calm, and suck in a breath. It was alright. He was going to execute an escape plan, just as Verity had done with the birds. And he would take the opportunity to find out more about these mysterious creatures of the deep. Starting with the one who had brought him here.

It was continuing its dialogue with the other squid, and Michael finally got a proper look at that one. It was an octopus, in reality. Green, with a gradient markings plastered over its skin, with all eight of its tentacles flapping determinedly to keep it afloat. There was something off in its movements that Michael couldn’t quite pin down. It was too stilted. Not as fluid and bendy as the other cephalopods he had seen. Was it hurt?

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

The two were joined by another, though. Similar gradient markings, but with purple. And the same stilted manner of movement. Maybe it was a subspecies characteristic?

They moved away, though, caught up in their conversation so much that they didn’t even care to question Michael about the surface world, or inform him about what he was doing there. They just left, leaving him standing in his cell. Nobody passed by in the hallway. Nothing moved. For a very, very long time.

No point putting it for any longer. He was going to break out now. But how?

The water was his most pressing concern. Any exits he could target would drown him immediately. Except for… his eyes turned to look up at a circular window fixed at the top of the bubble cell, where the nozzle of air had been fixed. This one was made of steel, not glass.

That meant that it was hiding something.

He ran a hand around its edge, feeling for a hinge or a latch. Some sort of locking mechanism. He was running low on mana to power his spells, so he couldn’t simply disassemble the mechanism. But that was okay. Back in Wayside, he didn’t have his magic, or his Console abilities. And still he had managed to do alright. Through a lot of help from Verity and Jared, maybe, but he still had to pick some things up for himself. Not any Console skills, but handy tricks that were stored in his brain nonetheless.

He pulled out a flat pin, and inserted it into the edge, searching for the lock’s teeth.

Some finagling was required for the next bit, but finally he was able to put a wedge between the two parts of the lock and drive them apart. The circular steel door swung open, and he braced himself, ready to activate the breathing spell at a moment’s notice.

No water rushed to meet him.

He cracked an eye open, unsure of what lay above him.

It wasn’t water, at least. Just air. A large tube, only big enough for a person to walk in, filled with breathable air. Weird.

Michael reached up and gripped the sides of the door, pulling himself up into the tunnel. It held fast, and didn’t buckle at all, despite the fact that it was being bombarded with tons of pressure and a single kilogram of unaccounted weight could destroy this… vent system? Delivery tube? What was this place’s purpose?

Which meant that whatever it was meant to contain was as big as a human, at least as heavy as a human, and needed the same type of air as a human. To say that it was humans being transported and contained here was an unlikely assumption, but not an impossible one.

There were other doors, and signs on the wall, and they weren’t in some script he didn’t recognize, something suited for squid tentacles. But no. They were proper, coherent, Times New Roman typeset signs in English.

He gulped. What had he walked into? Why was this here?

Answers could only be found if he dug deeper, he decided, and picked an arbitrary direction to go, reading the signs all the way.

One of the doors was called a Buzz-saw room, which Michael decided to wisely leave alone. The next was labeled a hydroponics garden. Uninteresting, unless all the others were labelled with similarly bland names, which meant that the labels were meaningless. For the time being, he continued moving.

The next door was not built into the side of the tunnel, as all the others were. Instead, it was fixed into the end of the tunnel, and the sign on it claimed it to be a ‘Redocking Station’.

Michael considered turning around and trying the other doors. Searching through manually one by one. This was obviously going to lead right back into the water. But one thing stopped him from moving onto the next lead.

[Available Console Closer in Range; Consider Switching Source!]

Console technology. Connected to the Developers or someone like them? A thin sheet of metal was keeping him away from his answers.

He did his trick with the clip again to break the lock and sneak in. Metal was a lot more reflective than the water from before, and the clanging of the lock’s teeth screeched against his ears. Anyone could hear him easily, and then he would be discovered, and captured, and ripped apart by beaks all the same-

Michael forced himself to keep breathing. Slow and steady like a metronome. The lock opened, the door was wedged to the side, and he moved in.

It was a large room, with a glass ceiling shaped like a dome. It was bigger than the hallway, and the cell he had been put in, though it was similar to the latter, structure wise. It was almost comparable to the giant space where the squids and octopi roamed that he had seen while inside the cell. In fact, through the heavy glass, he could see the corals and panels from that space.

This station must be in that space as well. But why was it called the ‘Redocking Station’? There were mostly boxes here, with strange machines twice his size, grey and weirdly shaped, with headlights that looked disconcertingly like eyes. Past them, he could see a hole built into the bottom of the place, the engineering such that water didn’t flow up into the bubble, just floating underneath, like an artificial cove, twenty thousand leagues under the sea.

He bit down a hysterical laugh as something rumbled, and a colorful creature passed under his feat, heading right towards the water entrance. The cephalopod creatures must have some use for these tunnels after all, Michael had been starting to build up some crazy conspiracy theory of extra Players or Harbingers using the empty space for nefarious schemes.

Less celebrating, more hiding. He ducked beneath a burlap sack and tried to be as still as possible.

The octopus sprung up, water splashing everywhere as it flopped onto the ground lifelessly. Its green gradient markings were exact matches to the ones he had seen just half an hour ago. Had it whisked the others away without bothering to question Michael because it was deathly ill? Would certainly explain the weird movements between it and the other octopus. And the weird hissing sound it released, like an animal in its death throes.

Or a hydraulics system.

The rubbery skin of the octopus curled outwards, peeling off of a metal skeleton, which split into two, allowing something to walk out of the machine that was disguised as an animal.

Something with two legs, and two arms, and a head covered in hair, while all the rest was clothed in a shirt and pants and a jacket.

It was a human.

[Player Log End]