The others…

I have to think about myself, first and foremost. Not because I don’t want to help, but because the rescuer who gets in over their head is just making the problem worse. Self-sufficiency first. Then, help from a strong foundation.

But being realistic, the others have either dead – most likely – or found another sanctuary. Looking for them isn’t a huge priority in either case. I just have to hope I find them, and not worry about it

Declan hadn’t considered it at first glance, but the wetsuits hanging by the lockers could be called unusual in two ways. For one they were still here, suggesting the inhabitants had left without them, or somehow died without leaving a corpse. For another they were human-shaped, implying this craft had originally been made for humanoid inhabitants. Assuming it didn’t come from Earth that meant there were human-like aliens somewhere out there.

Or I suppose that the game made this whole thing up, but that’s the same as saying nothing really matters or means anything here…

Shaking out his old pockets, he took out what he had to his name. His phone, which he was almost glad to throw away. A penlight, which had shorted out in the water. He set it aside to dry. A wallet with useless currency, his ID, and a picture of the dog, Hammer, he’d had when he first left home. He sighed as he looked at the waterlogged and ruined picture, then tossed the whole thing onto one of the beds.

“Game, did you make these suits or did somebody real leave them here?” He asked aloud as he took down a wetsuit and began stripping away his waterlogged clothes. The outer fabric was strangely scratchy instead of smooth, divided into countless teardrop scales that caught his fingers on their edges, giving it a friction like sharkskin. Thankfully the inner lining was smooth.

‘Game’ is a misnomer. The entity speaking to you now is known as the Universal Voice.

“Well, game, I sincerely wish you the best in getting a single damn human to call you that. To us? You’re a videogame.” Bracing against a wall to hop his one leg into the wetsuit, Declan drew it up, discovering the fabric was loose and baggy despite his broad-shouldered physique.

As for the question, the High Command did not create this Rift in any specific way. Rather, pieces of your world were naturally drawn in to contain the emergent negative energy at its center, forming a prison. The High Command then used pieces of other worlds that had been previously destroyed by the Supreme Conflict to complete the prison.

“So uh. Supreme Conflict? High Command? Universal Voice?”

These are the entities at play here, what point do you draw between them?

“... don’t you think your naming scheme is a little…”

There was silence.

“Pompous?”

We disagree.

“Oh, hitting me with the royal we, huh? Sure…” By the time Declan had zipped the suit up, it was clear this wouldn’t work. The baggy suit would fill with water and drag him down. But just as he was about to start wriggling out of it, he noted a new notification that popped up when he glanced down at his gloved hands.

It was a tiny gray icon shaped like a treasure chest.

Focusing on it expanded the icon out into a new ‘screen’.

Adaptive EcoSuit (Basic)

An adaptive layer of manaform fabric that can be reconfigured to the present environment or the needs of the wielder by injecting mana. Provides minimal protection, but can self-repair with the wearer’s mana.

Damn, that’s pretty nice.

Closing his eyes for a moment, he focused. The feeling in his chest before – the hollow sensation of being completely drained of mana – gave him an idea of where to look. It was on the opposite side of his chest to his heart, a tiny spark of warmth. The more he focused in the more intense that feeling of warmth became, until it felt like it was suffusing his whole body, the sensation of being within a sea of flames but somehow pleasant and comforting. The sensation simply felt natural.

The suit also existed within this ‘feeling’ – it was like a thread that extended out of his chest into the fabric, connecting the two. At a slight push, the heat of his mana poured down the channel and the suit began to shift, the fabric squeezing in pulses around his arms as the excess leg shriveled up and vanished, the baggy extra size condensed in, and the whole thing tightened until it was snug against his body like a layer of paint.

Letting the feeling go, he sank back into reality slowly, finding that even when he opened his eyes it took several minutes for the light to be visible again – as if he had truly gone somewhere else when he focused. Glancing around the room again, he focused on two things of note: the open doorway to the cabin ahead, and the lockers.

If the stuff lying around is this good…

He moved to the lockers, but they were in fact locked. There was no keyhole or number pad, only a small knob made out of a light blue stone. Touching it resulted in a sparking jet of electricity and a singed finger. “Fuck!” Snatching his hand back, he scowled and looked around.

Declan was betting this was some kind of identification system, maybe a fingerprint or even ‘manaprint’ sensor. But there was more than one way to crack an egg.

If I can find something sturdy, flattish, and long, I can just rip the door open…

But there was nothing like that in sight. Other than the wetsuits and a set of odd brushes in a cracked porcelain coffee mug that had clearly fallen off the metal sink, there was very little of use inside the the little submarine.

He went out into the cabin, but there were only the many levers and switches of the control board. He wanted to start figuring out this ship but he could see the darkness of the abyss just beyond the porthole ‘eyes’ of the lobster-craft. One wrong move, and he’d go plunging straight in.

Best to get outside and try to shift this back a bit…

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Giving up on getting the lockers open before venturing outside, Declan returned to the airlock and began to wind the valve open.

“Any advice for me, oh Universal Voice?” He asked aloud.

Let none shake you from your path. Do not follow in the wake of others. Cut your own name into the world, and fear only the death that leaves no mark of your passing. Other than this – the path must be walked by instinct and learning, and each mistake must extract a price. I can offer advice on the mechanical nature of the Supreme Conflict only.

Wonderful. So, a tutorial with some vague platitudes.

As the the first door swung closed, and water began to burble up from the floorboards, he tilted his head up, waiting for it to reach his neck before sucking in a deep breathe.

Let’s see how this new Diving thing holds up.

The second airlock door swung open. Wishing for a flashlight, Declan clambered through the ruined rear segment of the lobster. It was some kind of engine room for sure, and as best he could tell in the dim light, the engine itself didn’t look too badly dinged up. It was mostly damage to the armored hull, and the flooding that ensued.

He tensed as he neared the doorway…

The octopus could very well be waiting. So, bracing himself, he aimed his body like a javelin and fired off a Scorching Spear to launch himself through and out into the ocean beyond.

What he saw could have taken his breath away, if he hadn’t been carefully rationing it.

The ocean had changed completely. Before it had been dark, bleak, and terrifying. Now Declan realized that the enormous angler-serpent that ate the plane must have simply driven off all the wildlife except for the few scavengers who tried to pick off its scraps.

Because when he looked out at the world around him, the ocean was full of countless darting points of color. Bright tropical fish that glowed with multicolored light flickered past, leaving trails of red, yellow, and green through the sea. There were so many that the sea itself had faintly changed colors, becoming a lighter, more transparent shade of green.

Which allowed him to see the pastel-colored corals, the bright ruffs of lace-like moss, the striped and luminous shellfish that clung to the rocks. He’d come out prepared to face a graveyard looking for another corpse – but this was a world in its own right.

Starfish and enormous, moss-covered clams sat on the seabed, scuttling hermit crabs making their way across the sand from the safety of one boulder to another. As he watched, a small stone suddenly lunged forward, unfurling tentacles and revealing itself as a tiny version of the octopus that had chased him.

It lunged for the hermit – and with a burst of steam Declan swept in and scooped it up by the reaching tendril. Before he could stab it through the head, the arm he’d grabbed simply detached and the octopus spat up ink, going flying away. The severed arm wriggled in his grasp.

The feeling of holding his breath was more comfortable than he expected. With his new Deep-Sea Diving skill, there was barely any sense of pressure from the ticking clock. While he didn’t suddenly become an underwater genius, every time he made a movement, the was a vague sense of feedback. It came not from any of his standard five senses, but from the less-known sense that allowed you to track where your hand was even when your eyes were closed – it was like he had two sets of limbs now, one tracking the motions he made, and one tracking the motions he should have made, subtly guiding him without a word to improve his form.

So the skill doesn’t make me an instant expert. It just tells me what they would have done, so naturally I’ll pick it up like a habit if I keep practicing.

He looked around for predators – almost expecting the shark to appear again – but it seemed there were more specific conditions to trigger its appearance. It would make sense if the local creatures didn’t call it, otherwise it would never go away with the whole ecosystem around it constantly shedding blood.

Something glinted in the sand. He drifted down to see his leg lying there, bitten nearly in half with a swarm of small reddish shrimp surrounding it. They were brushing their little antenna over the chrome surface, and everywhere they touched quickly turned to rust that they gobbled up.

So even the little creatures here are magical? That’s fascinating.

As long as he held still, the fish almost seemed not to mind him. They drifted so close he could almost reach out and touch them – they were striped with black across their glowing bodies, and they had faint auras of rippling energy that surrounded them. Besides the tropical and luminous ones that seemed to be everywhere, there were spiny, fat-lipped fish the color of stone, large sandy eels, and all kinds of other aquatic life.

What am I looking for? Declan wondered. Monsters to kill? I suppose that’s one way forward. Power to progress my stats. I think the message said I had two weeks to ‘close’ this Rift, however I’m supposed to do that. Which means I can’t turtle up and practice my skills until they cap out…

Killing monsters is something I’ll need to do, but seeking them out with no weapon is idiotic. So basics first. Food, food is big. But I actually have a bigger problem, water. The salinity of the ocean makes it undrinkable, and I don’t have a way to filter the salt out yet…

Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink.

Its way less hostile out here than I thought at first, but the sea on all sides is still totally unforgiving. If I don’t come up with a strategy soon, I’ll just flounder until I run out of time or get picked off…

He closed his eyes. It was the strangest thing, but Declan was looking for something strange. A tactic or path here that was less than obvious, and more than just surviving. Sometimes…

Sometimes you had to take a swing in the dark.

He reached into the mana-space, accepting that he’d be blind to threats and likely have to spend the rest of his dive recovering. Accepting that – as terrifying as the unknown world surrounding him was – if he didn’t open himself to risk here and there, he’d become at best another undersea creature, darting out of its nest to eke out a subsistence living.

As the warmth of his mana surrounded him, he tried to reach out in the same way he’d sent mana flowing into the BioSuit. The darkness rippled, and light entered into his mind. It was the light of ‘flames’ like his own – other pools of mana around him filling up the black with strange, neon colors. It reminded him of a photo negative.

The fish each had a tiny aura of their own, the same color as their light. But other creatures had auras too. Some were small, some surprisingly large.

He tilted his head towards the rift and–

Grimaced, flinching back and snapping his head away. That mana was too intense to look directly at – he felt terror stab into him just from the brief glimpse he’d caught. No way was he going down there. Not without a fundamentally different level of power than he was holding right now.

The deeper the abyss went, the more stifling and oppressive the sense of power was.

But there were other, more tempting sights dancing in the strange unlight of mana. Littered across the ground were numerous points of mana, standing perfectly still. Each one was a perfect sphere about the size of a human eye.

When he opened his eyes and waited for the world to fade in, he saw what they were. Pearlescent spheres glittered on the seabed, lost amidst the crowd of shells and corals bristling from every rock. They glinted up at him.

But he wasn’t an idiot. Pearls didn’t come from nowhere. Around each one was a waving layer of thin tendrils emerging from the sandy earth at the edges of a circular and concave space, with no other body visible. Just to prove the point to himself, he threw the octopus tendril down into the pit.

The moment it touched the tendrils, spikes exploded up from the edges of the pit to impale it.

Yeah yeah, big deal. Buddy, back on Earth we had real landmines.

Turning away, Declan swam back for the safety of the ship, already planning his return when he had more breath to spend.

If I can figure out one thing each trip, and make a little progress on securing my survival needs, I should be able to get my bearings.