Chapter Text
"'Outrageous!'" the crooked senator shouted. "'I object!'"
Fine clouds puffed up around the hunched and bent councilors as they shifted in the silt, punctuating their collective outburst.
"'What?'"
"'Preposterous!'"
"'Don't be daft, mech!'"
The prime, still upright but with only three arms, let them bluster before demanding through the murky water, "'On what grounds?'"
“Jazz. Seriously?”
Jazz's voice broke as he tried and failed to stay in character: "'Why, the grounds our city used to stand on, of course!'" he laughed, stirring up additional silt with his tail as he rocked the senator-statue back and forth to simulate him speaking. Ricochet, floating several feet behind him beyond the worst of the billowing, snorted with disapproval. "Aw, come on," Jazz whined, turning to face him with a pout. "I thought it was funny!"
"You thought wrong. Now, you come on," Ricochet said, waving webbed fingers for Jazz to follow as he took off. "Boss wants us to check out the new landfa–"
"There's a new landfall?!"
"Oh, interested now, huh?" Ricochet grinned through the gloom as Jazz shot ahead of him, his yellow biolights illuminating his face just enough to be seen. "Yeah, pile of stuff's sitting at the bottom of the east canyon cliff face."
"Really?" That was odd; apart from the catastrophe at the southern gap – formerly the southern cliffs, but so much material had come down in the collapse it had been renamed – things from Above didn't settle at the base of the canyon walls. Legend had it they went so far up they rose above the end of the darkness, protruding out into something called the Sky. Nothing fell that far without breaking up and being carried away, but, "You sure it's not just debris that fell out of the current?"
"You wanna ask the boss if he's sure?"
No, Jazz didn't want to do that, and Ricochet knew it. In any case, Jazz himself was the most qualified to make that determination. No one else in the clan had as much experience with things from Above, even among those with an interest in such things.
Jazz lost sight of Ricochet as they swam closer into the area disturbed by the potential treasure, but he wasn’t worried. The inert particulate kicked up from the sea floor didn’t block EMF, and it wasn’t long before they were both making enough noise to hear each other as well. “How big is this pile?” Jazz called out, trailing his fingers over the collection of strange shapes to get a feel for it.
“Not sure. I think–” Ricochet’s voice disappeared momentarily beneath the sound of something in the pile shifting “–to swim around it.”
Their paths crossed as they lapped it, swimming in opposite directions. It was a decent size, though significantly wider than it was tall. Most of the pile was made up of broken bits of rock and metal, dotted with dead clusters of coral and the empty shells of other long gone sea creatures. Jazz’s fins shivered with excitement at one knobbly patch, prying it loose to show Ricochet. “Look,” he said, pressing into his hands. “Feel that? Those’re kepah!”
“For real?” Ha! He sounded excited now too. “Wow, they actually are.”
“Right? And that means!” Jazz rolled his way through a flip, physically unable to hold still. Kepah didn’t grow in the deep. “It’s a real landfall!”
“It’s definitely broken up enough to be one,” Ricochet said, dropping the kepah-encrusted chunk of metal with a dull clack! “Time to find out if anything survived intact enough to haul out.”
He was hoping for containers, Jazz knew. Even empty containers were useful, and sometimes they still had things inside! Artifacts from Above, like the statues Jazz collected. Damaged as they were, they were clearly modeled after mechs despite having two handless arms instead of tailfins. “I hope there’s–”
“If you abandon me to drag another statue away,” Ricochet interrupted, “I’ll tell them you left me to do all the work.”
“I won’t leave you to do all the work!”
“Uh huh.”
“I mean it!”
“Yeah? Prove it.” Ricochet bumped Jazz with his tail and led him over to a section of the pile before taking Jazz’s hand and guiding it to–
Jazz jerked back like he’d been burned by a thermal vent, then tentatively reached back out. That was a face! “Oh, Rico…”
“Leave. It.” Ricochet flicked a finger against Jazz’s head. “It survived falling all the way down here. It’s not going to disappear if you don’t bring it to the others right away.”
“I know that! Of course it’s not,” Jazz said with a petulant twitch. Ricochet scoffed and swam a short distance away, leaving him to dig the statue free from the rubble on his own.
It had stern features and broad shoulders, Jazz noted, its head high with empty optics staring straight ahead. Bent points of metal lay pushed back against its helm from where they were anchored on its forehead, and Jazz left them alone rather than risk breaking them off. He went slowly, more careful even than usual, though he didn’t quite know why. Something about this was… different. Every time his fingers brushed the statue’s surface, Jazz could almost swear he felt…
“Jazz!” Ricochet’s arms grabbed him from behind and pulled him away as the pile suddenly shifted, large chunks of debris falling away in a tumbling cascade. Silt swirled up where they hit the ground, streaming in eddies that caught and diffused the radiant blue light emanating from the statue’s newly exposed and heavily cracked chest. Jazz clung to Ricochet as they hung together in the hazy, glowing halo, too stunned to speak.
The statue wasn’t a statue. It – he – was a mech, and he was still, somehow, alive.