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It was morning, and the Depths were no different from usual.
Iskall’s boots scratched against the broken cement slab that he had just scrambled over, his rounded tanuki tail bobbing out behind him for balance. His furry paw-like hands began to dig through the rumble.
You might think he was frantically searching for something. Yet the Anarchy was far away, and Iskall was on the younger side when it came to recollections of that time.
The younger side, yes, but no less was he affected. He wore the marks of the Anarchy on his face, after all.
Iskall was one of, as far as he knew, two people in the entire under-city with a functional archival eye.
He shared elite company.
The Director himself.
Iskall rolled his natural eye, even as his archival one thrummed green. He was pouring through his database, specifically the files he had saved on a particular passion project of his.
If you wanted to call it that.
Iskall had been one of the last victims of the former wardship program.
Five years old. He’d been the initial archival eye experiment. It had fallen through, he’d nearly died, all of it was rather blurry in his own memory because again, he’d just been so young. In the aftermath of the Anarchy, he’d gotten scooped up by one of the fracturing shards of under-city society that was at least half-way decent, and they’d worked for several years, over several iterations as he grew up, to turn the failure into a success. It had been small amalgamation of labs officers who hadn’t been in agreement with the previous Directors methods, and yet hadn’t had the courage to stand up to her.
Which was fair. Who possibly could? She was terrifying.
Or so Iskall recalled in his blurry, young memory of the woman. All he truly recalled of her appearance in his own mind was the glint of the surgical room light off the golden earring in her long, cow-like ear. Her face was lost to the haze of time and the filter of a child who was too terrified to really be thinking straight.
It wasn’t even that Iskall’s archival eye had been a failure, necessarily. The issue had been merely that it hadn’t worked straight away, and she found it more efficient to start from scratch than to waste time working on him any further. So she’d tossed him out like trash, or at least, that had been the plan. Several labs officers, the same ones who would later shelter him and some other young members of the wardship program from the worst of the Anarchy, had smuggled him away from ending up down a trash chute. She hadn’t even batted an eye, or so he understood, even though it was obvious she had to have figured they were doing this, especially with those slated to be tossed out who were so painfully young.
Maybe that’s where this had all started?
He straightened up from sifting through the pile of rubble with a huff.
“No luck…”
He reviewed his database again.
When he’d been in high school, he’d snuck down to the Depths with Stress. She’d flown them both down here, and had been terrified and jumping at shadows the entire time. She’d been born and raised in the near-surface, and her family had managed to keep relatively insulated from the Anarchy.
As much as any could, of course.
Iskall, on the other hand, an orphan of the wardship program who’d been getting juggled around like a hot potato between any of the former labs officers who would watch him for the night, was used to living out of the bag on his back, saving everything into his database for future review.
They’d found something.
An old ID card, printed in the style the previous Director preferred. It was badly damaged, clearly it had wound up in a fire at some point, not a surprise considering how bad the Anarchy had been in the Depths. Most of the text was scorched to the point of being illegible, and the photo side of the ID was torn away almost entirely.
Save for one small fleck of a surviving detail.
The very very tip of a golden earring, the edge of what Iskall was convinced was a cow hybrids ear.
Stress didn’t see it.
Neither did anyone else Iskall had shown, including the new Director, whom he’d burst in on babbling about all the research he’d done into the truth.
Because it is the truth! No way I’m wrong! They just don’t want to see it!
This was why Iskall didn’t work for the labs.
He was an independent researcher. He’d published a few different articles with the under-city news industry which…to be fair, wasn’t all that big. He also took advantage of his archival eye to do odd jobs around the city for spare cash, calculating orders for shops or doing research for independent clientele. Between all those different sources of income, he was able to scrape by alright, and in all his spare time he did stuff like this.
Beef and Stress made fun of him for it, said he was a crazy conspiracy theorist. Iskall took it in stride, mainly because they were the only two people he had who even remotely seemed to buy his argument.
And what exactly was his argument?
The previous Director survived the Anarchy.
If or not that meant she was still alive to this day, almost a quarter century later, Iskall had no hard proof. But as far as her surviving the initial fall out, he had plenty!
First of all, there was never a body.
The new Director insists that there was scraping going on in the Depths for anyone with augments, and she had augments as well. Her corpse being shredded for spare parts would be expected. But that is not something that can be proven!
Iskall’s point couldn’t be proven either, but…anyway!
Second of all, the ID card.
It is difficult to make out, ok, but the earring is there! She always wore that earring! And it is clearly a cow hybrid to me! I dunno why that’s so hard for everyone else to see!
Third, not only had no body ever been found, but there were no eye witnesses to the Director actually hitting the ground after she was thrown from the bridge by the current Director’s now-husband.
Eye witness accounts during the Anarchy, especially during the early days, are practically gibberish, and that’s if you can convince someone to actually talk about what they saw but…but still! Still! My point stands! It does!
Iskall was feeling fiery again just from thinking about it. Even if no one else believed him, he knew he was onto something, and he wasn’t about to stop looking now.
He lifted his gaze, eyes wandering along the cavern wall as it climbed up into the light haze. He strolled along it, the entire time his archival eye hummed and whirred from it’s connection to the redstone circuitry and other tech all around. He kept part of his focus on that, knowing he needed to make himself scarce if any threatening individuals decided to turn their attention onto him. He’d been doing research in the Depths for years by now, though, so he knew how to keep himself safe.
He shoved his hands into the pockets of his vest, mind running through all the details he had. He’d checked over this area a hundred times. This was right around where the Director would have fallen, and also where he and Stress found the torched ID card years ago. Usually he would keep his gaze firmly to the ground, searching for any hint of impact, perhaps some other debris that had been left behind, but today he was looking up as he parsed through his thoughts. It hadn’t been intentional.
Yet it caused his gaze to trail over something, about a dozen feet or so above the ground near a small branching tunnel entrance.
Iskall froze and spun on his heel, lifting his chin and triggering the redstone and biotech mashed up within his archival eye, circuitry that connected to his brain, to zoom his vision, and he squeezed his natural eye shut. His archival eye zoomed and enhanced on what he’d spotted.
The very bottom edge of a broken blade.
Is it a knife!? What is it!?
He darted closer to the wall and craned his neck trying to get a better few.
Spotted the leading scratch marks dug in against the wall.
His heart thudded faster.
Immediately, he cross-referenced with his database, compiling everything he could in frantic fashion, because he knew that the Director’s augmentation had been armed with a concealed blade in her wrist.
His archival eye scanned and analyzed the tiny sliver of the blade that was visible. Results weren’t enough to be conclusive, but they were conclusive to Iskall, who was already convinced he was on the right path.
Aging and decay dated the blade to the correct time period, including the angle of the blade and the carved path down to it, all of it made perfect sense to him. His archival eye blipped and insisted it wasn’t conclusive, but Iskall figured his logic could make up for the gap.
She fell from that bridge up there…dug the blade from her augment into the wall to slow her fall…but the blade couldn’t take the force and snapped. She would’ve landed down here…while she was falling her ID must’ve flown out of her pocket…
Iskall’s eyes trailed to the tunnel mouth next to where this hypothetical situation would’ve landed the tormentor of his youth.
He crept inside. Set his archival eye to high alert, because it was already stupid to be wandering the Depths by himself, much less going into one of the branching tunnels. Still, he couldn’t let his opportunity escape him. He also had his archival eye search for any anomalies as he walked, also trying to focus his natural senses as best he could, and his heart skipped a beat when his archival eye notified him of something critical.
Head snapping to the side, he saw along the ceiling a small crevice. It was far to small for him to fit through, and yet, as far as he recalled and as far as any sources said, the Director had been a very petite woman.
The redstone in his archival eye whirred and thrummed as it processed the intaking information.
Skipped again.
Fresh air.
In minuscule quantities considering how far down they were, yes, but Iskall’s archival eye, one of only two in the entire under-city was capable of breaking down the composition in time with what he drew into his lungs.
Fresh air!?
He whirled on his heel, feeling giddy and terrified and validated and disbelieving all at once. He dashed out of the tunnel and began running at a full sprint toward the rail cart station. As he ran he fumbled his phone from his pocket, because he had to tell someone about this.
Stress would be at work in the medical wing right now, so that only left him one option.
The phone rang twice before he picked up.
“Good morning.”
“BEEF! You will not believe what I have found!” Iskall shouted, barely able to keep it together.
“Oh dear, won’t I?” His friend replied in his typical relaxed drawl.
Iskall huffed. “Don’t be sarcastic!”
“You’re catching on, my friend.”
“Shush! I hear none of it! Now listen to this! I was doing some excavations in the Depths…”
“You mean you were dumpster diving in the old labs trash heaps?”
“I mean I guess I…hey! No! Do not belittle my research!” Iskall harped, even though he was used to getting teased by both Beef and Stress when it came to this sort of thing. The amount of times he’d called them in an excited tizzy over something he found in a trash heap was probably worryingly high.
“I wouldn’t dream of it, buddy…alright, you’re on speaker, go off.”
“I feel patronized.” Iskall snapped, even as he continued his sprint toward the rail cart station.
“Good.”
“Good!? What do you mean good!?” Iskall’s shouts rang off the foundations of the towers that stretched all the way up to the bedrock.
Up, up, up.
Where that snaking tunnel with traces of fresh air had to lead as well.
Iskall tried to catch his breath enough to go on his tangent, even as he ran, even as he tried to figure out what to do with this new information. He was widely branded a crazy conspiracy theorist, and he had no interest in going to the labs, not after they’d shut him down on this topic time and again his younger years. So for now, he’d continue trying to find something that was damning, but in the meantime, he’d take this new sliver of information in stride. If there was one thing he’d learned throughout his life, being bounced around for as long as he could recall, it was how to run with it.