Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Somehow, she felt more real than she did before.

She was curled into a foetal ball, drifting above the clouds in a nighttime sky - exposed, and weightless. Her bioluminescent tentacles shimmered, like she was just one of the many stars twinkling in that sky.

The whole sky was out on display, filling her eyes with their splendour. She had always loved this view, ever since she was a young girl with wet grass on her back and her cousin by her side, and yet now she was so much closer to it all. For the first time, it was all well and truly in her reach…

…and yet she didn’t reach for it. Her mind drifted back to that field, and to those autumn nights. Back to the only person she could truly share that joy and fascination with.

(Where is Callie.)

She could go anywhere in the universe now, and she chose to drift down through the clouds, to the ground below her.

(This is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, I need to show her.)

Beneath the clouds, a repeating city of white came into view, with all of the lights on, and a spire looming over the centre.

She recognised this place, and a recent memory came back to her, fuzzy and abruptly cut off. It filled her with dread.

(We were in a simulation. I had to protect her. There was a fight - I must have won…)

She frantically scooped at the air in front of her, trying to descend to the square before the spire as quickly as possible.

Her feet touched down lightly on the lunar soil, kicking up grey dust that drifted through the air, never coming down. She looked around the empty street, a lifeless approximation of Inkopolis square, and noticed Marina with Agent Eight in the window of her old haunt, with their backs turned away. She reasoned that the rest of the group had to be here as well.

(I’m sorry, Marina. No hard feelings.)

It was then that she heard a sound from inside the Shoal next door. It was continuous, yet strikingly irregular. She approached the automatic doors, light on her feet as though she truly were walking on the moon. It should’ve been a childhood dream come true, and yet the uncertainty and the concern bit at her relentlessly. The door did not open for her, but she went through anyway.

Dust hung in the air around her, swirling under fluorescent lights and settling thickly on the rows of arcade cabinets, rendering them grey and indistinguishable. In the furthest corner of the abandoned establishment, she found Callie and Four. Her heart sank, and she dropped to the floor where they sat.

She didn’t understand why they were sobbing, and tightly holding on to each other as though it was their only hope not to be torn apart somehow. None of it made sense, and yet her eyes faltered too.

(Please don’t cry Callie. I have something I need to show you, it’s so beautiful…)

She started to cry as well, for no reason other than the sight of her family so distraught beyond repair, and not knowing how the strongest people she had ever known could’ve even gotten this way. Her tears accumulated in bubbles that freely drifted around her in zero gravity.

(...Please…why are you crying? We won, we’re safe now…)

She hesitated, before inching forward to reach for one of Callie’s hands, wrapped around Four’s back. To squeeze on to it tight, to stick with them through whatever it was that they were going through.

Neither of them budged, and her hand went right through.

The air was chilly.

Chapter Text

All Marie could see was black, and all Marie could see was white, but not at the same time.

When her eyes were closed it was black, when her eyes were open it was white.

On, and off. One, and zero.

When her eyes were open, she could see that the sky was white, and the world was white, but she could not see where the white sky ended and the white world began.

She felt like she was moving her head, and yet her view seemed fixed in place, as there was nothing to show that her perspective was changing - nothing moving from the left of her world to the right, or getting bigger and getting smaller, just unmoving whiteness. The lack of feedback could drive her crazy, as it almost made her wonder if she was even moving her head at all, or if the sensation of muscles moving was a mere hallucination - the mind feeling what it expected to feel when asked to look around, on pure principle. All five of her senses gasped for air, and something for themselves to latch onto and make sense of.

She was surprised by how torturous nothingness could be.

She began to walk forward. Her footfalls sounded as though they were walking on concrete, and yet there was nothing beneath her. She was floating, and yet there was nothing for her to float above. Considering the fact that it wasn’t there, the ground felt incredibly stable.

And when she stopped to look back at the way she had come, she saw a long, black spike looming over her.

She gasped on principle. It couldn’t have been there before, it wasn’t possible. She would’ve seen it if it had been there before. It was standing right on her path, she would’ve bumped into it.

And yet it was there, and it was not alone, as a vast row of them towered over her, slowly curving and disappearing into white fog. By their trajectory, they seemed to form a circle that was too big to see in its entirety, penning in the world that she had found herself in.

She hesitantly approached the monolith before her, strangely thankful for its existence, as it was the one thing giving her a sense of space. The one thing that actually got bigger as she got towards it, and smaller as she went away.

Arriving at the base of the spire, she circled around it, to view it from behind. As she turned around it, however, she realised that it was merely an illusion - completely flat, like a colossal piece of paper standing perfectly erect and unwavering.

And when she was behind it, it was no longer there.

She tried to walk through where it had once been, and she could.

When she turned around, it was there again.

Could this be…?

Marie reached out to touch it, and saw her hand painlessly clip through it.

It is.

A dozen long-undisturbed memories of using noclip in old PC games flooded back to her.

Logically thinking, as she wanted to hope she always did, it looked like she was out of bounds somewhere.

… but there’s no such thing as ‘bounds’ in the real world?

A realisation started to bubble up in the back of her mind, and she was unsure of whether to entertain it or not. On one hand, it simply wasn’t reasonably possible. On the other hand, what she was witnessing was impossible too, and yet she had witnessed it whether she liked it or not - and the conclusion that that evidence led her to was that…

… this is a simulation.

She reached for her temples, to pull off her headset and return to the real world.

There was no headset. She was actually here.

She kept running forward, into the brightness. 

As she did so, she stuffed her hand between the buttons on her long white coat, and retrieved an ink pistol from the holster on her hip, which she held upright with two hands, and no finger on the trigger.

As she ran, another cluster of black spikes emerged from the white fog in front of her, seemingly visible from behind this time.

They were always facing directly towards her. As she ran past them, they turned to keep watching her.

Don’t say it like that. It’s just the way that billboards work.

Once she was past them, another flat plane appeared before her.

It was white, endless and lay horizontal as it should…but not without floating above the ground at about waist height. When she looked under it, it wasn’t there, and yet when she put her hand on its surface, it was tangible, and completely rigid.

The surface of it was crumpled and contorted in an almost grid-like manner, and she could see polygonal hills and valleys ahead of her, casting shadows upon themselves and affirming her sense of space.

She climbed onto it, and trusted it to keep its shape, which it did.

Actual terrain. Wherever she was supposed to be, she was getting closer.

Her footsteps now sounded like she was on sand, and she slowed down because of it. The sand was unmoving, and she left no footprints where she had been. The surface had a sort of texture to it, yet said texture was somehow both blurry and pixelated in nature, with random splotches of grey and pale pink filling the white with ugly noise.

She pressed onwards, over the foothills and sand dunes, and eventually a new forest of spikes came into view. They were three dimensional, but the side facing her on each one was completely invisible, and she could only see them at an angle. When she caught up to one of them, she reached out to touch it again, and this time it was solid, yet completely textureless under her fingertips - not an unremarkable texture, like hard plastic with no blemishes, but the complete absence of texture altogether. 

The further she went, the more detailed the world around her seemed to get, and the more…real it seemed to feel. The blurry mess beneath her feet started to look and feel more and more like a pinkish-white sand, until she could make out each individual grain, and see them fly into the air and leave indentations where her boots had been. The dunes were smoother and sleeker in appearance, and the desert was peppered with black rocks, shallow pools of murky black ink, and what seemed like dead coral plants. The spikes were visible from all sides, and she could see that they were made of a sort of black marble, peppered with chips and decay. She could run her fingers along them, and this time she could feel every lump and bump that interrupted the smooth black stone.

She knew she was getting close now. Out of the background, and into somewhere intended to be accessible to the user. To herself, whatever it was that the creator of this place wanted of her.

And when she emerged from between some tightly-packed spikes, she saw where “somewhere” was: the towering skyline of a city of white in the heart of the dust bowl.

Her curiosity was piqued, but the momentary rush of excitement was crushed by the haunting realisation that she had no idea where Callie was.

Chapter Text

Eight slowly came to her senses in the centre of the square, and got to her feet. She looked down and saw that she was now wearing some sort of white jumpsuit - the exact same shade of white as everything around her.

For indeed, the entire world around her looked completely and utterly bleached. It also looked just like Inkopolis Square.

Where was Marina? She hadn’t been told anything about this simulation when Marina connected her to it, other than the fact that it was “life changing” - which was all well and good when being convinced to connect yourself to such a thing, but not so useful once she needed to figure out where to actually go in this world. Eight had figured that Marina would be there waiting in front of her, but she was alone. There was no life anywhere, save for an endless stream of cars on the freeways distantly looping around the square - even then, they were too far away to see who was driving them.

Had Marina been here at any point? Had she gone off somewhere? Eight wondered how long she had been out for, and how much time she had given for such a thing to happen. She checked inside the whited out suggestion of the Off the Hook studio, and found nothing again.

It was then that she realised what had happened to Deca Tower. Marina seemed to have tinkered with its design somewhat, as all of the slanted and lopsided billboards had been realigned, and were now pointing straight upwards in orderly rows. She wondered why Marina had gone to the trouble of making the spire less interesting.

Either way, she presumed that, whatever it was that was important, it’d probably be in there. Walking past a set of lockers that she had no key for, half submerged in the sand, she pushed open the grand double doors and stepped inside.

The lobby was completely different to how she remembered it, and almost reminiscent of some kind of upmarket art-deco hotel. She was no stranger to these types of places, although she couldn’t seem to remember ever seeing past their lobbies, where she would sit on faux-leather sofas at the first stages of crustiness, disinterestedly thumbing conservative-leaning newspapers and waiting for Pearl and Marina to come down and meet her.

It was then that a harsh shrieking noise echoed throughout the lobby, followed by a sound akin to vinyl crackle. She looked up, and identified the source as a loudspeaker stashed in the top right corner of the lobby.

And then a voice came through. Crackly, slightly distorted, but instantly recognisable. It was warm and friendly against the coldness of the world it inhabited - a little nervous, but peppered with joy and laughter.

Marina.

“Hi everyone! Welcome to ‘Project Mem-‘ ah, hang on a second.”

Eight heard papers rustling through the speaker.

“Of course, I got too used to the working title, oops! Ahem, welcome to ‘Dramatic Days in Orderland’! I’m Marina - most of you may know me already, if you don’t then you certainly will very soon, don’t worry! I, ah, I built this place with a couple of friends, and now I’m here, I guess! This might be a little confusing for a few of you, I’m sure, but uh, just follow my pre-recorded instructions, and you’ll be right as rain! I’m hoping that this little program should help with memory restoration for those who were affected by the actions of Kamabo Co. Prior to its…dissolution, so if that sounds like you then step in the lift and we’ll be off!”.

The message was over, and the static cut out a few moments later as the speaker seemed to turn itself off.

Eight supposed she had a better idea now of what she was meant to be doing, but the pre-recorded nature of the message concerned her nonetheless, as it meant she still had no true lead on where Marina was in this place.

Sure enough, however, the grandiose doors to a lift stood before her, at the end of a damp grey carpet which extended straight out from the front door.

She was undeniably apprehensive about the notion of stepping into the lift of a building that looked like it had been built about eighty years ago, and had been abandoned for at least ten of them - why did it look so abandoned anyway? Had something gone wrong?

She scouted around the lobby, to see if there were any stairs for her to ascend, in lieu of the rickety old lift being offered to her by the recording. There was no front desk in the building, merely the carpet leading visitors straight from the front door to the lift, and branching away from this path yielded few revelations beyond rotten black sofas hiding in the shadows along the walls. Looking up, she saw that dead ivy was creeping down from the ceiling, which occasionally leaked droplets of water that splashed down into puddles of black ink, diluting the mixture and making it run further across the floor. She could see light pouring in through a big window on the side wall, filtered through the frame and throwing a grid-like spotlight across the path up to the lift, seemingly reminding her it was her only way forward, as it was becoming increasingly apparent that the stairs did not exist. Reluctantly, she boarded the lift.

It was remarkably spacious, and had windows on all sides, although all that could be seen through them was a grimy black elevator shaft. For all the tower’s height, the panel to the right of the door only seemed to have buttons for a ground floor and a first floor, to Eight’s perplexion. Supposing the choice was simple, she commanded the lift to take her to the first floor, and after a few moments it hesitantly obliged, trundling upwards with a slight tremble - so far, so functional.

Eight watched out of the window, waiting for it to reveal something other than blackened and grimy walls, shrouded in darkness. When it did, the space was suddenly flooded with light, and Eight instinctively winced. Once her eyes adjusted, she saw a vast expanse of brutalism, built from colossal cubes of chipped off-white concrete. The pillars were fighting to hold up the lofty ceiling, occluding light and casting shadows across the wall. Black ink was strewn across the floor, and coral that had once been growing through the cracks in the concrete now rested motionless and grey. The lift eventually deposited her out onto a vantage point from which the entire chamber could be seen, with a staircase zigzagging down when she wished to confront it. As she looked down in awe, Marina’s voice came in once again over the loudspeaker, made slightly difficult to hear by the cavernous reverb of the space.

“Hi again, welcome to preliminary longlisting! Of course, what we’re going to be doing at each step of this process is trying to narrow down which memories in the database belong to you, so that you can reclaim them, and that begins here! In this first step, what the simulation is gonna do is just, like, throw all of the memories it has at you, and you’ll tell it what kiiiiiiinda sticks, and what definitely doesn’t. Don’t stress about it too much at this stage - trust me, you will know if a memory is definitely not your’s. Just listen to your gut, follow everything that feels kinda familiar, and we can worry about whether or not it’s actually your’s later on. Sound fun? Then let’s do it!”

Eight couldn’t help finding the disembodied voice slightly unnerving, and as she descended the stairs she wondered once again what had happened to Marina that made her unable to do this in-person, or at least make these announcements in real-time.

She arrived at the bottom of the staircase, with her feet now down on the ground in the mysterious, empty, cavern. She walked forward as she looked around, stumped as to what she was meant to do, and what there was that she was supposed to be interacting with.

The answer became clear, but not without raising new questions of its own, as she suddenly felt a strange ringing in her ears, and a thousand voices calling her name from every direction except the stairs. Panicked, She held her hands up to her head, and tried to make sense of any of it, to parse at least one individual voice in the static.

Teachers, drill sergeants, doctors, cadets…all talking…

…She thought she could hear her mother’s call from somewhere to her left. Kind, loving, tender, and proud. Homely, even when life was difficult at their home. She immediately ran closer to meet it…

…And yet when she arrived there were now dozens of mothers, all calling, all sounding the same, no matter who they were or who their child was. She had no idea who any of them were, and where to even begin with finding her own. She eventually realised, however, that none of the voices to her right were those of Octolings - each one sounded like a proud Octotrooper, beaming down with joy at their monoparental severed hair strands given life for the first time, which, as Marina had said, she knew for a fact was not her.

And yet, none of the voices of the Octoling mothers and fathers to her left felt remotely familiar either, and there wasn’t a single one of them she felt she had once belonged to at any point. She wondered if she was being too discerning with this strange process, contrary to Marina’s advice, although the thought of claiming a completely random memory she felt no connection to just to get it over with didn’t sit right with her, and somehow the thought of having outright false memories was even more sickening than having none at all.

From behind her, she heard the voices of much more youthful Octolings, all chatting amongst themselves. It wasn’t her mother, but it felt more instinctively familiar, and she followed it.

When the voices were split between girls and boys, she went towards the girls, hoping to discover somebody she had once… trained alongside? That was what we used to do, right? They had us in some sort of army from a young age, and the boys were sent off someplace else…

She was undeniably excited by the first hint of her past life that had creeped back to her, and rushed forwards with excitement to discover more.

The next fork in her path, however, proved difficult. To one side, the girls were smiling and laughing, open-hearted and supportive of each other. To her other side was the sound of jeers and cheers, which gave way to oppressive silence whenever one of them gave in and started crying. All sounds were made in perfect unison, including silence, except for that crying.

One made her heart feel warm, fuzzy, and complete, while the other made it feel unloved, chained, and cold, forced to adapt to the world around it. She knew what she preferred and yet…she also knew what was more familiar in the pit of her partly-erased soul. She wanted the comfort of a lie, and yet, she moved towards what she knew to be the truth of what her life had once been.

And then all of the voices fell silent, except for Marina coming in over the speaker. A small, colourful piece of plastic appeared before her, and dropped onto the floor with a bounce and a rattle. Eight picked it up and held it in her outstretched palm.

“If you’re hearing this, then just by doing that you’ve already narrowed down the database to just 3% of its original size, and we’ll find a memory belonging to you in no time whatsoever! That’s a colour chip, it’s a certificate of completion for this particular stage - just pop it into your palette, and when you get back into the lift you can press it to head to the next floor!”

Palette…?

… Had she missed a step? Was she meant to have picked one up earlier? She didn’t seem to have anything on her person that even remotely resembled a “palette”. With the chip pinched in one hand, she patted down her strange jumpsuit with the other, and yet all of the pockets seemed to be empty. She quickly turned and retraced her steps through the open field of concrete to the best of her ability, wondering if she had had it at some point before losing it, or had missed it when it was offered to her earlier - cod knew that either could’ve happened in that bizarre fumbling through a cacophony of noise. If it wasn’t here it would be in the lobby - is what she told herself, trying not to worry about the fact that she might be trapped here if this strange “palette” truly was inaccessible, and if the rest of the tower was inaccessible without it. It couldn’t have vanished into thin air though, it had to be-

“Hey! This what you’re looking for?” a strange and otherworldly voice rang out through the room.

Eight immediately looked to the source, and saw a curious individual in black, with sickly-green skin, waving a white panel of some kind, which must have been the palette. She immediately recognised them as a sanitised Octoling, and yet they seemed fully conscious, and not hostile at that. She had no weapon if things went south, and yet she also had no other way of moving forward if she didn’t get this palette, so she approached.

The figure took a parting glance at the device, and seemed to nod as she got closer “Yep, this is your’s alright.” she said, mostly to herself, as she handed it over. Eight took it, nodded a ‘thank you’, and flipped it over to get a look at the front. There were all manner of knobs and dials along the top, and below that a thin black LCD ran across the device, with adorable pixel art of Eight staring back at her from the far side, bobbing up and down and affirming that this device belonged to her. It was hard not to smile just a little. The majority of the front panel was dominated by a grid of empty slots, and Eight slotted her colour chip into the top-left of them with a satisfying click. A “2” began glowing softly on the chip’s surface, presumably indicative of second floor access when she got back to the elevator

“Are you one of Marina’s new buddies then?” the figure asked abruptly, making Eight look up from the palette. She nodded.

“Cool. I figured as much, they must’ve been expecting you instead, because they gave me this outta thin air as soon as I got through the door.” they said, “I’m Acht, by the way. Me and Marina have…a bit of history, but I…get the feeling she wasn’t expecting to see me again.” Acht continued, seeming almost hesitant, and avoidant of details. “Still though, your guess is as good as mine as to where we are, I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that Marina knows - if she doesn’t then she might be in danger, so either way we can’t go wrong looking for her, right?”

Eight simply nodded again, to Acht’s amusement.

“Not a talker?” they shrugged simply. They looked like they had a comment to make about that, but before they could speak, the loudspeaker came on once again, and Marina’s voice came through, although it seemed to be having an even harder job against the interference than ever before.

“Nicely done! Before you return to the elevator, however, you are strongly advised to take part in a little activity to boost memory retention on the way out! It’s just something I read about in a research paper a while back! Anyway, there should be some flashcards on the discoveries you’ve made on this floor outside the lift, grab those and just test yourself on them for an hour or two, ok? Ok~!”

Eight could hear the delight in Marina’s voice towards the end, and immediately had the sneaking suspicion that there was a twist - Marina had never been particularly good at hiding her excitement for things, and had a remarkably terrible poker face - not that Eight considered that a negative trait at all. 

Acht, however, seemed to still be in the dark. “Classic Marina, thinking anyone other than herself can bear the sight of a flashcard for more than 10 minutes…” she sighed to herself. “Do you reckon you’ll give it a go then?”

“Just kidding!” Marina’s voice began again abruptly, with a hearty laugh. “Got you good there didn’t I~?”

(No.)

“We’re gonna have a bit more fun than that, don’t worry! You wanna know what else is good for memory retention? A good battle! Some enemies are gonna spawn in down there, just use the weapon your palette comes with to fend them off, destroy their portal, and have fun! I know those guys are absolutely adorable, but don’t feel guilty, because they love a good challenging fight - I specifically programmed them to!”

Eight wondered where her complementary weapon was, and, rather conveniently, it seemed to spawn right into her hands just as she did so. A standard-issue OctoShot - impossible to go wrong with …and awfully familiar too .

She realised now that the seemingly unarmed Acht stood closer to her than before. She unwisely offered up her Octoshot on an impulse to help, but Acht declined, explaining they were incapable of producing ink.

Eight nodded, and immediately started painting the arena while she had time to do so undisturbed.

Then the enemies came, in a vast horde pouring out of what looked like a freshly-opened black hole. Both octolings gasped and backed away. 

Something must have gone horribly, horribly wrong somewhere.

Slimy. Translucent. Skeletal, and spewing ugly black ink everywhere they went as they slid uncomfortably across the ground. Dozens and dozens of blood-red and blood-thirsty eyes, all staring at two small Octolings, one completely defenceless.

There was nothing cute about them at all.

Chapter Text

“Agent 1, this is agent 2. Over.”

…

“Agent 1, do you copy?”

…

“…Callie, can you hear me? Are you safe?”

She sighed, putting the radio away, shuffling slightly on the jagged black rock she was sitting on, and then she buried her head in her hands.

This was bad.

If Callie was in this world too, then Marie had no idea what mess she possibly could have gotten herself into, and knowing that she wouldn’t be there to keep her safe was tearing Marie apart from the inside.

(Why is this happening again?)

Not in a physical sense by any stretch of the imagination, being midway through a lonely mile through the sand dunes leading to the city, but in a sense that she had failed Callie.

This wasn’t the first time. She had abandoned her cousin once already, and was lucky that both of them had lived to regret it. She had let herself live in fear of that pain from then on, she had been good this time.

It wasn’t fair that this was happening again. How was she to know that this would’ve happened? That’d she’d be so suddenly torn away, into such a cold and lonely world?

But she knew it was her fault for not having attempted to make contact sooner. What if they had started close to each other, but walked in completely opposite directions?

The last thing she remembered before coming here was doing research in Alterna. Callie was there too, Callie had her radio too, why wasn’t she answering? Was she not picking up? Was she not in range?

Marie took a deep breath.

(Maybe she’s just not here. Maybe she’s still safe and sound in the real world.)

She slowly regained her composure, got up, and kept walking towards the city. It was all she could logically do - if Callie was here, then that was the most obvious rendez-vous point. If she wasn’t, then perhaps it held some sort of way to get out.

Either way, Callie would be safe when all was said and done. She had promised it on her life, and held herself every bit as accountable to that as she would’ve done if Callie had actually heard it.

Chapter Text

The fighting was about to start. In the corner of Eight’s eye, she saw Acht completely paralysed with fear for a good few moments.

(Have they truly never been in a fight before? Every last one of us was put through combat training, right?)

She surprised herself with wherever that thought had come from, but there was no time to dwell on it. It was time to fight, and time for Acht to get to the stairs.

(It was a long way. Cod help them if they get caught out on the way.)

She wasn’t used to having dead weight on the field with her, or a life to worry about other than her own.

(There’d been a place like that in the metro, with dead weight. I went around it in the end…)

The fish-like creatures were greatly varied in their size and build, and yet they all approached in a singular hive-minded clump, which was just asking for a spray and pray - exactly what it received when 8 slammed her finger down on the trigger and did not let go for anything.

The ink coming thick and fast made quick work of the smaller frontrunners in the pack, but most of the heavyweights withstood the barrage, and were closing the distance quicker than she could eliminate them.

In an act of delaying the inevitable, she carefully backed up as she fired, wary not to sway the gun too much, or to be cocky and blindfire behind her while assuming they wouldn’t change direction. 

Such rationale, however, ultimately failed her, as she stumbled and fell onto her back. Ignoring the jolt of pain it came with, she immediately rolled over and scrambled to get up on her feet.

She could not ignore the second jolt, however, as an unseen heavyweight’s jaws came down heavy on her ankle, making her howl as the excessive agony shot up her leg. Her breathing turned heavy and her thoughts turned primal, as she reflexively dropped into octopus form. The ankle she was pinned by ceased to exist, and she was gone before the jaws could realise what had happened and reach for the newly-shrunken prey, which slipped away like a squeezed soap bar.

(Hook…)

She was glad to have claimed so much turf earlier, as she was free to swim anywhere she pleased while the leg healed itself. “Where she pleased” mattered not however, as she moved where it was most strategically logical to be, setting her sights on a spot behind the portal.

The horde was far away, and had left the portal unattended in their simple-mindedness. She was almost made giddy to see their aimless wandering, knowing she had this in the bag, and imagining their confusion as to where the intruder had gone.

(Line, and…)

With a freshly renewed tank of ink, she slammed the portal with all she had. It had more, however, and it seemed barely half-covered when it was time to refill. As she did so, the portal seemed to pulsate, and true to its name, summoned a fresh new horde.

(Not now, please, not now-)

This time, she could not hide. Not without letting all of the progress she had made on the portal waste away back to square one in her absence.

She resolved to finish what she had started, not halting their approach in any way, and ignoring the increasingly pungent smell of their foul decay looming closer and closer. Her aim stayed in the dead centre of that portal.

She was close, so close.

(Come on…)

She acknowledged the pain of the small fishes eating away at her from the knees down, but did not feel it in any way.

(Come on…)

“Eight!”

(Come on…)

“ EIGHT!”

(Come on…!)

The portal exploded, turning the threat off at the tap, and even leaving behind a ferocious fireball of Eight’s own ink to deal with the threats it had just spawned. She was safe. She had won.

“EIGHT!! HELP ME!!”

(I forgot about Acht…)

The remnants of the first pack weren’t so aimless after all.

The horde was hot on their trail on the other side of the arena. She threw herself down into her ink, and hurtled across the pitch to right her wrongs.

She saw Acht trip over on an inclination, and fall to the ground.

She emerged from the ink to hurl a bomb into the fray. Some of them were splattered, and the survivors were thrown up into the air.

Acht did not take their eyes off Eight as they scrambled to their feet, not seeing the one that had landed behind them. Eight tried to warn them, raising a hand that could’ve meant anything.

The warning was not received, and Eight winced at the crunch and the shriek that came as it clutched Acht’s hand in its jaws. She felt a rush of emotions, the whole spectrum from anger to defeat. Her hair stood on end, and she knew what it meant.

She rose up in the air…

…and crashed straight down on that fucker, obliterating it in a blinding flash of ink.

She stood in front of Acht, her chest heaving. She had barely paid any attention to what she had done, but now she knew the palette had a triple splashdown, at least.

And with that, the arena was emptied.

Acht tried to get to their feet once again, but placing the weight on their injured hand without thinking made it immediately jerk back in pain. They rolled over grimacing, clutching the wound. Eight offered to pull them up, and they wordlessly took her up on it with their other hand.

Walking back to the elevator in silence, save for Acht’s laboured breathing, Eight couldn’t help studying their injury. It was puncture wounds on the dorsal side of the hand, one somewhere near the convergence of the ring and pinky fingers under the skin, and another all the way up on the forearm.

(Just how wide was this thing’s jaw…?)

Where the inwards-bent skin finally broke, the blue flesh was faintly made visible, bumpy and slimy. Nothing obscured it as, true to Acht’s word, no ink was bleeding out, and the entry points lay eerily still.

They had climbed the stairs, the lift was just ahead now.

“Well,” Acht began finally, “if I wasn’t sidelined already, then I guess I am now, huh?”

Eight laughed nervously, not sure if that was meant to be a jab at her failure to protect them.

“I’ll stick to the lift from now on but, please, for the love of cod, think about someone but yourself when you’re out there from time to time!” Acht continued, affirming that it was. “I could’ve died if you’d needed to shoot that portal for even a second longer before you were done!”.

They mindlessly hit the button for the lift doors as they spoke, and only Eight seemed to notice that it was coming up from the ground floor, and wasn’t where they had left it.

“”You do realise that you didn’t even need to get the portal, right? The stairs were still there, there was nothing stopping you from just…”

They finally noticed Eight staring up at them with a grin. The door had already been open for a while now, and a short pink-haired woman was staring at Acht with bemusement. Acht finally returned the gesture.

“Eight! What’re you doing here? And is that Marina? What the fuck happened to her, and why is she slagging you off?”.

Chapter Text

With the silence broken, Eight finally released her laugh, and Acht looked visibly flustered.

“I’m…not Marina, just an old friend.” they finally opted to plainly declare, only finding it pertinent to reply to the first query fired their way. They boarded the lift and Eight followed suit.

“So you do know Marina then?” asked the woman, who was unmistakably Pearl, even with the change in fashion. Eight doubted that the puffy jacket emblazoned with the nation’s space agency logo was actually indicative of any kind of space-faring experience, but it probably didn’t mean nothing either, and Eight wouldn’t be surprised if Pearl’s dad was somewhere on the board.

“Yeah, used to be back in the day.” Acht replied, “It’s a…long story.” they added vaguely, with little eagerness to get into the details of that ‘long story’. “Why, who’s Marina to you two?”.

Eight wanted to tell her own Marina story, but she couldn’t speak.

…Why couldn’t she speak? For so long - as long as she could remember, really - she had just taken it at face value. Speaking was what everyone else did. She didn’t speak, she just listened. Why was that?

Pearl took it upon herself to begin, breaking the silence. “I’m Pearl, and me ‘n ‘Rina are both halves of Off the Hook, the hippest music sensation in the whole damn world! Not to flex, but we’re #2 right now for most monthly listeners on Splatify!” she claimed proudly, before quietly - perhaps jealously - musing to herself, “Really, it’s better to be 2nd place. If you’re 1st then that means you’re too radio-friendly, and 3rd place is just lowkey irrelevant. 2nd is, like, perfect middle ground innit?”.

Nobody said anything.

“Oh!” Pearl perked up again, remembering another flex to drop on Acht, no doubt. “Me, ‘Rina ‘n Eight here also kicked the shit out of this weird fucking statue thing from the Deepsea Metro before it could genocide Inkopolis this one time. That was pretty sick, right?”.

Eight couldn’t help nodding. It was a weird flex, but an undeniably formidable one. Although she got the feeling Pearl shouldn’t have told it to someone they had just met. Pearl’s face scrunched up, affirming that the same realisation had dawned on her too, perhaps too late.

Acht looked like they had something they really, really wanted to say, but all that came out was “cool,” and “ready to take us to the next floor, Eight?”.

She nodded and pulled up the palette. Amongst the empty slots stood a bright red square button labelled “2”. Eight tapped it. It was slightly spongy, and didn’t click down at all, simply flashing in response to her touch. The lift started ascending.

“I just realised, that thing kinda looks like a Launchpad, doesn’t it?” Acht remarked out of nowhere.

Pearl leaned over Eight’s shoulder to get a look. “A launchpad? This thingy? Whaddya mean by that?”.

“That’s a palette” Acht explained, “I don’t know much about it, but it seems to be tailor made for Eight. It gives her a weapon, and it can use the colour chips she’s been finding to control the lift.”.

“But whaddya mean ‘launchpad’? What’s that got to do with anything?”.

Acht chuckled “You’ve never seen a Launchpad? I thought you were a musician!”.

Pearl looked ready to explode. “I- I am a real musician codammit!” she snapped, clearly flustered, “Not all of us use ‘Launchpads’, whatever the fuck those are!”

“Yeah, yeah,” Acht grinned. The lift pinged as they reached their destination.

Eight summoned their Octoshot, and departed from the lift. There were footsteps following her, but they were quickly cut off. 

“I wouldn’t follow her if you don’t have a weapon. It’s dangerous out there. Right, Eight?”.

Eight looked back and nodded solemnly. The doors slid shut, and in spite of all the people she had met in such a short time, she still faced the trial alone.

Pearl watched as Eight disappeared behind the brushed steel doors, and turned back to look up at Acht with a neutral smile, not actually caring all too much about the ‘lunchpads’, or whatever they were. She knew she was a musician, and nobody could say she wasn’t when she had come so far.

Acht looked like they had something to say, but as soon as they opened their mouth they were cut off by the loudspeaker coming on. Both of them looked towards an approximation of where Marina’s distant, static-drowned voice was coming from.

“Now, I know we just established that you’re already really, really close to retrieving a memory, but I’m sure you’re probably not as excited to hear that as I am, because you’re probably thinking “Hey, Marina, don’t I have to do this again, like, a bajillion times?”. And what I know that you don’t know - yet - is that you don’t! I read this really cool research paper on amnesia-recovery by the Open University of Splatsville - there’s really a field for everything these days, isn’t there? Anyway, uh, what they found is that successful restoration of just one memory, if it was transformative enough for the patient, is usually enough to make the rest naturally come back to the patient from there! So yeah, we only need to do this one memory and then you’re home free! How cool is that?”

Pearl grinned, “Cod I love it so much when she gets nerdy like that…”

Acht, however, seemed unwilling to divert from what they had wanted to say.

“You’re the one who liberated the Deepsea Metro?” they immediately began.

“What, killing that dumb statue?” She batted her hand dismissively. “I shouldn’t have told you about that, forget it.”.

“No,” said Acht immediately, “You don’t understand, I was…I was trapped down there. You saved me, so…thank you…”.

Pearl grinned and shrugged, not quite seeing the gravitas. “No prob’. Eight did most of the work. She was trapped too, doing all kinda weird shit. Me ‘n ‘Rina were just kinda topside, helping as much as we could.”.

Acht nodded, “Yes, the tests. I never did those, I was just the DJ.”.

“The DJ?? Fuck kinda raves were they havin’ down there??”.

“Yep, the DJ. No raves prior to the Low Water Party, but I made the music for those tests. It was a time in my life when I just felt bogged down by…everything in my life that wasn’t making music. Eating. Sleeping. Showing up to classes, and sleeping in those too. I was given this promise…this promise of a life of pure artistic output, and nothing else…” they paused solemnly, “...and I got that, but at the cost of all my memories that weren’t cold hard music theory, and my free will. I lost the ability to produce ink too…for good measure. Guess they figured the only reason I’d ever need such a thing in my line of work was if I wanted to break free…”

“Sheesh, you’re sun-dried?” asked Pearl.

“Yeah,” Acht replied coolly. “Has its perks…I guess.” They held up their injured hand, and grunted in pain as they did so, before putting on a showmanship grin, like a snake oil salesman advertising the life of a geriatric to the fresh kids on the street. “No bleeding, and couldn’t die from ink loss anyway if there was!”.

“Shit, what happened to you?!”

“Bite from one of the things out there. Don’t worry, I’ll be fine.” Acht explained plainly. “Eight can hold her own, they’ll be fine too.” they added, not that Pearl needed telling.

Pearl was unimpressed by the party trick, however. “You’re still gonna wanna get that shit covered up though before it gets infected, and, y’know, if you weren’t sun-dried you could just sit in your ink and be good to go.”.

Acht chuckled as they lowered their hand to their side, “C’moooonnnn, lemme pretend there’s at least one silver lining to this.”.

“Heh, not a bad mindset to have, actually,” she shrugged, “I guess you’ll live longer, won’t you? There was a 100-something down in the metro with Eight y’know, he was sun-dried.” Pearl thought she was done talking, but then remembered something else, “Oh, yeah, word on the street is that he somehow got, like, even more sundried in some freak accident, and now he’s been hooked up with some physiotherapist lady in Inkopolis who specialises in, like, re-hydrating. Could be worth a look when we’re outta the Memverse, I dunno.”.

Acht smiled, “I’ll consider it.” Then they realised what Pearl had said. “Wait, “Memverse”? What’s that?”.

Pearl grinned, “You’ve never seen a Memverse? That’s where we are now!” she mocked the Launchpad incident from earlier. Acht did not laugh. “Just kiddin’, hell if I know the deets. Back during the low water party, Marina snuck off to, like, scrape some data from the old computers down there? I don’t know. But fast forward to now, and she’s suddenly, like, telling me about this simulation she’s made using the data to restore the memories of sanitised Octarians, or something?” she recounted, “And y’know, I’m like ‘Yeah. Uh-huh. Sounds wild. Good luck I guess.’ and I leave her to give it a go. Come back in five hours and she’s in some weird trance hooked up to her laptop, and I can’t get her to snap outta it! So…yeah…hopped on to see if there was some way to help her, and…that’s all I know…”.

Acht looked deeply concerned. “This is a simulation? I-” they found themself lost for words at the thought of such a thing. “Forget that, Marina’s in trouble, and we need to find her. I don’t know if you’ve seen them, but the tower is completely overrun with strange monsters…”.

Pearl wasn’t feeling as worried as Acht probably wanted her to be. “Eight’s on it, so I’m sure we’ll find her in no time!”. Then a thought crossed her mind, “Hey wait, you’re one of those sanitised guys right? Does it, like…work?”.

Acht nodded. “I don’t know how I got here, but yeah, it works. Credit to Marina, I just…remember everything now. Not sure why it wasn’t instant for Eight though, why she’s gotta do this weird tower thing to make it work.”.

Pearl thought about it. Sanitisation - what an awful, degrading fate - and sun-drying too…she couldn’t even begin to imagine a life without her ink.

She remembered what she had first said, and felt strangely awful about it, especially directed at someone who seemed to believe she had saved their life. Yet she also felt strangely embarrassed about the words that were about to fall from her mouth - was it really that rare for her? Was she unapologetic in a punkish sense or an asshole-y one…?

“Hey uh, sorry about earlier…I uh, forgot what sanitisation was - in my defence it’s been like 5-somethin’ years - and I kinda…spoke without thinking.”.

Acht laughed “You’re fine, it was honestly pretty funny. I do it too…I guess you heard that didn’t you?”.

Acht looked like they had something else to say, and Pearl watched expectantly.

“...Hey, can you promise me something?” they added finally.

“Huh? What’s up?”.

“It’s Marina. It was ages ago, the last time I saw her…” Acht shuffled nervously “...I don’t want to get into it, but I…spoke without thinking, again. I wanna help if I can if she really is in danger, but…I don’t know if she’s gonna be happy to see me in the end…” they gulped, “...whatever her reaction to seeing me is, good or bad, please…promise you won’t interfere. It’s between me and her, and whatever she sees fit to do…it’s what I deserve.”.

Pearl was stunned into silence. Eventually, the silence was filled by the loudspeaker on the other side of the door.

“Nicely done! You’ll be going through memories one-by-one on the next floor, because there’s so many eliminated now that it’s feasible to do so! After that you’re all set!”

The doors slid open, and Eight returned.

“Hey,” Acht called out, making Eight glance their way. “Sorry about what I said earlier, that was totally unnecessary.”.

Eight batted her hand dismissively and shook her head, in a gesture of “It’s nothing,”, before pulling up the palette, pressing a new button, and making the lift ascend once again.

Pearl smiled and nodded to Acht.

Promise.

Chapter Text

From a distance, the most striking thing about the city had been the shape of the skyline.

A cluster of skyscrapers with no suburbs, a city that began just as abruptly as it ended. The tallest tower was in the centre, and each ring of skyscrapers around it seemed to get shorter and shorter at a remarkably consistent pace. Of course, any city out there naturally assumed an approximation of this pattern sometime in its evolution, yet this skyline felt far more deliberately planned than any Marie had seen before, affirming to her it’s artificial nature - more artificial than a real life city, at least.

It was like it had started as a perfect pyramid, with any sort of deviation from that template being a mere afterthought to make it look more believable and lived-in. It would’ve been out of place, if not for the fact that every single building was bleached the same off-white as the sands it was being smothered by.

Now that she was down on the streets, however, and that bigger picture towered too high over her head for her to see it, what struck her now was how empty it was. Not the absence of people - though that was indeed the case as well - but the absence of a soul. Nothing like the city Marie now felt herself pining to go back to.

Every street was on a grid, and every building looked the exact same - flat roof, white concrete, balconies everywhere, and what seemed like they were supposed to be a glass front door and glass windows, but were completely opaque, and lacking any meaningful difference in colour and texture to the rest of the building. It’d be no use trying them, it looked less like a white-concrete building, and more like a sculpture of a building into white concrete. The constantly-reused model varied only in height, and had clearly been pulled or squashed to achieve the effect, as the number of floors never changed.

Despite the buildings being Inkling-sized, she still felt incredibly small and alone. She wanted to attribute it to the astonishing scale of the eight-lane roads with no cars to contend with, but deep down she knew it was far more spiritual than that.

For the first time, she felt truly lost. She had wanted to believe that making it to this city was all it would take for anything to start making sense…but she had done that now, and she felt not one step closer to getting to the bottom of this.

There had to be something here. One vertical slice of this city that held something of importance. She wanted to believe it was out there, but hadn’t any idea where to begin with finding it.

It all looked the same, and nothing was alive. Some things were once alive, however, like long-dead coral in front gardens - some branching up like trees, and brains lining under windows like hedges. A browned and sepia specimen climbed up and around walls, like a nervous system.

Entering yet another block, she once again saw nothing new. She sighed, and crossed the barren and open road to try the next one.

She gasped as she was blown back onto the floor by a car speeding through the lane she was just about to walk through.

She scurried backwards towards the kerb and scrambled onto it, as a dozen more cars spawned out of what seemed like thin air, cruising along at equal speed.

She panted for air and waited for her fight or flight response to die down, watching them as they came and went in an endless stream. Curiously, their wheels did not spin, and they merely slid across the road at top speed.

Marie presumed they were some kind of set dressing that wasn’t meant to be seen under such close scrutiny as it was now. Nevertheless, she resolved to follow them wherever they were headed, presuming that they eventually went in eyeshot of this program’s intended playing area.

Chapter Text

There was a ping, and Eight prepared herself once again as the doors of the lift opened. She instinctively summoned her weapon and walked out of the doors.

“Wait, where the fuck is the, like, the room!?”

Eight realised that Pearl had a point. All that awaited her was the stump of a plain white hallway, barely long enough to step out of the lift.

She glanced at Pearl and Acht’s shared confusion, before shrugging and stepping out to the best of her ability, figuring that staying in the lift was just as much of a dead end, and that there had to be some sort of catch.

And surely enough there was. She gasped and stumbled as the lift door immediately slammed shut behind her. There shouldn’t have been room for her to stumble, but the wall in front of her was now much further away, and the newly-made corridor was populated with evenly spaced white doors. Counting one side and doubling it, there were fourteen of them.

“Sorry!”, Marina's voice came in, “It just needed a second to count how many memories there are! But each door you see now represents an individual memory that could belong to you! That’s right- this is the endgame, doesn’t look so bad does it? Use the peepholes to find the one that’s yours, then just open the door, grab the colour chip, and meet me at the top!”

Eight noticed that there was also a fifteenth door on the back wall - that hadn’t always been there, had it?

“Oh, also, the one on the end isn’t a memory, that’s the security office. Don’t touch it, I don’t know how much the security lady likes being disturbed, she’s not really one for talking! I guess it’s just best not to find out, right?”

Eight made a mental note, and walked forward to try a door. Fine particles of dust swirled all around her in bright light, making the whiteness of the hallway somehow almost overwhelming in its blandness. Closing one eye, she looked into the peephole, which - as expected, faced the opposite direction to what she was used to, allowing her to see through - although what she seemed to be looking at was not the room on the other side, but rather a telescope into another time.

A time in which a young Octoling girl was surrounded by people who must have been her friends. Every word they said was like a competition, and the words mixed and overlapped and lost all meaning as they were hurled around with reckless abandon, in a frantic scramble to be the queen of some figurative hill.

The girl was not speaking, and despite all her company she looked lost and alone, not saying a word. Eight wanted to reach out to her, and comfort her, but it was too late now - it was nothing but a distant memory, belonging to some sickly-skinned girl she would never meet, idling the ruins of the metro in wait of further orders that would never come. And indeed, that wasn’t her.

She turned to the door opposite that one, and hesitated before looking inside.

Some kind of hazing ritual, happening to a girl that looked like herself, but with a uniform too elite to have actually been her. She made no effort to resist, as a crowd of older-looking girls surrounding her started beating her to a pulp. Someone on the fringes of the pile-on, who looked a little younger than they were, was trying to break it up, but their face was hard to identify.

Again, it hurt to watch, but it was not her, and she had to move on.

She tried the next door, and as soon as she knew what was happening she jerked away, cringing with a vivid and personal sense of shame and humiliation.

This was her own, alright. No doubt about it.

With a deep breath, she opened the door, which swung open with an ear-piercing screech.

The room was completely pitch black, with no indication of what she had seen before. The light from the hallway hung in the air through the open doorway, and yet it failed to illuminate the floor where it landed - the same could be said of the soft red glow of the colour chip, on the floor in the dead centre. It was as if everything was suspended in a pure-black void.

She knew by now what happened when she picked it up, and decided that she would come prepared this time. 

She stepped out into the narrow corridor, dreading to imagine what fighting those fish-things would be like in such a tight space, and painted as much of it as she could in advance. Doing this, she noticed that her ink had taken on an almost orange-ish hue at this point, unlike the chocolate-esque shade it had been when she started - were the colour chips doing that?

Either way, it was time to add some more red into the mix. She re-entered the room, took a deep breath to compose herself.

Then she snatched up the colour chip and ran for the lift.

Somehow, she was too late.

The first door had been flung open, and from it a red eyed figure unlike anything she had seen prior had emerged, holding her at gunpoint. In the uncertainty of what it was capable of, she dropped her gun and threw her arms up in surrender.

It seemed to take mercy, though it’s giant, red, vacant eyes betrayed that - they were the only facial features on the creature, which was humanoid like herself in its stature, yet devoid of any features denoting either octoling or inkling, with metallic grey skin.

She heard a door behind her, and instinctively glanced over her shoulder to see that another creature had emerged from the security office. This one had ears and hair, and seemed more like an inkling wearing a mask, though their skin was still sullen and lifeless.

She didn’t move a muscle as the creature cautiously approached her, not pointing the muzzle of the gun away from her face for even a second, and her heart raced as she wondered what it would do. 

She noticed the way that its feet heaved uncomfortably as it trudged through her orange ink, which it had not painted over. 

She felt a smile curling at her lips. It would be risky, but she might still have the upper hand.

She kicked the Octoshot that rested at her feet, and it glided across the floor, through the creature’s spread legs. For all the focus it had before, it seemed genuinely taken aback by this move, and reflexively fixed its gaze on the weapon.

When it seemingly realised its mistake, and looked up, Eight was nothing but a series of ripples on the floor. 

And before it could realise it’s next mistake, Eight held the gun to the back of its head and fired. 

It must not have had a spawn point set up, as instead of splattering to set the spirit free, it simply fell lifeless to the floor.

It was truly dead, if it had ever been truly alive to begin with.

Not taking her eyes off the other one, she backed up and felt for the elevator button with one hand, while still keeping her weapon held high with the other, as the masked person started shooting to claim black turf, and charging forward to get in range. 

Once she had pressed the button, she hurled a bomb forward, and the person stopped dead in their tracks until it detonated, seemingly aware that the hallway was too narrow for there to be any way around it. They stared vacantly and motionlessly at Eight across the divide, as the bomb’s warning drone intesified, and the ensuing explosion mixed with the ping of the door opening behind her. She backed into it, and the last thing she saw before the door closed was that mist of orange ink, with the threat presumably still alive on the other side.

Eight panted for breath, and held her gun up to the door, until she was certain the person had no intentions of opening it for herself. The other two simply looked on in concern.

Marina’s disembodied voice came in once again, “Thanks for taking part, your memory should be restored now, and ready for viewing on your palette! Don’t forget to drop by the top floor and say hi to me on the way out!”

Sure enough, a light started blinking in green next to a button on the top row of the palette.

“Do we get to have a look?” Acht asked - to no response, as they should’ve expected.

Eight pressed the button, and, in a move that should’ve been impossible, the grid of colour chips zoomed out exponentially, until the chips she had collected thus far were so small they looked like mere pixels on a screen.

Which is exactly what they were now, apparently, as some sort of video started automatically playing.

Eight panicked, and fumbled with the knobs above the screen until she found one that turned the sound down until it was barely audible. She retreated to the opposite corner of the lift and watched it intently, resisting her hesitation, and the temptation to remain in the dark about herself.

“...I guess we don’t then. Fairs.” Pearl shrugged.

It was her first day at the garrison.

Her predetermined fate was one of mediocrity. It beat being one of the slackers destined for menial home front work, but she still remembered her teacher’s reasoning behind the grading loud and clear - she was disciplined and well-mannered enough to be in the frontline army, but unlike the Elite-stream, she was disposable.

“Not special” , was the phrase that had stuck with her.

She already loathed this place compared to being in school. Apparently age seven was the time to wave goodbye to playground games and Maths worksheets, or the PE lesson where she had thrown her first splat bomb, and yet it felt unnatural in her heart, like it had been yanked from her grasp just as she learned to love it. She even missed the lessons where there wasn’t actually any work to do, and she just listened to the teachers talk for an hour, like Octarian History or Race Studies (she never quite understood that one though - how could the inklings be an all-powerful threat to our nation in one lesson, and worthless hedonistic idiots in another?)

Above all else though, she missed her friends, even though she doubted her friends missed her. Everything had gone downhill as soon as the exam results were revealed, a month before the end. Borders sprang up all around her almost overnight, as some of the girls she once knew and loved suddenly looked down on her with scorn, and told her plainly and simply that she was unworthy to stand in their presence, while others simply walked away when she came near, dismissing her as a “stuck-up prick”.

It was the Elite stream girls that had confused her the most, however, in their utter conceit. They all acted and talked like they were so high and mighty, and yet they seemed to completely overlook how much their achievements paled in comparison to Marina, the girl who had left with the same grades they all had - the year prior. The teachers seemed almost annoyed when she had given her speech in her graduation ceremony. Scarcely a word of her own extraordinary achievement came out of her mouth, it was all just teary eyed and heavy hearted thank-yous and farewells to her friends, whom she was glad to rattle off all the best qualities of one-by-one.

The girl wished she had known Marina in the time they had shared a school. She seemed like a nice girl, always so friendly to anyone, blind to any divide or difference between herself and them (Hell, if memory served, the friend she had the most to say about in her ceremony ended up failing the exam a year later), and always so content with her situation - just happy to serve Great Octavio, no matter what.

The word the girl was looking for was “special”. Someone irreplaceable, who saw the world differently. Destined for great things.

She wanted to believe herself and Marina weren’t so different in some ways, but then the words of her teacher came back to her.

That teacher was right, and that was why she was here. Why she was stood as straight as she could be, surrounded in all directions by a vast array of girls doing the same, and doing it better. All the same age as her, all looking equally fresh in brand new uniforms, and all sporting fresh new haircuts, styled into side-partings. It had been the first haircut of her life, and the pain was excruciating. The freshly squared-off-ends were still stinging now, and she resisted the curious urge to poke them, knowing it would hurt even more if she did.

It was to be 3 months of gruelling self-discipline, as tantalisingly-pickable scabs formed and the tentacles slowly healed, starting to look less like weird stumps and more like a short tentacle should look.

She looked around at the other girls of her unit, to see what they were doing.

It was almost unnerving how little difficulty they had keeping still, relative to herself. They seemed almost lifeless, albeit less like strung-up corpses, and more like statues of marble - like the fountain in the centre of her hometown. She remembered it clearly. It had been carved in the likeness of Great Octavio when he was still a person like herself - before he had to make the difficult but necessary choice to dry out, so he could be Octaria’s guardian for all eternity.

She missed that town. There had been a perfectly good garrison there, it made no sense to her why she was now boarding on the other side of the domes, in a place none of her friends had been sent to. Even back then, she scarcely ever saw her parents, but the night before she moved truly felt like goodbye forever.

A remnant sense of mischief inside her almost wanted to try pushing over one of the girls, just to see what would happen. Would they get angry and try to throttle her? Would it be like the old times, and they would roll over laughing, before initiating a play-fight when they got back up?

Would they still perfectly hold that straightened pose, as they emotionlessly fell to the floor and shattered into a million pieces of rubble?

She was snapped out of her thoughts by the sound of someone important shouting, although she couldn’t see them. She missed the first half of the sentence, and had no idea what she was meant to be doing.

(Oh cod, I can’t screw this up on my first day.)

Everyone around her started marching to the right. She assumed that was the order, and unquestioningly joined the procession a second late, hoping nobody noticed.

She was getting nervous. It was almost time to go to bed, and she still hadn’t made any new friends. 

In the crowd of people searching for their bunks, she felt lost and alone, with her only company being the abstract idea that Great Octavio was always with her. Nobody had spoken to her, and she hadn’t spoken to anybody either. She had been quite the eccentric chatterbox in primary school, and yet the words all escaped her now. Something about the air of the place, and something about the silence, just felt fundamentally and innately oppressive to her.

Shortly before the lights were switched off, she thought she could hear the distant sound of an attempt at conversation. She couldn’t make out the words, and they seemed to go unanswered by the people closer to whoever was saying them. Everyone was staring in the direction of that girl, with vacant and unreadable expressions. Eventually they got a response, from the girl in the bunk above Eight.

“Oh, do us all a favour and shut the fuck up!”

This person had no more status than any other girl in that hall, and yet her voice ringing out across the hall stuck with Eight more than it should have. She assumed that was what had been on every girl’s mind, as they all stopped paying attention to the one talking, and lay down facing the wall, ready for the light to be turned out.

Eight wanted to reach out to the girl that had been talking the next day, but she had no idea who was who, and was scared to be yelled at or stared at like some sort of freak if she got the wrong person.

One day of complete silence turned into another. It was never truly a vow of it, but after enough time she became almost scared to use her voice, wondering if she would even recognise the sound that came out, after all this time.

Chapter Text

The surface of the palette returned to normal, and Eight looked up over it at Pearl and Acht.

Acht had a look of undeniable curiosity on her face, and yet they said nothing. It was Pearl who asked her what she had seen.

Now understanding the secret to why she had been silent for so long, she opened her mouth to speak for the first time in 14 years, before closing it again.

A million fears and doubts were racing through her head.

Pearl - and everyone else she knew - was used to her being silent. She could only begin to imagine how much of an unnecessary scene they would make.

(What do I even sound like? Can I even pronounce Inklish words? I’ve never tried…)

(...and what if this silence is just the way that they like me?)

(Why am I so scared of what I want?)

She pressed the button to keep moving.

Natural light flooded through the back window of the lift, and Eight rushed to take a look, pressing her hands against the glass.Somehow, despite the tower only having 4 floors, they were above all of the other buildings in the city now. She had a clear bird’s eye view of its unfaltering uniformity, and of the wasteland that lay beyond it.

What piqued her interest the most was the furtherst reaches - the border of the world, lined with towering black spikes, trapping everything that lived. It was hard to tell with the distance, but they easily looked three times the height of a person. Someone could seriously hurt themselves on those things, if they weren’t so far away.

The lift pinged, but the door did not open. There was a button on the panel to do it manually, but she was distracted from doing so by Pearl’s voice behind her.

“Yo, let me come with. I know I’m unarmed, but I gotta be there if anything’s wrong with ‘Rina.”

Eight nodded, and looked expectantly over Pearl’s shoulder at Acht. She noticed how, after a moment, Pearl turned to do the same.

“I’d…rather not at the moment, is that cool?” Acht said finally, seeming strangely shifty and uncomfortable. “I’m just gonna head back to the bottom, I’ll see you guys there.”.

“Cool,” Pearl affirmed, in a subtly solemn tone that was unusual to Eight.

She pressed the button to open the door, with Pearl in tow.

The sight of the machine filled her with dread, as did the sight of Marina.

A black amorphous sludge, somewhere between a bloated octopus and a brain, fuelled by heavy black tubing sagging from the cieling and across the floor, on a platform accessible only by one of four narrow walkways across a bottomless void. Marina was half-submerged, looking completely vacant.

“‘Rina! What is that thing!?” Pearl immediately shoved past Eight and onto the walkway to get a better look. “Can you hear me!?”

Marina’s body was slowly reanimated, and a smile curled at her lips. “Yes, I can hear you. I’m so glad you could make it.” she said, sounding tangentially like herself. “How have you been finding my experiment so far?”.

“What are you talking about!?” Shouted Pearl, before pausing to parse the question. “I mean…I think it worked for these two, but what the hell is that machine, and why do you sound absolutely nothing like yourself!?”.

Eight walked up behind Pearl. She felt a strong gust of wind blowing her tentacles across her face, which made her realise that the ginormous windows of the chamber were actually just empty frames.

“I’m not referring to the memory restoration, Peal.” Marina continued, completely unfazed by anything. “The Order Sector itself…is it not beautiful?”

“What, this place? It’s boring as fuck and you know it!” Pearl immediately objected without any hesitation.

There was an uneasy silence, as Marina nodded understandingly. “As I expected. Your mind is still anarchic, impure, and dangerous. I do not blame you for it - you are here to be healed after all.”

Pearl didn’t respond, and simply looked over her shoulder, straight at Eight. “Aight. Fuck that machine up. That’s not Marina talking, it can’t be!”. Eight nodded, and ran ahead of Pearl, weapon at the ready.

“Eight.” Marina began. “Your current form is no longer needed, please dispose of it.”.

Eight didn’t know what that meant, and she wasn’t even listening to whatever she - it - was saying. The machine opened fire on her, and she ducked and weaved around the hail of black ink with the little space she had to move in, before laying down a path of orange and swimming onto the main platform during a break in the tirade. With more space to work with, avoiding being shot proved to be a lot easier.

She noticed a portal tethered to the machine, and then she noticed another.

“Eight!” Pearl cried out from a safe distance, momentarily distracting Eight to glance over at the walkway. “Try destroying the, like, orb things!” she suggested, pointing aggresively in their general direction.

(Not helpful)

When she turned back around, the first portal had generated a horde of the now-familiar fish monsters, quickly approaching her. Used to dealing with them by now, she opened fire as she backed up into a more favourable position. At every interval where she deemed herself to be a safe distance away from the horde, she changed her aim to the portal itself, slowly covering it in her ink bit by bit. Slowly but surely, the portal exploded without major issue, wiping out the horde at its feet. It seemed to have an effect on the machine, albeit one that enraged it further, causing it to spew out sting rays in all directions.

Not expecting it, Eight struggled to duck and weave under the overpowering and constant streams of black ink, until one of them finally caught her.

She struggled to escape, before plunging back into her own ink within an inch of her life. As her wounds healed, she tried to relocate behind the machine, and into an expanse of unclaimed ground - which presented an opportunity.

As soon as she felt adequately recomposed, she rose out of the ink and painted the ground, not stopping until her hair was standing on end, and a smirk crept across her face.

With that, she immediately painted herself a path and made a beeline straight for the second portal, faster than the ink the machine was spewing at her, and going straight around the horde emerging from the portal.

As soon as she was next to the portal, she ascended from the ink, into the air, and swiftly obliterated it with her splashdown.

Sparks flew from the machine, which undulated fiercely with a bitcrushed roar, as clouds of pixellated steam bubbled up from under its surface. Pearl rushed forward onto the main platform, just in time to catch Marina as she fell loose from it. It was hardly a second before Marina scrambled to her feet, looking around and assessing the situation, utterly terrified.

“‘Rina! Are you ok?” Pearl immediately began. “There was this machine, and it was controlling you a-”.

“Huh?” Marina interrupted her immediately “No, that’s not-”. She shook her head. “I know what’s happening. This is bad, we need to get out of here before it takes over!”

“Before what takes over? I-”

“Just follow me!” Marina immediately raced towards one of the walkways, which went to some sort of balcony by the window. Eight noticed then that there was one opposite where they had entered from, which seemed to lead to another hallway entirely. Pearl remained put with Eight by her side, frantically exchanging glances between Marina running away from her and the lift behind her.

“What are you doing? The lift is that wa-”

“The lift will be on the ground floor now, there’s not enough time for that! Just follow me!”

The machine next to them gurgled more ferociously than before. This time they followed Marina. By the time they caught up to her she was on her laptop, typing furiously.

“Now what are you doing ‘Rina!?” Pearl cried out in frustration, stopping just short of Marina with Eight right behind her.

“I’m modifying the code, ok?” She hit a keyboard shortcut. “It’s compiling now, I just need you to jump as soon as I tell you to!”

“WHAT!?” Pearl screamed “Out of the window? Are you still out of your fucking mind!? Are you trying to kill us!?”

Marina looked somewhat hurt, and yet her voice still rang out powerfully. “It’s the only way down that’s fast enough! I promise you, it won’t hurt!” She glanced at her laptop screen one more time. “It’s finished, now go!”.

Pearl seemed to be preparing another protest, but fell silent when Marina immediately took her own advice and vaulted over the railing. That was enough for Eight, who - not without a lot of fear - closed her eyes and took the leap too.

As soon as she felt herself thud down on the sand below, she opened her eyes. She felt the impact, and yet she was in no pain, and had sustained no injuries. She scrambled to her feet, back in the square and next to Marina, who was looking back up at the top floor with dread.

“There’s nobody stopping it now…” Marina muttered under her breath in Octarian, just before Pearl landed beside them, and rolled over onto her back.

All three of them looked up at the spire looming above them, as the machine’s mysterious black smoke of pixels billowed from the windows, and covered the walls of the building like an infestation, making it warp and shift all throughout it’s length. Floors appeared. Floors disappeared. Floors appeared between floors. But when all was said and done, the tower was somehow even taller than it was before, with a sickly black malice radiating from the summit.

Chapter Text

Acht was not watching the tower’s transformation.

From the shadowy backalley where an approximation of the Grizzco office stood, they stared in awe and fear at the trio, who had seemingly fallen from the sky, and were all but completely unfazed by that. Eight, Pearl…

…and Marina. After all these years, there she was again. Her hair was longer now, and her elite uniform had turned into a bright orange suit - but when the adrenaline of their escape wore off, and she finally scooped her dearly-missed companions up in her arms, her smile was the same.

(It’d be a shame to ruin that.)

They looked away, still clinging to the same shadows they had fled into as soon as the lift doors opened.

“Wait, did Acht get out in time?” Marina suddenly perked up with concern, exiting the group hug she had initiated.

(How does she know I’m here?)

(Why does she care?)

“...they went on the elevator, they should be down here...” Pearl mumbled.

“I know, so why didn't they make it?” Marina said, sounding genuinely worried about their wellbeing.

Acht gulped as Pearl scanned the surroundings.

Eventually, her eyes met their own. After a moment, they simply nodded.

“Oh!” Pearl pointed at the alley. “There they are!”

Marina turned to see where Pearl was looking, and for the first time in 8 years, they made eye contact.

(...please don’t be mad. I’m so sorry I’m so sorry I’m so sorry I’m so sorry I’m so sor-)

Marina rushed towards them with the biggest and teariest smile on her face, and practically tackled them into a hug, picking them up off the ground and spinning.

“Oh my cod! I-it’s really you! I thought I’d never see you again! Oh my coooodd…!”. She sounded like she was almost hyperventilating. “I’m so happy, I’m so-!”.

(Why is she…?)

(...I think I should just go along with it.)

Before Acht could even speak, Marina let go of them, leaving them scrambling to find their balance again as she rummaged for her phone in her blazer pocket “Oh my cod, we need a proper group selfie!!”. As she turned the phone on however, something on the screen made her eyes widen, and she seemed to forget the selfie altogether in favour of desperately waving the phone around in the air in various directions.

Acht had been more than used to Marina’s eccentricity back in their Octarian days, but this was truly a whole new level.

“...What are you doing…?” Acht mumbled.

“Hm?” Marina stopped dead in her tracks and turned to face them.

Something about this still felt surreal and terrifying. “Uh…why are you waving your phone around?” she asked again, this time with just enough volume to actually be heard.

“Oh, sorry about that! I’m just…I think I’m getting a signal from somewhere…someone must be trying to contact us, and we need to help them…”.

Chapter Text

Pearl and Eight ran towards the alleyway where Marina and Acht were, to see what was going on.

“Yo.” Pearl interjected as she slowed to a halt in front of Marina. “Hol up. We’re the only people here, ‘Rina”. She was trying to seem authoritative, looking up at Marina with her hands on her hips, but the very fact that she had to look up rather than down betrayed the effect. “It’s just us and those, like, evil fish things. Ain’t no way that this whole “signal” biz ends well for us.”

Marina didn’t stop to properly speak to Pearl, simply continuing to look for the signal. “Actually…” Marina gasped between lunges in random directions, trying to get a stronger signal, “I can tell you for certain that the Order Sector was programmed to contain far more than just the four of us…”

“Really? And when do we get the proper lowdown on what you know ‘bout this place, anyway? You’re the one who made it, right?”

Marina nodded while furiously refreshing something. “Don’t worry, once this is dealt with, and we’re sure it’s not urgent, I’ll tell you everything I know!” She continued murmuring to herself after that, in frustrated jargon-loaded signal-something-somethings in Octarian, until she suddenly took her thumbs off the touchscreen and sighed. “Oh, I forgot to-” she cut herself off with an embarrassed laugh, “ that’ll be why the signal isn’t strong enough!”

“You forgot to what exactly?” said Acht.

Marina moved her hand towards an indentation at the top of her smartphone, which looked like it could’ve been a headphone jack or a slot for a stylus, not that either of those things had come standard with smartphones for as long as Marina had been topside. “I modified my phone a while back to pick up radio signals, up to and including shortwave number stations, you remember that Pearl?”

Pearl shrugged, “Something like that, yeah...” she turned to agent Eight. “...and then the novelty wore off after like 3 minutes of listening to some posh lady reading out random ass numbers,” 

“Hey, we got a good sample out of that!” Marina defended herself, “And it’s coming in handy now! And, I mean…” she trailed off and shrugged. “...what else was I gonna do during lockdown?”

“...Lockdown?” said Acht, seemingly having missed it. Nobody answered.

“Anyway,” Marina continued, “for it to work properly I need to get the antennae out…”

“Say what now? The antennae?”

“C’mon,” said Marina, bargaining, “It’s not that weird.” She pulled out the antennae from its slot, and it must have been about a quarter of a metre once at full mast. That was hardly an apt description of it though - thing, gangly, and sad overall, it lay flaccid over the otherwise perfectly modern smartphone, reducing it to an anachronistic relic.

Marina held the phone up to her ear with an intense but directionless gaze, pinching the base of the antennae with her other hand to keep it from flopping over again. She tuned and listened intently, looking for anything that emerged from the static. Eight looked over at Pearl, who was wide-eyed and looking like she wanted to sneeze.

In the silence, something about that sad little instrument made Pearl crack up laughing. It wasn’t even remotely funny, and it seemed she was trying to reclaim her composure accordingly, but like all bad cases of the giggles, that effort just made it snowball further, until nobody even knew how it started. Eight stared at Acht with vague disappointment, as even they fell victim to it. (Though, that being said, she still thought it was good to see them in better spirits again, as she had noticed how tense Acht seemed to be now that Marina was with them).

Eight returned her attention to Marina, as something on the radio made her eyes widen - presumably she had caught something. The antennae flopped straight back down again as she took her hand away to motion at Acht and Pearl to zip it, to no avail.

Eight came closer, to listen in. Somewhere in the static, a voice was trying its best to speak clearly and professionally in cold and measured Queen’s Inklish. Whatever pressure she was under, she was keeping her cool remarkably well.

“This is Agent 2 requesting urgent backup from and NSS units in transmission range. Contact with Agent 1 has been lost and I am under fire from an unidentified hostile.”

The muffled sound of an otherworldly scream crackled through the speaker. Something lunged, and at that exact moment the unmistakable sound of a charger pierced through.

“Repeat, there has been an ambush.”

Marina looked to Agent 8, and mouthed to ask if she knew which one Agent 2 was. She shrugged. Marina had no valid reason to assume that Agent 8 knew literally everybody else with “Agent” in their name, and it wasn’t like that title had meant anything at any point after Cuttlefish and herself went their separate ways.

Marina then redirected her attention to the other two, who were still sniggering away. “Hey!” she called out firmly, “This is a distress signal! Take it seriously!” , which changed nothing for them.

“...Marina?”. The voice on the other end dropped the voice somewhat, and their Calamarian dialect became a little clearer. It could’ve only been

“Marie!?” Marina blurted. This time, Pearl fell silent, and Acht got the memo to do the same.

“Excuse me-” Marie huffed between gunshots, trying to sound in control and yet so clearly not, “-you’ll find that I’m the one asking questions here. What are you doing here? Where are you? And are you armed, for that matter?”.

“Oh! We’re uh-uhm…” Marina seemed to stumble on her words when speaking to the second half of The Squid Sisters, fidgeting like a high school girl phoning Justin after school for the first time. “...it’s a long storyyyy…”

Being more inclined to consider herself an equal (or even superior) to The Squid Sisters, Pearl wasted no time in snatching the phone/radio away from her.

“Oh gizzit here ya sap… uh…Roger. One of us is strapped.”

“Pearl? And that’s one out of how many?”

Pearl counted on her fingers. “Roger roger. One out of four.”

“Ok, and where are you!? C’mon, quick sticks!”

“Roger tha-”

“You can’t just say ‘roger’ over and over!”

“Whatever. Uh, like, Inkopolis Square? But…not?”

There was a sound like running on the other end. “‘Inkopolis Square’!? The fuck do you mean Inkopoli-”

The running stopped abruptly.

“...oh, I see. Fair enough. Right, are you girls ready to dance? Or, at least, whichever one has the gun?”

Eight retrieved her Octoshot, and lowered her stance.

“Roger that!”

“Honestly, close enough to being correct.” Marie murmured, before her charger made a deafening blast and the signal went dead.

The group realised that the sound was actually within earshot in real life, and turned around just in time to see something rippling through a straight line of yellowish ink, which started in the alleyway where the metro station should’ve been, and ended at the entrance to their own alley.

Marie emerged at the end, sporting a much smaller firearm than Eight was expecting given the sound, scarcely more substantial than a single dualie. Without even stopping to wave, she spun back around to face the way she had come, and dropped into a crouch with two hands on the pistol.

Eight ran up and approached her from the side, and when Marie glanced over and noticed her weapon, she smiled.

“Excellent choice, I think we’ll make a good team. When they come, get in there and raise some hell. I’ll back you up, don’t worry.”.

Eight nodded to her, and looked up to see the army of black fish squeezing through the alleyway in pursuit of Marie, piling on top of each other and bursting out of the other side like a flood wave. She sprayed the central area to claim her turf, threw a bomb into the heart of the mob to scatter the strong and splatter the weak, and then dived into the fray.

She emerged from the ink looking upwards, and saw one of the larger beasts, already weakened by the bomb, get blasted to pieces by a straight-shooting pulse of yellow from the back lines. Eight turned her own attention to what remained of the smaller frontrunners and started spraying them with her ink, but it was simply too many to deal with the old fashioned way. She looked over to Marie and, not knowing any better signal for it, furiously patted her scalp.

Marie looked up from her ironsights, momentarily confused, but then she seemed to get it. “Uh, yeah, you got it kid! I’ll get them off you!”. She lowered her pistol and sprinted out into the open with Eight. Once she was sure she had the mob’s attention, she returned to shooting at them as fast as her gun could handle, while Eight painted the lower end of the Square, remaining alert for the moment she felt the ‘click’, and her hair would stand on end.

“Uh, Eight? Are you gonna be much longer?” Marie cried out from the other side of the Square. “It’s just, y’know, this weapon really isn’t suited to a situation like thi-”

Eight swam back, and made the horde disappear into a fireball of ink as she hit the ground with all of her might. When the ink-cloud settled, her fist was still against the sand, and she huffed to regain her strength. She heard the click of a gun being flipped on to safety mode.

“That’ll be a no then,” she chuckled to herself, as she approached Eight with her weapon lowered. The rest of the group followed suit behind her, and Eight sat upright on the floor to meet their gaze, while they all looked at Marie instead.

“So, that’s Pearl, Marina, and…who else do I have the pleasure of speaking to?” said Marie, evidently a lot less stressed now that her assailants were gone, but still seeming a little formal and impersonal, perhaps uptight, even.

“Acht,” they introduced themself, raising their hand, “and that’s Eight. Agent 8. She’s not a talker.”

“Oh, Agent 8? Is that really you?”

“Don’t you recognise her, Agent 2?”, joked Marina.

Marie chuckled again, “Oh, of course, you heard that, didn’t you? But no, I’ve had nothing to do with Agent 8 until now. I’ve heard good things though, that NILS statue sounded like a right piece of work…”

“Hey!” Pearl interrupted, “Whadda you know about that!?”

Marie grinned, “I know everything my old man told me, normally it’s our job to keep tabs on things like that, you know. I’d say you stole my paycheck, but I was keeping busy at the time, actually.”

“Doing what exactly? And were you planning on telling us that you and Cuttlefish do, like, secret agent shit?”

“Now that you’re here as well and I presume we’re going to be teaming up, I guess you deserve to know, yes.” Something about Marie’s face shifted, Eight thought it could’ve been something like dishonesty or guilt, “And, I mean, let’s just say that it’s a lot of fucking work for me every time the zapfish just, like, magically turns up in the wash. Same goes for my cousin, you know - loved your coverage of that particular news story by the way, very urgent - you haven’t seen her now for that matter, have you?”

“Is she Agent 1?” Marina deduced.

“Doesn’t matter what you call Callie, is she here?”

“I haven’t seen her, no.” she shook her head, and everyone except Acht did the same.

“Have you seen her?” Marie peered over the crowd to address Acht, with clear urgency.

“Oh, no, I haven’t seen anybody else here, I just have no idea who we’re talking about.”

Marie rolled her eyes.

“Anyway, tell me about the secret agent shit-” Pearl resumed.

Marie sighed, “It’s all that you care about,”

“Is that why you’ve got a weird new gun and you look like you’ve just come back from a snowstorm?”

Pearl wasn’t wrong, as Marie stroked the poofy neckline of her long white coat with one hand, and admired her pistol with the other. “Honestly not a bad guess with the snow thing, but the gun has nothing to do with it, I just picked it up in a shop recently on the less civilised side of the Splatlandian border - uh, actually, for that matter, we’re not actually in Inkadian jurisdiction right now, are we?”.

Being the owner of this place, and welcoming all the firepower she could get, Marina shook her head.

“Yo, what the fuck!? You carry, Marie!?” Pearl blurted out in what seemed like horror or disgust.

“When I’m in the Splatlands I do, yes,” Marie answered matter-of-factly “Does that surprise you? I thought you were a bit of a Gangster, Pearl, what happened to that?”

“I-uh, well, I-”.

“No, I get it. To be fair, I imagine the typical crimes in your neighbourhood are more on the tax evasion, union-busting and insider trading side, not exactly violent…”

“Hey!” Pearl looked to Marina for backup, but she was completely starstruck, and was probably enjoying the show more than anything.

“Anyway, it’s just a Spattershot, nothing too crazy. I got it just because it’s the most charger-like of all the mid-range handguns. Packs a surprising punch for its size, but isn’t good for that many shots when not hooked up to a proper ink tank, and just going off of the integrated magazine...” Marie explained, as she pulled the magazine out from underneath the grip, and held it up to the light. Eight stood up to get a better look, and saw through the translucent window on the side that there was only a tiny bit of ink still sloshing around at the bottom. Marie sighed and loaded it back into the gun, before sticking her hand inside her coat to holster it. “Whatever, are you lot headed inside that big tower, then? I must say I’m not too keen on standing around out here much longer given the circumstances…”

“Weren’t you three just retreating from it? Surely we don’t go back in now, do we?” Acht made a valid point.

Marina shook her head. “It’s stabilised, we go back in now.”

The now five-member-strong team turned to enter the tower, and Marina was about to go through the doors first when Marie’s voice at the back of the pack made them all turn around.

“Oh, and what’s up with this thing?”

She was talking about the array of lockers, half submerged in the sand outside the tower.

“Why are the numbers so big? What is this, an advent calendar?” Marie crouched down next to the 36th door, on the bottom-right corner. “You’ve got 11 days too many for that,” she gestured to the empty space to the right of the 36th door and looked up to the others with a grin, “If there was a cubby here then I could keep my bloody gold, frankincense and myrrh in there!”

“Oh yeah, the lockers!” said Marina, “I was gonna say, if the program still works then Eight and Pearl should have keys for it!”

Both rummaged throughout their respective garments, and were surprised to find a key in their pocket, exactly as described.

“But how do I know which one it opens?” said Pearl, staring at the key in her hand.

“Oh, don’t worry, it’s a skeleton key!” said Marina, “The only catch is that it’s single use!”

“Oh, this game has Splatt Co. crates?” Marie groaned under her breath, “Give me a break…”

Pearl was the first to open one, opting for number 18, seemingly at complete random. The key dissolved into the sand beneath her feet the second it clicked in the lock, and she swung the door open to peer inside.

“Oh, it’s just some paper…”

She took out the loose notebook leaves and studied them, suddenly erupting with childish glee. “-oh wait, is this from Marina’s diary!?”

Marina rushed over, “I forgot I put that in there, please don’t-!”

Eight and Acht had already crowded around, gawping at the secret-laiden cursive like schoolgirls - an experience only one of them had been fortunate enough to have had.

Marie tried to get a look in, but Marina quickly informed her that she was “Like, even more banned from reading it than these three” , which she seemed to  accept, although Agent Eight could see on her face that she was amusing herself with her own assumptions on what could possibly be too embarrassing to share with your childhood hero.

Once they were finished reading, Marina snatched it away and shoved it in one of her orange blazer’s inside pockets. All eyes were on Eight as she went for the 8th door, thinking it might belong to her in some capacity. Inside it, she found a palette, which she presumed couldn’t be hers as she already had one. She held it up for the rest of the group to see.

“Oh, a palette!” Said Marina.

“Do you know anything about those things?” asked Acht.

“Mhm!” said Marina, “as I’m sure you’ve already gathered, they contain the owner’s favourite weapon, and they’re used to operate the lift, but as far as the technicalities go, it’s a physical representation of a memverse user’s soul, and…”

While Marina was talking, Eight hit one of the buttons, making the screen come to life. She saw the art, and immediately handed it to Marie, which seemed to make her breath hitch slightly as soon as she saw it.

“Sorry, I hate to interrupt-” 

Marina stopped talking, and looked at Marie.

“I know I’m the one who held us up, but can we go inside if we’re gonna be doing Squidmas morning?” she asked, with a slightly unstable pitch. “Before that, though,” she added, “I missed the best part of your explanation of these things, may I ask one quick question?”

“Yeah?”

“Are you saying that if a person has a ‘palette’, that means they’re in this…game…somewhere?”

Marina nodded.

Eight was close enough to Marie to see her starting to tremble slightly, her gaze completely fixed on the palette.

“That’s…” she tried to respond, “...that’s…uh…ok. No, that’s…fine…we can work with that. We can-”

“What’s wrong?”

“It…well, this palette belongs to Callie.”

Chapter Text

Apparently this wasn’t the first time the others had been in this tower, as all they could talk about was the fact that the lobby was completely different now, as well as grovelling about the loss of the sofas, even if the ones that apparently used to be there were rotted.

To Marie it just looked like, and always had looked like, a wide walkway to a lift, with vast but shallow waters on either side of it. An unoccupied mass of grey concrete, which looked like every commie-block in her and Callie’s neighbourhood taken apart and put back together as one unified monolith. Where the walkway widened out in the middle, they all stopped, as Marina turned to address them.

“As promised,” said Marina, “let me explain why we’re all here. As I’m sure you’re all aware by now, we’re in the Order Sector, stroke memverse, - this is a simulation, and I created it.”

Marie raised an eyebrow. She had gathered as much thus far, but now it was confirmed.

“But why? What’s the point of it?” said Pearl.

Marina pointed at her with a grin and mock-accusation, “I talked to you about this almost daily as I was working on it! Out of everybody here, you should already know!”

“Well, maybe I kinda stop listening when you start talking about the additional GPU load caused by not using pre-baked lighting, can you blame me?”

“Whatever. For the rest of you, I built this place with the purpose of it being an efficient, free-to-use system of memory restoration, for all those who have undergone sanitization - we all know what that is?”

Everyone nodded.

“And would I be wrong to assume that you two have never undergone it in any capacity, as far as you know?” She asked again, looking at Pearl and Marie in the back row. They both affirmed that they were unafflicted.

“Good! When the system is operating normally, anybody in possession of a palette would, upon completing the therapy and reaching the top floor, be given a memory belonging to them in the Kamabo database, assuming one existed. That being said, the only people here that applies to are already processed without issue.”

Eight nodded to Marina, but Marina turned her attention to Acht instead.

“Wait, has it worked for you? Are your memories back?” Marina asked her.

“Yes, but I didn’t have to do anything for it to work…” said Acht, “...why is that?”

“Good question! You underwent a different - less comprehensive - sanitisation procedure during your time in the metro, is that correct?”

“Yeah, they kept the bits of myself that I needed to do my work, and I lost everything else…” they recalled.

“Well, the good news is that when I looked at the database, I noticed that all of your memories were in their own proprietary format!” she beamed, before her face turned to momentary horror “I-I didn’t look through your memories or anything! I just…that made it easy to set all your stuff to one side, and I could complete your palette for you in advance just in case you ever showed up here…”

“Does that mean I don’t get a weapon?”

“...Well, I didn’t think you’d be needing one at the time, did I?”

Acht sighed, and laughed nervously, “Don’t think I could get anything done with it anyway.” She tried to flex her injured hand and winced. Apparently it wasn’t ready for that yet.

“Eight’s was proprietary as well, come to think of it, I just chose to leave her in with the rest because doing otherwise would kinda ruin the point of her playtesting it,” Marina muttered on the side, and Eight looked slightly irritated, presumably thinking of all the time she could have saved herself.

Then another thought seemed to come to Marina, one that made her look straight at Marie. She wondered if she was to be the recipient of good news or not.

“That all being said, keep an eye out on Callie’s palette, Marie. If she’s here somewhere and anything here is…messing with her in any way, then the palette could hold memories that would…sort that out…” she continued. The hitching in her voice was that of somebody who knew that what she was saying was not going to go down well, but it had to be done either way.

Marie drew a sharp breath. “What’s hurting Callie?”.

“N-nothing! To my knowledge nothing at all!” Marina pleaded innocent, holding her hands up, seemingly well aware of the rhetorical landmine she had just stepped on, the one thing you never said to Marie unless you were asking for trouble.

“But what on Earth are you trying to imply? What does that mean, something ‘messing with her’?”

“I’m not exactly sure, but-”

“Answer me. You said you made this place Marina, don’t bullshit me.” For now, Marie refrained from raising her voice like Marina had. There were a lot of things she was refraining from doing to the creator of this fresh hell. 

“I promise that’s all I know! This place, while I was on tour I outsourced some of the coding to a friend of mine. And the textures as well,”

“Wow, this friend of yours is really quite creative…” Marie groaned, admiring her blank white surroundings with all of the respect they warranted.

“Anyway, she’s a brilliant programmer, but she isn’t here now, and…she can never be bothered to leave comments on any of her code, so I have literally no idea what any of her stuff does. I can only really modify the things made by me.”

“Like fall damage?” Pearl

“Like fall damage, yeah.”

“And what, you’re saying that this woman’s code wants to suck Callie’s brain out or something?” Marie brought the conversation right back to the only thing about it that really interested her all that much.

“No! Not at all.” Marina once again seemed to be figuratively begging on her knees for forgiveness, “I’m just saying that I don’t have complete control here. There is, however, a…virus of sorts, that has much more power than I do, and it wants to hurt us. That’s what I was trying to get to.”

“Ok, well, tell us what you know about the virus, then.” Said Marie.

“That’s exactly what I was going to do. I just call it ‘order’, because that’s what it’s trying to achieve. It recognises this simulation’s therapeutic nature, and it’s ability to change people’s conscience, and has gone haywire abusing that. It seems to have started with us, but it wants to forcibly connect as many people as possible, and then deprive them of their free will…”

Marie shrugged, “Well, I don’t see why you two can’t get along then!”

“Hey! You were on team Order too!” Marina pointed out, truthfully.

“And we lost fair and square.” Marie pointed out, which was even more true.

“Oh, stop hounding ‘Rina, would you?.” Pearl came between them, “Marina. Does any of this, like, does any of it matter?”

“What?”

“Well, can you not just turn the computer off and go outside? If Virus-Guy gets what he wants and the memverse becomes the order zone, do I care?” Pearl put it bluntly, and then seemed to feel a twinge of regret, “I mean, I’m sorry about what happened to your passion project, but the real world is still the real world innit?”

“No. I’m trapped here too, and I wouldn’t leave if I could, because Order must be stopped.” Marina declared. “If it gets its way here, that exerts influence on the real world too. Everyone in the real world will be greyscaled - that is to say, deprived of their free will, to the point of entering a completely vegetative state…”

“Jeez, so if you die in the game you die in real life, or whatever?”

There was a silence before Marina finally answered “...In so many words, yes. Be careful out there, guys…” it was evident in her hesitance that she hadn’t given it much thought until the moment she had to say it out loud, to the faces of her liable-to-die friends.

For the first time thus far, she dropped the euphemisms. “Please don’t…die…” she added feebly, turning to hide her face as those words echoed around the chamber “…oh cod please don’t die, oh cod what have I done!?” She wailed.

The engineer of the memverse and de-facto leader of the militia sobbed into her hands. 

Pearl was the first to rush over to her aid, “What’s wrong ‘Rina?”. It made Marie smirk ever so slightly - she knew she was being tone-deaf too in doing so, but at least she was self-aware, right?

“Everything’s wrong!” Marina cried out, “This stupid little project is going to bring about the apocalypse! I should’ve known this would happen, it’s all my fault! It’s all my fault and now you guys have to clean it up and- I don’t know! I’m sorry!”

Marie, who deep down was strongly inclined to tell Marina that, yes, it was all her fault, and that she should be utterly ashamed that Callie was apparently in danger of death’s-next-door-neighbour and she couldn’t even tell Marie what she knew, realised the importance of preserving morale, and just let the conversation play out while all of Marina’s friends came to her aid.

“Don’t say that! Your intentions were good, its just this fucking virus that wants to ruin everything. And we’re gonna kick its ass together!”

“Pearlie…you don’t understand…I’m so sorry I-”

“I understand plenty, ‘Rina! Just find me a weapon and you’ll have three of the best ass-kickers in the whole world headed straight for the jewels of that bitchass Order weirdo!”

Marina managed a short laugh.

Acht was tall enough to put her hand on Marina’s shoulder. “I’m not an ‘ass-kicker’ at all, unfortunately, but…you’ve given me my life back, Marina.” Her strange, non-native cadence turned gentle and reassuring, “You and this thing you’ve created. As far as I’m concerned, that’s what matters, not the fact that it's been ruined by something you can’t control. You were always my dearest friend, and if you’ll let me, I’m always going to stand by you. I’ll do anything I can.”

“O-of course I will, Acht, thank you…” Marina sniffled.

Eight said nothing, as usual, but seemed to be doing her best to help Marina anyway.

Marie didn’t want to say anything she didn’t mean, but she was also acutely aware of the distance she was making between herself and the people that she was meant to fight alongside - the people who Callie’s life probably depended on. She patted Marina on the back and said the only thing that felt true and right:

“Nobody is going to die on my watch.”

Chapter Text

As the lift went up, Eight held on tightly to Marina’s arm and watched her working on the laptop. Marina didn’t seem to mind her presence one bit, and occasionally looked down at Eight to flash a warm, almost motherly smile.

Something had changed in her, ever since she had found out who she used to be, and just how much pain and violence she had gone through in her previous life. Looking at Pearl and Marina now, the true knowledge of just how much suffering they had gently plucked her away from made her overwhelmed with gratitude, which she had liked to think she had always had towards them, but what came before felt insignificant in comparison to the way she felt now.

And this simulation, this world that Marina had created, was what had given her the beautiful gift of that understanding. It broke her heart to have seen her dismiss it as a failure, to even regret having made it altogether. Coming here was one of the most beautiful things that had ever happened to her, even if it was now going downhill, and she was expected to fight to save the world.

She just didn’t know how to say that the idea of violence, fighting and bloodshed had never made her more sick to the stomach than it did right now. 

On the other end of the room, Marie inspected Callie’s palette, while Pearl kept trying to jump up to glance over her shoulder at it, and eventually settled for looking through her armpit.

“Didja know that that thing is modelled after a Launchpad? Like, the instrument thing with the buttons? I dunno if you’ve ever seen one, but, it’s like that.”

She turned and death-stared Pearl into standing down. “I played every instrument on our debut album, you know.” She stated, with an informative tone of voice that sounded uniquely hostile when Marie used it.

Then there was silence.

“...So we have no idea where my palette is, then?” Marie looked up at Marina.

Marina shook her head.

“And you can’t just be like, I dunno, slash-give-Marie-one-Marie-underscore-palette?”

“Don’t think so, not without access to the console at the top of the tower. I’m testing some things out now though, it might be possible, we’ll see.”

“And what’s the significance of that console?”

“If I can gain access to it, I should be able to freely summon and recalibrate palettes.”

“Recalibrate?” Acht looked up from what looked like an injured-hand-based trāțaka session.

“That means I can sever your conscience from the memverse, and delete any trace of you from the database, which will prevent Order from exerting any influence. That doesn’t kick you out though, you still have to disconnect manually.”

“Which isn’t gonna happen until we’ve gotten rid of this Order guy.” Marie added.

“Of course. Do be careful, though, Acht,” then, Marina looked down at Eight “and you Eight - especially you. You two have already been recalibrated, and, well, anything not saved will be lost…” she once again slipped into euphemisms.

Marie caught her in the act immediately, “Are you saying they might die here then? Use your words, please.”

Marina said nothing. 

The lift door opened, and Marie stepped out. As she did so, a roller materialised in her hands and immediately dragged them to the floor with its weight. she groaned.

“Ohhh I do not know how Callie manages with this bloody thing…” she murmured, trying to lift it into a resting position over her shoulder as a starting point.

It took her a moment to get used to its weight and heftiness, but she seemed to be able to perform the basic manoeuvres competently enough before long. She spent some time practising and getting a feel for the unfamiliar weapon in the practice area, before looking back at the rest of the group. “Are you not coming?”.

“Eight’s joining you,” Marina said, “I think she’s just waiting for you to stop swinging that thing everywhere!”

“Oh, sorry. You haven’t turned on friendly fire here, have you?” Marie flashed a rare grin, which Marina seemed to be relieved by.

“I’m pretty sure I haven’t! While you’re doing that I’m gonna keep testing this thing out, ok?” She twiddled the lid of her laptop up and down a little to indicate what ‘the thing’ was.

Marie’s good humour towards Marina was short-lived. “Wait, so you’re staying back?”

“Well, us three don’t have any palettes to use, do we?”

She still didn’t look impressed, but she nodded in resignation. “...fair enough. Eight seems like she’ll be more than enough company.”

“Good luck out there,” said Acht.

Eight stepped out to join Marie, and the lift doors closed behind them.

“I wonder if I still have my…” Marie plunged her hand into her coat, and retrieved the spattershot. “Nice. And it’ll be hooked up to a proper tank now, too.” She glanced over her shoulder to affirm that she had an ink tank now, and then looked at the roller she was actually meant to be using. “I’ve half a mind to ditch this thing,” she sighed, “but I suppose a woman must not rest on her laurels, right Eight?”

Eight said nothing, clutching her octoshot tighter. She suddenly loathed the way that Marie talked about waging war like it was an art or a sport, even if it wasn’t at all surprising coming from an inkling.

Marie chuckled. “I guess you’re the wrong person to ask, you’ll have been using one of those all your life, won’t you? Well, your skill speaks for itself I suppose. Come on, let’s go.”

Marie had already been briefed on her job here, though she was taken aback by the size of the portals and the quantity of bloodthirsty fish that emerged from them. Jelletons , is what Marina had called them, and the creator’s word was final. They appeared and made pursuit immediately, as the tower was done trying to pretend to be anything more than a trap trying to eat her alive. As soon as she was in the arena she spied a vantage point she fancied, then the weight on her shoulders reminded her that she didn’t have a charger, and she cursed under her breath.

She saw Eight charge forward to face one of the hordes, and slammed her roller down on the ground to make a beeline straight for the other one. She mowed down the first few smaller jelletons effortlessly, and just as she was starting to understand why Callie enjoyed doing this, she found herself face to face with a larger jelleton which hadn’t been run over. Its breath stank of the abyss and its face dripped black ink like sewage. 

She sensed that she had made a terrible mistake, and this was affirmed when she was immediately surrounded on all sides by beasts of comparable size. Best case scenario she would have her head bitten clean off by one of them, worst case scenario all four of them were about to team up and slowly rip her limbs from their sockets. 

She threw a sub weapon at her feet, not even knowing what it was, hoping that literally anything that wasn’t a squid beakon might give her some kind of opening to survive. The burst bomb exploded before she could even get a look at what it was, and she barely even processed that the explosion had happened in time to take advantage of it. The explosion hardly lifted the beasts off of the ground, but she quickly remembered the strongest advantage of a burst bomb, and threw a second bomb at the one in front of her, juggling it just about far enough into the air to create an opening to escape through the ink on the floor.

She never wanted to be this “up close and personal” again.

She looked to see what eight was doing, and she seemed to be handling herself quite well. Marie ran forward to put some distance between herself and her own aggressors, and took out some of the bigger threats with a carefully-aimed spattershot. 

She returned her attention to the four jelletons pursuing her, and finished off one of them with a formidable vertical flick of her roller, which was awfully painful to pull off, but she supposed she could get used to it. The rest were dealt with by another burst bomb, which made them easy targets for the spattershot while they were thrown up in the air.

She was surprised by how much fun she was starting to have in her cousin’s shoes after the initial mistakes, and that thought gave her an idea.

She filled up her ink tank, and ran over to Eight.

“Eight! Wanna try an old trick Callie and I used to use on salmon runs?”

Eight nodded, and Marie hurriedly gave her the plan, which was incredibly simple and hardly a ‘trick’, before slamming her roller down and rushing forward, taking a moment off of her flight path to pass in front of every jelleton she came across and get its attention.

She couldn’t look back and see how many were following her and how many weren’t, but she turned to go towards Agent Eight, and gave her a thumbs up. Eight gave one back, so it must’ve been all of them. Eight hurled a splat bomb at them and started shooting relentlessly, and Marie turned to face them again before her tank could run dry.

But then she realised that she wouldn’t even need ink. She felt it in the blood rushing all throughout her body.

And that was how she found out that her special for this mission was a kraken royale. She charged through the horde itself once, before remembering that she was completely invulnerable - and wouldn’t be for much longer. She went straight for a portal, completely ignoring anything that tried to stand in her way, and eliminated it effortlessly.

She returned to her normal self just in time to spin on a heel and look at the explosion, and to see that Eight had understood that as an invitation to go straight for the other one. Marie ran to her aid with her boots on the ground, silently bemoaning just how little turf she had painted.

As soon as she knew she was in range she hurled both of her burst bombs at the portal, before emptying what was left of her ink supply through her spattershot. Eight threw a final splat bomb, and then it was done.

Upon the destruction of the final portal, two identical colour chips spawned in. Eight picked one up and snapped it into her palette, and looked up at Marie expectantly. Marie hesitantly did the same with her own chip and her own palette. The two walked back to the lift, and Marie offered Eight a high five before they went back in, which they accepted once they realised what it was.

“Quite an impressive performance out there, Eight, I’m proud of you.”

Upon re-entering the lift, Eight flashed the other three a thumbs up, making them smile.

“So you two are vibing with each other then? And the roller didn’t do your back in?” Pearl was leaned against the opposite wall to the one Marie went straight for.

Marie nodded, smiling. “I can assure you my back handles a lot more weight than your own, and your Eight here is worthy of her honorary agent designation. And what about you three, did you have a nice gossip in here, or…whatever it is you do?”

Chapter Text

The three waited until Eight and Marie were out on their next mission before saying anything.

“I don’t like the way she talks to us.” Pearl immediately snapped, and she threw her back against the wall and crossed her arms. “I mean, who the fuck does she think she is, anyway?”

“The biggest pop star of at least the last two decades, if not all time?” Said Marina, still on her laptop and not looking at Pearl, “A combat veteran? One of the only people here who’s actually risking her neck?”

“Oh, I know you bought their licensed calendar or whatever, but don’t give me that shit about either of the Squid Sisters. Callie, Marie, Agent 1, Agent 2, I don’t give one, we’re the majority, if the…whatever they call their little squad…”

“The NSS?” Marina filled in.

“Yeah the NSS. If anybody from the NSS wants to join our gang, then they gotta play by our rules. I’m all about respect, and why aren’t you? Don’t let anybody walk all over you or act like this is your fault, ‘Rina, I don’t care if they rescued a big fish once or twice.”

“They wrote Fresh Start though.” Marina was still typing away.

“Oh, I don’t care if they wrote Fresh Start either. I don’t like the way Marie treats us. You’ll probably find that she didn’t actually write Fresh Start anyway. You know what those two are like, bloody industry plant girl-groups, just another part of the system, with a massive tag team of writers and producers that do everything for them. No respect for proper ends music. If she heard my bars she’d probably shit herse-“

“Marie wasn’t lying, she composes and plays all of the lead synth lines herself, and she did everything on the debut. Trust me, I read the liner notes.”

Pearl rolled her eyes. “Oh, you would.”

Acht shuffled between the two women, “So is anyone gonna tell me what this is all about? I’m gathering this Marie person we’re tagging along with is a musician…and a secret agent…?” 

“You’ve never heard the Inkantation!?” Marina finally stopped, and looked at Acht like she had no idea what they even were. They hated it.

“What…no!? What’s the Inkantation and why would I have heard it?”

“Well, I assumed that that’s why you’re not under the influence of any mind control…?”

“No, I’m free because apparently you three blew the Kamabo database to smithereens and the entity controlling me is dead?” She buried her face in her good hand and sighed, “Can you just rewind to the start for me, please?”

“Ok, the woman who's been tagging along since we first got out of this place is Marie Kensaki. It’d seem she’s one of the first people that Order has trapped here, and she strongly believes that her cousin, Callie Kensaki, is here too. Together those two are ‘hot shit’ , as Pearl would put it-”

“-I really wouldn’t-”

“-they’re the Squid Sisters, a really, really popular band up on the surface. And, I mean, I wasn't aware of this either until literally today, but apparently they’re highly trained secret agents too, just on the side. You remember Captain Cuttlefish?”

“The illegitimate son of the great octopus god, born from a hedonistic love affair with an inkling peasant woman, who went into battle with the rightful heir of Inkadia one hundred years ago and bested him with foul tricks, leaving a trail of merciless genocide in his wake?” Acht said, moreso reciting it from memory than actually speaking.

“...Cod, I forgot how weird our education was down there. Ok, pretty much none of that is true, but like, he is a good sniper. And those two apparently trained under him personally, I mean, he’s their granddad. So…yeah…tough stuff…”

“Well, he was a good sniper, did nobody tell you he’s in physio now?” Pearl interrupted.

“He got completely dried out!?” Marina gasped. The look in her eyes made it seem like she was almost fond of him. “Why do you know that?”

“Word on the street. My dealer was pretty upset about it, Craig’s been a pretty big name in the local drill music scene ever since he got out of the metro.”

“The guy you met in the metro was captain cuttlefish?”

Pearl and Marina both nodded.

“...And he didn’t spit on your face?”

“No?” Said Marina “He was a little old-fashioned, but he was alright, even after he found out I’m an Octarian refugee.”

“Wow. Small world.”

Marina nodded, “Anyway, I don’t know if Marie’s bluffing or what, but she-”

“She’s totally bluffing. No way she rescued the zapfish, certainly not twice. She might’ve been involved in some way, but she won’t have been out there fighting,” Pearl weighed in again.

“I don’t know about that Pearl, she seems pretty serious about fighti-”

“Marie is the one who stole the zapfish back!?” To Acht, the world was starting to feel smaller than a postage stamp. Sure, the Kensaki family may not actually be a brutish band of pillaging rapists, but they were absolutely everywhere all the same.

“Yeah! You remember that day, don’t you Acht?” Marina asked Acht.

“It was the day you gave up on us for good, ‘course I remember it.” Acht immediately regretted how spiteful that had sounded.

“Oh, yeah, I suppose it was, I’m sorry…but do you not remember that song that was playing?” Acht was thankful Marina had avoided the subject.

“If there was something playing then I didn’t hear it, I just remember having my headphones on and listening to that old Selling Inkland by the Pound cassette you had lent me on loop.”

“I think you’d recognise it if you heard it now!” Marina looked back down at her laptop, and Acht peered over to see her alt-tab away from the game engine she made the memverse in, open her web browser, and look the Calamari Inkantation up on Gootube. Acht listened intently and Marina moved her thumbs so that they weren’t covering the tinny speakers on the laptop.

“Now that’s odd…I’ve definitely never heard this before, but I also definitely feel like I know it. Like, you could pause it now and I could tell you exactly what comes next, or something.”

“Mhm, it’s the Calamari Inkantation! It’s a folk song that’s been passed down for generations, and recent research suggests that it’s hardcoded into all our DNA, and it has a universal power to inspire dreams of freedom in all who hear it - the Squid Sisters just so happened to record the best version of it of all time!” Marina infodumped without taking a single breath until the very end.

“I mean, it’s pretty catchy…what are you saying though?”

“That night, the Squid Sisters  performed the Inkantation, and it freed the souls of all those who heard it, including me. It sounds cliche, but their music saved me…it really, really did save me. I owe my life to them…”

“‘Rina,” Pearl’s voice was a lot firmer than it usually was. “I don’t care what it did, you don’t owe them shit for some stupid cover of an old folk song. My dying grandma could have whistled it to you and it would’ve had the same effect.”

“I’m not gonna argue about this with you, Pearl.”

“Dafuq? I’m on your side here ‘Rina! I’m tryna tell you that you’re better than her, and we can’t put up with her shit just because you reckon you owe her your life or something. You really don’t.”

“I don’t wanna hear anything about ‘sides’, ok? This is world-threatening danger that we’re in, and the only way we’re gonna beat it is by working together. Those two are risking their lives out there…”

“And I’d be risking mine too if I could, but none of us have weapons!”

“Well, hold that thought. I’m getting the hang of this now. I’m testing the limits of what we can and can’t do…” Marina typed something into her IDE. The only word Acht recognised were Pearl’s name and ‘palette’. “…ok…your one doesn’t work, as expected let me-“

Marina’s palette appeared out of thin air in the centre of the room, and fell straight down onto the metal floor with a flat clang.

The lift door opened, and Marie and Eight joined the other three in being taken aback by the sight of it. Marie was the first to perk up.

“Oh, nice going Marina! Me and Eight’ll take all the help we can get out there.”

Chapter Text

Marina's eyes widened at Marie's suggestion “Oh…you mean-“

“Well, yeah? You’ve got your weapon now, right? Are you not coming along with us on the next floor?”

“Well, you see, while you were out there I’ve been rereading my code, and getting a feel for how it all works and what I can and can’t do. On the next floor I should be able to tip the scales in your favour, preeeeettttyyyy big-time at that.”

Marie knew where this was going, “…but you’d have to stay behind with your laptop?”

“…I’d have to stay behind with my laptop.” Marina nodded, making Marie roll her eyes.

She turned back around to face the lift doors, ready for them to open up onto the next trial, but just before leaving she turned back to face Marina one last time. “And you’re absolutely one hundred per-cent confident that we’ll be stronger with you back here on your laptop than we would be with you out there with that brella of yours?”

“...Confident.”

There was no use pushing it further, “…well alright then.”

This better be worth it.

On the battlefield, everything was what Marie presumed must have been the usual affair. There was a portal, there were those jelleton things chasing her, and Eight was doing a pretty good job at everything except communication. She thought she was doing alright herself, but sensed in the back of her soul that she was outnumbered, that they were coming faster than the roller could fend them off, and that things could get ugly quite quickly if the situation was allowed to prolong itself.

“Eight! Requesting backup!” Marie called out across the field as she adjusted to prioritise self-preservation, using the roller exclusively as a tool to put as much distance between herself and the enemy as possible. Eight was certainly dependable, as Marie heard octo-shot fire shaking off her pursuers, and turned to rush towards it, flicking her roller and swimming up the wall onto the vantage point Eight had secured.

“Nice one,” Marie drew her sidearm and joined Eight in picking off the enemy. Eight’s fully automatic fire was sprayed mercilessly across the entire swarm, while Marie prioritised large targets that she knew could be taken out in one fully-charged shot.

But then one of her shots didn’t land. It didn’t hit the target, it didn’t hit anything, it just floated curiously in the air before her in the middle of its flight path. She turned to share in a bemused stare with Eight, who seemed to be in the same predicament as her.

But then she felt light on her feet, she felt herself floating away from the ground beneath her, and she knew exactly what was going on.

It was as though gravity had been pulled right out from under her feet, or the entire facility was suddenly underwater.

Was this Marina’s doing?

Marie almost hoped it wasn’t, because it wasn’t helpful. Like every inkling she had never swam in her life, and her opponents were an overwhelming, fast-approaching, mob of fish.

Suspended motionless in the air, Marie wondered what there was that Eight and herself could even do to stay alive, let alone clear the trial. She reached towards Eight just for something to hold onto, but Eight flinched away, her expression unreadable beyond a basic determination to stay alive no matter what.

And then, instead of floating freely, she felt as though she were somehow falling up . The chamber had no ceiling that she could see, only grey fog. She tried not to dwell on the prospect of splatting against whatever roof might be on the other side of the cloud, because the ink from her spattershot had velocity once more, and her foes were no longer in their natural habitat. With Eight’s help, she could stave them off and make them lose the ground they had gained in the zero gravity.

And then all of the Jelletons died simultaneously.

Marie looked down and realised that the portal had been pulled off of its chain.

Huh. Not such a bad idea after all, Marina.

But then the gravity was returned to normal, and Marie and Eight were plummeting back down to the ground. Marie tried to be hopeful that this wasn’t the full extent of Marina’s plan - because it would kill both of them - but knew that she needed a backup plan too, just in case Marina really hadn't thought this through.

“Eight!” She cried out to her comrade in freefall, “Try to land in the ink! I don’t know if it’ll work but it’s our only hope!”

Both agents repositioned themselves as best they could above the sporadic puddles on the battleground, and fired their weapons on the off chance that the ink would splat against the ground before they did. Once Marie was satisfied she had done all she could, she closed her eyes.

But the impact never came.

When she opened her eyes, she was floating a few metres above the ground, no longer at terminal velocity. Then the gravity returned to normal once more and she was dropped onto her back in a red puddle of her own ink. She looked up and saw more of it raining down from above, presumably being what she had tried to shoot back when the gravity first changed. It landed on her cheek and the end of her overcoat. She sighed, and didn’t get up.

The fatigue from the previous battles was coming on strongly, and she was content to lay there for a while.