Disclaimer: I do not own Subnautica. Unknown Worlds does.

Thanks to DevoutRelic for editing.

Chapter published 8/24/17.

Estimated Time to Death: 30 days, 17 hours, 34 minutes

Varien

I am an idiot, he thought.

Varien swam at the outskirts of a kelp forest, a dead peeper in each hand. His flippered feet kicked at the water. Above him the surface was grainy and disturbed as rain fell. Within the dense creepvine, roaring shadows danced about. He gulped nervously, feeling a painful lump of illness in his throat as he did. "Come out come out," he muttered, glancing left and right. "I've got something for you."

This was a dumb idea. Retarded, even. There was no reason for him to try hand-feeding a stalker to get at its teeth. Sure the Degasi crew had done that, but there were better ways! He could take his exosuit and punch them, then get their teeth that way. But no. He'd gotten the idea of 'feed the stalkers to get their teeth' in his head and now he was out here.

To add insult to injury, none of the stalkers were coming for him. What, was he not appetizing enough? Maybe if he drew closer?

The image of a bleeder latched onto his arm flickered through his mind. His body chilled at the thought. No, maybe he wouldn't go closer.

Did he even need stalker teeth? He needed them if he wanted to make the Cyclops submarine, but did he need that? Varien wasn't sure. Maybe it was too large and clunky. Or maybe better safe than sorry.

Speaking of 'sorry', one of the stalkers finally noticed him. The creature, a cross between a bottlenose dolphin and a shark, roared and swam towards him, jaws wide open to show off its impressive dentistry. Varien's heart pounded, and he prepared to call out his seaglide and make a break for it at any second. But then, to his amazement, the stalker began to slow down.

It closed its mouth and growled, eying him with a tiny pupil. He held out his dead peepers and let go, letting them float in the water. Alright, would -

CHOMP!

"Ah!" he yelped, jerking away when the stalker's long mouth opened wide and snapped down just as hard, swallowing both peepers at once with a blood-curdling crunch. Varien's voice came in strained gasps, his heart pounding hard enough to send numbing chills through his chest.

The stalker eyed him again, hissed quietly in its throat, then turned off. Its tail beat up and down against the water, not at all like Volara's side-to-side swaying. The fish vanished into the gloomy kelp, and just when Varien was wondering if that was it, it came back with something in his mouth.

A massive piece of titanium salvage. The metal hung lopsided in its jaws, but sure enough the stalker was bringing him a piece of metal. It slowed to a stop next to him and opened its maw, dropping the wreckage at his feet. A pair of its teeth were wrenched out, stuck in the metal, and a third tooth fell to the side. The stalker eyed him expectantly.

"Uh, good boy?" he stammered, summoning a cooked boomerang from his suit. Varien presented the fish to the stalker. It gave a quiet keening roar and moved forward, opening its jaws. His breath skipped as it took the boomerang out of his hand with uncanny gentleness and swallowed it whole. Then it turned tail and headed back into the forest.

With the shark-like thing gone, Varien pulled the teeth out of the salvage. They were massive, nearly as large as his forearm and pearly white. The teeth looked like curved cones with points sharp enough to cut diamond. He put the three away into his suit, and as an afterthought pocketed the metal salvage too. Just then, the stalker came back with another piece of salvage in its jaws.

The ritual repeated itself. It gave him the salvage, this time dropping only a pair of its pearly teeth. Varien pulled out his last piece of food - a dead holefish - and presented it to the stalker. If it'd been gentle last time, it was downright adorable this time, nibbling the fish out of his hand and then even nuzzling him with the side of its lengthy mouth. He could easily imagine someone keeping a stalker as a pet, with some effort.

But he wasn't going to. He took the two teeth and, when the stalker vanished back into the forests, got away as quick as he could. He didn't want to find out what it would do when it returned with metal and he had no fish to give.

Once back in his base, he got to work. A quick scan confirmed that, sure enough, they were exactly what he needed to make enameled glass. The next few hours he worked hard, dancing around his fabricator and storage lockers. Copper ore into copper wire, into computer chips, into wiring kits. Mushrooms into batteries into power cells. Titanium into ingots, ingots into - after a trip to the mushroom forest for lithium - the super-strong alloy plasteel. Varien worked and worked, wracked with illness all the while. He hoped he wasn't keeping Volara waiting.

At long last, he swam to the surface and unleashed his mobile vehicle bay. He hopped on, rain battering him, and tapped on the console, bringing up Cyclops Submarine. It was supposed to be a vehicle famed for being able to be piloted solo. Which was good, because 'solo' was his middle name.

The quartet of drones flew up, shining their lights to form the holographic sketch of the Cyclops.

His jaw dropped. It was huge, stretching all across his vision from left to right. It was bigger than an ampeel, maybe even bigger than a Reaper Leviathan. He couldn't make out many details with the hologram's shimmering lights, but there was a dome at the front, and some array of sensors on top of the center.

Piece by piece, the drones went to work. Metal and glass and wiring took form, cracking and creaking as the Cyclops took form over the course of half an hour. When it was finally done, the fabrication robots flew to a safe distance and gravity took hold of the submarine. With a titanic splash, it slammed into the water and sent a tidal wave over him, knocking Varien off his vehicle bay and into the ocean.

There, beneath the waves, he saw it sink a short distance before coming to a stop. "The Cyclops," his PDA spoke. ", is designed to be operated by a three-person crew. Only experienced helms-people should attempt to pilot this vehicle solo."

... right, he should've known. The Cyclops could be piloted solo, but it wasn't recommended. Well, he'd just have to make do.

Rubbing his hands together giddily, Varien swam to the underside of the plasteel behemoth. He swam along its long body until he found a hatch near the front, leading straight into the water. He tapped a gloved fist against the hatch, which opened up automatically. Varien gripped the inside and pulled himself in.

A computerized man's voice greeted his ears. "Welcome aboard, Captain! All systems are online."

"Yeah," he said happily. "That's right. I'm the captain."

He'd arrived in a cramped, claustrophobic room. The hatch closed itself beneath him, leaving him looking around the brightly lit white room. A single hatch on one side was the only way forward. He opened it, pushing his weight into the heavy metal door to open it up and stumble into the next room.

"Oh stars above," he said, awed. The ceiling was tall and broad. A ladder to his left lead up to a second floor, and to his right were five lockers sunken into the hull of the submarine. Varien walked forward to the end of the room, where there was a door that led further. On the other side of it was another room, with a checkerboard gray floor, glass ceiling, and what looked like moonpool arms hanging from it. After that room was a ramp that sloped upward, with two ladders on either side of him at the end.

Breathless, he climbed the ladder to his left and arrived in what was surely the engine room. Sticking out from the far end of the room and into the other was a colossal cylindrical turbine, sitting still and slicing the room in half. On either half were three receptacles, each holding a power cell for a grand total of six. In the wall next to him was a tiny fabricator sunken into the wall. He opened it up and examined its options.

"Power efficiency module, docking repair module, cyclops pressure compensator," he read aloud. Didn't he have a power efficiency module? He thought he did, from his journey in the Aurora's ruins. Eh, he'd get it later. The pressure compensator was more important.

He brought up his PDA and released more materials from his suit. A red shard of aluminum oxide, a computer chip, so on. He fed them into the Cyclops fabricator and, after a few minutes him staring excitedly at it, the lasers finished making a tiny metal tube with an orange cap. He grabbed it and headed out the engine room's right door.

Now, he stood above the loading station. There was a hatch in the glass floor, and behind him was another hatch in the wall where he could load decoys. Another door led him back to the engine room, on the other side. There was no fabricator there, but rather a small console with a readout of his Cyclops. How much energy it had left, current crush depth, menus upon menus with charts upon charts. Beneath the console was a station with six empty holes. He plugged one with the pressure compensator. A subtle shift indicated his Cyclops's material rearranged itself to be better suited for deep diving.

He left the engine room for good, and strode past the hatch in the glass floor. Fire extinguishers clung from the walls. There was another small room after that, and beyond that a hatch led to the bridge of his staggeringly large submersible.

The first thing that got his attention was the massive glass dome at the far side of the bridge. It gave him a perfect view of the shallows, inundated by floodlights. Right before it was the steering wheel, and beside it a holographic display of the submarine itself. All around the room were charts and scans with wildly flashing lights, but a certain few drew his attention. The first was a second hologram of the Cyclops, with the words 'damage readout' beneath it in orange. The second was a hardlight touchscreen to turn the interior and exterior lights on or off.

Last was a customization panel. Varien grinned and slid the color sliders around, setting his Cyclops to be camouflaging green and blue, with the name 'Cyclops' on the side in pale teal.

With shaking hands and short breath, he excitedly stepped to the steering wheel and gripped it in both hands. There was a glowing white compass in front, and he sounded the horn giddily.

Now that he was at the... helm? Now that he was at the helm, symbols appeared on the inside of the glass dome. Battery life, a bar on the side showing a way to reduce the noise made by the engines in addition to camera feed. He flicked his right hand at the camera feed. Just like that, the entire glass dome shifted to show him the signal from one of three mounted cameras on the submarine's outside. He flicked his hand again, changing the glass back to normal.

On the left was another button to power on the engines. Varien glanced at it, but stepped away. First things first.

He slid down the ladder, stumbled at the bottom, and dropped out the hatch. Varien swam away from the Cyclops, marveling at the way its newly-colored form dominated the shallow waters. In record time he was back in his shelter, fishing out the power module. He also grabbed a first aid kit, in addition to the purple alien artifact his fabricator had spent twenty hours making yesterday. With all those in store he climbed in his exosuit.

Varien stomped his way under the Cyclops with his suit, and the submarine's bottom opened right up, flooding the lower floor with water. He pressed on the thrusters to soar up, where he was picked up by the arms and suspended just like in the moonpool. The hatch beneath him closed and the water drained. He opened the top hatch and got out.

Right. Now he was ready.

After another quick check to make sure he had food and water, as well as putting in the efficiency module, he was ready. He turned on the engine, giving him even more data on his sub. Engine temperature, his current speed, ways to change the speed, he felt like his head was going to explode!

Focus. Stick to the basics. He flicked his hand to the option for normal speed -

"Engine: Powering up!" the Cyclops boomed, making him cringe under the volume.

Anyway. Normal speed, turn the wheel left. He had a good idea of which way the blood kelp was after being there so often, so it shouldn't be too hard to find his way -

CLANG!

The entire submarine jerked to the side, sending him spilling onto the floor. "Ow," he groaned, pulling himself back to the wheel. An ear-grating siren beeped in his ears, and on the holographic Cyclops to his right were red, flashing lights around the back end.

He'd hit a rock.

"Alright, alright." He turned the wheel back, ending the sirens. "Let's try it again. Forward..." The Cyclops lurched, making him nearly lose his footing again. He stopped after a moment, then tried to turn. This time, no rocks slammed into the hull. "Better, better. Alright, forward again - "

CLANG! "Damn it!" Now a rock underneath him. He rose up slightly. "Forward again, take two."

That time it went much better. But it wasn't long before, while piloting his submarine -

CLANG!

SLAM!

SMASH!

"I'm starting to see why they suggest three people for this thing," he muttered. A glance back at the damage display hologram showed a clean bill of health, thankfully. Plasteel was something, alright.

Varien's difficulties mostly ended once he got out of the shallows and into open waters. There, he was free to let his mind black out while he drove to the chasm. Sometimes a spadefish or a school of biters would slam into the glass dome and slide off in a shower of gore. He wondered, idly, what place Volara had found. So far the sparse reef and jellyshroom caverns were both busts.

Third time's the charm? He hoped so. He'd only been sick five days and he felt ready to keel over.

Before long the Cyclops cast its shadow over the mushroom forest, and then the chasm itself. He looked closely and saw a flare of blue light above the plains of black rock; Volara, waiting for him.

He hoped he hadn't kept her waiting.

Volara

It seemed her human had no end of surprises in store for her.

While she swam in circles, worrying herself green, she'd expected him to come along the sandy floor in his suit. What she hadn't expected was for a rock thrice her size to descend from the Above. It was long and round, with a bubble of clear material taking the place of a head. She could see inside through the dome, and standing there was Varien, holding something in his hands.

She relaxed her swim bladder and rose to his height, staring at him incredulously. "Varien," she said, all thoughts of talking him down gone from her head. What was this? When had he made it? What was it for? What magical things could it do? "What is this?" she asked, giving him a moment to retrieve his translating mini-shocker.

"This is my unknown submarine," he said proudly, puffing out his chest with not-water. "Uh, unknown. Cy-clops. It's named after a mythical creature that looks like a human, but with just one eye in the middle of its head."

"This is what you needed all that time to build, isn't it?" she wondered, circling away from the clear dome. She went a lap around the construct of rock and metal, taking in its scale. It was large, larger than her. Maybe with this he could... no. She had to stall him. Volara went back to Varien's field of view. "So, what can it do?"

He shrugged. "I'm still learning myself. I've got my Prawn docked inside, I know that much. Lots of food and water, too. I should be good for a week or something. So, where - "

"How did you make it? I understand making something large takes longer, but was that all?" she interrupted, hearts pounding within her body.

"Well I had to get some stalker teeth, that was a real pain. But - wait, no. We're getting off track. Volara, you said you thought you knew a way down?"

No, no no no, he was being too direct! "Um, Varien, about that," she started. "I was thinking about that." She shook her head, swaying her entire body from side to side. "I don't think we should go down the way I was thinking. It's a bad idea. It's, uh." Um, um, think of something! She'd had an entire day to think of excuses! "It's caved in, no way past it!" No no no, stupid! That was the best she could come up with?!

"Really?" He raised one of the furry ridges over his eyes. "That's okay, I have my Prawn and you're super strong, right? We can just move them out of the way."

Aaaaaahhh! "No, I mean it's really caved in! In fact there's no cave left! It's all gone!" she said, coiling up.

"Wait," he said, leaning in. He pressed his face against the glass dome. "Volara, you're not scared of going down there, are you?"

"Yes! No! Of course not!" She raised her head proudly, but her swim bladder tightened up involuntarily and she sank a bit. "I'm a shocker, we're not scared of anything!"

"Alright, so can you just lead me there then? We can figure out a way past. We need to get there, Volara!"

"Let's look for another way, then!" she begged. "We don't need to go that way, i-i-it's probably not even that deep!" she insisted frantically.

His voice turned still. "Volara, show me where it is." She whined, arcs of electricity flashing and zapping around her. "Please," he pleaded, contorting his face into a pathetically adorable form.

She trembled, tensed up, then released a cry into the water. "Fine! Just." She sighed and turned tail. "Follow me," she muttered, leading him into the unclaimed lands. Volara heard his massive construct of metal humming and beating at the water as it followed her. They passed around vines and rocky cliffs, deeper and deeper until they neared her territory. But instead of swimming forward, where they'd come across the lifepod that had landed in her home, she lead him straight down and turned him around to face the way they'd come.

They came face to face with a gargantuan tunnel carved into the cliffs; they'd swum right above it on the way over. Stalactites hung from the roof of the cavern, like the teeth of a massive predator. Nodes of strangely colored rocks decorated the insides, and a mouthful of bone-fish swarmed the inside. "Well, there it is," she said at last.

"It's not caved in." He turned to face her and she cringed away. "Volara, what's gotten into you?"

"It's! We can't! Ah! Don't you get it?! That's the entrance to the Underworld! The cursed land of the dead! We don't belong there!" she insisted. "If we go in we won't come back!" she explained, leveling her head at him. "We have to find some other way because if we go in we're both dead! Or worse!"

"The... Underworld?" he repeated dumbly.

"Yes! I don't know where you humans go when you die, but when we die it's down there. It's no place for us so we have to leave here and have to find another way to your facility or whatever because we won't find anything of value down there! Nope, nothing! Just the spirits of the dead!"

"Spirits of the - Volara, are you serious?" he asked incredulously. "Ghosts aren't real. It's probably just a bunch of predators down there. Let's get going." His Cyclops started moving forward, past her. Volara did the only thing she could think of.

She attacked it.

Her jaws clamped down on the metal just above the clear dome, crunching and tearing with a horrific grinding noise. She pulled away, leaving a shower of sparking wires behind. Varien screamed something in song, but while she couldn't see the translation he did stop moving. Something clanged inside the Cyclops for a moment, and a moment later the human was in the water with her, swimming up with a tiny bit of metal in his hands.

He sang something lowly and angrily, and she backed off to let him approach the spot where she'd bit his vehicle. He held the tool to it and its end sparked to life. Over long minutes, he welded it back together and the damage was fixed. He looked her way, glaring lightly. "Varien, look, I'm sorry but we cannot go down there!" He didn't have his translator with him, but that didn't matter. He didn't need it to understand her. "It was a mistake for me to even bring it up, I wasn't thinking. Please, let's just go look for it somewhere else!"

The human looked her way, then sighed and rested his tool on the ground. He kicked off and swam towards her, closer and closer until she couldn't talk without hurting him. Varien came up to her mouth and wrapped his arms around her head, looking down at her and singing quietly and reassuringly. She knew he was trying to calm her, but he didn't get it! Going down there was suicide!

He kept singing, rubbing his hands around the outside of her shell hard enough for her to feel it. Slowly but surely, she relaxed and let herself lay on his Cyclops, eyes closed and heartbeats slow.

Eventually he let go and went a safe distance from her. She rose up from the metal floor. "Alright," she muttered. "Let's at least try it."

Varien nodded and swam back inside his vessel. She headed around to the clear dome, where he used the metal-shocker to speak. "Thank you, Volara. Look, if you're so scared we'll just poke our heads in, and if we see anything we can't handle we'll head right back out. I mean, what in there could hurt you? You said it yourself, you're a shocker. What are you scared of?"

"Shockers," she said simply. "That's what I'm scared of."

He tilted his head. "Uh, there are shockers down there?"

"Their spirits are," she explained, swimming back and forth in front of him. "The wicked and vile of our kind, their souls are not content down there. Slowly but surely they coalesce until dozens, hundreds of spirits come together in a soul conglomerate, which rises from the Underworld to wreak terrible havoc upon the living. A body clear as water, a head with blades each as long as one of our kind, countless eyes! That's what I'm scared of. Multiple, murderous shockers at once."

"Volara, you're being silly. There's no such thing as this 'soul conglomerate' you're talking about!" he said, leaning forward.

She raised her head up and sparked angrily, glaring at the stupid human. Didn't he hear anything she just said?! "Of course there is! I have a fryhood friend, Ohmaron. His parents killed the most recent one! They fought the conglomerate for days on end, just the two of them, and destroyed it all on their own! They're as real as you and I!" she insisted.

"Riiight," he drawled. "Did you see it?"

Her head flushed with blood and she looked away, embarrassed. "Well... no. I was a fry, my mother had us hide in a cave while it was active. But it's real!" she insisted, turning back to him. "Ohmaron saw it!"

Varien took a big breath of not-water and let it out. "Alright, whatever you say. Let's just go. You can stick by my ship if you're that scared," he teased, moving forward.

"You'd be scared too if you had any sense," she muttered, swimming alongside him. Volara sunk and swam in the shadow of his Cyclops, trembling quietly. She hated herself for this. She was a shocker, she wasn't supposed to ever know fear! Green-blasters, crawlers, chompers, everything cowered before her kind. But this was something different. This was the realm of the dead. The cursed darkness from which the Green Weakness came bubbling forth. She didn't want to go down there, this was suicide!

But there was nothing she could do. Varien just kept sliding down, the tunnel dipping away beneath them. The feeble light from outside vanished. They went deeper and deeper, the water around her cooling rapidly until every current was a refreshing chill. She looked around carefully, her gills pumping shallowly. Trickles of something thick and green oozed out of the walls, tumbling down to the ground and forming a stream, thicker and thicker the deeper they went.

She didn't want to think what it might've been.

A colossal vine-root heralded the end of the land of the living. Beyond it the tunnel opened up into a titanic cave, with a column of stone letting them choose to go left or right. Varien turned his machine right, swimming above the ever-thickening stream of green... stuff. Then the two of them entered the cave, the Underworld.

Volara's eyes flicked left and right as she tried to take in as many details as possible. It was dark, with the only light coming from what looked like gnarled black strands that sprouted from the ground, twisting and turning and ending in glowing white spots. They filled the cavern halfway to the brim. The green fluid was everywhere, forming 'puddles' on the flat ground. Any place free of the fluid was dotted with rock-hard plants, shaped like squat white domes with smaller domes within them. Bone-fish filled the water, either swimming around alone or in thin schools.

A deep wail sounded. Volara screamed, swimming up into the water. It was then that she saw them, the spirits of dead shockers.

Some of them were flat and blue, with transparent skin that let her see structures within them. They flapped wings through the water, moaning and wailing deeply. She couldn't see any mouths on them, let alone any teeth. Their eyes were simply two glowing blue orbs at their fronts. They filled the water above the twisted black vines, swimming about in small packs without a care in the world.

The others were more predatory. Shorter than her, but not by much. They had red faces with wide open mouths filled with jagged fangs. Four pale white tendrils sprouted from their heads and whipped around. The bodies were spiny and bony, like a bone-fish inflated to immense size. They patrolled the cavern in groups, sometimes lashing out with a tendril to snag a bone-fish, or teaming up and tearing apart one of the glowing blue souls as they warbled and hissed.

Volara trembled. This was it. Dead shockers. She was the first person to see the souls of the Underworld. Or maybe others had, but never lived to tell the tale. She could feel the chilling water creeping around her prongs like grasping hands, as though the very water itself was urging her to stay and join them. The cut in her side stung painfully, as though none of the armor had regrown.

Varien's vehicle lowered itself and came to a shuddering halt. He vanished from his place at the clear dome and, a moment later, the underbelly of his Cyclops opened up. His suit, with him in it, dropped and the Cyclops closed back up. He landed with a slam, deafeningly loud in the eerie silence of the Underworld. "Alright, let's take a look around," he told her.

Frantically, she swam closer to him and coiled up near his suit. "I don't like this," she whimpered. "Look!" Volara gestured to the flapping blue spirits. "There's so many of them. I didn't know there were so many wicked shockers, but there's so many more of them compared to the noble ones!"

Varien looked at her and sighed. "Volara, they're not spirits. They're just fish."

She swatted his suit with her tail fin. "Shows what you know - hey, where are you going?!" she hissed, following after him.

"There's some new metals here," he said, stopping his suit on a small hill. An oddly shaped gray rock clung to the floor. "Just let me see if I can..." His suit reached out an arm, opening its trio of fingers to grasp the stone. Slowly but surely Varien tried to put it in the suit's storage -

Awooooo! a wicked soul screamed.

"AH!" she screamed, shooting away. Even Varien jumped, his suit losing its grip. Volara crashed into one of the black stalks and crumpled up. A flash of pain engulfed her head and she groaned, her body piling up on itself. Her eyes rolled in their sockets. "Ugh," she moaned, mouth open listlessly. "Ow."

"Are you alright?" he asked, leaning forward in his suit.

She righted herself, shook her head, and swam back to him. "Y-Yeah, I am." She looked around, catching sight of the wicked spirit flapping around. She could only wonder what they had done to have their predatory forms stripped. "Let's keep going."

Varien eyed her curiously, but then shrugged and finished picking up the gray rock.

The two of them stomped about the Underworld a little while longer, spiraling out from Varien's vessel. He stopped to collect shards of red crystal, gray stone, and white-blue shards. Volara, for her part, did nothing. Like she was just weighing him down. What could she possibly do to help him here? Protect him? From what?! The spirits of the dead? She was worthless, useless. Worse than useless, because he was worrying about her and not focusing on his task.

At length, he decided to go back to his Cyclops. Varien, suit and all, was swallowed by the machine. Moments later, he stood at the clear dome and piloted it, with Volara nervously following in his wake.

SMASH!

He ran the Cyclops into the black, twisted vines. They snapped and tore, tumbling down to the putrid green fluid. "My bad!" he shouted. A nearby pack of predator spirits hissed and warbled at him, but swam away and left them alone. She wondered if they were anyone she knew. Insulara? Chiralaron? Her mother? Would they attack her, or would they recognize her? Would they attack her even if they did?

Ignorant of her musings, Varien continued to pilot his Cyclops among the twisted souls of dead vines. More than once, he smashed them to bits while trying to turn, even with her assistance. All around them, rivers of green sludge poured from the vaulting ceiling. The stony floor sunk down multiple times in sudden cliffs, causing the trailing emerald liquid to form falls as it tumbled down.

At one point, Volara saw a skeleton.

Not like a bone-fish, or the noble spirits who were remade into the spiny predators, but an actual skeleton. It was just a skull resting among the black vine-souls, but was still twice her size. Had there once been a creature so much larger than her?

N-No. That was ridiculous. She was just unnerved, was all.

It wasn't just bone-fish and spirits, either. There were crawlers too, scuttling about the rocky floor, jumping and yipping. Whenever Varien dropped to inspect the area, she could at least kill those. She even gave one of the bodies to him to eat later.

The two of them searched high and low, up and down, in the Underworld. They didn't find anything immediately useful, though according to her stupid human they were over six hundred meters down. Closer than they'd ever been to his futile goal.

The Underworld continued on and on. Soon they found a tunnel that led straight down, just like the tunnel that led to the cavern of giant mushrooms and ambush-snakes. By then her eyes were drooping, and even Varien continuously sang long yawns from within his vehicle. He steered the Cyclops forward, past a growth of vine-souls. She followed after him and looked down; the green slime poured straight down into the deeps, further than she could see in the unusually murky waters. Varien wedged his machine right up against the stone corridor and sighed.

"Alright, I'm getting pretty tired," he muttered. "I think I'm gonna make a bed and go to rest in here. Continue this tomorrow. What about you?"

She looked around nervously. The wicked and noble souls warbled and wailed in the distance, but miraculously none had tried to make her like them yet. "I... I think I'll rest too. Mind if I lay on your machine?" she asked, gesturing with her tail to the wide metal sides.

"Go for it," he said. "Night, Volara."

"And to you too, Varien," she said, glancing around the Underworld one more time. Satisfied nothing was coming to get her right away, she found the side of his Cyclops closest to the stone walls and let herself sink onto it. The metal was cold and hard, nothing like the nest of plants she was used to, but shelter was shelter, especially with the rocks forming a ceiling above her. Volara closed her eyes, shifted her tail fin briefly, and rested.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow, she'd convince Varien this was foolish.

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