My name is Sheldon Gaines. Son of Maxwell Gaines and Nina Albright of Portland, Maine. Valedictorian from the University of Maine. Remote operator of the EC Drone and member of the Providence submarine.

And this will be the last thing I write.

I had fallen in with the research team headed by Professor Henry Dryer after graduation. His research notes concerning the prehistoric civilizations of 32,000 BC and before were dismissed by most of the scientific and archaeological community as just a bunch of nonsense. But I found it cool. I mean, who would've thought that civilizations that could do metalwork and other practices would arise that far back?

It sounded like stuff straight from the comic books and pulp fiction collections I consumed as a kid. While others were reading up on Captain Celebrity's latest scandal or that cool Hero from Japan, All Might, I was reading the adventures of Red Sonya of Ragatino and the adaptations of Solomon Kaine by Kurt Busiek. I was picked on for liking old stuff that was, admittedly, kinda racist, but I still liked them. Maybe that's why I specialized in mechanical engineering and unmanned aircraft system science. It was my attempt to compensate.

But when I saw the job listing on the university's website, I jumped at the opportunity. The professor was taking a research team down the Milwaukee Trench in the Atlantic and they needed someone to operate an unmanned drone. I had dabbled in underwater drones while studying for my degree, so I embellished that fact and my experience with drones in general in my application. Then I made sure to really make it clear how much the professor's research interested me.

Within one week's time, I had gotten my acceptance letter and was on my way to Florida to meet with the rest of the team.

That's where I met Nenet Ledger.

I was shocked to find a fifteen year old girl wearing a lab coat, a bikini top, a plaid skirt, and sandals standing next to the elderly Professor Dryer. I thought she was his daughter until he explained that she was actually a doctor, PHD and everything, and would be accompanying us as an onboard oceanographer.

When I asked for clarification on what kind, she proudly declared "All of them".

Apparently Nenet was a genius.

She told us that she had been noticing some strange tectonic activity by the trench Apparently, that wasn't supposed to happen and through research found out about the professor's own plan to investigate what lied at the bottom of the trench. They got in touch and arrangements had been made for her to accompany us.

The three of us along with five students, eight members of Nenet's lab, and eight crewmen to keep the submarine running spent two weeks training. I'll have to admit that during those two weeks I began to like Nenet. She was childish, but that was to be expected for a fifteen year old. But she was also fun and loved to talk shop with the rest of us. She would listen and discuss about the wonders of the ocean and how simple adjustments could be made to the EC Drone in order to improve its mobility without compromising essential parts. She also liked to talk about movies and video games with the same lighthearted tone she used to discuss the professor's research on old figures like Bran Mak Morn.

Maybe in another life we could've been friends.

But the training came to an end and we boarded the Providence.

I had thought I knew what I was in for from old war movies and the occasional creature feature. But reality showed that a submarine was way more cramped and stuffy than fiction liked to show. The corridors were wide enough to fit people through, but all the pulsing pipes and blinking technology made me feel smaller in a way. Like I was in the mouth of a beast.

The only spacious areas were the observation deck at the belly of the submarine and the lab area, where Nenet and the other eggheads would be studying anything interesting.

I am not ashamed to admit I was beginning to have second thoughts when the hatch closed and we began to sink below the waves.

Nenet noticed my anxiousness and brough me and some other guys to the observation deck. As we descended, she pointed out all kinds of fish from tuna to stingrays to the occasional turtle and shark. ANd that wasn't even counting the array of fish that were colored all different shades.

There was beauty in the ocean. And that beauty only grew as we descended further.

The coral, so varied in color and shape that made the seabed look like an alien forest. All the lobsters, eels, shrimp, and seahorses that swam in and out of their hiding places. Everyone was impressed save for the professor.

He only had his eye on the prize.

My feeling of apprehension grew greater as we left that wonderful floor and went to the trench. Nenet and some of her lab partners noted that the trench appeared to be bigger than its estimate only a few months ago and noted the bubbles that were streaming out of the edges. The captain, after studying some of his instruments, said that while things would be a little toasty the Providence would be able to handle it.

So into the trench we went. I heard the captain begin listing the death to which we were sinking. Twenty-five, fifty, seventy five, a hundred…

It was when we passed a hundred and ten that Nenet began to look positively giddy. She said that the trench was never this deep, and the recent shifts in tectonic activity must have deepened it. She and her lab partners began to talk about taking the drone up to get soil samples.

Oh how I wish I did not spot it.

I had seen angler fish from a boring Google search back in college. Those big, bony, and monstrous things with elongated jaws and teeth like long nails. Their glowing appendage lures their prey so that they may feast on the curious fish.

I never saw one like this.

It's veins glowed as if it had been decorated in red neon. It's bulging eyes looking everywhere and nowhere. Then, it seemed to spot its prey and its bioluminescent light pulsed. A small guppy of sorts was suddenly enveloped in a glowing orb that was like a miniature sun.

I barely noticed the small gasp I had made which alerted the others.

They watched as the orb disappeared, revealing a fish that looked like it had been cooked in a fire. The angler fish swam closer to its dead prey before swallowing it and chomping it into pieces.

Nenet's colleagues were in a frenzy at that point. While animals with Quirks hadn't been unheard of, they were increasingly rare. To find one this deep was astonishing.

But it paled in comparison to what we saw next.

As the angler swam away, its natural light began to reveal a large stone gate of some sort carved into the right sea wall. It loomed large, its frame decorated in symbols that were similar to Latin but faded with age and slime. The stone steps that were at the entrance descended into utter blackness that almost seemed physical.

Professor Dryer kept muttering to himself. "Incredible!" I remember him breathlessly whispering. "Absolutely incredible!"

The submarine's crew and Nenet's partners wanted to head back. To report their findings in order to arrange for a team more suited for deep sea exploration so that they may study the ruined gate. But the professor and Nenet refused. They said that the tectonic activity might collapse the entranceway and the secrets it held.

This was their one chance to uncover its secrets.

I should have remained silent, then. This wasn't my fight. It was just a bunch of scientists arguing amongst themselves over stuff only they found interesting. The wider world wouldn't care. What good was the work of some lost civilization to them?

And yet I wanted to find it too. To become one of Robert E. Howard's protagonists, descending into the ruins of a lost civilization to uncover its riches.

I told them that the EC Drone could withstand the pressure. With it, we could take some photographic evidence and samples before returning to the surface. That would assuage the wider scientific community of the validity of our claims and get us samples for study even if the entrance collapsed.

Nenet and everyone agreed to this compromise, and I sat in my station to activate the EC Drone.

It dislodged from the top of the submarine and began to sail past the looming gate.

As the drone's lights illuminated its surroundings, I began to see such wonders.

Fishes that multiplied into smaller clones to avoid predators. Crabs that wore ice shells. Shrimp and grew in size for mating rituals and coral that reached out with appendages to absorb any organism too unfortunate to wander close. Each one of these creatures had a Quirk. It was remarkable! Even I, who never really cared for sea life, could see that!

But the hieroglyphics on the walls grabbed my attention the most.

The carvings were done in a style similar to that of Ancient Greece, depicting men in toga communing with women in armor. Scenes of war against snake-like humanoids that were defeated by those same women. The scenes then shifted to the toga-wearing men and women in chains, women wearing the strange armor pointing outwards with Latin words engraved over their helmets. The professor said it roughly translated into 'Utopia'.

There were more scenes depicted on those walls. Of men and women shooting energy from their hands or with the features of animals. Nenet's fellow scientists were muttering how it was impossible. How there could not have been Quirks that early in human history.

Those beings were then shown in a ring of some sorts, fighting snake men and creatures with fish-like features. Battling with one slaying the other or committing acts that sicken me even now.

And then, at the end of that perverse tunnel, light shines forth.

Through the lense of the drone, we glimpsed an ancient temple covered in seaweed and coral. It looked vaguely Roman with obelisks that had twisting tentacles carved on it circling around the perimeter reaching up to a cracked ceiling.

Yet it wasn't the sun that was lighting all this strange, alien architecture to us.

The light was coming from within the tunnel.

The light was all the colors or perhaps none of them. Reds, greens, blues, yellows, purples, and even whites. They mixed and yet were separate, becoming new colors unlike anything I've ever seen. There was a hue like magenta and yet it wasn't. It was something I cannot even describe, but it pulsed with each shift in the current.

And yet we advanced.

Nenet was hungry for discovery. The professor was yearning for more proof of his theories. Despite their protests, the crew and scientists were practically starving for knowledge. And even I, claustrophobic and deeply regretting my own actions, was seeking to find the treasure at the end of this rainbow.

Slowly, I made the drone approach the temple. The light from the temple and drone illuminated more alien sea life. These creatures each had an individual Quirk, turning what would've been prey into predators and predators into monsters.

Bones littered the ground, but few of them were remotely human. Half heartedly the scientists and professors muttered about how perfectly preserved they were. But even I knew they were focusing on the bones that looked like a perverse fusion of man and fish.

Slowly, the drone passed through the obelisks that marked the temple's entrance and entered into the pulsing coral floor.

There, in the center and on top of a floor made of smooth marble and at the foot of a twenty-foot tall statue of a stone-faced mad, was a prism. A gem that emanated the living colors and seemed to beat like a human heart.

The sonar and devices began to hum strangely. They whined in a beautiful yet alien song that none of us could identify.

Before the drone's camera focused solely on the prism, it caught a glimpse of an inscription on the feel of the statue. The professor would later translate it to the rest of us before the horror occurred.

Behold Kull. Warrior, Gladiator, and Conqueror of Utopia. Look upon his glory and despair!

Perhaps what is happening is that ancient creature's curse on us for intruding on its lands.

I hear a scream. I believe it is the captain. He was one of the last. It let him live long enough to bring us to the surface. Once it is close enough, it will likely come for me.

I have to live. I have to find a new hiding place where its terrible color cannot find me.

Why?

Why in God's name did I bring that thing onto the ship?

That prism.

That prism and its color is not of this world.

Notes Yeah, so this chapter was made because some discussion on Spacebattles made me really want to write the story of how Nenet got the Prism. Let me tell you, writing Lovecraft-lite is fun. Especially when I recontextualize Marvel stuff as being almost Lovecraftian in nature within the context of the more grounded MHA world.

The biggest inspirations for this two parter are Lovecraft's The Temple and The Colour Out Of Space, with some stuff from Robert E. Howard for flavor!

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