I am writing now inside a cupboard in the kitchen. My phone's flashlight is only giving me enough light so that I may see the words that I write down, but I fear it is enough for that prism to find me.

I no longer hear the sobs of my fellow crewmen or the screams of the captain. It no longer had a use for him, and I can feel the ship steadily rising. Soon, perhaps in a few hours or even minutes because I doubt a thing like that needs to worry about water pressure, we will break the surface and it'll be free. Free to do what, I do not know. Even now, its motivations are a mystery to me.

How I hate myself. I wonder if the remnants of humanity will curse my name once they find this journal, knowing that I took a key part in bringing an end to our race.

I had used the drone to pick up the prism and place it in the sample compartment. The drone's sensors picked up a concentration of heat emitting from the prism. One that was almost comparable to a human's.

Nenet had begun discussing with her fellow scientists about its nature. They had concluded that the prism was a recent addition to the ruins. The cracks in the ceiling hinted that it had somehow broken through the miles of sea floor before arriving at its final destination. Someone had suggested that it might have been a meteor, but they were laughed off. How could a meteor not lose its velocity in the face of water resistance? And that was not accounting for the sea floor itself. But its alien nature was the cause of much debate. One thing that was agreed upon was that it was an element never discovered before.

I could see their hunger for new knowledge in their eyes. That almost greedy gleam in Nenet's eyes was only matched by that of the professor's.

Professor Dryer had been over my shoulder, instructing me to obtain various samples of bones, idols, and stone tablets that along with the steel weapons had miraculously remained intact and preserved. A discussion between Nenet and the professor resulted in them hypothesizing that the undisturbed temple, sealed off from outside elements until today, along with the chemicals emitted by the animals' waste and limestone kept them intact.

After taking numerous videos and pictures, it was determined that we had obtained enough evidence to support our discovery and I brought the drone back so that we may study its samples.

Everyone, including the non-scientific crew and I, gathered around the drone's bounty. Swords with hilts encrusted in almost alien barnacles with steel that seemed to flow as if they were crafted with liquid metal. Idols of the grim-faced figure we knew from the statue as Kull, pieces of glowing and squirming coral that was slowly beginning to die, nearly whole tablets of an archaic and almost alien Latin, the strange aquatic life that inhabited the strange temple…

And in the center of it all, the prism. Glowing in its weird, eldritch light and colors.

Perhaps I should have noticed something was wrong then. Nenet kept staring at it, an almost hypnotized look on her face as she looked upon its facets. It had only ended when one of her colleagues excitedly shook her shoulder, rambling on about how their discovery would place them in the history books.

The scientists and the professor had begun their work. I had once dissected a stillborn piglet and squid in my high school biology class, and I barely had the stomach for that. But the way that Nenet and the scientists began to dissect the fish and take careful notes. These normally friendly and warm people had suddenly been drained of human emotion, gazing upon their gruesome and grim work with the clinical disinterest of one kicking a pebble off the side of the road and watching its path.

Nenet had taken the skulls of the snake and fish men and began muttering to herself. Whenever something dawned upon her, she ran to the professor who stayed seated over by the computer diligently scanning the photos, videos, and tablets to share her findings.

All the while, Nenet kept glancing at the prism and I couldn't help but note that it seemed to glow even brighter. Some of Nenet's fellow scientists had gathered around it, but they couldn't make heads or tails of it. The radiation it emitted didn't match with anything recorded by humanity.

After a few hours, the two gathered everyone to share their findings.

Professor Dryer excitedly stated that this civilization, dubbed 'Atlantis' due to its actual name being untranslatable, had once been ruled by humanity's distant ancestors. An ancestral matriarch society ruled by the Utopians who ruled humanity fairly save for the 'Inhumans'. Humans who had been granted powers that varied from person to person, unlike the snake and fish men who were merely separate branches of the human race.

While the Utopians had waged an almost genocidal campaign against these separate and monstrous branches, they seemed to act with greater zeal to stamp out these Inhumans. Appalling and cruel acts from hunting parties to capturing these Inhumans and other humanoids to throw them into gladiatorial games for entertainment.

Kull, once a gladiator and slave, had revolted against the Utopians and driven them out through his cunning and brutality. But his later years were lost. Perhaps available in other, undiscovered tablets and murals found deeper in the temple. This discovery had rewritten everything we knew about human history and only confirmed his theories about the Hyborian Age.

Nenet and her fellow scientists then shared their discoveries. The Utopians had perhaps been the creators of Damascus steel and their architecture contained elements of Greco-Roman, Egyptian, Asian, Aztec, Indian, and various other ancient cultures. Even their hieroglyphics and writings contained ancient phrases and samples of other languages. This civilization was likely the source of various others throughout human history, each one taking an element and making it their own.

The animals were all Quirk users. Each one contained the extra joint that was needed to show physical evidence of the Quirk gene. Even the fish and snake men had the extra joint, and unlike humans where some of them wouldn't have it… each one of them did.

This discovery was inconceivable. If Quirk users existed during these ancient times then did it mean that Quirks weren't the next step in human evolution? Were Quirks merely a gift given to us since our ancient ancestors were nearly indistinguishable from monkeys, unsuccessfully stamped out through genocide and inbreeding?

The ideas that humans had suffered the same fate as the canines and felines that inhabit our homes was nauseating.

That was when I noticed Nenet's eager expression began to dull. She kept staring at the prism, which glowed and hummed brighter with each passing second. Few besides me noticed her slowly walking to the sample table.

I cried out to her, snapping the others out of their zeal to turn their attention to Nenet. But it was too late. With her bare hand, she picked up the prism and held it in the palm of her hand.

The… flesh around her palm began to hiss and bubble as if it were burning. The flesh, however, was rippling and flowing like a liquid. The prism sunk in and Nenet had snapped out of her daze to scream in pain and clutch her wrist. As the gem-like surface began to show on the back of her hand, her eyes rolled to the back of her head and she fell back. I had barely managed to save her from hitting the steel floor of the submarine.

Oh, the things that came out of her mouth. It was spoken in a tongue that was not of this earth.

"ELOCH MINACH ESTAIN ETERNACH… CTHULHU FHTAGN RYLEIGH EC'SAN KALAN CELE'TAN…"

She kept saying those words and other alien gibberish as the crew rushed her to the medical area. The medical officer laid her on the table and took out a scalpel. The prism had obviously fused with her skin, muscle, and bone like an alien parasite. The only hope we had to separate it from her hand was to cut the thing out entirely.

It happened so clearly, but to describe it all here would make me break down in insane sobs.

The blade touched Nenet's hand, and as it did so the light of the prism took form. A swirling mass of color unlike anything I had ever seen shot out and enveloped the medical officer in an instant. The man's eyes went wide as a silent scream came from his lips. The color of his body and clothes seemed to slowly be sucked out of him. The color was being consumed by the prism like one might suck the contents of a drink from a straw.

The screams of horror and shouts for help were drowned out as an alien song began to be blasted through the various electronic instruments surrounding us. Everything began to grow loud and bright, and I had to turn my eyes as a flash of white nearly blinded me.

When it faded, I turned back to see what had become of the medical officer.

He was like a statue, completely white with his skin and clothes now having a rough stony appearance. That moment of stability went away in an instant, as a slight shift in the submarine made the thing that was once a man collapse. To my horror, I could taste the man's remains in the very air and found it to be like salt.

And the prism… it was not done.

More tentacles came from the gem, reaching out and taking members of the crew like it had with the medical officer. The room seemed to hum as color was being drained from the surroundings and absorbed into the prism. I, thankfully at the back of the crowd, began to turn and run as solid light constructs began to form in the air and descend to block all exit.

One of Nenet's colleagues was behind me… and she was crushed by the wall of light. I had turned around just in time to see her body be reduced to a wet pulp on the floor and her blood leaking on the floor.

And past the block of light I saw Nenet begin to rise… but it wasn't her. Not really. Those glowing eyes shifting in colors across the spectrum and alien hues stared at me, but not with hatred or even amusement.

I was a mere animal to it. Fit only to fuel its existence and purpose, whatever terrible thing that may be.

Perhaps that is what we all are to that alien intelligence that inhabits Nenet. Mere food and fuel that it can slaughter on a whim.

Time moves slowly as I hide like a rat in this behemoth that we humans built and controlled, but must seem primitive to the prism. As I sit here, I write this journal in hopes that should I die, and should by some miraculous chance the military be able to destroy the prism, they find this and heed it as a warning. They cannot go to the temple. They must bomb it and destroy it.

Because what if this prism isn't the only alien thing that exists on this world?

What if there is more down in those depths, lying in wait for humanity's natural and cursed curiosity to discover it and become its newest victim?

And I doubt many will be able to accept the sad truth of human existence.

Humanity is not special. Quirks are not the natural next step.

What we are… is a mistake. Something that managed to survive by mere chance in this chaotic and strange world.

We are but a blip in vast cosmic indifference.

And soon, the prism and others like it will arrive to remind us of this fact.

I hear it coming. It knows where I am. Perhaps I am its last meal before it rests and devours the rest of Nenet.

Please tell my family that I love them.

Emilia Burbank closed the journal and glanced up at General Richard Alexander. "Is it safe to assume that he didn't survive?"

He didn't let his discontent with the teenage girl, young enough to be her granddaughter, give him a serene smile as if she hadn't read a man's dying message.

"No, he didn't." Richard poured himself a glass of whiskey and took a sip. "There were no survivors of the crew of the Providence save for Doctor Nenet Ledger, who was in a coma when the submarine reached the surface. All of the crew had been transmuted into sodium chloride and the inside of the submarine was drained of all color. You can look at Dr. Steadman's notes if you want more details."

"I would like that." Emilia placed the journal back on his desk. "The prism had been a power source of Hyperion's ship. The 'color draining' as you put it was merely it sapping all spectrums of radiation and light from its surroundings. I can only guess that it must have been drained when it crashed into that cave and was performing an emergency recharge… and finding a new vessel of course."

Richard kept his face stony, but inwardly he was fuming. What took Steadman weeks to figure out it only took Burbank a couple of hours and a glance at both the journal as well as the heavily censored notes regarding the prism.

"This girl is dangerous."

But he could already guess that when the girl arrived on helicopter to become the civilian consultant of Project: Hyperion. When he took over after the last dumb bastard pissed away years of research just to make one teenager into America's ultimate weapon, letting the ship and its parts just collect dust, he has assumed their would still be a level of secrecy. The public didn't know about Hyperion's alien nature or the fact that they had the Creature of the Black Lagoon swimming around in a pool with the Flash dropping in every couple of days for tests.

But this girl, who hadn't even been debriefed fully, seemed to have them all figured out.

And there was that damn smile.

It was obviously a mask. But while even his hard demeanor would let up or slip slightly, hers just remained plastered. Emilia Burbank was like a doll that spewed facts far beyond someone her age should know.

She didn't even act like a teenager, unlike Nenet who despite her intelligence at least acted her age.

"Am I to assume that Dr. Ledger has no recollection of the events?"

"No." Richard glanced at the journal. "As far as she knows, she just blacked out and the crew had decided to go their separate ways. We began publishing some of their findings while omitting the more radical discoveries until we find an appropriate time to reveal them. But any future publications will be done through ghost writers and their relatives are being paid handsomely to lie through their teeth should Nenet or the media come knocking."

Personally, he would've preferred blasting that place to kingdom come. But Gaines was right. No amount of destruction or threats would ward off human curiosity for long. It was better, as well as cheaper, to just control the narrative.

Emilia hummed and crossed her legs. "So tell me, General Alexander, why did you show me this?

"To scare you off and get you the fuck out of my hair. Because I don't like you and that damn smile tells me I have good reason."

Instead he said, "To let you know what you're in for. Nenet, Hyperion, Stewart, and Amphibian are just the beginning. They are part of something new that is, frankly, terrifying. If you don't have the stomach for this project, Ms. Burbank, then I wouldn't blame you for backing out now."

Emilia merely chuckled and waved her hand. "Oh, I'm sure I'll be perfectly alright. After all…" Richard's jaw clenched as the smirk seemed to grow an inch bigger. "…I'm sure Hyperion will be more than happy to save me."

Richard let out a small sigh. Well, there wasn't much he could do now. The order to allow for Emilia Burbank's involvement came from the very top, and he doubted he had enough money or dirt to make them change all their minds.

So, reluctantly, Alexander stood out and offered his left hand. Emilia, seeming to be pleased as punch, stood up and shook it.

"Well then, welcome aboard Ms. Burbank."

The End

Notes: Phew! And with that this short little loveletter to both Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard is done! Hope you all loved this little horror twist with the origins of Quirks and weaving it with some Marvel lore!

Be sure to leave a review and let me know what you guys thought!