Hey guys, Summer's here, and you know what that means! I have free time!

…okay I know that the improved chapters for my other story have stopped, but let me explain.

I said that I would not stop updating The Agents of Inkopolis with polished chapters on Tuesday, April 7th.

The thing is, later that exact same day, I fell off of a mountain bike and broke my jaw. Seems like the timing was perfect.

Anyway, I'm fine now. It's been a while, and I'm glad to be back. Finally.

Unlike most people, I owned nothing that could feasibly be stolen that wasn't either with me or locked up in my room, so everything I had was pretty much safe from Jacob. If he were to rob me in the first place, which… No, he wouldn't. He couldn't.

Unless he were to somehow get the entire couch out the door or something. He'd have to undo all of my hard assembly work and get each piece out during the night when I wasn't there.

In other words, I had absolutely no worries in my mind as I obliterated the other night owls of Inkopolis.

Annie and I held the dead center of Wahoo World, a stupidly-named amusement park that was still open for some reason. "You're sure there aren't any duo battles held here?" I said, ducking under a volley of fire from the pit below, "I'm tired of carrying these amateurs." I dropped a bomb on one side of my attacker and fired at the other, securing an easy victory.

The thirty-second bell rang. "Unfortunately," she said between shots. "There're League Battles, but those also put you with another pair." She swung her gun—which I couldn't identify—in a wide arc. "We're surrounded."

"You don't have to tell me." The rest of the team was approaching with a fresh coat of Ink Armor.

I swam to the side, and when I turned back, Annie was in the air. I thought for a moment that she'd fled, but her ascension was straight up. At the height of her jump, she pressed a button on the bottom of her weapon. She hung in the air for a moment, now covered in a coat of purple ink. Not a second later, she launched toward the ground, sending torrents of purple at the team. I held my arms in front of my face to shield my eyes. The force of it nearly blew me down.

And then the whistle blew. With the match ended, I nodded at Annie, and we returned to the lobby.

The other two in our team had already cleared out by the time we made it back. Annie and I had outshined them, and by more than a small margin. I was sure that that played a part in their early departure. I sat on one of the seats, and Annie took the one next to mine.

"What was that?" I asked her. "I've never seen something like it before." As in, a Splashdown out of a super jump. I'd seen something similar, but… no, that wasn't it. It would've been illegal, anyway.

"It's called Sk— Uh, just a midair Splashdown." She turned away, and I raised an eyebrow at her.

"What…" I said. Skydive. She was going to say Skydive.

That was a term that only people from the underground training camp knew. It was coined by an Inkling named Rose. Only possible with Dualies, it was performed by dodging midair into a Splashdown, which, to put it simply, boosted it far beyond a normal one.

"Were… were you going to say Skydive?"

"No!" she said, way too quickly. "It's nothing. Never mind."

I don't exactly pride myself on my social skills, but Annie did not hide that well. I relaxed my shoulders. She knew I knew. "It'd start with a few small streams from the point it hits the ground," I said, "then it would shoot up like a geyser." I turned away from her. "Then for a moment, it would look like a… like a twister of swirling color—not just the ink's color, every shade of it—then it would open like a flower, and then it would all fall apart and come raining down."

Annie sighed. "You got me. Where did you hear that?"

That… was the question I wanted to ask her. But I had nothing to hide. About that, at least. "I was Captain Rose's… right hand." Yeah, that was probably the right term. "I fought in Sharktown."

"Me too," said Annie. She looked over her shoulder. "I did too… Skarktown. Uh, I didn't want many people to know."

"You must really know what you're doing, then."

"I guess." She turned to look at me again. Again with that distant sense of familiarity.

Is that where I'd seen her? The underground base under Inkopolis Plaza? We might have been in different divisions. I tried scanning my memories of the time, but it had been so much of a blur that nobody really stood out that could have been her. But that feeling she gave me, I could tell, went much deeper than a recent memory.

"But it's kinda hard to bring that here," Annie continued. "There are a lot of rules and regulations I have to follow, but in Sharktown, all I had to do was—" She looked down, wistfully. "Win."

I leaned back, paying no mind to the final score. "I get it," I said. "I have all these instincts I constantly need to suppress to not get banned."

Well, that was another thing we had in common. Though I was pretty sure I had it a bit rougher than she did. At least she knew where the instincts came from.

"What is it?" Annie said. "Why are you staring at me like that?"

"Nothing." I averted my gaze. "I just really feel like I've seen you before." I stood up and took a deep breath. "You wanna get out of this lobby? It reeks of tryhard sweat."

For a moment, she didn't say anything. I turned to her again, and for an instant, I saw her staring back at me, eyes wide. But as soon as our eyes met, she composed herself and faintly smiled at me. "Let's go. It's quiet outside at this hour."

"Ugh…" I sat down, quite stiffly, at the table outside of the shoe place. It had a parasol right in the middle, but I didn't know why. It was never that bright here, even when the sun was up. Annie sat on the opposite end.

"Even less people than I was expecting out here," Annie said.

"Mm." I leaned back, giving myself a view of the sky. I could see more of it from here, but there seemed to be less stars than the first night out. But there was still nothing out there I could fix my eyes onto. It just kept going and going… I still couldn't wrap my head around it. "Annie?" I said idly, not bothering to look at her.

"Y— yeah?" She seemed on edge.

"Sky isn't really my birth name," I said. "Probably. I don't even know if I have one." As she'd said, there weren't many people out. And the few that were likely couldn't understand Octarian.

"You don't know?" she said, leaning closer to me.

I didn't respond for a while. A cool wind drifted into the area. "Annie, can I ask you a favor?" Another star appeared.

"…What is it?"

I let out a slow sigh. "What I'm about to tell you, keep it between us."

"Alright." She looked anxious. "What is it?"

"I know nothing about my past. My parents, birthday, what I did, anything. That's why my card says I'm three." I looked down at her eyes and slowly blinked.

And at that moment, I decided I trusted her.

"Six months ago, I woke up underground in an abandoned subway. Something had wiped my memory clean."

Her expression remained blank. I chose to leave Cuttlefish and Agent 3 out of the story.

"I was told that I could reach some 'promised land' if I went and found some pieces of a machine in the subway. So I did, but it was a lie. All it did was try to kill me."

"You—"

"Hold on. I broke out and climbed out of a hole in the ceiling. And then I was on the surface. On a statue that almost blasted the planet with something I couldn't tell you. I stopped it. Kinda."

"Kinda?" Annie started to look suspicious.

"Remember that time Pearl shrieked out in the middle of the ocean and passed it off as a publicity stunt? I was there, and that scream sank the statue."

I didn't see any flash of recognition pass on her expression, so I guessed she was underground when that happened. Like most others.

I continued, speculating as I went. "Really, the entire subway should be flooded now, but I saw some really advanced stuff as I went up, so maybe not. Oh yeah, and that phone thing was powering up the statue. It seemed… sentient? Somehow? But anyway, it said something about 'primordial ooze,' but I didn't really catch all of it."

Annie was looking more confused than anything by now.

"I think the blender was going to use my DNA… or… something…" I was ranting. I knew that entirely well, but I was on to something, so I was going to keep going. "You could only really get those pieces if you were really good at firing a gun, so a lot of others would have died of like, starvation.

"A little bit earlier, I saw some other guy get attacked by a couple of green Octolings I saw underground, so I helped him out and brought him to my apartment—that's the guy you saw with me—but I'd never seen those guys on the surface before…" I trailed off and looked at Annie's eyes. As dumbfounded as she was, I thought I could see another star in them. "And… and now that I think about it, maybe they'll head after you, too."

Annie put her elbow on the table and her forehead in her hand. She blinked a couple of times. "You're kidding, right?" She said with dead seriousness.

I stared at her. "Sadly, no," I said. "I couldn't make this up if I tried. Come on, you wanna ask the guy I saved? His name is Jacob, but… he's asleep, maybe tomorrow."

Annie put her hand back down and leaned forward. "Jacob? Was there… anything more he said? About his name?"

I was too lost in my own thoughts to understand, much less respond to her. I stared at my feet, then glanced at Annie. I opened my mouth, then closed it again. "Hey, Annie," I finally said, looking back at her. "Can you do me another favor?"

"What is it this time?"

"I'll—" I coughed. "try to find a way back down there. I— If you want to, can you… come with me?"

She fell silent.

I couldn't believe I was asking someone else to witness the same things I did. I couldn't believe I was even asking a favor, to begin with.

"I— It's fine if you don't!" I said. "I know it's dangerous down there, and—"

"No, I'll go." The sentence was aggressively casual. It was as if she didn't know what she was getting herself into.

Which she didn't.

"But—"

"I'll go," she said again, with the same tone and the same composure.

I blinked at her. I didn't know what to say. I didn't know what I was expecting. But all this meant that, someday, I would find myself in Deepsea once again.

At least, this time, I'd have Annie with me.

I rubbed my eye with the palm of my hand. "And I met you like, two days ago… Sheesh." I tried to laugh, but it came out as nothing more than a sharp exhale.

Annie smiled at me. But this one didn't seem genuine.

"I'll tell you when I find something," I said. "What's your number?"

The ellipses are strong with this one. There was a lot of dialogue in this chapter.

Anyway, how was this chapter? I would imagine it would be an odd one since 90% of it is about stuff you already know.

And it feels so good to be back.