(To moniker is sorrowfully defnktn:) Thanks for the feedback! I've been trying to make my first-person writing feel natural, and I've felt myself getting better at it, especially in the emotional scenes. I've been writing for only a year and a half, so hearing that I'm improving is really exciting. Really, any review is exciting for me.

Thanks again!

I couldn't shake the feeling of guilt that I was just a spy for the NSS, talking to her only to hear she wasn't a threat. I wasn't Agent 8. I never really was. But in any case, it was over. I didn't have to worry about it anymore.

Captain Rose led me, holding my wrist with an unnaturally firm grip to a section of the city that I hadn't had the chance to explore yet. I knew there was a boardwalk nearby… and that was it.

I had so many questions that I couldn't ask. When did Eileen turn herself around? What exactly was she thinking of right then?

What will she do?

She couldn't just ignore it all—she knew that Captain Rose knew her name. And Rose was in the NSS. Eileen knew eyes would be on her—even though I was confident that didn't matter. I had told her that she could take steps to make up for… whatever else she had a hand in, but what was there left to do?

"So what else happened?" Rose asked.

I opened my mouth to speak but stopped. I couldn't just tell her all of that. It was between me and Eileen. "You know about it all already," I lied. "Like the attack on Inkopolis and… Just… she said she won't… yeah."

"That makes sense…" Rose turned the corner of the sidewalk. The ocean came into view. "Her motive was always to get to the surface, and now she is… But her dad's just dead! How is she okay with that? It was only, like, three weeks ago!"

"…Maybe she never liked him?" I suggested. Really, I knew nothing about how things were between the two, but I didn't want to let things end with the opposite sentiment.

"Here we are." Rose pulled me to a bench overlooking the sea. We were in some kind of miniature park, a small patch of grass by the ocean. A bridge was close by, leading to… actually, I didn't know.

She dropped onto the bench, crossed her legs, and unzipped her jacket. The wind from the sea made her hair sway in a hypnotic circle, and the light from the moon made her face shine just as beautifully as the water. Smiling, she shut her eyes and took a breath. I joined her on the bench, taking care not to stare.

I blinked at the ocean. Why were we here, of all places? "…What? No base of operations or anything?"

Rose looked at the water, her eyes glinting in the reflection. "If I took you there, the rest would find out, and then we'd be going right back to her apartment."

Okay, that eliminated their base, but what about literally anywhere else? Had she taken me out here just for the scenery?

At least the stars were better from this lonely bench.

Rose shifted a bit closer to me. "So… uh…" she said, so softly that the inward breeze almost drowned it out. "You said something about a memory wipe?"

"I… yeah." This had nothing to do with Eileen, but then again, she was Agent 4, and the NSS liked to know things. "Ask Agent 3 later. He knows all of it."

And by that, I meant he knew everything I wanted anyone to know. The captain wasn't a complete stranger, but I wasn't going to thrust my entire life story onto her.

An awkward silence overtook us, but I didn't care. And naturally, my mind began to wander.

Eileen, wearing the shades, helping me up. Knowing that it was the same person in that apartment… What were the odds of us just randomly meeting each other again?

It was obvious why she'd tried to hide her name from me. It wasn't a well-known name, but the few that did know it dreaded it. But the fact that the whole time, she was Eileen was surreal. I didn't feel any disdain towards her. Actually, it was the opposite—I seemed to view her with a kind of odd respect. It couldn't have been easy to move to Inkopolis like that. Especially after attacking it like that.

To choose to restart—what a luxury it must have been.

With my eyes fixated on the stars, I saw in the corner of my vision Rose, who had her own eyes on me. No… I couldn't tell her any of that either. "What now?" I asked. Everything I was willing to say had been said.

She pulled her hood up. "You wanna just… talk?" Her face was red. It wasn't that cold, was it? She was trying to hide it with her hood, but she was failing. Pretty badly.

"Uh… sure." I mean, I had nothing else better to do. There was still some time left in the night. The moon was my clock, and it said sunrise was close. "About what?"

Rose relaxed, leaned back, and took another breath. "Whatever."

I stared at her, waiting for her to say… well, anything.

"A memory wipe, huh…" Rose looked back down. "That can't be easy, right?" she whispered. "Sorry… That's all I can really do. O— Or say."

I turned to look at her, surprised. I'd thought she would just shrug it off as everyone else had. Cuttlefish, Pearl, Marina, Agent 3, they all ignored it. Treated it as if it were just some minor inconvenience. In hindsight, it really was when I was stuck in Deepsea, but I wasn't anymore. I was on the surface.

Granted, I did cut ties with the NSS right after I escaped. And Off the Hook was pretty busy most of the time. And I did ask them to pretend I didn't exist…

At least, other than Eileen, I had Rose. Not Agent 4. She had it way better than I did, having all of her life with her, but at least she recognized my situation. And that was all I needed.

"Captain…"

"Okay, first of all, stop calling me 'captain.' I was never a captain in the first place." She turned to me with that warm smile of hers. "More like a drill sergeant," she muttered. "But just call me Rose."

"Uh, sure… R— Rose…"

"Wait, hold on." She hung the headset on her neck, then slipped off the jacket she was wearing and pulled it down to her waist, revealing a pink shirt underneath that looked… kind of tight. "Now I'm Rose."

I broke into laughter. I don't know why that was so funny to me. Just a pair of headphones and a jacket! That was it. That was what separated Agent 4 from Rose. "S— Sorry… It's just… n— never mind. I'm sorry."

Just an hour before, I was a corpse sitting against an underground wall. And now, here I was, giggling like a child. Maybe it was Eileen. Seeing her come to terms with her past seemed like the first step in making up for mine.

The wind blew my hair into my face. I swept it back, the laughter dying down, as I looked back up at the stars. "Why were you down there alone?" I asked Rose. "What happened to the rest of the… uh… 'the team?'"

She stared at me, jaw hanging open, then shook her head. "O— Oh, uh, the others went earlier. I was busy… at the protest… you know."

Ah, the protest. It was hard to believe that it was less than a day ago. So close to Eileen's… unmasking.

"I've already heard rumors of another one," Rose said. "No solid date yet, though."

I couldn't say I was surprised. They wouldn't have left it like that, with Rose and I stealing the finale. Hold enough of them, and Rose would run out of things to say eventually.

And especially those remarks about myself—

"Wait." I opened my eyes. "You—"

"So during that protest, One, Two, and Three all went down there ahead of me. Uh, a— and they shut down some evil computer thing. Two told me it was an easy mission, but One was, like, clutching Three's hand the whole way back." Rose shrugged. "I don't know what happened to him."

Again, I wasn't very socially adept, but it didn't take a genius to see she was changing the subject.

"He's fine, though, said something about how stupid terrifying that place was. And then I got curious and went down there myself. I got as far as that train, then… yeah."

Shut down an evil computer. That was TarTar, right? Who else…?

I was under the impression that Pearl's screech had finished it off. Though, it may have made a backup of itself. That's probably how that worked.

But, really, this wasn't my problem anymore. If the NSS had handled it, more power to them. I wanted no part in that. There was too much going on that night for me to care.

More—or less—importantly, Rose was avoiding the protest. No doubt because of her… actually pretty flattering comments about me. I squinted at her, just to let her know that I could tell, but decided not to mention it anyway. "Okay," I murmured. "The stars are better than earlier," I lied. The sun was coming up, and there were actually fewer stars than before.

Rose breathed a painfully obvious sigh of relief. "Heh. Yeah…"

So she wasn't looking.

…I didn't think I could have blamed her for not wanting to mention it, though. If I were in her spot, I wouldn't have handled it any better.

By the horizon, where the sun peeked over the ocean, a rosy hue shone. It wasn't as mesmerizing as the stars, but it was beautiful in its own way.

"Is that why your name is Sky?" Rose leaned closer to me. "I've never met an Octoling named after a word in our language before."

"Took you that long?" I had a very unique name. I hadn't heard of a single Inkling with that name either. "The first time I saw it, it was… actually, like this. But night always looked prettier to me." I held out my hand. "I could see more stars from here than from other places… Is there anywhere else like this?"

Rose gasped. She tried and failed to hold back a smile. "Wh— What's the farthest you've been from Inkopolis at night?"

What did that have to do with anything? "Uh, I guess Sharktown, but—"

"Meet me right here at midnight."