"There's a what?"

"Another protest." I glanced at the depth gauge. Yeah, that was about where I needed to be… probably. Eileen wasn't saying anything about it, and that was enough confirmation for me. "You didn't know?"

"No, this is the first I've heard about it." Eileen scratched her head. "Wow. I thought they would have waited a few more weeks."

"Tell me about it," I sighed. She did not tell me about it.

"How did you find out?"

"That Rose girl told me," I said. "The same Rose that took over the first protest."

Eileen turned her gaze to the floor. "Rose… She's… the same Inkling that found us underground."

So she did know. "The same one." Really, it would have been odd for her not to, with how hard both the protest and that underground encounter had hit her. But still, the NSS was supposed to be a secret thing. Eileen knew she was Agent 4, right?

But, then again, the name Eileen Octrope was also supposed to be a secret thing, and they all knew that too. As weird as it was, the NSS and the Octropes were irreversibly connected now. And I was caught right in the middle of it.

"Start ascending. Slowly, though."

"That's a buoyancy thing, right?"

"Yeah, you got it." She stretched and yawned as I dragged some handle over. "You know her? Rose?"

"Kind of," I said. "It's weird. Did you hear what she said about me at the first protest?"

"I tuned in when she started talking about Octavio. So, yes."

"All that was true." I spun around in my seat. "The mentoring, the giant robot thing…"

"Really…" Eileen scowled at the floor, but I didn't have a clue as to why. "She wasn't exaggerating?"

"I would have thought the same if I didn't know any better," I said. "She took me out here the other day. The ocean. That's why I knew… yeah."

She forced a laugh, and a corner of her mouth curled up. "Is she into you or something?"

"Oh, shut up."

"What? That's a way to get back at those protesters, eh?" She nudged me with her elbow, but I had to push back to stay upright. "Oh yeah, speaking— Dim the lights."

I slid one of the handles down. "This one?"

"That's the one." She nodded again. "Can't let anyone know we're down here."

"Why does this thing even have lights?"

Eileen crossed her arms. "It was a Salmonid research vessel for a little bit. Not a long time, though. Once… Once he set his sights on Grizzco, the Piranha became a kind of warship."

"Was there a reason to have a warship when everything happened on land?"

"In hindsight, not really," Eileen said, shrugging. "It was an NSS trap, and…" Her voice fell. "That was it. Um—" She waved her hand in the air in front of her. "Speaking of that, what's this Rose have in mind for the second protest?"

"Nothing." I put my hands on my lap and leaned back. "She thought it'd be better if we just ignored them. Said they didn't have a lot of power anyway."

"Oh. That… actually makes sense." She furrowed her brow. "Leave them alone, and let it fade out, huh?" A smile crept onto her face. "Fade out," she echoed.

"I think that's about it."

She shook her head, grinning. "Our father's vision always had us at the top and the Inklings at the bottom. He wanted to stop things like this before they could even start. If we didn't crush them, he thought, they'd push us all back underground again." She laughed again, but I could tell this one was genuine. "He never knew—never even considered that most Inklings just don't care that we're different. The protests and all—it's something we knew was going to happen. But if it really is that little of the population…"

"Yeah." I narrowed my eyes. Even through those six months, I was never hiding from the Inklings. I was hiding from other Octolings.

Eileen shrugged. "I always knew there was something wrong with that. If we flipped our roles around, then, somewhere down the line, the Inklings would turn around and do the same thing right back to us. Even with the Hypno-Shades—it's impossible to keep track of that many in the long term. It'd have just been a cycle. Between us…" She sighed. "And them."

I looked at her, right into her eyes, but her gaze was already out the window. She shifted her weight to one leg, and her expression was unreadable. I turned back to the control panel. It was still kind of a blur to me.

"I never said anything about it, you know," she said. "I couldn't think of a better way. I thought there was no better way. I didn't know either, just how… that it didn't matter we're not the same."

"Eileen—" I spun around in the captain's seat. "Nobody could have guessed it would have turned out like this. Nothing after Sharktown was in anyone's plan."

"I guess so," she sighed. "But still, I…"

Something was off about this conversation, I could tell. Something was different about it. She'd never spoken about herself like this, never told me a regret so clearly. I eyed her, just at the edge of what I could see. Was this what she was always thinking?

I stared at my lap. Eileen knew everything she'd done, and I knew nothing. I knew nothing about what she was thinking, what she was feeling. But I couldn't just let her say that and leave her alone after it.

"There's no use dwelling on it," I said, eyes still on my own lap. "You're probably never going to be in the same situation again. And on the off chance you are, you already know what to do. Already know what's up here."

Eileen turned to me, eyes almost imperceptibly wider than usual. "You…"

"—But that's only what I thought. It's not like I know what it's like."

"Right, the memory…" she said. "But you're right. I can't really change it now, can I? Ah, adjust the sonar."

I pointed to a dial to my right. She nodded, and I spun it a few notches.

"Yeah, that's it. Should cover a wider range now. You want to do that when you're closer to shore—that's when the seafloor's elevation gets awkward."

"How do I know when I'm close to shore?" I said.

"Notice how the sonar found a cliff? That's when."

"I see…" I squinted at the control panel. So that's what that symbol meant. "Remind me why this room's in the back?"

"Because the weapons…" Her eyes darted around each of the meters, then stopped back at me. "…Are all in the front. Attackers would target the mouth. And since we're so far from the main entrance, it's easy to catch any intruders before they get here. Are the stabilizers fine?"

"Oh, um…" I glanced at one of the small displays. "Think so." I sat up. "There is a second entrance, right?"

"Of course. Several actually. But a lot of them are emergency exits."

"Mm…"

It was getting difficult to hold a conversation with her in this state. I hadn't gotten the chance to say much before I needed to mess with the Piranha again. What did she actually think about what I'd just told her? Now that I had the chance to think, it couldn't have been that easy to just… not worry about it. But that was really the only way I knew how to do it. No, not only that— it was the only way I could do it.

"At Sharktown, somebody told me…" Eileen cleared her throat, and she started to grin again. "If we win here," she said in clear Inkling, "I and my team will not allow any barrier between the underground and the surface to exist." She shut her eyes and turned her head down. "What really got to me was that the person saying it—she was someone Octavio had captured. That was when I knew. It was possible. If someone like her could say that—to me, even—it wasn't a matter of if we could both live on the surface. It was… would we. And soon enough, I found myself moving to Inkopolis." She opened her eyes, and for a moment, I thought again that they were sparkling on their own. "Okay, do you remember how I told you to surface the Piranha?"

"Press the button on the back," Eileen said to me, just as we jumped onto the area near the bench.

I flipped the black remote around in my hand. There was… something there. A small, circular button, the size of my fingertip. There was a white symbol on it, vaguely resembling a blanket, but I couldn't tell what that meant. Just like all the other symbols on all the other buttons.

I turned the remote back around, felt for the button, and hit it. The Piranha's mouth slid shut—very inorganically, really—and sank as if something had grabbed onto it and pulled it down. "Huh," I said. I crept to the edge and peered into the water. I couldn't see it, even with the nearby streetlight. We were fortunate that Hammerhead went over some pretty deep water. I turned around. "How long—"

Eileen had her back toward me, arms hanging by her side. Her eyes were turned upward, but not at the sky. She was staring at the tip of Inkopolis Tower. "Did I… did I really attack this city?" she muttered.

"Eileen," I whispered.

"No, I wasn't even there that day. The day we attacked Inkopolis. It's so different when I'm actually standing in it. I wonder what I would have seen. All the fighting. The panic. But now… this is where I live." She looked over her shoulder. "Who I was isn't who I am… but I need to be someone new, don't I?"

Now, let it be known that I don't know the first thing about submarines. Good thing I can always handwave it with the idea that Octarian tech's just that different.

Also, it's kind of crazy how my brain so seamlessly blends canon and non-canon. Like, in this chapter alone, a huge sticking point was that Callie was kidnapped, which is inarguably canon. And another one is what she said to Eileen at Sharktown, which is so far removed from canon that I sometimes wonder how I ever got there. It's gotten to the point where I can't even think about Splatoon without this little world I've built around it popping up. Is this always how it goes for fanfic authors?