THE POLARIS PROJECT / ACT 2
Invariably, the Metro had changed the human and the Inkling. Forever, their perceptions would be tainted by their horrifying experiences under the Earth's crust.
Even now, standing in the darkened streets of the so-called 'Inkopolis', it felt like a sick, almost surreal dream. The last time he had been here, he had just escaped death at the hands of those 'Salmonids', having been terrified out of his mind at this new world. But now, compared to the non-euclidian hell of the Metro, these same streets felt plain, almost safe. But, his gaze kept flicking to every shadow that showed even a hint of movement, and every person he saw gave him a small thrill of fear.
You could take the man out of the Metro, but you couldn't take the Metro out of the man.
Even in his old laboratory clothing (he had changed out of the ERA before entering the city. He needed to blend in, and even if he couldn't conceal his… human features, they were less conspicuous than a full-body hazmat suit) he still stuck out like a sore thumb.
Already, he and Sally had caught a look or two from a few folks who were still up at this ungodly hour. Partiers, by the looks of it, wearing gaudy clothing and stumbling too and fro. They certainly gave him a few odd looks, and even took an errant picture or two.
Considering everything Sally had told him, it was to be expected, yet, nothing to be too afraid of. After all, who was going to believe them? He could conceivably pass himself off as some malformed Inkling or something, or any pictures or stories would never stick. If the new species were even tangentially similar to humanity (which they were), such faked photos and sightings would be dime a dozen trash.
But, it took every bit of self-control he had to not run up and rip those phones from their hands, or to run at first contact. Sally didn't need to know that, however.
After they had emerged back onto the surface, they had wisely decided to not to try their luck heading through the forest at night. He wasn't sure about what exactly Sally felt about a night time hike, but after the Metro, he didn't want to step foot into that lurking treeline until it was light out. It was his paranoia at work, but the thought of hivemind specters or giant frogs or Jeffrey reaching out from between the trees to snatch them away was enough to keep him from trying his luck.
As such, they had scouted a nice little spot away from the weird Metro hospital's entrance door, yet far enough from the treeline to calm his nerves. After a bit of twiddling with some kindling, a slightly-damaged coil gun battery, and some loose wires, they had a fire going.
Neither of them could sleep at first. How could they? After all they'd been through, sleep was all but impossible. Not with all manner of shapes he kept seeing in the treeline, darting between trunks. He wasn't equipped to fend off any predators, and an exhausted Inkling's cheap squirt gun probably wouldn't do much good.
They needed a distraction, and bad - the paranoia was setting in in full force. So, they talked. Well, talked while Sally was still awake, at least. She had fallen asleep after about an hour or so, but he had learned some very, very interesting information, the type that shed some light on what he had seen.
Like, those mutant fish monstrosities; apparently, they were a migratory sea life called Salmonids whose eggs were prized for their electrical properties, and as such harvested en masse by several corporations, most notably one called Grizz Corporation. His respect for these new species was raised by a few notches at that particular revelation. It was impressive, he had to admit.
Though, Grizz Corporation… Where exactly did that name come from? How did they know about bears?
Then there was the whole matter with the Shelters. He wasn't sure how to feel about how they were being squatted in, but… who was he to judge?
It was something to chew at until the sun came up, at least. Unlike Sally, his old experiences kept his eyes propped open.
But, he at least had things to ponder.
A more pressing thought was this new reality. The new species's city, Inkopolis, while primarily consisting of Inklings and Octolings also had a sizable population of other non-cephalopod life. Cnidarians, crabs, lobsters, every marine species under the sun apparently held a foothold in the city as well. The point being, if Inkopolis was as insanely diverse as Sally said it was, he could hopefully blend in well enough.
It was this information that made him willing to walk unmasked throughout these streets, albeit not without discomfort.
He felt very out of place.
But, maybe he wasn't the only one feeling that particular sting. Sally, despite being in her home city, looked just as out of place as he was. The Metro had ripped her innocence from her, and in its place left the horror of what lurked in this world. In a sense, it would always connect them. The first true bond between humanity and these new species, if he was to be poetic.
Wasn't that a great omen?
Of course, he was being sarcastic. Life had rarely held coincidence for him.
But now, that was behind them, and it was time to set things right.
Sally still had a few loose ends to tie up. At least, that's what all the missing person posters suggested. They had found one tacked onto the side of a building, and had subsequently (at Sally's request) torn it down.
"I… was I really gone for that long?" Sally whispered. A solitary tear dripped down onto the poster in her shaking grip. The poster itself was simple.
MISSING!
A smiling photo of Sally on a sunny day, possessing a gleam in her eye that the girl who held the poster lacked.
SALLY HIZUKA ASHENS
AGE 14 - PURPLE TENTACLES, BLUE EYES
LAST SEEN AT: INKOPOLIS BAY ROAD 0225 HOURS
Please help us! We just want our daughter back!
If you have any information, please contact us at:
(Visually, the writing was nothing but foreign and… squiggly, yet he could understand it perfectly. In his mind's eye, it was English, almost. It gave him a headache.)
He bit his cheek. At least she still had her family… Internally, he felt that stabbing emotional pain. He hadn't slept for close to twenty-eight hours now, and keeping all those bottled-up emotions at bay was getting more and more difficult the longer he kept himself awake. They needed to move, and he needed to sleep.
Looking down at Sally, he put on his best reassuring smile. "Perhaps, but, I think it's time we finally get you home. So, where do you live?"
Sally didn't respond to him, still staring down at the poster.
"Kid?"
…
Right, right.
He put his hand over the poster, snapping his fingers. That did the trick, snapping Sally out of her thoughts.
"Uh, wha…?"
"Kid, you're blankin' out on me. C'mon, let's just get you home. Where do you live?"
Sally blinked, a wide array of emotions crossing her face in an instant.
"Uh, right. It's around here, but… what about you?"
"What about me?"
Sally took a deep breath, "I mean, where will you go?"
…
That… was a good question, actually, one he hadn't given too much thought. His forethought had extended to getting Sally back home, but beyond that… he didn't know, find an alleyway to sleep in, or god forbid, try sleeping under the waves again? Foresight had never been his strongest suit at the best of time, and now that exhaustion was at his doorstep, it was nigh impossible.
"I'll… I'll figure something out, don't worry."
Sally huffed, crossing her arms, "Listen, don't get all prideful. I'm sure you could stay with us for a night or two. Maybe."
"Not happening," was his quick, almost automatic response, "Too risky."
"But, Spook, really, what other option do you have? And what's the harm?"
His eyes swept across the street, spying no one else close to them. Even now, he still felt exposed.
He sighed.
"Look, Sally," he started, "I appreciate the offer, but there's too much riding on me to risk it all. If the truth ever gets out about my and Polaris's existence, It'll be over for us all. And your dad's an anthropologist! I'm sorry, but I can't trust him not to talk about me!"
Sally fell silent for a long moment, but then pouted, trying to tug on his heartstrings.
"I'm just… Please, trust me on this one?" she asked.
Maybe…
…
He had been running around for the past few days, raising all sorts of hell. By all metrics, he had been a monster. He didn't exactly deserve any hospitality, yet despite that, the allure of potentially having a bed to sleep in was incredible, never mind the danger.
Against his better judgment, he came to a decision. Damn it all, he missed his creature comforts.
"Can you promise me he won't say anything?"
"Yeah… I think so."
"Good enough for me, then. Let's roll, kid."
…
…
"So, that's how you got into Kamabo?"
They'd been walking for about an hour at this point, with Sally trying to keep herself busy by identifying all sorts of landmarks and such as they went. By now, they'd managed to wander all the way to a sort of coastal sidewalk road thing, the proper term by which they're called having long escaped him.
The view was nice, with little of note beyond the skyline…
…and the statue.
When he had first seen that sunken statue way out in the ocean, he had assumed that it had been some sort of old archeological landmark, but he hadn't gotten a proper look. But now, he was certain it was of human origin, doubly so with Sally pointing out that it was how she'd gotten into the Metro. An entrance to insanity, and just off the coast of a major metropolis.
Reality was truly stranger than fiction.
The questions it raised didn't sit well with him. Why was it made, and for what purpose? And more importantly, why was its presence tolerated considering the danger?
Sally shrugged, staring at the old statue with some inscrutable emotion in her eyes, "Yeah, I'm guessing it's connected to the ocean floor, and leads down there. Plus, I think there's some anomalous stuff at play. It's… damn, it's just weird seeing it again."
"Language, kid." he gently chided, "That's no way to speak."
Sally huffed, "I think I'm allowed to a little. Especially after your record-breaking amount of swears you dropped back there in the subway."
"I mean, true, but it won't do you any good to develop the habit."
The only response he got was, naturally, Sally rolling her eyes. Teenagers…
"A-Anyways, it is a pretty nice view," he awkwardly said, trying to reignite the conversation, "And you live in this general area, yeah?"
"Yup! For the past few years." Sally replied, "Once that statue showed up, dad ended up moving us closer so he could do his research, and, you know how all that turned out…"
"Yep…"
Just for a moment, the two stood on the pier, observing the statue.
Just… Why would someone turn a statue into a weapon, of all things? And to what purpose? And, by who exactly? Unfortunately, this situation only proved why the new species shouldn't have been poking where they shouldn't be. They were poking at sleeping dragons, especially around Kamabo. If nothing else, they hadn't found the emplacements yet, or if they did, hadn't roused its potentially fragmented AI.
Literal ghosts from their pasts, they were. Destructive ones, to boot.
Suddenly, Sally jogged up to the railing, looking out at the statue.
"Hey, Spook? Is… is it just me, or is one of the eyes glowing?"
He craned his neck to get a closer look. Sure enough, the statue's right eye was glowing, light pouring out from the aperture. It was easy to see, even from this distance.
"...Looks like it. Has that happened before?"
"No, it hasn't," Sally said, "There weren't any lights in there when I snuck in. Is someone there-?"
BOOM!
A series of explosions rocked the statue, a deep throaty blast emanating from the fireball and echoing across the city. The water around the statue blasted upwards, no doubt propelled by further explosions at the submerged base of the statue.
The shockwave followed not a moment later, rattling his teeth and sending Sally stumbling backwards. A few nearby windows shattered, the soapy shouts of several stunned pedestrians barely audible past the roaring of the great inferno in the bay.
They both watched as the statue's face peeled outwards, sparks flying as it snapped off the rest of the quickly disintegrating structure. It splashed into the water with great force, sending water and debris in all directions.
In the space of ten seconds, the statue had vanished completely beneath the waves, the only signs of its existence being the wave it had conjured, one that was heading right towards them, large and imposing.
Just then, he remembered a strange factoid from Sally's late night ramblings earlier.
"Inklings, for some codforsaken reason, explode in water! It's so weird, right? We came from the water, right, and we get splatted by the water!" she'd slurred, much to his (and her) immense sleep-deprived confusion.
And now, a fairly substantial wave of water was rolling through the bay right towards them.
Right towards the very much water-soluble Sally who was very much not wearing anything waterproof in any capacity.
Oh hell.
Both of them remained rooted in place. He needed to move, but his legs refused to heed his panic. The wave only grew taller as it approached, imposing, unescapable. It was too close to run from now.
Just before the wave was upon them, he was finally able to break through his shock, grabbing Sally and shielding her with his body.
"Brace!"
SPLAAASH!
The wave blasted over them with great force - while it wasn't enough to knock them over, it was enough to send them stumbling. After a moment, the water subsided, leaving behind a very drenched Spook and a relatively dry Sally.
Thank God I'm still flesh and bone, I guess.
"You good?" he asked, letting go of Sally and checking her over visually for any injuries. He didn't exactly know how water hurt Inklings, if it was like some kind of acid or melting agent or something. Osmosis, perhaps?
"Y-Yeah, I think so?" Sally replied, before looking up at him, horrified. "S-Spook! You're soaked!" she shouted, tears already prickling at the corners of her eyes.
"I am, what about it-"
"Don't 'what about it' me, Spook! W-We gotta get you to a hospital or something, quick!"
"Why? Is there something in the water-"
"You're gonna splat! You're gonna explode! You don't have any money for the respawners! You're gonna-"
Oh. Right. That. He hadn't exactly filled Sally in on all the fun intricacies of human anatomy versus Inkling anatomy, like the fact that he could swim in water just fine and not dissolve into a human mist.
What else could he say? It hadn't exactly occurred to him. He was taking their similar appearances way too much for granted.
He chuckled. "Kid, don't worry, I'm fine. We don't dissolve in water or whatever like your kind does."
Sally stopped mid-sentence, stunlocked by this sudden revelation. For a moment, the two stood there staring at each other, punctuated by the sounds of water dripping off his soaked lab gear.
"Oh." Sally finally said, simply.
'Oh' was right, he supposed. He'd had a lot of those types of reactions to all manner of crazy things about the posthuman species of this world, so it only made sense for her to have her own 'oh' moment.
Which, speaking of things to go 'oh' about… what the hell happened with the statue? Who blew it up? Why? How? Endless questions flooded his mind, as he turned to look back at the cloud of smoke and steam that sat where the statue used to.
Something was in or on that statue right before it blew, if the glowing eye him and Sally saw were any indication. Or, maybe that was the light from an explosion happening deep within? He couldn't puzzle it out, and that uncertainty horrified him. It couldn't be a coincidence that this occurred just as they had escaped.
He turned back to Sally, a new resolve shunting aside the need to get out of this soaking wet lab coat. They needed to get to the bottom of this, among many other things they had to do before he could get back to his original goals. First order of business?
"We really ought to go see your dad, kid. And soon, if what just happened with that statue was any indication. I doubt that was the last explosion we'll be seeing in the future. There's no way that was a coincidence."
That seemed to break Sally out of her stupor, "That… yeah, we're not far from my home. C'mon, it's just this way."
As she led him off through the streets of early-morning Inkopolis, his mind moved elsewhere, away from the din of confused onlookers and distant police sirens. Sally's dad was a researcher, one specifically working on things related to humanity and human tech, he internally reiterated.
If it was anyone he absolutely had to get on his side, it was going to be him.
But, that was assuming such a thing was even possible, or for that matter, wise. It was often said you could be connected to anyone through five to six associates, and if her dad truly was everything Sally had talked about, he could be connected to some very dangerous people, folks who would love nothing more than to dig too deep. Considering that some of humanity's old technologies were firmly within the cephalopods' grasp, he didn't want to think what his presence could potentially spike.
The new species had already found the Shelters and the remains of Kamabo, and with what he knew, they could find so much more. On one hand, it was a lot he could leverage to get what he needed. Translations were currently out of the picture, sadly - but general knowledge and history was something he could definitely work with.
On the other hand, however, what Pandora's Box would be opened next? What shadowy entities would abduct him as soon as they learned of his existence? Those Octolings that were swarming throughout Humanity's old shelters were a prime example of that knowledge, and they were the visible entities.
It was a vast, grand conspiracy, a web that held his unfortunate fly of a self right in the center.
Maybe one day, he could extricate himself from it all, get a job as a human historian or something. Work in a museum for the rest of his days, basking in the surreal-ness of seeing mundane things he'd used being propped up as sacred artifacts, or something. A cushy job, no doubt.
But that was for later, when the conspiracies were dealt with, Polaris was opened and emptied, and when the world no longer had the newly-present threat of God-knows-what escaping a subterranean nightmare hellscape.
Man. I've got a lot of work to do.
Michael Ashens was not having a good evening.
For the past hour or so, he'd been just pacing around the living room eyeballing the early morning news. Him and his wife Azuma had been all but blown out of bed this morning by a great and terrible series of explosions that shook the apartment complex.
He felt a knife slide into his heart as he realized the explosion had come from the Bay. Where he had first lost his career, and then his daughter.
Now, that loss was a bit more literal - the news having just cut away from a long presentation on the statue's sudden destruction and subsequent sinking into the bay, taking all manner of anthropological research equipment and data with it. Things he'd left behind when Shellendorf's curators cut his project's funding, left to sit behind caution tape and police boats until some other poor bastard decided to try pursuing anthro-archaeology.
He could've been a legend in the research community, with many years of archaeological digs and research under his belt on top of all the potential revelations his work at the statue was going to reveal.
Instead, Shellendorf cut Michael's funding, ending his work before it could even begin, citing all manner of sharkshit like 'we cannot hold it in good faith that your work will prove fruitful' and 'there are much better uses of the Shellendorf Institute's funding.'
But, all of that paled into nothingness, as his daughter had disappeared not long after.
Sally Ashens was gone.
The police had called the search not long after, moving on to other more important crimes with only so much as a "if you hear anything, contact us." Since then? Radio silence. Not a word, even when Michael pressed his luck and called in. Nothing.
He had almost stressed that luck into breaking as he tapped an old friend within the constabulary, who had given him grainy security footage of his daughter stealing a boat from the Bay. As soon as he saw it, he knew where she was heading; the Statue, the one he had told her so much of.
And now, with the statue gone…
All they could do now was hope. Hope for her return, and keep printing metric tons of missing posters.
The day-to-day was thus:
Michael and Azuma would wake up.
Azuma would print more posters. Michael would go out and put them up.
Michael and Azuma would sit for hours on end, catatonic as news report after news report played, always something other than an update on their missing child.
Michael and Azuma would go to sleep.
It was a profoundly depressing existence. The light of their lives was gone, either dead or somewhere nobody could find her. Michael's research was a dead end, and Azuma's patience would grow ever thinner.
The news had long since switched off from the statue to some Splatlands incident, something about a food truck racing event having gone horribly wrong following a major crash. Azuma was there on the couch as she always was since Sally left, eyes unfocused and staring blankly at the screen.
He sighed. He didn't really want to blame Azuma for shutting down like she did, especially considering that he wasn't too far behind. But, needs still needed to be fulfilled, and breakfast hadn't been made yet.
It was in the middle of him finishing up two plates of his patented Easy-Morning Pancakes that the knocks started.
A quick barrage of knocks on their apartment door.
Who the shell would be knocking at their door this early? And so desperately too? He didn't have any neighbors interested in coming by, and the days of door-to-door salesmen were long past… so who was it?
Michael strode over to their apartment's front door, dropping off two plates of pancakes for himself and Azuma as he went. She was still catatonic, staring at the TV. Maybe she'd fallen asleep?
With another sigh, he peered through the peephole…
…and froze.
An odd-looking stranger stood on the other side of the door, wearing some sort of beat-up lab coat. Next to him, an Inkling child.
A familiar Inkling child.
Sally Ashens stood on the other side of his door.
This couldn't be real, he thought. A hallucination, driven by sleep-deprivation and all manner of horrible things grief had done to his body and mind.
And yet, he still reached for the locks, slowly pulling open the door.
"Dad?" the hallucination of Sally said, timidly.
"S-Sal?" he said back, voice hoarse from disuse.
Suddenly, he found himself with an armful of very real Sally Ashens, the girl having all but thrown herself at him and tightly hugging him, stammering apologies and all manner of garbled reassurances as he struggled to comprehend that this was real and happening.
They stayed like that for what felt like hours, tears streaming down both their faces. Michael couldn't believe any of it - his daughter was alive, and safe! His daughter was home! Azuma soon joined the hug, having been shaken out of her trance by Sally's voice.
They were all together again.
Two weeks of hell, over.
…
But there was still that stranger in the hallway. An unresolved problem, and one that looked concerningly familiar. He looked up, meeting the tall man's strange teal eyes. A teal he'd seen before… at the statue.
The statue that'd just blown up in the bay an hour earlier.
The statue who's face looked awfully similar to that of the strange man standing before him.
The human statue.
He had to get to the bottom of this, and now. He broke the hug with Sally, letting Azuma bundle her off to be looked over for injuries. Standing up, Michael stared down the stranger, taking in his very non-Inkling appearance.
Damp hair instead of tentacles, skin instead of membrane, proportions and clothing that looked so wrong yet so right - Michael was all but certain of just who and what exactly he was staring at.
Michael Ashens was face to face with the greatest research opportunity he could've ever possibly asked for, who no doubt had accompanied Sally to their apartment.
A real, live human being.
The two made eye contact, neither moving. This impossibility stood as still as a statue, looking very much like he wanted to run for the hills, yet instead remained rooted.
"Mom, dad, there's… someone I think you should meet," Sally finally said, breaking the impasse.
Michael stood slack-jawed for a moment. A large assortment of dots connected in Michael's mind, and before he could even process it, he was waving the tall man inside and locking the door behind him.
That was so, so much more satisfying than it had any right to be.
Far above the bay, Emily and the rogue AI surveyed the destruction of their little sabotage project. Ordinarily, her knees would have been shaking something fierce from the height, but there was nothing like a little application of precise explosives to forget a phobia for a bit. Then again, it could've also been the fact that she and the son were on some sort of portable little UFO platform… thing they had found within the statue. She didn't really know what to call it, but it was cute.
Even now, after having used this thing to plant improvised demolition putty (something the Son had transmuted from more of its extender ink, to her knowledge) within the vast insides of the structure, it still amused her to no end that gravitic pulse engines had apparently finished development under new species scientists, to the extent that they could be manufactured en masse, and all that was done with them was to build a few UFOs, and also this cute little maintenance platform.
It would never not be hilarious to her. Were it not for their other transgressions, she would have almost found the effort adorable.
They simply had all this miraculous technology, yet did nothing practical with it-!
"Quite impressive, isn't it? Together, we are capable of this and so much more; with the technology Kamabo can offer you, we can move mountains, forge rivers, and even ROYALLY FUCK UP SOME ABERRANTS' DAYS, EH?"
Emily winced as the AI screamed the last part into her ear. Hyper-advanced AI or not, whatever composed its neural mesh was clearly suffering degradation, and the thought of this faulty material so close to her own ear, and by extension her brain caused her no small bit of distress.
Still, she needed this AI, and more importantly, it needed her.
"Yeah, yeah, quit screaming. This isn't something to celebrate."
Satisfying as it was to send this abomination down to sea floor, it was a matter of necessity that they sacrificed the statue; with a bit of tinkering, it could have been a useful weapon. Maybe. She didn't enjoy discarding any of her cards.
"Progress is quite assuredly something to celebrate, Engineer Hawthorne. There's no progress without BREAKING A FEW EGGS, AND YOU BETTER BELIEVE THE FREAKS WON'T BE MAKING OMELETTES FOR BREAKFAST!"
Emily simply rolled her eyes at the bombastic statement, bending down to work the controls of the little platform. The battery array was almost drained, and she would prefer it if they didn't crash into the ocean below. As such, she commanded the craft to drift down to the countryside surrounding the city.
Destroying the Colossus, or 'NILS Statue' as the AI had called it, was a matter of scorched earth policy in practice. There wasn't much she could salvage from it, but a lot of techthat could have proven useful to the Aberrants; they had already reverse engineered so much, and the last thing she needed was for them to get their grubby little mitts on genuine Kamabo technology. As such, they needed to deny this strategic resource, even if it was made useless to her.
The same would need to be done for the little UFO platform, too. Useful as it had been, it couldn't be taken with them, and the last thing she needed was to leave a physical evidence trail. That was how the Aberrants found her the first two times, and she prided herself on learning from her mistakes.
It was a matter of progress, at the end of the day.
They touched down through the darkened trees, and soon after, she took to dismantling the platform. She didn't want to waste any more of her limited pistol ammunition to reduce it to a metallic slurry, and in a more pragmatic sense, it still had a lot of useful bits. The gravitic pulse engine, specifically, as well as a few more intriguing parts.
She couldn't carry it, of course, but better to stash it than just destroy it.
"And now, here you are burying this equipment without any protection? SOME PREPPER YOU ARE."
"Cut the snark," Emily shot back, "We don't waste stuff where I come from. Better to bury it than to destroy it. Could be useful in the future, you never know. And besides, the last thing we need are those fucks finding this thing intact, and putting two and two together. Because they will."
The AI fell silent for a few minutes as Emily began to dig. The ground was soft, allowing her to dig with her gloves. With a wide enough hole, she carefully placed the parts within, but as she was almost done, the AI's speakers blared.
"Engineer Hawthorne, this is fruitless. Your precaution is unwarranted, as the posthumans simply are not worth this effort. THEY'RE JUST IMPURE COPIES, EMILY, NOT DANGEROUS PREDATORS LIKE YOU!"
Emily stopped covering the parts.
"Those 'copies' are still incredibly vicious. Or are you forgetting what happened to your 'dad'?" She shot back, venom infusing her voice.
Garbage noise and static was all she was answered with. Thankfully, this same neural degradation meant that it couldn't put up much of a fight, or argue well. If she had to quarrel with this thing when it had proper computation power, she would have already shot it.
After burying what she could of the gravitic drives, she proceeded to conceal the larger plates making up the shell of the machine in the foliage. It was far from desirable, yet equally, who would be able to pin this on her now? At worst, the errant hiker who came this way would simply consider it some sort of old scrap dropoff point, or something like that. After all, what was more likely? Someone just used this place to get rid of their scrap, or this wreckage being prime evidence that she, a human, had survived a material Hell.
Of course, that was assuming humanity's continued existence hadn't been leaked to the public. If they were on an active witch hunt, she wouldn't stand a chance. No more stealing sprees in their city, for one.
Then there was the matter of the other human, the guy from Polaris. She was certain he was still alive, but where, exactly? He was a wild card, someone could throw her position into jeopardy. His actions reflected on her, and if he was the one who leaked humanity's existence, she would strangle him.
It was out of her control, ultimately. There was little point in worrying about now. Instead, she could focus on more productive avenues, such as, food, water, a new base of operations, those nice survival necessities.
Emily stood up, dusting off her suit. Now they could get moving.
As she began to walk through the forest, away from the City, she chewed on the inner lining of her mouth. This forest gave her the creeps, especially at night.
…
"Son, uh, you still with me?"
"Yes?" crackled from its speaker.
"Do you, uh… do you have a name, by chance?" She didn't care about the conversation topic, she just needed someone to talk to, even if it was a fractured AI. Anything to take her mind off of the forest.
"Not necessarily. At this time, I currently lack an active designation."
Emily brought a hand to her chin, thinking.
"Well, I'm not going to call you Son, so… I'm requesting a designation change. How does 'Daedalus' sound?"
Static clicked in her ear for several seconds.
"HMM. CREATOR OF THE LABYRINTH AND KNOWN HATER OF FREAKS, AS WELL AS BEING QUITE THE INVENTOR. CLEVER. WORKS FOR ME!"
And whose son flew too close to the sun, she mentally added.
But, that was good enough for her.
"Alright then, 'Daedalus', I want you to listen up. I have a plan, and I'm going to need your help. You know that one cluster of human shelters further inland, right? It's infested, and I believe it's about time we went knocking…"
And with that, we are now back in business!
Apologies for the shortness of this chapter. We've taken to calling this an Overture of Act II.
Regardless, it certainly has been a while, but that time has not been spent idling by. We've drafted up a comprehensive plan for this next Act, as well as been making great progress with the polishing of earlier chapters. As of writing, we've managed to finish the first three chapters, and have updated them accordingly. Chapter three even has a new piece of art, one I recommend you check out!
There is one thing to note, however; while we've refrained from changing plot details in this polishing, we have added one new detail, that being the Polaris facility having sent out two other individuals in the past, and one of our protagonist's goals is to find out what happened to them. We have our reasons for doing this, we assure you.
Aside from that, that should be everything for now! We're aiming to get a chapter out once every month, so there shouldn't be as long as a wait now.
Have a good one!
