Seela sat on the helicopter, as GrizzCo whisked them back to the boat. Even with her and the new kid–Ray, or whatever his name was, the two others in the group were newbies. Fresh, never used a splattershot or slosher in their life, and it showed. The ride back was tense. The less lucky of the two, an inkling, had taken a bad hit from a stinger–nearly lost their arm. The other though, while basically useless…at least survived. They kept staring at Seela, as if confused. She tried to pay them no mind.
"I thought Octarians were all bad." They say finally, breaking the silence. She glances at him, as if annoyed, but says nothing, letting them continue. "You saved my life back there. Thank you. "
Seela sighs deeply, annoyed "Look, Kid." She starts "Two things. First? I'm not an Octarian. And second, most people don't stick around this job if they don't have a choice. Get out while you still can." She turns to stare him with a dull glare. "Get a job, some nice, relaxing desk job in Inkopolis or something.."
"Sorry ma'am." He replies, shrinking a bit in his seat. "I just assumed based on the ink…"
"Eh?" Seela frowns and pulls a tentacle down to look at it. As opposed to the orangey red it normally was, it was back to a pure red, like a soldier's. Or a scout, in her case.. She scoffs, squinting around the cabin of the copter. Aside from a death glare from the new inkling, Ray, nobody else had commented on it. "Probably just a heat of the moment thing. I'm sure it'll be normal soon." She says dismissively, "I promise. I was a…"
"A what?" Ray says. Seela glares at him a moment, then back to the inkling next to her "I was a consultant in Inkopolis." She sighs, "For Toni Kensa. Fashion stuff."
"And 'fore that?" The inkling asks, "You're not quite like the other octolings, yeah? What did you do during the war?"
Seela hisses through her teeth, annoyance growing. Ray's eyes stay locked on her. "Do you really want to hear that? Your friend got hurt, and we had a Cohozuna attack during shift."
"I asked, didn't I?" The inkling beside her seems much more laid back now, leaning back in his seat a bit. "Helps pass the time."
"Ugh." Seela sighs. "Fine. Fine. I'll tell you."
It was a moody day. Why'd they even program those underground? Seela sat in an office chair, poring over reports while digital clouds grumbled outside her window. Another report had come in–and of course,
"Another loss."
She leans back in her chair and groans. Ever since they'd taken the great zapfish, it's like they had lit a fire under the inklings. Those damn squids. She reads the report and sighs. Fourteen Octarians dispatched to stop the inkling agent. Fourteen casualties. None of the traps had worked. She opens the video file and watches, numb to the sight of her comrades getting mown down.
"Seela!" A voice breaks her out of her spacing out session. Her boss. Commander, technically, but really, the army felt so corporate now. She looks over at them and waves
"Yo."
"You'd better figure the next encounter out." He says, a big, tentacle of an octarian, glaring at her. "At this rate your department's going to get cut."
"We're doing all we can, sir. And it's a division, not a department" She replies, almost nonchalantly, "It's not our fault they picked some sort of juggernaut to take us on–I did what I could to help the king during the last battle." She gestures to her screen. "And yet, they're practically unstoppable."
"Well stop them next time. You're working overtime tonight, and into next week too. We want that footage analyzed, and any weakness you find noted down."
"Understood, sir."
Hours passed. Then days. The power got less and less with each passing moment. With the great zapfish lost…that was just another failure her division was blamed for. The recon squads did the filming. The scouting. But it was up to her and her fellows to do the analysis now. The strategy.
For Seela, her job was to analyze footage and note any weakness since she was deemed no longer fit for field work. Any trait that could be exploited for a win. And until recently, they'd done perfectly. That is, until the blue-haired menace came in and destroyed everything. They were still scraping up what they could, from where they could.
More footage comes in.
She watches and grimaces at this. An octoling squad taken down in mere minutes by a one man army. She pauses at a certain point and sighs. The only consistency was they always gave them a chance to not fight. To let it go peacefully. But even when they did try to surrender…no mercy was afforded to them.
Not that it mattered. Mercy was hardly something that her comrades were ever met with.
She scoured footage for hours, looking for anything. Anything at all! But it was all coming up bust. As she was about to call it quits for today, another message came through. She frowns at the subject line and email.
"Watch this now!" It said, "Or you're mince-meat! Do you understand, Ensign?!"
Seela ignored that the email seemed…wrong, to come from her own boss, and watched the attached video, headphones on. She wasn't expecting to see a music show. Images of Inkopolis struggling without the zapfish, and how entire neighborhoods were affected. Imagery of what her kind had done in the past. Even without context, she feels herself start to cry–something stirred within her. Those images…that song…they caused her to realize that…maybe she was fighting for the wrong side? She looked around the office, and found that she was the only one still working. She stands, hands shaking, and heads to the window to look outside, suddenly feeling disgusted. She'd always wanted to feel the sun on her skin–why couldn't she do just that? Why should she suffer in the dark underground, watching a screen with her constant reruns of allies getting slaughtered every day?
She made her choice.
She went home, grabbed what she could, and made her way through the checkpoints.
Her clearance only got her so far, before they suspected something was up, and she had to run.
Her heart pounded in her ears.
Yells echoed behind her, declaring her a traitor, sounded so crystal clear in her mind. Shots whizzed passed her head, as she ran through the old tunnels to the surface, finding herself just outside Inkopolis. She kept going, before accidentally crashing a photoshoot for Toni Kensa. They, of course, immediately hold her up, but she surrenders instantly. She doesn't want to die.
And off she goes–whisked away to corporate. They wanted to milk her for every scrap of info–about octarian weapons, octarian fashion. They interview her to start, playing the nice guys. Then they interrogate her. She says what she can. But eventually, they decide two things–she'd work an inside job, in an office building with no windows, perpetually monitored–and that she'd always wear a hat and shades to try and mask the fact she was an Octoling. Effectively a prisoner.
At least until Octolings weren't shunned entirely.
She stuck with the goggles that covered her eyes for the most part, and the visor at the same time. While it didn't mask her tentacles, the eccentric look worked well to draw the eye away from her blatantly non-inkling looks.
And that's how it went–all the way through, till there was news the great zapfish had returned–and that some "agent 8" had prevented some sort of catastrophe. When it was revealed they were an octoling by Off the Hook, the disguise was dropped…and her life continued as normal in inkopolis.
Seela persisted–and found herself in the most boring job ever, just like her inkling counterparts. Wasn't this what she wanted?
"So you were a military analyst, that heard a good song and abandoned your people?" The inkling beside Seela asks. "Isn't that kinda awful?"
Seela didn't know what to say. She'd given her whole story and then some–and it seemed the whole helicopter was listening. Was that really the response she was gonna get? "Yeah, I heard a good song and scurried off." She says simply, in a bit of a huff. "Hey, I'm gonna be honest, kid."
"It's Bradley."
"I Didn't ask, Kid." Seela looks out the window. "The boat's close, and you have the social graces of a Jelly with brain damage. Do us all a favor…"
"Yeah?"
"Shut up. For all our sake."