Squishy
The dock stood crowded with an audience considerably smaller and more personal than the roaring send-offs Arista had grown used to, no forum-ready crowd this time, just the people who actually mattered standing at the water's edge.
Gorthruk stood with his arms crossed, the same weathered, quiet pride he'd shown at every previous launch. Beelzebub, in his human-passing form, waved with unusual restraint, keychain still faithfully attached to his belt. Petrov stood a careful, deliberate distance back from the actual edge of the dock, solid ground firmly beneath his feet. And Thoth, wings folded, dish tracking the hull with obvious, rust-averse interest from a comfortable distance.
"Try not to die," Bram called cheerfully toward the dock, entirely too pleased with himself for someone about to be sealed inside a metal tube underwater.
"Try not to get eaten," Gorthruk called back, dry.
"We have an electric net specifically for that," Arista said, waving from the hull's open hatch. "Though I appreciate the confidence."
"Good luck, Strawberry," Beelzebub said, voice carrying easily across the water. "Try to bring back something interesting. Preferably nothing that requires another emergency summit."
"No promises," Arista called back, grinning, already climbing down into the hatch as Claire began the sealing sequence.
Thoth simply inclined his head once, wings shifting slightly. "I will be here upon your return. Rust-free."
"Wouldn't expect anything less," Arista said, and the hatch sealed shut behind her with a soft, final hiss.
The descent began smoothly, ballast tanks flooding in slow, measured stages exactly as tested, the hull sinking beneath the harbor's calm water and out into open sea, Colm already stationed at the stylus, watching the needle trace its steady, unbroken line across the soot paper.
"Depth check," Claire called, monitoring the pressure gauges.
"Three kilometers out," Colm reported, cross-referencing their position against his own charts. "Fifty meters down."
Arista watched through the small, reinforced viewport, the seabed gradually, gently sloping away beneath them, not a sudden drop into darkness, but a slow, patient descent, exactly matching the numbers Colm called out as they continued forward.
"Six kilometers. A hundred meters."
"Ten kilometers. A hundred and fifty."
"...It's consistent," Arista murmured, genuinely fascinated despite herself, watching the pattern hold steady the further they traveled. "Roughly fifty meters of depth for every three kilometers of distance from shore. That's not random terrain. That's a deliberately graded slope."
"Another design decision," Claire said, not looking up from her instruments. "Same as the storm border. Somebody built this ocean floor on purpose, gentle enough that early exploration wouldn't be immediately overwhelming."
Sunlight still reached them at this depth, filtering down in soft, wavering shafts through the water above, illuminating a world neither of them had ever seen before, reefs of pale, branching coral stretching along the gradually sloping seabed, schools of small, silver fish darting between them in shifting, glittering clouds, tiny crustaceans scuttling across sandy patches undisturbed by the hull's slow, careful passage.
"...It's beautiful," Colm said quietly, forgetting the stylus for a moment entirely, pressed against his own viewport.
"Nothing dangerous yet," Bram noted, watching the peaceful scene with visible, cautious relief. "Just fish. Coral. Little crab things."
"Sunlight's still reaching the bottom here," Arista said, checking her own notes against the depth readings. "That tracks: real-world oceans lose meaningful light penetration somewhere around two hundred meters, give or take. We're still well within that range. Everything down here's had actual light to grow and live by, same as any shallow reef back home."
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"And past two hundred meters?" Colm asked, already anticipating the answer.
"Past two hundred meters," Arista said, watching the gentle, sunlit reef stretch on ahead of them, "we lose the light. And then we're relying entirely on your stylus instead of our eyes."
She glanced at the depth gauge, still climbing slowly, steadily, the peaceful shallows sliding past the viewport in soft, sun-dappled color.
"...Enjoy the view while it lasts," she said, quiet, almost reverent. "I don't think it stays this gentle forever."
The sunlight faded exactly where Arista's math had predicted it would, the warm, dappled glow of the shallow reef giving way, gradually, to a deepening blue-black gloom that swallowed color first, then shape, then everything but the faint, ambient traces of Fen's bioluminescent hull-lighting reflecting off the water just beyond the viewport.
"Two hundred meters," Colm called, eyes fixed on the stylus, needle tracing its steady, unbroken line.
Then it wasn't steady anymore.
The line jumped, sharp and enormous, a spike unlike anything their small-scale harbor tests had ever produced.
"...That's big," Colm said, voice tightening. "That's, Arista, that's considerably bigger than anything we tested against."
Before anyone could respond, something filled the viewport entirely.
An eye.
Vast, dark, impossibly patient, easily as large as Arista herself, staring directly into the hull with an expression that, despite belonging to something utterly alien, read, unmistakably, as curiosity rather than hunger.
Bright rings of color rippled to life across the visible expanse of flesh beyond the eye, pulsing in slow, deliberate waves of electric blue.
"...Oh my god," Bram breathed, backing away from his own viewport on pure reflex. "Oh my god, that's, how big is the rest of it—"
"Octopus," Arista said, staring, transfixed despite the sheer scale of it. "That's an octopus. At this size, I think we just qualify it as a kraken instead."
"It's not attacking," Claire said quickly, watching the massive shape shift and drift around the hull's exterior with slow, unhurried curiosity rather than aggression. "It's just... looking at us."
"Curious isn't necessarily safe, though," Bram said, already reaching toward the defense lever on pure instinct. "Something that size doesn't need to be aggressive to crush us by accident."
"Wait—" Arista caught his arm before he could pull it. "Don't."
"It's the size of a building, Strawberry."
"It's not attacking," she said again, firmer this time, watching the massive eye track slowly along the hull's length, one enormous tentacle drifting close enough to brush curiously against the exterior net without ever tightening into a grip. "We are not going to zap something just for being big and interested in us."
"We built the net specifically for this scenario."
"We built the net for something hostile." Arista kept her eyes on the creature, something in her chest settling into a strange, immediate fondness she couldn't quite explain. "This isn't hostile. Look at it. It's not squeezing, it's not pulling, it's just... touching. Same way I'd reach out and poke something new and interesting if I ran into it for the first time."
The rings of color along its skin shifted again, patterns rippling in slow, thoughtful waves as one of its arms traced gently along the length of the hull, testing the texture of the cloud-material net without ever applying real pressure.
"...He needs a name," Arista said, suddenly, delighted despite the tension still radiating from the rest of the crew.
Bram stared at her. "That's not the point right now."
"I'm calling him Squishy."
"Arista."
"He isn't aggressive," she said, watching the enormous eye blink slowly, unhurried, patient. "Just curious. Kinda like me, honestly."
Colm, still monitoring the stylus even as the crisis unfolded, glanced up. "...The readings are actually stabilizing. Whatever it's doing, it's not increasing pressure against the hull. Just maintaining contact."
Claire studied the creature a moment longer, some of her own tension easing slightly. "...If it wanted to crush us, it's had ample opportunity already. It could have applied real force the moment it made contact."
"Exactly," Arista said, quiet now, watching Squishy's massive eye continue its slow, patient study of the hull, of her, of the whole strange, glowing intrusion into its world. "It's not a threat. It's just... meeting something new for the first time, the same way we're meeting it for the first time. I'm not going to hurt something for the crime of being curious about us."
Bram let out a long, slow breath, releasing the defense lever, though his hand didn't stray far from it. "...Fine. No zapping. But if Squishy decides to get handsy—"
"Then we reassess," Arista agreed. "But right now? Right now we're just going to sit here, very still, and let him look."
Squishy's massive eye held on the viewport a moment longer, one enormous ring of blue pulsing slow and bright across its skin, and then, with the same unhurried patience it had shown the entire encounter, it drifted gently away, tentacles trailing loose through the dark water, vanishing back into the depths as quietly as it had arrived.
Silence settled over the hull.
"...Well," Colm said finally, voice a little shaky. "That's one entry for the log. 'Squishy. Massive. Curious. Not hostile. Do not zap.'"
"Add 'reminds creator of herself,'" Bram muttered, still catching his breath.
Arista grinned, watching the empty water where Squishy had disappeared, something warm and quietly delighted settling in her chest.
"...Okay," she said. "Let's keep going. I want to see what else is down here."