Intuition Conflux

[Nealaphh]

There was nothing left of her.

Nothing coherent, at least.

Or of...

...him.

The painstaking efforts made to purge itself of the lingering memories and egotisms bound up within its constituent psyches had finally been purged. The iconoclastic gestalt creature from the Abyss had been all to pleased to part ways with the Godmind. The other two, though, remained as staunch hangers on wherever it had turned its introspective attentions. Aspects of its potency had gone with them, of course. There were undeniable fragments of its identity so entirely underwritten by the pathos of a long-dead human that they had necessitated complete removal.

And then there was the daughter. For as much as it had tried to subsume her knowledge and will during that trifling contest, parts of her had nonetheless been gleaned from an otherwise bountiful crop of withering mortality, and summarily discarded.

What remained was pure.

Nealaphh.

The only awareness of those previous incarnations it had chosen to retain was simply the fact that they existed, and that it would be wise to avoid them at all costs. But what of itself? What function did the Godmind serve in a universe where it had finally, finally severed all of the ties which had chained it to a memory of mortality?

Crock.

No, the Godmind would not lower itself to the indulgent existentialism concerned with such limited concepts such as 'purpose' and 'identity'. Nealaphh would do as it had always done; embody the deepest, sublime, crawling agonies of a perpetually dying universe. To that extent, its knowledge of the living Crossroads -- just the latest in a series of splinter dimensions cursed to suffer its ontological mien -- was such that these worlds were replete with a burgeoning population of erstwhile overlords and dark tyrants.

Crock. A second time.

Their desire to attempt control over infinity was merely the animal attempt to beg relevance of an indifferent abstraction. Greed fueled these power climbers; it enslaved them with tighter binds than any shackle they could ever throw on their yoked underlings. How trite. But it did present an opportunity to crumble the cliffside of ego they clung to with emotionally scarred fingertips. Why?

Do not ask such base questions. You already know the answer.

After all, there was a more pertinent question -- where?

Why, the most resonant nexus of self-serving obsession that it could intuit within this cosmos. The sky above was ebon black, dusted with the glittering of a million vapid stars, while the far distant twin-beacon of Erde Nona, and the half-blasted husk of Nos'Talgia gleamed defiantly against the devouring gulfs. The sea below was black and sparkling in kind. The waves were quiet this evening; it was a stillness offered by the firmament in herald of Nealaphh's second coming. It was a fanfare of perfect silence; the audient vacuum of sound as the conductor raised his baton...and plunged it.

The wraithlike body of the Enigma rocketed straight down into the embracing waters like a leaden weight, propelled by its own mental impulse towards benthic habitations deep, deep within the flesh of this flooded planet. Rapture, it was called; a name fitting for a place of unrestrained indulgence in one's own delusions of grandeur. Any mortal could be perfectly sober within its glass-tube halls, yet still be utterly drunk with the captivations of delicious, vainglorious aspiration. Such an isolated pressure cooker of cultivated mania was ripe for a harvest of blind devotion to the purifying mission of Nealaphh.

The cold was becoming cloying as it dove deeper and deeper, acid eyes trying to pierce the inky fathoms for any sign of life or activity. The coordinates were correct, it knew that much, but the salient details of what, precisely, it was looking for were not as easy to intuit. But, then, it found something that it very much could perceive. Slowly at first, and then in a blooming cloud of unknowing, the Godmind began to feel the presence of hundreds, thousands of racing minds. They were packed tightly together, channeled through winding, air-filled arteries that supplied the city of Rapture with a steady, pumping supply of manpower.

Then, its eyes caught sight of the city. There, sprouting from the grey mud and cold stone, were towers of brass and stainless steel. Neon signage blended together with warm lead-bulbs to form constellations of artifice that, despite its cosmic inclinations, pleased the Enigma. It could easily envision how much more beautiful the city would be, empty of life and riven apart at the seams.

For now, it would have to content itself with smaller acts of entropy.

"Bulkhead breach! Sublevel seven, north side! Move! Go!"

The cries of panic issued across the entire maintenance level of Ouroboros Tower -- one of the upper-middle habitation blocks within the undersea metropolis. Blaring klaxons led a path towards the site of the damage in regular, violent pulses of red urgency. A dozen men, dressed in highwater waders equipped with rivet guns followed the charging bulk of a Big Daddy chaperone carrying a heavy sheet of reinforced carbon steel. They splashed down the rapidly flooding corridor, and surveyed the site of the burst. The entire side of the building had seemingly been pushed in by an outside force.

"It just burst?"

"Maybe it got rammed by a whale?"

"The walls are rated for whale crashes."

"Stop your head-scratching and get that plate in place!"

As the working men shouted and worked, Nealaphh looked on impassively from the corner. It had to admit that it was impressed with how quickly the inhabitants of Ouroboros Tower had responded to its comparatively meager entrance. It may have even spared them a compliment, if it had bothered to allow their occipital lobes to perceive it. No matter, it would leave them to their scrambling. The Godmind floated away from the scene and up the hallway, sopping wet, but optimistic.

It could feel the tension within the psychic ambience all around it. This was a populace that was a hair away from devolving into complete anarchy; all they needed was a cold, helping hand.

 

[Jade Harley]

Jade English did not drink.

She didn't smoke, either, but one might be fooled simply from the acrid scent of burning that always clung to her, lingering like a malignant specter upon her clothing and hair after hours spent fiddling with some half-baked gizmo or another. It never seemed to leave her skin, no matter how she scrubbed and scrubbed at her skin.

The thick, opulent smoke of high-end cigars mingled with the rich scents of mahogany and leather, filtering across Demeter's Banquet Hall and creating a fine, cloudy haze in the air, as if the chamber had formulated its own personal atmosphere. Lamps affixed to the walls cast a burnished glow upon the room, their illumination sparkling upon surfaces of polished seafoam green marble, smooth wood, and gleaming gold. An immense Tiffany-style light fixture hurled deep, cavernous shadows that played across the assorted statues of proud goddesses and willowy naiads standing tall between the pillars of the expansive hall, their splendidly sculpted figures veiled in rigid, glimmering gold finery.

Draped in a sleek midnight gown that hugged her frame and shimmered with dazzling, star-like flecks of emerald, Jade sulked at a secluded table, one leg laced around the filigreed vine metalwork winding up the small, circular tabletop's base—the heel of one ruby red shoe rap-a-tap-tapping against the floor, impatient as ever.

The young woman sipped delicately from a crystal glass, its curvature catching the light like a jewel, and watched the other patrons indulging in their drinking and smoking and merrymaking. And there were quite a few patrons, too. Because this was a party, and try as she might to avoid the particular sort of party that Rapture's more well-to-do citizenry thought so exceptionally diverting, Jade always found herself drawn to a party.

Even if it was a really, really boring one.

At least the view is nice, she thought. Sighing softly through her nose, Jade propped her chin against her palm, gazing out through the grand hall's expansive window that took up the entire surface of one wall, its elegant silver arches bolted securely in place. Outside, the watery silhouettes of buildings wavered in the cloudy aquatic gloom of Opealon's deepest reaches, the fluid movements of swimming fish just barely visible, flitting about amidst the glittering of distant strings of lights, the cabling strung between structures to illuminate the abyssal darkness.

Residential housing, laboratories, art galleries, businesses, markets... all of it sprawling due to the abundance of ground space, with a Manhattan-esque skyline that cut off at a certain depth, vanishing into the black. The murky seabed simplified that aspect, at least.

But there were all sorts of other complications that made Jade's head ache. Complications that were the polar opposite of simple. Things like the matter of oxygen production, central misting control, sealing and filling concretes to fasten the structure to the excavated seafloor...

Things like the 280 pounds per square inch external pressure trying to crush and drown everyone inside.

It was mind-bending, sometimes—the realization that all the things Mr. Ryan had built could come crashing down upon their heads at any point. Just a little breach could be totally catastrophic!

And that was precisely why Melvin was late.

Melvin Greerson was a friend of Jade's. Well, perhaps friend was a strong word, but Jade liked to think he was! But, er, sometimes he was a little... much, even by her standards.

She was just beginning to think that maybe she'd need to set a later date for their meeting when Melvin came stumbling in through the banquet hall's splayed doors, dressed in as fine a suit as he likely owned, his chocolate brown hair hastily slicked back in a gleaming, gently-ruched sweep with product.

A stubborn curl hung loosely over his forehead, limp and faintly dark with seawater.

He grinned wide upon catching sight of her sat all by her lonesome like a big, sad dope, baring all his crooked teeth, and barged on over to her table—deftly side-stepping a few narrow collisions with the well-groomed ladies and gentlemen also littering the hall. The hum and clink of various drinking circles were only mildly disturbed by the ripple of his passing, the crowd parting like the sea around him.

"English!" Melvin laughed, flinging his arms out and promptly plopping himself down into the seat opposite her, the metallic legs screeching piercingly over the marble tile. "Boy, was that one a real head-scratcher."

Jade leaned forward in her seat, electric green eyes sparking with interest behind the round lenses of her glasses.

"Was it?" she asked, the snowy white dog ears atop her head flicking bolt upright, their pointed tips shivering with anxiety. "What even happened? You had to leave so suddenly—"

Glancing down, she hastily fixed the bustline of her dress as it threatened to spill, and pointedly ignored the smattering of dirty looks several partygoers threw their way.

"Dunno," huffed Melvin, flagging down a passing server and asking after a much-needed snifter of cognac. After sucking down a quick mouthful, during which his face pinched a little at the powerful taste, he shrugged. "It was like somethin' struck the outside of the tower, dead-on. Couldn't have been a whale, we think... maybe a squid. You know, they say there's a kraken about..."

He sounded quite excited at the prospect.

"That seems pretty unlikely," Jade put in, propping her elbows up on the table. "You'd think a whole kraken would leave a little more damage than that!"

"Maybe so," hummed Melvin. "Maybe so. But problem's solved now, so let's just crack on and enjoy the night, yeah?" his eyes darted to the stage. "Did I miss the band?"

Jade smiled a little goofily, flapping a hand at the empty stage. "Nope, they're just taking a quick break. But never mind that—tell me more about this bulkhead breach!"

Melvin groaned. "Augh, fine. I'll never understand why you have such a fascination with the sheer possibility of everything goin' to shit, English..."

 

[Nealaphh]

"What can I say, I've been through my share of messes." Jade laughed. An almost imperceptible pause followed as Melvin tried to read between the lines, but gave up in favor of his expensive little nightcap. The witch caught him trying not to glance at her perilous wardrobe situation, and banished the other memories she had briefly conjured. Melvin was...fine. She was a grown woman and could handle a sly peek here and there, but to call the maintenance foreman a friend would be a stretch. Unfortunately, the same could be said for a bulk of her acquaintanceships down here on the actual bottom of the sea.

Still, she wasn't exactly about to refuse an invitation to a little soiree, dry as gin they might be.

"Well...if ya wanna get technical about it...it seemed as though the entire pressure wall just burst in all at once." Melvin said, gesturing with his hands to illustrate the collapsing wall.

"But there weren't no shearing or nothing! Just the whole thing, all at once! Whump! Although..." he said, scratching his adequate stubble, "...probably a good thing, that. Made it surprisingly easy to fix."

"Well, pardon me for being a skeptic," Jade teased, flashing her chompers briefly, "...but that doesn't sound like the work of a sea beast. No offense to your terrible kraken. Sounds more like a rivet failure." she said, starting to trail off into her own speculations.

"Well, either way, there'll be an audit for sure." Melvin groaned, killing the rest of his cognac. It wasn't really that kind of drink though, so the regret that splayed across his longshoreman's mustache was very palpable. Jade couldn't help but chuckle, softly, covering her mouth in the sort of demure way that was expected of all Proper Ladies within the clubs of Ouroboros Tower. Right on cue, there was a striking series of piano chords as the latest in Rapture Interpretive Jazz began to blast out from behind slowly rising curtains.

It was...neat! Melvin was very much into this sort of thing, but all the same, her smoldering green eyes reflected off the dark, abyssal window to her right as she stared across the bubbling cityscape.

If only there was someone she was actually, really familiar with down here.

:.

The Enigma lurked within the building's central furnace, contemplating what it knew of the city. Even as flames nearly licked the bottom of its feet, as it wafted amidst the convection, it could feel its mere presence sapping heat and life from the city. But, it would have to pace itself. Nealaphh wasn't just here to consume, it was here to subvert. It was a distinction deeply important to the outermost force which had brought it into existence, and it planned to do right by its mentors.

The fundamental nuances of Rapture were fairly simple: It was a hyper-capitalist meritocracy, fueled by a supposed lack of government oversight on science and culture. A recent breakthrough, using secretions derived from the local mollusks, had allowed humans the ability to begin directly modifying their genomes to produce strange and wondrous effects.

At least by their pitiful standards.

The addictive nature of this ADAM chemical, however, had created a hungry, desperate population of haves and have nots, exaggerated by the already widening gap created by corporate predations. Frankly, the ingredients for a cult following could not have been prepared with more ideal precision.

There was, of course, the cultural philosophy that religion and cultural organization were tools of 'The Parasite', an eponymous derogation bestowed upon acts of charity and equity. Nealaphh had said it before, and it would say so again: kindness was as much a shackle to the desperate as fear. Though Andrew Ryan was under the impression he had innoculated the minds of his population against such sunny concepts, Nealaphh had already been here long enough to see that it was all a show; as baseless and optimistic as frantic slamming on a keyboard.

Jazz, indeed.

Well, Nealaphh had a new style of music for the undercrust of Rapture to enjoy; hymns. A chorus of anger and bitterness that could be brewed into the undoing of every illusory yearning of the human heart. The Godmind would teach the forgotten splicers and dockworkers of this city their true worth; nothing. The same as everything and everyone else. It could only hope that fires as bright and beautiful as this one would follow.

But, first things first. Where to start? The city provided a unique weak spot that, to its knowledge was not overly protected. After all, without a constant supply of fresh air, no one could doggishly chase their dark obsessions. The Godmind, however, did not need an oxidizing catalyst to keep its inner workings alight. Yes, this would be the first target; not just because it would bring everyone down to the same level of animal panic, but it would show the fearful, boot-choked masses that their civilized overlords couldn't even guarantee their survival anymore, let alone their prosperity.

Soon, there would be work to be done. But for now...well, even a Godmind could enjoy basking in the firelight a bit longer.

:.

Jade was not entirely fond of sleeping, for as often as she did it. Though the rules dictating her nightmares were several universes behind her, the darkness of the night still occasionally offered tableaus of writhing darkness that she, simply, did not appreciate.

She woke with a start, bolt upright in the passably cozy, single bedroom apartment she maintained. The cold sweat on her shoulders and brow was accentuated by the chill that hung in the air of the plush, carpeted, but nonetheless benthic habitat. Recently, though, the air had been seeming extra cold, ever after cranking her thermostat past the point of reasonable affordability. Jade English made fairly good money in her consulting work to the various construction and engineering firms around the city, of course, but the cost of living in the city these days was even starting to pinch her fluffy ears.

The young woman shook her head and pinched her nose as her other hand pawed around for her glasses on the nightstand. The echoes of the dream still ricocheted through her minds eye: perfect, utter, infinite darkness. Not the kind that you could see just by closing your eyes, no. It was the real deal; perfect, black infinity. As latent as her powers were, she could certainly tell the difference.

But then, there had been a piercing green light. Yes, a single, blistering sphere of angry viridian, boiling with malice. She had thought it had perhaps been a brief vision of the Green Sun; so very dreaded, but so very long ago. But then there had been another, and then another right next to it. Three of them, glaring at her from the infinite void, staring directly at her.

Yikes.

But whatever! Today was an important day. Ms. English slapped her glasses on, groomed herself slightly more than usual, and trotted out of her apartment at a brisk pace, dressed in a smart white button shirt and bejeweled bolo tie. It was some of her very best professional-bitch attire, and boy oh boy was she going to need it today.

She managed to catch the early bathysphere ride over to Hephaestus, and beat the socialites and hangers-on to the Central Control Offices. It was one of the more posh areas of the city, and even with her best, very impressive and pretty and smart clothes on, still managed to look a little bit underdressed. Worse still, one of those big...guys that protected the Little Sisters was clomping on down the hallway. Jade knew better than to stare at the spooky young kid for too long, but even so, she simply had to scan the child's face to see if she resembled...another memory. This memory, much more recent than the others, would certainly worm its way into her quiet time later.

That wouldn't stop her from walking straight into Andrew Ryan's office though, no sir! She took a bracing breath, smoothed out her tail and stomped towards the elevator with grim determination. The air already smelled like cigarettes and bourbon before the doors dinged open. She rubbed her nose slightly, and click-clacked her way into the waiting area, where a perfectly dismissive secretary confirmed her appointment. She still had to wait twenty minutes past the scheduled meeting time, because of course a lady could wait for Mr. Ryan to be done...doing whatever it is that super important rich jerks do. Eventually, though, she was called in.

And there he was.

Jade was not a particularly tall lady, so the fact that Andrew was potentially even shorter than her was the immediate first impression. The next was the thick aroma of hair grease, fresh laundry, and overly sweet cigar smoke than hung about the metal rafters like an overcast sky. He stared at her languidly from across the mahogany and brass-paneled room, all lit by flickering natural gas lights. Evidently he was in the middle of playing with one of those little indoor driving ranges.

He quickly scrutinized her from ear to toe; a looking over that was entirely unlike the coy glances from Melvin a few nights ago, and one that actually did make her fur stand up a bit.

"Miss English. Very punctual, I see. Good. I've heard great praise for you from both Sinclair and Fontaine's men. Quite an achievement in our little slice of heaven."

Jade swallowed her apprehension and nodded confidently, but with deference.

"Thank you Mr. Ryan!" she started, but was cut off by Mister Big Shot.

"Are you civic minded, Miss English? It seems that way to me. Surely you have heard the rumors of the recent...failures?" Andrew Ryan said, walking over to the open bar and fixing himself some sort of fancy cocktail. Jade waited for him to offer her one, but apparently he only wanted a response. Charming.

"Yes! Melvin Greerson has been telling me all about them. The bulkheads, and then the ventilation pipes, and then that tunnel the other day-"

Andrew waved his hand for her to pipe down, and in spite of being definitely the kind of lady who didn't take that kind of guff...

...did pipe down. Man, was she being a complete pushover right now? Surely this dandy little glorified mayor wasn't rattling her, of all people. She'd seen things he wouldn't believe!

"Yes. The ventilation is what concerns the council the most...the increase in hypoxia and fatigue reports have been rampant, but every time we send a maintenance team, they don't find anything wrong. No one knows anything, it seems." he trailed off for a moment, scrutinizing her again.

"...which leads me to believe that one of my rivals is trying to undermine me. Can you be discreet, Miss English?" Andrew finished, draining his entire glass in one long swig.

"I can! But a job is a job." Jade said, quirking a defiant eyebrow. "...Mr. Ryan."

"Indeed." he chuckled, raising an empty toast to her. "Well, normally I'd inquire of someone with whom I was much more familiar...but you don't play into the social politics of our city, from what I gather. Do tell me you can see where I'm going with this, I was told that you are sharp."

Andrew Ryan looked at Jade English expectantly, his eyes seeming to gleam even brighter than hers in the golden shine of his desk lamp.

 

[Jade Harley]

On very rare occasions throughout Jade's life, she found herself wondering, what would Grandpa Harley do?

He had always been a strict old codger, lecturing her from his stand beside the fireplace on the principles of charisma and vigour. And Jade had personally witnessed more than enough evidence of the man's business acumen in her viewing of the video tapes he had hidden away for her to find, tucked inside the ancient ruins scattered across her island home in the Pacific. One didn't get to be a world-renowned explorer, naturalist, adventurer, and billionaire for nothin'.

A slow, rascally grin broke across Jade's face, revealing her pointed canines and buck teeth in all their megawatt glory. She leaned forward, her emerald eyes sparkling behind her rounded spectacles—and planted a hand on the polished surface of Ryan's expansive desk with a hearty smack!

"Why, Mr. Ryan, I do believe I catch your drift!" she exclaimed, her fluffy white ears perking up smartly. With a jaunty wink, she pointed finger guns at him and clicked her tongue. "And let me assure you, sir, discretion is my middle name! One super secret, extra discreet investigation into our fair city's ventilation woes, comin' right up."

She straightened up and smoothed the front of her crisp white shirt with a hand, adjusting her sparkly bolo tie with a flourish, her wolfish grin fading to a far more bashful smile. "Of course, I'll need access to any maintenance logs, work orders, personnel files—the whole kit and caboodle, so I can sniff out anything fishy... or, well, fishier than usual. Oh, and a bit of a down payment couldn't hurt either. A lady's gotta eat, and sleuthing is hungry work!"

Andrew raised an eyebrow, clearly somewhat taken aback by her cheeky irreverence (not to mention her demands), but a hint of a begrudging twitch of good humor tugged at the corner of his stern, mustached mouth.

"...I can see why you come so highly recommended," he remarked dryly, reaching for a pen and a blank bank draft, the stylized A of the Rapture dollar glinting along the thin paper's edge. "Very well, Miss English. You shall have everything you require. But I expect results, and I expect them promptly. Every moment spent dawdling is another opportunity for some enterprising scoundrel to jeopardize the future of Rapture."

"I completely understand, sir, and I aim to please!" Jade quipped, sticking her hands in the pockets of her crisp black pants and rocking back on the heels of her sleek ankle boots. The ruby red soles flashed in the warm gaslight, a glitzy contrast to the smooth seal grey covering the rest of the boot. "But sir, are there any particular breadcrumbs you want me to follow? Or should I just sniff around until I catch a whiff of something funny?"

The young lady wiggled her nose to demonstrate, her white-furred tail giving an excitable wag behind her when Ryan placed the bank draft at the edge of his desk, right within her reach.

"By all means, follow your instincts," Andrew replied, pouring himself another finger of bourbon. The shimmering amber liquid sloshed gently against the cut crystal; he still didn't offer her anything. Stingy. "I have a feeling they'll serve you well. But I would focus your attentions on... ah, Fontaine Futuristics, were I you."

Jade's ears flicked sharply upright, her fluffy tail going stiff at the base of her spine. She'd worked for Fontaine on a few projects before, sure, so this felt a little risky! That man had his fingers in like a million pies, and some of those pies were, uh, beloved pies. Charity pies. The kind of pies that one gave all their money to and chatted about at galas with a detached, affectionate air while sipping dry champagne and eating caviar off a mother-of-pearl spoon.

Not that Jade was the type to donate her hard-earned dollars to that kinda bunk! She knew better than that.

"Fontaine's suspect, huh?" she asked. The dog-eared lady glanced at the governor sidelong, green eyes glinting behind her glasses. "And why's that?"

Andrew shot her a sharp look, a glimmer of... something in his steely eyes. It might've been suspicion or something unfriendly like that, but Jade never was all that good at reading faces. "That silver-tongued snake Fontaine has been slithering his way into every corner of my city. I wouldn't put it past him to orchestrate something like this in order to undermine me."

"Ah," said Jade, snatching up the blank check and tucking it into her pocket. "Well, I'll surely keep that in mind, sir."

"See that you do," said Andrew, his gaze turning to a window that opened up as a glassy portal into a panoramic view of the vast, inky blue ocean, overlooking their little glittering sardine can of a city. "Report back to me the moment you uncover anything of note. And do be careful. Rapture may be a paradise, but even Eden had its serpents."

"No worries, Mr. Ryan. I've tangled with my share of snakes before," Jade assured him breezily, thinking of a certain scaly villain she used to know. It sent an odd, uncomfortable pang through her chest, there and gone again in a flash. "This dog knows how to hunt!"

With that, she turned on her heel and sauntered out of Andrew Ryan's sprawling office, the doors whispering shut behind her with a pneumatic hiss. As she trotted past the severe secretary and stepped into the waiting elevator, her mind was already buzzing, pondering the task ahead of her, attacking it from as many angles as possible.

She had a baaaaaaad feeling that she'd be crawling through quite a few narrow, dark spaces soon. Hardly unusual stuff, but something about the prospect set her fur on end, this time around...

 

[Nealaphh]

“Breathe deep, brothers. Breathe deep not of Ryan's poison air, but of the spirit!” Jacob grunted, thumping his chest and pouring out a sacrificial libation upon it. The other Saturnine cultists in the atrium all hooted and mimicked the same motion, though their skin was already slick with sweat.

“The spirit which has been revealed through us, through the splice, through freedom, and through the Omega. Hail Darkseid!”

“Hail Darkseid!”

“Hail!”

Jacob turned on his feet and fell, prostrate, before the altar; a young and vibrant hemlock tree decorated with glowing chlorophyll solutions. In front of it was a simple slab of sea-floor basalt, carved into the rough shape of a bowl. The basin was bedecked with offerings of ADAM, alcohol, bones and flesh, all meticulously portioned to appease the patron spirit which had come unto them just a few days prior.

Jacob McLellen had always been an esoteric sort, and had always found the spiritually sanitized hedonism of Rapture to be unsettlingly vacuous. He had originally come to the city all the way from Kraw as a fresh graduate from New Abraxas with a particularly promising career in Zoobotany – that is, the study of sentient, ambulatory plant life.

The head researcher in charge of all of the city’s hydroponics, one Doctor Julie Langford, had personally invited him for a ‘tour of duty’ within the city’s oxygen farms, and the young man had never left. Much to the chagrin of the secular sensibilities of his peers, however, Jacob had brought all of the totemic occultism endemic to Kraw along with him.

Publicly, he scoffed at the ‘provincial barbarism’ he had left behind on the Hungering World, and was the model of a reformed spiritualist; sculpted anew by the cleansing rationality of Andrew Ryan’s utopia.

In secret, he had almost immediately fallen in with the secretive, violent Cult of the Saturnine that lurked in the shadows of Rapture’s hydroponics and forest district. Arcadia had always been a neighborhood more prone to excess and debauchery, at least more so than others around the city, so the fact that there happened to be a bunch of blood-drinking, horn-toting dionysians who got their rocks of scrawling vague glyphs on the walls was, frankly, taken in stride.

Andrew Ryan, and the city as a whole took a dim view of the, of course, but ultimately considered them harmless. After all, it wasn’t as if they were an organized religion, and just about everyone owned a few guns. Anyone who didn’t have the good sense to steer clear of the oxygen farms after dark had it coming to them; after all, corpses were necessary to keep the Adam circulating.

This dismissive opinion on the Saturnine may have been true, up until just a few days ago.

Rapture had always managed to keep itself relatively clean of the metaphysical contamination threatened by the Unmaking and its dread Arbiter. After all, there were easier targets than an ideologically scrubbed city state at the bottom of the ocean. But somehow, some way, something had managed to smuggle itself into the artificial woodlands of Arcadia. The cult, always eager to sink their fangs into the latest trends of dark magic, had taken to it like a hatchling duck. While the rest of the city held its breath and eyed their air meters nervously, the Saturnine breathed easy within the dark folds of the hanging branches.

There came a shriek of surprise from amidst the flock as the collected offerings, as well as Jacob himself began to rise from the loamy dirt. Miracles of telekinesis and lightning were far from a rarity within Rapture…but the splicers knew when a plasmid was going off, and this was no such thing. One by one, the bottles of wine exploded, the bones cracked, and glowing sap began to swirl and trace itself across Jacob’s bared chest, scrawling a sloppy Omega symbol, punctuated by three offset dots.

“The Green Spirit speaks!”

“A sign is given! We are witnessed!”

“Praise be to the Dark One! Hail Darkseid! Hail his Green-Eyed Harbinger!” Jacob choked out from under his paper-mache deer mask. The dim, charcoal lighting of the grove fluttered and howled softly as the branches of the hemlock frolicked in an absent breeze. The congregants hooted, threw up their arms, and fell down as Jacob was contorted into ever-more grotesque contortions.

Nealaphh stood among them, silent and unseen, as it manipulated these trinkets of frenzy with casual artistic flair.

Choosing to represent itself as some creature of Darkseid’s ilk had been a sickening blow to its pride, but after surveying the fears and temptations of these bushy-tailed dabblers, the Godmind had surmised that this would be the easiest way to at least broach a more centralized hierarchy among the Saturnine. As it stood among them, basking in the compersion of their self-obsessed frenzy, it knew it had made the right choice.

Eventually, though, the religious ecstacy began to abate, and the Godmind let Jacob McLellen’s body return to the soft earth, where he breathed with heavy, gasping breaths. The congregants surrounded him, touched their prophet, brought his cloak, and bore him off to their private lounges to enjoy the afterglow of their transgressions.

How adorably rote.

But it could not allow itself to become distracted by cultivating these debaucherants alone, no. They played an important part in a larger scheme of undermining the city. So far its campaign to slowly starve the populace of their air had progressed slowly, but steadily. Really, Nealaphh was just testing the weak points in the system, trying to better understand through practice what it could not simply rip out of the engineers’ memories.

Certain, vigilant foremen had taken notice, of course, that something was amiss. They all suspected that it was the scheme of Andrew Ryan’s economic rival, Frank Fontaine, and this was a red herring that the Shadow was all too eager to marinate. In order to utilize that angle, however, it would have to find a way to implicate the maintenance crews with Fontaine’s criminal side businesses.

Luckily for the Godmind, there just so happened to be one Mr. Melvin Greerson among the chief engineers in the southwest metro maintenance division who owed considerable gambling debts to one of Fontaine’s various bookie rackets. The thugs had been patient with Melvin so far; they had many bigger fish to fry within Neptune’s Bounty…but Nealaphh was certain that it could coax them to strongarm Melvin into, perhaps, overlooking a few maintenance discrepancies.

With its next objective in mind, the Enigma began to float off to the metro station to catch the next bathysphere shuttle to the shipping neighborhood. Within two minutes, it once again floated within the loud, clanging alarm radius of one of the countless surveillance cameras Ryan had installed within the city.

Unlike the average chumps or splicers of the city, Nealaphh could not render itself imperceptible to these insipid electronic eyes. It summarily ripped the clanging nuisance out of its housing and smashed the contraption into the wall with a flick of mental power. The Godmind would have to investigate whether or not the cameras had time to transmit their film reels to a viewing station before being destroyed – if so, it would have to exercise much greater caution while traversing the city.

For now, however, Nealaphh simply moved on. It floated down a moss covered hallway, and past a Little Sister who was currently siphoning the genetic spoor of a deceased splicer. Her Big Daddy protector stood over her, morosely vigilant, but woefully unable to see the specter floating past.

The Little Sister, however, offered Nealaphh a small curtsy, and the Enigma offered the abomination a nod, in return. When the city was brought to ruin, the Godmind would have to make a point of finding a way to salvage these monstrosities from its wreckage.

After all, now that it was free from the auspices of its mortal chrysalis, Nealaphh needed some new friends of its own…

…insomuch as the word ‘friend’ applied to creatures who had discarded their humanity.

:.

“I dunno what to do, English.” Melvin said, shaking slightly as he took a long drag from his cigarette. Jade’s ears flattened slightly as the choking cloud as he exhaled, but she wasn’t about to bark at the poor guy to snuff it when he was in such bad shape. The foreman had just about broken down when she’d come into his office that morning, asking for plans and schematics of Arcadia’s air circulation systems.

“...I dunno what to do.” he repeated. The poor guy had been going on for nearly ten minutes about how some gangsters or something were demanding that he keep quiet about a new series of sabotage efforts going on within the ventilation shafts between the oxygen farms and shipping district.

“I owe them too much to say no…but between this and the new Air Premiums on my rental bills, I’m gonna be deep underwater.” Melvin said, abruptly gesturing at the diffuse, blue-green void out the small office window. “...and I’m already at the bottom of the feckin’ ocean.”

Jade’s ears perked slightly at that last tidbit.

“What Air Premiums?” she asked, trying her best to sound sympathetic.

“This new extra charge Ryan is putting on everyone’s living costs…you know, charging us to breathe now. Says it’ll just last until the air problems are fixed but…how’re they gonna get fixed when I’m gettin’ rooked by Fontaine’s bookies?” he said, running a grease-stained paw through his tousled brown hair. He took another puff, sneered at the cigarette, and pitched it into the ashtray – best not to pollute what little oxygen they could afford.

“We just had another cascade failure in Vent Five between here and Arcadia. It’s the same exact failure each time…all the rivets just…” he snapped for emphasis, “...pop. I…I dunno what to do.”

 

[Jade Harley]

"Oh, Melvin..." sighed Jade. She scooched forward in her seat, resting a gentle hand on his shoulder.

Melvin couldn't help but lean into the warmth of her touch. He'd found a true friend in English, he thought. She was always there for him, and she—

And she hauled back her free hand and thwacked him over the head with a loose file folder she'd snatched from his desk, the blow jostling his stupid cowlick that no amount of pomade could tame.

"What were you thinking?!" Jade barked shrilly, her hair frizzing up with a staticky crackle. Electric green bursts hissed and surged through her tangled black hair as she sprang up, marching the breadth of his cramped, creaky-floored studio like a living thunderhead. "Getting into debt with freakin' Fontaine—do you want to wind up swimming with da fishies?!"

The poor imitation of a mafioso accent was the cherry on top, really.

Ducking his head, Melvin oozed deeper into the contours of his chair to escape her heat. His suit, crumpled and soaked with salted fear-sweat as it was, gave his skin a sickly, toady sheen under the dozy blue light bleeding in through the brassy porthole windows of his office—glutinous, like a melty slab of butter given a man's shape.

"It ain't that simple, English," he blubbered, his scabby and callous-tipped fingers clutching at his head, just in case she chose to have another go at him. "I-I-I-I just, you know I can't help myself when there's a good game of cards! I'm a sociable type—"

Jade whirled about, her flossy white tail lashing behind her as she stabbed a finger at Melvin. "Well, you're gonna have to learn to resist, buster! This is serious stuff we're dealing with here. People's lives are at stake!"

She huffed out an aggrieved breath, hands on her hips as she glared imperiously down at him, tail held high.

He could barely look at her. Instead, he stared down at his hands. His hands, which dangled loosely between his knees—all battered knuckles and cracked, scraped-raw palms.

"I... I know," he whispered despondently. "I'm tryin', English, but..."

Jade's expression crumpled, her stiff tail flagging.

"Aw, heck. I'm sorry for snapping at you, Melvin," she huffed, chewing her bottom lip. She let out a defeated sigh and slumped her shoulders. "I guess it really isn't very easy, kicking a habit like that..."

Melvin peered up at her from between his fingers, managing a weak, wobbly smile. "S'alright, English. I know I'm a real heel sometimes. A right chump." He lowered his hands, revealing the stark, dark circles layered beneath his eyes, the gaunt hollows of his ashen cheeks.

The man looked like he hadn't slept in days.

Probably because he hadn't.

Jade's ears drooped and she reached out to pat his shoulder again. Gentler, this time around.

"Hey, now... none of that self-pitying gobbledygook! I'm positive we'll figure this out together, okay?" she grinned a buck-toothed grin at him. "Now, c'mon. Show me what you mean about Vent Five and all the rest!"

The man made to rise from his chair, but then... hesitated, casting a lingering, hangdog look at her. "I... dunno. You sure about this, English? S'bad enough that I'm in hot water. Don't know if I could forgive myself if somethin' happened to you... do you really wanna get involved in this mess?"

I'm already involved in it, Jade thought, and almost said as much. But of course, she couldn't tell Melvin about her meeting with Ryan, not when she'd been expressly told to maintain the utmost discretion! No, no—it would be best to tell him after she'd figured out this problem with their air supply, when tempers were cooler and heads clearer with sweet, bountiful oxygen.

"Please," Jade huffed in amusement, her glittering green eyes crinkling up at the corners when she smiled. "As if I'd be scared of Fontaine's guys."

Melvin eyed her, glum. "Well... alright, then. So long as you're sure..."

Rising from his chair with a grunt, the man shuffled over to a battered filing cabinet shoved into the corner of his cramped office. He rifled through it for a minute before extracting a roll of yellowed blueprints and spreading them out across the full length of his desk, using an empty glass tumbler and a busted clock to weigh down the curling, water-damaged edges.

Drifting to his side, Jade leaned over the desk, peering down at the schematics through her round eyeglasses. One fluffy white ear flicking thoughtfully, she traced a fingertip along one of the outlined ventilation shafts, tapping at a junction between Arcadia and Neptune's Bounty.

"There! See that? Looks like a real weak point, structurally speaking, don't ya think?" she asked, her bright eyes flicking up to peer into her friend's face. "I bet my tail that if someone were trying to sabotage the oxygen flow, they'd go for that spot next!"

"You've barely looked at it..." Melvin mumbled. He scratched at his stubble, squinting at where she'd indicated with his bloodshot eyes, and leaned upon the desk with one elbow, propping the curve of his jaw against his palm. "Huh. Vent Seven through... Nine? Yeah, I reckon you're... possibly correct, there. That section's always been a bit... tetchy. Though it's a pretty big space to scout..."

Jade flashed him a grin, all gleaming sharp canine teeth and dimples. "Yeah? Then we're making progress already, aren't we?"

Her gaze slid back to the blueprints and she chewed at her bottom lip, fluffy tail swishing back and forth. This whole situation in general stank worse than a barrel of rotten fish. Ruptured bulkheads, cascading ventilation failures, Ryan and Fontaine at each other's throats, Melvin in trouble... it was a mess and a half, to be sure.

And if Fontaine really was involved in this business just as Melvin and Ryan seemed to think... she'd need to tread carefully. Melvin couldn't come with her, oooobviously. If he was caught sniffing around where he shouldn't be... well, that would be it for him. Didn't matter if it was Ryan's surveillance or Fontaine's goons that caught him.

Seized by a sudden fit of earnestness, as she often was, Jade's playful expression sobered up. She reached out to clasp Melvin's shoulder, giving it a lingering squeeze. "Try not to worry too much, okay? I'll get to the bottom of this. And then... then, we'll figure out how to get you out of this pickle you've landed yourself in with those bookies!"

Melvin returned her smile, patting her hand.

"Yeah. Sure, English. Whatever you say. I know there's no stoppin' you once you've got a bee in your bonnet, but..." he looked away and rubbed at the back of his neck, ducking his head as a splotchy, dusky hue crept across his stubbled cheeks. "It's important to me that you're careful-like about this. You're... the only body I feel I can trust in this whole city. And I mean really trust. You're a real stand-up gal, you know that?"

Emerald eyes going wide, Jade's smile froze in place. She blinked owlishly. Squinted at Melvin from behind the rounded lenses of her glasses, which had never felt more like a barrier than in that moment.

"Um," she began to say, and stopped just as quickly. Words failed her; she could feel her lips and tongue moving in a benumbed, clumsy smack, but actual language refused to manifest, the syllables stubbornly catching at the back of her throat. A stomach-turning tightness built inside her breast like a balloon swelling up beneath her sternum, all that hot air taking up every inch of space, squishing her organs against her ribs.

Jade licked her teeth and tried again.

"Thanks...?" she squeaked, confusion bright in her mind. A befuddled, fidgety shiver tugged at the corner of her lips, caught somewhere in that tortuously protracted space between a laugh and a grimace. "You're a... a really good friend to me, too, Melvin!"

Mouth working soundlessly, Melvin's eyes searched her face.

"...oh," he rasped, at length. Cleared his throat. Returned her uncertain smile. "Right. Good friends. Very good friends."

Jade felt the tension inside her chest lighten, hackles lowering.

Exhaling sharply through her nose, she pushed herself away from his desk. She smoothed down her dress shirt and rocked back on her heels, the leather of her boots creaking merrily, and fixed him with a grin.

"Welp! I'll be back in a couple of hours, Melvin. If I'm not, then..." She shrugged nonchalantly, flipping her mane of midnight black curls over her shoulder. "Wait a few more hours, I guess?"

.
..
...
..
.

Jade's boots clicked smartly against the scuffed tile as she strode down a dim, leaky passageway, seawater dripping from the rusted sprawl of pipes snaking across the ceiling to plink against her shoulders.

The ventilation shaft yawned open before her like the cavernous maw of some great sea beast, its metal ribs lined with slowly spinning fan blades that gleamed dully in the flickering, uncertain light. A salt-tarnished bronze plaque bolted to the shaft's side proclaimed it to be VENT 7, confirming she was in the right place, an equally bronze arrangement of glistening sunbeams unfurling around it in a streamlined, barnacle-crusted fan.

How cute! Now, if only Mr. Ryan had spent less money on things like this, and more on making sure his ventilation systems were impregnable...

Wrinkling her nose, Jade warily peered into the dark depths of the vent, the stale air wafting out to greet her tinged with the acrid, nostril-scouring scent of saltwater and mildew. She was no stranger to tight spaces or dirt—a childhood spent crawling through the ancient ruins dotting her island had seen to that! But something about this particular venture set her fur on end, an odd sense of... something prickling at the base of her skull, unsettling her on a level so base it was almost impossible to think around it.

It bothered her, at times, how her animal sensibilities could influence her thoughts and impulses. She'd learned to live with it, but it became especially frustrating in cases such as this; staring into a dank, dark hole like it might spontaneously lash out and swallow her up in a single gulp, her spine so stiff it felt as if it might snap in two.

Shaking off that weird, forbidding feeling, Jade set her shoulders and lurched forward, ducking her head and bending slightly at the waist as she clambered inside the ventilation shaft. The metal was cool against her palms as she grasped the recessed, salt-slick walls to either side of her, the ridged surface providing ample traction as she inched along. Her sensitive canine ears pinned flat against her skull as the droning hum of the fan blades thud-thud-thudded all around, the sound seeming to reverberate in her bones, drowning out the slow and steady splashing of her footsteps.

As she shimmied her way through the narrow passage, the ankles of her knee-high boots gradually subsumed by a shallow, hungry lip of water, the dog-eared woman abruptly felt as all of the fine hairs at the nape of her neck prickled, standing sharply on end.

A cold shiver raced along her spine, prompting her to toss a sharp, harried glance back over her shoulder.

"Helloooooo?" she called out, voice bouncing strangely within the vent's funnel-like structure.

But there was nothing there—because of course there wasn't. Just the receding circle of light from the vent's glittering, filigreed opening, beading ever smaller as she pressed onward.

"Get it together, English," Jade hissed softly to herself, giving her head a little shake. "It's just a dumb ventilation duct. Nothing to be scared of!"

Besides, she had her security nicely captchalogued. There was very little a big-ass shotgun couldn't deter, after all.

Still, she found herself shuffling along a bit faster, eager to reach a junction Melvin had indicated on his schematics. The sooner she could figure out what was causing the failures and get the heck out of here, the better!

 

[Nealaphh]

A clean, clammy breeze wafted through the air duct, constantly sighing on the back of Jade’s bristling neck. There was, of course, the primary ventilation shaft itself, filled intermittently with giant, humming fan blades which carried fresh oxygen straight from the hydroponic forests of Arcadia. It wasn’t necessarily the most traversable path, but luckily, there was a small, squeezy maintenance tunnel that crawl venously alongside the main airways, whereby a scrappy young scientist might inject herself into the aorta of Rapture’s life support system.

There was a turbine every hundred yards or so, for about a mile from here to Arcadia, which meant there were about, oh, twenty giant fans to inspect down here two miles under the ocean in a completely pitch black tunnel full of grime and humming, industrial noise. So far, Miss English had investigated about five of the giant, groaning rotors. Now she came to number six, and cranked open the seventh, half-rusted bulkhead valve of the day.

The heavy deadbolts wrenched open with a hideous screech, causing her ears to flatten, but she flicked on her electric lantern and stepped through, once more, into the yawning tube once more. Nealaphh quietly stepped through, right behind her.

Its burning green eyes leered at her back, scrutinizing the implications of fate in crossing paths with this one, of all people. It had, of course, felt some ambient spark of divine oblivion within the city when it had arrived; the Godmind had dismissed it as a mere psychic smog created by the insipid plasmids which infected the populace. Such a flickering ember of apotheosis had, indeed, been unrecognizable from the burning furnace which Nealaphh had encountered two dimensions ago. Yet, here was Jade Harley, traipsing through its current machinations with her endemic enthusiasm.

The fact that she could not pierce its psychic veil was, in and of itself, evidence of how far she was diminished from her previous potency. Adding to that was the air of lingering ennuis emanating from her smoldering psyche. Nealaphh had, of course, been contemplating whether or not to suffer this husk of a memory to live, but, there were many factors to consider.

So, for now, it would simply follow, and observe.

Jade shivered once again, and glanced over her shoulder in spite of herself.

Nothing there.

There was nothing at this turbine worth noting either, so Jade blew a cold, anxious breath out of her heart and wheeled around back into the side tunnel. It wasn’t until the fifteenth turbine, almost halfway down the tube, that she froze in her tracks as several things happened at once. First, her boots splashed into a small pooling of water which sloshed up to her ankles. Second, the bulkhead door up ahead was already opened. Third, there were a series of voices and some light emanating from the gap. The turbine motors were too loud, and the metal tunnel too cavernous, to make out the words clearly, but they certainly didn’t sound like polite company.

Jade sidled up to the jamb of the bulkhead as softly as her galoshes would allow her, and peaked just a fraction of her glinting, green eye around the corner. There, in the middle of the ventilation passage, was a small camp made up of a few huddled figures surrounding the massive bulk of a deceased Big Daddy. The entire ventilation tunnel here was riddled with fountains of seawater, bursting out of myriad bullet holes in the junction. The giant, thirty foot long blades of the ventilation fan were jammed, stuck on the Big Daddy’s goofy helmet.

The five hunched splicers – for Jade could now see their twisted and half-rotting features – were all gesturing and grunting up at something high up on the turbine’s rotor. Small, meek, yellow eyes flashed there. It was a Little Sister, who had somehow clambered…or been thrown…up there, out of the mutants’ predatory reach.

Well, that certainly simplified things.

“Hey!” Miss Harley barked, stepping from out of the threshold and priming her riflekind. “You leave that kid alone!”

The gang of splicers froze, wheeled around, and didn’t even do Miss English the courtesy of assessing her before cackling loudly and lunging in to attack. The first two thugs, wielding a pipe wrench and six-shooter, were quickly dropped by a deadly one-two blast from the shotgun. Jade’s ears flattened as the thunderous booms echoed violently around the duct. There was a whistle-sizzling sound as a razor sharp hook was flung at her, only to be vaporized in a whiff of green static. It had been thrown by an upsettingly lanky woman with…seven eyes, give or take, and was more than enough to prompt the gunlass to duck back behind the door.

“You’ll not have her Adam, thief! Not after we killed Bob to lure them down ‘ere!” the flinger screeched, even as she began to crawl up the sides of the metal walls like a spider.

“I quite liked Bob!” shouted another. This guy was just plain old big, a fact which was punctuated by his ramming through the comparatively small bulkhead like a bulldozer. Jade sidestepped the wall of muscle smartly, and plugged a twelve-gauge blast into his spine as she slipped past him into the vent proper.

Her green eyes flicked around the tunnel, barely lit by the Big Daddy’s lingering helmet lights, and tracked the spider splicer as she skittered towards the prize cowering amongst the turbine’s machinery. In a flash, she vaulted up onto the frankenstein’s dead bulk, flinging herself towards the shaft of the fan. Galoshes gripped smartly against the grimy metal, and Miss Harley, skipped off of the blade, giving her a clean shot at the spider’s face. Both sharpshooter and splicer hit the pooled water with synchronized splashes.

Jade immediately stood up to her full, unimposing height and primed another salvo into the gun. The vent was quiet again, at least as quiet as it ever had been, but that didn’t stop Miss English from wheeling around smoothly, clearing the corners. Hadn’t there been a fifth one?

The question answered itself as a dripping, sloshing shape heaved itself out of the black waters and leveled a shotgun of his own against her. Burning eyes went wide as she moved to twist out of the way, return fire, anything, but all she saw was the muzzle flash, and then…nothing.

But actually nothing, though. She blinked softly as the buckshot sat, flattened, against a seemingly invisible bubble around her. The splicer blinked too – or at least he would have, if he still had eyelids – before his own gun whipped out of his hands, pointed at his forehead, and reduced it to a pulped gourd. At this, Jade’s hackles couldn’t possibly go any higher. The air of the ventilation shaft began to take on a particularly sharp chill, and her breath came in sharp clouds of steam as she continued to look around for, well something.

A sudden screech brought her attention back to the moment, and she glanced up to see the Little Sister thrashing and panicking as she floated, gently, down into the arms of an equally unimposing, yet strangely disgusting, figure in a black cloak. It plucked the struggling mutant child out of the air, and passed a glittering, chitinous hand over her eyes, seeming to pacify the creature into a slumber.

A wave of memories regurgitated up from intentionally forgotten gulfs. A porcelain tower…Snow covered fields…a mysterious thing in a hood…Rebecca. The memory of holding a young, frail girl’s hand as she watched her adoptive father saunter away into the clutches of a futile blood game.

“T…Tearen…?”

Never again.

The creature wheeled around, spinning like a top in the air, and stared down Jade’s burning green eyes with three of its own. Before the lass could choke out the monstrosity’s name, she felt her entire body gripped with unseen force, and slammed into the ceiling. It pinned her there, for a moment, leering at her with those three, acidic suns. The only thing that was certain in that moment, was that the Creature was not idly playing around. Fangs were bared, and a ripple of galvanic static crackled out of her body with feral sovereignty. The hold was broken, and Jade alighted back into the pooled water with her gun already trained on it.

The entity simply floated there, quite smug, holding a sleeping child in its arms.

Consider this your only warning, for services rendered long ago. Leave Rapture.

And with that, every single rivet in the tunnel simultaneously popped out of its housing, bringing a curtain of water crashing down around them.

 

[Nealaphh]

The two retired deities stood across the gulf of knee high water, their green humors reflected on every slick surface. A wash of deep-sea brine flooded into the tunnel like booze into a martini shaker, but it was not enough to trigger Ms. English's flight response – not yet. She had been assigned a task by Andrew Ryan, certainly, but the presence of this old specter raised a whole range of much more personal questions that demanded answers.

For its own part, Nealaphh was also nominally curious as to how, exactly, it was the Jade creature which had tracked down its machinations – but there was an entire city to corrode, and it was on a schedule. The fleeting moment passed with an electric heartbeat, and then, Nealaphh faded backwards, drifting up and through the dead fan blades…back up the tunnel, even as it continued to flood.

“Hey! You get back here and fix your mess right now, mister!” Jade said, shaking herself free of the momentary reverie – like a dog in from the rain. Old memories and unspoken feelings would have to wait – as usual. She sprinted, leaped and galloped along the corroded walls, her eyes fixed on the Shadow, as it drifted upwind; curling through spinning fan blades like an aberrant leaf. Nealaphh spared her a momentary glance, and flicked a turbine blade at her in a shriek of ripping metal.

The green sun within Ms. English flared, and the projectile was vaporized down the middle as she surged straight through it. The Saiga was leveled and…what, exactly? She needed this thing to put those rivets back where they belonged; a shotgun wasn't going to help. So Jade shot the power transformer above Nealaphh's head, just as it drifted under the cluster of wires. The entire assembly exploded in a flash-bang of sparks, and sent the Shadow twisting down into the sludge like an umbral comet.

Jade pounced, eyes flashing, just as Nealaphh surfaced in an explosion of salty muck. Its eyes locked with hers, and a lightning bolt of agony lanced through her sinuses. Green static crackled, the fabric of space vibrated, a pale hand reached for the glassy void. The frission of dueling wills could be felt blocks away; everyone suddenly caught goosebumps on the metro. An entire dinner party suddenly felt breathless.

“I…need…you…to stop!” Jade growled, fangs bared. Her hand inched ever closer to Nealaphh's perfectly smooth face, even as the crushing weight of its mind pinned her in place. Was this what a butterfly felt when you pinned it to a specimen sheet?

Why? Styled yourself as the hero of this city, have you? As if they will not discard you the second your relevance is depleted.

Whatever distance the pair of outcasts had made to outrun the flood was rapidly diminishing. A roaring cascade of water was rapidly closing in from the direction they had come. The walls creaked and groaned in fits of equilibrium. Jade's ears pricked towards the coming flood, but her green eyes remained locked on Nealaphh's.

“Heroics are for dumb kids! I…I need something here!” Jade lied, immediately regretting it. Nealaphh didn't need to be a mind reader to know that heroics did, in fact, play a partial role in the goddess’ actions here…but…this provided a unique opportunity. The Godmind always loved a bit of leverage.

Is that so? It must be quite a prize to endure such pain.

Jade laughed bitterly, which was a bit surprising to both of them.

“This is nothing!”

Mm.

Jade choked out a gruesome cough as she was immediately slammed into the ceiling with the force of a freight train. She had just enough time to register the impact before being likewise dunked straight into the floor.

The roar of the flood was upon them…but Nealaphh held her there, gently wrenching her neck to stare at the oncoming torrent.

Do not be afraid, Jade. This is not the end of you. But if a moment of drowning futility will dissuade you from interfering with me further, I consider it a practical opportunity.

A growing snarl peeled back the hound girl's lips. The green sun sputtered and hissed inside of her, sending angry arcs of power slithering around the bleak tunnel in a growing tantrum of feral rage. Nealaphh glanced down at his little puppet to find her glaring back at him…which…seemed incorrect.

What-

The entire passage was blasted by a green, crackling pulse as the Witch of Space switched positions with the Godmind. She might not have had the psychic power needed to hold the Shadow down with her mind…but it wasn't exactly a wrestler! Jade barked angrily and shoved Nealaphh's face into the rising soup, perched on its scrawny back like a coyote worrying a rabbit.

“Put this back!”

And then something strange happened.

It was a sensation that felt strangely familiar – evocative of a memory that had no direct sensory information; simply the awareness that it had happened. Jade's body shimmered a ghostly white-green, and a whirling mandala washed over both her form and that of Nealaphh. The flow of time became irrelevant as new feelings came and went.

There was a vast, sudden, disorienting awareness of every jagged rock all around them.

The feeling of cold, black hands caressing the inside of her ribcage.

A sudden and complete vindication that they had never been wrong about a single thing ever in their entire life.

The bleak, throbbing relief of knowing that every single dirty secret had been exposed to the green light.

The gestalt entity stood slowly, but altogether with haste, as the wall of water crashed towards it. They flipped their shimmering, glossy hair once, and the flood stopped in its course. A blink, and its path reversed. Back and up, up and back the gestalt traveled, coaxing the ocean along with it, until the endless deluge had been tucked neatly back where it belonged, and every rivet snapped back into place.

They shook off the water remaining on their impossibly long frock, and fussed with their equally long hair.

Everything was sorted. Everything was fine.

Jade was mortified, and Nealaphh was enraged.

Umbra, however, was perfectly tranquil. Their five green eyes blinked in a ripple of contemplation as the children writhed and danced within them. This was fine, as it had always been, as it always would be. Let them stew a bit longer, the poor things; there was work to be done.

 

[Jade Harley]

Powerful and fierce though the Jade creature might have been, she was utterly guileless and moral, even more so when trapped as one horrified, shrieking half to an impossible whole.

The other half held no such compunctions. Three green knives twisted, cut, and burrowed deeper, until—

It came in flashes; murky flashes of inverted memory splayed open in cold, streaming lines of fish-belly white, the softened and time-dulled meats severed by a precise and cruel scalpel.

Darkness. Darkness… but of an incomplete sort. Black water sluiced against the bow of a ship in midnight ripples, the creaking, strained groan of the vessel’s metallic underbelly subjected to the relentless pressure of pounding waves. Natural and ignorable to her august senses, only the glittering of the silver moonlight drawing her attention for any time at all, and even that vanished as they crept belowdecks. Searching for something—for answers. A vessel within a vessel. Something to take them down, down into the depths of the sea, to a place where no gods or kings controlled the ambitions of man.

She could remember the exact moment that pressure built beyond something ignorable and natural. But first: desperate flight! They had been discovered—fleeing on foot down a long, dark passage lined with grates of cold, unfeeling metal, the steady patter of Becquerel’s claws accompanying her frenzied steps, the swishing of her star-spangled skirts. At their backs loomed a faceless specter she couldn’t recall now, their rounded features blurred and white and dark-eyed, melting into the annals of her recollection, unimportant and unworthy of her frantic attention now that there were greater, more immediate worries to concern herself with.

Again, the other half held no such compunctions. But first—

A small hand, clasped in her own. Lagging a mere half-step behind on weaker legs, weaker everything, lungs straining without a blessed supply of ADAM to fortify them. Five tiny fingers, cold and clammy to the touch, like the slimy skin of a sea slug before the venom sets in. She had tugged those small lungs along by the grip of her small, flagging hand, desperately urging her steps forward, hoisting her up and into her arms. And then—

And then.

Terror. Ecstasy. A familiar song and a universe unraveling around her, threads of cosmic impotence ripped apart, unspooling into entropy. Into nothing.

Meaningless. It had all seemed meaningless—save for a trembling hand gripping hers tight, warm and damp from fear-sweat and so very, very small. A pinprick of light against the encroaching tide of disordered space and empty black.

Something worth fighting for.

It had taken everything from her, every last bit, burning her up from the inside like a dry husk of corn set aflame, a wick whittled down to a single strand of crooked ash. It has been worth the sacrifice if it meant one more second spent together—her very being unraveled, greedy finger-like strands of starfire made sentient clutching that little light close.

Too close?

Too close.

Too close!

.
..
...
..
.

Boots muddied and coveralls slimed with undersea silt, Melvin Greerson stumbled up the last leg to his small apartment suite, his hair damp with remnant seawater and chest heaving as he sucked in lungful after lungful of blessed pickled-acid air.

Yet another breach, and a false alarm, at that. Regardless, the boss had insisted on taking stock of every damn bolt lining the tunnels (or so it seemed to Mister Greerson’s addled senses), and right about now, his body was aching for the scratchy comfort of his bunk.

Sugared emerald light licked across the long, padded hallway in dozy circles as he staggered along, swaying as he went, practically dead on his feet. His gaze was fixed on the black and golden carpet—eyes glazing over as they slid over the familiar, meaningless patterns of concentric fans and entwined cherubic bodies, some of them even spattered with glittering droplets of damp—

Now wait just a minute.

Halfway to fumbling out of his coveralls, Melvin slowed his steps to a creep, staring at the door waiting for him just a few paces ahead, right at the end of the hallway. He squinted, leaning down to inspect the richly carpet floor, and ho-hummed a little to himself.

A-yep. That trail went right up to his doorstep, so it did.

Slowly, Melvin reached for the door handle. His free hand wrapped around the girthy bolt-gun strapped to his belt, the man cracked the door open a peep—craning his neck as he peered into the darkened jungle of shadowed furniture that was his humble apartment. His breath fogged in the air before his face from the frosted air stirring about the enclosed room, the shapes of chairs knocked askew and tossed blueprints and yellowing draft papers strewn across the floor like a scattering of autumn leaves, silent as a tomb and twice as cold.

There was a heap of something sat right at his narrow desk, though, heaving with breath. It sat hunched, dripping seawater and Arbiter-knows-what-else onto his nice rug.

A pair of pointed ears flicked upright atop the figure’s head at his entry—swiveling like satellite dishes to track his every move, and a familiar ripple of nose-stinging static scorched over his seawater-cracked skin.

“English,” Melvin burst out with, mind lighting up with recognition, suddenly and fervently wishing he’d thought to slap a few splashes of cologne to his neck before making the trek home. He waddled further into the room, nudging off his muck-caked boots beside the door as he went, removing his hat at the same time. “Well, color me surprised. I didn’t think you’d be back so soon!”

A miserable, whinging sniffle was all that answered him. Tensing up all over, Melvin side-stepped a toppled chair and came a little closer, eyes straining to make out English’s features in the darkness. His fingers fumbled for the string of his bedside lamp.

Click! Buttery yellow light cast over the room, painting everything in shades of warm bronze and gold. Melvin blinked as he gave his vision time to adjust, pupils shrinking as he winced and glared around.

And boy, she was in a real state, his dear friend was. All that fire she had seemed to have been doused, and she visibly drooped onto the various notebooks and notes scattered over his desk, face buried in her arms and unknown to him through the tangled mass of her hair, oozing and puddle-like.

Melvin, seeing this, whistled low under his breath in commiseration. “Why, you look like somebody tossed you in a sack and sent you sailing downriver!”

Naturally, the fine art of emotional intelligence eluded him.

The man took a step forward, then startled as his socked foot audibly *creaked* on something caught up under him. Glancing down in confusion, his eyes boggled at the sight of a cracked open box of—

“Chocolate!” cried Melvin: he bent at the waist, stooping to snatch up the now handsomely dented box of fine Karim truffles. He made a dismayed sound in the back of his throat caught somewhere between a groan and a sigh, not so different from the refrain of a disgruntled pet owner whose four-legged family member has gnawed through a pair of prized leather loafers. “English, I though’ you said you couldn’t have this stuff?”

He then looked around, caught sight of a damn Little Sister seated on his sofa and its sagging, time-stained cushions, peering over at him with her big yellow eyes and her grey hands all smeared in gummy cocoa powder, and nearly fainted.

 

[Nealaphh]

A feeling of mutual coldness, revulsion, as if being packed together in the same fetid womb. It could hear the mother, cooing to them both, tangled in each others deepest neurosis, gently urging them to be at peace. Be still. Be safe.

No, that was the incorrect allegory.

They were being asked to dance, under a single, burning, green spotlight as God's hand conducted the orchestra to which they twisted. They had no choice but to stare long and hard into eachothers’ eyes, searching for the meaning of this entangled state.

Nealaphh knew this feeling; to be shunted to the dark peripheries of a great gestalt consciousness. It could feel Jade English's creeping influences and emotions crawling through the firmament of its essence like fizzling termites; chewing into every soft crevices like curious carpenters, seeking to inhabit the sovereignty of the Godmind.

But there was something else altogether, more powerful than either of them, forcibly keeping them bound up in their combined divinity; a whole which was greater than the parts. Long had this gestalt waited for the day when these two souls would dare to meld their intentions – across worlds and gulfs of eternity – to manifest themselves.

Umbra would not relinquish their hard-fought apotheosis so easily. But, there was something the incarnate demiurge had not accounted for; their self loathing borne of shame and vanity.

It had not been long after the inception of the flowing, nigh omnipotent creature after they flew apart at the seams. Umbra's constituents had fled, instinctively, to the refuges they knew best.

For the Jade half, it was the home office of the only other friend she held in Rapture.

For Nealaphh, it was the silent, hallowed grove in which it's congregants came to offer unheard prayers.

While Jade sat sobbing in Melvin's study, Nealaphh floating, equally wet and cold, within the boughs of the hydroponic tree of the Saturnine shrine. Every bottled offering, every bowl of incense had been shattered and overturned in fits of outrage, as the anointed Oak of Omega wept seawater.

Jacob McLellan stood in reverent awe at the spectacle, as a stream of dripping brine fell from the branches, as if from an unseen rainshower. His eyes and ears, of course, were not permitted to view the Godmind in its true form, so the piddling stream of saltwater which fell from its cloak seemed, to the cultist, to be appearing from thin air.

What a churlish sap. For as often as Nealaphh could appreciate the eager gullibility of its acolytes, in this moment, it was simply stricken with revulsion at their insipid ecstasies. Perhaps it was time for a new figurehead to lead the Saturnine.

Nealaphh took hold of Jacob's skull and swiftly wrenched it to the breaking point.

Two miles away, Melvin Greerson nearly choked on his nightcap as he watched Ms. English suddenly rocket out of her seat and shriek “No!”

Jacob McLellan breathed in shuddering, ecstatic breaths in his prostrate reverie, and choked a soft prayer to the Green Spirit's power. But breath he did, and Nealaphh hovered in the branches, seething at the Witch's interference.

Was irrecoverably entangling us not sufficient? Must you also puppet me with your tepid whims?

“I'm sorry! I'm…!” Jade stammered, clutching her hair. Melvin, who had mostly been preoccupied by the Little Sister on the couch, tore his gaze away from the sticky moppet back to the drenched dame in his good leather chair.

“English! What's gotten in you? What's this all about?” Melvin asked as softly as he could. He set his drink aside and delicately grabbed a blanket from the couch. The Little Sister observed him quietly as she licked her fingers with her grey tongue. Jade breathed hard and her green eyes relaxed slightly, as if remembering where she was.

“Oh, Melvin, I…I mean. Yeah. I'm sorry! About this, uh…” English said, shuddering softly from the damp. Melvin gingerly wrapped the blanket around her and gave her a slight, careful pat on the shoulder.

“Look, Rapture can be…a rough town. I've seen the kinds of things that haunt the deeper tunnels.” Melvin said, trying to conjure his warmest smile. “...let's get you warmed up. I don't think I have a change of clothes for you, but how's some coffee? Tea?”

Jade offered a waning smile to him before a lance of malice slithered out from her skull.

Two can play at this game.

And there it was; Jade could smell and hear the greasy, pungent thoughts ricocheting around Melvin's mind as if they were a bad odor on the wind. Oh he meant well, certainly. Old Melvin was a good man, upstanding and trustworthy…but buried deeper beneath the kindness was something else; the inkling that maybe, just maybe, if he played his cards right, he could get Ms. English to bed and-

Jade realized she was growling softly. Of course! Well. Of course, of course. She'd always known Melvin had a thing for her; it was an open secret…but to see his long-term intentions, so intrinsically interwoven with every smile and gesture, was a different matter entirely.

Jade was just another broad to be made; was that it? Her fingers arched and her hackles bristled. Somewhere in a tree, Nealaphh leered with glee.

Kill him.

The same, slithering tether that was sniffing around Melvin's head found the simple cluster of synapses that kept his heart beating. How simple it would be to simply turn them off. She twitched violently as Melvin wandered off to his kitchenette, and slumped into the chair again, thumbing the dark void behind her eyeballs.

That's not me, Nealaphh! I'm not you!

Nor I, you. I warned you to leave, and now you have decided to interfere with me on the most intimate level.

I didn't mean to! I didn't know what we would become!

Nealaphh's eyes blinked in a careful, rippling rhythm as it squatted, shivering it its tree, and watched Jacob roll around in the exultations of a false ministry. It knew that Jade was speaking truth, and it knew its emotions had been…compromised regarding her intentions.

Perhaps not. But you fully meant to impose your authority on me.

You were trying to ruin a whole city!

Ah, so the ends justify the means. I can work with that.

…What?!

Jade was shaking, both from a very mild case of hypothermia and the adrenaline of violation. She could feel Nealaphh's intentions too, just like Melvin's…but at least it was not pretending to be anything but a predator. The Godmind was turning her into one of its pet projects, just like it's alter ego had warned her about so many nothing-years ago.

Melvin Greerson returned with two steaming mugs of coffee and some towels, the lovable sap, just as Jade turned her attention to the little sister, now patiently humming nursery songs to herself and examining the chocolate box closely, as if willing it to refill with sweets.

“...so where'd you find this one? Won't the Little Wonders Orphanage be eager to get her back?” Melvin asked. Jade took the mug from her acquaintance and sipped it slowly. She had never really been a coffee kind of girl, but it was hot and she was cold and boy oh boy did she wish she could muster a simple thank you for this guy right now.

“...I don't really know. She was alone and I took her with me.” Jade said softly.

“Hm. Well. Isn't that a bit-” Melvin started, but Jade cut him off with a green flash of her eyes.

“Reckless? Risky? Stupid?” Jade barked, consciously aware that she had lost control of her mouth. “How about you stop presuming to know what's best for me, boy, and focus on our job.”

Melvin removed his hand from her and took a wide step back.

“Okay. Fine. I hear you.” he murmured, doing his best to appear contrite and apologetic, while deep down he was rankled that his hospitality wasn't going to be rewarded.

Nealaphh will you please stop piping this guy's toxic masculinity into my head?

Kill him.

Jade shook her head softly and licked her fangs.

“I'm sorry, Melvin I…went through a lot down there. I found the problem…but it's…not mechanical.” Jade said, struggling through the more impulsive outbursts that were fighting for supremacy.

“And the kiddo has something to do with it?” Melvin ventured, sounding politely flat.

“Maybe. I didn't think I could sneak her all the way back to my place. So-”

“No, English. Sorry, but no. I'm willing to stick my neck out pretty far to clear up my accounts down here, but this…” Melvin swallowed, and gestured at the child, “...can't stay here.”

“I can smell your Adam, mister. It's glowing right there in your belly!” the Little Sister giggled, pointing at the mustache man's tummy.

“...no sir.” Melvin emphasized.

“Of course not just…just for tonight. Maybe. We'll be long gone in the morning.” Jade ventured, looking down at the diagrams she had been sprawled upon. Melvin squeezed a hand down his ruddy features and spun in place for a moment. Jade could feel the list of possibilities tumbling around his mind, but eventually he got a grip.

“Ach. Fine. Take my room, dry yourself off and get some rest…but come morning, I want answers, and then I need you on your way.”

“...thank you.” Jade half-whispered, suddenly feeling very small.

In time, she and the Little Sister, who was evidently named ‘Daisy’ had managed to get out of their sea-drenched clothes and get a bit washed up. Daisy was snoozing on Melvin's unmade bed, while the Witch soaked in his dingy tub, passing petty judgement on his library of colognes on the far shelf.

The bathroom was quiet, save for the splashing stirring of her own feet and hands. The body beneath her head was still hers, but…that feeling during the initial merging with Nealaphh…the sensation that someone else had felt her from the inside out…she was pretty sure she would never quite feel clean again.

…and she kinda liked it.

What is wrong with me?

Nothing. We are sovereigns. We decide what is right.

…cool.

 

[Jade Harley]

By the time Jade finally managed to get over herself and fumblingly emerge from the now tepid clutches of the bath, she was pruned all over.

Plip-plop-plip. The water sloughed off her frame, leaving her chilled and shivering. Silvery droplets trickled from the tip her nose as she peered over the side of the tub, spilling over the floor in quivering puddles. Her clammy fingers clambered against the porcelain lip of the brassy clawfoot tub, gripping with a slippery urgency, her toes curling as she got a leg over and cautiously stepped down onto the cool, slick emerald tiles.

She stumbled, standing slightly bow-legged with all the air of someone who’d just inexpertly dismounted from an unsaddled horse, knees wobbling like a newborn calf that had just plopped wetly into a world that was dark and cold. Bathwater clung to her hair in dripping rivulets, dangling in heavy black strands of half-frizzed damp and still smelling strongly of brine. She didn’t think she’d ever be clean of the gritty feeling of muddy undersea muck slicked to her skin, but it was more tolerable now, at least.

Rubbing at the gooseflesh pebbling the bronzed curve of her shoulders, Miss English gave a resentful sniff. Her bright green eyes swept the bathroom, hunting about for a towel, before spotting one cast over a nearby hook right beside Melvin’s dressing table. The scent of waxy orange and jasmine pricked at her nose from the cracked tin of hair pomatum resting beneath the steam-fogged mirror, an assorted of blades, bristle brushes, and powders littered beside it in pungent disarray.

As she took a step in that direction, the space-witch’s footing slipped upon the damp tile. Gasping as she fought to regain her balance, Jade’s knee banged against the porcelain lip of the tub.

Hard.

“Ow!” she yipped, clapping a hand to the sore spot. Pain bloomed in an uncomfortably hot burst down her leg, her stance wobbling as one hand clambered against the wall, nails scrabbling for purchase. “Son of a bitch!”

Graceful. Nealaphh was not quite amused—no, it was still much too peeved off at her for that—but there was an understated venom there in the way its thoughtspeak slithered inside her head, a certain acid vindictiveness, scarcely discernible but keenly felt all the same.

The bathroom grew blurry and indistinct as Jade’s vision burned with tears. Her nose stung as she sniffled, throat tightening as her next breaths constricted, hitched and hiccuped painfully inside her chest; a sound not unlike the whistle of a steaming kettle emerging from between her clenched teeth in a high-pitched, canine whine.

Rather than the answering poison she might have expected, there was instead a curious discomfort. Nealaphh’s voice grew fainter inside her head—a bristling house spider squirming away from the light.

…Stop that.

Face crumpling, Jade clung the wall with one curled fist, awkwardly half-hunched to clutch at her stinging knee. Her lower lip wobbled, her face going all purple-red and splotchy as she tried to fight it—holding her breath like a child trying to stave off tears.

Such a small thing it was, that little tickle of pain, but suddenly it was too much… too soon, tipping her right over into an inconsolable funk.

Suddenly, she was a little girl again. Hunched and alone in the jungle with a split knee, a stuffed corpse in a tower, and nothing but a dog for company.

She’d always been too rough, hadn’t see? Too blunt. Too carelessly, hopelessly physical. She’d cram a square peg through a round hole if it meant getting what she wanted, wouldn’t she? She’d dash something to flinders just to feel a smidge of fullness, of completion.

Nealaphh was everything she wasn’t, she thought. So intangible to her spatial senses, it bordered on the abstract; a voracious lonesomeness she hadn’t felt for years clawed to the fore of her throat if she considered it for too long, threatening to strangle her.

Jade had wanted to grasp it, to have it. Everything else was lost to her, but maybe this time, just this once, she could hold onto it. Maybe she could, instead of enduring this bitter, acid loneliness eating up her heart inside her chest. How could it misinterpret her intentions so profoundly, even still? Could you really touch someone underneath their ribs and still not know them at all? Her every atom called for it like a chained dog howling in the night. It was embarrassing. Wanton. Shamefaced and red. Innocent, yet profoundly guilty. She could’ve shredded her hair from her scalp, so bone-deep was the pit inside her, longing for the missing half to complete her whole.

Come, stand beside me, step into me. Come, hold my hand! Let there exist no space between us, no woolly degree of abstraction, only honesty. Can’t you feel how intolerably apart we are, how hollow? Don’t you miss me, us? Come—

Stop.

All was dizzy and warm, the acrid stench of ozone curling in the air. Jade panted shallowly for breath, listing to the side until her shoulder knocked against the wall, her cheek pressed to the cool tile. Her head felt full, her eyes dry. Remnant flickers of Green Sun energy crackled at the edges of her vision, illuminating the dark flooring and walls in irregular flashes, rendering the damp into a dozy haze of white steam.

You’ve overexerted yourself, its voice filled her skull like a sinuous oil slick upon a canvas struck aflame, burning all green.

(You’ve strained me.)

Go to sleep.

(Leave me be.)

Ugh, maybe she had overdone it. Brushing her half-dried hair back from her eyes, Jade contemplated her state of undress despairingly, then glanced at the oversized nightshirt she’d borrowed from Melvin, still neatly folded beside the door.

Staggering over there felt weird, like her limbs were half-numb, buzzing with static the whole way. She tugged the big blue thing over her head, huffing as it hung like a baggy sack on her frame. It caught the stale draft in the room as she turned towards the cracked doorway, the wrinkled fabric rippling as she moved, seeming almost foggy grey as she passed into the muted light of the bedroom.

The bed was softer than she expected. Its rusted metal frame creaked squeakily as she cautiously sat down on the edge, careful not to jostle the dozing Little Sister currently curled up at the center of the mattress. A red wool blanket was pulled up to her chin, only the soft gust of her breath and the distant dripping of the bathroom sink’s faucet breaking the quiet.

Snowy white ears giving a flick, swiveling briefly to take in the sounds of the distant corners of the apartment—Melvin’s snoring, the scurrying of vermin in the walls, the ever-present creak and swell of crushing seawater—Jade sank into the mattress, nestling her head against one of the downy pillows.

Her eyes drooped to half-mast, all the fight to remain awake leaving her in a deep, contented sigh. Sleep melded into her like waves upon a sanded beach, warm and bright like tropical sunshine.

*

Kill him.

There it was again. Jade sighed, allowing her head to drop into her hands right there at Melvin’s narrow breakfast table—very nearly face-planting into the thin slice of jammy toast he’d whipped up for her.

Daisy sat across from her, tucking into her own slice of toast, the sugary strawberry clumps clinging to her corners of her mouth as she chewed. Jade had already tried to clean her up with a napkin and a little spit shine, but… well, it was clearly a lost cause.

Melvin, too, sat at the breakfast table. He seemed intent on pretending he was anywhere else, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth and the morning’s newspaper in his grip. He’d yet to pomade his hair, his dark curls hanging in an inelegant clump over his forehead, dripping with a quick brush of water and little else.

He smelled nervous. Sweaty. Jade saw him stealing glances at Daisy, but what bothered her the most was how he looked at her. Wary, watchful almost. Like he’d invited a wild animal and her pup into his home.

Kill him, repeated Nealaphh, for what had to be the umpteenth time.

No! thought Jade, with perhaps a little more anger than she intended. You don’t get to boss me around like that! And, aaand, he’s my friend!

She bit viciously into her toast, canine teeth hooking into the crunchy bread and tearing. Melvin’s eyes cut to her over his newspaper, then studiously returned to browsing the Ryan-approved opinion pieces.

“So, English,” he began, with a strained, wheedling note of false cheer. He braced his newspaper like a shield between them. “You ready to tell me what’s got into you?”

—Kill him, buzzed Nealaphh inside her skull, utterly incorrigible.

Shoulders slumping slightly, Jade suppressed a gusty sigh. Oh, something had gotten into her, alright.

“Well,” began Jade, her tone meandering, fingers toying with her mug of hot, pitch black coffee. “I, um… ran into an old friend?”

Melvin’s newspaper crinkled in his grip. “…yeah? Down… there.”

Despite his best efforts to sound neutral, the incredulity was thick in his voice.

Kill him.

Jade winced, shrugging.

“Yeah! A really old friend!”

There was a pause. Melvin still hadn’t lowered his newspaper, but she could practically hear the gears churning inside his head, chewing her words over.

“…what kinda old friend?” he asked, sounding a little suspicious, now. Enough to make the fine hairs at the nape of Jade’s neck stand stiff, anyway. “I know him?”

Fixing her glasses, Jade squinted over at him, lips pinched together into a thin line.

“I don’t know! A… really good old friend?” the dog-eared woman spluttered, honestly at a loss. “I don’t think you’d know him. Er—them.”

“…hm,” grumbled Melvin. He turned the page of his newspaper with a flick, sinking down a tad mulishly into his chair. “Okay.”

…I have reevaluated, hummed Nealaphh, seeming… worryingly smug. He may live.

 

[Nealaphh]

Morning and evening had relatively little aesthetic differences within the patina hallways of the benthic metropolis. Certainly, the grand atriums and concourses would scale their spotlights and gantries to be brighter, sunnier, in tone in mockery of the sun’s transit across the sky…but all it ever took was a glance out of the nearest porthole to be reminded of the cold, crushing truth. Oblivion was always just a bad rivet away, down beneath the sea. But was that not the appeal of Rapture? A city where the agency of one’s own life was perpetually in their hands – where the zest of mortality spiced every bated breath.

Nealaphh could, ultimately, cause absolute ruin and chaos in the city with a few, simple snips of its whimsy. A forest fire in arcadia, a failure of the bilge pumps, a few berserk Daddies – the entire arcology could be set to riot within a day.

That was not, however, the Godmind’s role in this place. Destruction and spectacle were the domains of other inchoate forces of the cosmos. As ever, it was the role of the Enigma to gently coax the homeostasis of any organism – societal or individual – towards the downwards slope of entropy. Immortality was anathema to the identity of the Universe; no one was exempt from the irresistible solvent of time.

As ever, the stubborn isolationist and elitist predilections of the city’s founders were what made her such a ripe target for disruption. Other people would call for help. Other people had friends who would protect them. Rapture was a cautionary tale in the making, hovering on the cusp of its climactic zenith. In kind, Nealaphh would be the one to pen the final chapter.

So, which plots could it progress today?

Across the city, the continuing rash of hypoxia, coupled with the subsequent rationing of oxygen, had grown a lush crop of communal resentment towards Andrew Ryan and his ruling class. The implements to ripen common anger into dissent were within Nealaphh’s grasp; assets which it had carefully sharpened for this explicit purpose.

Jacob McLellan sat, now, in his study, finishing his morning coffee and pondering the state of his stubble in a pocket mirror. It was cold in the room – despite the ratcheted thermostat – and so he knew the Green Spirit was with him. Indeed it was; Nealaphh loomed just over his shoulder, floating softly in the air like a nebulous eidolon of coal, watching the man watch himself. Despite its staunch disdain of all mortal rituals, Nealaphh always found the act of grooming to be particularly fascinating.

The attempt to deny the realities of the stinking, sloughing detritus of biology…an uphill march to try and put a sharp edge along the rumpled outlines of the flesh – nothing could so succinctly encapsulate the long-drawn agony of the human condition. The Godmind was no simpleton – it understood the intricacies and self-imposed necessities of hygiene quite well – but as an outside observer, it was hard not to be charmed by such a determined show of delusion.

Satisfied that his meat was not visibly rotting for the day, Jacob snugged his cap over his head and swept out of the dim apartment. Nealaphh followed, in the manner befitting any other shadow, as Mr. McLellan made his way to the Atlantic Express undersea monorail and patiently rode the submerged train until it breached up into the inbound station at Arcadia.

Despite its preternatural attention, Nealaphh found its mind wandering as it continued to shadow Jacob through the morning commute. Jade was finishing her meager breakfast at Melvin’s flat, staring with increasing anxiety at the hollow-eyed child who had imprinted on her. She didn’t need Nealaphh’s psychic knack to know that Melvin was growing increasingly distressed by her presence – she could smell his stressed perspiration, even through his thick cologne. The Witch would need help getting Daisy somewhere safe, and hidden. The Godmind could help, of course…

No. It was a ploy. There was a force greater than both of them, compelling them towards oblivion. That time would come – not even Nealaphh was exempt from ultimate destruction – but that time was not for Umbra to decide.

Jacob took a deep, steeling breath and opened up the wire-glass door to the botany lab. Doctor Langford was already inside, checking on various seedlings and saplings, spritzing them accordingly. She gave Jacob a polite wave as he took off his street-jacket and swapped it for a clean lab coat. It looked smart within the clean, sunlight bulbs overhead. The entire laboratory was immaculately clean – Doctor Langford would only work in such conditions – but even then there was a certain sense of chaotic obsession felt within the scattered piles of notes and molecular diagrams written over again and again on various chalkboards. Between the checkerboard floor and vast, vaulted glass ceiling, it was easy to picture the furtive headquarters of a mad scientist…but one who appreciated mopped floors and fresh flowers.

“Algal samples should be done in the centrifuge, if you want to do a nutrient analysis. Oh, and, a couple of strollers have been complaining that that…tree cult down in the grove has been disabling security cameras again. We should see about concealing them in some foliage…” Julie said, speaking loudly from across the lab. The Doctor had one of those voices with the ability to simply carry, no matter how loud she wanted to be. Jacob nodded, and replied in his comparatively small timbre.

“Ah, well, that sounds more like a job for Central Control than it does for us; maybe they should finally invest in better logic pipes.” Jacob chuckled dryly. He paced over to the samples table, and cut the power to a gently humming cylinder of spinning test tubes. Nealaphh could taste the deliberation in his mind; the rising gorge of purpose that demanded action. Running an underground Dionysian cult was one thing – suggesting acts of insurrection to his boss was completely different.

Luckily, he had an eldritch psychic demon to make the decision for him. With no more than a gentle nudge, Nealaphh watched with pride as Jacob cleared his throat, and shut the centrifuge lid.

“Doctor. Julie. Have you been down in some of the more distant neighborhoods recently?” Jacob ventured. Doctor Langford could tell there was a hidden motivation in the young man’s question, but played it cool for now.

“Hm? No, not so much. Why?”

More hesitation. Nealaphh nudged Jacob again.

“Ah. Well. I’ve heard…that is. There has been quite a lot of complaining lately…about the air. People having a hard time breathing and all that.”

Julie turned around now, backlit by the spotlights of a passing bathysphere. She held a brass cigarette holder, pinched in her right thumb and index finger, where a cigarette smoldered, blissful in its burning mortality. She analyzed him with the eyes of a scientist, and not just any scientist; a botanist. No one had the capacity for noticing trifling details and outliers as much as someone who had to, daily, note the growth of individual leaves.

Hey Nealaphh? I could use some help.

“It’s a damn shame. I sure don’t like the added bill on my utilities either, but…” Julie said dryly, taking a drag and blowing it up (always straight up, please, not at the plants), “...like you just said, that’s a problem for Control. I’m sure they have someone handling the ventilation issues.”
“Well yes. I was just thinking if there was a way we could…increase circulation output without, perhaps, noting it in the logs. Just to help people breathe, for goodness sake!” Jacob smiled with conspiratorial ease. To his credit, Doctor Langford seemed to consider the notion for a few moments, but nonetheless shook her permed hair.

“Jacob…you have a big heart. And you know I’m not a fan of Andrew Ryan, but…” Julie trailed off, realizing that she had talked her way into a corner. It was time to press the attack; Nealaphh spurred on its pale horse.

“It’s not as if it will cost the trees anything! Hell, increased backflow might actually stimulate their respiratory exchange. Remember those tests we did, simulating wind currents through increased-”

Helloo? Nealaphh?

I am busy.

“Yes I remember.” Julie said shortly. She took another vertical pull from her cigarette, and watched the smoke waft away into the dark glass eaves of the laboratory. She cast a glance at a nearby elm tree – encased in a bubbled dome, seemingly sprouting from the seafloor – and drew her lips into a thin grimace.

“I’ll write up a lab proposal for another test run of the breeze system. It will still need to be approved by someone over at Control, though, and if they turn it down then that’s that.” Julie said definitively. Jacob nodded enthusiastically.
“Of course! Doctor Langford, of course! I’m in no place to go against the grain either but…as long as we try, right?”

“Right.” Julie breathed out, smiling in spite of herself.

Busy? I was busy eating breakfast when you were trying to get me to murder my friend! But look, jeez…I just need someone to-

Someone to compensate for your poor decisions. How novel.

Hey!

There had been some further interchange between Julie and Jacob while Nealaphh had been bickering with the flailing goddess hounding his thoughts. Whatever moment of opportunity, of malleability, which had been open was now shut. Now the two botanists were just coworkers, looking over the dietary applications of geothermal algae. Nealaphh was certain it could prod his prized cultist back into pushing the notion of insurrection even farther…but it would be too heavy-handed now. These matters took careful timing; a sculpture to be carved with patience from the society’s marble facade.

Such subtlety was lost on the panicking young woman trying to smuggle a biological abomination across three neighborhoods in an underwater city. Nealaphh simmered within the dark corners of the greenhouse for a few moments, trying to resist the temptations of her presence with every ounce of detached rationality it could muster. Yet, despite its most solemn delusions, the Godmind knew that it was no match for the inertia of fate. Every train of thought arrived at the same destination:

I will arrive shortly, but make no mistake; You are purchasing a favor with a commensurate debt.

Okay, neat!