Two Months Before

If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing.
- HP Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu Part I. "The Horror in Clay"

Somewhere off the coast of Whalestrand
March 1st, 2023

It was not yet Kobber season. Not by two months yet. But even so, Whalestrand was making preparations already. Long-term hotel stays were being prepared for, local tourist traps were gearing up. Even local law enforcement and military bases were gearing up, ready to assist and/or detain when it came to the more destructive habits of the transient superheroes. Almost everyone in the city was on high alert, waiting for the excitement that came with the Kobbers.

So the crew of the research ship søhest weren't too surprised when a Kobber appeared before them and made a request. After all, they'd been expecting something like this. Plenty of science-minded Kobbers would have wanted to take a look at the ocean surrounding their temporary new home, just in case it was hiding some nasty secrets. Money was no object - they'd been promised handsome compensation for their trouble. And, in any case, it was their job to do whatever it was

What did give them a moment's pause, however, was where the Kobber wanted to go.

They'd asked if he was correct, and he insisted. One of them - only one - objected, although not very strongly. Dark things were said to have on that stretch of water, he said. No fishermen cast their nets there, no sailboats crossed it. No divers ever went near it, and those who did swore off the place the moment they came back. If they ever came back - two people had vanished and one had washed up on the beach two days later, mutilated in a manner like nothing the coroner could describe. It was, in summary, bad luck to go near that place.

But as it wasn't a very strong objection, and since they were scientists who had been paid a healthy sum, they saw no real reason to refuse. So, in a week's time, the Søhest sailed out one grey, foggy March morning, with the sun struggling to come through, towards the spot.

And when they went, the hestesko, or "horseshoe", came with them, as it always did. The modified triton submersible, only big enough for one, was a constant companion. It had helped in mapping out the shoreline, in charting the health of the reefs and in retrieving important specimens from the floor of the sea. But now it was going to go somewhere it had never been before - a sheer abyss, the drop of the continental shelf that formed a solid wall of rock facing out into the open ocean. It had never gone as far as this, nor really dived as deep as had been requested. And now was that time.

In moments, the Kobber had climbed inside the hestesko. The entrance lid was shut and screwed tightly, the instruments checked and the engine turned on. With a shout from the captain and a whirring of gears, the craft was hoisted out over the open water, then dropped into the rippling grey sea. And in a matter of moments, in a whirring of motors and a flurry of bubbles, it had begun its long descent into the depths.

But as the crew watched their monitors, glancing out occasionally across the iron, rippling ocean, they were desparetly trying to put something out of their minds. And that something was the reason why this place, far out from the shores of Whalestrand, was sometimes called helvedes mund.

Or, translated from the local tongue, "the mouth of hell".

--------

"All I'm saying, mother, is 'forewarned is forearmed'."

Of all the strange, strange things he would ever do in his life, Ventus Arcturus Cosine did not ever thing that fielding a phone call from his mother while inside of a submersible would be one of those things. But even as the hestesko vanished beneath the waves and began its descent, he was finding himself having to reassure his mother, Dawn, that what he was doing was entirely reasonable.

"Think back to Kuwahawi," he was saying as the surface of the sea rose away above him and the waters grew rapidly darker. "How many of our foes came from the ocean, the one place we should have expected? Do we really want a repeat of the Snowmads, or Hookjaw, or the Morgawr? The sooner we try to examine what could be lurking down here, the sooner we can isolate potential threats and-"

He paused as the voice on the other end cut in. The churning of the waters above dropped away, more and more muffled by the heavy thrum of the submersible's engine. Meter upon meter of cable, connecting the cameras attached to the hestesko to video feeds back on the ship, spooled out from behind as the little craft descended.

Something that was said made Vent sigh in irritation.

"It's not that I don't approve of your new hire, mother. It's just that I don't believe she's... appropriate for this. Her expertise is in fighting, hacking and occasionally spouting some off-planet lingo that takes me far too long to translate. Sending her down here... I don't think that's going to end well."

There was another beat as the craft continued to descend.

"Well, we'll see. Just try not to get her killed before you make her start the proper work. Last thing we need is for more of our employees to renounce us.

"...no," he added, with a smirk, "I will not let you live that down. Somebody needs to keep you grounded in this family, and it may as well be me."

Already the waters were growing dark around him. He reached over with his free hand, keeping the other on the controls, and flicked a switch. Instantly, near-incandescent beams of light flickered on from the front of the submersible, illuminating some - but not all - of the blackness ahad of him. His eyes briefly glanced down at the depth gauge, knowing full well that, even though he was pushing Even so, he knew it would take nearly two hours to reach maximum depth at full speed.

Hopefully, he would reach where he wanted to go before then. And hopefully nothing happened until then.

He knew what he was doing was dangerous. Aside from the crushing pressure and freezing cold of the ocean, there was... who knew what. But that was why he was doing this at all. He had to know what could be out there and, if there was indeed anything, what threat it posed to the land and how best to stop it. The Kobbers solved problems, but Vent wanted to be the one who found them and then warned the others first. There was no way they were going to be caught by surprise this time.

Deeper and deeper still. The water grew blacker, darker. The pressure gauge was ticking steadily up. There was only so deep this thing could go, so far down it could travel, before the sheer weight of the ocean would start to crush the tiny craft like a paper cup. Vent could only hope that it would last long enough.

"I'm not really sure what I expect to find, mother. But there has to be something to account for all these local legends. And whatever it is, we need to be sure that it isn't going to-"

And then he saw it.

He stared.

And then it took him some time to respond to Dawn, who was enquiring

"...I think I found it, mother."

He knew that Scandanavia was surrounded by many miles of continental shelf. So there shouldn't have been anything there, beneath that stretch of water the Whalestranders feared so much. But there it was - a great, yawning chasm, like the blade of a gigantic sword had been roughly dragged through the very rock. Still far off, but growing closer as the sub descended, looming like the ever-widening maw of some angry god. Not helping the comparison was the protruding spikes of black rock, glinting in the distant light of the submersible's beams, like crooked obsidian teeth.

He suddenly felt the local name to be very appropriate.

"...I have to go," he said to Dawn. "I've got work to do. You just worry about things on the surface, okay?

"...yes, I have my sifter. Yes, I paid them. Yes, I know dinner is in the fridge. No, I don't need Evolto's help, he tried using Nebula Gas as an accelerant last time. Took forever to clean the smell out.

"...I love you too."

Then he ended the call, put his phone down and continued his descent into the cavernous maw in the seabed they called the Mouth of Hell.

--------

The remainder of Vent and the hestesko's journey into the abyss need not be dwelt upon. It was mostly filled with the humming of the submersible's engine, all while staring at nothing but blackness, framed by the rock walls around him. Occasionally, a strange-looking fish swam past, or a squid, or even a small shark. Or the crew of the søhest would pipe in over the radio with some remark or other.

But those were hardly worth remarking on. And Vent barely noted them, as he spent much of that time amidst his own thoughts.

How long ago was it, now? Since he'd come to this world? Of course, he knew the real answer - five years - but in truth seemed a lifetime ago. A blur amidst that period of his life lost in the struggle against Faust. As for when that hellish organization first rose, and when he first put on the Build Driver and fought as a Kamen Rider... that was even more distant in his mind. It seemed to span a decade of his memory, even when his computer brain could pull up the accurate figure to prove him wrong.

It seemed to be another life, another Vent who lived those events. A Vent who didn't know quite as much, who hadn't yet experienced things quite as wonderful and amazing as what this world had offered. A vent who had struggled not to break, had splintered briefly...

A vaguely luminous animal floated past the viewing bubble. He ignored it.

..and then he'd come here. And the splinters had been healed and smoothed over. That was what this world did to you, he supposed. It changed you. Moulded you into something better than what you had been before. And so much had happened at once, and it meant that he'd found something better than fighting madmen and monsters. A wife, a kingdom, a position as overseer and scientific advisor to the Kobbers. A family.

He supressed a snort of amusement. Family. He'd fought so hard to protect his own - not always successfully, he had to admit. He'd nearly lost them all in that terrible war, the war that had claimed even the lives of other Kobbers. And then he'd found them again... elsewhere. The universe was truly-

Something caught his eye. 

On first glance, he took them for mere scratches in the cavern wall. No more than the mere pitted gouges of pebbles thrown against the rock by the current, his eyes first told him. But then his higher brain, the one he owed his genius to, woke up from the haze of mixed boredom and trepidation he'd been in for the past... however long it was. Which meant that he quickly noticed something stranger about what the average person would dismiss as mere quirks of the natural world. 

Something worth looking at.

He gripped the control sticks of the submersible and let go of the throttle somewhat. The hestesko slowed, and with the momentum he still had, he manoeuvred the little craft around to get a better look at what he'd seen before the craft came to a complete stop. The whirring of the turbines slowed, leaving the submersible and its pilot suspended in the water column, right in the middle of the seemingly endless cavern.

He looked again.

And his eyes widened almost to the point of falling out.

"Oh, my...!"

He was right. These were no mere scratches. They were grooves, carved right into the rock. The depth and width of them suggested not just a deliberate hand in their creation, but the use of some sort of tool - pointed and durable enough to gouge the stone, at any rate. Their shape was not irregular, either. They formed... patterns. Shapes. No - they were pictures. Drawings, made with a deliberate intention.

But... this was so far down! Even accounting for the rise of sea levels between the last great ice age and now, there was no way that something like this should exist! And yet, the more he looked, the more he followed those grooves and lines with his eyes, the more Vent, brain already in hyperactive reserch mode, realized that he couldn't name them as anything else.

Cave art. Primitive, underwater cave art.

He heard the captain of the søhest make some exclamation into his earpiece. But he was already enraptured, absorbed by this most astounding of discoveries.

The first scene, the one that caught his eye to begin with, showed strange figures, almost humanoid but too long in the arm. From the posture alone, it seemed that these figures were meant to be apes, or at least ape-like. They stood upon a faint line, surrounded by scratchy impressions of what might have been trees, with jagged, wave-like lines off to one side.  But as Vent's eye wandered over the image, he noticed something.

Some of these figures, Vent could see, were ambling down to this depiction of the ocean. And as they descended beneath it, they changed. Their bodies morphed - their arms shortened, their legs fused, became... tails, maybe? Finned, like the flukes of a cetacean, or perhaps a fish - the angle made it rather difficult to tell. There was only so much detail that the flat, two-dimensional plane could provide.

"Re-mark-able," he breathed. Because he knew what he wanted to say, what name he wanted to give to the figures he was looking at. The word squatted on the tip of his tongue, aching to escape. But no, not yet. Not until he was sure of what he was seeing, that he had more evidence to keep him from sounding insane when the word merfolk came out of his mouth.

Thinking it didn't count, at least.

He swept the beams of the hestesko across the cavern wall, following whatever line the original artists had laid out with the positioning of their drawings. An entire tapestry unfolded before him, and he took in each picture with the same eager scientific enthusiasm that had created Full Bottles and Progrise Keys.

There were scenes of these aquatic beings forming gatherings - perhaps distinct tribes. Some, surrounded by crowds of their fellows, fought with what looked like knives, either battles for leadership or territory. Some farmed long strands of weed, or picked mussels from the seabed. There were scenes of hunting, the figures wielding spears and nets, accompanied by... he squinted... no, those were almost certainly dolphins. It made sense, with hindsight. What other species was intelligent - and tractable - enough to work as something akin to hunting dogs?

A word was coming. A name, sitting patiently in the back of Vent's head, waiting for him to say it out loud. But he didn't dare, in case it broke the spell. His eyes were running back and forth over the pictures, of the little stories told in every one, occasionally twitching the controls so the headlamp beams flickered over new stories. An entire history, spanning thousands if not millions of years, recorded for posterity in this cavern by an unseen race of-

And then, moving his lights over the wall a little further, he stopped.

Something was wrong.

He couldn't quite make it out, at first. So he squinted, and his eyes flickered as his internal scanners came online. They took in every inch of the rock face, every imperfection and pittance and chemical variation between every micro-inch of stone, right down to the atoms themselves. It was overkill, but he had to be sure on every single detail.

The scans came back conclusive. This next set of carvings... they were new. The lines that marked them out were much paler in comparison to the dulled, weathered lines of those previous drawings. They were shakey and uneven, ad if the owner of the hand that carved them were gripped by some terrible emotion - grief, fear and rage all mixed into one. And what they showed was a far cry from the pleasant scenes of the earlier art. 

Now, these tribes people fled in terror from something that sat on top of the water, something alien. Something vaguely lozenge-shaped, with an invisible tail that beat the water behind it. It reached into the water with long, pincered arms and snatched up their children, screaming, from the water. It shot long spears or streaks of flame at those who fought back, killing them. Spears did not stop it. Claws made no dent. And on the bottom of the ocean floor, those who had escaped wept and wailed, hands buried in their faces or raised in supplication, as if begging to be delivered from the monster that.

...no.

Not a monster.

Vent peered. And scanned again.

And covered his mouth as he realized that, in his zeal to learn, he'd missed the human figures on top of the monster. Except it wasn't a monster, it was a boat. A boat full of humans. Humans wielding catch poles. Humans wielding guns. This wasn't a depiction of some ancient history, either - the carvings were new, and the general outline of the boat looked modern, or at least as close to modern as these beings could understand it.

Somebody swore into his ear. Probably the first mate of the boat. He'd cursed like... well, a sailor, throughout the whole thing. And he didn't blame him. This was a scene of... tragedy. Something terrible had happened, and the beings had come here. They'd recorded it, etched the event, or as close as they could comprehend that event, for all time into the stone. The only way they knew how to express what had happened and what they felt, their grief and terror, their confusion as to why this happened, the rage they felt...

But there was one more scene to go. Vent could see the corner of it, intruding on the edge of the circle of light. 

He didn't really want to go on, not after this. But he had to know. There could be further answers to this, further clues as to what had happened and why...

He turned the submersible to face it.

It was huge - the largest drawing by far, taking up most of the cavern wall by itself. The lines of it stood out like white scars in the dark rock, perhaps a joint effort by several hands working together to refine their own terror and rage into physical form. It depicted... he didn't know what. Something vaguely between a frog, an ape and an ogre, hunched over and glaring with a single narrow eye in a horned, skull-like head. Clutched in one hand was something sharp and pointed - a trident, perhaps - smeared with dark red. 

And, as the submersible's headlights flashed up and down the great height of it, he could see that this alien silhouette was formed from the tessellating bodies of the aquatic race, each one crushed together like a living jigsaw.

And every one of them was screaming.

"My God..."

Vent didn't know how long he stared at it, trying to gauge the height of the carving, to understand the torment and agony on the faces of those it was made of. The more he stared, the more his brain tried and failed to parse it. Did these things... have a religion? Was this some fearsome, primeval deity that they worshipped? A record of some history, tormented by a cruel leader? Or was this something darker? The eye glared, the tongue lolled, the teeth glinted, all in what seemed to be an expression of malicious, chaotic, vengeful hatred.

There was something written underneath. He pushed the stick, trying to pitch the hestesko forward so he could illuminate it and-

A massive pincer reached up and clamped around the hestesko. 

Vent looked down. Shining reddish-orange dots peered up at him from the blackness beneath. A hissing noise filled the air, accompanied by the creak of steel under stress as the claw tightened. Glass cracked and metal buckled around the Kobber scientist.

"Oh, buggerballs," he groaned.

--------

Some time later, on the deck of the søhest, and a slightly soggy Vent was speaking on the phone again.

"Mother? Yes, well, I have good news and bad news. Aside from me being alive, obviously - that one goes without saying. The bad news..."

He looked up at the sailors. They were hauling the hestesko, mangled and crumpled, with its glass viwing canopy completely shattered, out of the ocean with their mechanical winches. The yellow paint was scoured with great rents, the metal was buckled and one turbine hung on by the cables it was attached to the rest of the craft by. Even despite Vent's quick thinking, it had been damaged far beyond the means of anyone to repair, never mind a genius Reploid. And from the half-despairing, half-frustrated looks on the scientists faces, they didn't approve of this fact in the slightest.

"...well, I owe these people for a new submersible. The old one had a bit of an, ah... accident. Incidentally, you wouldn't have any advice on clearing out Macra infestations, would you? Turns out, undersea thermal vents are an open buffet for them."

The captain of the søhest looked at him, tried to hide the annoyance in his eyes and failed. Vent couldn't hide the sheepish grin on his face in reply, and thus the Whalestrander turned back to his work, muttering something that sounded vaguely like "forbandede Kobber" as the android went back to the phone.

"As for the good news? Well... I found what I was looking for. Or something like it. And as much as this is going to make me sound crazy when I say it..."

His free hand turned the the thumb drive over and over in his fingers. The proof of his dive - the footage taken from the now-doomed submersible.

"...I think I know what they found on Mocrocks Beach."

TO BE CONTINUED
In ZFRP 2023