SplaTOON: The Bonus Content!

Manufactured War

Second Lieutenant Dodaji Idoho leaned against the chainlink surrounding the Nantai Military Base on the Octarian border. His fingers were wrapped around the links as he stared out on the Octarian base only 100 meters away. Here he was, the youngest Inkling soldier to make second lieutenant gets a position on the Octarian border, and the most he had done was get the general his coffee, make copies. You could hire a rice cake to do this job. After months of menial labor, all he could do on his time off was stare at the Octarian base and hope they could start a war or something just so he could make something of himself. He didn't care if the Octarians had been their allies for hundreds of years. JUST SOMETHING HAPPEN!

As he watched that base disappear into the shadows of the sunset, he saw a third hand wrap itself around the links. He looked to the right and saw Miraa Yukema, the general's daughter. He still didn't know if she worked here. He just knew she was fun to be around.

"Having another quarter-life crisis?" Miraa asked.

Dodaji furrowed his eyebrows. "Don't put it like that."

"I find you like this every evening, staring into the sunset at the Octarians. You want some action, don't you?"

Dodaji nodded. "Yeah." She saw right through him.

"I mean, you'd expect something from an Inkling military base set up directly across from an Octarian military base," Miraa admitted, "but you just gotta wait for something to happen. You can't expect there to be a war all the time." She put her hand on Dodaji's shoulder. "Dodaji, your time's gonna come. I just know it."

Dodaji took one more look at the Octarian base. There was something different about the scenery this time. It could have been the three soldiers marching through no-man's-land toward him. He thought it was just three Inkling boys who had strayed too far from camp, but it was when one of them turned toward his comrade and started speaking that he realized that wasn't Inkish, and he didn't have two tentacles on his head like normal Inklings. Just one, and it grew towards the front, not the back.

And it was covered in suction cups.

The boys didn't stop until they were nose-to-nose with the second lieutenant. The other two had the same strange tentacles. The one in the middle rose his hand and pointed at Dodaji. "Dal kka, ye."

The two on the sides nodded and each took out a pair of bolt cutter. One by one, they began cutting up the links around Dodaji.

Both he and Miraa cried in protest. "Hey, what are you doing?!" "You can't do that!" "This is Inkling military property!" "I'm telling the general about this."

The two were able to yank away the portion of fence directly in front of Dodaji. As each one grabbed a wrist, Miraa yelled, "STOP IT!"

The leader sneered and threw a burst bomb at Miraa's face. As she stumbled back, Dodaji got dragged away.

When Dodaji asked for something to happen, this wasn't what he meant. He never expected he'd spend his evening being kidnapped by these weird Inkling/Octarian hybrids, his last look at the camp being a cut-up chainlink fence and Miraa trying to wipe Octarian ink off of her face.

No. This wouldn't be it. He began to wrestle out of the boys' grip and shouting, "Let go of me, you buffoons!"

The leader took out his shooter and yelled, "Shut up!" He felt a thwack on the top of his head.

When he woke up, he was in a dimly lit room with gray brick walls. His head hung down, so he could see that he was sitting in a chair. His ankles were tied together, and he could already feel his wrist tied together behind the back of the chair. He definitely felt the throbbing in his head, too.