𝐑𝐈𝐌𝐄

Pt 10: To the Ocean Floor and Back

Kingston refused to open his eyes for a while, feeling like he was tumbling along in a forward-moving washing machine. Finally, he hesitantly opened them, keeping one hand on the bridge of his nose to make sure his glasses didn't fall off. He couldn't see anything outside of the tube of water; it was all a blur. Minerva was ahead of him, wings spread out like she was gliding through the water. He spread his own limbs slightly, finding it was better for balance, and stopped him from tumbling over himself. Now that he could look around, he noticed shoals of fish swimming against the current, pausing briefly only to be sucked back down.

"How are we going to stop?" Kingston shouted, barely able to hear himself over the roaring water. Griffith, just ahead of him, shouted back, "You'll see!" and smiled at him. Kingston frowned, anxious to get out of the whirling vortex of death as soon as possible. Vexx had somehow managed to hold onto a branch of coral long enough for the other three to catch up, releasing it as they did so.

"What took you guys so long?" she yelled. "Did the human get seasick or something?" the siren laughed obnoxiously at her own joke as she floated past.

"Ignore her," Griffith suggested. Kingston nodded but didn't say anything, certainly feeling seasick. He suddenly began to dip in the current, toward the bottom of the tube. He tried to swim back up but he was being pulled into another branch of the current. Holding to his promise to not let him fall out, Griffith pulled him back up with much more effort than he'd exerted on land, reaching down to grab his arm just as the current pulled away. Kingston shrieked as a large fish shot past him, nearly snagging a jagged tooth on his sweater. He heard a bubbly, joyous sound and realised it was Griffith laughing at him. Huffing, Kingston composed himself and hoped Vexx could be trusted and that the current didn't lead to something awful.

"Sir, something's happened." Orion opened his eyes, lifting his head from the back of his chair.

"Something good, I hope," he replied to the employee who had woken him, a young woman with the name Rose stitched across her breast pocket with the logo of the organisation above it: MONSTR. She looked nervous, which was natural. Everyone was nervous whenever they went to see Orion. As everyone knows, megalomaniacs come in one of two possible packages: those who are mutated or disfigured and those who appear flawless with the never-fading bloom of youth.

Orion was the latter, sometimes compared to a well-aged wine by a couple of female clients that kept coming back to auctions, though if it was because of the monsters or him was hard to tell even though he refused to have anything to do with them. There wasn't a single grey hair on his head of dusty gold-brown hair, his face wrinkle-free, his clothes pressed and neat, and he was still quite young – young to have built up an entire multibillion-dollar organisation, at any rate, as he was approaching his mid-thirties.

"N-no, not quite," said Rose, fingering her thick black braid of hair nervously. Orion stood up from his chair, using an arm of flesh and an arm of stone-like metal to steady himself, leaning against the desk.

"Which means?" he pressed gently, straightening himself. The name on her chest didn't mean anything to him. Just the logo and the number next to it that stated her rank and department. He moved from behind the desk, past the glass wall that held an empty cell behind him. Rose, or, as Orion preferred, 322, swallowed nervously and backed up slightly, folding her hands in front of her.

"We lost — we lost the Atlantean," she said anxiously. The office around her was clean to the point of being sterile, not a speck of dirt in sight. Obsessed with purity and cleanliness — that's what Orion was. The man paused, tilting his head like a cat observing his next meal.

"Who exactly is 'we,' Rose?" he asked, only remembering the name because he had read her pocket. "I need to know who to blame, and possibly punish." A small smile curled at his lips, a friendly smile, at odds with his words. He wasn't partial to letting his prize piece of property escape so easily. Orion circled slowly around his employee, waiting for an answer.