A World Once Familiar (Splatoon/Subnautica x Male Reader)

(Epilogue) 34: A Girl Once Afraid

  No matter how many times she looked at it, the neon-green inkling could never bring herself to enjoy this particular dinner.

  A blank look adorned the face of the green inkling as she slowly lifted a spoon to poke at the mound on her plate. It was... lumpy, gelatinous. People kept telling her it was good, that it was nutritious, but every time she looked at it, the awful texture invaded her mind.

  With a low sigh, the spoon the green inkling held was slowly brought down, carving yet another bite of cold, meat-packed gelatin out. With a grimace, it was brought to her lips, and forced down. She hated the taste, she hated the texture.

  But, in the end... it was dinner. People who didn't eat dinner were punished.

  To either side of her, across several large tables in a white-brick cafeteria, several inklings sat down with similar plates. Some were barely choking down the food in front of them, some were enjoying it as if they forgot how to taste. But all of them were eating, because people who didn't eat dinner were punished.

This was regular practice. It was dinner time, so all the inklings that lived here with ages ranging from just leaving toddlerhood to young adulthood would gather in the cafeteria. Failure to be there, or failure to eat, would be punished.

Bite after bite slowly went down, for the green inklings best interest, and against her personal wishes. All until the plate was finally polished off, leaving no more than the wet imprint where the food had once been. Now to wait for the others...

  The light pink inkling to the girls right soon finished, as did the dark green one to her left. One by one, the food was finished, replacing the occasional sound of scraping cutlery and even the once-in-a-while gag with low chatter among the more sociable of the inklings. The neon green inkling was not one of them.

  As it always did, time slowly passed, bringing more and more chatter to the room until half an hour had passed since the inklings had all been seated for dinner.

  At exactly thirty minutes, a set of speakers crackled to life, sending out a wave of low tolls, the mimicry of a grandfather clock as it announced the passage of an hour. It was seven-o'clock. Time for the green inkling to go to her room.

...

"Hey..." A low whisper greeted the neon green inkling as she entered a small room with three beds. Sitting on a bed in the far right corner of a sparsely decorated room, a red inkling greeted the green one.

"Hey." The green inkling greeted, careful not to speak above a light whisper. If she spoke too loud, she might disturb someone sleeping. People who disturbed the sleep of others were punished.

The green inkling sat down on the middle bed, opening a drawer in a white nightstand by the head of her steel-framed bed. From it, a book was drawn, and the green girl was soon laying back in bed.

The bed in the left corner of the room had been empty for a few weeks now. The girl that had originally slept there, a rather obnoxious, pale blue-haired inkling, simply wasn't there one morning, as if she had vanished. Maybe she disturbed someone's sleep, or she had refused to eat dinner. Or she didn't do as instructed. Or she started a fight. Or she swore.

Either way, she didn't follow the rules, so she had been punished to the point of no return.

"You think someone else is going to be gone tomorrow?" The red inkling wondered out loud, slowly grabbing a book from her own nightstand.

"Maybe. I don't know." The green inkling answered honestly. After all, anyone who told lies would be punished.

"You think it'll be that pink-haired girl? She's been starting to get on people's nerves, you know." The red-haired girl pointed out.