It had to be at least the tenth time he had looked over the footage. Thank God for the surveillance, and for the sensors actually picking up on the movement...
"That oversensitivity actually came in handy," he said aloud to himself with a shaky laugh. His hands still hadn't quite stilled- fingers fumbling against touchpads, swearing quietly when he hit a wrong tab or button.
The footage (a mere thirty seconds, that was all it was, though it had felt so much longer in the moment) had already been sent to about as many people on the team that he could manage. Surely someone had to be awake to receive it. Then once they did, they'd get in touch with him immediately, and then they'd come down here and decide what to do next. This was the sort of decision people ought to make together- he might have just captured the first footage of an undiscovered species, but he wasn't going to send out a probe after it without at least consulting with someone else. With the way those tendrils had been moving...
He restarted the video again, fast-forwarding to fifteen seconds in with a light touch- yes, that looked like a lot of force. Well enough to damage a probe if the creature decided it didn't particularly like being followed.
The video paused on a surprisingly clear freeze-frame, one of the clearest he'd found so far. On this larger monitor, he could see the details more clearly. The red tinge to its scales, faint in the dim light, but defined enough to tell that it was only scaled from its midsection down. The upper body and head seemed more fleshy- or perhaps the scales covering that area were just smaller, as the creature as a whole was that same dark red colour, almost black in places, by the look of it.
They would blend in well in the darkness down here- even those creatures that could see would be hard-pressed to tell them apart from the open ocean, or a rock, obscured by the billowing smoke of a hydrothermal vent. Then, he supposed, they'd strike- with those reaching tendrils, with those teeth.
He felt the itch of something watching behind him- he couldn't help but turn around to the window. Nothing. Just the wall, the water, the dark. It wasn't the first time that had happened in the last half hour, or however long it had been. He wished this monitor faced the other way, so he could stand somewhere without his back so vulnerably facing the outside...
The window didn't have a scratch- not that he could see. He had a new respect for it now, perhaps the next time he was down here on his own he wouldn't feel so distrustful of its structural integrity. But he kept on looking back, expecting the creature to be there, reaching and lashing at the walls, causing that eerie scraping sound that made him wince at the thought of it.
He was torn between fear and awe.
A new discovery- what this would mean for him, for their whole team, for the facility... this was better than the discovery of the sceptre and those other pieces of human materials, this was unexpected. Unprecedented.
But a part of his mind was still shuddering at the footage of the thing. Strange, as deep sea creatures usually were, but that first glimpse haunted him. That instant where he'd seen its shadow approaching up into the light, how human-like it had looked for just that moment... the 'hair' drifting freely about its head, the body giving way not to legs but to a tail. Faced with the unknown, his mind had grasped at fairytales. To mermaids, to the stories a boy grows up hearing when he lives alongside the ocean. That innocence, twisted the next moment into something horrifying by that alien face, devoid of eyes or recognisable features; by the mouth, split wide across it.
The sheer ugliness of that moment, he feared, was going to colour the rest of his interactions with these creatures.
Creatures. There had to be more of them, surely? Odds were that they were solitary, like most things down here- finding one likely wouldn't help them find the rest, if there were many. He refreshed the message page again, the same light tap he'd been doing near-constantly for the last few minutes.
A cheerful ping came from the machine- a different one than what had alerted him to the presence of the creature before, but it still sent a little thrill through him that resembled more fear than excitement.
A message- finally. He'd felt he was going mad down here with his thoughts.
Did you just record that now?! I'm in London with family so I can't get to the lab but what is that?
It's got to be 3am over there- tell me someone else has gotten in touch with you, that someone else is awake?
-Julia
Another quick glance out at the ocean- nothing. He was already smiling, a breath of relief leaving him.
The footage was taken at 2:36. No one else has replied yet. Haven't sent out a probe to follow it, figure we ought to decide together what to do next.
I don't know what it is, but it's very strange-
He deleted those last few words. Just because his first interaction with them hadn't been the best, that didn't mean it had to stay that way. They were strange, but to survive in an environment like this... well, they had to be. Julia sounded astounded- he could practically hear her excitement as he read the email over once more, and even from 3000 miles away, it was infectious.
He spoke aloud as he typed, then hit send.
"I don't know what it is, but we've found something amazing."
