[Team two girls / Part 2]

[floatingplot]

[You have escaped. Congratulations, surely all your problems are over and you can return to your apartments- Oh, wait, no.]

Comments

[floatingplot]

[As you leave the jailsite, there is no sky, no horizon. This fragment of a fallen city is surrounded only by black water, held at bay by a thin glass bubble. There is nothing to be seen beyond the bubble but the dark, for you are in a city of glittering and crumbling buildings deep within the abyss of the ocean.


The buildings themselves are old and decayed, but once they were shining futuristic metal, high rises towering to the sky far beyond the technology of Atuin and East Blue.


This is not a true city, a whole city, because you can see in the distance where it unnaturally ends, where the buildings and paths are sliced in two by the bubble’s wall. It is still the size of a small island.


If you stare at that bubble hard enough, you will notice the cracks on its surface, the occasional droplet of water beading and falling slowly to the decayed ground.]

[chargingher]

We're under the ocean... this city must have been abandoned long ago.

[snowandice]

[ A city below the ocean... this large, and with this level of technology, it had to be "owned" by one of the gods. The ocean god nobody speaks of, perhaps.

She takes note of where they are from the ground and how far she'd be able to see off the roof before to give herself a vague direction, before walking again. ]

I am not surprised.

[floatingplot]

[As you walk, a half-shattered screen hanging from a high-rise springs to life.

Data feed corrupted, retrieving recent headlines...

Magic injection proven unsafe for children after use on small girl caused multiple organ failure. ]

[chargingher]

[Well, that's not... surprising.]

There's still power?

It sounds like those tests we saw in the tapes.

[snowandice]

[ Magic injections-- water is saturated with magic, perhaps to resist the long-term negative effects of the magic at this depth injections of similar properties, designed to gradually increase resistance? A vaccine, in a way-- failed, poison, their bodies are not meant to take that level of magical toxicity, even native as they are. Children and elderly likely even more susceptible to illness and eventual death, cure unlikely. If those monster guards and the people in the videos were any indication, physical mutation from overexposure likely if the user survives... although... their bodies seemed to form the meshed in wings and tails rather well. Were those natural? Testing, regardless, to this extent and on children-- disgusting.

She checks to see if she still has the extra tapes in her shirt, before walking. ]

...Technology at this level likely is being able to hibernate, without anyone to show it to. It does sound very similar.

[chargingher]

I wonder if some of them are still alive... like cryogenic freeze.

[floatingplot]

[Data feed corrupted, retrieving recent headlines...

Retreat to safety via catacombs plan underway, all citizens recommended to meet and join this group.

The city seems eerily silent, although far far in the distance is the glow of a burning building.]

[snowandice]

[ ...catacombs

why the everloving fuck is catacombs ever a meeting place. but burning building gets her attention, and she heads for it. ]

Monsters, perhaps. People doubtful. It seems there was some sort of emergency...

[chargingher]

Let's go. There might be people there, or something!

[floatingplot]

[And as you head for it-- You run straight into the people fleeing from it.]