Faction What lurks in the depths (Levant and those interested)

[Brooke Waters]

Analog controls were something she’d not seen in an age, her personal watercraft had analog, but on something that did more than ride the wind? No. The Sunjammers she’d seen were digital, her own star yacht was digital, if not fully auto, but this? It was a work of simplicity in action, and she couldn’t fault it. It made more sense when water was getting everywhere, losing the good motor control on the propulsion or rudder? Would end their trip. She was a blubreen, but only half. Pressure and her could flirt, but they’d not get along well. Plus her lightsaber? Primed for the water, but only a certain depth.

As was most things.

Most organics didn’t want to consider that. Hell, most aquatics didn’t either.

The galaxy was old, ancient, timeless. And she already knew of the Precursor races, the Forerunners, she thought the group was called. The ones that were not happy with humanity and the new species on the block. Why couldn’t there be something more massive, purgill, or maw sized, that became sentient? And touched by the Force. Nightmare items, she figured, and one was rearing its head from the depths.

“Brooke Waters, originally of Pamarthe, lately a Witch of Dathomir by way of Arda.” Did that mean anything to the Mandalorian? She doubted it. Arda wasn’t exactly on maps. Her mind was still itching, the feeling in the Force, of being called, being summoned. She didn’t like that, but it was where the sub was heading. Maybe this could be taken down by a spell, and release her and the others? Maybe it’d need a more wet-works hand, one that Cato here could provide.

"I don't like the feeling I have in my mind with this thing. If it gets worse, I may need you to pilot." She had taken a few moments to pull her hands from the controls, place them on her forehead, as if she was shielding. Muttering under her breath in an ancient Aquan language spells of protection and strength, Or more appropriately, prayers.

Cato Fett

 

[Cato Fett]

He noted the slightly acid edge of ache and discomfort to her words. Cato resumed thumbing through his borrowed, well-worn operations manual, more rapidly now, attempting to absorb either directly or through a kind of hopeful, noetic osmosis, every pertinent detail the instruction tome had to offer. Submersible steerage was plain, in theory: the aft rudder paddles were responsible for turning the vehicle starboard or port, respectively, while laterally mounted hydroplanes helped to shift and control the fore-and-aft angles of rise or descent. That wasn't taking into account ballast weight, engine speed, or certain factors that related to water depth, pressure, salinity, as well as the torque and tumble of unseen underwater currents.

Thankfully, the absent Captain Mako had seen fit to either refit or simply keep the Typhoon's original analog controls. Steering was performed primarily from a simple control yoke; it resembled a pilot's joystick in older Twin-Ion-Engine fighter models, further simplified into a brass-plated hand wheel, wired with shielded copper filament, fitted to a canting steel stanchion. There were notches of degree-marks cut into both the hand-wheel and stanchion, allowing for precision steering according to navigation headings. Beside it was a large gear box, replete with a handful of shift-levers, and a section of cabin walling decorated with innumerable spin-valves. Cato couldn't tell what even half of them were meant to monitor.

"Haar'chak..." Cato muttered. "If I do pilot, it will be rough. I don't have the muscle memory for a submarine..."

He looked forward through the cockpit bubble. The surrounding waters were black now; brow and chin-mounted floodlamps pierced the liquid gloom with static shafts of sour, white light. Every so often, schools and shoals of darkly scaled fish wove in and out of their path. Hanks of severed seaweed drifted languidly, disconnected, propelled by currents and the bow-wake of their submersible. The vast tracts of open, airless space felt less inhospitable than this, Cato thought. He'd put the manual away, now. His hands were resting on the co-pilot controls, ready to intercede should Brooke require it.

"Do you know any shielding spells?" Cato asked her, gesturing at her skull. "Any Force techniques that can soften or dampen whatever it is that's needling at you?"

Brooke Waters

 

[Brooke Waters]

The woman was used to traveling the seas she found and the stars between each, but typically, they were calm and welcoming. They were a sea that gave her the warmth, or refreshing cool that could help her on her way. When she was seeding Blue Corals, but this world? It was her second time at it and she really was not a fan of this one. Last time a big fish tried to eat her, but maybe that was where the itch in her own brain came from? She wasn't sure how it was calling her from across the stars to here. The itch, the call in her brain was harsh, it was loud, but lucky, it did not override Brooke's knowledge of aquatic vessels, even if this one was fairly archaic.

Okay, extremely. She saw the controls, they were modified from some ancient starfighter or another, and that made it a bit easier for the daughter of Pamarthe pilots to handle.

She wasn't her brother, but she knew what she was doing.

Cato was looking around, and surveying the gear. She hoped it looked somewhat familiar to him, but wasn't sure what his comfort level with submersible or small-starfighters was. Honestly, she didn't know anything about the man that was in this can with her, descending down. She felt that there was going to be at least some air, some station for them to connect to, but again, she knew nothing of him. Swords and armor, and an apparent drive to prove himself.

"Its similar to zero-G, just, slower?" The blonde muttered out. More as she was trying to focus on the harsh sound in her ears. Echolocation? Maybe, the sounds of cetaceans echoing, and pointed to disrupt someone. It was working but she was doing her best to keep it at bay.

Force Resonance, match the sound, and counter it? She had done something similar a few times as a Jedi, but she didn't want to lean on that too much.

"I've got one thats not working and another I'm trying to not use." She was going to have to. Her hand ran up her torso, along her bandolier, and onto the zeffoian alloy of her lightsaber, not pulling the weapon, but using it as a focus as she continued to grit her teeth. Should Cato be observant enough there was definitely a low reverberation coming from Brooke now, one that was counter to the high pitch that was making her ears strain…

Cato Fett

 

[Cato Fett]

With Brooke momentarily occupied, Cato's hands went to the steering yoke. There was a brief wobble and sway within the cockpit cabin while he adjusted to the tilt of the bow-planes and felt the tug and inertia of the rudder fins. The Typhoon was gamey, responsive, needing little encouragement from his touch to pitch, yaw, or roll as he required. Cato kicked his heel against a small catch on the edge of his seat and rolled it closer toward the control consoles, settling in. Now properly engaged with the submarine's piloting, the vast tables of sensor and pressure readouts displayed behind brass and crystal cages were beginning to make better sense. Cato had to curtail a juvenile urge to give the sub a good 'shakedown', feeling an unexpected yearning to push the aft-engines to high gear.

He glanced over at the Sea Witch. From behind her teeth, issuing at an eerie pitch from her highly trained vocal chords, he could hear the sonic counter-note. With it came a ripple in the Force. Cato shuddered, made an effort to train his attentions back to the submersible's steering. His time aboard the Pomojema had awakened the architecture of his mind, stirring and feeding what'd been a nascent, subtle Force sensitivity into something grander, more potent. It did not, however, come without drawbacks. He down-pitched the bow-planes and began a sharper, helical dive into deeper water depths. Kept a weather eye on hull pressure readings, watching ghostly sonar returns on a nearby viewing slate glow and fade like firefly candlelight.

"...What is that?" Cato murmured.

He tapped against the ear-guard of his helmet. The keening malevolence jabbing at Brooke's hearing had shifted a modicum of its attention. He tasted its effect before he began to hear it too: an acrid, metallic tang on the back of his tongue, like licking hoarfrost from a steel rail. Chemical. Numbing.

And then the sound started to fill the interior caverns of his ears. A single, droning note that affected something akin to tinnitus, laced with cetacean chirps, warbles, and sub-sonic clicks. It was disarming. Unbidden, nausea began to roil in the pit of his stomach. Cato blinked a flock of phosphene stars out of his sight, the taste of ice and iron growing more powerful as the 'song' note buzzed on.

"Wait," Cato said suddenly. He had reversed the flow of the aft-engines and the Typhoon sat temporarily becalmed, floating stationary and still. He looked to Brooke once more. "We're swimming blind down here. I don't believe either of us know what it is we're looking for, or supposed to look for. But that, that sound... Can we pinpoint it somehow, follow it?"

Brooke Waters

 

[Brooke Waters]

Having someone else who was comfortable with the sub was going to be good if this got worse. If the sounds and the calling in her mind was going to be worse, someone who could step up and get them to the finish line, or back to safety should it get any worse. Brooke was holding her head as she was focusing on the call in her brain. Cato was confident, he was definitely a Mandalorian through and through.

She was whispering her spell at first, then switched to the resonate power that she had. The one that was more like a Jedi and Sith spell, one that came from deep within her, intrinsic as anything. She was the type who wanted to make it through the galaxy on her own, and she went and got all of her training through her own strength. The way the Force worked was so varied that she had to learn all the processes when she was younger, but stepping out of the Jedi was the best thing she’d ever done.

“I’m fighting back… whatever it is its hitting me in the Force, but like… echolocation?” Brooke gritted as she finally felt the ebb of what was hitting her brain. The blonde looked up at Cato and nodded. “I think I’ve got it…” As for going blind?

She nodded as Cato continued. “We’re going to have to travel a bit, but its coming out. I can feel it bouncing in the Force, and the water. Something we can triangulate…Thoughts?” If she was in her home seas she may be able to track it, but this ocean? It felt foreign to her, it felt dark.

It felt wrong.

Cato Fett

 

[Cato Fett]

"Thoughts? Nothing with any great substance," Cato said. His hands were still bound to the control yokes, now pitching the throttle lever forward and easing the submarine into speed. The aft engine bay, previously purring at idle, now began to throatily croak. By now, Cato was no longer laid back in his co-pilot's seat; he was leaning forward over the console banks, the armour-glass of his visor fixed to the sub's forward view port, his feet in their terrain-sandals arched on the knuckles of their metatarsals, heels up.

"Thoughts..." He muttered again. He loosed a hand from the steering yoke to tap at a handful of dial-readouts along the console bank nested between them. "If these are correct, the sub's rated for eight-thousand meter depth. Which means we have some room to play with as we dive. I've been hesitant against going any deeper but if we want to attempt any sort of reliable triangulation, like you suggested, we need some fixed points of solid geography. This - - "

Cato waved at the almost chthonic wall of jet-dark water that was clenching against the reinforced view-port. The stabbing floodlamps bolted to the sub's chin allowed them a scant fifty meter cone of illumination before the darkness swallowed their lights entirely. "This gives us nothing. So with your assent, I'm going to start a better descent climb. While we manage that, I... would like to know if the good Captain Mako kept any navigation charts about on this sub. Flimsiplast, datapad, anything. We should know something about the local sea floor."

He tilted the wheel-yoke forward. The bowplane wings obliged him, canting, pulling the weight of the sub downward. He counted a dozen heartbeats, then pushed at the gearbox lever, cycling the electro-diesel to a higher speed rate. The inertial pull briefly swatted at their skin, making the flesh of their organs and the meat of their musculature tug against their bones. Flecks of swirling deep sea detritus began flying through their floodlamp cone like snowflakes in a blizzard.

Prior, Cato had been internally debating whether outright stealing Mako's Typhoon was more acceptable than simply cajoling the man harder into chartering them an expedition. But two bodies occupied less space and oxygen resources than three, and he had a sudden notion of of Mako's increasing obdurance, unease, and panic the further they dived. Issues that would become terrifyingly exacerbated in the cramped quarters of a submersible navigating through an invisible maze of increasing liquid pressure and lightless, cyclopean depths. He wondered how they would contend with anything that made such an environ its kingdom. He wondered how the Rapture Followers, those degenerate occultists, had managed to survive, secreted away in some subterranean fastness.

"...There," He said suddenly. The radar display by his hip was beginning to glow with hard terrain returns from below. "Two hundred meters until we begin seeing some sea floor."

Brooke Waters

 

[Brooke Waters]

No great substance. Brooke nodded. She needed to find her way to floating in the sounds that were coming at her and the push-back she was making in the Force. She needed to find the lull between the two competing swells and keep herself there, the eye of the hurricane. She was doing her best to keep her focus, and to be a part of the team that she had inadvertently helped to create. The Witch and the Mandalorian. Time had shown this to be a dangerous team, the Mandalorians have often protected the world of Dathomir, and uplifted some of her kind to the stars.

She came in on the reverse of that.

“We’ll need a few points. Various depths would help… And I am fairly sure the sub can take us at least where we need to go.” She was based in the oceans, she was an aquatic space, knowing what she was getting into was important, and her ship did have a way to scan below the water’s surface. Around here she wasn’t certain the depth climbed more than a kilometer.

Other parts, she wasn’t so certain, and didn’t want to imagine what lived in those depths.

Took her a moment to grasp the word assent, she was used to witches, or travelers without a purpose, and a word like that didn’t come around often. “Yes, we can go deeper. If we can hold this sub still, I know that I can get the sonar to ping out. Maybe I can find us another point from there…” She had a chance to look at the aging SONAR unit. It was the kind that would get a fairly decent scan of the area, and what they were hitting.

She also needed to try to find a direction for the Force assault she was facing. The blonde would have to double up her time. Maybe calling on the Force would help calm her breathing now that she was making it almost natural to fight back. “Bring us down…”

As Cato continued the piloting, Brooke leaned back to start working on the controls of the SONAR system. “Going to use this to help ping, give it a few minutes, and give me some too…” She tapped the controls to start the pinging from the sub’s SONAR before leaning back, falling into a mix of Jedi Relaxation Trance, and a small slow song of seeking, an ancient Witch trick from another process of magic. One that could follow the direction of the assault.

And just as she thought, the rope that was coming at her gave her a direction but no distance… But as she tried to tug on it, to confirm the direction, it moved, it came at her like a fan. Was the thing large? Or merely intelligent?

Either wouldn’t be great.

Cato Fett

 

[Cato Fett]

The work was a delicate tandem. Cato coasted the Typhoon forward a few scant hundred metres or less before gentling the sub to a stop, working the manoeuvring fans and correction water-jets installed across the outward hulling to leave them paused and suspended against an unseen ocean floor current. He waited, wordlessly, watching the ghost-returns on the sonar plate and Brooke for tell-tale hand gestures. At her direction, he raked speed and power out of the aft-engine bay and renewed their careful voyage. And again, at her signal, he slowed, paused their vessel above a bank of pale, sand-like deep water sludge, and waited while Brooke took stock of their coordinates and regained a comfortable modicum of energy.

This repeated as needed. The 'rope', as Brooke described it, dragged them deeper. Cato forced himself to swallow the last of his misgivings when the submersible's floodlamp array brought into focus the bleak edge of a continental drop off. The shelf of sand, sludge detritus, and settled oceanic waste he'd been piloting them over came to an abrupt end. The prior tracts of deep water, so lightless and elemental in its deep tones of grey and pitch-black, seemed almost bright by comparison to the yawning continental shelf-slope now open to them. The carpet of pallid sea rubbish appeared to just... vanish. As if a sharp-edged instrument had carved into Mezokara's very mantle and scooped up an entire mainland's worth of stone and rock matter.

It was abyssal. In every sense of the word. Cato jammed a control stud keyed to the Typhoon's floodlamp cones, pushing their scope and brightness to maximum gain. By his eye, it gained them nothing. Visibility bottomed out at a dozen meters from the edge of their viewport screen. The sonar slate refused to coalesce any return-imagery pinged towards the bottom of the abyssal plain. Either its old, almost rudimentary systems were being baffled by some kind of masking ...Or it simply could not reach the drowned earth hidden so very far, so very deep below.

An excellent place to hide, Cato thought. And with the 'rope' Brooke had grasped between her mental clasps and webs of Force spells still tugging gamely at them, there was little choice left. Cato pushed with the control-yoke and angled the submersible's lateral bowplanes. The Typhoon loosed a set of gasping creaks, as its outer hull plates began to flex back against the not inconsiderable pressure vicing in from every angle. The sub drove forward under Cato's steering, pitching down, down further, past curtains of ashen and pasty flotsam-scrap clouds. The continental shelf edge dwindled behind them rapidly. Cyclopean, black waters of true antediluvian age, swam and wrapped around the bubble of their viewport.

For a moment that blinked by too rapidly for Cato's liking, he could have swore he saw the sinuous shape of a great cephalopod arm swing and glide away out of sight...

Brooke Waters

 

[Brooke Waters]

It was always a challenge, for Brooke, to learn how the Force worked. She was pretty strong in it, if she was being honest, and not actually to blow smoke up her backside. Being a Witch seemed to open skills that even the Jedi didn’t have a connection with. Maybe the Sith, but it gave her that so-called ‘third’ way of the Force. Something well between the Jedi and Sith, and maybe even beyond the both. Using the Force to help guide her navigation was something that she had picked up from her time at Tidehome and around the Starchaser clan. They had a very specific skillset as a family, obviously.

Good thing Cato seemed to be a man who worked well on a team. And with little to no actual communication beyond hand signals. Were all Mandalorians born and raised in combat and in a place where you had to adapt to working in strange conditions? Or was it the Force guiding him slightly, reading her thoughts? She was never great at reading people in the Force.

“I think we have a heading…” She stated. With the way the sonar pings were working, and the rope in the Force to guide them, it wasn’t long for them to find where they were going.

Away from the safety and warmth of the colorful reef, and into the abyss, the depth and darkness.

What she felt more than saw was the arm. Along with the call in the Force, the one that made her cover her ears.

Circle the depth. Circle the depth.

REMAIN IN THE DEPTH

BELONG TO THE DEPTH

Even with the Typhoon’s engines, the submersible was moving in the direction of the arm towards it, and the ruins…

Cato Fett

 

[Cato Fett]

"Oh..." Was all Cato could muster to say.

They were upon the edge of some great, sunken architecture before Cato's eyes or the submersible's instrumentation could properly gauge it. There was, at first, only blackness. Watery inkiness, sublime darkness, where the ocean depths balked at the idea of natural light and greedily devoured the meagre illumination proffered up by the Typhoon's floodlamp arrays. Nothing to hint of shape or form. As close to directionless buoyancy one could get without being in open star-void.

Then, without much warning, an outcrop. It'd first looked like a natural formation of limestone karst. An immense, if lonely, pillar of encrusted and current-worn pillar jutting up from an unseen abyssal floor far below. Cato looked closer. Details began coalescing: the empty sockets of watchtower windows, embrasured battlements forming a looping walkway around the topmost throat of the construct, a broken needle-point taper atop a four-sided pyramid fitted to the tower's sloped roof, all of it knobbled with hard-water mineral accretions and shelves of coral growth. He piloted them by the tower, slowly now for a better glimpse, but didn't dare halt their careful glide. Some loathing, a harshly guttural feeling lashing up from below his gut, was beginning to prick at his sense of worry.

A grey, milky lambency suddenly seemed to come shining down over the Typhoon from some unfixed point overhead. No matter how hard Cato canted and strained to see it, there was no telling where the sudden light was emerging from. It'd arrived like the first rays of dawn, unbidden. The surrounding currents looked like an amniotic brine, lactic, primeval, intensely antediluvian. What the sickly, greyed-out radiance illuminated gave his soul pause.

Below them was a city, but Cato felt a paradoxical discord at the word; 'city' scarcely defined the immensity of sheer architectural dimensions cut into the deep sea mantle, nor was the drowned blaspheme of construction worthy of any normal definition. The tower they'd swung round was the first of innumerable spires erected across the cityscape. Many were broken, shattered. By age and slow decay or by violence, Cato couldn't say. There was seemingly no rhyme, reason, or much symmetry to the pattern of their formations. Beneath their cyclopean gaze lay innumerable districts and city blocks, minuscule outlines of collapsed roofs, arterial highways, vein-like streets, avenues, and thoroughfares, the uncountable capillaries of secondary breeze-ways and side-roads that tangled the eyes.

None of it had been built in accordance to right-angles. The best way Cato's logic centres could approximate it was like peering at overlapping layers of liquid corrugation. Like the rugose whorls and spirals of primrose leaves, the sunken city districts creased, folded, and interwove without any regard if the angles properly added up. The harder Cato glared, he realized the more his vision began to sting. He blinked away the moisture running at the corners of his eyes and tried to keep the Typhoon levelled off. The worry below his stomach began to mingle with nausea.

"...Oh, hell's teeth," Cato suddenly breathed. He pointed forward through the cockpit viewport.

It was a basilica. But like the 'city', the word did its form no justice. Hemmed by high, concentric defense walls replete with thousands of those equally abominable tower formations, its great, smoothed, central dome glowered down and over the presumably uncountable tracts of desiccated boroughs. Fanged, flying buttresses in their thousands, many sporting pearl-like globules that hung from their sharp arches, formed a tooth-like curtain that surrounded the edge of the great dome's roofing. Attached wings of secondary and ancillary edifices, as equally mammoth and dour, unholy, spread out from its central point like blood-poisoned veins. The Typhoon's on board instrument suites displayed confusing and contradictory measurements when Cato tried to ascertain a sense of the basilica's dimensions.

One readout was scrawling on and on into infinity. Another readout contested that the basilica and its annexes weren't there at all. The whole of its superstructure seemed carved from single, monolothic block of basalt. Its dimensions swarmed over them, ready to devour the submersible the closer they drove in. Cato's hands were locked tightly to the control yoke, the musculature flexing. He looked over to Brooke.

"No telling what this place is, if it even has a name," He said. There was a steely, sharp edge to his voice. It cut through the deep quiet of the cabin. "If we were a pair of wretches and occultists, I'd say that... 'structure' would be the place to make camp. I think we have to go in, Ms. Brooke. I think we have to keep going."

Brooke Waters

 

[Brooke Waters]

Brooke was not super confident in her approach to head deeper. She really had a bad feeling about it, knowing how overplayed that statement was. Especially from someone with the Force, like she had. Shaking her head, though, she knew what had brought her and Cato here. They had arrived on this world due to some outside circumstances. Brooke for the Force, but Cato?

PART OF THE DEEP

She wasn’t sure… The journal.

“So, what did the journal say about this place?” She knew that there were the Cultists of the Rapture.

It didn’t quite matter at the moment, she was looking out at the same city scape that Cato was seeing and saw something a bit different. The blonde was a blubreen, so an underwater city was not a totally foreign concept. She wasn’t quite a Mon Cala, but well, she could last for a short while completely submerged like this, being the hybrid that she was. “This place just… feels ancient. Before time.” Was it even before the Rings? She didn’t think so, but it was close.

WORSHIP THE RINGS

Maybe created by the Followers…

“Its so organic.” She muttered to herself, almost like it was a Mon Cala city, but it felt so much older. Who was living here… Who was here? “There is a feeling of it in the Force. Something uncomfortable…” Not necessarily dark, but deep. Old.

“Can’t fault them for some of the decor… I do like pearls.” She offered a half smile to Cato, hoping for at least some of the ice to be broken. “How big is it?” The blonde looked over to Cato’s read-outs… That didn’t seem right? “Does it seem to.. Fade for you? Like reflections on the sea? When the sunlight moves between the waves?” There but not, a blur, misty? She couldn’t find the word for it.

“We’re a bit too deep in it now, aren’t we?” There was a feeling… She leaned forward and pointed to the structure. “Come in on the left, I can feel something… in the Force? Making air? Plants?” She was muttering the last bit.

ENTER THE TEMPLE

Cato Fett

 

[Cato Fett]

"The journal was mad gibberish," Cato replied. He was canting the Typhoon around on a careful, broad port-side swing, angling towards the monstrously wide base of the monument. "And the scrawlings were hideous. Yet, there were odd references. 'Divine Valves'... 'Pnakotic Aorta'... There was a length of bad poetry called 'In the Heart of the Sea' that said something about a 'mausoleum' built to house 'deathless lifeblood'. I thought it was hinting at some weird esoterics about a metaphorical 'divine body' or what have you. Figures it all had to do with this... -" Cato's hand gestured nonplussed. "'Place'."

They slewed down onto a grand avenue that ingressed up towards the basilica. It was a boulevard constructed to take in the step and gait of unbowed gods. The long, unnumbered traffic lanes spanning its heady width were forested with long aisles of age-worn statuettes. Each statute was a posed giant, enfolded with layers of verdigris salt crusts, small coral growths that lent them an even greater alien air, swathed in capes and robes made of deep-ocean filth. Time and tide had worn away their facial features. Cato glanced up through the viewport at sculpted crowns now bereft of feature and expression, each rock-skull easily the size of their own submersible.

"There," Cato said suddenly, nodding ahead. "In through there."

Nominally, in some age past, entry into the basilica's interior would have been through a pair of great, brass and iron doors that stretched up too high overhead. Each door set into that monstrous jamb of basalt and granite-mica could have accommodated the hoary bulk of a standard Imperial Star Destroyer. Again, Cato felt a kind of soulful nausea at the inhuman scale of the place, its grandeur, its sheer impracticality, how the city and this basilica edifice had been built not with any mortal consideration, but perhaps to placate much larger things. 'Greater' things. He knew he and Brooke were darting along the razor edge of known space. Out here were places and civilizations not even the arrogance of the Sith Empires could countenance for.

What Cato saw was a much smaller, minor entry point. For all intents and purposes, it appeared as a kind of overwrought servants' entrance. Through the midnight haze of wafting, almost sourceless lambent glow, the Typhoon's mounted floodlamps made out the texture and concentric bands of an archivolt semi-spiral, one that wound around a darkly back-lit service gate missing its own bay doors. Red light, like a glowing coal ember, glared out from within the unlit space. Hands clutched at the controls and his own shoulders bent forward with concentration, Cato drove their submersible towards the scant portal. There was enough warbling play of bending light and shadow on what they could see of the bay ceiling to suggest there were pockets of air inside. It took a long moment for him to wrestle the height of the Typhoon's conning tower under the archivolt's film-encased mouldings.

For the first time in hours, they could feel the submersible suddenly bop and bounce with buoyancy, as it breached the air pocket. Cato reversed the aft engines until the sub finally halted in place. He slapped a control stud, releasing an anchor-spike that smashed down into the service bay's unlit platform flooring and held their vessel fast. His hands worked quickly on the console bank, silencing the growling aft-engine.

"According to hull sensors, we have air," Cato said. Without the constant thrum of the submarine's propeller screw, his voice felt suddenly too loud in his own ears. "But that's as much as the sensors will tell me. Radar can't penetrate the surrounding rock. Sonar is blind too. It's apparently wet and cold. However, we are inside and that must count for something."

Brooke Waters

 

[Kaia Starchaser]

.

 

[Brooke Waters]

That was what she was afraid of, that the journal wouldn’t be worth its wait in anything. Brooke shook her head as she felt the shift of the submersible. And the fact she could feel anything? Meant that things were changing down here, as they got deeper under the sea. She was mostly okay with that, but it meant that she and Cato the Mando were going to have to fight their way out of here. And they weren’t exactly a tested pair. As a Witch, she’d worked with some of the Mandalorians before, but those were the less-than-calm gun toting ones. Cato and his weapons made her think he was less than typical.

And the fact that he didn’t just come in guns blazing to steal a submersible.

“Divine… valves… Aorta?” Brooke had a really bad feeling of that. Just how large was this monster that they had seen. Oh, Darkness, they were going to have to enter it? She was making a huge leap of faith, based on what Cato had also said was the ravings of a madman. Hopefully her mind was wrong on what they were going to find.

As she looked out the viewport of the sub, she was smiling as she was seeing a few different things, some familiar, some ghastly. Seeing reef? That was a familiarity, none were her blue reefs, those didn’t seem to have made it this far. Maybe if she was lucky one day. But then her and her clan would have to contend with…

THE DEEP

THE GUARDIAN

She heard the call in the Force. A guardian? That was all it was? What was it guarding? She didn’t need to know that. Not yet. But if it was just the guard, then there was something else here that she had to be aware of. “I see it.” She nodded, her eyes were investigating. The rusted, worn down doors, barely doors at this point. But there was something to the way the metal was not totally gone. It was enhanced. She’d seen it before.

If she could sense the Force visually, like a Miraluka, she was confident this place would be alight. The deepness of space out here, the ancient worlds and realms were homes to forerunner races, who knew more about the Force by age 5 than Jedi and Sith could ever hope for. Yet here they were, a Witch and a Mandalorian in a very fragile metal shell. She’d wished she had others from the Sanctum here, and maybe when they got off this world, Brooke would be reporting this to the gathered at the Watchtower on Kyrikal.

The motions in the water were more obvious now, that a non-aquatic could feel it. The blonde looked out the shell of their submersible again. She took a calming breath and reached out in the Force. “I can feel air, there is something alive here, but not… not aquatic? And still… aquatic? Amphibian? I mean, in addition to the obvious… beast.” The blonde looked at her companion. “Are you ready?” She was almost sounding excited. It was the closest word.

Cato Fett

 

[Cato Fett]

"Jor'lek~" Cato replied. The smile behind his words was thin, toothy, and hungry. With unseemly surety, he had stowed the co-pilot controls into locked, neutral positions, undone his seat-webbing and was making a final, rapid check of his person.

The short hunting bow, compact, crucial, constructed of hardy polymers alongside a core of traditional Asahian bamboo and island rattan. Stocky quiver now attached behind the small of his back and bristling with a good two-score of killing arrow shafts. His own fighting harness, borrowed, adapted, and trimmed down to his own specifications, somewhat 'fat' in places where he kept stores of vital field equipment. The small arsenal of fighting short-blades: tantō long knives, shorter, fat-blade kaiken, shuriken throwing spikes and darts of bleak, matte steel. And finally, his daisho. The long and shortswords, his primary combat weapons and a traditional sign of warrior aristocracy. His touch wove over each item with rapidity. Murmured a low prayer to the spirits of war to watch over them. Satisfied, Cato signalled to Brooke with a nod and eased back down the length of the Typhoon.

-

Atop the submersible's stubby, knobbled conning tower, its sole entry hatch creaked loose and gave a sharp, pinging pop! as its interior atmosphere exhaled and met with the outside air. Cato eased the edge of his visor over the top hatch-rung and peered about the chamber. They had swam their sub into what he could best tell was an almost medieval receiving bay; the ceiling was tall, vaulted, with several barrel-arches meeting at right angles overhead to create a bristling pattern. He climbed the last few ladder rungs, briefly posing atop the conning tower by his heels and with his bow and drawn arrow in hand, scanning round. He hadn't opted for torchlight, not yet. Instead...

Magnify Senses. Force power swelled, filled him. A trained thought put the energies towards massaging the fabric of his eyes, the auditory nerves in his ears, the palette of olfactory sensors in his nose. Darkness drew back for him and he could hear the sigh of the ambient air crackle as it passed over the smooth-hewn stonework of the chamber. Could smell the aeon-rot of untold ages in the thick mildew and phosphorescent molds growing between the flooring tiles. Now, Cato could see in detail: piles of rotting trash, disintegrated furniture, discarded clothing now bitten and chewed to ribbons by absent vermin, upturned and bashed-in machinery forged from glittering metals that had tarnished darkly with the centuries. It was all familiar enough. Cato leapt from the conning tower onto a stone platform jutting out over the pond their Typhoon now docked in, giving Brooke room to exit.

His fingers pulled gently on the arrow-fletching in his grip. The bowstring flexed, subconsciously testing his hunting-bow's tensile strength. He kept a constant scan of the chamber, identifying angles of ingress and egress, checking against the pair of entry doors waiting for them at the end of the tall hall. Like the great basilica now surrounding them overhead, the edifice's interior seemed composed to the same, dark basalt stone. The air was chilly and Cato watched his breath frost with each exhale. There was a constant echo of moisture drip, with the walls themselves seeming to constantly weep with clammy rivulets bleeding from between the bricking.

"If there's no objection, I'll take point," Cato said up at Brooke. He fished a glowstick from a webbing pouch, gave the tube a snap and watched the chemical reaction birth a sharp, cyan glow. The glowstick was dropped away, leaving a marker for their eventual... hopeful... return.

Brooke Waters

 

[Brooke Waters]

There was always another way to cause mayhem. And right now? Brooke was considering a few ideas. If they were going to be going into a piranha’s nest, as it were. The Witch was more than happy to be here with Cato, knowing that he was … well, that whole Mando with the combat skills. She was not as well armed as he was. A few different blades, one from Arda, one from Pamarthe. An energy bow was not far from her skills, but now there was a slugthrower on her hip. And if she needed it? She’d summon her lance. That could keep things at range.

Plus, there was, as always, her spells.

As the pop occurred, Brooke took a second to swallow hard, equalizing pressure. She took a moment after that to call on the Force, to cast a spell of protection for herself and Cato, blue energy spraying from her hands to envelope the traveling pair. She sensed part of what Cato was doing, but since she had given up her bit of the Jedi teachings, she could feel it, but not always put names to what she could sense.

With her gear ready, the blonde stepped from the hatch. As Cato stepped up. “I mean, you do have a bit more armor than me…” She gave a sweet smile, mostly as a tease to Cato.

"Not like we know where we are going, but I can feel it..."

Cato Fett

 

[Cato Fett]

From the edges of the receiving bay, a handful of communicating passageways and smaller, more ancillary and secondary tract tunnels wormed and bored away into the basilica's sub-level floors and adjacent basements. Each hallway entrance spanned the length of the floor to the deep shadows of the bay's vaulted ceiling, and none of them were marked with any descriptive signs or placards that might've guided them along. A low, cold, caustically scented breeze issued from each of the entrance-ways. Gauzy, acid-coloured fog pooled and wafted around their ankles.

Cato was on a knee, pushing the fog aside to examine the floor. The bare, seamless basalt was hideously dirty and gritty, layered with dust that, by sheer dint of long, long time, had congealed and compacted down into an additional sheet of black lamination. It took a partial moment to find what he sought; traces of still fresh sea-water and patterns of wet dirt. Patterns of boot prints and footfalls. He dug into the Force a touch deeper, pushing his vision to receive infra-red patterns. Traces of heat-glow, little pools of faint, milky light, shivered against the grime and the rock. Bare, unclad feet, trundling against the floor, unheeding of the damp and chill. Leading away, down a larger hallway second from the left-most passage.

Cato rose and readjusted his grip on his bow and arrow-shaft. He nodded to Brooke to follow his wake, then began to carefully stalk down the high-ceilinged corridor.

There was little illumination. Only a vague, filmy haze that seemed to seep in from the featureless walls. Every twenty meters or so, Cato would pause to produce another chem-light marker, dropping it aside to trace their way back to the receiving bay later. His stride and method of walking were odd, from the clench-and-paw way his tabi'd, sandalled feet tucked against the floor to the bend of his legs and hips. Even his torso trunk and shoulders seemed to narrow in, hunching close to provide a more shrunken profile. But his steps and motion were fluid, soundless. His hands kept his hunting bow's drawstring half-taut, ready to fire.

"This place is dead. Dead," He said suddenly. He was stopped now, still slightly hunched, looking back at Brooke. He held a hand up to the side of his helmet. A deep, almost airless silence wafted around them. Stole the sound of their own heartbeats. "I keep trying to think of this place like some kind of over-built sepulchre but Brooke, it doesn't feel as so. Like we're wandering through the dried out capillaries of some great, deceased antediluvian. Even abandoned places have a kind of soul. You feel the echo of its life, what it used to be, who used to be there. This place? It feels like it was never alive in the first place... But never quit died either. You said you could feel what we're chasing. Can you feel it still?"

Brooke Waters

 

[Brooke Waters]

This felt more like her turf than most places did. An ancient technological marvel in the middle of some forbidden and wild sea? Yes, Brooke could handle that. As a transplant to the Witches, one who came later, and was, as she was called Starborn, technology and her were not foreigners, even if most of her technology was pretty rudimentary. She had no idea what Cato had going on under the hood, was the helmet a traditional combat helmet, like so many of the Mandalorians she’d met before? Or was it more a sensory deprivation helmet, that she had her bounty hunter armor?

Right now, it didn’t matter. She hadn’t had time because of the way she rushed them onto the Typhoon, to collect her armor and tools. She had her knives, her lightsaber, and the Force power, all bundled up in Force enhanced, but not drastically so, blue robes. With the Mandalorian leading, she had the chance to really try to look into what they were finding themselves in.

Basalt? She thought it must have been. Closing her eyes and focusing, the hybrid pulled on her Blubreen heritage, the ability to see beyond what surface dwellers could see, and work with very low light, almost on the electromagnetic spectrum. It wouldn’t do so well if there was nothing moving, nothing to see, but finding life? That she could do. She’d found Cato fairly easy, and this was not something that some hunter in the Force would feel triggered and come after her for.

JOIN US

REMAIN WITH US

As he was stating that the place was dead… She could still feel the pulsing, the thrumming of the words, in the Force and in her mind. She shook her head. “It doesn’t feel alive, but I’m not quite sure its… dead. Its primordial… Maybe thats too dramatic.” She shook her head again. “But its old.” Another deep breath and she could all but feel the chamber breathing with her, very subtle, in the Force. Was it calling to her? Was it calling to him as well?

“Let me try something?” She requested, and even without permission began to hum and sing a small song, creating a blue orb of light, one that shone brilliant in the adjusted-eyes of the darkness, but one that was quickly sucked away, stretched and compressed as it went.

MORE.

Cato Fett

 

[Cato Fett]

M O R E

The word and the notion behind it, echoing off the surface of Cato's own thoughts, sent a shrill, cold chill down his spine.

They ventured on. Brooke's all-too brief orb of floating lamplight had illuminated another stretch of vast, featureless hallway. A stretch that, Cato noted thankfully, terminated in a tall, open doorway cut through a single, enormous block of polished green phanerite communicating into an unlit chamber. Said chamber was the first in a series of interlocked and knuckled together storerooms and sloven depositories, each with vaulted ceilings where the lambent glow oozing through the walling didn't or couldn't reach and strewn with what could best be described as dried jetsam. Trash, both ancient and recent. Hanks of torn burlap habits left discarded in unruly piles, furniture that was shredded down to neat splinters and almost oily sawdust, broken cans and tins of one-and-done foodstuffs that gave off a smell that almost singed the fine hairs in Cato's nostrils. Dismantled machinery sat in wooden tubs filled with old lubricate.

And fish bones. Carpets of tooth-flayed cartilage in the forms of bent, delicate ribs, crushed in toothy skulls, and transparent fins that cracked like old plastic. Each chamber boasted of these dirty graveyards. But there was precious little else save for these signs of passing life. Cato guided them through with care, skirting around any and all objects that would rattle too loudly. The silence clinging to them was damp, immense, and he had little wish to disturb it unnecessarily. His mind still ached from the echo of that voiceless presence.

Soon, the spareness and ascetic plainness of the deeply lower levels began to alter. It began with the passageway walls. The smoothed, flat, featureless volcanic stone gave way to bas-relief forms. Vast tracts of rock were devoted to upraised depictions of deep sea monsters: bicephalic sharks, each head with its own sets of primary and pharyngeal jaws, one hundred limbed octopi with hooked and fanged beaks, their great arms reaching out to crush the stars, sinister humpback whales rendered with slit-eyes and their baleen filters replaced with enormous razor canines.

Some of the carvings were less prosaic. At one section, a kilometre's worth of walling had been gnashed out to portray some vast cosmological scenery. But the language and strangeness of its shapes and sigils disarmed something within Cato. There was something wrong to all this hidden art.

-

"...Shh!" Cato held up a hand. They were along a short length of corridor, passing underneath the glare of support columns fashioned into chthonic beasts. Ahead by a scant few meters were a pair of heavy-set blackened wood doors fitted with onyx brackets and hinge-work. They were the first intact doors they'd so far encountered.

Cato was still as a stone, his helmet slightly canted. He waggled his fingers to Brooke for her to follow closely.

Lithely, he took the last handful of meters in two long strides and quickly sunk down into a low crouch by the doorway, bow and arrow pointing aside. Light issued and sputtered brokenly through a shallow gap between the paired doors. Cato peered through...

Beyond was a grand foyer, overlooked by more bas-relief stonework in the upper wall arcades and rotten, faded tapestries. Discoloured curtains hung down the length of fluted granite columns. Torch sconces installed between the applied columns gave off fitful, dirty flames. It was the central scene planted square in the main floor of the foyer that arrested all of Cato's attention.

It took an effort not to press closer against the door crack, in case the rim of his helmet butted loudly against the door-frame wood. There was a great pyre erected beneath a chandelier of cobwebbed metal. Bonfire laced and ate at the feet of a long iron rod driven into the floorstone. From the iron rod hung a long dead body, now seared and broiled by the heat and tongues of dancing fire. It was not the only corpse in attendance: Cato's eyes glanced over the bare, pave-stone floor and saw the cut up and sawed remains of dozens of bodies arranged in broken, knotted patterns. Sigils. Pictographs. Lengths of human and alien gut had been used to scrawl out the more complex characters. It was a scene of gut-churning blood and gore.

Kneeling around the pyre were a half-dozen men and women in plate-armoured habits and sackcloth. Their faces were hidden behind rebreathers and gas-masks daubed with paint and blood. Cato saw their arms were upraised, cracking their hands together to create strange, double-jointed shapes.

A priest of sorts led them in prayer from a landing along the foyer stairs. They were a massive specimen, tall, hoary with mass, wearing the remains of an armoured space-suit and a bowl-helmet adorned with pieces of sharkteeth and bone. All of them were armed, variously with blasters, carving blades, and saw-toothed swords. The choir of half-chanting, half-singing voices set his teeth on edge. He didn't require a full understanding of esoterica to know that murder and torture had been done to fuel this profane scene of worship.

"That must be the Rapture cultists... Can you understand anything they're saying?" Cato whispered up at Brooke.

Brooke Waters