Chapter Text
My employees have been extremely diligent.
You don’t go back to Grizzco immediately.
It takes a week and one day this time. A week and one day after killing the CEO. A week and one day after the huge-ified marine life energy that flooded LB left his body. A week and one day after seeing the bear’s melting face hover each time a Grizzco worker walks by. A week and one day after hearing your old boss’ words echo inside your head.
My employees have been extremely diligent.
You don’t really remember most of the details from the first two days after the battle of Marine Life vs Mammalians (that's what you heard some Squidbeak members call it). You visited Agent 1, 2, the ex-captain and current one the first day. There were no new orders for you. They told you to relax, to enjoy yourself. That you did all you needed to do.
Cuttlefish was still dried out, cracked body light enough for his form to seemingly float off the ground. He didn’t seem to care much. That or he was just not really with it anymore. You're not sure which of the two possibilities are better. LB’s tail wiggled as he watched the one sided conversation. You just stood, just nodded, form automatically locked into the position of the competent agent the Squidbeak saw you as.
That perception, and everything else mentally slips the moment you leave the underground.
Day one’s remainder and most of two were spent wandering amidst flashes.
You blinked and you were in the general store, a cheap keychain in your hand that you must have bought and three brand named shirts in your inventory you couldn’t sell and doubted you would wear.
Your back twitched against a railing you were leaning against and then your feet were dragging down an alley of card players passing slips of paper beneath shifting eyes and sticky fingers.
You're at a table upstairs in the battle lobby. A plate of food you have just the vaguest memory ordering and half of it already in LB’s stomach.
You're staring at the ceiling on your apartment bed. It’s dark. Your arms and legs obnoxiously tingle atop the comforter. The smallfry is nestled against your thigh. You barely register the touch.
It’s not until the afternoon of day two until something in your brain decides it's time to start booting back up again. It doesn’t bring back the broken pieces you lost though. It doesn’t do much to stop the CEO’s words from sounding off.
You're scoping out the plaza as you walk through it three days post battle, neck controlled as it cleanly swivels back and forth, pupils locking along store doorways and open stairwells. Something freezes as you catch yourself entering a slight crouch through the reflection of a clothing store’s window, two inklings inside staring at you oddly.
You blink a few seconds to yourself before continuing to walk, pointed ears twitching inward as you force your legs to move faster.
When… have you started doing that here?
Of course you have always tried observing your surroundings. You had to as far back as when you lived in the desert. But the level of focus you were putting into this, the way your ears swivel and the concentrated softness to your steps, hands twitching around the memory of a weapon, eyes darting through crevices in walls and suspicious dark corners that probably weren’t actually that suspicious or dark at all because something is telling you that their could be something waiting there…
How long have you been doing this? Putting this level of detail into scooping an area that has always been fine? While you were actively looking for the advisor? After you had started Salmon Run?
But this isn't Salmon Run. This isn’t Alterna.
This is the city plaza. And the plaza has never had anything in it that could or even has remotely done anything to you.
You tell yourself that as you keep walking. You continue to swivel your head each time you pass a too large space between buildings regardless.
You start getting antsy on day five. Palms twitching on their own accord, fingers parting just enough to where a blaster could have sat, nails digging into pant fabric hard as you make your tenth lap around the plaza.
An odd itchiness has begun to nestle up your back, pinpricks of unreachable pressure sprouting and pushing against your middle, a hot bubbling sensation flickering from the inside of your chest. It’s not from anything physical though, doesn’t feel heavy enough to be real. No amount of scratching ever dissipates it.
So you walk more around the city, taking LB with you sometimes and other times going alone. You can only travel around the square so many times before you get sick of it though, only try so many meals in the Battle Lobby before it all begins to taste the same.
You only hesitate for a beat before entering the Battle Lobby the evening of day five. LB is in the apartment today. You slip on tennis shoes and secure your ink tank to your back. There's a tiny prick as the tube inserts into skin, a slight coldness ebbing from the import site you've long since gotten used to as purple ink begins to fill the glass. The bulky frame of the Splattershot rests protectively in your arms.
You’re only splatted once during the first Turf War round, teeth held in a thin line as you shoot and pivot, eyes locking onto the slightest movement before firing a controlled shot into an opposing team member's chest. Some of the cephalopods you take down attempt to head you off again. You can’t help the condescending grunts that leave you everytime those going for revenge splats attempt to cut you off the same way they did the first time.
Everyone on your team is slapping high fives once the winning music blares from the speakers. An octoling compliments you after. The other team sulks a bit before walking off to sign up for another round. You blink before entering the terminal again. Something miniscule, but ghostly tangible in your chest buzzes.
You play another match. Then another. Then another. Eventually switching from Turf to Anarchy and then back again. You resume position each time, knees bent and gun held at the ready. Ink turf, move, ink turf, move, ink turf, move.
But that buzz dissolves even before leaving the lobby a few hours later, eyes still hollow but ink stained shoes leaving too even prints on the ground.
You weren’t fully sure why at first, why being in a position which should simulate battle after a while began to feel like a chore, why you somehow felt more empty leaving than when you came. But something inside you twitches, twists, growls every time you think about that tingle that's now not even a ghost in your chest.
It clicks what's wrong day six.
It’s almost funny how long it took you to figure it out.
There’s no stakes.
In Turf War your job is to essentially paint a floor. In Anarchy Battles it’s to stand on a platform or throw a ball. In all the above it's to shoot at players in a game that respawn before they shoot at you and you respawn again because…because…
Why…?
Money? You have more than enough to last for a while now. Fame? No one really pays attention to random team battles.
Fun? Is it because it’s fun? Was it supposed to be fun? Maybe it would have been. Maybe before you fought for the Squidbeak Splatoon, before Salmon Run. Maybe it was the first time you tried it, though even that thought somehow feels completely absurd, pointlessly obnoxious.
You've begun pacing in front of Grizzco night six, then seven and now eight. Getting closer each time, drool building against chapped lips, digits taking on a life of their own as they vibrate every time you have to force yourself away from the door. A few figures that pass by point, duck their heads and whisper.
You didn’t plan it, to come here. To stock the business grounds in a way that probably makes you look like a maniac, your feet marching back and forth back and forth back and forth as triangular teeth endlessly scrape against each other, tongue licking against enamel you could almost swear tastes sweet.
You've been avoiding it. Opening that door, going in here again.
The business is somehow still functioning, still ongoing. The idols still advertise for it and the Squidbeak members don’t care that they do. Their problem was just with the last one who ran it. Yet maybe that not-quite-so-dead part of you where something close to morals once lied shivered each time you thought of signing up again, LB’s and mutated Grizz’s visages and hundreds of blurred salmonid faces the first few days after the final battle having flashed sharply each time you found yourself walking near.
But now there's a hunger, not for food, nor games, one unsatisfied with false battles with no stakes.
You don’t feel much genuine excitement anymore. You have long since understood that your job as an agent and being flown out to metal islands had at one point burned normal emotions, normal reactions out of you.
But on the field, on the battlefield, you've realized, adrenaline never seems to die, that specific, but oh so real thrill-like feeling, that high when your weapon punches through the bodies that want you dead, but you win. Against all the odds you win and those that want to tear you apart can do nothing but cower and run and you can continue to slice through them and their warm orange orbs flow into you and fill that frigid space where the dead part of you hungers, starves for and a real smile can’t help but light up your face and your living and your alive, your finally alive and no passer buyers look at you like you've lost it from the windows of stores, from the sidewalks you observe the city on, when you walk like a personal guard with no client through a restaurant and they think your paranoid and sneer but everyone else on a salmonid field is on the same page and applaud it, hallow it, praise and praise the skills you have and you need that you need that.
You. Need. That.
It’s screwed up. You kind of know that now, know that you are probably screwed up too. But a scarily large part of you doesn't care right now. Because the closest you feel to being normal, you realize, is when you're in a field, is when you're in a field shooting real enemies, real targets that want you dead. Where your instincts are rational and your reactions make sense.
And maybe you deserve to feel like that. You saved the world. And salmonids…they're violent. Maybe they're not the completely mindless demons acting without reason you once thought they were, not too different from LB. Maybe you're wrong. Maybe you're just sick in the head.
And the part of you that is keeping you from that door, the element inside that flips when you approach the metal frame? Maybe…maybe it's pointless to hold onto that?
All cephalopods are infused with the memories of human desires… right?
So maybe…maybe wanting this isn’t really your fault?
Maybe these feelings you have, the gleeful urge to eradicate, to kill, to shoot your opposition down to nothing, that sense of control and the way that is the only outlet for you were from whoever’s memories you inherited. Maybe not even from dissipated millions but from a singular sick twisted human.
A sick twisted human…
So, perhaps… you're just a carrier, just a living diary whose soul is permanently stamped over with wishes, the overwhelming cravings of another person, desires not yours tattooed into your being. And maybe that's true because you never have felt like this before and that other person may have wanted this, would have loved this so maybe your a walking message, a eulogy thousands of years out of time that must be delivered because it was always going to be delivered or was already on course but paused when the liquid crystal shattered so it’s not you and these cravings are not yours and you don’t have a choice but to bend to those instincts because they are programmed into you, are the echoing cries of another person dead and dead and dead and gone but not dead enough to where their soul no longer screams and echoes and cries from beyond the grave so then it wouldn’t be your fault you feel this way would not be your fault you are this way is not truly your fault if you participate if your a puppeted vessel for the sick twisted ghost that’s forever bound to keep unknowingly pulling those strings.
And…and if you're wrong, even if you're wrong, even if some of these specific feelings really are just your own… salmonids in the here and now are still a current danger. They’re always a known risk for invading. The past doesn’t change the present. And you didn’t know. You didn’t know collecting their eggs would fuel a weapon. No one did. And there's been rumors, rumors of them getting closer to the mainland. It still needs to be done. The city could eventually fall if you don’t allow these desires out to help. Grizzco needs your skills. Just a few rounds. Just a few rounds are ok. Someone else will take your spot if you don’t and…
And…
Cod.
You just need this.
Cod you just, really need this.
Your palms are hovering over the door now, shaking, shivering, the corners of your mouth quivering, but not from fear. And this time, this time when you see the orange light creep up from the bottom of the underground stairwell, the beacon like an old friend reaching its arms out, you run to it.
-
The statue has been replaced. That’s the first thing you notice, the fish eating a bear instead of a bear eating the fish. The second thing you pick up on is that no other workers seem to really care.
Of course they mention it. Discuss it to themselves a bit, exchange smiles and quips, but nothing beyond a surface level, nothing ever approaching the real meaning as to why a predator’s body is being crushed by the jaws of prey. They already have forgotten about it the second they strap themselves into a copter.
You suppose there might be some symbolism to it, but all it really does is cement the theory of the power vacuum being filled, that someone else has taken up the space Grizz left behind.
A few workers recognize you as you practically slam your hands against the counter, digits vibrating almost uncontrollably as you sign up to be on the next flight. You only pause when looking at your reflection on the locker door, eye twitching abruptly before you slide the orange helmet onto your head.
You don’t need to see the results to know you delivered the most eggs, to understand that you instigated the most kills. It’s a blur, but at the end of it you're smiling with the others by the basket so hard it feels like your jaw will disconnect, the drug of battle like lighting shooting up and down your limbs.
Grizz’s words echo in your head as you leave the building that night, the metallic door slamming shut somewhat faded sounding as the lights behind you slip from your peripheral.
That thrill, the firecrackers lighting up your chest finally begin to fade out the further you walk from the building, a pit in your stomach that started after the finishing siren from the last round rang filling, swirling, constricting.
The CEO’s face is accompanied by those you took down that night, bodies hollowed and lifeblood freezing in layers beneath your boots flashing as you slowly make your way back to your apartment. Something in your throat goes dry.
You enjoyed what you did tonight. You know you did. Your hearts are still thumping in your chest.
And yet an ancient rushing tide, somehow even louder now than the leftover adrenaline, that swirling hole twisting and suffocating your middle continues to swarm, the vortex only rising as a single truth cuts like a knife across your conscious.
You’ll crave it tomorrow.
Another part of you you haven’t felt in a long time burns like fire up your throat in response. It ends up laying in a pile near the plaza stairwell.
-
You were right about coming back again, about wanting to. Needing to.
You honestly don’t remember the walk to the building tonight. You're still getting the thrill you need now, know without a doubt that this is the sensation your body wants.
You’ve started recoiling whenever you decimate a snatcher though, Grizz’s words flashing each time you see another teammate smush their egg carrying bodies against metal.
You make a deal with yourself to avoid hitting them if you don’t need to. Something about that makes you feel slightly better after the final round ends.
-
Another Splatfest started today.
You forget the categories the second you hear them. You take out LB to look at the decorations again though, the floats getting their last minute touch ups in preparation for the idols who will ride them. Both of you are sitting against the metal stair railing in the center of the square, Little Buddy’s flippers curling and uncurling in a game that only makes sense to him. He’s leaning closer to you today. He’s been doing that more lately.
Your eyes find the Great Zapfish raised hundreds of feet in the air, the eel-like creature’s body curled around the power center building.
You wonder if it stares at you, if it recognizes you from when you ran by it in that building at the edge of Alterna. You doubt it. Even if it could find your body, its giant eyes are much too distant to ever make you out even if it wanted to.
-
You’ve lost count of how many days post battle it’s been.
That thirst for that high doesn’t leave. It continues to come back. Not as rabid as before, but strong, hungry. The longer you stay away from Grizzco the more that part of you builds, conjugates.
You have enough silver scales to purchase a new work suit now, so you do. The memory of an adrenaline rush ghosts your chest as you look at the higher ranked colors. Your choices are yellow or green.
You pick yellow. It’s not until a few hours after that you realize it's the same shade as your agent outfit was.
-
You're starting round eight one night when a cohozuna shows up, screams tearing from its pear shaped fleshy body, presence shaking the very foundation of the outpost as it slams a kaiju sized tail into it.
The others immediately start running towards it. You join them. But then the behemoth does something you didn’t expect it to. It turns, stares. Something frigid runs up your spine as eerily familiar, pupil-less eyes meet yours. A demonic shadow overcasts everyone as it moves closer.
You take one more step before feeling your legs freeze, the workers' warcry's starting to buzz and fizzle to nothing, your eyes not seemingly able to do anything but bore ever deeper into whitened soulless ones.
Your chest doesn’t feel right. Your limbs don't either. They don’t want to move anymore. Your insides squeeze hard, throat closing inward, pupils spirling.
A blob of decomposing purple stands, soulless, beconing. Shivering lungs forced to take in more and more air that is quickly dissipating the further the rocket your on moves out from earth’s atmosphere. Nails sprouting ink beneath them as you switch between squid and humanoid form, finger nails perpetually quivering and clawing against the spinning mass of metal. Another half turned arm shooting out as LB begins to slip from the case on your back. Body lurching, stomach shooting into your throat as you jump towards just one more egg, just one more golden egg you need to further blast open that hole in that things torso because you’ll die if you don’t you’ll actually die if you don’t LB will actually die if you don’t and the egg is warm in your hand cause it's supposed to be warm in your hand is always warm in your hand but now it's getting warmer too warm too warm now why is it getting so warm now why is it getting so warm, now hot, it’s hot hot hot hot burning burning burning burning burning burn-
“....!”
You're on your back, scorching fire ripping across your side, body instinctively curling inward. Darkening red taints your vision. Your eyes immediately dart to the damage.
Green. The ink is green.
A flipper flopper circles amid its painted circle before using it to dive away. You must have just jumped away from it but was hit by something else, avoided its influence just enough to not be sent to a buoy.
A worker runs over to you. An inkling. His face looks slightly blurred. The jackhammering from your three hearts morphs the surrounding colors further. You stand. Your legs uselessly wobble. His arm finds your shoulder. You shift hard away from it. Your head whips towards a line of guttural screams now on the other end of the field.
The timer runs out before your group can take down the giant. You still end up being passed five bronze and two silvers. It takes longer than it should for you to be able to fully feel the weight of them.
When you finally make your way back to the lockers that night you catch your reflection. That spark in your stomach that starves seems to be satisfied now. The jittering of your limbs is gone, eyelids no longer caught in a syncopated dance. There's a hollowness to your face though, a darkness layering like charcoal beneath your cephalopod outlined eyes that you know won’t ever leave. You dimly hear your top set of teeth clack as they connect with the bottom jaw.
You don’t look like seventeen anymore.
My employees have been extremely diligent.
Somehow your but finds the locker bench. The eyes of a stranger look back at you from the red paint of the metal cubby in front. Something dim in your chest echoes the longer your fake reflected pupils trace those false mirror eyes.
These eyes belong to a stranger, yet could only be a part of your body. But you’ve seen the same type, the same, eerily similar classification before-another soldier, a leader that has been working under the Squidbeak much longer than you have.
Captain 3.
Caparin 3 has those eyes.
Before they had just seemed wise, drawn back in the way one who has seen the world and knows how whispered legends conclude looked.
But that's when you first started, because back then you had never seen that gaze before, hadn’t yet been there long enough to have the act of killing become monotonous.
Your leader’s eyes have wisdom in them, yes, but that far, muted look isn’t just because of having more knowledge than those around them, that piercing gaze that rips into your own wasn’t there just to look intimidating, to strike awe into the soldiers around them.
No. Those eyes may have elements of those things, but now, now the true reason, the main one seems too obvious, so stupidly predictable but one that you simultaneously know most cephalopods may never have been able to put together.
They belong to someone who understands what the weight of expectation does, what it means to make sacrifices even if those sacrifices kill and burn you more and more, what happens when you put everything you are into a cause, hollowing yourself out over and over until that cause becomes the only thing that reflects to the outside.
It doesn’t take much time before Grizz’s melted form and LB’s face start to cycle again.
You don’t know how long you sit there. All you know is that the next time your eyes snap into focus the lights have dimmed and a damp sensation you haven't felt in a long time is settling against your cheeks.
It takes a few days to come back to Salmon Run after that.
It takes two weeks more to add another Salmon Run award sticker to your collection.
-
To be a visionary in business-and in life-one must be prepared to make tough decisions.
The copter waited for you today. You entered it as you always have, glanced across the seats at those who would be joining you as you have always done.
They nod at the color of your uniform, “Not a low enough color where we worry if they’ll be a liability,” you're sure they think.” It’s different today though. No smiles or quips make their way past anyone’s lips, necks held impossibly clenched as they raise and lower their foreheads.
The whole city’s on alert. Even the earth itself seems to know something is amiss, the sky casted in a strange, ghostly orange.
Big Run, the populace call it. The salmonids are taking a stand, have grown enough to make their way unperturbed past the city defenses, have rushed like the tide itself towards the Wahoo World theme park.
You're an Eggsecutive now. There's only so many of you. It didn’t feel like much of a choice to come here. The city is in real danger. They need people like you, and yet, at the same time…
My employees have been extremely diligent.
You know you would have kept going even if there was no threat. You know you will after this one inevitably ends.
Maybe you’ll stop, eventually. When you make enough to be sure you won’t run out for you and LB. Some part of you thinks you at one point will. Perhaps before the fry grows into a teenager.
But not now. Not today.
You're addicted. You've come to realize that, not of the high. You were at one point, when you were rescuing the advisor and that tiny, manic window after you were relieved of duty. But not anymore. That's not what you're chasing after now.
It’s the equilibrium. It’s that feeling of normalcy, that drug that only battle gives you but one you’ve already felt so many times. It’s not a chore yet but it's your life. And no matter how much of it you get, no matter that those feelings won’t ever reach the same level they had before, you keep coming back. You’ll keep killing them.
You sometimes wonder if that makes you the monster, if you can even be considered a borderline good person anymore.
The agents seem to think you are.
You don’t really believe them.
You saved seven billion.
Seven billion.
But in order to support yourself and LB to get there you killed thousands upon thousands. You directly continued to feed the person who wanted to eliminate that seven billion.
It’s easy to blame the way the city is structured. It should be anyway. The prices of living are so high that many don’t seem to have a choice but to look for an alternative. The media is paid for by Grizzco ads. The economy and currency systems are structured in a way where Salmon Run becomes the most profitable option. The idols push for salmonids to be taken down. The news networks call the species monsters.
It’s normal to be a salmon slayer. It’s “good” to be one.
Something warped in you still sees some of the salmonids as demons, still feels something light up when you kill a boss one.
A part of you still wants to believe it wasn’t all on you. Maybe there's some truth to that.
Maybe what you feel and what squid and octoling filled cities propagate is just a by-product of human desires. Maybe the source of that endless need to be that something was theirs, perhaps the whole collection, maybe really just from an individual. Or maybe humanity's default was just to kill each other, to put boxes around each other only to eradicate every one in those boxes while pretending they never drew the lines in the first place.
Maybe that's the real reason they ended up underground.
Yet an even bigger part of you also knows that no matter how much of your decision to continue a genocide may have somewhat been due to external factors, no matter how much the structure of your life had influenced you, some part of your decisions, thoughts, a larger part of you than even you fully want to believe that did everything it did…
Was just you.
You chose to fly out. You chose to join the Squidbeak Splatoon. You chose, no matter where your impulses came from, to pull that trigger again and again and again. And even if you didn’t know that the only reason you were sent to collect eggs was to just burn them as jet fuel for an insane man’s plan, you still independently contributed to it.
You decided, made the choice as far back as the desert to continue down that path that would cement you as…“something”.
So maybe you know, maybe deep down you already knew that you were never a good person, because why would a good person barely hesitate to hunt down, to put a round of ink through that first octarian just based on an assumption that their species may have been responsible for stealing a powersource? Because someone who clearly has a bias towards them told you you should?
Because they were a member of the Squidbeak. Because you decided to put LB in that situation. Because it was an ex agent that encouraged it.
Because that would help you become that “something.”
The copter shifts slightly, the propellers hitting a bit of turbulence. No one on board seems to care. Your eyes trace the outline of Splatsville, pupils locking onto the general area where you know the grate lies.
On some days you wonder what would happen if you never joined the agency. If you hadn't taken that train to the city. If you never found LB. If you just died in that desert.
Little Buddy may have just been a soldier on a Salmon Run battlefield. He probably would have died there. Maybe you would have been the one to kill him. Maybe it would have been someone else. Perhaps in a way your actions saved him.
But, now that you think about it, now that you're really stopping to think about it, he became a soldier anyway, didn’t he, having to take down octarians that stood in both your ways. A child soldier leading a much younger child soldier.
You wonder if he’ll ask you about that when he’s older. You won’t tell him about Salmon Run though. You won’t ever tell him about Salmon Run.
Maybe the world would have just ended, if you weren't there. If you didn’t find LB and didn’t slide through that sewer grate. Maybe you were the only one who could have stopped it. Or maybe in some other reality you wouldn’t have and all the death you caused would have been for nothing.
But you could have stopped going to Salmun Run as much as you did once you had enough to support yourself for a while. Maybe.
But you didn’t.
No, you didn’t.
And now, now you don’t have a choice but to go, because the city may fall if you don’t, because you're too skilled to sit out anymore.
And then, when it’s over, after you spill green, enjoy it more than you should before even that satisfaction fades, you’ll fly back. You’ll walk into the apartment, LB bouncing and jumping into your lap, and you’ll stare at him as the faces of those you killed today flash over his.