Itvara crosses her legs tighter on the bed. There's a slight draft coming from her back, where the window is. It's still too early for the sun to make a difference in temperature, though it basks the bed in pale straw light. She's got a blanket draped over her shoulders, encircling her in a fluffy warmth. Some more heat enters though her hands, which nest a steaming cup of instant noodles. She rearranges the chopsticks between her fingers and gets the liquid swirling. The powdered flavouring has started to settle on the bottom.

As she swirls, the steam puts her under hypnosis. She projects her sleep deprived hallucinations into the noodles. A knot of category 8 high speed network cables tangles around her chopsticks. A boot's blue accent lights streak the air as they crush the cables. In reality, a car's headlights flash from the window behind her briefly. Steam keeps escaping the cup. The cables are left smoking, unattended, buried in the mud. The network infrastructure is failing in another dome. Nobody's left to attend to it. The longest night falls in dome B-11 as the automated energy management services can't be polled. Another typical morning falls on Inkopolis.

She sips the sodium concentrated water from the cup, catching a floating piece of seaweed. The infrastructure will have to wait until she can troubleshoot it.

Some furious clatters emerge from beyond the dresser, making Itvara peek her head around it. This dresser divides the studio into the kitchen area and the sleeping area. A string of semi-restrained swears sound from the kitchen. The clatters end with the sound of shattering glass. She finds Dana straight as a pole at the counter, eyes shut and lips stretched thin to conceal her spite for the sugar jar spread on the floor.

"Let me help," Itvara offers. She leaves the instant noodles and begins gathering the larger shards of glass.

"It's just an old jar," Dana's voice nearly whistles through her beak. "Finish eating first, I'll grab a broom in the meantime."

Dana knows her home's layout even in her lowest forms of consciousness. She expected this to be the usual routine, heating up half a kettle and getting everything in order for tea and coffee, as if she's back in control. She feels for the broom handle underneath the sink's cabinet. She pivots on her heel to finish cleaning, though a warm hand grabs the rest of the handle.

"Please, let me."

Dana's claws clench harder on the handle. The white figure doesn't budge, although a faint sigh escapes her upon feeling this.

"I know you hate this treatment for a child. I hate it too," Itvara says.

It's hard to come to terms with her powerlessness. She was untethered, feared, even respected by the most cold-blooded scum around her. Now, a mere cup of coffee beats her.

Meanwhile, there's a dozen tea and coffee boxes to decipher. Itvara reads each box in its entirety, assimilating every marketing buzzword used for caffeinated beverages. Dana makes for her usual stool, the one facing towards the window. The colours outside gradually get warmer, though she can't tell if it's clear or overcast.

"...Don't put any milk in it," Dana's grabbing her head, pressing her palms into her eyesockets. "I would've also added a spoonful of sugar but, you know. Fuck my life."

Itvara follows the request with no complaints. She places the cup on the table, taking her place on the opposite stool. Half of the table is already taken by her noodles and her laptop. She picks the machine up, anxiously booting it up for any messages from the domes.

"Oh, no..." Itvara scowls at the battery indicator. The computer's coil whine stops sharply. The screen immediately turns off, without a chance to check for any communications. "Dana... Do you have an eight-prong charger?"

"Never heard of that," Dana crosses her arms. "Don't tell me you forgot your laptop charger in the Valley."

"Not forgot. The time to pack supplies was none," her tone's defensive. "Even so, your outlets are different," she observes one under the fold-up table. "Hmm... I think I can make one from the Inkadian standard. Do you hold a multimeter and soldering kit in your apartment?"

"What am I, the repair shop?" Dana's pincers clench. She takes a deep breath, then takes her black coffee back to her lips. "You'll have to shop for one yourself. Though I don't hold any cash in here. There's enough in my other apartment, if you can crack that hell of a safebox," she murmurs into the ceramic lip. "You can run over there quicker than I will. I'll give you the address."

Itvara fidgets in her seat. "I have to ask you to come with me. I don't want to do a mistake there."

"You're going to be fine," Dana's empty pupils shoot upwards. "You were just saying you don't like being treated like a kid."

"But understand my initial worry. Inkopolis isn't as safe as the Octarian Valley. And my kind was exiled for a century. And I saw a building on fire in my first hour here."

Dana shrugs. "That fire's more on our gangs, honestly. Not on the city itself."

While Itvara attempts one last boot of her computer, Dana starts picking at the bothersome loose strings of her top, feeling a cold sweat trickling under them.

There's a chance Silviana could've been caught in the fire. There was so much foul play before Dana's departure. Although the uncertainty quickly gnaws at her fears, Dana puts it at rest, clear-cut facts inhibiting her mind's emotionally loaded backrooms. The more likely scenario is that Silviana left long before the fire. Silviana was already with a foot outside that door. She outright refused to keep being part of their hidden world, and thus of Dana's life entangled with it.

The fire was destined to consume the basement, together with the mistakes left in there. It left them space for a do-over. Ashes reform into a new world.

"Besides," Dana sets her mug down, "I'm fair certain someone of our own was involved in this."

"The Northern Triad?"

"Even closer. The Tilda Trade. They've done half of the deed with me. They had to finish it as well. Amygdala, what you just saw burn, was under my name."

Itvara bunches her fingers at her lips. "I don't see the sense. We were still getting delivery requests for the area, still after you got sent down to us."

"I don't know," Dana pulls one loose string to its end, freeing it from her top. "Something happened in there that caused a change of heart, and I can think of many reasons. Not a single one is pretty. I think the easiest one for us to accept is that I've had the papers for the place, and I went AWOL. Someone had to clean it up."

"Huh..." Itvara breathes out. "You held a base of operations, but you weren't officially part of the Trade, no?"

"Who can tell anymore? I was a puppet on a string, just as you were."

Itvara's brow bunches. The phrase doesn't fall well on her.

Twenty fifteen, Mollusc Era. Dust hung in the air from the recent tremors in the ground. A neighbouring dome went out of commission from a messed up armament trial. Yet the dome screens displayed the same hopeful blue skies.

Each blue cupola had its own satellite, a bundle of indispensable energy. The Great Octarian satellite could emulate all the benefits of a real solar body, though their light rarely hit her skin. She more often glowed under indoor light sources. She had the watchtower's windows covered up with posters: motivational propaganda and past headliners of A-2's famed Eight Star venue.

About six screens hanged above Itvara's head, monochrome CRTs from the Great Turf War period. This tower hadn't deserved a technological upgrade. Despite that, Itvara was delighted to work with old-school hardware. It asked for more know-how. Almost routinely, between her tasks, she glided her hand along the glass screens, to feel their static fuzziness and hear the soft sparks. It was like a comforting pet for their hard work. The sparks had been tingling her arm harder since the Great Zapfish had been generating their energy. Prosperity laid ahead.

One of the screens displayed a rustle in the shrubs. Someone moved with their head low, picking at the ground for something unidentified. They wore an ink tank, an unknown model.

...Intruder?

She reached for her keyboard, though her purple-toned claw just grazed the control key. She squinted closer to the screen, analysing the trespasser's actions. Although dressed in protective high-vis gear, buckled with combat equipment, they looked peaceful, more curious than anything. A butterfly flew past their ear. It didn't twitch.

They were fully engaged into an interior world of wonder and observation, scientific and poetic. A notebook with a thousand loose sheets cascaded over their forearm. A colourful plastic pen with a foreign mascot on the other end rested in the middle of the hand-sewn binding. Its head was egg-shaped, eyes freakishly open. Itvara vaguely recognised this mascot, though wasn't able to name it. She knew it was part of the fantasies of the Surface.

Yet the intruder's face would never come into focus, no matter the camera's settings. Their head would turn away from it as well, leaving Itvara looking only at their hanging, round-tipped tentacles.

"Technician Dewaele, report for today?"

Itvara turned to face her superior. Her finger instantly shifted one key to the left, turning the screen she was scrutinising off. "Yes, Major. Initiating shutdown as per OI protocol," she spoke into her headset, and pressed another key.

The systems became silent, no lights indicated any activity. They were fully disconnected, ready for a private discussion.

Itvara nearly ripped the headset off her tentacles. She rattled her hair with both of her hands, and turned towards her Major. The technician didn't get up, but kept swinging in her office chair from leg to leg.

"All quiet, Regina! Are you going up today?"

A tall octoling, with slender tentacles and wisened eye creases stood in front of Itvara. She stepped with an imposing weight, yet she held a friendly stance.

"Scheduled delivery. We've been summoned at a different point," the Major dragged her own chair next to the pale-inked octoling. "It's a short-notice change too," she continued with her eyes to the side, eyeing Itvara's sticky notes, in their cryptic technical jargon. "Find me which dome's underneath Bottlenose Boulevard."

Itvara promptly keyed the name in her spare laptop. No previous records showed up for it.

"...Is this a new base?"

"As far as I know, it's got a direct opening around D-3, though I reckon that ridiculous route won't do our limited time any favours. We need a shorter road, since they want it to become a regular drop point."

"Did the Tildas request this?"

"Yes. The late leader's son."

"So, are we comfortable with breaking the non-exclusivity pact to the Northern Triad?" Itvara squinted.

Regina touched the tips of her claws together. "It is best for the Tilda Trade and the Octarian Liberation to re-establish contact, for both legacy and strategic reasons, regardless of the unaffiliated groups' sentiments around it."

"Fair..." Thinking better than to further inquire, she typed another query, to locate the destination's coordinates. She yanked the result and put it through one of the Army's systems, to reveal an equivalent coordinate in their domain. She nipped at the inside of her lip. "It'll be a bit awkward. There don't seem to be any other direct passages there. All of the shorter tunnels start from our dome, too."

Despite Itvara's somewhat apprehensive brow, Regina's beak shined under her lopsided smirk.

"Excellent, I'm spared of Eiso's driving. We do have an appropriate kettle around here, right?"

"Yes, Major. Although... Aren't we avoiding any departures from our home dome? At least, last time I checked..."

"Let's try our luck with it, it's about time. We've had no incidents with our current ways."

Respectfully, the Major had no idea how much work went into not having incidents.

Itvara bit her tongue and turned her chair slightly towards her workspace. "Okay. I will draft some variants, though I will need more time to check the surveillance systems. Since we've never had a direct departure from here, we have yet to implement the exit logging overrides. Just to be safe, we'll need to send a communication to the OI that the D-10 systems will undergo maintenance for firmware upgrades. ETA 2 days."

Regina's eyes squinted with satisfaction. "I fully trust you here."

Itvara paused for a second, relishing in the praise, and the weight of responsibility that came with it. Her sense of self-preservation got more and more repressed with each such command. A little grin formed around her cheeks. "Thanks, Regina. Take the usual D-3 road for today."

Major Revelia pushed her chair backwards as she got up. Patting the side of her hip for her holstered weapon, she left the watchtower's upper floor through the antiquated lift.

The chair squeaked when Itvara's back pressed on its tired hinge.

"...Ugh," Itvara placed her headset on her ears again. She brought the screens back to life, shoving her eyes closer to the one she was analysing before.

To her horror, the unidentified individual was no longer under its capture.

She flipped through the footage, seeking the moment the individual left the frame. No matter how far back she scrubbed, even before her discussion with the Major, there wasn't a sign of life present in the frames, besides the passing butterfly.

Her hearts picked up the pace. With her mouth agape, she pulled the headset off and dropped it on the table.

"How?!" It echoed on the top floor.

Had someone reverse-engineered her system overrides? She spent another ten minutes checking the rest of the dome's footage. She was doubting her sanity with every passing frame. There were no signs of tampering in the logs either, though that could be to her own merit of hiding any trace a bit too well.

Of course, knowing all the ways these systems could be manipulated, it was clear that what was in them could no longer to be trusted. What was undoubtedly real had to be experienced with her own sight and touch.

Itvara stood up, equipping her emergency ink tank up on her back. The sting of the tank's connector wouldn't ever become kinder. She holstered her own Octoshot, a miniature model, a possession she would dread to use. She kept it more as an intimidation charm.

She half-shuts the elevator's accordion door before descending. The inside of the elevator always smelled of damp soil and iron.

D-10's dense vegetation spread outside. It tripped any newcomer with its twisted roots and netting of vines. She trekked the familiar undergrowth like nothing, to the last point where she saw the stranger. She was guided by a pocket compass, her only non-powered device.

Her gut sense was flairing the closer she got to it. She got the sense that reality could've bent at any point around her, that the trees and shrubs would start switching their place behind her. Suddenly, the plants she knew by hearts weren't as surely planted. She grew cold on a brush on the neck with a leaf, and even brought her hand to her holster a few times.

But the clearing was as empty as in the footage. The ashes from the old fire pits were just as the watchtower octolings left them: undisturbed until another night of digital stargazing. No matter how much she looked and twitched her ear, she was the only soul around. Yet, it felt illusory. The air quivered, itself unsure what particles it should hold in suspension. She made for the clearing's centre, and stillness was found, at last. The air ballooned with relief, instead of cutting thin. She took her hand away from the holster, and spent a few moments in the quiet.

Amidst the green, there was a neon splash. Under her boot, an oddly colourful piece of paper got stamped by the tip of her sole. She balanced on one leg to unstick the paper from it. While wiping the dirt off, Inklish writing was revealed. She was fortunate enough to partake in the Octarian Intelligence's Inklish classes, meant for talented, obedient individuals like her.

Inkopolis Underground - One-way fare

This side up. Not for resale.

This ticket is valid for one journey across the Inkopolis Underground and the Inkopolis Tide Rider Line.

Her sanity was restored, though it made the situation trickier. She'd had to ponder wether to create a trespasser incident, or let this individual roam and drop more Surface intelligence. After all, the magnetic band on the ticket's back was incredibly intriguing. She placed it in her pocket, for further analysis.