Isandro and Anthos settle at an old friend's venue. She is one of Barresi's alumni, just like them.

They begin their night with a dive into the past over candle lights and amaro. They can't tire of discussing their months spent in the Memverse, which felt like a lifetime that stood on its own.

Looking back on it, they never thought they'd reach the Spire's top.

A climb was underway. Rodi couldn't run away, and Olive admitted their run was unsalvageable. In other words, it broke them.

Black ink pooled at his platform shoes. Taking his Dual Squelcher back in one hand, making its yellow wiremesh distort and bend in the yank, Rodi jumped out of the seeping tar towards a clear floor tile. He looked back at the textureless columns around the edges of the floor. He was just about spotting Olive’s overgrown tentacles from behind one.

The Memverse’s monochrome gear and bodysuit allowed great mobility. Prismatic particles were left behind his every move. His light, rapid steps generated hundreds of golden triangles in the air. Such polygons were this world’s interpretation of the most basic form of matter: dust.

Rodi slid behind cover, leaving the Splat Zone to the mercy of hundreds of enemies. He sat next to his fiancé, peeking beyond their cover. The tar was relentlessly pooling closer, while the surrounding, endless water rose to the platform's edges.

“Do we really have to wait until time’s up?” Olive gritted his fangs. If his tentacles could squirm, they would be curling. “I’m gonna rip this headset off. This is unbearable,” he whined like usual, yet he was grave from pain.

His pristine, silver overcoat had one of its sleeves ripped, bitten off by a low-poly skeletal beast. Olive held the exposed arm close to his chest, shielding it from more of that acrid tar. His opaline ink ran to the ground in drips.

Indeed, it was rather cruel to have such believable pain signals blasted into their brains, just to make this virtual world more immersive. It would've made more sense to put more effort in, say, the graphical fidelity. All these chambers had been block-outs, their perils were pointy and primitive. Rodi thought the polish was put in the most stupid features.

However, Kayus, one of the talented octolings able to bootleg this incredible tech, had a realtime log of all the signals these thoughts generated, and more, running on one of his screens in the real world.

“It’s not final. It’s a prototype build,” Kayus spoke through a microphone, reaching inside the Memverse like a godly figure scolding from the heavens.

“Motherfucker, you said it a hundred times,” Rodi snarled to the empty sky. “Pirate a new version, already! One with a big fuck off button. Put it on my forehead, for easy reach.”

Olive’s unscathed hand went for Rodi’s forehead, pressing it successively, hopelessly, as if something different would start happening.

“We won’t implement it. I'm getting valuable data points also in failed challenges," Kayus' terminals were filling copiously at the higher stakes. Locked memories were chiselled out with each connection found in Olive and Rodi's streams of consciousness.

Sure, this was a pretty obvious way of uncovering their thinking patterns, thus any repressed memories. The Spire's first floors were procedurally generated simulations, with sights and conversations eerily similar to their Inkopolitan life. Their past choices were constantly probed and put to question.

Too bad the Spire's last floors were absolutely sadistic in design. If they weren't set in flames, they were drowned. They couldn't understand this shift between the familiar and dire, but it must've said something about their subconscious.

Unable to take it anymore, Olive dipped his chin into his chest, chest to hips, sucking in his winces. “Grrrargh…!” He ceded, looking back at Rodi with a sweating, pale gaze. “Can’t you just… kiss it, make it better,” he briefly exposed his arm, revealing the black ink eating away at his skin.

“Oh, yuck,” Rodi laughed while coming closer to the wound. “You kiss that.”

“I’m not playing…” Olive attempted a scoff.

“Not playing, in a game?” he brushed the overgrown tentacles tufts out of Olive’s eyes. “Come on. It’s not real, and you know it. Just think about reforming.”

“That... That’s why you should kiss it,” his jaw wouldn’t loosen. “It's not for my arm. It's for my mind."

Rodi was about to joke how the ink was reaching Olive's head, yet he stuttered with a gaze beyond the verdant eyes.

In their beginning, a kiss would’ve fixed so many things. It was the universal cure: it would break the heavy silence, the inner chatter. It would sweeten the days when they've tried their best, and yet failed. It would make pleas they were too afraid to say aloud: stay brave; stay with me. They forgot that, too.

However, Olive was so dazed by the injury and ink poisoning, that his childlike belief in booboo kisses was brought back from the depths. How cute.

"Anthos, Isandro," Kayus spoke directly, "We got a huge spike in data. Bear the latency..."

Not that it mattered. Rodi pushed the tufts out of the way again, and left a peck on Olive's head. He laughed a bit stronger, this time. Since it seemed to work, Rodi stamped him across his cheeks, his nose, his ears, remembering how good it was to see him overwhelmed by it.

Olive squeaked instead of whimper. "Okay, okay!" He couldn't pull back anymore, being virtually stuck to the pillar. "...Don't make me strain!"

In jest, Rodi kept placing his lips over anything except it. Neck, shoulders, belly, chin, mask... He was so lost in finding new spots to nip and annoy him, that he couldn't feel the stinging wetness coming from below.

The timer was reaching its last seconds. The sea level got to their legs, their knees, their noses, yet they still pecked and laughed. Their lips met underwater. The black ink was becoming oil slick on the water's surface, blocking any air or light underneath it. The iridescence in their ink sizzled off, floating into complex patterns in the tar. The world faded to blistering darkness.

Something as simple as a kiss could still bring comfort.

They felt the armchair's cushions, the weight of the headset again. When their hearing returned, they were hit by the excited noises of all the octolings in the room. ...Something happened that run.

Kayus swivelled his chair. The braid in his colourless tentacles was coming apart, from moving frantically between the screens, day and night.

"You need to go back in. As soon as you went underwater, there was a 70% match in the O.R.C.A. database," Kayus translated for them.

The two inklings took their headsets off briefly, to check each other's eyes. They were bloodshot from hours of wearing them, yet they immediately agreed on it.

There was always another try, another life.