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That sinking feeling; at
Topic Started: Apr 7 2015, 09:40 PM (95 Views)
Lonile
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Near the center of the meteor ocean, a battered fishing trawler battled the waves. The old ship's black paint was chipped and cracked with a line of rust visible a few inches above the water line. She was almost fifty feet long and a third that wide with the first fifteen feet taken up by the wheelhouse. Half of the twenty-five feet of deck was taken up by a boxy tracked vehicle painted a uniform dark green with the phrase 'Stella splendens in profundum maris usque' written along the sides, whose pristine condition contrasted sharply with the ship. Behind it stood what looked like a gigantic sphere made out of metal until finally the profile of the ship was finished off by a recently rebuilt winch. A man wearing little more than a loincloth made of bloodspattered yellow cloth moved back and forth between the sphere and the winch talking to himself and testing the steel cable at his feet, a hair dryer shaped Rotom floating beside him with a worried expression.

"Look, I know you've got my best interests in mind but I want you to face facts. I am the only one who has a chance of surviving down there even with the bathysphere." The haggard man glared at the rotom accusingly. "Besides, Fridge, without you up here how am I supposed to get back up here? The mechanism is too old to hook it up to a timer of any sort and Pillow can't work levers." He waved towards a ball of fluff currently sleeping in one of the missing windows of the wheel house. "If you want to help me, I need you to stay here." He patted the top of the hair dryer just as it shifted into a very upset looking mini fridge.

"I still don't see why you refer to her as such, sir. You know that she dislikes that nickname." Partially garbled words floated out of the machine as it turned to 'look' from the resting swablu back to its trainer.

"Yeah, well it's her fault for insisting on sleeping in my bed. She's lucky her wings are comfortable or I'd kick her out." Mark grumbled, checking another part of the cable.

"I really must protest again. You only have six thousand meters of the heavy spool cable. With the estimate you made you're still more than a thousand meters from the bottom at this point in the ocean. I still don't see why you feel the best course of action is to descend to the limits of the cable and then exit your vessel at six hundred atmospheres!"

"I told you that the 'sphere is only rated to six hundred and I need to get to the bottom-"

"That's a further fourteen hundred meters, sir, and almost seven and a half times atmospheric pressure." The fridge gave him a frosty glare as he continued.

"Thank you for reminding me, anyway. I need to get to the bottom and get a look at what's left of this meteor."

"....We both know that's not why you're doing this."

~~~~

Mark climbed carefully through the door of the bathysphere before screwing it closed. This is it. A six foot wide ball of metal. Five sets of two inch alternating layers of steel and lead between me and the crushing depths of the ocean. Taking a deep breath, he fastened his seatbelt and checked his oxygen tanks before nodding at the porthole where the rotom floated. At that the face vanished and the ball was suddenly rolling and hitting the water with a jarring crash. He felt the vessel sink a few feet before finally righting itself, leaving him sitting upright as it continued its descent. The radio at his side squawked and the voice of the rotom came through: "Your descent should take an hour and a half and in five hours I will reverse the winch. Is there anything you feel the need to say before we lose radio contact?"

"No, Fridge. I'm fine. Thank you for asking." He smiled as he thought about the ghost's worrying. "I'll be fine."

"Alright then. We will remain on station until you tell us otherwise. If you do not return within four years I may become bored. Though there is a lot to say about an electric type living at se~" With a burst of static the pokemon's dialogue cut off.

~~~~

I am so bored! I wish I'd brought my 'brace so I knew how long this has been going on. The hybrid trainer had done everything he could easily do while crammed into the sphere including running through starmie's moveset and figuring out what he could and could not do. One of the 'I can do that' incidents had shown him that it was possible to use confuse ray on oneself. He was considering cutting open his arm again with swift to watch the regenerative process again when the motion of the vessel suddenly stopped. Am I here? Pulling off the seatbelt, he leaned against the window at the inky blackness beyond. "I guess I'm here. Well then, time to see if it's possible for me to die." He carefully closed off his air supply before layering on the defense provided by Cosmic Power. Skin glowing violet with energy he held up his hands as he conjured layers of Reflect and Light Screen as well. "That seems to be about all I can do so far." He murmured, as he grasped the wheel at the bottom of the vessel and grimaced. "Now for the fun part of this mess." He spun the wheel and watched as water began to flood the cabin . Slowly he opened it more, until it became impossible to breathe the air that remained and he was forced exhale to dive beneath the water. Feeling the water pressing in on him, he grasped the release for the door and pulled it open before using a few blasts of Water Gun to get out of the cabin.

His buoyancy canceled by a quick application of Gravity, he began to descend again through quick applications of Water Gun until he lost sight of the 'sphere's lights (around ten feet) and switched to using Hydro Pump until his arms began to ache. This is far enough. Rubbing a little bit of feeling back into his arms, he felt for the lead weight he'd tied to the tattered remains of his clothing to ensure he was still going down before casting Camouflage. The pressure seemed to lessen and his growing headache vanished as suddenly his lungs were filled with water and precious oxygen. Hands flying to his neck, he was startled to find a complete absence of gills, before his finger trailed up his arm to find a line of sucker tipped tendrils running up the inside of it. Oh god that feels so wrong. Fighting back a shudder, he once again began firing off Hydro Pump towards the surface to push himself towards the depths. I really need to learn how to swim.

~~~

There was a hazy glow on the edge of sight that was not another of the darkness induced hallucinations he'd been dealing with. As they came into sight he saw that they were, almost impossibly, a set of crystaline columns framing a cave entrance. Having no better alternative he steered into the cave, quickly losing sight of the entrance as he traveled down deeper into the earth. The cave itself was round and the rocks smooth almost as if the passage had been crafted. After a hundred feet more lights appear as the cave turned tunnel curved upwards until finally Mark could see the surface of the water. Breaching the surface, he felt the breathing tubes melt back into his skin as he looked around in shock at what he found. He stood at the edge of what looked to be a half sphere of flawless obsidian nearly a mile across. Crystals glowing in a rainbow of colors dotted the ceiling in patterns that made it look the night sky while the ground was coated in a thick layer of bluish brown moss. In the center of the room was a small pond of crystal clear water.

Drawing himself to his feet, he half staggered/half crawled to the center of the space before collapsing at the edge of the pool and staring at the roof. "This is impossible..."
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Steel Cerberus
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The Dog in the Machine
Mark was left unmolested for quite some time. Long enough that he was able to recover, and stand up to explore the cave. Aside from the way Mark came in, there was only one other exit; a crack in one of the walls, not very large, but big enough for someone to squeeze through. Hard to tell if it continued on, since it was dark and made of the same obsidian as the rest of the cavern, at least as far as could be seen from the entrance.

So Mark had plenty of time to look around, while the permanent resident of the cave watched him curiously.

Improbable, perhaps, but not impossible. It was quiet again for a little bit, the source of the psychic voice not immediately visible. You're new.
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Lonile
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"Ah yes, you're right mysterious voice I am in fact misusing that word." The trainer said as he walked around the pool, his eyes picking out patterns in the crystalline dome that he began making into constellations. "This is, as you say, merely improbable rather than impossible as I am in fact witnessing its existence. On that note I would like to add that while I am new in the sense that I am new to this chamber, and relatively new to this dimension, I am not a new person... Unless we're speaking on a geologic scale in which case I barely even exist."

He kicked self consciously at the grass and stared at the dome of the roof for an indeterminate amount of time before he continued. "At least I didn't say it was 'inconceivable."
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Steel Cerberus
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The Dog in the Machine
The voice was quiet as long as Mark was, and instead of responding to what he just said, went back a little, You're new to me. You're not my normal human.

Something shifted somewhere among the rocks, but it was hard to pinpoint as the noise bounced over the walls in the dome. And the psychic voice had no clear direction either, so Mark was left to stand seemingly alone for a little while longer.

You're quite a bit different.

An aurora rippled through the crystals above, and something very quietly wooshed through the air.
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Lonile
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The trainer's eyes swept what he could see of the cavern again at the psychic voice's statement. Its normal human? Does that mean that there have been others down here? Who else, and why haven't I heard about this place... Looking down at himself, he realized he wasn't in a good position to be meeting new people. The tattered remains of a bloodstained sundress hung loosely at his waist and only draped to the middle of his thighs and the only other article of 'clothing' he could speak of was a ring of steel around his right ankle to which a lead weight with the words '5 Lbs' had been affixed with a thick chain. His hair hung past his shoulders and was an unbound mane that was barely distinguishable from the thick beard that covered his face up to his cheekbones, leaving little besides his eyes and forehead visible. All he was lacking was a sandwich board with 'The end is nigh!' written on it...

His introspection was interrupted by the return of the psychic voice. Looking up he was treated to the sight of coruscating cascade of light that swept through the dome. So taken by the sight was he, that the movement through the air completely escaped his notice. "I would hope that I differ from your normal human. I would hate to consider the possibility of another abomination of my sort running about." He walked back to the pool and knelt down beside it and took a drink before sitting back and looking at the pale stones that lined the bottom. "You know, I was always told not to drink out of still, clear pools because of the chance they'd be poisoned, but I find myself not really caring all that much."
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Steel Cerberus
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The Dog in the Machine
"Abomination" is a relative term. Do you refer only to your appearance? Or everything you've done?

The crystal cavern stayed serene and glittering softly as he drank from the pool. It tasted pure and not salty at all, the stones varying between rounded pale things and a few clusters of jagged crystals. Something hovered just behind Mark, standing over him.

There is nothing to poison the water down here. I'm the only thing that lives here.

The pokemon leaned over where Mark was sitting, staring at him upside-down. Most of its body was a coppery-orange red color, accented with blue, with white eyes and a purple crystal stripe in the middle of its face and a purple crystal on its chest. If nothing else, Deoxys was intensely curious about its intruder, instead of hostile.
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