Tossed aside

Charlotte gulped at the fearsome spectacle beneath her, but managed to lock her gaze on Olar. She didn't fancy herself pusilanimous, and it would be the height of cowardice to throw her own life away for some rushing water and one outworld bastard's ugly mug. Taking a deep breath, she let rip with the simple truth.

"I'm not what you're looking for," she told the pirates, "I'm not the perfect specimen, I'm not sex-mad, I don't even live in this Grud-forsaken city. I'm not the definite article. I only just arrived. I was exploiting that boy to try and make myself less available. My plan backfired. Sorry."

She shut her eyes and hanged from the ladder. Her heart throbbed in her temples, and her breaths turned shallow. When she straightened up, panting, it might have been a few seconds or a few minutes since her confession. No one had moved. The only obvious change was on Taffy's unnaturally lined face. A new crease formed, and his snarl slowly became symmetrical, every tooth bared.

"How unfortunate that you should reveal this to us now." Olar sighed. "I advise you not to struggle, it will only prolong your suffering. Taffy, drop her."

The monster growled assent, and with predatory swiftness closed the small distance left between himself and Charlotte. One huge hand flashed to her waist and swiped her clean off the ladder. Too stunned to react, she tumbled head over heels almost gracefully, eyes wide, still processing the sudden twist in her destiny. For a split second her cloak billowed out behind her like a great black wing before the canal swallowed her. A black stain appeared on the surface of the waves, and floated away into the darkness.

"Lesson learned," the pirate leader said, "Next time we ask a few questions first."

Several circumstances appeared to ensure that this would be the doom of Charlotte, mostly to do with her recent ancestry. She had heavy bones and musculature inherited from a handful of full-blooded terrans just two generations back. The water on this planet would not support such mass without assistance, and yet the fine art of swimming was a skill almost nobody on the surface ever learned, including herself. Only because of the strong current she drifted onwards beneath the waves rather than straight down. A glancing blow against the canal floor set her bouncing into the darkness, and presumably ****. But she didn't immediately get a chance to test Olar Skund's advice.

The light of the pirates' sphere faded within seconds. The cold kiss of water on every pore numbed Charlotte's limbs. She lost all sense of up or down. The noise of waves above was muffled and distant. In the total blackness was left only a constant falling sensation. But this sensory deprivation was soon cut short, and new lights appeared. Thoughts of where a mounting pressure in her chest were leading to momentarily lost urgency.

From the sides and bottom of the trench glowed a pale blue. It shone a lot brighter than the phosphorescence from before, but still too weak to separate any other hues from itself. Shapes rapidly became visible, lines and blobs growing thicker and more substantive as Charlotte rolled and tumbled toward them. Although still convinced of her impending end, she continued to hold her breath. What in Thordon's name was this?

A heartbeat later she arrived upon the anomaly. Great living masses passed by under her, resting on the bed of the trench and smothering it. The current took her over a sea of amoeboid creatures, the transluscent flesh hinting at massive organs throbbing with the flow of luminous life-blood. The lines criss-crossing each other were long tentacles entwined a thousand different ways in an inconceivably intricate knot.

Charlotte felt herself drop. The current was weakening. Her struggle of will to keep her mouth shut began to push rational thoughts aside. She wriggled and thrashed trying to pull her trajectory upwards, anything but to risk what might follow first contact with these incomprehensibly alien beings. Yet the effort was in vain, and the slow slithering mess curved up to meet her.

The impact was like a bomb going off. From apparent lethargy the shapeless giants exploded into frantic movement. All at once their mangled and tangled limbs snaked free as though coordinated by a single intelligence cognisant of all the different twists and kinks in the web. Their huge hearts accelerated, not only hastening how fast the blue blood pulsated but causing it to glow double as bright. As one the creatures recoiled from the dense human form which, driven into them by the water, hit them like a wrecking ball. Tentacles shot out at her, grabbing hold of her feet, her wrists, her neck, every madly thrashing extremity of the tumbling intruder.

She came at last to a stop, the unspeakably strong grip of a thousand arms on her body easily resisting the current. Still more came to grab Charlotte, and their collective hold slowly tightened. Perhaps therein had been the meaning behind the lead pirate's final words to her. It would have been better to drown quickly. She would not die with water in her lungs after this. The creatures were set to squash her flat from head to foot. When came the first involontary spasms she let her mouth fly open, but no water rushed in. All her orifices were incidentally sealed as a tentacle wrapped tightly around her head.

Once more it was pitch black, only this time accompanied by a violent overload of sensation. Every inch of her was to be slowly crushed to a pulp, the breaking point just around the bend. Whether oblivion came from suffocation or excessive pain was academic. Charlotte welcomed it, sinking straight down.