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Acht wakes up alone.
It’s nothing new.
They don’t recognize the city. Its whites and grays blend together with the dark sky, and the whole area is lit with a gentle glow, which creates strange, soft shadows. The architecture is clearly Inkling in construction, with their penchant for large, empty spaces and ornamentation, no regard for limited materials or space, but the coral trees are something straight out of the bottom of the ocean. Strange, but Acht hasn’t spent much time on the surface, so they’re not sure what’s normal and what’s not.
There’s something snow-like falling from the top of the central tower before them. When they hold a hand out to catch a snowflake, it sits in the middle of their palm and doesn’t dissolve like all their schooling told them it should. It smells of ash and smoke. The ground is covered in the stuff and, when they step, their boots sink a little with the soft squish of sand. The smell gets worse.
There’s only one direction to go. Behind them, the fence is tall, and, beyond it, the world is a wasteland. Better to risk it with the tower and the strange bank of lockers set in front of it. The locker doors are numbered in Octarian, which is reassuring, and they knock a knuckle on the dead readout, hoping for some kind of clue.
They get one—just as their finger strikes the readout. A loud blast of feedback, like an old radio, and then a voice, echoing through the whole gray world: “Pe…arl… H…lp… me…”
It takes a second for Acht to recognize her voice. They haven’t heard it in almost ten years, but, when it clicks, it seems impossible.
“What have they done to make Marina Ida desert?” the higher ups asked, after that battle with the New Squidbeak Splatoon. What went unsaid: Marina Ida was the best of them, diligent, hardworking, focused, and smart; if she could be tempted into turning her back on her own kind, on the fight that had consumed generations of Octarians, what did that mean for the rest of them?
Acht shakes their head. There’s only one direction to go, and, with Marina’s voice calling out, they continue—across the foyer, into the elevator, and up as high as they can go.
Once the doors slide shut, the elevator console flashes. Only one button is lit up, floor one, blinking rhythmically, and, when Acht presses it, the whole world takes on a gentle whirr. There’s no tell-tale tugging sensation of climbing, just a series of flashing lights under the door to signal movement, and, when the doors slide open, the readout above the threshold reads First.Floor.
“Okay…” Acht mutters, stepping onto the landing.
The world digitizes in front of them, shapes filling in with solid gray, as if everything is procedurally generated. Across a large gap, the geometry of the landscape looks more like one of Marina’s video games than anything natural, with a familiar looking boost pad tacked onto one of the smooth, gray walls. The textures are impressive, and the lighting engine shines most when they spot the dark, writhing portal in the distance. It’s placed right in the middle of the geometry, a clear objective, and Acht steps forward.
There’s only one direction to go, really.
It’s impressive, this video game that Marina created—because that’s all it can be. It’s got Marina all over it, from the gold, sparkling animation of the world coalescing around them to the small toys stored in the see-through cubes lining the walls. Elite Octarian prodigy, scooped up while she was taking a virtual pet apart, surrounded by her impressive and structurally sound block towers.
The coding is remarkable, considering how real it all feels.
The cage appears in a similar flash of gold, and, once they’re over the gap, Acht lands hard on their feet.
When the first Jelletons spawn in, Acht doesn’t stand a chance.
The worst part of their injury is that it makes it harder to rip the elevator console apart.
Their hand is basically worthless, but they have to try. It’s the only option, considering how they were kicked all the way back down to the bottom after they were defeated—and, knowing Marina, she put a back door where she could reach it. Just in case.
“You should always be prepared, Acht.”
“Prepared for what? Face it—everything down here has been marching along for a century and it’s going to keep marching that way until the sky goes out and the panels fall in.”
They snort to themself as they finally manage to pry the side of the panel up. Trust Marina to take that personally. Marina leaving didn’t quite make the sky fall down, but it was a close thing. The Calamari Inkantation, they called it. Acht never learned what it did, not really, but hearing it was enough to send Marina racing for the surface, and that was enough of a warning for Acht. It didn’t take long for them to filter down to the bottom of the base, where a DJing gig protected them from the worst of the sky falling in.
Behind the elevator panel, the code is laid bare. The developer console isn’t too hard to find, but the permissions are all locked. It’s too complex for Acht to really wrap their head around, but, eventually, they find what they’re looking for: a scrapped healing item, a fragment of bandage, with no real healing properties, but the physical stabilization is better than nothing. After they bypass multiple warnings about its instability, it materializes in another fractal of gold. They leverage it tight around their wrist using their teeth, flex their fingers, wince at the sharp pain, and immediately launch back into the code.
It only takes a few minutes of reading to figure out why everything went wrong on the first floor.
“Octoling user… User Management drone… I need a drone…”
Drone, palette, weapons, color chips, floors, difficulty… Slowly, Acht pieces it together, and it all starts to make a sick sort of sense. Sanitized Octolings, memories, repetition… All centered around fighting and completing basic tasks, like good little soldiers.
“What have you gotten yourself into, Marina…?” Acht mutters as they step back. As soon as they do, the panel fuses itself back into place. The quiet simulation offers no explanation, and they sigh and lean back against the wall, head hanging, eyes closed.
An Octoling with a drone. The only thing to do is wait.
Upon meeting Pearl and Eight, three things become immediately apparent:
1. Eight is a well-trained, serious soldier. Not an engineer, but when she hears the marching orders, she nods, steadfast, and steps up to the elevator doors without pause. It’s eerie, to see someone so stripped of their memories that their personality goes too—and all that’s left behind is the training and the fighting. Maybe that was why Octarians were the preferred subjects for sanitization: the job was half done already.
2. There’s no tutorial system coded into the sim yet. It’s an oversight, but Acht imagines that Marina being trapped at the top of the tower wasn’t intended. It’s up to Acht to teach Eight everything she needs to know if they’re going to make it out of here—especially because Pearl seems just as confused. It’s a weird bit of coding, the fact that the drone doesn’t know what’s going on, but Acht figures that the companion NPC would be more endearing if she had to figure things out alongside the player.
3. Pearl is obsessed with Marina.
It makes sense, really. Pearl is a user management drone in Marina’s program, a program that she’s clearly spent an unfathomable amount of hours coding. She has incredible artificial intelligence, with an advanced language model that seems to have access to an extensive Octarian slang library, and smoothly transitions from moment to moment without any strange hiccups. It’s incredible work, leaps and bounds beyond what Marina was coding before she left the domes, but Acht can’t help but find it eerie, how Marina’s creation seems attached to her.
Marina is charming, it’s one of the many positive qualities that drew everyone to her back in the day, and Acht wouldn’t put it past her to personally train the AI in her sim, especially if this whole thing is intended for what Acht thinks it’s intended for. Curing sanitized Octolings is a lofty goal, but a bunch of lost soldiers won’t take well to being plunged into some sort of battle sim—at least not without a friendly presence to guide them, to make sure they won’t fail on the first floor, to soothe and encourage messy, lost feelings, and Acht can’t imagine how long Marina must’ve sat with her budding AI, interacting with it and shaping it into the charismatic, snappy little drone that it is now.
It makes sense that Pearl would be attached to Marina. Marina is probably the only person she’s interacted with, and, knowing Marina, she was probably as genuine as ever, giving all of herself to her little program. That would make anyone fall in love with her.
Acht finds themself warming to Pearl immediately, as is probably intended, as Eight snaps the first red color chip into the palette and Pearl trills and twirls and cries in success when Eight’s weapons power up. Her cheery support is contagious, and, as Eight steps up to the door to take on the floor that took Acht down, Acht can’t help but be impressed with Marina’s attention to detail and foresight. Pearl only knows this world, but she’s determined to assist any outsider who enters it.
And, as they take on the Jelletons that bullied Acht back into the elevator, they lean against the side panel and breathe out slowly. At least it’s not just them alone anymore. At least now they stand a chance. At least now Pearl’s single-minded focus on finding Marina will drive them all the way up to her, where there will be answers.
At least now Acht doesn’t have to be the motivating force.
It only takes the first climb for Acht’s assumptions to come crashing down. Pearl drops small details that are easy to write off as quirks of the programming, little choices that Marina had to make to during the AI training to convince Pearl that she was as real as the Octoling users she was supposed to bond with, thorough enough to convince her that she was alive and had accompanied Marina through her adventures in Inkopolis. A musical duo that hit it big enough to tour the world—it was fanciful enough that Acht easily tags it as a fiction designed to mold Pearl into the perfect little drone. Her boundless optimism is tempered only by her worry for Marina, but the details that she drops are so specific that Acht can’t help but continue to be impressed by Marina’s coding skills.
“Marina had to learn a whole new language when she got to the city all by herself,” Pearl says as they climb, Eight a stoic, thoughtful mass beside her. Her voice is softly awed, impressed by a feat that she’s clearly been told about often enough that she believes that she was there to witness it—along with Marina’s full ascendance into Inkling culture. It makes sense that Marina would tell her about that—Pearl’s supposed to be guiding Octolings that are about to go through the same thing, if the simulation is successful.
She mentions Off the Hook, and all Acht can do is play along. They don’t want to be the one to break Marina’s complicated AI. Still, Pearl sounds so proud and pleased and in love with Marina as she goes on and on about their accomplishments together that Acht thinks that they should feel uncomfortable with just how hard Marina sold this little drone.
Other hiccups don’t make sense. Pearl often forgets words while she’s speaking. Most often nouns, trailing off and muttering to herself like a flesh and blood person who needs prompting. Sometimes, she replaces words with nonsense that Acht doesn’t recognize, perhaps tapping into a glitchy syntactic structure that needs finer tuning. “Marina chose her new fit to match mine! She really wanted to go with the... What’s it... The stuff above the sky. The...” and then a word that Acht had no hope of replicating.
“Space?” Acht prompts, twitching a little. The whole simulation is a little glitchy, which makes them think that Eight is a beta tester of some kind. It’s unfortunate that she lost her memories, even if Pearl is excited to share whatever she quote-unquote “remembers” of the surface and her deep friendship with Eight. Maybe this whole thing is a beta test of Pearl’s programming, with the rest as set dressing. It would make sense, considering how complex she seems compared to everything else.
“Right—space! Yeah! Heard Marina say that one once. Anyway, so she even changed her ink color to this really specific shade that she spent a week fine tuning with her art program. She really is somethin’ else...”
When they reach the top floor, Acht can’t help but lean around the elevator frame and watch as puny Eight and her tinier drone take on the writhing beast that Marina’s become. The sight of her, so huge, completely out of control, singing raw with a voice that Acht knows wasn’t that practiced or clear before she deserted the military, and of Pearl, screeching and panicked, as if convinced that her whole world just turned against her, is enough to make Acht think that maybe it’s not that the simulation is glitchy—it's that it’s been stolen out from under them.
Of course, after they’re successful, after Marina lands in Eight’s outstretched arms and the first person Marina looks for after acknowledging Eight is her little AI, after they’re blasted out of the tower and Acht is blown back into the elevator, after their head slams into the wall and the world turns dark around the edges, after they wake up at the bottom and stumble across the foyer, after they march back through the doors to the outside, that’s when they realize how wrong they were.
There, crouched in the ash, sits the friend Acht hasn’t seen in almost a decade. She’s taller, tentacles long enough to curl around her arms, still lean with muscle but with a roundness to her cheeks that’s unfamiliar. As Acht leans hard on the door, half-hidden in the threshold to the tower, Marina slides her hands together, palm to palm, drags her fingers across each other, and a heavy, black laptop materializes in the air in front of her. She catches it when the physics engine lays gravity on it, and, as she shifts a little so she can open the computer, Acht spies the little drone on the ground in front of her—still in one piece but knocked out.
“It’s okay, Pearlie. I’ll get you back,” Marina mumbles as she types. On the screen, Acht can see the developer console, thrown open by Marina’s quick fingers, and, after a few keystrokes, she sits back with a sigh. In front of her, gold light fractals around the drone, and, within seconds, the sphere is gone, replaced with a small, humanoid form.
Pale tentacles and skin, huge, reflective coat, white, lace up boots, and, most importantly, as she groans and sits up, a mask that’s connected in the middle.
An Inkling.
An Inkling who rubs her head, tentacles round at the ends, and, when she opens her eyes, hits Marina with the biggest, widest smile Acht’s ever seen. She launches herself at Marina, and Acht turns away from their physical reunion, feeling a little sick over how much they missed.
And, as Marina explains the whole thing to Eight, Acht can only watch Pearl as she leans forward on her haunches, watching Marina’s face for something that Acht can’t identify. It’s a doozy—a rogue AI, captured minds—and Acht can’t help the sick little twist they feel in their belly because there’s an AI after all, just not the one they initially assumed.
Pearl smiles up at them. It’s strange, because Marina did such a good job modeling the drone that, for a moment, all Acht sees is the pink orb, the expressive eyebrows, before they shake it all and focus back in.
Then, as they’re regrouping, after Marina rises and dusts herself off, so consumed by the world-ending situation they’ve found themselves swept up in that she barely blinks in Acht’s direction, after Eight looks down at her hand and curls her fingers, one at a time, after Pearl stands and stretches, as Acht turns to pack back into the elevator, Pearl claps a hand on their shoulder.
“Glad to see ya made it out okay,” Pearl says, grinning. “Don’t worry about Marina. She’s in over her head, but we’ll get her to chill out.” She winks, and then she’s gone, transformed back into a drone and hovering over Eight’s right shoulder.
And maybe Acht was worried about Marina a little, because she didn’t flinch when she saw them again, but maybe that’s just how things are now. Haven’t seen your friend in ten years? It’s whatever when you have your new life and your devoted little Inkling and your Octoling-saving pet project. It’s nothing personal.
Marina’s always been like this, Acht reflects as they climb and climb again. Focused, but airy at the same time. She flitted from project to project, unable to talk about anything except her current obsession—and that was fine because most of the time Acht was involved in whatever the hell she was fixated on (or at least knew enough of it to dredge up some care), but now? It’s the sim or Pearl.
And Pearl isn’t helping things. She’s a little cooler than Marina is, a lot more lowkey, but that’s what makes it worse, because she’ll say something and look sideways at Marina with those unwavering LED eyes and Marina will turn a bright, brilliant blue, and Acht will just have to deal with it—because this is who Marina is now. She’s not the head down, study-until-you’re-sick engineer anymore. Instead, she’s about as infatuated as she can be and still function.
The weird thing is that that’s normal too.
It’s the same thing: being in love with a person and a cause, the unwavering desire to climb and climb, to prove yourself—except now she’s allowed herself to sink lower and lower, all the way down to the bottom of an all-consuming love with someone who Acht can tell Marina believes is worth her weight in gold.
But Acht doesn’t get it.
They’ll never admit it, but, as they watch Pearl nuzzle herself under Marina’s arm while Marina types away at her laptop, it doesn’t make sense. Marina could have the world; Marina could be so much more than some pop star who flutters across the stage or some lovesick woman who obsessively talks up the object of her affection with wide, worthless eyes.
It scares them to think that. It reminds them too much of the Military; the eternal droning about potential and promise, about what they’re owed of the surface world—and Marina clearly dug herself in and got what she wanted from it. She left and she became this giggly, focused airhead and that was exactly what she wanted. Acht just needs to accept that, or else risk turning directly into the head instructor that made them feel like they were worth less than the dirt that dared stick to her heeled boots.
Maybe it’s Pearl that’s the confusing thing—but she’s as simple as they come. An Inkling who got everything she ever wanted out of life, eternally optimistic and so self-assured that she seems impossible to shake now that she’s got Marina back. She grins and waggles her eyebrows, and she constantly checks in with Eight, with Marina, with Acht—and Acht can’t help but be impressed by her.
It’s annoying that Acht really believed that someone this real could be an AI.
“Danger floor,” Pearl says as Eight picks a new color chip. “Hope I don’t end up in chains again—”
She sails out the door, bouncing as she flies, and promptly grinds to a halt as she’s ensnared.
“Oh, come on.”
Eight shrugs at her, tightens her grip on her Charger, and steps into the cage.
“What’s with that, anyway?” Acht asks as Eight dead-drops onto the stage. The little cowards she needs to splat squawk and whiz away when her laser pans toward them.
“What?” Marina asks, busily typing away on her laptop. “The chains? That’s all Overlorder. Though, I did design a random stage condition where Pearl isn’t allowed to help the user. It’s supposed to help boost their confidence, prove to them that they’re capable without her there to hold their hand.”
“Mm,” Acht hums. “Speaking from experience?”
To her credit, Marina doesn’t flinch. Her fingers stay on the keyboard, and she doesn’t look away from the screen. Whether that’s because she didn’t pick up on the barb or because she doesn’t care remains to be seen.
“Pearl is amazing,” Marina says eventually, as Eight lands two consecutive splats on the objective Jelletons. “That’s why she’s their guide, but she isn’t going to be there when they escape the Memverse.” She smiles to herself. “Only one of us is that lucky.”
She didn’t pick up on it. Acht shakes their head. Oh Marina. So oblivious, yet so earnest. That’s what Acht gets for trying to poke her.
Before they can answer, Eight gets the final splat and they’re sailing upward again.
A new climb, a similar scenario: danger floor, Brella, destroy the portals, and Pearl groans when she’s trapped by the bright red chains again.
“Rina, let me out of here,” she grumbles as Eight lands on the stage. “I promise I won’t help. I need to stretch my legs.”
Marina’s brow furrows and she chews her lip as she leans around the edge of the door. “But someone really should watch Eight...”
“You can watch. I need some floor time.”
The worry in Marina’s face clears into something sunny and understanding, and, with a flourish, she smacks a few keys, and Pearl drops to the ground on her own two feet. As they pass each other in the threshold to the elevator, Pearl grabs Marina’s elbow and mutters something to her in Inkling. It doesn’t make Marina giggle like it normally does. She nods, serious, and continues out onto the platform. Acht sees her settle on the edge, feet dangling, before suddenly Pearl is in their face.
“Hey Acht,” she says, chipper, but there’s an underlying edge to her voice that Acht hasn’t heard before. “Let me show you somethin’ cool we do on the surface. Come on.”
She grabs Acht’s arms and pulls them down, right onto the ground in the middle of the elevator. The door slides shut as Acht is pulled off the button that holds it open, and they just catch a glimpse of Eight, struggling because her bright turquoise ink can’t splat enemies fast enough without Pearl’s assistance, before it closes completely.
“We’re going to return to the bottom,” Acht warns, but they know Pearl isn’t that stupid. It’s mostly a shock response, especially as Pearl stretches out onto her back right there on the floor.
“Rina’s got it. C’mon, lay down. It’s real good for your back.”
Acht hesitates. Pearl sets them with a sharp look. Acht lies down.
“Good. See, this is what me n’ Rina call floor time. Well, I guess everyone calls it that, but it’s real special for us. You feel?”
Above them, the ceiling of the elevator is smooth, without a single blemish, overlaid with a texture designed to make it look shiny and sparkly. It’s almost mesmerizing, how it glows with the universal illumination that clings to everything here.
“Y’see, Rina’s got a lot going on. She’s a producer, DJ, idol, and, apparently, a game dev. And she’s gotta deal with me and I’m not the easiest to deal with, especially when we were on tour and doing shows every night. You ever get on stage after barely sleeping? You ever get on stage after barely sleeping for two months and working yourself down to nothing? That was Rina.”
Acht swallows but doesn’t say anything. Pearl’s hand blurs as she waves it in the air to illustrate her speech.
“So, one time—I don’t even know what city we were in. But one time we’re in the middle of a show and I look over and I can tell that Rina is this close to breaking down. She was so overwhelmed by it all. She’s live mixing and scratching and her face is all screwed up into that twisted little frown that means she’s about to lose it. You know the one?”
Acht only saw it once, right after the officer’s exams, but the sight of it seared itself into their brain. It was foreboding, to see the prodigy of the Octarian Military seconds away from breaking into pieces. If Marina Ida couldn’t handle it, then who could?
“Acht?” Pearl prods.
“I— Yeah… Yeah, I know.”
“Yeah, so you can imagine... It wasn’t pretty. So what did I do? I stopped the show. And I was like yo whatever city, let’s take a second and just chill on the floor! And y’know what? I plopped down just like this, and I dragged Marina down too, and she closed her eyes and just laid there with her face pressed into my neck, and I told everyone to just shut up for a second. And they did, because when you’re the headliner they listen to you. And we just laid there, and the band laid down too, and I told everyone how important it was to take a break, but mostly I was talking to Marina. You know how it is.”
Pearl leans up and presses a single finger against Acht’s head, poking them right in the hat. “She doesn’t know how to take a break. You get that, huh?”
Acht chuckles, dry and humorless. “I know how Marina was—is.”
“Yeah, so you can imagine that maybe, just maybe, she needs someone who will make her have floor time.”
Acht’s mouth goes a little dry. Suddenly, it’s clear what this is about. “I see. She told you what I said.”
“Nah. I heard it. Elevator’s not soundproof, ‘specially with the door open,” Pearl grunts, and sits up so she can look at them. Her tentacles fall forward and almost block her face, but Acht can see the tight line of her mouth. “You’re Rina’s friend and you’ve really been helping us out, but I gotta say... Don’t say stuff like that to Rina. She’s the hardest working person in Inkadia. If we need each other sometimes, it’s not your business. Get me?”
Acht doesn’t answer. Pearl pats their shoulder and pushes herself to her feet, stretching. “Now c’mon. We got souls to save or whatever.”
She bangs on the door, and it slides open. Acht ratchets up in time to see her drape herself over Marina’s shoulders, pointing at Eight as she tosses a sprinkler at the foot of the final portal. “You got this, Eight!” she cries, loud enough for her voice to echo.
And, as Eight sends the portal up in a swirl of turquoise, Acht is starting to get it too.
“I can’t believe I thought she was an AI,” Acht says as Eight tests the roller in the foyer. Pearl twirls after her, whooping as Eight overhead swings the weapon into a testing dummy. Next to Acht, Marina is leaning on the frame of the elevator, grinning fondly.
“You thought Pearl was an AI?” Marina repeats, incredulous.
“Everything else was fake, so why not her?” Acht shoots back.
“Have you met her?”
Acht shakes their head and feels the barest smile lift the corners of their mouth. “She’s different from what I’m used to. Tough.”
“She talked to you about what you said to me.”
It’s not a question, and Acht looks over to see Marina turn to lean backwards on the door, halfway between entering and exiting.
“Yeah,” Acht answers, blunt. “Sorry... For what I said. I get it now.”
Marina’s smile is as soft and genuine as ever. In some ways, she hasn’t changed at all. “Don’t apologize. I know you’re prickly because you care.”
And there it is: the familiarity that Acht was missing. They blink, hard, and cross their arms.
Marina laughs and pokes them gently in the bicep. “C’mon, Acht. Don’t shut down on me now.”
Maybe that’s the thing with Marina. To her, their friendship didn’t end when she left, so her understanding of things is the same as it’s always been: gentle teasing, prickly prodding, an easy comradery.
And that’s not so bad, is it?
“Ready to go, Eight?” Pearl calls as Eight comes to a stop in front of the elevator. “We got this!”
Marina grins and falls back into her corner. Eight takes her place, with Pearl floating above her, and Acht leans back against the wall as the doors slide shut.
As the elevator climbs, Marina crouches down and opens her laptop, looking exactly and nothing like she did back in the day, Pearl crowds near Eight, watching her consider the options for her first color chip, and Acht finally feels the tightness in their chest release.
After all, there’s only one way to go from here.
