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Chapter Text

 It's spring in the southern hemisphere, and he's standing on the shore again, on the white and sandy shore of a tropical island, looking exceedingly out of place. The sun, already hot so close to the equator, and relentlessly grinning, bears down upon his armour, which sounds heavy from the way it clicks with every tiny movement. Actually, Atlantis knows it's heavy, horribly heavy, and he doubts the large amount of exposed skin Robin is showing does much to alleviate the discomfort. Some people, like the English, aren't meant for sunny or warm locales. 

From his hiding place obscured amongst the coral as just another interesting growth, Atlantis watches what he has learnt is a scene that occurs a few times a year, although at the moment it's a little more difficult to peep on it, as the coral is spawning, making the warm water cloudy. Around midday, when animal life quietens down, Robin Mask lands on the shore of a river, lake, island or even continent. Australia is not always the location chosen, but sadly the Devil Chojin doesn't have the time to map out all possible locales. The Masked Noble lands, and then waits, anxiously, striding up and down, talking to himself, his cape flapping in the salty breeze. At first Atlantis imagined it was the usual business - an illicit meeting between lovers - but no, it's worse. 

As the time for meeting approaches,  Robin checks his watch, squints at the sun, then ceases his pacing, taking on the stoic and unruffled demeanour most are familiar with. Atlantis sits amongst the energetically reproducing reef as it waves its millions of multicoloured fronds to and fro, sits extra still and quiet, only his frills moving in the current, fabulous little fish paying him no mind. Only his head is visible, and there's plenty of fish more ugly than him, with his lurid green skin and bulging red eyes. As Deep Ones go though, he's exceptionally handsome, a supermodel. Dagon can't even.

A flash, a glint of iridescent scales shoots past him, a long snaky tail terminating in powerful, fishy fins that waft through the water like the most gorgeous silk. Golden blonde hair scatters warm light around the crystal blue paradise, a mane managing to look dry even while completely submerged. A woman's sun-kissed skin invites wonder and awe. The mermaid, a chojin, is very young and still human sized, except for her tail, which is two to three times her body length, and pure muscle, allowing for extremely rapid movement and staggering blows. But despite her initial quick speed, she stops and lingers behind a stand of pink coral, which matches her pink scales, pauses at a point where she is still invisible to the man on the shore, her hair floating around her like a golden disc. The flowering coral seems to attempt to reach out and kiss her in its exuberance, and a moray eel slides out its den to grin foolishly.

Although Robin Mask is his enemy and he hates and detests him, Atlantis dislikes it when the mermaid does this, and she does this often. Call it masculine solidarity, or a shared guilty conscience, but the moments when she waits irks him. Sometimes she doesn't surface at all, leaving Robin to eventually, sadly, take off into the air again, and those times are most aggravating of all, making Atlantis want to pick her up and toss her onto land. 

This time though, she very slowly rises, her long body unfurling, sliding through the blooming coral formations without harming it. A school of iridescent fish accompany her, including bioluminescent jellyfish, and Atlantis grins wider when he spots a pretty blue crab hitching a ride by clinging onto a sparkling tail fin with one claw, the other held up as if in enjoyment. The mermaid, whose name he knows from his spying, seems to have an affinity for crustaceans and jellies in particular, as they always congregate in the area on these meeting days.

The leader of the Justice Chojin gasps when the shimmering supernatural head of his secret daughter emerges from the water. He doesn't run forward, but he does uncross his arms and otherwise look as happy as a man like him can, his silver and ruby armour sending shafts of bright white light whirling around like laser beams. Of course, Atlantis has heard about the sordid drama with his eldest son, so the first time he witnessed one of these meetings, he was rather shocked.

“Maria. You came.” breathes Robin.

One side of Atlantis’ mouth twitches, and he shifts position ever so slightly. It's all well and good telling everyone that you have no feelings but the suitably devilish ones, but he's still made uncomfortable by his choice to spy on a private moment. It appears as if no one but him and the pair of people involved know of this secret, and for some reason he's not sure about, he'd like it to stay that way. Just in case, he looks around, checking for other aquatic chojin with the same idea. Most of them are rather difficult to hide, having legs instead of fins. Can't wrestle with fins. 

By now, the girl, after refusing assistance, is lifting herself onto the untouched white sand, the muscles in her smooth white arms and back bulging. Mermaid arms, and mermaid chojin arms especially, are not to be messed with, being much stronger than they look. They form the main weapons of female merfolk, along with their powerful tails, sharp teeth and nails, captivating voices, potent magic, and poisonous spines. The men rarely ever go on shore or up to the surface, and they prefer the use of whale bone tridents for offense and defense. The men also don't sink ships, create storms, or lure sailors to their deaths, a sexual dichotomy Atlantis finds absolutely fascinating. As per usual, the female is the deadlier of the species, and living with them must be all sorts of interesting. How the heck Robin Mask wooed one without drowning in the process, is a feat that will likely never be fully understood.

Neither person makes a move to touch the other, and the mermaid takes a long time to oversee the arrangement of her tail, which she keeps her sea green gaze on. Like the rest of her kind, she wears a haughty, disdainful expression almost at all times. Also like the rest of her kind, she possesses no visible gills or other markers of fishiness above her waist, and she is naked, although her long, thick hair protects her modesty. Today she's arrived unadorned, but there have been times when she's been wearing luxurious accessories like pearls and abalone shells, and even diamonds and gold, all of which causes an untold itch of curiosity, and something else, to ignite in Atlantis’ bowels. 

Some of these pretty things come from Robin, as he always brings a gift, always something beautiful and sea themed, like he imagines aquatic people have no industry and can only tolerate the oceanic aesthetic - an abalone compact, a polished seashell necklace, a pearl encrusted mirror, a pet seahorse, a glittery blouse, and once, a dagger with the chameleon abilities of certain octopi. Today he's brought a little cake decorated like a scene from an underwater kingdom. Carefully, carefully, Atlantis moves closer.

The cake in its fancy cooling box is placed on dry ground between father and daughter. Nothing happens for a moment as sea birds call and the ocean tickles the fabulous tail of Maria, a tail which twitches, and moves, creating fan shapes in the wet sand. Then she picks up the little box, opening it, the reflected light from all the edible pearls encrusting the cake casting a delicate glow across her face, where a small smile has developed.

“Do you like it, sweetheart?” asks Robin, bending down towards his half fish, half human creation. The anxiety in his voice is enough to make Atlantis gnash his teeth. The urge to laugh, bitterly, is extreme.

The mermaid takes a small, precise bite, chews, then nods. That mildly enthusiastic movement of his daughter's head makes the great Robin Mask light up as if he's just won some epic tournament over and against all odds. 

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 Although it takes a great deal of set up, the meeting lasts only an hour before Maria begins looking longingly out at the sea, and, as if it misses her, the waves turn insistent, pulling at her with every lap, hissing and throwing themselves at Robin. During all this time she hasn't said anything more than a monosyllabic word here and there. Tons of personal information pours out of Robin's mouth though, where he's been, what he's been doing, his opinions about this, that and the other thing, his training, his teaching, you know, the reason why Atlantis has been lurking here since before dawn. Yes, listening to Robin speak about his irritation with the low quality of his tenants is exactly why Atlantis is not currently training to take over the world, or whatever it is that Devil Chojin do while out of sight of the cameras.

Listening to him speak about himself is an extremely perilous activity as well, because he's so charismatic and cool, and one is in constant danger of growing to like him. At least, Atlantis is. Robin's daughter? not so much, apparently. She acts as if it's not an indescribable honour to be related to him, no matter what shameful way it came about. Further down the beach, a monstrous saltwater crocodile slithers into the ocean.

Gulls caw, and the wavering image of Robin that is projected down into the deep, stands up. “I suppose you have to go now.”

The mermaid merely tosses her hair, her eyes fixed on the cerulean waves, which once again become gentle. 

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 Once she backs into the water, side-winding like a snake crossed with a seal, Atlantis faces a choice, he would like to stay and watch the hated Robin Mask take off, but he would also like to follow the mermaid, solely for enemy reconnaissance purposes, of course. He's been dead for a long time, and recently revived into a world where he is young, and his greatest foe is old, and it's difficult to handle. But of course ‘old’ to a Deep One is not a minus. 

In the end, he decides to go with the second option, as there are plenty of YouTub channels dedicated to Robin's landings and take offs.

 It has to be said, but the mermaid swims better than he does, due to the lack of legs. He could easily overtake her though, if he wanted or needed to. There she goes, a shimmering pink dot amongst the deep blue, Atlantis very carefully keeping back far enough and low enough that he will be able to obscure himself should he need to by darting into a school of fish or into a crevice. A merfolk's senses are not as good as an Atlantean's, that's simply the price you pay for a pretty face. Back in the day, it was taboo to, no, where is his mind going? Must be all the springtime coral love making getting to him.

Although he's been spying on this particular ocean dweller for a little bit now, he doesn't know much more about her than her name and relation to Robin, so he has no idea where she will go, making her turning towards the continental shelf a bit of a surprise. That thing drops down more than two thousand metres, a depth it's rare for mermaids to descend to, but, this is no ordinary mermaid.

Chapter Text

 Light doesn't travel very far underwater. Not two thousand metres far. Very quickly one's diving experience changes from crystal blue, to murky blue, to grey, to black, really black, pitch, tar, ink black. This doesn't bother the always grinning fishman in the least, not personally, as he is well suited to such zones. The problem is that his people live down where the sun don't shine, in trenches and in the awful places past the edge of tectonic plates, and his people, the Children of Dagon, are some of the most heinous creatures on Earth and beyond, creatures who practice the art of torture to a very high degree. Their habitations, their cities and towns, stink of blood, and gold, the twin fixations and holy materials.

As a devil chojin who has literally sold his soul to Satan, it's not as if he in any way disapproves of their behaviour, it's just that he would not like them to get a hold of Robin's daughter before he can. He'd moved to the Great Barrier Reef to get away from his family after a, uh, minor disagreement, but they're always expanding their reach, and could very well have expanded into the area while he's been away. 

Once the sea turns to liquid night and it becomes easier to hide, Atlantis discovers that Maria's jellyfish friends are not just for show and company. Neon light in pretty blues and pinks and greens cycle through their bodies, slow, fast, in zigzags. Some of them eschew fancy showmanship and simply become soft luminous lanterns, bewitching the eyes. And Maria's own tail lights up with blues, pinks, and purples as soon as the watery void wraps itself around her. They are so dazzling, that a distracted Atlantis has to fall back to make sure he keeps clear of their nigh invisible stinging tentacles, some of which are more than thirty metres long. To become entangled in them and paralysed - how embarrassing a first impression that would be. 

Down and down they sweep, gilding head first over a sheet of black rock that becomes increasingly bare of life the further they go. At one stage a giant squid surges past, its huge eye bearing an alarmed look. The reason for this becomes apparent when a sperm whale buffets the pair of chojin with the speed of its pursuit. Compared to such beasts, the pair of sapient beings are very small, but size doesn't always predict power, Atlantis would know, being only 178 centimetres tall. 

Debris from higher up forms a continual fleshy shower, tiny dust-like fragments, but also entire carcasses of fish, whale, or even man and alien descend to the depths with them. Weird animals appear as they approach the sea floor, and Maria begins a pattern of pausing to ferret around on the vertical wall of rock. With the help of her living light sources, Atlantis watches her attach some sort of square, pale contraption with rounded edges to the cliff face. It begins as a small parcel, but expands rapidly by unknown means. That's no underwater production, he can tell because it lacks the ocean aesthetic, which he has to, regrettably, admit is a characteristic of anything fishy-folk make. It may be the Dark Ocean aesthetic of mermen, the Stormy Ocean aesthetic of selkies, the Evil Ocean aesthetic of his people, or the Girly Ocean aesthetic of mermaids, but the various types of aquatic people always include the ocean in their decor. Nope, this box thing comes from above. 

Hidden in the deep dark, his eyes shrouded by the lack of light, he observes what appears to be a capture and recovery operation. The mermaid sets up the box, gazes around, then darts at the rock, returning with a creature gripped tightly but gently in her hands. Hands which are tougher than they look. At this depth she comes back to the box with numerous basket stars, an exceedingly elegant type of brittle starfish, which she packages carefully. She also digs up samples of coral and plants with a small tool fit for the purpose.

Now, Atlantis is clearly brawn, but he's also brain, as you must be to defeat Robin Mask, and he immediately intuites what is going on here. That girl is a collector, maybe even a hunter, either way, she gathers interesting specimens for human and non-human scientists and others who don't have the time, abilities, or money to gather them themselves. Suddenly, the meetings with her father being scattered all across the planet make sense. If Atlantis had eyebrows, he would raise them.

The next deep sea monstrosities the beautiful creature gathers up are bone-eating worms, and common fangtooths, a wicked looking fish that bears more than a passing resemblance to Atlantis himself. The box must be a self contained aquarium, no doubt an absurdly expensive item provided her by Robin Mask. The Devil Chojin huffs. Luckily, he has no nose, so no inconvenient spray of bubbles alert Maria to his presence. 

 The deeper down you go, the bigger and more outlandish things tend to become. There’s nothing that a chojin of Atlantis’ calibre need fear from the sea, Man's eternal foe and desire. Neither giant shark nor kraken haunts his dreams, but a female, even a female chojin, is in a different position. Once again he is shocked by Robin Mask’s behaviour, this time in letting this girl casually waft around in one of the most dangerous places on Earth, not entirely charted even by fishfolk. She doesn’t seem particularly frightened, but that’s probably due to youth and ignorance and merfolkish arrogance. Certainly she doesn’t look around as often as she should. If she did she might see a very unusual anglerfish inching closer and closer, its teeth much bigger than hers, its eyes never closing.

Or maybe, he tells himself as he passes an unmanned exploratory vehicle and sulphurous bubbles from a nearby vent rush past his face, maybe she thinks herself immune to danger, thinks herself protected by the mere existence of her famous father? Ke ke keh! Oooh, how deluded! 

At this thought, Atlantis can't help but let a laugh break past his teeth, a laugh which is loud in the crushing silence of the deep sea, where only the agonised groaning of the Earth can be heard.

Some ways ahead of him, the mermaid jerks, twisting at a ninety degree angle at the same time as all her luminescence extinguishes itself. The jellies surrounding her blink and go dark and thrash their tentacles, a couple catching Atlantis across the face with stinging slaps. The blow and the pain give his quarry a half second of unobserved flight, which she uses to dive further into the black, not knowing her pursuer and his capabilities. Atlantis laughs again, deliberately loud this time, no longer bothering to hide. His blood is up, the predatory urge to chase the fleeing prey overwhelming all else. Down here there is no one to contradict him, him, one of the most powerful chojin ever. He even forgets about what else might be lurking in the depths.

Chasing, even in the dark, is simple. Mermaids have a peculiar smell, not human, and definitely not fish. It isn't a smell one would associate with the sea at all, it's not briny, not dank. It must be because they are magical creatures, but they smell of flowers. What flowers, Atlantis doesn't know. In his forays on the surface, he is generally in a cave, in a wrestling ring, dead, or trapped in some nasty motel, and not frolicking through a spectacular garden. In fact, he can't remember ever sniffing a flower, but still, he has caught the fragrance on the breeze.

Following the scent of a freshly blooming meadow in spring, he performs the same dives, twists and turns around rocks and the jagged outcroppings that litter the floor of the sea, that his prey is performing a beat ahead of him. Copying the wild movements that the mermaid is doing in an attempt to lose him, Atlantis cruelly laughs all the while to scare her even more, his high pitched shriek magnifying as it echoes around the grim alien landscape which has likely never been seen by anyone but them, developing a weird reverberation as it does. He even purposefully slams into an outcrop, sending showers of stone fragments battering Maria's tail, his gnashing shark teeth disintegrating great chunks of rock between them before snapping at the trailing edge of her fins. By now the jellyfish have long since been left behind, and Atlantis is gaining.

“Aaah! Ke keh! Where is Robin now!” he laughs again, letting his legs languish behind him so he is only using his arms to swim, doing this to mock her. 

In a desperate attempt to evade the cackling thing she can't afford to look back at, but whose voice hurts her ears, whose red eyes are invisible in a world totally lacking in red light, Maria dives further down, heading towards an abyssal trench. 

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 Down in an ocean trench the warmth of the Indian Ocean is nonexistent. It's only a single degree off freezing, something which makes the mermaid yelp and flail for a moment when in her haste to escape the monster she passes over a hydrothermal vent spewing forth hot water. The sudden drop in speed forces her pursuer to dart sideways to put a bit more delicious distance between them. Even better, when he swings back around, gliding gracefully around a spike of rock, she's dived over the edge into the gaping black wound in the earth which is the trench.

Looking for a moment down into the humongous crack in the ground gives Atlantis pause. To him it is still brightly lit, but to a member of the lesser fish races it will be like a human travelling down a dark country lane on a night with no moon. The frills edging his face, twitch. Hmm. From past experience he expects to find his prey has brained itself on a rock and is now free floating, drifting on the current, and that is not…ideal, as it turns out. 

Shooting along the trajectory he predicts the girl to have taken, he swims with purpose, mouth closed, arms held to his sides. Playtime is over. Believe it or not, but he has training to do and world domination to participate in. If his leader discovers he's been doing the underwater equivalent of a hound chasing a fox, well, he'll be punished. 

Technically he should just leave off the game here and now, but as he carefully plunges into the horrible chasm, he concocts plausible excuses for why he has not done so, excuses which revolve around the magic word which begins with ‘R’ and ends with ‘n’. Yes, he has discovered this informational tidbit of debatable worth, and he must keep a track of it. 

 If the ocean at two thousand metres was weird, then the ocean at close to six thousand is much more so. How the mermaid dived so fast so quickly would be a mystery in other circumstances, but when Atlantis catches up he finds she has turned herself into a soft needle of mismatched flesh, plunging vertically downwards in a crazy, silent dive, bubbles pouring uselessly out of her mouth, which sets into a terrible grimace the instant he emerges out of the gloom into her line of sight. Ha! Surely he is not as frightening as all that? She must be a big scaredy-cat! What an unusual trait for a spawn of the ‘Mad Noble’ to possess. So much for justice making you strong.

While he's deciding what to do with her, a ghostly phosphorescence gradually comes into view at the bottom of the trench, first as a tiny spot, then as a circle the size of a dinner plate, growing larger every second. Sick and pale is that light, and while Atlantis is staring fixedly at it, his powerful jaw dropping, Maria’s tail flicks sideways and slams into the back of his head, knocking him into a vertical spin. Even worse, a few of the deadly spines hidden between the colourful gossamer frills of a mermaid’s tail puncture his scaly hide and deliver their shots of fast acting neurotoxin. This is how the gorgeous fishwomen, those dreadful sirens of legend, incapacitate their victims. First they lure them close, down to the water, then the mermaid wraps her arms around the man's neck, and then she wraps her tail around his body. By the time the spines penetrate his flesh and the mermaid's hand is in place to tear his heart out, he is too deep in enchantment to notice. It's a kind and gentle death, as deaths go.

Unfortunately, Atlantis has not been privy to the embrace that softens the deal, and his accidental would-be killer surges past, leaving him to float downwards in an increasingly stiff state, heart still present and accounted for. No laughing or jeering for him now, not when his jaw has seized up, fixed into a grimace which mirrors Maria's of a few seconds earlier. 

A phantom glow approaches ever closer, a fuzzy blueish white cap growing on the bottom of the trench, like a deep sea Destroying Angel. But it's no fungus, but rather a Deep One mining outpost, perched on top of a vast river of gold. Thank God it's only an outpost, otherwise Atlantis, and others, would have already had an extremely nasty encounter in a dim corner of the Reef. 

Chapter Text

 Floating freely through his native element, unable to do anything, is still a new experience for Atlantis. In his career, he's only been hurt seriously once, and only killed twice, which is a phenomenal record, extremely prodigious considering how many fights he had to engage in to become of personal interest to Akuma Shogun himself. As such, the blow which has paralysed him is all the more astounding, coming from a woman as it did. Just one shot, and he's essentially shark food. 

Although his brain is not paralysed, it may as well be for how his mind stutters and stammers along. Unfortunately, now is not the time for indulging in a personal crisis, as not only is he sinking rapidly towards the bottom of the crack in the earth, but he can no longer see any iridescent pink glow. Silly girl, he would have thought she would know better than to swim headfirst into a trench.

“Ahh..” he hisses, attempting to at least get his jaw moving. No way mervenom is going to take him out. Not even Robin Mask could do that, and mervenom is only dangerous to foolish, weak humans, and Perfect Chojin, no doubt, keke. A tough struggle ensues between him and his flesh, which steadily refuses to obey his commands, as he steadily refuses to cease giving them. Again and again he commands a finger, his tongue, a leg, to move, and again and again the part stubbornly remains numb, making him feel as if he doesn't exist, has become one with the water, a floating pair of eyeballs falling helplessly into the void, where he will remain, forever. Fear is not something he claims to know the name of…but it's in the water around him regardless.

But eventually, after almost three minutes of horrific effort, a muscle in his jaw twitches, and then without warning the thing snaps shut on his tongue, forcing two rows of bottom teeth into the soft organ. A deep hiss of agony fills the black water, along with crimson blood, invisible in the lightless depths. Still, the shockwave of pain unfreezes the rest of his body, sending it thrashing around of its own accord, heavily muscled limbs clawing at the cold liquid in which they are suspended. 

Knocking from below draws the sufferer’s attention away from his throbbing tongue and still numb body. Industry, work, no one can say his people are lazy. They built Z'thul'ath, known as ‘Atlantis’ to mortals. They helped build R'lyeh, and live there still, awaiting the day their ultimate progenitor and Great High Priest, Cthulhu, awakes to shake the world to its very foundations. Many a sunken wonder owes them its existence. But that's not to say they don't like to play as hard as they work. 

Wasting no more time, Atlantis dives with the force and speed of an arrow shot from the bow of a chojin giant, using his familiarity with the layout of Deep One habitations to guide him, aiming for the central phosphorescence. The glow becomes brighter the closer he gets, separating into many, the buildings arranged with mathematical precision to form an elegant spiral that nonetheless would call forth horrible phantasms in the minds of any mortals who had the misfortune to witness it. 

To Atlantis though, no particular horror is conjured for him as squat living forms begin to appear in the spaces between increasingly solid shapes, although his cruel, ever jovial expression takes on the cast of a sneer. The mermaid would have been able to see where she was going at this distance, so surely she would not catapult herself right into the bedrock of the main square? When it comes to her, he finds himself torn between his astoundingly low opinion of everything not himself or his associates, and his annoyingly high opinion of Robin. A stubborn opinion, it insists on rising every time he thinks of his match against the great man, and he thinks of it everyday. As far as he can tell though, Robin didn't raise his merdaughter, so she may still do something exceedingly stupid.

The outpost, at close quarters, is like any other Deep One creation despite its small size and dedication to a dirty, grueling job, being much like an unearthly Rome built from silver coral and black stone. Thick ropes of gently waving kelp many times the size of trees line pleasurable avenues, and buildings are lit by bioluminescent creatures of every sort. Pet gulper eels, giant bone eating worms, vast crustaceans and seven foot wide jellyfish amble around, or stand guard outside miner’s houses. Gold, in the forms of runes and murals and statues praising Dagon and Mother Hydra and Cthulhu and other Deep One gods, shines from walls and plaques and pedestals, invulnerable to the effect of water, immortal, like its amphibious smiths.

Once Atlantis approaches within a hundred metres of the curved stone roof of the temple, because that is what the biggest, most splendid building is, its guards notice him, seeing him as a black figure emerging from the dark ‘sky’ above their heads, gliding down from the deep green heavens beyond. As humanoid as he is, he is unmistakably one of the ‘Princes of the Sea’ as no other ocean dweller would approach a Deep One dwelling place of their own accord. Because of this they don't immediately turn hostile, as he may be a courier, come to warn them, or to deliver a message.

Compared to Atlantis, these ‘men’ are hideous. More frog than fish, their bodies are bulbous and fat, while their limbs are thin and bent and flabby. They display the pallid bellies which are so common among their kind, and wear no attire but heavy gold jewellery, which is plentiful even amongst the most humble class of Deep Ones. Like Atlantis, their savage jaws are filled with row upon row of pointed shark teeth, their heads are narrow and finned, their eyes are huge and unblinking, but the whole is set in a much less pleasing arrangement than seen in their obnoxiously good looking brother. This is partly because the guards aren't chojin, and partly because they are hybrids, and were once human, unlike the purebred Atlantis, who never was human, and who can point to a family tree untainted by the stain of Humanity. They're also shorter and smaller than him, like most Deep Ones under the age of three hundred, which is when they begin the growth to spectacular size. At only twenty-seven (if you don't count the many years spent dead), Atlantis is remarkably large for his absurdly young age.

It's a good thing too, that the men he approaches are only hybrid guards of a mining outpost, because Atlantis’ ability to not instantly disgust and alarm humans into insanity and death, is a great detriment when it comes to interacting with his own kind, and not simply because he makes them envious, but also because it's easy to recognise him for the outlaw he is.

Adopting a peaceable posture and hoping his description and fame has not reached these depths, Atlantis swims up like he's on business. “Dagon t'kha'ru, madjuth. N'ghftob i'rh'ul aima'ra, na'az k'vulg'kth g'h'th?” he says, inquiring whether the fine gentleman on guard outside the temple have seen an escaped mermaid slave on the loose, as he is hunting her.

The guards lean more heavily on their halberds, (made of a strange alloy of gold, the production of which is known only to the Deep Ones) and look up at the great statues in whose umbral shadow they stand. 

A guard to the left of Atlantis, answers his question. “N'yeh. L'vith ae'lah ushta.” Although capable of telepathy, it is both bad form and a bad idea to engage in it with a stranger without a pressing reason, so all three beings use their voices, which in the case of the guards, sounds like a deep and raspy croak.  

“Z'kul. Nai ph'nglui d'rklal sh'te c'thau g'hnat na'k'yha?” Although he very much does not want to take his gaze off his sinister brethren, who despite their shape, are deadly in combat, Atlantis makes a show of casually looking around for one of the caves he posited that the mermaid might be hiding in. 

As far as slaves go, the only ones that give no trouble are the shoggoths, one simply has to prevent them from getting hold of literature. All other types of slaves eventually pull one kind of stunt or another, not limited to running away and inciting uprisings. Merfolk, or rather mermen, make good slaves thanks to their strength, patient temperament, and tolerance for deep sea conditions. Mermaids, on the other hand, are a huge bother and are unsuited to manual labour…but, well, they aren't used for manual labour, not the traditional sort anyway. 

Knowing this, Atlantis studies the neighbouring foreman's mansion out of the corner of his eye. It imitates the temple in its circular shape, but on a much smaller scale. Only the top brass can afford to put up with the wildness and danger of a mermaid, or care for her particular needs, and yet it is the deeply held, and secret desire of many a Deep One male to cause one of these most beautiful and capricious of sea creatures to fall for him, meaning there will be a lot of running to and fro for pretty trinkets with which to impress her, should one be entombed within a house. To Atlantis’ knowledge though, no Deep One has ever caused a mermaid to lay eggs, an act which no amount of coercion or force can compel, as mermaids will only lay eggs if they truly love their mate…It's not really possible for Atlantis to frown, scowl, or glare, but he makes a good go of it when he is reminded that the hated Robin Mask somehow caused a mermaid to lay eggs. 

“N'yh…n'ghluth sh'lonk, rw'lyth? U'rysh...i'khta.” a halberd lowers as the fishman on Atlantis’ right leans forward in an attempt to get a better look at the hovering bodybuilder. No other Deep One displays the sort of physicality Atlantis does, and even a sleepy, dim guard might eventually begin to wonder about it. He asks where Atlantis comes from, as he looks…familiar.

Instead of making something up, Atlantis makes the smart decision, and goes with the truth, all the while angling his body for an easier escape. “Y'ha-nthlei.”

“Ah, ah, ah. K’thun wash'thar Innsmouth?”

“Yog. Th'ghor h'k'tera y'u xhotoon sh'tekron n'rl fomthru.” here Atlantis makes a mistake. He uses the R'lyehian word for ‘chojin’, telling the guards that the humans are too caught up with chojin to remember that there are other, older, and more hostile beings in the universe. The word ‘chojin’, when coming out of what can only be a chojin's mouth, sets off silent alarms in both guard's minds, alarms visibly ringing in the back of their yellow eyes. 

Smarter and faster than they, Atlantis doesn't bother to equivocate or bargain, no, despite the absolute blasphemy involved in fighting within temple grounds, he fills his mouth and throat and stomach with a vast quantity of water, then expels it at immense pressure, knocking the more intelligent guard off his webbed feet and into the obsidian wall of the temple, tearing off a golden arm from a Dagon statue in the process. The second guard prepares to thrust his halberd into the chojin’s side, but Atlantis is too quick, he swings around and shoots his water magnum at that man too, the powerful jet of water throwing his victim off the temple steps. 

With no time to stop and make sure they're dead or at least unconscious, Atlantis zips around a great pillar and away into the open water, making for the foreman's dwelling. If Maria is not there, then he'll search every other building, then the mines, then search for caves and crannies and nooks and holes, before owning himself evaded.

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 The devastation wrought by a super(fish)man enraged by the thought of his prey being brought down by another, is immense, as the statues of Dagon and Cthulhu magically come to ‘life’ to call down oaths of vengeance upon the malefactor who dare breach sacred taboo, their reverberating voices terrifying most of the loitering animals into sudden flight, and causing the kelp forest to thrash about. Grotesque deep sea sharks, lantern nautilus, and piranha squid are loosed from their pens and sicced on the intruder. 

Imagining he is here to steal the gold, security comes down with lethal force from the beginning, flinging harpoons at the agile chojin as he wheels about, these shafts of hooked metal flying over his shoulder and through the gap between arm and body to smash into the trench wall, a statue, or a building. With no time to waste, Atlantis simply breaks through doors made out of giant clam shells, frightening any females or young that the workers might be keeping sequestered inside their dwellings, as Deep One's do to keep them out of harm's way, whether from friend or foe. More deadly taboos are violently snapped in twain in the process. 

“Ke ke key!” able to laugh again, Atlantis laughs at the many blood feuds being added to his account for this behaviour. The list is very long. 

No mermaid is being kept in the foreman’s mansion, so it's on to the next in line, the supervisor’s. As before, Atlantis simply barges in through an aperture, followed by the animals set on his tail. A shark attempts to corner him in a bathroom, snapping at his feet with its double set of jaws, but he turns and kicks it through the roof. 

Eerie light beams generated by the lantern nautilus follow him as he plunges through the softer wall of a single man's dwelling. It's more of a hovel than a home, having only one room with little furniture, but Atlantis turns over what is there, seeking for a trapdoor set into the bedrock. Even the poorest Deep Ones can find cash and space for a private torture dungeon. But no, there is no girl in the one he discovers, no mergirl anyway. 

When he emerges from the dungeon, he ducks immediately, a needle of metal fluttering his head fin as it passes. The guard beside the one who threw the harpoon, doesn't get a chance to throw his own before a huge maw full of needle teeth closes upon him. A sudden gush of blood appears black in the beam of a nautilus. 

There's only the miner's barracks to search now, a barracks for transient workers or newly turned or very young Deep Ones. Had Atlantis not been an exceptional product who decided to find his fortune and fame amongst the stars, he would still be languishing in one of these dismal places, without a female or family, without wealth, prey for bigger, stronger males to do what they liked with. As such, he displays particular malice while searching it, viciously eviscerating with his claws any hapless sap who gets in his way. 

No girl is holed up there either, and with a cloud of neon red piranha squid rocketing towards him, Atlantis must make some quick decisions, his gaze looking over the furious crowd charging at him, towards the temple which sits at the end of the spiral boulevard of dwellings. Behind that place of worship are the mines and administration offices, and he really can't see a mermaid, a creature of freedom and wide open spaces, choosing to squeeze herself into a maze of tunnels populated only by gold-hungry monsters whose only thought is to do her harm. 

Hmm. Something catches his gaze while he's using the slowed time provided by adrenaline to think. The temple glimmers blackly, round and dark as a chocolate cake, surface cuisine Atlantis is very fond of. Tiny bubbles emerge from the hole in its roof, generated by the many living things housed within…

His eyes brighten, as they can't widen. Living things. There's fantastical gardens contained within Deep One temples, created as an ode to their gods, who in their decrepit theology, have all played some part in populating with fabulous life the waters they call their own. Flying forward through the thick liquid, Atlantis punches and kicks his way into the horde of squid, who all seek to latch their hooked tentacles and dreadful beaks onto him. With a sweep of his arm, he mentally compels a wall of water to do his bidding, knocking a group of these creatures away, but in so doing, one attaches itself to its back, aiming to chew through to his spinal cord. Now this is where most who encounter this species of mollusc, perish, as when one squid succeeds, it distracts the victim and allows time for the rest to pile on, the animals rapidly reducing their prey to scraps of flesh and bits of bone. 

But no one has ever been able to classify Atlantis with ‘most’, and in a moment inspired by another wrestler whose matches he watches avidly, he spins in place, creating a self-feeding water funnel that pulls the squid off his back and prevents any others from burrowing their way into his flesh. As an underwater tornado he flies across the square and through the circular aperture in the temple’s roof, where he forces a counter clockwise movement to end the spin.

Below him is spread, in miniature, all the verdant glory which the sea is capable of. Kelp, coral, fish, snakes, jellies, slugs, cucumbers, crustaceans, even a dolphin, all busily seeking the things with which to satisfy their needs. Special devices keep the pressure and light levels acceptable for species from higher up, and there are even air pockets for those creatures who need them. The scene is intense, with all colours fully displayed, a shock after the pitch black of outside. Creatures ceaselessly swim to and fro, yet the effect is somehow not chaotic, but peaceful. Never does anything slam into anything else, putting Atlantis to shame for a moment. 

But he can't admire the view for long. In the centre of the garden stands a statue of Father Dagon and Mother Hydra, their sinuous bodies entwined around each other, and beside its plinth, in the shadow of a pale blue king crab, almost entirely hidden by flamboyant coral, is the girl he is searching for. Bright green eyes the colour of jade stare up at him, unblinking, like she imagines he hasn't seen her, and won't so long as she doesn’t move. 

With the mood the inhabitants of this place are in, the situation is perilous, and likely to lead to her being caught in the crossfire, so, with the deep booming sound of large, rapidly approaching fish growing louder and louder, Atlantis grins, wider than usual, lets out a giggle, and lifts a hand, index finger raised towards the far distant surface of the sea. While staying exactly where he is and making sure she is fully aware of him, and not catatonic, he jabs that finger up, once, twice, then waits. The booming intensifies, sending animals in the garden into hiding.

Only when a shiver of sharks are streaming into the garden, their mouths open, teeth projected, does Maria nod once, twice.

Chapter Text

 Just agreeing to escape is not escape itself, however, and before either Atlantis or Maria can move, the swarm of sharks part to let in the priest of the temple, backed by guards and the strong men of the mines. Wearing the traditional tiara of blasphemously wrought white gold, he glides over, kicking his elongated frog feet, murder writ large on his hideously amphibious face, magic words spilling from his flabby lips. In one webbed hand he holds a staff of malign design, a thing not quite straight in shape, but ever so slightly curved so that to look at is to feel as if one is on the verge of falling off a precarious height, into the unfathomable abyss beyond. In the other he holds an equally grotesque sacrificial blade, used to spill the blood and end the lives of many a sapient being. Both of these objects he points at Atlantis.

“Ih! R'luh! G'har! Azathoth'nok, akh'ra!” Like many native aquatic folk, his voice thunders through the water, clear and decipherable, keeping its shape, as it were. Maria understands nothing of the unearthly language of the Deep Ones. But understanding it is unnecessary, as not only does the sound make her feel sick and dizzy, but in response to it the skin of her pursuer's face turns a milky green and his eyes twitch and narrow as much as they can, though the savage grin remains fixed in place.

Only a moment passes between Atlantis discovering Maria, and the arrival of Dagon's priest, and no more moments will be spent by Atlantis in listening to maledictions he's heard numerous times before. Cursed? Yes, yes, CuRsEd. But what is Dagon and Azathoth to Satan? Lesser demons, hahaha! 

Knowing what comes after the bestowal of a curse, and once again displaying his devil-given prowess, he darts at Maria, at an angle, one arm wrapping around her soft waist, the other, along with his legs, pushing off the unholy statue. The priceless specimen cracks in two, falling towards the priest and his entourage as Atlantis and his captive shoot upwards at spectacular speed, rank smelling bolts of radioactive green magic flying past them on every side. Unfortunately the angle he was forced to take means that Atlantis has to kick off the side of the trench wall a couple times, turning his epic ascent into more of a wild zigzag. It gets the job done, at least, but if some of the other guys had seen that, there would be serious ribbing.

Stinging him now while he's distracted would be a simple(r) task than attempting the same later on, but the young mermaid decides that she might have misunderstood his intentions, seeing as his own people attacked him, and his own people are dreadfully evil haters of all goodness. Perhaps all he was doing in the first place was attempting to warn her about them in the least tactful way possible, going about the task in a similar way to how her father might. Because he's taking her away from that awful hole full of monsters desperate to enslave her, she loosens the grip she has on him with her tail, careful not to jab him with a spine, tightening her arms around his neck to compensate. Atlantis makes a small and incongruously adorable sound.

Maria's naively made decision to trust, is a mistake. 

“Who are you?” she says, into Atlantis’ ear, her voice made of the purest musical ecstasy condensed into the sweetest of feminine tones. She's not pitched it to deliberately enthrall or seduce, but it still causes her ‘rescuer’ to shiver violently and zone out, just for a moment, the unseen pupils of his eyes constricting to pinpoints, his grip on her becoming like that of a drowning man. In that instant, he would fight all the world just to keep a single finger on her. The spell departs as quickly as it arrived, but it has a permanent softening effect on Atlantis’ expression when he looks at her, and his claws cease to prick her skin quite so carelessly.

“Just a Good Samaritan, heh.” he says, in his deep and gravelly voice, the opposite of hers. Like all Deep Ones, it sounds like he has water in his lungs, which he does.

The pair of escapees crest the lip of the trench, Atlantis still swimming at a greatly enhanced speed, a speed far faster than what Maria was doing while attempting to evade him. Deep One pursuit ceases as soon as the gouge in the earth becomes a faintly glowing blip in the distance, only the curse and a lone piranha squid continue to follow. 

As if he possess an instinct for when she's feeling that he's been holding her for long enough, Atlantis begins to loosen his grip, and for a bright moment, Maria, who trusts few people, thinks she has come across someone who really does not have ulterior motives. She even chastises herself harshly for judging him based on appearances. But then, too fast to be seen, he rips her satchel off her waist, a beautiful sky blue affair made of woven crystal and hammered shark skin, the force of his movement battering her with icy water, before he surges backwards to grab the end of her tail, his narrow, pointed fish face fixed unerringly on her, its lipless grin showing row upon row of pointed white teeth.

Her response is immediate and instinctive. An unvoiced scream sounds in her mind as she fights to jerk out of his grip, but Atlantis holds on as easily as a man holds onto the string of a balloon. There is no laughing from him now, with no crowd and no colleagues watching, his gaze is intent, and serious, his grin more of a grimace, his face a slightly lighter blur in the deep dark. His other hand creeps its way through the bag he stole.

Around and around the girl goes as she attempts to free herself, her body contorting and snapping back and forth in ways that look very painful, but which she isn't even fully aware of. No scream or plea or hiss of anger emerges with the bubbles streaming from her lips, although her face is set in an even more violent rictus of horror than the first time Atlantis saw it up close. A pang in his chest forces a grunt from him, but he doesn't let go. Too late now, too late to turn back. He's a devil, after all, every interaction devils have is founded on some manner of violence.

Soon, painfully soon, exhaustion sets in, and the mermaid's thrashing begins to slow, the currents she's been generating stop tossing the nearby plants quite so forcefully, beginning only to gently wave them back and forth. A group of bone eater worms crawl back to the whale carcass they had vacated when battery began. Bursts of old blood fill the water as they return to feeding. 

Aware somewhere in her terrified mind that it might be all over for her if she becomes too tired to swim, Maria stops moving before she's made to stop. Her long body floats suspended in the murk, eerie and serpentine, her pretty scales without beauty down here, just above hell. 

Atlantis, at the end of a length of venomous muscle capable of wrapping around him at least twice, waits, his fish eyes taking in a vast amount of the seafloor to either side of him, saving him from having to turn his head to check for attack. The piranha squid, thankfully, came across easier prey, and is unlikely to attach itself to him at the worst moment possible. A minute passes, hollow knocking, whooshing, clicking and bellowing the only sounds in the deep, made by earth and animal alike. A silver object shifts in Atlantis’ free hand as he adjusts his grip. 

Unaware of his intentions, and afflicted by tunnel vision and terror, Maria, now slightly recovered, drifts closer to the other chojin, her last remaining energy headquartering itself in her tail. He's taken her dagger, and his flesh looks too tough for her to pierce by teeth and claw in her weakened state, but she felt her barbs break through once, and they'll do so again if she can only wrap them tightly enough. She doesn’t know he's a professional wrestler, doesn't know anything about him at all.

The last metre separating them closes so slowly it might never close at all. A microsecond before Maria lunges, her foe clicks the button on the capture device he took from her bag, before touching it to her sternum as she's in the process of surging around his side. It's meant for larger, anti-social animals, and Atlantis had seen her use it on a shark. A whir, a click and a flash of neon blue light, and she's frozen in place and packed up small, ready for transportation. 

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…Now what. Atlantis hovers in the black water for a couple minutes, continuously making the small movements needed to keep himself in place, his eyes looking inwards. Away in the near distance, something huge, pale, and cylindrical slithers along the seafloor. The grinding noise it makes, and the appearance of an utterly monstrous manta ray, convinces him to cease introspection and make for shallower waters. Eerie, crushing depths outside the borders of a sunken city are all well and good, but sometimes it becomes a bit much.

Instead of flying along at the extreme speed he's capable of, he swims to the surface slowly, contemplatively, travelling through waving kelp forests, avoiding boat propellers, skimming sand bars, passing colourful coral and fish like he's a human on a snorkeling tour. He even pauses to catch himself a meal of raw marlin. What he just did is going to cause trouble, not only with the Justice Dweebs, but also with the Dashing Devils. The matter of upsetting his own kind doesn't bother him, as he's been doing that since he was only a young tadpole, and it's rare for Deep Ones to all-out murder each other. A bit of torture as penance? Yes, but he's used to torture, being a wrestler. The matter of upsetting Sneagator, the Devil Knights, and Akuma Shogun himself? Maybe even Satan? That's a whole different level of trouble. The Devil Knights already decapitated him once, an experience he would be glad not to repeat.

“Hmm.” Atlantis can't evade going ‘home’ forever, as his waterproof demonic pager buzzes. Yes, the Devil Chojin have not advanced past the 90s, but why should they, when pagers do the job better than mobile phones. 

Before taking the plunge, as it were, back into the demon realm, Atlantis surfaces, but only the top of his head to his eyes emerges from the crystalline water. He's spent much more time than he thought pursuing the beautiful fish lady, and a star filled, balmy evening has taken the place of the day, a pity as he loves the sun, but evening is good for him as its less likely that passing tourists will see him and subsequently become fatally convinced that he's a relic from the Cretaceous, or a cryptid of some sort. Whenever that occurs he has to stage one of those unfortunate and mysterious dive accidents Youtubers love to make endless videos about. Small waves lap at his cheeks, like a favoured dog, friendly, loving, homely. The Demon Realm is none of those things, and the Devil Chojin base is sparse on water.

His pager beeps again. Any more procrastination is dangerous, so Atlantis dives, the frills on his head and neck slicing through the water. Once pointing straight down, and after having completed a quick look around, Atlantis presses a button on the pager attached to the waistband of the flax skirt which serves to protect his modesty. A couple inches below him, a deep purple hole in the water appears, relatively slowly, as if a child with craft scissors has come along and cut out a wonky shape. With a world-weary sigh, Atlantis forces himself downwards, accidentally or on purpose drawing a school of fish along with him. 

Simultaneously, a portal opens on the ceiling of the gloomy communal cave of the Devil Chojin's hideout, dropping a tonne of fish onto Black Hole. After doing a flip, Atlantis lightly springs onto this mass of wiggling wet stinkiness, and trots off, striving to reach his quarters before anyone decides to hold him up for a chat, and thereby possibly notice the suspicious little bag and the suspicious little gadget he has on him. Bringing a stranger into the lair without permission is a no-no, a big no-no, and Atlantis still isn't quite sure why he's taking such a risk. It's not like he couldn't just exit the lair into the rest of the realm and find some demon chick, groupie, or other chojin with whom to slake his lust. Why choose a girl who could easily kill him should he attempt such a thing? Other Deep Ones who are so fortunate or skillful as to own a mermaid take steps to curb the danger, but he hasn't even got a place to keep her, as he realises when he enters his dismal suite of rooms to find them exactly as he left them, i.e bare of furniture except for a scrap of demonic straw on the rough purple stone of the floor. Because he can see in the dark, the rooms aren't even lit.

Now, it would be outrageous to even suggest that a Devil Chojin, let alone a pure blooded descendant of Cthulhu, could be depressed or experience so much as a fleeting moment of sadness or regret, but it stands, the room is bare of comfort, just as its owner is. ‘Owner’. Satan is a hard master, and for all his power, Atlantis is nothing but a slave, and he owns nothing, not even his body or soul.

“Eehh…” the fins to either side of the fish-man's head dip as he surveys his hostile kingdom. You can't just dump a mermaid on the ground and pray for the best, they're not land creatures, and while they can breath air, they will be harmed by the hard earth, on which they are unable to move well, and on which they will eventually shrivel up and die. But before that occurs, they will kill you. 

“Errr…” Atlantis scratches his neck. This impulsive act of his has loaded unexpected difficulties upon his usually simple life. Now he's going to have to go shopping, as not only is there little point to keeping a showy pet in a fancy box at all times, but those boxes aren't meant to store sapient creatures.

Stashing Maria's satchel in a secret hole in the ground where he keeps his cash and few valuables, Atlantis makes the decision to keep her capsule on his person, attaching it to his waist under his skirt, where it rests in the hollow of his hip, safe and sound so long as he is not ordered to jump into any fights.

First step, attend to whatever issue required him to be paged so incessantly. When he emerges from his den, he discovers all his colleagues gathered around the massive heap of fish he brought with him on his return. Wannabe superhero, Black Hole, has been rescued from the centre of it, and now holds a large fish like a club. Upon catching sight of Atlantis, he threatens to bring this makeshift weapon down on his head, but The Mountain distracts him by declaring that he's hungry, beginning to gorge himself on the fish, earning himself disgusted looks from everyone except Atlantis.

“Ke ke keeeh…What did you want? Does our leader need me? Is Robin Mask in desperate need of catching another death?” he says, while edging towards the door. Compared to the other Devils, he's a tiny man, a short king, almost as wide as he is tall, but that fact has never bothered him, as he can expect to grow to a hilarious size if he can only stay alive for long enough. That fact never bothered him, until he showed up with illegal contraband hidden on his person, contraband which any of the others would gladly take from him, if they became aware of its existence. Unlike them, he's not got a special friend amongst the group, but is the weird loner, so there's also no one he can count on to keep his secret.

“It’s dinner time.” rumbles The Mountain, around a mouthful of fish guts. 

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 Dinner is agony. All six (at the moment) members of the gang sit around a piece of rectangular rock that sometimes looks like a table, and sometimes like an altar, digging away at mounds of whatever food it is that Sneagator, their trainer, says is best for them to eat. Atlantis has baked salmon and dog bowls full of black and red caviar, SteCasse King and Springman have metal shavings and plastic bits and bobs on China plates, Black Hole has creamy antimatter pudding sucked out from who knows where, Mister Khamen has the blood of virgins and babies in crystal decanters, and The Mountain has rocks. The food is not the problem, nor is the problem the others muttering about Atlantis showing off with his epic haul of fish. The problem is having to wait. There’s always a lull after dinner and before evening training, but the shops Atlantis needs to visit may be closed by the time he finishes his meal. He doesn’t know for sure when closing time is though, as he doesn’t buy books or pet equipment, those are Springman and Mountain things. 

“So, King, how are you getting on with that internet course?” In the absence of their trainer, who is watching his grandson’s basketball match, as well as with Buffaloman working through his latest Good Boy arc, it falls to Springman to be Team Dad, which he pulls off with finesse, speaking to his neighbour and best friend gently. The jump to the modern day has not been easy for any of them, but least of all for the ‘Stereo Cassette King’, and unlike them, Springman had been revived much earlier, so he understands how to use Gogle MAPs.

“Fine. I don’t really want to talk about it.” mutters SteCasse King, in a much less jaunty voice than usual. Being a robot, it is catastrophically difficult to read his body language or tone of voice, but the others have lived with him so long, that his feelings are much less esoteric to them.

The extreme science fiction state of the calendar has had the least effect on Atlantis, as he’s such an outdoorsy person, and surfing the web is not so different from surfing the waves, but he doesn’t laugh at his friend like he might ordinarily, attracting the nerdy Mister Khamen’s attention by so failing to do. 

“Why are you so quiet tonight, Atlantis? You’re usually laughing your head off at nonsense by now.” the Egyptian asks, from across the table. 

“I bet he’s taking an internet course too.” mumbles SteCasse King, despondently shoving his metal filings around his plate. This warning sign of poor appetite shifts the focus off Atlantis, and he sighs in relief, scratching the nasty scar on his throat, as he does whenever he feels particularly anxious. The old wound is always numb, so he feels nothing but the lightest pressure from his claws. 

After forever and a half, the meal ends and Atlantis is released.

Chapter Text

 Released into the outside, which is no better than the base. Worse actually, as there is much less privacy in what is essentially a hole in the ground. Atlantis stands in front of a huge door carved out of a rock wall, and gazes across a vast expanse of cave, a nightmare cave born from the mind of a very uncreative man. 

The Demon Realm is modeled on the Chojin Graveyard, a place Atlantis has spent all too much time in. Like the graveyard, it's an infinite cave, a cave seemingly designed to bore its inmates to death, with the added addition of innumerable traps to speed the process along. Columns of purple rock spiral up to a distant, unseeable ceiling veiled by smokey fog that never disperses. Stalagmites jut from the floor as a fatal carpet of spikes. Bottomless holes to nothing wait to swallow the unwary. Eerie purple torches provide a modicum of light. Unlike a natural cave, there are no beautiful sights, no glowing mushrooms, strange animals or crystal formations, only endless dreariness.

Oh well, Atlantis has to (grimly) chuckle over the fact that if Maria were to escape, she wouldn't get far. Even he suffers from the relentlessly arid environment…but at least it's not on fire.

Demon and regular chojin, as well as their hangers on, mill about, sometimes busy, sometimes only affecting to be. Many of them pretend not to be staring at Atlantis. The sound of sparring mixes with that of conversation. 

Now since you can't have a functional society without somewhere to procure goods, Atlantis takes off across the barren ground toward a cluster of stone buildings, bitterly regretting the lack of natural water. It's much more difficult for him to move on land, taking a great deal more energy, but it does also act like wearing weights, helping to train his muscles ‘for free’. Well formed and mostly free of amphibious characteristics as he is, one can still trace the slight presence of a hopping gait, a hop which makes him almost hypnotic to watch, although weaker minds tend to derive some sort of feeling of cosmic dread from the experience. 

Pets and books are two ways to alleviate the grinding burden of living in this world, and Atlantis heads for the fiendish bookshop first, entering a stone hovel with a crudely drawn diagram of an all-seeing eye on the crudely hacked lintel. Unlike some, he has no need to duck through the door. 

Inside, a giant eyeball with arms and legs mans the counter, while all along the grey walls stand grey shelves full of grey (and dusty) tomes. Now asking for books on mermaids specifically, is a bad idea, so Atlantis asks for general sea related books, something no one would find odd coming from him.

“Looking to acquire a pet, sir?” asks Eyeman as he shimmies around the edge of the counter to approach a particular section of shelving. “Or is this for entertainment or study?”

“Uh, all of the above.”

“Okay, well, this is our aquatic section-” the eyeball chojin proceeds to show his fishy customer exactly where every even faintly relevant book is located, before returning to his post, where he is covering particularly valuable or pretty books in plastic.

Scanning the books with haste, Atlantis has his gaze drawn to the prettiest, most colourful book in the entire Realm, a pastel pink book shimmering with iridescence, its cover plush with false scales. He doesn't need to read the mother-of-pearl title to know what sort of knowledge it contains, but picking such a thing not only makes his interest very obvious, but it slights his masculine pride. There must be another book on mermaids that is not quite so out there and girly. 

After some searching, he discovers a collection dealing with all manner of sapient aquatic creatures, although it's not a book dedicated to their care, but more about their identification. It's not what he needs, but it will have to do. And indeed, when he slams it onto the counter and begins searching through the various methods of payment accumulated over his short, stop-start life, Eyeman immediately assumes he's purchasing it in order to look up the entry on himself. 

“Your kind are the victim of quite unwarranted prejudice, and I'm afraid this author will prove no different.” he says, in an attempt to prevent, or at least ease Buyer's Remorse. To be quite honest, he's not convinced that Atlantis can read. He's not convinced any of the Devil's, except Springman, can read. And he only knows that Springman can read because he wears glasses sometimes. 

Sharp-finned Atlantis, cheque in clawed hand, looks up, his bulbous, unblinking red eyes glinting in the lilac light, his slimy scales rapidly drying out to an ashy colour, the jagged rows of his teeth projecting from his extremely wide mouth like ever more hellish stalagmites and tites. Now and then his grey tongue emerges from his cavernous maw to wet his face and eyes, and when he turns his head, the deep slashes that are his gills can be seen, lying still and flat on his neck. Whatever his thoughts may be regarding the proprietor's assertions, he doesn't utter them, and the shades of his expression are difficult to make out even for his colleagues, leading most to assume he's nothing but a savage, if empty headed clown of greenish-grey hue.

“Here.” he says, sliding the cheque across the counter, the weight of his claws leaving deep scratches in its surface.

This same process has to be repeated in the local pet shop, but with even less satisfactory results, as Atlantis must resort to approximating what sort of animal he intends to keep behind four glass walls.

“Large, powerful, dangerous.” he says, making serpentine shapes with his hands at Ptolemy the pet shop owner, a perfectly normal human of Atlantis’ height, but a mere fraction of his size. 

“A killer whale calf, sir? Or a sea serpent?”

“Close enough.”

Ptolemy gives the chojin a funny look when Atlantis turns his naked back on him, but as it is not wise to spend too much time in conversation with any superhuman, let alone a Devil, he makes his way to the back of the store, where the largest, strongest tanks are kept. Their glass, unlike that on earth, is truly shatterproof, but boy, will it cost you. 

“Here we are, sir.” Ptolemy gestures diplomatically at the last two tanks, each of which would not be out of place in a public aquarium. Their glass walls are so thick, and made of such special demon sand heated to a hellish degree, that even most chojin could not punch through them in one go. They are also so large that a human would be trapped inside if they had the misfortune to fall in. Suffice to say, that if you happen to have a thing for glass, and fish fancying, then you shop in the Demon Realm. “I sold one of this make to the Kinniku palace steward last week.” says the shop owner, proudly patting the last tank the way he would an obedient horse. Inside, for demonstration purposes and also for sale, is a hammerhead shark. The animal stares at Ptolemy with cold yet intense interest.

Just looking at the price tags makes the Atlantean's eyes bulge even further out of his head, and compulsively, like he's been burnt by the sight, Atlantis slides his gaze down the line, stopping on a tank that is not so big, but also not so pricey. “I don't want a royal tank.”

“But sir, an animal of the type you described, requires a great deal of space, and also safety measures. This item features a magnetic locking system capable of exerting-”

“And this?” Atlantis points to the lid of the tank he's determined is the best for his budget. Inside the tank is a baby stingray, already four feet wide.

“Well, yes, that also features mag locks, but, er…” unable to say that they are of inferior quality, Ptolemy riffles through a mental checklist of attractive buzz words. “That item doesn't come with a premium thirty-six month warranty.”

Not supposing that he'll need even a one month warranty, Atlantis laughs, grimly. 

Having paid for the tank and accessories with another cheque, the issue now is to get the thing back to his suite without anyone noticing, or at least, anyone noticing who might rat him out. There is no clause in his satanic contract that states that he may not own a pet, it's just that the others, with nothing to do except train and scheme, will be willing to die in order to satisfy their curiosity as to just what sort of pet he's gotten a hold of.

It's just as well that he's the most cunning of the lot then, isn't it? 

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 When Atlantis next strides into the Devil Chojin base, his peers are helping SteCasse King decide on his next epic killer track for his next epic killer match, the five of them, minus King, hunched over with their hands to their ears. Atlantis soon has to adopt this undignified pose himself, the reason being that the gigantic boom box in the training cave is blasting music at its highest volume. Not its usual heavy metal, mind.

Ra ra Rasputin, lover of the Russian queen. They put some poison into his wine.

Ra ra Rasputin, Russia's greatest love machine. He drank it all and said, “I feel fine.”

Like every other robo-chojin in existence, past, present, or future, SteCasse King possess the equivalent of a robotic crush on Warsman, and he's even wearing Warsman's ‘look’ as he stands there, claws out, listening to the music with the same creepy smile on his face that Warsman wears whenever he's meditating on imminently inflicting death upon all and sundry. Too bad SteCasse King wasn't designed with a neck, because he appears desperate to nod it in time to the high-energy tune.

As terrible as this situation is, Atlantis works it into his plan to distract his comrades, finding it to be the key, in fact. He has to cut through the music somehow though, as it definitely won't be turned down just because he wishes to speak. To that end, he unleashes one of his favourite moves, the water magnum, hitting Mr Khamen in the back of the head. That draws all attention his way, whereupon the next move is to whip a stack of tickets from his skirt the way a cowboy draws his revolver from its holster, splaying them in the process. The gold foil decorating the pieces of paper flashes even in the abysmal light of the cave. 

As the others are leveling obscenities at him, he waves the unmistakable things vigorously, shutting them up. “Look what I got. VIP tickets to the Kevin Mask Exhibition Match this afternoon…who wants one?” That makes all eyes light up, especially SteCasse King's, although it is not du jour to be seen to be interested in watching a Justice Chojin duke it out, even if he happens to be a Brutal Justice Chojin. “Or if you'd rather continue this cassette party, I'll take some friends instead.”

“Ah ah!” The Mountain almost crushes him in the process of taking possession of the precious items. “You have no friends, Atlantis, except that guppy we saw in that Tokyo restaurant thirty years ago.” he rumbles.

Ooh, an attack upon his popularity was not part of the plan. “Ke…yeah I do. I get bitches.” Atlantis says, puffing himself up in a way that is half threatening, half cute. 

The word ‘bitches’ coming from his fish face sets all the others howling with laughter. It continues for so long that Atlantis leaves the room in a huff, which helps him, even as it hurts him.

The music doesn't return and not long afterwards a voice attempts to break through the stone door to his rooms. “Hey, ‘Lantis! When you're done sulking, we’ve left your ticket on the dinner table.” Stomping footsteps, questions about where car keys were last seen, the hissing of a giant reptile, accusations of wallet theft, and then finally the click of a pager and whoosh of a portal opening tells Atlantis that all his problems have left the building.

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 For about five minutes no problems exist within the building, and then Atlantis returns from a quick dodge out the door, followed by shop assistants and pieces of the tank he purchased, which he directs to be set up to the right of the entrance to the empty main room of his suite, just so it won’t be immediately visible should someone break in here without his consent. That’s great, but once the big glass cage has been assembled with its filter and pump and whatever, it needs water, meaning he has to go back out and approach the water seller and his operation in the industrial area of Demon Town… 

“Need a bath, Atlantis? Hahahaha!” the purple-black water merchant demon asks when his customer finally makes it to the head of the long queue. Water, it's the prime commodity here, and everyone and their mothers knows Atlantis craves it more than most. 

“Less than you do.” he hisses, holding out every one of his accumulated ration of steel water chips, which the demon takes, and chews on, deciding they are in fact genuine. Being offered genuine chips doesn't occur often down here. A chorus of laughter goes up around the huge crystalline pump, like something funny was said, but Atlantis is more concerned with the fact that he’s being given fresh water, when what he needs is salt. So much salt. 

“I need salt.” he says to Ptolemy ten minutes later, his mind anxiously spinning around the little capsule on his person. They must have long-term  life sustaining properties, but it's one thing to abduct Robin Mask’s daughter, and another to be responsible for her gruesome death. He knows the man better than anyone who's not fought him, although anyone who’s not fought him can also claim to know him and his bloodthirsty, vengeful ways which are fully capable of leading him to scour the universe for that one perfect assassin.

While Atlantis is thinking about all the possible ways that the leader of Earth's Forces of Justice might exact his monstrous revenge upon him, the pet store owner’s lips are flapping, but no sound comes out, chiefly because a new realisation has entered the noxious fish boned skull of Cthulhu's great grandson. Why is Atlantis attempting to pay for salt, why is he enduring taunts for water, when he has a perfectly good solution attached to his skirt in the form of a magic pager?

Chapter Text

 That book was the wrong book, but before Atlantis discovers this, he fills the tank in a most ingenious way that will certainly not cause extreme consternation to anyone other than himself. The portal out of the Demon Realm, summoned by his pager, will appear elsewhere than in the middle of the entrance hall ceiling, but only when you're on this side of it. To this end he gives the tank another once over and closes some interleading doors, before carefully aiming the little machine at the ceiling above the open tank, preparing himself to rapidly click the button.

Tonnes of seawater falls through the portal, filling the tank in a split second, along with the rest of the empty ‘living room’ of Atlantis’ suite. He clicks the button again, and closes the portal before half of the Pacific Ocean has invaded the base. The solution to the extra water, which he swims around in for a while, sighing in delight, is to open his door to the rest of the base, and hope no one asks any questions. 

Next, he needs some way to prevent his pet mermaid from using any of her wiley tricks on him, or at least, to prevent her from using her most dangerous one. To that end he digs around in his bedroom,  unearthing a hidden cache of items brought over from his former life - Deep One trinkets. Many are merely decorative, but many are not, being useful tools for subjugating other races of living things. All are made of the strange white gold for which his people have a perpetual fascination. The ‘blood of the earth’, as it's called, holds strange properties, creating a deep sense of unease or even physical pain in those without Deep One heritage. 

“Hmm.” Atlantis digs through the jumbled fortune stashed in a (demonic) perspex crate, coming upon an item he vaguely knew he possessed. Lifting it from the mound, he holds it to what passes for light down here. It's a circlet of beaten gold with a loop attached. Very beautiful with eerie etchings and priceless green and yellow and black jewels, it is nonetheless a collar, one made to suppress a mermaid's voice just enough that she can't sing and therefore cause her master to lose his wits. Other noises are welcome, however, so she is not prevented entirely from vocalising.

Taking this with him, Atlantis returns to the tank, where he runs through, mentally, what he has done, and what he still needs to do. Tank? Check . Saltwater? Check. Mermaid? He plucks the containment unit from his belt, and studies it. Nothing smells or looks off, but he has no idea in what condition Maria is going to be when she emerges from this thing, but surprise, and strength should be on his side. 

Since there is no time like the present, and because he doesn't know when his colleagues will return, Atlantis points the piece of fancy tech at the floor, and leaps onto the silvery form before it even finishes materialising. 

Maria, who had been in a state of fitful, uncomfortable sleep like she had passed out in a fridge, jerks to awareness to feel a great weight sitting on her tail, one fishy hand clamped to her mouth, and another equally fishy hand affixing a collar around her neck. In the dark it would take her a moment to understand, had it not been for the blood red, glowing, bulbous eyes and long dagger teeth staring her in the face. Hot and salty breath wafts across her face, and even if she were free, she might not be able to move, so scared is she.

Atlantis clicks the collar closed so that it forms one continuous band of magic metal, then stands up, lifting Maria by a hand under her torso, and another under the flat front of her tail, before turning and throwing her into the open tank, which he closes and secures with more padlocks than the thing came with, just in case the pneumatic lock is not enough. Water sloshes over him while he's busy, but that's okay, more than okay. There is nothing in the tank but some sand that fell through the portal, and a fish or two, so he can clearly see his captive look around in disorientation. 

“Ke ke keh! How about that! I've caught a mermaid! I bet you're wondering where you are, my little angelfish. Too bad for you, you're in the secret lair of the Devil Chojin, and that is where you will stay. Now, rules-” Atlantis is just getting into the meat and potatoes of his villainous monologue, when his captive turns her back on him, her hair and frills and fins forming a beautiful and ethereal undulating mass which entirely hides her form from his piercing view. She clashes entirely with her woeful surroundings, clashes so hard that Atlantis unconsciously narrows his eyes against the sight.

An internal tremor shakes the supervillain and his world. People do not ignore him, not even females, although he doesn't have the movie star looks of Black Hole or the charisma of Buffaloman, and he's usually to be found lurking at the back of group shots. Still, he receives respect wherever he goes, so this treatment is….uncomfortable. Atlantis can feel his masculine pride being slowly fed into a shredder. Tapping on the glass or otherwise doing anything to attract her attention and force her to look at him would wreck it even more so he laughs nastily. Ha, he's won. Let her sulk. 

Miniutes pass and he continues to be ignored. Just to show how unbothered he is, he sprinkles some heavy duty protein rich fish food through a grate in the top of the lid of the tank, following the recommendations of Ptolemy for feeding a kelpie.

After checking that everything is locked and will stay locked, barring outside interference, Atlantis makes a dash for the match, ripping a voluminous black cloak off a stone hook on the stone wall and leaping through another portal into a secure site that his group use for secret ingress into Tokyo. Once there he rejoins his gang, but even the elbow jabs of his fellows, the sight of Kevin Mask twirling about a ring, and the possibility of Robin Mask's presence, can't distract him from his murky thoughts.

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 The ego in the shredder thing continues when he returns from a pub with his excited colleagues, to find that his mermaid has not touched her food. But before that, he must undergo scrutiny from the others when The Mountain notices that the bottom of his feet have turned to mud, and SteCasse King laments that his boombox has been mysteriously flooded and destroyed. The buoyant mood created by watching a riveting wrestling match and then repairing to a bar with their team leader, Buffaloman, begins to sink. Something has changed in their base, and change is highly unwelcome. 

“How can there have been a flash flood here? Atlantis, did you take a bath before joining us?” Springman asks, all of the Devil's turning to look at their piscine ace warrior.

“Yeah.” he says, frills waggling as he speaks. 

Mr Khamen changes into a flying head and sniffs Atlantis' scaled neck, barely holding off from giving it a lick. “He does smell nicer than usual.” 

“I used bubbles, hehe.” 

“You used too much water, is what you did!” SteCasse King, bereft at the loss of his giant boombox, points a red plastic finger at his colleague. Before a fraternal fight can break out over retro electrical equipment, a rumble shakes the cave, and Sneagator enters, whip in hand. He doesn't need to say anything, only stare at his longterm students. 

Harsher than usual training is the punishment ordained for disturbing Akuma Shogun, where he roosts upside down somewhere in the vast cave network, so it's numerous hours before a now very sweaty, bloodied, and exhausted Atlantis returns to his room. And when he does, he finds most of the flakes of fish food lying on the bottom of the tank, or floating on the surface of the water, which churns slightly due to the action of the filter. The mermaid herself is sitting in a corner, with her tail wrapped around herself, her arms wrapped around her bent tail, and her head resting on her ‘knees’. It's a picture of despair, but Atlantis growls at the spurned food. 

Tapping the glass is still not on, but the growl alarms Maria enough that she looks up involuntarily, presenting a white and frightened face to her captor for a moment, before hiding it again. Atlantis says nothing, and goes to bed, using his ration of water to take a bath in a scooped out bit of floor in his bedroom, the same watery hole he usually sleeps in.

The next morning, Maria is still in the corner, the flakes are all lying on the glass bottom of the tank, going off, and Atlantis has a frisson of anger rush through him. To hide his disconcertion, he laughs, putting as much derision into it as possible. The mermaid raises her shoulders to provide more of a defence for her head and ears, but otherwise doesn't respond.

Returning to his bedroom, he flips through his book, but it proves supremely unhelpful, giving nothing but a description of the difference between a siren and a ‘normal’ mermaid, that being that a siren can manifest bird wings and fly away to wreak havoc elsewhere. It gives no information on how to get a captive mermaid to eat, only saying that they are omnivorous, but that offal, and particularly the hearts of other creatures are considered a delicacy, and that if a mermaid eats your heart, you die.

“Great. Thanks.” he mutters, slamming the thing shut. Breakfast and training await, and breakfast and training wait for no fish man.

After breakfast, training, lunch, more training, and numerous snacks, Atlantis takes possession of the flat screen TV set into the rock wall of the in-home cave theatre the fiendish gang possesses. The TV may be advanced, but the remote is not, and he has to mash the sticky buttons because the AA batteries are running low. Channels flip over, and keep flipping until Atlantis comes across his quarry, Robin Mask. The problem is that what is shown him are various reruns of Celebrity Come Die With Me, particularly famous, beloved, and bloody matches, and people discussing the latest announcement made by Robin Mask, Headmaster of the Hercules Factory, about the ninety percent death rate at said institution of higher education. Nothing that will tell him what Maria's father is doing currently, right at this precise moment.

For that, he approaches SteCasse King's Fisher-Price training computer. Everyone knows that he likes to renew his enjoyment over defeating and murdering Robin Mask that one time, by keeping tabs on him, so when he appears beside his colleague as the robot attempts to navigate Internet Explorer, SteCasse King doesn't raise a metaphorical brow.

“I want to Google you-know-who, King.”

“Why don't you use his name, ‘Lantis? We know who you mean.”

“So you know, so what's the issue?”

SteCasse King sighes, and struggles to move his overlarge, neon yellow cursor towards the search bar. It looks like a massive fly is slowly perishing on the screen. Atlantis licks his face, trying not to wrestle control of the mouse from his irritable colleague. No one but SteCasse King is allowed to use the machine by express order of Sneagator, who bought the thing.

The cursor reaches the search bar, and SteCasse King very heavily hits the left mouse button. The browser closes, the computer suffers a blue screen of death, and SteCasse King bursts into oily tears.

“Why don't you buy a smartphone, Atlantis! Didn't you hop on Bitcoin? I know you're not a caveman! Stop trolling poor King!” shrieks Springman, coming over to hug and comfort his best friend. The volatile Greek is so angry, that his glasses are lopsided. As the one who's been amongst the land of the living the longest, he's well aware of modern technology and social media, and he himself possesses an Android phone, scorning the Apple make as being for idiot, technically inept Boomers slash Justice Chojin. “You're still coasting on Robin Mask, we all know that, and Buffaloman is tired of you pumping him for tidbits. How about you go do your gloating in private, for once?”

So because of this unwarranted and humiliating telling off, when Atlantis returns to his suite, he is not in a good mood, and that mood plummets further when he discovers that this morning's ration of fish flakes have suffered the same fate as the previous day's.

“Why don't you eat, huh? Keee…Maybe you get sick and I flush you down a diabolical toilet? Would you like that?!” he's so angry that he slaps the tank, not hard enough to damage it, but hard enough to produce a painful reverberation in the water. Maria looks up, just enough that her eyes are visible over her tail. The gloom makes her and her floating halo of bright hair, look to Atlantis like a sea witch contemplating evil upon the unsuspecting, but to her he looks like the rotten devil he frequently declares himself to be.

A low, dry hiss quite unlike a mermaid's usual voice, issues from the darkest corner of the tank. “Frogspawn.”

A glowing red eye begins twitching. “... What? What did you call me?’ Atlantis says, very softly, very dangerously.

Pale shimmering loops of scaly human flesh burst from the back of the tank to crash into the wall of glass Atlantis is resting his hands upon, surprising him and making him lose his balance to fall to the rocky ground. “Filth of the abyss! Blasphemous pond scum! Half breed monster!” Maria can't sing or make her voice preternaturally pleasing, but she can still scream, although it can't be heard past a couple inches beyond the confines of the sound proof tank, which is fitted for delicate and easily excitable animals. Confining herself to this one shocking display, she returns to her corner.

Insulted and humiliated, Atlantis climbs to his feet, then slaps the filter off button. “Fine, we'll see who's filthy at the end of this, and you can starve too!” he storms out of his rooms, almost colliding with the great metal monolith that is SteCasse King. 

The robot's face is set in its usual array, yellow discs for eyes placed on a black rectangle head, a wide, white and ‘toothy’ rictus slapped across the rest of the available space. He turns his head stiffly, and Atlantis is so focused on its uncannyness, that he doesn't notice for a second that King is waving a Nokia 3310.

“Having girl troubles, Atlantis?” he tips the old phone back and forth. “Did you flood her sound system, hmm? Mock her internet usage? Give her a ticket for a bad seat at a wrestling match?”

“Ke ke keh! I don't know what youre talking about, King. I don't have a girlfriend.” 

“Kekeke! That's the truth, for once.” says SteCasse King, still tipping the phone back and forth, like a very depressing modern metronome. “You know having serious things with girls ain't allowed, right? If I don't get to have a thing with a girly ‘bot, you don't get to have a thing with a girly fish.”

“I don't have a thing with a girl.”

“Good. It had better stay that way.”

“Are you threatening me?

“No. I'd never threaten my good colleague, Atlantis, Short King of the Sea, or whatever. But I would warn him about girls. Bros before…uh, what was the line?” it's too bad that SteCasse King can't cross his eyes, because at the moment he very much wants to.

Chapter Text

 The life of an Akuma Chojin is boring, deeply boring, and monotonous. Like cannons wheeled out to get a few good shots in before being overtaken by the battle as a whole, their chance at action is rare, coming after years and years and years of training. Even now, long after their heyday, they spend most of their time training. Yeah, occasional skiving off and prolonged rest breaks occur, but those tend come when Sneagator is busy with his son or grandson, or there is an Idol Chojin match on. 

A stretch of intense work occurs directly after Atlantis leaves his room, knocking thoughts of Maria slightly to one side. Not all the way out of his mind though, no, not at all, mermaids continue to swim through the pupiless red waters of his eyes while he spars with colleague, trainer or dummy in the hellish cave he calls home. Hellish, empty, featureless cave absolutely bereft of comfort or hope or even change. The Demon Realm is a facet of the Other Side, after all.

Meanwhile, Robin Mask shows no public sign of noticing that his illegitimate daughter is missing, he continues to strut up and down stages, being the figurehead and pride and joy of the Good Guys, while that illegitimate daughter herself continues to starve. Everyday, multiple times a day, Atlantis stomps back to his room, to check that no one has invaded it and discovered his secret, to see if she's eaten the fish flakes he throws onto the surface of the increasingly cloudy, filthy, airless water. 

Placing his hands to the algae encrusted glass, he peers through, still able to separate the exquisite shape of the mermaid from the green murk. Curled up in her corner, she doesn't look too good, her brilliant colours dimming, her scales beginning to peel off her skinny body. This day, the sight provokes Atlantis to save some salmon from dinner, tossing that into the water. The fish seesaws to the bottom of the tank, where it lies, looking shocked. Maria fails to take any notice, her lank hair wafting around her head, which rests on her arms. Since calling her captor by the most insulting slur possible, she has not paid a single iota of further attention to him. 

“Stupid book.” he says, kicking his fish book after retiring to his bedroom so that he doesn't embarrass himself or weaken his position further via indulging in a temper tantrum in front of his victim. It's time to head back to the pet shop, a feat he'll accomplish by volunteering to visit the Demon Bank for Sneagator or Springman, the money men of the operation. 

“I need medicine for a sick fish.” is what he says to a confused Ptolemy some minutes later. Now the pet shop owner did not sell the demon chojin a fish, so where he acquired one, or how it became sick interests his mind for a couple seconds while the demon himself grins at him in silence, nothing but his heavy, labored breathing audible over the Soft Rock music playing over the store speakers. ‘Grins’, Ptolemy happens to know that the expression is an unsettling quirk of physiognomy peculiar to certain types of Deep Ones. Those without lips with which to cover their massively enlarged teeth, or eyelids to cover their grossly enlarged eyeballs. Considering that his pet is ill and he's currently on dry land, it is unlikely that Atlantis is actually amused. 

Also, he should know better than Ptolemy about aquatic medicine. 

“What symptoms is your fish showing, sir? And what sort of fish is it? Gold?”

“Pink. Pinkfish. Her scales are coming off.”

“How's the water quality? Perhaps you require more salt?”

The expression on the fish man’s face is now definitely shaded towards the less than happy, the more than alarming. His great big piranha teeth glint in the artificial light. 

Like he's being held up in a heist, Ptolemy raises his hands. “I have some tonic for common goldfish ailments, and a selection of other medicines. Here, my good man, let me show you a flowchart…”

Next, the bookstore. Eyeman is slightly less surprised to see an irate Atlantis, because what's the point of being a giant walking eyeball if you can't see, right? 

“This book is garbage, I need a better one.” Atlantis says, fish book held high in one hand. Slapping it down on the counter, he turns towards the shelf where he saw the Pink Book of Mermaids, his frills all a-quiver, his grin momentarily in eclipse as he contemplates purchasing such an effeminate object. 

His frills quiver, violently, when he notices a horrifying gap in the bookshelf where the pink book should be. Horror momentarily dances across his dark soul, before becoming stuck in the morass of it. Stepping over to check, he discovers that the pretty volume is definitely gone, but masculine pride prevents him from inquiring about this hideous turn of events. It's gone, and there is no other. He doesn't need it anyway. Plucking his original purchase from the counter, he moves on, leaving a mildly amused eyeball behind him. 

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 Back in the tank, the world is made of thick pea soup, a dish which Maria has never tasted and wouldn't like even if she did. She does eat vegetables, but they are much saltier than anything found on land. The water she lives in is not only thick and green, but heavy, hot, and increasingly airless. It's like being  stranded in a watery desert. Death Valley for fish. Most of the time she concentrates on keeping her breathing slow and steady, except for when the Deep One is present, which is when she unavoidably breathes fast and shallow.

All the time she spends in captivity, she beats herself up for even momentarily hoping that one of his kind could be anything but wicked. They are cruel to each other, how could they ever be kind to other creatures? creatures they consider beneath them in every way, and then some. The stories of Deep One barbarism are legion. They are the humans of the sea. Every denizen of the waters prays never to meet one, knows to flee if one should be so unlucky as to encounter one of these most monstrous of hybrids. 

She doesn't know why exactly she's been abducted, but assumes it's the usual reason. It's well known that Deep Ones possess an enduring fascination for their fish tailed cousins, but that fascination is not exactly exclusive to them, as all humanoids fancy mermaids and mermen, depending on the sex of the fancier. Something about the temptation of the untameable.

It's her father, she thinks, her father and her occupation, they led her to let down her guard. Her father is forever preaching about the ‘power of friendship’, and the importance of ‘unity’ and ‘building bridges’ with evil people, while her occupation compels her to approach the strange, dangerous, and rare. But you can build no bridges with the gold loving fiends of the deep dark abyss. Their father is Dagon, their mother is Hydra, and they aim to unleash their grandsire, Cthulhu, upon the world. 

While she's lamenting, an icy breeze twists the water. He has returned. Very carefully, Maria shifts position, enough to free an eye, allowing her to keep half a watch. The Deep One, a devil chojin on top of his other sins, stomps past the glass, his gait only ever so slightly hopping, more out of a remembrance of watching his people move, than any need on his part. Satan took most of the frog from him. Red eyes glow in the gloom, blurring, distorted, leaving trails of light behind them. After several moments, they turn towards the tank. 

Maria hides her face. 

There's a click, the tank shakes, the filter sucking in huge gulps of water, pushing it back out through a lower part. A reinforced glass slot on the top of the tank slides open and something heavy, meaty, lands in the water, sinking rapidly, creating eddies underwater, filling it with the iron rich smell of red, red blood. So different to usual is this occurrence, that Maria is forced by instinct to look up, and be greeted by the sight of a falling bull’s heart. 

The massive thing pumps still, and smells like it was ripped out of its owner's body not five minutes ago, and to Maria that smell is quite tempting, quite tempting indeed. Blood spirals through the slowly clearing water, the mermaid no longer seeing the Deep One through it. He has left the room, moved much more silently than the rest of his kind could ever hope to. With him out of sight, Maria feels like perhaps she might, might take a bite, a little bite, might risk diverting her attention towards sustenance. 

Of course she doesn't stop at one bite, and in moments her razor teeth have shredded the organ, which now lies as a pleasant warmth in her stomach. When her captor returns, and discovers the heart missing, his grin intensifies, leaving little flesh on either side of his head, and he laughs his chittering laugh. But he doesn't praise her, or otherwise verbally acknowledge the success of his ploy. 

Hearts, of many kinds, keep coming, and Maria keeps eating, so long as he is not in the room, that is. 

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 “Why so distracted, ‘Lantis? Baby mama laying eggs? Kekeke!” SteCase King, like all robots, is a sadistic being fond of tormenting fleshy creatures, and like all robots, most of the capacity of his elevated senses goes toward discovering chinks in said fleshy creature’s armour. Hormones are in the air, and he doesn't need a nose to discover that fact. The cloud of chemicals, not usually found in their base, has led him to ambush the culprit in the kitchen, just after Atlantis has buried his head in the fridge, a dark purple-grey SMEG. 

His victim hisses, sounding like a punctured lung when he emerges from the machine, a chilled protein powder drink clutched in one clawed hand. Protein powder,just about the only consumable that they're allowed outside of meals. “My kind do not lay eggs!” Atlantis says, his ear fins flattened back, his grin now a grimace. He recalls that he hates robots, and why. Torture devices, and not especially smart ones, yet, for some reason, there is a robot on every team…oh, crap. Since he's abducted Maria, he might be forced to confront the worst one of all - Warsman. A man not technically a robot, but certainly fond of exhibiting the immortal, trickster hatred robots possess for Humanity. 

SteCase, enormous and square, records no change in his expression. Giant robots, giant robots are even worse than regular robots. “I didn't say your baby mama was one of…whatever you are. But I did figure she must be some sort of piscine. Like attracts like, hmm?” 

“I'm not involved with any girl.”

“Why not. Biologically, you're like, thirty years old. And if we count dead time, you're-”

“Why are you fixated on this, King? Jealous? Sour grapes? Boredom? All of the above? Trying to get me into trouble?”

Nothing in the robot's flat yellow eyes changes. Nothing in its permanent grimace shifts. How did a robot sell its soul to Satan? It doesn’t have a soul. And what did it receive out of this non-transaction? None of them talk about what tawdry trinket they got, but you can usually work it out after knowing a guy for a while. 

“Chill, dude. If I wanted to get you into trouble, Atlantis, I would. Just wondering why you go around looking inward all the time.” says the animate machine, the buzz in his voice crackling. Protein powder does nothing for him and his pipe cleaner arms, but he holds a can regardless. 

“I've got things on my mind.”

“Never known you to brood.”

The fridge door slams shut, the appliance returning to looking like it's part of the cave wall. “I brood! I can brood with the best of them!” Atlantis, the fish devil, puts on his best ‘broody’ expression. He still looks happy. 

“Yeeeah. Suuuure.” the robot gives him a thumbs up, first one, then a double.

 Gossiping around the fridge can't continue all day, so after the afternoon training session, Atlantis visits The Mountain, a man who keeps a garden, possibly the only garden in the Demon Realm. It's inspired by Japanese zen gardens, with rocks, bamboo, light, and peaceful water. Everyone loves to visit, but no one will admit to it. 

“I need vegetables, Mountain. I need…vitamins. I'm moulting. It's a merman thing.”

The Mountain, towering equally over both his colleague and the bonsai he's busy cultivating, quirks a rocky brow, his expression always vaguely amused whenever Atlantis is around. It's because the diminutive man is always more than half naked and grinning, wearing a flax miniskirt like a particularly brazen hula dancer. That can't help but create a certain party atmosphere around him, evil criminal that he may be.

“Where's your tail?”

“Huh?”

“I thought merfolk had tails.”

Honestly, how long has Atlantis had to put up with this nonsense? How long has he been stuck in this timeless hell with these people? “...There's different sorts of merfolk. It's an umbrella term. My sort don't have tails. We're the most human. We birth live young and bleed red.” he explains.

The look The Mountain delivers upon this pronouncement, says that he queries his teammates' statement. “You told me once that you were very proud of not having human blood.”

“It's complicated. We were transmogrified directly from a Human base. My line didn't mate with them like some of the other families did. That is for plebs.”

Snip. The Mountain’s scissors clip away an offending twig. “What vegetables are you interested in?”

“What grows underwater?”

Snip! The Mountain’s scissors clip away a non-offending twig. 

“Huh? Seaweed? Sea lettuce? Algae?“

“Give me those.”

Back in the tank, extra, lighter splashes join the heavy main one around dinnertime, and Maria looks up to see a heart sinking through the crystal blue water in front of her, accompanied by zigzagging strips of seaweed and handfuls of algae.

Chapter Text

 Days pass with bitterness in the water, but of course the mermaid has seen her captor dump curatives into it. Along with the hearts that form the staple of her diet. Usually he feeds and medicates her without saying anything. Occasionally he’ll mumble about ‘pinkfish problems’, but that's enough for her to understand that her captivity is supposed to be a long-term thing, and death isn't the goal, but a side effect. Beating herself up is leaving mental bruises, so she desists, her mood rising with proper food and sanitation. Still, being unable to sing means she stands no chance against him unless he makes a mistake. And he might make another mistake, like he did when he was chasing her. Too haughty, too arrogantly superior, he has not yet tranquillised her, which is what his brethren do when handling her kind.

A claw taps on the glass, succeeded by an ugly fish face, red eyes as huge as her fist peering through the water at her. In response, Maria curls into a ball.

“Hey. Mermaid.” the voice is distorted by the air of the Demon Realm, and from too many teeth, raspy, not as deep out of the water as in. From her experience, it takes practice to learn to speak with force in free air.

Surprised that he's not speaking the frightful Other God derived language of the Deep Ones, Maria looks up, peering over her arm and through her floating hair. In that language ‘mermaid’ is a harsh word. But all words in that language are harsh.

“Mermaid, what is your name?” Atlantis knows her name, of course, having heard her father utter it on a sigh.

Maria does not reply, and not only because she hates him, but because doing so might put Robin at risk for blackmail and extortion. He's a perfect family man, with not the barest whiff of scandal attached to his name. Being found with illegitimate children, especially monstrous, inhuman children, might cause some of the golden shine to come off. As for his safety, Maria is even more concerned about that, for by now she has realised just who Atlantis is. Whatever she does, she cannot be a lure for a second murder.

The fiend's piranha grin widens. “You're chojin, don't think I haven't noticed. We aren't common. Especially not under the sea.”

“What do you want, frog filth?” where once it was effortless, it now costs a great effort to project her own voice, the awful band of evil gold, a malignant presence. As if alive, it exerts a will which she must continuously resist. Were she a human untainted by Deep One blood it would eventually drive her mad, compel her to walk into the sea, where the Children of Cthulhu wait. Though she is not human, it still has a greatly depressing effect.

At her insult, her captor's eyes narrow to thin strips, while the rictus grin remains, his breath whistling through his teeth. His kind possesses no connection to amphibians beyond the superficial. It is like calling a human an ape or monkey. “Now, now, play nice and we will get on. I don't want to hurt you. In fact, if anyone but me comes in here, you must fight them, because they will want to hurt you. Especially the robot.”

“...The Seven Devil Chojin.”

“That's right. You learn quick, little fishy.” Atlantis pats the tank lid. “SteCasse King is too curious for your own good. And he's a robot. Maybe you don't know what that means. It means he has no conscience. He might cut you up just to see what your insides look like. He might not even bother to put you out of your misery afterwards. It is, heh, messy having a machine on the team. As for the others, well…you're very pretty…if you catch my meaning.”

Even in the dim light of the cave, Maria can be seen to pale, and go still, even her frills and hair ceasing to sway so much in the artificial current.

Atlantis continues, speaking very low. “The uncanny robotic bastard already suspects I am hiding something. So, I'm going to move this tank into my bedroom. No one will dare enter there without my permission. No one but our leader, but he does not concern himself with pettiness.”

Though she had intended never to reveal her name and origin, in her fright Maria finds herself no longer able to think clearly or hold onto her resolution.

“Maria. My name is Maria. Robin Mask is my father. Kevin is my brother. They will pay to get me back in one piece.”

White as bone, the grimace on the other side of the glass widens, bunching green and scaly skin up into corners. “I know. But I wanted to hear it from you.”

 The tank is not easily moved, and Atlantis must once again wait for his comrades to leave the lair on some ridiculous pretext, which arrives one evening at dinner. But before that, he returns to Earth, to Australia, in order to communicate with fish.

Swimming with purpose around the Reef, through aquamarine water, over pink and orange coral, he clicks his tongue, summoning a school of barracuda, the ugly, dangerous, torpedo shaped fish approaching like loyal dogs. This is the usual way he discovers when and where the mermaid meets her father, via fish, who merfolk cannot control the way Deep Ones can. The revelation about her brother knowing and caring about her was unexpected. He has never seen Kevin Mask standing on a remote island shore, but then again, this obsession of Atlantis’ is not very old, and he doesn't pay much attention to the younger generation of chojin, son of Robin Mask or not. 

“Watch Robin and Kevin Mask for me. I don't trust them. If they step foot into the water, or onto a sailing craft, warn me.” he says to the hundreds of flat eyes watching him. The command will be passed on, from fish to fish, all throughout the seven seas. Ideally he would contrive some way to get a fish of his into a tank in one or both of the champion’s domiciles, but that will be Plan B…It's too bad this ability doesn't work on sapient sea creatures. At most he can participate in telepathy with other Deep Ones.

Speaking of them, whilst he's floating in the warm water of the Pacific Ocean, enjoying the play of it against his skin, luxuriating in using his gills, it completely escapes his mind that he's been cursed for the third or fourth time by his own people, and, while he's one of the only chojin examples, they are the great power of the oceans for a reason. Accordingly, as soon as he returns to the Demon Realm, and his school of barracuda swim over a deep sea trench, they are pulled down into the black gash in the earth's crust, there to receive a very different set of instructions. 

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 Chojin cannot live without drama, it is a compulsion in them to start fights in which they can display their gifts. At least it is in the case of the men. Whether or not this is a feature of female chojin is unknown, since the majority of the males pay less than no attention to them, causing them to be on the verge of extinction. 

Mister Khamen - a pharaoh who faked his own death upon being told that he'd have to marry his sister, a woman - is the centre of the evening's drama when Atlantis returns home from explaining to fish how to be spies. First he checks that no one has broken the human hair he placed across the threshold of his suite of rooms, and then he sits down to dinner. The night begins as it generally does, with an eclectic supper over which friendships and rivalries play out, and where everyone except Springman attempts to bully SteCasse King, later to be amazed when he pulls some whack shit. 

Today's edition of whack shit is also care of him, but no one realises till later. On the huge double doors of the cave, sounds a single booming knock. Every devil sitting round the table pauses in their consumption of sustenance, their eyes rolling from colleague to colleague. Eventually Sneagator agitates the phlegm in his throat and stands up, leaving the head of the table to go see what dumbass wants what. You never know down here, although nothing of significance has happened for thirty years, the knock might herald something important.

And oh boy, does it. Sneagator returns with a strange man carrying an ancient crocodile skin suitcase. A tall man with sunburnt skin. A magical man wearing a suspiciously familiar (but much more colourful and detailed) headdress, mask, and jewelled chest plate. He, and everyone else, turn to stare at Mister Khamen. The latter leaps to his feet, his arm raising, index finger pointing at the same moment as his much better looking doppelganger does the same.

“You!!!”

As one they shout, as one they leap at each other, fists, teeth, and straws out. Stopping to politely inquire into a perplexing situation is not the chojin way. 

Thinking fast, Atlantis climbs onto the table, disturbing bowls of nuts and bolts. “IWF!” he shouts, cupping his hands around his mouth. “Pay-per-view!”

The green thought of money cuts through a haze of testosterone fueled aggression, and a pager beeps, summoning a family sized portal. Everyone, including the rival Mister Khamens, clatter through it. Everyone except Atlantis, who tosses a dead salmon through in lieu of himself.

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 Moving a massive tank full of several tonnes of water is more cumbersome than difficult for a chojin of Atlantis’ calibre. It involves a lot of running back and forth to make sure the immense rectangle doesn't slam into a cave wall, grind its bottom, or become wedged in a turn. At one stage he has to use his claws to remove a couple feet of stone, debris that will have to be thrown into the recesses of the training cave, or possibly used to hide the tank somehow. 

Huffing and puffing around cackling laughter, Atlantis shoves the translucent box forward another foot, its front already nosing over the threshold of his bedroom. No more risk. No more impertinence from King. Just him and his pretty piscine prize. 

Inside it, the water sloshes violently, but Maria is used to riding out storms during her creature collecting expeditions, sheltering in kelp forests and under rock overhangs. There is neither in the blue-dark and empty waters of her glass cage, so she sits in the middle of it, consoling herself with the previously absurd idea that a Deep One captor is preferable to a robot. He has not harmed her gruesomely, yet, or otherwise forced himself on her in the typical way his kind do, although she has no illusions upon that point. Still, any moment left alone is another moment that her family may be using to find and rescue her.