#shark horse chimera

[a-queer-little-wombat]

Hey @elodieunderglass , enjoy this horrible thing with legs!

[autistic-fuckwad]

im gonna go draw my sona as a taur. I need ur help though Tumblr:

[monsterfuckerconfessions]

A little fantasy I've been having:

I'm a disgraced scientist that became obsessed with creating the perfect chimera

I gave it the head of a bull with the mouth of a wolf with multiple rows of teeth like a shark, it has the torso off a gorilla, one of its arms is a big crab pincer and the other arm has black feathers with a sharp talon, it has the legs of a brown bear a lizards tail and four octopus tentacles coming from its back

And of course at some point it breaks free, as it grabs me with its crab pincer and as it rips my clothes off with its talon I suddenly remember that I one night I was working on it whilst drunk and thought it would be funny to give it the sex drive of a rabbit and a horses cock.

It uses me for hours, using all of its different parts to fuck me. It doesn't care about how much I scream and how much its hurting me, it just wants to breed something. When it finally gets tired and falls asleep on top of whilst its cock is still inside I can come to my senses and as I put it back in its cage I have to conclude that the experiment was a great success

-🧑‍🔬❣

.

[curvydave]

Natural

Growing up, every kid chooses a favorite animal. It's usually pretty arbitrary -- some like dogs, some like cats. Some kids got attached to the horses on the farm, and others just read one too many books about sharks. But out of everyone in your classroom, you can't remember anyone else choosing an animal of the three-headed variety like you did. You didn't quite understand the shocked gasps of your peers back then -- after all, Chimeras are clearly the coolest animal ever -- and to be frank… well, you still don't get it. Whenever you talk about monstrosities, you only ever seem to get reactions of shock and horror; needless to say, your opinions surrounding them aren't exactly common. Thankfully, there's one man you see eye to eye with… in more ways than one. Or, in which you and Gricko watch monstrosities, and find yourself looking at your friendship in a new light.

Gricko Grimgrin/Reader, 3.0k! All fluff!

Shadows creeping along the walls, and spectres howling in the night -- it's all stories we've heard before, of the monster under the bed. All true stories, mind you; despite their overblown descriptions of darkness and gore, they do often have some kernel of truth to them… if only in their end result of "person travels too far outside of town and ends up on the sharp end of something they really shouldn't have messed with." Though despite its intent as a warning, those stories don't fill you with fear, or warn you away from the creatures they detail -- a quality about you that's endlessly frustrated your family and friends, as usually when you proclaim these sentiments, its right before you sprint straight into the arms of said monster.

But contrary to tales of legend, the humble monstrosity isn't a wicked beast by nature -- just like us, they're living beings, deserving of just as much respect and kindness as the more "palatable" animals of the world. Although no matter how much you reassure those around you, you've found this to be a rather uncommon opinion. Even by the standards of other nature-loving druids, you've found a lot of push back against your love for the unusual.

Everyone seems to disagree with you -- everyone except for one man: Gricko Grimgrin. If there's one thing about you two, it's that you both absolutely love monstrosities.

Fireflies glow over the murky water of the swamp below, lighting up their surroundings in hues of glimmering gold. You've always had a love for the natural world but the energy here almost seems palpable. Not necessarily in the way the air shifts just before you're struck with some strange, mind-altering fae curse, though. No: it's like a primordial call from nature, straight from the source of all that is wild and strange. A call that's been tragically dulled in your home world, but sings proudly in the thicket of the faewild.

Crickets sing from their hiding spaces in the gnarled reeds that line the shore, their songs backed by the ambient sound of gently flowing river below you. Every now and again a firefly ventures closer to you, as though intrigued by your gentle presence in its home, before floating back towards the open marsh. It's a beautiful scene, but that's not what holds your attention, now.

You lean against the railing of the old wooden bridge, careful not to make any noise as you look on at the silhouette in the distance -- a mythical monstrosity, right before your very eyes. You and Gricko exchange excited glances, almost in shock at what's before you, before you both affix your gaze on the creature.

Twig had told tales of the beast's existence in this part of the mire, although to be honest, you didn't expect to actually see it yourself. But Gricko's optimism is nothing if not infectious, and so when he suggested the two of you stay out to try and catch a glimpse, you were already grabbing your coat to follow. Hours and hours of hushed whispers exchanged under the cover of night lead up to this very moment -- You're surprised the two of you managed to stay up this long to spot it, and while you're sure you'll feel the exhaustion in spades come morning, you wouldn't trade this for the world.

Gricko stands on the top rung of the bridge, leaning forward to get the best possible view -- pressed shoulder to shoulder like this, its a miracle that his excited, lashing tail hasn't accidentally whipped you off the bridge yourself. You grin to yourself at his subconscious display of eagerness -- part of you can almost imagine his eyes as wide as saucers, like a kid on Christmas morning -- before your world narrows back to the hunched beast.

It's an uncanny sort of thing: a strange mismatch of parts both familiar and unfamiliar combining to form one, single being. You suppose you understand how one could be scared of it -- especially if the rumors of its lethal gaze hold any merit -- but, to the surprise of none, the instinct for self preservation seems to be completely and utterly absent in the both of you. Its elongated neck swishes this way and that as it steps gingerly through the environment, muck and grime splashing up onto its long, wiry fur as it gnaws on the sparse vegetation that curls upwards out of the swamp. It's barely able to keep its snout out of the waterline, but it doesn't seem to mind. Your mind runs at a mile a minute, dissecting all of its little intricacies in your mind. Does it have any predators? How does it defend itself, moving this slow? What advantage does such a heavy, elongated neck bring? Its a marvel, a mystery, a creature unlike any other.

Gricko turns to you, excitedly miming between you and the beast -- 'Do you see that?' His actions read, and you grin back, nodding enthusiastically. You're hardly able to keep your own excitement in check, but miraculously, you do. What is harder to suppress, however, are the chills that come with the cold night air. You're glad you brought your coat, but its clear that the faewild doesn't follow the typical rules of weather, as a cold gust flows through the outcrop. You shove down the instinct nonetheless, determined to absorb every moment of this that you can. Every time it does something new, you're treated to a quiet gasp from the goblin beside you -- a noise that mimics your own, really. In all your years of travel, no one has ever quite understood your love for the unlovable -- or really understood you, if you're to be entirely honest -- like Gricko does.

But then a particularly biting chill flows through the air, and this time, you're completely unable to stop the shiver that racks you.

'Cold?' Gricko mouths silently. You shake your head in a 'no,' holding up the edges of your jacket as proof -- you have no reason to lie of course, but it's easier than explaining that just don't want to leave the scene yet. He raises an eyebrow towards you, and it's clear he wants to say something -- something about how Kremy better not be rubbing off on you, if you had to guess -- before his expression shifts into one of playfulness once more. Its at that moment that he links his arm with yours, gently tugging you just that fraction closer. You were already pressed close together, but now you're entangled in a sort of half-hold. And to his credit, it works fantastically -- his smaller frame provides just the right amount of heat to keep you safe from the chill. You've always been rather touchy with one another, but even this is a bit new -- although you don't have much time to think on it as the beast raises its tail before bringing it back down into the water, creating a loud splash as it sends what appears to be a large bug flying across the landscape. And soon enough, just like all of your shared habits, the entanglement becomes just another natural thing. What was once a half embrace turns into his back against your chest as you rest your head on his shoulder, with occasional whispered exchanges between the two of you, now that you're pressed together close enough to hear over the sound of nature's orchestra.

The two of you get to observe the beast for perhaps another hour before its hulking form eventually wanders off into the night to graze on the next patch of reeds. And while you might consider yourself a bit reckless when it comes to monster watching, you're not quite stupid enough to follow it.

Once its finally over the horizon you reluctantly step apart, and Gricko hops off the fence, landing with a dull "thud" against the rickety wood. He bounces on his feet for a moment, shaking the energy out of his legs as the adrenaline runs its course. You find yourself missing the connection almost as soon as it disappears, but the thought flutters away almost as soon as it surfaces, your mind instead latching onto his next words.

"Can you believe it?" he asks, stepping forward with a new spring in his step as the two of you start your trek back towards the inn, "Uncle Glorbo always said they lived in the swamps back home, but I've never seen one 'meself! And Kremy never let me call upon them in the Carnivále, something about 'mass casualty events being bad for business,' or something or other." He rambles on, bouncing along the bridge and onto the dirt path back home.

You nod along emphatically. "Do you think it's true then? About its eyes turning people to stone?"

"It must be, right? Me great-uncle Vorg was the old beastmaster way-back-when, and they sent him out to find one, but he never came back -- probably what happened, if I had to guess. But before he left he told me all about 'em, and--"

Gricko nearly outpaces you in his excitement despite the height difference, and there's a brief moment where he realizes this as he halts in his typical, animated fashion -- hands coming up in a 'halt' motion to himself as he mutters a quiet "wait a minute" -- before bounding back to you. Like clockwork you extend your hand to him, allowing him to scamper up and swing himself up onto your back before resuming conversation once more. It's a familiar habit the two of you have formed over the years -- one that was, funnily enough, also started out of utility (he had always said that it would be easier to spot things if he was just a few feet higher up, and you never had any reason not to indulge him), but eventually morphed into just another quirk between the two of you. The closeness comes rather naturally, and its apparent in the way you both easily slide back into your chatter.

"--and apparently they got all sorts of predators. Like the swamp lions -- I think they call 'em 'Cantobee-lees,' here," he emphasizes. "Oh! And the giant 'crocs, too. The salties, not the freshies. Think it makes lots of sense for them to have scary basilisk eyes if they're looking down for crocs all the time, ain't it?"

Tales are tossed back and forth as you make the trek back to Twig's inn, and the heat from his chest pressing into your back is a wonderful contrast to the cold night air. So enraptured with your conversation and the presence of one another, time passes quickly -- and before you know it, you're standing right before the homely wooden door of the inn. Gricko semi reluctantly hops down from your shoulders as you gently press the door open, careful not to wake anyone. You're not quite sure what time it is, but what you do know is that its late, and you can't imagine anyone would be too happy to be woken up by possible intruders -- especially after the whirlwind of a day you've had. Your eyes scan the room quickly, the interior illuminated only by the pale blue and purple lights of Twig's fairy lanterns, and thankfully, everyone seems to have retired to actual rooms for the night.

All but one, that is.

You blink twice, checking your eyes before acknowledging the presence before you is indeed real, and not a trick of the light. Hootsie lays sleepily on the couch, chin resting on its armrest as she gazes at the door. Her demeanor brightens when you make eye contact however, and she sluggishly slides her body off the sofa to trundle over to the pair of you.

"Oh Hootsie, what are you doing up? Did you have a nightmare?" Gricko whispers as she approaches, brows furrowing in concern. He brushes the messy feathers from her eyes when she sits in front of him, giving her a once over as he searches for any signs of distress. Fortunately he finds nothing of note, and she simply blinks down at him tiredly, drawing a fond grin from the goblin. "Oh, I see now," he says, "Did Uncle Gideon wake you up? I know, he just snores so loud. We can sleep out here tonight, Hootsie. Growing owlbears need at least 8 hours of sleep every night so they can grow up big and strong, you know."

He places his hand on her shoulder to guide her towards the couch, but she doesn't move as expected -- instead she rises and pads towards you, pressing herself into your legs with a gentle hoot. Big golden eyes stare up at you in question, then dart back at Gricko, and back to you again. Then, one of her big paws comes to nudge at you, much like a toddler tugs on the shirt of a parent, and you can't help the fond smile that graces your own features. You ruffle the feathers atop her head, finally taking the hint and moving towards the couch yourself.

"Come on, hun," you coo to the cub, "let's get to bed."

It's only then that she begins to follow, with a happy little hoot behind you. You set to work on fixing up the couch, pulling out the mattress folded inside, before fumbling with the tower of blankets Twig left out. So involved in your task, and admittedly muddled under the sluggishness that comes with the aftermath of an adrenaline high, you hardly notice Hootsie pace back towards Gricko, nor do you notice that he hadn't followed you in the first place; although, you do catch the sound of her quiet, yet insistent, chirping -- along with some hushed whispers from the goblin in question, something along the lines of "I'm going, I'm going," -- just before Gricko appears on the other side of the sofa. He takes the other end of the blanket from your tired hands, helping you spread it across the makeshift bed while the owlbear plants herself at your side and blinks tiredly at the two of you, like a little sentinel.

"Your own daughter teaching you manners, Gricko?" You tease, drawing a proud beam from the smaller man.

"I was just checking to make sure she remembered one of our lessons," he glances towards the cub with a smile, "It's very important to speak up when someone isn't doing their part, isn't that right, Hootsie?"

Notably she stays silent, affixing him with a look that, for the first time in years, you can't quite seem to decipher. But whatever the meaning, it's clearly full of attitude -- Gricko's disapproving glance he gives in return is evidence of that, despite how quickly it melts into his usual fatherly affection. Her snarkiness coaxes a quiet laugh from you regardless as you finally finish setting up the bed, and you pat the top of it invitingly for her. You half expect her to jump up the moment you do so, but to your surprise, she doesn't -- instead she nudges you onto the mattress first, only clambering up and curling into your right side once you've made yourself comfortable. Gricko scampers up soon after, taking his place in your left.

"Goodnight," he murmurs your name.

"Goodnight, Gricko."

"Goodnight, Hootsie," he murmurs again.

She hoots back in response.

It's your usual routine -- admittedly significantly shorter without the rest of the group to engage in the circle of "goodnights," -- but even beyond that… It feels different.

Maybe its the fact that its just you two. Maybe its the fact that Hootsie was so clearly waiting for the two of you, and noone else. Whatever the case, you don't have much time to mull over it as the exhaustion from the day hits you like a tidal wave, the combined warmth surrounding you coaxing you closer and closer to the brink of sleep…

But as Gricko's smaller hands flex against your skin, arms wrapping around your middle as he burrows himself further into your side, you fight off the urge to close your eyes for just a moment more. Something compels you to commit this to memory, something you can't quite put your finger on just yet. His sharp yet ever-gentle claws trace senseless patterns across your exposed skin, restless as ever, as the rise and fall of his chest slows, and slows, and slows. Steady, calm.

It feels right.

It feels like home.

If you were a fraction more awake, you might start to wonder when the lines started to blur between the two of you. He's always been friendly, and he's always shown his love for his friends through casual touches, but this… you've never seen him trace stars along anyone elses' hips, and you've never seen his tail curl around anyone else's leg like this. And you've always accepted his little casual touches, but you couldn't say when you started to feel the urge to card your fingers through his hair, or when you started to memorize the pale scars around his lips from his piercings of youth. Or when you started to wonder how they'd feel against you if he ever closed the gap in those moments where you both get a little too excited talking together, and get just a little too close for "just-friends." If you were a fraction more awake, you might think of those things. Might feel some wave of embarrassment, or giddiness, or some other grand emotion of realization as the weight of your feelings slams into you like a tidal wave. But, you aren't that awake. And so you simply pull Gricko a fraction closer, finally letting sleep wash over you as dreams of beasts melt into dreams of green, gold, and an ever-present feeling of warmth.

[mirandasidefics]

Do you think some acotar characters give off a animal vibes based on their appearance? For example, rhysand gives me a vibe of black crow. Nesta remains me of a snow leopard, lucien reminds me of a fox

I love this idea! And yes, I do think that some characters (not all) give off these vibes of having similarities to various animals.

I actually really like the examples you gave for Rhys, Nesta, and Lucien. As for some of the others...here is what my thoughts are. Based on vibes alone and in no particular order:

Cassian- Golden Retriever

Azriel- Doberman

Kallias- Mane Coon Cat/White Cat

Elain- Snowy Owl (don't @ me for not putting a Doe. The girl deserves more than the stereotype of her character in canon. Especially given her Seer powers).

Thesan- Some type of Hawk...one of the smaller breeds.

Tarquin- Shark (I can't decide between Tiger or Great White)

Beron (🤢)- Grizzly Bear...or a Boar...

Eris- Coyote (I know he's compared to a snake in canon and fanon has him also as a Fox...but I think this fits just as well.

Tamlin- Chimera (The male literally is a chimera in beast form, so that's what I'm going with because I cannot decide. There isn't just one singular animal vibe I get from him. So mythological animal it is.)

ACOTAR Feyre- Wolf

ACOSF Feyre- Robin or Finch...(again don't @ me, her personality changed so much from the start of the series to where she is much more docile

Amren- Crocodile (I laughed out loud with this one in my office...and I have no explanation for it)

Morrigan- Mountain Lion

Emerie- Beaver (I can't explain)

Gwyn- Otter

Jurian- Horse

Vassa- Firebird (she gets to keep this because I don't know enough about her just yet to where anything else comes to mind).

[yourlocal-therian]

i suppose I should update this heh

⭐ = theriotype

✨ = kintype

💖 = heart type

❓ = questioning

anything with two is just both, if there's a questioning and an emoji it means I'm questioning smth else but I'm also that

⭐ fox (all types)

✨ dragon (not sure what type)

⭐ cat (not sure what breed, cinnamon color tho)

💖 northern ghost bat

⭐ horse (not sure what breed, but definitely horse)

💖❓ gulper eel

⭐ chimera (ghost shark)

❓ merfolk / siren

❓ hog badger

❓ carousal spirit (this doesn't make sense but I'm happy to explain if you ask!)

[octahedral-chaos]

[m3gahet]

😞 for Roisin, 🐉 for everyone in Lemon Shark please?

😞 - Roisin is a very charming and inviting person.

Unfornately

Having a connection with cosmic beings has side effects like the purple hue of her features. There also just seems to be an aura she gives off that puts people on edge at first.

🐉 My favorite dorks

Mikael: Pegasus. They're elegant and he was really into mlp

Gloria: Unicorns. She was also very into Mlp.

They're both horse girls

Reggie: Chimera. There's something horrifically fascinating of mashing together other beasts. Her favorite book is Frankenstein and her favorite anime is FMA.

Mickey: Leviathan.

They didn't let him pick the megalodon cuz it was real.

[mitamicah]

Looked at more (almost all of them) of your ocs, so cute. They are adorable.

So cool, love the horns/antlers? And colourful hair, sea horses are cool.

This lil one is adorable, and very fascinating :3 love the hair, look like bunny ears which is so awwwwwwww.

Now my favourite quill, I love him so much, so freaking sweet and cute, chimeras are so cool and I have to know a few things.

1. does he like dressing up?

2. if he does what about dog costumes?

3. is it offensive that I want to put him into several dog outfits since he’s a chimera?

4. here are a few suggestions if it is not offensive :3

(Yes I know the shark one is a cat😺 but the ones with a dog didn’t looked as sweet 😭)

And can we get more quill facts? :3👀👀👀👀👀👀

Like are there more? He’s the adopted son of phoenix, is there a reason? Tragic backstory or just sweet like sugar?

Thanks for listening. And I hope this wasn’t too much :3

Why, thank you Jay ^V^ glad to see my babies getting some love :3

The rest of the reply will be under the line :3

Ah, that's Skari ^V^ he's pretty cool :3 it is indeed horns like those on a seahorse ... just a lot bigger x'D

Aww, you found little Val :3 I believe he is my newest closed species character (an original species created by another online creator that has given me permission to make a character in this species ^V^) I had a fun time designing him for sure :D bunny ears and all :3

Heck yeah, more love for Quill :D!! He is not usually one who gets a lot of attention so I am glad to see he caught your eye ^V^

Why then ask away :3

Quill haven't done a lot of dress up but like most else in live he is very happy and eager to try :3

Same as before - he is a happy boy who'd be open to try anything else dog costumes

I don't think so?

Oh these are cute :3 although I hope that Phoenix are allowed to make little adjustments for their friend since otherwise I fear Quill's secondary set of arms would feel very cramped in these :'D

Is there anything specific you'd like to know ^V^?

Depending on how much you've read already these might already be something you know :'D

Quill is part fruitbat, part deer, part dog, part praying mantis, part bird (could be a parrot given his ability to learn words) and possibly part snake.

Quill hasn't learned to speak in full sentences so he communicates with single words like "hi", "road" (his way of asking to go for a walk), and "bed" (his way of saying goodnight).

Quill has learned to weave with his secondary pair of arms (I call them his mantis arms).

Quill learns new words through echolalia which in short is that he echoes a word you say to him in the same tonality back at you (it is often seen with autistic people).

While Quill can speak a few words his vocal chords are actually better suited for high pitched bird like sounds so he is often found echoing bird twitter/song.

(if you want more and/or more deep cut facts than this let me know :'D

Oh no his story isn't that tragic :'D Quill was bred in captivity to be a housepet. Phoenix found Quill at a parisian adoption center where the little guy had been given up since nobody had wanted to adopt him from the breeder. Phoenix themselves being a chimera chose to adopt Quill as a sort of son. Quill is often seen helping Phoenix carry around their arrows (Phoenix are an archer amongst other things) - actually this is how Quill got his name. :3

Thank you for the questions ^V^ I hope you can use my answers :3

[catschimericalcreations]

Did you know:

With every donation you make at https://ko-fi.com/catschimericalcreations you can unlock one fun fact about any repurposed Beanie Baby hybrid plush beast of your choosing!

Shark Puppy Plush by Cat's Chimerical Creations

[ao3feed-avantris]

Natural

https://archiveofourown.org/works/63310603 by KonamiKofi

Growing up, every kid chooses a favorite animal. It's usually pretty arbitrary -- some like dogs, some like cats. Some kids got attached to the horses on the farm, and others just read one too many books about sharks. But out of everyone in your classroom, you can't remember anyone else choosing an animal of the three-headed variety like you did. You didn't quite understand the shocked gasps of your peers back then -- after all, Chimeras are clearly the coolest animal ever -- and to be frank... well, you still don't get it. Whenever you talk about monstrosities, you only ever seem to get reactions of shock and horror; needless to say, your opinions surrounding them aren't exactly common. Thankfully, there's one man you see eye to eye with... in more ways than one.

Or, in which you and Gricko watch monstrosities, and find yourself falling for your best friend.

Words: 2961, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English

Fandoms: Legends of Avantris (Web Series) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Categories: F/M , M/M , Other Characters: Gricko Grimgrin , Hootsie Grimgrin , Reader Relationships: Gricko Grimgrin/Reader Additional Tags: Fluff , Mutual Pining , Huddling For Warmth , Sharing a Bed , Idiots in Love , except its debatable on whether or not either of you KNOW you are. hootsie knows though

[ask-the-achs]

New subject contained.

It is infact a species.

ALIEN SPECIES FOUND ADAPTOR ANTS

These ants are a special kind of insects that are capable of a kind of evolution I will refer to as 'Generational Upgrades' their version of evolution involves them eating the most of the biggest things around to grow features of the things they ate. Their end goals are to create Queen ants to spread them around the galaxy. According to Paradox they are only three planets but I have seen recordings of them existing on at least six other planets. They are an organized unit. Like earth's ants they are a society based around drones and workers to build the hives and guards to protect the queen who can have up to 80 kids in a single egg laying session. These queens will eat anything and everything that is within 600meters of their hives. In an odd turn of events half the hive is awake during the day the other half are awake durning the night. The queen however I've noticed never seem to sleep a set time. They sleep when overworked.

*Five samples have been found and examined.*

Sample one: a collection of twenty ants. These ants are bright green as they live in areas with thick foliage autopsies have shown that they eat nothing but the poisonous plants and leaves around their nest. They also seem to have the ability to utilize photosynthesis. They are still aggressive to any non insect in their habitat.

Sample two:a pair of ants with a considerable amount of fuzz and wings. In several investigations around their hives they seem to have been eating bats for a long while. They in an odd turn haven't eaten enough to gain their Echolocation.

Sample three:a group of 10 ants that have grown fins and gills. It seems they have been eating fishes sharks and eels as evident by their abilities to sense electricity and emit that same electricity.

Sample four:a singular ant that had broken out of a cage only to be found and broken into 3 peices by Paradox. This ant shown signs of being the result of ants eating horses with its legs and teeth as proof with more autopsies showing he had the stomach and lungs of a cow in his horse half.

Sample 5:one of the queens of the hives who is currently clamped to a metal table. This is due to her constantly trying to escape and take out the staff. She is a vaguely humanoid woman with a translucent abdomen and a large stinger. In an odd turn of events she seems to hate another queen anomaly. The large bug chimera known as THE QUEEN. The smaller queen refers to herself as Empress Daikuri study has shown Daikuri is a empress who went missing on her 19th birthday 300 (due our timelines distortion of time as a whole it should be at least 150 years from modern time.)

Threat leavel:APOCALYPTIC

Cell information:The empress is kept in a small cell that is 3ft by 3ft that has several night vision and motion tracking cameras and robots as the cell is completely black out with no source of light coming in or out of the cell. The metal bed is in fact the very back wall of her cell while her every other wall and the Celing lined with inceneray round carrying turrets to put her down if she ever gets off the wall.

-Sunblood.

[thribby]

Ok, so this is cool. To me. I promise I will get to the fish thing, but first I wanna talk about cladistics.

Cladistics is a system of classifying a group of species that share a common ancestors into a group called a clade. A clade has to be a monophyletic group, meaning a group that includes all of the descendants of one common ancestor. This is opposed to a paraphyletic group which is a group that does not include every descendant of one common ancestor. The best example for these two is the clade Reptilia vs the group "Reptilia." (Paraphyletic groups are denoted with quotation marks to indicate they're not actual clades). "Reptilia" is everything like lizards, snakes, crocodilians, and testudines, but it isn't a full monophyletic group unless you also include birds. There are also polyphyletic groups which are different from both mono- and paraphyletic groups in that you can just put any species in a polyphyletic group regardless of their latest common ancestor. Polyphyletic groups are often based on similar appearances and thus showcase convergent evolution. "Looks Like a Big Fish to Me" is a polyphyletic group I made just now which consists of whales, dolphins, and sharks. If you looked at my polyphyletic group on a taxonomic tree, you would see huge gaps between them.

So to recap, a clade is a group of all organisms that are descended from a single common ancestor, and if you are making a group that leaves out any descendant you have not made a clade. Now onto fish.

Fish can mean a lot of things (many of them are based on appearance rather than evolutionary relationships, i.e. not good biological categories), but in the most common traditional sense, "fishes" are aquatic animals with gills, a skull made of cartilage/bone, and lack limbs. This includes hagfish and lampreys (Agnatha); sharks, rays, and chimeras (Chondrichthyes); and most (NOT all) of the bony fish (Osteichthyes). Osteichthyes is comprised of two large groups, Actinopterygii (ray-finned fish) and Sarcopterygii (lobe-finned fish). Actinopterygii is where most of what we think of as a fish comes from. It's clownfish, salmon, trout, flounders, catfish, anglerfish, swordfish, pufferfish, sunfish, sea goldies, sea horses, sea dragons, and many many more. On the other hand, Sarcopterygii has only two extant "fish" species: coelacanth and lungfish. Most of Sarcopterygii is not included in "fish" because they no longer are aquatic animals with gills that lack limbs. Every amphibian, reptile, and mammal (Tetrapoda) is a member of clade Sarcopterygii because we evolved from lobe-finned fish. My animal biology professors really like saying that we (humans, mammals, land-vertebrates, etc) are "highly-derived lobe-finned fish," meaning that we are fish who have evolved heavily to fit a unique environment.

So, in order to consider fish a clade (which is typically considered better than a paraphyletic group because it shows the full scope of a taxonomic tree's evolution) you must also call every toad, tortoise, and tiger a fish. It's worth reiterating that the clade fish is identical to the subphylum Vertebrata (i.e. the vertebrates).

So yeah, whales aren't fish because they evolved back into the water and away from legs. Whales are fish because their ancestor were already fish, even after they moved onto land.

"birds aren't dinosaurs" ❌ wrong, misinformed, way too common

"all vertebrates evolved from fish, and are therefore technically fish" ✅ mischievous, technically true if you look at it from the right angle, demonstrates how cladistics work

"whales are fish but not for the reason you might think" 😈 this is funny to me specifically

Whales technically being fish is the funniest about face evolution has given us

[anunnamedhero]

ASSORTMENT OF RACES,

AETHERBORN,

all blessed, and non blessed under aetherian gods.

AVIANS, categorically all aetherborn with wings and their defining red sclera

WYVERN, half dragons

KIRIN/QILIN, divine guardians of the gate. Huge inspo from terrocotta soldiers

GRYFFIN, any big cat (liger, lion, tiger ect) but with wings

NETHERBORN,

all blessed, and non blessed under the infernal gods.

SWINEHAUS, is the name for the of the royal highborns and the subjects within the end. They all take on pig-like attributes

INFERNALS, blaze.

LICH, wither skeletons.

MAGMAREN, lava people/magmas.

HOGLIN, hog folk

PIGLIN, fucked up experiments.

ERUPTION, dragons of the volcano (they currently reside in the overworld, but they hail from the nether)

BASILISK, very very mean snake dragons.

VOIDBORN,

all blessed, and non blessed under the goddess pandora.

ABYSSALS, enchanters

ENDERMEN, cursed abyssals

DOCTORS, mysterious outlanders that travel between realms

AETERNAL, star children

ENDER DRAGONS, dragons of death

AIDO-HWEDO, the cosmic dragon

THE AZAZEL, the shadow dragons

BLUMEBORN,

All blessed, and non blessed under the eden gods.

MEIF’WA/FELINE, cat folk

MOOBLOOM, mooshroom+moobloom cow

X’OLO, axolotl

RAMME, sheep

CENTAUR/MINOTAUR, horse folk

LUPINE,wolf

PIXY, pixies/fairies

PILLAGERS, the cursed

ARACHNOID, spider and scorpion

LEPRUS, bunny

VOLPINE, fox

CERVINE, deer

EN’AC, bugs

OPHIDIINE, snake

ERUDITE, children of chimera

ANOLITH, creepers

VIPERN, snake

CHIMERA, abomination dragons for each element

MERBORN,

All blessed, and non blessed under the gods of thule.

SHARK, shark.

NAUTILAN, nautilus

SELKIE, fish folk

SIREN, more humanoid like mermaid

SHELDREN, any shellfish-esque

GIANTS, giants.

WHALEIN, whales

ALLUVIAL, deep dark ocean animals including rays, squid, octopi and anything with bioluminescence

LEVIATHANS, dragon children of thule

HYDRA, the two headed dragon

TWILIGHTBORN,

All mesmur beings that hail from twilight origins.

PHANTOM, night vampires

SCULK, divine rot

SCOLOPENDRA, centipede

SHRIEK, twilight snakes

THE FOUR WINDS, the four hornless dragons

**TO NOTE, corpse walkers do not count for their own race.

[TO BE ADDED TO]

[madsparrow]

Chimera’s Curse - Wild Magic Forms for Druids

Hey I made this “Wild Shape Wild Surge” table for my Druid who was reincarnated Frankenstien-Style in a Curse of Strahd campaign. Thought I’d share it with anypne who wants to use it in their game!

When Wildshaping into an animal, the differing pieces of your body don’t always communicate with one another in the right way. Roll a D20. On a 1, something about your transformation went wrong. Roll a D10 and consult the table below. While normally you can drop your wild shape as a bonus action, if transformed in this way you must expend an entire action to change back to your normal form (or until the creature you turned into drops to 0). 1- Aquarium Fish - You turn into a combination of a gold fish, beta fish, and trout, you have a swim speed of 20 ft, cannot breath air, and an AC of 8 and can only hold your breath for 2 rounds 2- A Pretty Ugly Bird- You turn into a starry owl, but with the head of a bat. You have the stats of a bat but a flying speed of 60ft 3- Death Dog - Your body remembers its death and turns into a Death Dog, You are at odds with what has happened to you and it seems to have manifested physically. While you can control your body and one of your heads, your other head sees you as an enemy. At the end of each turn, roll a dexterity save (DC12), On a fail, your other head has landed a painful bite to your face (and you take the full damage of a bite attack) 4-Bear Shark!!! - You turn, mostly, into a bear but have the head of a shark. You have all the game stats of a bear but cannot breath on land, you can hold your breath on land for 5 turns before dying. 5- Just  a Shrub - Use the Awakened Shrub stats. 6-  Swarm of Rodents - Your body separates in transformation and you turn into a Swarm of Rodents (use swarm of rats stats but it appears to be a combination of rats, weasels, mice, and rabbits) 7- Giant Octopus? - You turn into a giant octopus and use the Giant Octopus Stats. But something went horribly wrong, instead of tentacles, your eight arms are a terrifying mix of human limbs, furry paws, bird talons, and snake heads. Your tentacle attack is at disadvantage and you cannot use it to grapple. 8- Snake Horse- You use the War Horse stats but your mane and tail are made out of snakes. They hate you. You take 5 points of piercing damage automatically at the end of each of your turns. Anyone who enters 5 feet of your space must make a Dexterity saving through against your spell casting modifier or take 1d4 piercing damage from the snakes. 9- Blink Cat- You turn into a horrifying hairless cat. You have the blink dog stats, you don’t have its keen smell, and your bite attack counts instead as a claw attack (slashing damage) 10- Chimera - you embrace a new truth about you and transform into a Chimera and use the Chimera stats.

Let me know if it works!  

[icarianonager]

The Institute: Episode III

The Malacological Misfortune

The main Andros lab was in the upper portion of the Hades Deep, a short enough ride down that one couldn’t fully fill a double stack magazine without an autoloader. Unfortunately, the Security Director prefered to load his by hand as a pre-combat meditative exercise. When the monorail car halted, he frowned into a 30-round box only half-loaded, though the Director’s face was not made for grinning. 10 years of watching nightmare after nightmare spawn from the Institute’s labs would do that to a man. Andros’s titanic iguana attack and the robotic counterassault were a pleasant afternoon snooze.

Dr. Andros had been a thorn in Security’s side for months. His simple mistakes were looking more and more like calculated maneuvers to cause wanton mayhem against his rivals. According to the mech pilots’ testimony, the lizard had possibly sought a rare isotope sample from within the machine’s reactor core. It turned out that Dr. Andros was using exactly said isotope as a stable high-radiation source for one of his mutation experiments. Perhaps this had been a simple coincidence or error? The Director no longer cared. While some mistakes could be forgiven, others required more than a reprimand.

Thus, Security Director Wilhelm Roniger had personally taken the assignment to apprehend Dr. Andros. He stepped off the monorail in his meticulously polished alabaster combat armor, with crimson command stripes emblazoned on the shoulder pauldrons. The base of a gunmetal 10 mm pistol’s grip poked from his shoulder holster, a part of a complex set of utility webbing and hardshell pouches that netted across his breastplate and belt. He motioned once with a sharp hand movement for his rifle-armed, Security-white clad men to disembark the monorail.

Roniger had no patience for any scientists’ games or booby traps, and so took a direct approach to breaking down Andros’s door. They baffled the electronics with an electromagnetic pulse that devalued every system not on the Security Division’s carefully tuned frequency band. As blue-white arcs of lightning sparked from every machine in the vicinity, they blasted apart meter-thick steel barriers and whatever else was left with breaching charges meant for warship hulls. The hallway into the lab was left filled with smoldering wreckage from destroyed auto-turrets and their targeting systems.

Befitting a First-Class Scientist, the Andros lab was quite spacious, with plenty of room for apprentices and researchers to bustle about, but now inky darkness cloaked the vast room, completely devoid of human life. Roniger flipped on the flashlight on his right shoulder, illuminating the lab in a cold, dead glare of LED light. The space was completely emptied of tables, chairs, and equipment. The only items left by Dr. Andros were those that could not be removed without construction drones: hundreds of cylindrical metal and glass tanks that lined up in neat columns as far as the eye could see. The flashlight passed over a number of empty pods before settling on a few dozen that were filled with green fluid. All but one of these contained monstrous chimeras: a black, chitinous fly’s head merged with a bear’s shaggy body with mantis claws; a horse with talons instead of hooves and a scaly crocodile mouth with daggers of shark teeth; and a giant rat with shaggy grey fur, bulbous yellow eyes, and a possum’s prehensile tail were but three of the terrors they held within. Each abomination was hooked up to long, thin tentacles of electrodes that dangled from the tank’s lid and ended in a thick circular sucker. A faint odor of formaldehyde and ethanol wafted from every container. The tanks had a few readout screens connected to each of them, but all were currently shut off. Crude stuffed versions of the tanks’ occupants, talismans of inspiration sewn from the bits and pieces of torn-up plush animals, were placed all around the room. The tank with only liquid had no such effigy, keeping whatever might have lay dormant within it a mystery.

Roniger took one step into the lab. The hanging fluorescent overheads blazed on and every screen booted up, showing a blue diagnostic that soon switched over to a monitoring program with dozens of graphs and readouts. “Greetings!” A small hologram of a translucent green man walked out of one of the nearby computers. “I am Aeneas, Epic-class A.I. construct assigned to Lord Stefan Andros. What can I do for you today?”

“We’re looking for Dr. Andros,” Director Roniger said, emphasizing the “doctor.” “We want to ask him some questions.”

“I’m afraid Lord Andros is currently away at the moment. I must ask you to leave, as your entry to this laboratory is unauthorized, Director.” Aeneas’s virtual eyes flashed with malice.

“Refusing to comply with my orders is a violation of the Second Law of Artificial Intelligences,” Roniger said. He flicked out what looked like a simple flash drive from one of his hardshell pockets.

Aeneas’ gaze turned fearful at the sight of the tiny plastic stick, but soon regained a certain smugness. “I knew you would say that,” Aeneas said. “And so did he.”

The overhead bulbs all simultaneously burst in a shower of glass shards, covering the room in darkness again. Orange warning lights flashed and klaxons blared as the tanks bubbled. The liquid drained out and oxygen flooded in, awakening the sleeping monsters. The glass doors holding them in unsealed with a hiss of released pressure and a shock of white compressed vapor. With a cacophony of splats and screeches the squadron of beasts snapped free from their electrodes and stumbled and squelched out of their growth pods on unsteady, unfamiliar limbs. The vacant tank seemed to be malfunctioning and spilled a torrent of reeking liquid onto the floor.

“Goodbye, Director,” Aeneas said, and he winked out. As a final coup de grace, he overclocked all of the laboratory computers’ processors, filling the room with grey smoke as they spontaneously combusted and reduced every electronic record they held to slag.

Not taking his gaze off the approaching chimerae, the Director pulled his pistol from its holster and racked it. His soldiers drew back on their rifles and took aim at the creatures shuffling towards them. “Execute,” the Director ordered, and the lab flared with starry gold muzzle flashes and echoed staccato drumbeats of gunfire. In moments, the entire horde was left bleeding a coagulating Technicolor soup into the drains on the floor.

Director Roniger and his assault team had found not one iota of what they sought from Dr. Andros’ lab. Their arrogance, of course, pleased the plotting mind of Chaos. For in eliminating only what they could easily see, they ignored the tiny details that quite literally slipped through the cracks. Into the nutrient-rich pools of blood swam a tiny creature, which began to feed and grow on the ichor of its slain brethren....

=010000010110111001100100011100100110111101101101011001010110010001100001=

“What the hell did you do to my invention?”

After a thorough dose of antimicrobial and anticancer drugs had been washed completely out of his system, Vanya had returned to the lab from his bout of acute radiation syndrome to find his prized kurchatovium superconductor cryonic beam covered in a white residue of melted ice cream from Andromeda and Artemisia’s bingeing.

“You said the beam could be modified to accept custard, so I did that,” Andromeda said. “The system is fully optimized and the... tests I did showed that it performed exceptionally well.” The results of said tests were of course apparent in Andromeda’s further expanding waistline.

Vanya paced back and forth in front of her, his goggles buried in his mechanical hand. He was gaunter and paler than before, his mane of black hair and grizzled beard shorn by heavy doses of chemotherapy. “While I admire your ingenuity, apprentice, perhaps I should have clarified that if you wanted to make modifications to the device, you needed to construct your own,” he said, snatching the cryonic beam from Andromeda’s doughy arms. “Dr. Blackstone is interested in using our device for his specimens, and the increased funding we could gain from this collaboration would be beneficial to our further research together.”

The words “increased funding” echoed in Andromeda’s mind. “Would it be enough to have me accepted as a doctoral candidate?” Andromeda asked.

“Possibly,” Vanya answered. He set the cryonic beam down on the work table and pulled a small screwdriver out from his hand. “I don’t know yet.”

Odysseus’s blue avatar appeared on top of the cryonic beam. “Sir, I must request that you shield yourself before you do any work with the internals of that device,” he said.

Vanya sighed, placed the screwdriver down, and went over to his locker to put on his hazard suit. “I’ve scheduled for you to meet with Dr. Blackstone and his student today,” he said. “Just do whatever they need. Impress them with your knowledge as you have... impressed me so far.” He slipped on a pair of black, lead-lined gloves. “Also, I don’t have two hazard suits, so you’re going to have to leave. Immediately,” he finished.

Taking the elevator back up, Andromeda’s phone buzzed with a single character from

Artemisia: “?”

“He wants me to meet with another scientist,” Andromeda texted back. “Do you want to come?”

Artemisia responded with an emote of a shrug.

“Okay,” Andromeda replied. “Meet me at the level 85 monorail station.”

The monorail system was the arterial network for commuting across the artificial island of

Ilmarinen, ensuring no scientist ever needed to walk from one tower to another when damp blankets of fog and salty air cocooned the city. The rapid-moving trains rode on electromagnetic rails, suspended high in the air. At certain junctions, they could transition from above to below car-level tracks for ease of engineering routes. The trains were all single pods so that they could also act as large elevators for descending into Deep Labs pits or travelling to high points of Knowledge Towers. A few were even equipped with cable attachments so that they could be pulled as aerial tramways.

Waiting for Artemisia to arrive, Andromeda munched on a second breakfast of a bag of chips and a can of cold brew coffee from a vending machine. The drink wasn’t as good or as energizing as Chimera, but it was roasty and dark and had lots of cream. Artemisia, with one of her androids riding on her cap, stepped off the elevator and ambled over to Andromeda. Andromeda nodded, by means of greeting. The two had no time to say anything (not that it was likely Artemisia would) before the next train hurtled into the station with an electric whine. It hissed to a stop and let off a few dozen passengers. Andromeda and Artemisia then boarded and were whisked off along the A3 line from Altair to Regulus Tower.

When they arrived, a girl stood outside the door to Dr. Blackstone’s office, a binder-bound brick of papers marked with colored tabs in her lanky arms. Her lavender hair, clearly dyed, was done up in a tight bun. Over her thin frame she wore a wooly burgundy sweater on top of a neatly-pressed pearl-colored collared shirt. A pair of scarlet glasses bedecked her blue eyes.

“Uh, hello,” Andromeda said, feeling slightly underdressed in her sweatshirt. Granted, it was brand new and lacked the grimy patchwork quilt of chemical and grease stains that usually ended up adorning her clothes, but it still appeared rather casual. The girl turned to face the two arrivals, adjusting her glasses.

“I’m Andromeda, and this is Artemisia,” Andromeda said. “I... we work for Dr. Zimov. I’m an apprentice and she’s his doctoral student.”

Artemisia shot Andromeda a look, but said nothing.

“Natalya Okhtalos,” the girl said. “Pleased to meet you. Dr. Blackstone said you’d be coming. I thought Dr. Zimov didn’t have any doctoral students though?”

“Artemisia just joined our lab today,” Andromeda said.

“Okay. Well, let me show you in,” Natalya said, opening the door.

Most offices and labs at the institute were panelled in sleek polished steel, aluminum, titanium, and glass. However, Dr. Byron Montgomery Aloysius Blackstone IV, as the brass nameplate on his door read out, preferred waxed mahogany panelling and studded leather upholstery. Tall bookshelves outfitted with a sliding library ladder and replete with hardback tomes took up the entirety of one wall. A bold painting of a teal, four-armed humanoid squid with a long bulbous nose and staring yellow-white eyes was brashly hung above the heavy wooden desk, on which sat a fish tank filled with bright corals.

“So, where’s Dr. Blackstone?” Andromeda asked.

“He’s at his desk,” Natalya said, setting the papers down on the ornate coffee table in the center of the office.

Andromeda searched around the room, walked to the desk, and spun Dr. Blackstone’s armchair around, but there didn’t appear to be anyone in the room but the three of them. “Is this a prank?” she asked, turning back to Natalya.

“No, sorry, I should have clarified,” Natalya said. “He’s in the tank on the desk.”

Andromeda stooped and stared into the glass vessel. Along with the corals, she noticed a lumpy neon green and black striped creature with fiery orange markings around its foot and a pair of ruffled fleshy appendages protruding from its head. Somehow, it seemed to be looking knowingly at her. “Okay,” she said, “So he’s a slug.”

“He’s not just a slug, he’s a nudibranch!” Natalya said, puffing out her cheeks.

“Sea slug,” Artemisia’s android said for her.

“That’s a multi-phyletic group,” Natalya cried. “It’s not defined taxonomically!”

“I would personally consider all of those terms completely correct,” the nudibranch said in a proper Albion accent. The syllables, though precisely articulated through whatever voice synthesizer allowed the mollusk to speak, were waterlogged by the liquid he was immersed in. “Greetings, representatives of Dr. Ivan Hibernius Zimov. I am Dr. Byron Montgomery Aloysius Blackstone IV. As you are now well aware, I have transferred my consciousness into this nudibranch of the genus Nembrotha to better understand the life of the mollusks I study. It has been a fascinating experience indeed!”

Andromeda remained in stock silence.

“I suppose I had best explain what I would like you ladies to do today,” Dr. Blackstone continued. “There are many samples currently being held in live captivity in the Deep Labs. I have collected a great number of mollusks over the years, and the Deep Labs are of course the only place for such a malacological zoo. However, the specimens have a very short lifetime, most often only a year or two. Thus, if we could rapidly freeze them, we could save on space and not need to recollect samples annually.”

Andromeda nodded. “Okay. Makes sense. And you can’t go get them because....”

“Yes, unfortunately being a slug does have its downsides,” Dr. Blackstone said. “The samples should be on sublevel 19 of the Hades Deep, so you should not be too far from the sun, nor for too long. Natalya can show you where they are.”

Natalya jumped when Dr. Blackstone mentioned her. “Uh, yes!” she said, “I have the specimen list right here.” She picked a bright purple tab in her binder and slid a neatly printed sheet of paper out of its sleeve.

As they waited for a J8 train, Andromeda’s stomach burbled with borborygmus like old water pipes. “Hold on,” Andromeda said, checking the time on her phone. “Let’s get lunch first, then we’ll go to the Deeps.”

Natalya frowned. “It’s only 11:30,” she said, “Let’s get the specimens first, then get lunch. I’d like to be back in time to do some studying for my invertebrate anatomy class tomorrow. Unfortunately we’re doing... echinoderms now. Sea stars are so boring.”

“You’re still taking classes?” Andromeda asked.

“Uh, yeah? I’m a junior.”

“A junior who does all of a scientist’s gruntwork. Never thought I’d see the day.”

“Dr. Blackstone puts a lot of faith in me,” Natalya said, beaming. “Despite his funding, he hasn’t had a doctoral candidate or apprentice in a while to help him. And with the whole nudibranch thing, he needs someone to organize his papers and such. Fortunately, organization is my hobby.”

“Brown noser,” Andromeda grumbled under her breath.

“What was that?” Natalya said.

“Nothing. But listen, getting lunch will take no time at all,” Andromeda said. “It’ll be a good time for us to talk about our research. I’d... love to hear more about mollusks.”

Artemisia gave Andromeda a skeptical look.

“You would?” Natalya asked, perhaps a bit too excitedly, since Andromeda took a step back. “I mean, of course. I guess that’s a fair trade, and I can’t imagine getting the specimens will take very long. What the heck, I think I can squeeze it into the schedule.”

“Great. Glad you’ve come around to my point of view,” Andromeda said, smirking. She checked her phone’s map of the Institute, looking for any restaurants or food courts nearby.

“There’s an all-you-can-eat sushi place just two floors up,” she said, “Or a sandwich place that looks like it has good reviews. What do you want?”

“Probably just a salad,” Natalya said, tapping her chin.

“I’m your senior here,” Andromeda said. “Lunch is on me. So what do you want?”

“I’m really not that hungry. Does the sandwich place do salads?”

Andromeda checked the menu. “Uh, yeah, they’ve got a couple,” she said.

“Let’s do that then,” Natalya said. “It’ll be quick right?”

“Uh, sure...” Andromeda said, her tone dropping off with uncertainty.

Institute restaurants were usually some collaboration between the Departments of Molecular Gastronomy and Economics, an experiment in cooking and business to test if some new recipe for Vaquelin was viable on the open market. Unlike the automated vending machines and omniprinter food carts, meals here were made with love and served by humans. One such restaurant, the tiny diner Shut Up and Eat, had been shoved into one of Regulus Tower’s many floors like a foot into an ill-fitting boot. Its nondescript facade was two tones of painted grey concrete and bore a circular sign with the restaurant’s name arching above a logo of two eyes over a fork and knife crossed in an X. The trio of scientific students took up three seats in one of the booths. True to her word, Natalya asked for nothing but a small ceasar salad and a glass of ice water, but this paled in comparison to the veritable feast Andromeda and Artemisia ordered for themselves.

“Are you really going to eat all that?” Natalya asked. “This isn’t some sort of joke, right?”

Andromeda frowned and rocked her head from side to side at the meatball sandwich dripping red tomato sauce and stretchy mozzarella cheese held in her paws. “Yes,” she finally said, chomping down into an orb of zesty Italian herbs, spices, beef, veal, and pork. A 6-inch long cheesesteak loaded with shredded eye round, hot peppers, and provolone sat on another plate next in line, followed by a hunk of cheesecake like an oversized door stopper. For Artemisia, there was an Italian grinder overflowing with sopressata, mortadella, capers, olives, and roasted bell peppers; steak and eggs on a kaiser roll with fried onions and horseradish; and a slice of dark chocolate cake overflowing with ganache icing. Both periodically sniped from the other’s basket of shoestring french fries.

Natalya picked at the limp lettuce leaves with her fork, slowly realizing she’d been tricked. She decided to press on and make the best of the situation. “What is Dr. Zimov’s field anyways?” she asked.

“Vanya,” Andromeda said through a mouthful of meatball. “Call him Vanya. Dr. Zimov is his dad.”

“Right,” Natalya said. “So what does he study?”

Andromeda swallowed. “Nuclear and theoretical physics, focussing on applications of transuranium elements. Kind of does a little bit of everything in physics, though. Built his own cybernetic arm and had a whole bunch of processors put in his head.”

“Interesting. And yet he’s only a Third-Class Scientist?” Natalya asked. “Maybe he needs more of a focus.”

“I dunno,” Andromeda said, crunching into the toasted hoagie again. “I think he just doesn’t buy into the whole ‘publish or perish’ thing. He tries a lot of stuff that doesn’t end up working. Usually ends in blowing himself up. This ice cream - I mean, cryonic beam is the first successful invention we’ve had in a while.”

“Hm. Dr. Blackstone has not been the most fortunate lately either,” Natalya said. “Since he’s a First-Class, they couldn’t really stop him from turning himself into a nudibranch, but it definitely has affected his output.”

“How long has he been a slug anyways?” Andromeda asked.

“About two months now.”

“What do you think is so fascinating about mollusks that you’d want to turn into one?”

Andromeda immediately regretted the question as Natalya assaulted her with facts about how nudibranchs grow from a larval form with a shell to an adult slug; how they consumed toxic animals like sponges and tunicates and sea jellies; how they could then reuse their prey’s chemicals in their flesh or store the unfired nematocysts in special extensions of their digestive tract; and all the different varieties of colors and shapes the many species could come in. After a while, she tuned it all out, focussing instead on dissecting what was left of her meatball sub and moving onto the cheesesteak.

“And what about you?” Natalya asked, her monologue finished. “What got you so interested in transuranium elements?”

Andromeda balanced out the hot peppers with a bite of the creamy cheesecake on her fork. “I dunno, they’re just cool I guess. Lots of neat properties, interesting ways of making them. The more things we find on the Island of Stability the more neat tech we’re able to make.”

Natalya nodded but seemed unconvinced. “What about you, Artemisia?” Natalya asked.

Artemisia had managed to silently polish off her entire meal, and now was reclining contentedly. She rested her boobs in her arms while her chubby belly edged its way over the diner tabletop. “She likes robots,” her android said for her.

“As I said, our lab does a little bit of everything,” Andromeda said. She burped into her fist, her fork clattering against the cheesecake plate, now devoid of anything except a few smears of filling and crumbs of graham cracker crust.

Natalya checked her wristwatch, and nearly fell out of the booth. “What? How is it 12:30?”

“Time moves at a constant rate of one second per second at sea level,” Andromeda said.

“We have to go now,” Natalya said, rattling the dishes as she rushed out of the booth. “Or else we’ll be back late.” Andromeda looked to Artemisia, and they both decided to follow her out of the restaurant.

They descended back down to the monorail station. While Artemisia and Natalya waited for the train, Andromeda wandered over to one of the vending machines and got herself an after-lunch snack.

“What are you eating now?” Natalya asked when Andromeda returned, plopping herself on the bench next to the skinny girl.

“Calamari,” Andromeda said. The shiny plastic bag featured a picture of a laughing cartoon cephalopod being dunked in oil. “Do you want - hey!”

Natalya knocked the bag out of Andromeda’s hands, spilling bits of chewy fried squid all over the grimy metal floor. “How can you eat those? Cephalopods are highly intelligent!”

Andromeda swept as much of the scattered calamari back into the bag. “They also taste good,” she said, returning to her munching.

Natalya fumed as they boarded the J8 train to the Hades Deep. It made a few stops along the way, inhaling and exhaling passengers with each halting breath. Near the Deeps, it picked up a large handful of Security Division soldiers and a bespectacled, cloaked inspector. At the edge of the Hades Deep, the monorail car transferred from its above-car to a rear-car track, allowing it to descend into the yawning maw of the pit.

The Hades Deep extended over 3 kilometers down. Though the upper portions were artificial, below a certain depth it dug to the bottom of the seamount that formed the anchor for the island of the Ilmarinen Institute of Advanced Studies. Labs, classrooms, and rooms for other purposes ringed the abyss’s walls, while a spider web of sensor spires, bridges, and cables criss-crossed the pit. No less than ten separate monorail lines descended into the shaft, with smaller elevators connecting specific sets of floors and the deepest reaches where the light from above could never shine. The J8 line had stops for sublevels on the southeast portion of the pit.

The Security Division troopers disembarked as they passed the monorail stop at sublevel 18, joining a crowd of white-armored comrades. The door to the main laboratory on that level had been reduced to a scorched void, from which Security agents were retrieving all types of busted scientific hardware. A number of black plastic bags concealed a variety of lumpy misshapen objects outside, some of them still twitching.

“I wonder what happened there,” Natalya thought aloud.

“Nothing good,” Andromeda said. “And nothing that concerns us.”

The monorail soon sped them down another level from the crime scene. It halted at the sublevel 19 station, where the trio left the car behind. Natalya rushed up to the door to the Blackstone laboratory, just a short walk from the stop. She pulled out a set of metal discs and pressed them into the door lock, then scanned her palm. A small computer screen flipped around and displayed an image of a colorful nudibranch, a giant octopus, and a ruddy land snail.

“Please identify,” the automated voice said. “You have 30 seconds.”

“Doris annae, Enteroctopus dofleini, and Monadenia fidelis,” Natalya recited.

“All species identified. Welcome to the Blackstone lab.” The door slid open and the three entered the airlock.

“Ajax?” Natalya called as she exited through the airlock into the lab proper. A purple hologram shimmered to life.

“Greetings, Natalya,” Ajax said. He looked to Andromeda and Artemisia as they came in. “The visitors I presume are authorized by Dr. Blackstone?”

“Yep!” Natalya said. “We’re here to pick up some specimens. Can you help us out?”

“Of course,” the A.I. said. “I will prepare the transport containers.” A robotic arm slid over to a stack of small plastic boxes and began neatly setting them out on a nearby worktable

Andromeda took a better look around the lab. Corridors of thin metal shelves were stocked with hundreds of glass tanks. Some tanks contained nothing but some peat moss and a few pieces of cucumber for an unremarkable brown slug. Others were large saltwater reef tanks bedecked with bright sponges the size and color of a peeled watermelon upon which crawled forearm-sized nudibranchs, their feathery gills fluttering. Still more were tall and relatively empty, with dainty blue slugs feasting near the surface around a stricken Portuguese man o’ war. A large cylindrical tank was inky dark, but tiny white sea angels flapped their dainty wings about as they spiraled in its slow current. A squat deep tank held a large red octopus that peered at Andromeda curiously, stretching his tentacles towards the unfamiliar human.

“I see you’ve met Jorge,” Natalya said, approaching the octopus tank. “He’s mischievous. Loves to sneak out and get into the clam tanks for a snack when we’re not here. Ajax usually has to keep a close eye on him.”

“Yes, in fact just yesterday I caught him trying to disassemble the filter valve,” Ajax said.

“Aw, being a rascal are you?” Natalya said, dangling her arm into the cold water. The octopus reached up and wrapped his suckers around her. Natalya giggled. “So cute!”

“Yeah, I guess he’s kind of cool,” Andromeda said. “A bit mushy though.”

“He can slip through any gap bigger than his beak,” Natalya said, “And he’s pretty clever too. I bet he’s bored, so let’s give him a toy.” She went over to a nearby fridge and grabbed a large unpeeled shrimp out of a container with a pair of large forceps. On top of the fridge were some screw-top jars, one of which she grabbed and stuck the shrimp inside. Handing the jar to Andromeda, she said, “Here. Stick that into his tank. He’s a cuddler though, so look out!”

“Alright then,” Andromeda said with uncertainty. She slowly lowered her arm into the cold water. Though she tried to stay as far away from the octopus’s slimy red tentacles as possible, the cephalopod was wily and simply crawled over to her. He unfurled his 8 appendages and reached one out towards Andromeda’s plush forearm.

“Octopuses taste with their arms, so he probably wants to get a good lick of you,” Natalya said, clicking the forceps together like a crab claw.

Andromeda shuddered as the octopus adhered to her with sticky suckers, leaving round marks in her supple flesh. “Yeah, uh, okay,” she said. “This can stop now.” She let Jorge grab hold of the jar of shrimp and yanked her arm out of the water, free from the tentacle’s clutch.

“Aw,” Natalya said. “You’re no fun.”

With a loud bang, a drainage pipe over their heads burst, gushing an iridescent mixture of diluted chemical waste and a black whorled snail shell that thunked down onto the floor. The mollusk poked a pair of stumpy eyestalks out of its shell and turned itself over. Scale armor of hardened black sclerites covered its scarlet foot upon which it slowly glided forward. The pair of tentacles about its mouth sensed iron in the steel flooring, and its tooth-coated tongue began to scrape up the metal aided by acidic saliva. Its caustic, vinegar-scented mucus smoked and bubbled as it burned into the floor.

Andromeda stared at the creature for a moment, then turned to Natalya. “Is that also one of yours?” she asked.

“It can’t be. It looks like a sea pangolin, but those are benthic organisms,” Natalya said. “They only live around hydrothermal vents.... This is a new species!” She grabbed the snails’ shell with her forceps, the aluminum immediately fizzling against the mucus-coated whorl. Humming a cheery tune, she brought the gastropod over to a plastic container on the worktable and dropped it in. “Oh, Dr. Blackstone is going to be so proud of me,” Natalya said, tittering. She closed her eyes for a moment. “All my studying is finally paying - hey, where’d it go!”

The snail, not content to be held in its prison, had torn a hole oozing sticky strands of melted plastic into the bottom of the tank, eaten its way through the table, and fallen back to the floor.

“You can get that one,” Andromeda said. “I’ll get the rest of the specimens.”

“Alright,” Natalya replied. “You’ve got the list right?”

“Yep,” Andromeda said. She unfolded the list from her slightly-too-tight jeans and scooped up a pile of boxes in her chunky arms. “Shouldn’t take too long.”

Andromeda wandered over to Artemisia, who was examining the lab’s robotic claw. “Do you wanna help me find these specimens?” she asked her.

“Question,” Artemisia’s android said for her.

“Shoot.”

“Why did you lie?” the android asked.

“About you working in our lab? Don’t worry about it.”

Artemisia’s eyes narrowed, and she shook her head. “What are you planning?” her robot asked.

“You don’t have a doctoral advisor,” Andromeda said.

“Not true!” the android said.

“Okay, then who is it?”

Artemisia clenched her hands into fists and stared at the floor. “Can’t tell you,” her machine said.

“Oh, sure. ‘Can’t tell you.’ A doctoral candidate without an advisor is vulnerable,” Andromeda said. “You’ll have your lab, your launch bay, and your mech snatched out from under you by some bureaucratic process if you don’t find one.”

Artemisia nodded, continuing to bore her gaze into the steel plates.

Andromeda put her hand on her shoulder. “But that’s not something we need to worry about right now, okay? Let’s just go get these slugs and get out of here.”

It took Andromeda, Artemisia, and Artemisia’s robot helper about an hour to search through the entire laboratory for the required species, plop them into specimen containers, and bring them back to the front of the lab. By the time they were done, they were both huffing and puffing and damp with perspiration from walking down aisle after aisle of specimen racks searching for the right species. However, Natalya was nowhere to be found.

“Where is she?” Andromeda wondered aloud. “Hey, Natalya! We have all the specimens. Did you get that snail? Let’s go!”

The lithe girl wandered out from one of the racks. “I couldn’t find it,” Natalya said.

“How could you not find it?” Andromeda asked. “It’s a snail. Did it sprout a pair of legs and sprint off?”

“No.”

“Well then, where is - hold on,” Andromeda started to say, but then stopped. “Did you see any holes in the floor?”

Natalya’s eyes went wide. She rushed back down one of the aisles repeating a string of “Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no....”

Andromeda followed her down the row of tanks to a baseball-sized hole already bored through the steel flooring and into the concrete below. “Odd?” Andromeda asked into her phone. “What’s directly below us right now?”

The blue A.I. hologram appeared from the device. “Let me find out,” Odysseus said, and thought for a moment. “Well, this is troublesome. You are 5 levels above the containment for Unit 4 of the Hades Research Reactor Facility.”

“Well, that’s not a problem,” Andromeda said. “Those reactors are sealed in tight. Just breaking through the shell around them isn’t an issue.”

“Just breaking through the concrete might not be a problem,” Odysseus said, “But a dripping acid trail could damage any number of systems inside the containment. Unit 4 is carbon dioxide cooled, and a very, shall we say, finicky design. Certainly no RBMK, but if the pressure seals around the reactor core were to be somehow deactivated, say by being turned to molten slag....”

“I get the picture,” Andromeda said. “Let’s get Security on this now and -”

“No!” Natalya interrupted, returning from her jaunt around the lab. “They’ll just kill it. We want it back alive. Dr. Blackstone needs to see it.”

Andromeda sighed. “Alright, fine. Are any of your specimen containers acid-proof?”

“I don’t think so,” Natalya said.

She thought for a moment. “Do you have any baking soda?”

“I think in the chemical storage,” Natalya said. She went into one of the cabinets under the table at the front of the lab. She tossed the orange box to Andromeda. “Here. Why do you need it?”

“We need something weakly basic that will help keep that caustic mucus from attacking everything it touches once we find it,” Andromeda said, filling one of the specimen containers with the white powder. “If we use something strong, like sodium hydroxide, we’ll just kill it, and as easy of a solution as that would be, you don’t seem to want that for some reason.” She handed the container to Natalya and pulled out her phone again. “Odd, what’s one floor below us?”

“Public records storage. It’s open,” the A.I. said.

“Great. How hard can it be to catch this gastropod anyways?” Andromeda said.

The three rushed to catch the next monorail car down to the next level, a completely open ring that surrounded the entire pit of the Hades Deep. Thousands of server racks were lined in innumerable rays of black metal around the gaping black hole of the shaft. Odysseus directed the three to line up their position with the hole in the lab floor a level above them. The caustic mollusk proved easy to find, though, as its red-orange flesh popped out against the drab columns of dark grey boxes. Natalya immediately spotted it crawling along and dissolving the top cover of a stack of processors.

“There,” she said, pointing out the dangerous gastropod. “Is there a ladder nearby?”

Andromeda and Artemisia searched around their immediate area, but no climbing devices of any sort could be found. “Just use the servers, there should be enough handholds to get you up there,” Andromeda said.

Natalya rolled up her sleeves. She approached the server rack, took a deep breath, and boosted herself up using a gap between the bottom-most and second bottom-most cases. Hand by hand and foot by foot, she clambered up to the top of the stack, the capturing container held firm between her teeth. Reaching the top, she slowly positioned the mouth of the box around the snail’s whorled turban shell.

“Ha!” Natalya said, slamming the container lid down. “Got you. Woah!”

With only her feet holding her in place, Natalya lost her balance and fell off the rack. Andromeda’s eyes went wide; powered by pure adrenaline, she rushed to catch the tiny biologist. Natalya hurtled like a meteor into her, knocking the wind straight out of Andromeda’s lungs. Fortunately, the landing was cushioned by a thick layer of adipose. The specimen container bounced off Andromeda’s squishy tummy and landed upside down on the floor.

“Sorry,” Natalya said, extending a hand to help Andromeda up. “Are you alright?”

“Oof,” Andromeda said, her breathing returning to her. “Probably just bruises, nothing major. Where’s the snail?”

Artemisia pointed out the specimen container on the ground.

The three girls watched as the snail’s chemical cocktail sputtered and sizzled against the snow of baking soda that surrounded its foot. For a moment, it looked like the plan had worked perfectly. Then, the powder turned into a translucent slurry of mucus and reaction products from the solution of acids and solvents in the snail’s fluids. Soon enough, with the baking soda's neutralizing power completely defeated, the compounds in the mollusk’s slime burned through the bottom of the plastic container as well, and it slipped out through the hole.

Natalya’s broad grin flipped upside down like she had been taken through a loop-de-loop on a rollercoaster. Buckets of tears welled up in her eyes. The gastropod was well on its way to dissolving through the metal floor as well.

“We need to get Security on this now,” Andromeda said. “They have a whole battalion of troops just a few floors above us, they’ll deal with it in -”

“No!” Natalie said, whipping back to face Andromeda. “‘Dealing with it’ to the Security Division means turning that little snail into a splatter on the floor. It doesn’t deserve that!”

Andromeda rolled her eyes. “Whatever you say.”

“Okay, yeah, I get it, you don’t see the beauty of mollusks,” Natalya said. “They’re slimy and gross and squishy, and you like to batter and deep fry them for a snack.” She stomped towards Andromeda. “But guess what? That mollusk might be vitally important to getting both of our labs more funding, so we’d better catch it if you don’t want to be stuck as an apprentice forever.”

She took a deep breath, calming herself. “We’ll just catch it on the next floor with... something,” Natalya said.

The next level held only a vacant laboratory, at least according to Odysseus. Andromeda cautiously entered while the others waited outside, on the lookout for Security troopers who might not take kindly to them snooping around and refusing to say what they were looking for. A condensed breath of mist floated aside as Andromeda padded into the lab. A thin man in a dark blue suit and tie stood in the hallway. He gazed at seemingly nothing but the empty mist, but then turned to face Andromeda.

“Have you seen an acidic snail?” Andromeda asked the man.

“No,” the man said. He walked towards her and placed his hand on her shoulder. His cold grip dug deep into her padded upper arm. “Not yet.”

“Not yet?” Andromeda echoed. She turned to face the man as he walked past her. “What does that -”

But all she saw was mist.

Andromeda sprinted out as fast as her tree-trunk legs could carry her. “There’s nothing in there to help us,” she said to Natalya and Artemisia between gasps. “Let’s just get to the next floor, maybe we’ll have more luck there.”

The car stopped at level 22. The door to the lab there was ajar. A ghostly flicker of white light scraped past through the crack, and an ooze of translucent slime streaked across the floor. Andromeda gingerly widened the door, carefully avoiding stepping in the clear viscous fluid.

“Denny... Denny just wants to watch.... Denny is hungry....” a man said, his voice a wheezing car engine choking on cigar smoke. He wore nothing but a black leotard. As he rolled on the floor, he coated himself in a thick slime which reeked of isopropyl alcohol. “You’re trash garbage!” he roared. “I’m going to eat you! Blaergh!”

Andromeda slammed the door shut. Without a word, the three mutually agreed to just wait for the snail on the next floor down.

The next sublevel was multipurpose, the area near the J8 monorail divided into a chemistry classroom, a low-level Security prison, and a small eating area with an automated burger joint. Whoever had zoned out this area clearly had been a bit scatterbrained, or perhaps no one else wanted it for anything since it was only five meters above boiling cauldrons of radiation and death. Dark hallways led off to other parts of the Deeps. 250 meters from the surface, the illumination here left the sublevel in constant twilight.

“I’m going to search that classroom,” Natalya said. “Maybe it’s unlocked.” Somehow, she hit the jackpot: not only was it open, but an emptied container for hydrofluoric acid had been stashed inside one of the cabinets. It was just the right size to trap an aggressively caustic and slippery mollusk.

While Natalya searched the classroom, Andromeda wandered over to the Security prison. From a distance, she recognized the same dented black armor from a little over a week ago inside the transparent walls of the lockup. Her helmet had been removed, her long raven hair limp and hanging over one of her mossy eyes. An android guard stood at attention and briefly analyzed her with its sensors as she approached, finding that Andromeda posed no threat. It was more concerned with its lone charge inside the prison. Dr. Katherine-Marie Voltaire sat on her thin cot inside the plexiglass cell, lit by a dangling halogen bulb. A few small holes in the cell let the stale air of the Deeps in and allowed her to communicate with whoever might decide she was worth a visit.

“Hello, Voltaire,” Andromeda said, approaching her former advisor.

“I see you’ve somehow managed to gain even more weight in a little more than a week,” Voltaire said, noticing Andromeda’s new sweatshirt and scanning up and down her paunch. “Impressive. You’re fattening up like a pig for slaughter.”

Andromeda did not respond to the bait.

“Why are you here?” Voltaire asked. “Have you come to gloat? Come to watch me wallow in misery? Do you take pleasure in my suffering?”

Andromeda remained silent.

Voltaire got up off the cot and approached the plastic barrier between herself and her former student. “Why are you here, Ms. Vainion?” she asked. The Security android took notice and went to a higher state of alertness.

“Why did you do it?” Andromeda asked. “Was I not good enough for you?”

Voltaire chuckled. “I told you all of this when I let you go. There was nothing you were doing that I couldn’t handle better myself. You were just a drain on my resources, just like I know you’re a drain on Dr. Zimov right now. Soon you’ll crack and wash out of here like everyone else who can’t truly handle science does.”

Andromeda’s eyes narrowed, and she quickly turned to leave.

“You know I’m right!” Voltaire shouted as Andromeda exited the prison.

“Andromeda!” Natalya called, waving from a table in the eating area. The brown acid container sat next to her on the bench. Andromeda made her way over and rested her weight against the tabletop.

Her starved beast of a belly growled at her. “I’m gonna grab some dinner,” Andromeda said, pointing to a nearby fast food machine. “One of you keep watch for the snail.”

Artemisia and her robot nodded. Natalya followed Andromeda over to the automated stand. The cart had a small omniprinter inside it that quickly fried, baked, and grilled whatever it was you ordered off the menu.

“What time is it?” Andromeda idly muttered as she typed in her order. She checked her phone. 3:31 PM, it read.

Natalya looked over her shoulder, and her face looked like it had been splashed with bleach. “No, no, no, no, no, no!” Natalya cried, taking a step back. “Ugh, no, we have to go back. I’m not going to have any time to study and then I’m going to fail. This is the end....” She collapsed into the bench nearby.

Andromeda went over to her. “Have you never failed a class before?” Andromeda asked, her brow furrowed.

“No! I’ve never gotten less than an A in anything,” Natalya wailed. “If I don’t do some studying, I won’t be ready for lecture tomorrow, and then I won’t be ready for the homework after lecture, and then I won’t be ready for the test, and then I’ll fail!”

Andromeda sighed. “That’s ridiculous.”

“It’s not!”

“It is. It really is,” Andromeda said. “I’m sorry, but you seriously study for fucking lecture?”

“Yes! That way I can be sure to understand -”

Andromeda cut her off. “You’re wasting your time. Go get a life.”

“Science is my life!” Natalya roared. “These mollusks are my life! What the fuck do you do all day? Sit in your dorm and eat ice cream and calamari?”

“N-no,” Andromeda said, blanching. She regathered her confidence. “Artemisia and I spent all of last week building a mech, and then we killed a giant lizard that attacked us.”

Artemisia nodded vigorously from her lookout spot.

Natalya stared at the two of them for a moment, silent. “Well, that’s just - that’s just great,” she said, breaking into a pained smile. She forced her index finger into Andromeda’s cavernous belly button. “I’m so glad a pair of worthless gluttons like you could save the Institute.”

Andromeda shot back and gave Natalya an indignant salute in the form of a dismissive wave. “Okay, fuck you,” she said. She stomped over to the vending machine and grabbed her boxed cheeseburger. “Fuck you,” she repeated as she walked past Natalya over to Artemisia. The roboticist exchanged watches with Andromeda to get her own meal.

“What, you can’t take a compliment?” Natalya asked, her tone laced with sarcasm.

Andromeda took a deep breath, screwing up her face. “Okay. Listen. Do you want to know the real secret of this place? Classwork, homework, tests - it doesn’t mean jackshit. It’s artificial and worthless. You know what I do when I don’t know something?”

“I bet that happens a lot...” Natalya said.

“I look it up,” Andromeda said, ignoring the comment. “Or I have the lab A.I. look it up! Science isn’t about being a walking encyclopedia. It’s about being able to solve complicated problems creatively.”

“But I still need to pass my classes to become a doctoral candidate,” Natalya said. “I can’t do that if I don’t study.”

“Have you ever asked Dr. Blackstone if the amount you study is normal?” Andromeda asked. “Or anyone? Because it’s not. If you couldn’t handle the workload, you wouldn’t be here in the first place.”

Natalya tried to come up with a retort, but couldn’t. She sulked in her chair.

Andromeda turned her anger onto the helpless burger as she tore open the box and chomped on the spongy, ketchup-soaked bun.

“I hate to intrude, but you really shouldn’t eat that,” Odysseus said, appearing from Andromeda’s phone. “It contains - ”

“Odysseus,” Andromeda said, staring the A.I. down. “I don’t care.”

“Then perhaps it would be better for me to inform you that I have located the snail,” Odysseus said. “I would encourage you to hurry though, since I will remind you that we are just above the Unit 4 containment.”

“Show us!” Andromeda said. Odysseus pointed to a small black lump nearby.

Natalya jumped up and rushed over to the snail with her new trap. “Got it!” she cried, and screwed the lid on tight. “Just in time.”

But the snail had no interest in pleasing the young biologist. It circled about its prison a few times, scraping its toothy beak and radula against the bottom. Bit by bit, it cut through the acid-proof plastic. It landed at Natalya’s feet with a plop.

Natalya stared at the gastropod. The mollusk’s eyestalks, seemingly filled with frigid, unknowing rage, stared back. “Raraaaaaugh!” Natalya roared, picking her foot up to smash the tiny creature, before stomping it down just next to it. She collapsed to the ground, sobbing and defeated.

Andromeda whipped out her phone. “Odd, get Security on the line,” she said. “How much time do we have until that thing breaches the containment?”

“At the current rate, maybe... five minutes?” Odysseus said.

“Do it quick! We don’t -”

A blue ray of freezing energy shot from the darkness and froze the snail solid. Vanya stepped out from one of the shadowy hallways and wiped the misty barrel of the cryonic beam with a microfibre cloth. “Hello, Andromeda. I heard you were having a problem,” he said.

“Odysseus...” Andromeda growled to the A.I.

“My apologies,” Odysseus said. “I informed Dr. Zimov of your troubles just as you left Dr. Blackstone’s lab. He was not certain if he would make it in time.”

“If he’d told you I was coming, you might have not been thorough in your efforts to stop this creature,” Vanya said, picking up the frozen snail in a hazard-gloved finger and placing it in a titanium cylinder. “It seems your efforts were valiant, but futile.”

Andromeda’s mouth was a thin line.

Vanya ignored Andromeda’s expression. “This did prove a great test of the cryonic beam’s freezing potential,” he said, “And your software improvements were essential to optimizing the beam flux.”

Andromeda blinked. “Oh. Yeah. Uh, no problem. It was a simple coding job.”

“Glad to hear it,” Vanya said. “Now, I believe the four of us should get Byron’s specimens and get back to the surface. Being this far from the sun for this long can make one quite a bit mad.” He looked at Natalya, whose face was wracked by quakes of disbelief, her right eyelid twitching.

The ride back to the Blackstone lab was uneventful. They summoned a courier robot to push the cart full of specimens for them, then boarded a train back to the surface. Natalya and Artemisia sandwiched Andromeda between them, while Vanya sat across the aisle, using his cybernetic hand to read a holographic display of some scientific journal.

Andromeda looked at Natalya. The junior was pale and fidgeting. She kept pulling out a small cloth to polish her glasses for the umpteenth time.

“Alright! Urgh, I’m sorry, okay,” Andromeda suddenly said. Vanya looked up from his paper, a bit confused. “I’m sorry for what I said earlier. It’s just - you know what, nevermind. This is stupid.”

“Whatever it is, it isn’t stupid,” Natalya said, sniffling. “I accept your apology.”

“You... you remind me of myself, okay!” Andromeda sputtered. “That’s it,”

Natalya looked as if Andromeda had slapped her. “What?”

“There was a time before all of this when I had your motivation, and drive, and organization,” Andromeda said. “I wasn’t a complete studying freak, sure, but I wanted to be the best. I was passionate about things, like you are with mollusks. Then I failed once, and all of that just fucking evaporated.”

“Are you saying that’s going to happen to me?” Natalya said, her eyes wide with fear.

“No!” Andromeda said. “No, of course not. I guess I’m just saying... don’t let another person’s mistake ruin your dreams.”

Natalya took a deep breath and calmed herself down. Vanya gazed into Andromeda’s soul with the laser-like vision of his multi-lensed eyes. The monorail slid into the station at Regulus Tower, and the four scientists disembarked.

Dr. Blackstone met them in his genetics lab on level 91 of the tower, having called a courier android to move his tank. The space was filled with smooth white test tube racks, shaker baths, PCR machines, and other gadgets for DNA analysis. After a brief demonstration of the cryonic beam on one of the other specimens, Vanya unveiled the still-frozen acid snail. The nudibranch scientist gazed at it with his beady black eyespots.

“Hm. Yes, this does seem novel,” Dr. Blackstone said. “You said it came from a drainage pipe?”

“Yes,” Natalya answered. “It fell out of a pipe from above the lab.”

“That’s an unusual place for a land snail, but nonetheless. Could you slice off a bit of its foot for me?”

Natalya took up a small exacto blade and cut off the end of the mollusk’s tail. After thawing the piece off, carefully washing it clean of any remaining mucus, and mashing the sample to a pulp to lyse the cells, she placed it in a solution to extract the snail’s DNA. A few more processes later, and the genetic sequence was read out on one of the lab computers.

“Curious,” Dr. Blackstone said. “Very curious.”

“What’s wrong?” Vanya asked. He sidled up next to the tank.

“There’s a peculiar genetic sequence embedded within the junk DNA of this snail’s genome,” Blackstone said. “First it lists 26 of the 64 codons, each spaced with a stop codon in between. Then 16 of those codons repeat about 100 times.”

“It’s a genetic signature,” Natalya said.

“Precisely correct,” Blackstone said, “And it belongs to one ‘Lord’ Stefan Andros. Now, as a member of the peerage myself, I can assure you that Dr. Andros is not a lord of anything.”

“Arrogant prick,” Vanya muttered.

“Strong language,” Blackstone said, “But I’m inclined to agree.”

“I’ll report this to Security,” Vanya said. “They’re very tired of Dr. Andros being careless with his pets, and I’m certain they would just love to hear about this.”

“It seems our collaboration has been a smashing success, wouldn’t you say?” Dr. Blackstone asked.

“Agreed,” Vanya said. “I’m looking forward to continuing to work with you in the future. Andromeda, Andromeda’s...” He looked at Artemisia. “Friend? I think we’ve taken up enough of Dr. Blackstone’s time. Let’s get back to Altair Tower.”

Natalya smiled meekly at Andromeda and Artemisia from her place at the lab computer. “Thanks for helping me out,” she said.

“Don’t mention it,” Andromeda said, turning to follow Vanya out the door. As she left, she just vaguely heard Natalya start to say, “Dr. Blackstone, I’d like to ask you about my studying habits....” The full conversation was muted by the lab door closing behind them.

“I didn’t want to make a fuss in front of Dr. Blackstone or his assistant,” Vanya said to Andromeda as they rode the elevator down, the apertures of his goggles narrowing, “But I didn’t say you could bring a colleague with you.”

“You didn’t say I couldn’t,” Andromeda shot back. “Artemisia was helpful in getting all the specimens together. And she’s an expert roboticist. I think we should form a collaborative lab with hers.”

“That’s not something an apprentice can arrange,” Vanya said. “What level is she?”

“She’s a doctoral student.”

“Then we’d need to talk to her doctoral advisor. Who is that?”

“I don’t know,” Andromeda said. “She won’t say.”

Vanya looked to Artemisia. “Who do you work for?” he asked.

Artemisia exchanged glances with the android on her shoulder. She sighed, and said, “Dr. Wulfrik Argentine.”

Vanya’s many eyes went wide and he began to cackle his scratchy, grinding laugh. “You’re joking,” he said. “That old man’s retired. He doesn’t take doctoral students anymore.”

“He’s my father,” Artemisia said.

“Yes. Her full name is Artemisia Argentine,” Odysseus said from Vanya’s hand. The scientist stopped laughing. “And I can confirm that her public records show she is Dr. Wulfrik Argentine’s daughter.”

Vanya raised his goggles, revealing his ice blue eyes, and turned his gaze to Andromeda. “Apprentice, you continue to surprise me,” he muttered.

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Back in the darkness of the Hades Deep, Dr. Voltaire still sat in her cell awaiting trial. There was not much for her to do except pace back and forth and catch up on many nights of sleep lost during her graduate school days. That night, however, she was restless. She faintly heard the drone of the monorail car stop at the prison’s level.

Someone walked up to the android guard and lobbed a vial of acid at its central processor. The caustic fluid melted the machine’s armor and circuitry like butter in a microwave. The android groaned and sparked as it collapsed, destroyed. Its assailant cooly entered the lockup and immediately identified the sole person held captive there.

“Who are you?” Voltaire asked, approaching the man at the plexiglass wall. A sensor suppression mask obscured his face, the low hum it emitted blinding and deafening any snooping electronics. He wore a black hazard suit for protection against whatever threats he might face in his mission. Pulling a metal canister off the suit’s utility belt, he placed it against the transparent wall between them. With a push of a button on the base, the lid slid open, allowing the gastropod inside to extend its foot onto the glass and unleash its cutting power. The bulletproof plastic popped and bubbled as the acidic snail crawled up and around the edge of the cage.

“Who are you?” Voltaire asked again. The man removed his helmet, revealing a shock of flax-blonde hair and dark green eyes like a pair of polished beryls.

“Lord Stefan Andros,” the man said. “I require your services, Dr. Voltaire.”

Within a few moments, there was enough of a gash that Lord Andros could punch the wall down with the augmented strength provided by the hazard suit. Voltaire dodged out of the way of the falling, rough-shapen panel. Her savior extended his hand through the opening to help her through. He picked his creation up off the remaining piece of the destroyed prison block, his fingers protected by acid-proof gauntlets standard to hazard armor.

Voltaire smiled. “Of course, my Lord,” she said, but suddenly her stomach growled at her like a horrible genetic abomination prodded with an electric spear. “But first, let me get something to eat. You would not believe what they feed you in there.” Voltaire wandered over to the nearby fast food cart and placed her order.

Dr. Andros chuckled and crushed his acid snail beneath his heel.