The legs wildly struck out at him. "Put me down!"
"No. What are you?" Before it could argue, he snapped his jaws at it. "I don't enjoy waiting. You will tell me what you are, or I will rip out all your circuits."
For good measure, he stretched his jaw as he had not been able to do for such a long time. Proteus was not one of the People of Water, and his body showed the differences. He felt his jaw snapping, popping and then finally it opened as it was always meant to do. It split along his cheeks, likely spilling even more light into the water as the bones of his jaw cracked in half. And then it kept splitting, a line carving out his throat, the twin pieces of his jaw falling open to reveal more teeth that stretched down his neck and into the wide open maw he revealed.
The droid squeaked. "I am Pilot! I was sent to release you."
"What took you so long?"
It scrambled still, the legs still moving erratically. "I was only awakened a hundred years ago, and the ocean is rather large. I did not know where they had moved your tomb, and like I said, there’s no tracker on you."
"Why were you programmed to awaken only a hundred years ago?"
"That was the appropriate time to... to..." Pilot stopped moving and then said, "I don't know. You were supposed to do the rest, I think."
With his mouth still split wide, he grinned. "Then I will do whatever I want."
Two
Proteus
The droid directed him through the sea to a place he had never been. Or at least, he had no memory of it. Proteus had seen many things in the years he had been alive, so he was surprised that there were still places in this water that he did not know about. The droid surprised him often, though.
He swam past ancient shipwrecks and signs of battle. This area had apparently seen much of the war between humans and the People of Water. He had known it would happen long before the world had been destroyed. Perhaps that had even been part of why they had locked him up.
Proteus hadn't asked. He'd been too busy fighting against them, snarling that they would not put him in that damned coffin and weld him inside of it. The complicated locking system was one he still saw when he closed his eyes. All the pieces and parts that he'd destroyed year after year from the inside. He'd even bitten some of that metal off, taking hundreds of years to tear at it with his teeth that would always grow back. And still, the mechanism did not break.
Shaking himself free from the memories, he stared at a massive ship with masts so tall that it was clear it was very old. "How is that still here?" he muttered as they swam by it.
The droid in his hand wriggled. "Time is not the same in this place. I have only been here once before, when I was looking for you, and it is not the same as the rest of the world. This is an odd pocket of the ocean. A place outside of time."
He could feel it. The strangeness in the water. The odd glide of sensation against his skin that wasn't entirely water. He had seen the People of Water create a slick oil that oozed over their skin, allowing them to slip away from predators. The water here felt almost like that. Thick and hard to breathe.
Still, he took a deep breath of it, forcing the ooze through his gills, and moved farther into the depths.
The droid pointed him in certain directions, but it never said much until he finally saw where they were headed. The shadow looming in the sea before them was somewhat of a facility he recognized. Back in the days before they had imprisoned him, Proteus had worked on many creations. This strange box may have been one of them.
"The humans were the ones who wanted to wake me?" he asked, confusion turning his words a little guttural.
"Yes."
"Why?"
"I do not know. They wanted you to see what had happened in your absence, though. And they want you to be the person to take control of the sea once again." The droid clicked its legs against his hand to get his attention. "We go there."
The metallic box was similar to how he remembered the research facilities. The floating building was tethered to the ground by massive anchors. Very out of place for where it was at these depths. But considering it hadn't imploded, he could onlyimagine that it was built to withstand time. Unless, of course, this place helped keep it whole as well.
He swam closer, surveying to see if there was any glass on the exterior he could peer through. But there wasn't. It was just a box. A large box. He imagined there were many rooms within, but he couldn't get a glimpse of what the humans had hidden inside.
"This looks like a trap," he snarled.
"It is not."
"How do I know I can even trust you? You are merely the droid who released me."
"The only thing that has done so in centuries," Pilot reminded him. "You were requested to be released for a reason. I cannot tell you what the reason is, or why they want you alive. The only answers you will get are inside that building."
He didn't like it. He didn't trust the humans any more than he trusted the People of Water. But he did want answers.
