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The Hadal Blacksite was dying.
The Blacksite was a terrible, beautiful thing. A massive monster of metal and concrete and glass, a graveyard for thousands, both human and not. Her caverns groaned, metal wavered; water trickled in endlessly over the floors, flowing through the cracks and grooves and wearing them deeper. Windows burst, swarms of glass shards rode the temporary currents. Rooms shuddered like the lungs of a drowning man.
No one cared. They didn't bother to clean up, to rescue those who could have been. They didn't even care to nuke the place, either. The Crystal was worth more than anything; with it gone, so was all interest, so was all life. And so, the Blacksite was sentenced to die of her own accord.
Expendables no longer roamed the shifting labyrinth. Those close enough to the docks got to leave; those less fortunate were deemed a lost cause and left to the whims of the monsters. After a while, the Anglers no longer rushed the halls either, having disappeared one by one, over months, into the vast darkness outside of the Blacksite.
Sebastian had already been sickly, worsened by stress. He was a brave soul nonetheless. When the Crystal was taken, he tried, he tried his damnedest to make a plan still work. It failed. Painter and Navi tried to use as little power as possible, the barest semblance of still being there, like crouching under a ceiling that inevitably lowered til it crushed them. Lights dimmed, flickered, and never turned back on.
On the outside of the Blacksite, near the weakening light of a floodlight, a smear of green interrupted the water.
Mr. Lopee wasn’t sure why he had begun gravitating towards light. Perhaps, whatever sliver of humanity remained in him was showing itself, now that there was no one else to be human. He watched the minute particles drifting in the floodlight’s beam, perfectly still, standing on yet never touching the ground. He watched them for hours. Was it longer than that?
He had found the last nest of Deep Sea Bunnies, cowering together as water lapped at their enclosure. The modifications made on their bodies to allow them to survive on land had made them tragically unable to thrive in water as they may have before. He had pet each of them, once, and their fluttery ears had twitched curiously at the half-corporeal cold. He left, and avoided that room for a long time.
The ground began to tremble, disturbing the stillness of the floodlight. Lopee lifted himself from his thoughts to watch Lucy trundle on, each massive step taking far longer than it ever used to, unmaintained machinery catching on itself and groaning, once-blinding lights hardly cutting through the black. She was the only surviving Trenchbleeder of the four. No one had switched her programming to roaming before leaving, so she had still drilled the ocean floor. With no one collecting what she stored, she had eventually stopped on her own.
Sometimes, when Lucy stopped to drill, Lopee would materialize atop her “head,” as close to the heavens as he could ever get. If he stared long enough, he could convince himself that he could still see the stars, incomprehensibly distant beyond the veil of crushing water.
Lucy passed. The floodlight dimmed some more. The neighboring spot on the sand where Lopee had stood was empty.
The Blacksite was changing. Beyond the physical deterioration, things were… disappearing. Lopee half-walked, half-drifted through rooms that he found were more and more the same each time. Those unique rooms that used to add flavor, the sections that seemed like they didn’t belong, they faded from the Blacksite, the entities contained in them vanished, the tenuous connections to their alternate realities closed. All that remained were the purely Urbanshade-made gray and blue corridors.
In particular, the Man from the Mindscape used to show themself to Lopee, a brief moment of friendly coexistence before they parted ways. They no longer did. Any trace of the Mindscape was gone, too. Lopee wouldn’t say they were friends, but something felt admittedly and pointedly empty without them. A routine was broken. He wondered, briefly, where they might be now. It didn’t matter. He would never know.
Miraculously, they had once played a game of chess. They were never quite present at the same time; Lopee would visit the board once in a while to find the next move made. It was… pleasant. The board would be buried somewhere by now, the pieces scattered beyond hope. He couldn’t remember who had won.
Time dragged on.
Time was losing meaning. There was no sun or moon; there were no working clocks. A heavy silence blanketed the Blacksite, another layer of blankness to complement the dark. Lopee turned the memories of everyone and everything he had known over in his mind again and again, an endless game of telephone with himself. It was warping the memories, he knew that; they were pearls worn smooth and imperfect. But they had to be remembered somehow. He turned them over one more time.
For some time after the Crystal was taken, he would still sometimes catch himself trying to sense expendables, trying to reach into the void to see if anyone needed to be caught. How silly of him. But it had been his purpose, after all.
At some point, some Searchlights passed near the Blacksite again, a rare source of light that pulled Lopee from his state of half-existence. He would always turn his eyes to their bright tail fins and spotlights, just to have something to focus on; this time, it felt different, less clear. Their details eluded him for the first time. Even a dead man could age, it seemed. He couldn’t find it in himself to feel dread at that fact, or any emotion at all. If anything, this was a good sign, no? Deterioration meant change, something different to look forward to. It meant a possible end.
He looked down at his hand, and saw the ground through it.
The herds of Abstract Art had roamed out over the sands once the Blacksite flooded completely. They never strayed too far; a meaningless migration out of habit. Lopee joined them a few times in walking the ocean floor, skirting the edge of the group until they came to a standstill again. Eventually, of course, their concrete wore down, the rebar inside them rusted through, and their movement ground to a permanent halt. Poor things.
He spent a lot of time thinking of nothing at all. Every memory already gone over, every remaining room already walked. A wisp of green that barely shimmered over the sand, as if the next time the black water moved it would wash it away entirely. He dearly wished it would.
It was easy to say, in hindsight, that being a part of Mr. Shade’s project in any way was a bad idea. In fact, Lopee understood from the start that there were risks. But could anyone have foreseen such a fate as this?
The DiVine rooms had been among what you might call his favorites. A minuscule approximation of the greenery and sun up top. He had the privilege of witnessing some of the DiVine moving about, outside of attacking intruders. They were slow and charmingly curious creatures. With no one able to care for them, they slowly dried out, and their discolored, statue-like remains were eventually swept away.
Lucy fell.
Lopee watched from afar, only faintly making out the shapes of crumpling metal. Her lights winked out as she gracefully, ponderously swooned into the gravel. The tallest remaining part of the Blacksite, at long last reduced to just another heap of scrap out of many. He bowed his head for her for a long moment.
A vague memory surfaced of the beast named Pandemonium. He had once made the mistake of being in its line of sight, and it rushed for him instantly, shrieking in a voice so loud and shrill it might raise the dead. Of course, it couldn’t do anything to him, but Lord was it determined. In some other time, the thought might have made him smile.
He could feel the water weighing down on him, stinging. Had it always been this way? He swore it used to be as easy to walk through as air.
There was a particular expendable, one who… he couldn’t remember. He couldn’t remember.
There used to be an armchair here. Lopee sank into the memory of it. He wasn’t much more than a memory, himself; he couldn’t see his body anymore. He couldn’t see anything else in the dark, either, so he shut his eyes. It made no difference. Distantly, he thought of the stars.
The Blacksite was nothing more than rubble.
There used to be a man here.