It took us almost half an hour to flip the Slyck a single time. The hardening oil made it easier to hold on but infinitely harder to do the actual flip, but we’d eventually managed to pry the Slyk free while being gentle enough not to harden the oil. It was a whole lot of slow movements and waiting, but when that rock crashed down on the deck, it was beyond cathartic.

“Finally.” Jun sighed, leaning against the Slyk as she caught her breath. “The drowned rock is fifty times heavier than any of the others. It’ll be so satisfying to send it crashing to the abyss when we throw it off the side of this drowned trawler.”

“I-I don’t.” I gasped, pressing my hands against the rock as I tried my damndest to catch my breath. I really needed to up my health stat so my body wasn’t as much of a burden to my armor. “I don’t think we’ll be flipping this fucker any more than the one more time we need to.”

“Maybe not right away, but I’m not leaving this hazard before that boulder is smashed into tiny little pieces.” Jun decided, brushing the rock with her knuckles before punching it as hard as she could. She looked down at her knuckles in frustration when they came away dusty, and the rock unharmed. “Okay, maybe a few big chunks. Even if we need Okeria’s help with it.”

I had to admit, it would be cathartic to see this thing broken and leaking while we sifted through it for its core. No; that was for later. Much later, when we could damage this thing on our own. If I was going to get the core out of this thing, I wanted to make sure I would get a copy of it. That meant I had to do at least some of the work.

“One more flip and we’ll be able to get down there.” I said with a gesture at the perfectly square hatch that was now only half-covered in oil, and an eighth covered with rock. “We’ve been up here for almost an hour and a half, so let’s get this done and dusted. I want to see what the inside of a rock-ship looks like.”

“Trawler.” Jun corrected. “Rock-trawler. Ships go along the surface, trawlers go along the bottom.”

“Right, of course.” I said with a roll of my eyes and barely restrained sarcasm. “How could I forget?”

The second flip of the rock was just barely easier than the first. I didn’t risk using any of //ENDLESS’s ribbons, just in case the inside of the trawler wasn’t quite as safe as the outside, but by the time we managed to flip the rock off the hatch I really wished that I had. My body was not in good enough shape for what I’d just done.

“I fucking hate rocks.” I groaned, instantly contradicting myself and consuming the recovery potion that I’d stuck on //ENDLESS. “If the trawler is full of these things, I’m going to scream.”

Jun grunted in agreement and bent down to set her fingers into ten little holes in the top of the hatch. They grew slightly when she pressed into them, and I heard the hissing of steam somewhere below us. It was followed by a series of loud clicks, and the whoosh of sudden depressurization as the hatch opened just a crack.

“Since we’re not planning on going underwater, we don’t need to wait for depressurization.” Jun said as if we didn’t have armor that would protect us anyway, then gestured for me to hand her a rock. I grabbed the largest one I could carry in one hand and gave it to her, which she slammed onto the hatch with a little too much force. “Just in case something weird happens. We don’t want to get trapped inside like in the abyss-bottom disaster.”

Before I could get a word in, Jun dropped down into the trawler. The impact of her boots hitting something below was muffled and dusty, not the metallic clang that I’d been expecting from the inside of a boat. But I probably should’ve expected that the entire trawler would be made of rock.

I stuck my head over the hatch and saw Jun standing in the middle of a perfect circle of dust. “See anything down there?”

She planted her hands on her hips as she looked around, then craned her neck up to me. “Nothing so far. The entry room’s usually pretty small, but this one’s a lot bigger than any trawler I’ve been on.” She said as she watched me swing my legs over the side, then stepped out of the landing zone. “The rock’s still on the hatch?”

“Haven’t touched it.” I confirmed, sliding my ass over the lip. One more motion and the trawler fell out from underneath me, the floor of the deck below rapidly rushing up to meet my feet.

Jun had already blown away most of the dust under the hatch, so my landing only reverberated through the floor like a small earthquake. The inside of the trawler was somehow far more unstable than the deck above, which hadn’t so much as trembled no matter how we manhandled the slyk.

Jun patted me on the shoulder as I stood, then pulled me close and gestured with her other hand at the inside of the trawler. “Welcome to the least luxurious trawler that’s ever existed. Probably. Well, in the last couple of centuries at least. Usually there would be a bunch of kiosks with maps of the place and things to do, but as you can see, this room has absolutely nothing at all.”

“Nothing but rocks.” I chuckled, letting Jun lead me towards the only door out of the room. I looked back to the hatch to see how we were supposed to get out, and saw a stone ladder on the other side of the room with rungs wrapped in yellow tape. “How luxurious were the trawlers you took?”

Jun’s grip tightened ever so slightly, then relaxed as she blew out a breath. “Uh… very. We kinda had our own private one.”

I raised an eyebrow at that. “A small one?”

“Nnno. Not one of the huge, thousand-people ones, though. But it was… big enough.” Jun said slowly. Unless there was a significant cultural difference between us, which there definitely could be, that usually meant someone was beyond loaded. “Can we talk about something else, please? Like, um, what people do on trawlers while they’re underwater! Yeah, that’s something else.”

“If you have a private one, then how would you know what other people did on trawlers?” I asked.

“I’ve been on normal ones too.” Jun said defensively. “Just because we had a private one doesn’t mean that it was always available for me. I have a big family, and if the trawler was in another city, and I had to be somewhere, I couldn’t just wait for it.”

“Okay, then tell me.” I said, walking out from Jun’s weakening grip to put my hands on the door to the rest of the trawler. “We had cruise ships back on Earth, so maybe they were like that?”

The door crumbled away at my touch, revealing a room that was so strange that it stole all other thoughts from my mind. Jun stood there next to me a second later, and I felt her shoulder press into mine as she struggled to take in what we were seeing.

Oil was everywhere. It saturated the walls, pooled over the entire floor, and hung from the ceiling in long glistening stalactites. Strangely shaped rocks poked through the oil at random, like weeds growing through cracks in asphalt. They were like plants, but not. Large rocky trees swirled with oily bark and a canopy of rocky needles bathed in a torrent of oil, giving shade to smaller bushes with thin stems and plump berries that looked like raspberries but with the bumpy fruits replaced with equal parts round pebbles and balls of oil.

Then there were the massive spears of rock that jutted out of the ground, barely reaching from the ground below to the top of the room as they went from massive at the bottom to needle-thin at the top. Oil crawled up them in a spiral pattern, reaching the very tip before it spread out to coat the ceiling in thick webs.

I turned to look at the faraway walls of the trawler’s insides, noticing patterns created from a myriad of different sized and shaped rocks pressed into oil that slithered over it in thin tendrils. It was like looking at an ancient temple with carvings all over the walls that told the story of a long-dead civilization, but I couldn’t recognize anything on them as person-like in the slightest. It was all abstract shapes and sharp lines, spirals and flourishes and filigree that started abruptly and ended equally so when the shapes didn’t seem even close to finished.

And finally, there was the thing in the middle of it all. A massive stone that was completely smooth except for two lines of oil that gave it a very insectile look; one perfectly down the center until three-quarters of the way down, where it met a line that circled the rock until it touched the oil. Like how you’d start drawing a ladybug on a rock.

From my previous experience with Endra, I really didn’t like the idea of fighting a giant rock-beetle slyk. A visible pulse of electricity began from the massive centerpiece, emanating outwards and up all the protruding rocks until it reached a high point or collapsed in on itself and disappeared. The oil shivered for a handful of seconds after the pulse, then returned to utter stillness.

“This is wrong.” Jun whispered, backing away from the door as another pulse of electricity built within the center stone. “Those things are just myths. Stories for little kids. Not… not reality. They aren’t real. Endra’s living stem and now this… they can’t be real. Are they even our stories if they come from here? If they come from somewhere real?”

I was about to ask what Jun was on about, but then I remembered finding a centaur in one of the first hazards I’d cleared. It was massive with bulging muscles under leather-thick skin on both its horse and ‘human’ halves, but I so clearly remembered its eyes. Those twin pinpricks of bright yellow with lightning bolts of sickly red on otherwise perfectly black orbs, opened so wide they looked like they would pop out of their sockets at any moment. It spoke in a language that only had words for anger and mania, and there was no time for awe at the mythical creature brought to life.

This world had drawn inspiration from our culture, then twisted it until it was just recognizable enough to be terrifying once more. Greek myths, Egyptian myths, Mesoamerican myths, and everything in between. The histories, both true and altered, were taken equally in the making of the hazards. One particularly unpleasant hazard had been a sort of alternate neo-nazi version of the events of world war two, where Hitler and the axis were these shining beacons of hope against a caricaturly evil allied force and absurdly overpowered Jewish people.

It would’ve been hilarious if one of our own hadn’t openly sided with the nazis the moment it was clear we could pick sides. I’d always wondered if the reason we never saw him again after clearing that hazard was because one of us sought him out and gave him the true end he proved he deserved, or if he’d gone back to that hazard and lived out the disgusting fantasy he’d always dreamed of back on Earth.

But I wasn’t in human territory anymore.