The Harvest
“Have you ever wondered why they need these seemingly unimportant objects?” Hellbeorn asks, cutting down another peaceful jelly and harvesting its organs, “and like, ten of them at that.”
“What? Who?” Anineteenth replies, dealing with his own insurgence of quest-related creatures on the other side of the reef, his voice only slightly muffled by the oxygen-restoring bubble encasing his head.
“These strange denizens of every town we visit that seem to think its our job and ours alone to help them collect five ancient artefacts or kill ten leper worms or score him seven pieces of Babelfish lung.”
“They explain why they need them, you know, every time we take a quest they-”
“Yeah but I never actually listen,” Hellbeorn interrupts as he continues the unpleasant job of gutting the fish only to find – somehow – it without the required organ, “ugh, empty. These drop-rates are horrific. I’m getting like one lung per five fish. How do these things survive?”
“They probably don’t need lungs, what with the whole amphibian thing they have going.”
“So basically this quest is about us putting a stop to the evolution of the Babelfish?”
“No, Jermiah Whitewater told us he needs the lungs for-”
“Don’t care,” Hellbeorn cuts in again, angrily, “All I’m saying is we go through a lot of meaningless garbage to save the world.”
“Story of our lives,” Anine says to herself glumly, perking up only slightly when inside her latest kill she finds a shimmering lung. She takes it and thinks about the surface. About how much she missed breathing real air. About how, in every zone, the underwater area is a pile of unadulterated suck.
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
Okay, calm down, gotta stop venting through my characters. But seriously, how much does any underwater level in any game suck? Name me one good one that isn’t Ecco the Dolphin or somethin similar, smartass.
