The Island of Secrets

Epilogue

KateSeleneMelody3OCs

Captain Barnacles POV:

Three months.

We've been training, learning, and searching for three months now.

I guess it's to be expected that it would take a while to find them. There's a lot of ocean to search, even with the technology that we have access to now from Selene's connections.

But still, three months... and nothing that could tell us where to look for our missing crewmates.

I know they're alive, though. Or at least, one of them is. Some of the sea creatures we've encountered in the past have gotten suspicious about the Octopod drifting around the ocean for so long, without any sign of a single Octonaut.

Some of them found us at this base, and have been expressing their concerns and desires to help. Everytime I hear about a sighting of our stolen ship, I feel lighter.

It brings knowledge that we're not too late.

The problem is, it keeps moving. The sighting and the news of it can be weeks apart.

I was still breathing hard from the training exercise I had just been doing - a test in stealth, speed and lock picking as you chased a very elusive villain target - as I made it down to the basement bay. I had always found that this place, with a large black-blue pool in the centre of it, and seats and screens around the edge, looked bizarrely like the Launch Bay, and I think it just made us miss our ship ever more. Upon hearing a voice, I whirled around and came face to face with Sophia Lycanth, Selene's older sister. I did my best not to grimace at the sight of her, but it was a hard thing. The Lycanth family was really testing my patience. Our oh-so-gracious hosts were infuriatingly calm and collected, but it didn't change that no-one trusted each other one jot.

"Do you need something?" I asked, trying to be civil.

"Barnacles. I just thought I'd let you know that we have a location of your missing ship, and along with it, your missing friends."

isobeljones2000

I smiled at this news. After three months of waiting, it was still music to my ears. This was by no means the first, but every fresh start was increasingly welcome. Yet another lead, one of thirteen already over the last three months, by various sea creatures swimming in and giving their eye-witness accounts of seeing the Octopod sailing by, or even which island the villains had gone to next. A worrying number of them, I had to say. Maybe it was a trick; they somehow knew we were trying to track them so had spent all that time setting up decoys. Maybe a new giant master plan akin to the Island of Fear, with a whole host of islands caught in the mix. But Lupo, despite his many interrogations - by me included, since Stephan had the inkling that Selene and I might be able to rile him up enough to get him to accidentally spill the beans - wasn't saying anything. And on our thirteen previous attempts at heading to the locations that our witnesses directed us to... we found nothing at all.

"I'll get the others, and we'll figure out things from there." I replied shortly, and left before she could simper any more.

As I walked through the hallways of the hidden organization looking for the rest of my crew, I thought about all the things that we'd worked on.

Dani was definitely the best combatants of our crew, with Tweak as a close second. Dashi had learned many more science skills, as did Shellington. Selene was a sort of a jack-of-all-trades, being pretty good at every skill. Elena and Christian, who I would have preferred to be relocated somewhere safe, were acting as stand in medics in Peso's absence.

As for me, I was doing my best to learn everything I could about tactics. How to analyze a situation and quickly come up with a course of action, one that preferably reduced the number of injuries that my crew might have to encounter.