Remembrance

We are Octolings,

And we do as we're told

That's what makes us strong and true,

Keeps us brave and bold.

Marina and her family are on a hike up the mountain. The cool breeze ruffles through Marina's tentacles; she pushes one out of her eye and takes a few fast steps. "Bet I can get to the top first!"

"Betcha can't, tentacrop," snaps her brother, Harbor. He sticks his tongue out at her.

"Kids-"

"We're not kids anymore, Mom," says Marina. She glares at her younger brother, who's making his way to a fallen... it has a name, round brown thing. Inconsequential. No, no it's not, but don't worry. Enjoy it, it won't last. But he's balanced on it, suckers clinging, and using it to cross a line of water. "Least, I'm not. And I can be useful even without a full eight tentacles."

Marina sees her mother come closer, sees the hands on either side of her face, but feels nothing at the kiss on her forehead. "Of course you can. You're-"

"Engineer Ida, decommence remembrance." The metallic voice in her head makes her flinch back, even after all this time, and she shakes her head, blinking fiercely. The pink-tinted sky, the tall brown plants, all of it disappears. Instead, she waits in ink with the other three members of her Splatoon, on a small metal platform a super jump above an even larger metal platform. "The Mighty Octostomp has suffered a severe malfunction. Please gather pieces and return to base for improvements and repair."

Marina lifts up from her ink to get a better look at the area. An explosion of orange-orange? no, just brighter pink than normal-ink surrounds a charred spot where, once, a juvenile zapfish lived.

The bass beats reverberating in Marina's skull tell her to be angry, so she's angry. Angrier than she would be anyway. Something went wrong. This part of their plan to retake the surface-all of the surface, not just the grounds of Mount Nantai she remembers walking-has failed.

But as her splatoon super jumps down to the field, and the ink stings her feet so she hisses and pulls out her octoshot and makes it the proper shade of pink (pink, always pink, what other colors matter?) she tries to remember what Harbor's face looks like. And she can't. Because she's not in remembrance any more.

And the sky wasn't supposed to be pink, but in school they said it was something called blue.

And if she didn't know the name for those plants, she would've asked. She asks about everything. Which is why she turns to Engineer Sushi and asks, "When you were younger, did you ever climb the mountain?"

"Still in remembrance, Ida?" Sushi shakes his head and reaches over, tugging on her lucky tentacle-the one that makes her unfit for combat. "I did, when I wasn't much older than you. And my younger sibling, she'd have been about fourteen and just getting the hang of octoling form, challenged me to a race and balanced on a fallen plant over a moving water line." Sushi's smile softens. "You remind me of her, sometimes."