CreepsMcPasta Creepypasta Radio - "I’m a Marine Biologist. Something’s Building Structures on the Ocean Floor" Creepypasta

Episode Date: May 8, 2025

CREEPYPASTA STORY►frequent-catCreepypastas are the campfire tales of the internet. Horror stories spread through Reddit r/nosleep, forums and blogs, rather than word of mouth. Whether you believe these scary stories to be true or not is left to your own discretion and imagination. LISTEN TO CREEPYPASTAS ON THE GO-SPOTIFY► https://open.spotify.com/show/7l0iRPd...iTUNES► https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast...SUGGESTED CREEPYPASTA PLAYLISTS-►"Good Places to Start"-    • "I wasn't careful enough on the deep ...  ►"Personal Favourites"-    • "I sold my soul for a used dishwasher...  ►"Written by me"-    • "I've been Blind my Whole Life" Creep...  ►"Long Stories"-    • Long Stories  FOLLOW ME ON-►Twitter:   / creeps_mcpasta  ►Instagram:   / creepsmcpasta  ►Twitch:   / creepsmcpasta  ►Facebook:   / creepsmcpasta  CREEPYPASTA MUSIC/ SFX- ►http://bit.ly/Audionic ♪►http://bit.ly/Myuusic ♪►http://bit.ly/incompt ♪►http://bit.ly/EpidemicM ♪This creepypasta is for entertainment purposes only

The RV arc light was about as glamorous as you would expect from a deep sea survey vessel. A flat grey hole stained from salt spray, a deck cluttered with rigging and cable drums, and a permanent smell of hydraulic fluid that seeped into your clothes no matter how many showers you took. We were out past the continental shelf, hundreds of miles offshore, crawling a forgotten stretch of the abyssal plain. No shipping lanes or geological features marked on the map. Just endless, featureless sea floor at 4,000 meters down. My job was simple enough. I was part of a five-person science crew operating bathymetric sonar sweeps,

logging data to the cloud array below the bridge. We flew an ROV twice a day, a heavy steel-framed unit about the size of a golf cart, rigged with high-intensity light, manipulator arms, and a suite of still and video cameras. Everything was backed up twice, raw feeds dumped into redundant cold storage banks,

reviewed nightly over instant coffee and bad jokes. Most days blurred together. We would lower the ROV, follow a tight grid programmed into the system, and then scan every inch of mud and stone for anomalies, like boroughs, sediment plumes or lost straw nets. Anything that broke the monotony of silt and darkness,

there was an unofficial contest among the crew. Find something worth naming. It was usually a thermal vent or a shipwreck. Occasionally someone would discover an unidentified rock formation. If it wasn't on the database and passed the checks, you got to propose the designation. It was a dumb bragging right, but when your world shrank to 40 metres of shipsteel and the endless screaming of the sonar pulse, you took what you could get. I remember the day it started, because it had been a bad morning for the ROV team.

The winch system had glitched during recovery and nearly dumped $2 million of hardware into the deep. We were tense and distracted. Still, protocol said to keep the scans running all repairs were underway. The bathymetric sweep came in slow, layering soft outlines across the workstation monitors. Rows and rows of nothing. Until Sam, our sonar tech, leaned forward and frowned. Hey, you're seeing this? He piped the signal to the main screen.

There, against the background noise of the plane, were clusters of depressions. Hexagonal, about three metres across each, shallow but precise. At first, we thought it was sensor noise, maybe a misfire from the multi-beameray, but the pattern was too clean. They repeated with eerie regularity, spaced at near-perfect intervals, stretching outward for what looked like miles. No obvious elevation changes, no ridges or venting nearby. Just those shapes punched into the seabed with surgical precision.

Sam ran a calibration check while the rest of us crowded around. The readings came back normal. The array was working fine. Could be polygonal cracking, Lucas. offered. He was a junior geologist fresh out of postdoc, you know, desiccation features from sediment drying back in the Pleistocene. No way, said Marla, our RV pilot, shaking ahead. Not this uniform, and not down here. Too deep, too much pressure. We logged it like any other anomaly. File stamped, coordinates noted.

Nobody said it out loud, but you could feel it in the room. The slight thrill, the unspoken possibility. Maybe this was the thing we could get to name. We decided we would send the ROV back down first thing after repairs. Take a closer look, maybe bring back a sample if the manipulator arms could manage it. Later that night, lying in my bunk with a ship's soft crue. freaking all around me, I kept replaying the sonar image in my mind. Most perfect hexagons stretching into the dark.

Waiting. By noon the next day, the ROV was repaired and pressure tested. No major damage, just the fried relay in the tetherwinch that the engineers swapped out with a spare from the parts locker. Marla ran the pre-dive checklist twice, cross-referferferferfer. referencing with the topside crew. Thrusters green, cameras clean, manipulators responsive. The fiber optic tether hissed through the winch as we lowered the ROV down through the ghostly blue haze of the upper ocean. I sat behind the monitor array in the control van,

sipping bitter coffee while the depth counter ticked upward. 500 meters, 1,000, 2,000. By 3,000. 800 meters, the sunlight was gone. Only the faint scatter of bioluminescent creatures spun past the camera, looking for all the world like disembodied stars. At 4,127 meters, the ROV's altitude warning chimed. The bottom was close. Coming up on the target grid, Marla announced, hand steady on the joystick. She feathered the vertical. thrusters, easing the ROV down with practiced grace.

Twin LED arrays flared to life, pushing a stark directional beam across the dark sea floor. The feed resolved slowly. Fine sediment kicked up in lazy clouds as the ROV skids brushed the bottom. When it cleared, the formations came into view. I leaned forward unconsciously. They were even more precise than the sonar has suggested. Wide hexagonal trenches, each one about two meters, were carved into the substrate with impossible symmetry. The edges were sharp and clean, not slumped or rounded as expected from erosion.

They were arranged in a pattern too regular for any known natural process. Between some of the hexagons rose thin spires no more than a metre high. They were narrow, almost needle-like, tapering to sharp points. The floodlights revealed the surface was not natural stone at all. It absorbed the light strangely, reflecting only a dull sheen. Material composition, I asked. Lucas checked the spectrometer read out. Low reflectivity looks basaltic at first glance, but the density's wrong.

No magnetic signature either. Could be synthetic. Synthetic. That may my stomach tighten. There should not be anything synthetic four kilometers below the surface. Marla maneuvered carefully over the field. The manipulator arms tucked in close to avoid disturbing the formations. No visible life, Sam noted from behind me.

He was monitoring the low-light auxiliary cameras, too deep for anything beyond extremophiles, maybe some amphipods or microbial mats. There was something strange about the water chemistry too. The conductivity probe picked up faint electromagnetic readings, tiny surges, barely above background noise, but steady. Could be geothermal, Lucas offered, but he did not sound convinced.

I kept my eyes glued to the forward-facing cameras as we moved deeper into the cluster. Every trench, every spire was placed with mechanical position. No collapse, no drift. It was as if the entire field had been set out according to a blueprint we could not see. At the edge of one of the frames, something shifted. A blur low to the ground. I choked upright, heart stammering. Marla, panwright.

She nudged the stick, swinging the ROV around. Nothing, just sediment curling in the beams. Probably a fish, Sam said. But he sounded uncertain. There were some species of snailfish, rat tails and amphipods that could survive at this depth, but nothing that would move with that kind of speed. Another movement, this time at the far periphery of the overhead camera, a flicker too fast to focus on.

Could be debris stirred up by the thrusters, Marla offered. She was trying to stay calm, professional. but a voice was tight in a headset. We locked the coordinates of the anomalies and swept the immediate area for more readings. Nothing consistent. Just those endless trenches, the eerie towers,

and the faint sense of something just beyond the reach of our lights. By the time we winched the ROV back to the surface, my nerves were humming under my skin. I sat in the dry lab the next morning, staring at the overnight scans until my coffee went cold in my hand. The multi-beam bathymetric data had finished rendering, stacking into shimmering blue topography grids on the analysis monitors. I pulled three sweeps, baseline 12 hours later and 24, and layered them together to check for any seafloor changes.

At first, it looked clean. Identical patterns, no collapses, no disturbances. Then Marla slid into the chair next to me and pointed with a stylus at a cluster near the site's northern edge. Doesn't this look weird to you? I leaned in. Six depressions, all hexagonal, arranged in a loose arc. Another seven clustered just below them, five more to the west.

I ran a quick measurement tool over them. The distances between the pits varied a little, but not enough to call random. There was a rhythm to it. Coincidence, I said, mostly to convince myself. Pariaodalia, our brains want to find patterns. Marla wasn't convinced. She chewed her pen cap and tapped the open ship's internal manifest, a digital diagram showing cruise quarters, lounges, labs, and shared spaces.

She tilted her head. Humour me. Look, she overlaid the manifest atop the bathymetry render. It was not perfect, but it was close enough to stiffen the hair along my arms. The largest grouping on the seafloor roughly matched where the gallery and the rec room sat on the ship. The five smaller pits aligned roughly with the forward cabins, my bunk among them.

We sat there for a long time without speaking. By lunch, word had spread. Half the crew jammed into the lab to look at the scans. Opinions split fast. Some said it was pure chance that it was just rocks, debris-filled, shaped by currents we didn't yet understand. The others grew silent, thinking about how the ship creaked at night, how the sonar would sometimes ping back false returns.

The tension was palpable. Meals grew quieter. You could feel its shift in the air, heavier, harder to shake. Conversations stayed locked on surface topics, instrument calibration, generate cycles and food rations, nobody spoke about how the wall seemed to hum when you were alone. Sleep came hard. I woke once around 3 a.m., heart-hammering, cold sweat soaking the sheets.

In the darkness, I thought I heard something tapping rhythmically against the hull, distant and slow, like something running the pads of his fingers down the ship's spine. No one admitted to hearing it when I asked around in the morning, but no one denied it either. Then came the update from the overnight automated ROV mapping run. A new structure had appeared. It had not been on any previous pass, verified by timestamped footage and sonar sweeps. It was shaped differently. No perfect geometry this time.

Instead, it was slightly irregular, almost anatomical. A stretched oval embedded into the silt, text shud and away the data could not fully resolve. Marla printed out the overlay and pinned it up next to the others. She added a sticky note underneath it. It's watching. Nobody laughed. We launched the second ROV dive just after sunrise under a sky smeared thin with silver clouds. No one ate much that morning.

Even the engine noise seemed muted as we crane the ROV back overboard, letting it sink into the depthless dark. The cable unspooled and measured worse from the A-frame, tension sensors ticking numbers into the console by my knee. We dropped fast, following. the same descent vector as the previous night, straight back to the mapping site. At about 3,800 meters, the lights kicked on, cutting long cones through the water full of swirling silt. The first glimpses of the seafloor came seconds later. The original formations were still there, silent black trenches, neat towers of map material. but now something new sat among them.

It did not look natural. Manning the camera controls beside me, Marla zoomed in carefully, nudging the pan with a slow, steady hand. The new structure rose out of the silt, maybe three metres high, much more complex than the clean hexagonal pits. It looks skeletal, almost bony in its angles.

thin arches intertwined at strange geometries that no natural basalt or limestone formation would have made. At its base, embedded in the seafloor, something caught the light. A leaned forward, squinting at the monitor. A spiral, deeply etched into the silty plain. No, more than etched. It had dimensionality and stood raised,

shallow ridges of black material rising into the water, curling tightly into a pattern. Marla cursed under a breath. I toggled the data overlay on the screen. The plotted course of the arc light from the last three days appeared in green lines. It matched. Perfectly. The spiral mirrored the ship's path through the survey area, down to the minor course corrections logged by the Auto Nav.

We had not transmitted those paths outside the vessel. There was no broadcast, no relay. That pattern should not have been accessible to anything except our internal systems. The realization hit like a cold slap. Whatever was down there, it was not just reacting to our presence. It was tracking us. It was learning. Marla swung the ROV in closer, aiming to capture a better angle of the spires.

The feed stuttered as the ROV shadow passed over the new structure. Static blared across the screen. Status lights on the pilot board flickered. The deep vibrating hum rattled through the ship's deck plates. Backer off, I barked. Marla immediately reversed the thrusters, pulling the RV out to a safer side. standoff distance. The noise eased, but not completely. Instruments on the readout panels pulsed faint red warnings, voltage drops, minor system faults. It was not damaged in the

traditional sense. It felt closer to interference or corrosion happening in real time. Mala muttered, scanning the status lights. It's like it's eating the signal. I keyed into the shipboard internal channel. ROV team to bridge. We are getting electromagnetic disruption at the dive site. Adjust passive scanners and prep for possible early retrieval. Copy that ROV team. Monitor vitals and advise.

We floated the ROV higher, switching off unnecessary systems to conserve power. The feed cleaned slightly, enough to get one last slow pan over the field. The new skeletal structure was not alone. Further out, just at the edge of floodlight range, another small formation began taking shape. It bulged out of the silt, dark and ridged,

the way barnacles first cling to a ship's hull. I logged the timestamp, noted its coordinates, requested retrieval. The ROV rose steadily, whining as it climbed through the course, cold weight of the abyss. As the winch hauled it back onto the deck, I caught Marla watching the monitors a second longer than necessary. Did you see it? She asked, voice low.

See what? She hesitated, then shook her head. Never mind, but the look in her eyes told me. She had seen something move, and the arc light sat. by the next day. The meals were even quieter. Conversations clipped at the edges. No one said it out loud yet, but the divide was growing.

Marla paced the lounge in short, sharp bursts, arguing with Ethan, our senior hydrographer. We should pull the anger and get the hell out, she snapped, voice cracking under the strain. This isn't natural. It is not geology. It's not life as we know it either. Ethan, ever the opportunist, folded his arms and shook his head. You realize what this could mean? If we're the first to document a non-biological sentient structure,

do you understand the weight of that? Careers are made of less. His voice had a note of desperation. I remembered the early days of the voyage, how we used to joke about finding the next Challenger Deep about naming some underwater canyon or thermal vent after ourselves. The competitiveness was baked into the blood of every research ship crew. Now, it sounded pathetic, hollow.

I said nothing. Instead, I chewed my breakfast slowly, watching the tensions strangle the room. Later, while rerunning bathymetric sweeps, I caught Sam, our sonatech, staring too long at the screen, jaw slacked. He pointed at the data traces, deep harmonic ripples that are not been there before. Slight deviations, faint signatures, repeating deeper and deeper in the water column. Feels deeper than it should, he mumbled. Feels like falling.

No one was sleeping much. Whenever I did doze off, I dreamt of those spirals, dreamt of standing barefoot on the seafloor, staring up at towering black spires that stretched forever into a starless sky. No water, no pressure, just the endless sensation of sinking. We launched another ROV dive that afternoon. None of us wanted to say it was stupid, but every glance said it. The ocean was calm above, but the field looked different again when the ROV hit the bottom. A new structure stood near the original cluster.

Marla controlled the ROV with tight, nervous flicks of the joystick, angling the floodlights to frame it fully. The spire was taller than the others, irregular, where the other ones had a machine symmetry. This one bent slightly. top-heavy, almost humanoid. There were jutting shapes where arms should have been, a rounded dome where a head might be. The radio crackled. Marla's voice came thin and wired from the control booth.

You're seeing this? Ethan, hovering behind her, whispered, It's copying. No one dared breathe too loudly. Marla nudged the hour of each other. closer, attempting a slow orbit around the figure for better imaging. The starboard thrusters engaged, humming softly through the deck. Halfway through the sweep, the R-OV jerked to a sudden halt.

Red alarms blinked across the piloting console. Tether tension spiked. Damn it, tether snag. Marla cursed, hands flying over the controls, trying to reverse the motors. The RV barely budged. I switched to the rear camera feed, squinting. Something had latched onto the tail end of the vehicle. Nothing mechanical, nor a net or debris.

It was something organic. It looked fibrous, like strands of thick kelp, but the way they gripped and flexed against the pressure was all wrong. They merged, seems to be it. seamlessly into the black material of the surrounding structures. We ran emergency retrieval protocols, tugging manually through the winch, but it held fast. We could not rip it free without risking the whole tether system. There was no real choice left.

The R of E was stuck hard, tether tension redlining, and we could not afford to abandon it. Not just because of the equipment cost, though that was astronomical, but because it was our eyes, our only clean set of them down there where no human belonged. The problem was, we had no backup unit.

There was only one other way. The arc light carried a single, two-person submersible, in case of emergency retrievals or close proximity geological surveys. The seeker, A sphere-shaped titanium pot bolted with manipulator arms and a single narrow viewing slit. It had been loaded on board, almost as an afterthought, a nod to redundancy in the paperwork.

But nobody had touched it beyond maintenance checks since the voyage began. Only Ben, our junior pilot and maintenance tech, was rated to operate it. He volunteered without question. I can get it loose, he said, tapping the side of the subs hull. Get close, use the starboard arm to pry it free. Marlow was pale but nodded. Ethan and I ran rapid systems checks on the Seeger's life support, ballast controls and thrust the calibration. No time for real redundancy checks.

If the field was shifting daily, we had no idea what the ROV might record. or what it might provoke if left attached too long. We sealed Ben into the sub, gave him a thumbs up behind the thick viewport glass, the white lights from the hangar floor flashing across his face. The winch lowered the seeker slowly into the churning black until it disappeared under the surface, leaving only the faint crackle of the tethercoms line trailing back up to us.

Descent took nearly an hour. From the command deck, we monitored his telemetry. The seekers onboard sonar pulsed dutifully, slow pings rebounding off the abyssal plane. At 4,100 meters, he hit the bottom. Marla switched the external floodlights on, the screen filled with particulate haze like slow snow drifting through eternal darkness. Shapes loom through the gloom. First, the old structures, spires rising like broken teeth, matte and ancient.

And then the new one, the irregular figure spire, the one that bent at the shoulders, arms askew. Ben approached cautiously, thrusters whispering in minute bursts, keeping him neutrally buoyant a metre of the seafloor. He swung the seeker around the tangled ROV The manipulator arms were used the probe the fibrous strands Wrapping the equipment On the video feed It looked almost fungal A slick membrane had sprouted over the ROV chassis

pulsing faintly Ben grunted over the comms Feel soft Almost like tissue None of us spoke The sub lurched, telemetry spiked, depth indicators ticking down in jerky fits. Something's pulling, Ben's voice broke through, roar and panicked. We saw it on the monitor.

The seeker was sinking, not falling freely, but being dragged downward. The ballast control flashed critical thrust this screaming against an unseen force. Blow tanks! Ethan shouted into the comms. But it was useless. Ben was already trying. No response. The final seconds of the feed were a blur.

The seeker's exterior light swept the seafloor, illuminating the figure spire again. But closer now. Distorted, twisting inward. The ROV appeared briefly in the frame, still cocooned in that alien growth, and behind it, with a trench dipped into darker folds, more shapes weighted, larger ones. The feed cut to black.

Chaos rippled across the arc light. Ethan and Marla scrambled at their stations, shouting across the deck as the last telemetry from the seeker flatlined. The small submersibles depth indicator had frozen at an impossible number, beneath a designated operational range and then blinked out. No visual feed, no external sonar ping. Only the droning emptiness of the abyss beyond the hole. I stayed, glued to the ROV console. The tether was still functional, but barely.

Battery drain warnings pulsed at the corner of the monitor, the autonomous systems fighting to stay alive. I twisted the joystick, panning the external camera one slow, deliberate sweep across the field of formations. Something caught the edge of the frame. Where before, the spires had stood in jagged randomness. There was now a new structure, right on the fringe of the disturbed trench where Ben had been pulled under.

It was still forming. Not rock, not coral. No slow geologic patience here. This was something birthing itself from the seafloor, extruding and reshaping in real time, tendrils of black and material writhing inward, knitting together. We watched in horrified silence as it thickened and took on contour and form. The beginnings of a figure coming into shape.

Malakur softly, backing away from the screen, Ethan stood there, arms crossed, white-knuckled against his own ribs. This cannot be natural, he muttered. I tried to turn the camera again, angling toward the last no position of the seeker, hoping maybe Ben had escaped, hoping there would be a light, a moving object, anything to suggest he had somehow gotten free. Nothing. Only blackness.

I rotated back to the formation instinctively, scanning for landmarks, but the figure was gone. The seafloor was bare again. The R of E's battery warning flashed critical red. I powered down the external lights to conserve energy for the tether systems. Across the deck, Ethan was flipping through the passive sonar array, rerunning diagnostics. We could not use active son. now, not with certainty that Ben, or whatever remained of him, was not near the hole. The shockwaves from an active ping could shatter a man-submercible if it was close enough.

Ethan leaned into the console, frowning harder. I've got something, he said. A faint contact, a return on passive sonar. It was moving toward us, fast. No surface ships within range, no known subs, no other research vessels were in this quadrant. We were supposed to be alone out here for another two weeks. Marla grabbed the emergency flare protocol and hovered near the distress beacon switch, but I shook my head.

No sense signaling. Whatever was coming, already knew where we were. The contact was smooth. Steady, gliding without turbulence, closing distance too cleanly. Ethan adjusted the gain. An outline began to coalesce on the sonar projection, a shape nearing the arc lights hole, small compared to the ship, but just the right size for something like the seeker.

Marla exhaled sharply, almost a sob. It's Ben! She whispered. I kept my hands clamped tight on the edge of the console to stop them from shaking. If it was him, if somehow he had gotten free, he would have radioed by now. The Seekers' comms were silent, completely murderously silent. The contact reached the vessel, docked. The ship lurched slightly, a vibration through the steel underfoot that carried the moon

pool all the way to the bridge. The crew instinctively turned toward the access corridor that led down to the moonpool bay, leaving to see what had docked. I stayed at the console, the black screens offering no guidance, no comfort. The ROV was dead now, severed from us, blind and powerless. Only the sonar lingered behind, an occasional soft ping from Ethan Station, trying to to resolve an image that would not come. Marla's voice cracked through the intercom from below, tight and strained.

Contacted this submersible dock. It's the seeker. Looks intact, no visible damage. Through the deck speakers, Marla's voice again, higher pitched. He's... Ben's here, just stepped out, looks... Normal. Says he's fine.

I stayed frozen in my chair. staring at the dead ROV feed. A flicker of movement caught in my eye. The passive sonar was still active in the corner, and there was a side utility window no one had touched. An object was drifting past the ship's bow, slow and aimless. Curious, I toggled the camera, hoping for a glimpse before the power fully died. Static and distortion bloomed.

But one shape pushed through, a body, bloated, skin pale and slowing away under the crushing pressure of depth. His uniform was torn and trailing in the water, but there was no mistaking the orange patch stitched to the chest. The colour used for juniors. The chill went through my veins so fast it left me dizzy. I stood hard enough that my chair clattered to the floor. No. Ben was still on the seafloor, which meant whatever I had just climbed aboard was not him.

I sprinted across the deck, shoving past the storage cart, nearly losing my footing on the grating floor. Halfway to the hatch leading down to the docking level, I grabbed the first heavy object I saw. A rusted steel emergency, pry bar, long and pitted from years of salt exposure. It weighed heavy in my hand. I barely registered it. My boots hammered down the stairwell. Below, I could hear laughter, shouts, the casual

tones of a reunion. I rounded the corner into the docking bay, my heart trying to climb out of my chest. Ben, what wore Ben's face, stood surrounded by Marla. and Ethan. They were patting him on the back, half laughing, half crying, disbelief and joy muddling into one chaotic scene. They turned at the sound of my footsteps, saw me coming in fast, Prybar raised. I screamed without words, a roar that tore out to my throat. Ben turned, confusion flickering across its face. Mala shouted my name. Ethan, move to intercept. I barreled through both,

shouldering them aside with every ounce of terror and momentum I could summon. The first blow caught Ben square in the side of the head. He staggered, a hand going up defensively, mouth opening in a protest that sounded wrong. The cadence too clean, the tone pitched half-step too high, the consonants dragging unnaturally for someone with blunt head. trauma. I did not stop. Another blow and another. Ethan tried to pull me back. I wrenched free. Ben clapsed to his knees, hands trembling, mouthworking in a silent, broken mimicry of human

distress. I raised the pry bar one final time and brought it down across the top of its skull with every fibre of strength I had left. The head cracked open. The sound of liquid bursting across the floor silenced the room. Ethan stumbled back, hand clamped over his mouth. Marla simply froze, eyes wide, making a keening sound low in her throat. They no longer fought me on my decision, after seeing what spilled out. From what looked like Ben, a gush of thick, briny water exploded across the deck plating, puddling across the decking.

Strands of green filament, slick and twitching, spalled out of the ruin of its head, writhing weakly against the metal, before falling still. The air filled with a sharp, stinging reek of deep salt and rot. The thing twitched once more Then stilled silence Only the low, steady drip of salt water from its body remained I dropped the pry bar In the aftermath None of us moved for a long, long time

In silent agreement We pushed whatever looked like Ben off the ship wearing multiple layers of protective gear. We cut the line to the ROV. The considerable loss was much more palatable after seeing the consequences from below. We called it, ended the mission and returned home. All reports were wiped, and Ben was documented as missing at sea.

We cooperated a story about his reckless behavior and repeated it enough, until it was believed.