Chapter Text
Sound echoed throughout the half-submerged cave walls of the Mirelurk King’s cavern. His watery domain had been.. unsettled in the last few days. The others, the unawakened mindless creatures that made up his species were creeping closer and closer to his territory. Though they backed off once hearing his warning calls, their proximity kept the king in a constant state of wakefulness while needing to keep the lesser creatures away from his home. The king did not like the panicked and unharmonious energy in their sonar chitterings, he did not like their unrest that felt wrong against the steady push and pull of the tide.
The others were no better than insects. They hatched, they ate, they bred, and then they died. As was the cycle for their species. They sought territory, they sought somewhere safe to lay their eggs. They did not seek anything besides that of their instincts, it seemed a blissful existence to live without thought. The others were different from the two-legged king who sought peaceful solace in his cavern. He’d lived years beyond that of the mindless, he’d seen the world around him change from blue skies to the dull green-grey that hung foreboding in the sky. The world slumbered for years, a wasteland by pure definition- and then in the blink of an eye, humans re-emerged into the world like mirelurk young hatching from their eggs.
A lifetime ago he was a man, a lighthouse captain who loved the daily ins and outs of his solitary job. Now, he was scaled with webbed fingers that were tipped with lethal claws. Red spined fin-like growths protruded from his body. He no longer walked like a man, he swam more than he walked anyways. His eyes were large with no pupil to be seen, he did not see color in a way that he remembered from before. His teeth were needle-like and monstrous, even his nose had receded back.
At some point in his mutation, he sprouted a tail, but despite this, his consciousness remained present throughout the transformation. His humanity was long gone just like the world before the bombs fell, his grasp on speech or language was iffy if not completely lost in the obscurities of subconscious thought.The king thought himself above the other mirelurks, yet he also remained loyal to creature instincts. He woke, he hunted, and he went to great lengths to secure his territory.
The cave system was his, as was the little beach on the surface. He’d killed enough humans for them to know to stay away, yet every so often one was stupider and braver than the others. Those who traveled all the way to his territory were usually young and foolish, they never made it into the center of the labyrinth where the king slumbered, waiting out time as the world above changed. He left his inner sanctum only when he needed to eat or when something in him compelled him to stretch his limbs. The king could sleep for weeks at a time, the movement of the water around him would signal if he needed to defend his home.
With whatever it was making the others restless, chittering and clicking, echoing in the cavern’s walls.. the king found it difficult to rest. The harbor’s resident queen, a leviathan of a creature died broken at the bottom of the sea a week ago. Thus her drones were unsettled. The disruption in hierarchy left the waters feeling as if they were boiling hot with unease. The king felt the queen’s rage whilst she fought whatever enemy that threatened her. She called out again and again for backup but the king was not a slave to her calls like the others. He did not care to assist her. The creatures he coexisted with were not his people, they tolerated him and he tolerated them. He had no such loyalty. A new queen would move in soon enough, sensing the vacancy and the uneasy drones that the previous queen left ungoverned. He would call out to her, draw her in, and then she would be utilized as his territory’s new attack hound.
The echoing in the cavern was louder now. The king roused from his nest and he took a deep breath, filling his lungs to sound out an echolocating call for any creature in his waters to stay away. He rested in the innermost chamber where he squirreled away the treasures he’d claimed over the years. There was something in his mutated instincts that made him crave things. Maybe it was a simple survival instinct to keep him alive, to give him a sense of drive to keep living… but the king was like a bloodhound to things that glittered and gleamed. He collected lobster cages, fishing lures, pieces of metal… bottlecaps and anything he could get his hands on really. Nuka quantums and glow-in-the-dark toys were his prized possessions, he kept those at the heart of his nest. The unfortunate humans who met their death in the caverns were stripped and he kept their weapons and armor, piling them up in a cave with their unfortunate bones sticking out from the pieces.
His hoard was representative of his pride and the king filled cave after cave with the treasures he accumulated in all of his years. The idea of something trespassing into the sanctity of his home filled him with an animalistic rage. The creature who approached did not listen to his warning call, and he vocally screeched out a noise in response to being ignored. If the creature wasn’t a mirelurk, it would at least hear the threat in his warning cry. The king was scarred from age and survival, he was strong and smart, unlike the other creatures. He did not doubt that he could kill this intruder and yet he was somewhat annoyed that the queen was dead. He could compel the creatures to silence through the queen, but he could not communicate with them directly. They only listened to their queen, uncaring toward the much older king who reigned beneath the water.
The king left his nest to swim to the surface, following the echoing pangs that were making his teeth feel uncomfortable in his mouth. The vibration of the water made his thoughts fuzzy and he fought the urge to turn tail and leave just to get away from the panging noise that accompanied the intruder. The intruder was nowhere near the center of the labyrinth but their footsteps felt strange in the water. They walked heavily, their steps were two-legged.. and there was no doubt in his mind that they were underwater. He could feel their movement in his bones, he could almost taste them.
He called out again, listening to the cry bounce against the watery cave system. The king did not care that the creature must be aware of his presence by now, he wanted them to fear him. Something about the presence made him feel unsettled to his very core. He could sense the others' panic and rage, their frantic scrambling all pulsed to one location, and the king knew immediately that they swarmed to the cavern in which they laid the majority of their eggs. The cave was far from any of which he’d claimed for himself, it was just barely in the nexus of his territory, but all of the disruption was blinding him with near-feral rage.
He felt compelled to rush to the cave, the king felt as if he might tear his own head off if he didn't follow the echo’s demand. The echoing pulse was similar to that of the dying queen’s desperation, but this time the insistence and the demands were un-ignorable. The frantic energy he felt from the others was a thundering storm that tunneled his vision and he soon forgot that he sensed footsteps. All he could focus on was the pulsing call that tore his consciousness into tattered pieces.
The king emerged from the water and into the hatchlings' cave. He surfaced with a roar. His instincts screamed to kill, to do anything to be rid of the noise. He blindly rushed past the scuttling mirelurks that swarmed where the pulse seemed to originate from. At the center of the writhing mass of creatures was a blinking light. The light seemed to further confuse him, making his mind feel weak. The mindless scuttling around him made the echo ring worse. The unsettled confusion from the swarm was loud in his thoughts. Without their queen, they called out to him for command and he hated it. His mind was bombarded with hundreds of desperate pangs of sensation and the light that pulsed and pulsed seemed to render him a slave to its demand to kill.
He wanted silence. He wanted peace from the insistent echo and the frenzied creatures. While completely mindless and full of nothing but the increasing rage behind his eyes, the king launched himself onto the soft-shell closest to himself. His claws sunk easily into the creature’s underbelly and then it was dead. He trilled out, commanding the rest of them to cease their panicking, and then a second trill sounded out. The noise was different from anything he’d ever heard from himself before, the sensation he felt was that of hunger and rage. The creatures began to tear at each other and the king at the heart of the swarm was their ringmaster and executioner. The sound from him was a command for the creatures to tear at each other until there was nothing left alive. He ripped their legs from their bodies, he pried their shells from their backs, roaring with the spines on his back sticking straight out, his fins flared and he’d not felt so alive in years.
The king did not stop the slaughter until he realized that he no longer heard the others chittering, he no longer felt their frenzy. His shoulders heaved with his breath and he felt as if he needed to return to the water. He stood amongst a pile of the dead and the echoing pulse still sounded from beneath their bodies. He dug down and pulled out the now filthy device. It was quick work to crush it in his hands and finally, the madness stopped.
The king stalked back to the water, feeling as if he could rest for years after everything he exuded just then… but the vibration he felt in the water shot an unfamiliar panic throughout his body. The two-legged intruder, the creature with the heavy steps was far from him now. Far enough that he could barely sense their location.
He tore through the water with a new sense of urgency once realizing that the intruder lured him into a trap and now his inner sanctum’s spoils were unguarded.