Across the Bay
Mounting a Glowcap is not for the faint of heart, nor stomach.
Each person climbs onto their own machine, labeled Damaged by your Focus, whose tentacles-roots fan out below to steady themselves in the water.
Once each rider is secure, the Glowcap undulates those same appendages in graceful paddling motions, moving out into the water.
Picking up speed also makes each machine more susceptible to waves, so a slow and steady compromise is found.
After a while, you can’t make the bottom of the bay through the kelp forest. It seems like the bottom is between three and five meters below. Dark, wide swaths, too straight and perfect, hint at artificial channels for the larger sea machines. Faint blue machine glows, streaking by at much faster speeds, would seem to support this hypothesis.
Your destination begins as pale glow against the horizon. As you approach, it becomes apparent most of that glow comes from beneath the water itself — only handful of machine structures rise above the surface of the barrier island. At first the glow seems a pale white, but splits into two distinct colors as you approach: a dazzling yellow-green and the same raw-salmon pink surrounding your Glowcaps. The latter comes from similar filtering tentacles, innumerable and gently undulating in the current, extending a half-kilometer out from the coast.
The yellow-green comes from a series of fishing nets between you and the filter-ferns. Closest to you, a mesh of meter-wide hexagons, extending from floating pontoons on the surface, down through a forest of kelp, to the sea floor maybe 5 meters down. The fibers of the mesh produce the glow, through waters so clear they could be mistaken for the runoff of mountain snow.
Beyond the first mesh is a second, with hexagons half as wide. Then a third, again half as wide, followed by more. Eight, in total, with holes so small on the farthest it looked like a solid curtain of lemon rind. Metallic crabs, of similarly decreasing proportions, skitter along each mesh, plucking free kelp and other debris.
Schools of fish dart in and around the nets. Something about the glow repels the animals, so they never get within a hand’s breadth of the mesh which would finally be too small for them. Unlike the nets of Deeproot designed to drag fish in, these are clearly designed to keep fish out.
In a line, the Glowcaps arc to parallel the barrier. Ahead, an additional glow approaches: two sets of meshes, ten meters apart, running from the island to the barrier. The section between the new paths dimmed and peeled away as the Glowcaps approached, creating a temporary gate.
TODO: Corrupted Glowcap battle
Once you have resolved the encounter, continue on via entry 288.