“Namor, for the last time. If you want to talk to Beatrice about going back to the open ocean, you can go downstairs and talk to her yourself. But if the residential kraken in the house doesn’t want to go, you can’t exactly make her.” And it wasn’t that she was locked in, either. He’d had to drag the story out of Wong as to why there was a giant squid creature living in the basement of the New York Sanctum, but apparently Beatrice had swum up the East River and, being then very small in size, gently accosted the then resident Master of the Sanctum looking for somewhere safe to live. The Master of course had granted her request, but then Beatrice had never left, and instead had built a bigger and bigger pocket dimension to meet her needs. The aquatic life she’d assembled for company in her little series of underwater catacombs was quite impressive, but he’d never gotten to see all of her friends because he had to ask permission to enter let alone go for a swim. And he had no idea, short of it being within the time of New York being a city, when exactly she’d taken up residence.
And as a more long-term resident than he, it seemed rude to go poking around her business when most days he was just grateful her lair wasn’t on the Sanctum’s water bill.
“She’s not some zoo animal or captive, or political refugee.” So far as I know? Lord that’s a terrifying thought, her being on some kind of kraken-kind’s most wanted list. “She lives here, this is where she’s chosen to make her home regardless of all the other freedoms she’s always had to leave and do that elsewhere. And if you want to ask her why, that’s information you’ll have to get from her because I honestly could not tell you. Aside from the fact that a swim down the East River now would probably kill her.”
He turned, the cloak fluttering around behind him as he did. He had an armful of books, and having met a still very wet, typically half-naked, and grumpy and accusatory King of the Sea, hadn’t even had a chance to finish what he’d been doing with them before getting interrogated about a seemingly old issue between them. Stephen knew Namor had tried to go and talk sense into Beatrice once before - with about as much success as any man ever held of “talking sense” into a lady, especially when that lady was a titanic sea monster.
“Besides, is that all you really came here to grill me about? Because you usually avoid me like the plague, so if you’re actively trying to hold conversation with me that means you’re avoiding talking about something else, which isn’t like you at all. And if you are here genuinely flogging me about Beatrice and want me to get the answers for you like some errand boy, that means you’ve done something to make her not want to talk to you, and I am not overly apt to go interview her knowing that I wouldn’t even bother trying to lie to her about who is asking.”
( @foratlantis )
