Easy money, part 1

But finally the punishment was over, and I was able to return to my plans. Luckily for me, Omniman's work is in full swing right now. Black Samson is almost completely out of the game now, and only appears occasionally at minor incidents, showing some of his former strength, and of the others, only red Rush and Darkwing were unharmed in the battle with Hail Mary, as the media called that Kaiju, and they're good, but they can't replace the rest of the team. Not to mention that Darkwing almost got his ass kicked by the Mauler Twins the day before yesterday when he tried to hold them off on his own while Red Rush and Immortal dealt with the League of Lizards. So the Omniman will have to live up to his name for the next month-until War Woman and Aquarius recover from their wounds.

I benefited from this situation because, thanks to my father's busy schedule, I was able to go deep-sea diving the same day my mother released me from house arrest. Yes, I decided to use my abilities to try my hand as a treasure diver.

In fact, I had stumbled upon shipwrecks more than once during those months, but, having neither a pressing need for money nor a desire to explain my findings or to draw attention to myself, I left the ships untouched. Especially since it was during the inspection of one of these wrecks that I was first spotted by the ichthyander scouts, who made a brief pursuit. From which I deduced that they were on watch there, just to fend off the cunning supers like me, who might want to get their hands on the treasure without asking.

In this world, there are not too few ways to find and bring a valuable sunken cargo to land. And the easiest and yet most effective is to negotiate with the underwater people, but... just that is only at first glance. Even land-based countries manage to argue for decades about who owns ships sunk in their neighbor's waters. As, for example, is still happening with the "Frau Maria", which the Finnish scallywags did not let be raised until two thousand and eighteen years, in order to then declare that she was in their waters for a hundred years and now under Finnish law belongs to them. * The underwater people are simpler in this respect: they consider everything that hit the seabed to be theirs. And even if it is completely useless for them, the ichthyanders will not give anything away for nothing. So every joint expedition has to be negotiated through Aquarius, and he's a very peculiar guy. He wants action, not diplomacy, politics and all that. And it is quite expected when the strongest representative of the people is chosen as the supreme ruler.

So, thanks to the laziness of Aquarius and the complexities of international politics, there was plenty of valuable cargo on the seabed, and it was for one of these treasures that I went down. Yes, it would have been more fun to pick up something valuable and culturally important from the Titanic or the Frau Maria, but I am not here for the fun, I am here for the money. So my choice fell on a sunken schooner, which I was not able to identify by googling the wreck site, which allowed me to hope that no one but me knew about her existence.

It was too far from shore and too deeply submerged to be an easy target for divers, and the couple of quintals of gold I found in the hold would obviously not recoup the cost of the expedition needed to bring it up. For me, however, such an expedition only cost ninety bucks - that much for a professional flashlight capable of withstanding a dive to four hundred meters.

And at first everything went smoothly: I went down to the ship, which had not sailed anywhere since my last visit, found my gold and began to fill the bag from the volmart with it, when suddenly there was an indignant gurgling sound behind my back:

"https://youtu.be/qMPpnCvCZvw"

Holy shit...

When I turned around at the sound, I saw in the cone of light from the flashlight a blue-skinned creature shaking a spear in the water with a belligerent look. And judging by the quite human breasts with their poured tits and swollen, like a worm had crawled up her face, painted lips on a fish face, it was a female. Pretty as fuck...time to get the fuck out of here.

Clutching my burden to my chest, I rushed to the opposite side of the scout (or border guard), right through the hull of a schooner half-submerged in the bottom silt. Then another ichthyander tried to block my way, and I bumped into him with my head, not seeing him in the dark.

Goddamn you, you fucking murlocs.

Pushing the slimy, scaly body away from me, I broke free of the grip of the webbed paws and sprinted away from the ship. There were indignant gurgles and lance shots coming at me-some kind of energy weapon, capable of boiling water and leaving me with a slight burn on my skin. Of course, I could have easily avoided all the shots, or I could have accelerated right away so that the Murlocks would only have to swallow the bubbles from under me, except that a cellophane bag from Walmart didn't have much in the way of durability or heat capacity. The first time I tried to swerve at speed, it nearly tore, so I had to take a shot on the back and then spend a few more minutes pulling away from the chase.

Fucking murlocks. Tenacious. Like it's really their gold.

The second part of my plan was to market the loot through people I knew in the underworld. I had two options.

The first was to find a Titan and try to sell the gold through him, but there were several problems. First, Titan was a small potatoes and would not be able to give a decent price for the treasure. Second, Titan is a fucking cheater. The last time he used me for dark purposes, he told me a sob story about his daughter, so he could break into power and take his boss's place. All in all, I don't trust this guy.

Second possibility: the boss of Titan himself. The guy with the calculator instead of his head. Of course, he's also a real chiseler, but he's driven by logic and pragmatism. His mechanical brain can calculate probabilities and almost predict what other people will do. And I'd rather bet on him than Titan, for I know the lair of Machinehead, thanks to the Titan story.

And that's where I went, having first changed into dry clothes and hiding my face behind a black medical mask and black sunglasses.

Note:

* Actually much more, it is just that the Finnish Republic received its independence only in 1918 and in 2018 will celebrate the centennial anniversary of Lenin's decree granting it sovereignty. And since Finland is not a signatory to the UNESCO International Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage, it can act within the framework of its own legislation... if that was of any interest to anyone at all...