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It’s not as busy as you were expecting. The halls are only patronized by the sound of your footsteps and the subaquatic chur of the ocean outside. Peeking through the tiny glass portholes, you spy delvers hard at work. This base was built over an especially rich deposit of scrap metal. If Consol is an organism, then scrap metal is what its bones are made out of, and NAVY is its central nervous system. In a sense, you are walking through the brain.

Well, one of them at least. There are hundreds of other bases just like this one, after all. You suppose that maybe Consol would have to be an organism that has multiple brains, like an octopus. But wait – those don’t have bones. Then maybe the scrap metal is the blood or something? Do octopi even have blood? You’ve never seen one bleed. You’ve never seen one outside of movies. For all you know, they are a made-up creature. You think about it for a minute as you slink through the brain-guts of the worldsea and you come to the conclusion that no, octopi probably aren’t real. They’re more akin to the uncanny monsters from black-and-white movies.

“It is a pneumatic machine that attacks you... The claw, that’s the beast that enters your flesh; the sucker, that’s you yourself who enters the beast... This dream is upon you. The tiger can only devour you; the octopus, what horror, breathes you in!”

-Hugo, Victor. (1866). The Toilers of the Sea. Verboeckhoven et Cie.