Cohost writing prompt: @Making-Up-A-Villain — Villain who is taking a break from earthly delights
Diva Diabolique throttles down the copter's contra-rotors, pops open the cockpit, and scuttles across the gently pitching helipad through the stilling blades' downwash.
The bright yellow refitted trawler announces to the ocean in all directions in peeling paint that it belongs to the Puffin Sound Island Research Institute, which is entirely fictitious. Diva sticks her head into the deserted bridge, captained only by a server rack bolted to the deck; she prods at a console and heads below, the winches already running when she clangs through the airlock to overlook the moon pool.
She watches as the windowless black bathysphere is hauled halfway above the waterline, and locked into place. The robotic sphere clunks and hisses, eventually petalling open; a dedicated overhead halogen spot turns on, shining into the entrance.
She can just make out the foetal curl of the figure magnetically held in the centre of the liquid-filled interior, sleekly suited, power-air-fluids feed tether linking the eyeless blank of the helmet to the machine.
The first tickle of external annoyance pokes into her mind, all kiki-synaesthesic prickles.
"You promised me," Diva says, tone on the irritable side of bored. "No more sensory deprivation submarine without at least one person on board to pull you up if something breaks. This is irresponsible, Margaret."
A bright, staticky flare of rage, dulling fast to sullenness. The suspension electromagnets disengage; the figure stirs weakly, bobbing slowly to the internal fluid surface, clumsily pawing at the open lip of the bathysphere's entrance.
Diva strides across the gangplank even before it finishes extending, grabs beneath the slippery suited figure's arms, and helps haul them out, crumpled and visibly panting with effort on the metal mesh. She begins tugging on fastenings, painstakingly opening up the suit's layers until the sleek face peels off the waxy-pale flesh one beneath, eyes screwed against the sudden insult of unaccustomed light.
"Fuck...you," Brainscream coughs breathlessly, wheezing around the sudden absence of the air and nutrient fluid mouthpiece between her lips and on her tongue.
"Nice," Diva says. "The gratitude for caring about your suicidal ass, that's why I do it. You need help with the catheter?"
"Ffffffffuckyou." A limp hand scrabbles, twists feebly into Diva's sweater; Brainscream makes a futile, abortive lunge in her direction.
Diva slides to a sitting position, easing herself into place for Brainscream to drop her head exhaustedly into her lap.
"Ffffuckyou," Brainscream wheezes several more times, quietly, into Diva's sweater. "Fffffuck. You," as Diva gently strokes her brittle, hood-flattened hair, the telepath's self-loathing horror-panic at her own condition tingling sharply across Diva's scalp.
"Well, next time I'll leave you down there to atrophy all the way to death, then," Diva says. Her voice is scornful; her hand cradling Brainscream's jaw, impossibly gentle.
"Cunt," Brainscream says, wetly violent enough to shake her entire body, as if the word might physically break something, and Diva wrinkles her nose.
"You are," she agrees.