Chapter Text
1
After after the captain woke up and everyone was introduced, Pidge and Keith had a hard time keeping their eyes off Shiro.
"I need a moment alone," Shirogane said, looking very depressed.
Lance frowned, watching him exit the hut that was Keith's home. It was in the middle of nowhere, semi-surrounded by cliffs that kept away the greenery, making the place look like a desert rock. On the other side, the Sun had yet to poke its head, but Lance could still make out sand and beach.
The smell of salt still permeated the air. It was a very wide beach, but a beach it still was.
The silence was uncomfortable, so Lance forced his crew to make small talk while Keith worried himself sick near a window facing the beach. Pidge checked his equipment, emitting the same mood.
Keith left the house at dawn and came back a moment later with Shiro. He revealed a billboard with maps and pictures and musings pinned to it.
"This is how I found you."
"What have you been working on?" Shiro asked.
"I can't explain it, really. After getting booted from the Garrison, I was kind of lost and found myself drawn out to this place. It was like...some energy was telling me to search."
Lance crossed his arms, studying the board. The maps had a series of small isles and the edge of Mauna, but it was mostly blue—ocean.
"Looking for what?" Shiro asked.
"Well, I didn't really know at the time. The I stumbled across this area." he touched one of the bigger isles, which was circled three times, labeled "ENERGY SOURCE" and surrounded by smaller circles at the edges of the isle.
"It's full of caverns, and I found an outcropping of giant boulders with caves covered in these ancient markings." Lance looked to the side, where the picture of a cave was surrounded by cave drawings. They depicted...dolphins?
Lance's teeth clicked, his eyes widened.
"Each tells a slightly different story about a blue dolphin Some of them are even underwater, but they all share clues leading to some event. Some arrival happening last night." Keith looked at Shiro. "Then, you showed up."
Lance was still entranced by the drawings when Shiro called his name. He took the man's hand in greeting automatically. It's not human, he realized, staring at it as the man continued to shake Pidge's hand.
"So, did anyone else from your crew make it out?" The youngest boy asked.
Shiro frowned. "I'm not sure. I remember the mission and being captured. After that, just bits and pieces."
"Yeah," Hunk raised his hands to query. "Sorry to interrupt, but back to the guys who captured you? Were they mermaids?" He was completely serious, and Pidge facepalmed.
"Of course not, you buffoon-"
"Actually," Shiro interrupted him, "I don't remember much. All I remember is the word...'Voltron.' It's some kind of weapon they're looking for, but I don't know why. But whatever it is," his eyes caught a serious glint, "we need to find it before they do."
"Oh, please," Lance laughed half-heartedly. "Voltron can't possibly be real!" It was a little kid's story! Like moon cheese and aliens, come on!
They ignored him. "Well," Hunk offered, "Last night, I was rummaging through Pidge's stuff and I found this picture." He held up a picture of Pidge and a girl posing in front of the sea. "Look, it's his girlfriend," he chuckled.
"Hey, give me that!" Pidge snatched it. "What are you doing in my stuff?"
"I was looking for a candy bar! But, then, I started reading his diary." He took out a small book from his pocket. Outraged, Pidge snatched it back too.
Lance almost felt sorry for the little dude. Almost. He'd been dealing with the same stuff for years. Garretts, geez.
Hunk continued, "I noticed the repeating series of numbers the mermaids are searching for looks a lot lie a Fraunhofer line."
"Frown who?"
Hunk went on with science and Lance glanced over at Pidge, who was reading over his diary with his back turned on them. He almost managed to read a passage when Pidge slammed the book shut on his nose.
"Ow!"
"I thought it might be this Voltron," Hunk finished the bout. "I think I can build a machine to look for it, like a Voltron Geiger counter."
"Hunk." Lance crossed his arms proudly, "You big, gassy genius!"
"It's pretty fascinating, actually," Hunk reached another pocket for a sheet of paper. "The wavelength looks like this."
Almost immediately, Keith grabbed it. "Give me that." He made his way to the billboard again, paper facing them. He held the chart below a picture of a series of seastacks.
That looks familiar, Lance thought.
2
"I'm getting a reading," Hunk said, looking at a little radar he'd built. Pidge was holding the antenna, pointing toward the seastacks that looked a lot like the wavelength of a series of numbers meant to look for mythological dolphin robots.
He started walking, Pidge forced to follow closely, leading them near the seashore before turning a swift right and walking to a deep incline full of roots and greenery. Lance's heart almost leapt out of his chest, but he followed. The water licked at his shoes, but he could feel nothing.
"Whoa." Underneath some brush was a cave.
Then went inside. "Whoa!"
"These are the dolphin carvings I was telling you about," Keith gestured to the drawings on the entrance walls.
Lance looked around, speculatively. His little kid heart was applauding the adventure, awaiting the arrival of the famous Paladin heroes of Voltron to come save him and his family from the Galra.
Grumbling to himself, he ignored his kid heart and looked closely at one wall covered in abandoned cobwebs. There is no way Voltron is real.
He cleared the cobweb away, rubbing the a familiar mark on the wall. Before he could decipher its meaning and origin, it started to glow blue.
"Whoa. Whoa!" He stepped away and realized the entire cave was colored in blue. All the drawings had started to glow. "What!"
"They've never done that before," Keith informed them as the floor below started to glow as well.
They fell through the ground, screaming as they went, too late to jump out of the way. They were plunged underwater.
Lance could taste the sea.
Lance gasped, and the water entered his mouth. An unwelcome taste mixed with the bitter sensation of being back in the ocean, now with kicking legs.
His legs kicked, the sea kicked back. As his legs kicked, the sea kicked back. The sea was kicking him out, and it was all his fault.
Panicked, Lance made his way to the closest shore he could reach. He spluttered out sea water, ignoring when everyone else made their way onto the rocks too.
He was still breathing hard, he was still wet with seawater, but he was out on land where people like him belonged. He ignored the urge to cry and looked back at his companions.
"Y-you okay, Hunk?" He had never felt drowning before, and he kind of had, it was such a hard reality—
"Am I okay? Are you? I thought you were over your fear of the ocean." Oh, so Hunk could tell?
Way to put me out there, buddy, Lance thought sardonically, giving Hunk an equally sardonic look.
"You're afraid of water?" Keith looked at him like he was crazy.
"I'm not afraid of water," Lance intoned at the same time as Hunk answered, "He's terrified."
Pidge also seemed confused. "But you're training to pilot a submarine!"
Lance looked away in frustration, but he couldn't glare for long. He gasped. Just a few yards away...was a dolphin.
A giant. Blue. Dolphin. Surrounded by a force field.
"The-the-the-the-the," he pointed at the blue dolphin (no, the Blue Dolphin), a giddy feeling in his heart as he realized that Voltron might not, after all, just be a fairy tale.
"Is that it?" Pidge said, sounding disappointed. "Is that the Voltron?"
Still speechless, Lance wanted to tell her off. Of course that was not the Voltron! Voltron was much bigger, and it looked like a siren, not a dolphin, but this was still the blue dolphin! It was the Blue Dolphin! The second most treasured of the Dolphins in Lance's memories because it represented water!
"It must be," Shiro answered her calmly.
How are you guys not freaking out about this too!? Lance wanted to yell. What kind of stories did your moms read you when you were little!?
Humans...
"This is what's been causing all of this crazy energy out here," Keith said.
And Lance finally calmed down enough to realize that...Keith was right. The Blue Dolphin was emitting a crazy amount of quintessencial energy. Lance had simply written it off as the ocean, but now that he was closer, the pull from the ocean and the pull from the Blue Dolphin was different. Similar, but not quite.
He'd been ignoring the Blue Dolphin all this time in his attempt to keep calm.
He'd been ignoring a war machine of the AGES in order to get a mediocre submarine.
By Aegir, he was an idiot.
Keith walked forward first. They followed post-haste.
Lance continued to look at the Dolphin. He moved from side to side, but no matter where he went, the eyes followed. It was actually starting to creep him out.
"Does anybody else get the feeling this is staring at them?"
"No."
"Yeah. The eyes are totally following me," Lance continued, making a show by moving his head around.
"I wonder how we get through," Keith said, rubbing his hands against the force field. It didn't seem to be dangerous, but it was also not very permeable.
Lance frowned, sad to see he wouldn't get to ride the Blue Dolphin after all. Not that anyone but the Blue Paladin could drive it.
"Say we wait for the pilot," he answered, nearing the force field as well. He looked up at the dolphin, whose eyes were still following his every movement. The wall of the force field reminded him of a door for a reason that made no sense. Maybe... "Maybe you just have to knock," Lance added, raising his hand and knocking on the force field twice.
The effect was sudden and powerful. The force field fled from the scene, and the waterbed beneath the Dolphin started to glow like the drawings in the cave. Most spectacular of all, the Blue Dolphin's eyes started to glow.
Lance could hear Pidge and Hunk yelling behind him, but he couldn't take his eyes off the Dolphin. He saw...Voltron. It flashed, in front of his eyes, in front of all their eyes! Five dolphins, purple, red, green, yellow and blue, combining to become a siren. No, that wasn't a siren, that was... It flung out a red sword. Flames. Underwater.
"Whoa," they all synchronized.
Lance spoke first. "Uh, did everyone just see that?"
"Voltron is a robot mermaid," Hunk exclaimed, his feeling represented aggressively in his face. "Voltron is a huge, huge, awesome robot mermaid!"
Mermaids don't have legs, Lance wanted to correct him.
"Mermaids don't have legs," Pidge would not be silenced, "and this thing is only one part of it!" He was clinging to the straps of his backpack, clearly surprised. "I wonder where the rest of them are."
"This is what they're looking for," Shiro uttered.
"Incredible," said Keith.
The huge dolphin began roll its way toward them. For the first time, Lance realized it had wheels. It's snout nearly ran them over, and Hunk and Pidge screamed.
The Blue Dolphin's mouth opened, and a ramp lowered itself to them.
Lance would like to think the moment was a special one, but the only thing on his mind had been that he would make a better pilot that Keith Kogane. It wasn't the childhood memory that sparked his motive to enter the dolphin, nor was it some mystical force that beckoned him to save the world or anything like that.
He just really wanted to one-up Keith.
Lance chuckled to himself, barely looking around to take in the sight of the Blue Dolphin's interior before sitting on the only seat available.
He let his giddy child heart laugh at the feeling. "Here we go," Lance crossed his arms confidently, feeling very much like the Blue Paladin.
The euphoria didn't last long, as the seat moved forward haphazardly, causing Lance to scream and groan after hitting his head on the wall in front. He lifted his head, rubbing at it only to see that screens had started to appear before him.
"Mermaid tech," he muttered to himself. He could read underwater now. Finally.
"See," Hunk whispered behind him. "He thinks its mermaids too!"
He didn't think, he knew.
The screen brightened and showed the view from the dolphin's eyes. They admired the screen with excitement.
"Okay guys," Hunk said. "I feel the need to point out, just so that we're all aware, we are all in some kind of futuristic alien fish head right now! Actually, scratch that. Futuristic mermaid fish head."
"Futuristic?" Lance couldn't contain the judgement in his voice. This was not any sort of human science! It was a discovery made by mermaids, shaped by sirens, powered by magic and research that had been discovered centuries ago! It wasn't futuristic. It was ancient and powerful!
He took a look around him again, now using his human shaped eyes to take it all in.
"It does seem...futuristic," he murmured. He was shot out of his train of thought with the sound of a dolphin's squeal.
"Whoa! Did you guys just hear that," Lance looked around.
"Hear what?"
"I think it's...talking to me," Lance leaned into the controls, looking for some big START button. He knew how to speak dolphin as much as Hunk knew how to speak dog or cat. Which was to say, not nearly enough.
He pressed what seemed to be the right combination of buttons. The dolphin hopped in its spot, splashing the water heavily and emitting a strong chortle.
"Okay, got it. Now let's try this." Lance took the levers into his hands and pushed.
The Blue Dolphin crashed into whatever got in its way until it reached the ocean, and it hopped inside like they had been waiting their whole life to swim again. Lance stifled a cry of excitement. They had been waiting a long time to go back in.
He blinked a little, the hands that were suddenly grabbing him in a panic making him focus away from the dolphin. He had started to refer to himself as we. He and the Blue Dolphin.
By Aegir, am I the next Blue Paladin?
The dolphin shot forward with his feeling, resonance in every movement.
"You are the worst pilot ever!" Keith yelled.
They were all screaming after that. Once they started doing silly dolphin tricks on the water's surface, Lance looked back at them. "Isn't this awesome?"
"Make it stop, make it stop." Hunk looked close to throwing up.
"I'm not doing anything! It's on autopilot."
Even if he could, Lance refused to do such a thing. It almost felt like he was back in the sea, in his own coat again. He almost felt selkie. He was the most selkie he had been in a long time.
A tear managed its way out of his eye, forcing him to look pointedly away from the gang.
"Where are you going!?" Keith shrieked.
"I said it's on autopilot," Lance answered. "It says there's another ship approaching the island. I think we're supposed to stop it."
"What did it say exactly?" Pidge remarked, not feeling safe in the hands of his pilot. That was a little insulting. Hadn't he chosen to follow Lance to the deep sea already, why was he freaking out now of all times?
The Blue Dolphin's wild ride stabilized as they spoke, so Lance took his hands off the controls. He glanced at Pidge, irritated. "It's not like it's saying words. It's more like feeding ideas into my brain. Kind of."
Now that he thought about it, he was a little unsure of how much fighting off the approaching vessel was his idea and how much of it was the dolphin's.
Behind him, Hunk had a "better" idea. "If this is the weapon they're looking for, why don't we just, I don't know, give it to them? Maybe they'll leave us alone. Sorry dolphin, nothing personal"
"No," Lance replied without hesitation.
Shiro added, "You don't understand. These monsters spread like a plague throughout the ocean, destroying everything in their path. There's no bargaining with them. They won't stop until everything is dead."
Lance's mind flashed to a time he'd much rather not be remembering, especially not in the current turmoil. After it had occured, he had done his best to forget it, to think of only the aftermath and what he would do, but watching the Galra take over his community's turf...
His lips quivered and he swallowed hard at the lump in his throat, refusing to get sentimental in front of everyone else. The dolphin's wild ride stuttered.
Hey, he called out to the Dolphin. Shouldn't we, like, head to the Castle of Dolphins or something? We're not going to bring them with us, are we?
No response.
Because, well, Hunk's not very good with motion sickness, you know? And, and Shiro looks like he had a tough time. I'm pretty sure he was captured by the Galra and-
-and he had made it out alive.
Suddenly, Pidge's interest in the rest of Shiro's crewmates made sense. Most of the undersea was working on the same time as the surface (some parts were slower, some faster), and Kerberos had been missing for months.
It held nothing against the years Lance's family had been missing, but it meant the Galra weren't killing mercilessly. They were, but at least not everybody.
Maybe...his family was still alive.
Lance had only ever thought of looking for his uncle. The neighbors he hadn't seen captured. The one's he admired for their magic and their fighting moves, those ready for an attack and those lucky enough to escape. But the thought that he could see his parents and his sisters again.
He groaned as he leaned forward, intently looking away from everyone else.
Make the tears stop, he begged the Blue Dolphin. It finally "responded," however that worked, but all Lance could detect was smug and hints of sorrow that had no business being inputted directly into his consciences.
"Lance," Hunk asked in a panic. " You good, buddy?"
"I'm good. Better than good, in fact. Hey, Hunk, I have something to tell you when we get back. Maybe all of you, depending on how things go after this."
"Huh?"
"What is that?" Pidge pointed at the screen, where all sorts of creatures danced in front of the Dolphin's eye beams.
"Fish," Keith answered.
"No, I mean behind the fish!"
They were heading to the deepest part of the oversea, and the dolphin, of course, had not given in to the pressure of the water. There were trenches far deeper than the one they were in, but even in those, the Blue Dolphin would not be phased.
"Holy crow! Is that really a mermaid ship?"
"Stop calling them mermaids! But...it's got the same fin as the other one, even if the shape is a little different," Pidge responded.
"It looks like a base," Lance said.
"It looks more like a knife to me," Keith joined in. What the hell?
Shiro took a moment to form his own response to the ship, and it took Lance an equal amount of time to remember he was technically a refugee. "They found me."
That was when the fire nation attacked.
The Galra empire was not the fire nation, but it sounded good in Lance's brain as he tried his hardest to work with the dolphin in avoiding the beams of light being thrown at them from the Galra ship's cannons.
"Alright." He was freaking out a little. "Okay." But he would remain calm. Blue would protect them. "I think I know what to do."
"Be careful, man! This isn't a simulator!" Way to contribute to the panic, Pidge.
"Well that's good." Lance grinned at him. "I always wreck the simulator." Behind him, all four of his companions paled. The dolphin shot forward.
Submarines work nothing like this, he pondered as his Dolphin spit out a blue beam of light at the vessel. Fish were running away from the heat and the movement, making the water sway around them. His beam stayed on course.
When he had been a child, shooting his own weak beams of light, the water had easily swayed his magic from side to side. At most he'd been able to make a little cave light for exploration. He had hated refraction with a passion.
The Dolphin's beams were brighter, stronger, and much more lethal. Refraction was nothing to them.
They swarm toward the slow Galra ship, dodging and dismissing the smaller beams of purple that shot at them. With some ease, they made their way to the ship's exterior and the dolphin's tail seemed to become twenty times as sharp as before. It left a hazardous streak on the ship, which exploded when they swam away.
"Nice job, Lance," Shiro praised.
"I think it's time to get these guys away from the surface."
"We're nowhere near the surface," Pidge said. To him, the bottom of the ocean was as far as you could go, right.
"Then let's get further away," he corrected. "We're too close to Oceania for comfort."
They swam away, until they reached a dark trench. Then he started to dive. They couldn't tell, but it was deeper than any human had any right to be already.
"Wait wait wait," Hunk shrieked. "We're not going in there, are we!?"
They did. The Galra ship was now faster, but it chased after them rather...peacefully.
"That's weird," Lance remarked as their journey into the darkness neared its end. "They're not trying to shoot us. They're just chasing."
"Okay, seriously, now we think having mermaids following us is good? I am not on board with this new direction, guys, those guys probably eat people," Hunk complained.
"Not mermaids," Lance frowned, his glare on the screen. "Mermaid aren't the conquest type. They don't eat people either."
"Where are we?" Keith tuned in. A cloudy wall was now covering the Blue Dolphin's vision, despite the light in its eyes lighting their path. Very suddenly, a wall presented itself in front of them.
The children behind Lance screamed. "A dead end?"
"Now that I think about it," Pidge fixed his glasses, "the ocean isn't that deep at all."
Lance swallowed. "This may seem crazy, but I think the Blue Dolphin wants us to go through."
"What?"
Lance glanced at Shiro. "You're senior officer, what do you think we should do?" It wasn't only his own life on the line here. Lance couldn't bust into the undersea—even at the dolphin's sage beckoning—just like that.
"Whatever is happening, the dolphin knows more than we do," Shiro responded. "I say we trust it, but we're a team now. We should decide together." The moment he'd said "team," Lance knew what his answer should be.
Instead of telling them they should stay out of it like a good teammate, however, he agreed like everybody else. Pidge put a hand on his shoulder. "Alright. Guess we're all ditching class tomorrow."
His hand clenched around the controls, and before anybody could suggest another direction or ask why the wall looked so perfectly formed, he burst forward and into the metal. It didn't break away like the caves and seastacks had before. It morphed around them.
3
The metal wall didn't work like a normal passage. It morphed around people like a slimy plastic wrapper. Bad imagery, Lance thought to himself.
Instead of leading to the same spot, however, the wall became an elevator of sorts. No, not an elevator, a crosswalk. Under the sea. Instead of roads, tunnels. When the journey through slimy wet plastic metal was done, the crew remained silent. Lance spoke first.
"That was..."
Hunk immediately tried to hold off from throwing up all over the Blue Dolphin's insides.
"Which tunnel are we taking?" Keith asked behind him.
There were, indeed, quite a few tunnels surrounding them.
"We're not being followed anymore, right?" Hunk worried to his left. No.
"Eenie, meenie, meinie, mo," Lance sang with a grin, well aware of which direction to take. Thank you, Blue Dolphin.
They crashed into a wall again, only to discover it had a hidden tunnel inside.
"How'd you know that was there?"
"Ask the dolphin," Lance said.
"Where are we going?" Shiro wondered, looking around the screen. "Where are we? The wall..."
"The obvious answer here is magic," Hunk reasoned. "But...where are we going?"
Lance smiled to himself. Not far off from the real answer at all. "The dolphin," he replied, "I think it's going home." To the Castle of Dolphins.
Lance jumped in his seat. The Lost Castle of Dolphins.
The tunnel led them to a deeper location, but they soon reached a place where the sea became breathable. (What? Sirens and selkies don't have gills, you think they can breathe under normal water? Sirens and mermaids used to hang out a lot, and not every siren could get a mermaid kiss.)
"Guys. Personal space. Hunk, your breath is killing me," Lance said as they gathered around him, closer than before. The dolphin had started to shake as it landed, wheels touching the ground with a loud noise. They rolled forward a little ways, stumbling over every available rock.
We are not clear for landing, Lance berated. Then again, maybe no one in the castle knew the Blue Dolphin was returning home. The way would have been cleaned if it had.
Come to think of it, where was the Castle of Dolphins?
"Why did we think trusting a mechanical dolphin was a good idea?" Hunk asked, holding on to Lance to avoid falling. "Why are we trusting a sentient metal dolphin again?"
"It got us away from the shark warship, didn't it?" Lance challenged.
"I don't know if you noticed," Keith leaned in to say, "but we're in a dolphin warship. There's not a big difference."
"Oh," Lance smirked. "You scared?"
"With you at the helm? Terrified." They glared at each other.
Shiro intervened. "Alright, knock it off. No one's happy to be in this situation, but we're here now."
Speak for yourself, Lance thought back at him, I might get to meet a real princess!
"If we want to get through this," their senior officer continued, "we've got to do it together."
"So what do we do?" Pidge asked.
Shiro thought about it. "First, we find out where we're headed." They all looked at the pilot. "Lance?"
Oh shit, what do I say?
Blue Dolphin was silent. "Uh...I don't know." They were headed to the Castle of Dolphins, weren't they? Where was it, then? Lance looked ahead and grinned.
They gave him a look.
"I'm sorry. The dolphin's not talking to me anymore. Wait! Wait, wait, wait! Shh," Lance silenced them. "Listen. I think I hear something."
"I'm hearing it too," said Keith.
"It's uh—" Hunk added, "It's kind of a— a high-pitched squeal? But not like a dolphin's, like—"
When the smell caught up to them, the three teens and adult covered their noses and looked away from Lance, groaning at him. Lance laughed.
"But seriously," he said, unbothered by their glares, "there's a castle up ahead."
They looked. There, in all its glory, was the Castle of Dolphins. White, shining, brightly lit with a blue and polished white surface. It gleamed under the light of the dolphin's beams, and even the Sun's light seemed to reach it despite the fact that the Sun's light was nowhere near the bottom of the undersea.
"Where is that light coming from?" Pidge asked.
"The Sky." Lance said.
"That's no—"
They came to a sudden stop at the castle's entrance.
"Keep your guard up," Shiro told them when the dolphin refused to move forward. "My crew was captured once. I'm not going to let it happen again."
The dolphin's mouth opened and the intake of water washed everyone but Lance out of the ship.
Way to go, dolphin.
They went screaming. Lance stood up to try and help them, or at least tell them that the water was, in fact, healthy for their lungs, but they were already gone.
It soon washed out, leaving him, dry, inside the Blue Dolphin's head.
"So you know," he said aloud, speaking to the Blue Dolphin. "About my skin." It was leaving him the choice to go out alone, by his own volition.
Before, he'd had no way of reaching the undersea without his skin. Swimming felt horrible, he couldn't breathe underwater, and he had had no chance of diving to the deep ocean to the barrier before drowning or succumbing to decompression.
His crew was out there: his brother, his friend, his rival, and his hero. He couldn't very well act like a coward now.
"This is going to suck," Lance said with a grimace. He gave himself a running start before diving in after his crew.
The sea kicked back at him, but as long as it didn't drown him, he would survive.
Karma. Karma was going to punish him for this later. Nobody said his god would be nice...
Outside the dolphin, Hunk was still worrying about the drowning part. Most of them were bemused by their ability to not die, but Lance focused on their ability to swim forward.
"We should go in," he told them, putting a hand on Hunk's shoulder. His brother stared at him.
"You're swimming," he remarked. "I'm speaking!" More excitable than before, and less afraid, he continued to freak out. "I'm talking underwater! Oh, I knew this had something to do with magic!"
Lance grinned at him knowingly. Shiro spoke.
"We should move forward."
Behind them, the dolphin jumped in its place, shaking the ground. It released a strong chortle and clicks.
Hunk cowered at the movement, too close for comfort. He fell backward when the castle walls (bigger than they initially seemed) opened at the Dolphin's beckoning.
"The door opened," Hunk said, hiding behind Shiro. "Guess it's not going to eat us."
"Eat us?"
"We probably look like delicious mackerel to it!"
The others looked at each other.
"I guess we...go in," Shiro suggested, already swimming forward.
The inside of the castle was dark, and more human shaped than expected. When Hunk spoke, his words echoes back at him, but no one answered.
"From the size of the dolphin, I expected the halls to be wider," Pidge said. They were plenty big for the five of them. They found a set of stairs. "Do dolphins even need stairs?"
Lance sat down immediately. "People can get tired of swimming, don't you think?"
"Only because you never do," Hunk retorted. "I didn't even think you could swim."
Lance didn't answer.
"Do we even need to keep swimming?" Hunk continued. "It's not like sinking will make us drown."
Shiro looked around, taking the advice and falling to the ground. He called out. Instead of a person, some sort of scanner responded. The light shined above them, scanning their bodies. Lance looked up, having evaded the scanning from the steps.
Shiro didn't receive an answer when he questioned the non-sentient device, but Lance could take a guess as to what it wanted with them. When the Galra technology that was Shiro's arm was approved, Lance figured Galra had once been accepted into the castle.
Which made sense. The Black Paladin had been rumored to be part shark.
They followed the lighted path the castle provided for them.
It led them up and down, but eventually they arrived to a chamber of beds. Well, beds was not exactly what Lance would call them, but they were tubes meant to be slept in. Mermaid technology, of course. The healing powers of mermaid witches was famous.
"Mermaid tears," Lance uttered under his breath, smiling at the myth. Not mermaid tears, obviously. Yet people like his Uncle Lot had often said the mermaids were such good healers because of their tears.
Lance walked up to one of the vertical containers.
"This must be some kind of control room," Pidge said, walking to a device that lit up in his presence. Two chambers rose from the ground, revealed by a veil of fogged water and air bubble. The rushing waves made by the chambers almost swept Lance off the ground, unaware.
"Are these guys...dead?" Hunk whimpered behind the control panel. The unused chambers hid themselves behind him.
The answer came when the chamber's barrier dissolved and showed a white haired, dark-skinned female with mermaid markings under her eyes. A crown on her head. A tail instead of legs.
"Father," she gasped, reaching forward only to fall over. They floated, she wouldn't reach the ground even if she was going to fall momentarily, but Lance still shot forward to catch her.
She looked up at his face, and Lance wondered if what he felt when looking into her eyes was the same feeling humans felt when they looked into his.
"Is that a mermaid?" Pidge said behind him.
"See, I told you so!" exclaimed Hunk.
"Hello," Lance smiled charmingly. She was unfazed. Right, his eyes wouldn't work on mermaids (or most anybody under the sea for that matter).
"Who are you? Where am I?"
"I'm Lance. And you're right here, in my arms," he continued.
"Your ears," she said.
He tried to look at his ears, an impossible task. "Yeah?"
"They're hideous. What's wrong with them?"
This was not going to work out. Lance let her go, certain she could hold herself up now. He responded appropriately. "Nothing's wrong with them! They heard exactly what you said about them!"
She grabbed his poor ear and his arm, bringing him to his knees and to tears in a second. "Who are you? Where is King Alfor? What are you doing in my castle?
Ow ow ow ow ow ow ow!
"We were brought by the Blue Dolphin! Please let go, ow!"
She did, thank Poseidon. "How do you have the Blue Dolphin? What happened to its paladin?" She looked to the rest of the crew, who were all still mighty shocked. Keith, ready for a fight; Shiro rather frightened for Lance; Hunk, hiding behind Shiro; Pidge observing at the very back. "What are you all doing here? Unless..."
Lance stood up and rubbed his ear, eyeing her suspiciously.
"How long has it been?" she asked their eldest.
"We don't know what you're talking about," Shiro answered. "Why don't you tell us who you are? Maybe we can help."
She gained a sudden confidence. The sort that came with repetition. "I am Princess Allura of Ys."
Lance's eyes widened. He covered his mouth with his hands and lifted his knees up to his torso, barely containing whatever cry of excitement wanted to escape him.
The Princess of Ys? How many myths were coming true today? He felt a bit feint.
"But I thought this was the Castle of Dolphins!" He shouted, not able to contain it after all.
She gave him a look. "It is. I've got to find out where we are and how long we've been asleep."
She walked to the control panel and pulled up a screen, meanwhile Pidge watched. Lance heard a scream behind him and turned away from the princess.
"Enemy combatants!" A red haired man with a mustache yelled, also marked as mermaid. He didn't fall over, so Lance didn't have to catch him too. As a matter of fact, when the mermaid launched himself at Lance, the teen dodged his tail fin and stared at the fallen figure.
"Ah! Quiznak! You're lucky I have a case of the old 'sleep chamber knees,'" he told Lance, getting up fast and facing the boy.
"You don't have knees," Lance refuted.
"My fins are stiff," the man shook his tail. "Otherwise, I'd grab your head like this, wrap you up like so—" He demonstrated what he would do very well. Lance relaxed, seeing as this man was no foe. "One, two, three," he snapped his fingers, "Sleepy time!"
"Well, before you did that, I would—" Lance shot out a karate chop toward him, grunting heroically. His team stared at them as they continued their pseudo-fight. "Like that."
"Man, these guys are good," Lance heard Hunk say from the side.
"It can't be," Allura's distressed voice shocked the adult and teen away from their fighting.
"What is it?" Mustache asked.
With wide eyes, Allura read the panel. "We've been asleep for five thousand years." She looked down with reprisal in her eyes. "Ys and its surroundings cities were destroyed by that dragon!"
Dragon?
"Coran," Allura mourned to the other mermaid. "Father is gone. Our entire civilization... It must have been the Imoogi Empire," she said, hate in her eyes.
"Imoogi?" Lance frowned. They had gone extinct or into hiding (one could never tell with magical creatures) long ago. "But, if Ys was fighting the Imoogi, then why were we attacked by Galra?"
Shiro looked up at Lance with shocked eyes. "Galra," he repeated. "I remember now. I was a prisoner. Their king...Zarkon."
Pidge and Keith looked at Lance curiously before shaking their heads.
Lance simply shook.
Zarkon? The King of the Galra?
"But-but he was a scientist," he muttered to himself, grabbing his wet shirt to hold himself steady. "I thought they had been taken over by a dictator. I didn't think Zarkon," he'd gotten a little loud. Enough to attract Coran's attention.
"What are you muttering here, lad?"
"I—" Lance couldn't answer.
"These Galra," Allura said, "they could be related to the Imoogi somehow. Even if they aren't, the dolphins are meant to defend the world. They wouldn't be summoned for just any foe. The Galra must be dangerous."
Lance laughed coldly. "More than you know."
"It's true," Hunk added. "They were attacking us a while ago, but we think they want the dolphin for themselves."
"Yes," Shiro agreed. "It's Zarkon who wants the super weapon called Voltron."
"Then he must know that it can defeat him," Allura said. "And we must find it before he does."
So much for stealing a sub.