Such Patient Sorrow...

Water.

So much water.

It was almost sad, in some strange way the Hunter couldn't quite comprehend. This was a natural phenomena: an underground ocean created over tens of millions of years by the steadily pouring acid rain that refused to let up. Nature had created it, and nature had populated it. Then why would something so natural seem so unbearably sad? Why was it that every time the Hunter came down here, immersed herself in the underwater tranquility of Maridia, that she was gripped with such agonizing sorrow and loneliness…?

A skeletal fish swam languidly by, its drooping fins stirring up the sediment that had collected after aeons on the cave floor. Even the fauna here looked sad. The fish's mouth was half open and gaping and its down turned eyes, glowing a faint yellow, made it look like it was about to start crying.

Maybe that's where the ocean came from, she mused with a smirk. Maybe the fish had cried it here.

She stopped to watch the fish swim by, resting her hand on a rocky wall. It was covered in a thin layer of slimy sea moss coloured a deep green. It blended well into the dismal blue rock, almost looking like a natural colouring, a splash of mineral deposit, instead of a live plant. With a faint sigh the Hunter looked past the fish. The gloom up ahead was pitch black and she could just make out the glowing yellow of countless eyes, some of them trained curiously on her but the majority in their own little world where all that existed was the darkness and the water and their slow dutiful minds. She turned and looked back, towards where she had come from, her ribbed foorprints still visible on the soft mossy floor. Same story: Darkness. Up. Impenetrable blackness. And down, over the edge of the precipice. A deep abyss of swirling cold and loneliness.

The Hunter felt a dull ache at the center of her being and with a heavy heart turned away from the fish. It disappeared into the gloom with nary a sound. That's why Maridia was so sad, she realised. It was stuck here in its own little prison, with nothing but the cold rock and the deafening silence to keep it company. In fact, all of Zebes radiated sorrow. It was just more profound down here, without the constant clatter of Space Pirate feet to shatter the sadness. It was a dull loneliness that the Hunter felt in her heart, that she could relate to. After the Chozo had left, Zebes had been sad. And it had never recovered.

Suddenly much more depressed than she was before she had arrived here, the Hunter scanned the cavern. A door a few meters to the right. Standard energy door: blue. Made to keep the local fauna out and the illegal experiments in. Absently she angled towards it. A burst of bubbles issued from her respirator, but in the gloomy silence, she heard nothing.

She had a job to do. A species to eradicate. A parasitic life-form to retrieve.

But there was so much water.

And it was just as sad as she was.