Incoming

<I'm hungry> said Eats-Fast.

<We don't care> said Has-Ideas and Big-Suckers.

The three giant squid were swimming through the sea as quickly as their jets could carry them, which was not very quickly at all, since they were also dragging the strangest piece of equipment any squid had ever carried: a submersible.

Of course, it wasn't a submersible anymore. Has-Ideas had overhauled its structure completely. The vessel now contained water instead of air, and bore wheels instead of a propeller. If a human suffering from equal parts whimsy and pedantry had seen it, that human might have called it a surfacible.

<I'm lost> said Big-Suckers.

<We don't care> said Has-Ideas and Eats-Fast.

Eats-Fast was lost too, but saw no reason to admit it. She knew that Has-Ideas knew where they were going. An island, Has-Ideas had said, an island made of beautiful rocks and surrounded by cool water. An island where people would catch fish and bring them to you, more than even Eats-Fast could swallow. Her salivary glands fired up and her radula rasped the inside of her beak in anticipation.

No squids had ever crawled out of the ocean before. A few of their distant cousins the octopuses had tried it, roaming from tidepool to tidepool, never staying away from water for long. Their reports filtered down through plankton and tuna, through anglerfish and whales, until even giant squid in the depths of the sea had heard about the unbelievably friendly and accommodating creatures that lived on land.

<I'm scared> said Has-Ideas, slowing down as they reached the shallow water where sunlight illuminated every detail of the squids' color-changing skin. They weren't used to seeing each other in such bright light, so to her companions it looked like Has-Ideas had shouted as loudly as possible: <I'M SCARED>.

<WE DON'T CARE> Eats-Fast and Big-Suckers shouted back cheerfully. They continued to haul the surfacible up the rocky slope, dragging Has-Ideas along with them.

Has-Ideas couldn't help trying new things. As a paralarva, she'd used mucus to create a food-catching umbrella. As a juvenile, she'd constructed a predator deterrent out of sharp fish bones. And as a young adult, the moment she'd seen the broken submersible half-sunk in the mud of the seafloor, she knew it was her destiny to use it on land the way the bony four-armed creatures used it underwater.

But now that she and her friends were only a few feet from the air—now that they were climbing inside the surfacible and sealing the door—now that she was working the machinery to turn the wheels to clatter and splash onto land—now she was terrified. Sure, some humans loved octopuses, and built predator-free homes for them, and fed them delicacies.

Others ate them alive.

***

(This was all Twitter's fault. Here's how it happened:

A group of giant squids are setting out on an adventure. Their aim is to steal an enormous topaz.

— Magic Realism Bot (@MagicRealismBot) December 26, 2016

A+ would read https://t.co/awVCLVkJQW

— Rose Lemberg (@RoseLemberg) December 26, 2016

Would write! (The "enormous topaz" part seemed a little dull until I realized it's clearly a reference to the entire island of Topazios.) https://t.co/7ODnuOyiap

— Danna Staaf (@DannaStaaf) January 6, 2017

And then Topazios absented itself from the story by the time I finished writing. Which is just as well, because no one calls it that anymore.)