SURFACE KING King & Son's Oceanic Surveying Co. folded late in the year, unable to stave off the debts incurred by constant delays. The delays were caused by a disturbing casualty rate among the deep sea divers; they simply stopped returning to the surface. The company's assets and few remaining dive suits were sold to a competing group. They scrubbed off the suits' distinctive crown logos and immediately put them to good use in successful dives arranged in the same previously unlucky waters. During the course of these new untroubled ventures two divers working at the absolute limit of safe diving depth happened upon a building of sorts; some type of oppressive colonnade sheltering a row of seated figures. A tentative investigation discovered that within the building were seated the drowned remains of the missing divers, chained in stone thrones. In front of each corpse drifted bundles of kelp, crustacean meat and other seemingly edible offerings. The dead diver's bodies themselves were coated in a thick layer of silt, with the exception of the still shining, as though regularly polished, stylised crown markings on the dive suit's outer plating. Upon return, with the intent of winching up the men's remains for proper burial, it was revealed that the entire submerged building had seemingly collapsed, dragging most of everything down with it into an unfathomable trench below.

