Noel awoke much easier this time from unconsciousness than when she had been paralyzed by the sea snake venom. As soon as she did though, she noticed she couldn’t move her body at all.

Out of confusion, she instinctively felt herself verbally mumble, “Huh…?” except even her mouth wouldn’t move properly and she only heard a muffled sort of “Hmmmph…?” come out of her instead.

This was when Noel immediately noticed something was very wrong. She looked down at herself and saw the reason she couldn’t move was because she was tied up in several strands of an unknown greenish substance. At the same time, she noticed she was being restrained with her back against a tall stone column. The column was also thin enough for both her arms to go around to the back of it, which was where her hands were tied. As for her mouth, it too was covered in the same green stuff wrapped around various parts of her body including her tailfin.

“What is this?!” Noel thought to herself, her confusion quickly turning to panic as she began to make sense of her surroundings, starting with the stone column she was tied to. It turned out she was on one side of a modestly sized underwater cave, where stalactites and stalagmites respectively decorated many parts of the ceiling and floor. A few of them had joined together to form columns, one of which Noel just noticed had Caleb stuck to it, restrained in the same way as her.

“Caleb!” Noel tried to mentally call out to him, but there was no need to, as he woke up a split second after her eyes fell on him and had also just begun to access the situation.

Turning his head this way and that before struggling against his green restraints to no avail, he called back to Noel through his mind, “Noel! Are you alright? What happened? Where are we?!”

“No idea!” Noel replied, but upon hearing those last three words from Caleb, she realized something again and looked around the cave a second time. If they were indeed inside an underwater cave with a completely intact ceiling then it would have been near impossible for them to see anything. Yet they actually could see as well as day, and Noel could now see why.

Many parts of the cave walls, floor, and ceiling were covered in patches of bioluminescent substances that Noel and Caleb had seen before only in one place. That was enough to let them know where exactly they were.

“I can’t believe this is happening!” Caleb groaned. “They’ve captured and brought us to their home planet! AND they’ve tied us up with whatever this shit is because they sensed they can’t keep us captive via mind control!”

Noel suddenly remembered what had happened just before they blacked out, from the sensation of their hair standing on end to the violent vibrations that coursed through their bodies, all from making physical contact with the eel in an attempt to kill it.

“You’ve got to be kidding me…” She muttered with a sense of sheer disbelief even bigger than Caleb’s, “It was like an electric eel or something?! Of all the things that could have been guarding that one rift we were trying to destroy, why THAT?! No less a version of an animal that doesn’t even live in salt water back on earth!”

“Why indeed…” Caleb lamented in agreement. “After thinking we’d at least be able to make physical contact with the aliens we’d fight, this is like some sort of cruel prank…”

Speaking of physical contact, Noel noticed something else about their surroundings. “Oh no, I think they also took away our backpacks and weapons! They don’t seem to be anywhere in this cave!” She said.

“Even if we did still have them, don’t know what good they’d be for us when our hands aren’t in a position where we can use them…” Caleb muttered. He hadn’t given up trying to struggle his way out of his restraints yet, and Noel could faintly hear his voice making muffled noises through the surrounding water with every move he made. On the other hand, Noel just remained still where she was, knowing it was futile. From the way the green substance felt on her skin, she had come to realize it was the same kind of stuff that made up the protective layers surrounding the rifts. The only difference was, this wasn’t made to let living things pass it by. And seeing how those protective layers required sharp objects such as knives to penetrate, assuming the restraints also worked the same way, it was safe to assume neither her nor Caleb were getting out of here on their own.

“We still can’t just sit here and do nothing, though!” Noel heard Caleb’s voice, this time in her head. “I didn’t gather up every bit of courage I had and go with your suggestion just to end up like this!”

A pang of guilt shot through Noel like a bullet upon hearing those words. It wasn’t that Caleb was guilt-tripping her – because she could tell that most certainly wasn’t what he had said it for – but it was more that it was her idea which got them into this predicament. How could they, or rather she, have been so blinded to think they could face the aliens just from a single victory against one, when the reality was they were at a disadvantage on so many levels? Neither that nor any of the things they did for their preparations, or even their immunity to the aliens’ greatest weapon could change the fact that they were still physically far smaller and weaker than the creatures. Maybe the sea snake had indeed been nothing more than simply a stroke of luck. A single stroke of luck at that, which wasn’t enough evidence to support her foolish theory of them standing a chance.

Being so wrapped up in her own head over this, Noel had once again completely forgotten that Caleb could still hear her as he mentally spoke to her again, “Hey, I’m not trying to-“ but he didn’t get to finish his sentence just then at the sight of something approaching the entrance of the cave. Noel also snapped out of her thoughts and looked to see what was coming.

The car-sized cave entrance was at the far end of the cave, beyond which Noel and Caleb couldn’t properly see anything. They could only assume it lead to several other cave systems judging by how the only thing they COULD see outside it was another cave wall. Right now on that very wall there were two shadows swimming closer and closer until the things they belonged to came into full view before Noel and Caleb.

At first the two of them were both taken aback and slightly relieved to see they were approached by not any of the aliens, but two humans with tailfins just like them, still wearing the top parts of the clothes they were in when they were first turned. The relief was then extinguished to be replaced with uncertain fear when they saw the two humans before them had an unnatural look in their eyes, as if something else that wasn’t human were behind them. Noel knew that look all too well from the day the aliens first began their assault on the world, and immediately knew this was probably not going to end well for them. And the sight of two large pieces of meat they each held that neither Noel nor Caleb could tell what animal it came from didn’t help anything.

The two people, each a man and a woman who both seemed to be in their mid-to-late thirties, placed the pieces of meat at the foot of the stone columns Noel and Caleb were tied to. They then swam right up to Noel and Caleb themselves, who couldn’t help but squirm their bodies and let out muffled screams into their gags from terror. What would the aliens possibly want out of them that required mind-controlling a couple of humans to do the job instead?

This was why the two of them were once again taken aback when the man and woman untied the gags from their mouths before swimming down to retrieve the meat. Once the meat was back in their hands, they took off bite-sized chunks of it and held them up to Noel and Caleb’s mouths.

Noel glanced at Caleb out of the corner of her eye and asked, “They expect us to eat this?” She was so confused as to why the aliens would want to feed them and keep them alive in captivity if their whole purpose was to catch and eat every life on earth they could get their hands on.

Apparently having wondered the same thing to himself, Caleb replied, “Could it be they’re saving us for later? Are they trying to make sure we’re fat enough for their tastes before eating us up?”

Even as the man in front of her kept giving her anxiety with his uncanny stare and the meat of unknown origin, Noel took a second to think. Most of the aliens were rather big and therefore would fittingly need to eat a lot, so if they were gathering every life on earth to their home planet, there was no way they could eat up their collected prey all at once. If so, it probably made sense for them to keep some of their prey alive to eat up much later. That thought didn’t do anything to comfort her though, as it didn’t change the fact that she and Caleb were brought here to be chow.

“Just eat it already, don’t make us force the stuff down your throats.”

For the third time Noel was taken aback. At first she couldn’t tell where the voice in her head had come from, as she didn’t recognize it. Then she figured out it must’ve been the man in front of her.

“Of course…” Noel thought to herself. “It only makes sense for those creatures to have these people talk mentally to us if necessary, since they too can’t talk properly underwater…”

“Hurry up, we don’t have all day.” Noel heard the man say again. “And they don’t like to be kept waiting either, so if I were you I’d get this over with as soon as I can.”

The woman must’ve probably told the same thing to Caleb too, because Noel next heard him say, “We don’t even know where that shit is from, how do we know it won’t kill us or anything?”

The woman’s voice then said, “It’s meat taken from a shark, nothing more or less. And believe me, they need you about as much as they need us, despite you two being… different from the rest.”

“How you managed to pull it off, it doesn’t matter, because they made sure you’re not getting out of here on your own.” The man added. “Now will you please just eat? I’ve a feeling you’ll need it.”

There was no alternative. Noel and Caleb were not at all eager to find out what the aliens’ reactions would be to them being disobedient when they weren’t in a position to do anything about it. Therefore they had no choice but to let the man and woman feed them until they had their fill. Only then did they exit the cave and leave the two alone and restrained once more.

Once sure they were completely alone, Caleb started struggling again in many more futile attempts to break free. Several minutes of hearing nothing but the muffled grunts of him making no progress later, Noel told him, “You heard them, we can’t escape from here, so stop wasting your strength.”

“I’m not just gonna sit here and let the aliens fatten us up before eating us like the goddamn witch from Hansel & Gretel!” Caleb insisted through half a dozen more grunts and struggles. “Those two kids escaped and lived at the end of the story, and I wanna see us do the same one way or another!”

“I don’t wanna die as much as you do, that’s a fact.” Noel replied. “I’m just not denying the other fact that we’re completely helpless here.” And even though she herself said these words, they still sent another pang of guilt through her that this time seemed to even manifest into physical pain.

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If they never tried then they’d never know, she had told Caleb. Well, now that they’ve tried, they knew for sure they were never going to win this fight. But they didn’t have to come this far to find that out either. The answer was all around them in the form of their situation, it’s just that she was too stubborn to see it through her false hopes. Why did she never learn that wishful thinking would only bring them more harm than good? Was she really that unwilling to accept the harsh yet unavoidable reality to the point of tricking herself into thinking there was a way out?

Come to think of it, the turtle had also initially thought the same way, hence why this journey had even begun in the first place. Could it be that it too wanted to believe there was a solution to this unsolvable problem because it couldn’t handle the reality any more than them? Was it blinded by the pity it felt for her and Caleb so much that said pity created the delusion of it being able to help, when they had already lost before the start? If that was the case, just like the two of them right now, it too ended up being proven wrong the hard way…

Before Caleb’s mental voice could reach her mind, Noel spoke to him first, “You were right Caleb, I’m so sorry we had to get to this point to make me finally realize it. We should have went with your suggestion and tried to find a foolproof hiding place or method. Maybe we never stood any chance against these aliens even with the turtle’s help. Look what happened to it after thinking we could stop them, and now the same thing’s about to happen to us…”

As much as Caleb wanted to tell Noel she was wrong and that what happened to the turtle wasn’t going to happen to them, he eventually didn’t say anything. Unlike when Noel had convinced him they had to continue pursuing their original goal, there was nothing he could say now that would make things better. No wise choice of words were going to cut them free from their restraints, let alone return their belongings. Less talking and more acting was their way out right now, and he was willing to take any action possible despite their extremely limited movement.

At the back of his mind where Noel couldn’t hear him, he thought to himself, “I promised her I’d go with her suggestion because I don’t wanna lose her again… and I intend to keep that promise.”

Seeing Noel so devoid of any kind of hope – like he had before – made him more determined than ever to make sure nothing bad would ever happen to her. Because ever since their fight with the sea snake, he had come to realize what he hated more than being put in danger himself was to see Noel in any sort of distress and him being unable to do something about it. And right now what with both of them most likely to meet certain doom sooner or later, that was what drove his motivation the most more than anything else.

* * *

Being in an enclosed space with no freedom of movement gradually made Noel and Caleb lose their grasp of time. They did fall asleep from exhaustion at some point, but there was no way of telling if it was during day or night. Not to mention by the time they woke back up, there was also no way of telling if they were here for several hours or a whole day, maybe even more.

By then Caleb had finally stopped struggling against the restraints, but only because he was now busy trying to think of other ways to escape. While Caleb thoroughly inspected the environment to see if there was anything they could use to free themselves with or at least use to their advantage, Noel just stayed slumped against the column she was tied to. As far as she could see, the only thing they could do here was wait for the end to come, and Caleb was again wasting his time and strength by trying to do anything else. She could still hear Caleb’s mind as he thought over one possibility after another, but didn’t even bother paying attention to them. What was the point of raising one’s hopes in a situation where there was no hope at all, other than to just be let down more than ever later on?

Likewise, Caleb wasn’t listening to any of the thoughts coming from Noel’s mind that he could hear. The only way he was going to prove to Noel this wasn’t the end was by escaping, so it was best that he actually helped them do so one way or another rather than simply telling her he would, as a response to everything she was saying to either herself or indirectly to him.

Yet the hours-like-minutes came and went – if you could even call them that, as there was obviously no clock here – and no progress was made. After finding nothing of good use in the cave other than a few jagged rocks beneath them that were clearly out of reach, Caleb had to stop and rest from all the thinking he’d been doing. Next to him, Noel was on the verge of dozing off again.

Just then, there came the familiar sounds of something approaching the cave again. This snapped Noel back awake and turned Caleb’s attention to the cave entrance from where two familiar shadows could be seen. No doubt they belonged to the man and woman from earlier.

“Feeding time again, I expect.” Noel muttered hopelessly, watching the same two people come into the cave. But unlike what she and Caleb were thinking they were here for, this time they were empty handed. Nevertheless, they still swam towards the columns with the same unsettlingly unnatural look in their eyes, before positioning themselves up close to Noel and Caleb.

Immediately Noel felt her body fill with dread. Not only were the man and woman getting rather uncomfortably close to her and Caleb, but if they weren’t here to feed them, she couldn’t think of anything else they could possibly be here for. This couldn’t be good at all.

“Considering you haven’t been here for too long this could be too early… but there’s no such thing as too early for them, so better brace yourselves.” The man said to Noel, whose dread began to reach its peak when she felt both his hands hold her hips tightly. “All that matters to them is making sure their food supply doesn’t run out. Don’t take it as anything personal, they made us do this.”

“NNNMMMMMMMPPPHHH!!!!!” Noel heard herself scream in sheer horror through her gag. She could already tell where this was going, and she didn’t even want to think about it. But here she was, right in the middle of it as it was about to happen.

In between her muffled screams Noel could still hear Caleb also doing the same. Except his attention was drawn more towards her rather than the woman now barely an inch away from his body telling him they would make sure it would be over before they knew it.

It was only when Caleb also felt a pair of hands – these belonging to the woman before him – on his own hips that he remembered what was about to happen to him and he turned to face the woman. Every inch of his body and every part of his mind lamented that neither he nor Noel had no control over any of this, and it was unavoidable no matter what he wished.

Wait… control?

That one word suddenly gave Caleb an idea and he concentrated with all his might at the woman. “This had better work, we’ve done it before countless times already…!” He pleaded to himself.

As he kept on concentrating on the woman like his life depended on it, which wasn’t all that wrong of a way to put it, the woman suddenly stopped what she was trying to do and let go of his hips.

“Yes!” Confirmed of his success, Caleb then turned his concentration to the man in front of Noel. He too stopped and let go, but Noel, having closed her eyes out of terror and thus being unable to see the halted danger, continued to scream and squirm against her restraints.

“Noel! Noel, calm down and stop that! Open your eyes! It’s okay now, really!” Caleb called to her several times before she finally did as she was told. As much as she was relieved that nothing had happened to them, she was also confused as to why the man and woman had suddenly stopped. Then she saw something different about their eyes and knew. Their eyes no longer had the unnatural look of some otherworldly entity being behind them, but now one that felt like it belonged there. Almost like… the man and woman were themselves again and not under control.

Next second, the man and woman’s eyes were filled with great shock as they gasped and cupped their hands over their mouths. Noel and Caleb could both hear them thinking to themselves, “What were those monsters trying to make us do to these two just now?! This is terrible, I can’t believe…”

“Don’t worry about it, we know you weren’t yourselves when it happened.” Caleb reassuringly told them through their minds. “Good thing I stopped you in the nick of time, though. Do you think you can please release us from this green stuff, though? There’s some pretty sharp rocks lying on the cave floor you can use to cut through them, or at least I hope you can.”

Watching the man and woman swim down to get the rocks, Noel looked at Caleb with even more confusion in her eyes to ask, “What just happened? How did they manage to snap out of it?”

“I gave them the same protection we’ve been giving to the animals we freed whenever we got rid of a rift.” Caleb replied. “The idea just popped into my head as a kind of last resort, and I can’t be more relieved to see it actually worked.”

Noel breathed a relieved sigh through her nose and said, “We did practice that ability well through trying them on all those animals… and I can’t thank you enough for putting it to good use here.”

“You’re welcome.” Said Caleb, and he was extra glad he could say that with a smile to go with it, as the woman had come back up to pull the gag off him before working on the rest of the restraints. Noel was pleasantly surprised to see her theory on the restraints being made of the same biological substance making up the rifts’ protective layers were right, as the jagged rocks cut through them all, though not without some difficulty.

Nevertheless, by the time the green substance were nothing but tatters of itself lying on the cave floor, Noel and Caleb felt more free than they ever had in their lives. They gratefully thanked the man and woman for their assistance, and all four of them exchanged introductions with one another.

“It’s the least we could do, after the unspeakably horrendous thing we almost did to you two.” Said the man, whose name was revealed to be Steven.

“That wasn’t you, it was those aliens.” Caleb reassured them again. At this, Noel’s mind suddenly flashed back to something the turtle had told them before, on the day it had first spoken to them.

“No doubt they’re trying to exploit all of it to their benefit… I did hear something from them saying they don’t intend to make the same mistakes again, but judging by what they’re doing I doubt it…”

And as she recalled Steven saying something about the aliens wanting to make sure their food supply didn’t run out, she came to a realization and said, “The aliens are bringing their prey to their world and forcing them to reproduce with their mind control! That’s what the turtle meant when it said they weren’t gonna make the same mistakes again! Their idea of never running out of food is to have it reproduce new food for them! And yes, I know that was a really weird thing to say, as much as it is messed up as hell!”

“Is that what this was all about?!” Caleb asked with a revolted frown. “We’re something even less than livestock in their eyes, I’ll be bloody darned!”

“How could they do a thing like this?!” The woman, Lori, gasped again in both shock and disgust, when Steven asked Caleb in a tone of slight confusion, “Wait, wait, kid, did you say aliens?”

Caleb scratched his head a bit and replied with a sideways glance, “Bit odd to ask that right now, but yeah, that’s what those monsters are.”

Glancing at Steven and Lori’s weirded out looks on their faces, Noel said, “For better context, I do believe we owe you an explanation as to what all of this is, right?”

Fortunately, it didn’t seem like any aliens were coming to check on them anytime soon judging from what Noel and Caleb could detect with their senses. This allowed them to give Steven and Lori all the information they needed to understand the situation from beginning to end.

“Who would’ve thought turning our legs into these would make it easy for them to make us swim to where they were?” Lori said in a baffled tone by the time they’d heard everything. “Just baffling…”

“Yeah well, in absolutely no defense of those wretched things, they were kinda right.” Noel replied. “God knows how much of the ocean me and Caleb must’ve covered over the past couple of weeks or so just by swimming, because these tailfins do help us travel through water so much better and faster than webbed swim gear. For all we know, we could have been miles away from the coastline of a totally different country before we got here.”

“Pity they’re nowhere near as useful on land…” Steven mumbled. “I was one of the few who went through the change a little far away from the water. I still remember how difficult it was to drag myself all the way over there, even though I was under the aliens’ mind control then.”

“Well, they won’t be mind controlling you now.” Said Caleb. “Not with the protection I gave you two, they won’t be able to do whatever they desire with any of us four.”

“But what if they find out about this?” Lori asked worriedly. “Being immune to mind control still won’t stop them from catching us in some other way like they did to you.”

“Remember what we told you about those things called ‘rifts’?” Asked Caleb. “The rift they carried us through to get us here is our only hope of escaping them. Now, since you still seem to remember everything you saw, heard, and did while under mind control, can any of you recall seeing a rift somewhere in this cave system? There’s should be at least one if they brought us here…”

“I do.” Steven replied. “There’s a much bigger cave out there where more people like us are held captive, and this great ball of light in the middle of that, which I think is what you’re talking about. I think I even saw you two coming through it while held unconscious in the mouth of something like a giant eel. You do have hair colors that aren’t easy to miss…”

“Most likely that’s the same rift they used to bring everyone else into the cave.” Noel theorized. “We’ve seen them keep animals in caves before, and all the caves we saw had a single rift to them that when imploded, freed all the animals in the caves.”

“Then that’s what we’re going for.” Caleb concluded. “It definitely won’t be easy getting there, but if we stay then we’re as good as dead, no way of avoiding it. We’re already in enough deep shit as it is, so let’s not miss the one chance we still have at surviving. Do or die.”