It was the rhythmic rocking of the quartz walls that returned consciousness back to my nerve rings. As I unwound myself from my spherical vegetative state, the walls rose and fell, countering each stray push from my body with a push of their own. My tendrils tried to reach for the crevices between the crystals sprouting from the upper walls for stability, but almost immediately it sent the rock into a slow, lazy tumble.

A thought lit up my nerve rings, clearing my confusion. What if the force buffeting me and the rock was buoyancy? Pheromones of excitement frothed on my membrane as the prospect of returning home began to outweigh my dizziness. Gently, I threw myself against one of the walls and just as I had suspected, the wall returned the force as if it were supported by a fluid on the outside. The bubbles forming on my membranes grew larger each time, the loud pops of their bursting reflecting the elation I felt in my nerve rings.

The odd creatured had returned me home. I was home.

I slipped back into the tunnel I had drilled for the purpose of reaching the rock's hollowed core and slithered upwards towards the surface. A hundred thoughts swam through my mind, filling my ectoplasm with a cocktail of pheromones ranging from bubbling bittersweet happiness to saline anxiety.

What would I do if Water had passed on? What if the younglings had already hatched and left, what then?

What if the younglings regard me as a threat to them and flee? What if the Behemoths ate them all?

I sent a gentle tremble racing through my membrane to focus myself on the task I had before me. The ocean was vast and finding my way back to them won't be easy. Perhaps I would have to roam the methane ocean for hundreds of starlights in a vegetative state upon a migrating Behemoth to reach Water's remains, but I was determined to be by their side when I metamorphed.

We mimics made nests by secreting slimy froth on hard surfaces and then turning ourselves into a vegitative spherical form to rest within the slime. The slime would then go onto to nourish us in our low energy requirement state. It also kept possible predators away with a disagreeable scent. The slime I had secreted to nestle myself in the rock's core had plugged up almost all of the entrances assuring my safety. My tendrils prodded one of the plugs and the rock continued to bob up and down upon the fluid.

When a tendril succeeded in piercing through the plug, the first thing I had sensed was a gas filled space and searing pain. The three eye-spots I used for navigation clustered together in pain. I yanked my tendril back in but my chemoreceptors could sense the gas outside pouring in through the hole I had opened. My ectoplasm turned saline and my membrane began to ooze the protective slime, blocking the gas' route. I slid back into the rock's core, my nerve rings crackling with panic, my eye-spots scattered in confusion.

It was gaseous oxygen that had leaked in- elemental, lethal and eager to burn me. Oxygen had once been rare in the oceans save for the occasional bubble-streams from the hydrothermal vents that burned Water or me if we scooted too close. The civilisations of the Iv'lah or the Incandescent Ones who thrived in the ocean bottom had once weaponised elemental oxygen till their various nations came together to declare a ban on oxygen-based warfare, deeming it cruel and ghastly. It was true, there wasn't a creature on the planet that could survive oxygen poisoning as far as I knew.

Yet there was the enigmatic metallic beast, bearing the rock and me within its chest, swimming-no basking in its presence, unfazed and unpertubed. Suspicion gnawed at my nerve rings, was this thing even from our world?

I had to get out without burning myself in the oxygen waiting for me. Perhaps, I thought, perhaps could I drill a hole straight down into the fluid supporting the rock, reach the creature's chest cavity and escape?

I reached into my genetic archives to read the genetic blueprint of the Magma Runners. Their bulky bodies would just weigh me down while I tried to escape so I just needed their corrosive secretions. Soon, I grew myself a few Magma Runner masticatory glands on one of my pseudopodia and pressed it against the quartz floor. The floor began to hiss, bubble and splutter as the corrosive fluid began eating through the hard rock.

When the hole grew large enough, I let my pseudopodia take the space up and continue filling it with the fluid. My thermoreceptors sensed a certain pleasant coolness seeping into the rocks from the fluid beyond, beckoning to me. I drilled straight down till my tendrils found themselves floating outside the rock in the cool fluid.

The fluid, much to my surprise, was water. Being thicker and more viscous than liquid methane, it felt rather peculiar moving my tendrils through it. Tiny bubbles of oxygen stung my convulsing pseudopodia but they weren't big enough to cause serious damage. I pulled my tendrils back in and let the protective slime from my membrane plug it up.

It seemed that I had three paths before me- I could go up and burn to death in the oxygen rich air pocket, escape down into the water underneath me and let the bubbles sting me or stay within the rock till the metallic beast housing us decided to move again.

A tremor reverberated along the wall, drawing my attention to something crumbling above me hidden deep within the stone. With the roar of a newly-formed hydrothermal vent, light and oxygen gushed in through the torn cleft drowning me in a cascade of agony. My sensitive eye-spots plunged from the membrane surface into the safety of my ectoplasm, casting me into complete darkness. Blinded, I shrivelled into a drying blot splattered against the rock surface in the gaseous onslaught. My ectoplasm was a sea turned hypersaline, just barely being contained within a spasming membrane that was threatening to fracture and spill my insides.

Starlights seemed to pass in the span of one second. Then a stillness flooded my mind and I was floating in it, set adrift into a great unknown like a rotting weed leaf, swaddled within warm currents without a destination in sight.

If this was my demise, all that would remain etched into the stone would be cold regret. I could feel my tendrils tensing up, stretching and reaching for a body membrane that wasn't there, for a pheromone stream that would never arrive.

Perhaps it was time to be with Water. There was no fear then.

My touch receptors broke through the monotony. The tendril I had stretched had landed on a strange solid.

I couldn't tell if the pain had faded or if I had grown used to it. A brand new set of sensations streamed into my blank nerve rings through the tendril I had extended, assuring me that I had survived.

Bounding the space before me was a cool smooth surface, tasting of quartz. Curiously enough, the air around the tendril didn't burn anymore. A few of the outer tendrils I had unwound from my condensed form agreed when they found a rather soothing atmosphere greeting them.

My attention returned to the curiosity before me. It wasn't pure quartz, rather a peculiar melted mixture of quartz, sodium carbonate and limestone. The crystals that grew near the hydrothermal vents, ones that Water loved to nibble on whenever they got a chance, those were structures of pure quartz. I drew forth a brave eyespot from my depths and sent it to survey the structure. The gradient of darkness lightened into a light blue as my eye surfaced. It didn't burn.

I stiffened on the spot. Seperated from my body by a thick layer of the odd quartz material was a giant white creature with a black area on its upper end who I was certain was peering in. I sent out a second eyespot for a clearer view and waited for it to make a move.

The white creature was about ten times my size, bulky, slow and bipedal with four limbs. When I moved my eye spots closer to the quartz pane I could see that the creature was using its free upper limbs to manipulate a smaller object. There were five tendrils at the tips of both its limbs, while one set of them held the object in place the other tendrils seemed to twist it with some effort.

My pseudopodia detached itself from the quartz surface when something split from the object the creature was working on and came hurtling at the quartz pane. My membrane shuddered as a rosette of concentric cracks appeared on the surface, prickling me with the bits of shattered crystals sticking out. My tendrils slowly stretched to skirt the edges of the fracture. Oxygen, to my absolute horror, was slowly seeping through the cracks.

The life of an Iv'lah was a fascinating one, one that I had been too charmed by to notice that I may have outstayed my welcome. I had lasted for fifty starlights before I was discovered to be an imposter in their midst and was chased halfway across the ocean by a swarm of angry Iv'lah executioners. Water had found the incident hilarious and used to tease me about it whenever a chance arose.

The Iv'lah were gifted manipulators of the environment around them, and their civilisations had technology that could command entire ocean currents to steer their floating cities. Their engineering prowess stood at odds with their frail ribbon-like forms, protected from predators only by the potency of the venom in the thin webs they surrounded themselves with. Warmongerers by nature, the belligerent tendencies they had so meticulously tried to breed away would resurface every now and then in the ideas of an ambitious scientist.

Oxygen had been one such discovery- it had been used to heal and treat lethal infections until certain militant factions decided to pervert its purpose. Before long, entire cities fell to wars fought between inflexible, conflicting ideals.

I wondered what the Iv'lah would think of the curious, bulky white creature outside my quartz substance enclosure, submerged the ocean of gaseous oxygen and unbothered by it much like the metallic beast from before. Would they worship them as war gods or regard with a mixture of awe and terror as a testament to the undoing of their civilisations by their own tentacles?

Knowing them, it was more likely that they'd swarm, kill and eat the white creature.

My eye-spots caught the white biped lumbering on two feet towards the quartz enclosure and retreated to the safety of my body's membrane. Soon the creature's shadow fell over me. It prodded the fracture on the quartz pane with one of its five stubby digits at the end of one of its upper limbs.

Its top half twisted so that the blackened part of what I assumed to be its head turned to face behind it. The creature let out a complex cry which prompted the arrival of another one of the creature's kind. The second creature supported a container with its two upper limbs, placed it on a rock nearby and opened the container to extract what looked like a solid tool from its depths.

The dexterity with which the five digits worked on mending the fracture had my attention riveted to the quartz pane. The creature spoke in a soft series of coos and murmurs to its companion.

Oddly neither of them seemed to notice me plastered upon the quartz pane near the fracture. I stayed there watching them work, setting eye-spot beside eye-spot for surveillance. As the flow of oxygen into the chamber ebbed with each twist of the creature's digits, I realised that the creature was trying to repair the defect and stop the gas from killing me. I sent my eye-spots far and wide for confirmation. I was indeed the sole occupant of the quartz container.

A thought crystallised from the fluid of my mind. What if these creatures were holding me hostage within the quartz container? The Iv'lah loved trapping creatures in an adhesive living gel for their use, and such creatures served three purposes exactly: food, entertainment or to learn more about them.

Escape was not an option. What awaited me beyond the quartz was a world flooded with oxygen, a burning world eager to combust my being.

All I needed to survive in the harsh atmosphere was a sample of the white creatures' genetic material. Its digits hovered so tantalizingly close to the quartz, taunting me to melt the pane and sample it. Anxiety was slowly beginning to cloud my ectoplasm.

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The engineer kept his gaze fixed on the nozzle and glass pane as the sealant dried and shut the breach. He rubbed the liquid across the crack with his latex gloves, letting it filter deep through the fractures and fill them up. The automated air pumps attached to the container had gone into overdrive when the detectors sensed the increasing oxygen content.

Dr. Cabrera had been insistent that the goop they found inside the meteorite sample be kept in anaerobic conditions.

"Is that thing awake, kid?" he asked in a low voice as he examined the sensor readings on the digital display below the container. Behind him, one of Dr. Cabrera's understudies dusted a few soil samples off the rover's tires and onto glass slides.

"We don't even know if it's alive or not. All we know currently is that it's got viable bio-signatures and that atmospheric oxygen degrades it."

"What's a viable bio-signature?" asked the engineer as his eyes drifted to the goop sitting on the glass near the fracture. The goop had a grey metallic shade to it, irridescent wherever the dim light from the ceiling lamps touched it. The thing was roughly the size of a business card and occasionally a tremor sent waves across its surface.

"Um, a viable bio-signature means that either that thing or something inside it like a bacterial colony perhaps is alive. Thing is we haven't got clearance to study that substance from the higher ups."

The engineer nodded. "It looks exotic."

"Yeah, I mean the whole department's pretty excited since this guy's extraction. Some of the researchers think that this might be it, this might be the first time humanity makes contact with an alien species," the understudy's voice rose by an octave, "and that we're not alone in this universe anymore. Humanity might be able to see an actual extraterrestrial being in our lifetimes. We're raring to test it and see."

"Pretty cool," said the engineer, his lips curving into a smile behind the mask. He stood and up placed the sealant back into his toolbox.

"I'd be more careful with the bolts holding this thing together at the bottom if I were you. We''ve been receiving complaints of them not being stable. We don't want this thing going on a rampage through the facility."

The understudy looked up. The engineer could almost sense the sheepish grin behind the understudy's mask.

"Yeah we'll be careful. Thanks for helping out."

The engineer took one long look at the goop in the container before he exited. He had glimpsed a thin filament stretching towards the crack from the forner of his eye, as if the goop was probing the glass and through the cracks, touching him.

He looked at the black latex glove covering his right hand. He could swear something had pricked his forefinger while he was rubbing the crack. The thought of the interaction being perhaps the first contact a human had with an alien weighed heavy in his mind. An engineer struggling to make ends meet in an economy steadily marching towards hyperinflation and an alien far from its home stranded in a burning world, an interesting pair of lives crossing paths.

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Word Count: 2700

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