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The white beings had a certain rhythm to their routines based on the frequency of the white lights on the cave roof. The creatures stayed within the cave housing me for as long as the lights shone, and left when they were extinguished one at a time. One cycle lasted from the light break to when the lights went out.

At first light, a tall white creature would wander in and inspect the quartz container around me, fiddle with the knobs at its bottom, and leave.

Sometimes the tall creature would bring in a whole school of creatures belonging to its species along with it. It would wave in my general direction and warble in its mixed tongue to the school. The others would oscillate their tops back and forth. Then the tall one would point at various spots in the cave and the creatures from the swarm would take their assigned positions and get to work. A very social group of beings who had a very strict hierarchy with the tall one at its top, they were more like the Iv'lah than I had previously assumed. I was beginning to grow concerned. If these were anything like the Iv'lah, my escape would be difficult.

It wasn't that my stay was dull, the creatures were quite amusing.

For starters, they were obsessed with containers. If an object could be captured then the white creatures would have a container for it. A few cycles later, I learned that their white hides functioned as second skins that they used to contain themselves.

Underneath that, the creatures took a more familiar form resembling Behemoths. These things came in shades of pinks and browns, with a conical protrusion and three depressions on its head and a pair of globular organs above them containing what I thought were eyespots. Filaments of gold, black, red or brown grew on their faces bordering these structures, the longest of which sprouted from the top of their heads.

They used the lowermost depression on their heads to communicate, collect a variety of substances from their surroundings, and on one occasion during a lightless period, attempt to ingest each other's heads by sucking at each other. Failing to ingest each other, the pair of creatures fell to the cave floor and proceeded to grunt, moan and bellow all through the dark cycle. Had they been Behemoths I would've assumed that the grunting meant that they were either calling their Alpha for protection or declaring war upon a rival pod.

One light cycle, the Tall One, the leader of the school that nodded their heads, approached my container and rapped the quartz with a digit. I stayed rooted to the spot, having turned my membrane and ectoplasm translucent to resemble the quartz. Stealth had always been my greatest ally when it came to hiding from difficult encounters.

Or so I had thought. The Tall One produced a long, transparent tubular tool and pushed it into the container through an opening I had been keeping my eye spots on for a while now. Its metallic end had a gaping hole in its center fed by a steady vacuum sucking the air around me. All it took was a curious tentacle of mine straying too close to the hole to suck me into the tube.

As soon as my membrane touched the tube's material to derive nutrition from it, a taste so perplexing and unpalatable rushed through my receptors. I could barely move a tentacle within the tube, air permeated painfully slowly into my membrane and I was running out of energy. My eye spots were pressed flat against the sides, struggling to shift their positions. Around me swarmed the rest of the Tall One's companions and the Tall One did its arm-waving.

Relief flooded through me when the Tall One released me onto a slab of quartz. My hungry pseudopodia and acid-filled vacuoles latched onto the surface and set to work, melting off bits of delicious quartz with one-hundredth of the efficacy of a Magma Runner.

Metal bit into my membrane before I noticed its approach, a searing sensation followed its cold touch. My eye spots clustered near the point of impact to survey the damage. A gigantic part of my ectoplasm was seperated from the tiny bit that housed my nerve rings, and it was seizing on the quartz, throwing one thrashing tentacle after another in the blind desperation to reach me. The Tall One had cleaved me with a metallic claw, something resembling what the Iv'lahs had referred to as a blade.

The Tall One collected the miniscule part of me with my nerve rings into the vacuum tube and moved to a new container. This one contained a new creature, one that squeaked like a larval Magma Runner calling for its parent to come feed it. The Tall One reached into the container, grabbed one with its other upper limb and held it steady while it thrashed in its clutches.

The tube breached the creature's hide and a force pushed me into its body.

The insides were scarlet, soft and warm. Red glows flashed to life and dimmed within the fluid much like starlight filtering through the waves and entering the ocean depths.

There were two widely different kinds of pains that my receptors were sensing. I ignored the ache of the gash made by the Tall One's metal tool. Through the frayed edges of my torn membrane bled ectoplasm that clumped and dissipated into the stream flowing around me. With the calm flow carrying me onward came a bombardment of particles that stung like a spray of acid.

As my body slowly degraded into a smaller, more compact form, avoiding the particles that had the acid within them became easier. The worst of the lot were the red coloured ones.

One such red particle came crashing into me. My now filamentous tentrils flailed at the red particle, but instead of breaking, the thing's membrane held the blow.

It tasted like me. Why did these particles inside the squeaky creature taste like iron oxide?

I plunged a tendril into its depths and retracted it. Oxygen again, only this time it was encased within an iron-based eerie material. Stunned, I quickly primed my chemoreceptors eager to taste more of the sqeaky creature's insides. The fluid I was suspended in was saturated with eerie substances, substances that tasted like home but at the same time so foreign.

It wasn't helping that my surroundings were enriched with water, a constant reminder of what I had left behind and what I had to find before it was too late. Without knowing the creature's internal structure escaping it would be difficult. That was without mentioning that the amount of oxygen in its body would kill me if I were to consume it.

Water's children would have to wait. I could almost see them breaking through their sporangia, their chemoreceptors trying to make sense of the strange new sensations that the gracious green ocean had to offer.

The red particle didn't last for very long after that, it shrivelled and burst. As if responding to the red particle bursting, a larger white particle charged at me from a distance, weaving through the crowd of red particles as if to accost me. Curiosity curbing my flight insticts, I swam closer to the white thing eager to make it an accquaintance.

It stretched a pseudopodia towards me, which I assumed was in greeting and extended mine, hoping to establish communication through the pheromones flowing through our intertwined appendages. A certain strange kinship with this creature set into my nerve rings- it too was amorphous like me, bound by a membrane and hiding within a larger organism to shield itself from the unforgiving atmosphere outside. I even considered the possibility of this delightful creature being a long lost relative to the mimics.

Instead of meeting mine however, the white being's pseudopodia slipped past my pseudopodia and enveloped me with a manoeuvre that I couldn't help but admire. I thrashed my tendrils against the pseudopodia as it pushed me into its ectoplasm, trapping me within a food vacuole, readying me for consumption.

My tendril in its mad flail penetrated through the vacuole and grabbed hold of different membrane covered structure floating around in its ectoplasm. It unravelled in my grasp, releasing strings of a nitrogen-rich substance into the ectoplasm.

My eye-spots spiralled. The chemicals of substance had a particular pattern to their arrangement. In fact, I thought I sensed a particular sequence in there somewhere but the fragile strings broke down before I could have a second taste. I let loose another tendril this time winding as many of the loose strings around them as I could collect.

To my delight, the chemicals that made the strings were rich with patterns telling me an unusual tale. I pulled the strings into my nerve rings, now stripped to their bare molecular skeletons, and read the patterns over and over again. Stitching them together bit by bit, an image flickered into my mind's eyespot.

I now held in my nerve rings a full genetic blueprint of the squeaky creature, a fantastic beast that required deadly oxygen to metabolise energy, one that required oxygen just to merely survive.

My membrane trembled, frothing at yhe edges. Could I synthesise a body like this? One that ran on oxygen? Would it even be compatible with my structure? The strings had opened up a gaping chasm of improbable possibilities before me, and I floated at its very edge, staring into the darkness. To synthesise such a body would be to take a blind leap into the dark chasm.

I didn't have a second option. I would have to navigate the outside world even if I managed to escape. The blueprints promised me a form that was immune to oxygen's burning presence, in fact it offered me one that would thrive in its presence. It would make finding Water easier.

If the blueprints were to be trusted, the purpose of the white creature, an immune cell to be precise, that had swallowed me was to keep out foreign invaders from colonising the squeaky creature's tissues. If I didn't escape from the vacuole, I would promptly be degraded and excreted.

I waited for the ectoplasm surrounding the vacuole to thin at a point. When it did while the cell was being buffeted by the flowing stream outside, I thrust my tendrils into the ectoplasm to reach the outside. Once the tips breached the cell's outer membrane, I pushed the rest of my body outside through the tendrils using them as tubes. The white cell didn't survive the force with which I had propelled myself through the tendrils.

I fired up my nerve rings to hatch a plan. Morphing within the creature would be risky, because if I were to morph and grow to full size within the creature, we would both be mashed together in a rather gruesome way. Besides, the escape should be as discreet as possible being under the watchful gaze of the Tall One and its companions outside.

I searched the blueprint yet again, wondering if the creature had orfices I could escape through. Then I remembered, I wouldn't have enough time to morph once I was outside, the oxygen outside was still a very active threat looming over me.

My thoughts ran back to Water again. How would they have tackled this? Despite my ectoplasm slowly turning bitter and saline I clutched onto the thought and held in my head. What would Water do?

My eye-spots scattered on the surface. I scoured the creature's blueprint for a spore-bearing structure or an egg sac where I could hijack a spore or an egg and be nourished into a young one. I wouldn't have to spend energy growing a body then, the parent's body would nourish me into maturity. Interestingly, the creature did possess a similar set of organs deep inside it.

From what I could understand, the squeaky creature came in two sexes much like the Behemoths, the egg bearers and the ones who watered the eggs with semen so that they hatched into calves. The one I was in was an egg bearer, and it had to have an egg sac somewhere within the body.

Bearing the destination tenderly in my mind, I processed the genetic blueprint in my nerve rings a few hundred times till I narrowed down several places where the egg sac could be. If I needed a proper image and bearings, I would have to let the genetic material grow my cells which wasn't an option in my current state. There was no way of knowing where I was or how I could get to the egg sac.

I twirled in my place using my pseudopodia to rotate myself. The fluid, the red and the white cells were parts of the creature's circulatory system, which acted as the ectoplasm inside us mimics. Since these creatures were bigger, the fluid had to flow carrying substances to each part, as the ectoplasm did in the Behemoths, Iv'lahs, Magma Runners, and others. Unlike the fluid, however, ectoplasm never had huge solids like the cells floating in it. Neither was it so abhorrently enriched with oxygen, my membrane alone knew how it was keeping the oxygen outside.

A red cell brushed past me mid-flow and burned a hole into my shorn and abused membrane. If any one of Water's children were misbehaving, little annoyances, I would name them Oxygen without hesitation.

The blueprints had information on tissues being capable of producing certain unique pheromones called hormones that they used to communicate with each other. Filtering through the vast amounts of those suspended in the fluid around me, I selected one chemical and swam to its origin tracking its taste with my sharp chemoreceptors like it was an elusive prey.

That hormone led me to where the squeaky creature's gut, a large muscular sac that crushed and churned the material. My membrane spiked, and my ectoplasm grew acidic in a flash. I would have morphed then and there, not caring if I tore the squeaky creature apart while I shifted. Somehow, I decided to try again. Perhaps it was the water streaming into the fluid from the gut that cleared my thoughts, cool and understanding like the mimic bearing its name was.

Several failed attempts later, my tired pseudopodia finally landed on the soft, cushiony interior of the creature's egg pouch. If the blueprints were correct, the egg pouch would nurture me into a larval form of the squeaky creature. I began to unravel the creature's genetic material and made my cells secrete a certain hormone that would fool the egg pouch into believing that I was an egg from the egg sac.

To my utter surprise, the thick pinkish-red walls of the creature's egg pouch responded to the hormone with vigor, its fleshy extensions intertwining my pseudopodia and flooding my ectoplasm with a rich stream of hormonal commands. It took me a while to decode what they were saying but the blueprint assisted me faithfully.

A head, a tail, a pair of eyes, bit by bit, we were building a fascinating creature together, slowly and steadily. The hormones and the genetic material together taught me the names of each organ that we cultivated together in the language of the squeaky creature.

Now grow four limb buds, the hormones would say and I would allow my body to follow their lead.

Here, grow a brain from the mass of primordial cells, it would say, use it to control all that takes place in the body.

Here, grow a circulatory organ called a heart- four-chambered, strong enough to pump the fluids across your vessel, reaching even the most distant of tips.

Here, grow a pair of lungs, a pair of soft, branching spongy organs within your thorax.

The creature carrying me felt more familiar while I grew within its womb, feeding on the complex hydrocarbons that the genetic material had named carbohydrates, proteins, and fats it was scavenging for me.

I could hear the Tall One's whistles fading in and out of my consciousness alongside the beats of my parent's larger heart, reminding me that I was still under its watchful eye.

When the darkness around me finally gave way to a breach of gentle dawn, I found myself being separated from my cozy home and squeezed through a tight tunnel of contracting tissues called muscles that helped in movement. The water that had supported my being broke and I fell through the orifice into a bed of something itchy, prickly, and disagreeable. My surroundings turned blistering hot in a heartbeat, and my limbs thrashed against my will, hoping that someway, somehow, the heat would just go away. A pair of openings at the tip of my snout opened as I found myself gasping and squealing in protest.

In rushed air, cool as water, sweet, euphoric, and life-giving. My lungs expanded and my chest heaved as the air washed over and into me. My brain basked in ecstasy with each breath.

My nerve rings, built right into the brain parenchyma, jumped up in rapt attention.

The cool gas filling my lungs was oxygen. It didn't burn anymore, in fact, it reminded me of methane or water.

Lungful after lungful, I gulped down the sweet gas, my thirst for it outmatched only by my shock. I was breathing a toxic substance and was flourishing in it.

I didn't think for much longer, I slithered and crawled over the patch of wet filaments called fur covering the squeaky creature. My snout touched a wet protrusion leaking what my nose told me was food. I pressed my mouth against the protrusion, a teat according to the blueprint, and let the warm, white, fatty milk fill my belly with each suck.

The squeaky creature or rather my mother ran her warm tongue over my shivering, trembling, hairless body.

"Hello, little one. Welcome to this cruel world," she seemed to say with each lick. "Don't be afraid now, you are loved."

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Dr. Cabrera's forehead grew deep furrows as he turned from behind the microscope. The papers in the understudy's hand shook with the slight tremors of his fingers.

"What do you mean the mouse gave birth? I had checked the test subject this morning before Sample 056 was administered to it, it sure as hell wasn't pregnant then."

The understudy pushed his glasses up his sweaty nose.

"I think you should come and see this."

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Chapter Word Count: 3107

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