Kyma drags herself out of the tank and into the water, before shoving herself off of the slope and into deeper water. She swims into the waterfall cave and stops. There is a new box sitting on the stone besides the pool, and it is much smaller than the normal storage boxes, not to mention the fact that it has holes. Kyma hoists herself onto the dry ledge and carefully takes the lid off. Upon realizing that it has no contents, she pulls her bag off of her shoulder and carefully transfers all the shellfish from the bag and into the box. She places the box at the far end of her normal ledge, where water can flow in and out through the holes. Once the box is situated, Kyma drains her bag of water before placing the gold coins back inside of it. The radio beeps and Kyma swims over to the main cave. A tray is sitting a little ways away from the water, and she scarfs down the food before laying back against the gentle slope of the main cave's floor.

The water pulls at her, and she lets it carry her out of the cave and out to the far wall, the one facing the open ocean. Kyma bumps against the wall and lifts her head to peer out of the slit. She sees something in the water and squints, trying to identify it. Her attempts at identifying it fail, seeing as the object is about twenty meters out to sea. The object continues bobbing up and down softly, so Kyma whistles at it, wondering to herself if the object is possibly an animal. It turns, approaching her, and Kyma jerks back against the water in surprise. The object isn't an object, it is a girl! Why is she out there? The girl continues approaching the wall until she finally sees Kyma through the tiny slit, at which point she pulls backwards in surprise. Then she barrels towards Kyma, stopping a few centimeters away from the slit. She starts speaking rapidly, and despite the fact that she is speaking in Kyma's native language of Spanish, her accent is so thick that Kyma can't understand a word.

Kyma stops her rapid flow of words. "Slow down! Your accent is making it really hard for me to understand you when you speak really quickly, it's causing your words to blur together."

The mysterious girl checks herself before continuing. "I'm sorry! I'm just confused, and worried. Why are you trapped in there?"

Kyma gives her a sad smile. "I was kidnapped by the men that work here."

The girl looks behind Kyma and her face darkens with fear. Her next words are so fast that Kyma can barely understand what she is saying. "Come down to the bottom. Don't look behind you, then they'll know. Just dive as if you were leaving."

Before Kyma can ask how she knows there is and opening down there, the girl dives, barely leaving a ripple in the water where she was. Kyma sighs and turns slightly before diving down to the bottom of the pen to meet the girl at the underwater opening. At the grate, Kyma settles against the sand with her face looking out through the bars and her tail behind her, floating slightly toward the surface but still hidden by Kyma's cloud of hair. She grabs at the bars to keep herself on the bottom. She looks down at the sand for a moment, and when she looks up, the girl's face is now on the other side of the bars. Kyma looks at her in confusion over how they will communicate underwater, but the girl doesn't do anything besides hover there for several seconds. Her eyes flicker down to Kyma's larimar pendant, which is resting on the sand before her, before she looks back up at Kyma's dark blue eyes. She takes another glance at the pendant, and her eyes widen. She surges up and away from the wall, revealing a blue-green blur as she swims up towards the surface.

Kyma pushes off of the wall and follows the girl up to the surface, only to find her nowhere in sight. Dejected, Kyma swims back to the waterfall cave, but as she swims past the main cave, there is a flurry of shouting from inside it. Kyma stops in confusion as two divers exit the cave, dressed in standard black wetsuits. One of the divers sees her and points, hurting through the water toward her. Kyma darts away from them and dives down to the bottom before hiding amongst the coral. The divers stick their heads beneath the water, and despite how far down she is, her billowing cloud of white hair easily gives her away to them.

They swim down towards her, and she darts off again, but once she begins to approach the surface, her body jolts as an intense electrical pulses through her body. Her body floats up to the surface, and she stays there, bobbing like a piece of driftwood, unable to move due to her temporary paralysis. The divers reach her motionless body and drag her towards the cave as her vision begins to fade out. The sensations around her wink out one by one until she finally loses consciousness.

When Kyma comes to, she is once again in her carrying tank. She looks around herself, disoriented, and discovers that she appears to be in a large van. Dr. James stands in front of her tank, a clipboard held in his hands.

"Little Kyma, we have a new test for you. But before I tell you what it is, I want to know why you didn't come when called."

"How could I have known you were calling? I was on the other side of the pen!"

His voice is harsh. "Don't take that tone with me. Why did you try to escape the divers?"

Kyma almost throws up her arms in indignation. He appears to be trying to find a reason for punishing her! However, two things stop her from actually throwing her arms up in the air. The first is that she is afraid of what he would do to her if she actually did so, and the second is the sheer fact that her wrists are handcuffed to her tank. "For all I knew, they could have been trying to hurt me. You don't normally send people into the water."

He nods and leans back, appearing somewhat satisfied by her response. "Very well, would you like to know what today's test is?" He continues speaking before she can even open her mouth to respond; apparently that was meant to be a rhetorical question. "Today's test is to see how far away from the sea you can get."

Kyma's horror is evident on her face and he chuckles with contained glee. He raps his fist against the wall of the van and it jerks forward before settling into a steady rhythm. We have only been moving for about fifteen minutes before Kyma begins to feel like there is pressure on her entire body. They keep moving, and her body moves on from pressure and towards pain, although the pain seems to be centered around two places, Kyma's heart and her head. Thirty minutes after the pressure started, they are approximately twenty kilometers. She is in complete, paralyzing agony. Finally, after several minutes of her being in this state, the doctor pulls out a radio.

Instead of him telling the drivers that they can turn around, like Kyma expected, he instead says, "Slow down as much as you can, but don't stop the van."

The van slows to a crawl, and Kyma thinks that they make it about a half kilometer before her whimpers and agony-filled moans turn into a blood-curling and pain-filled scream and she finally passes out.

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I feel so bad, because I keep hurting Kyma! But it's necessary for the plot. I cried when writing it, and it still hurts to read it. But pushing that aside, what do you guys think will happen next? How many more tests will she have to endure? How long will she be stuck here? Now, on a happier note, here is another drawing of Kyma.

Happy reading!

~Goddess of Fate, signing out.