Angetuga did not cool off slowly.

More like, she was so enraged that she wanted to break something at one point, and then suddenly - bing! - it was all gone.

She stood up with a start, instantly regretting all the things that she had said to Grishgern.

"Grishgern?" She asked. "I don't know what -"

"Don't bother." Grishgern replied. "The same happened to me, so I know. It's okay, you weren't yourself. I don't know what it is, but it certainly isn't normal; I suspect it had something to do with what those humans did to us."

"Grishgern," Angetuga said firmly. "You are the best Yirinu on the planet, do you know that?"

"Of course I do." Grishgern joked. They laughed together for a minute, all worries forgotten, then fell into a rather uncomfortable silence.

Angetuga was the first to break it. "Grishgern, do you remember what happened?"

Grishgern's smile was wiped off her face as quickly as if she had looked up and seen a Valrag diving on her. "Yes." She muttered.

"Good. Do you have any idea of how to get out of here?"

"No." Grishgern stared at the floor, suddenly miserable.

"Are you okay?" Angetuga asked. "You've been acting weird since you got lost. What happened?"

"Nothing." Grishgern certainly loved being monosyllabic right now. Angetuga sighed. "Fine. Don't trust me, your best friend." She said sarcastically.

"It's not that, it's just- I can't."

"Fine." Angetuga turned away and started investigating the walls and floor, looking for any cracks or anything that would help her escape. No such luck. A few moments passed in silence.

"Angetuga?" Grishgern said in a mousy-small voice.

"Yes?" Angetuga was still sore at Grishgern's lack of trust.

"I've got something to tell you." Angetuga softened at the scared tone.

"Yes?" She asked, considerably more sympathetically. Grishgern was clearly scared.

"Well-" Grishgern swallowed. "You know when you got taken away when we were first here?"

Angetuga remembered that well. Being grabbed by huge claws and dragged to strange places has a strange habit of not fading from your memory any time soon.

"I was taken away too." Angetuga was shocked by Grishgern's revelation.

"I thought you said they didn't do anything to you?" Angetuga exclaimed incredulously.

"I had to. You- You'll understand." Grishgern sniffed again. She really was very easily upset recently, Angetuga noticed.

"I don't. Why did you lie?" Angetuga said sharply.

"I can't!"

"You can." Angetuga spoke with an icy tone reminiscent of the Yirin South Pole in winter. "You will."

Grishgern stopped, gulped, took a deep breath and began. "You have to understand that this was not my fault. I had no choice."

We always have choice, Angetuga thought. We just tell ourselves that we had no choice to make ourselves feel better about mistakes made in the past.

"When they took me," Grishgern continued, "They stuck a strange thing into my foot, like you said they did to you. I don't remember all that much from after, but I do remember one thing; I was not in control of my own body. They asked me questions in our language, and I couldn't not answer. It was like someone else was controlling me, and I was watching from the sidelines, powerless to stop it..

"Then they told me to do one thing; they told me to track you, and to tell them what you were going to do next at intervals. It was like the other thing controlling me took over when every you told me what we were planning and made me sneak away quietly. You didn't spot it the first three times, but then you did..."

Angetuga was in shock. How could Grishgern do this to her? But then, she knew what strange things the thing in her foot did, so why couldn't one do the something different to Grishgern?

She didn't know who she could trust anymore, what if the same had happened to some of the others? What if it had happened to all of them? What if-

No time for what ifs. Time for action. Now, what-

Angetuga was cut off mid thought. Quite a hard phenomenon to explain, really, but if you imagine those times when you're yawning and something makes you jump, so that you subconsciously stop suddenly? That's the exact feeling of being cut off mid thought.

Anyway. Angetuga was cut off mid thought by two shiny steel doors that neither of them had noticed sliding open and revealing three humans.

One of them was that tall one with the brown hair that Angetuga had met before, the other two were big, bulky and carrying long black sticks of the kind you or me would call rifles.

"Ah. We meet again." The tall one said, looking at the corner of her glasses again. "You and your fr-eends?" She stopped and looked intently at the corner of her glasses. There must be something there helping her to speak their language, Angetuga decided. "You and your friends have done well at our intelliegence test." The human was badly mispronouncing the longer words.

"Wait." Anger flared up inside Angetuga at the words 'Intelligence test'. How dare they? How dare they put them through all this for a simple test? Angetuga was too enraged to hold back any longer.

"This was all just a test? An intelligence test? Do you know how much we have been through? We have nearly been fried, sliced to pieces, lost and almost eaten on this stupid test of yours! How dare you do such a thing!" Angetuga stopped, red showing from beneath her scales, and glared at the rather stunned looking human.

"Well..." the human had obviously not expected such an outburst, and was completely lost for words.

"That's all you have to say, is it? Well? You know what I say to that? You had better take us back home now, or there will be consequences!" Angetuga stamped her foot to make the point.

The human seemed to recover her composure, and drew herself up to her full height.

"Consequences?" She laughed derisively. "What consequences? You can't do anything to me. If you make one aggressive move my guards will shoot you where you stand."

Angetuga stopped. This situation looked bad. Very bad indeed....

Angetuga found herself suddenly and rather ignominiously pulled from her thoughts over how bad the situation was, by the terrible and irrepressible urge to sneeze.

If she wasn't in such a precarious situation, she would have kicked herself. It was just so stupid! Why now, of all times?

She could feel the sneeze building up, creeping down her nose and back toward her throat unbearably slowly. It shuffled down slowly and ticklishly and with an evil grin. Angetuga couldn't stop it - it was going to happen soon, and when it did it would not be pretty.

After a last failed attempt to halt its progress, Angetuga gave in. As she felt herself take a deep breath, it made a fleeting impression on her mind that everyone else was standing still. Not just normal still, but rigidly dead-still. It was uncanny. But she didn't have much time to probe the situation in detail because -

Angetuga SNEEZED.

Loudly. And violently, too. Very violently. She felt herself thrown forwards by the sheer force of the thing and suddenly a dull kind of pain erupted in the crook of her left elbow.

She opened her eyes again, recovering from the blast of air, and looked around. The world was strange somehow, colours brighter and sounds bubbling. What was happening? It was suddenly very hard to balance; Angetuga swayed on her feet. The world was spinning, and a horrible headache was coming on with nasty speed. Surely something as simple as a silly sneeze couldn't do anything this major!

The world began to whirl faster, spiralling around...

Then all went black.

#

The Yirinu grasped at the side of the cliff as he pulled himself along. His leg hurt a lot but he carried on desperately, standing on his good leg and using the cliff for support. He had to go, he had to get out of here. He had to find someone. He knew there was somebody that he absolutely had to find, and now, but for some reason... he couldn't remember who or why. Maybe it had something to do with that awful throb in his head? He didn't know. But he did know that he had to find someone, and fast.

But he didn't know if he could make it. Everything hurt. His ribs ached dully, his leg was definitely broken and something seemed to be up with his tail.

Well, you can but try. He steeled himself, took a breath that made his ribs burn, and pulled himself forward further. He had to do it.

#

Mortaga squinted. Yes, it was definitely the entrance to the City. Never having visited the place herself was a slight disadvantage, but the large hole in the ground with steps descending into it was unmistakable, right? The black lumps that surrounded it were a bit odd, but who cared about that? She had finally made it!

Mortaga had never felt so happy. She shot down from on top of her igloo and raced through narrow winding streets and alleys at the kind of incredible speed that cannot fail to leave a cloud of snow behind. She had done it! She had found the Under Ice City! She felt like she could whoop. As she shot through the village, her mind took the time to slow down a little from its euphoria and think.

How would she find her way around when she got in there? It was dark, and since Mortangar had been the clumsy dolt that he always was and dropped their pack, she wouldn't have much equipment. This wasn't going to be easy, but since when had she worried about easy?

Mortaga mentally squared her shoulders, and continues her sprint. If she slowed down she might forget the way, and we wouldn't want that now would we? She might loose Squee somewhere in this maze, too. That would be something to be thankful for, she decided.

The igloos were growing more and more sparse as she reached the outskirts of the villages, and Mortaga found herself able to see where she was going more easily. It couldn't be much further now.

Round this igloo, turn that corner, avoid that pile of snow, turn the corner -

There it was. The entrance. What she had travelled so far to reach, what she had done so much to get to.

But there was something strange about it. Mortaga screeched to a halt, digging her heels and tail into the ground to stop herself. She left three rather interesting tracks in the sand.

She looked about in full observation mode. Something was definitely not right here. Maybe it was the extra wide cave mouth or the-

Oh.

Very much oh.

There were several large caterpillar track marks going in and out of the cave. There were so many that the snow beneath had been compressed into ice. The large black lumps were also nowhere to be found.

"What is this?" Mortaga whispered, staring. "What are they?"

Something small and soft collided into Mortaga's leg and she didn't need to look down to know that it was Squee. She just couldn't shake that creature off! It was creepy.

She stepped forward carefully, edging towards the entrance of the cave. Yes, something large and destructive and definitely been in there. Several times by the looks of it.

"Come on." Mortaga said to nobody in particular and stepped bravely forwards towards the entrance. So far so good, no huge explosions or anyth-

Boom.

A huge noise tore out from the hole in the ground, making the ground tremble in its wake and leaving Mortaga thoroughly shaken.

She remained frozen in place for all of a minute, then suddenly reanimated. "What was that?"

Squee was nowhere to be seen, having bolted away from the sound. It struck Mortaga that she was alone somewhere she had never been before, with no clue of what to expect, and was about to go down into a dark labyrinthine cave that probably held something very dangerous, completely unprepared.

Oh well. If you're going to do something crazy, you might as well do something really crazy.

Mortaga pulled her small and slightly battered looking stick of Bright Ice out of her pack, then dived down into the mouth of the cave with vigour.

Inside the cave, Mortaga noted, it was dark. She supposed that was only to be expected, considering that it was, well, a cave. The original natural sticks of Bright Ice that once illuminated the cave had long exhausted their supplies of Magic, and the many plants that once plentifully populated the caves had long since died.

The place had an air that was a cross between the traditional dark cave - black, oppressive, and silent apart from regular plop, plop sounds - and an air of silent awe, like that of a large Gothic cathedral.

Mortaga had never liked open spaces all that much, anyway. She strode in with great confidence, happily humming a tune that she made up along the way. Well, let's say that it was little lacking in the area of harmony. Mortaga didn't really care, anyway. Holding up her little stick of Bright Ice as a torch, she strode in merrily. The only thing she was lacking was a big stick.

#

Angetuga's head hurt. It hurt, and it span, and it pounded, and it generally did all the things that all good heads simply didn't do. After a few moments of inactivity, Angetuga opened her eyes a little. And instantly snapped them shut again.

It was bright out there. Very bright, and very, very white. What was odd, though, was the silence. An absolute silence that did not help with Angetuga's pounding head.

Again, Angetuga cracked her eyes open. Slower this time - much slower. It still took a while for her eyes to adjust to the glare from outside, but they did eventually.

The scene made her heart drop. Not just to her feet, but right down into the ground where it buried itself and started whimpering miserably.

She was back in the room with the pods.

Grishgern was back in her pod.

Everything was back to how it was before she had escaped. A gasp made its way out of Angetuga's throat and she rushed to the edge of the pod.

Or rather, tried to.

She was connected to a million little tubes and wires, covering her body from head to toe.

Gasping again frantically, Angetuga looked down. Her legs were tied to the floor with black restraints. What was happening? Where was she?

A small bead of red fell on to her foot and Angetuga - still dazed and shocked - began to look for the source. After a brief search, she discovered it.

In the crook of her left elbow, Angetuga saw a small bleeding patch. The scales around were slightly pulled and mussed about, and on the ground was another tube, this time a small one.

Out of the end of the aforementioned tube was dripping a clear liquid. Already a small puddle had formed around the end of the tube.

Intrigued, Angetuga crouched down as best as she could. The liquid certainly smelled good, vaguely sweetish.

She leaned forward, picked up the tube, and tasted a little bit of the liquid. It tasted vaguely sweet and Angetuga liked it. After swallowing several more drops, Angetuga was feeling lightheaded and dizzy. Her brain was slowly clouding over with a pleasant fog that made it impossible to think.

Anyway, who wanted to think? She could just stay here forever, drinking the liquid and enjoying herself...

A nasty stab of guilt at the back of her mind made Angetuga stop for a minute. What about all her friends? She couldn't just abandon them...

Oh stop it. A lazy voice at the back of her head told her. They'll be fine, let's sleep...

Angetuga shoved the guilt to the back of her mind, curled up on the floor of the pod, and was quickly fast asleep. The tube lay discarded beside her, still dripping out liquid.

#

Angetuga sat up out of her snow pile and looked about, trying to remember where she was.

Oh. She was home, of course. How could she forget that? She still had sculptures to make.

She pulled herself up out of her pile and yawned, stretching.

"Hey, Angetuga!" A voice floated in from outside. Grishgern poked her head in 'round the door. "Come and see! Urrhnaldo's made another one!"

"Coming, Grishgern!" Angetuga smiled. She stretched again, yawned, and followed Grishgern out the door.

It was quiet out in the city - eerie type quiet. No sounds penetrated the atmosphere at all; no laughter, no voices chattering, no shouts. Just absolute silence.

"It's a bit quiet today, isn't it?" Angetuga asked.

"No, not at all." Grishgern snapped. "Don't be stupid. Anyway, look. We're here." She stopped abruptly and pointed.

A large pod stood on the snow. A small white pod with one see through side. Angetuga felt her blood run cold at the sight.

"Grishgern, what is it?" She asked. "I don't like it!"

"It's your fault, Angetuga." Grishgern began to chant. "It's all your fault. It's your fault, Angetuga. It's all your fault."

"No!" Angetuga shouted, holding the sides of her head in her hands with frustration. "Stop it! This isn't right!"

The world was spinning, her head was pounding...

Then everything went black once more.

Don't forget to vote if you enjoyed!

🦅—Aquila!