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Jasmine was a patient person by nature, she thought as she floated within the confines of her prison. The one she felt responsible for locking Martin and herself within. Orbiting in slow circles around the limits of the tank in a form of restless pacing interspersed with spy-hopping between worlds to see what the Children were lately making a fuss about. But after taking away her ability to speak with her family and friends, and then her friends themselves, she was pretty darn close to giving these people marching back and forth with their guns a few good pokes from her rostrum!

Or at least as soon as Doctor Schofield could explain what he'd learned about why the government came with their helicopters and guns. For no very good reason Jasmine understood. Instead, she'd found herself incommunicado without a single word of elucidation.

Left without contact to any person on land, beyond the few disparaging remarks made by the people wearing jackets that were seven different shades of blue, an observation she must notate somewhere, Jasmine, Martin, and their new wary family were left to their own devices. Which largely comprised Jasmine fending off regular attacks from the elder rescues at Martin whenever he ventured too close to the pregnant cows.

To be fair, if Nikki and Umbra had had their way, the young Filipina's partner would've gotten launched somewhere a few meters above high tide to a particularly undeserved and desiccated fate.

It was not his fault he was male, after all. But despite whatever the Void Children had done to their naturally born cetacean tank-mates, shedding millions of years' worth of instinct like water off their shiny flanks was not in the cards. Luckily, Jasmine's natural charm and pluckiness transcended species. It was the only reason that Umbra's attempt to drown Martin by pinning him to the floor of their tank had failed after he'd accidentally bumped Kala while he and his fiancée floundered about.

Jasmine tried once again to speak to one of the blue-green people watching her and let them know it might be best for them to close the gates they'd opened between the pens to keep her and Martin separated from the others. She needed to figure out how to communicate without her visual aids.

“Click click click creeeeeeak squeal click," she sang with her pectoral flippers up on the lip of the tank and her tail idly swishing below. With one of Jasmine's eyes trained on the guard watching over the tank with a video camera on a tripod next to him recording the dolphin's movements, the federal agent knew she was being spoken to. Which is why it miffed the good-natured woman when her guard responded to the pointed flicking of her beak to the message board Jasmine had playfully nicknamed 'The Ouija Board', abandoned against the wall after the forced absence of her friends, with a scowl and a raised middle finger.

Squeaking in irritation, Jasmine wallowed around until her head pointed downwards and pictured kicking her feet. Her new, streamlined, and barely familiar body interpreted the signal by flicking her powerful tail to send a wave of water off her flukes to crash over the stationed guard. Trixie, Kala, and to her amusement, Umbra joined her with chittering cries of soaring delight in what they thought was a game. Turning the surface of the holding tank into a roiling chaos. The water taking the appearance of the North Atlantic in the middle of winter.

This led to a burst of frenetic play as the natural born dolphins raced around the lolling woman-dolphin who did her best to track their movements with ungainly strokes of her flippers. It had been ten days since Jasmine and Martin had transformed, and already it had grown remarkably boring in the tank to the mildly aggrieved female. In an invaluable usage of their idleness that staved off the worst of the ennui, she and her intended, who drifted by her upside down with a perplexed trill, had been trying to train themselves to ingrain the movements that were all too easy for their tank-mates. Easy and fluid motions that they were running out of time to master before they found themselves in wilder waters.

Why wasn't the Void Child helping them? She could see him with the tent's side rolled up for an equipment exchange. Surrounded by unfathomable instruments and wan, unhappy researchers who looked like they a stroll in the park to perk up. The alien himself paid little attention to the humans that relentlessly tried to get his attention. Instead, as always, with his head held stiffly aloft to brush against the canopy erected over it as he tirelessly and emotionlessly tracked Jasmine and the other dolphins. She wondered if he was waiting for them to do something he would act on. Even in that brief view, the glow of the alien's golden eyes fixed firmly on her as she churned the water to rise above the obscuring railing.

The big grump! She harrumphed, sending a ticklish burst of bubbles from the sinus opening atop her skull. Nothing to say at all after he'd started Rebecca down her crazy fresh path.

I mean, what?

She wanted to be a Child of the Egg?

What was she thinking?

After the Void Child had done that the furious tall woman ordered that none of the research center staff or their families could interact with him again. Not until she knew they wouldn't sell themselves to the devil.

Which held little sense for the woman-dolphin slowly rolling onto her left side. The rhythm of her flipper strokes lost while in idle thought. She had heard the constant railing of the angry Starling chirping her head off about needing more information. The federal agent demanded that those who talked with the Void Child were firmly controlled for reasons that seemed to preclude the woman-dolphin's human friends.

They didn't really care about any of them. Not her transformation nor the one offered the others. It all was about coaxing information from the alien who refused to acknowledge the FBI demanding answers of him.

She wanted the Ouija Board. She had to speak with the others. But her own people had done what the Void Child couldn't. They had made her mute and powerless. How could she and Martin lead?

More than anything, Jasmine wanted to speak to her inay and itay.

Martin drifted by again, a rising spiral of bubbles pouring from his spiracle along with a sonic nudge of support. Not able to communicate more than that. Despite what some might believe, turning into a different species didn't impart a magical understanding of what was an entirely learned behavior. Their senseless soundings conveyed none of the concepts that she so wished. 'I love you' was not an expression that existed in the dolphin world where couplings were fleeting and often coerced.

The only way they could express their thoughts was through rubbing their beaks alongside each other's with a buzz that stimulated a primal part of their new identities. Reminding the neophyte dolphins of the unbreakable bond they had formed in private with their Lord and Savior as witness. A symbol of that was the cross that Jasmine had carried around her flipper. The piece of evidence used to convince the others of her identity. Now, it was in the possession of Doctor Schofield when she last saw it.

Only Nikki remained watching them silently besides a periodic respiratory blast as she bobbed at the surface. The others were gone now, gated in the other tank and leaving the matriarch alone with Jasmine and Martin. An uncanny experience for the three and a perfect example of how the behavior of the dolphins had changed. This kind of observation wasn't like anything they'd seen before.

If Jasmine still had fingers, she would have been tapping them together apprehensively while she awaited what happened next.

'Squeak squeak click!'

An identifier that formed a picture of Nikki reminded them it was her speaking preceded a visual blast that showed Jasmine and Martin. Next came imagery of more, just like them, along with fuzzy sound-pictures of orcas congregating in numbers that Jasmine knew were impossible.

Jasmine lost track of her fins once more and started a slow backwards tumble that was interrupted by her mate's body being in her way. Martin made a rude noise that blatted back and forth in the tank, which Jasmine vaguely thought meant he didn't understand. Sending Nikki backwards with an aggressive curve to her body that made her dorsal fin look twice the size it should have been. The elder dolphin clacked her jaws, a surefire sign of aggression, and Jasmine tried to interpose herself between Nikki and Martin. Overshooting instead, of course.

The attempt was enough to check Nikki's first instinctive reaction to Martin trying to voice his inability to comprehend what they were being showed. Again, Nikki showed them scores of dolphins ranging from massive orcas to smaller white-sided and common varieties in what must have been claustrophobic proximity.

Martin's gentle eye appeared in Jasmine's vision while he slid beneath her and then lifted her upwards to the surface.

Oh… right… explosive exhale… big inhale. Voluntary breathing was not something easily remembered for those who'd spent nearly their whole lives as human.

No sooner that the woman-dolphin had re-oxygenated her blood, than Nikki blared the image of the dolphins again. In cyclic pattern that Jasmine was starting to recognize. Nikki was calling faster and faster with increasingly shortened intervals.

But what did that mean?

Bubbles boiled from her spout as Jasmine thrashed, speeding up to lap the tank in agitation at not being able to communicate. Jasmine just wasn't picking this up as quickly as she needed! The newly born dolphin had better luck conveying thoughts to the Children of the Egg, who defied their guards to dive periodically into their tank for a chat and a swim, than she did Martin or Nikki or any of the others. She didn't know what to expect, becoming a species that evolved for sea life. But she might have underestimated how difficult it was to reimagine using sound to communicate as the cetacean she now was. She was being told something with the Void Child watching in expectation, but meaning and answer escaped Jasmine's awareness.

Because why would it be clear after she'd been deprived of all input? They were being kept out of touch with their friends, family, and guides by myopic authorities. Hadn't the Void Children told them that humans were not living up to what God had intended for them? What it meant if they didn't cooperate with each other?

Martin chittered squeaking laughter and the sound-thought of realization! hammered Jasmine's melon. He had figured something out. Jasmine squealed in fresh frustration. How would Martin tell her? Bother this not being able to talk! They needed help.

Listen

Jasmine heard the whisper in her head. Getting just the help she needed from what felt like April. One of only three Children present who could cross a bridge that Jasmine could not. Each of them with their own distinct presence.

See

See? See by listening? Drat! Why couldn't they just talk to her like they used to? In dolphin, dragon, or what have you. Peeking above the water again gave her the answer. None of the Children were visible. As far as she could see, nothing. But she could hear them, high above and circling with the beat of their vast wings. Crying out in high, reedy, emotional voices. Mournful tones and wrathful hisses that Jasmine anthropomorphized to be of a human-like character. When they might be anything but.

With the former humans already being spread across three distinct species. One not even of this world. The ability to communicate was slowly being stretched to the breaking point. The only commonality left were a select few Children. All female. Only they could share the intentions and emotions of any who were nearby and willing. Creating intimate networks of connections that helped the men and women struggling to accept the changing the world.

Jasmine felt Martin slide up next to her, their fins touching in what she hoped was solidarity, to join in looking up at those flitting in and out of low dark green clouds in the sky. There! Martin clicked and pointed his beak at one pair of wings circling directly above. Jasmine following the line of his rostrum to the particularly large presence of April, who had a phalanx of other dragons around her.

We hurt! Her mental echoing of another Child's grief accompanied a forlorn moaning cry that was taken up by hundreds of other unseen throats throughout the sky. Sending shivers out to the flukes of Jasmine's tail and making the humans stare warily upwards while fingering their weapons. One man went a horrifying step further and fired a burst of warning fire from a much louder and meaner sounding weapon mounted on a tall metal stand when a dragon swooped low to buzz the center, startling the other dolphins into a terrified burst of squawking. Sending a colorful array of streaking red light out into the sound that Jasmine would have found pretty if it wasn't an indicator of deadly violence.

“Background! Watch your background!"

Another man shouted at the shooter as Jasmine slipped below the water. A meaningless statement to her, but she'd seen enough. Something was making the Children sad and restless in ways they weren't before. Something the agents who took the Ouija board had inflicted upon the Children. Lord, she was so useless in this tank thinking about… gosh-darned mackerel she was kind of hungry for!

Listen, she had been told. See. How could anyone listen with so many thoughts tumbling through their heads? She—they had to lead! Trixie and Kala had calves in their bellies that were rapidly approaching their expected delivery and too many questions in their new behavior. Oddities mirrored by Nikki and Umbra in how they watched the humans and then turned to blare sound pictures at Martin and Jasmine. Seeking answers from them about every item that the humans held or used. No matter how frustratingly powerless the two new dolphins were to respond.

Jasmine kicked her legs, but dragged one fin and spun right into the wall of the tank. Bouncing off with a squeak of dismay and a stung beak, she blinked rapidly in a daze.

Right… nothing was working. She needed to calm herself, to find her center. She wanted her cross. Martin, perhaps reacting to her agitated movements or maybe just knowing her, pushed himself with an ungainly wallow against her side, a comforting pressure that she wished would never leave. Staying with her as they rose for breath. Her mind settled tranquilly into the mantra of prayer with Martin against her side. Where her love was meant to be.

That's when she heard it. The voices toward the setting sun. Voices full of loss and fear. Voices that knew new understanding yet lacked purpose. Sight sounds from magnificent creatures of black and white dwarfing the torpedo sleek body of her own and many similar around them. Grief that they were dying struck her the hardest, like a physical blow, that pushed her away from the lamenting songs she could only hear in the calm granted by her ritual of faith.

It was Martin, blessed Martin, who gave her the answer. A feeling of wind accompanied by impossible weightless soaring far above the water. With a glance to her side, she saw humans alongside as Jasmine was carried aloft. If they could entice the alien to go somewhere else, they might free the captives and escape the city.

The questions remained. Could they get their friends and their families free, and would they even want to trade indefinite incarceration for a life they never imagined? Would the humans accept the offer to be greater?

Jasmine giggled with the feeling of her beau's sound tickling her as he conveyed sound-images of the Children coming closer. Puzzling out what he was saying after a moment, she joined him in frolicking to entice their aerial friends closer out of curiosity. Stop Stop, the one they counted on to be the most interested in Jasmine's squealing laughter after her and Martin's ungraceful belly flopped landings and uncontrolled pinwheeling leaps.

Once the diminutive psychic baby had come close enough for them to hear her roared laughter and feel her mental encouragement.

Do again!

Finally able to arrange a meeting for that night with a conversation full of the pidgin emotional imagery. Conveying their desire for the physical contact that the Children would need to allow Jasmine, Martin, and their human friends to communicate.

++++

The moon had yet to rise when Jasmine watched with her superior night vision aided by the lights of the center as Stop Stop and the praetorian guard that followed her everywhere plunged into the water of the sound with nearly silent splashes. Their arrival rousing Jasmine from a curious stupor that had her idly paddling in circles with foggy thoughts of squeezing puffer-fish in her beak as she'd waited.

There was only one guard in the amphitheater at night. A reflection of how cocky the blue-coats were. The guard that night was grumpiest person they could find, it seemed to Jasmine. An acerbic man who made mean comments such as “How does it feel being a mute animal?" and “This tank will be the last place you'll ever live, you godless, unholy thing." Which, as much as it hurt the devout woman to be called godless by the very man who'd stolen her cross from Doctor Schofield. Would have hurt even more if it hadn't been mistakenly told to a bemused Umbra who clacked her jaws angrily at his tone and rammed the tank near him with a slosh of churned water.

“Psst! Suspicious stuff here!" said a voice. The unseen speaker calling in a coarse rumbling voice from behind the edge of the spectator stands. The echoes of the gruff whisper helped Jasmine see that there were eleven, relatively tiny, Children crouched there stamping their feet in stifled amusement.

“This is Agent Hicks. I've got an intruder in the amphitheater. Moving to investigate," the angry, unhelpful meanie said, pulling out his gun and flashlight. Cautiously, he leaned over the edge of the bleachers to peer down. The muzzle of his gun leading the way.

“Suspicious fish!"

The man yelled as a cutthroat trout slapped his face and knocked him to the ground. Boosted by a flap of its wings, a Child launched himself up to perch on the railing on his hind paws with another thrashing trout clutched in hand.

“Extra suspicious!" he yelled, flinging the other half-meter fish at the prone man before running off along the railing. The juvenile howled with laughter as he was being chased by the shouting guard. With a leap, he transitioned to a glide into the swallowing darkness as he led his pursuer out of earshot. Now that the dolphins were alone, Children shot up into view with their wings spread as they leapt from hiding. One broke away from the chortling vortex to thump into the wall above the tunnel and perched there for a second with wings flapping as it kicked at the camera below with one foot to slice its cord. Spinning away to join the others as they circled above the transfixed dolphins.

One after the other, young Children closed their wings to streamline their bodies and plummet into the water well away from the dolphins. Wriggling like monitor lizards, they kept their legs tucked backwards and wings tightly furled while swimming to breech the surface with powerful undulations of thick tails. Water glistened in the harsh artificial light on their thousands of scales as they arced above the following gray rostrums to smoothly resubmerge. Arising again with fins extended outwards and mouths gaping to reflect the playfulness radiating from their minds.

Stop Stop was the last of them to splash down and did so with dramatic elan by looping into a backflip before corkscrewing into the water. She greeted Nikki with a bump of her wing to elicite a loud creaking from the elder female who always seemed to enjoy contact with the Children. Stop Stop was a particular favorite of the dolphin on the few times she could come.

Whatever carefree manner the Children had evaporated quickly enough, Jasmine was both relieved and saddened to see, when all but Stop Stop abandoned the tank to keep watch for the inevitable response. The she-dolphin peered intently outwards at the alien, who deigned to peek his head out of his tent and at the exits where slamming doors and distant shouts were already audible. They had little time as the baby Child slid up between Jasmine and Martin to throw one of her expansive wings over each of them.

“Tell!" she squeaked, pressing Martin and Jasmine tight with her deceptively strong appendages. “I learn."

The former young woman felt a fluttering touch against her thoughts that alarmed her at first, just like all the other times, before it enveloped her with the heat and safety. It reminded her feeling her own mother's caress. Drawing from Jasmine's thoughts, just as it did from Martin, what they wanted to convey in moving images that the Child could infer meaning from.

“Open? Children bringing slippery to bigger water? We all these sunglows think much on next, after, thoughts for slippery ones and friendly half minds. Children know slippery ones ache to carry life beyond puddle to their past thoughts."

_ _Jasmine wasn't sure how she knew what any of the noises Stop Stop made meant. But she knew it had something to do with the touch she felt in her mind. The presence of the tiny Child, both ephemeral and physical, that was needed for communication to be possible. Martin was the one who figured out what the Child had said first when he squealed loudly and bobbed his head affirmatively.

“Keep minds open, hear sounds from big water and Guide," she lifted a wing to point with her thumb at the watching head of the Void Child peeking out from beneath the side of his enclosure.

“Not need touch squeaky slippery ones with wings, then. Talk from sky and water where safe. You in danger. Other Matriarchs and Stop Stop agree. Await touch of claws in this many sundarks," she said, holding up four of her clawed fingers to Martin and Jasmine. The only cetaceans still paying attention.

A Child trilled loudly with the sense of a warning, giving Stop Stop enough time to retract her wings, plunge, and then erupt out of the water with her adorable phalanx coalescing before her in a wedge. As soon as her claws clacked onto the ground, teams of shouting law enforcement streamed from the central maintenance tunnel.

“Get on the fucking ground!"

Stop Stop and her band burst into activity with a speed that stole Jasmine's breath from her dorsal sinus passage. Leaving her wondering whether they had planned this whole adventure on a level she hadn't considered, or if they really were that mentally agile.

Kicking from the ground, half of her band tackled those in the forefront with the release of powerfully coiled legs. The juveniles immobilized all the gunmen bearing the larger weapons that Jasmine vaguely knew to be grenade launchers beneath their bodies with their wings spread wide. Batting the weapons away into the water tank with swipes of their tails to provide a distraction for the other dolphins already shrinking away from the developing chaos in fear.

Before the rest of the federal agents could react, the kidnapers transferred their stunned prisoners from the grasp of their claws to the breadth between their wings to launch aloft. Dumping their screaming passengers into the void with summersaults before seizing them in their hands once more with their wings beating back and forth furiously to keep them hovering meters above the pen they'd drifted over. Releasing them with startled screams as they plunged below the water's surface with the weight of their armor and combat gadgets.

Her entourage turned into a whirlwind of wings and tails. A blur utterly impossible to keep track of. Spinning downwards until their blizzard of chaotic movements engulfed the agents. Two of the baby Children peeled away in the maelstrom. With the cover their storming friends created, they shot down the darkened tunnel. Leaving Jasmine to suspect that she and Martin were not the only reason these Children risked themselves for this meeting. Fearing for their safety, Jasmine squalled and thrashed in the water with a rapid series of clicks.

“No, no little ones! Run while you can! This isn't fun," she said. Or thought she said. Nikki was giving her the side-eye.

“Stop this!" a tall, thin woman that Jasmine knew she'd seen before commanded while she strode to the forefront of the storm authoritatively. Exuding the air of one accustomed to being obeyed. The woman-dolphin could have sworn she'd heard the other humans talking about this supervisor, or whatever, being evaluated for a stroke. Jasmine hoped she was okay!

An aide ran to the woman and pointed frantically at the watching alien. Who'd stuck his head out from the tent. “It's moving! It's responding to them!"

“Not now!" the supervisor snapped.

“What do you want?" the supervisor said. A demand shouted at the swirling Children as the storm of their bodies parted to reveal Stop Stop staring back with a low rumbling in her throat. No longer happy as Jasmine thought a child so young should always be, instead glaring with her fins stretched taut and vibrating. Stop Stop said nothing, but evidently must have signaled others to join the conversation as her guards stopped beating their wings about the human's heads and reformed around her. Sitting on their haunches with their heads weaving back and forth on the end of long necks in agitation. Jasmine's mixed amusement and fear for their safety slid into an uneasy wariness. Martin, perhaps feeling as she did, sidled up next to her while the other dolphins hid near the bottom of the tank in fear.

Stop Stop's undetectable cue, Jasmine could only guess, was the catalyst as the events spiraled quickly beyond the dolphin-woman's ability to follow. A much larger Child, the much flustered dolphin-woman was quick to spy that it was quite obvious it was a she, flared to land with another, whose proportions didn't look quite right, upon her back. The smaller female sliding backwards down her companion's tail to her feet while her partner flared her wings with a prideful arch of her neck that lifted her head high. Jasmine listened as the true motives of what she'd thought had been joyous sky-larking evaporated in guttural snarls from the two females. Leaving Jasmine with all thoughts of spunk and sass forgotten.

“We want tooooo talk," the biggest Child-woman Jasmine had seen yet elided in slurred English. “About thooooose weeeee want released."

“Hah!" the lanky woman with an alarming shade of green hair in charge crowed. “There is no talking to be had. There is me telling you what to do, and you doing it. Now release my men, pin your wings to your sides, and lay down so that we can arrest you. I don't give a darn how big y'all are. This is national security, and you can obey me, or I can drop the hammer on your danged heads. Starting with your families if we can't manage your scaly asses."

“Our families are not your damn toysssss!" the smaller female snarled with her mouth hanging open and pupils constricted into menacing slits as a bristling Stop Stop landed on her back.

Jasmine normally considered herself a woman not afraid of a challenge. Buuuuut… when no one could understand her anyway, she thought huffily, with a longing glance at the unutilized dry erase board. Perhaps discretion was the better part of valor here.

A realization she knew, blowing bubbles in a spiraling helix with a giggle as she corkscrewed downwards, Martin would have been tickled pink hearing from her. Hiding from the wrathful words being thrown back and forth above them while they circled the bottom of the tank, Jasmine sent positive thoughts to all those in a world she'd chosen to leave behind.

And many thoughts for those whose panicked cries she could hear from the sound.

“Just like I told you every other time. The only thing the alien dragon will talk to me about is how important the future of marine life is on this world. It doesn't give a damn about the United States or whatever you're obliquely trying to tell me to ask about oil without actually saying so.

“Now, we've played your games and answered your questions. When are you going to release my staff and their families or allow us to speak to legal counsel? When are we going to be allowed to answer for whatever we're accused? And what are we being accused of?"

The tall red-head, Benny was discomfited to interact with a woman taller than he was, visibly bristled with her lower lip curling. She brushed at her brow and took shaky breaths to calm herself enough to reply. Tapping oddly at her nape and the sides of her head before her hands fell to Benny's desk with a thud where she flexed them slowly against the metal top. She jolted, her eyes flaring wide, as she snatched up her hand again to peer closely at her fingertips. Sparrow's, or whatever her name was, weather-beaten appearance grew alarmingly pale until she noticed Benny's concerned look. Snapping out of it, she fussily rearranged the paperwork stacked on one side to distract him.

“We know that two of those juvenile delinquents visited you last night for starters. For seconds, I have these."

She spread two papers before her from a stack of others that showed a variety of personal information. Each with the images of Jasmine and Martin in the upper left corner. Pulling out a stamp and ink-pad, she imprinted 'Deceased' over the image on each biography in blood-red block letters. Dr. Schofield looked down at the barely veiled threat and then up at Songbird. Not sure if he was supposed to be genuinely frightened by the ostentatuous militancy.

“Pike's market?"

The woman's mouth twitched with amusement and other unidentifiable emotions before she responded. “Where I got the stamp doesn't matter. The implied threats I just gave you do. Do as I order, or you'll never be free again."

“Are you trying to make an enemy of us, Passeriformes?"

In agitation, she rose from her chair and stalked around the room, bent slightly at her hips with her arms hanging loosely. Swinging her limbs and head with each step as she prowled with a bizarre gait that left him as perplexed by its disjointed nature as the quiet snorts coming from her nose with each step.

“Stop calling me a bird and stop thinking you're in a situation you control. Martin and Jasmine have been reported missing and presumed dead, and the rest of you are being held under the authority given me by whatever domestic terrorism act you'd like to quote. There is no leaving this place. Not until we have a complete understanding of what the aliens intend and your part in their plans. There are no lawyers, no advocates, and no politicians coming to your aid. You are now in a black hole.

“This is a threat to our country's existence like none we've ever faced before. The only release for you is after we put the aliens in their place and determine that you are not enemies of the state. You can start convincing me of that by getting the alien to talk."

“Jesus, Passerine. The least you can do is let Jasmine and the rest go. They're dolphins. Who could even understand them? Two of our rescues are pregnant, and they all deserve better than being stuck here. Not while we run out of food and clean water for them."

“To hell with those pregnant cows and the rest of them. Anyone who gives them a stick and a printed alphabet will know everything occurring here. I don't need a dang… rabble-rousing organic torpedo, making more problems than I already have! If they're going to starve because we can't get them any more food, or their tanks become contaminated with their own filth after my idiot men shot the filters, then you can do them a favor with all those drugs you have locked away here by putting them down. It's all the same to me."

Dr. Schofield recoiled in horror with a choked shout at the very idea of what was being said.

“Fuck your moral outrage. People are dying. People that aren't turning themselves into porpoises. Now get out of here and tell the others y'all have to prove you're still on the side of humans."

“Just one thing," Benny said, getting up.

“What?" Agent Starling demanded, not looking up from focusing on the laptop whose keyboard she stabbed awkwardly at. The vague look of surprise on her face when she didn't touch each key when she expected was almost enough to be amusing. Like her fingers were centimeters longer than they actually were.

“Stop rearranging my office," he said, rehanging a picture set against the wall he'd taken of the New Caledonia barrier reef. “I want it the same way I left it when I get it back. The soviet-era brutalism of bare concrete doesn't do it for me."

Benny gently shut the door just as something heavy rattled it. The director bemusedly wondered how a human could make the roaring howl that'd come from that woman's throat as he left. He'd hoped his attempt at a joke would buy some measure of grim humor for himself, instead he was now even more concerned for the precariousness of their circumstances under their unbalanced warden. There were consequences graver than he ever could've imagined surrounding every moment.

It had been less than twelve hours since a dragon had burst through the door of their prison ward née conference room, and already Benny knew things were in a downward spiral.

“You have one hour before you talk to the subject again," Benny's guard said, giving him an entirely unwarranted shove that sent him recoiling off an unaware Samantha who grunted in surprise.

“You horse's asses need to stop doing that!" Samantha barked at the guard as the door slammed, reaching down and yanking Benny up.

“So, what did the psychopath have to say after our visit from Shadow Hopper last night?" Bob asked from his seat at the table.

“Is everyone okay?" Benny asked instead of answering as he joined the Nebraskans at the table, pushing away one of the makeshift beds laid out on it.

“Yes, no one's said a word to us while you've been gone."

“The kids?"

Samantha sighed and walked away to stare at the wall as Bob continued answering. “We haven't heard from Yoo, her family, or anyone else. They refuse to allow us to talk, even to call our own son."

“Tell us what this Starling asked us to do," Grace said, raising her head from reassuring the hunched form of Hidalgo, her husband.

“Not you," Benny said, putting his head in his hands. “Me. I'm the only one they'll let out there, and the alien only wants to talk to us."

“So, you couldn't convince her to allow more of us to talk to the creature?" Jacob asked anxiously.

Benny shook his head as he told them what he learned. About the impossible demands, the threats to their own family and the dolphins, how the chaos in the city had turned the infrastructure plans laid out for supplying the center into an irredeemable mess, and lastly his thoughts that they would never be free of their incarceration. Benny felt all that talk of release with all they would know of the alien's plans and their treatment was an imaginary carrot. The United States Government didn't like loose ends that could infringe on its security mandate. Expressing that, he saw many of the heads he shared the room with nodding in agreement. Not a lot of trust going around lately for the government.

“They can't do that! There are laws and rights to stop this," Maria protested. “It's why I came here from Guatemala. The government in America can't just make people disappear!"

“Whether the executive branch may do what they're doing or not does not seem to have stopped them," Benny said wryly. “And unless we have an army equal to theirs, we're not getting out of here."

Bob coughed ostentatiously and slid a torn piece of notebook paper over to Benny.

But we do. A scaly one.

Benny looked over his shoulder at the camera lens fixed dispassionately on him and the other inmates before writing his response.

And then what? A life on the run?

Bob looked at the director's response, shrugged, and then showed it to a thunderously frowning Samantha. Bob shredded the paper into tiny scraps and then… ate them.

“What?" he said, noting Benny's disgusted look. “I saw it on Hogan's Heroes!"

Benny shook his head as he paced around the room, looking for other cameras. Spotting a total of three surreptitiously installed among the water pipes crisscrossing the ceiling, he envisioned their field of view and was confident none would see what he was about to do before striding over to the dry erase board lining one wall.

Drawing two shapes, labeling one human and placing a question mark in the other, he gestured at the bubbles while sketching an arrow that pointed towards the unknown. He underscored the uncertain possibility in emphasis after receiving a few blank stares. Making some in his audience visibly blanch at what he was asking.

“There must be another way!" Hidalgo exploded, much to Benny's alarm as he flapped his hands to shush him fruitlessly. “We have to give the federals what they want, not involve ourselves in a contrived disaster."

“The children," Samantha reminded Benny. “We can't possibly make this choice for them as well. To have them give up their futures. Their lives. It ain't right to put this before us with the vagaries we're running on."

Benny sighed and erased his message before turning back to those already arguing amongst themselves. A kernel of a thought germinating in his mind.

“The alien told me that without the addition of our involvement, or any other volunteers, all higher marine life will die off because of humanity's actions. I told Starling about it, in addition to the fourteen different recordings of the session, but it wasn't high on her priority list. Instead, she yelled at me for not asking about the number of barrels of oil in Saudi Arabia or how many dragons were in Russia and what they meant to do."

“That's really sad, Dr. Schofield," Hidalgo said. “But awful things happen in this world all the time, and I enjoy being who I am. Me, and the children, deserve to be human. It is our right!"

“They're not even yours, you lame donkey!" Samantha shouted back. “It's not just about us, is it? Every day more species go extinct, which is exactly why we've been horse-kicked by these aliens. Are you willing to say that you, or our…" she said, trailing off limply. The enormity of what the Nebraskan was arguing for finally registering.

“Yes, you finally see my problem with this whole contrived situation. A disaster forced on us we must sacrifice to react to! This is total bullshit! Turn into an animal to solve humanity's problems? What right do these aliens have to force that decision on us by changing the marine mammals?"

“I feel you're missing at least half the point of this," Benny said tiredly. “What Jasmine was told was enough for her to go swimming with the dolphins. You heard what… Sky Hornet…"

“Shadow Hopper," Bob corrected.

“… Shadow Hopper said. The resident orca pods are circling just offshore, screaming, as he described it."

“None of that matters. I don't want to spend the rest of my life in jail," Hidalgo said resolutely. “Or as an animal."

Benny shook his head at the man warningly, but he could do nothing to keep Hidalgo silent as he swelled with indignation.

“The federals must know that the dragons are going to break us out in four days. We have to work together to stop them! It's our duty."

He couldn't be more transparent than that. Less than a minute later, Benny and the others raised their hands disarmingly when the door slammed open.

++++

Benny didn't know what happened to the others after their separation. Thrown as he'd been in a closet with a disconcerting number of scratches on the walls, like a cat had been sharpening its claws. If he ever met a cat that could scratch concrete with the depth of the gouges his fingers probed or at that height, he'd hope he had one bullet left in the chamber of whatever gun he was holding. Looking down from the marks, he spied a small black flake about a centimeter across next to the foot of a shelf.

Picking it up, he immediately recognized the tiny fan-shape. How could he not, when he'd seen thousands just like it erupt painfully from George's skin? Stumbling backwards, he sat down hard on the cot, fabric badly stretched out by the weight of a previous occupant, and looked up from the tiny scale to the evidence of what had become of Rebecca. Yanked from their communal prison cell after jumping on the table and defiantly proclaimed that she would do anything to be a source of strength in the world to come. How she wanted to soar into the future.

“Oh Jesus, Rebecca. Why? Why did you think doing this would help?"

Whatever her reasoning had been, Benny thought it was likely a combination of her friendship with the middle-aged Mexican security guard and his family and her alcohol-fueled cynical apathy. The result was the same. Damn her. Did she care about her other family at all? Benny ground the tiny scale against his forehead and winced when it cleanly sliced into the skin.

“Shit… now I'm probably going to become one, too."

Getting up, he paced. He felt responsible for her actions. He knew he shouldn't. She was a very intelligent young woman that could answer for herself. But he knew, he knew, that she had looked up to him and his vast experience with the ocean's creatures. That she esteemed his word as she did few others. How often had he told her the value of thinking of those who shared her passion as a family that would support her just as she supported them? Every day.

Oh yes, he felt responsible for the fact that he probably could not recognize her as ever being human now.

The dragons, children, or whatever Shadow Hunter said they called themselves, were adamant that no action could be taken yet with their relatives imprisoned. That they didn't want bloodshed, and they didn't want their loved ones to suffer further for being forced into the alien's plans. That was why they hadn't just plucked Benny and everyone else from this place by sheer force. They, and Benny, knew that there would be no opposing them if they wanted. However, the casualty count in getting that would be enormous, and afterwards, no one would ever trust the dragons again.

Their chance to get Jasmine, Martin, and the other dolphins out of that tank had been blown. Nor could there be any escape now with them separated into isolation. Not with the tension he sensed from their captors.

Just on his frog-march to his new cell, he had heard all the frantic talk of new reinforcements to guard the humans needed to control the dragons. Every federal officer on the coast of Washington was being drawn here. Which, Benny thought, was a bit of a security breach to allow him to hear something like that. A lapse in judgement that he worried reflected the quality of the dregs they were scraping up.

And what would they even do if they escaped? They had been denied their rights, but would anyone be able to help them, or would they be fugitives from lawful incarceration? Starling certainly seemed to believe that she had all the authority she needed to keep them hidden away from the world. Why weren't the dragons telling anyone what was happening here? Were they not being believed? Surely someone was trying to investigate the imprisonment of people surrounding these dragons and the activities on the piers.

What was happening out there?

He hurriedly placed the scale in his pocket when they came for him again. Putting him in leg irons that were attached to his handcuffs this time as they prodded him out to his session with the alien. As he shuffled down the main corridor to the amphitheater, he heard loud, amplified voices shouting over each other. One calling out names and another bellowing at someone who sounded further away. Over these human voices thundered the coarse rumbling calls of dragons in reaction to the men shouting out names to them in the sky Benny saw as he emerged. One smaller dragon circling overhead emitted a long, keening cry after the last message.

“Your sister and your parents are in our custody, David Stockman. If you want them to go free, you will submit to our commands."

“You mean bad guy!" the dragon screamed in a voice that had Benny doing a double take. Its size was only a few meters longer than tiny Stop Stop.

It was just a child.

The dragon made a strange huffing and flew into a larger companion hovering just above it that wrapped its arms around the squalling youngling before flapping away. Tail lashing in agitation as it cast dark looks backwards.

Looking down at his clipboard, the federal agent wearing a jacket that prominently announced he was with the DEA, whatever that was, didn't seem particularly moved by the emotional display. When he raised a bullhorn to start the process again with the next name shouted at the circling dragons, Benny found himself by alarmed to notice something else new had changed overnight.

The tanks where six bottle-nose dolphins lived were now thick with particles of filth and green algae. The damage filtration and treatment systems had failed entirely. Now, it was only a matter of time before the dolphins sickened. He had to get them out of there or convince the authorities to get him the replacement parts they themselves had destroyed. Most alarming of all was that he saw a net of steel cables were now being installed over the area. A web meant to prevent only one thing.

“Keep moving!" his guards barked, pointing at the tent thrown up over the front half of the large alien who seemed to occupy their entire world.

No help there, nor was there any to be found from Starling, waiting just inside an anteroom within the tent, holding another clipboard that she shoved into his chest.

“This session's questions. No ad-libbing. If it responds, you are to await the answer we will tell you to give."

“Release Jasmine and the others. If you just let the…"

“To hell with your traitorous intern and the rest of the sea-cows. This is a zero-sum game forced on the United States, and if you're not with us, you're against us. Now get in there and dance. If you don't give me what I want, your friends will drown in their own shit."

“You… you can't! You're condemning them to die without our help. There are two human beings in that tank."

“Are there?" she turned to look ostentatiously with a hand shading her eyes. “Oh wait, there they are, or maybe it's those two, or those other two. You know what, Flipper and Flipperina are just going to have to wait their turn behind the three hundred and fifty million human Americans whose lives are in danger. I told you we have declared those two dead, and I meant it."

“Callous bitch," he muttered as the weight of helplessness dragged his eyes down to the questions he was being ordered to ask.

“Get used to it, dick-hump. I hatched with three older egg-brothers spreading their wings over me. I will not let you steal my air."

Benny froze, not sure what pit of madness he'd just fallen into. “What?"

“Get it done. I don't care about you or your dolphins, I need answers," the senior commander reiterated, oblivious to her own words as she stomped off to a window that looked in on the dragon. Its head, laying on the ground with the crest on its crown coming up nearly to Benny's eyes, was pointed straight at the window. From his current distance, he could see both featureless, golden eyes. He didn't know if it was looking at him or not. Or if it even needed to.

“What do you want?" Benny asked, reading the first question off the list. Getting something that he hadn't before. A response. The scales of the alien's neck whispered against each other as it raised its head. Turning slightly, the rescue director now knew the eldritch dragon had fixed its sight on him. Already he could hear someone beating on the wall behind him and Sparrow's strident voice.

The sounds stopped, the announcements outside, the anguished roars, the spouting of the dolphins. In confusion, Benny looked back to see that Sparrow had frozen. As had her fist just centimeters away from impacting the flimsy vinyl window. The cuffs at his wrists and ankles dissolved to free his movements.

“This is the reality that will come," the alien said, drawing the confused man's attention back to its lifted head. “An existence without the movement of life," and then Benny truly was without understanding as everything went black. “And without light. Humans. So petty. So small. So… blind."

“Then show us! Show me!" Benny cried in frustration. Shouting into in an infinite void that left him with no sense of direction of any kind. His voice itself seeming to be sucked into the nothingness.

“We have. The creatures of your world that we have touched. Those that we have changed. Those that we have forced into an awareness before they were ready. Alterations," it said as the world came blindingly back into being. “Which have become necessary if life on this world is to continue, because of the actions of humans."

“I have spent my whole life caring for these beings!" Benny protested, blinking the tears out of his eyes as he reeled. It felt like he'd never known gravity or light with the way his legs shook and his eyes burned when the world came rushing back to his senses. What had just happened to him?

“Yes, you have. And if circumstances were different, if the situation was not so dire, we would not ask you to do more than what you already were undertaking. This facility is a place of healing, of respite, and now look at what it has become under the direction of the frightened humans. A place of imprisonment, of fear."

“You, you did this. They are reacting to you, and what you've done."

The alien dragon snorted, an explosion of heated air bursting from its cavernous nostrils to swirl around the doctor's face, not impressed with the argument. Neither was Benny, truth be told.

“Time has run out. Humans cannot remain in sole charge of this world any longer. It is the only chance they have to undergo their own collective change for conditions that do not suit them. Guided by those we have given new lives after stealing their previous ones. The presence of light demands it. The amount of life that would fade is a number too horrible to grasp and the sterilization of Earth is an outcome that we will not allow to occur."

“Already you see the depravity of your fellow humans. Does Jasmine, Martin, or their newfound companions deserve the fate that awaits them? Does Jasmine or Martin deserve their neglect for believing in what we'd told them? That Rebecca deserves to learn that her family is being punished for a desire to better the world that I've already told you is our concern?"

“Would you stop that?" Benny said, pacing. “I need to… I need to think. I am a scientist, tell me the facts as they are, and let me make my assessment of the narrative you expect me to believe without proof."

++++

“Less than a hundred years?" Benny said in tones of despair, snatching Sparrow's chair from behind her frozen form to sit in. Overcome by learning how little time was left. The charts and graphs that the alien had shown him at first gave way to time lapse overviews of the changes wrought to the Earth.

“How can I believe what you tell me? How can I believe that human civilization will break and that three quarters of the Earth's surface will be uninhabitable in so short a time?"

The dragon's wings flared in a kind of shrug as it spread its hands in what Benny supposed was an equivalent gesture.

“We can bend reality to our will, and you currently exist outside of time. What more proof do I need to offer than that for the veracity of my word? Do you suppose we expand the entire energy output of your sun per day to play with your species, human?"

“96 years," Benny repeated, burying his head in his hands. “96 years. Is there no other way?"

“Only paths that would be even less palatable to you or your species, and none that would be acceptable to us. We cannot allow the pride you feel for your own achievements to doom so many. Nor can we solve the problems you have created for yourselves. Far too much is at stake."

“Well, you have told me everything that they wanted to know. Now we can be free to see about getting Jasmine and the others to sea."

“I am afraid that your release will not happen for some time. Years, according to the most likely outcome. Even if I was to return to my origin, you and your companions will remain captives of your government."

“Then help us!"

“Is that what you desire? A life on the run? You see how they treat the Children of the Egg? Their families used as bargain chips. Is that what you desire for yours?"

“We've been damned the minute you showed up then, haven't we? Let me guess, you won't use those reality-bending abilities to right all our supposed wrongs, will you? This is all your fault."

“Is it?" the alien asked. Ignoring the other question entirely and confirming all of Benny's assumptions. “It was certainly no counsel of mine that directed your authorities to bring us to this unpleasant circumstance. Others of my kind are giving your national leaders guidance, yet they continue to act in these unfortunate manners by aggravating the situation in attempts to dominate. Do you believe that Assistant Director Starling is acting outside of the orders and directives given to her?"

“We could have avoided this all if you had just communicated with us."

“And how many of you would our words or presentations convinced? How many would have volunteered for what Jasmine and Martin have, for what Rebecca has?"

Benny turned away from the dragon to stride through the flimsy door to the area Stork and her minions were. Stopping for a moment to scribble 'dolphin-killer' across her forehead with a convenient permanent marker. Staring, mystified, when he tossed it away and it halted mid-air the instant it left his fingers. Outside, he was not particularly surprised to find either another golden-eyed tyrant or the same one he'd just left behind.

“I will admit that unnecessary action instills a level of amusement within me. Do such gestures amuse you as well, or did that serve a darker purpose?"

The director pointed at one of the sleek gray heads spy-hopping above the edge of the pool in a discordant rhythm, its dark glistening eye watching with the acuity that Benny had always found the most fascinating thing about cetaceans. The look of a thinking mind in those aquatic bodies processing so much of what they saw. He hoped the pair that surfaced in tandem were Jasmine and Martin. Honestly, he couldn't tell them apart when they didn't rise far enough to display their dorsal fins.

“Why aren't they frozen?"

“I remain at this place of suffering for them and those in the sound. Why would I exclude them from that which they must learn?"

When he reached the edge of the tank, going all the way around to reach the examination platform, the two he'd been watching were there to meet him. Both breaching the surface with their rostrums rising above him.

_Click click squeal squeak! _

The Tursiops truncates sidled closer to pat his hand on the lip of the platform with one pectoral flipper in a comforting, and very human, gesture. Benny ignored the water soaking into his clothes and reached out with one hand to cup around the beak of the dolphin before him.

“I failed you, Jasmine. I failed all of you."

The dolphin squeed disagreeably and bat its nose against Benny's head. The stench of rot infusing the water and the dolphin's skin struck the biologist. An unwholesome bouquet of rancidity from the bacteria building up in the tank.

“You are… Jasmine… aren't you?"

She bobbed her head with vigor, producing an eruption of water from spiracle and flippers.

“Jasmine, I will get you out of here. But you need to tell me, do you and Martin feel ready to live out there? I know, that you know dolphins… and… Jesus, Jasmine. How can I even ask this? Are you ready to live in the ocean and probably be beyond our help? Because that's what your escape will mean, and you need to get out of here. You're already developing lesions at the corners of your mouth."

Dragging over a medical kit, he joined her at the examination platform to dab antibiotic on the sores. It was nice to have a patient that understood what he was doing for a change. Although having Umbra slide her bulk into the two of them because she was following Jasmine's lead and wanted her own treatment wasn't something he was used to, either. Jasmine squealed to get Benny's attention and thrashed to point her beak at the whiteboard pushed back against the wall. She wanted to talk.

“C-A-L-V-E-S"

“I know, Jasmine. But you, too. It's not just them. There's Rebecca, her family, George and his family, all the other dragons and theirs as well. Your family here, and out there," he flung his hand out and then stumped up to the man with the bullhorn held to his mouth to snag his clipboard. Appalled by his cursory glance at the names and their sorting on the paper. A colossal breach of privacy that completely blew his idea of what living in his country meant. How did they even get this information? He showed it to Jasmine's inquiring eye one page at a time.

“R-E-L-E-A-S-E,"

“My family could be in danger if I do this. Our family would be. What would be the cost? What is this worth?"

“F-U-T-U-R-E-W-E-L-E-A-D,"

“The children?"

“H-A-V-E-W-O-R-L-D,"

“Jasmine, they made you into a flipping dolphin! How can you think that they have what is best at heart? They turned us against each other!"

“H-U-N-T-S,"

He fell back into his stolen chair, at a loss for words for what she was referring to. That he'd seen himself off the coast of Japan. On the scale of evil, who would be the worst here? Who ended more lives on Earth? The aliens who probably unleashed an incalculably destructive change in humanity, or the species that considered it their right to rape the entire world. Benny yanked a chair out from beneath the bureau man that was just about to sit down for himself. Putting his head in his hands to think.

“Can I talk to the rest of the family brought together here?" Benny demanded, spinning away to the alien stalking his movements.

“I can bring them into your time frame, if that is what you require," the much larger alien replied. “However, I must inquire as to how many repetitive answers are needed."

“All of them!" Benny shouted, losing his cool. “I need to hear the consent of all of them because that is something you don't seem to have realized! That individual choice is what our world values most and what I decide impacts them just as much as it does me."

“Very good, Benny. Perhaps if more people realized their actions spread far beyond their own petty self-interests to beings that can't speak for themselves, our forceful intervention would not have been necessary."

Benny glanced up, looking at the murders of dragons frozen overhead. Their wings nearly blocking out the sky in their numbers and proximity. They were so close, and this opportunity to recover their loved ones from those who dangled their safety in front of them like proverbial carrots.

“You have a chance to stop this right now by letting the dragons free. They could rescue everyone. Even the dolp…Jasmine and Martin!"

“It is a mercy that I have divorced them from the time slip I placed you in. If the authorities believe them implicit in what occurs next, humanity will have spent its last chance in vain."

“What do you want, then? It's obvious this is all leading to some action you want me to take with your vague implications at something following this. What do all the theatrics that I'm being led by the nose through lead to? What choice do I have to make to make this right?"

“There is no choice that you must make here. Instead, I ask you this; what do you want? Whatever you say, I know we've chosen well in someone that still desires a rightness to the impossible they've found themselves in."

“There you go again. Presumptions, assumptions, and vagaries. Do you even care what I have to say?"

“Yes. More than you'll ever know, friend of the waters."

“HELLO-HELLO-HELLO" flashed the bright red laser of Jasmine's pointer, startling the doctor. Or was that Martin pushing the pointer around his grinning beak now? There was a different contour to the dorsal fin of the cetacean pointing towards the introductory word scrawled on the upper left of the white-board.

“BABIES" the dolphin that Benny now knew was one of the wild females that wasn't pregnant when she squirmed and revealed her ventral side, pointed at one of the pre-written words around the edge of the board with the swirling red dot. “BABIES BABIES BABIES BAB…"

“Okay, okay, okay," Benny yelled, scratching at his head in exasperation, and a bit of terror that a dolphin could express in words the pregnancy of another. “I get it!" What the hell had Jasmine been teaching them? The dolphin clacked stridently, slapped the water with her tail, and then left the laser pointer equipped tennis ball behind when she barrel-rolled into the water. Leaving the good doctor nonplussed before he drew himself back together.

“Did you see that? They are concerned for their children. I want them to be free. So, how do I do that? Being a sea-mammal would earn nothing. Being non-verbal would trap me in here with them, as whatever the hell you are looking for volunteers to transform to, or I'd be out in the sound. It can't be another dragon. There're dozens of them right over my head and they can't solve this with their families being held hostage. So, what option has that left me with? If I stay here federal law…"

“Will eliminate you from the life you've built for yourself, as you suppose. But the path you need to take to accomplish what you wish will do that just as completely, Benny. I am happy that you are understanding the necessity of agreeing to my proposal."

“See? There you go again. Pushing me to a decision by presenting it as the only possibility. What do you gain from turning me into an animal? What is it you want?"

The enigmatic dragon sighed, making the normally mild-mannered man's blood boil, and sat up on its haunches to lift one massive foot that scratched absently at its neck while the creature looked away to the northwest.

“We have the ability to predict the most likely outcomes of the intermediate future, and we always hope that our predictive models are proven wrong by some… inspired actions of those we interact with. That the chaos of this universe would lead to a surprise that would make it interesting."

Confused sounds, human voices, were coming from the tunnel just before the first of Yoo's children scampered out with a black dragon half the seven-year-old's height leading him.

“Every time," the creature continued with its head wagging side to side. “That we think you see the greater purpose of our intervention, that you really believe that this is the act of altruism that it is, we are disappointed once again. I knew you would refuse, so concerned with matters such as your legacy of saving aquatic mammals that it would stop you from being a part of saving all those same beings for good. Why do you continue to refer to anything that isn't human as a subordinate lifeform?"

“Oh! Benjamin, the tank," Yoo exclaimed the moment she arrived with her extended family. The other members of the center, along with their own families, trailing after her and marveling at the stilled world. “We must get them out of there. Immediately!"

The Director was glad he didn't have to waste time on bringing her up to speed as her kids raced to the examination ledge where one of the pregnant cows met them. But he doubted Yoo knew what he was about to lay on her.

“We are running out of time, as you see. But the alien has dragged me kicking and screaming into something approximating a plan."

“It would need to be something to free us from this jail. Not an escape though…"

“No," Benny agreed, dismayed she already was coming to the coerced conclusions he had made.

“We need something that can draw attention here. Something that will release the dolphins into the bay."

“Something the dragons won't do because of the hostages being held against them," the Director agreed.

“What?" Samantha shouted, striding out with the rest of the center's family in train. “What have the Yankee feds been doing? Kidnapping people? That can't stand!" she said, outraged, while looking up and around.

“You!" she spotted the alien scratching at its neck and flicking away a scale it'd plucked. The scale disappeared as soon as it left its claws. A useful reminder of how little of a connection the creature had with the world it had invaded.

“You," it mimicked, not seeming particularly enthused to being addressed but not ignoring her either when it got up and went through the serpentine contortion needed to fold back on itself to walk nearer the pool where five dolphin heads bobbed in a row, watching intently.

“Stop! If you can do this," Samantha waved her arm at the frozen menagerie overhead. “You can help us get out of here. Why aren't you doing that if you want this dumpster fire to work?"

The alien paused and swung its head back to face the irate woman. “You are free to take this opportunity while Benjamin decides whether he can save you to leave, of course. Or if you are of a more murderous mindset, dispatch your captors while they're helpless."

Samantha jumped as if she'd never considered that Benny certainly hadn't. But her look of surprise turned quickly sour as her skin took on a sickly pallor at the thought of killing people frozen in time.

“However, the matter remains that doing so will lead to the same unfortunate vagabond life of those who flee the guardians of your laws as any further action on my part. If you want to be free of this place, you must free yourselves by utilizing your own institutions. To be free, one of you will have to get their attention in a way that cannot be ignored. Beyond that, we owe you nothing, as you seem to believe.

“I only hope that you're quick about making your decisions. You are rather boring."

Samantha's husband Bob was apoplectic and shouted the impotent outrage marching across her face in her stead. “We are what?"

“Boring, and also suffering from aural degradation."

“You… you… you!" Bob could do nothing more than sputter.

“Very sad, very sad," the alien said with that same infuriating wag of its head. “You must see a doctor if you survive the hospitality of your own government. Try to make your decision snappy, yeah? Holding you apart from a universe worth of entropy takes more energy than you seem to understand."

“What in God's name does it want you to do?" Bob asked, nonplussed at a world frozen around them. The only sounds were the water of the bay and a distant unearthly ululation. Benny lifted his hands and dropped them uselessly.

“It's asking me to change to save us all."

“Change how, into what, and who is 'us all'?"

“There's nothing to save us from!" Hidalgo shouted. “We are right where we should be, like the government said."

“Hidalgo, take it easy," Jacob said soothingly, snapping out of his delirium to take comfort in his training. “We need to hear all the facts before we can help Benny in the choice he has to make. We don't know what the end state for us here is."

“My wife and child will not spend their lives on the run and in fear!" he declared, pointing at his wife Grace and their daughter cowering at the mouth of the access tunnel.

“They won't," Benny vowed. “But, neither will we forget what has become of Jasmine, Rebecca, George, or his whole family. I am responsible for you all. Even that kid, Marlin, swimming with our Jasmine." The director stopped to look around at his friends, his family. The one he'd brought together to replace the one he'd lost to the vast midland of the United States. As his wife had said, as far as they could get from him and the ocean.

“Good job, Benji," Samantha said acerbically. “That would have been more heroic if you could remember the boy's name is Martin. Do you even know what the alien has in mind for you?"

“They want to transform me, like so many others. I can't ask the dragons overhead to do more than they're willing. The feds are using their families as hostages," Benny said, snatching the clipboard out of the frozen federal agent's hand to show the outraged others. “And we need to get Jasmine and Martin out of here."

“How can transforming you into something new even help any of that?" Samantha asked.

“Because it might be something that can't be ignored or controlled. It might be something that can bring the attention to us we need," Yoo said, explaining in place of Benny.

“Right, it hasn't told me yet what, but I expect it wants to turn me into some shocking grotesquery that will make even the dragons look normal," Benjamin said, adding onto what she'd said.

“That is treason!" Hidalgo said with a shout. “You owe this country your loyalty."

“I lost one family by being selfish. I will not watch this one rot in concrete cells or die of disease in their own filth," the doctor said with equal fire in his tone. Not backing down from what he thought was the best for all those he looked after. A little patriarchal and substitutionary, perhaps, even the director had to admit.

“Perfect," a disembodied voice said before the alien materialized like a ghost. Or a demon, Benny thought angrily while grinding his teeth.

“Just what, what, are you conning me into doing?" he snapped. “At every step of the way, you have been goading us to an outcome that you find desirable, which seems to mean stripping away all that I've ever accomplished."

“You humans really seem to enjoy mixing inspired brilliance with the most asinine degenerations. Is this the part where you live out one of your fantasies and save the day by somehow convincing me we have made a tragically horrible mistake? Do I need to remind you that this opportunity gives you something else dear to your heart?"

“That's rich! What goddamned opportunity?"

“A return to the only home you've ever had, Benjamin," the draconic alien said, shifting its weight to point at the wall next to it. “A home that you never have to leave again if you choose, in a form that will get the attention you need for your plan to get your family released from this facility."

An image formed on the wall to show something that Benny knew was beyond possible. The others gasped as he looked on with muted incredulity dragging his jaw earthward.

The scale. The scale was not possible!

“A beautiful species, a beautiful species, the dreamers. A poor fit for this world, I've felt, but the influence that they will have on aquatic species cannot be overlooked. Neither can any sense that humans claim can measure the bravery them've shown in coming here. They've come here to guide those worthy of joining their ranks in seeing that certain species of this world will survive humanity if coexistence proves improbable.

“You have asked what we want, and now you know. All of this," it flared its wings and swept its tail in an arc that encompassed all the frozen dragons overhead. “Has been the buildup to this moment. You, Benjamin, Jasmine, and Martin are why I'm here. The only one who hasn't made their choice is you, Director Schofield."

The human figure with its hand raised shown for scale only made the sheer enormity of what Benny would volunteer for clear.

Not even standing as tall as the leviathan's paw, and a fiftieth the creature's length. In a bizarre reflection of the human figure, the creature raised a foreleg to splay the fingers in a familiar greeting that displayed the greenish webbing strung between them.

“Well, Benny," Samantha said, shakily clapping her hand down on his shoulder. “You'll turn a few heads casting that shadow. Lord have mercy!"

“Ah," Benny squeaked insensibly. It was, after all, not every day you found out that you needed to become one of those things in that movie Atlantic Ring to save the creatures you'd dedicated your life's work to and free the family you tried to create to replace the one you lost.

The wheels in his mind jerked into motion once more after a few moments of useless sputtering and he could consider the implications for himself and the others.

“The damage that one creature alone would cause to the ecosystem could not… You said you were doing this for the sea mammals! You brought an entire race of those to a planet that they never evolved to exist on? Into a biosphere that never evolved to coexist with such enormous beings?"

“We do not do things without understanding all the parameters, human. You can put your well-intentioned concerns to rest. The presence of a few Dreamers is required if the waters of your world are to be rid of the poison you cast into them to this day."

“We're scientists!" Jacob protested. “You can't just tell us something so extraordinary, or demand such unconscionable concessions without exhibiting an equally extraordinary amount of data to justify your actions."

“If you believe in a future where humans exist, you are going to have to accept the immediacy of your choices and the incompleteness of the data you have. Do you not hear their cries?"

The alien lifted his head up and away to the west, its eyes sliding closed. The squealing repetitious calls of at least one orca were clearly audible, as were the rising whistles of smaller dolphins. Signals of distress easily heard over the lapping of the water with the rest of the world fallen silent.

“That's a panic that you have caused in them. And for what? To manipulate us?" Jacob demanded, torn between one set of impulses and another. His career dedicated to helping others and his personal feelings of outrage and hate.

“This might be a herculean concept to grasp for a species as arrogant, and as lonely, as humans," the alien said, with eyes shifting to look at Jacob. “But did you ever stop to consider that this is not all about you? It has been your actions that precipitated us needing to intervene in the extinction of species that will shine long after your own light has extinguished against the implacably encroaching darkness.

“It is a mercy that we allow this attempt to right your wrongs. We know some amongst you think your suffering amuses us and I can assure you that is not the case. If you need evidence for why our intervention is warranted, you do not have to search very far. It is time for humans to accept that this world is not yours alone and that there is more to consider beyond your own narrow interests."

“Enough," Benny said quietly but firmly when it looked like the argument was only going to get worse. “I have decided. I will do what I must to get you out of here," he said, turning to the other humans. Almost pleading with them to accept. “To live your lives. Please, none of this is right, and it has to stop no matter what it costs me. Yoo, you are next in line to…"

“I'm sorry, Benjamin. But I cannot take over the facility for you after this. My family and myself will be joining you in departing from the country that took us in, but that now seems to demand that we return to the shadow of totalitarianism we have fled. We will, as our last choice as humans, act to ensure that life flourishes where it has been in a decline that I feared my own children would see reach its end. I am proud of my children in joining with us to honor the world that gave birth to us all. It is what our ancestors demand."

Yoo, Si-woo, and all four of their parents stood behind the children, who looked solemnly at their ancestors. Each of the elders resting a hand on one of the three youngest in a gesture of unity. Leaving a flabbergasted Benny with nothing else to say. As one, they bowed.

“Sam… Samantha?" he tried instead. “Can… will you take over for me? You signed the same documents the lawyers gave us Yoo did. There must be someone here who can…"

“Treat injured people-dolphins? Yeah," the big Cornhusker said, a little more distractedly than Benny would prefer. “I… we will be here for you all. If your plan to break us out works, I should add."

“Hmph," Benny grunted humorlessly, staring with fascination at the model of the Jörmungandr. “Is this really going to be my size? How could this organism possibly consume enough calories to sustain itself?"

“Of course not," the alien said, much to Benny's relief, although he noticed it didn't answer his second question either. “It will take you thousands of years to reach this stature. You will be approximately one quarter of this projection's size."

“Is that all?" the volunteering man said faintly, sitting down hard on a table that he dimly remembered using what now seemed weeks ago. The unreal sense of reality shifting around him making the director's vision spin. Was he really doing this? Did it just say thousands of years?

“No," at this, for the first time, the arrogant alien actually had the grace to look contrite.

The damned thing.

“There is also the likelihood that you will suffer mental degradation in the short term upon assuming this form."

“You son of a bitch!" Samantha roared. “What do you mean by 'he might go nuts?'"

The image changed by zooming in on along the spine of the immense creature to a highlighted set of organs and connecting tissue. A huge cluster of filaments becoming apparent within the skull, the brain apparently, with another manifesting in a broad encircling band just forward of the hips that stretched halfway around the girth of the creature like a horseshoe.

“As you probably cannot recognize here…"

“Dick," Samantha muttered loudly enough for Bob to shush her.

“… there are two of what you might consider brains within a creature so immense." For the first time, Benny got the sense that the alien was addressing him seriously.

“In the immediate future, you will not be receiving the help and guidance that others who will become Dreamers enjoy. Grossly oversimplifying the matter, you will be two voices arguing past each other. The results are… unpredictable, as will be your actions, without that guidance. Exacerbating matters will be the way your sensory inputs differ from that of a human's."

“Just tell me that this will mean something. That my family here will have something better to look forward to. Tell me that there wasn't another way."

“There are no absolutes, even for us. You will have to find solace knowing that the likelihood of your relations to enjoy relative happiness only increases by the choice you've made."

“You smug creature," Benny cursed it. “You knew this was going to happen, and you set all this up so that it would. Well, congratulations."

The dragon-alien only made, what sounded like to the director anyway, a heavy sigh at the same time its wings lifted and settled in a remarkably human shrug for a hexapod with two pairs of shoulder joints.

“We are the agent of change that your collective decisions have made necessary. The choice to be involved or stand aside is yours. Many did not get that opportunity, a sacrifice we forced in atonement for the avaricious nature of your kind."

Hidalgo howled in outrage and fell into arguing with the mute dragon that paid the man not the least bit of interest and instead watched as the director turned his attention to Yoo.

“Please, doctor, consider the skills you have. If the aliens are adamant about how important the biota are, and what they've changed in them, your knowledge and abilities will be even more indispensable. We assume that there are going to be others asked to transform as well. They will need skilled medical care."

But no one could persuade the world-renowned Korean aquatic veterinarian or her family in their joint adamantine belief that human life was no longer what was best for them.

“It is certainly selfish, but my family must come first. My parents," she replied, accepting the reassuring touch of her elderly forbearers. “Remember well the lessons of the war they experienced when the north invaded the south, backed by powers from far beyond the horrors that were committed in the names of their ideals. I would rather see my children happy, and alive, without regard to their species, than living in a country that so quickly casts aside the freedoms it espouses. We believe ominous times are fast approaching that will inflict unbelievable pain and suffering.

“Samantha is a capable physician that I have collaborated with and trusted for years. She is also third on the list of succession we've all signed for the maintenance of this facility and more than capable of continuing our work when my family and I take our places in what is next for this world. We will become a unique pod of Orcinus orca, and our voices will rise together in song as we help to save a species from extinction."

“Is anyone else willing to accept the offer to guide those crying out for help?" the dragon asked, swiveling its head about to look at each of the humans in the face. Benny was happy to see, but also saddened in a way that no one else stepped forward. Only casting fearful glances between Jasmine and Martin beached on the exam platform, and Yoo's family.

“Then you have made your decisions," the dragon declared, pushing an increasingly aggressive Hidalgo back from where he'd been poking at its chest with one slow, inexorable sweep of a wing to rise to its feet. Satisfied that no one was going to ask anything else of it, the creature faded away.

“Time will resume in five minutes. Make peace with each other. It will be the last time some of you will ever know each other as humans."

Yoo's family clustered around each other with their hands grasping each other's. The Director reached out for them, wanting to hear just why, why they would agree to transforming, but drawn away instead by Samantha's powerful tug. Forced to address those choosing to remain human, and accept that he was now a world apart from what he'd known.

“You need to go back to where they had you," Benny said immediately to the family he was trying to save. He couldn't allow them to be roped into what was about to happen. If they dug their hole deeper by being viewed in allegiance to the aliens after this time freeze, then it wouldn't matter how much attention he brought to this unlawful detention facility.

“It doesn't matter if you do your bullshit or not!" Hidalgo declared, dragging his family with him. “I will tell them everything that's happened here. You won't get away with this."

“Benny," Samantha said miserably. “Isn't there any other way?"

“I don't think so," he said with a shake of his head. What he was afraid of was that the alien would say that any other options, if there were more, would entail an even more egregious cost.

“If," Benny fortified himself. “If what I become no longer remembers you, I hope that I've at least freed you from this place of misery that should have been one of the healing that we had all worked together to create."

The large Nebraskan shook his hand with an expression of dismay and then crushed the wind out of him in her massive embrace. “If you remember nothing else, go to the only home you've ever really had," Samantha told him. “We will see you again, Benny. I know we will."

The husky woman was already pushing her family back down the tunnel when Benny spied the clipboard that he'd thrown aside earlier. A perfect opportunity he hadn't seen before.

“Wait. Take this," he said, yanking the paper free and shoving it into her hands. One look at the classification designator, FBI letterhead, and the meaning described for the list of people below told her all she needed about how destabilizing it would be. If it could get it out in the open.

“Oh, yes," Samantha said, looking back at him with savage delight.

*****

Back once more in the tent where the other alien that had never left awaited him, Benny slumped into his chair with the world whirling around him and his heart pounding in his ears. Looking down at his shaking hands, he hyperventilated at the feeling of tingling in his body.

“It will not start until you say that you are ready. The feeling you are experiencing is your own panic."

“I'm scared, alien. I'm scared that I'll lose everything I worked for, for myself, and for the people that I feel I owe this to. I'm scared for the daughter that I will never have the chance to meet again."

“Remember those connections that you have created. They will help you when the sensations become too much."

Benny's will fractured as he jumped to his feet. Shaking and sweating while he bolted for the door towards the still frozen world to escape from everything. Only halted halfway back outside when the alien spoke again.

“We cannot force this decision on you like it was the others for reasons critical to the fate of all you hold dear. Benny, without those like you, those who have tried so hard to protect and nurture the species of Earth, this unfortunate intervention would have come long ago. It is most unfortunate that it was not enough.

“It is humans like you that there is hope yet for your species. Look at what you have accomplished here, at a center that you have fought and fought to undertake and fund, Benny. It is a beautiful thing, the family you have created from strangers to help those helpless before the forces of apathy and avarice. A family brought together in devoted altruism."

None of this provided much comfort to the man locked into a swirling tempest of disorientation. Was he truly not going to be human anymore? What about his bank accounts, his estate? Would he be dead? His estranged daughter! She might come back someday with the ex-wife and then what would they find? That he had ended in the beast that they'd always called the ocean, just as they'd thought. If only they knew that to return to his home that he would become a beast himself.

A beast…

“Being this thing… can you show me it again?" he said instead, trying to draw himself together by focusing on a problem to be solved. The same imagery from before sprung up on the white tent wall. Scaled down now to be what he presumed would be his actual size, and with a dragon equal to any he'd seen so far to serve as a fiducial, the breadth of the creature was still breath-taking.

And that would be him. His breath hitched in his chest as his panic spiraled again. No, no, he couldn't do this. This was all wrong. Wrong for this world, wrong for humans, and wrong for him.

“What would I even do as this after I get everyone out of here? Go insane like you said? Become the fabled Kraken that would strike superstitious terror in sailors around the world?"

“Of course not. There is no need for such hysterics."

“Hysterics?" Benny shrieked, hysterically tearing at his hair. “Then what can I do as this monstrosity, beyond unbalancing an already teetering ecosystem? The… the… resident pods are already starving!"

“And now, we have given them the voice to express the grief of having known that every year made them fewer and weaker. Without the assistance of you and many more, the inescapable damage already inflicted upon the world will doom you all. Untimely advancements proved needed that have left paramount species terrified with their newfound awareness of their duress. Bringing them to seek comfort from the very beings that had compromised their ability to thrive. Humans, who have chosen as you saw here yet again against the interests of any but their own.

“The part we hope you'll undertake is to protect them all. It is a fitting coincidence that you have an organization that calls themselves the Sea Shepherds in your own past. For that is what I am asking you to become once again. All higher aquatic life off the coast of the western continent requires it. If not, a certain shy individual awaiting in the strait will reluctantly take your place."

“The wildlife must return to the strait! They can't live in the sound like this. It's polluted, too shallow, and devoid of the food they need. And just who is hiding who could take the place of that," he waved his hand at the image. “If there is some world-class, shy, whale whisperer in the area, I would have heard of them."

“I never said she was human." The projection changed to the titan shown to Benny and the others earlier. “She is very shy of your kind, and fears the confrontation her appearance will inevitably cause, but her patience chafes at hearing the cries of her distressed aquatic friends."

Presented with the obvious, Benny's panic broke. Why the hell wasn't this leviathan taking charge? She should be the one breaking the dolphins free of this deteriorating prison. She could do everything if she would just…

“It's not her role to help you, nor would she be so inclined. She came here to guide other Dreamers in helping the singers of water. Like us, the Dreamers believe that humanity does not deserve the gift of having their disaster solved without some toll being paid to settle the consequences of their ruinous collective behavior."

The man felt frightened and cold, the room spinning as he collapsed against the dragon snout that abruptly appeared beneath his falling body. Left draped over the broad nose to gasp weakly like a fish out of water. The only thing that felt real at all for Benny were the thrumming vibrations of air moving through the nasal passages just below him.

“Just take the choice away from me and do it. Force me to do it. I don't have the strength or the madness to choose what you are telling me is the only thing acceptable to you and to save us from this imprisonment."

Benny rose when a gruff snort travelled through the muzzle that held him bonelessly off the ground. “I had thought better of you, Dr. Schofield. You lower yourself in my estimation with comments like that. Is that the legacy you wish to have? To be forced to help others? Standing here amid your achievements puts your words at odds with your own deeds.

“Since you are using me as a bench top," the director definitely detected some mirth in those words despite their gruff inhuman nature. Like listening to a boulder speak. “Please close your eyes and focus on my breaths. Your panic is overtaking you. If you decline this offer, I want you to do it with sober thought as would befit a scientist and philanthropist of your stature."

Benjamin did as the alien asked. Letting his weary, blood-shot eyes close with a hefty sigh to settle his biological rhythms. With the mindfulness exercise, he found his answer as unpalatable as it was.

“If there is a god, and he isn't one of you, I hope he damns you all."

Dr. Schofield sighed and plunked himself down in the seat he'd been in when the laws of physics had been broken. “I hope he damns us too."

****

Thump, thump, thump.

The sound of the FBI woman's fist reverberated around Benny when time resumed. A handy way, he fleetingly thought, to know that the dragon had finished rewriting the laws of physics. He hyperventilated, fighting against the clenching of his throat, with the awareness that these were his last moments as a human as he sat in the same relative position, hoping to fool the agents trying to get his attention so that they would never suspect that his family had anything to do with what was about to happen.

“Oh god, this is really it", he muttered. His mind drifting with a dream-like disorientation that left him removed, as if this was all a movie and these events were being brought down upon someone else.

“Hey Sparrow!" he yelled at the unseen people behind the mirror. More specifically, at the owner of the fist he knew was beating against the partition even as the G-men kicked open the flimsy door between reality and fantasy. “You have something on your face, and I hope you choke on this."

Benjamin Schofield raised his middle finger over his shoulder. The skin of his outstretched hand already turning a dark, roughened, and mottled green that wouldn't look out of place in an Atlantic winter. In an instant, he didn't recognize the makeup of his own body with a sheet of skin creeping up the notch between three of his four fingers with his pinky looking strangely withered. Within his loafers, the same feeling of there being more, and less, than there was before.

Energy, like none he'd ever felt even in his youth, surged through him as if he'd just brushed against an exposed power line. His muscles seized with the unfathomable power coursing through him. Every muscle, every nerve ending, alight with boundless energy that made the director feel capable of anything.

“He's changing! He's changing! Bring him down, get the tranquilizer in him!" Sparrow said. Shouting over the bedlam with her voice gone high and thready in panic. Ignoring the alien, who took one last look at Benny's wide staring eyes and then vanished.

Two of the burliest men present tag-teamed to slam the changing man violently to the ground as the rest dog-piled on. The crushing weight and the shock of his skull impacting the concrete there and gone in seconds. More energy flowed into him, his clothes tore and he surged upwards, dragging the whole pile with him to shake the shouting government agents off to every corner of the tent like sea lice with swings of his longer sea-green arms.

His body stretched with the sensation of millions of biting ants crawling on and within his flesh as he grew. Those around him were already a head shorter and still receding. Within seconds, he was looking down at the gaping muzzles of the rifles pointed at him when they gave up trying to contain him. As fearful as he was of the change and what it meant for him, he held none for the weapons aimed at his head.

“Open fire! Kill the motherfuaaarrroooaaarr!"

What was happening to Benny flushed away all thought on the human voice devolving into an incongruous bellowing roar. Already pressing against the roof of the tent, he cried in alarm as he grew to push against the metal beams. Hampered by the weight of the anchors holding the tent in place. He screamed as burning tunnels of agony blazed across his frame in time to the flashes of gunfire that dazzled his eyes and the shrill whip cracks that deafened his hearing.

But nearly as quickly as the pain had come, it diminished and swept away with the increasing distance between one point of his body and another. Groaning, Benny stumbled, and grew aware of a wave that swept upwards from his hips that had his upper body undulating independently of half his physical form. Across his scalp there was a brief burning and then a sense of loss as his hair shed. His greying brown tresses wafting in and then out of his sight. Under the upward push from his head, the tent was lifting from the ground while the bedlam of voices grew louder around him.

“Bring him down!"

“Oh god, what's happening to her?"

“Check your six, check your six! The dragons are attacking!"

“The fucking dolphins!"

Benny no longer cared about the dragon roars, human shouts, or cetacean chittering as he staggered and the tent moved with him. Grunting and panting while everything drew tight. So tight. Bending, he reached down past the dangling bottom edge of his reeking dress shirt, riding to the bottom of his ribcage, to scrabble at his belt with stiffening fingers.

He sighed with relief at the release of pressure when the leather strap let go, kicking off the shoes that his heels had already lifted and stretched clear of. Rising with a sigh, he examined himself with brief touches and noticed his navel was gone and that he could no longer feel the touch of his own fingers against his thickening skin.

His clothes creaked as weight, and vitality burned through the director. Buttons tore and popped with the swelling of his body. Taking on an inertia that he didn't know how to wrap his head around. An impossible stretching took him upward, this time pushing his face into the tent canvas. Irritated by what he saw, a pulse of emotions swept up his spine to add to his annoyance. Growling, his swelling arm swung and tore open the canvas with a dangerously pointed claw growing from his index finger.

The world grew brighter and darker in near constant cycles. The colors more, and less, vibrant in equal measures. His sense of smell and taste deadening, the half-man, half-alien could no longer smell the musty dragons and the rancid tank water nor the salt of the air that he could taste before. All gone.

As the changes piled atop each other and his growth through the widening rend in the canvas accelerated, he felt a tingling tsunami was over his lower abdomen and the world became more.

He felt more.

Benny felt the world become alien around him, as if some immutable property had shifted so that Earth was no longer what it was. The air smelled off, gravity felt too light, the sun was a color too bright and too red to be possible. Turning his head and stumbling, he knew which way was magnetic north. A tidal pull at the edge of awareness.

The silent presence in his mind made an ultrasonic hum with Benny's throat, making the man trumpet in panic that snatched his body back from responding to another's control, and he knew beneath the obscuring canvas tent where all the people still stood around him. He knew where the dolphins were, in their pools. He felt a shift in pressure, and that strange echo whispered that it would rain to the north soon. It wasn't the world changing.

It was him.

His nervous system was changing. His brain was changing. He remembered what he needed. A quartet of whiskers erupted from his upper lip to dangle against his chin. Sensory input overwhelming the human in him, and distantly he felt an echoing response. A query and an ultimatum reaching out to his unchanged but reeling mind.

“Family," Benjamin said, in a guttural voice that must have matched the length of the neck he felt stretching his head away from his torso. An accompanying sensation of floating nearly making him vomit.

“My loves," the director intoned, remembering the alien's words. Remembering two sets of family, his biological and adopted ones. Clinging to every face with all the tenacity he could gather while his body grew up and out.

He turned with a swipe of his lengthening hand to break the spine of the tent that sent it collapsing to the ground, revealing his swelling frame to the world. A droning from above came closer in every direction, even among the heavy thudding flaps of the descending Children in his strangely itching ears. Reaching up with a hand that was losing its pinky as swiftly as a translucent green web spun between the three remaining taloned fingers, he tore the last rags stretched across his shoulders to display the half human, half alien chest to the approaching cameras.

I hope the recording of me turning into a giant monster is enough to get five seconds on the ten-o'clock news, he cynically thought, despite everything else, like the fact that he hoped it was a tail he felt worming its way down one of his pants legs.

With a yell that resonated within his extending throat, the burgeoning length of his tail bud brushed back and forth between the thighs that bracketed it as it swung in time to his wild emotions. An unthinkable experience, feeling a part of his body reciprocate a touch with something that hadn't been there before.

“Release my family!" he cried, pouring all the hope that he was doing the right thing until his call echoed back to him from the skyscrapers kilometers away.

There was no pain, nothing but an overwhelming pressure swelling him outwards and inwards in all directions. Pushing and massaging every aspect of his body. The sensations were maddening and making it increasingly hard to think. Soon, even as he huffed and moaned when there was an elastic tugging at his groin that receded within, the being that changed from one species to another only knew one thought. An all-consuming impulse that the being's psyche coalesced around to cling with all its strength. Giving him just enough to keep a vague concept of self.

Benny's trapped family needed help.

Stretching upwards, he felt the touch of his skin deaden everywhere except at points of his body that sprouted to be tickled by the salt-laden moist air blowing over them. The man's skull groaned intolerably loud in his ears and he bent his neck to bury his face in his quadrudactyl hands. Opening his eyes wide in surprise when he felt his face pushing against his palms. He gaped uselessly as his jaws ached and his teeth ground and tore as they expanded in their sockets. Unable to comprehend the distance of length between his sight and where he felt his hands pushing against his broadening nose.

An unintelligible grunt from his throat revealed a new image of his surroundings as the cage of teeth cramped his tongue. New points spiking upwards to prick at the scrunched organ as if he was growing a second row of teeth behind the first.

“My family is being held! They are dying!" Benny bellowed. Opening his mouth so far that it felt like his entire head had split in two. Turning to cry out to the buzzing noise that heralded the attention needed to force the government to let innocent people go. Those in the tanks and trapped beyond his senses, all used as tools to control the flying ones circling about him.

The wasp sting of bullets, no longer penetrating the slabs of hardened epidermis sheathing his body, grew to a fevered pitch. Even striking across the bridge of his nose in a burning jagged line that could not cause more than cosmetic damage. Angry pockmarks that were healed nearly instantly by the replacement of flesh and bone in the transformation. Still left reeling by the impacts even with the lack of damage, he stumbled and tripped over his own awkwardly bent legs to fall on his side in a cascade A motion that started at his hips and revealed how long he had grown when his body spanned the diameter of one water tank. Undulating in waves that churned the rancid water from his spurting tail tip to where his head swept backwards with the eruption of points of his skull through the skin.

Finding the edge of the tank, he gripped it and pulled himself to land. His creaking neck lifting his head up high to look down at the humans who seemed so small now at the same time a part of his body brushed against the bottom of the water pen.

The rhythm of the fight shifted dramatically away from the government and into the unknown in an instant. It began with the tiniest dragon he'd ever seen landing next to another that the being who thought it was a man knew he'd heard the sound of before. Forming a wall of bristling and roaring anger around him in his metamorphic throes. Those still trying to fire at him retreated, carrying a strange one that had red-hair growing from her head away into the tunnels as swings of tails and wings pressed them back. There was a massive blast somewhere toward the tall strange things the Dreamer didn't know the function of, and all glowing orbs that looked like one of his whiskers went out.

With aching eyes that blurred in and out of focus while they changed position within his skull, the being watched water activate patterns of light across the slick dark green scales covering its skin. The luminescence taking on shapes and repetitious movements in kaleidoscopes of color that meant nothing to the dying man. Burning gashes tore across his whipping neck that let fresh torrents of air surge in an instant through burning flesh with a fluting sigh to cool its alarmingly heated body.

A wrench in his hips drew a bellow from the mouth that extended far into his sight and divided his world into two. The sensation of expansion within his lower body being cradled by the filthy water briefly drawing Benny back to his senses and out of the shapeless world where he didn't exist.

But the sensations of his foreign body did not leave him long to get his bearings within his own head. Already the terrible feedback loop of his own amplified emotions and awareness crashed back into him as the enormous mass of his tail rose from the water to swing the towering fin taking shape on its end. Gasping with painful swells as he stood on four legs, he flinched in surprise and squeezed his eyes shut against the sight of the formerly scummy color of the tank water taking on an incredible array of blues and greens that he knew he shouldn't be able to see. Nor should he have been able to hear the difference in the individual orcas crying out in panic from the harbor. Or know the panic of the water friends.

The newborn titan sneezed at the feeling of the whiskers sprouting from near his nostrils when they squirmed and surged into a frenzy. The glow emanating from the bulbs on the ends flashed brilliantly when they contacted a flying creature, sending it somersaulting into another with a carrying squeal of alarm. Another colossal sneeze shot a mist of water from the Dreamer's mouth and gills alike at the irritation of the luminescent appendages.

New itching growth erupted everywhere on his body with the ponderous inertia-filled blossoming of his size. Blasting his mind apart as an avalanching number of sensory inputs frayed his identity. The creature… No… Benny… felt himself losing the battle and retreated to the same singular nugget of purpose that had helped him so far. Trying and failing to close himself off from a world that he didn't know how to process anymore.

Reaching out with one hand even larger than the dolphin he had calmed with the lulling colors that flashed off his arm, he scooped her up and gave his last message to all the winged and grounded creatures, watching him warily.

“Let my family go now!"

With his final demand roared for all to hear. The discordant colors and sounds he felt beat against his attachment to reality. Severing anchor after anchor until the echo came again, riding up the column of his spine with disorienting speed. He was too big, he shouldn't be on his hands, the colors were too much. The sounds too much. It wouldn't stop.

I'm sorry I couldn't hold on longer, Benny thought, looking up at the sky as the first light of morning crested over the towering Cascades.

The Dreamer that was once a man sighed sadly as he felt the last strange thoughts of the tiny creature fade into an abyss. Only a nearly complete darkness and three warm glowing orbs to keep what remained of the human company.