When I awoke, Kaptain Kronk was still babbling on about his favorite childhood pet. There appears to be no stopping him. I guess this is how he tortured his captives, by pelting them aimlessly with an endless hail of words. He slithered, crackled, fuzzed, and popped over to my seeds and unwrapped the grapnels while still talking. He continued to talk as he led me down a long hallway to the prisoners’ barracks.
“This is the Krib,” he shouted gleefully, pointed to a rotting wood sign hanging above the door. One of the nails in the sign was rusted and broke in half as soon as he pointed to it. I continued to assume this was a coincidence.
To my surprise, the first creature I saw upon entering the Krib was Dave. He was chained to the wall and had beads of sweat dripping down his forehead and through his feathers. Next to Dave, there were several other tortured prisoners from other corners of the galaxy. The Kaptain pushed me into the room and slammed the door shut. With a loud klanking, a key fell into place and Kaptain Kronk locked the door.
I tottered over to one of the cots and just sat there. There was nothing else to do. I couldn’t talk to Dave, and I couldn’t talk to any of the other prisoners, either. The only thing to do was just sit there. So that’s what I did: I just sat there. For hours. I sat there until I started to see tiny ducktopi floating around my head, from sleep deprivation.
When I did fall asleep, I had cluttered dreams about the Military Exus Leader and Weasel fighting over the glowing egg. I often had visions about the unseen creature from the egg attempting to tell me the future. It talked about robotic arms and extra features, and strange things I couldn’t picture. I had dreams in which I attempted to save Plittereeg from a giant fire-breathing snake. And just when we were in mid leap from the falling rope bridge to the edge of the cliff on the other side, somebody would rewind and it would play over and over and over. I never got to see if we made it out alive.
Those were the dreams of the first night. They got worse every night I spent aboard the Mayfly.
I had diabolic visions of what the Deathbird would look like from the outside—signs and portents from the tiny creature in the egg—and even more terrible monsters attempting to destroy Plittereeg, with no sign of whether we got out alive or not. Every night I awoke dripping with sweat from another nightmare. Each night, the nightmares were worse and worse, leaving me in worse and worse situations with Plittereeg with more terrible predictions from the creature in the egg.
One night, as I was waking up in a cold sweat, before I had a chance to throw my head back down onto the dusty featherless pillow, I was picked up by two metal arms and carried at ferocious speeds out of the Krib. My first month in the Krib was over. Whenever the arms went around a turn, I was swung against the wall, being knocked almost out of my senses. I eventually arrived in the biggest room I had ever seen on the ship. There were chairs and benches and tables everywhere. A sign above the door read: “Waiting Room.”
As I strained my eyes to read the sign above the door at the other end of the chamber, my heart skipped a beat. This was the waiting room for the Genetics & Mutating Lab.