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Taking a brief break from digging through the ceiling above me, I looked through the hole I had made. I saw the sky—albeit periodically obscured by the faces of the Night People working on the other end of the tunnel. By the pinkish hues beyond, I guessed that it was evening (unless I was on some kind of cotton-candy, alien world with perpetually pink skies). There was a smell of salt water in the air above, and I could hear the splash of waves over the soft scratching sounds of claws digging through sand. “Are you sure this is … alright?” I called out. “I feel kind of bad for digging out your cave.” “Of course, Sleeping God,” said Krogallo, sticking his head through the hole to look at me. He ignored the jostling movement of the other bats still digging around him. “We cannot leave you prisoner here, after all.” I nodded and got back to work. I had to stand on my toes and awkwardly dug one-handed over the top of the pod. While my body did not seem specifically designed for

I gasped as I fell unexpectedly into the dark pit—with smooth black stones serving as the walls—and fell into the muddy ground below. Fortunately, the mud was only about an inch deep, and I realized how much worse it could have been had it been raining since I entered the jungle. When I frantically I looked up at the entrance where I’d been dropped from, the tails quickly flew out the entrance—along with the weight of their presence. Even though I was now scared at being imprisoned in a pit—with what looked like claw scratches on the stone and a few clumps of variously colored fur on top of the mud—it was still a relief to no longer be surrounded by shades carrying me to an unknown fate. My fate was known now … even if it wasn’t a particularly pleasant one. I no longer felt their seemingly-psychic influence. The previous limits to my vision felt gone, along with the sense that someone was poking around in my head. The only problem was that being stuck down here meant that the