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You take some fire corals and carefully knap the edges with smooth stones to make it sharp and pointed. You make small notches, breaking the coral along natural fault lines, careful not to touch it directly to your sensitive hands, and eventually form it into a sharpened spearhead. Then, you attach it to the end of your fathom-pole, creating your improvised weapon. You don't even really think the sharp point is necessary, given how painful the coral already is just by touch, but you feel much safer with this at hand.
By the time your weapon is finished, the sun is going down on the surface, and the light piercing the water gets dark very quickly. It's far too dark to swim out into open water now, meaning you're spending the night here. There is no chance you're leaving when it's dark. You break out one of the underwater emergency flares; making light through a burning chemical reaction that's state of the art, and check the inside of the whole grotto; paranoid that the beast could break its way in. But you don't see any cracks or crevices it could fit through, and even if it did, you are confident you could stab it with your speak if it tried. You even get to have a snack. As the light fades you settle down to sleep in the cool waters, thankful for your species ability to breathe through your lungs without having to swim, mindfully entering a state of suspended animation yet with your eyes remaining open. You feel no need to blink when under water. Overhead, the light from the twin moons of Swallia are occasionally eclipsed by a large moving shape; the Zhark; keeping well above the grotto. It hasn't left yet, it seems. You think for a moment it's doing it on purpose; like a demon of folklore taunting you with your upcoming demise. But no, it is merely an animal trying for its next meal. No need to personal something operating on raw instinct.
The next morning, as the sunlight returns through the water and you shake from sleep, you take the last of your snacks and poke your head out tentatively. Is it gone? You wait a while longer, not sensing any disturbance in the water. Even the other fish are out again; scuttling creatures moving out from the cover of the grotto, including some of your potential research subjects; looking health and happy even though the protein collapse seems to ravage them. You are eager to get back home again, and don't want to wait any longer. After a few minutes of caution, you cut your sample straight from the kelp stem for maximum freshness and head out from the safety of the grotto back into open water and towards the shore. Staying in that grotto was getting boring anyway!
But as you begin your swim back, you get a trickling feeling of paranoia and the sensation of being exposed again. With no easy cover on the sea floor beneath you, you turn about to see what is following you...
>Quest continues tomorrow
