There are many things that a person does not see in ordinary life. Here, though, those sights are almost more common than what most would consider 'normal'.

It isn't every day that you see a grand cavern, so grandly lit by the natural green glow of luminescent crystals, hundreds of feet overhead but still so impossibly bright. A cavern with tens of little off-shoot tunnels running in different directions, and with verdant stalagmites reaching for the sky in a vain attempt to join with the beautiful, shining gems so high above. It was a sight so rare, or indeed impossible to see on Earth that it would lead cavers to unfortunate deaths just on the merits of hyperventilation- indeed, on Earth, something like this could only be far underground. Instead, this 'cavern' was not a cavern at all, but a cave. It sat miles above water level, actually placing the cave, and its new residents, at quite the altitude. The air was still thin, but not so thin as to be lethal, and certainly not from being trapped beneath the ground. Fair few caves come ornamented with thirty people unconscious in a circle, either- especially not in the nude. Naturally, they were the 'new residents' of the cave.

It isn't every day that you see twenty-nine humans together in nakedness, every bit as embarrassed and self-conscious as you are. You could suppose that it was easy to find that on Earth, perhaps on a nudist beach, but this was not some voluntary act of exhibitionism or naturalism, or at least none of the unfortunate souls seemed to remember how they got there. Some were (un)lucky enough to have memories of the precursor, of the swirling black abyss had frozen the world around them and ate them whole. Others had simply gone to sleep at night and woke up in the midst of strangers. Many of this chosen thirty had family with them, but not all. They would also likely never forget the first time they saw each-other in the nude, because even if they were all awkward and embarrassed and maybe even a bit 'excited', there was also beauty there, like the statues of the Greeks or the Romans. The green glow of the crystals hanging so far over-head gave new color to each shade of skin, one that seemed to make it dance; bringing it to life in a way that only an artist could muster.

It isn't quite so easy to find such an insane view from a mountain-side, either. Rather than standing on a ledge, thus cutting off part of your view, the people of the cave also got to see down, deep below their cave's mouth. It had no real ledge, only little ridges, rocks, and impressively intrepid plants along its steep decline. Far in the distance, they could see a rival mountain, almost as tall as the one they were lodged in appeared to be. Judging by where they met it at eye-level, they were hardly even half way to the peak. Far below, there was a jungle, one that was so lush and impressive that it could put the Amazon to shame. The canopy was so dense that they couldn't even see the jungle-floor. That was the first thing to tip off the small army of nudists that they might not in fact have been on Earth at all. No one had heard of two improbably tall mountains so close to each-other, let alone adjacent to a jungle.

It was categorically impossible to see a dragon on the Earth. Scientists had long since started monitoring the entire world at once, and something as large as this moving so fast would have set off a sheer quantity of "counter-terrorism" satellites large enough to accidentally start a thermonuclear war. Rather than a dragon, it was perhaps accurate to call them 'giant snakes', but as the cave dwellers watched down in awe from their little cave-mouth, they unanimously decided that 'Dragon' was more appropriate. These Dragons had no legs or arms, but they were giant reptiles. They weaved in and out of the jungle, banking off the mountain-side as though they were just a skater's half-pipe. They had to be at least a hundred yards long, and they could throw themselves into the air from the they were on mountain-side so fast and hard that they could snap birds from the air as though it was easy, only to land on the other side. It was intense, impressively terrifying, and so yet graceful. That was why 'Dragon' fit so well- even if they had no wings, these Dragons could fly. They never once fell into the jungle itself, instead seeming to prefer pre-made tracks that they had long since worn into the ground. Also, on re-inspection, the things they had written off as 'big birds' were quite likely car-sized. Gulp. When one Dragon had passed right over their cave-mouth, they canned any idea of leaving through that exit.

No matter how fantastical or new something was, it gave way to terror quickly. No matter how 'cool' the Dragons would have been on a nature documentary, they were real and they were scary and they were trapping them inside. What would they eat in this barren cave? What would they even drink, in fact? How would the younger ones care for themselves? What could they possibly wear? They were hungry, thirst, and naked. Thankfully, people band together. They corralled their rampant curiosity and burgeoning fear and channeled it into exploring the best-lit caves, hoping to find things that were more useful. Thankfully, they had. Some certain individuals even went deep within the bowels of the mountain, but nothing ever seemed to come of it. In any case, the well-lit tunnels had "nutritious" insectoid grubs (and no way to cook them" as well as thankfully clean and crystal-clear water. It was a stroke of luck like no other- there was some form of bat that nested in the caves and they had left behind enough residues over decades to attract native colonies of insects. They had even found some colonies of gross mushrooms that seemed to be edible enough, if unpleasant. Even as disgusting as the grubs and mushrooms were, it was categorically better than eating shit.

Life went on like that, just exploring while subsisting on grubs and water and human perseverance, until it was rudely interrupted by harsh reality- some of the men were feeling pent-up. This was not a large cave, and it wasn't easy to find an excuse for privacy. The married couples had no such concern, 'buddying up' with their significant other as nature called, but bachelors had no such luck. Pair that with the fact that everyone was nude, all the time, and that 'strangers' does not mean 'good people', and you have a problem. For the sake of survival, "bad people" will do nice things. They'll fix their shit up, and play to the strengths of the group, because it's what they have to do. At the same time, most of the 'badness' they have just stems from the idea they should be running everything.

Naturally, one of these "bad people" was a people-pleaser, and he found an excellent friendship with a literal thug, a person who used to be a bouncer from a seedy club, and that man made friends with a normal plumber who had never been able to find a real relationship. None of them were evil, or necessarily even "bad", but they did have urges, and those urges were strong ones. They saw people who had families with them, the couples, and they envied that. They saw the weakness engendered by their desperate attempts to shelter each-other from harm or risk, and that only made it worse. In truth, it probably was true that people weren't taking the situation seriously enough. At the same time, at no point would the actions they planned to take have been necessary.

They hatched a plot of how to seize control the next time the husbands and young men would be away, on how they could get their 'fix' and set things right. Luckily for their would-be victims, and unluckily for the would-be victimizers, people had a sense for these things. The husbands had been ready for the attempt, and had indeed organized on their own just in case of this sort of occurrence. Outnumbered easily two-to-one, the fight was swift and brutal. The men were beaten mercilessly for actions they had yet to take, and without trial, they were cast from the mountain. Literally. Their 'exile' was to be thrown from the cave's mouth. It was something no one was happy about, and once the rage left them, it was a new regret. If they had been more sympathetic or really thought things through, or even had let them off with the cruel beating alone, there wouldn't be three dead men. Life was not some game that you could just restart and try again, though. The group shrank from thirty to twenty-seven. It shouldn't even be a shock that, rather than the cruel environment itself, the first cause of death was human hands.

Life did indeed continue, and after many long discussions, quite a few fruitless explorations into the depths, and a number of days and nights, things were back to some approximation of normal. Right until the morning that their neighbor came to greet them, that is. He was an impressive specimen, with massive muscles, a wide frame, and an impressively thick tail. If he was a human, perhaps women of the correct persuasion would simply pass out at a glance from his pale-blue eyes. It was a shame, then, that he wasn't human. He wasn't human, at all. He was a reptile, a crocodile-man of great stature. He wore an armored plate over his chest, something like a Samurai's Ō-yoroi, and he wielded a complimentary Yari. His sides were well-covered with sharp, red scales, so they didn't bother to finish the plates. Those red scales continued all around his body, only ignoring his stomach, which had the pale stomach of a lizard- presumably why armor was necessary at all. The thick metal plates of the pseudo Ō-yoroi's skirt had been parted to make room for the (completely literal, by the way) tail, which lashed from side to side as it walked.

They didn't know what to do. It was another fantastic sight, a giant lizard-man armed and dangerous and coming to greet them, and they didn't know what to do. They would have to choose fast, too, since the monster passed great distances with each step, gliding gracefully over the bumpy and uneven terrain of the cavern. Most of the crowd truly wasn't prepared to act. When it came to 'brutally victimizing each-other', people tended to make decisions in mobs, but this was no other 'person'. It was a monster, a true beast of the likes the Earth had never seen. In situations like this, it was up to a select few who were willing and able to make decisions to actually do so. Humans tended to consider them 'Heroes', as a general rule.

The first person to respond truly was a hero. He was a doctor of many years, middle-aged and wise. He had retired his primary career to become a pediatrician, and in his time as a pediatrician, he had become thoroughly convinced that any situation could be talked out civilly, that even the most obstinate of children could be tamed with enough caring, understanding, and effort. Who could possibly be better than him to appease this lizard-man? 'Lewis will handle it, he's a politician!' He had thought, but when the old doctor searched through the terrified crowd for him, he was far too busy cowering in the corner to help. So now it was up to him. He set himself ahead of the crowd, trying his best.

He bowed and scraped, trying to appease whatever cultural overlap the big lizard had with the Japanese, but it didn't seem to so much as slow. As it drew ever nearer, he even tried a proper 'Dogeza' of the like he had learned long ago. The monster was right in front of him, now, and it loomed over his prostrated form. It had stopped. He let his hope swell, scrambling to his feet, staring it in the nostril-holes. He couldn't manage eye-contact, although that might have been for the best. He waited, and waited. Then, he tried to speak- only to be cut off by a terrible noise. It was like a weed-whacker was being held right next to his ear, or that of a thrumming motor. The lizard's mouth was gaping open wide, then shut, and then wide once more. It took him a moment to realize it was laughing. It kept on going, and going.

He started to laugh, too, hoping to get in on the joke, to build comradery. When he realized that it was laughing at him, he panicked. He didn't stop laughing, but he did start to back away. That was how he died- he laughed with the lizard only a moment longer before its spear slammed into his head. The force of the impact and some oddity of the motion combined to great effect, and rather than gore splattering everywhere or his body toppling to the floor with the spear lodged in it, his head practically exploded into a fine mist, popping like a balloon. The crowd was not just terrified, now. No, no, they were screaming and running and cowering like their life depended on it. Some just tried to run past the horrible Crocodile monster, towards the only true exit from the cave, while others were immobile due to the terrible truth of what they had seen. One, however, did neither.

He was the second hero. Rather than a friendly sort of 'save-the-day-for-everyone' superhero, he was a quite frankly a heartless son of a bitch- his actions would only save himself, at best. The main reason that was so terrible was that the boy had come with his family, not even a bunch of strangers. He hadn't even informed them of his escape attempt. Something had snapped in him, quite recently or possibly even long before they were 'taken', and he had been a true soldier ever since. Although, it should be noted that he considered himself more of a commander, a general. It was one of his favorite hobbies- military history, strategy, and so forth. He was a tall young man, a teenager no older than fifteen with an exceptionally narrow frame and frail limbs. Indeed, he had been called 'Twig' for quite a long time. His real name was Caleb, and he ran for the tunnels, rather than the cave mouth. He was one of the few to actually explore the cave, and while he had never found a way out, he had found a few leads. Not that he had told anyone that, of course. It was his escape route. Francis Marion wasn't famous for being an excellent duelist or a nice human being, no; his claim to fame had come from the time he spent using and abusing the environment to make a clean get-away. The lizard paid the ape trying to hide no heed, instead deigning to just stab at another of its brethren running for the exit. It had the thing's scent, and if it had the scent, there would be no escape- or so it believed. The second hero succeeded in starting his plan, but only time could tell if it would come to fruition.

It seemed as though he was the only other one would step forward. The few who still had the will to run were the last to even attempt an escape, with the rest of the people simply broken, their lives officially so far off the tracks that there were no tracks anymore, left spinning in place like a broken record waiting to be replaced, or in this case, 'disposed of'. There were only three runners, now, while eleven cowered in the back, and one ran to the tunnels, composing the sixteen people left alive. The runners moved in unison, and the fastest of the runners gave even the lizard pause. It had to spend an entire second poking a hole in his body. He fell away, and in the time it was busy with him, the other two had made good time. They were actually ahead of it, now, running desperately for the cave-mouth. It ran, spearing the slower of the two. It could see the satisfying sight of the cave's floor through him, like a morbid magic trick. He went to repeat it, running for the next of the apes. When it finally caught up, though, he realized that there was just another layer of skin on the other side, as though…

If the crocodile-man had the highly responsive skin of a mammal, it may have blanched white. It had seen twenty seven people when it came in, but when it had re-counted just now; it had only actually seen fifteen, despite killing only eleven- which could only mean that the last of the foul beasts was out of sight. At least, she had been, until he poked a hole in her cover. She was a lithe little thing and the fastest runner of all the humans to make the attempt thus far. She had mirrored the inferior runner to use him as cover, an effective (if tragic) way to give her a better lease at escaping. Her pace and cadence had been perfect, matching even the big man's footfalls to disguise her own, lighter steps. The only thing that really helped the Crocodile-Man catch on so fast was the fact her skin-color didn't match his, she mused- not particularly accurate, but it was still fact.

The man had been the tanned white of someone who worked in the sun, although it had lost some of its bronze because of the many days in the cave's dim, UV-deficient light, while the girl was a sandy, light-brown that would be termed 'Hispanic' in a heartbeat. If Caleb's flight towards the tunnels could be called 'running', then she was flying across the cave, faster than even the Crocodile Man who chased her. She was a tad broken, too. She smiled as she ran, dancing a mad dance over the bumpy terrain that could only be described as 'a drugged-up ballerina running from Satan himself'. If someone saw the scene from a distance, they might have even been able to guess that answer in Charades. The two of them cut fast across the grand cavern, and almost too quickly, she was gone. She had almost leapt from the cave-mouth, well and truly free of the creature's grasp. It would find time to chase the swift ape in a moment, it resolved. It couldn't risk the other eleven escaping.

The lizard roared, a sound less like a weed-whacker and more like a chainsaw, and it tore back towards the rest of the humans, killing them even more thoroughly dead than the rest. It was pissed, now. Not one, but two newly Ascended creatures had got the better of him, even if it was temporary. The browner of the two apes was out on the cliffs of the mountain, so it couldn't possibly make good time, it thought. It went to the tunnels, gliding into the dark. If one was to look, they could see its eyes widen, taking in the dim light easily and readily, almost as naturally as a nocturnal predator. It had calmed down a bit, now, and it had a job to do.

It followed the scent of the tunnel-runner, trailing it deep into a massive pile of guano. It was disgusting for the creature to dig through the swill, and worse to find absolutely nothing in it. He stamped and stamped, frustrated. The scent practically ended in the pile, and following the little bit of trail left him to an impressively murky pool of water. He was furious- the ape had anticipated it and tried to throw him off the trail. He tore through the tunnels, and near the very end of his hunt, he found a steep, near-vertical shaft that reeked of the little mongrel's blood. It was too small to fit down for him, and he could tell the scent was a long way down. It was a start, but tracking it down there… The ape on the cliff would have to be first.

He ran to the main cavern, once more venting his frustrations, this time at full volume. The stalactites shook overhead, and he only barely stopped in time to avoid dislodging some over his head. Even with his scales, it would hurt. Still, it couldn't possibly hurt more than his shattered pride. He left the cave, hoping to catch at least the easier of the two would-be escapees. Then, the cave was empty once more. No nude humans lived within, now. It was serene, if terrifying, with all of those corpses.

The floor of the cave began to pool with the blood of the fallen, and as it settled, it attained the sort of infinite reflection that only the undisturbed waters of a cavern could hope to gain. The green stalactites hung overhead, and if someone were to look into the cave, they would think that there was a matching set of red stalagmites. It was the sharp teeth of a cruel beast, and thirty humans had been dropped there to die. Perhaps the cave wasn't the culprit, but it didn't need to be- there would always be a reason to kill, and a reason to be killed. That was the natural order. At least, it had been. With every successive generation, humans spent untold amounts of effort combatting that order. Fighting nature- even human nature. Eventually they succeeded, truly attaining a world that could be considered 'right and just', without war or unnatural death. As early as the year 20XX, the most significant cause of death had become old age and even the standard of that had long surpassed the lofty goals of their forefathers.

Yet, it was robbed from them. Quite a number of that beautiful world were simply plucked from their homeland and dropped straight into a brand new world, as though to mock them for living a life with nothing to fear. That was a mistake, though, and a big one. It was true that by 21XX, humanity had become attained world piece, found new heights in technology, and even solved the balancing act of 'industry' and 'environment'. If that was where history started, you would get the wrong idea. In reality, humanity warred with itself on an increasingly massive scale, hunted down any and all reason to obliterate any competitor species or threat to their turf as far back as the Stone Age, orchestrated great advances in technology just to spite each-other and even discovered a weapon that was quite potentially world-ending and proceeded to build thousands and thousands of them, because their fellow man could not be trusted to simply avoid ending the world as a matter of course, and that insane concept led to the longest sustained peace until the Great Afterwards that led to the true golden age. Humanity was ruthless, with a capacity to hold grudges across centuries and wars over generations, and it would never tire.

All thirty of the people who had once lived in this God-forsaken cave had one, unified thought burning in their minds every single night. They were unified in the certainty that they would make whatever monster stole them away pay, and pay dearly. None of the people themselves could have known that was what they really, truly felt. The thought came in many forms, after all. It could be "I wish my family could just be safe." Or perhaps "how could this happen to me?" Or even "what did I do to deserve this?" Yet under all three burns the same rage at the squalor they had been forced in, or the suffering their families had underwent. Even in Caleb, the death of his family would still; follow him for a long time still, burning the rage in his gut until he was a creature of righteous vengeance and fire.

The phony crimson crystals of the bloody reflection almost seemed to shine brighter than the real things hanging on the cave's ceiling, so far above.