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One final note; I tried to make certain dialogue appear in a weird font of symbols, but the site wouldn't accept it. It has been encrypted instead. Feel free to translate if you can, but I encourage reading the chapter WITHOUT translating it first, just to get the full experience.

Chapter 4: The Face of Our Enemy

"Stan..."

"Stan..?"

With a weak and warbeling groan, the young boy struggled to pull his concious mind back together. Everything seemed so distant, lost somewhere in a muddy haze. He could hear a voice calling out to him, and he fought to target his focus on its origin.

"Stan! Come on!" The voice shouted, each subsequent syllable sounding clearer than the last as Stan's foggy mind began to wake. "You have to get up! Please!"

Motivated by the desperate tone in the voice's pleading, Stan breathed an exaggerated moan to let the other party know that he was listening. Summoning his returning strength, he slowly rose to his hands and knees, blinking rapidly in an attempt to restart his vision. The black curtain of fatigue and confusion lifted from his eyes. Blurry shapes began to take form, and he leaned back to sit on his legs for a better view of the muddled figures around him. Almost immediately, the form standing closest to him became clear as day as his mind instantly recognized the familiar colors of orange and green.

"Kyle..?" Stan brought a shaky hand to his head as if to steady himself, his brow furrowed in thought.

"Stan! Dude, you're awake!" Kyle shouted excitedly, feeling a portion of the heavy weight of worries leaving his burdened shoulders. "We were starting to think you weren't ever gonna wake up!"

A significantly larger figure emerged from behind Kyle, looking to Stan with an annoyed and cynical expression. "Yeah, Stan." Cartman sarcastically sneered. "You were gonna miss all the fun."

Stan's mind suddenly began to race with questions; how did Kyle and Cartman break free of their dome prison? How had they found himself? What knocked him out for so long? Where were they now? How did they escape the alien ship and its weaponry? What 'fun' was Cartman referencing? It all felt like too much. Stan leaned forward with both hands cradling his forehead, trying not to throw up.

"Hey, Eric..?" A timid voice rose from behind Kyle and Cartman. "Do you really think that... That maybe they just want to have fun?"

Stan, confused, quickly looked up to try and catch a glimpse of the other person present. As the once blurry figures filled in, he noticed that around a dozen kids were standing huddled before him. His mind flashed with memories of his daring escape, and he realized that the kids here were the same ones he had seen becoming caught in the aliens vile traps.

"No, Butters, of course they don't!" Cartman growled, stepping forward to reveal the soft spoken child just behind him. "They put us in a cage! They're probably gonna kill us!"

A cage? A quick survey confirmed it; Stan and the other twelve or so children were locked in a large square cage that was only slightly tall enough to allow the kids to stand without hitting their heads on its top. The boy turned around to find the cage's door was set just behind him, but the room beyond the metal bars was too dark to see clearly.

A sudden sharp and uncontrollable vocalization startled Stan to turn back towards the others.

"They're... They probably are gonna keep us so they can eat us later!" Tweek sputtered in a single strained breath amongst anxious twitches and gasps. "Oh god! Or they're gonna feed us to their young!"

"What if they're taking us somewhere to experiment on us?" Token spoke up nervously. "You always hear about those people who get abducted and probed by aliens..."

"No, those guys are grey and their ship is round." Cartman immediately dismissed the idea, spurring a confused look from most the other kids. "They don't put you in a cage. I don't think aliens that put you in a cage plan on ever letting you leave."

"I don't wanna be alien food..." A much smaller, softer voice whispered before dissolving into quiet sobs. Stan hadn't even noticed the little Canadian child firmly affixed to Kyle's side.

Stan couldn't take his own fear, frustration and confusion any longer. "Could somebody PLEASE fill me in on what is happening?" He exclaimed, quickly rising to his feet.

But the others were never given a chance to respond. Just then, a bright light from beyond the cage came to life, illuminating the surprisingly cramped room all around them. They now could see that the entire space was around the size of a school bus, but perhaps slightly wider. The cage the kids were trapped in was pressed against the wall and underneath some kind of shelf that could be found on either side of the room. Sitting dead center was a large, somewhat oddly shaped pilots chair, set just behind a curved complex control panel covered in switches, levers, and readouts. Six huge tv screens hung in front of the controls; four of them displayed strange schematics of the ship or what appeared to be the fluctuating numbers of constant system checks. One screen displayed the view directly in front of the ship, which was nearly pitch black aside from the handful of scattered stars. The last of the tv's was blank.

A fully automated door opened from the small wall in the back of the room, located to the right of the captive kids. Stan held his breath as a single ominous figure loudly marched through, finally allowed a glimpse of the creature responsible for the children's capture.

The being stood at an impressive height of somewhere between seven and eight feet, and was coated head to toe in a gleaming black and seaweed green armored pressure suit. It's long, satyr-like legs were topped in thick, heavy boots that accented his every step with a dramatic thud. Around its waist was a jarring array of strange electronics, not unlike the orb shaped devices that had aided in the human's capture. Four arms protruded from its wide chest; two dominate limbs stemming from wide set shoulders and ending in a five fingered hand just as a human's, the other two much smaller and sprouting from either side of the aliens sternum, ending only in mitten like graspers. It's head was completely covered by a huge, menacing looking helmet, decorated with odd fins and flairs at its top and appearing almost beaked due to the air hose entrance jutting from where its nose and mouth would be. And from its neck down to its middle back, then beginning again from its rump was a colossal rat tail, so long and unwieldy that the creature seemed to drag most of it across the ground as he walked.

A sleek electronic device was clutched firmly in one of the aliens smaller arms, which it held close to its armored face. It gestured wildly with its other three forelimbs, furiously pacing back and forth in the cockpits entrance.

"Vyyu, S gkc xofob dyvn drkd drobo gkc cywo cybd yp zbopoboxmo sx grkd usxn yp zkdrodsm lbyynvsxqc droi gkxdon!" The beast spoke in a frightening chorus of shrieks and growls over top a constant low clicking not unlike the sound of echolocation. "S tecd nsn grkd droi dyvn wo kxn klnemdon grkdofob pyyvc S dbkzzon psbcd! Sp ro nyocx'd vsuo drow, ro mkx gkbz rsc vkji kcc dy drsc zvkxod kxn ny sd rswcovp!"

A brief response resonated from the creatures gizmo. "S nyx'd uxyg grkd dy dovv iye. Tecd qod drow robo kxn iye mkx cybd sd yed gsdr rsw. Yfob kxn yed."

Apparently the response wasn't a favorable one. Infuriated, the alien hurled his handheld gadget across the room, impacting the far shelf with a crackling snap that caused all the caged children to jump. With a beastly growl rumbling from its chest, the being's larger left hand ghosted over a slot on its belt for a moment or two, and Stan, to his horror, recognized the shape of a gun in its holster. Thankfully, though, the alien decided against removing his weapon, and instead stormed out of the cockpit with his hands grasping the base of his helmet, roaring what must have been rage filled commentary about his previous conversation.

It wasn't until the aliens voice was far enough away that the kids finally began to move again. They had frozen solid when it had entered, but now most of them quivered uncontrollably in fear.

"Well, SOMEONE has a temper..." Cartman scoffed quietly.

"Dude, not a good time!" Kyle hissed. "The last thing we want is that anger directed at us!"

"Did you see the gun he has on him!?" Tweek whimpered, choking out several extra syllables of mindless vocalizations. "We are dead! We're all dead!"

"It's r-r-really starting to look that way..." Jimmy solemnly eased himself to the floor.

Stan's blood felt ice cold in his veins. This couldn't really be the end, could it? He felt like they had survived so much worse in the past. They had to be able to get through this one little alien encounter, too!

Stan turned and pushed hard on the cage door with all his strength, encouraged by the metal bars creaky groans. But no matter how long he maintained the pressure, the door refused to give an inch.

"We tried that already, Stan" A muffled voice came from somewhere on the other side of the cage, whom Stan instantly recognized as Kenny. "Kyle tried almost everything to get that door open."

With a solemn hum of acknowledgement, Kyle nodded his heavy head. "It's no use. That door will only open if its lifted upwards at the same time significant pressure is applied from the other side. There's nothing we can do from in here."

"Escape may not be our best option in this situation, anyway." Someone added from the cages far end. "From the length of time we've been in here, there's a good chance we arent even on Earth anymore. Even if we broke out of this cage, theres no saying we could safely get off the ship."

Stan was surprised by yet another familiar voice of a kid he hadn't realized had been trapped with them. He tried to look for them, but he couldn't see much beyond the four standing in a line just before him; Kyle and his brother Ike, Cartman, and Butters.

"Wendy?" He tried calling out instead.

"I'm back here, Stan." The gentle voice responded.

The group of captives parted as best they could to allow the long haired girl to slip her way toward the front. She nodded almost grimly at Stan, who replied only with a wide eyed stare and a tilt of his head, then she turned to face the others.

"Listen; I think it would be best if we just lay low and wait to see where this alien is taking us." She stated. "We might get a chance to plead our case to some sort of leader, or maybe find a good escape opportunity later on. We might even find that these creatures arent hostile at all, and eventually they might let us go on their own."

With a roll of his eyes and a shake of his head, Cartman scoffed at Wendy's speech. "Well, yeah, that's fine." He droned, stepping forward. "If you want to wait around with Wendy until you get eaten by the aliens! If we don't escape, we all die!"

"I don't want to die..." Clyde broke down in a mess of defeated sobbing.

"Oh, what, like you're the expert on aliens now?" Kyle grunted, tapping a few reassuring pats on the back of the child now gripping him ever tighter. "What would you know about this guy, fatass? Wendy's plan makes more sense than yours."

"Remember just who's been abducted the most times, Kyle!" The larger boy stomped towards the two brothers. "I'd say that makes me the alien expert around here!"

Kyle didn't give an inch. "I'd say that makes you the expert on getting bested by aliens!"

Before Cartman could retaliate, before Stan could protest, the towering creature suddenly stormed his way back into the room, still muttering something under his breath. His helmet had at some point been removed, exposing his alien face. The beast had three eyes, three nostril slits, a wide and fang filled mouth, and five long growths on its scalp not unlike scorpion tails. He held the very tip of his monstrously long tail in his smaller pair of hands, running his little mitts across a patch of scar tissue that appeared to be causing him discomfort as he made his way towards his pilots chair.

The human children had all fallen silent once more at the creatures reapearance. At least, most of them had. Try as he might, Clyde could no longer hold back his torrent of tears, and he emitted a quiet, uncontrollable whimpering. As he realized he couldn't stop, his fear mounted, which only served to make his cries louder.

Just as he was about to sit down, the alien froze, one large hand gripping the chair to steady it. He turned his head towards the cage beneath the shelf, a piercing anger present in his three blood orange eyes.

"Clyde! Be quiet!" Craig's sharply whispered voice sounded somewhere between commanding and pleading. "You have to stop crying!"

"I don't wanna die, Craig!" The sobbing boys cries escalated into a complete emotional breakdown. "I don't wanna be eaten by aliens! I just wanna go home!"

The loud sobs and hysterical shouting prompted a few of the younger children to join in with their own loud cries, until several of the kids were wailing uncontrollably in terror. The others desperately begged for silence, but the sound only persisted.

His patience gone, the alien furiously stomped towards the cage with a snarl. In a single swift movement, he kicked the front of the cage with all his strength, rattling the metal bars and eliciting screams from the kids before they finally all fell quiet again. He leaned his face down and roared something at full volume to his prisoners.

"Lo aesod, iye cxsfovsxq lbkdc! Sp iye mkx'd lo csvoxd, iye'vv lo rebvon yed dro ksb vymu!"

Accenting his anger with one final kick, the creature growled and returned to his chair, flopping down in a huff and returning to studying the tail still held in his grasp. The frightened kids breathed in terrified gasps, their chests heaving, realizing just how much danger they were in.

After a few tense minutes of silence, the alien breathed what almost sounded like a sigh, tossing the tip of his tail away and letting it flop to the ground beside the cage. With a frustrated and fatigued expression, he leaned forward on the control panel, deftly manipulating the controls as he monitored the six displays before him.

Cartman, defiant to the bitter end, scowled and approached the cage door, pressing his form against the bars and reaching an arm outside.

"Cartman!" Stan gasped. "What the hell are you doing?"

Briefly groping at the ground, Cartman eventually found what he had been reaching for, pulling the end of the aliens rat-like tail towards his face. Just as he suspected, the beasts tail was too thick skinned and unwieldy for him to notcie the tip being moved, so his eyes never strayed from the tvs screens. Satified with his ignorance, Cartman returned his gaze to the object in his palms, paying careful attention to the patch of raw, pink scarring across the side.

"I'm not gonna sit around and let some alien feed me to its young." The large child sneered, lifting the tail even closer.

"Cartman, no!" Kyle pleaded, pulling Ike closer to his chest. "You saw how angry he gets! You're gonna make him absolutely furious!"

Cartman only responded with a devilish grin. "That's the plan." He replied.

Before anyone could stop him, Cartman opened his mouth and sank his uneven teeth into the sensitive tail wound.

Sure enough, the Alien would respond with pure fury.