Having finished her plea, Miki's eyes rolled back into her head. That was quickly followed by a series of violent convulsions. Andoh and Takuya rushed to her side and grabbed her arms, slowly guiding her to the ground in a lying position. Meanwhile, Masako took a small pillow from her backpack and laid it beneath Miki's head. A new trickle of blood found its way down her nose, and a sudden heave of her chest was marked by an equally-vicious spat of coughing. Gobs of dark-red blood were heaved from her mouth, splattering all over Takuya's face and Miki's clothes. After a few moments, Miki calmed down and was peacefully sleeping.

"What was that?" asked Masako, wiping Miki's mouth with a sweaty handkerchief she'd be carrying in her pocket.

Takuya wiped away Miki's blood from his disgusted face. "I guess the act of unpossessing someone is just as rough as the act of possession is. Perhaps Miki's consciousness put up a fight to let Mothra go as much as she had tried to prevent it from entering her?"

Andoh took a swig of sake from a small flask he kept on his person. "Why would she not want to be possessed? Sounds like an odd change of heart."

Takuya shrugged and finished cleaning himself.

"Perhaps it was the peace," commented Masako.

Both men turned to her.

"I don't know if you two felt it, but there was an unmistakable aura of peace around Miki when Mothra was in her. I can't explain it. It's like you knew that today was just your lucky day, that everything would be alright," she paused. "I guess that's a silly way to put it. But I did feel something different. And perhaps Miki felt it even more."

"Could be," said Takuya. "With all that we've seen and heard today, it certainly wouldn't be the strangest. " He put his thumb to his chin and rubbed it lightly. "I've read about experiences like this in recent months. But those stories were far from peaceful."

Masako glared at him. Any talk of what he had been working on prior to the expedition put her on edge.

Andoh noticed and stepped in. "That'll make a great campfire story for tonight. But for the time being, let's find a place to settle down."

It took an hour of climbing stairs and looking in random rooms and compartments, but Andoh and Takuya eventually found what appeared to be living quarters some ten floors up in the atrium. The beds were too dusty to use, so they agreed to just use their sleeping bags. But the rooms were relatively cozy and were spacious enough for them to set up shop. Miki had begun to regain consciousness by the time they got back downstairs. Andoh and Takuya supported Miki in ascent while Masako carried Miki's things. The two men came back down to get their own backpacks and Masako's too.

Once upstairs in their quarters, Takuya shared some of the fruit he had cooked the previous evening, along with some of the jerked beef and other foods included in their rations. Miki ate voraciously, but declined to answer any questions about what had happened to her. Andoh asked Takuya about what he had been studying back in Thailand, and after a few minutes of pouting, Masako actually listening intently to her ex-husband's findings.

"Not that it makes a right, but he really does know his stuff."

After dinner, Miki crawled into her sleeping back and went to bed early. Takuya and Andoh excused themselves to explore the facility a little more. Masako took the opportunity to use her satellite phone to send word of her recent findings to Professor Fukazawa.

By 7 p.m., the barrage of strange and wondrous that all three had been bombarded with over the course of that day had proved too much for them to contemplate. They all retired for the evening for good night's rest.

Masako was wrested from her sleep by a violent wave of heat that struck her like a fist. She noticed that she was soaking in sweat from head to toe. She felt as if she had been hurled into a river while she was asleep. She looked over at Miki. Miki was still sleeping, but was also sweating profusely and breathing heavily. Masako got up, stepping in deep pools of her sweat that filled her sleeping back and overflowed onto the metal floor.

"Ouch!" she cried. The ground was especially hot. "Miki! Get up! Now! Something's wrong!"

Masako scrambled quickly to where she had set her clothes and threw on a pair of socks and her boots.

Miki jumped to her feet as soon as she realized what was going on. "It's burning up in here! What's going on?"

Masako poured some water from her canteen onto her face and then handed it to Miki. "I don't know. It wasn't this hot yesterday. There's no reason this place should feel like a sauna now."

Miki quickly threw on a pair of cargo shorts and a clean blouse, which was soaking wet in a matter of seconds. "What about the others?" She put her hiking boots on before the ground could burn her feet even more.

Suddenly, Takuya burst into the room. "Girls, it's looks like we're in for it now."

Masako shrieked. "Don't you have any manners?"

"There's nothing on you that I haven't seen already."

If Masako's face weren't already red from the severe heat, she would've blushed.

"Oh, and sorry, Miki." Takuya bowed quickly. "Anyway, come outside. We have a big problem downstairs."

"Downstairs?" replied Masako, running across the room to where Takuya was.

He nodded. "Andoh got curious and messed with the weather machine down below."

In half a second, Miki was in front of Takuya grabbing him by the shirt. "He what? Did the two of you—"

Takuya quickly cut her off. "This happened while I was sleeping. Come on, we need to find out exactly what's going on."

Back at EPB Headquarters in Tokyo, Joji Minamino and Security Officer Tomashi hurried out of the conference room where they had been debriefed on the progress of Masako's expedition. A senior analyst had called them to the main room to look at a pair of satellite images that had just been taken of Infant Island. They entered a large room whose walls were covered with large screens, displaying satellite images of numerous locales in Japan and Asia, on varying scales.

As soon as the two older men arrived, one of the analysts barked for a junior analyst to transfer all images related to Infant Island to the main screens. The screen showed a 2-D CG image of Infant Island, with large red and yellow splotches all over the island.

Minamino cocked an eyebrow. "A storm?"

The senior analyst nodded. "Yes sir. The strange thing is that it literally came out of nowhere. About forty minutes ago. No air masses. No fronts. Nothing in the surrounding area—we confirmed with weather stations in Okinawa, Ogasawara Island and the Phillipines. None of them reported anything. Just on Infant Island."

"Well, that's strange."

"Hai! There's more, sir."

Tomashi took a step forward and squinted at the screen. "I hope the 'facility' that Masako and the others found is offering them adequate shelter from the storm—"

"—and the heat," added the analyst.

Tomashi spun around. "Heat, you say?"

"Hai." The analyst turned to his colleagues. Switch on the laser thermometer."

A new sceen with an image of Infant Island appeared. This time, the entire island and the surrounding ocean were colored a shade of red so dark it was practically brown. Isotherms appeared on the screen.

"Sixty degrees Celsius?" exclaimed Minamino. "That's impossible. Check those readings again."

"We confirmed with our opposite numbers in both Taiwan and South Korea. Their weather satellites say the same thing."

"My god," gasped Tomashi. "Our prayer is that Masako and her team won't die of exposure."

Minamino grunted and nodded.

"And that's not the worse part," stuttered the senior analyst.

"There's more!?" Tomashi was incredulous.

The analyst nodded gravely. "Turn on the Cerenkov Light filter," he said to his colleagues.

Against a black background that represented the ocean, the entire island turned blue on the screen.

"It's a radioactive storm," the analyst said.

Minamino looked at Tomashi. "Contact the ship—"

"Uh, sir. We've lost contact with the ship."

"Oh no. Get a plane out there. As soon as the storm subsides, we need to get those four out of there."

"What the hell did you think you were doing?" snapped Masako, pointing at the machine and flinging hundreds beads of sweat in its direction.

"It's the opportunity of a lifetime," said Andoh, defensively.

"There won't be any life to take advantage of the opportunity," she cried. "Don't you understand? This machine is what caused its creators' destruction."

Takuya stepped forward to join the argument, but Masako held up her hand to silence him. He closed his mouth and stepped back next to Miki.

"That was millennia ago!" Andoh's defense was weak. "Besides, we need it today more than ever. I need it!"

"You-! Er—what!?" Masako looked dumbfounded.

"The Maritomo Company has raped the environment for decades. Japan is quickly becoming a giant urban hell."

Masako nodded. "Go on."

"But with this machine, we could give back to Mother Nature. We could transform the Sahara, the Kalahari, the Gobi into prosperous places. Animals can prosper. People can prosper. Japan can prosper!"

Masako looked thoughtfully at him for a moment. She was surprised at his awareness of his company's activities. "Be that as it may, it's still not a viable idea. What if everything that Miki, er Mothra, said is true? What if the Earth really is its own organism?"

"So?"

"Then it won't be happy that mankind is making the same mistake twice. There will be prices to pay. There are no free rides, Andoh."

Several Hours Later

"Sir, the storm has subsided," said the now-exhausted analyst.

Minamino grunted.

Tomashi, who was still at the EPB Headquarters, reached for a phone and dialed a few numbers. "Get me the American base in Okinawa." A few moments passed. "I need a ship and a helicopter to extract the team…No, there's too big a danger of radioactivity in the area…It'll have to be by air…We need it as fast as possible…I'll stand by." He hung up the phone. "The Americans have a ship in the region. It'll be there in six hours. They'll have a helicopter fly over the island and pick them up."

"Good."

"Sir," said the now-pale analyst. "We just got a report from a Chinese sub who was also watching the storm from afar. They picked up something on their sonar."

"Eh?"

"A large object. Probably a hundred meters in length. It's making a beeline for the island. At its current speed, it should arrive in five hours."

"It could only be—"

"Godzilla!" exclaimed Miki. "He's coming. I can feel it."

"But how?" said Masako.

"The storm attracted him. Probably the entire island is contaminated with radiation now. He's coming her to recharge himself."

Takuya struck an embarrassed Andoh in the arm. "As if things couldn't get any worse."

The Pacific Ocean – 100 miles south of the Kamchatka Peninsula

The deep reaches of the Kuril Trench, where the Pacific Plate subducted beneath the Ohkotsk plate, begin to stir and shake. The darkest depths of the ocean, far beyond where sunlight could reach in any capacity, begin to glow red. Magma seeped up from the bottom of the trench, lighting the ocean and heating the freezing water around it. For a moment, the ever-so-slow motion of the great Pacific Plate pushing itself beneath its neighbor stopped, and for about five hundred feet—a tiny dot along the great Pacific Rim of Fire—something pushed back on the plate. Thousands of tons of magma entered the ocean as a large entity exerted a powerful force on the Earth's crust.

It wriggled and writhed, unscathed by the intense heat of the Earth's mantle and unperturbed by the immense pressure of the ocean depths. Like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, the creature struggled against the elements that bore down upon it until it finally freed itself from its prison below the Earth's crust. The fissure in the Earth quickly closed behind it, leaving the Kuril Trench dark again, save a pair of sinister red eyes that lighted the water as the entity made its way to the surface.