You could barely even hear the outside world, your mind a haze of confusion and exhaustion. You didn’t remember anything, nothing about how you got here, nothing about why you were here in the first place.

Your body felt weightless, yet an overwhelming sense of displacement settled over you like a thick fog. Everything around you felt unfamiliar. Too cold, too sterile, too unnatural. You weren’t where you were supposed to be.

Your eyelids were too heavy to lift, your limbs unresponsive, but even in this half-conscious state, you could hear voices. Distant at first, muffled like they were coming from underwater. Slowly, they became clearer, their urgency cutting through the fog in your mind.

“Oh FUCK! What are we gonna do?!” The panicked voice rang through the air, sharp and frantic. “Hanni, how could you be so careless?!” Another voice snapped, lower but filled with frustration.

You wanted to move, wanted to wake up and understand what was happening, but your body refused to cooperate. Every breath felt heavier than the last, like you were sinking deeper into something unknown. Your thoughts swirled, messy and unorganized. Was you dreaming? Was you awake? You couldn’t tell anymore. What was happening to you?

Minji stared at the unconscious human lying in front of them, her mind running through every possible solution, each one worse than the last. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Their research missions had always been carefully planned, executed with precision.

Observe the humans, collect data, and leave. No interaction, no interference, no evidence left behind. Yet here she was, faced with undeniable proof that they had made a terrible mistake. A human had been abducted, and now they had to figure something out.

Hanni paced back and forth, her hands gripping the sides of her head as she muttered to herself in panic. "This is bad. This is really, really bad. We were supposed to be in and out, no traces, no problems. But now... Now there’s a human on our ship!"

"I know, Hanni," Minji said through gritted teeth, her gaze never leaving the unconscious girl. She was trying to stay calm, but the weight of the situation pressed heavily on her chest. Mistakes like this weren’t supposed to happen. Mistakes like this had never happened.

"But how?" Hanni continued, her voice laced with desperation. "How did this even happen?! We’ve done this dozens of times!"

Minji’s fingers flew across the ship’s control panel, pulling up the extraction log. The answer was there, flashing in red letters, a fluctuation in the energy field at the last moment. Something had interfered with the calibration, expanding the pulse just a fraction of a second longer than it should have. That was all it took.

"The market," Minji muttered under her breath. "Huh?" Hanni stared at Minji blankly. "The energy surge came from the market," Minji said, finally looking up at Hanni. "You were in the busiest part of the city, weren’t you?" Hanni blinked. "Well, yeah, but-" Minji cut her off. "And during extraction, you were close to someone, weren’t you?"

Realization dawned on Hanni’s face. She had been navigating through a dense crowd, her senses overwhelmed by the sheer number of humans around her. She had been so focused on observing them that she hadn't noticed someone standing too close, hadn't noticed that the pulse might’ve caught someone else in its grasp.

"Oh no," Hanni whispered, looking down at you with a mixture of horror and guilt. "I didn’t mean to... I didn’t even notice-" Minji cut Hanni off once more. "Not noticing doesn’t change the fact that we have a human on our ship," Minji interrupted, pinching the bridge of her nose. "Do you even realize what kind of problem this is?"

Hanni groaned, slumping onto the nearest chair. "Oh, I realize. I definitely realize. This is the worst possible thing that could have happened." Hanni's voice was still panicked, her expression a mixture of guilt and slight terror. "And yet, here we are," Minji muttered.

For a moment, there was silence, the only sound coming from the soft hum of the ship’s engines. The reality of the situation settled between them like a heavy fog. They weren’t just researchers anymore. They weren’t just observers from afar. They had crossed a line, one that should never have been crossed.

Hanni hesitated before speaking again. “So... what do we do now?"

Minji looked down at you, watching the slow rise and fall of your chest. You weren’t injured, at least not visibly. The extraction process must have overloaded your senses, knocking you unconscious, but you would wake up eventually. And when you did, you would realize you weren’t on Earth anymore. That you had been taken.

Would you panic? Would you scream? Would you try to run? Minji didn’t know. But what she did know was that they had very little time to figure out a solution before that happened. This was no longer just about research. Now, it was about damage control.