I was just a young boy at the time. It was my first trip outside of the country I was born. In the warm waters the cruise ship embarked, I went to meet the people of the sea. I suppose it was fitting that I have a fascination with those who spend their whole lives in the oceans. My people have a strong affinity for rivers, hence why we are born with webbed paws. Still I wished to communicate with the people who dwell solely in the water. While some among this order are literally the largest creatures to inhabit this Earth and its waters, I was invited to meet with one of the smaller species. One could confuse them for a large gray fish the size of a large tuna if not paying attention to the up-and-down motion of their tails. However, I was not paying attention to the nearly invisible distortion of light in the sky moving closer towards us.
	What happened next was something I had only thought possible in a work of science fiction. The kind where people get abducted by aliens from another world. Only there were some things that should have tipped me off to the fact things weren't as they seemed. The so called aliens spoke in perfect Aldish. Several of them spoke in accents I couldn't quite put my finger on where they were from, but definitely somewhere on Earth. They tended to remain in the shadows where I couldn't get a good look at them. They all seemed to have one eye obscured by shadow and the other behind a red eyepiece. They knew or figured out enough about me to lure my father into being captured by another raid. This was surprising as my parents were separated at the time and I lived with my mother and her parents.
	I had no idea where the craft would be taking me. The fact I was only ten and never really studied much geography outside of Betuland didn't help much. Although along the way I had heard reports of a massive tsunami hitting countries halfway across the planet. I was not sure why supposive aliens would be paying attention to such things. Another thing was that while our captors kept us in the dark, they at least provided us with food and water. They clearly cared for our well being. That should have alerted me as to what their true intentions were. I was not prepared for the weirdness of the likes found in old TV shows my dad used to watch.
	The metal plates on their heads, glowing eyes, and glowing orbs on some of them should have tipped me off as to what they planned to do with me. Looking back, their goals seemed similar to both antagonists in TV shows and those I would fight against in video games. By the time the craft I was in turned off its special armor I was in the region of the world ravaged by the seismic tide. I saw the ship was mostly saucer shaped with a large red orb at the top and many smaller ones dotting it. Projections that looked like claws stuck out from its midsection. I was taken to an underground city that was accessed through small, undamaged facilities on the surface. It was as if some sort of barrier protected them with what I assumed at the time was alien technology. It was there I saw people from many species all over the world were among their ranks. They all sported these metal plates over their heads and usually other forms of armor.
	I would see the same people in the morning as ordinary Earthlings come back at night with the signature metal plates and glowing eyes of our captors. That was why they were concerned with our health and safety. As to what the overall goal was I still was kept in the dark, but I knew they were using their technology to graft machines onto the heads of their prisoners. I should have figured the fact they were taking us all the way to Ganjeera was a hint at the deception in their tactics. I was led to believe these cyborg creatures were aliens. Or at least the leaders using the cybernetics to control the new members were not of this world. That is what they intended us to believe. But the truth was far closer to earth. Or more accurately, below it.