Uriko's coworker Kumi appeared near Ecco's position, the treat bucket in her hand.  Kumi bent down, proffering a fish, but Ecco barely glanced at it.  The dolphin just kept urging Uriko out of the water.  She was just about to accede and swim over to them when she saw the puzzled look on Kumi's face.  Uriko turned, following her coworker's gaze to the upper edge of the visitors' stands.

A strange protuberance was sticking up past the building's edge. This weird - thing - made Uriko think of a drawing of burning flames.  Except it was hard and solid; a bizarre bony extrusion primarily green but edged with purple.  It gleamed in the sun as water cascaded down its razor-sharp flanks.  Her stare was drawing yet more attention to it, and by now most of the audience was watching it too.

Then Uriko realized the object was rising.  Now others like it had joined the object.  Triple rows of mismatched blades rose, then tipped backwards as the animal attached to them straightened up from the distant waters of Hakata Bay.

Uriko found herself staring right into the golden-hued gaze of Godzilla, King of the Monsters.

Godzilla snarled and the audience panicked.  Uriko was bobbing in the pool, stunned into immobility.  Godzilla, it seemed, just kept going on and on as he finished straightening up slowly.  Finally reaching his full height of three hundred feet even, Godzilla began wading onto shore.  More water ran from his smooth green scales to pool around the kaiju's feet out-of-sight behind the amphitheater's walls.  Even at this distance, the shockwaves of Godzilla's thunderous footsteps skipped across the pool's surface.

The amphitheater's exits were choked with stampeding people now.  The sight broke her stunned silence.  Uriko spun around again and in a few smooth, powerful strokes, reached the main platform.  She hoisted herself out of the water and found Kumi at her side.  Her friend helped pull Uriko to her feet as both women heard a big splash off to their side.

Blackfin had leapt onto the platform in a desperate bid to escape the advancing Godzilla.  The mammal's skeleton was unused to supporting his weight enough for him to breathe without water's aid in negating gravity.  He wheezed through his blowhole, floundering on his stomach, chattering madly.

"Run!" Uriko shouted above the crowd, pointing Kumi toward the backstage exits and possible salvation.  Kumi's eyes flickered doubt, but off she went.  Uriko flew back to Blackfin, pushing him toward the pool's safety.  Since the dolphin and the platform alike were slick with water, she would've had a fairly easy time of it…if Blackfin wasn't fighting her the whole way.

By the time Uriko had her friend back in the waves, only a few trampled people were left to keep her and the dolphins company.  Despite herself, Uriko looked up past the stands.

Godzilla had drawn near but stopped.  His narrowed eyes were focused past her, ignoring Ecco as well.  The dolphin was doing a tailwalk at the kaiju and chattering angrily in a challenge that belied his fear.

Uriko peered over her shoulder.  Fukuoka Marine World's familiar shape gleamed back at her.  Even for the artistically-minded Japanese architects, the building was an unusual beauty.  The sprawling complex was shaped like an immense seashell.

Everything within that could was screaming for its life, be it human, sea mammal, or aquatic fowl.  The mixture of sounds made it seem like the building was giving off an eerie call all its own…

Her face turned white.  Between the cacophony of sounds and the building's unusual shape, Fukuoka Marine World looked like a semi-aquatic kaiju squatting on the landscape.  And Godzilla took this as a challenge.

The monster roared back, pounding forward in deadly earnest.

Uriko could do nothing to help the other people, lying wounded and bleeding, brushed aside by the crowd in their haste to flee.  She couldn't save her dolphin friends either as they yet circled frantically, still seeking escape.

But she could stay and die with them.

Uriko dove in and Ecco joined her one more.  He put himself between Uriko and the advancing kaiju protectively.  Uriko clasped his dorsal fin, her tears of gratitude and fear mixing with the cold salt water.

She had never believed in Shinto or any other divine intervention…but she was praying to someone, anyone, to save so many innocents with all the power she had.  Uriko could almost feel her efforts combine with the desperate pleas of so many other humans and animals, reaching out somewhere across time and space…

Unheedful of those so near yet so beneath him, Godzilla snarled.

Then the kaiju king stopped again, turning his gaze upwards toward a bright flash of light.

The burst of light unfurled like an opening flower.  And what Uriko saw there took her breath away.  Uriko suspected she was peering into another dimension.  As bizarre as that would be, it would be the only thing that would explain that…place.  A world that was so totally alien she had nothing to compare it to.

Waves of shifting colors danced within the widening rift in the sky, following patterns that made sense only to the colors themselves. It was a unending emptiness, and yet it was not.  Uriko could smell sounds from it and hear throbbing melodies carried along by her own heartbeat's pulse.

Eyes narrowed against the growing glare, Godzilla howled a challenge at the fissure.  His back plates lit up ominously and whisps of smoke escaped his crocodilian maw as Godzilla powered up his atom beam to strike the out-of-reach sky fissure.

With a quick upward snap of his head and gaping jaws, Godzilla fired.  The beam ripped through the gap and into that otherwhere.  The fissure rippled like water; its myriad colors disrupted by the beam.  But it quickly returned to its full flower without any visible effect.

There was a response, however.  Dozens of tiny black shapes, bizarre and each different from the other, poured out of the fissure.  They chattered at each other with the same monotone voice as they flew without wings toward Godzilla.

Godzilla swiped at the new arrivals.  His claws slashed and his tail whipped, but the agile creatures dodged every blow.  Their movements were so quick and so accurate, Uriko had the ludicrous thought these creatures could foresee where Godzilla's fists would be even before the monster lunged.

In the next instant, the creatures' demeanor changed.  A decision seemed to have been reached.  Instead of dodging individually, these beings pulled into a circular formation surrounding the kaiju.  Their relentless monotone grew into a loud chant as waves of colors, matching the still-shining rift, spread from the group to envelop Godzilla in rippling glory.  Uriko could just pick out the sound of a hundred-thousand individuals chanting in the same soft voice, over and over again:  "Unown…Unown…Unown…"