I am with my family on an expansive spaceship. It's clear that the spaceship is not ours, as we're occupying ourselves with exploring its many rooms. We walk into a large room. As with every room we've entered, there is a time delay of about 15 seconds before the overhead lighting automatically switches on. In the near darkness, all I can see initially is rows and rows of cages. I'm frightened, as I am fairly certain that we've entered the ship's prison. However, when the lights kick in, we encounter something much stranger. The room is an exotic zoo of sorts. It's full of creatures alien to us, each in its own cage. Imagine all of the bizarre characters from Monsters, Inc. as zoo animals, and you've got an idea of what we see.

The family and I are walking the room individually, ogling the caged animals, when Sarah screams with shock. We run to her; she's standing in front of a cage that contains two tiny kittens, your garden variety domestic short hairs. We also see immediately why Sarah screamed. The kittens have collars embedded under their skin, but no one has tended to the hastily-sewn stitches after inserting the collars. The two young cats are very obviously in pain. Papa pulls out a medical kit and declares that we must help the animals. After applying a topical local anesthetic, he cuts the collars out and begins to sew the wounds back together neatly. One of the kittens starts to lose blood quickly. I'm holding his neck wounds together to stop blood flow while my dad works. Weirdly, the blood lost is purple at first. Bleeding continues for a minute or two, and then the blood turns a more pedestrian red. The kitten is much less lethargic and generally more kitten-like after its blood looks normal. We realize that the kittens have been poisoned into near-torpor somehow via the collars. Since all of the zoo animals have these collars, we begin to debate our next step. Most of the room's species are foreign to us, and who knows what the animals are capable of doing once fully awakened from their lethargy?