"What's with you?" You ask her. "You're shaking terribly."

"I don't want to mess around with therans, that's all." Jekkal whispers. "They aren't a semite's best friend by any means. I'm just staying here until your special tour guide for this island shows up. One of them, anyway."

An uneasy feeling grows in your stomach� one part hunger, two parts fear."What's a theran? And who are these guides?"

"A theran is this HUGE creature that keeps the sea population down. Fish, drekels, dolphins � well, we've never had it on record that they eat dolphins, but you get the idea. Semites don't visit this island because with our serpentine bodies, we look like tasty eels or sea snakes to them. Humans live here because it's the only island the Semites can't live on. There is one exception to this, however.

"The exception is this family of semites known as the Mekon � literally means 'giant' in Radon. The original parents were as normal as possible, but they had two daughters, Jopa and Maphia, who had a strange non-royal mutation� they couldn't stop growing. They aged normally, but they just plain grew and grew and grew until finally the Riph-tal intervened and made them stop growing. They stopped on the same day, but Jopa was ten turns older than Maphia, so she's bigger by a good ten meters or so. About the length of a long bus or limousine, which should give you some idea of how big they got." Jekkal grins when she sees a shadow in the hut. "Here's Maphia now. She'll walk around the island and let you ride on her; if you take her up on that offer, I sincerely hope you're not prone to motion sickness."

An orange semite with a buff-gold belly walks through the archway, which makes her look small in comparison to it. However, she's quite tall� if Jekkal was as tall as a horse, then Maphia was taller than an elephant. You wonder how you'll get on her shoulders until she grasps you with a wing-thumb and puts you there� the natural groove between her shoulder blades now makes for a very comfortable seat. Maphia flaps her hood to say goodbye to Jekkal, and then walkes out of the hut. "We can either visit the main herd in the Area or we can go over to the human city on the east section of the island. Where to?"