Tirad asks them why they won’t go back to their ships, although he knows the answer but he wants to hear it directly. They say the same things that the giant fish had attacked them, some of the ships have become partly damaged and the fishers and divers were attacked and killed. They couldn’t bear the danger anymore and risk going out to sea to fish. All of them are grieving, having lost at least one member of their family, a husband, brother or sister or even their young sons and daughters. They start telling him whom they have lost with spite and grief and some burst into tears. Tirad asks them how huge the giant fish were. They all start answering giving their own definition of ‘huge’. One of them says three times as a man, the other says the size of a fishing boat and another one declares as four times as a dolphin. The sizes they give do not match. They might have seen different things or perhaps they are deluded, caught up in the amnesiac state of the sea people. It is, however, clear that the fish were large enough for them, and they didn’t have the means to fight them back without help, not unless they had to disobey the Saviour Rules. An old woman makes her way to Tirad and points to a young woman who is holding a baby in her arms.

“We haven’t seen a baby born on the southern ships for more than two years. The giant fish take our pregnant women. They kill them and eat their babies. If we hadn’t come here, on land, this woman would have died as well…her baby too,” she says, showing the young woman again. Tirad silences the crowd and looks closely at the old woman and the new mother. He wants her to explain further.

“They conjure our pregnant women in the middle of the night… The women throw themselves into the sea as if they are spellbound… I’ve seen it with my own eyes!” she explains.

“How do they do that? The fish put a spell on the women?” Tirad asks.

“I don’t know how they do it…but I’ve seen it. It was a school of large fish, not as big as the ones that attacked the ships and fishing boats. But they were large,” she continues. Tirad still wants his straight answer. He asks the young mother how she was bewitched by the fish. But the woman doesn’t answer. The older woman replies instead.

“I saw her wanting to jump off into the sea, she was seven months pregnant. I stopped her. That’s when I saw the fish. But she hasn’t said a word since that night,” she says and puts her hands on her mouth and ears to show how she has lost her hearing and voice. She then explains if they hadn’t come there looking over her at all times, who knows what would have happened to her.

“But why do they spellbind the women? To eat their babies? Why not eat the women themselves?” Tirad asks. He feels his sentence was hilarious and smiles. But the women look at him with a serious look as if it is not a laughing matter but a very drastic situation.