I was awoken by the sound of a frog's blaring croak. Or was it the sirens again? Nowadays, it seems like the alarming sound of the evacuation sirens are just as common as the sound of the bullfrogs living just outside my window. They sound so similar to each other, a person still groggy from sleep wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the two. Lucky for me, I was able to tell that it had in fact just been another frog that had woken me from my slumber before I threw on my bathrobe and slippers and rushed out of my house.

It's been exactly three years since the day I was introduced to this world. Three years since the day the life that I had known so well had gotten torn away from me and I fell into a tailspin of what seemed like some fantastical sci-fi flick. More importantly, it's been exactly three years since the day that I discovered that my entire life had been a lie. A sham. Those people, those humans that I considered to be my family, new the truth and denied it from me for fifteen entire years.

I'm sorry. Let me explain; my name is Gabriel Martin, most people (if that's what you want to call them) just call me Gabe. I'm eighteen and I pretty much live in the subway systems of Manhattan. That's a lie. The way it's set up is kind of confusing to most humans. My kind, the Geryon, are a kind of… alien race, I guess you could say. We're not from this planet. And, if you ask me, our living situation is kind of fucked up. There's our realm, and then there's your realm. For some reason that we still can't seem to explain, our realms overlap. You can see it this way if you want to: we can see you, but you can't see us. Unless we want you to, that is. But on a day-to-day basis, you humans can walk right through us, and you wouldn't even know we were there. The only thing you feel is a slight, momentary change of temperature of the air around you. When we want you to see us, however, we can pass through the thin veil between our two realms and make ourselves visible to you.

Up until the age of fifteen I thought I was a completely normal human. But then I met some people, some really strange people, and now I know myself to be a Geryon. Not a human. Not anymore. The first few days of this life were hard, but I won't tell you about that. Not now, at least. That's a story for a different time. Right now, I need to tell you why these evacuation sirens have been happening so frequently lately…

For starters, I'll need to explain to you how our evacuation system works. It's not too complicated, really. We live in huts underneath the subway systems, and underneath all of our huts is one large room that a tube takes us down to whenever the alarm sounds. The tubes are in a compartment in the back of our closets. When we hear the sirens, we have to get in there as fast as we can and press the blue button (mine's blue, I don't know if everybody's is blue) and that takes us down to the giant room. We stay in there until it's safe for us to go back to our huts. When that time comes, our leader, Ezekiel, teleports us to our huts. Why doesn't he just teleport us down to this room when the siren goes off? I don't know. It's one of the many quirky mysteries of our race.

The only times the evacuation sirens ever go off is either when there's a test drill, which we get warned of ahead of time and they only happen every other month, or because we're at risk of a human stumbling upon our colony. More often than not, it's a test drill. But not lately. Usually, only animals can see us. But now it seems like the humans can see us as well. We can't explain what's happening, but the veil between our realms is deteriorating and we've been trying to, but we can't find a way to fix it. Everyday, the risk of getting discovered by the humans grows more and more. We always have to be on our toes and we can never be too far away from our tubes. If we are, and the siren sounds, well… I don't know what will happen. We'll be exposed. To one person, that is.

What if somebody came to you and told you that they saw a colony of green, scaly freaks that looked part fish, part human? How would you react to something like that? Personally, if I still considered myself a human and didn't know what the hell a "Geryon" was, and somebody came to me saying that, I'd say that they belonged in a mental asylum.

There was one time, it was a few weeks ago, and a person saw us. We were all caught by surprise. I guess now would be a good time to explain to you what we look like and why being caught in our natural form would mean bad news. I said it before, we're green and scaly. Not really a bright green, but kind of a bluish-green. I remember the first time I saw a Geryon, I thought it looked just like a human. Okay, imagine this: a human, but with the complexion of a fish or maybe a lizard. That's what we look like in our natural form.

You're probably wondering why I call that our "natural form." You see, we can change from this fishy form to what looks like a regular human. We only do this when we need to, though, and we can't do it for long periods of time. Now you're probably thinking to yourself "But, Gabe, you said you thought you were a human for fifteen years." That's true. I guess now would be the time to tell you the story of how I came to find out about what I really am…