Stardate not given: Everyone but Mariner is excited as the four lieutenants junior grade beam down for a cave mission on Grottonus. Suddenly rubble falls from the ceiling and traps them in the cave without them being able to call for help. Even worse, the moss on the floor turns out to be carnivorous. Boimler knows that gammanite can be used to boost the comm signal. He recounts the story of him being trapped in a cave on Kyron IV with Levy, the notorious conspiracy theorist. He dismissed Levy's suspicions that they were set up by the Vendorians in a morality test, until exactly this turned out true. The Vendorians eventually gave him the hint about the gammanite. Rutherford tells of how he was in a cave on Balkus IX with T'Ana and attempted to find a plant to heal swamp rash, when their local guide was fatally wounded by a grafflax, a ferocious animal. In order to survive, the guide impregnated Rutherford, who then gave birth to a "cave baby". Eventually he managed to communicate with the grafflax that was just trying to protect its own baby. Mariner reveals that she crash landed a shuttlecraft in a cave on Glish when she was on a mission with the Delta Shift and Asif broke his leg. In order to obtain pergium and power up the shuttle again, she and Karavitus tried to traverse a temporal field that made them age rapidly. However, Ensign Amadou found a freely accessible pile of pergium that allowed them to escape. In the cave on Grottonus, the four Lower Deckers are now completely engulfed in the moss, which suddenly begins to talk and requests to hear Tendi's story. So Tendi tells of how the quartet were trapped in the turbolift for hours on her first day on the Cerritos, after the rage virus had been cured. The moss agrees to release them in exchange for more stories. What Tendi, Mariner, Rutherford and Boimler don't know is that the Vendorians are actually behind the scenario of the "sentient cave", in another morality test.

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