This could go into a lot of different directions. You're supplying suspense and surprise deftly.
Forgive me for mentioning a matter only tangential to the story, but there's a typographical error, probably due to autocorrection. in an early paragraph of this post that wraps up the "story so far" — cephis, not chepis, should be the abbreviated form of cephalopod.
For some reason, that happens all the time while writing this story. Thanks for pointing it out, I'll correct it.
In many cases, you can type a word correctly only to have some kind of autocorrect function change your typing to something incorrect. Watch out for that. If you post before you set it straight, I'm told each later correction will consume as much of your "bandwidth"as the original posting for 7 days.
Brushing aside these technicalities, I'm impressed by your ongoing story. The educational references at the end of each installment are a nice touch, reminiscent of afterwords by Greg Egan or Stephen Baxter, yet yours are episode-specific.
I don't really worry about my bandwidth, I'm not even close to running out of it. But thanks for your concern :)