Unbeknownst to the two in the lifeboat, a strange series of events was taking place under the waves, a series of events which would change everything in their world.
Deep down in the hadalpelagic zone, almost 18000 feet down, in fact, a medium sized angler fish missed the attack on his fourth hatchetfish of the day, sending the lucky hatchetfish on a fateful escape trajectory, straight into the eye of a passing giant squid. Bewlidered, the giant squid released an enormous cloud of ink and shot upwards at an incredible velocity. The massive bulk of the surprise squid set off a cascade of smaller events, as shoals of various baitfish, jellyfish, smaller squid, and finally a lone swordfish, became startled by the events beneath them, and spooked upward.
Now, some say the swordfish is a highly intelligent creature, but this one was not. It swam blindly forward and upward away from the commotion, and did something no other swordfish would have thought to do; it looked back! And just as it did, it slammed with full force into a very large passing narwhal. Ordinarily one would think "lucky narwhal!" and in some respects that would be correct, at least in the respect that the narwhal narrowly avoided impalement by the swordfish, but what happened next was extraordinarily unlucky for the narwhal, as well as the thin man in the lifeboat.
