Dan quickly realized the trap's parlor contained one other lobster, a slightly smaller fellow who scuttled to a corner and stared warily at him with suspicious eye stalks.
"Look, you don't bother me, I'm not going to bother you," Dan thought as his antennae waved and his eye stalks swiveled to keep tabs on his trap-mate. "God, you're ugly," Dan decided, staring at the alien physiognomy, which was all bumps, spikes, feelers, and the two dominant tendril-like antennae. Then, realizing he was now the mirror image of the other lobster, if perhaps a plumper one, he thought better of his hasty judgment and realized that the strange chitinous armor encompassing the entire anatomy fascinated in a odd way... BUMP!
The whole trap shook and lifted from the rocky ocean floor as a set of pulleys connected to an electric motor began to hoist the trap toward the surface. Dan tried to secure a grip with the pinchers on his walking legs. "Oh god! This is it!" Dan thought in a euphoria of panic and arousal. The trap's owner had come to collect the catch!
For a moment, he wished Kat or mom would whisk him away with a magic spell, but then he decided to trust in his sister's reassurances.
The trap broke the choppy surface of the water alongside a gigantic red-and-white lobster boat. A man with much practice opened the cage and removed each lobster, one after the other, with Dan the last to be removed. The man's hand firmly grasped Dan around the middle of his carapace and dropped the crustacean into the compartments of a wooden cull box. He kept control of Dan's attempts to squirm out of the wooden compartment as he double-checked Dan's body length by measuring from eye socket to plump tail with a fixed gauge before he handed him off to another shipmate, whose sole job was to quickly and efficiently band the claws of the keepers, of which plump Dan was definitely one. A stern sea breeze whipped the mens' hair as they manhandled the caught lobsters before tossing the keepers into a water-filled barrel. The others, such as Dan's trap-mate, got unceremoniously dumped overboard to continue growing if they could manage to avoid a gauntlet of piscine predators.
Dan's highly-charged mental faculties churned as he found himself writhing in an ecstatic agony among dozens of other closely-confined plump Maine lobsters in one orgiastic mass of shells and claws. He sank deeper into the anticipation of becoming a delectable main dish.
The crew finished locating the orange-and-white buoys marking the location of sunken lobster traps before they finished for the day and headed back to port. Once the boat was moored, two men hoisted the barrels of lobsters off the boat onto the docks. Two barrels were set aside, but Dan's barrel got turned on its side, spilling a tide of confused crustaceans onto the planks. Dan's eye stalks saw dark boots, blue rubber gloves, a long red water hose, and the overturned blue plastic barrel. A shadowy form that looked like a woman nudged a plastic crate with her own boot.
"Looks like you had a good catch," the woman said.
The men agreed with her, but one of them groused, "I can't believe I am agreeing to sell you these and you're not even going to eat them."
The woman smiled. "I paid you above market value," she pointed out. "Besides, the research might prove beneficial to your fishing industry in the long run."
The man grunted and had one of his subordinates take charge of filling the woman's rectangular crate with about a half dozen lobsters. She pointed and chose, rather randomly, the lobsters she wanted, the next-to-the last chosen chosen being Dan. He had been trying, without much success, to scuttle away from the chaotic scene when a man's boot halted his progress and a hand plucked him off the ground and dropped him in the cage with the other five lobsters.