15,107 / 50,000 (30.2%)

I've always wanted to have a clay fight :)  Oh, vicarious experiences...
 

This was fun. I was getting bored attempting to be subtle about the magic.

12,027 / 50,000 (24.1%)

Happy 4th! I've been having a lot of fun today pushing the little brother - he's off to boy scout camp on Sunday, and won't be able to be doing and Julno for a week. Slight problem for him, there. So he's a thousand words ahead of me, and I'll probaby be obnoxious tomorrow as well and push him to get to 14/15k. Anyway: the second installment:

8,104 / 50,000 (16.2%)

I will be participating in Julnowrimo, Nano's July equivalent. And it is July 1st. Therefore: there shall be lots of prose coming at you. I apologize. But please, if you have time to read it, comments and thoughts would be lovely. (Oh - and if you can figure out what's up with the mop, I am in awe of you.)

Prologue: Visit on the Wind

2,222 / 50,000 (4.4%)

Walking though the cold cloudy day
I saw the snowflakes fall onto new grass
The greening glimmering springtime called through
From the freshly robin raked o’er clay
To the tips of stately branches waving past
Natural spaces following their cues
Little blooms peeking through the rising tide
of grasslets and rootlings and Spring’s fair smile
searching for the source of life-light and warmth
Trees stretch, stiff from the chill, and the wind chides
As each the other’s rightful place will take
Spring flirts with the wind, sending him her dearth
Empty branches only – then buds, and birds
Blossoms opening on every tree
Happy stretching, rising, flirting, flaunting
While the animals prance still winterfurred
Spring offers Winter her remembrance
Thin white petals float – his memory daunting

Very rough - and it doesn't flow. But I think it gets my idea across.

So it certainly needs editing. But not for a while.

Chapter 22

Venet looked at his son, who was lying on his bed staring at the ceiling.
“You know that it wouldn’t have lasted anyway. You were just a summer fling to her.”
Venedig ignored his father, and went on staring at the ceiling.
“This isn’t helpful, you just lying around. I know that we can’t offer to take people out in the boat while the ocean is like this, but I haven’t seen you this lazy in your life. You’re always doing something – if it isn’t trying to make an impression on the ladies, it’s like you’re trying to prove yourself to me, or – just the ocean, perhaps! Come on. Get up.”
Venedig made a noncommittal noise.
Venet sat on the edge of his son’s bed. “You’ve also never cared when your spoiled little rich girls leave you alone and completely drop contact.”
This, at least provoked some reaction. “They weren’t. Rich, I mean. From what I gathered, their family was only done here because of some favor of the father’s boss.”
Venet grimaced. That didn’t really make Venedig’s lovesick and guilt-ridden self-imposed coma any better. “Look. I’m sorry I can’t bring them back here. But you need to pull yourself together. Where did your bright ideas go? Your mind always running, and running, in every direction. You are as bright as your mother was!”
Venedig stilled, if possible, even further. His father never, ever, talked about his mother. His eyes, though, slid around and locked onto his father’s face. Venet noticed the attention, sighed, and began to pace around the room. He threw open the French doors and the foot of the bed, letting the ocean breezes in. (Though the ocean was still partially putrified through the red tide, still, Venedig had deteriorated since the day Tayin’s family had left – the ocean’s smell was preferable to the stink of sweat and unhappiness that permeated the room.)
“Come sit on your porch with me.”
Venedig sat up, slowly, and tottered out to the porch, landing heavily on one of the white plastic chairs. Venet didn’t sit, but paced up and down the little porch, forcing Venedig to pull his legs in close, so his father didn’t trip over them. They looked out over the sea, recovering but still a brownish-blue rather than the crisp tropical blue that they knew and loved.
“Your mother came back with one of my tours. I had taken a bunch of tourists snorkeling out by the reef, and I remember that we had had one empty seat going down. But when we pulled away from the the island, she swam up, calm as you please – no flippers, no mask, just a little bikini – your little rich girls have bikinis that look like that – as little material but screaming expensive.” Venedig hoped that his father wouldn’t continue to go off on side rants about his mother’s clothes – it was the personality, and the plot, that he cared about. Venet saw his impatience, curtailed his reminiscing. “It was cute. She was cute. She was tanned, but lighter than me.” Vendig’s father smiled, his white teeth stark against his dark skin. “She asked for a ride back to shore, and when we got back, she hung around the boat and asked if I knew someplace she could get a room for pretty cheap. I was staying with your grandmother at the time – your aunt owns the inn, now, you know – the one in the rainforest?”
Venedig nodded. He knew the one – not only was it where he had spent a good portion of his life, but it was where he and Tayin had heard about Kaia (and hence the one place he had gotten rip-roaring drunk in his life, ever).
“So I offered one of your grandmother’s rooms to her; and your grandmother was rather… not unhappy, but kind of scandalized, that I would bring a young lady (and one not wearing many clothes) to her establishment. I gave her rides back into town, when she needed them, and lent her clothes when she asked. Those drives… those drives were wonderful. She knew all manner of folklore of the island, and we discussed what could and could not possibly exist, the philosophy behind our belief systems, current movies. Eventually we got to the bigger questions of life, and love. We got married the next year.”
Venet smiled at his son. “I just wanted you to know that I understand what you’re talking about, when you speak –or don’t speak, in your case – of love. She died after you were born. Remember that you have the ability to see this girl again, if you really want to. Though you’re going to have to show me that you’re able to stand on two feet, to hang onto your dignity, before I’m sending you all the way to Ziemia, understand?”
“You would send me to her home? But we don’t have enough money for that!”
“We’d be able to manage.” Venedig knew the finances as well as his father did. Plane tickets were expensive – to get there and back, Venet would have to dip into his retirement fund.
“Thank you.” Venedig stood, and gave his father a hug. Venet’s life goal was to ferry around tourists until he could finance taking the boat out by himself, or with Venedig, and just let the sea toss them back and forth across the waves.
Venedig walked back inside, stripped his bed, and began to clean his room, his whirlwind of activity a little slower than it usually was, but sparked by his mental goal: once he didn’t feel like a slob anymore, he would be able to relocate the slip of paper Tayin had written her phone number on. (He was sure he knew where it was, but was putting that bit of his room off until he had unslobified.)

&

Kaia reached for the telephone. Everyone had assured her that it would work, then withdrew from the sunlit balcony. Her hand shook. There was no way she could do this! She hated telephones to begin with – they were such horribly disembodied things, and though they could transmit voices, you lost that sense of how the person was saying what they were saying – the emotions were muffled – and what was she going to SAY? She stared at the black telephone with loathing. Yes, she needed to call home. Like ET, it was something she needed to do. Unlike that little green guy, she was happy in her new environment. It was weird, yes, but the ability to fly through the water, letting the water slide past her eyes, her face, her gills. How could she explain that to her parents – or rather, how could she explain that to her parents in a way that they would understand? She could just see it: ‘hi Mom, Dad. No, I’m not dead. Some crazy mermaid came across me when I was mostly dead, like that old Princess Bride movie, and was able to make me alive again by turning me into a mermaid.’
It wouldn’t work. Was it really better to let them know that she wasn’t dead, or would it be too much?
Testhys came out with a glass of water, ostensibly for Kaia, and sat down next to her friend. “You need to do this”
“I know. It’s just – they won’t believe me.”
“They’ll believe you aren’t dead.”
“But what do I tell them about what I… am?”
“You don’t need to. It’s a secret, remember?”
“But what do I tell them about being not dead? How long has it even been?”
“Two months.”
“But what do I tell them? That I went on a drug trip and overdosed? That I hit my head and randomly got amnesia? That I was abducted, chained up, and guarded by a slavering dog?”
“The second wasn’t bad, anyway.”
“But… they’re my parents. I don’t want to lie to them.”
“You were hit over the head. And you didn’t remember anything when you woke up after Sistern fixed you up.”
“And I’ve just been larking around for two months?”
“You have. But you needn’t tell them that.”
“Is there any way I don’t have to use that – thing?” Kaia threw a hand at the telephone.
Testhys smiled, sadly. “Not unless you know anyone else on the island.”
“Well”
“Do you?”
“My older sister was going out with a guy – he lent me books”
“Name?”
“Venedig. Venedig Thomias.”
“Go grab a dress from the closet. We’re going into town and you’re going to run into him and your amnesia is going to disappear. Just like that.” Testhys snapped her fingers.

When Kaia ran off to grab ‘real clothes’, Testhys flipped through Sistern’s phone book – which was a little different than normal ones. Though it was the same bright yellow and ridiculous thickness, the names of people on the island were color-coded. No one really knew what the codes meant except for Sistern, but most of them weren’t important. All of the tourist places, for example, had yellow highlighting, while the people who knew Sistern’s family, even a little, had red.
Venet Thomias’ number was in orange.
Testhys wondered a bit at this, but knew she had to make this quick if th boy – whoever he was – was going to meet them in town.

Venedig picked up the phone, slightly irked that he the line would be busy while he attempted to be polite to the customer, and he wouldn’t be able to call Tayin for a while yet. Whatever he heard, it was enough. He sprinted out the door, calling over his shoulder a plea to borrow the car as he went, and was in town seven and a half minutes later. As it usually took him ten to maneuver the curves around the cliff-top roads, he might have been speeding. A bit.
He found a place to park and went to go sit in the specified café. A few minutes later, two girls walked up. One was unfamiliar, the other shocking. She had lost some weight and held herself differently now, but there was no mistaking Tayin’s knowledge-thirsty little sister. Venedig sprang up out of his chair – it fell with a clatter and earned him a disapproving look from the waiter – and ran through the door scooping her up in his arms and spinning her around. He heard a rather confused “what?” and saw the shock in her eyes as she recognized him. “Venedig!”
“You know her then?” the other girl asked, sounding confused. Venedig thought he had heard the voice before somewhere, and connected it to the phone call he had just gotten.
“Yes. But you know that, somehow, don’t you?”
“She talked a lot while she was out of it. Your last name was one of the only ones we could find in the phonebooks for the island, so I called you in. Sorry for the shock value. I just thought that it would do her some good – possibly shake her into remembering – if I showed her someone she knew.” Then, to Kaia – “are you remembering any more now?”
“Yes. No. Maybe? I dreamt there were mermaids. I dreamt you were a mermaid. And now – now it’s just so confused.” Tethys smiled, though a little sadly. The drug that she had put in Kaia’s water worked, then. Perhaps better than she had hoped. It did seem cruel that she would think of her time with the mers as mere fantasy, but Sistern said that for particularly strong-minded individuals, its effect was not too lasting. And if Kaia ever started telling her children stories about the mers, then maybe it would come back. Or if Naoise got his wish, and got into that little prestigious college near her home, perhaps he would help her to remember.
“Has she been like this for two months? And why did she never get put into the hospital? Her family’s been worried sick!”
“My uncle, name of Sistern, has been a registered doctor in these parts for years and years. Your father might have heard of him – he did retire a while ago – but he was perfectly qualified to take care of your –“
“She’s the younger sister of my girlfriend”
“of your almost-sister, then”
“And she didn’t go to the hospital because we were worried that the quality of care there has diminished something awful. Sometimes they even let their patients go before they’ve been treated! Imagine that. We knew that they wouldn’t have had enough staff to look after her.”
“But – the Amber Alert!”
“She was on the Amber Alert?” Tethys looked impressed. “Our communications were completely shot during that last big storm. Took us weeks to get stuff back together – we’re down on the other end of the island. Didn’t hear it – I’m so sorry. Do you know how we can get in touch with her parents?”
Kaia, curled up in the crook of Venedig’s arm, smiled. She was going home, and everything would be all right again when she was home. Venedig put off calling Tayin no longer, and it was arranged that he and Kaia would take the next flight off the island.

Testhys, upon returning home, looked out at the brightening ocean. Finally, it looked clean enough to swim in. Disregarding Uncle Sistern’s warnings (they mostly applied to the littler ones, anyway), she sprang off of the rocky edge of their property, shedding clothes once she got in the water. It wasn’t perfectly clear, but the little dinoflagellates were dead, now, obscuring the water but not polluting it. Testhys dove down to the caverns, and unstoppered one, knowing that she’d be yelled at when the rest of the clan came down, for letting the messy water into the caverns.
She wandered, drifting through apartments until she heard voices, not particularly happy with each other, but having some kind of a discussion on – girls? And shrieking?
But she knew that voice. She went barreling in the direction of it, and landed, sopping wet, on the hard, dry, floor of Sistern’s workchamber.
Her shriek of Ahab’s name as she barreled him over probably won Evert’s side of the argument.

55,731 / 56,000 (99.5%)

Ahab's not dead any more. Because... I like him too much. And his sister may have broken the fourth wall to kill me. And Kaia might have a personality, now!

Changes to chapter 20:

But the eggs were the thing. Naoise needed them for his experiment; he had promised to et them to Naoise; so he would do it. With the alarm bells, though – Ahab didn’t think that Naoise would still be in the cave, the one he had started to call his “lab” – but Ahab knew that he certainly hadn’t heard the bells while inside a structure, so there was a possibility that Naoise wouldn’t be able to hear them as well. Shore was closer: but doing one of his completely unexpected pleasant turns of mind, Ahab aimed himself – in the swirling water, difficult to navigate through – towards the lab. There was no one there. But the lab room was warm, and comfortable, so he made slings for the eggs and tucked them in, hoping that they would stay, and grow, and live to be happy little dinosaurs. He wrote out, for Naoise, where he had found each one, then looked around the room one last time – making sure that there weren’t any tell-tale bumps of heads or feet of little spies – and dove out, to make the swim to shore.
The red waves were more of a struggle to swim through, this time. Ahab noticed that breathing, though through gills, which should have been comfortable enough – you get used to having a flap of skin float up with each exhalation when it’s been you’re normal state for the vast majority of your life – but now, his gills were feeling uncomfortable, and feeling lightheaded, Ahab tried to swim faster. After all, as he needed to get to shore anyway, why not cut through the clouds of the red things?
A less than prudent idea. Ahab’s gills were swarmed over by the red things, drinking in every possible nutrient that they could get, and Ahab was getting less oxygen each time his blood pumped. He saw the rising of the ocean floor, meaning that he was near land, but his blood pumped through his ears and his gills began to cause twitchings in the rest of his body. He needed oxygen – was getting none from the water – and knew the end before it came. He shook out the mess of his hair – hoping that it would trap some of the creature, filter out his water – and grasped the small piece of coral he wore around his neck. Inscribing it with a message to whoever found him took most of the rest of his energy. Remembering, vaguely, that the water farther down was a little clearer, he started back that way. Yet even he was not sure if he managed to make the clear, dark waters below. Stranded in no man’s land – no mer’s land – Ahab surrendered to his inability to breathe.

Sistern had realized Ahab’s disappearance as soon as Roosevelt house was calmed down a bit, and had assumed that the younger one would realize that if he was safe, he could stay where he was. Of course, safe was always a relative term, but better turning pale and listless in a cave at the bottom of the sea than washing up on the beach as some sort of flotsam, hoping to stay rather than let the tide carry you away.

Chapter 21:

Evert arrived in Sistern’s area as the red tide shifted off towards shore. His first hope was to get his relations out of the area. Though sistern had never – quite – condoned Ahab’s hunting spree, he had never really spoken against them either. There would be no reason for Sistern to waste time or energy – or possibly the life of his immediate family – to help beings he saw as simple sharks. If they were killed by the tide, then the reef would be safer for the young ones; if they weren’t, then they would have less food and might just disappear anyway. Either way – Evert knew he wouldn’t have hope from Sistern’s group.
Arriving, Evert didn’t bother with the usual precautions against the red tide. The Council had gifted him with a little ointment to spread over his gils, which would allow them to function even better than normal in this environment. He wasn’t sure exactly what was in the ointment, but sometimes it was better not to ask. He navigated the covered reefs, a little thrown off by the lack of color, the lack of life evident under the mers’ coverings. It was deserted, and a little eerie under the red glow of the sunset.
Twisting and undulating through the corridors between the coral, Evert noticed a shadow hanging limp. Was it one of his relatives? He circled closer, wary of the teeth. Instead – he saw dark hair and the flash of light on the scales of a tail. Uncle Sistern had managed to leave one of his people behind? And – he came closer – the mer’s gills did not have the protection his own did. Evert brushed off the flakes of dead-looking bits of tide, smeared some of the ointment on the mer’s neck – and noticed the face. His hand stilled. The destroyer of his life lay there, gently floating in the water, swishing back and forth with the waves. Ahab. Mostly dead. Evert glared at the inert body. Ahab had no right to take his revenge away from him! For the past few years, he had pestered the council specifically for the revenge he needed. He deserved a decent fight with Ahab. The stupid mer had no right to go off and die on him!
Irrational, perhaps, but Evert was furious. He heaved the bigger mer up with him and dragged Ahab over to Uncle Sistern’s dwellings. Finding a way in was annoying – Sistern had made some changes to the architecture since Evert had last been here – but he managed to find a way in. The lower rooms had some of the same red impurities that the outside, so he dragged Ahab up to the upper rooms. These were cleaner, but Evert wanted to shock Ahab back into life. If only to kill him for being such an idiot as to let himself nearly drown. He had GILLS, for Pete’s sake. It was horridly embarrassing for someone with gills to drown.
Evert switched, pulled himself out of the water heaved his rival out of the water and into the clean air of one of the underwater rooms. It looked like Sistern’s doctor-room, all white and ridiculously clean and dry. They were making rather messy puddles on the floor. Now, assuming Ahab switched – which he did, with a convulsion and a hacking cough – he would cease being mostly dead. Good.
Perhaps the eyes rolling to the back of the head was less good. Evert didn’t know, or particularly care. (The cough, however, gave him an excuse to smack Ahab between the shoulder blades – help that gunk come right out.) Oh! And the attempt at language was always a good sign. (though Unguh is not usually a sound that has a whole lot of meaning associated with it). Perhaps some stimulation would get a more articulate response.
“Hey. Ahab”
“Wha?” Better, but still less than coherent.
“I’m going to kill you if you’ve managed to kill yourself. You should be embarrassed. Drowning? Really? So gauche.”
“When… did you learn… such a big word as ‘gauche’?”
“About the same time that you ran me out of town”
“We’re not in… some stupid Western. You… left. Not my fault”
“Not your fault? Not your FAULT?” Evert was a little irritated. In the volcano-boiling-over sort of way. “You – you – landlubber! You’re the only reason I left. Didn’t you understand that? I’ve been getting support to come back here ever since – and getting ready to take you down somewhere that you won’t come back from. You have no idea what you’ve done, do you?”
Ahab pretended to drift off into unconsciousness in the middle of Evert’s tirade. A move calculated to irritate his rival to no end. He was a little surprised to hear Evert curb his rant and subside to just muttering to himself, for from what he could remember, Evert would have continued yelling, even at a dead body. Ahab’s brain pondered. For that matter… had he drifted here? No – he was in air, he could feel that. Had Evert… rescued him, then? Oh, that would be unfortunate. In debt to Evert? He shuddered at the thought, then subsisted as he heard Evert walk over and felt the breeze as a – towel? – was shaken out over his body and gently settled over him.
“Honestly, for such a double-crossing family killer, you certainly don’t take care of yourself very well, do you? New scars – well, I suppose you tell Sistern not to take care of them because they amuse the ladies. Wonder if you’ve actually settled down. Bet you haven’t. You’ll be one of those annoyances who go after the little ladies even in your old age, don’t you. I wonder if any of them escaped. Hope so, otherwise you’ll have to do something worthwhile and actually –God forbid- court the ladies you want to like you.” Ahab zoned out as Sistern’s mutterings floated around him. Yes, yes, Evert was peeved with him, that was nothing new. And had always been jealous about his success with the girls. But the first bit – what had he meant by family-killer? Ahab vowed to have a serious discussion with Evert before they had whatever kind of epic battle the silly boy had dreamt up. But – after a nap.

&
Naoise helped support Kaia up the stairs. Her lungs hurt, yes, and her legs felt wobbly, but she felt that in another situation she could have made it by herself. It was nice, though, that he was helping her out. And his hug was warmer than she had any any right to expect – he was half fish, anyway. (And, she realized belatedly, so was she.)
“Kaia?”
“Mm?”
“Sistern said you might go into shock. We need to get you warm, and get some fluids into you. Fluids first, I mean.”
“Alright”

“So how does it feel, to be on land once again?”
“Decent”
They sat, companionably side by side, on the bed in the room Kaia was sharing with a couple of the others.
“Still doesn’t feel real, you know? This seems justlike an extension of the dream – I was a mermaid, now I’m not – but I still haven’t woken up.”
“Want to wander around outside? That may help you wake up.”
She shrugged. “It might help – and I don’t think it could hurt. Let’s go.”
“Alright – let me go let Sistern know where we’re going.”
“I’ll tell the girls I’m off. Mind if I ask them along?”
“No problem.”
Kaia wandered around the house, looking for Pele and Tethys. She found Pele in the salt-water pool built into the roof, switched back into mer form, and wearing an actual shirt while playing with her dinosaur. The sight of the little one’s bright red hair and the dinosaur’s elegant green and black striped scaling was incongruous, but the way that they frolicked in the blue water was adorable. Kaia sat down on the edge of the pool, and waited until they noticed her. The dinosaur actually saw her first, and when it swam over to nuzzle Kaia’s hand – invite her in to play with them – Kaia giggled. At this, Pele noticed her and swam over as well. Pele wasn’t content until she showed her dino’s new tricks to Kaia – she had trained it to swim through a hoop, and do flips up and out of the water.
Kaia applauded, gave both the dino and Pele a kiss on the cheek, and asked, “Pele? Naoise and I were going to wander down to the beach. You want to come?”
“Can we go in the water yet?”
“I don’t think so – but Naoise’ll probably know when he gets back.”
“Dino can’t be out of the water for too long. So if we can’t go in, then no. Some other time, though?”
“Okey-dokey! Enjoy the sunshine, little ones.”
“I’m not that little. I’m thirteen”
“But didn’t Sistern say something about how time runs differently here? You’d only be seven or eight if you grew up on land. Thus, little.”
“No fair!”
“Well, how old would you say I am?”
“Um… twenty, maybe? You seem older than Khanty, maybe the same age as Tethys, but older than me.”
“I’m not fifteen yet.”
“What?”
Kaia smiled at the little one’s incredulity. “You heard me. I’m 14 and a few months.”
“Well – well – psh.” And thus declaring the subject closed, Pele swooped down to the bottom of the pool, her little dinosaur following after her like a duckling after its mother.

Kaia smiled, trying to stuff down the rememberances of her family – of Dafne at that age, and how – Dafne would be 13 now, wouldn’t she? Had she missed her birthday? Dafne was going to kill her! Kaia always got spoiled with presents by Tayin, Dafne by Kaia, and then Mother and Dafne always got together to plot what to get for Tayin (as most of Tayin’s birthday wish lists were names of guys, and those were a little hard to wrap up in a box.)
She found Tethys on the balcony overhanging the cliff, staring into the red water, smashing into the cliffs, then being sucked out by the next wave’s impending strike. In – and out. “Tethys?”
The older girl didn’t turn around, didn’t make any motion that she had heard. “Tethys!” Still no response. Kaia contemplated leaving her alone, but she didn’t look right. Walking out to the edge of the balcony (it was quite a long drop. Kaia wasn’t sure shy she had no problem with airplanes, but was insecure on the upper floors of tall buildings.) she grabbed Tethys’ hand (perhaps harder than necessary; her apprehension transferring), and drew her slowly back from the edge. She didn’t have any response from the taller, stronger girl, other than a grip equally hard on her own hand.
“Come sit with me, Tethys.” Two of the lounge chairs on the balcony were dry. Kaia spread towels over them, and sat Tethys down on one, while sitting on her own. Their hands stayed locked, so they sat across from each other rather than lying in the seats as the tanning crowd would.
“What on earth is wrong?”
“Not on earth.” When Kaia looked more worried, Tethys grimaced. “Sorry. Horrible pun. Under the earth is where the wrong is.”
“You’re not making sense, honey.”
“Ahab… didn’t make it in.” The cold – the stiff – the stolid expression on Tethys’ face melted away, and tears started raining down her face. “We can’t live in that sort of an environment. There’s no air.”
“Well, when you’re underwater, of course there’s no air.” Tethys glared daggers at Kaia. “Sorry. Attempting a horrible pun of my own.”
Tethys sighed, and tried to explain. She knew Kaia wasn’t trying to make this harder for her, but it certainly seemed that way. “You’ve never known what it’s like, to have somebody there, always, to help when you’re sick, injured, whatever. Sure, sometimes he was out doing something else, taking care of the shark problem, learning stuff with Sistern – but he was always there, if I needed him. All I had to do was call. My big brother, Kaia – and I’ll never see him again. We’ve been here a week, Kaia. He knows what the alarm bells mean, knows that he was to get to shore if he heard the one that played. He’s been around for a while – he knows. But he didn’t make it. Even if he made it to a different island, he would be able to call.” Her voice sunk, and added, barely above a whisper, “He’s dead, Kaia. I don’t have a brother anymore.”

Kaia hugged her friend, and Tethys’ words sank in. She whispered as well, shocked with her own sense of guilt. “Oh God. What have I done to my family?” Tethys hugged her back, then released her. Her tear-streaked face glowed with color, with emotion, with passion. “You need to let them know that you’re alive.”

53,370 / 60,000 (88.9%)

Chapter Twenty

Evert was back at the council, restless again. He couldn’t face going through their entranceway, he knew that if he did they would do their best to leave his only coherent thoughts popping like bubbles in his brain yet again, but he needed to know what they were doing. The council had finally let him go, hoping that a tour of the surrounding water, to check on the sharks that might have been long-lost relatives would make him happier, more easily coerced into sitting around and doing nothing.
Sure, they were allowed to do their part in order to keep the peace, and Evert knew that his thoughts, at least, wouldn’t tend towards the peaceful if left alone, but still. Was draining him of the ability to think, the ability to put names and faces together in his mind, really the right way to go about fixing that? Evert wouldn’t admit that, as a hot-blooded young thing, his was not the path of calm, of right, of happiness. But still. The idea of that deadly calm, like a monstrous iceberg right before it killed you (because mers had gotten stuck underneath, before, and it wasn’t fun, as far as he’d heard) of cold and silence and stillness, and this enormous pressure – he wasn’t going back in. The guard in lonely duty smiled sadly at the boy’s persistence; he didn’t seem like he was willing to leave without confronting them.
“They’re not in a particularly good mood today, boy.”
“Mm?”
“I wouldn’t recommend going in. There was some trouble in the Carib isles – you know where they are?” Evert did, though the council seemed to have really odd naming systems for locations – or perhaps they used the names that had changed over the bazillion years that they had sat there in their throne-like chairs. He nodded to the guard. “There’s a pretty severe red tide over there. The fish, the reef, the mers – they’re all going to be effected. Their chief, Sisyphus, was it?”
“Sistern”
“Yeah, him. Sistern rang the alarm bells earlier, could almost be heard out here. All the nearest tribes got their people out. Council’s trying to figure out why it happened, what will happen if something like that happens again. They’re not used to trouble in the Caribs.” The guard continued his garrulous ramblings, while Evert tried to understand what this would mean. There was always the possibility of his once-time rival getting himself killed, though he wasn’t sure if he wanted the red flagellates to take care of his own job for him. Evert had always meant to take care of Ahab’s disposal himself, but he wanted the sanction of the council and to reveal how incredibly despicable the boy was, before he would strike: he wanted to be in the right, revealing the great wrong Ahab had done to him, and he wanted it to be resolved so Sistern’s tribe looked on him, evert, as a savior from some sort of horrible darkness in their midst. Somehow, dinoflagellates didn’t seem to fit his mental picture of what would happen.
Evert cut the guard off in the middle of his sentence, left the entrance to the council, and swam off with all speed towards Sistern’s area. They were probably too far away – but he could come to ostensibly help his relations (though he had moved as many of them as possible away from Sistern’s reef long ago, hoping that Ahab would not stray far afield, and that the carnivores he found to slaughter would not have Mer origins) and in fact get his revenge.

&

“Come on – didn’t you hear?” Naoise grabbed Kaia’s arm, nearly carrying her towards the shore.
“I heard the bells, but what are they there to mean? Danger, I’d suppose, but from what?” Kaia’s eyes were bigger than usual, she had no wish to die underwater or to never swim again – though, in general, she’d rather never swim again than not see her paerents – and she wanted to at least try to listen to Sistern’s advice on keeping herself in the water and not trying a change, for as long as possible.
“red tide.” Naoise’s voice was terse, and unhappy.
“But they don’t harm humans. What’s the rush?”
“We’re not strictly human, remember?”
“OH – the whatchamawhosits – “
“dinoflagellates?”
“yes, those – they eat up all the oxygen in the water, right?”
“They can. And then we suffocate. Rather embarrassing, don’t you think?”
“I’d say painful.” Naoise regretted his joke – she had almost suffocated rather than breathe in the water, she knew what such a process entailed.
“Sistern told me to stay in the water. Said I don’t know how to control the change yet. What do I do?”
“I have no idea. We get you to Sistern.”
“and he is… where?”
“He’ll be down at the boathouse by Roosevelt house, keeping everything organized.”
“Then let’s get down there.” They swam for it – not too far away, but uncomfortable. Their beautiful blue water was murky, and in the haze they ended up running into more things than even a small Mer child would in the dark. But they made it, though slowly. Their gills protesting at the deficient quantity of oxygen in the water, they experimented: it was a little easier to breathe, when down almost touching the bottom, and the visibility was a little better there as well. But they made the boathouse, and Sistern was, as predicted, standing there, wearing an old pair of swim trunks and organizing everything. Naoise popped his head out of the water, and addressed his “uncle” on what they should do about Kaia.
“She really shouldn’t turn back. But there’s nowhere else that she’ll be safe, if the red tide grows. Let her know that it’s her decision.”
Kaia chose land, as Sistern had known she would. “Very well. Tell her to get a good mouthful of water, and force it all out through her gills, two or three times. I’ll be right in.”
Sistern shucked the shorts – it wasn’t as if anyone was looking, as the two smart ones were both underwater anyway – and dove in, changing as soon as he hit the water. It was harder to breathe down here than it had been a few minutes ago. This wasn’t going to be easy. “Kaia? I need you to focus. You’re going to pop your head up above water, and your gills are going to stop working when you inhale air. Keep that head out of the water, and breathe deeply a few times, then remember what it was like to be human. Remember what it’s like to have a tail – or we may never be able to bring you back down here - but just think of having legs, and toes, and not having everything from your hips down fused together. Whenever you’re ready – I’ll bring you in as soon as you make the switch.”
Kaia nodded, took a few more breaths, and flipped herself up to the surface with her tail. Air – fresh, cool, clean – flowed into her lungs. Breathing in, and out, she felt her arm caught and drawn towards shore by Sistern. He hauled her out, gave her a big striped towel to wrap up in, and promised her a drink (he could see how much her lungs were paining her; they tended to be irritable the first few times one made the change) as soon as he was sure everyone was in. Kaia sat, still, in shock. She had been a mermaid. And, in theory, could be one again.
Glancing over, Naoise noticed the tears trickling down Kaia’s face. He put an arm around her shoulders, hesistantly, afraid to be presumptive, and she buryed her head in his shoulder, silently crying. She couldn’t tell him why, what for. Some combination of the reef, her pain-free childhood, her parents. The word she was able to get out was “why?”, and to that, neither she nor Naoise had any answer.

&

Ahab did not notice the alarm bonging of the bell until he made his way out of the second volcano, two normal-sized eggs and two the size of sea-turtle eggs cradled in his rucksack. That sort of peal – that was Sistern with one of the big old bells. Why would he be hitting one of those? Ahab raked his brain, looking for the signals that Sistern had drummed into all of them – oh – that peal was the low tide bell, maybe? Then there was the problem of where to go, with that sort of a ring. Some – Sistern still told stories of pirates – you could just go and hide anywhere convienent. But for this one… it was probably Roosevelt house. Wasn’t it always Roosevelt house?
Mostly, at least. He wrapped his arms around the rucksack – worn the wrong-way-around, so he had a pouch somewhat like a kangaroo’s, and emerged from the dim, stillness of the cave into what should have been clear water. It was murky, though, the sun not filtering down to lay golden bars on the sand, but instead stuck, fighting through the masses of whatever kind of nasty bug this was in the water, and feeding them. Glowing brighter, an orangy-red, they seemed to pulse when the sunlight hit them. Ahab didn’t really like the look of those.
But the eggs were the thing. Naoise needed them for his experiment; he had promised to et them to Naoise; so he would do it. With the alarm bells, though – Ahab didn’t think that Naoise would still be in the cave, the one he had started to call his “lab” – but Ahab knew that he certainly hadn’t heard the bells while inside a structure, so there was a possibility that Naoise wouldn’t be able to hear them as well. Shore was closer: but doing one of his completely unexpected pleasant turns of mind, Ahab aimed himself – in the swirling water, difficult to navigate through – towards the lab. There was no one there. But the lab room was warm, and comfortable, so he made slings for the eggs and tucked them in, hoping that they would stay, and grow, and live to be happy little dinosaurs. He wrote out, for Naoise, where he had found each one, then looked around the room one last time – making sure that there weren’t any tell-tale bumps of heads or feet of little spies – and dove out, to make the swim to shore.
The red waves were more of a struggle to swim through, this time. Ahab noticed that breathing, though through gills, which should have been comfortable enough – you get used to having a flap of skin float up with each exhalation when it’s been you’re normal state for the vast majority of your life – but now, his gills were feeling uncomfortable, and feeling lightheaded, Ahab tried to swim faster. After all, as he needed to get to shore anyway, why not cut through the clouds of the red things?
A less than prudent idea. Ahab’s gills were swarmed over by the red things, drinking in every possible nutrient that they could get, and Ahab was getting less oxygen each time his blood pumped. He saw the rising of the ocean floor, meaning that he was near land, but his blood pumped through his ears and his gills began to cause twitchings in the rest of his body. He needed oxygen – was getting none from the water – and knew the end before it came. He shook out the mess of his hair – hoping that it would trap some of the creature, filter out his water – and grasped the small piece of coral he wore around his neck. Inscribing it with a message to whoever found him took most of the rest of his energy. Remembering, vaguely, that the water farther down was a little clearer, he started back that way. Yet he didn’t make the safety of the deep, dark water or that of shore. Stranded in no man’s land – no mer’s land – Ahab surrendered to his inability to breathe.

Only when the red waves washed Ahab’s, now distorted, body up onto shore did Sistern’s tribe learn of their loss. Sistern had realized Ahab’s disappearance as soon as Roosevelt house was calmed down a bit, and had assumed that the young one would realize that if he was safe, he could stay where he was. Of course, safe was always a relative term, but better turning pale and listless in a cave at the bottom of the sea than washing up on the beach as some sort of flotsam, hoping to stay rather than let the tide carry you away.

Sistern had nothing else to attempt; not even Pet could help him to ameliorate his grief. He believed that it was his fault for sending Ahab to work with Naoise; if not for this, Ahab would (perhaps) still be flirting with everything wearing a top, and though exasperated – he would still be around.

51,219 / 80,000 (64.0%)

Well, yay, Zokuto's back up. Though... I probably won't get all the way to 80K, and right now, that's depressing. Ach, ja. <3 Fellow nanoers, I would like moar!

... and not inspi(red), either. (though hints of expi(red), I suppose...) Yes, more doom.
(So does this really seem like a medical drama? B/c that wasn't really what I was going for, I just love to spout AP Bio termage at y'all)

Chapter Nineteen

“So Ahab? Can you head back to where ever you found the first one and figure out if there are any more down there?”
“Very well. Though if you’re right, and I get fried, I’m going to come back and haunt you, you understand?”
“You believe in ghosts?”
“No, but I may change my mind if you happen to be annoying… and I’m dead!”
“For all your anger, you actually do have a sense of humor, don’t you?”
“Perhaps. Is your entire project centered around dinosaurs, though?”
“No – but I’m looking for things out of the ordinary in the reef. A decline in such-and-such or an increase in something else since the last comprehensive survey was made.”
“Who else had the time or inclination to do this sort of thing?”
“I think Pet did the last one.”
“Really? Why?”
“No idea. But I’m glad I have something to compare my results to.” Naoise pulled out vials (full of air) and let the bubbles escape to the surface before collecting a sampling of the various algae and plankton in the water. “Off you go, then. See you later?”
“I’ll bring back another one of those eggs – if there isn’t one where Pele found hers, I’ll keep looking. There’re a couple of other spots around here that might very well have them as well.”
“Would you mind checking the other spots anyway? The actual numbers of the dino eggs that you can find would be more useful than a sample, as much fun as having a dino would be.”
“Very well. If I have to.”
“Hey, Ahab? Where did the eggs come from – and how do you know where they are?” Ahab raised his angry eyebrows, looking fierce once again, and Naoise regretted the question. He was surprised to the utmost when Ahab deigned to answer.
“There are a few around. Always have been. The eggs need to stay warm, and have really long gestation periods, so pretty often some get blown up as the volcano they’re sitting in explodes. Though from what I’ve seen, they’ve been a little easier to find lately.”
“YES. That’s what I need. Numbers. Do you know if anyone would know the rough numbers of dinosaurs found in the past?”
“Well… the council might. But they don’t tell anyone anything if they don’t ‘need to know’. And they wouldn’t think your possibly getting into college – no offense intended – worthy enough to dump you into the ‘need to know’ category. No, mostly it was just legends, and every so often someone would find a dead/dying one swimming around sadly, all alone. I got bored, went looking for them. Got a couple of nasty burns while looking for them, but they were too interesting.”
“but wait a second – the story I heard had Pele going into a volcano by herself. You’ve been burned before, but you’d let a little kid go in?”
“First off, she’s not that little. Ridiculously little, as far as her mental state is concerned, but not too bad otherwise.”
“Please tell me you haven’t been hitting on the little kids, too.”
Ahab glared, affronted. “She sees me as an older brother. I wouldn’t do that.”
“Rumors would say otherwise.”
“Yes, yes, rumors spread by whom?”
Naoise remembered that all the supposed rumors he had heard where spread by Mirovia, probably on Khanty’s orders. Khanty, who was completely obsessed with Ahab. “Fine. So they’re prejudiced, so their opinions don’t count. However: she’s obsessed with you. Why do you ignore her?”
“Why are we having this discussion? You want numbers of dinosaurs, I can get those for you. That’s wonderful. Association ended.” Ahab swam off, to find those dinosaurs.
Naoise went back to taking samples of the ocean water. When his vials were full, he took them back to one of the underwater caves that Sistern had said he could use as a laboratory, and looked at it under a microscope – Sistern had had some of Ahab’s gang, who seemed as bored as their leader, lug down piles of stuff that Naoise could use – and through means of a centrifuge (and a long, long time figuring out the useful, but unbelievably irritating thing worked), he was able to figure out what the proportions of algae in the different parts of the reef had been.
He hadn’t labeled some of the vials. Slightly peeved – he had spun them the requisite half hour, he wanted to use them – he dumped the spun, separated liquid back into the entrance, and figured out where he hadn’t gotten water from. Over by the butt-corals, and down by the purple fans. He shook his head, not for the first time, when he got to the first location. Some of the young ones, many years ago, had decided to give the tourists something to look at when they came down for their snorkeling and scuba diving, and had formed the corals into two mounds right next to each other. Over the year, the brain corals had been convinced to grow together, and pretty soon they resembled the rear ends of humans. Tourists were confused by this odd phenomenon. The mers shook their heads at the impetuosity of youth, and continued their lives.
The water seemed a little hazier by the time Naoise got over to the purple fans. Odd, that, as there weren’t supposed to be any storms today, and the water only got kicked up like this if there was some big sort of disturbance.
Spinning the vials, again, thankfully took less time this time around, as the centrifuge was all ready to go, and Naoise didn’t have to figure out how to make it work without a power outlet (the young ones were all ready to light up their underwater caves with electricity, thought it would be the most awesome thing in the world to have plugs under all the caves – and then they would remember what happened when wet things got plugged in, and why electrocution was not their friend). After quite a time of frustration, he managed to fix up an EE to the centrifuge, though neither the eel nor the centrifuge was particularly happy about this combination.
While the two new tubes were spinning, he took out the old ones and checked out the layers: mostly just what Sistern had told him was in the last survey, though hopefully the proportions would be different (otherwise, how could he prove the adverse effects of global warming?). There seemed to be an awful lot of richness to this water – not just algae, but random nitrogen that just seemed to be floating around. Hm. Maybe the other vials would shed a little more light on this.
The other vials, as if hearing Naoise’s thought and questions, let off a little sound (or rather, and absence of sound) as the centrifuge stopped its hum. Naoise opened it up, and was rather disconcerted to notice a layer of completely red things in the separated liquid. Placing them under the microscope, he recognized that they had tails: flagellates, then. Perhaps Sistern would know what kind.

Ahab got to the volcano Pele had dived into, and was alarmed to see that it was brighter, and hotter than usual. Usually it seemed asleep, perhaps it had decided to wake up and build that island that it had always wanted to be. It seemed odd that it would choose now, though, when he just wanted to visit and wasn’t even going to attempt to pre-mine some of the shiny things that lived inside. (And there generally were some pretty shiny things inside the volcanoes. As long as you didn’t get too close to the active part, and there was some escape route, exploring inside of them was fun… and the payoff was pretty awesome, as Drys tended to avoid getting their hands dirty whenever possible. Larimar? A blue opaque stone only found in the islands? There were some deposits. Some pretty quartz, liked because of the small (but recoverable) amounts of gold that could be taken out of them, and various others.) Every so often, the volcanoes got mad if you tried to steal their treasures. But were the dinosaurs treasure? Interesting idea. Ahab didn’t know.
He swam up to the opening, and was greeted with a face full of hot water. Now, the fish parts of the merfolk don’t particularly like hot or cold water too much. It tended to hurt too much. When the temperatures got too extreme for the human bits? Generally it was time to find a different patch of water. But he had promised Sistern to help. And Naoise was, indirectly at least, speaking with Sistern’s voice.
Ahab went in, his tail, torso, and all attached appendages complaining. The water was hot, not just normal warm. Just a quick glance around – walls not glowing yet, which was good, as by the time the walls started glowing, they were usually about to implode. And you didn’t want to be in the middle of a volcano when it imploded. It was rather painful, Ahab’d heard.
The chamber was small, and close, and there was nothing there – the walls were bare, the nooks and crannies dark but nothing hid behind the dark corners – he nearly flew out of the cave, and felt the blessed coolness of the rest of the water. He hoped that he wouldn’t be all burned (again), as Sistern got rather annoyed every time he had to patch the boys (who should know better) up, even though it happened really often. Eh, blisters, but nothing new. He hadn’t hit the stage of third degree burns, and was barely into second. Sistern couldn’t scold him too much. He just hoped that the other little islands to be would be less unhappy at his coming to visit.
The other volcanoes were much more dormant; no heating of the water at all, and rather dark, but not quite dark enough that Ahab’s vision didn’t adjust. He explored along the crevices in the rock that he had come to know, not too worried about missing one of the eggs (they glowed enough that they would be pretty easy to see in this kind of dark) and explored deeper and deeper into the crevice. The silence grew as he went further into the volcano, none of the outside world penetrated this far. It was a sanctuary for the noiseless, the nonmoving, the quiet. Ahab, as a foreigner, paid his respects to the awesome craftsmanship of the halls, keeping his gaze alert for the slight orange or yellow glow of an egg.

&

“Sistern? I’m running across something that I can’t identify. I think it’s some kind of flagellate; it definitely has a tail. It’s red.”
Sistern had been sitting in his small receiving chamber, half hoping that no one came by so he could have a nap. In the dimness, he couldn’t quite see the murkiness of the water, now slowly spreading over the reef. Naoise’s news took a minute to make sense in his brain (he was exhausted, having stayed up all night trying to explain everything to Kaia – that girl asked some amazingly intelligent questions, but sometimes he wished she had been a little less intelligent) - but once they did, his reaction was as quick as if he had just ingested a chunk of C8H10N4O2 and it was flowing through his system like fire in the veins, waking him up with a particularly unpleasant piece of news.
“Red?” Naoise nodded. “Dinoflagellates. Not good. How far has the bloom gotten?”
“Bloom?”
“The water’s cloudy, yes? How far?”
“I was over by the butt coral, then to the purple fans – it covered the entire area.”
“We need to get everyone to Roosevelt house. Now.” Naoise and Sistern moved through the reef, warning everyone they could see to swim as fast as they possibly could to RH. No time to stop to pick up belongings. Just grab your children (and as many others as you could collar) and take them up.
When they had warned as many as they could easily call, Sistern unstoppered the gigantic ship’s bell that had been used in emergencies long ago, that had come from a wreck sometime in the sixteenth century, and that Sistern’s tribe had adopted. The bell was not held high off the ground, but it resonated with the weight of centuries behind it, it bonged and clanged in a raucous manner. None of the groups around Sistern’s were (probably) close enough to be effected by the algal bloom, the red tide, but it was still his duty to pass the warning on – and to let any of his own tribe that hadn’t heard the spoken warning know to get to safety as fast as possible.
Safety, in the older days, had meant land, or at least close to land. Now, for so many of the young ones, it meant the caves under the reef, and those might not be enough for a red tide. Mers had died because of red tides, before. The little dinoflagellates ate up all the oxygen in the water; they couldn’t breathe, they suffocated to death. It hadn’t happened for a long, long, time, and never here. The island here had been pristine, free from any problem of that sort, since the mers had first come to this hospitable climate, following the boats as they made their way across the sea. Still, the caves – some of them had air, and the network was pretty clear. Someone breathing irregularly would know how to get to an air cave. Sistern hoped.

Zokutou's down :(
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So... I decided that Chapter 17 wasn't quite done: so here's a little bit more

Sabella stayed at home, did her best to pick out the favorites of Kaia’s books, the kinds of flowers she best liked, the way she wanted the service to be run. She talked to the pastor at their church, arranged the timing, went in to speak to the principal of the school, so the students who wanted to come to the memorial could. The pastor had been adament that it be on a weekday; Sabella was worried that this would cause Kaia’s better friends, complete nerds but wonderful people, that they couldn’t come for need of studying for three tests in a, b, and c. (Back-to-back periods of work, these were the people who skipped lunch so they could take another class – then pretended that it wasn’t because they wanted to choose a “fluff” class – say art, or astronomy, or graphic design – rather than waste time. They held study parties rather than the drinking parties Tayin held at that age, they had problems relaxing, they talked about art and history rather than boys and clothes.
They wouldn’t deal easily with coming on a school night. The principal was very nice about it – they would not be forced to turn in the work for the next day – but the problem was, that they’d all force themselves to make it up – and lose the sleep otherwise; to try to catch up so they could still get into their top schools. Sabella wasn’t sure it would make it any easier on the kids.
But Tayin and Dafne had decided to go back to school early; it was probably their father’s character showing through, as they didn’t usually embrace their work. But Tayin went in a rather somber outfit – dark purple shirt, black pants, black shoes. With her naturally black hair, she looked like some sort of goth poster child. Dafne was also more subdued, but nothing quite as drastic – a nice black shirt, with dark blue jeans – and no one who didn’t know her would pick her out of a crowd, though any that did would be alarmed at the lack of pastels or pretty (aka loud, obnoxious) colors. The shirt was one of Kaia’s favorites – she had called it her pirate shirt. It was black, and ruffly, and Kaia usually dressed it up with hints of big shiny jewelry. Dafne played with the sleeved all day, pulling the lacy layer off of the black material, smoothing the black material back over the lacy layer.
The girls went through the school day in a haze of information, solicitude, prayers and cares. They ignored the drama happening in their respective groups, preferring to continue their struggle through the day by themselves. Friends found themselves brushed off, consistent friends got the silent treatment (from Dafne) or a barrage of tears (from Tayin). By the end of the day, Dafne was talking (a bit) and Tayin was flirting (a bit), but both looked rather overdrawn, tired, and a trifle grumpy when Sabella picked them up.
“So, how was it to be back to school?” The girls looked at each other, at their patient, cheerful mom, and back at each other.
“It wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been.”

Chapter Eighteen

“So do people often … wear … dinosaurs?” Kaia was, understandably, rather confused.
“No.” Kaia didn’t quite believe Ahab’s smile, glancing at Thala for confirmation until she shook her head and added her own “No,” with a smile.
“And… so why does this little lady – Pele, you said? – have a dinosaur?”
“I’m not sure.” Thala certainly didn’t have any idea. Kaia noticed Ahab’s smile, though. It seemed odd that Ahab was looking at her again, and odder still that he was smiling.
“Ahab? What do you know?”
“Oh, nothing.” He shrugged, tried to turn away. It was a little disconcerting to see Pele swim up and throw her arms around Ahab, spinning him and her around and around in a circle, then crunching his back into an outcrop of coral. More surprising still was Ahab’s reaction: he smiled. He messed up her hair, admired the brontosaurus wrapped around her middle, and gave her a big kiss on the cheek before he let her go rejoin her friends.
“Ahab?”
He looked over, smiled, and didn’t quite confess, but continued his wave to Pele before turning over and raising his eyebrows. “Yes?”
“What do you know about Pele’s dinosaur?”
“I helped her find it.” He couldn’t take the commotion his comment ensued, and disappeared with an angry “what do you kids care?”

Kaia, confused, tried to understand the motivations he could have had. He seemed nice, or at least decent, with the little kid. And yet… he didn’t seem able to relate well to people, actually. And he stared an awful lot.
“Do we know why Ahab is so awkward, like all the time?”
Thala looked over at Rheic. “I don’t know. His little sister might, though”
Rheic blushed, a little. “He’s usually rather suave, knows exactly what to say. I think it’s probably the fact that he helped Thala find you, bring you back. You’re different, you’re interesting. And the fact that you’re pretty probably doesn’t help. He doesn’t talk, he just does. He likes to be doing things.”
“But does that explain why he keeps disappearing? And then reappearing – like some, I don’t know, little lost puppy dog”
“No. I cannot explain my brother’s behavior. Often enough, he doesn’t even talk to me about why or how he was going to do such and such.”
“I don’t know. I guess I usually understand my sisters, but I’ve never had to deal with a brother, so – your best guess is better than mine!”
Rheic smiled, shrugged, and continued. “How many sisters do you have?”
“Two.”
“Older, or younger?”
“One of each. I’m in the middle. You?”
“Well, I’ve got Ahab, older, and Tethys, younger.”
“And as far as I know, I’m an only” Thala shrugged, brushing off her unknown parentage and possible siblings. “But you know, it’s like we’re a giant family, with Sistern and Pet as uncle and aunt, as the top matriarch and patriarch.”
“It sounds comfortable. Nice, like.” Kaia was comfortable, happy, with this new family sense, but couldn’t help but feel a little out of the loop. At home – she had met friends of Tayin’s, and Dafne’s, whose only interests were clothes and boys, and who was going out with whom – but Kaia had always had more important things on her mind. No one here seemed to want to talk about the weather or the wave flow or even how they created their home structures. And as different as clothes and people might be – they were interesting for a time, but they’re super-duper boring after a while.

&

“Jadyn, come in here.” Rosco felt like he was attempting to pull out all of Jadyn’s teeth, to try to keep him from working too hard. “Jadyn, listen to me. I’m going to give you a raise.”
“No, you’re not.” Jadyn stayed rational, kind of, and kept his voice level.
“Yes, I believe I am.” Rosco smiled, called to his outer secretary. “Would you send in Mrs. Vadik, please?”
His secretary, a kindly lady, sent Sabella in.
“Rosco, what’s this all about?” Sabella didn’t know what was going on, that was sure. “It’s lovely to see you –“ (Well, Rosco thought, that did seem to put out the idea that she, at least, had forgiven him.) “-but why did you call me in?”
“I’m giving Jadyn a raise. I knew he was going to be difficult about it. And I know, there will be the rumors that I’m trying to buy him off, and that I know that it’s all my fault that you went there in the first place. But Sabella, he’s not going to listen to me.” Jadyn stared out of Rosco’s plate glass window, doing his best to completely ignore the drama going on behind him. “Help me to convince him, please.”
Sabella walked over to Jadyn, Jadyn tensed. She didn’t speak, though, just slipped her arm around his back, and nudging him until he put his arm around her. She just stared out the window with him, but kept an eye on their reflections in the glass rather than the beautiful scenery below. The children weren’t there – but they were together. “Bella?”
“mm?”
“You really think that this is a good idea?”
She nodded into his arm; he hugged her tight then let go, spun, and bear-hugged his long-time friend. “You really don’t need to do that, you know.”
“Of course not. But I want to do something to help you guys out.”
“still doesn’t seem right, though.”
“What, you’d prefer I offer up the partnership now, instead of Christmas?” Jadyn blinked.
“You’re joking.”
“No, but if it really makes you that uncomfortable, I won’t tell you about it again for a while longer!” Rosco’s face was a picture of merriment.
“is that supposed to be a consolation?” Jadyn seemed unhappy, despite the banter.
“but why should you need consolation, honey? He’s trying to do you a favor.” And Sabella’s comment just set the two men to laughing – and when the laughter turned to crying, for Sabella, and silent mourning, for Jadyn, Rosco did his best to console them with hugs, and drinks, and sending them home to enjoy each other and their daughters.

&

“Uncle Sistern?” Sistern looked over at the figeting boy and wondered what was irritating him.
“yes, m’boy?”
“Give me something to do. Please. I just – I can’t hang around here, doing nothing. And you’ve said I’m not supposed to be indiscriminately hunting, and the carnivores from the reef really aren’t here anyway and –“
“And you’re thinking about Kaia?”
“mmph? No, what would give you that idea?” He tried, and failed, to look and sound innocent.
“Ahab? You’ve been stalking her. Stalking is generally an indication of obsession, and obsession when the object of your obsession is a person, generally means that you’re thinking of that person a lot.” Sistern hoped that the kid would realize that he didn’t mean anything bad, but that his actions were getting more obvious by the day.
Ahab relented, recognized the truth of Sistern’s statement.
“You really want something to do?”
“Yes.”
“Stop stalking Kaia. Ah – calm down, stop figiting. I am actually giving you something to do while you’re in ‘non-stalker’ mode. Help out Naoise with his reef life survey. You’ll have to move around, track down the schools of the different types of fish, plankton, etc.” Ahab did not look pleased. He, in fact, looked like the entire idea of Naoise’s survey would bore him out of his mind. “What. You really think I’d put you on a really boring detail with no compensation?” Ahab watched him, not quite certain where Sistern was going with this idea. “Kaia’s a smart kid. I’m willing to bet you – oh, the use of my motorcycle? – that Kaia will come sprinting down to where Naoise’s holding his experiment as soon as she hears what all’s going on. Go on – she’ll follow.”
“Why is Naoise even doing this? It isn’t something we usually do.”
Sistern grinned, looking more predatory than usual. “College admissions. A project like this – published in a scientific journal – will get him in wherever he wants to go.”
“Naoise’s going to college? Why?”
“He’s got dreams. He wants to fix the problems inherent in the world. College will give him the easiest start for that. And besides – no one has more fun than college kids. I don’t know if you’ve thought of it, but if you help, we can put your name in on the paper, as well; you could also go to college.”
“What’s the use?”
“Fun. Knowledge. Don’t ask me this question – I’m prejudiced. I’ve been several times, they’ve been some of the best years of my life.” Ahab shrugged, his expression hidden beneath his scruffy hair, and swam off to find Naoise. Sistern hoped that he’d come to see the benefits eventually.

Naoise was happy to see Ahab, as a comprehensive survey of the entire reef (with only one person) would be unbelievably difficult to accomplish single-handed. And besides, perhaps they’d be friends. Naoise wasn’t sure why, but even in the midst of the mer-girls and the attentions Sistern and Pet made sure to give him, he was lonely. None of the guys deigned to talk to him. Perhaps he’d blown it, going so gung-ho over global warming. Yes, it was important, vitally so, but it didn’t help his social skills.
Still, Ahab was rather intimidating. With his hair mostly captured in a ponytail, but with some curls floating around his face, and the beard (perhaps just flaunting the fact that he had one, but still) close-cut but still springing into grizzled curls, his eyes and expression were emphasized: the expression usually angry, surly, or noncommittal. And his greeting wasn’t friendly, either. “Sistern told me to come down, to help out? What are you doing, anyway?” And as Naoise attempted to explain, Sistern cut him off with a brusque “Nevermind.”
Naoise looked scared. Ahab laughed, finding the boy’s fear amusing, and added, a little more gently, “Sistern sent me down here because I’m antsy. He told me that you could give me something to do that would keep me occupied. Think you can manage that?”
“Y - yes.” Naoise couldn’t stnd the fact that his voice squeaked. Only when he was scared, or angry, but still. Such an irritation.
“Why are you even doing this, anyway?”
“Well – “
“Can you possibly explain it without shouting global warming every other word?”
“I’ll try. I can use it at least once, though, right?”
“Fine”
“So: the possible consequences of global warming are the world getting dramatically warmer, and lots of the animals that we now have dying off because they’re not suited for warmer water temperatures, or the destruction of the gulf stream. And though the Gulf Stream doesn’t really effect us all that much here – we’re still around the equator, we have warm water – it does effect those people who live up north. See, it’s an ocean current that carries warm water up towards Europe form around here, and makes weather conditions there less severe. So if we mess up the gulf stream, then the weather’s going to get a lot worse, fast. Does that make sense?”
“Yes, I suppose, but what does it have to do with a census of the reef?”
“Well… the majority of people don’t believe there are any dinosaurs on the reef.”
Ahab didn’t really have anything (intelligible) to say to that.

&

“Sistern.” He turned, not particularly surprised to see Kaia, but finding her more agitated, more upset, than he expected her to be. Her short hair flew around her face, and she pushed it back angrily.
“What is it, Kaia?”
“My parents are going to be going crazy. I don’t know what I can do for them, but – is there any way for me to let them know that I’m not dead?”
“Well, there are the usual methods: a postcard, a phone call, showing up on their doorstep – but your only problem is that I don’t think you should be going on land yet. Once you change, it’s often very, very difficult to change back, for the first few times, when you’re not used to it. And you’re not as comfortable, like this, for me to not worry about you being able to change back. It’s an act of will, more than anything else, but you have to know what you want. Pet can make half-changes, I think Thala can as well, but until you are comfortable like this, I can’t let you back up.”
“But why?”
“How much did you understand about the Op?”
“Well – you gave me a tail. And gills, presumably, as I can breathe comfortably underwater. I don’t know how, though.”
“There’s a bacterium now living in your lungs. Your lungs stop functioning when you’re underwater, and the gills and tail kick in. If you’re unconscious. Or conscious, actively wanting them to.”
“You stopped my lungs from working?!”
“yes”
“Well, don’t my alveoli have something angry to say about that?”
“No more than when you were drowning.”
“Hey. Are you making fun of my drowning?”
With a smile, “Perhaps. But no, we don’t kill off your alveoli. There’s enough oxygen being taken out of the water that the blood vessels that they nourish the alveoli and the bacteria attaching onto those alveoli.”
“Fine. But I need to talk to my parents.”
“I’ll see what I can arrange.”

47,082 / 50,000 (94.1%)

Chapter Seventeen

Mirovia giggled as she watched Ahab convince Pele that this idiocy was a good idea. She could see why Khanty was absolutely obsessed with him, at times like these. He was so funny!
“But listen, Pele. I’ve heard that they do have dinosaurs in there. Yes, it’ll be a little bit warm, but you’ll be out before you know it.”
“But Ahab, are you sure?” The little Pele seemed even younger than she actually was. Yes, Ahab could certainly be convincing.
“And you won’t have to worry about your starfishes swimming off, you know,” he needled.
(If she had been on land, you would have seen the little tears gathering in the corners of her eyes.) “You know, you’re not very nice sometimes.” Pele darted off, diving into the mouth of the island-to-be, though it’s building processes were currently on hold, as the volcano was dormant.
Ahab snickered. He didn’t look quite as mirthful as he should – Mirovia could barely keep her laughs from escaping as she hid just out of sight – he didn’t look quite happy enough. He actually followed Pele down to the mouth of the volcano; calling in instructions. Did he really think that she would find a dinosaur in there? And it would – what – let someone wear it?

Pele came out, looking flushed, but clutching a – was that an egg? – to her chest. She spun over to Ahab, leaning up to give him a kiss on the cheek, whispered “thank you”, and swam off.
He paused, struck. He hoped the egg would open up for her. She was a cute little thing. And… Rheic would be proud of him. He had done something (mostly) nice for a little one. He couldn’t really say it had been completely unselfish – she looked ridiculous with that lopsided starfish look. And if she would be happier wearing a dinosaur, than so be it. The dino shouldn’t mind, not if it got to share her body heat. And she would be willing to coddle it, and really enjoy it.

Mirovia still thought it was funny; not noticing Ahab’s introspection. She swam off to tell Khanty what all was going on – Khanty would appreciate this. A dinosaur? How in the world did Ahab manifest a dinosaur? And he actually expected the egg to hatch into a dinosaur? Maybe she’d just follow Pele for a bit, and try to see if that would work!
Pele’s shriek of joy resounded over the reef, and Mirovia snuck closer. She couldn’t quite see around Pele’s arms, but could hear a little cracking, and got even a little closer, sneaking around the edge of the red orange coral outcrop. She could see the egg in Pele’s arms, now. Pele’s egg had a rather large crack in it, and there was a little head sticking out – a little head that had a distinctive foreign, distinctively alien, distinctively dinosaur look to it.
Ahab actually found her a dinosaur. Oh, my. What else did he know about, that the rest of them did not? Pele playing with her dino, helping it to come all the way out of its shell, paddling around ineffectually in the water, cuddling with it, made Mirovia kind of sad. No one had offered to find her something as cool as a dinosaur. No one had, for all she knew, found a dinosaur for the past several hundred years. Why Pele? And why now?

&

Rosco walked up and down in front of his desk, in the executive office at the top of the building owned by his company. What would he say to Jadyn? Offering him his winter vacation home, trying to do something nice because he had disrupted his travel plans – and yet, Jadyn’s daughter was gone. Probably dead. He had no way to make amends. Sure, he could try… Jadyn deserved a raise anyway, and more vacation time, more time to spend with his family, but – would Jadyn take it as it was meant? Or - he would take offense, wouldn’t he.
Jadyn talked about his wife with joy, his daughters with exaltation, with those he knew well. And now, now how would he cope with the loss of his daughter? Rosco knew that Jadyn was having issues trying to keep the media off of his lawn, stopping them accosting him at home. He doubted that his presence would be tolerated coming to visit; and yet he didn’t feel quite right, not going or calling or anything. He bought a card, and yet couldn’t figure out what to say. Just signing it seemed cold, callous. And yet… he took a deep breath, and started to write. He covered the empty space on the right, the inside left (awkwardly moving with an arrow to the other side), and the back with his sympathy, his self-wonderings, his unhappiness at having indirectly caused their loss. Ending with an entreaty to Jadyn to take off as long as he felt necessary, he offered his sympathy, condolences, hope for their future, and closed. Squeezing his name in at the end of the card, he addressed the envelope, put the card in, sealed it, and sent it off.
He hoped that it would be well-recieved.

&

Naoise was frightened beyond belief by Pele and her new friend. Where had she found a dinosaur?!? Dinosaurs were extinct. This was obviously another one of the bizarre products of global warming! He nearly flew off, going to tell Sistern – and the council – and the world.
Sistern listened to him, calmly, and let the silly goose know that without proper evidence, there wouldn’t be any reason to believe that such an occurrence was caused by global warming. Yes, perhaps it was. But there’s no better way to tell, now, so you can’t just assume.
Naoise took a rather brazen tactic. He complimented Sistern on the tactics he had made for Roosevelt house’s improvement, then on the future things : “But don’t you see? Not everyone is following your lead. Very few people around here, actually. The island people are too dirt poor to have any hope of helping the environment – they’re just trying to survive. The rich folk on the island? They don’t care. There are maybe one or two other mansions on the island that have half the attributes of the Roosevelt house. But – why can’t you do something to help people out? To force them in the right direction? To direct the rich bozos on the island on what they should be doing! They would listen to you! You’re respected, you should know that!”
“Naoise? Hello, Earth to Naoise. They respect someone who doesn’t exist anymore. I haven’t been a doctor on the island for eighty years. Whoever told you those rumors should also have told you the time period in which they existed.”
Naoise slumped. “Isn’t there something we can do? This planet is going to die. People are going to die. Like that girl you saved – we can’t just do nothing, can we? The storms are getting worse. They’ve never been this bad before, or this often before, have they? And each time there’s a storm – there’s a New Orleans, or a flooding out of even one home, someone’s hurt. And isn’t it our job to help protect them? It is, is it not?” Naoise’s eyes were pleading. He wanted to make this world a better place, wanted to help the world grow and thrive.
Sistern’s face drew tight, and haggard, while Naoise ranted. “We’d like to help. But sometimes it isn’t possible. Pay attention. Naoise. We can’t fix everything. We don’t have the funds, the hope, the ability to stay that far away from water to fix everything. We don’t understand everything that needs to be fixed.”
“And you’re just willing to deal with that?”
“Did I say that?”
“No”
“What do you think I meant?”
“That… we can do the little things, like fix our homes, but we can’t save the world.”
“No, not quite. Listen, Naoise. You’re a smart one. Though we can’t save the world – we can send you off to college, if you pick one close enough to the water. And you’re perfectly welcome to start any kind of political initiative that you’d like while you’re there.” Naoise’s eyes grew. He blinked. His eyes got even bigger.
“You’re saying that I can go … to college. And I can try to change the world… while I’m there.”
“I think I can cover you the cost of tuition, provided you don’t pick something too exorbitant.”
Naoise seemed to be in shock. “You’re willing to do that – for me?”
“Like any one of my nieces or nephews. Of course. – You’d better start calling me Uncle Sistern, though.”
“Al – Alright.”
Sistern smiled. “Alright who?”
“Alright, Uncle Sistern.” He started his research on colleges the next day.

As Sistern went to turn away, off to help Thala orient the andromeda, Naoise asked the one question that had still been bothering him – “Uncle Sistern? How did little Pele get a dinosaur?”
Sistern was rather confused. But he smiled, and shrugged, and let Naoise know that he would figure it out. Maybe.
(A dinosaur?!)

&

Jadyn read Rosco’s note. Blinked. Looked again. Rosco expressed himself decently. But as to the idea of taking off from work. No. He was absolutely ready to come back to work. To immerse himself in work, to keep everything completely under his control as much as possible. He would give the girls the choice whether to go back to school or not, but as for now, he was completely ready to go back to work. He needed to do something. Now, preferably.
But huzza. Whatever had had happened to his life, in the time since he had last seen Kaia – Rosco would still have plenty of work for him to do. Rosco swamped himself in work; it wouldn’t be hard to emulate Rosco’s immersion, to keep this hole ripped into his heart by Kaia’s loss stuffed with the work he should be doing, the work he would be doing.
Walking into the office the next day, Jadyn noted rather sardonically that everyone in the office – even those he never spoke to – were handling him with kid gloves. Rosco, too. The man had new wrinkles, and they showed every time he looked at Jadyn, his brow furrowing and a frown replacing his usually pleasant or cheerful look.
At noon, when Rosco cornered Jadyn, making him bring his lunch into the office, rather than eating in his cubicle, Jadyn resisted more than usual. He had things to do – groceries to buy – flowers to arrange for – relatives to fly in for the memorial. “Rosco, as much as I’d love your company – “ (the implied Go Away was only implied in tone; the voice itself was lovely, modulated well, almost happy) – “I have a lot to do. Despite what you’re about to tell me – that I’ll have all the time in the world to do this, that it’s okay if I don’t think about it right now, that you’re willing to help me out in this mess, I know that if I come into your office, you’re going to try to cheer me up for the hour we have off for lunch. And right now, not much is going to help me out, other than getting Kaia back. Despite the fact that that may never happen. Despite the fact that I’ll probably never see her again.” The raw emotion in his voice showed Rosco there was no way that Jadyn was going to get over this quickly.
“Jadyn. I’ve known you since college. If you don’t want to talk, fine. If you want to talk, I’m here for you.” Jadyn nodded, and retreated to his cubicle. Rosco watched him go, trying to come up with ways that he could stop his good friend from working himself into the ground. Just before the lunch break was up, he wound his way over to Jadyn’s spot, and stuck his head in – “Just be careful, you understand? I don’t think I could ever stand to face Sabella again if you kill yourself through overwork. I won’t stand for it.”
Jadyn’s anger took the form of a tidal wave, and he ripped into his boss, his friend. “I didn’t believe I’d ever find the day when you’d be telling someone not to work hard, Rosco. It’s always been the opposite, remember. Our group wanting to have fun in college, you predicting we’d all flunk out. My marriage, you hoping that – as much as you liked Sabella – that it wouldn’t take too much away from my work. Yes, the research we do here is important, it’s good that we have something to do to try to make the fuel crisis – fuel crises? – better, but don’t you get it? It’s not the most important, Rosco. I’m not some idealist that’s going to sacrifice living this life for working. And despite the beautiful house you’ve got in the Caribbean, and the mansion tucked up in Canada somewhere – Rosco, you’ve got no one to share it with. You’ve got no family, you’ve got no life, you take business with you wherever you go so that your life seems to have more meaning. And you’re daring to criticize me, wanting to drown in work, now? It’s what you’ve done all your life. Work, studying, finding things out, dry, hard, facts, have been the spinoffs of your existence. Don’t tell me not to work too hard unless you’re willing to do the same.”
Rosco hid behind his managerial mask, and though he instantly regretted it, was as nasty as possible: “I apologize for holding you back from your work. I wouldn’t want you to get behind”. He swept out, and held his head high until he sat down in his rolly leather chair and spun himself towards the window. What had he done?

&

Sabella stayed at home, did her best to pick out the favorites of Kaia’s books, the kinds of flowers she best liked, the way she wanted the service to be run. She talked to the pastor at their church, arranged the timing, went in to speak to the principal of the school, so the students who wanted to come to the memorial could. The pastor had been adament that it be on a weekday; Sabella was worried that this would cause Kaia’s better friends, complete nerds but wonderful people, that they couldn’t come for need of studying for three tests in a, b, and c. (Back-to-back periods of work, these were the people who skipped lunch so they could take another class – then pretended that it wasn’t because they wanted to choose a “fluff” class – say art, or astronomy, or graphic design – rather than waste time. They held study parties rather than the drinking parties Tayin held at that age, they had problems relaxing, they talked about art and history rather than boys and clothes.
They wouldn’t deal easily with coming on a school night. The principal was very nice about it – they would not be forced to turn in the work for the next day – but the problem was, that they’d all force themselves to make it up – and lose the sleep otherwise; to try to catch up so they could still get into their top schools. Sabella wasn’t sure it would make it any easier on the kids.

44,197 / 50,000 (88.4%)

to clarify: Jornumgandr is not supposed to have ambiguous gender. I apologize for any confusion this may have caused. He is male. (I think.) From this point on, anyway.

Chapter Sixteen

The Council reconvened once Evert had left. “Jornumgandr? You had no notion of this?”
“I had none. I can only know those words spoken around or by one of us, you know.” And, a little peeved, added, “I am not infalliable, you know.”
“We know.”
“Ukeanos, the currents?”
“Calmer, this time. With the anger he has, I fear it is a well-banked fire of anger, able to be blown to a rage at a moment’s notice. The young one is very troubled. He will not be content without doing something.”
“Can you calm him, Samudra?”
“I have tried. He seems resistant to coercion. It felt like something was protecting him.”
“I, too, had that feeling.” Varuna added. “what shall we do about him?”
Jornumgandr looked down at his younger counterpart. “If we do not want him doing something drastic, we should do something ourselves.”
The Council hushed, as they considered their plans, ideas flying every which way as Ukeanos manipulated the streams of consciousness from each councilor, and Samudra helped to weave them into a coherent whole. Each councilor, in turn, agreed: they would keep Evert with them, teach him what they wanted him to learn: the importance of understanding a good or bad idea. The importance of who to obey. Knowing which ideas fell under proper decorum.

Evert was not pleased with this plan, when the council saw fit to bring it to his attention. His anger flared bright; Samudra had to coax the waters to flow gently around him, to let the waters remove his anger, his free will, only to the point where he was ready to agree with the councilors, not farther. In this remote, rather frightening state, he was interrogated by Varuna, and Jornumgandr absorbed the times, the names, the places, the characters in his own personal drama. There was still some sort of block on his memories of the fish-mers, but everything else, that he knew or ever had known in his life, was sifted and revealed to the light on the water, given to the council for consideration.
The guard on the entrance kept his face smooth, his back rigidly opposed to what was going on inside the chamber. When they closed the internal door, it was frightening for anyone outside: some sort of abuse was happening; no one ever came out of there happy. They looked drained, emotionally and physically, and looked like they hadn’t spent any time in the sun for many, many years. Pale, drawn, unhappy. He almost did not want to see the poor child come out of that inner chamber.
Yet emerge the child did, with a straighter back and longer stride than any the guard had ever seen walk out. Well, usually they called him in to move the bodies… still breathing, almost still thinking… the boy’s being able to walk out by himself spoke a great deal about what sort of kid the council was messing with – and the way the council would want to hold onto him in any and every way possible.

&
Venedig brought Tayin home as soon as he possibly could. It was a little bit awkward, as his aunt didn’t really want to clue him in on how drunk he had been, how drunk Tayin had been, and if anything… irresponsible… had occurred. She seemed to be worried, though it was probably for the poor kid, not him. He hoped. It was embarrassing when his aunt worried for him – he had attempted to show the family that they really didn’t need to worry about him. He kept himself respectable, kept his life as calm and unfrightening as possible. Venet had never recovered from the loss of his first boy: Venedig vowed that he would never make his father worry about what might happen to him.
The Amber alert shadow had criticized his driving to the point where he stopped the jeep in the middle of the still squishy dirt road and climbed in the back with Tayin, letting the annoying one drive the rest of the way back. Sabella greeted her eldest with a kiss the size of texas, and though embarrassed, Tayin (who had been clued in on what was happening – or might not be happening, you know, basic life processes and all that) was perfectly willing to let her mother squeeze her; it was good for Sabella to be able to get some of her anxiety out.

The search for Kaia had been unsuccessful. Amber Alert was a twenty four to fourty eight hour program, and nothing was seen, heard, found, or otherwise noted that could have been someone kidnapping this child. Icarus had passed the island by, grumpily still spitting storms in their general direction, but not malevolently, now. Just a little tinge of spite, at the people who he couldn’t take down for long. He hadn’t been nearly as sever as people had worried, the winds had dropped dramatically in the middle of the night after that first five-hour burst, and though the natives had wondered if it was actually over, or if they were in the calm of the storm, it’s eye, persay, and if Icarus wouldn’t get testy because there were a multiplicity of things sticking it in the eye.
Icarus must have shut his eyes before passing over the island, or else hurricanes were less averse to being poked in the eye than normal people. Perhaps the latter.
Dafne discovered that Kaia’s raft was missing after Icarus had passed them by. It could have, feasibly, been blown away, but Dafne knew that Kaia had been making hurricane predictions (the Amber alert people were very interested in this fact. They tromped up the spiral staircase to Kaia’s tower room, where they sorted through the papers she had left out – formulas that Amber recognized as chemistry, her partner recognized the hurricane notation from a book he had had to memorize a good deal of while in high school. (He had never left the island, but he still remembered a good deal of that book. Hurricane, had been the title. The author was… somebody Smith-Jones, he thought. Funny, how the little things stick with you.) Kaia’s raft though – that was a possibility that the vadiks’ really hadn’t considered. What if – Kaia wasn’t kidnapped, but that she was somehow out on the ocean, when Icarus hit. She wasn’t a strong swimmer, but she could swim. Even the Amber alert people were willing to bet that she had a really high IQ – what sophomore girl had the time, patience, or inclination to puzzle out what those formulas meant, and apply them to her actual life? A special one, that’s for sure (and not “special”, implying the other end of the educational spectrum). And yet – the kidnapping attempt didn’t seem to have any ground to it. They withdrew her name from the radio station, left her picture up in the missing part of their website, and they had nothing else they could do – they let it be.
Sabella was frantic; Jadyn, frozen. Dafne curled back up on Kaia’s bed, breathing in the smell of the waves, of the pool, of the books, and tried not to cry, even when Jadyn and Sabella sat down beside her, and the Amber alert people forced them to understand that Kaia was probably dead. She could turn up. Odder things had happened. But they needed to not hang onto that hope.

Their way home, on the flight delayed for several days to continue searching, was spent, rather than frantically doing homework, planning a memorial service for Kaia. Exhausted, they could barely think when they finally had gotten home. The local newspapers and television stations met them at the exit of the plane, though, and wanted to do a special segment on Kaia. Jadyn was ready to refuse right off – a brusque “No” and shouldering his way past the cameramen and reporters, his glare warding them off as he escorted his daughters and his wife tailed behind.
But one of the reporters – there was real emotion in his voice as he recognized Sabella. “Wait – this was your kid?”
Sabella looked up, tears glimmering. “Yes” she whispered, almost inaudibly, pausing almost imperceptively. Jadyn stilled, not willing to let her out of his sight for even a small period of time; Tayin released her father’s arm and took her mother’s arm.
“Come, mother.” Sheltering Sabella from whoever it was who had actually recognized her, Tayin walked her mother down to the baggage claim (where the reporters followed them; the tension in Jadyn’s neck and back was palpable) and they collected their baggage after an interminable wait. The shuttle to their parking spot was quick, thankfully, and small, so the media couldn’t keep following them.
The ride home was long, and though Jadyn’s eyes stayed dry, there was plenty of snuffling in the back seat – though the girls tried to keep them in – and even Sabella, sitting shotgun, wasn’t dry-eyed. Jadyn did his best, gritting his teeth and blinking, to keep the keep the road clear in his vision on the rainy way home.

&

Rheic still felt she should talk to Thala about her brother’s behavior. He was inexcusable, almost all the time. She didn’t know if he just didn’t understand that, or whether he enjoyed being associated with everyone’s name. She was willing to let him talk, whenever he needed to; but he never seemed (ever) to want to talk. He wanted to be doing something, anything, the more crazed the better, rather than talk. When he was willing to talk – he was frivolous. But how to explain that to someone who was serious 100% of the time, rather than 0% - she had no way how to explain that to Thala, but she was certainly willing to try.
But when Rheic finally found Thala, after the frenzy of the storm, Thala seemed to have yet another younger person, taken under her wing for politeness’ sake… that girl worked too hard.
Thala introduced Kaia, neglecting to mention where she had come from, or who she was. Rheic just took her to be another visitor, like that Naoise (but certainly more polite about not forcing her views on others). She didn’t swim very well, but elegance could always be learned; those people not from here always did tend to move funny.
Ahab joined them nearly as soon as introductions were made; Rheic was amazed to see the tenderness, the respect, he seemed to have for this Kaia. Who was she, what had she done, to get this sort of a response? Whatever it was… Rheic hoped she stayed.
Kaia didn’t look comfortable, but she generally didn’t, when she had to be around Ahab nowadays; Rheic wished she could start some sort of discussion, but didn’t know how, and so didn’t try.
Thala fought down her embarrassment, tried to keep Ahab from being too possessive to the poor andromeda, and attempted to keep the metaphorical conversational ball rolling, asking Ahab his opinion on the places she should show Kaia, what Rheic planned to do with her day, and other inconsequentials. She was so tired; didn’t know if half the things coming out of her mouth made any sort of sense, but hoping they would so that no one would gift her with the funny looks that she so often saw. Yes, this sort of conversation felt forced, like it came out of one of the old-fashioned books Sistern kept up in Roosevelt house, but she wasn’t sure what other kind of conversation would be appropriate – talking about other people, when Kaia had yet to meet almost any of them, seemed insufferably rude.
She commented on how Kaia could better move through the water, and asked Rheic to demonstrate (she moved better herself, but didn’t really want anyone staring at the way she moved; better to critique from a distance); Kaia’s swimming looked a little, but not a lot, less forced after that. Rheic smiled to see Kaia attempting to help the little one, hoping that Kaia wouldn’t get interested in boys too soon. Thala should have somebody to help her out with all the work she chose to take upon herself.
“Mm?” Rheic raised her eyebrows at Thala’s question. She hadn’t been speaking aloud, had she?
“Ah – it’s very nice of you to help out Kaia. But I can see in your eyes that you haven’t been sleeping. How long has it been?” When in doubt, change the subject.
Just the mention of tiredness made Thala yawn. She answered, “five – six? Days, now, I think.”
“Wait just a moment here. You’ve been up for the past six days, and yet you shoo me away from more than a one-night vigil?” Ahab was rather vehemently opposed to this suggestion that she was stronger than he – he had been tired, after that short time.
“You – couldn’t really have helped, had she actually needed something. Sistern or I would have had to take care of it, anyway.” Ahab’s face turned a particular shade of puce. “I’m not meaning to insult your masculinity, or any such tripe. You just haven’t been trained for this.” Rheic spun around the nucleus of their group and grabbed Ahab by the shoulder.
“Calm down, you.”
“No” Sulky, Ahab did look a little calmer.
“Why not?” Kaia and Thala had moved off a little bit, Kaia a little confused; Thala hoping that Rheic could get Ahab to chill.
“Why should I?”
“Because she didn’t mean any harm. Ahab – “ He turned away.
“Forget it. I’ll let you go off and do girly things. But don’t let anything happen to her, you understand.”
“Of course.” As Ahab swam off, and Rheic caught up with the other girls, she just wondered: how had Thala – or possibly that new girl – caused him to get emotional. She could barely remember the last time she had seen him upset (or even color, partially. But puce?) It seemed ridiculously odd.

“Off doing girly things” seemed to include a tour. And more swimming lessons. And if Rheic didn’t know better, she would have thought that Thala was purposefully attempting to avoid the young people.

42,591 / 50,000 (85.2%)

hey... that's a B!! At Emmaus!

Chapter Fifteen

The andromeda did not wake for two days; her feet were healing as well as could be expected for a Drys, she did not seem abnormally hot (as she would, if her body was subconsciously gripping it human state and trying to run up a temperature with her wounds, as opposed to letting it sink down to a typical on-land mer temp.
Sistern was a little nervous at actually making the cuts; it had been a hundred years or so since he attempted this little piece straight out of a horror novel, and even that one was frowned on by the Council’s reactionary view. But the Council couldn’t actually believe that someone would randomly have gills open up on their necks, as theirs had, without some sort of tremendous strain: the knowledge of your city slowly sinking into the sea, and panicking as there’s nothing you can do about it, but heaven granting you a reprieve, might do it, but simply drowning would not. People had drowned ever since the Cataclysm, the Great Deluge; heaven wouldn’t save every one who happened to breathe in water.
Sistern dug through the trunk that he had kept in one of the rooms here for a hundred years, uncorked and sniffed the contents of a ceramic milk jar, and was jolted back to the last time he had been forced to use this. It had a rather evocative, not-particularly good but very refreshing smell. It contained the organelles of fish gills, quite a bit of rum, and a few other ingredients that only the Council knew about. There would be no way to get another bottle, once this was gone. (In the council’s eyes, there should be no reason to even have one now, since the ban outlawed the Op and making the Op successful was its only purpose.)
Thala was standing by, waiting to be of use, as was Naoise – Sistern had sent Ahab off, afraid that the boy’s possessiveness would not let him keep as still as he should, for the help needed. Naoise had been willing to do whatever was asked of him; he admired Sistern’s caretaking of the reef and was astounded at the advances he had created by installing solar panels and other things into the Roosevelt house; Sistern had shown him the bill for electricity, which was almost nonexistent, and Naoise was in awe.
Yes, the councilors had looked at him with those big eyes, in their almost completely sunken faces, those deep-set eyes with the wisdom of ages breaking out, and yet Naoise didn’t feel compelled that anything Sistern was doing was wrong; warranted the council chewing him out. So while he knew that what had been attempted, what they were going to continue to attempt, was kind of illegal, he couldn’t say he really cared. It was exciting, it was science, it was doing good. How could anyone protest?
He was willing, then, to keep the andromeda immobile, keeping her spinal column in line and her body fixed in one position, while Sistern unearthed a small, curved, deadly looking blade from his person, filled the dived down the length of the blade with that pungent liquid, and cut into the sides of the andromeda’s neck: twice on each side. Frankly, Naoise was expecting more blood. Drys’ necks don’t just trickle blood, if you slash them with a blade; they tend to spurt in a rather messy manner. But the blood merely trickled, and the andromeda barely moved at all.
Sistern was satisfied with the job he had done. Guesturing to Thala and Naoise to pick up the andromeda, he slid over to the entrance and shifted, keeping his torso still in the air, so that he could take the andromeda down for the first time in the water.
Whatever the juice was that he coated his blade with, Naoise mused, it works quickly. By the time they got the girl over to the entranceway, she was shifting more than he’d ever seen someone – flick flick flick – the transparent hint of an existence of a tail, legs again. Back and forth.
Sistern took the andromeda, and eased her under the water. Flick – once more – and then she stayed. A young lady of the mer, much like Thala at that moment, she opened her eyes. Blue eyes, like the sea – Sistern approved, and swished her tail as if she had been born to it. Breathing normally, her gill flaps opening and water being expelled out of them, the diffused oxygen racing to her blood, she recognized the arms holding her as male – and yet, no male she had known.
“Easy, girl”
The blue eyes blinked. She was underwater, and yet could understand every word out of his mouth. What had happened? The last thing she could remember: rain and the swirling of clouds. A tinge of worry at the storm…
When she felt the need to swim, to bolt away from this stranger and the fact that she couldn’t remember much, Sistern nodded, and asked Thala to tail her, to do what she could to help the andromeda – mergirl adjust. It was never an easy adjustment, but Thala should understand its importance.
Naoise followed Sistern around, chit-chatting about the evils of global warming as he pestered his mentor.

&

She looked around the swirling, sparkling world. Somehow, life had not looked like this before. But who was she? And before what? She was Kaia. Oh, good, a name. Kaia Vadik. She lived in Ziemia, with her sisters and her parents. She had friends. Faces, names, events floated through her mind, much as she floated in – wait a minute. She was in the water?!? Suspended, with no means of support? WHAT? She didn’t like to swim. What in the world was going on?
She noticed movement, mostly out of her vision, and swirled, sending herself off-balance towards some pile of rocks. A… girl was there. Underwater, holding her hands up in a guesture of peace, of calming. Kaia calmed her racing heart, sensing no threat in the stranger, but threw herself backwards again, when the stranger came farther out from the coral she had been partially hidden behind. The girl had a tail.
Thala saw the shock, the inklings of wonder, in the andromeda’s eyes. “What is your name?” Sistern had told her to start simple, make any and all questions to try to see if the girl had lost any portion of her knowing mind.
“I am Kaia.” The speaker stared long and hard at Thala – the girl’s neck opened up when she spoke, and little bubbles escaped. Fighting the idea that had sprung into her mind, fighting the urge to look down, fighting even her common sense (which was informing her at the top of its – metaphorical – lungs that she couldn’t breathe down here, and why in the world was she so comfortable), Kaia looked down.
Her swimsuit top was there. Her cerulean blue tankini was still there. Or rather, the top was. And she, like the stranger, had a tail.
Thala watched the dawning shock on the andromeda – Kaia, she reminded herself – on Kaia’s face, and wondered what her reaction would be. Over the days Kaia had been recuperating, Sistern took any and all the time he could (usually when Ahab wasn’t around – there had been cases of a successful Op, but the andromeda went into a permanent state of shock when they figured out what had been done to them, and they had deliberately killed themselves – Sistern kept these stories away from Ahab, who was unusually interested in the girl, but told happier tales with successful lives for the andromeda either adopted into a community, or eventually reunited with parents and / or friends.) to explain the differing reactions, the state of shock that was potentially dangerous.
Kaia glared. (Not suicidal, then, Thala noticed happily.) “Who are you. And what have you done to me!?”
“We saved your life. In doing so –“ Thala guestured at Kaia’s new appendage. “there were modifications made.”
“MODIFICATIONS?” Thala shifted, did her best to look a little guilty. “I HAVE A TAIL.”
“Yes. They’re rather useful down here.”
“But –“
“No. You don’t have to live down here. But you’ll always have the option. And you need to understand us, before you go back.”
Kaia’s head whipped up. Thala sighed, the bubbles escaping from her neck fascinating Kaia in spite of the oddity it was – the repulsion she felt. Why would she have to stay here? What were they asking her to do? What would “understanding” entail?
“I apologize for failing at talking, sometimes. We’d appreciate it if you’d take the time to understand what we had to do, to save you, and who we are. And – oh, I’m such an idiot, I never introduced myself.” Thala moved forward and offered the mer version of a handshake – undulating her body down towards the ocean floor, then flipping herself up from a sharp angle, bowing her head and taking Kaia’s hand in hers in one smooth motion. “I am Panthalassa. Everyone calls me Thala. It is an honor to meet you, Kaia.”
Kaia couldn’t really help herself. She was impressed; her anger dimmed. Still a little bit miffed, but realizing that the mermaid (agah. How had she gotten herself into some kind of a fantasy story with mermaids in it?! She didn’t even really like fantasy literature! Scientific facts and history and great works of literature were much more to her taste, thank you very much!) that Thala was attempting to be polite, was being kind in her way – and really didn’t seem much older than Tayin. (More mature, certainly, but not older.) Kaia thought about her options for a few seconds – she could try to get away, but she had no idea where she was, and they might come after her; or she could let them teach whatever it was that they thought was vitally important, and then be sent on her way with love. Staying seemed to be a better option.
“Nonsense. The honor is all mine.” Kaia spoke quietly, in her best british accent (which wasn’t lost on Thala – her eyes crinkled in amusement), and resolved to do her best here as elsewhere, in the hope to go home soon.

It was not until later that Kaia considered what her parents, her siblings, would be going through.

&
Kaia’s parents were, to put it mildly, freaking out. The Amber Alert folks had been to visit twice, taking pictures that had just been developed from a pharmacy on the island; the pictures taken were from Dafne’s camera, Dafne threw what could be politely termed a hissy fit, that she wanted her pictures; the lady who came with them (who’s name, rather oddly, was also Amber), took a look at the teenager, tears streaming down her face, and took Dafne with her to the pharmacy to get doubles right away. Dafne was less prejudiced about parting with these.
Sabella rode along with them: the only child currently in her possession was not going to leave it for any amount of time. Dafne wouldn’t tell her, but she was glad her mom had come along. Amber was nice, but Dafne was taking any and all “don’t trust strangers” advice to the utmost, after the stories she heard Amber and her coworkers trading about what had happened to little kids. It was scary – and good to have someone to lean over an squeeze your hand.
Amber’s coworkers filled Jadyn in on the potential problems they would have in finding Kaia now. The kid Venedig had been cleared, he had a credible alibi for the entire time he was away, in the kid’s older sister, and his relative. Yes, the storm was, for the most part, headed away from the island, and so it was much easier to move around, but Icarus had wiped away any trace of a kidnapper, and so all trails would be obscured. No one would have sailed in that sort of weather (unless they were suicidal, the Amber workers noted in an off-hand manner), a little motorboat could have made it to the next island, but the airport here was being watched and the airports on the other Caribbean islands, also, but to a lesser scale. She could still be on the island.
They also forced Jadyn to consider the idea that she could be dead.

&

Venedig’s aunt had never seen him more distraught than when she had had to inform him that the Amber alert had been given out, and he was the suspected kidnapper. She had been hard – pressed to keep him from grabbing his keys and sprinting out into the still – pouring rain, into the mess of the rainforest to get back and clear his name. it had been a little storm, not very important at all in the scheme of things; only the power out, and the generator fully-stocked with oil, so he could put in a phone call to the requested number.
Needed or not, the Amber Alert people were very thankful for his call. And very suspicious. They showed up that same day in some sort of contraption rigged to drive until it started floating, and then turn into some sort of boat. His aunt and girlfriend’s vouching for him (despite the fact that the girlfriend and he were a little hungover), and their realization of his name, along with the Vadik family’s vouching for his character, went a rather long way towards helping him out of it, but there was now a member of the Amber Alert crew keeping tabs on every movement of Vadik’s.

The newspapers, the televisions (both in the islands and back in Ziemia) started taking the story of the lost, presumed kidnapped, little girl. People back in the Vadik’s hometown – back in Ziemia – back in the girls’ high school, rumors flew.

39,211 / 50,000 (78.4%)

Is this more clear? <3

...and doesn't follow Kaia. I put that off a chapter. *apologetic but not really*

Chapter Fourteen

Icarus worsened as he hit land. The winds picked up, inciting the waves to ever larger crests, and the rain sleeted down. The television told Sabella and Jadyn, curled up in front of it, that Icarus was now a Category 2. They wondered if going home early would be advisable.
Dafne came clattering down the spiral staircase. “Kaia’s not here!”
The couple on the sofa looked at each other – was Dafne just exaggerating again?
“Are you sure, honey? It’s a big house.”
“Of course I’m sure, Mother. I’ve been looking for her for the past half hour – I don’t understand one of my readings, and when she speed-reads through something, she can explain it so much better than the book can – I wanted her to take a look. But I can’t find her.”
“But where else would she be? She didn’t go with Venedig and Tayin, did she?”
“No – but they left me their number. I can call them, and figure out if they knew what she was planning to do today.”

Neither Tayin nor Venedig had heard anything from Kaia. Jadyn put on a rain jacket and shoved the door open against the blustering wind, and went out to walk the beach. Sabella started to search the house from top to bottom; Dafne climbed back up to Kaia’s room, curled up on the little bed up there, and stared out the window, having been forbidden leaving the house, hoping that Kaia would wander in, dripping wet, from a long walk at any moment.
Kaia was not a great walker, though; she wouldn’t go for a long walk alone. But maybe she was just wandering out of the house when Dafne started to look for her? Then she could have only been gone for, say, half an hour, before she got soaked in the rain, and she made do with what shelter she could find? Perhaps.
Dafne sighed, and dragged her (now rather crumpled) homework out again. What did the teacher mean by “analyze the timeless themes found in this work?” Sure, the book was what could be called a classic (definition: possible to read if and only if it’s not required for school, and even then struggling will occur) but timeless themes? Great Expectations had been hard enough to read; now the teacher seriously expected her to have understood what was going on, and be able to coherently say what she thought had gone on? What did they mean as theme? If there was more than one, it wasn’t something having to do with the plot, or was it? Were there themes that depended on the time, as well – so certain themes were timeless, but others weren’t? Was her teacher going to dock points because she had no idea what was going on?
Dafne stole Kaia’s pillow and curled up around it, trying to puzzle out both what she could remember of the story, and what sorts of themes might have been in those bits.
When Jadyn walked back in, having been able to see very little through the rain at the beach – he almost thought he saw figures in the water, playing, but when he waded into the water (getting soaked to the waist when a wave slapped him back) and squinted at the spot, there was nothing there. He knew his daughter, though. Kaia was a smart cookie; there was no way she would go out swimming in a storm like this. She didn’t really even like swimming that much. They had nothing to worry about through means of water.
Sabella had the same amount of luck that Jadyn did. Kaia was not in the house. Consulting, they decided to call out the island cops if she wasn’t home in time for dinner. Kaia loved her food; she never missed a meal, and she always joined the family for them (unless she was caught up in a really interesting part of one of her books, then she might. But the books wouldn’t leave the house when it was raining; she worried too much about borrowing other people’s books to hand them back crinkled and unhappy from a drenching in the rain.)
True, she could just be waiting out the storm at some random person’s house. But wouldn’t the random person have a telephone? And she would be too wary of alarms or dogs, or other fancy-schmancy security measures that rich folk here might use to hide out in someone’s shed or boathouse or cabana, unless the weather got ridiculous.
Then came the dreaded question: what if someone had kidnapped Kaia? They didn’t have oodles of money, but no one who saw them living in this kind of a house would believe that. And would there be a ransom? Or some sort of horrible letter hating on rich people, and would they ever see their daughter again? Sabella had been (relatively) calm until this thought caught her mind; now she freaked.
Jadyn saw it as a possibility, though not as a sure fact, and so he moved to call the local police; the same number they used at home, for police/ fire/ ambulance worked here as well: 911.
The operator heard Jadyn’s case; though he was inclined to wish that these stupid white people coming onto his island would keep track of their children, he issued the orders for the officers to keep their eyes open for a girl, mid-teens, medium height, golden-brown hair, brown eyes, answering to the name of Kaia Vadik. The operator, getting to the questions that were always more difficult, tried to figure out if there was a possibility of a kidnapping; though from her father’s description, the girl was not particularly good-looking or eye-catching: why would a kidnapper go after this child?
He got the list of people Jadyn had met on the island, the places they had gone and those where Kaia might have gone, and when she was last seen. Jadyn was surprised to hear the operator considering Venedig a prime suspect – he knew that Venedig was a good kid! The operator, though, needed no such assurance; obviously Jadyn had been influenced into liking the kid, so he was prejudiced.
Island kids got into trouble pretty often: they got bored, had nothing to do, so harassed the tourists. If one of them was possibly guilty, it was ten to one that he was guilty. The operator got the number and appearance of the kid – and his name, Venedig – funny, that was also the name of old Venet’s kid? He had turned out well, maybe the Caribs were naming their kids after him, now, because he was successful – and his last known location.
The operator thanked Jadyn politely, asked him to call again with any information, and reassured him that they’d start an Amber Alert for his daughter as soon as possible, explaining, of course, that an Amber Alert was an immediate broadcast of the girls’ looks and last known whereabouts, along with the description of her (possible) kidnapper all over the island, asking citizens to help get involved with the search – then leaving Jadyn holding a buzzing receiver in as polite a way as possible.
Dazed, Jadyn hung up the receiver. He pulled himself together in order to answer Sabella’s questions – yes, they were doing everything possible to find Thala, had she heard of an Amber Alert, and for some reason, they thought that Venedig was the kidnapper.

&

Venedig’s aunt would have laughed to hear anyone accusing her nephew of kidnapping at that moment. She hadn’t seen him this drunk since his older half-brother had married off the island. Neaple had been his mentor, his best (and only) friend, and he had bad feelings about his moving off the island to live with the family of his wife, Sable. Venedig had been justified in his fear, and that was why he had gotten drunk that time – Neaple and Sable’s plane had crashed with another plane on their connecting flight in Puerto Rico, and though their lives had been saved, the fire had burned one of Neaple’s arms so badly, and he had kept part of the plane from falling in on their heads with that same arm that it was black and crispy, the hand completely dead. Sable had stayed with him through the hospital visit, but she had thought she was getting a full, handsome husband – not some sort of cripple.
Slowly, she withdrew the love she had promised to give; Neaple had committed suicide. Hence, Venedig was very drunk.

Now, however, he had no such excuse, other than the little lady there seemed to be neither so little as she seemed, nor a lady – she seemed to want him to misbehave, and he seemed to be resisting as much as possible. Though walking in, just to check on something that really didn’t need to be checked on, she did see them rather wrapped around each other. Obviously the girl was no good, used to having her way as quickly as possible with any poor good-looking masculine soul who passed her way.
It was close to 10 pm, too. Time for bed. Venedig’s aunt shushelled the girl out towards one of the guest rooms, ignoring her protestst that the night was “still young”, and took Venedig (tottering, not quite able to stand upright on his own) to the other open guest room, on the second floor rather than the first with the girl, and made him sit down. She took off his shoes, and tucked him into bed. He was asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow.
Tayin wondered if she could, or should, sneak upstairs once the aunt had left. But no, she was a guest in the house, she would behave herself. Just – she had hit the loud stage of being drunk, and she was so awake! She wasn’t sure if she could just go to sleep. A good-night kiss would have been nice, at least. She climbed into the bed fully clothed, leaving her flip-flops on the ground, and didn’t remember falling asleep.

The headache she had in the morning was not to be envied.

&

One of Pele’s starfish had run away. She had not noticed. Khanty did, and giggled about it with Mirovia; Rasa had seen but had to rush off – one of the older children had not come to take his shift, and someone needed to fill in, or someone would drown (again).
Testhys was the first to mention something about her “unusual attire” to Pele. Pele, though, took this as a compliment to her starfishies, and nodded, smiled, said that she liked Testhys’ top as well, and swam off to go play with her friends, spinning in the waves close (but not too close) to shore. They had heard Sistern’s stories about ‘Thippe. No one wanted to land in a tree, no matter how much they’d like to be able to fly.
Wilton, one of Ahab’s posse, made a rather inappropriate comment to the little mermaid; she ignored him, sure that he wouldn’t make a comment in that tone of voice to her – maybe to Khanty, maybe to Rheic, but certainly not to her. She wasn’t sure what he had said, or even (if what she had heard was correct) what in the world he could mean, but she flipped and sped off to where her friends were meeting – and he was too cool, too sure of his own worth, to consider her worth chasing.

&

“The young one – what was his name, Jornumgandr? – who came to pester us about Sistern’s clan.”
“Evert”
“yes. That one. He has returned, and seems angry.”
“Shall I do my best to get him to talk, then?” Heads nodded as Varuna proposed a good solution.
Somehow, she had aged more gracefully than the rest, and though she, like them all, had been around at the fall of Atlantisse, she still kept her form of the beautiful young one she once was. She now, perhaps, looked like someone’s mother, caring and calm. Lean, yes, but not terminally skinny, like Ukeanos’s wasted frame, and she hadn’t put on any excess flubber, as Jornumgandr seemed apt to do. (Though her metabolism increased when she did, so it wasn’t too much extra flubber, but still. It was hot, here. Better to keep as little to carry around as possible.)
The other councilors withdrew into the deeper caves. They would still be able to hear all that went on, but no one in the council chamber would have any reason to suspect their existences. Varuna settled back in her uncomfortable chair, and waited for the angry one to enter.
Evert skimmed past the (mostly ornamental) guard at the entrance to the Council cave – the guard was perturbed: after all, it was his job to announce people and make sure that the council wanted to see them – and into the room. The guard, puffing, spun the young thing around with his trident (effectively tripping him) and asked the lone council member if he should escort the young bilge-rat out.
“No, no. You may leave him here.” Varuna’s musical voice convinced the guard, almost instantly, that he had no place in her chamber, yet thanked him for doing his duty. He bowed, and went out. (Sadly, he found that the acoustics of the channel were forced in some other direction – he could hear no more than the murmer of voices from the door.)
“Young Evert, is it? How do you fare on this glorius day?” For, indeed, the sun around Atlantisse in this time of year was brilliant.
Evert had very rarely had anyone speak to him in that sort of manner. It was courtly, smacked of insincerity, and yet – her voice. It was like the play of light in the water, the blue of the sky after a storm. It made him want to throw his troubles at her feet, to let someone older and more experienced take over his problems, let himself off the hook. He would have to tell her the truth, then. He wasn’t sure if he could.
“Do you remember, how many years ago, there was an experiment to take the shift not just to a half-fish half-Drys form – what we now call the mer form – but to a full fish form?” Varuna did not, but in the darkness behind her, she could almost feel the nodding of Jornumgandr.
Varuna nodded, allowing him to continue.
“They were successful.” Her shocked expression, that he saw then, was the most emotion any living being had seen on one of the councilors’ face (neglecting, of course, the play of feelings that they occasionally let show, to draw out a story or understand someone’s motives). The most real emotion, at least. “But they lost their identity, who they were. There were identifying marks, you see, on the forms they became. Yet sharks are not accepted into society, and with no one looking after them, no one talking to them, no one calling their names, they regressed and became completely the beasts they were.”
Varuna repressed the urge to squeak. But they had never known! No one had ever told them! And they were supposed to be the advisors for the mers! Honestly, some people never told their secrets unless there was some sort of coercion, verbal or otherwise. How come no one had ever told them? She could no longer sit still, but swam around the chamber, picking up momentoes at random and remembering where they had come from. Samudra sent Varuna a ripple of calm, which settled around this unsettling information and returned her to equilibrium – kind of. Varuna knew what he was doing, knew that Samudra had put this on her because she was about to make some sort of outburst – and the young fellow obviously had more startling information – but she still resented his interference. The surge of forgiveness he sent next didn’t really help. She felt overwhelmed in the need to forgive something, but really didn’t want to forgive him. Harumph.
She settled onto the petitioning floor, next to the young one, and asked him to continue his story. Evert went on to explain that the relatives of those who had tried – the sisters, mostly – had vowed to look after the ones who attempted this transformation, for better or worse. This vow had been passed down to their children, and their children’s children – as he was. And yet, when he had been with Sistern’s tribe, his chief hunter (Jornumgandr made a note to herself: he still wouldn’t say Ahab’s name) had killed indiscriminately, whenever he found a shark. True, the shark problems had been worse than usual, but that was because too many of the older sisters and sisters’ daughters and sons forgot to pass it on to the next generation, or thought that it would be possible to bring them back; they let their ancestors go feral.
Jornumgandr nodded, knowing what would come next:
“Ahab killed my great-aunt, the day I left Sistern’s tribe”

37,160 / 50,000 (74.3%)

This is kind of sad... but I find it funny that if you subtract 2% from that, it's what I got on my last math test...

And yes. You get random revelations two chapters in a row. Don't you feel special??

Chapter Thirteen

Sistern brooded. The young ones could enjoy the storm, and indeed they did, exulting in the waves flying up and around in a way they usually would not; swimming to keep up with the waves, then stopping, exerting no energy, and letting the waves push them through the water. His people were always hurt in this sort of a storm – none actually killed yet, thank goodness, but there was always some poor kid who overestimated their own strength and flew face first into the beach. There’re all sorts of stories of mers on other islands, drunk in a storm, getting to taste the sensation of flying.
Why, there was that one poor mergirl, ten or twenty years ago in a really severe storm. What was her name? Oh – that’s right – all the young people called her Thippe, short for… Xanthippe? Yes, that was it. Thippe went swimming along with a huge, full-blown hurricane wave, and didn’t successfully get out of it’s drag before it hit shore. Well… it crested over the shore, and flew several stories above the ground, and dumped the poor kid onto the top of a palm tree. She changed back to get down, of course, but had broken an arm, and ended her flying career by falling down to the ground. She’d since recovered, but she had never gone wave hopping alone, again. Flying seemed to be more trouble than it was worth, so usually nowadays she stayed at home with the small ones who weren’t allowed to go out, letting some incompetent little one play with her long, long hair. Sistern hadn’t seen Xanthippe for quite a while – not since he had helped to set the bones broken in her fall – but Ahab had grown up over there, and brought stories back with him. Thippe was one of the only adults over there who understood the importance of caution; sadly it hadn’t seemed to rub off on Ahab.
Sistern hovered, musing but tense, in his completely underwater cave, hoping that whatever disaster was going to happen, would happen soon; he knew from experience that he would be on constant edge until the storm finally stopped. It wouldn’t stop for a while, though, and usually no one, on any of the islands, was really reckless until a day or two into the storm.
Roosevelt house would be snug for those cooped up there, the emergency generator would keep running until the electricity was hooked back up – there was plenty of gas to keep it running – and Pet would keep the little ones occupied, with games and books and toys and movies, trying to teach them things through playing.
Sistern smiled at the idea of Pet mothering all the little people, like she had never been able to do with her own children; their childlessness appeared less brutal, or would it be more brutal?, on this kind of an occasion. So many children, none of them hers. And yet, she would be able to care for them as if they were hers for the next few days to a week. She probably wouldn’t get much sleep, unless she really tired them all out.
He grimaced. He wouldn’t be getting much sleep, either, as he planned to stay constantly on alert until the storm was over. It wouldn’t be harmful, really, as the older they got the less they needed sleep, but going completely without sleep was generally a less than stellar idea. But necessary, nonetheless.

&

Thala and Ahab had been paired up to be storm buddies. Thala was irate, Ahab amused. “Who made this list? Do you have any idea who made this list?”
“No idea, none at all”
“I hate you”
“Really?”
“Go away.”
“If I wouldn’t get completely skinned alive by Uncle Sistern if I left you out here all alone, his favorite little mer-child all alone, out here in the big wild ocean during a great big storm, I might. But I like my skin.”
Thala glared. This could have been exhilarating, a wonderful experience with someone in the middle of a storm, all the power and beauty of the sky and the air put together – but no. Someone had to go and have the wonderful idea of pairing up the two of them.
Someone else came swimming up – it was that new guy, Naoise. Ahab winced. Why did that guy keep following him? It would be complimentary, say, if the stranger wanted to join his posse, but currently the guy was acting like a creepy stalker. Thala smirked at the irritation on Ahab’s face. If he was uncomfortable, she’d welcome this new guy, even if he was a little obsessive about some things.
“Weren’t you assigned a buddy?” Ahab’s voice betrayed some of his tension, some of his wish to get rid of the stranger.
“He’s welcome to come with us, isn’t he, Ahab?” Thala phrased her question as nicely as possible; she’d like to see him get around this one!
Ahab grinned. So she wanted to play that game, did she? He spun over to her other side, covered her mouth with his and kissed her. “I’m afraid we have a little… personal business to attend to, if you would excuse us?” Thala was too shocked to do anything until Naoise had swum away, his blush spreading across not only his cheeks, but half his torso.
“What were you doing? We have no ‘personal business’. There is no ‘us!’ We were put together to look for humans struggling in the water; that and nothing else, do you understand?” He just laughed.
She willed her face to return to a normal color, instead of the beet red it certainly currently was, and swam off without a glance behind. He followed, entertained by her anger.

They had drifted apart, then Ahab darted off towards a deeper part of the reef. “Hey, wait up, you!” The waves had really started to roll, now, this was no time to start galumphing off, wanting to play with the sharks that hid out down there! She followed reluctantly, but quickly sped up when she saw the stain of crimson rising up on the dark water. How had that fool managed to be bleeding that copiously? He had just gone down!
Drawing closely, quickly, she realized it wasn’t his blood. He was fighting with sharks again – but this time he seemed to be trying to keep them away from whatever was down there, bleeding. Not a shark-on-shark attack, then.
Thala dove down behind Ahab, distracting the shark for a single second – long enough for Ahab to stab a knife down through its brain. No finesse for this one – no style, but it was dead.
She took the bleeding human in her arms, noting that the girl hadn’t yet breathed, but she would suffocate, and soon – if she hadn’t already – without air. She debated internally, for a few precious seconds – take the girl to the surface, or to Sistern? - and chose Sistern, who would know any possible method of saving the girl.
Moving as fast as possible, she took her knife from its sheath and chopped out the extra material in her shirt, winding it around the girl’s slowly bleeding feet, which seemed to have been ravaged by the shark especially violently. Slow blood flow, for Drys, could be disastrous – the body could hve already started to die, the brain just hadn’t gotten the message yet.
Ahab joined Thala, helping her to carry the dying girl to Sistern – leaving twice to take care of the sharks tailing them, in the midst of the storm – and returning to help carry the weight back to the caves.

Sistern did not see them coming because of the silt and sand kicked up by the storm. He finished mending a facial graze – one of Pele’s gang had decided to go bodysurfing on the waves and smacked her face on shore – and was turning to see what the next person in the “fine to wait but we’d really like this to get seen to” line needed him for, when he heard Thala’s cry of his name. The line got out of their way; Ahab was in no mood to wait for people and let them know by the butt end of his knife, if they didn’t move quickly enough.
He saw the body they were carrying; knew that if he didn’t try something drastic, the girl would die. He took over from Thala, asking her to look after the minor injuries – she had been through enough of these storms to know what to do for the easily-injured merfolk. Luckily, their healing times were very fast, especially with some of the acquatic cures Sistern used – the salt water alone was better than leaving wounds out in the air. She nodded and turned to deal with the line; Sistern grabbed supplies and got Ahab to carry the body up into one of the air-caves.
“How long ago did you find her?”
“About 6, 7 minutes.”
“She was alone?”
“Well, the sharks –“
“No – were there other drys with her?”
“She was alone.”
“Are you willing to help me out here? Her brain has gone to sleep, kind of, it’s like she’s died. We need to start that up again – can you track down one of the EE’s and bring it back here, alive?”
“Of course.”
“Fast”
Ahab was gone before Sistern had turned back to his patient. Sistern murmered a prayer – the Op had been outlawed for several hundred years. Yet the girl wouldn’t survive without it – even if they could start her breathing again, her brain wouldn’t be the same. And they were sworn to protect – ah, so much for the Council! They would bother him later, but for now, Sistern was going to save this kid’s life.
He uncapped a vial, let the air out of his lungs, and inhaled; opened the girl’s mouth, tipped her head back, and expelled the air he had just breathed in into her lungs. The vial contained one of the most dangerous gases on earth: it was replete with a sort of bacteria that caused lungs to malfunction when the person’s head was underwater. It would not effect her for now, except that the bacteria weren’t very patient with a person’s alveoli, and forced them to work at double capacity when the person’s head was out of the water. They also helped speed the healing process.
He kept her heart beating – slowly, but effectively – by sharing the efficacy of his own, until Ahab returned.
Ahab was more than a little freaked when he saw Sistern bent over, looking pained. Sistern was one of the strongest men he knew – and certainly the best one. He did not want to see his mentor in pain, as lame or wimpy as that might sound to any of his posse. “Uncle?”
Sistern could smile, and show Ahab what was to be done with the electric eel, suspended in a plastic bag of water. Attaching its tail end to the girl, they scared the eel (dropping it towards the floor worked well; catching it was a little trickier) and lightning zig-zagged over the girl’s chest. She bucked, thrashed, then lay still.
They tried again, and Sistern could detect a heartbeat, but still the girl did not breathe. The bacteria were going to get pretty antsy soon; if they ruptured the alveolic sacks, he wasn’t sure they could be mending. He beant down, and breathed for the girl again – one breath, two, and then she started on her own. Not deeply, or particularly well, but she was breathing.
Sistern hoped to save the other part of the Op until she had recovered sufficiently from her scare – and hopefully trusted him enough to do it. Cutting into a girl’s throat to create gills was not something that someone who didn’t believe in his good intentions was going to do – but her lungs would just quit working, now, when underwater. The next step was necessary, if she was ever to get to the surface alive. Yet – would she stay still? He couldn’t be sure.
Deciding that procrastinating for a single day would help mend her feet, her head; and if she had not woken by that time (for the patients, in older times, never had until they had hit water for the first time after their accident; their eyes would fly open and their memory would be returned, their brain would stop having to worry about basic life functions and they could think again), then he would perform the gill-making, and hopefully she had not already lost so much blood, that he would be able to keep her alive through the surgery. For now, let her rest.
“Ahab – I need to go down to check on Thala, make sure no other disasters are also happening. Will you sit with the andromeda?”
Ahab wondered where the name had come from – had Uncle Sistern done this before? – had others? Why did no one ever speak of such a thing? Sitting her alone with that – andromeda? – was not something he wanted to do. He wanted to swim through the storm, battle sharks, do something exciting. Sitting here would not be exciting; about as far from it as he could get. And it wasn’t as if they got storms here very often.
Yet… if he refused, Sistern would stay here; and Sistern should be helping out those who he could help. “Very well, Uncle.”
“Watch her. If she stops breathing, her heart stops again – you saw what I did?”
“Yes.”
Sistern could see the anger, the anxiety this was causing his nephew. Of course the young one didn’t want to sit here – but he would, and this was reassuring. Sistern felt he owed it to his nephew not to tell him that very few andromedas actually stopped breathing; had another cardiac arrest, after that first breath. The breath of life. It would almost be ironic, if it weren’t so powerful. Any more made than a vial the size that his was would explode, and the bacteria released would do their best to completely gobble up any and all oxygen in their immediate environment – toxic to any who relied upon gills while in the water.
Ahab watched the girl, toying with a piece of writing-coral, scribbling out his anger, his frustration, then wiping it clean again, with nonsensical poetry he had memorized for lack of something better to do. His uncle called out “Thank you”, as he shifted back and jumped down into the entranceway, swimming back to take care of his other patients.

Thala came up to relieve Ahab some hours later. In a foul mood by that time, he fully expected to have missed the brunt of the storm. He didn’t notice her wan appearance, like uncle’s when he had tried to help too many people, until she stumbled, and almost fell on top of the girl, unable to catch herself.
Ahab, released like a cannon from restraining cords, nearly flew to stop Thala from stumbling into the andromeda – who he considered his patient, and felt that it would almost be a sacriledge to give her up, as uninteresting as she was, she was his.
Thala did not pull away as quickly as she usually was from the embrace-like catch Ahab had made, but she did pull away.
“thank you. Sistern says that if you want to leave now, you’re welcome to.”
“and leave you with her? You can’t even stand up! Do you really think that I’d leave you with her?”
Thala grimaced. Sistern had said that Ahab might get possessive. But he had also told her what to do. Staggering slightly and leaning on the furniture as she passed, she knelt on the floor and dug in the supplies that Sistern had brought up. Among them was a concoction that she had only been forced to use a few times in the past, but if she looked as bad as Ahab seemed to think she did – and the ache in her head and back transmitted ‘you idiot, stop living on principle and take the stimulant. You’ll feel better’ – she figured she might as well take it.
A mouthful chewed, swallowed, the insanely fast metabolism of a human going to work – two minutes later, she walked back to the bedside, radiating energy. “Will you leave her with me now?”
“What are you on?”
“C8H10N4O2”
“How long will it last?”
“Depends if I have to take more or not.”
“How long will this bit last?”
“At least six hours. Go, Ahab. She’ll be fine.” He wasn’t sure if he believed her.
“I’ll be back to check on her.”
“Yes, yes.” Thala ignored him until he left the room.

34,169 / 50,000 (68.3%)

Laura, I'm not sure if you're coming back into this or not: but there is your moment of glory.

Hm... the question of the year: will I let Ahab redeem himself, or will he continue to be a stick-in-the-mud? Thoughts?

Chapter Twelve

Icarus flew too high. His father had made him wings, melting candles and putting feathers to a frame, in order that he could fly away from prison over the sea. But he enjoyed the sensation of flight too much, decided he wanted to see how high he could go, and the hot sun melted the wax holding his wings together. He went plummeting down the earth, and the ocean swallowed him.
The Agean, where he supposedly fell, is not the same part of the world as the Caribbean. Not even close, in fact. But Icarus had risen with the evaporated water from the Caribbean, and came beating down towards the island.
He flew quietly and swiftly. The first brushing glance of his touch the island felt was the slight increase in waves, the afternoon rain that happened after the afternoon rain generally did. But rainfall was not that out of the ordinary.
Thala felt the rain, and it woke her up from her drowsy state; but it wasn’t raining hard, so she stayed where she was, watching the drops fall from the clouded sky and land all around her, gradually lulled back to sleep, her sunburn keeping her warm despite the cool rain.
Venedig and Tayin put the cover on the jeep in which they were traversing the rainforest, Venedig smelling a storm a little worse than usual, but not too bad. His humanity seemed to cloud whatever senses he shared with Sistern’s band, or he would have known this to be a storm for which they should all get under cover and away from the sea.
Sabella and Jadyn cut their shopping trip in town short. They had gotten groceries, and Sabella thought that Jadyn purchasing some sort of expensive jewelry for her, as he was wont to do, should be put off for as long as possible. She was worried about the storm.
Dafne woke up when the rain hit her face, and went into the house. Her schoolbooks getting wet would be a bad idea – the books were only on loan from the school, and they were ridiculously expensive. Paying for them, out of her allowance, because she had soaked them would be a bad idea. And… she supposed she should start actually trying to do that homework, instead of trying to turn brown in the sun, like Tayin. She sat down in one of the chairs in the common room, the big open room in the center, so that she could giver herself a study break whenever someone got home.

Icarus’ winds grew, and the sky began to turn a sickly greenish grey color. Dafne had not paid any attention to the wind before, but knew what a pleasant breeze there usually was. She didn’t see anything odd about it until one of the doors flew open and hit the wall. But Dafne supposed that she had just left it open, carelessly, the way father usually yelled at them for doing, and went over to close it. The wind buffeted her face and the door tried to go flying back to smack the wall again, but she wrestled it out of Icarus’ hold, and closed it. Locking it for good measure, she sat down in her peace and quiet again to work on homework. The reading was kind of dull, but the questions weren’t hard, so she hoped she could get it done before Mother and Father got back, and then they could do something. Or she could start one of her beaded-shell creations. She wanted to be making more of those, but it was hard to figure out what and what not ought to be put together – no. Homework first, she chided herself.
Dafne went back to her chair and her books.

&

Icarus tousled Tayin’s hair, releasing the long strands from their confinement. Venedig, as well, had his hair tossed about, but somehow his hair, while also long and messy, looked good. She sighed, and Icarus stole her sigh.
Their visit to the mahogany carver’s little store in the woods had been fruitful, Tayin had picked up a gecko magnet for Dafne and a set of bookends for Kaia; though she wasn’t sure whether to hand them out for birthdays or Christmas. Venedig had helped her to pick them out, and the more she thought about it, the more it seemed that he knew her sisters better than she herself did. Odd, that.
Venedig, squinting at the sky (while keeping the car on the left side of the road like a pro – or perhaps he had never learned to drive, where life wasn’t in the left lane), sounded Tayin out on a proposal.
“This is going to rain for a while. The road between here and your family’s home isn’t too good, but if you like, there’s a place near here that we could weather it out in.”
“Okay. But I haven’t seen anything around for miles!’
“Hardly. There aren’t many miles on the island!”
“But all the roads go in circles – so there might be miles of road, yes?”
“Very well.”
“What sort of place is it?”
He hesitated. “Actually, it’s a bar. But relatives of my father own the place, they won’t mind having us hang around for a while. And they have a phone, so you can call your folks to make sure they don’t worry.”
“Sounds good to me!” He wasn’t sure he liked the look in Tayin’s eye. She wasn’t expecting him to get her alcohol, was she? “My folks will worry. They seem to be perpetual worryworts. I bet you need to call home, too, don’t you?”
“Not really. My father had me move out, though I’m right down the street, and we don’t see each other very often. I think he may still be sore that mom left.” He trailed off, not wanting to tell her his entire life story, and what a sorry one it was, before taking her to a bar. He would be far too prone to drink away life’s sorrows and do something stupid. Like dancing drunk on a table, singing love ballads at the top of his lungs. Actually… Aunt Sophia would probably find that exceedingly entertaining.
Bringing a girl to her bar would be awkward enough. Sophia, though not much older than Venedig in years (Venedig’s father had married his mother at 17, Sophia was 5 at the time, and Venedig was born a year later.), she prided herself of being the queen of innuendoes. She would tease him forever about this. Perhaps he could pretend to be bringing Tayin to visit the hogs? Aunt Sophia would feel proud that he considered what he had, in past, deemed a “kitschy, stupid tourist attraction” with enough notoriety to bring a lady friend to see.

He was right. Aunt Sophia was ever so glad to see them, and made their lives ever so much more interesting. Feeding the pigs (hogs, rather, as pigs implies something cute, pink, and fluffy with a little curly tail, and these things were huge) nonalcoholic beer made Tayin giggle; Aunt Sophia offering them dry clothes, a room (with significant wiggly eyebrows in Venedig’s direction), and all that they could drink for free made Venedig wince. Use of the phone was granted, and used, Tayin caught her parents just coming in to the house. They were very glad to hear from her, and were glad that they had found shelter.
Tayin took Aunt Sophia up on her offer of a drink. Or two. Venedig sighed, and joined her. He knew this was a big mistake. Any time he drank here, Sophia did her best to get him ridiculously drunk. He had to drive home, though, so perhaps not more than one – and having it forced on him, he suddenly realized he had no idea which number of drink he was on. (Usually he knew that if he couldn’t keep it straight in his head, he needed to stop. Now. The alcohol wasn’t cheap on the island, though the tourists seemed to think it was, and drinking too much made him groggy, anyway).
When he asked Sophia to put some music on, she shook her head, put on one of the cds her nephew had given her, and left the room. There were no other people around. Why not leave the two alone?

&

The reef was ready. It would withstand whatever Icarus threw at it, with no more damage than there was to be seen on a reef that hadn’t been hollowed out for living quarters. Nothing would collapse, through any sort of storm that anyone for the past hundred years or so had livd through. The youngest were safely either in Roosevelt house or inside the reef. Adolescents and adults drifted with the storm – with any sort of warning, the scuba crews wouldn’t be down, and the snorklers wouldn’t have anything to see with the turbulence that was starting.
Ahab and Rheic, lip-locked, hung suspended over the dropoff. Icarus, or Ishmael, or any other sort of name the storm had been given, would not disturb them other than to give them a wild ride through the waves today.
Thala sat in her workroom, alone, using the paper she had used for drawings as a tissue as she realized how much she was disliking herself. And yet – she felt anger pop up, too, as sharp and bright as it had been when she had fist ordered Tethys out of the room. The storm today would be a good one. Thala welcomed Icarus, hoping to ride out her anger and frustration on the storm.
Khanty, Pele, and their mother huddled in one of the underwater caves. Pele’s exualtation had worn off into lethargy, and she was worried about the little starfishies that she had sent off to get their dinner, who had never come back.
Rasa held her girls close, getting them to promise not to get into any trouble until she came back to get them, after the storm was done. The girls nodded. Khanty snuck out soon after her mother left, probably after some little boy she liked. Pele’s friends came to visit – this habit of sneaking around was old, and the parents were accustomed to it, though they mock-scolded their children every time they caught them at it.

Sistern, with Iapetus beside him, addressed the adults who had just come out of their family caves. “You know as well as I that these sorts of storms can be dangerous. We’re prepared for nearly everything here. I need people to go and look for Drys in trouble – no, I know, they’re probably smart enough not to stray into the water during a storm like this. But just like us, they have their less intelligent people.” He waited for the snicker to die down. “That being said, if you find anyone – anyone at all – who’s hurt, take them to Roosevelt place. Pet will be up there with the little ones who can listen, and either Pet will get them patched up or she’ll get them the help they need.
I’m going to be here, if any of you, any of your children, are hurt, you know where to find me. Go with hope.”
“And with hope may you go” murmered the crowd.
Sistern gave Pet a slow kiss before sending her up to the surface. There was always the possibility of someone being injured, and though it was more likely for him, he wanted her to know that he loved her.
The whistles of the crowd returned him to reality – and Pet swam away, up to the surface.

&

Jadyn and Sabella were glad to get Tayin’s phone call. Getting to meet Venedig’s family! How sweet. And if the roads weren’t any good, it was better that they stay there than try to come back through this rain. Though hopefully the young people wouldn’t be stuck there for too long, and they wouldn’t have a problem getting back, when the rain did stop! Venedig had assured them, though, that it didn’t look to be a bad storm, and the roads dried out pretty soon after a storm. Jadyn, who had never let Tayin sleep over when the only person she knew in the house was male – he had noticed how Tayin buddied up to her boyfriend’s sisters, probably just for an excuse, but even so – he wasn’t worried about Venedig taking advantage of his daughter.
Of course, no one had told Jadyn that his family owned a bar, out in the middle of nowhere, where people came for fun to feed nonalcoholic beer to hogs.

Dafne was more than happy to see them come home, and doubly happy that it gave her an excuse to take a study break. All that reading was really annoying. Sure, the story was good, but there was so much of it, and it dragged precisely because she had to read it for school, rather than have any ability to pick or choose for herself which books to read. The style was wordy, and long – she glared in disgust at Great Expectations. Expectations of what? The ending? That would certainly be a great thing to finally come about!
Kaia’s absense was noted, but no one worried too much. For right now, it was just a rainstorm. She was either up in her room curled up with a book, or would be coming in the back door from the ocean any second now, whining about how the rain had woken her up. She was smart enough to not stay out if the storm started to get ugly, though it seemed just like one of the island storms – there and gone again in fifteen or twenty minutes, almost not worth coming back to the house for. Kaia was a smart kid, she would figure out when she should come in. And she was probably upstairs in her little tower, anyway; and had been rather particular about who came in to check on her. The books were a little over her head, but she was enjoying puzzling them out so much, and getting to ask intelligent questions of Venedig – whenever someone climbed her spiral staircase, there was a creak as their foot hit the fourth or fifth step, and she couldn’t continue to concentrate on her book, when she knew that someone was coming. Better to just leave her up there, she’d come back when she got hungry. (Which would happen soon, as she loved food. She had taken the idea of creepy island bugs in her room to heart, and left all the food downstairs, so if the bugs came out after it, they’d be down there and not up in her room.)

&

Kaia woke abruptly, to pain, and just as quickly felt herself start to slide back down into unconsciousness – though not caused by sleep, this time. As the rain had continued, her raft had continued to drift down the beach, slowly drifting out of the realm of her own knowledge. The beach’s arc, like a rounded letter c in its curve, had rocky outcrops at both ends. Once at one of these edges, the white sand faded and the brown rocks, with their attached whelks of all shapes and sizes, gleamed in the light with the water constantly splashing up and around them. It was to one of these outcroppings that Kaia’s raft took her – not to the outcropping below the Roosevelt house, but the one on the opposite side. The winds brought with the rain had whipped up the waves, so their undertow was stronger than usual, and the red raft floated closer and closer to shore with each of the lapping of the waves. Coming in to shore, the raft had spun so Kaia’s head was lined up perfectly with the unworn edges of these rocks – and the next surge slammed her into them.

Her world went black.

Sliding off the raft, Kaia’s body slipped into the water. The water did not revive her, and the blood spilling from her hair left but a transient marker of where she had gone under.

32,134 / 50,000 (64.3%)

*is a horrible person*

Laura: you get to fly in the next chapter. Your name is Xanthippe, by the way. "golden horsie" seemed appropriate.

...though it does deal with the problems of mermaid clothing, and what could and doesn't feasibly work...

Chapter Eleven

Icarus had made it to a Category 1 hurricane status. The news claimed that it was headed more towards the Dominican Republic, it might miss the island completely, now. Sabella couldn’t help worrying: how often was it that weathermen were wrong? Nearly half. And did they actually know what they were doing the other half?
And yet, it wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been. A category one hurricane was classified as minimal, after all. Which meant some damage to whatever was in its way, some damage to the shrubbery on that island, etc.
Kaia cheerfully quoted the history of the island with respect to hurricanes; it was part of the huge stack of books that Venedig had added to, each time he came by. Sometimes the books seemed to be the excuse for the visit “I promised Kaia I’d bring this by”, sometimes he didn’t seem to need an excuse. Though a little anxious about whether Venedig would be able to make a living if he continued to visit all the time, and never seemed to go out in his own boat, Sabella thought he was just so much nicer than any of the other boys Tayin had ever been interested in. Usually they had all kinds of odd piercings, strutted around (if they even came in) and attempted not to acknowledge the parents. For some reason, Tayin found this sort of behavior “sexy”. She had not said that she thought Venedig fit that category; but then again, Sabella wasn’t sure how Tayin would classify a “gentleman-like manner” in a boy she thought was attractive. The words probably weren’t even in her vocabulary.
Odd, how the children could turn out so different. Tayin seemed to need some male to hang on to, to consider herself worthwhile. Her frequent breakups sparked periods of wearing dark colors to school – not just black, but deep, rich purple, and a velvety midnight blue and a crimson red – and though these set off her skin tone nicely, they generally precluded an emotional breakdown at home. And that was never pleasant – usually ending with an “I hate you all” and stomping off to her room – and she never really apologized. She would just come to breakfast some morning, wearing a characteristic “dressed to kill” shirt, a teeny tiny miniskirt, and not much else. She would be civil, then.
Dafne was happy in her relationships with pretty much everyone. She liked the sort of quiet boy who liked her; her breakups were as quiet as the rest of her relationships. She had had infatuations for boys with good singing voices, but nothing had seriously touched her heart so far. She liked school, liked being able to figure things out, though hated to feel dumb; hated it when a math or chemistry or physics problem eluded her.
And Kaia was the inquisitive one. She would help Dafne with her homework, screwing up her face to try to remember something she had learned two years ago, and then work it out on her own, making Dafne understand it by prodding her in the right direction, one insightful question after the other. Sabella smiled, thinking of Kaia’s frenzied searches on the internet for whatever had caught her fancy at the moment: whale hunting (which she then condemned to everyone who would listen to her for more than 60 seconds for the next week), fairies, the moon, volcanoes. Now she was on a tangent about tropical storms. She didn’t seem to see boys as things to go after, as Tayin did, or people who would evidently come to her, as Dafne did. She was content, alone.
Sabella just hoped she wouldn’t be alone forever.

&

Sistern was surprised when Naoise presented himself, handing the chunk of brain coral (with the particular shape and size that meant it had been convinced to grow that way by the council) over and expecting that to explain everything.
It did explain some things: the kid’s name was Naoise, he was taking a journey through all of the clans, he wished to stay for a few days with Sistern’s clan, to see if he might someday find a place there.
Something didn’t seem right, though. If the council were trying to use the kid, though, he had Sistern’s pity. He acquiesced to Naoise’s request, and took the kid around to introduce him to the other young people. Naoise was perhaps Ahab’s age, maybe a little younger. It was hard to tell with adolescents – and harder still to tell when the adolescents were male. At least when they were female, there were obvious signs. The girl’s first shark-dance, for example. And how the young ones got very preoccupied about finding tops that fit.
He left Naoise trying to explain the theory of global warming to a bewildered Mirovia. She couldn’t see any gossip worth getting out of him – though he had seen the council, no one she knew (or who her friends would be interested in hearing about) was there at this time of year – and so she eventually took him on a tour of their under-reef dwellings.
Mirovia showed him the beauty of the place, and chattered about its history, glad she could show off, even if she hadn’t been born when it had been built. “The caves here had been carefully hollowed out over many, many years. The structures of the polyps now living had to not be shifted, and the native divers who would occasionally come needed to have no idea what was going on. The Caribs, who had been the only ones there at this time, though, she had been told, were very superstitious. And Sistern hadn’t yet taken over from… whoever that other guy had been, so there was some damage to the reef here and over there, but - ” Naoise was happy to let her rattle on – she was a pretty little thing – though most of the other clans he had visited had much the same story about their dwellings.
He was impressed at how much room they had, though, and at the excellent quality of the air in the air-chambers. The architecture was odd, but pleasing, none of this attempting to build the Coliseum, underwater, and to scale stupidity that he had seen: just using what they were given and turning it into home.
Mirovia wanted to take him into the small council chamber, where Sistern held an informal court when he was pressured into holding any court at all, but some of the brawnier of Ahab’s posse were helping to set up braces for the ceiling, to help strengthen the reef.
“Are we to have a storm, then?”
“They only put those up when we are. Though I thought that the television said – have you watched a television before? They’re a marvelous invention, we have one up at Rosevelt house – the television said that it was going to miss us. I wonder why sistern’s so worried? Did he seem worried to you?”
Naoise couldn’t help but smiling, though rather grimly. Pretty she was, but some people needed to learn when they shouldn’t talk. Speaking slower than usual, so he wouldn’t have to hear her voice for a longer time, he answered “No, I have never watched a television. And as I have just met Sistern – does he really go by just his name, no title? He is the lord of the clan, I’m sure, but there’s no addendum you add to his name? – I would have no idea whether he was worried or not.”
“Okay, okay, fine. Yes, Sistern’s very neglectful of tradition. Khanty says he should be more traditional, but some of the tuff we get to do is fun. He lets us watch the television, so long as someone makes notes on what’s happening in the world, and he loves the doctor shows, so we get to watch those as a big group. He almost decided to try out for one of those – he’s a wonderful doctor – but he worried that someone would make him use an actual thermometer, or that he’d forget that his patient isn’t one of us, and treat him for fever when he had a normal temperature. That, and he doesn’t always use normal medicine. Maybe you’ll join us tonight?”
“I would like that.”
“It’s settled, then! Come on” – dragging his arm – we’re going to meet all of my friends, and then I’ll introduce you to Ahab and his posse, and then – “
Naoise tuned out the rest of her ramblings. Ahab. The name that the council had told him to be very wary of, but to collect any and all information that he could about. He would do his best to remember all he could about this Ahab – there was talk that the councilors could “help” you to remember, if you forgot something that they wanted to know. The rumors said such remembrances weren’t pleasant.

&

The storm wouldn’t come (if it came at all) for at least two days. Kaia had made the calculations, for a category one, two, and three hurricane, with the respective air-sped velocities, and they had at least that long to play in the sun. She took her raft out to the beach, wondering if she should tell someone, then shrugging off the idea – Tayin and Venedig were busy with each other, probably nowhere near the house, Dafne was asleep in one of the lounge chairs by the pool – obviously her reading for school had been particularly diverting (though at least she was getting something done for school – Kaia was pretty certain Tayin hadn’t picked up a book since they had gotten here, if not to coo over how nice Venedig was for bringing them for Kaia) – so diverting, in fact, that Dafne fell asleep. Mother and father had gone into town. No biggie, she thought, wandering down to the beach. I’ve done this plenty of times before.
The beds of shells off to the right held her interest for about ten minutes. Dafne seemed to have done a pretty good job at clearing out this portion, she didn’t really see anything and her back started to hurt. The sun on her shoulders and hot sand on her feet convinced Kaia that it was time – and past – to get in the water.
She walked in, amazed at how little she thought about what could possibly be underneath her feet anymore, and at the way the water pushing at her legs didn’t really bother her anymore. When it got too deep for her to stand, and the water buoyed her up and down as the waves flew by, she climbed onto the raft, staring at the blue sky above. The afternoon rain had come already, the sky was clear and blue and bright.
Before she knew it, Kaia had fallen asleep. (Perhaps staying up until all hours of the night to read Venedig’s books had taken a toll, who knows?)

&

Most of the mers were working on one thing or another on the reef; out of sight but trying to keep everything they’d worked hard to create alive and flourishing, despite the bad winds, high waves, messing up of normal ocean currents, etc, etc. Some of the very young were being completely absurd, though, hyper about getting to ride out their first storm, and thus more ridiculous than normal. Pele had decided that she was going to act like one of those mermaids from the bad movies that Sistern let them watch every so often, and attempted to stick clam shells to her chest, rather than wear a shirt. This was less than successful.
It also wasn’t too kind to the clams, and Rasa came over to scold her for damaging any of the life on the reef, while everyone else was attempting to save it. Chastened, Pele repaired the joint she had snapped when separating the clamshells; she put the clam back into the water and whispered an apology after it.
She couldn’t resist pulling two starfish off the reef, though, and trying those instead. They tickled, a bit, but they certainly stayed on. And they were fun to play with. Rheic saw Pele messing around with the starfish, and supposed that the little kid would stop when she realized where a starfish had it’s mouth. And the fact that the starfish used it’s mouth both as a mouth and an anus. Recognizing that had certainly been Rheic’s reason for stopping her playing with the cool little guys. The suckers were a little odd, to be sure, but it wasn’t as if they were uncomfortable.
But someone else would clue Pele in. Eventually the little one would figure it out, and hopefully before the starfish tried to eat her. Rheic shrugged as she swam on – it wasn’t her problem, and she had someone to meet.
Pele found her group of friends, and they followed suit with the starfish. Obviously if Khanty’s sister thought it was a good idea, it would be for them as well

30,366 / 50,000 (60.7%)

Meet Pele. aka Jen, the next-door neighbor. She actually acts like that. *facepalm*
(if you people would like distinct cameos, you must tell me if you'd like to be mer or drys)

...I just made more references to Darcy... and made a blatant POTC reference. *runs away* (not here, btw...)

Chapter Ten

Sistern appeared before the council the next day. He was greeted with a hospitable “You’re late.”
But Ukeanos was often cranky. Sistern generally was one of his favorites – he could do something about the councilor’s achy joints – but evidently Ukeanos had been having a rather bad day.
“Yes, yes. May I inquire after your arthritis, sir?”
“Bad as it usually is”
“I apologize. If that was what my summons here was for, I am sorry indeed for my neglect of duty.”
“You know as well as we do that Ukeanos’ back, though a suitable excuse, would not be a suitable reason for us dragging you from your precious Iapetus, indisposed as she has been” Sistern’s gaze narrowed from the blank face of indifference into suspicion. Were they watching him, now? And why would they find that necessary? Generally bad things came to those who angered the council. Several of his acquaintances had met… untimely ends… when they were purported to have bad practices by the council. And though that wasn’t quite fair, or right, in any sense of the word, he could understand the political expediency that would force them to take such a drastic plan into consideration. But they weren’t planning to take him out of the picture, were they?
He wouldn’t let them, or at least not without a fight. But perhaps that was not their goal, perhaps they had some actual reason for calling him here.
The council decided to use that drivel they had had to listen to yesterday as an excuse. Evidently there were too many tourists, too many Drys, on and near the water close to Sistern. They were dirtying it, polluting it, and he was responsible for keeping it clear. Could he fufill this task?
“Indeed, I can, and I shall start as soon as I return.”
They had nothing to hold him with for a longer time. Varuna saw nothing that wouldh have showed him to be lying. They would further their inquiries about Ahab at a later date, he seemed oddly reluctant to be questioned today. Was he involved in some plot? Perhaps they would have him watched, as well as the boy.
After Sistern had left, the council chose one of their more trusted advisors – young, he could feasibly be on a tour of the surrounding sea – to go to check on the situation with Sistern’s clan. Information on Sistern and Ahab should be summarily forthcoming.

&

Thala and Pet wandered down to the beach, soaking up the rays of the sun in their (comparatively) skimpy clothes; thala leaning on Pet’s arm more and more as they walked down the hill. But by the time they finally got to the beach (despite the house’s remarkable view over the ocean, getting down to the ocean was an annoying hassle), Pet was keeping Thala upright as Thala stumbled along, her arm over Pet’s shoulder the only thing keeping her from faceplanting into the sand.
The sand, hot and burning under their toes in its brilliant whiteness, made the water at the bottom seem even that much more beckoning. The blue-green beauty of the shallow water, as it rolled towards shore in little waves, was stunning, and inspired the girls to stumble a little faster towards the water.
The water was cool, but floating on top, Thala was still warmed by the sun. The light breeze was comfortable, the touch of an old friend, and the ocean’s embrace let her feel secure in where she was, for once. This is where she belonged, despite not knowing exactly where this was.
“Pet, where are we, exactly?”
“You don’t remember?”
“It’s kind of embarrassing, but no”
“Well. That’s annoying.” But attempting to make light of it, she explained where they were, on the beach down the hill from Roosevelt house – where they had just left – and that she had managed to catch – Sistern had used the word steal – the fever that he and she had had in the hospital.
The recital confused Thala, but she nodded, and smiled, and hoped her memory would come back quickly. This was annoying, and actually a little mortifying. She shifted, more comfortable with a tail in the water, and hung, suspended, right under the surface, breathing the ocean water easily and embracing the feel of the water moving through her gills. Pet moved to stop her, but figured that this might be an easier way of rehydrating Thala than anything else she could come up with.

This was a good plan, until Pet saw tourists walking down the beach. Not good. Not good at all. Pet dove underneath, shifted as quickly as possible, so she could talk underwater, yelled for Thala to shift, then popped back up, looking just like a Drys and dripping. Thala popped up a moment later, looking disgruntled.
“What’s going on?”
“Look”
“Oh. Tourists?” Thala wondered where that word had popped into her vocabulary from, and whether she’d remember other such odd words. “Tourist” meant someone who would "travel to and stay in places outside their usual environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure, business and other purposes not related to the exercise of an activity remunerated from within the place visited". How nice. But how utterly odd that she could remember something so inconsequential.
“Probably. None of the natives really think this beach is safe. Something about its perfection frightens them. They’ll come here when they have to – if the whelk population is diminished everywhere else, or there’s a shortage of fruit on the other beaches – which only happens because of some people’s overharvesting – then they’ll stop by, but usually not just to wander around. Or to swim.”
“and they are here to swim?”
“they’re certainly not here to find whelks or fruit. No baskets, see?”
“do we have to talk to them?”
“honey, you’re reminding me of when you were maybe six, seven years old, and you were frightened to talk to anyone. Act your age, alright? They don’t live here, we do, we can welcome them. Just no changing until they’ve gone away.” Pet stopped treading water and swam the two feet necessary to bring her within walking distance of shore. “Come on, Thala.”

Venedig and Tayin were astonished to see someone else on the beach. Venedig, for he knew that most people thought the beach was haunted or cursed or some such absurdity; Tayin because she hadn’t seen anyone else there, and so no one else could be there. Venedig wasn’t afraid of the odd superstition – his father had met his mother on this beach, when he had come for one of the parties that the rich people owning these huge houses gave every so often – and so this beach, the Strahnd, had always been an amazingly good place for him, rather than a frightening one.
“Have you seen anyone else on the beach before?”
“No, not really. I thought everyone, like, wasn’t here for the summer or something. Does it get very hot here in the summer?”
“Well, our summer is mostly over; though it does get warmer than it is now; the trade winds keep up cool most of the time.” Venedig was more than happy to explain any question Tayin had. She was beautiful, and even mildly pretty girls generally didn’t take an interest in him. He could never really tell why. Her attention, despite its sometimes vacant intelligence, was flattering, and she was a nice girl, despite not really having a very intelligent idea of life, the universe, or anything. “Usually the people who own the houses – like the one your family is – renting? – come down in the winter, where the weather by them is cold, and they are sick of something called snow.”
“Oh, we’re not renting it. The people who own the house are letting us use it. You see, my dad’s boss is the owner of the house, and there was some thing that he needed my dad to do during our family vacation time – we take a vacation as a family every year, keeping ourselves together and enjoying each other’s company and all that – and because Mr. Pang – though all the family calls him Rosco, isn’t that odd? - Mr. Pang let us use the house to make up for making father do some thing over our vacation time, because we schedule the time like a year in advance and dad gives his notice to Rosco and everyone that he’ll be unavailable, but still, this thing came up and I guess that it was a big deal for Rosco, because otherwise he wouldn’t of let us push this vacation off. Though we would’ve never come down here if not for that, and then I’d’ve never met you.” She gazed up at him adoringly; he was astounded at his good luck.
“I must say, that I wish your vacation is so uprooted in future years as well. I hope you’re able to come back.”
She was cut off from a response by the arrival of the strangers. Introductions were held, all exclaimed at the uniqueness of the names of the others (generally, Venedig was introduced to a Robert, or Tayin to a Pansy; never before had everyone in such a group had a name out of the ordinary idea of what a proper name was).
Thala did not speak much; Pet carried the conversation forward. Where were they staying, what had they done, had they met any of the other neighbors, etc. Tayin was encouraged to chatter; she raved about Venedig’s boat, the snorkeling, the house, the beach, and managed to avoid one of her favorite topics – the relative minority of attractive young males. Venedig smiled in appreciation of her praise, but found his eyes being drawn from his chattering companion to the young lady introduced as Thala, who looked a little dazed, but stared off into the distance, watching something only she could see.
The brown pelicans were feeding again, Thala mused. It was traveling, probably with a herring, back to its nest; she hoped its young were not in danger from that DDT poison. Called back to reality by Pet’s call for her opinion, she dragged her gaze back from the horizon. “Umm?”
“you weren’t paying attention at all, were you?” Pet mock-scolded. She worried about that girl. Sometimes you just couldn’t be sure if she was going to fall over, back into the water that washed around their feet, or fall into some sort of meditative state. She was the most impossible thing alive with a fever. Not that she’d had many before, and… truth be told, she had been remarkably well-behaved through them, but this was starting to get ridiculous. She liked small talk no better than anyone else, especially when it was with a couple of Drys. And the inanity of the topic! If only there was something that the whole group could join in, something that everyone could enjoy. “Thala, what did you see?”
“There was a pelican, with a herring, out there. I was wondering if it had chicks, and if they were still having problems with DDT all the way out here.” Pet smiled wryly. Well, there was an intellectual topic. But was Thala remembering everything she had missed yet? Or not? Oh, well, better not to ask.
Venedig jumped into the topic with glee. “But DDT’s been banned in the US since the 80s – and though we’re not officially the US, the USVI still aren’t allowed to use it. Some of the other islands around here do, admittedly, but they know that if something happens to the environment because of it, it’s going to be their fault, there’d be a giant outrage, and their tourism profits would drop like stones.”
“But people still use it. Have there been human cases of egg-thinning?” Pet blinked. Was Thala trying to imply that humans grew from eggs?
“Are you sure you’re alright in the sun, dear? You were dreadfully tired from last night.”
“Mmm. Perfectly fine. But what do you think, Pet?” Pet, who had been introducted as Iapetus, which was a much better mouthful for non-relations to get around, winced, but dealt with the inevitable nicknaming – at least it was by one she loved – and continued to try to reassure herself of Thala’s state of mind.
“I really don’t think we should imply that we’re the same as birds, Thala. We don’t hatch from eggs, it’s not quite the same thing.”
“Ah. Not quite. But how close are we?”
“I have no idea.”
“I would say we had similar roots, once upon a time.” Venedig’s intrusion kept the conversational ball rolling, at least.
“You’re a proponent of evolution, then?”
“Through and through.”
“Creationists” Thala and Pet spoke in unison.
“Why does it matter where we’ve come from, when we’ve only got now to live?” Though an intelligent comment from Tayin, it effectively ended the subject.
“Did you come down to swim?” Thala stepped further into the water, tensed with the idea of not changing in front of these Drys.
“We’re actually just down for a walk. Come visit sometimes?” Tayin looped Venedig’s arm through her own, and they continued down the beach. Their backs in the late afternoon sun made Pet pretty certain that they could change and swim back home; when Tayin glanced behind, the two pretty girls were gone. Tayin was glad; Venedig had seemed a little too interested in the younger one.

Thala and Pet surfaced on the other side of the hill. “You know, I promised Sistern that I’d keep you quiet and calm until he got back. I think an “in bed” was implied. Do you think you can sleep more?” Thala’s yawn was a good enough answer. “Very well. Back to a Drys form, then off to bed with you, little one.”
Thala, wanting to protest that she wasn’t little, didn’t remember climbing the hill or falling asleep.

Waking again, she saw Sistern at the window, humming her lullabye. Oddly enough in this case, it woke her up; she felt refreshed and fully awake, though really parched. As her memories drifted back, she wondered what, exactly, she had been thinking to go after Ahab like that. In hindsight? A really bad idea.
“Sistern, why am I such an idiot?”
“You’re not an idiot, Thala. You may be a silly goose, and expect the world to run according to your rules of decency, but you’re certainly not an idiot.”
“You heard, then? About Ahab.”
“He was loath to tell the story; Mirovia was not.”
“So everyone knows, then?”
“Close enough” She winced. “there’s supposed to be a storm coming in, though, the council room was abuzz with it while I was down there. May hit the island, will probably harm our reef. So I can promise you that you won’t be the prime object of gossip for long.”

&

Sabella was alarmed to see on the news that night that September was expected to be a hurrican month in the Caribbean, and that this year would be no exception. A tropical storm was forming; the next official hurricane they’d get would be called Icarus. The man who flew too high, too near the sun. Interesting, but not a reassuring thought.
The tropical storms, the hurricanes, didn’t often hit the island at all; they usually went around one way or the other. When they did hit, it was usually the other side of the island; the storms hitting were part of the reason that the big ocean liners didn’t put in to Wilhelmstead very often; too often the town was ripped apart by storms.
Every so often, the storms would hit this side of the island, but never had any of the storms hit the Strand. Sabella wasn’t sure if that was comforting, or if the laws of probability would make it certain that their beach, their Strahnd, would be, obviously, the next thing hit.
Rosco had reassured them that they would be safe in his house. Would this sort of storm negate that? Or would they be okay? Would it be possible for them to stay here? Or would they have to leave early?
“Sabella?”
“Hm?” She had thought Jadyn was asleep. He had certainly retreated to that boneless, calm state, where he didn’t move at all, until she was certain that he had stopped breathing, worrying for moments then realizing that he only breathed very softly.
“Don’t freak out about the storm. Honestly, we’re safe on this half of the island. It’ll be okay, and we know that we can get out of here whenever we need to, if you think we need to. But I don’t think that we need to cut the vacation short. We’ve only been here for six days – we’ve got three more to go. The storm won’t even get here before we need to leave.” He slid an arm around her; she scooted closer to him on the couch, and leaned her head on his shoulder. “It’ll be okay, Sabella. Just enjoy the last couple of days of our vacation.”

&

Tethys pulled herself up from the pool in the middle of Thala’s workroom. Thala had begun to attack the messy piles of material, setting everything in order, putting the projects that were started on a pile – on the top, things that were almost done, that only needed a little bit of work, and then as the pile went deeper, the pieces were only recognizable as future clothes by Thala – she knew what each piece would and should look like, and who it would look well on. She generally stayed away from frippery; people who liked that sort of thing could add it for themselves – but every so often would add a beaded fringe or a design to a top; lace or ribbon to one of the tiny skirts favored currently by the girls.
Thala didn’t recognize Tethys’ presence until the older girls spoke up “may I help, in any way?”
Why was she here? Thala’s memory had just come pouring back, and she was not in the mood to be charitable to Tethys, her brother, or anyone associated with them. Her brother was the cause of so many problems, and yet she had the gall to invade Thala’s only private space on the whole of this island? Thala did not want to think about Tethys’ brother. At all. Forever, if possible. His sister ruined that plan. “Go away, please”
“That’s not very kind”
“I can’t deal with all of this, okay? Your brother, Sistern, the Council – it’s too much. So yes, as your confused look suggests, I will overwork myself. Maybe I’ll get ill again. Who knows. But as for right here, right now, I’m going to keep myself busy, so I don’t think about any of the things that are just going to annoy me. Versteh?”
“Very well. But I wish you would talk to me. We have some things in common, you know.” Tethys slid over the smooth floor of Thala’s workchamber, landing in the pool with a reasonably graceful movement.

28,102 / 50,000 (56.2%)

Chapter Nine

Sistern had barely been back an hour before the inevitable gossip wave hit. His usual tactic was to avoid speaking to the younger girls until they forgot that he had missed this or that piece of juicy gossip. Evidently that wouldn’t work this time; someone must have leaked the fact that this wasn’t just another trip to the different clans around the islands, offering his medical knowledge and healing skills to anyone who needed them. No, the fact that he had been doing something drastic for Pet had probably already taken hold, and while the younger ones would take it as highly romantic, the older ones – the council, in particular – would see it as a really horrible idea. Despite the fact that it may have saved her life. Despite the fact that neither of them would probably be around, if he had not. The councilors were ridiculously tight about security, and he had broken it without even thinking about it. He just had no idea what else he could have done – and planned to use that as his excuse, when he finally had to face Jornumgandr and his cohorts.
The attack of the crazy gossips helped him to come back to reality, though. Rasa would want to complain about his nephew not paying her daughter the correct amount of attention. Not that he could blame her; if he had had a child like that Khanty, he would try to do anything and everything to keep her happy as well. Yet it certainly got annoying, and it was not as if Ahab listened to anything he had to say.
And yet – “Rasa, do you happen to know where I might find Ahab?”
“No… but Khanty says that Mirovia usually knows” (so Khanty had set her spying on Ahab, he translated. Interesting.)
“Where might I find Mirovia, then?”
“Probably with Khanty. They said they were going down to collect the bead-shells on the beach.” Seeing how exhausted he looked at the idea of changing back into human, again, she added, “I can go get them, if you’d like.”
Sistern grimaced, but accepted. He’d assumed that he looked alright – he certainly felt well! – but evidently he did not.

When Rasa got back, looking harried, but with both Khanty and Mirovia in tow, Sistern had just managed to refill his underwater stores with those he had brought from on land. The young people nowadays had the tendency to “borrow” anything he left down here long, and as some were pain relievers, others stimulants, random mixing (though he was pretty sure his nephew’s crowd indulged in it pretty often) was a very bad idea, so he didn’t keep much down here.
“Girls. Do you happen to know where my nephew is?” Khanty burst into tears. Mirovia, looking guilty, explained.
“Yes. He went down by the reefs with his gang, and they said they were going to hunt that nasty ole’ barracuda that lives down there. But he invited Rheic to go with them, and she accepted. Khanty’s sore, she wishes it would’ve been her, instead.”
“Very well. Thank you, girls. Hope you collected all the shells you wanted before I called you so egregriously away from your fun. – You didn’t? I’m so sorry – you’re welcome to head back up to the top, if you’d like.” Khanty, only slightly snuffling, followed Mirovia out; they knew when they were dismissed.

Sistern had worked himself into a mostly calm manner; but when he saw the hunters flitting out of the shadows more and more brazenly, he began to work up a proper rage. Those irresponsible young idiots! They should know better than that, with the lessons he and all their other teachers had taught them. Did they want to give away the entire community? It was a beautiful day; this part of the reef was rife with scuba divers and snorklers, who you would never see unless you were specifically looking for them. Honestly.
“Boys!” The call came, not mellifluously as his voice generally was, but harsh and carrying. “You young idiots. Come here; now.”
Ahab had let his cohorts enrage the barracuda, they had attempted to use spears; had managed to shoot the poor thing through the eye and maddened it with the pain. Its long, thing shadow fell over Sistern, he flung himself (not backwards, as the boys had hoped, in order to take the glory for themselves) but forward, letting his fingers glance over its head and numbing the pain in its eye.
The boys were stunned, and even Rheic drew back into the shadows, mouth hanging open. What had he done? The beast, lethargic as usual once again, drifted upwards, towards the hull of some sort of sailboat (no motor, at least they didn’t have to worry about that) and Sistern half hissed, half shrieked the call that had been drilled into the youngsters since childhood – the signal to vanish. There would be divers coming down; they would see those underwater unless the silly children could disappear.
As the hunters faded into the shadows, into holes shared by octopi, which discouraged divers from investigating, and under overhanging rock walls and underneath coral structures, pressing themselves to the top, until they heard Sistern’s call, that they were allowed to come back.
Sistern held out for as long as he could before letting the stupid impetuous children back into the light. When they finally came out, he addressed the group as a whole. “You all will meet me at the Roosevelt house tonight at twilight. Understood?” They nodded, hearing in the tone of his voice that he was really peeved.
As the hunters and Rheic started to drift away, he addressed his nephew. “Ahab. You shall come with me now.” Ahab sighed, knowing that his uncle would insist on his sitting through some ridiculous lecture, having nothing at all to do with survival or the way things actually were, and what he owed to the clan, and what the councilors would do if they figured out what sort of antics he was pulling, blah ditty blah blah.
Ahab was a little surprised at Sistern’s quiet question, then, precluding the rant. “Do you remember what Thala told you?” Ahab smirked, then brought up a hand to cover the smirk. Not quite quick enough, though – or Sistern had come up with some way of putting eyes in the back of his head, which he wouldn’t put past him – as shown by Sistern’s question, cold and hard with anger. “Did you treat Thala badly?”
“No.” As Sistern’s unhappy, angry, stare evinced that he was ready to know exactly what had gone on while he was away, Ahab clarified. “I did not listen to her – Uncle Sistern, she came after me on a bonfire night! What was I supposed to think?”
“Obviously you did think that you amazing manliness had caught yet another one of the girls in your trap, and you were wiling to continue with that.”
“I didn’t –“
Sistern raised an eyebrow. Ahab realized that it might be inconvienent if he refused. “Very well. I did. She did enjoy herself, though. And she’s funny when she’s peeved.”
Sistern couldn’t quite believe his nephew. Sure, Ahab had been brought up a couple of islands over, where making the tourists fall in love with them (as natives, of course, not mermaids) was seen as a pastime, and ripping them off were ways of life, and his parents were some of the most messed up people he had ever met, but did the boy really thing that flings with as many girls as he could get to go with him was the proper way of restoring his life? And not just harassing the flirts and the gossips, but also people like Thala, who probably couldn’t flirt if she tried.
Sistern was tempted to confine Ahab to the caves, the Roosevelt house, somewhere that he would be out of the way and wouldn’t get himself into trouble. Psha. Not get himself into trouble? Ahab could find trouble in a minnow flitting by. Not actual confinement, then.
“Shall we go up to Roosevelt house? Very well, Ahab.” Sistern droned on and on about duty as they surfaced, changed, and wandered down to meet the others. Sistern picked up a rucksack of his stuff – teas, other brews, some stronger and others medicinal. He got one of the younger boys to boil some water; added something and dumped in a lot of ice. The young people came to take their fill; no one noticed that Sistern did not drink any of the beverage he had provided.

&

Council was now in session. A petitioner hovered before the throne-like chairs of the councilors. Samudra felt that this one had spent too much time as a human, listening and participating in the green party. This was another one of those misguided fools who thought that unless everyone started trying to clean up the environment right now, the world was going to end. And yes, the world had become dirtier over the several centuries that Samudra had been alive. It was mostly the Drys, though, who caused the problems, spilling their garbage into the land and creating all sorts of things that would never go back into the land the way they had come out. The technology of the mer was very, very simple in comparison to that of a Drys, but at least for theirs, what went into the product was the same as what came out. Instead of manufacturing something out of something else in the Drys fashion, they used the original something for a different purpose, perhaps changing a bit of its chemical structure or genetic code, but always allowing their work to be undone by the next big jump in the reset mechanisms of this sort of simple creature.
So yes, Samudra nodded when the petitioner – had his name been Naoise? - blundered on about the need for each of the clans to become a part of the cleanup effort, both in and around the reefs, on the beaches, everywhere else. The idea of cleaning up was fine. But cleaning up someone else’s mess was irksome enough when that someone was a sibling, a friend, a child, who would look at you with gratitude and realize what you’d done. The idea of never being thanked for constant work – that irked Samudra.
This was the first of many petitioners, for this day’s council. Many that should have the sense to resolve their own complaints were here; as were the majority of the mers requested to appear for this day.
Sistern was not among them.

The councilors knew that he would come eventually; he often did not show the first time he was summoned. It was disagreeable, though, to have people sworn to do your beck and call, but then never appear when you wanted them. And Sistern was sworn, both as a political leader and as a healer. Oft times, he tried to ignore his duties in politics, though he was one of the most intelligent ones they had; he tried to avoid having to sit in the lesser council.
His skills as a healer, though, were proficient, and his ability to help in almost any sort of situation made him valuable. His healing skills often gave him good excuse not to show for any sort of political meeting, though he was usually one of the first to appear when medical issues were to be discussed.
For today, at least, the agenda seemed to be more towards the spectrum of activism related to the environment, and the failure of the Drys to understand what they were doing, and how that affected everyone else. How dull.

&

Thala awoke, breathing air, feeling legs weighed down by blankets, and panicked. Where was she? Why was she there? Her memory of the immediate past was not good; but she eventually recognized the mural on the ceiling as one of the rooms in the Roosevelt house, and relaxed a bit as she realized that her surroundings were not completely foreign. Not wanting to move, but feeling dreadfully thirsty, she tried to map out the room in her mind. The bed was there, in the corner, by the windows, where the late afternoon? sun trickeled in through the blinds, and the nearest water would be there, across the room and into the hot tub.
Moving slowly, cautiously, feeling old and lethargic, sore and a little cold, she gradually sat up and moved towards the bath. One step, then another, and then the walk through the length of the room began to feel natural again.
Pet, soaking in the hot water, heard the shuffling feet of her invalid, and added more bubbles, pouring a glass of cold water for Thala and setting the pitcher on the little table next to the tub. “Thala, dear, how are you feeling? A soak would do you good, I’m sure.”
Thala pulled the name of this stranger out of the back of her brain. “Pet. How long have I been ill?”
“Close to half the day. But you got a good nap in; I’m hoping that you’re going to be as good as new very quickly. Climb in, now.” In the water, and shifted to a more comfortable form, Thala happily slid down so only her nose stayed out of the water – bubbles, as nice as the were for soothing the rest of one’s body, did not do good things when you tried to breathe them in – and sucked down the water Pet had been so kind as to put out for her. One glass was followed by another, and soon the pitcher was empty.
“Perhaps Sistern was right about that fever. I’ve certainly never seen you so dehydrated.” Thala ignored the pressing questions of who Sistern was and what dehydrated might mean, then slipped back into a semi-lethargic state.
Pet climbed out, and the water level dropped dramatically. Thala slid down in the molded seat, so she didn’t get cold – for it was cold, today, despite the fact that the air down here was comfortable all through the winter, and this was still high summer. “Why’s it so cold, Pet?”
“You shouldn’t be cold. Not now, in the warm water.”
“Not really cold. But cold" – with a shiver – "nonetheless.”
Pet frowned. Sistern had asked them to stay here, but Pet obviously needed the warmth of sunlight; and though the beach down by the boathouse was not completely free of people, they could go down to lie in the sun. “When you feel like you’ve had enough water, dear, we can go down to the beach and just soak up the sun. You’ll warm up quickly, then.”
“Okay, Pet” was her only drowsy response, and, not satisfied, Pet began to peel one of the little key limes that Sistern liked to keep around the house with Sistern’s knife (which, for some odd reason, he had left behind with her. Perhaps the chivalry of old wasn’t quite dead, for though he was willing to leave her alone, he was not willing to leave her unprotected. Dropping the peel (in one long spiral) into the pitcher of water, she broke the segments apart and nicked each one with the knife. The restoring, almost vibrantly colorful smell woke Thala up a little.
“Mm. That looks yummy, Pet.”
“Help yourself”
Only when Thala’s inhalation of the liquid had started to slow, and her eyes had begun to open fully, did Pet suggest their moving down to the beach. It seemed a shame to waste the warm water here, but there wasn’t a whole lot they could do to save it. As it was warmed by the sun, filtered through sand, and reused, though, it wasn’t too big a loss. Leaving it in the tub, though, would certainly be fine; no one would object to a bath already poured.

26,009 / 50,000 (52.0%)

Criticism would be lovely :)
<3