... 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.

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