Rhea was about to slip out the door when a pair of arms wrapped around her waist. She felt her feet lift off the ground as she was spun one hundred and eighty degrees. When she dropped back onto the ground, she was confronted by two irate mermen. Had she meant to make Hazel suspicious? Not at all. Did it work out that way? Maybe. She’d never seen an immunity develop so rapidly. In fact, she hadn’t seen full immunity at all.
As expected, a very long lecture began on the dangers of messing with people who were getting wise. Her best friend and her lab partner took turns admonishing her for her questionable judgment. The clock ticked. They asked what was up with her voice lately. Rhea has no answer. The clock kept on ticking.
By the time the talk ended, it was dark out. Tristan drove her home, being the only licensed driver between the three of them. A bad licensed driver, hence his continued use of a bus pass whenever humanly possible.
“In a few weeks you can pick out your kitten,” he offered while she moped in the passenger seat. Rhea ignored him and used her phone to look up spells. “Your cat summoning worked.” She grunted. “To be fair, you have no idea if she already knows someone who she gets charmed by all the time.” Rhea looked up long enough to consider the possibility. That was when she got another risky idea.
“We don’t know if it might be genetic.”
Blue light reached just far enough to highlight the absence of fish and the abundance of trash in the water. Hazel wished she had more time in her schedule between working and sleeping for swimming, but it was a little tricky when her job was in the city and the decent beaches rested on the outskirts. Her goggles were a little foggy, but she could see she’d have to do some searching to find any fish. She adjusted her snorkel and swam farther from shore.
Eventually, some comb jellies came into view. Next were some silverfish, a flounder… then something odd. The sand was being disturbed, but she couldn’t see the creature that was doing it. The clouds of tossed up sediment came up along a path, as if whatever was making them was moving towards her, not quickly, but at the pace a human might walk underwater. Being near fish didn’t make her wary, but being followed did. She swam a few yards to the side. The trail of sand clouds adjusted its angle. There was nothing she could think of that would benefit from stalking her along the bottom. A predator large enough to eat her would have difficulty hiding. A creature that wasn’t sneaking wouldn’t need to be stealthy. If it was afraid of her it would be doing a better job of hiding.
She was about to swim away when a dark shape passed directly in front of her face. A garbled sound, like a melody followed as the shape seemed to dissolve into cerulean waves. That was her limit- it was time to get out of the water. As quickly as possible, she swam to shore and threw on a sweatshirt.
In the sand close to where she’d left her belongings, a rock covered in freshly dried algae looked as if it had been carefully placed behind her sunblock. Hesitantly, she chipped some of the algae away with a fingernail. Already expecting to see a weathered engraving, she was surprised to instead find an unearthly glow. It wasn’t a common rock, but a glimmering, yellow crystal embedded in sand and coral.
Under a temperamental, secondhand microscope, the patterns of the coral were just barely clear enough to be sketched in a notebook and compared to kinds found in the Atlantic. It didn’t quite match any temperate species when compared. Hazel knew she wasn’t much of an artist, but the polyps didn’t look like those of any local species she could think of. Scouting the web for photos to compare to, she was getting bored and frustrated. Deciding to take a little time off, she gave up the search and clicked a link to a tropical coral site. If nothing else, they were pretty.
Rhea raised lantern in front of her face as a signal to Tristan. He copied her gesture and turned away, to face a dark, eerie, positively filthy swath of the continental shelf. It was deep and very out of the way, even for a mer. What was there, they weren’t exactly sure, but it was where quite a lot of trash from both humans and deep mer seemed to wind up- like a dump, but underwater. Exploring it was dangerous- fishing nets, scavengers, microbes… It all came with the territory, but so did a lot of discarded technology. One scanner in reparable condition was all they needed, but finding anything useful amid the garbage would be a challenge.
With little natural light and an endless plane of mysterious filth to sort through, they were planning to divide and conquer. In a few quick strokes, Rhea was at the opposite end of the dump from Tristan. Scrubbing bits of sludge and detritus away from the objects nearest to her, she found fish bones, a tire, and an oil drum. Another try revealed a number of glass bottles. Plastic, half a dumpster, a bolt of stained fabric, rusty cans, shoes, a shopping cart, even more tires… Most the items belonged in a landfill.
Toilet, sofa, crate of disintegrated magazines, lost frost stone, broken clock. Rhea picked up the frost stone and slid it into a bag she’d brought. Coat hangers, cling wrap, cement, nautilus shell. The shell was nice, but was it from the deep? What might be a lens became visible with a little cleaning. She threw it in the bag. Chicken wire, lost lobster trap, diaper. The list went on. By rendezvous time, Rhea had collected four possible scanner-type objects, two frost stones and a cool-looking skull.
Tristan, in his time collecting, was more fortunate. One definite broken scanner, five unidentified bits of deep mer technology, a message in a bottle he’d found trapped in a rotting crate, and two bottles of very old alcohol of some kind filled his collection bag. Granted, wine wouldn’t help him fix a scanner, but who could pass up such a find?
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