Naoto was aware of the gentle rocking of the waves. He was also aware of an itchy sensation along his arms and back. His awareness of those two things came and went as he drifted in and out of waking. When he finally opened his eyes, his own reflection stared back at him, shimmering, disrupted only by small waves that passed overhead.

Weakly, he reached out a hand to his reflection and his fingers broke through the surface of the water. His face scrunched into a pout at the sensation of air on his fingers. All around him was a bed of muddled yellow seaweed, and, beyond that, the water was a dull color that he knew wasn’t right. Or natural.

He finally gave in and scratched where the sargassum weed irritated his scaleless skin. Naoto pulled a few leaves out of his shirt, worked a few stems out of his now-loose hair. By some miracle, his bag was still attached to him, and so he worked on detangling the straps from the seaweed.

Below him, the water was dark and ruddy. Old debris and ancient overlander refuse hung down low in the dead water. When he looked left and right, a clear layer, barely big enough to swim through, of breathable water spread out in a shallow current over the miasma. Naoto was unable to see if there was any bottom below.

“Hello?” he called into the dirty, dead water.

He hadn’t expected anyone or anything to answer him back, let alone a tiny squeaking noise. Naoto rolled onto his side and saw the unmistakable brown, furry form of a small otter swimming towards him. The otter swam right up to him, snuggled against his chest, and proceeded to grab a tiny handful of his hair before it floated on its back right above him.

Naoto sighed, letting the otter use him as an anchor.

Carefully, so as to not push his savior bed of sargassum too low, he sat up. Breaching the surface, he blinked several times as his eyes adjusted to the air. There was a speck on the horizon: an island about an hour’s swim from where he was floating. The closest land to Reshfen were the rocky islets used by the gull colonies that nereids collected eggs from - there shouldn’t have been any islands nearby.

“How far out did that thing throw us?” Naoto said lowly.

If he closed his eyes, he could still see big, open jaws heading for him. But he couldn’t recall anything after. His thoughts were broken by the juvenile otter trying to climb on top of his head.

“Ow! No, you have claws!” Naoto pulled the animal off of him.

The otter was exhausted, and, after the events that brought them both out so far, Naoto understood the animal’s desire to rest somewhere… solid. They couldn’t float out in the deep water, not above the miasma or any promise of nereids nearby to swim to.

Naoto dunked back under the water, rolling so that his back was facing skyward. The otter quickly grabbed hold of his hair again.

Naoto winced a little at the light tugging. “Guess I’m your ride today.”

He wriggled out of the sargassum for the last time and headed for the island, keeping as close to the surface as possible as he towed the otter with him. In his mind he already planned out that he would have to find somewhere deep and hidden to sleep during the night. Islands and shallows meant overlanders.

Gradually, the dead water below grew its proper blue hue in color; the clear layer growing deeper and deeper until the miasma was barely visible.

The current around the island wasn’t unswimmable, though it was strong enough to make Naoto double guess his original estimate of only an hour’s swim.

🐚✯🐚✯🐚✯🐚

Charles spent most of that morning dumping bucket after bucket of water out of his daysailer. The repetitive work was good for keeping his mind off of his situation… and what happened the night before.

He remembered leaving the dock and warning the nightfishers about the storm. He remembered the water looking funny, softly glowing in deep patches. He remembered rain and a river of bones rise above the ocean.

Charles remembered nothing between seeing the wiggling, long eel-like skeleton look down on him and waking up, off the shore of an island he didn’t recognize as being part of East Banks. Based on the sizable welt and stinging cut on his forehead, he hit his head and passed out.

The bad news? He had absolutely no idea where he was and had no supplies. Both the sail and the mast on his daysailer were gone. Just… gone. He had seen no other people yet.

The good news? He didn’t drown. His boat had taken on water while he had been out cold, but not enough to sink it somehow. He could bail the water out and head for the island, provided he found something to paddle with.

He set his bucket down and laid down on the seat in the sun. After resting for a moment, he sorely removed his soaking wet boots and socks, placing them on the flat bow to dry in the midday sun before returning to resting on the seat.

Most of the water was bailed out, so Charles felt he could rest for a little bit before trying to get to land. He placed his arm over his eyes in an attempt to shield himself from the sun.

Tiny splashing caught his attention, followed by the sound of skittering up the side of his boat and onto the floor. Charles sat up. An otter slumped onto the floor exhaustedly.

What came out of the ocean and rocked his boat next made Charles question if he should have just gone to the island first, instead of bailing out water.

There was a mermaid latched onto the side of his daysailer.

Or he guessed it was a mermaid. Fishpeople liked deeper waters, away from human settlements, so Charles had never seen one. Not alive. Not in person. He vaguely recalled hearing that syrens had feathers, which this creature did not have in the slightest.

She was around Charles’s age, (not that he was the best guesser of age for fishpeople), on the thin side with creamy pale skin. A delicate, flat nose set into a squat, diamond-shaped face, her lips were full and pouty. Behind stringy hazel bangs were narrow, long-lashed eyes; Charles had to take a moment to be sure he wasn’t seeing things, but the stranger’s eyes were more iris than white and a striking amber color. She wore a black, wrapped… tank top? It was some kind of top made of some kind of fabric Charles couldn’t guess from first glance.

The mermaid looked at Charles, then to the otter, then to Charles again. She reached out to grab the otter and Charles threw his bucket at her, causing the mermaid to let go and splash back into the water. He may have been stranded on a strange shore, but he wasn’t going to sit back and watch a sad little otter be some mermaid’s lunch.

“Get lost!” Charles shouted at her over the side of his boat.

He could see her down there staring back up at him. He could now see her fully, all of her long black tail with white patches and yellow fins. She made to swim under the boat to try the other side and Charles followed her, smacking the water on the other side of his boat with his boot.

“Go find lunch somewhere else!” he told her.

She shot up and grabbed the boot and his hand in both of hers, then tried to use her weight to pull him into the water. If Charles knew one thing about fishpeople, it was that he wouldn’t stand a chance in the water. He let go of the boot and managed to pry his hand free, falling backwards as the mermaid slunk back into the water with his boot.

The otter squeaked and chittered in alarm. It ran over the length of Charles before scrambling up the side of his boat and into the ocean again.

“Of course,” Charles groaned. He didn’t get back up from the floor. “Don’t say ‘thank you’. Go back to the thing trying to eat you.”

His boot, full of water, splashed down next to his head as the mermaid threw it back.

🐚✯🐚✯🐚✯🐚

The otter had squeaked and taken off through the water so quickly that Naoto had trouble turning to see which way it had gone.

There was a small, wooden boat floating limply at the surface. It was what the otter was racing towards.

“No, no, no, you get back here!” Naoto called after it, but the otter, being an otter, mistook his raised tone for one of excitement and was spurred on further.

It jumped out of the water and climbed over the side of the boat.

Naoto slowed, diving as deep as he could above the dead water, and circled the boat. There had been old statues, some sketches in books, that he had seen. But seeing one in person set something in him on edge. The… tall pointy part of it was damaged, broken towards the lower half of it, and no sharp metal pieces hung from the butt; he knew enough that the boat wouldn’t have been of use to any overlanders. Most importantly, there were no nets.

The boat was abandoned, Naoto decided.

When Naoto lifted himself out of the water to retrieve the otter, the boat was certainly not abandoned. An overlander stared at him in just as much surprise.

If he had been nereidic, the overlander would maybe have been around Naoto’s own age. Deep-set eyes the color of the ocean in winter and dark hair cut close to his head, except for in the center. No gills flexed on the bronze skin of his neck, though his ears were a little big and stuck out from his oval-shaped head. His gray shirt had short sleeves and was baggy. He had legs, which he wore some strange, light blue article of clothing on.

Naoto glanced from the overlander to the otter, then back to the overlander. Just as he reached out to grab the otter, the overlander threw a bucket right at him. Naoto pushed himself off the side of the boat and dunked back into the water.

“Get lost!” the overlander shouted over the edge of the boat.

Naoto leered up at him. He had never tried his senses with an overlander, but it didn’t take empathic Will-senses to tell the overlander was not happy.

He swam under the boat, only to be met with violent splashing on the other side.

“Go find lunch somewhere else!” the overlander, voice cracking, demanded.

He thinks I’m going to steal his lunch? Naoto’s tail twitched.

Naoto’s mouth drew to the side in a determined pout. The next time the overlander stuck his hands and… thing… too deep, Naoto rushed forward the grabbed on, tucking his tail up in an attempt to drag the overlander into the water. The overlander’s hand slipped through his grasp, leaving Naoto only with the thing.

The otter slipped into the water on the other side of the boat and snuggled back up to Naoto.

Naoto only briefly inspected the item he had taken. It smelled bad. Musky. It was brown with an open mouth and a hard, flat shell. It was made from the hide of an animal and was in the general shape of the overlander’s feet.

“Ugh,” he sneered, surfacing again. He wound his arm back, finding the action suddenly foreign and wobbly above the water, managing to throw the gross, musky item back into the boat.

Hugging the otter gently, Naoto then swam towards the shallows of the island.