Very, very hesitantly, I poked my head – just the very top of it – out of the water.  I looked around like I expected something to jump out at me, but it was just waves as far as the eye could see.  Well, except for the small island, which was my destination.

This area of the coast had a lot of small islands out far enough not to see them from inland, but they kind of created a sort of barrier to the harshest ocean waves.  It made the inner waters past the line of islands usually quieter and calmer, although still extremely deep, which made for an excellent place for a merfolk community.  These outer islands, meanwhile, were too small to build on and generally only served as camping destinations for adventurous humans or as hideouts for merfolk who wanted to surface without going inland.

That was me.  Well, sort of.  I didn’t want to surface because surface life scared me, and I hadn’t been inland to the real town of Port Fylin since I was in elementary school.  On the rare occasions I did want to come up, I came to these islands instead.

I didn’t want to surface now, but I’d heard some of the merfolk mention what looked like an injured sea otter and I was worried about it.  I didn’t exactly have medical training or anything, but I wasn’t going to just ignore an injured sea creature, either.  There were sealife rehab centers, right?  Or vets?  I mean, I wasn’t about to go wandering inland to find one, but if I could confirm that there was, indeed, an injured sea otter, I could get it close to the shore and ask my brother to take it the rest of the way.  I just wasn’t going to bother him about it if it was only a rumor, which was why I was checking it out for myself first.

Confirming that there were no lifeforms in sight other than myself, I swam over to the island, still feeling very on edge, almost waiting for someone to appear and try to harm me.  Surface life was dangerous, but I could take a risk on a deserted island to help an injured creature.  That was safe enough.  Harmless enough.  I would be fine.

I’d brought some simple sarong-type wraps with me, knowing I’d planned to surface, and I now tied one around my waist awkwardly and another across my top, ensuring that they’d cover everything before cautiously pulling myself out of the water.  Once I was on land, my scales and tail changed to skin and legs and I stood up, a little wobbly at first – I rarely used my land form at all since I was in elementary school – and then set out to find the sea otter.

The island was pretty small, so it didn’t take long to locate the small creature.  It was curled up forlornly next to a tiny freshwater spring, not moving or doing anything.  That seemed bad – sea otters didn’t normally sleep in places like this, so it had to be injured.

Along with the clothing wraps I’d brought, I’d remembered to bring a small pouch with a few clams and small fish.  I pulled one of the clams out and set it close to the sea otter as a peace offering.  Most sealife was quite comfortable with oceanids, generally – despite our status as ocean predators – and would let us get pretty close, but if this otter was injured, he might be more wary of me than normal.

“Hey,” I said softly as the tawny face turned to look at me.  “I’m just here to make sure you’re okay.  I won’t hurt you.”  I gave it a bright smile.  “You can eat if you like, I have fish, too, if you’d rather fish instead.”  I set out a couple of the fish to see if it was interested.

The sea otter observed me and for a second I got the impression it thought I was being ridiculous, but then…I mean, I was offering it food, that was good, right?

I couldn’t see any obvious injuries, but this sea otter wasn’t behaving like most sea otters, so something was likely wrong.  Maybe an internal injury or a broken bone or something?  I wondered if it’d let me get closer.

I scooted forward a few inches and held out my hand hesitantly.  “I’m not going to hurt you,” I promised again, “I just want to see if you’re injured and get you to a vet or something if you are.”

The sea otter shook its head slightly, and then, to my surprise, it uncurled itself and hopped off a couple steps – looking like it could do so without any pain or hesitation, I noticed – and then it shifted.

“I’m perfectly fine.  Are you okay, though?”  The man looked at me with confusion and a tiny amount of incredulity, like maybe he thought I was kind of stupid.  “You can’t tell when someone is a shifter instead of an actual sea creature?  Isn’t that a little odd?”

I felt a tremendous amount of chagrin and embarrassment and didn’t even try to hide the later.  “Oh, I’m – I’m sorry, I’m really bad at telling when someone’s a supernatural or not.”

I was.  I mean, really bad at it.  Apparently I lacked whatever magical gene 99.9999% of supernaturals had that let them identify others as supernaturals by sensing their magic or whatever.  I could figure out merfolk who lived in my community easily enough because I knew them and, well, if someone was swimming around underwater as half fish, half human, that was an oceanid; if they were mostly human but with webbed feet and hands, that was nymph; if they were an animal who was living in the community and could talk to me, that was aquatic shifter.  I knew what others were, of course, but even swimming out in the ocean, if I didn’t know the individual personally, I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between an octopus shifter and an actual octopus.  Or a sea otter shifter and an actual sea otter.

This was really, really embarrassing.  Here I’d bothered to come all the way to the surface to try to help a sea otter who was probably injured because it was behaving weird, when in reality it was behaving weird because it wasn’t a sea otter, it was a shifter.  Aquatic shifter, so a merfolk, or otherwise I’d probably be freaking out and diving back into the ocean immediately, but still, it was a stupid mistake that no one other than me could make.

“Sorry,” I mumbled again, then backed off as I got back to my feet.  I wasn’t sure if I should leave the fish and clam or if that was insulting that someone brought him food like that, but at this point, I was more just interested in getting out of there and being embarrassed somewhere that didn’t have this particular sea otter shifter staring at me like he was worried I’d maybe hit my head on the way up.

“Wait – ”  He started to say as I got back to the water, but I didn’t wait.  Instead, I just dove in, pausing long enough to let my tail, gills, and scales reappear before diving as swiftly as possible into the deepest part of the ocean, trying to not feel even more stupid for what I’d just done than I already did.

In my defense, he wasn’t a shifter from around here, or I’d have recognized him.  No, actually…that wasn’t true.  He could be.  Aquatic shifters like sea otters didn’t spend much time down in the merfolk community like I did or the shifters who were dolphins, stingrays, and so on, because they couldn’t just live underwater indefinitely.  Unlike oceanids, who breathed both air and water when in aquatic form and our lungs just filtered both separately, sea otter shifters needed to spend most of the time on the surface, just diving down more to get food and the like.  They couldn’t even come down as far as the community, given how deep in the ocean it was.  They could come down further than your average actual sea otter, but not this far down.  But since he’d have to spend most of his time on the surface, for all I knew he lived in the area and had done so for years, but I just didn’t recognize him because he wasn’t part of the underwater merfolk community.

I reached the ocean floor and groaned a bit.  Oceanids were built to withstand extreme cold and pressure – able to swim to the deepest parts of the ocean – and could see underwater easily, so down here it was almost as light as at the surface for me.  Which meant I was able to see easily enough when a pod of dolphins swam overhead and one of them paused before splitting off to come see me.

“Sage?”  My brother asked in his magical underwater voice.  “You okay?”

“Not really,” I admitted.  Silas was one of my closest friends and my older brother.  “I made a stupid mistake and thought a sea otter shifter was a sea otter.”  I rubbed at my eyes a bit.  “Why can’t I just recognize supernaturals like everyone else?”

“Aww, it’s okay, baby sis.”  Silas nudged me with his nose, demanding that I pet him, which I obediently obliged.  Like most people, he referred to oceanids as whatever gender they currently were in, thus I was, at the moment, his baby sister instead of his baby brother, which I would be if I were male.

“It’s not that big of a deal,” Silas went on.  “So what if you don’t recognize supernaturals?  You’re nice to everyone, and I’m sure you were just there to help them if you went to the surface.  If they get all fussy about you making a mistake, it’s really not that big of a deal.  I promise.  I’ll go tell them so if you want.  Where are they?”

I laughed a little, unable to help it.  “You don’t need to tell him, but thanks.  I just feel so stupid every time I do that.”

Silas bumped me harder this time.  “You’re not stupid.  You just get a chance to see the world differently – more like how humans see it, I guess?  When you see people, you just see them as people.  You don’t know if they’re humans or supernaturals and you treat them all the same.  We can’t all claim to do that, sadly.  Maybe we’d be nicer to people if we did.”

I didn’t particularly see it as a good thing, plus that whole theory of his resided on the idea that I was seeing people on the surface, and we both knew I didn’t do that.  I almost always only interacted with merfolk, and, well, the biggest mistake I could make underwater was thinking an actual sea creature was a merfolk or vice-versa.  A stupid, embarrassing mistake each time I did that, but not usually a dangerous one.  At least there was that.

“You wanna swim with us?”  Silas offered.  “We’re going to go follow a yacht and jump out at it.  People get excited when we do.  You don’t have to come that far up, just enough to watch, but it should be fun.”

I didn’t get his idea of fun, but I did appreciate that he was trying to share it with me.  “No, it’s okay.  I should be getting back to town anyway – I was going to help Sidney build a new room to their place for their baby.”

Silas didn’t seem bothered at my refusal, but probably realized I wasn’t going to accept it anyway.  It was too close to the surface.  “Well, let me know if you change your mind.”  He bumped me with his nose one last time.  “Or we can all head out to an island or something and have a picnic if you want!  Just forget about the sea otter, he’s the stupid one if he cares about it.”

I rolled my eyes but felt a little better as I headed back to the merfolk community.  Silas had that effect on me, though – he always knew how to encourage me to move on when I was feeling bad about stuff.  Maybe it was a dolphin thing, or maybe it was just a brother thing.

Sidney was almost pacing – well, swimming version of that – when I arrived.

“Sage!”  She darted over to me.  “Oh thank goodness you’re here, I’m not sure Jett can do this on his own and I’m ‘not allowed’ to help because I’m too far along.”  She threw her hands up.  “We should have done this months ago, not at the last minute like this, but it’s all my own fault – I couldn’t make up my mind about where the room should go!”

Sidney, unlike me, normally preferred their male form over their female form.  However, in order to have a baby, they’d switched to female.  They had to remain female until the baby was born – since the shift to male form would get rid of the uterus – but then they’d go back to being male like normal.  Until then, we’d all dutifully refer to them as a she because they were currently a female.

I glanced over Sidney’s shoulder at their massive husband who looked like he was trying to slowly just make the entire house disappear.  “Jett,” I tried not to laugh, “just leave it to me, you don’t have the dexterity for that.  I just need your help to bring the clay, okay?”

I was treated with an eyeroll from Jett before he obediently moved one of his giant arms to try to start moving the clay that he and Sidney had worked on preparing.

Jett was a kraken, an extremely rare variety of merfolk.  He was basically like a giant octopus and was hands – tentacles? – down the largest member of the merfolk community.  Unlike shifters, he could actually change into a humanoid form underwater and survive just fine, but he wouldn’t be much help building this room in that form because he had normal hands and feet and couldn’t, well, do much.  He had minimal elemental magic in human form, so in his human form he’d be more of a hindrance than a help initially.  Once we got the actual shape of the room established, he’d switch to help me smooth out the walls and finesse things, but right now his massive size was helpful to basically splat clay where it needed to go while I tried to use a mixture of earth and water magic to shape it properly.

Sidney supervised us, biting her nails nervously as she watched.  “No, it needs to be taller there, Jett will bump his head.  Oh it looks all bumpy on the floor, that’ll be awful for Jett.”  Since Jett actually had feet to walk on the floor, unlike most merfolk.

“We’ll fix the floor, this is just the rough draft for now!”  I chuckled a little as I caught the next armful of clay from Jett and worked to position it along the rest to build the wall slowly higher.  “Don’t worry yourself too much or the baby will come early!”

Sidney groaned.  “Don’t even put that thought out there!  We aren’t ready for it to arrive yet.  It’s due like any day now anyway, but the room isn’t done, we haven’t picked a name, I don’t even know if we’re going on shore to do this,” and she went on.