"We haven't cared for a mermaid before, no. But we're happy to do so, if that is what it'd take to let you be happy."

THIS IS SO CONFUSING.

She doesn't even know what her question is, but she definitely has at least one question!

She thinks about it. She figures out what one of her questions is.

"Why… Why do you think I'm not happy? I just got here. You don't know me. And… even if I'm not happy, why is that the first thing you offer? Don't you know mermaids come from the ocean? Why not offer to take me to the ocean? Or just ask me 'What do you want'? And… why do you care so much if I'm happy in the first place? I just got here!"

"Everyone deserves to be happy, don't they? And you didn't look happy lying in the snow outside, so I suspected you needed something from us, like maybe this warm bath you're in. I didn't believe mermaids existed anywhere in reality, so I would have no idea about what you might want for yourself. I've never seen anyone even remotely like you!"

'I didn't believe mermaids existed anywhere in reality'?

"Aren't… Aren't you all Unveiled? How do you not know what mermaids are?

And… And that still doesn't make sense! I know you don't know what I want, that's why it's confusing that you didn't ask! And then offered such a big thing, right away! Warm water makes sense, but… you offered to 'take care of me' and 'help me have a good life', which is totally different! 'Life' is a long time! How can you just offer that? What if your family needs things first? Or what if I need ten times as much food as you? Or I need something you don't even have? Do you just use magic to get everything you need all the time forever?" (…That's probably it, isn't it.)

"Well, nuclear energy and a globe-spanning industrial society are close to enough to magic to our tastes, yes! We have quite a vast amount of resources, and if just letting you float away into the ocean would give you what you wanted, that's absolutely something we can 'just offer', as you put it." As she says this, she looks over the mermaid, curious about whether what she looks like made much sense at all.

Good question! Twintails has no opinion about whether her appearance makes sense, but the humans are free to form one! Here's what they've had a chance to notice so far:

She is very small. By height and width, she looks like a 6-year-old child; but her proportions suggest that she's more mature than that for her own species.

Her upper body looks basically human; the skin looks like normal human skin. She's Ambiguously Brown; without any other examples to go on, it's unclear if this is an indication of some kind of mermaid ethnicity, or if this is just the universal mermaid skintone.

She has dark brown ?hair?, which is somewhat wavy and hangs down to the ends of her ears. It looks normal from a certain distance, but by now the humans are standing close enough to see that it's not actually hair. The strands are too thick, for one thing. And they… seem to move on their own, a little bit, especially when she's agitated. (A human from her own world might draw comparisons to Medusa, though Twintails's 'hair' isn't nearly that thick.)

Her lower body is scaly and silvery. If the humans' concept of a mermaid typically has just one tail, it will probably stand out that Twintails has two. Sort of. About halfway down, or maybe a little more, her tail forks into two ends. It… doesn't really look like it's supposed to be like that, though; one of the tails looks a bit… supernumerary.

She's missing an eye. (Either that, or she's been keeping her right eye persistently closed for no apparent reason.)

They're standing close enough to see that her arms have some thin, faint scarring, like something was digging into the skin in a lot of different places.

It's actually not clear whether she's a girl or a boy. She's completely naked, and by now they've probably seen her from nearly every possible angle — with all that flopping around she did earlier — but she has no immediately obvious genitalia. Meanwhile, her torso looks like a buff man's. (Although notably there are no nipples.) If they're thinking of her as a 'she', it's probably mostly because of her voice and her hair length.

She has no clue what that first part means. 'Close enough to magic'? She'll get back to that in a minute.

'We have quite a vast amount of resources'… She doesn't know what 'vast' means, but from context it sounds like it means 'a lot'?

"…You have so many resources that you can just decide to take care of anybody that shows up, even if you don't know what they need in the first place?!"

That sounds completely ridiculous and fake, but everything about this situation is already ridiculous and fake.