"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.

"Do you think we're wrong about what you need, miss? It looks mostly like it's warm water, something to drink and something to eat. Do we really not know what you need, or am I saying something that's true enough?"

She closes her eyes and sighs. (Eugh, it's been a while since she was last on land, she forgot how the land reflexes feel.)

"Even if you're right, you didn't know that before you offered… And you don't know what I eat… And if I get sick, you don't know how my body works… If you're saying it doesn't matter because you have so many resources that you can always get the stuff I eat no matter what it is or how long I live, and you can fix any sickness no matter what it is or how my body works, then what you're saying could make sense, but it's hard to believe anybody has that much stuff. I guess it could be true if you have really good magic."

They really don't seem to understand why it's weird to just assume they can help her and not even ask what she needs first. So they either really do have ridiculous ?magic? that can do basically anything, or humans are way weirder than she thought. (She would say 'dumber', but humans have done a lot of things that they probably couldn't do if they were dumb. Besides, lots of times she thought something was dumb, but then it turned out she just didn't understand it because she was dumb.)

"And I didn't get what you said about something being 'close enough to magic'. Why do you need something 'close enough', what about actual magic? And I still don't get how you've never heard of mermaids, either, you're obviously Unveiled…"

"What do you think you might that we do not have? If this heated pool, far within an icy landscape, is a surprise to you, as it seemed to be, then I think it'd be strange if we didn't have similar wondrous ways of fulfilling any of your other needs. We've never heard of mermaids outside of stories we tell each other! Clearly, you're from someplace we've never looked. You remember your life before you got here, right?"

A few thoughts race through the head of the woman looking at Twintails: where would she want to stay, would she ever want to see the outdoors, how would she be able to move around? All her curiosity directs her to think of inventions for the little mermaid before her; it'll probably be fascinating to find out what she does to navigate this world.

They still don't get it! Possibly she should just let it go

"Even if it turns out you do have some amazing way to get everything I need, it's still weird you didn't ask what I need first. Just to make sure. Because you couldn't know ahead of time. Especially if you've never heard of mermaids."

(Okay, now she'll let it go.)

"…So you're saying this thing is magic?" She looks up at the shiny thing that's been pouring warm water on her. Humans make all kinds of things out of this shiny stuff, but she's pretty sure it isn't magic, the stuff is everywhere when you go on land… Maybe the shiny has nothing to do with magic, maybe that's just what it's made of, and the magic is just making the water come out of it…

"No, not at all! It's just hooked up to the heating system that also keeps this entire lodge nice and warm. But things like these would seem like magic to those who've never seen it and don't understand it, and the end result is much the same, wouldn't you say?"

???

Heating system…? What does that even mean…?

(The only reason she believes them that it isn't magic is because she's spent enough time on land to see a lot of human things that look like they have to be magic, but are way too widespread and openly visible to be magic. Unless every place she's ever been on land happened to be a tribe of Unveiled, which she really doubts.)

(…Maybe now that she can actually talk to humans, she can find out how all that stuff works…?)

"Yeah, it does seem the same… But you keep talking about things that 'seem like magic', or are 'close enough to magic'. What about actual magic? I keep asking that but you keep not telling me…"

"What would make something magic, as opposed to ingenuity? For all we know, we could be doing something that is magic, just not realizing that it was because we had gotten so used to it!"

Blink.

Blink blink.

"I think you'd know if it was magic! It's really different from all the other things people do and all the other things that happen in the world! Haven't you ever heard of magic before? You're Unveiled! Right? Aren't you?"

(Wait, is she dreaming? Is this a dream?)

"Unveiled isn't a word that makes any sense to me in this situation. And yes, we've heard of magic, in stories we tell each other. The issue being, we didn't think it made sense to think of things as magic after we had done them."

They don't… even know what Unveiled means?

And they don't… think of magic as a real thing…? They don't know magic? They haven't seen magic?

But… But… She looks the same… So a god isn't covering for her… And there's nowhere in the world the gods aren't looking, because of the agreement they made… So they have to be Unveiled… But… But if they don't know about magic, they can't be Unveiled, that's logically impossible…

Is everything she was ever taught a lie?

Did Yara lie so that she'd be scared to ever ask humans for help?

No, she… wouldn't… she was useless but she wasn't evil…

Right?

Twintails is not going to cry in front of these people, so she ducks back under the water, where crying isn't a reflex that happens.

They wave at her as she dips under the water. "It looks like you need some time to yourself. Feel free to just... enjoy the warmth and relax."

(Relax? As if!)

Twintails lies at the bottom of the pool and thinks for a little while.

She… supposes it actually could be possible to be Unveiled but not know about magic. For instance, if you were Unveiled but then you lost all your memories, including your memories that magic is real. Would the gods decide that person is Veiled again, or would they still count as Unveiled? She's not sure. But she's heard that some gods steal their clerics' memories sometimes. Maybe some of the time they go around not knowing about magic.

And actually… she's also heard of people who can do enough magic to count as Unveiled, but they haven't discovered their magic.

And she's also heard of mythic creatures where you could be one and not know it, if nobody told you. And those all count as Unveiled.

She doubts all these people are one of those, but… it means it's not literally impossible that they're Unveiled but don't know about magic. Which means maybe she wasn't lied to.

That's all she really needs.

She pokes her head back out of the water. Are the humans still there?

Only the woman, who is sat down, looking around the room and thinking to herself.