He sighs. "I'm gonna help all the mer and invent underwater technology."

"That's nice."

"And then no one will die because of sharks. Or anything else."

"Won't things get crowded?"

"We can colonize other planets if they do."

"Oh, good. I thought you were going to try and make us stop mating and having babies."

"No, people like doing that so they should do that."

"Okay. Now, take me to this dark scary under-sea!"

"Under the sea—under the sea! Under the sea—under the sea! Darling it's better down where it's wetter, take it from me!" he sings as he swims.

"Um, guys, Sadde is saying things that are true for once, but is he going insane?"

"I'm singing a song from a musical."

"What's it called?"

"...'The Little Mermaid'..."

"Ooh, what's it about?"

"Okay so you should know that there aren't mer where I'm from so they imagined a lot of stuff wrong. The musical is based on an old story, and they're both about a mermaid who falls in love with a human and turns to a witch to become human, too."

"Why would she want to be human?"

"In the musical it was 'cause she didn't like living in the ocean and wanted to be on land, I dunno about the original story. In the original she dies, though. Also she doesn't look like mer at all, she looks like half human half fish."

"She sounds silly."

"Maybe. But the music was very good."

"Humans used to have really weird ideas about mer."

"Why did they?"

"Because they didn't see us up close, I guess. It's getting really dark."

He clicks the flashlight on.

"Why didn't they?"

He shrugs. "Zaneta once said it was because we live in different habitats."

"Do mer only surface rarely?"