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One day, Twintails wakes up and notices her crop hasn't fully emptied. It should have by now.
She's not sure if this is a big deal, but it probably isn't good.
…Maybe eating more will help?
It does not help. She thinks her crop has emptied some by sunset, but not nearly as much as it should have.
If Yara taught her one useful thing, it's that you go on land when you're sick or injured.
She catches a few crabs and fish for later. After looking around for quite some time (an eternity, considering how hungry she is), she finds a rocky ledge sticking up out of the water, just outside a small grotto. It might flood a little at high tide, but it'll do. She scrambles up onto it and lies down and tries not to worry too much.
When she wakes up, her crop is the same size as it was when she fell asleep.
If she can't fix this she's going to starve to death.
She thinks she remembers seeing one of the nurses massaging another pup's crop when it wasn't emptying properly. She's not sure if there's a trick to it, a one true technique, but she gives it a shot.
It feels weird, but not painful. Before long, she regurgitates some partially digested food. Her crop still isn't empty, but maybe this will help?
(She's pretty sure it's possible in theory to shove something down a mermaid's throat far enough to reach the crop and fish out what's inside. But even if she knew how to do that safely, her arm's not at the right angle to do it herself. She knows because she just tried. It's not going to work. And trying to shove a foreign object in there could just make things worse. What if it gets stuck? What if she damages her crop, or even punctures it? That's a definite no.)
She's tired from hunger and worry. She falls asleep for a little while; it's still day when she wakes up. She stares up at the sky and thinks.
What are her options?
Continuing to eat clearly didn't help. She doesn't know what would help.
She doesn't even know what causes this. Her best guess is maybe there's something bad inside. Maybe the other end is blocked up. Or maybe whatever made her sick not too long ago is still in there, doing something bad. Either way, the only thing she can think to do is empty her crop as much as possible, and then… let it rest, or something? She can't think of anything else to try.
She scoops handful after handful of seawater into her mouth. Seawater heals, that's another thing Yara taught her. (If this works, she will begrudgingly admit that Yara taught her two useful things.)
She spends all day drinking seawater and massaging her crop, and she regurgitates really quite a lot of food, and she thinks maybe that's enough. So she eats those crabs she caught earlier, and then falls asleep and hopes for the best.
The next day, her crop hasn't emptied at all.
She tries not to cry as she for-real-this-time considers the possibility that nothing is going to help and she's going to die of starvation.
She tries again. She spends all day drinking seawater, massaging her crop, regurgitating. This time, she doesn't eat anything after. She ignores the gnawing hunger and somehow falls asleep, and the next day she does it all again. More food comes out.
That night, she's so scared she can't sleep. If she does this for two days in a row instead of just one day, will that be enough? What if it isn't, and she has to try again but for three days? It'll make six – no, seven days without food. And then what if that doesn't work either? What if it turns out the magic number is five days in a row? By the time she got there, she would have gone 16 days without food. If she wasn't dead by then, she'd be so sluggish and weak that she'd get killed by the first whale or shark or even little bitty baby dolphin that spotted her.
So should she just skip straight to five days?
What if five days isn't the magic number either?
What if there is no magic number? What if nothing can fix this?
She lies there uselessly for hours, thinking of nothing because fear and hunger and exhaustion have eclipsed all thought.
She stares at the Moon the whole time.
She cries. She's cried before. She's even cried because she thought she was dying before. But this is different. It feels… cruel. Like something an angry fairy would curse you with in a story.
She stares at the Moon for hours. It captivates her, though she knows not why. She doesn't even notice when she eventually stops crying.
Before the Moon can set or the Sun can rise, she falls asleep, praying that somehow everything will be okay.
