the seaweed is always greener | Glowfic Constellation

k-shut-up-now

There's one person you can go to, when your life sucks enough that you're ready to throw away everything about it in favor of something else. Such as, for example, if you get into a terrible fight with your father and he wrecks all your possessions that matter and demands you be kept under constant guard, even if it's just by your other family members (who are also all the actual worst).

There's one person in Cyllene's family who isn't the actual worst, and quite conveniently it's the same one.

The witch runs a hand through his hair. "You sure about this, kiddo? I mean I'm all for sticking it to the man, but if anything's not how you like it you won't exactly be able to drift back to me and complain."

"Uncle. Please. I'll be fine - or I won't; little matter. I at least won't be here. I'd take my chances if you'll let me."

"Yeah no sure, I gotcha covered. You know I've gotta check, though. Last call to bail out?"

"I would say it was almost as if you hadn't known me since hatching, if the category's competition weren't so dismal."

He laughs at that, without much humor. "Fair enough."

As it turns out, Cyllene ends up with several more opportunities to back out; figuring out how to order the spells is a small nightmare. They have to do her legs and her lungs at the same time (and given the situation the two of them can hardly go up to the surface), but the language spell takes long enough that she would probably drown if they started there. Under different circumstances it would be easiest to do language comprehension first, but the other two spells both require the use of her voice. Ultimately the witch gives up and detours to find an air-creation spell, and Cyllene sings until she chokes and sticks her head into a little pocket at the top of the cave, treading water with her strange-wonderful-marvelous-perfect - but somewhat difficult - legs (legs legs legs legs legs!!!). Her newly-webless hands aren't much help, sliding so frictionlessly through the water, but there's a little crevice in the rock where she can stick just two fingers, and by pressing her other hand in a different spot she can balance with her face in the air without needing very coordinated kicking from her confounding and delightful new limbs.

She runs her tongue over dull, rounded teeth while her uncle busies himself with the next set of preparations.

"You're real lucky we're pals, Llene," he sighs, and pulls out some ludicrously powerful little trinket which will allow her to sing two spells at technically the same moment, in some kind of time loop that Cyllene doesn't need to know the theory for to take advantage of. The tunes clash and the tempos don't match at all but she's good at music and it doesn't matter that there's another Cyllene trying to pull her wildly off-key; she can hold her own line regardless.

Her voice - or voices- go out and for a moment she's terrified, that she's human and omniglottal but still here, that now she's not even stuck with forced supervision but stuck in this tiny crack of air - even if her father were agreeable she just wouldn't have time to make it to the surface alive - but then the tips of her fingers and toes start dissolving.

It is not comfortable, and it's in fact dread- and horror-inducingly not-comfortable; she tries to start screaming - but right, no voice - her grip falls away and she thrashes back into the water - there's a hand on her shoulder for the remainder of time her shoulder exists, a few seconds - and then there's nothing, she's nothing.

But only for a moment.

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k-shut-up-now

Nod.

"Yeah I think that probably has to be magic. What kind of fish are the other sisters, like what colors and stuff, I can look that up too."

k-shut-up-now

With some searching the two of them determine that Cyllene has two ray sisters, a sea jelly sister, a leafy seadragon sister, a thresher shark sister - actually another shark sister, a catshark; Cyllene didn't realize because she was so small - and an arctic char mother. Cyllene thinks she herself was a blue shark.

Sesh becomes abruptly obsessed with leafy seadragons and sends fourteen pictures of them to the printer to put on her walls.

k-shut-up-now

Hee hee.

The lights flash for dinner. It's fish tonight, actually, but they are eating it dipped in peppery egg batter and deep fried and smothered in garlic lime sauce.

k-shut-up-now

HUMANS ARE SO GOOD AT FOOD. It doesn't even taste THAT much better than other human stuff she's eaten but the difference between this and what she ate as a fish person is WOW.

"You like this recipe, huh?" giggles Sesh, who is separating all of her fish from the batter and eating the batter by itself and dipping the fish in the sauce.

k-shut-up-now

Fish people are so boring of at to for about food.

"Well you can't really cook in the sea."

k-shut-up-now

Nod nod chomp chomp.

Now Sesh has to go take a bath.

"You should take a bath too," she tells Cyllene while she's heading up to the bathroom she prefers.

k-shut-up-now

How?

"You fill a tub up with water and soap and you wash off all your dead skin and sweat and dirt and stuff! And your hair! - you don't wash off your hair you wash stuff off your hair."

k-shut-up-now

Dead skin?

"Skin is dying like all the time! The top layer of your skin is actually ALREADY DEAD. It's -"

"Sesh, this looks a lot like dawdling..."

"I'LL TELL YOU LATER. OR READ MY HUMAN ANATOMY BOOK."

k-shut-up-now

Well, if Cyllene has to wait for Sesh (and possibly Paju?) to finish with their baths then yeah, she'll check out the human anatomy book while she waits. Especially since she can do that while plucking at her harp.

The human anatomy book confirms that human skin is constantly dying and replacing itself.

k-shut-up-now

Woaaah. She wonders if her old skin also did that; it didn't feel like it was but her human skin also doesn't. She switches to harping at her skin to get it to tell it about itself but doesn't get super far before the bath is free.

Bath: What Is It Like??

It is warm! It is bubbly! It doesn't taste good at all!

k-shut-up-now

Blechh! Also ack water going in her nose is pretty bad as well, even though it smells good out of her nose. She splashes some water out of the tub from shaking her head trying to get it out of her face.

Tubs are much much too small to swim in, in a way that's pretty disconcerting, but eventually she finds a comfortable position and then it's kind of relaxing.

It's kind of really relaxing.

. . . It's relaxing enough that she maybe dozes off a little.

She is not three years old so no one is actually trying to supervise her in the tub and this will not be noticed! Hopefully she doesn't get any in her nose while dozing!

k-shut-up-now

She does not, and she's not out for long enough that the water goes cold either. Baths are excellent she wants to take them - well, not all the time or she should have just stayed a fish person but frequently. It's so warm and nice and not at all like the sea, anyways. Only the good parts.

- There's something kind of weird about the skin on her hands though, she should go ask someone if that's normal. She stands up and steps out of the tub and tries not to slip on the splashed water and fails with a painful thunk.

"You all right in there? Uh, kick the door if I don't need to come in."

k-shut-up-now