"Hey, miss? You dropped your coat."

The woman, short and plump and adorable with her multicolored braids, startled and stared at Ivan in shock as he bent down with a grunt and scooped up the furry coat that had fallen out of the backpack on the back of her chair after she pulled out a binder. It was kitten-soft against his hands, silvery and gunmetal gray and snowy white in a pattern that pinged something in the back of his head, but he wasn't sure what. Still, he offered it to the seated woman with a shy smile.

Aaaand she was still staring at him, eyes wide even as her hands automatically came up to take the coat from him and clutch it tightly to her chest.

And then, for some reason, she squeaked and blushed bright red as before burying her face in her coat.

"Ooookay. I'm. Just. Going to go back to studying," Ivan stammered out awkwardly, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand. "So, um… yeah." Unsure what else to do, he gave a small wave before turning to head back to his table and textbooks.

A little odd, but she had definitely been cute.

"Um, excuse me…"

Ivan looked up from his textbook, wearily rubbed at his eyes, then blinked at the young woman standing nervously beside his table. "Oh, you're the girl from yesterday."

"Yes, um…" she squeaked, then hurriedly offered him something small in both hands, eyes squeezed tight.

Okay, she was too adorable for words.

Hesitantly, Ivan plucked the small object out of her hands and examined it.

It… looked like a ring box. A lot like a ring box.

Maybe because it was one.

Look, he had been studying way too long by now because midterms were a bitch, okay?

A little more hesitantly, Ivan opened the box.

That was... a very shiny ring. Very shiny. Were those sapphires? Ivan knew absolutely nothing about gems but those looked like sapphires.

"Uh… is this an engagement ring?" Ivan's mouth said without consulting his brain first.

"Uh-huh!" The woman's cheeks were red, but she seemed to be on a roll. "I thought that since you're human, we could get married according to human customs, too."

"…What?!"

About ten minutes of trying to get his brain to reboot later, Ivan was sitting at a table in the corner of the campus library across from the young woman, fiddling with a bottle of water she had pulled out of her backpack and given to him. A flash of silvery-grey had proven that the weird coat was back in there.

"So… an explanation would be… really nice right about now… um… I'm sorry, I don't think you've told me…"

"Oh!" The woman flushed, fiddling with the end of one of her braids, a blue one. "I'm Mylene."

"Ivan."

Mylene nodded, then took a deep breath. "Okay, so, um… long story short… I'm a selkie."

"What in the world is a selkie?"

"Sometimes we're also called silkies, although that word is pretty rare these days."

At Ivan's blank look, Mylene pouted, and Ivan really wished that it didn't somehow make her even more adorable. It was hard to be irritated with someone when they were so cute he just wanted to hug them. Also he was going to very firmly ignore that desire right now. "I should have expected that, we're not very well known here in France." She took a deep breath and went back to fiddling with her braid. "So, basically, I can turn into a seal."

Ivan blinked. "Like a mermaid, or a werewolf?"

She gave him a stern look that was about as intimidating as a kitten. "Absolutely not." She shook her head and muttered "Stupid popular species," under her breath, then turned back to him. "I just put my sealskin on, and turn into my seal form. I take it off, and I'm in my human form."

"… Did I hit my head and not remember?"

"… No?"

Ivan looked around. "Okay, is this being filmed? Some sort of joke for one of those TV shows?"

Mylene's jaw dropped slightly, then she huffed and smacked her hands down on the table, making Ivan jump from the loud bang. "I'm not joking!"

"Shh!"

Mylene jerked and flushed as a group a couple tables over shushed them, then turned back to Ivan. "Look, I can prove it tonight," she continued, softer again. "At the pool in the campus rec center, after it closes. Eleven PM."

"How-"

"A friend got me a key so I could get some swimming in at night, since Paris is so far from the ocean and I am not about to dunk myself in that gross thing you people call a river."

Ivan gave Mylene a flat look. "And why should I show up?"

Mylene dropped her head into her hands with a low groan and fussed with the bandanna covering the start of her colorful braids. "And that's what I needed to talk with you about."

She looked so upset and distressed that Ivan was reaching over to gently rub a large hand over her upper back in a clumsy attempt at comfort before he even realized it. He blushed as she peeked up at him, and pulled away with a mumbled "Sorry."

"No, it's… I don't mind…" She flushed and straightened up. "I was hoping you would believe me about the selkie part before we got to this part, since it's kind of… really important."

Mylene looked down again, then pouted and seemed to force herself to meet his eyes. Ivan tried to tell himself that it was not cute.

Yeah, he didn't even believe himself at this point.

"Look, in selkie culture… our skins are really important. They're the source of our magic. A lot of our culture revolves around them, and a good chunk of that culture is about humans interacting with our skins. Do you follow me so far?"

Mylene was so serious and intent that Ivan found himself nodding before he realized it.

"Good. In the past, humans would sometimes steal our skins and hide them, and make the selkie marry them because they couldn't leave."

Forgetting, at least for the moment, that Mylene was talking about things that shouldn't exist, Ivan's jaw dropped. "That's awful!"

"It was. But we couldn't exactly stop going on land or interacting with humans. So, a new law sprang up." Mylene flushed hard now, one hand coming up to fuss with her braids again. "Any human who got ahold of our skin, and gave it back of their own free will, would have proven themselves kind and trustworthy enough to… to marry."

Ivan's brain must have been lagging a step or two behind at this point. In his defense, he was still trying to get over the 'selkie' thing. "And what does that have to do with me?"

Mylene reached down and picked up her backpack, opening it up and fishing out the coat that he remembered from yesterday.

Only, now that she partially spread it over the table, fingers lovingly combing through the silvery fur, Ivan realized that it wasn't a coat at all.

It was a skin. A really big one.

And suddenly what Mylene was talking about seemed all too real.

"This is my skin. And when you handed it back to me yesterday after I dropped it, in selkie culture, you… I… we're kinda… married now. And that's why I gave you the engagement ring."

And that's when Ivan's brain officially bluescreened.