Hi everyone! I'd just like to note that clams can indeed produce pearls (something I didn't know until writting this) but they look different from the ones you find in fresh water oyesters. There are also lots salt water oyesters and other such muluscs that produce pearls. Eridan gladly takes pearls from all of these, but he doesn't always like the way they taste. Also, this is the first fic that I've ever uploaded to this website, so I hope you enjoy it!
The seadweller glided along the ocean floor, looking for more clams. Clams were Eridan's favorite snack, but more importantly, he wanted the pearls that he sometimes found in them. He'd been collecting them for quite some time, hoping to make a necklace for Feferi as a proposition of matespritship. He knew that her feelings for him where less red and more pale, but he was hoping the gift would be just thoughtful enough to change her mind.
As Eridan was about to crack open a newly found clam, he noticed a shadow passing over the coral nearby and readied his gun (which, for reasons we cannot explain, works perfectly well underwater) looking to the shimmering streaks of light that were the sea-filtered Alternian sun. What he saw there was not a shark or a whale or anything dangerous, in fact, it looked dead. He swam closer to the thing which was now settling further down into the water. Was it a dead dolphin? Eridan shuddered at the thought, but looked closer. No...no, it was a troll, and a landdweller at that!
Eridan had only ever met one landdweller in all 8 sweeps of his life, and he was not fond of him. The highblood made a habit of tossing his garbage into the sea by which he lived, which wasn't only disgusting, but dangerous for the trolls (and dolphins) who lived there. Eridan had marched himself up to the hive of the no-good, littering scum, ready to give him a piece of his mind. Instead, he immediately slipped on some kind of garbage (not a difficult task to accomplish considering the trolls hive was covered with the stuff) and landed in a pile of horns, underneath which was buried the land dweller clown. The troll proceeded to thrash and scream, and Eridan, too startled to react, was thrown across the room into the kitchen. All he remembered from that point on was a green pie coming towards his face. According to Feferi and several snickering witnesses, Eridan had been acting...peculiar...upon his return home.
Eridan supposed he should try to help the drowning landdweller. Maybe this one wasn't a hysterical, littering drug addict. He figured he'd never find out if he didn't save him. He darted towards the sinking body at a speed that only a seadweller could accomplish and looped an arm around his waist. He found that the troll was abnormally lithe, maybe even malnourished. He pressed his lips to the other trolls in an attempt to filter some air from his gills into the landdweller's mouth. It worked. Neat, he didn't know he could do that.
The troll didn't respond, but Eridan could tell that he was still alive (or at least very recently deceased) from his body heat. He took him to the surface, then looked around for some land to bring him to. These waters were pretty shallow, so it didn't take him long to spot a small island in the distance. Eridan looked down at his unconscious cargo. The troll boy had two sets of small, pointy horns and a surplus of teeth. He couldn't have been any older than Eridan himself. He wondered for a moment whether or not he should give him another breath of air before heading for the island. He didn't know how much good that would do, but he had a vague understanding of landdweller anatomy and he knew that the top priority was to get the water out of his lungs. He went for the island, reaching it in what seemed like less than a minute. He laid the troll boy down on the beach in a scene sickeningly reminiscent of that in a classic troll Disney movie. He pressed down on the trolls chest in the most appropriate manner possible given his sparse knowledge on drowning resuscitation, his only reference: troll Hollywood. He was surprised at how quickly spurts of water lept from the landdweller's mouth, and was stunned enough to hesitate for a moment before bringing his lips to the troll boy's mouth once more. He was greeted by the near immediate coughing and sputtering of the other troll, who then rolled over and vomited the remaining sea water onto the hot sand and coughed in agony for several minutes while Eridan stared, horrified and disgusted by the display.
Waiting for the land dweller to stop being disgusting gave Eridan some time to wonder how the hell a land dweller managed to get all the way out here when there was no boat in sight and live. How long had he been floating out there, anyway? Did he just become too exhausted to keep swimming and pass out just as Eridan had found him? These grotesque land dweller antics also gave Eridan time to realize that he had left the clam he had found behind. Damn. With his luck, it probably had the biggest pearl in the entire Alternian sea inside of it.