Disclaimer: The settings, events and one or two characters are essentially JK Rowling's. I have expanded on the little we know and have developed it into more. I receive no money from this, so don't sue me! I'm poor.

A View From The Lake

Chapter Two: The Monster

I'll skip the boring parts of "the early years" and get straight into the interesting parts.

I was aged 7.

Nothing interesting had happened down in the town square for a long time. It was just us Mer-folk dealing with our daily lives of collecting food, avoiding the Giant Squid, dealing with the little things that the lake life throws at you, and then it happened.

The Giant Squid had developed a taste for us Mermish folk, and it decided one day to force its way into our city of Mermania. It happened as suddenly as that!

Mermen were acting in fright, using their weapons to fight the hideous creature, mermaids were protecting the mer-babes, and generally the whole city was in uproar. We needed to have some kind of protection, but the Squid was rampaging around the city. We fled and hid away in places where the Squid was too large to enter.

My best friends Dusty, Murkie, Greta and myself figured out what we could do to stop the Squid when we were hiding in the gallery… the place where we write and draw our stories. We had to scare the Squid away.

It was so simple, yet so brilliant, that we had to contact the whole city so that they could perform our great plan.

Greta swam to her pa (the Deputy-chieftain- Gloomak) and told him our plan.

He agreed that we had to get the Giant Squid to leave soon, because it was scaring away all of our food. Gloomak announced our plan to everyone who was in the town square, but his voice couldn't carry much farther.

Everyone that was within earshot swam over fast to help; our plan required a large number of fins. We needed all the help we could get. We armed ourselves with long spears as a backup, in case our plan didn't work.

Gloomak led us all the way to what we call The Valley. It is really lots of plants that reach from the bed of the lake to beyond the surface. It is where all of the mermaids that are of age go to lay their eggs, and where the mermen look for a wife. This was where the Giant Squid was.

The valley was too important to our kind to let the Squid remain there. We would have all died out. All of the inhabitants of the Great Lake, not only Mermania were distraught over the Squid infiltrating our sacred nesting ground.

In order to get the squid out, Gloomak and all of the mermen he could gather surrounded the best, and charged it out of the Valley. They drew spears, wore some of the hardest shells they could find as armour, and stood in a crowd, spread as far around the beast as they could. They charged, screaming at the top of their lungs, while we back in the Village Square worked on our part of the plan.

When the Squid was far enough out of the Valley, I shouted my command to the town folk-

"Everyone, the plan has to come to action. Places!" We arranged ourselves a good distance away from the demon, in a wide circle on the lake floor. We then tipped it onto its side, so that the circle was vertical within the Lake. The squid would have fit inside our circle if it came close enough.

"Ready- Set- Go!"

All of us moved as we had planed. We all swam around; holding hands in the circle, spinning the circle as fast as we could. After we had built up enough momentum, the effect was amazing. There were 200 or so mer-folk all spinning, creating a fast moving water tornado towards the beast.

It seemed confused at first, and then when it realised that the Merperson tornado was advancing upon it, it began to back slowly away, and then fled far from the Valley, and fled from the city.

I also heard, that in its anger, the squid was fearful, and when a small wizard (see A/n 1) fell into the lake, the squid accidentally knocked the small wizard back up out of the water, which saved him, rather than eat him as it would normally have done. Wasn't it a good idea?

Everyone was so happy about the Giant Squid leaving, and so proud of my idea, as a reward, they allowed me to do my very first drawing on the entrance to the city. I drew myself and Gloomak charging at the Giant Squid with spears. I was rather proud of my drawing, and my transcriber agrees that when she came here in her forth year, it was very impressive.

A/n 2: Dennis Creevy

Please review if you have got this far. Is it worth me extending this much further? I was thinking of just adding one more chapter. Would anyone like to see this develop?