Starmaids? Star mermaids.

June 2nd, 2022

Those that called the far reaches of space cold, black, and empty were wrong.

There was nowhere you could go, no place you could swim to, where the light of a million different planets and galaxies didn't shine on your scales and make them glitter.

There was no hole in an asteroid, however deep and dark, where you couldn't feel the flares of the nearest sun washing against your mantle.

Of course, Keiichi and his friends were something of an exception. Space was the only home they had, and if they tried to go near a planet, well…

It took a careful balance of gravity and internal physiology to maintain their sleek, shining bodies in the infinite void of space. If they got too near to a planet, to a moon –anything with a noticeable gravitational pull of its own, really– their delicate system would be thrown into chaos, and the results were not pretty or pleasant. Keiichi had heard whispers, on those shining metal objects hurtling through the void, of fish and how they reacted when thrown on land.

Those voices were strange, Mion had remarked often. They didn't seem to understand how quiet space was, how far those little whispers reached even through thick bulkhead walls and shining glass.

Well, whatever.

Keiichi yawned from his place sprawled over an asteroid, stretching out and making the darting coil of his tail flicker and flare, bright red like the tail of a comet hurling down onto one of the many planets he couldn't touch.

"Keiichi-kun!"

He opened one eye, looking up to see his best friend, Rena Ryugu, coiling and curling in excitement above him. Her hair flickered a bright copper, her eyes the shimmering blue of a dying sun, and her tail was long and white. She spread her fins, and stars shone under and through her filmy mantle.

"Find a new piece of treasure?" he asked, languidly sitting up, and she nodded giddily.

"Its soooo adorable!" Rena squealed, somersaulting in her excitement as she spun around herself like a firecracker, before coming to an abrupt stop and darting towards him. "C'mon! I wanna show you!"

Before Keiichi could protest as to the very fine nap he had been taking, Rena seized him by the hand and yanked him up off his asteroid, flickering her tail to pull him along as she wove expertly through the shattered debris of some long-ago planet. Knowing exactly how difficult it was to reason with or divert her when she was on this kind of course, Keiichi sighed and started swishing his tail to follow her.

They sped up once they had gotten out of the asteroid belt, and Keiichi lifted his free hand to wave as he saw a gleam of green in the distance. Within seconds, they'd come even with Mion, who possessed two tails –one of long green hair that swayed behind her head, and the other a long, sinuous tail of emerald green, flickering like a tongue of fire behind her as her scales glittered in the solar light.

"Woah! What's the hurry?" she teased, looping around in a graceful path to join them as the three streaked through the blackened void like a trio of shooting stars.

"Treasure!" Rena squealed, and Mion rolled her eyes and laughed alongside Keiichi, needing no more explanation.

"Last one there's a black hole!" Mion shouted, flicking her tail and stretching her arms out in front of her like she was about to take a dive as she shot even faster through space, and Keiichi and Rena both cried their outrage and, dropping each other's hand, belatedly shot after her.

"Mi-chan, you don't even know where we're going!" Rena shouted, half-laughing, as they swung around a planet covered in stormy clouds and arched over one of its moons.

"Doesn't matter!" Mion cried back from her half-tail-length lead, making them all laugh again, even as they flew. It was probably a plot of hers, to make them out of breath by the time they arrived, and so cut down on their strength! Keiichi clenched his fists as he swayed his tail with all his might, straining to power past the other two.

What a cunning ploy…

"Yeeek!" Satoko spun out of their way as all three of them blitzed past, out of control for several moments and frantically clutching her own heap of recovered treasures to her chest, before she managed to flick her sun-yellow tail several times to right herself. "Hey!"

"Sorry, Satoko!" Mion called back behind them, and the other girl freed a hand from her pile of scrap to shake a fist.

"Watch where you're going! You nearly bowled me over!"

"Sorrrrrry!" came faintly in the distance as the three lights winked out.

"Hmpf." Satoko sniffed haughtily and swished her tail, coiling her way back to her own asteroid, where she'd stashed a mound of gizmos and gadgets. She liked building things, especially if those things could play tricks and pranks on the others. They'd rue the day they nearly sent her precious raw materials flying off in all directions! She had a brilliant plan for a snare, and another for a large tarp, and another for perhaps a lid over that finger-flicking Keiichi's cave, so that he'd bang his head when he tried to come out…

"Hey, look at Rika-chan!" Rena called as she and the others streaked across the starlit void, and Keiichi just barely flicked his eyes aside to glimpse, for a brief moment, the other girl sitting coiled up on a rock, her long blue tail glittering like a mysterious nebula, as her cousin Hanyuu…did something to her hair?

"This is ridiculous." Rika groaned, and Hanyuu puffed out her cheeks, her mantle flaring in agitation as her fins spread to their fullest extent.

"I'm telling you, this is what the voices do!" she cried, and rubbed the thing she'd called a brush against Rika's hair several times. "They say it's essential to hygiene!"

"Does hygiene mean tangling my hair into knots?" Rika muttered sourly, folding her arms, before three bright streaks raced by overhead –red, white, and green. Looks like Keiichi, Rena, and Mion were out racing again…

"Ack, no!" Hanyuu cried as the slipstream of the trio's passage suddenly hit them, and both Rika and Hanyuu were blasted out of their respective seats with near-identical yelps. Righting herself with a powerful flick of her tail, Rika watched with a sigh as her cousin spun tail over purple fin, and shook her head as Hanyuu lost her grip on that "brush" thing and it was sent flying off into the void, probably never to be recovered. Rika probably could've caught it, but why bother?

"Seriously, you are so weird, nipah." she told her cousin's dizzily sprawled form as Hanyuu hit a rock face, reaching up to rake her fingers through her long, shimmering blue hair and properly comb it out.

9.23 AM, USA Central Time

If you like my work(s), please consider supporting my book! The Business of Creation is a fluffy and wholesome collection of short stories in which the gods' process of creating their fantasy world is examined from the very moment of its beginning, and you can support it by moseying on over to my profile page and the link there to buy an electronic copy from one of several sites, or by just searching "Business of Creation by Anna Marcotte" on the web. You can leave a five-star review to boost the book's prominence in its category, if you don't want to spend money, but the more profits this book brings in, the more time (and less stress) I have to work on fanfiction!