April 2, 2005 - North Atlantic Ocean
Annabelle soared low over the ocean on her Stardust broomstick, doing occasional loops and swerves for amusement, but all the while making a speedy pace toward the straight beam of a rainbow shooting up out of the ocean to meet the clouds.
She reached her destination and hovered over the waves. She tapped her wand to herself, vanishing her clothes off her body and storing it all in the small bag hanging from a cloth band around her waist. She stowed her wand into the bag next. She flexed her fingers, and out of the bag came a little potions vial. She didn't hesitate to drink it. She vanished the empty vial away into her bag and gave her broom a tap of a finger. Then she just fell sideways off her boom and plunged into the ocean.
She swam up to break the surface a moment. She watched her broom disappear into thin air, and she smiled and sank back down below the waves as she felt the changes taking hold across her body. Assured that the broom was also stored in her bag now.
Freezing waters became warmer. Vision became clearer. She didn't need to hold her breath; she had gills on her neck. Her legs fused together and lengthened, becoming a long tail with fins. The culprit for all this was a very new, very powerful potion that utilized gillyweed, crushed magical fish scales, and some other ingredients to it that Annabelle wasn't really familiar with. Nonetheless, she was pleased that, in her line of work as Magical Britain's nonhuman diplomat, she got to be one of the first people to try the new transformative potion out.
Not that this was some diplomatic endeavor here. No, it was just that Annabelle had gotten an informal invitation to the mermaid kingdom of Creterul by its current ruling Queen, Lailu, which the Ministry of Magic had taken to be a diplomatic action - and had therefore reacted accordingly to prepare Annabelle for it. The kingdom, and more specifically, its capital city of sorts: Mairai.
Mermaidian Annabelle practiced swimming circles, twisting and turning. It wasn't too different from flying around in the skies with Anju while using her enchanted wings. It was better, even: she had buoyancy, here. There wasn't any risk of high speed free-falling if anything went wrong. Of course, there was the risk of dying a terrible death of suffocation...but she didn't want to think about that too much. Besides, the potion would give her up to 24 hours worth of this transformation - it was specifically designed to be long term (something of an admittedly recent concept in potions). And, if in some event it stopped working on her, she had two extra vials in her bag she could hopefully get to before drowning.
Annabelle kicked her tail and soared into an effortless, downward spiral. She rolled over and over as she did, then switched to rolling the other way for a while. She did a forward loop and went straight on down, picking up speed and slicing through the water like it was nothing. Deeper and deeper she went, and darker and darker her surroundings got - even with her changed vision. But she kept at it, kept going. Down, down, down, until she saw it.
The rainbow pillar that shimmered and glowed in this dark depth met with a series of scattered lights below her. Magical light sources. As she got closer to it all, those lights spread out and multiplied, and Annabelle really saw just how big of a place it was that she was bearing down on.
It was definitely a city. But not like any city she'd ever seen before.
There was a dome, made of shell or something. Massive and wide. It spread out and covered an area of over fifty miles or so. All over the surface of this shell were those lights, in circles and in other patterns. They were circling, they were floating above these wide, circular holes in the shell, here and there - several dozen, all over. These lights pulsed between an eerie green, and a bright yellow. On the curved side of this shell dome, out of these openings were streams of mermaids, mermen, and close pods of what looked like sharks, dolphins, and a few octopuses and giant squids - Annabelle even watched a whale of some kind emerge and set out for the open seas.
The lights seemed to be like...like traffic lights, indicating go or stop.
Looking through these openings, Annabelle gleaned glimpses of great rows and clusters of structures made of rock and shell, so far below, in all shapes and sizes, with lights lining them, ringing them, too, and there were carvings and statues about them, wooden poles and planks on roofs...and...
"You surfacers really do think too highly of yourselves, don't you?"
Annabelle whirled around, startling horribly.
A mermaid was floating there, had snuck up on her in open water!
"How did you do that?"
"Do what? Speak your language?" the mermaid's eyes (four times larger than a human's, and a lot rounder; they took up most of her face) jiggled around in their sockets in an odd way. Her lips curved into a smile. "I've known how to do that for a long time - it's necessary for dealing with your nosy surface nations."
"No, I mean- how did you just sneak up on me like that?"
"Your expression is, you stick out like a sore thumb, I think," the mermaid replied, her smile turning into a full-teethed grin. "A child could've done it, Anne."
"It's Annabelle. And, how do you know my name, anyway?"
The mermaid laughed. She leaned back and crossed her arms. Twisted left and right, as if blown by current - or wind, maybe. "I wouldn't be much of a queen if I didn't know who I was inviting into my kingdom - and about the sort of things going on with you land-livers lately."
Annabelle stared. "Q-queen? What? You're- Lailu?"
"Yep."
"Uh-huh." Annabelle paused. "This isn't a prank or something?"
"A prank? Not yet." She laughed again. "Come on, follow me. We'll get you into my house. We can talk there."
Annabelle shrugged easily. "Okay..."
"I'm not one for going slow," the queen informed her, flashing another grin. "Can you keep up?"
"Probably not," Annabelle admitted. "I've only had this for...maybe half an hour," she added, gesturing at her tail.
"Mmmm. Well, bad luck, Anne- abelle." That said, Lailu, queen, took off toward the expansive dome shell like a bat out of hell.
Annabelle sputtered, floundered, and tore off after her with a madly swishing tail.
Lailu twirled and twisted, moving along on her backside to stare at Annabelle. She made a complex motion with her fingers where her fingertips flared up with individual, different colored magical lights, and then she flipped around, belly down again, and shot off even faster.
Annabelle kicked her tail harder to keep up. She followed Lailu through one of the great openings, and she really realized something new about the shell dome. It wasn't just many dozens of miles wide: it was also dozens upon dozens of miles high. Annabelle had thought the clusters of buildings were so small and grouped together because she'd been so far away, or because of the underwater weirdness of her vision, but no. No, big no! They were actually really, really far below even the dome shell!
Now inside the dome herself, Annabelle saw there was a lot more to it. Not just the...clusters of buildings littering the rock bed far below. The whole of the dome's interior was littered with other structures that bobbed and floated about, almost haphazardly placed in relation to each other, and with no real regard to the elevation of them all. Most of these structures were orbiting each other, grouped together in twos and threes, sometimes fours and sixes that clung tight and rotated while they orbited other groups together. Larger and smaller swirled around each other, both vertically and horizontally. Like planets and stars did.
What was astonishingly meticulous about it was the fact that none of them were bumping into each other, knocking out orbits or anything. They seemed to all be perfectly timed so that none ever came close. Some had wider or tighter arcs, tilted orbits, and it all came together for an amazingly perfect routine. They were all moving in-between and through each other, around each other, and none of it was in any sort of chaos.
And what orbited these orbiting structures themselves were more of those magical, bright white lights!
It wasn't chaos. It was design, and it was breathtaking for Annabelle to witness.
Mermaids and mermen were darting between and around it all, through it all, like it was an everyday thing. There wasn't any panic, no desperate darting about the structures.
They all knew exactly how and when and where something was going to move.
Annabelle, on the other hand...
Lailu swam right up to her, swirled around her waist, tight like a constricting serpent, her body rubbing against Annabelle's, and popped up to give her a bop on the forehead with a glowing white palm.
Annabelle jerked back, staring. She slapped a hand to her head. "What was that for?" she asked, bewildered. Not hurt at all. Lailu made a general gesture around them. Annabelle obliged her, took another look around, and as she did she saw glowing, pulsing magical trails of white appearing all around herself. Trails, she realized instantly, that were quite obviously revealing the path and motion of each and every structure and cluster of structures around her. Every orbit, every direction was revealed to her.
"Can you see it?" Lailu spoke, quite seriously for the first time now.
"Yeah. Thanks for that, uh- that spell? Some kind of magic, duh, but...what is it?"
"Just something we slap over our kid's eyes until they're old enough to navigate themselves," Lailu responded, that sly smile of hers back again. "Figured you're enough like a kid in my kingdom that you'd get some use out of it."
"Thanks," Annabelle repeated, trying not to huff with the upsurge of exasperation and embarrassment filling her body just then.
"No pouting - this kingdom runs on happy thoughts. Come on now; we need to keep going. Just stay on my tail, won't you?"
Annabelle shook her head, smiling despite herself. "Okay. Lead the way." Again.
Again they were off, fast and tight, weaving and diving together. Lailu, with utter confidence and a casual air about her, and Annabelle, with all the desperation of someone trying to control an out of control vehicle in a bid to just keep it on the road, for god's sake.
After several minutes of this insanity, in which Annabelle still managed to bump into structures and passersby (prompting her to make frantic and constant apologies), she really started to suspect that Lailu was leading her on a difficult route on purpose. She was diving, then taking her up again, then left, right, around in a circle and...
"Here we are," Lailu announced, drifting to a stop in front of a pair of two small houses that were in a mind-boggling, vertical spiral path of motion - which took it up and down through another group of six larger structures with a standard horizontal orbit to them. "The small one on the left side is mine - don't let the door knock you on the tail."
"Could you just- uhm- take me in by hand, please?" Annabelle said weakly.
"Sure thing." Lailu grabbed Annabelle's flesh hand and eyed the spiraling houses. A second. Two- She surged forward, dragging Annabelle along, twisted them around a larger building and slipped into the properly faced, rotating doorway to her little home. Annabelle felt the tip of her tail touch the doorway as they entered.
Annabelle breathed - whatever - through her gills, leaning against the nearest wall of smooth, curved rock. Bad idea: she started rotating with the structure. She quickly pulled her hand away and reoriented herself.
She turned to look out the entrance, and she saw the underwater world rotating from this new perspective. A narrow view. It almost made her sick, so she shut her eyes and turned to look at Lailu instead. The only constant in this place. There were two other side rooms in this house whose entryways kept moving around her that she couldn't bear to look at either!
"So...Queen Lailu-" Annabelle started.
Lailu held up a hand, and her index finger flared a bright red color. "Please, just Lailu! I know you surfacers love that respect in formality stuff, but down here we show respect by familiarity. When you're here, you're one of us. Family, whatever term you want to call it. We invite you in, we treat you good, and hopefully you'll want to come back."
"Alright, Lailu." Annabelle smiled, feeling her heart swell. "Uhm...so this is your home? It's...really small."
"Of course it is," Lailu said simply. She swished her tail and leaned forward, onto her stomach. A hand came up under her chin, while the other began to lazily swirl through the waters with fingertips that glowed white again. "How big is your home, Annabelle?"
"Sometimes really, really big - but most of the time it's pretty average for- uh, for people," Annabelle stammered out. "Depends if we have any large visitors."
"Right! Your dragon kid. Norberta. The one who swims above even the land itself! What's it like up there? I'd love to ask her."
"Um...it's cold. Blue. And...white. Cloudy."
"Blue." Lailu hummed. Her fingers shifted out of white, phased to a deepest blue. "My favorite color."
"The ocean is blue," Annabelle said stupidly.
"Yes, yes it is," said Lailu. Her eyes bobbed in their sockets again, in that strange way. "So, you're probably wondering why I invited you all the way out here to begin with, aren't you?"
Annabelle shifted in the water. She flexed her tail a bit under herself. "Uh, yeah. Definitely still wondering that."
"I invited you here to have some fun with me."
"Some fun?" Annabelle repeated. "Like, more of what we've already done? Racing and stuff?"
"You think that was a race?" Lailu's eyes spazzed out, and she flipped over onto her backside and squirmed about like a worm on a hook. When she'd stopped, she flipped back upright and stared at Annabelle with those huge, unblinking eyes of hers. "You want to race me?" she asked, utterly serious again. For however long that'd last.
Annabelle shrugged. "Um...maybe? If you don't race for fun, what did you mean instead?" She was so off balance it wasn't even funny. Literally, because...she didn't have land or legs to stand on!
"Oh, we race," Lailu said airily. "But not here. Not like that. No, no. That's illegal, can cause chaos and injuries - we don't do that. If you want to race, we have a few courses built underneath Mairai, into the rocks. They go all over the place."
"That's...sensible," Annabelle replied. Inside, however, she was vowing to herself to never allow herself to be inside a deep ocean, underground cavern or tunnel, because that was too damn terrifying to even contemplate.
"It sure is." Lailu smiled, her huge eyes looked Annabelle up and down. Her blue fingertips pulsed brighter for a moment, shifted into a shade of orange, and then returned to its original, plain white state. Lailu closed her hand, and the lights blinked out entirely. "Do you want to?"
Annabelle tried to smile back. "Maybe later?"
"Ok. If you feel the urge, just let me know."
"Right. I- I will." Silence for a moment. "So...I'm really just here to...have fun with you?"
"Yes." Lailu's hand pulsed scarlet, held, and receded to nothing. "Okay, not really. I'd like to be able to convince you to keep coming back because I'd like to develop certain relations with you surfacer nations. There are some big changes passing through your societies, and I want to get my hands into it before it's over. It could give my kingdom some new toys to play with. Some new options. Trading, aid, all that sort of stuff." Her lips pursed into a frown. "Some other kingdoms around here have already been doing this, and it's affecting the rest of us in some bad ways."
"What kind of bad ways?" Annabelle asked.
Lailu leaned back in the waters, let out some bubbles from her mouth. She held up her hands and made a quick, two-second pattern, with lights of scarlet that flashed and intermingled as her fingers did. It was really almost like a kind of sign language. "Some of our people are being...kidnapped, and then they're being handed off to some of your people. Like gifts. Trinkets. No...prizes. Some of your people are also being taken by some of our people, and none of it's nice to look at. I don't know who I have to make aware of the situation up there to get this whole thing solved, but I need to do it somehow. I don't like it," she finished, simply but...emotionally.
"I didn't know anything like that was going on," Annabelle said quietly. "I'm sorry. I um- I'll try to...do what I can to help get it fixed. Get your people back here, and get mine back up there."
"Most of...neither of...they're not really alive anymore," Lailu blurted out. Her huge eyes were very still. Her palms glowed a dull purple, held outward to Annabelle. "When your people get brought down here, typically they die from it - if they don't, they get held and tortured, raped and killed. I think interrogated, too, maybe? I've heard things, that's all. And my people have been dying slow, terrible deaths whenever your...fishermen snatch them up in those nets and bring them onto your boats. They get other injuries too. And the ones who don't die get sent somewhere else else, or they get pushed back down here for us to find a few days or weeks later. Bleeding, with broken bones, and - in the case of some of our men and most of our women - sexually based injuries."
"Okay. Okay, um...I am really, really sorry that this is happening."
"I can see that - even without any ferai signals."
"Ferai signals?"
Lailu raised a palm at Annabelle again: it glowed a brilliant white. "This. Ferai signal."
"Even the ones on your fingers? Those are ferai signals, too?"
"No, those are turai signals."
"What's the difference?" Annabelle asked, curious.
"Ferai are for conveying more intense, larger scale emotions and ideas. Turai are for minor feelings and ideas."
"And the different colors? Do they all mean something different?"
"They do." Lailu sounded as if she were trying very hard to be patient. Suddenly she whirled around and swished her tail, and began a fast circling of Annabelle. She was following the rotation of the house, keeping close to the walls. Almost skimming them. Keeping pace with them, almost exactly. "Red is offense or embarrassment, or distress, generally. Blue is tranquil, or neutral, I suppose. Calm, at peace - contentment. Orange is attraction or arousal when directed at another through the fingers - turai. Purple is grief, or remorse, usually. Mourning, if you're mourning anyone. Green is annoyance or frustration. Yellow is a warning, a call for caution or care - it's complicated. And multicolor is joy or excitement."
"And white?" Annabelle asked, nodding.
"That just signifies a use of magic," Lailu laughed as she circled the room, her voice swirling about in a strange way with the motion. "Impending or current."
"Okay. Do you have any signals that use...like, pink, black, or...whatever? Turquoise, grass green, what about shades? One finger or multiple? What about flashes and bursts versus pulses and slow droning? Fading? And what do you do if you feel more than one thing at once? Do you just-"
Lailu interrupted her quickly. Gave her a strange look for a brief moment, when she passed in front of her. Annabelle had no clue what it was. "We don't want to get into shades or finger numbering, or flashes and pulses, and you generally never want to see either pink or black, unless you're alone with someone you've known for a really long time. Don't mention shades, don't contest fingers, and don't mention those two colored signals around anyone - they can be misinterpreted in a terrible way. And if you see any pink or black lights like, around a house, don't go anywhere near it, for gosh sake."
"Alright. I'm- um, I'm sorry."
"I just didn't bring you here to teach you every aspect of my culture in a few hours," Lailu responded, dismissive and casual again. "Do you want to eat something?" she added spontaneously.
"What do you have to eat?" Annabelle asked cautiously.
"Wait a moment." Lailu circled the room twice more, then flashed out of the main room into one of the two side chambers.
"Green is annoyance?" Annabelle said suddenly, as a thought struck her.
"Right," Lailu's voice drifted back to her from the other room. "Why do you ask?"
"Your...dome's opening...hole thingy...signals turn green sometimes," Annabelle said, trailing into muttering.
"Right," Lailu said again. She laughed, loud and high. "That's just- oh, how do your people say it? How did that last surfacer put it...An in joke? It's a culture thing, you wouldn't get it? Does that sound right?"
Annabelle smiled. "I guess." She paused as another thought burst to life in her head. "And, hey - um, you used...orange fingers at me a minute ago, didn't you?"
"Yep," Lailu's voice replied, still in that casual tone of hers. "You make a good mermaid, in a weird way. Your eyes are all wrong, and your skin is just weird weird, but the rest isn't too bad to look at. But that probably makes me the weird one, doesn't it? Weird attractions."
"Um...I wouldn't- like- you know, kink-shame you or whatever..." Annabelle mumbled. "You like what you like, you know?"
"Oh, I know," came Lailu's reply, a humorous hint to her voice. "But not everyone thinks that way. A nearby society of lamia likes to intermingle with my kingdom's citizens, and vice versa, and it gets a lot of troublesome attention on both sides. I've been working with their ruler to stamp that out, but it's been slow going. Different histories and cultures are responsible for the difficulties, mostly - even though we do share one big thing in common that I think should really be enough to see us through the rest." She came back into the main room with a block of ice in her hands. This block of ice had a fish inside it. "Here, take it."
Annabelle took it. She was a little surprised to find it was both weightless and lacked any sensation of freezing temperatures. "What do I do with it? Sorry, I've never...eaten anything underwater before. Or...fish, period. How do you- how do you prepare it, and all?"
"Is this a surfacer problem, or a you problem?" Lailu flashed a smile and took the fish back, slowly and deliberately. Her fingers ran over Annabelle's. "You always have those boats, and you're always taking and killing fish, whales, sharks, and sometimes octopuses - I thought you'd be an expert already."
"Not all of us are...fishermen," Annabelle stuttered, crossing her arms over her chest. "I've never actually been on a boat, or...gone fishing before. I- this is my- first time in the ocean, honestly."
"A day of firsts for you, then." Lailu's palm lit up white, and she ran it over the side of the ice. It disappeared in underwater steam. She stroked the fish, and the scales popped off rapidly. Then, the fish itself was split open, and its insides were gushing outside. Lailu flicked her lit-up fingers at the guts, and they vanished into thin air. "You have to be pretty brave, don't you? To come here like this, into a twofold unknown world. Just because I invited you here."
"I- I like to think I'm brave, yeah," Annabelle said, distractedly eyeing the fish that was being prepared. "Not to be egotistical, or arrogant, you know - just, I hear that from people a lot."
"Right." Lailu nodded; she closed her fist above the fish, and it was suddenly enveloped in magical, waterproof fires. "That's something I hear, myself. And stupid: mainly for looking to reach out to you surfacers for any kind of help."
"Sorry."
"Public opinions ebb and flow," Lailu dismissed. "It will all come back my way soon enough - once we're past this situation."
"I hope so."
"Thanks. What's in the bag?"
Annabelle sniffed at the cooking fish, glanced down at her bag. "Um, my wand, some potions, my clothes and my broomstick - not much."
"I don't really know what all that is," Lailu admitted, still not looking away from the fish she was intently staring at. "Could I see some of it?"
"Erm, if you want to, sure," Annabelle reluctantly answered. "None of it does well in water. They...can get damaged, and- other stuff. But if it's just for a short minute or two, I think it could all be fine."
"Really? Oh, well: here." Lailu lifted a hand of glowing white, directed off to her side.
A bubble began to grow in the room. Small at first, then larger, larger, larger...
"Is that big enough for your stuff?" Lailu asked.
"Yeah. Thank you."
Lailu smiled, lowered her hand. "You're welcome."
Annabelle untied her bag and reached her arms into the large bubble. She found dry air and room temperature inside it. She retrieved her things and spread them out for Lailu, hovering inside the bubble together.
Lailu extinguished her flames and pushed the fish aside; it floated off a few feet, and then just bobbed in place in defiance of normal water physics. Lailu's huge eyes were now peering into the bubble. She tentatively reached her hands in to touch, stroke and feel Annabelle's affects.
"You really wrap all of this around your body? How do you even move with all of that? Isn't it really restrictive?"
"Um, well, on the surface we don't exactly have to be as agile or...as fast as you do down here. So it's not really a problem for us. And if we do have to be fast, we have things like this broomstick to help us go faster magically. Or, technologically, we have cars and stuff."
"You have to rely on other things all the time to just move around?" Lailu's fingers flared bright red. Not deep scarlet, like before. And it was only for a moment, a second, before dying down. She made a quick, intricate motion with them in that second that Annabelle couldn't guess at.
But she could ask. "That was bright red. Not dark. And the...hand sign? What was that about?"
"Pity. Sympathy," Lailu responded, hesitant for once.
"Oh. No, it's- it isn't that bad!" Annabelle laughed. "Clothing, I mean. It's not like we're all cripples or something," she hurried to explain.
Lailu's index finger flashed bright red, singularly. "Right - sorry. I didn't mean to imply that about you."
"It's okay. Um, Lailu, not to get into culture and history lessons again, but...why exactly do you have the...uhm...ferai and turai signals, and the hand motions, too? Why do you have all that when you're talking to me just fine with your mouth? You know, a voice and all? A language."
"We didn't used to be able to talk with our voices," Lailu said simply. "In our ancient past, our species...my subspecies, actually, in particular, developed this system. Ferai and turai signalling, that is. Everyone else generally used various hand signals, too. But we're special, because we started to use our magic to communicate more - more complex things. We brought nuance to social interactions. We advanced social interactions, with ourselves and with other societies who met us. Other kingdoms in the modern age use...bastardized ferai and turai signalling, because of their old encounters with us - they took it home and twisted it up into their own versions of it. Between all of us modern types, over time, we managed to find words in common there and force a bridge to be made between our separate versions of the signalling."
"Cool."
Lailu grinned. "Yes. Cool." She flicked a finger at the fish, and it split into two whole fish like a dividing cell; one of them zoomed over to float in front of Annabelle, while the other went straight to Lailu's waiting palm. She took a big bite out of it, then flipped onto her backside and leaned into the wall, letting it take her around and around again.
Annabelle lowered herself awkwardly onto her...nonexistent knees? In the middle of the room. She bit into the fish. It was wet, chewy, and...well, it was food. She glanced at Lailu as she made another round in front of Annabelle's field of view, and took another bite out of it. Chewed, swallowed it up. "Thank you for the meal," she spoke, mentally crossing her fingers (and feeling a bit terrible about it).
When Lailu came around again, she had a smile on her face. Her huge eyes were shining. Literally. They were a radiant, light shade of pink. "Of course!"
Forbidden color number one, Annabelle thought. What was that color about, and why was Lailu shining it off with her eyes now?
Annabelle wasn't going to ask this time. It probably wouldn't be socially acceptable to push on that front.
Annabelle let Lailu lead her around Mairai for the whole day.
They never went down to the rocky, sandy bottom, though. The floor of the ocean. Or, this...ocean shelf, or...whatever. Annabelle really didn't know much about aquamarine-ology or whatever it was! She thought she should probably change that, though, if she was going to be coming back here on any sort of regular basis in future. Or even semi-regular. She thought that she'd love to.
Unfortunately, it was as Annabelle was looking down on these "streets" that she put her nonexistent foot in her mouth for the first time. Really, really badly.
"So is this like a class thing? A social divide? Is it poor merpeople on the bottom, rich ones up there?" she had blurted out in wonder, looking all around herself. "I mean, I never see anyone down there. Does anybody live there, or did they used to?"
Lailu had stopped dead. Her whole body had flared a bloody red. "No." That was all she had said, with her back kept to Annabelle.
Annabelle never asked about the buildings and houses on the floor again. And she never even thought about asking to actually go down there. And she apologized several times over to Lailu - who accepted them from her after the fourth time, a sigh of bubbles out her lips and a bright flareup of dark purple lights in her hands.
After that, Lailu quickly returned to her usual, excitable, welcoming self. She took her around to meet several other merpeople who could also speak english (not something they'd learned voluntarily, like Lailu had: it came from time spent in human captivity), and they stayed with them in their homes for a good few hours each. Then, Lailu also swayed her into visiting a sort of amphitheater where they spent an hour or so watching coordinated dancing routines (err, swim routines) from a group of competitive dancers at practice.
Annabelle was impressed with them, for sure, even knowing nothing about the style or whatever else. The way they moved, weaved and swiveled, how they used magic to induce colorful pulses and swirls...she'd loved every second of it. Lailu had seemed to love that she'd loved it, and she'd taken great delight in explaining every move and motion in greatest details to her. Something Annabelle had been appreciative of.
And after that...
Annabelle held onto Lailu's hips - or, where her hips would've been, had she been more obviously humanoid than she was - and she danced with her. Lailu placed hands on Annabelle's shoulders, and she guided her about the area. Took her into a slow, gentle upward spiral along the cliffside, until they reached the next shelf. Lailu simply rotated with her, drifting them off to one side, then the other. She helped Annabelle to figure out how to dance while horizontal, and they went around in a circle a few times together, came out of it and did some loops, too. But it was all so slow, so careful. Lailu, she knew Annabelle's discomfort, her unfamiliarity with this way of being, and so she kept it as simple as she could, while still taking her through her own culture's dance moves.
For that, god, Annabelle loved her for it. So much. She couldn't stop smiling, she couldn't help from resting her head on Lailu's shoulder, and she couldn't help the hand that shifted up from waistline to the back of Lailu's bald head, where she caressed and stroked, held and held (and likewise, Lailu found great interest in Annabelle's hair, short as it was; she felt it, threaded it, tugged on it a bit, and even sniffed at it once or twice). And when she drew back again, she looked into those huge eyes, as they shifted all sorts of colors, flared and faded, one after another, and then how they'd go multicolor, and then those rainbow eyes filled the entire body, and Lailu was a living rainbow as her hands experimentally roamed and touched at Annabelle's breasts - something Lailu had absolutely zero knowledge about or experience with. Female mermaids of her particular subspecies, of course, had no breasts, because they had no need for breasts. No need for milk, specifically, as Annabelle learned while they casually, quietly discussed differences in biology right there in the midst of their half-dance, half-bodily-explorations together.
Annabelle giggled a few times, when Lailu's pressing, stroking fingers found her more tickly spots on the tops of her breasts. Lailu did it a few more times after that, after she'd been assured it wasn't a painful thing (she'd been worried, at first, at the reaction).
Lailu broke their dance up and settled herself at the edge of the cliff, overlooking Mairai. Still nowhere near close to the ceiling of the dome shell, though. They were off to one side, sure, but...not at all near the curved edge of it. That was a ways back and further up, hard to believe as it was.
Mairai was just so, so large it was incredible. And with all those lights...
Annabelle snuggled up to Lailu, both of them laid out on their sides on the rocky cliff.
Lailu had finally wound herself down, and now she was sort of sleeping. Well...well on her way to it, she'd explained. She didn't have eyelids, but she still slept, in her species' way. It wasn't like human sleep - something she'd been almost horrified by when Annabelle had explained it to her, for her part of the discussion. Lailu's sleep was, well, like a fish's. Eyes open, a part of her brain active to receive visual stimulation and movement, but...the rest of her slowed and relaxed. But, still, she never did go full unconscious, like a human would. It was actually more like...deep resting, as opposed to full sleep. And she could do it at any time she wanted, there wasn't a strict sleep schedule like a human had.
Anyway, Lailu was in this state in a matter of minutes, and Annabelle let her be. Lailu had her arms around her, was pressing against her from behind. Her tail was curled lazily around the base of Annabelle's own. Annabelle looked out across Mairai, watching all the orbiting homes and all the moving merpeople and sea inhabitants. All those lights and colors...
Annabelle had choked up more than once today. And now, here, with Lailu...well, she let herself get a bit more than that. Tears emerged out of her eyes, and floated off away from her.
An hour or so later, Lailu woke up. Her long tail unwound from Annabelle's. Her arms let her chest go. She flicked her tail and twisted upright, gazed down at Annabelle with a smile. "Hi."
"Hi," Annabelle said back, flashing a smile of her own. She sat up, too. She roamed her gaze over Mairai for the millionth time, and her eyes dropped down again. Down, down. Passing thought. Lailu picked up on it.
"I...am sorry for my reaction earlier," Lailu whispered. Her huge eyes were downcast, as well. Fixated on the sea floor. "The bottom...it's a very sensitive topic for me - for anyone living here. It's historical, and it's personal."
"I'm sorry for even asking."
"I don't want to have to talk about it...but I do have to talk about it if you're going to help me the way I want you to help me. I need you to understand what you're getting into with me. With this kingdom, and with the others."
"If you want to tell me, I'd be...honored to hear it."
"There's nothing honorable about it." Lailu pursed her lips, and out streamed little bubbles. She dipped her head, and her hands in her "lap" glowed scarlet. Not dark, but not light. The scarlet shifted into deep purple, then back to scarlet again. Her index finger snaked between her other hand's pinky and ring finger, grappled with her thumb in a strange dance, and skated across her palm with the viciousness of a knife stroke. "About thirty years ago, my kingdom was different. It wasn't my kingdom: it was my mother's. And we didn't have the dome around it, or all these drifter homes. It was open water, and just the floor. And this cliff here...it used to have a castle on top of it. A palace. For a long time, we had been having some troubles with another kingdom. A large one. A one with a very different view of the world, and a different view on how certain people should be treated. This kingdom sent its soldiers to ours sometimes. To attack, kidnap, kill. Push and prod, each time. Then, they made their move. A big move. There were thousands of them, all coming here. They took over Mairai, and forced most everyone to flee. But the people who were left, the ones who were caught, they were...rounded up, put into their own homes, one at a time, alone, one after another, and they were brutalized. Burned. Stabbed. Violated. Magic was used, too, for the worst things imaginable. And magical plants, and creatures. Toxins. It was all used on them. I'm talking everyone: adults, kids, and even infants."
"Magic plant toxins would make people's skin peel off, or their scales melt away. They'd take whole batches of developing eggs and feed them to magic sea serpents, right in front of the parents. Or eat them, themselves, and laugh." Lailu sent out another bubble stream. Her tail slapped the cliff. "My mother, queen at the time, was one of those people who got caught. But she was special, being the queen. She was held away from everyone else, and she had to watch it all happen - over the course of weeks, from right up here where we are now. From the entrance to her own palace, overlooking her city. She had her own troubles to deal with, too, though, so she wasn't left out on that front, was she? At the time, I was a year old. I had my own troubles during that time, too."
"But I got away from it," Lailu went on, her body flaring with brilliance of purple and swirls of scarlet. Touches of greens and yellows, too, blotches and tendrils among the rest. "A lot of the people who escaped the invasion came back, with the forces of a few neighboring kingdoms on their side. That lamia society I mentioned I've been trying to foster relations with? They were the largest, most prominent nation that came to our rescue at that time. They saved me, personally. Took me out of the wreckage of the palace, right after it was brought down on me and my mother as a final act of spite by the invaders who saw they were going to lose this city to our reinforcements."
Lailu pressed herself to Annabelle, and arms and tail wrapped around her body. There was a silence, for a long minute. Then her voice started again. "They protected not just me, but all the others of us who survived the occupation, for years afterward. They deterred the other kingdom, and they guarded us here. They helped us rebuild, and they contributed to this dome we have now. And still to this day they've been putting their soldiers between us and that kingdom, between our borders on patrol. They're still looking out for us." She paused. "Anyway, this is all why nobody ever lives down there anymore. And it's why we built our race tracks underneath it - it's a way of bringing remembrance through joy, with joy, to the souls of the dead who sank down there during those weeks. Their bodies hit the floor, but their souls kept going further down. So, we had to dig down to reach those souls again. To spend time with them again. We want to spend time with the souls, though, not with the bodies."
Annabelle turned around in Lailu's arms, her tail, and she held her tight and close. It was a while before she spoke. When she did, she asked a question. "Lailu? Is this...this kingdom that's the one...doing the kidnappings and things these days? Of your people and mine? Is it the same one?"
"Mostly, yes. They've gotten support from some smaller nations, though, too - somehow. I hate them, I hate this. I hate all of this. I want it to end already. Why can't we just be safe again?"
"I don't know." Annabelle stroked the back of Lailu's head. "But I'm- I'm going to say and do whatever I can to help you with this stuff. Okay? Even if it means...if it means just...doing some things that maybe other people wouldn't approve of," she finished softly. "I promise, we're going to get this sorted out. Your people are going to be safe again, and mine will be too. And this kingdom...we'll make them stop."
"You really are a kid," Lailu said quietly. "You think you can just stop an entire kingdom and its army from being aggressive toward others? Just like that?"
"Maybe not?" Annabelle conceded, shrugging against Lailu. "But um...that's why I'm here, regardless, right? You want help, support, from surfacer nations. I'll get you that, at least, yeah? However I have to. I'll get it for you. You'll have more allies than you can count, and they'll all help with this. Make it stop."
"That's the hope. I've heard about the things you've done on the surface. Miracles, friendships and alliances, going against every odd and every law in your surface world for the sake of helping people. I'd hoped you'd come help me that same way, too, with my invitation."
"I will," Annabelle promised. "I will."