Chapter 2 - I Don't Know You And You Don't Know The Half Of It

I'd had a lot of theories as to how I'd gotten into this situation. Kidnapping, a particularly bad dissociative episode putting me in some kind of weird recovery center, really weird dream that I just happened to be experiencing a little more lucidly than normal…

But being 'rescued' from an unsettlingly vague situation by a character I'd cooked up at sixteen for no better purpose than wanting a little bit of wish fulfillment hadn't exactly been on the list.

Yet here I was, staring down that very person as she poured me a cup of hot leaf water.

The tea set, I noted dully, was ceramic, the pot - round, squat, and almost unnaturally smooth all the way around - done up in a brown glaze that melted from chocolate to caramel in a way that was nearly watercolor in effect while the companion cups varied in both style and color. Not by a lot, but enough to make it clear they'd come from different sources at different times… or at least, that their shared tea set was one made by an imperfect artisan rather than mass production.

Somehow, that detail was reassuring. Nothing quite unsettled like 'perfect'.

"Do you take it plain or…?" Meryl asked.

"Straight is fine," I finally managed, my voice coming out as a faint croak. It wasn't like I'd drank enough tea in my life to have a preference in its preparation or serving.

The girl nodded, quickly moving through the motions before handing me the taller of the two teacups she'd brought - a tall, handle-less cylinder of slightly lumpy ceramic that reminded me of a Japanese-style cup a long since exed best friend had once pushed into my hands almost ten years ago, insisting that the milky chamomile tea would help relax me.

It hadn't really, really, it'd done the opposite, but it had been… alright when I'd been drinking it. Hopefully this would be as well.

I took a small sip and made an effort not to physically react to the taste. Whatever kind of tea this was, it wasn't either of the kinds I'd had before. It was stronger and had a hint of spiciness to it that actually worked in its favor - not quite like cinnamon, but close enough for me to find something I could latch onto as a clear point of enjoyment.

With a bit of milk and honey, it'd probably be even better.

Taking another sip as the cup warmed my hands, I turned my mind from the past to the present… and the matter of studying one Meryl Dacey.

She looked a lot like me - not as I was now, no, but a me over ten years in the past; the same general body shape and facial features, but shorter and softer around the edges, with a thick mess hair just barely being held back from exploding by the efforts of a single ribbon and a sense of fashion that was about as close to Hot Topic as you could get from the local Good Will - I would know, given that I had that exact same shirt bunched up in a laundry hamper back home.

Of course, it wasn't a perfect resemblance, even without the age gap being taken into consideration. Her hair was an ashy shade of greyish-brown - or was it more of a brownish-grey? - that was both lighter than my natural color and duller than the rainbow sherbet stripes I'd thrown on after bleaching that color out, my eyes were dark and dull compared to her impossibly bright near-neon pink ones, and she actually had something resembling a half-way healthy tan, which certainly hadn't described my looks at any time in recent memory.

Part of the package deal of being unhealthy, I supposed.

She also didn't have my wide-spread collection of scar tissue either, which was a small blessing for both of us. For me, because it spared me the opportunity to have a complete breakdown over being presented with a perfect mirror of myself at yet another a messed-up period of my tragic backstory, and her for the sake of simply not having to live through the shit that had left those marks in the first place.

But there was enough there that, even if this experience wasn't really like looking in a mirror, looking at her face had much of the same effect; a nearly hypnotic distraction of finding impossible similarities in an uncannily similar stranger.

"How's the tea?" Meryl asked, breaking the spell. There was a faintly anxious energy to her expression and posture, like she was trying to figure out if my staring was a sign I disapproved of her entire existence and defaulted to doing her very best not to be anything that could be seen as offensive.

I swallowed my current mouthful, waiting a moment for the light heat of it to pass down my throat before speaking. "Good. It's… good."

Smooth.

However clumsy my response was, it was apparently enough to calm Meryl down, the tension visibly running out of her shoulders as it was made clear that she wasn't in the shit for social misconduct.

"I-I didn't really think about what it would look like, bringing you here," she said as she took her own cup of tea in hand, idly turning the spoon around. "It makes sense, though. Waking up in a strange house without anyone around to tell you anything or any explanation for why you're there. That'd scare a lot of people."

"Not you?"

A twitch of that tension came back.

"I don't know. Maybe me too. Most of the time when I think about being kidnapped, it's usually not to like, a place that would have an actual bed," she said as she turned and started walking, pulling me behind her. There was something in her phrasing that almost made it sound like she had both firsthand experience with getting snatched and opinions on my framing whatever she'd done for me as being anywhere near the same category. "But I guess that it depends on what the kidnapper would be after, I guess."

That was… probably a fair assessment, considering that I didn't really have any first-hand experience with being kidnapped.

"Could you tell me what happened?" I asked. For all she was familiar, for all that I knew I was responsible for her existence in some way, I didn't know her - it wasn't proper, wasn't appropriate, wasn't safe to hold her at anything but arm's length - even if she had given my tea. She wasn't a perfect stranger, but I couldn't treat her like a close friend either. "To me, I mean. Because the most I remember is being at home and then waking up here with some vague sense of lost time."

There was a moment's pause as Meryl rearranged herself, putting down her tea and fixing her sitting posture to something that reminded me of a child trained for recital.

"There's not to much to tell," she said. "I was out to sketch some birds… on Stonecutter - that's the island next door to Ravenser. It's quieter there - the pirates don't have a real use for it, most of the time. And I saw your boat floating along without anyone on deck, which didn't feel right, so I went to look and found you."

I recognized both of those names as my work, but not from Meryl's story. They had been from a story that I'd meant to set in West Blue that ultimately hadn't gone anywhere beyond brainstorming, and if I remembered right, there had been no connection between them in any form… and not much in the way of pirates on either.

Still, information was information and information was something I could use, especially if it wasn't falling into expected patterns.

"Is the boat still… around?" I asked, trying to spin the start of a plan out of the tangle.

If there was a boat, there could be clues. Resources. Stuff. Something.

Meryl shrugged. "I think it ran ashore pretty hard, but I don't know that much about that sort of thing, so I threw the anchor out just in case."

"Probably the right call, not that I'd know personally." The idea of throwing down an anchor for a grounded boat might have seemed a bit like shutting the barn doors after the horses were gone and back again, but tides were a thing, so…

"You don't know anything about sailing?"

"Not really. Don't like the water - can't stand being too close to too much of it," I confessed before drinking down the last of the tea. Past experience with drowning had taken the pleasure and comfort out of body of water bigger than a bathtub. "Probably why I don't remember much, if I was out on the open sea. Would have been too scared to think straight."

Probably too scared to do anything more than curl up and go catatonic for the duration, though if I was honest with myself, there would have been a lot worse things I could have done in that kind of situation.

"And you want to go back there?"

"Shouldn't be bad, if it's on the sand. That means it's stable, at least." The logic made sense in my head, even if said-head was getting a bit fuzzy around the edges now that the adrenaline from earlier had left my system. "And even if there aren't any clues, there still might be some stuff I can use - might even have my glasses."

Even if they were a bit chipped, at least they were better than trying to navigate half-blind through an unfamiliar world.

"Still," I said as I switched mental tracks off of 'momentary inconvenience' to actual plans. "Even outside of that, the fact remains that there might be something useful there. And if I can somehow move the boat somewhere safer, I might be able to do something else with it. Sell it or sail it, I don't know…"

"Oh."

A moment of awkward silence passed.

"Well, that's going to have to wait for you to get better."

I jerked back to full awareness. "What?"

"You were very sick when I got you out of the boat," Meryl said, putting down her tea. "I don't think you should be going out and exploring just yet. Ravenser might not be a… huge island, but it's still big enough that walking that distance isn't something you can simply just do after being unconscious for over three days."

"But…" Dammit, I didn't have a good argument for that.

"I'll handle it. You rest."

I almost wanted to argue that I wasn't tired, but the vague fuzz around my head abruptly intensified into a fluffy vice-grip as I tried to force myself upright, my eyes suddenly turning off in a way that I'd previously associated with concussion.

Shit. Was this what fainting was like…?

Meryl looked up from the collapsed figure of her guest to her grandfather's looming figure, gnarled hands uncurling from where he'd gripped their head. "You didn't need to do that."

"Ah, but I am well acquainted with the type of person who has heard good advice and elected to ignore it regardless - well enough to recognize another of the stripe by tone alone," the old druid said as he pulled his hands back under his cloak. "I have simply spared you a fight in getting this one to rest."

That was probably true. Her guest - she still didn't have an actual name for them, did she? - seemed like they'd already had a course of action already plotted out as soon as Meryl had mentioned the boat… and had likely had been plotting something similar from the moment they'd woken up. The 'new' plan was probably just a further step of the escape she'd barely been able to stop earlier.

The idea stung a bit, but…

No, Meryl thought as she pulled a blanket over the sleeping form of her guest, it wasn't like she would have done otherwise if put in that kind of situation again. Most people couldn't rely on anyone else coming to rescue them, for a lot of different reasons. Just because Meryl hadn't been an enemy didn't make her an ally either, and one cup of tea couldn't be expected to change that.

Even if Meryl herself would have really preferred it so.

"Keep an eye on the house while I'm out, Garathair," she said as she pulled her shawl around her shoulders, getting ready to head back out into the winds of Ravenser Odd.

The bird mask dipped in acknowledgement. "Of course. Wouldn't want our guest wandering off."

Meryl gave one last look at her grandfather and her guest before closing the door behind her and beginning her walk.

The path Meryl usually took to Stonecutter required she cut close to Ravenspurn - actually, she probably was within the understood limits of the town, five minutes into the journey, even if the outskirts didn't have much going for them beyond being the dumping ground for most of anything the better-off residents didn't want or need anymore.

She didn't particularly like getting even this close, but it was safer than going through the heart of the place or attempting to go through the rougher forests of Ravenser. At least here, her only worries were -

The thought cut off as a large shadow crossed over her own, blotting out what little sun Meryl was getting. She looked up at the shadow's source, taking in the raggedly dressed tower of muscle and rubbery pale plucked-chicken pink skin without a blink.

"Hello, Pew," Meryl said, pointedly not sighing at being caught. Sighing would only make Pew even more insufferable.

The blind Fishman rattled off a series of squawking clicks that almost registered as a laugh - though maybe for dolphin Fishfolk, it was. "Young Dacey. It's been a while since you've been down to town, hasn't it? Young Zahlia was beginning to be worried and you know how Marshalsea feels about that."

And already, he'd started in on the pointed comments and the guilt.

"I prefer to keep to myself. That's nothing new."

"Hm. But the guest in your house is."

Her hands clenched involuntarily, the spark of annoyance a sudden hot coal in her chest. "I don't like being spied on, Pew."

"Is it really spying to keep an eye on the family of nakama no longer capable of doing such themselves?" Pew mused before clicking his tongue. "Ah, but that is a matter of semantics not worth arguing. The only question is when and where and how you picked up your latest stray."

"That's none of your business."

"You might find that it is, given what happened with the last one."

Meryl broke eye-contact - or whatever passed for it with Pew. "This is different."

"Is it?"

"Yes," Meryl bit out. "They would have died without my help." Or something worse. She'd known enough pirates and enough ghosts to know that death was hardly the worst thing that could happen to a person, especially on this island.

"Hm. I suppose that is your prerogative," Pew replied, his tone careless with both his disregard for charity and his dismissal of Meryl's choice to partake in it. "Just as it is ours to see that you are kept… safe."

With that, the dolphin Fishman turned and slowly began to limp his way back in the direction of the town center - no doubt to go tell Marshalsea that he'd checked in and given all due warnings before going back about his own daily business. Probably something that involved breaking the legs of some unfortunate who didn't know the rule about avoiding the blind beggar.

"I do have a… favor to ask," she finally managed to say.

Pew stopped in place. "A favor."

One she was already beginning to regret asking for, but she already had to endure this much of the man. Might as well go in for the whole shebang and get something out of it. "Yes."

It could have been frightening, to see Pew - big, old Pew, who limped and didn't have eyes and could break things so easily - move so quickly, to go from standing over there to directly over her in less than a blink, but Meryl had known Pew for most of her life, which was more than enough time to know that he was both blindingly fast and very precise with the power held within his body.

Pew never broke anything he didn't mean to, after all.

"You never ask for favors," he said, tone low and deadly serious as he leaned over her close enough for her to start mapping star charts across the freckles of his skin if she'd been so inclined.

Meryl might have mistaken that for an attempt at intimidating her, if she hadn't known Pew for most of her life. As it was… no, it was simply him being serious, dispensing with the pretension of 'friendly' he coated all of his interactions with.

"That's because I don't like owing you anything in return," she said. "But this is a situation that I do not have the ability to handle on my own."

"And that would be?"

"The person I rescued came in a ship. Some kind of sailboat. It's run ashore over on Stonecutter… and I need it brought to a safer port. Not," Meryl added quickly, "the main one."

"The Wheel," the Fishman replied, standing fully upright for the first time in the conversation. "Well. Not only just asking for favors but bringing strange ships into the old family territory. Must be a rather important guest, hm?"

Meryl Dacey did not answer the question. Instead, she asked one of her own; "Are you going to do it or not?"

Pew grinned, showing off a snout full of needle teeth, crooked and sharp. "Lead the way, young Dacey."

The walk was long; longer than what Meryl would have taken on her own for the sake of Pew's limp, and longer still for being taken in silence - well, relative silence. Pew had seen fit to quiz Meryl along the way, always with questions that were just relevant enough that she couldn't brush them off.

'How big is the boat?' Roughly thirty feet long, and maybe ten across.

'How many were aboard?' Just the one.

'Did you throw down the anchor?' Yes, even though it had felt a little silly to do so after the ship had run into the beach.

'What colors was it flying when it arrived?' None at all.

The worst part was that he spaced them out in a way that made it impossible to string the exchange of words into a proper conversation. It was just 'question', 'answer', and then awkward silence until Pew decided to make noise again.

Meryl almost suspected he was doing it on purpose, simply for the pleasure of being irritating, but there was also the fact that Pew was methodical and logical, with a tendency to drag other people into his way of thinking because he had little tolerance for moving outside of his own way of doing things and even less inclination to adjust his habits for the comfort for another.

Still, she'd known Pew to be worse in the past, so perhaps this was a small mercy on part of her 'favor'. It didn't stop her from having a headache by the time they reached the boat, but it was worth noting.

Probably.

The ship looked almost the same as Meryl had left it on the beach, slightly crooked from how it had driven into the sane and a bit rougher from the additional days of neglect, but there was nothing that made her immediately suspicious.

The sand around it was smooth and undisturbed - at least, as undisturbed as it ever was on Stonecutter. There was plenty of evidence of visitation by birds and the passing of the tides, but there were no sign of people visiting. That wasn't to say it was impossible to have happened, as the tides would wipe out any tracks as regularly as clockwork, but it was proof that nobody had come within the last six hours.

Pew, not being able or interested in knowing such a detail - given that he probably had already detected the complete absence of sapient life in and around the immediate area -, was running his hands over the sides of the boat, feeling and tapping on the vessel as he made his way around it.

"Feels sound enough. Not detecting any significant flaws in the frame. Decent enough quality, for secondhand salvage." He clicked his tongue, apparently done - and not at all impressed - with his initial judgement. "Nothing I'd take out in Paradise, much less the New World, but fair enough for Blue waters."

"You don't need to sell the quality to me, Pew, it's not my boat."

"So you say." Pew hummed a little as he slid his fingers between the hull and the sand, his tone picking up a bit as he apparently found what he was looking for. "Should be a clean lift and return to sea. You want me to tow it?"

"Yes," Meryl replied. "I'm not good enough to get it in through the Wheel's arch. Not unless I'm manning a bird."

"Your aunts weren't much better in that regard. Least you Daceys know how to manage your wayfinding with your heads in the clouds," the Fishman muttered, before he turned to Meryl.

"Shall I lift you or can you move yourself?"

Meryl stretched her power down into her books and let her drawings melt up her arms and back - not to completion, she'd learned when working on this trick - before spreading the wings, feeling the stretch and strain of a dozen different sets lifting her off the sand and up high enough to step onto the deck of the sailboat.

It wasn't her best trick, but it was relatively quick and didn't require the space needed for a proper take-off.

"T'was more impressive when Enda and Brenda did it," Pew muttered as Meryl tucked the birds back into her sketchbooks, letting her power settle back into her bones to ache like an overworked muscle.

"You're no fair judge of what anything looks like, Pew."

"Leastwise they were quicker about it. Even when they wanted to play at lovebirds."

Before Meryl could roll her eyes at Pew's dramatics, the Fishman tensed, made a little noise, and then pulled the ship out of the sand as easily as a normal person could have pulled a plum out of a pie; not just in the effortlessness of the action, but the delicacy required not to crush the prize into a fine pulp- or knock its passenger off - at any point in the process.

As Meryl worked on keeping her balance, Pew stepped out into the water, wading out until he was nearly up to his neck in the sea before setting the ship down in it and switching his grip to the anchor chain.

"Right. Been a while since I've had cause to swim this route, but I think I can manage. Collect anything that looks important while I handle the boat."

Right… Meryl bit her lip as a problem came to mind. "What would you say would be important enough to take with me?" she asked, poking her head over the edge to watch Pew.

Pew frowned as he wrapped the chain around his shoulders, apparently having not thought his directive the entire way through either. "Valuables, mostly. Anything that could not be replaced easily or would be difficult to live without. I suppose if you're concerned about the comfort of your guest, you could also get something that would attend to that - though what that might be in this case, I couldn't say. I'd say use your best judgement but…"

The Fishman let his sentence trail off teasingly, his mood apparently much improved for being in his natural element.

"I think I'll manage," Meryl shot back before slipping down into the interior of the boat.

Like she'd had assumed from looking at it from the outside, it didn't seem as if anyone else had bothered to investigate the boat yet… or if they had, they hadn't cared to try looting it. Nothing looked like it'd been kicked around worse than it had been in the first place and the 'valuables' - or at least, what Meryl assumed were valuables - still looked to be where she'd left them.

And that would hopefully include those glasses she'd remembered being somewhere around here-

There was a small but sharp splintering crack underneath Meryl's shoe, a sound that she immediately recognized as 'wince-worthy'. Well, at least she'd remembered the location right, even if it was a little too late to be actually helpful.

"We're nearly to the arch - did you find what you were looking for?" Pew called from outside, as if he hadn't heard Meryl's mistake the instant it happened.

"N-not yet!" she replied, grimacing as she picked up the broken pieces - too small to have any hope of fixing them - and shoving them into what she hoped was a trash bin before turning her attention back to the task at hand.

There were… well, a lot of things for how small a space there was inside the ship.

Some of it was easy. A large duffle that looked to be full of clothes, crammed in without much regard as to wrinkles or effective packing, was all ready to go without any further action on Meryl's part beyond picking it up.

The rest? Much more difficult, and Meryl soon found herself guessing as to what was worth dragging along or not.

The shelves full of strange slender not-books and impenetrable doorstoppers could stay behind, the bedding as another thing that could be forgotten, a red scarf hung over a swinging door was practical enough to add to the bag of clothes, a guitar was a bit much to haul around but also bit too valuable to leave behind unguarded…

As Meryl found herself gently guilted by chipped green glass eyes into adding a well-loved stuffed animal to the pile of things to take along, a flicker of presence behind her had her spinning on her heels to find the source.

In her experience, only a handful of ghosts felt like that - like a nameless pressure that could crush her from the inside out if they had the mind not to hold back -, but the only thing she found was a sword, sheathed and left to haphazardly lean in the corner instead of being held in a proper weapon stand.

Meryl bit her lip as she looked it over, mentally weighing her next choice.

A sword… swords were fairly valuable things, even without being decorated like this one. Even if the purple wrapping on this one's hilt and the complicated knot of the same material around the sheath was frayed to whisper softness - like the stuffed animal, it had been loved, loved almost to the point of desperation, some intuitive thought insisted -, there were still marks of being important, even without the secondary sense of weight hanging over it.

The much realer weight of the blade almost made Meryl, already somewhat unbalanced by all the other stuff she'd collected, trip when she moved to pick it up before she adjusted for it.

The nameless twig of a guest she and her grandfather had dragged into the house carried this thing around regularly? Well, it wouldn't have been the weirdest thing Meryl had ever seen or even heard of, considering Aunt Brenda had a set of wings attached to her shoulders her entire life, but she still had figured that her guest wasn't that much stronger than she was, after grabbing them at the door.

Or had that just been illness - or shock? - closing the distance?

Either way, the sword would go with, because if a guitar was too valuable to leave behind, an actual weapon - even without that bizarre sense of importance weighing it down - was even more so. It made juggling the whole mess of stuff a bit awkward, but a bit of careful arrangement and use of handy straps made Meryl fairly certain nothing was going to get dropped immediately.

"Alright, I think I have everything," she called out to Pew as she climbed back out onto the deck, just in time to see the sea arch that was the one entrance to the hidden dock area known to only a few as An Bran Rath - or the White Wheel, to those uncomfortable with the traditional language.

The 'White' was a bit of a misnomer at this point - at best, the stone dock was more of a dingy grey where it wasn't covered with crawling lichens and decomposing seaweed - but the Wheel itself was still round, even if some of the spokes had collapsed over the years and trapped the rotting remains of boats that would never sail again in their new tide pool prisons.

And, as Meryl could see, the stone path that would lead back to her home were still intact.

Pew pulled the sailboat to the best of the remaining docks, detangling himself from the anchor chain he'd used to tow it before taking some rope from the deck to moor the ship to the dock properly, his fingers performing the work deftly despite the curl of age.

"Right, that should hold it," he finally declared as he creaked upright. "Young Dacey, are you absolutely certain-"

Pew's question petered out as he froze in place. If he'd had eyes, Meryl would have bet they would be staring at her in an expression of shock as she stepped out onto the dock with her mixed-up load.

"What… is that?" he finally got out.

"What is what?" Meryl lifted the shoulder that she'd slung the guitar over. "Oh - it's a guitar. Not really a 'necessary item', but I didn't think leaving it to rust would go over well-"

"No. Not that. The… the thing on your other side, lower," Pew snapped, his teeth chattering in a way that didn't really strike as laughter anymore. Now, it simply sounded like fear and that wasn't an emotion Meryl was finding that she particularly liked on Pew. "What is it?"

"It's just a sword-"

"There's nothing 'just' about that thing you have there. Give it here."

Meryl held out the sword and Pew took it gingerly, his huge hands curling slowly to hold the sheath - not firmly, but with a caution that implied the Fishman expected it to rear up and bite.

Somehow, Meryl wouldn't have been surprised if it did.

"Just so you know, that's not-"

"Young Dacey, there are three beings here that know that this blade isn't yours. I know it, you know it, and the sword knows it. The only ones that don't know it are those that see such things for their rarity alone. You need not explain that it isn't yours to give. I am only taking it to Marshalsea for everyone's safety." The Fishman swallowed awkwardly, clicking his tongue the whole while in a way that read more as nervous tic rather than his usual sound of judgement. "Now, go back home. I need to… need to talk to Marshalsea about this."

Meryl watched Pew leave, the man almost managing a proper 'flee' save for the lack of speed brought on by his bad leg, and wondered again, just what kind of person she had brought into her home under the idea that she'd been doing the right thing.

"No, no, allow me to take the… quest rock to its final resting place," Ruith said, gently pushing Meryl's sleepwalking guest away from the door. "It's cold outside and you do not have suitable clothes."

"Hate bein' cold," the sleeper agreed muddily. "S'take good care of the rock?"

"I promise," the druid said seriously, taking the imaginary rock as it was handed to him. "Now let's get you back to bed. Certainly would be warmer than in here, yes?"

Author's Notes

Sorry about the month and a half-delay on updating - I've been having a bit of a time irl and it was kind of hard figuring out the exact flow of this chapter. Mostly on account of Raine wanting to take over the narrative a bit with both sucking the story too far into her head and then wanting to explore various areas too early - trapping her with social convention (my idea) and knocking her out was ultimately the best solution.

Monica also pointed out something that I missed (given that Raine is basically me setting a version of myself loose in a fictional place) in chapter 1, and that was that Raine's internal monologue, thanks to being paranoid and anxious about the situation, came off as more than a little unlikeable when aimed at an undeserving target, which was another reason to make Meryl the focus character for another chapter - which gives Raine more time to calm down and, given that Pew is now on his way to rat to the mysterious Marshalsea, means that paranoia/anxiety can be focused on someone else.

Speaking of Pew… some facts about him!

1. He is based off of the character Blind Pew from Treasure Island.

2. Originally, he was just going to be a very unpleasant human, but then I thought about river dolphins and how they've evolved pretty much be blind thanks to the amount of silt around them and that happened.

3. I know dolphins aren't a fish, but the movie Dead End Adventure had an Orca Fishman so I felt comfortable making a tertiary character a Dolphin Fishman.

4. Pew's actual dolphin species is a bit ambiguous cause I started out with the baiji and ended up with the Indo-Pacific humpback dolphin at Monica's suggestion (she's also the reason Pew is pink instead of a washed grey), but the specifics aren't super important beyond explaining 'why his snout + skin + fin look like that' and why he's blind in the first place.

Additional fun fact that has nothing to do with Pew - the sleepwalking at the end of the chapter is based on something that I supposedly did in real life. Unfortunately, my 'witness' has a tendency to weird but mundane dreams so there's no way to know for sure what actually happened.