This is a retelling loosely based on the world of the little mermaid. It explores the what-if of a mermaid princess who is interested in studying astronomy—just imagine the view of the stars at sea!—instead of the world of humans, which would be somewhat historically/technologically behind the world underwater that has access to sea-witches and mages.
Eight Foot Joe is a borrowed concept from the Villain Recruiters at Disney Japan. He is allegedly an apprentice to Ursula and a childhood friend to Ariel. Characters are loosely based on the disney retelling of the Little Mermaid fairy tale, and aside from Ariel, Joe, Ursula, Triton and Sebastian, all other characters are my OC's.
I'm a sucker for reviews!
More reviews=faster chapter updates. :)
I have about thirteen chapters drafted. Will edit and post with haste.
Chapter 2Joe scanned the sands and pieces of rotting wood at the bottom of Shipwreck Valley for signs of movement, ignoring the hair prickling on the back of his neck. He shook his head firmly when a floating piece of seaweed in the corner of his eye looked suspiciously like a tentacle. One of the few perks of him being cecaelian was that he didn't need as much sleep as other species of mer, but even only needing a few hours per day, he'd clearly been pushing his limits. His eyes burned in the saltier water that clung to the rotting wood and metal of the shipwrecks. If he'd had a full night's sleep, it might have been easier to keep his eyes open—even so, they were playing tricks on him.
"Found you, Joe!"
Joe nearly inked himself—something he hadn't done since he was very young—when Ariel's unmistakably little fingers gripped his shoulders from behind, putting her far closer than she usually swam to him.
"It's cheating when you hide in the shadows like this," Princess Ariel scolded playfully as she swam over his head into view. "You know I can't see in the dark like you can."
Joe felt himself jerk back a few inches when Ariel's nose nearly touched his, and one of his hearts tugged nastily in protest. He wasn't sure how she'd managed to sneak up on him. Her long hair blended in with the shadows and seaweed well enough, but the ocean-blue scales of her hatchling camouflage were nearly gone, replaced with a shining, jewel-red. Not even the long woven blouses she'd taken to wearing could hide her.
All three of his hearts still pounding, Joe ran a nervous hand through his white hair, effectively messing it up worse than any current could.
"I have a job to do," he sighed, trying his best not to meet her eyes until his pulse calmed down. "You shouldn't be here in the wreckages. It's almost squid season, and I can't see you all the time."
Her grin widened, and she nudged his shoulder distractingly. "That would be the point of the game, and we'll be fine if you're here."
"I still need to collect the anemone spawn before I take any breaks," Joe huffed, leaning away from her, and still not looking her in the eye.
"I shouldn't have told you about that lunar eclipse coming up, should I? You've had more work ever since I made that chart," she said with a slight pout. "And here I thought my studies were finally useful."
The wave of deadlines and potion orders that came crashing through his head at her reminder sent a growling groan through his middle. "No, no…" he said, rubbing at his eyes. "If you hadn't told me, I would have had a lot more work next month…and probably the next three months after that."
"I couldn't have done it without your seeing in the dark," said Ariel.
A faint smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. "And here I thought my eyes annoyed you."
She poked his cheek, swimming once more just a few inches closer to his face than was strictly polite. "So we've bought you a little time to relax," she teased.
It was as if some sort of spell had been broken. If Ursula so much as heard the word 'relax' in her territory, he might be scrubbing the sponge beds until dawn, and though he didn't mind the labor, he certainly wore it better than her younger apprentice, Krill. "Are you sure we should still be playing this? It might have been different when we were younger, but if your father's guards see you with one of Ursula's apprentices—" specifically me, he didn't say, "—you'll be in a lot of trouble."
It was a pitiful excuse, and even trying not to look at her he couldn't miss the way she stuck her bottom lip out disapprovingly.
"Father's guards don't come out here, except Adin, and he's not a guard yet—" she rebutted.
"Hey! I am a guard! Enough that they let me chaperone you today, and you two are both cheating!" Adin's bushy blond head and dark black and white-striped tail came popping out from behind a mast, his voice echoing uncomfortably loud around the ships on the bottom of the valley.
"Aren't you guys supposed to be swimming away from Ariel? Is the game over?" Krill, a Cecaelian boy of only eleven years, poked his head out of the porthole in one of the wrecks around them. Nearly ten years younger than Joe, his tentacles hadn't darkened yet, and his hair, instead of white was still the youthful gray of a child.
"It might be," Adin growled, folding his arms across his middle in a way that showed he was trying to look older than he was. "These two have been sneaking off in the middle again. Ariel, isn't the game of playing 'Squid' for you to chase us all back to the starting point when you find us?"
Ariel's face was quickly starting to match her tail.
"I was going to, but Joe forgot to yell for the rest of you!"
Joe folded his arms, and subtly, his tentacles loomed over Adin. He'd been friends with the little merman for a number of years, but ever since he'd turned seventeen, Adin had been very annoying about rules—especially when it came to Ariel. While Joe would usually support anything to keep his friends both safe, the influence of King Triton's guard apprenticeship had seemed to make Adin more stiff and less playful by the day. Despite knowing him for years, it had also made him more suspicious of Joe.
"Anyway," Adin complained, rolling his eyes, "isn't Shipwreck Valley off-limits for…for the princesses?"
Joe frowned. Adin had at least had the tact not to point out that Cecaelia weren't banned from any of the ocean's danger zones—probably in some royal effort to kill the rest of them off—but only just.
"That's why we're here!" Ariel said brightly, giving Adin a dazzling smile that turned Adin's freckled cheeks pink. "No one will bother us here! Unless you really think it's too dangerous for you to protect us here? You said earlier you wanted to come here, Adin."
It didn't escape Joe how Adin flushed and stammered under Ariel's gaze, and in that moment, he had no doubt Adin had suggested they play in Shipwreck Valley as a testament to how much he had changed or become as one of Triton's finest.
Ariel gave Adin a look of deep sincerity that might have shaken even Joe's resolve, and Adin visibly puffed under her question. "Of course I will! We're fine!" he grumped.
"And, Joe," she turned that dazzling smile on him, and he found himself looking away for the second time as his gills fluttered in guilt. This area wasn't particularly dangerous, but with so much sharp flotsam in the water, it wasn't exactly safe, either. With straight-finned Adin having brought her here, he'd assumed she had some sort of permission, but now he realized that there was still a bit of him that would ignore the protocol in favor of impressing Ariel, and ever since that part of Adin had surfaced the year prior, he'd been increasingly irritating. Part of him wanted to swim them all away from here, and the other part knew that he couldn't both find the ingredients he'd been sent to collect and spend time with the group, and the days they had left together were limited. "I know you have a job to do, that's also while we're here! I spotted three of the crabs you were looking for up in that new wreck," said Ariel.
Joe followed her pointing finger to a place where a new Galleon sat teetering on the top of three other wrecks.
"So high up?" he mused quietly, inspecting the painted sails that sat high enough to catch the last rays of sunlight from the surface. "Blue crabs usually prefer the darker spots."
"They're the right ones," Ariel giggled. "And now I know where to find you next round. I'll count!"
"This is the last round," Joe said with a pointed look at Krill. Krill would play with Ariel all day if he was allowed, and he was too young to see that while this area was safe for cecaelia like them, Adin and Ariel weren't the wisest for coming here this time of year—particularly when Adin with all of his illustrious training should know better.
As Ariel's counting rang out over the quiet wrecks, the prickling feeling Joe had had earlier hadn't gone away, but after making sure the waters around Ariel were free of floating debris, he sped off toward the wreck. The corners of his lips twitched when he saw Krill camouflage himself behind a crevice in one of the rocky walls. Krill was the best hider of them all, and he was somehow the only one who could ever avoid Ariel's keen eyes. She always seemed to have a second sense for exactly where her friends were.
"Six, seven, eight…" her voice followed him as he moved through the valley toward the galleon she'd pointed out to him.
The newer wreck was balanced precariously on several much older remains. An ancient Greek trireme, its bronze ram at the bow, once a powerful symbol of the ship's deadly strength, had long rusted through, and tiny pike darted through its caved horns. Slightly above that, two or three norse longships laid cracked over the trireme's remains, although the brightly colored paints remained miraculously intact. The galleon on top of those was in much better shape—which meant that it was quite heavy. Likely the next storm would knock it down to rest with the others cogs and ferries further down the valley.
Soaring over the galleon's railing fast enough that his tentacles had to snatch at the rigging to slow down, Joe shook his head at the deck. As usual, Ariel was right. Three or four blue horse-shoe shells skittered brazenly about in the sunlight on deck. If he caught them all, it would be just enough to fill his aunt Ursula's order for hemocyanin. If he was lucky, he could collect Krill's share as well.
"Nine, ten!"
Descending onto the deck, he snorted in displeasure at the memory of Ursula. With his tentacle-reach, it was easy enough to flip the crabs over and begin the extraction, but the chore itself was odious, stinking work. While he hated the job, he hated even more that Ursula was making a boy as young as Krill perform these sorts of tasks. They might have both been apprenticed to her under one of her odious contracts, but Ursula had no sense of how to raise a young cecaelia. If they didn't deliver by the end of the day, Krill would have a few more scars to match Joe's own—and those were getting harder to hide from Ariel. Joe credited the natural cecaelian durability for how they had survived her upbringing at all.
"Squid!" Adin yelled from the bowels of one of the stacked ships below.
Joe ignored the call, supposing that when the round ended, he could pretend he hadn't heard. Getting the hemocyanin was more important than the game—even if it was a rare chance to humor Ariel.
"Squid!" warned Krill, just a touch higher. Joe listened as they all darted back to the counting point, hoping to out-swim Ariel before they got tagged. It wouldn't matter as much as this was the last round, but it sounded as though they were all giving the round their best. He would have liked to have watched had his agenda not been so packed for the coming days.
"Squid!" Ariel shrieked. "M-Monster squid!"
Joe blinked, fatigue slowing his reaction. That wasn't right. Ariel had been counting…
Without thinking, his tentacles were already hurling him over the edge, leaving a trail of lost blue blood in the water behind him.
Joe bulleted toward the sound of her voice, coming into view of her around the hull of a company ship, just in time to see Adin pulling Ariel by the hand through a particularly jagged wreck. Behind them was a giant squid.
Judging by the color it had flushed, this squid was in season early, having arrived at the breeding corners that Shipwreck Valley sometimes provided the giant squid that game up from the depths to breed, and as it hunted the things that had disturbed its peace, it was angry. The squid's beak snapping at Ariel's tail, Adin had gotten them caught navigating through a pre-medeival shipwreck, only just pulling them through the eerie vessel fast enough to avoid permanent damage, and he was doing a bad job of it. The squid's beady eyes fixated on Ariel's red tail, she would have had a better chance on her own, but—and Joe growled, as he witnessed Adin's insistence on not letting her go—it seemed Adin was set on being the one to get her out.
The sharp wood of the broken wreckage was a treacherous obstacle course, and the creature's bulbous head was the only thing dragging it behind them. Ariel managed to duck and weave behind Adin. The squids long tentacles followed her through the sharp debris with remarkable dexterity, attempting to tangle her fins, when just then, Krill let his camouflage fall, and dropped seemingly from nowhere onto the squid's upper body in an attempt to slow it down, but with his size, only succeeded in making it angrier. Adin and Ariel were separated by a fast turn that Ariel couldn't follow him through, and Adin, not seeming to notice that he'd left her behind, left Ariel and darted toward the surface.
Joe snarled, not slowing as he watched for the squid to pass an opening big enough for him to get through. Passing Adin on the way down, he slipped through the broken bow where Adin had managed to get Ariel cornered, and made for the squid.
Adin's sudden departure had flung Ariel into the shadows of the back hull, and while it had been a good bet that the hull might have a hole big enough to escape through, this wreck was in better condition than most others, and remained intact. Ariel was trapped, opting to hide behind an old desk that offered her no real protection. Joe didn't have the luxury of waiting for an opening, and smashed through one of the cannon port-holes.
"Go!" he grunted at Krill, who was still trying his best to slow the beast down. Though he shot Joe a worried look, he at least didn't question when he used that tone.
Seizing the squid with his tentacles, Joe picked it up right out of its trail of pursuit and slammed it into the deck hard enough to splinter boards. The squid's yellow eye widened at the sight of him, and he could have sworn he heard a feral whimper rumble through its body. Encouraged, Joe gritted his teeth and slammed it down again, feeling the old wood beneath his tentacles creak and snap.
The squid sprawled in the splinters, stunned, and Joe didn't waste a second. He darted behind the desk, and scooped up Ariel from her hiding place.
"I've got you," was all he took the time to say.
Releasing a stream of black ink over its line of vision, he pulled Ariel from her hiding place in the now far-less stable hull and shot after Krill and Adin toward the surface.
Joe cursed himself, and Adin. Triton's guards always knew if there were early arrivals for the breeding season—after all, it was quite the risk to the Atlantean citizens if they weren't aware. Adin was aware of the risks, even if he'd never seen one of the beasts in person before. Trying to focus on carrying Ariel out of the valley so that his temper didn't get the best of him, Joe counted the wrecks that lead to the upper crests by the reef. If one beast had arrived early to the season, then there was a big chance of there being more. Once the wrecks thinned out and they breached the official kingdom borderline, he could breathe again.
"Ariel, are you okay?" Krill, who looked appropriately terrified, gasped when Joe brought Ariel to them.
"I—" Ariel hiccuped in Joe's arms, and his hearts pulled a little at the sound. She didn't cry, and she wasn't angry, but she was shaking like a kelp-bed in a storm.
"What were you thinking, Ariel?" Adin demanded, swimming up closer than Krill. His usually-perfect blond hair was mussed, and his tail stripes were quivering as he tried to hide how much he, too, was shaking. "I told you we'd get out fine if you just followed me, but—"
Joe pulled Ariel closer to his chest, and leaned into Adin's bubble, cutting off his view of the princess. "No," he hissed, letting his pointed teeth show more than usual. This debacle was his fault as well, but he had trusted Adin to at least take his job more seriously, and less stupidly. "You don't get to yell at her. Krill, a boy, stayed with her and fought that thing. You left her."
Whether it was the teeth or the tone, Adin wisely clammed up, but he definitely didn't look happy about it. Joe knew he would have some reparations later with him if he wanted to keep up their old friendship, but Adin's behavior had been getting steadily worse, particularly around Ariel. This time, at least, Adin seemed to be aware of his mistake, but that didn't mean he wasn't glaring spears at Joe and Krill in angry shame.
"Thank you, Krill. It would have got to me before Joe if it weren't for you," Ariel said quietly at Krill, whose cheeks blushed a light purple at the thanks.
"You'd have done the same," he mumbled, pointing his tentacles down and making himself a little smaller. "Adin, too, if he hadn't gotten lost."
Krill meant well, but his words only seemed to make Adin angrier.
"Fine!" Adin snapped, finally. "Just fine! You're obviously okay without me, princess, so next time, get another guard to take you to the wrecks!"
Joe was confident that Adin would have swum off just then if his new guard duties didn't require him to return Ariel to the palace that night. His mouth formed a hard line as he continued to glare at the young mer. He wasn't staying out of friendship anymore; it was only to save his own scales.
"Um, Joe…" Ariel said meekly from somewhere at his chest, and he ventured a glance at her expression. She was still shaken, but apart from a few scratches on the end of her tail fin, she was fine. Joe was more frustrated that she'd been in a position to get hurt at all. "Joe?" she said again, interrupting his angry inspection.
"Hm?" he responded,
"I'm okay to swim on my own, now," she said, placing a hand on his sternum.
He was reluctant to let her go, particularly when the anger hadn't faded, but at her request, he righted her in the water, and put some distance between them.
"There's some blue on your cheek." Krill pointed at his face curiously, finally something to break the tension of the attack.
"Hm?" Joe touched the place Krill indicated, and upon examining his fingers, cursed grievously. He'd left the crabs mid-extraction!
Adin muttered something about language 'in front of the princess,' as Joe darted back to the ship to find the crabs he'd left. Spilling his tentacles over the railing of the precarious galleon once more, it didn't take long to spot where he'd left his project. He'd managed to extract about half of what he and Krill needed for their day's mission, but the other half had already been lost to the current, and the crabs had long bled out.
"Codfish!" he cursed again, returning to Krill. This much blood in the water would warn away other crabs—not to mention draw in more predators. "You should get the princess home," Joe said with a warning glare at Adin when he returned. Much to Adin's displeasure, and Joe's amusement, Krill had his tentacles wrapped around Ariel's tail, and she was hugging him to her like a little brother and cooing over his bravery back at the ship. "And Krill, there's something—"
"Ah, there you are, princess!" said an old, gravelly voice just above. "I've been through every kelp-bed and half the seaweed gardens looking for you! I should have known to start looking closer to the borders. You, young mer-man!" Sebastian, High King Triton's advisor was flipping his way toward them, and Joe caught Krill curling his tentacles beneath him, and trying to make himself look small. Joe didn't mind Sebastian most days, but for Ariel's sake, he wished that today he'd shown up an hour or two sooner.
"Yes, Advisor Sebastian!" Adin snapped to attention, actually saluting the old crab, and Joe hid a smirk.
Sebastian propelled himself to eye-level with the group, and though Ariel hadn't let go of him, Krill was already trying to distance himself from her. Sebastian seemed too weather-worn to notice, or he didn't particularly care about the princess's attachment to a cecaelia. "Good to see you've prevented the princess from swimming somewhere dangerous," Sebastian addressed Adin once more, "especially with Archeteuthis season so close, although I'd have preferred if you kept her from coming into these waters at all."
Ariel and Adin shared an uneasy glance.
"And you, young Joe, young Krill! Staying safe as well, are we?" Sebastian narrowed his eyes at the Cecaelia boys, but not unkindly.
"Yes, sir!" Krill announced from behind Joe's shoulder.
"Advisor Sebastian," Joe greeted with a small bow. "Glad to see you in good health. I apologize for the journeying we've caused you."
"Hmph," Sebastian gruffed. Joe suspected the old crab saw more than he let on, and despite his well-known history in the old wars, he was perhaps the most encouraging at court of Ariel's interaction with the people—all of the people. However; though he liked the crab, that didn't mean that Joe particularly trusted him. "Well, that's enough of that. Your father has summoned you, little Ariel. 'Afraid he's already been waiting half the day."
"I'm already late? He didn't schedule anything. My sisters don't visit until tomorrow," Ariel groaned next to him, and although Joe understood the feeling, couldn't help but raise a silvery brow at the crab. It was rare for Triton to summon his daughters individually. He wasn't exactly a terrible father, but he wasn't a present one, either.
"Come on, Krill," Joe said quietly. This was where they needed to bow out. "We have some work to do, and I think it might have just gotten harder."
"Do you think she's in trouble?" Krill whispered low enough that only Joe could hear as Sebastian led Adin and Ariel away.
"If we keep her much longer, she will be," Joe said, feeling an ominous weight to his words that even he didn't understand as he led Krill toward home.