Show Me How the Melskinites Make Love
Chapter 1
"There's something moving out in the sea," came the voice of Dondragmer.
Barlennan looked to the towering waves with some confusion. "Well, yes. You've seen storms before, haven't you?"
Dondragmer looked slighted. "Indeed I have, Captain. But this is my first time seeing a body bob up-and-down in said storm."
"You mean someone is out there?"
"Well – must be…"
After diligently consulting the manual, Barlennan wiped the dust off the NearCom – it had not gotten much use in the past year. A recently updated treaty with the Cetascien Foreign Ministry had relieved Barlennan, alongside all others in his trade, of any responsibility to announce his presence when encountering the beasts in the open sea. The penalties for interfering with cross-bowl shipping, now sufficiently severe, discouraged the lazy brutes from bothering him. With the manual opened to the English phonetic schematic, Barlennan typed his message into the NearCom terminal – "Who are you? What are you doing?"
The machine hummed and transcribed a neural response – "Help me."
Barlennan grumbled. It was clear this was no pesky Cetascien, and yet there could be any number of bothersome creatures trying to cause trouble. Stories of Psyren migrants claiming to be Melskinite and manipulating lonely seamen into taking them aboard abounded in Dondragmer's collection of nautical mags.
"What race are you?" typed Barlennan. Better to be explicit.
"Yours!" came the response.
Barlennan was unconvinced, and yet did not want to press. If whatever was speaking to him was a sea-degenerate or one of the flyers' atrocious pets, it knew not to say so outright.
"How do I help?"
The machine buzzed to life and transcribed a Byzantine scheme. A spare tension-cord would have to be brought from below deck. The chord would have one end fastened to the mast, while the other end would be held overboard and then released – as if dropped on accident – overboard. The "person" out in the methane would then grab one end of the cord, and Barlennan and Dondragmer would apply a force along the rope to raise the wretch from the sea.
This scheme, Barlennan knew, could only work here, so close to the Rim. Closer to civilization, it was common practice to cut a tension-cord if one of its ends fell into the sea – hauling it back up was not worth the hours of painstaking labor. But here on the outskirts, a crew like that of the Bree could feasibly retrieve a cord, even with a hanger-on.
How lucky then, thought Barlennan, that this thing was out here. How monstrously convenient.
The creature looked enough like a pitiful, wet person, with the requisite number of legs, shaking there in the galley-that-wasn't-a-galley, methane pooling off it in little globules. And yet Barlennan knew that fliers possessed the technology to make themselves appear Mesklinite, and to make Mesklinites look like fliers. To hear Dondragmer tell it, the highest posts of government were already in the control of denizens of the less-civilized races in Mesklinite masquerade, but Barlennan knew Don was an eccentric.
Don himself sat in the corner, pretending to read a textbook on semi-methanuatic life. Three or four of his eyes at a time, however, eyed the stranger. It spoke Mesklinite as well as English, but with an accent neither Don nor the captain could place.
okie readers i don't know where 2 go from here so this is the end of chapter 1 w chapter 2 coming soon wooooo also dont flame me and say theres no whales on Melskin like its literally my fanfic and i get to add whales so stfu also dont say i dont understand the science bc i literally read whirligig world and literally read the explanation of how gravity works so leave me alone abt science stuff u npcs