Heart of Life

Marooned

Your name is Loren Breith, and you live in a lake. More accurately, you live In Lake Champlain. To be honest, you're not a big fan of it because of the huge influx of tourists and the pollution from all the boats that are constantly disrupting your peaceful naps. Probably because they had no idea a siren was living in that lake, as you have been for....about 100 years now. You're a pretty average guy, besides the fact that from the waist down you've got a bright purple fish tail. From the waist up, you've got the buff body of a swimmer, tanned from basking in the sun when nobody is around, muddy brown eyes, and similarly bland hair, which you keep short and spiky to prevent annoying tangles. You seem to lack the ability to grow any facial hair (much to your manly-pride chagrin) to cover the freckles that dot your face like fish turds.

You're approximately 25 in human years, and you're enjoying your wonder years (120-160 are always the best, and you've just turned 132 on March 13th). Despite your physical appearance, you're exposed to the world through drunk partiers and boozy women, and so you've learned to join at night, when nobody can see underwater as clearly. You absolutely hate beer (and puked ferociously the last time you were offered one), but you really have a fascination with blonde men. Your favorite partier, a flirty drunk named Angelica, has told you that you're absolutely gay, and has tried (and failed) to 'hook you up' multiple times.

You spend most of your time along one of the less populated shores, where your only supernatural buddy talks to you, mostly because she is also the only supernatural creature besides you that lives around the lake. Her name is Polly, and she's a will-o'-the-wisp. Normally, she takes the form of a pretty blue light, but a night, she is a tiny, hand-sized creature with blue hair, skin, eyes, and little butterfly wings. She wears a shimmering dress made of spiderwebs, something you made for her yourself to celebrate her first official kill.

Unfortunately, you haven't been so lucky. You were cursed by a witch as a guppy to never sing properly, meaning that you're basically useless as a siren, which is why your mother paid a shapeshifter to dump you in this lake, rather than stay in the ocean like your kind is meant. You sometimes wish you could go back, but then you remember that taking a chomp out of partiers who think it's a hickey is a pretty easy life compared to singing cruise ships to wreckage. You aren't sure what a cruise ship is, besides a really, really big boat.

Today is a day called the summer solstice, which you have discovered is the day that water creatures can leave the water as humans and interact, and will turn back when the sun rises the next day. You've never left because you've never had reason to, but today, Angelica has you set up on a date with, incidentally, a local nymph entity that Polly knows and hates for being an egocentric, rude, and totally obnoxious douche. He lives too far away for either of you to interact unless you learned to walk or he deigned to leave his comfort zone, so you've never met.

As the sun rises, you smile nervously at Polly, who is slowly blurring into a blue glimmer, and grimace as an odd feeling overcomes your tail. This always happens on the solstice, but you've never gotten used to it. However, the tingling soon stops, and you stare down into the water at unfamiliar legs and feet and...well, human parts that you don't understand. Polly has kindly brought you a dead camper's clothing, someone she lured and ate because he was your size. You like the gesture, but feel uncomfortable wearing a dead man's clothes.

You frown confusedly as you struggle to find meaning in these garments, eventually finding your way into what Polly insisted are clean, spare boxers (which don't seem to have a purpose) and the tan cargo shorts. It takes you a good five minutes to figure out the zipper and button, but the t-shirt is easy enough to make you feel less like an idiot. His sandals are too small for your feet, so you leave yourself barefoot and try to stand.

You fall onto your face. "Oh man. Polly, help!" You only see rapid blue blinking. Polly can't help you, and you know it. With a resigned sigh, you examine these legs and try to apply what you learned from swimming with them to standing and walking. You balance yourself carefully when you push up, and then you cautiously step forward, keeping your foot flat. You bend your knee too much and fall over again, but now that you have the idea, you are able to stand and walk extremely slowly toward the path leading to the campground.