Pen & Paper

Strange Creatures

Eneri was hunting a school of blue marlin when she saw the strange creature: it looked like a whale—most likely a humpback, by its size—but she couldn’t see its fluke and instead of having a single pair of long pectoral fins, it had eight shorter, spindly ones.  Curiosity piqued, she let her prey escape; the whales had always been friendly with mermen and sirens and it seemed that something was wrong with this one.  It was completely silent and its many narrow fins were still, only moving with the ebb and flow of the waves.

            Above the surface, night had fallen and the sky was dark.  But something bright and orange flickered above the distressed whale.  Her eyes, accustomed to darkness, took a few moments to adapt to the sudden light.  She could see now that there were also dozens of dolphins in a frenzy around the humpback.  It looked like they were playing a game.  Eneri felt a wave of relief; surely if the joyful pod of dolphins were playing, the whale was alright.

            She sped up, fins straining, eager to take part in the new game for she did not recognize any of their formations.  A few of the dolphins had begun to slow and she saw one dip beneath the surface and sink toward her lazily.  The closer it got, the more she realized that these dolphins were also strange.  She reached out her webbed hands in greeting and recoiled at its touch.

            The creature’s exterior wasn’t the smooth, firm skin of a dolphin; it was covered in long bristles.  Stiff layers covered its main body and she was that instead of a single, muscular tail, it had two much skinnier tails that bent sharply in the wrong direction midway through.  Its tail flukes were pointed down at what must have been an unnatural angle.  Instead of flippers, it had limbs with joints in the middle with—with—with hands attached to their ends, she realized.  She took a closer look at the animal now.

            It became clear that it wasn’t a dolphin at all; it bore more resemblance to a merman, with its head of hair and strong, broad facial features.  It had gone to sleep, eyes closed.  The merman was so strange; he had no webbing between his fingers, or gills at his neck, and he had those two queer tails with strange joints.

            “Who are you?” Eneri asked, shaking his shoulder.  The stiff layers still covered his torso and tails.

            The alien-looking merman did not answer and Eneri raised the frequency of her calls.  Still, the he slept.  Finally, she swam off; if he was going to be rude and ignore her, he could float off alone.  She darted to the surface where a few other merman—not dolphins, she knew now—were still lingering.  She saw that most of them had grown tired with the games like the first merman she had encountered; they were all napping beneath the surface, their strange limbs still as they sank deeper.  What strange creatures they are, she thought.  They don’t even swim home before they fall asleep.

            Her head poked above the waves and she listened to the merman speak in an unknown frequency.  They didn’t seem to be using sonar because even twenty yards away, she could not pick up on their words vibrating through the water.  But she could hear them.

            Their voices were deep and strange, but achingly lovely despite their sharpness.  “Fire!” They were yelling over and over.  “The ship is going down! Where are the lifeboats?!  Is the captain alive?”

            Eneri did not know what these strange words meant, but the mermen called for them repeatedly.  She wanted to please those lovely voices, but she did not know how to help, did not know how to make them happy.  So instead she opened her mouth and sang, trying to add to the lovely music.  The mermen around her stilled and stopped their thrashing as they drew near to her, falling silent.

            A few had still been on the glowing whale, standing upright on their bizarre tails, but they promptly dove into the sea when she offered up her song.  They gathered around her dazedly and she basked in the attention, though a part of her wanted them to join in her song, wanted to hear those beautiful sounds again.  Her voice was not as lovely as the other siren women in her city, but these mermen did not seem to care.  They stayed by her until they fell asleep and dipped below the surface.

            After a while, the whale—ship, they had called it—lost its flickering glow and sank also, following after the mermen.  It was not like anything she had ever seen; it had three rigid, sticklike dorsal fins on its flat back.  She trailed after it and watched as it settled on the ocean wreck.  She lingered by the ship wreck for hours, waiting for any of the strange creatures to wake and play with her, but none did and she eventually lost interest.

            If they were all going to be lazy fish and waste the days away, they could do it without her.  Above them, the surface was growing bright with the rising sun and she swam away, seeking more entertaining company.