Who were they? We're they real? Or was all of this a beautiful dream?
Just a second ago, Nate Sullivan had been in his granddaughter's bedroom and had read an old fairy tale, The Twelve Dancing Princesses, to her. It had been her mother's favourite fairy tale when she had been little. But kids were different nowadays than they had been 40 years ago and young Kira had been upset that she would have to listen to a boring old story from a book tonight and couldn't watch Disney's The Little Mermaid on her iPad for the 100th or rather 200th time.
"Why can't it be a story set in an ocean, and the princesses can't be mermaid?" Kira had complained.
"Because that's not how the story goes!" he had said and taken a sip of mineral water from a nearby bottle as his throat had been dry.
"Then the author was stupid. Mermaids are far cooler than ballerinas!" Kira had objected. "If I were to tell their story, they'd be mermaids living in the sea, and their Dad had cursed them because they never did what they were told!"
And then, all of a sudden, the floor beneath him had opened up, and before his mind had even been able to come up with a rational explanation, he had fallen through a blue curtain into an endless ocean of light blue water. He certainly wasn't in his granddaughter's bedroom anymore, and the question was rather where he was and how he could get back home. Obviously, there had to be an exit somewhere. All he had to do was to find it and go home. On the other hand, he had been pulled so deep in the ocean that he couldn't see the surface of the water, and he should certainly not be able to breathe under water. So what kind of an unreal fantasy world had he been pulled into?
One in which he was a merman with a real fishtail apparently. He could hardly believe his eyes when he discovered that his feet were gone. Well, he hoped that this would not be a permanent state and he could get out of this mess soon. At least the fishtail would make swimming easier for him since he was no younger that young and athletic.
But first, he needed to find out more about the eleven dancing creatures in the gazebo in front of them. As he got closer, he realised that they were not real ballerinas, but just dark shadows, and the gazebo wasn't real as well. It would have been against all the laws of physics if they had been real.
Yet something fishy was definitely going on. The shadows had to come from some sort of source.
As he swam forward, he would have almost bumped into the little mermaid. She sat on a rock in the middle of what seemed to be a carefully arranged garden of underwater plants and was such a tiny creature that one could have easily missed her.
"Hello there," he asked as he remembered the tales about mermaids he had heard as a kid. Unlike the Disney mermaid Ariel, these were dangerous creatures who could kill people.
On the other hand, this mermaid seemed too occupied with herself to care about him. There was a general air of sadness and regret about her as she stroked an item in her hand. It turned out to be an old music box which featured eleven minuscule dancers in a gazebo.
"Hello, can you tell me where I am?" he asked her again when she failed to react.
It was only then that she turned her head, which caused her long blonde hair to fly up and frame her head like a halo. As she looked up at him with her large blue eye, she asked, "Who are you?" His presence surprised her evidently.
"My name is Nate Sullivan, and I'm not really a merman. I come from a country called the USA, and I don't know how I got here and how I can go back home," he explained.
"Well, you can't. Nobody has left my father's kingdom ever before... At least not alive!" she exclaimed and looked at her music box again with sadness.
Needless to say, this was not good news at all, and he didn't want to believe it. "But that's not possible! I have to go back because I cannot leave my granddaughter alone!"
"My father won't let alone leave this place ever since they disappeared," she said and indicated with her hand that she meant the dancers.
"Who are they?"
"They were my sisters and princesses like me. Some of them were much older than me and gave my father a lot of trouble as they would sneak out of the palace to hang out with their boyfriends. They had a sneaky ballet teacher who supported their whims and lied for them. You know, he gave them potions to drink, and then they would change into a human form and be able to go to dances that were held on land. Then one day, all of them failed to come back. As I am the only child he has left, my father is afraid that I could disappear, too."
It struck him as odd that in addition to The Little Mermaid, a fairy tale similar to her story had been known on land for centuries. "What's your name?"
"I'm Genevieve."
"Like the princess in the Barbie movie?" he asked her, although he supposed that she had never seen a Barbie doll before.
She confirmed this by looking at him in a very puzzled manner and asking, "I'm sorry?"
Earlier that evening, he had put an Ariel figure Kira had found in one of those popular chocolate eggs in the pocket of his shirt because it had bothered him that she left her toys lying around on the floor of her room. That had been a lucky coincidence because all he needed to do now was to show it to her. "Is that one of your sisters?"
"Yeah, that's Arielle," she nodded and sighed. "The redhead and the cheekiest of all of them. She always wanted to become a human and marry her boyfriend, who said he was a prince. But my other sister Louise told me that he was just a poor fisherman, and Ariel couldn't tell the difference. You see, she wasn't very bright. Louise was the brains in the family."
"I don't think your sisters are dead," he said because he wanted to comfort her. "As a matter of fact, they've become famous among humans. We tell stories about them, and we know your name, too."
"Really?" she asked.
At this very moment, the sea began to tremble as a huge male creature approached. Nate immediately thought that this must be the king as he had a tiara on his head and looked like the god Poseidon in advertisements for online games. In any case, the king lost no time in threatening him as he pointed his trident at him.
He also had a voice that sounded like thunder when he spoke. "I demand to know who you are and what are you doing here?"
"My name is Nate Sullivan, and if I'm trespassing, it happened by accident. You see, I'm lost..." Nate tried to explain, but the king cut him off.
"And what do you think you are doing here with him, young lady?" he asked his daughter.
"I think he's come here to help us find my sisters. Nate says that they are still alive," Genevieve lied and looked him straight in the eye.
This seemed to interest the king, and he eyed Nate curiously. "Then tell me more, human!"
Before Nate could go on, he was in his granddaughter's bedroom again. Or he was rather lying on a stretcher in her bedroom.
A paramedic asked him, "Can you hear me, sir?"
Nate tried to nod, but noticed he couldn't do it. When he tried to move his hand, he couldn't do that either. So all he could do was blink.
"You passed out, and we will bring you to a hospital to find out what is wrong with you."
He tried to tell the paramedic that he was fine, but couldn't due to the oxygen mask they had put on his face. As he tried to move his head to see whether his fishtail was still there, I couldn't even do that. He seemed to be paralyzed.
It was then that he noticed her because someone called out, "Louise!" Among the medical team that tried to help him was a young female doctor named Louise. She was extraordinarily beautiful and looked at him as if she wanted him to stay quiet. He could just about imagine that she had pretended to help him and administered a drug that had caused his paralysis.
After all, she couldn't let him reveal her secret true identity.