Every Time a Ship Blows Up, a Mermaid Gets Her Tail... Wait a Minute...

A chapter from A Siren's Song (working title, unfinished) that I thought that I would publish...

I walk back to my dorm, a case file in my hand. Just kidding, the file is already on my screen back at home, waiting for me. Seraphimbia hasn’t used physical case files since people thought that the multiverse theory was just a theory. As I walk down the path, I see a group of my friends, Rick, Elliott, Draike, Kylara, Natalie, and Zania. They invite me to go deep-sea diving with them, which I politely decline in favor of my new mission.

When I get to my dorm, Dorm 8, the creativity dorm, I duck into my room and am grateful when I discover that my roommate is out. Thank goodness. She’s nice and all, but this is a top-secret mission, and sometimes she’s more than a little bit nosy. I tap a button on my screen and the file pops into 3D. I flip through it, looking at the diagram of the locat and the object of my mission. The case file of the leader of the group is included, but severely incomplete. Name: Tyron Jernigan, alias Drum Major. Drum Major? Seriously? I swear, these villains come up with stupider and stupider aliases every day. Powers: Necrokinesis. I don’t know what that is, but it doesn’t sound very useful. Weapons: No known. Backstory: Unknown. Seems easy enough. Hoping to get back before dinner, I change into my uniform and head out to the helipad as quickly as possible.

A couple of hours and a sore butt later, I get dropped out of the heli into the dark night, falling some forty feet (ouch), and land on the deck of what appears to be a gigantic ancient fishing schooner. I creep noiselessly towards the captain’s quarters, where what I’m looking for probably is. At the sound of footsteps, I dart behind a couple of metal barrels, catching a glimpse of a guy carrying a... clarinet? Why the hell is a dude carrying a clarinet around on a ship?? Oh, wait, that’s an oboe. My bad. Must be a sort of marching band-themed gang. I pity the low brass section. Once he's passed, I slip out and continue to the stern. Making sure that no one notices me, I creep around planting explosives in key places, based off of my analysis of the ship. I spot several other people carrying instruments and wearing marching band uniforms. I can't make out the colors in the dark. After hearing the last explosive click into place, I slide up next to the door to the captain's quarters.

The cabin is unlit and I can’t hear any sounds from within, even with my cybernetic super-hearing, so I quietly open the door, inch by inch, and slip inside, making sure to close it behind me silently. I grab what I came for and slip it into the bag on my back. I take a minute to look at the desk, which is covered in bathymetric seafloor imaging, some villainous-looking plans, and... sheet music? Man, this guy must be really committed.

With a creak that makes my heart skip a beat and adrenaline flood through my body, the cabin door opens and the light flickers on. I freeze, going wide-eyed. Standing at the door and wearing a black shako with a tall fluffy white plume with flecks of gold in it, a black and gold marching band uniform with a white cape and white gauntlets and gloves, and holding a baton is clearly Drum Major. Behind him is more of his crew, but I can’t really make out their details.

“Well, well, well, what do we have here?”  he drawls in an almost bored voice.

“As far as I can see, we have a heroic vigilante and an absurd band geek villain who’s still stuck in high school," I say, nerves making my voice higher than it naturally is.

“Take her.”

A couple minutes and a futile fight later, my hands are bound and I'm surrounded by battery thugs. My head is ringing from a shot from a trombone slide (yes, they fight with their instruments, yes, I got injured by my own instrument) and my side aches from being jabbed with drum sticks. Drum Major orders them to throw me overboard, and I hit the water and start sinking, weighted down by the metal cybernetics in the side of my head. A couple of seconds later, the boat explodes, the timer on the explosives I planted going off right on time.

    Pain. Red hot pain. Blindingly bright crimson, excruciating, unbearable, agonizing scarlet pain rips through my body, starting at my right shoulder and expanding outwards. I struggle in the water against something wrapped around me, which my cybernetics helpfully inform me is the sail of the ship that I just blew up. My panicked brain can’t form any thoughts through the intolerable anguish that has invaded my body. The white material is wrapped around me, making it hard to breathe. I thrash even harder and finally get free. I gasp in a breath, then fight through the pain to keep myself afloat now that the sail is no longer holding me up. I kick away from the sail and shiver as the salty cold of the ocean envelops me.

    I look around, gears spinning in my mind as I try to figure out what to do. The boat has gone up in flames, but I might be able to grab a piece of wood and float to a shore, but I can’t see any in the vicinity. I know that I'm not a strong enough swimmer to swim very far, but is there any nearby islands or anything? I search my brain, trying to remember if there was anything nearby on the map. Within a few moments, my left arm is numb, but I haven’t felt my right one at all. My thoughts spin wildly. Shouldn't my arms still be bound together? Why can't I feel my right arm? What if a splinter of wood went through my shoulder and I’m bleeding out? What if one of the instruments hurt it and it's dislocated, or what if something hit it and now my am is broken? I have to get back to Seraphimbia, or I could die. I look to my right arm to tap a sos into my wristclock and nearly faint at what I see.

    What I see is nothing. Where my right arm is supposed to be is just blood dispersing into the water. I scream and kick backward, hastily trying to get away from the horror that has become my right side. My entire arm has been torn off and my side is speckled with shiny metal pieces. I get a mouthful of water when I try to take in a breath to scream again. I realize that I’m sinking to due to my inability to think straight enough to either swim or relax. I throw my body around, confused about how I’m going to swim without my arm.

    A box of text pops up in my vision, informing me that my brain is going to limit blood flow to my right side and ignore the pain signals in the meantime. The pain starts to ease, and my brain clears up a bit. Then I remember. My cybernetics. They’re not supposed to be wet for more than twenty minutes. I struggle to gauge the amount of time since being thrown overboard by the explosion, but can't. The pain has receded so that I can think now, but I’m twice as scared as before. Flashing red text informs me that my cybernetics are getting waterlogged and deploying precautionary measures. My lungs scream out in pain as I turn my attention to them. I starting kicking towards the surface again, having been shocked still when I realized that my cybernetics were going to shut down. I flail my limbs as I try to swim without my dominant arm, dark spots forming at the edge of my vision. Is this it? Is this the way I go out? Did I beat cancer just to be killed by water?

    No.

    I can feel my resolve strengthening. I will not die today. Not today, not this way. The darkness, which had almost completely taken over my vision, recedes, making everything look different. I can see farther and everything seems brighter. I can discern details that I couldn’t see before and... new colors? I don't have the words to describe my surroundings.

    I'm so focused on my vision that I don’t even realize at first that my lungs no longer hurt, that they are no longer trying to draw in a breath. I can't believe it. I must be dead. But... I'm not. I'm alive. I stay underwater a few seconds longer, reveling in not needing to breathe anymore. A song floats into my head, and I feel strangely compelled to sing it, and I do, swimming about, looking at the different underwater creatures and plants. I move easily through the water, swimming in no particular direction, with almost no effort. The water forms a sort of barrier around me as I try to figure out what's going on and how to get out of my predicament.

    I reach a hand down to scratch an itch on my leg and freeze when my hand touches what feels like scales. I look down hesitantly, scared to look and see another normal body part turned grotesque. I gawk, paralyzed in fear at the mermaid tale that now envelopes my lower half. It looks like a giant red, black, and turquoise fish is eating me, except that there’s no head, instead, the scales just kind of transitions into my skin. I moved my legs experimentally and the scaly tail moves, the soft turquoise parts at the end waving gently. I run my hand down it, feeling the cool, hard, slightly slimy scales and the soft squishy tail ending and shiver as a chill runs down my spine. I smile. This is pretty cool. I turn and move my legs, actually, my tail, up and down, finding that swimming is pretty easy.

    I reach the surface and draw in a gasping breath. I push myself towards a piece of land that I didn't notice before. It dawns on me that I didn't see it earlier because I’m no longer near the explosion. I can't see the ship, which still looked like a bonfire on Independence Day the last time that I saw it. How long was I underwater? As I swim towards shore, I can tell that it’s sandy and bare, nothing more than a small sandspit.

    I heave my body onshore with my shaking left arm, then collapse as soon as most of my body is out of the water. I watch in equal parts fascination and horror as my blue, red, and black scales slough off and my one tail turns into two legs. I rest my head on the damp sand as I lay on my left side, trying to figure out how I’m going to contact Seraphimbia. Normally, I could use my cybernetics, but I don’t think that they are in the best working condition right now. I also normally carry a wristclock, but that was on my right arm. I flinch as I am again reminded of the loss of my limb, still not completely accepting the fact that something so vital to my everyday functions is completely gone. I mean, I'm right handed!

    I force myself to look at the atrocious mess that makes up where my arm used to be. The flesh from my hip to my shoulder is half-raw-pink, half-charred-black. There’s not a stump, no, it’s mostly flat, except for the bright silvery shrapnel pieces sticking out, none of which are bigger than a tadpole. I dimly think that they're from those metal crates that I put explosives on. What am I going to do about those? I scrunch my face in disgust as I realize that I have to get them out, or my wound could get infected, which would probably kill me. I roll onto my back and attempt to grab the biggest piece that I can see with my uncoordinated left arm, which ignites a wave of pain.

    I cry out and draw my hand back, then grit my teeth and force myself to do it again. I hiss at the wave of red that covers my vision, then flinch at the inhuman sound of my voice. I finally pull the piece out, which causes blood to start oozing from the now empty spot. I move on to the other pieces. After an endless painful forever, I finally am done and roll back onto my left side, ready to pass out. I close my eyes, sighing. Forming a thought requires a gargantuan amount of energy, probably both because of the blood loss and my cybernetics in my brain shutting down. How am I ever going to get out of this?

    Time passes indefinitely as I slip in and out of consciousness until I hear the thwip thwip thwip of heli blades and pounding footsteps muffled by wet sand. That’s the last thing I remember for a while. 

Author's Note

Fyi, in the Metaverse, sirens and mermaids are the same things, except that when mermaids are on land, they have legs and look like normal humans, albeit breathtakingly beautiful.
And locat is my slang for location.

Reviews

[Peregrinator7]

i haven't been on writerscafe in forever and just realized you put this up...
(spoiler alert: this isn't the last you see of the drum major...)

[Locke Redwyne (night sys)]

i posted this like four months ago!

[Peregrinator7]

i know, i suck at checking writerscafe

[Locke Redwyne (night sys)]

i can tell

[Onlyme]

Lots of action, interesting read and entertaning as well.

[Locke Redwyne (night sys)]

Thanks! I'm glad you like it!