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Then again, amidst all the crazy he’d had to deal with in the past month or so it was something that had barely ranked on his batshit-o-meter. So why hadn’t he mentioned it before now?
Because it was pretty fucking screwed up, that’s why.
Annoyed, he kicked a small stone out into the stream and watched it disappear beneath the water. He’d walked a ways down the stream by that point and supposed that it would now more accurately be called a river. A large, resigned sigh lifted his chest. He settled down to sit with his back up against the bark of a tree whose branches hung out over the flowing water. Then he closed his eyes and tried to get his head straight by focusing on what his pack should go about doing next. Those thoughts drifted on to the idea of sparring with Frelki, and the thought of the lean and limber orc enticed him to naughtier and more soothing ideas that lured him slowly back to sleep.
He was awoken to the sensation of a hand upon his thigh. This sensation alone wasn’t entirely uncommon as of late, but the particular hand in question was definitely not one he was familiar with. It was very cold, very wet, and slightly larger than a normal human hand with what felt like a webbed membrane of skin between each finger.
The moment he opened his eyes and tried to leap to his feet, he was halted by just how close the eerily bright aqua coloured gaze was in front of him. Barely inches from his own face, he felt the tip of his visitor’s nose touch his own and lurched his head back to smack it against the bark of the tree behind him.
“Fuck!” he yelled, more in pain than in surprise at his sudden companion.
The noise startled her, and she jumped backwards to lean up on her hands a few feet away from him. Watching with a guarded expression; he rubbed the back of his head and tried to get the world back in focus again. When she materialized from being a fuzzy blur, his breath caught in his lungs and he almost choked.
She’s a mermaid.
The thought, as impossible as it was, kept repeating itself in his head whilst his brain tried to actually process the information. After the time he’d already spent in Arolius, he thought that his sense of scepticism had been truly shattered and he was prepared for anything. The sight of her proved that notion quite wrong. Later, he supposed it was because it was the first time he’d seen a creature quite so alien to what he was used to. Valise might have been an elf, but she still had the usual elements of what he was used to seeing. Two arms, two legs. Algra might have had green skin and tusks, but her shape was basically humanoid and she moved like all the other people he’d met in his life.
The aqua-haired female before him was not so accommodating in her physique or her movements. A central difference was the tail, which seemed to be causing his brain to fault every time he came to it. It was quite a bit longer than usually depicted in the stories he’d read and seen as a child, and far more serpentine. The fins along its length seemed to retract at her will, and as a result she moved along the ground like a snake using her upper arms to crawl at startling speed. That tail was so long that it curved back into the stream, and he got the sense that if she chose she could use it to pull herself back into the waters in an instant.Contentt bel0ngs to N0ve/lDrâ/ma.O(r)g!
Despite the somewhat alien look about her, along with the eeriness of her movements, he couldn’t deny that part of the reason he was having trouble speaking was because she was also an achingly beautiful creature. The tail was covered in bright sea-blue scales gleaming with the shards of sunlight that pierced through the forest canopy. When she moved her fins, each one seemed to reveal a hidden fold of metallic gold or green stretching out into numerous intricate patterns along the fin’s spine.
Her upper body was also markedly different to what he’d have expected, as the buxom, curly-haired sirens of his old books were cast aside in favour of a much more streamlined physique. That short crop of hair had switched its aqua colour to the same bright shade of blue as her tail, and it ran in sleek lines over the back of her head where it seemed to stick out behind her as if she was constantly travelling at high speed. The eyes that were now blinking at him with curiosity lined with guarded caution were slightly too big for her head, and turned up at the corners as if to allow water to easily pass to the sides of her face. A long, pointy nose sniffed at the air in front of her and he saw fresh clear water escape the long slits in her neck as she did so. A small, blue tongue ran across lighter blue lips on the kind of mouth that tended to illicit naughty thoughts.
She then lifted one of her hands to cautiously pull herself closer to him again, and her entire body writhed on the soft earth to slide along with her.
“Hello,” Gregory said. He tried to think of something to follow it up with but couldn’t quite manage it.
Her head tilted to the side almost immediately when she heard the words. Then she slowly mouthed her own imitation of the noise he’d made.
“Hay-low.” She opened her mouth wide with the “a” noise and formed a little kiss in the air on the “w”. Soon after that, she blinked a few times and tried it again without moving her mouth quite so much. “Haylow.”
It became almost immediately apparent from the sound of her voice that if this creature were to scream she might well make his ear drums explode. It wasn’t that she was shouting, and her tone was certainly pleasant enough. It just had the quality of about a hundred world-class opera singers all harmonising in one note.
He glanced down at the necklace he wore around his neck and found it to be resting there comfortably. Grasping at the little medallion, he spoke to her again.
“Can you understand me?” he asked.
She tilted her head to the other side.
“Kaaaan-yowww-” she began.
“Ok! Ok.” He made her jump a little with that first ok. The long noises she was making had begun to make his ears hurt. Then he immediately lifted his hands in a peaceable way. The last time he’d tried this, it was with Algra and she’d understood the gesture to mean he wanted a fistfight, so he put his hands down quickly and smiled instead.
He hoped very much that she wouldn’t take this to mean that he wanted to try to eat her.
Instead, she seemed to get the idea and crawled forward on her hands to get closer to him. She definitely didn’t seem to understand the meaning of the term “personal bubble” as they were soon nose-to-nose once again and she was peering into his eyes as if expecting to see someone she’d lost waving at her from inside his pupils.
The movement of her hand was so fast that any sort of reaction was near-impossible, and over the past weeks his reactions had sharpened to a razors edge. A chill of fear ran through him as he realised the mermaid could probably have killed him very easily if she wanted to. Instead, she placed her open hand upon his chest over his heart. He glanced down and saw the webbing between her fingers, and the long, slightly hooked fingernails protruding from the tips.
They felt like little razorblades resting against his skin.
That might have scared him a few shades paler had it not been for what else greeted his eyes when he looked down. So far he hadn’t quite noticed that, amongst the many erroneous elements of mermaid depictions he’d come across, the shell-bikini was also a completely fictional innovation that real mermaids didn’t wear. She was for all intents and purposes, completely naked. Completely naked and very, very close.
He couldn’t help it. By now it was almost like second nature. Inevitable. It was as if what rested between his thighs stirred from its slumber, casually assessed the situation, and did what it had gotten perhaps a little bit too used to doing in the circumstances.
Hot, naked lady giving us that look again, boss? Great! I’ll light the furnace.
Then off to work it went, thickening the length of his cock until it pulled tightly against the light leather of his trunks.