literature

Commish: Part of Your World

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The sky above Sarah's head had only blue with swirls of white running through it. On one side of her was the sea; on the other, a mall with big brand name shops in it that kept Pier 33 preserved. Sarah saw a man dressed in a pirate dog costume posing with kids along the side of a ship. She had not seen him before; he must have been a new attraction.

The smell of the salty ocean near one of her favorite haunts as a child brought back memories.Whenever she cleaned her room, did well on a test, or some other achievement that pleased them, Sarah's parents had taken her to Pier 33. They bought her cotton candy, "pirate gold" that was really chocolate, and whatever else her little heart desired.

What young Sarah had enjoyed most, however, was looking out at the ocean. The glittering sea sparkled in her eyes every time she came. No matter what boat was in the harbor, Sarah would always look past it to the ocean. She had even seen dolphins leaping above the waves and always said hello to them.

"When I grow up, I wanna be a mermaid!" she would tell her parents. They would smile and nod and buy her mermaid costumes for Halloween, all the while knowing that their daughter's wish was impossible. Ever since she had first seen The Little Mermaid, Sarah had wanted to live under the sea. There, surely, she would be able to talk to all the cute little fishes and crustaceans that the movie had brought to life.

Sarah had been told after The Little Mermaid left VHS rental shelves that mermaids were not real. She had stayed in her room all day afterwards, playing with mermaid dolls while realizing that their world could never be. The dolls were currently in a box, as was the videocassette that she had coerced her parents into buying.

Sarah shook her head. She was an adult, now, and definitely not a mermaid. Instead of a ravishing young beauty like Ariel, she had matured into one of the plainest people one could ever hope to meet. Her mid-length hair was brown, as were her eyes; she was of average height; she was not particularly curvy. She had not dated anybody since her teenage years.

As Sarah took a stroll down memory lane, she could not help noticing how much Pier 33 had changed. The carousel that she had once ridden a seahorse on was no longer in operation. A fun house was being built right next to it.

But the sea's still there, Sarah thought. Yes, the deep blue-green sea was still sparkling happily on this sunny day. The parts closest to the pier were dirtied with seagull feathers and a few belly-up fish, but the farther out Sarah looked, the more pure it felt. Man-made fixtures like amusement park rides would come and go, but the ocean would be around forever.

Sarah found herself wandering past one of those silly automatic fortune-teller machines. A wrinkly old gypsy had her hands placed over a lightly-glowing crystal ball. She would cackle occasionally. The words "Money? Love? Fame?" were plastered above her head in hokey plastic letters.

"Ah, what the hey?" Sarah said to herself. She stuck a dollar into the machine. Out from beneath the gypsy came a small slip of paper. She took it out of the slot and prepared to receive her destiny.

"'You will be rewarded for your patience,'" Sarah read. She had been hoping to receive this week's lottery numbers or something far more clear than what the slip of paper was telling her. Then again, the fortunes were meant to be ambiguous; that way, one could interpret them however one liked. Sarah had never really been rewarded for her patience in the past. She wandered away from the booth in search of a garbage can in which to toss her 'fortune.'

"Excuse me," a voice said.

"Huh?" Sarah turned. Looking at her from one of the docks was a woman dressed entirely in teal and purple veils. She was wearing gold-rimmed, dark blue sunglasses that shone beneath the brim of her light purple hat. Despite her milky-white skin, she blended in perfectly with the sea in the background. Had Sarah not heard her speak, she probably would not have noticed the lady's existence.

"May I ask your name?" the lady asked.

"Sarah," Sarah said.

"Hello, Sarah," she said. "It's been a while."

Sarah blinked. "Have...we met?"

"Not like this," the woman said. "I am a nereid - a type of sea spirit. You used to come here all the time, did you not?"

Sarah nodded.

"I was watching you," she said. "No matter how many times you came here, you would always look at the sea with an awe rarely seen in other children. I don't know why you left - you would clearly have been content to stay here forever."

"My parents decided that I was too old for it," Sarah responded.

"Well...if you had come back one more time, I would have made you a very special offer."

Sarah's interest was piqued. "Oh?"

The nereid smiled. "How would you like to be a mermaid for a year?"

Had Sarah been drinking anything at the time, she would have spat it right out. Her first reaction was speechlessness. Then, after a minute of stunned silence, she finally said, "What?"

"You heard me correctly: I am offering you the chance to live under the sea as a mermaid for one whole year."

Sarah wanted to believe her. Deep in her heart, she really, truly wanted to believe that this woman could make her a mermaid. It had been her childhood dream. There was, however, something stopping her from saying yes right there and then.

No matter how much she wanted to believe, she found herself second-guessing the offer. Every rational impulse in Sarah's mind told her that becoming a mermaid was impossible on a million levels. For starters, unlike in fairy tales, people did not suddenly lose and regain human form. She had been taught that mermaids did not exist, so if this lady could somehow bend reality to her will, she would have liked to see it firsthand.

"Prove it," she said. "How do I know you're capable of doing something like that?" She felt like she was looking a gift horse in the mouth. Hopefully the nereid would sense that she wanted to believe.

"Understood," the lady said. She closed her eyes. The air around her began to glow bright blue.

Suddenly, Sarah began to feel strange. The skin of her right hand was getting cold and clammy. To her surprise, the skin between her fingers began extending to a webbing that almost touched her fingertips.

"Aaah!" Sarah yelped. "OK, I believe you. I'm willing to live under the sea for a year, especially if it means being a mermaid."

The nereid adjusted her spectacles. "I should warn you, dear...there is a catch."

"You don't want my voice, do you?"

"No, not that. The change is only for a year. After that year is up, you will become a sea slug," the nereid warned.

Sarah barely thought about the price she had to pay. This was her life's dream coming true; surely, any price would be worth it. Perhaps she could even inspire others to follow their hearts. What did it matter if her childish hope came with a steep cost? Nothing in life was free.

"It's worth it," Sarah said.

"That's more like it," the woman said. "Well, then...get in the water, please."

Sarah nodded obediently. She was going to object, but as she removed her modest lavender shirt, getting into the water made more and more sense. She was going to lose her legs and probably gain a few more adaptations for life underwater. Being on land would get even more awkward as the change progressed.

Sarah looked around cautiously as she removed her simple blue jeans. Nobody was watching except the nereid. After stripping down to her undergarments, she took a dive into the water and waited.

"Ready," she said.

The nereid began to glow again. Sarah felt a tingle course throughout her body as jade green, fishlike scales poked out of the flesh on her legs. She felt them go limp as her spine stretched between them. For the first half-minute, it felt like a fish had wedged its way between her legs and was slowly growing bigger.

Sarah tried swimming by kicking her legs and forming tail. As she thrashed them, they became less like legs and more like the spine of some bizarre, scaly dolphin; mermaids, she realized, did not swim like fish, but more like sea mammals like dolphins and whales. This notion was confirmed when Sarah's flipping tail suddenly yielded a ridged, translucent fin that sat flat against her longer spine.

Sarah had been so focused on her tail that she barely noticed any other changes. Even the webbed hand she had acquired earlier had reverted back to being a regular human hand. She looked herself over. She was a mermaid, yes, but one so simple that it felt like she had missed something.

"Wow...is this really all?" she asked.

The nereid smiled. "There are few more invisible things, but you shall find those out for yourself as you live your life. I shall see you in a year."

Sarah watched the nereid get off the pier. She walked as casually into the water as someone walking along the street. As she moved along the shallow bottom of the sea, she melted into the water in great streaks of sea green, dark blue, and purple. When all that remained of the nereid was sea foam, Sarah took her first dive into the water as a mermaid.

After the first splash, she knew what the nereid had meant when she talked about 'invisible things.' She felt no need to breathe at the surface like a dolphin or whale. The icy cold water felt balmy to her. The light streaming down from above guided her as she swam beneath the waves, free in the water as a bird in the sky.

Sarah found no need to close her eyes as she swam out into the deep blue. It was worth keeping her eyes wide open to take it all of the wonders of the deep in: fan coral there; a school of silvery fish here; a strange fish that used her top and bottom fins to swim in a sort of sideways fashion; graceful manta rays that levitated like ghosts over the ocean floor; anemones lining a giant reef that she would eventually call her home. Whenever she peeked her head above the water, the surface world seemed bland in comparison to the fluorescence of the world beneath the waves.

The new mermaid swam around her saltwater home with the zeal of a kid in a candy store. As a child, she had been obsessed with the sea. She had a book of all of the most recognizable fish in the ocean, and nothing pleased her more than to see the creatures in that book up close.

Whenever she swam by a fish, she would say its name aloud. "Seahorse," she said after spotting a few twined in some coral; "parrotfish," she indicated when a large, bluish fish with a hooked beak swam by her.

"Angelfish," she said to herself. The flat-looking fish swished away when she tried to pet it. At first, she was disappointed, but realized she was a big, new creature to the fish. Of course it would be skittish.

Beautiful though it was, life under the sea was a lot rougher than Sarah had ever imagined. As a human, she had been used to convenience and variety. Her diet consisted of crabs, fish, and even the occasional stingray. There was very little to do beyond hunting, eating, and swimming aimlessly in the deep blue. Perhaps the nereid had not been so kind to her, after all.

Most worrisome of all, however, was the loneliness that Sarah felt after a week. She could talk to the fish in her own weird way, but unlike the colorful sea creatures in the Disney movie, they never had anything interesting to say. She was lonely as the ocean's only extant mermaid.

One day, she could take it no longer. Like Ariel, she felt the irrepressible need to interact with the human world. As soon as she saw the shadow of a boat, she swam up to it.

For the longest time, she stayed in the shadow of the ship. Intuitively, she sensed that she would have to wait for just the right time to show herself to the humans above. The right person would have to come along.

"A mermaid!" she finally heard from above. A little girl who could not have been much older than five years old had seen her tail fin peeking out from beneath the boat. Sarah showed herself cautiously.

The girl's eyes widened as Sarah slipped out into the open blue. "Mommy! A mermaid!" she called. Her parents came over, but staunchly denied Sarah's existence after a moment of contemplation. They said she was "just some human dressed like a mermaid" or "a trick of the light."

Sarah vanished beneath the ship again. If humans could not believe their own eyes, what could they believe?

After that, the mermaid tried several times to show herself to humans up above. Each time yielded the same result: Disbelief and staunch denial of the very sight before them. Even when Sarah appeared multiple times before the same person, they denied her existence.

For example, the captain of Aqua Blue, one of the cruise ships along the pier, once saw Sarah's tail flowing alongside his ship. After rubbing his eyes, Sarah revealed herself in full.

"Hello," she said. "My name is Sarah."

The first time she said that to the captain, he got up. Without taking his eyes off of her for a few feet, he dashed into the nearest fishing shop. He came out with a harpoon in his hand.

Sarah knew better than to stick around. The harpoon nicked her tail fin as she swam away like a silver minnow. She looked back at the weapon as she got farther and farther away from shore. For as long as the harpoon was in her sight, she wondered "why?"

Why had he lobbed a harpoon at her? Why had he not accepted Sarah for the beautiful mermaid that she was? Did he plan to take her out of the sea and hang her corpse as a trophy? The possibilities swirled in Sarah's head like the water around her body as she swam away from civilization.

She tried to communicate with people on land four more times during the next couple of months. After being yelled at by that same captain, she changed people. The other men and women of the sea were not as cold as that particular man, but did not welcome her, either.

"Monster" was the most common word that Sarah heard. "What the-" was the second most common phrase. Only once did some curious child see her and call her a "mermaid."

Why? Sarah wondered. She had taken this form to not only satisfy her own dream, but also to inspire others. Instead, she could only inspire children, for the adults could not understand what she was. They were in solid denial of the impossible creature Sarah had become.

The year felt like it had been stretched like taffy. The only reason Sarah knew that her year had passed was that, after peeking up at the shore periodically, she finally saw the same nereid as before.

"Hm?" The nereid turned to her former acquaintance. "You're back?"

Sarah nodded. "I figured I should keep up my end of the bargain." She did not mention that the loneliness had nearly killed her inside. She did not even want to bring up the most depressing thing of all: even though no less than twenty people had witnessed a mermaid with their own eyes, they refused to believe what they were seeing.

Even if there had not been a price, Sarah would have asked for her life to end. Her life had been mediocre before, but it had not been nearly as painful as being the only one of her kind.

"You know," the nereid said, "if you had not come back, I would have let you stay as a mermaid forever."

"No," Sarah said, shaking her head. "I'd rather pay for my time as a mermaid." The truth was that she honestly wanted to die after that year.

The nereid sighed. "If you insist."

Sarah had not felt cold for a whole year, but as her body turned into jelly, things began to get chilly. Her fish tail became a light blue body striped with black. A pair of extensions like small legs sprouted where her legs used to be; each extension on them blossomed with a flower of electric blue, finger-like gills. Another set popped out of her new and permanent body like bizarre, cartoonish flowers.

Funny, Sarah thought, I had no idea sea slugs could be this beautiful.

As the slippery, spineless form of a nudibranch consumed her body, Sarah felt herself shrinking. Her tail had quickly gone from being a five-foot long fish tail to a slimy body only a few inches in length.

She was only getting smaller as her fingers multiplied and blossomed into winglike gills. She tried to move them like fingers, only to have her whole body jiggle in a very lizardlike movement. Quite unintentionally, she flipped herself over. She found that such a position suited her new life better.

When the change had almost reached her head, and she was about the size of a large Beanie Baby, Sarah felt her last few bones slip away. Her skull was dissolved into her new, gelatinous body. Her hair was scattered to the sea as her flesh changed consistency. Eye stalks poked their way out of her new head, allowing her a different view of the world. As her mouth morphed into a raspy radula, the change was complete.

This new form felt perfectly natural to Sarah. She had retained her sense of self, as well as her memories, but had lost a good portion of her humanity. There was no need to be super-social. She did not wonder. Her purpose in life was to eat, sleep, and mate. Nothing too special.

It was a simple life. This time, it did not drive her to madness. Sarah the Glaucus sea slug swam away from the divine presence that had changed her, looking for something appetizing. Only later would she find that men-of-wars suited her new palette best. She did not know it, but even at only 3 centimeters long, she was quite dangerous.

One day, the shadow of something very big passed over a very small sea slug. As the people above peered into the wonders of the deep, they were blissfully unaware that the tiny creature in the depths knew of their futile efforts to be a part of her world.
eBay has not been that kind to me lately, so yes, my commissions are open again. HOPEFULLY, now that the Halloween rush is over, I can work on my adoptables more. Don't look so scared; I'm not loaning eldritch overlords or anything.

Anywho, this is another commission for :iconhallvar:. Woman -> mermaid -> sea slug? I could not resist, and made it quite dark to boot! :D Hope you like! (For the record, <a href=[link]">here's the particular type I had in mind.) (Please let me know if I need to fix anything!)
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Bonniebro136's avatar
at least she knows what her life goals are..