“That does sound exciting when you put it that way,” Renzie replied, but it was hard to explain to others that he didn’t want adventures. He’d packed away his adventursome hopes decades ago, and to unpack them now would just be…so very painful. No. It was easier for Renzie Anand live predictable, plain, and adventure-free. Let the Stephs and Asters of the world seek out adventures.
Granted, he was technically here looking for insight into selkies and other sea people, suspecting that Aster herself was some kind of seaple, because kismet brought adventure to him. Whether Renzie wanted it or not.
“Some people can be water-persons…” Renzie said, amused by Aster taking it in stride. It usually felt awful, pretending and lying. But sea people had to be good at lying because they had no choice. What sort of life was that? “Like um…a preference for hot water versus cold? Lemon-water, carbonated water…endless possibilities.”
This conversation was so stupid. Renzie felt so stupid that he was able to carry on these stupid, trite, pointless chit-chat conversations with such effortless ease. His whole life, and he’d only bothered to delve deep with his family, and with a stupid ex who almost broke his heart. I know sea people are real!!!! he wanted to scream. It was maddening, and Renzie kept smiling.
“Do you have any…pictures of your art? If you’re willing to share. I’d love to see. I might be as talented as a mule, but I think art is amazing.”
At least art didn’t lie. It was a statement, an indelible honesty even if it got clever or deep. Renzie listened as Aster talked about her own life (or her own lies?), so plain and unadorned it would be so easy to believe her. Old!Renzie would’ve swallowed it all, hook, line, and sinker. Would’ve been compassionate for her supposed struggle (he was sure Aster had struggles, but perhaps not human struggles. Sea people struggles), called her strong and brave and all the other banal crap an actual refugee might be sick and tired of hearing from well-meaning, privileged fools.
‘We both found each other when we needed each other the most.’
There was a profound sadness laced into that statement that made Renzie’s shoulders slump. Maybe Renzie was just projecting; but regardless, his smile turned softer and more genuine. “So what you’re saying is that Nereida is a big old sweet softie underneath her hard shell. It’s good you two found each other then. Putting up a shell all the time - feeling defensive all the time - it can get so exhausting. And lonely.”
Renzie pointed at a journal entry from an old dockmaster’s records from the late 1700s. “Oh-ho! Look here. A smuggler’s gaff-rigged wherry, which claimed to have something in their wet cargo. Not a fish, but not a shark or whale. It…” Renzie skimmed along his finger, trying to decipher the handwriting and the olde tyme nomenclature. “…okay here we go. It claims the creature sang to them on a moonlit night, before jumping ship. But they retained scales, scraped off her tail as she crawled along the deck. That’s….actually that’s really disturbing. Hm. I wonder what happened to the scales? Maybe the dockmaster confiscated them…”
“Right? Sometimes it’s better to think of a tedious task as a small quest you have to figure out before you can work on the more fun things. That’s how I like to think about some of the chores I have to do but don’t want to do, you know?” She said. It was a lot similar to some of the adventure books she had read, and she found that she could get a lot of things done faster when she thought of herself as an adventurer on a quest. It made things a lot more fun than they appeared.
Leave it to the Anands to take that ideology one step further and make it their lives’ mission to scour the town for merfolk. She never understood what it was with this town and its obsession with mermaids, but she knew she had to watch her words carefully around him. He seemed to have a knack for twisting her words, probably hoping he’d catch her in her lies. Well, she wouldn’t give him that satisfaction if she could help it.
She raised as eyebrow at him as she pondered the thought. “Well, if you put it that way, I could argue that all drinks contain some form of water. Coffee is merely bean-infused water while lemonade is lemon-flavored water,” she said with a chuckle, wondering how long he’d try to hold this absurd small talk. “But that’s an interesting point, I suppose. I would prefer my water hot or carbonated, I think.”
She definitely had to commend him for plastering on a smile throughout their whole nonsensical conversation. He was either an idle chatterbox who enjoyed menial conversations, or he was baiting her somehow. She didn’t really understand what angle he was going for, but she found that she was quite enjoying their little conversation.
“I have a few little scribbles and drawings at the front desk. As for my paintings, they’re at home. I’m afraid I’m quite embarrassed by some of my paintings, so I can’t show them to you, sadly,” she said with a laugh. “I can show you some of my sketches, though, once we finish up here,” she offered before she focused her attention on one of the journals.
“Yeah,” she said with a soft, fond laugh. “If you say it like that, it does sound a little silly. But we all have our pasts, and our experiences make us who we are,” she said with a shrug. “We were lucky enough to be taken in and taught English in order to work here. I can say with certainty that I’m really lucky to be here,” she said dreamily.
She looked up from the diary she was reading to glance at the one Renzie was holding. “Whoa, that is so cool! Look at this one,” she said, holding up the journal in front of him. “I think I might be going mad, but I hear it every night without fail. The storm has caused my ship to drift far off into the ocean, with no land in sight. Our resources are being rationed, and it’s all we can do not to jump ship. My crewmates and I sing shanties at night to help boost morale, but sometimes we hear an eery voice, too high-pitched to be any one of us. It’s beautiful and haunting, and joins us in song every other night. It doesn’t sound like any creature I’ve heard before,” she read aloud. “Do you think this might be a mermaid experience?”
