MANIFESTING A GOOD JUNE MANIFESTING A GOOD JUNE MANIFESTING A GOOD JUNE MANIFESTING A GOOD JUNE MANIFESTING A GOOD JUNE MANIFESTING A GOOD JUNE MANIFESTING A GOOD JUNE MANIFESTING A GOOD JUNE MANIFESTING A GOOD JUNE MANIFESTING A GOOD JUNE MANIFESTING A GOOD JUNE MANIFESTING A GOOD JUNE
It was a new restaurant in Long Beach, nearby the Aquarium of the Pacific.
Siren Cove.
It featured large aquariums throughout — saltwater fish of every color and size swimming in slow, hypnotic circuits. The water cast swaying lines of reflected light across the venue, which was kept dim aside from moody accent lighting meant to emulate a cove.
He was seated in a large booth next to the biggest tank in the middle of the restaurant. It was a tube, and the fish swarmed in circles and schools, around and around and around. Chad wondered if they ever got bored.
Alice was seated next to him. The rest of the Z-team filled out the booth, with the overflow claimed by the table beside them.
It was Chad's birthday.
He couldn't focus on the menu. He wasn’t hungry.
"I can't believe Mecha Bitch got called into work," Chad said.
"Don't be too hard on him, Bae." Alice leaned on her hand. "I bet he feels like shit for it."
"He fucking better." Chad sighed. Then he steeled himself. The team had taken him out for his birthday. He wasn't going to be a fucking sourpuss over something Robert couldn't control.
The waitress — dressed as a pirate — came by and took their orders while they all caught up on the calls that had happened that day.
The lights around the cove began to shift. Moodier. Darker. Then the music changed, something more adventurous swelling up, an eerie chorus of voices rising beyond the notes.
The restaurant murmured around them as the lights dropped even lower. The sounds of crashing waves and a thunderstorm rolled through the speakers.
This is some Rainforest Cafe bullshit. Chad smirked to himself and sipped his drink.
"Ladies and gentlemen," a voice called over the intercom. "The siren song comes for us all. Can you resist the call?"
Chad looked at the tanks around the room. One by one, mermaid performers dropped into them, drifting down through the water, the shifting light catching eerily on their faces. The tails looked real enough, and they had prosthetic scales framing their faces and strategic scale-like pasties keeping them from being fully topless.
Several Z-team members looked around. Victor couldn't keep his mouth closed. Herm curled further into himself as a mermaid waved to him from across the room.
The rest stared at Chad expectantly. A few with their phones pointed at him to record.
"What?" he asked over his cocktail.
Malevola tilted her head to the side.
Chad looked at the tank next to him.
He choked on his drink.
It was Robert. Blue tail, blue scales framing his face, naked from the waist up. Hollywood-quality fins adhered to his forearms, mermaid-like ears at the sides of his head. He smiled devilishly at Chad, canines glinting — deep-blue lined eyes dark and dangerous even through the glass.
He was a fuckin' siren. For his birthday.
Chad's face broke into a grin. He laughed, a little nervously. "What the fuck, Bob Bob."
The team laughed. Alice pulled him into a tight hug. "Happy birthday, Bae."
Chad couldn't drag his eyes away as Robert winked at him and pushed off the glass, languidly flipping through the water, bubbles trailing behind him. Chad was transfixed, drink still held halfway to his mouth.
Alice took it from his hand and set it back on the table.
"What’d you think? You forgive him?"
Chad said nothing.
He watched his muscles ripple as he moved. The economy of Robert’s body normally used for fighting was now for something soft and graceful.
The scars caught the light the way the tank walls did. Refracted. Shifting. Made into something else. In here they looked like tide marks. Like he'd been shaped by water instead of violence.
He was the only merman among the performers, and the extra attention showed. More people had their heads turned to his tank, eyes tracking him as he moved. Chad noticed. He didn't love it.
Robert blew a kiss at him. Several patrons laughed and whistled.
Chad wanted to climb to the top of the tank, reach in and drag him out and back to their bed.
But Chad would behave. He had to.
Robert continued swimming around the tank, visiting the other surrounding tables. Occasionally he dipped down to breathe from the air tube, then surfaced again and blew bubbles. A gaggle of women hollered and whooped as he did so. A few had their phones out, and Chad had to consciously quell the heat rising in his hands.
Robert made his way back to Chad and stayed, pressing his palm flat against the glass — webbed, Chad noticed. Chad pressed his own hands against it and heard a few laughs around them.
He didn't care.
Robert leaned down, still holding Chad's gaze, and produced a small board from behind a boulder with writing on it.
Happy birthday, Bitch!
Chad laughed.
He wondered if they could steal the tail from the venue after.
It wasn’t supposed to keep going this long. Robert knew that.
Yet he couldn’t let go.
~~~~~~
A distress report came in from a gathering of fishing boats three kilometers off the coast— damaged nets, deep gouges carved into the hulls, one sailor dragged overboard badly enough to need stitches. The culprit was supposedly an aggressive merman haunting the waters near the reef shelf.
Nothing unusual.
Most conflicts between merfolk and humans came down to injury, territorial disputes, or panic. Robert had handled dozens over the years working with the aquarium’s marine rehabilitation division. Usually a sedative dart, some patience, and a temporary holding tank solved the problem.
Usually.. ..
The first time Robert encountered him had been six months earlier during a storm rescue operation.
A fishermans boat had crossed illegally into protected migration waters . Visibility was terrible— rain lightning and thunder the whole works. Robert remembered shouting through the radio while the engines screamed beneath him.
When the net had surfaced it wasnt empty.
Something inside it had thrashed hard enough to snap the steel hooks in a panic one of the crew tried cutting the lines loose. Robert still remembered the sound more than the sight— a wet, horrible tearing noise swallowed by thunder.
Two fingers hit the deck first.
Then blood.
Bright red against rainwater.
The creature broke free before Robert could stop it.
A flash of blazing orange and reds disappeared beneath the sea, Robert had dived after him despite the storm, lungs burning, hands numb from cold, but the ocean swallowed him whole.
But it ..he ? Was gone.
No blood trail. Nothing.
Robert filed the report himself afterward:
Failure to secure injured specimen.
He thought about it more often than he should have.
And now here he was again, staring through reinforced aquarium glass at the same creature he’d failed.
The interns had affectionatly named him Flambae.
Stupid name. Ridiculous, honestly. But it stuck almost immediately because of the patterns along his tail— vivid streaks of molten orange fading into black scales, like flames .
And God, he was violent just like them.
Caretakers came out bleeding more often than not. He bit through gloves, shattered feeding poles against the tank walls, slammed his own body hard enough against the acrylic that alarms triggered across the rehabilitation wing. The missing fingers on his left hand had healed badly, jagged scar tissue visible on the two nubs
Robert had never seen a merman sustain that level of aggression for so long.
Progress with Flambae remained nonexistent for nearly three weeks after his arrival.
He attacked handlers on sight. Refused enrichment. Refused medication unless sedated first. The acrylic walls of his enclosure were webbed with stress fractures from the force of his body slamming against them during episodes. Every morning Robert arrived expecting another incident report waiting on his desk.
Most of the staff had started avoiding Rehabilitation Wing C entirely.
“You should transfer the huge fucker” chase an older handler and robert mentor gumbled after Flambae nearly dislocated a caretaker’s shoulder during feeding. “He’s too unstable.”
Robert only stared through the observation glass.
Flambae floated near the bottom of the tank tail curled beneath him, fiery patterns dim beneath sterile aquarium lighting.
And still—
every time Robert entered the room, those amber eyes followed him.
Always him.
It should have unsettled him more than it did.
—
Then it happened
A cargo vessel had passed too close to the aquarium docks that morning, its engine vibrations carrying through the facility . The moment Flambae heard it, he went feral.
By the time Robert arrived, the enclosure looked catastrophic.
One of the enrichment structures had been ripped apart.Flambae thrashed hard enough to trigger warning alarms throughout the wing.
Then Robert saw the blood.
Dark streaks drifting through seawater.
“Shit—”
Flambae had torn open his tail against exposed metal during the frenzy. The scarred area where his missing fingers had healed split open again, scales shredded badly enough that blood clouded around him ...I'm not finishing this Dawg lmao just imagine Robert tending to flambae and he gets obsessive Yada Yada like u said in last post
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