Brooke, when she was alive, had never been the most subtle of people. Sure, she could move around quietly, but she had always preferred obfuscation by distraction over going unseen. At least, that was her artist statement excuse. The reality was, that she was bad at sneaking around and so she had made up for it by being a bit much to hid more subtle things.
So right now, as her six year old merself, she did her best to prepare. She took off the armor and accessories of the urchin, and wrapped them all up together into a bundle. Fortunately, everything was one form of circle or another, so she was able to link them all together and carry them on the breastplate with the shoulder straps as handles. It made such a nice, small package.
Then she grabbed a couple more medium urchins, scrounging them up out of the corners of the temple, avoiding the monster urchins, staying away from the king, and making sure that her bag was full to almost bursting. There were still a couple of medium urchins around, and she saw a healthy handful of small urchins in the corners. Clearly Salt intended to keep a small population around for her temple, and respecting that Dyaku didn't want to take every medium urchin available to her, however tempting it was.
Then she pulled herself and her treasures into the entryway. The result of their cleaning meant that the entry way, which had been under a pile up of slime, was now clean and clear and was only 6 inches under the surface of the water at the start. It had the barest of the downhill slope to encourage the flow of water in the right direction, and she slithered down the smooth hall to the exit.
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Her preparations did her a squat lick of good. She’d planned on swimming up to her bedroom's current vent window and pushing the urchin outfit through the grate, a brilliant idea that had occurred to her on her swim home. Then she could just go into the home like normal, right? Just carry the bag of urchins and be the good girl with the massive load of food.
It was unfortunate that her nam was doing routine maintenance that day to keep their house afloat and in the right spot.
The houses of mermaids were built, in their frames, from magic bubbles bound in cloth. The rich would be able to afford a ferrous cloth and subtle tudh (electrical) magic to build a base of solid calcium and to encourage coral growth right away. Everyone else would build frameworks of steel wires and ferrous cloth patches around the bubbles where they could, and layers of ǂak jiep—a sort of coral plaster that cured underwater and was an attractive base for certain types of corals and mussels to grow on.
One could always tell how well off a family was based on how much of the house was made with ǂak jiep corals and how much was populated with a variety of any other corals.
Regardless the corals it was growing from, this meant that the basic building block of the mermaid house was the bubble, and all mermaid houses started out as floats, even if ideally they would become solid edifices, one with the reef around them.
!nano Landsby, the village that Dya lived in, had many such permanent houses and community buildings, such as the temples, the council Jatja, the library. However, many homes, including Dyaku’s, just weren’t that old, either because a storm had smashed pieces off the structure and necessitated rebuilding or, like with her family, they just hadn’t lived in the area long enough for the home to grow itself into the reef.
This meant that their home was essentially a floating proto-reef anchored to the ocean floor by ties of magic and kelp rope that needed constant maintenance.
Kelp that would often be grown off the roof of the home in a kelp garden, which is exactly where Namcha was when Dya tried to come sneaking up to the house.
“Oh, Dya!” Namcha’s clicksqueal came out of the kelp and caused Dya’s skeleton to try to make a break for the open ocean. “Where there many medium urchins for harvest? Come, we go look at your first harvest inside!”
Dya plastered a smile on her face as her namcha swam down clicking excitedly at the full bag of urchins she was hauling, and did her best to hide the bundle of armor behind her back.
“This is all we can take.” Dya clicked back to her nam apologetically, as though somehow she was sorry she couldn’t bring home more than what would be a 20 lb bag of urchin on dry land, bless the ocean and its buoyancy.
“You left healthy urchins?” Namcha asked, as she led Dya down to the entrance of the home in the underside of the structure.
“Yes, nam.”
The home had two levels of rooms, trapped air bubbles and well kept kelps and sea grasses to keep the air fresh lining the walls and dry surfaces. As Dya followed her nam past an entrance to one of the lower rooms, she tossed her bundle of blessed spines.
“Sweetweed, what was that?” Namcha asked.
Crap Dya thought, but outloud she clicked, “What was what?”
Frowning, Nam swam back past her and found the bundled where it had landed, and internally, Dya groaned. This was going to suck.
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The child sized Set of the urchin had been laid out on the kitchen counter, the overstuffed bag of urchins set aside and forgotten for the moment. It had taken Namcha no time at all to jump to the very correct conclusion that Dya had come by the set through killing large urchins. The large urchins that she had been told to stay away from.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
As she was being told again, for something like the fifth time, how disappointed Namcha was in her, Dya found herself in the position of both working hard to not roll her eyes and also feeling guilty. It wasn’t easy on Namcha that her daughter had a 105 year old spirit that was just ready to get on with it already.
“I can’t trust you.” Namcha said for the eighth time.
“I’m sorry, nam.” Dya said contritely, trying to lean into the guilt and not the sheer annoyance at this entire situation. Play the role, she’s a six year old child. A six year old child. A six year old child.
“So am I.” Namcha said, “You’re kuwkouch.”
“What? No!” Dya protested, coming out of her distracted trance, “Naaaaammm!”
Kuwkouch was similar to being grounded. She wouldn’t be allowed to leave her room unless she was with her Namcha or Adra, and Adra was always out on building trips.
“Do you know how often a large urchin drops loot?” Namcha snapped angrily.
“One of five times.” Dya replied just as angrily, causing Namcha to give a start and look at her a little more closely.
“That’s right, roughly so. It is not very precise but that’s close enough. So this almost complete set you bring home means you disobeyed me at least 30 times. Probably more.”
“But it wasn’t hard to kill them!” Dya decided to fight back, since just accepting her punishment was not going to work for her. “Just flip them over an stab them through from mouth to poop hole. We didn’t even have to get close to them!”
Namcha glared at her, “And just how do you know the parts of an urchin?”
“You told me them last night!” Dya put her fists on her hips and glared right back.
“I didn’t think you were paying attention.” Namcha muttered, but she was not done. “What were you stabbing it with? I don’t see my brass knife anywhere.”
Oh crap. I forgot the knife. Dya thought, while thoughtlessly saying, “We used spines from a nearby King Urchin.”
“A WHAT?!”
Shit.
“It was behind the altar, and we stayed away from it.”
“An alter?! You’re in a temple now? With a King Urchin, which can SHOOT SPINES that could kill a six year old mer child.”
“I had a quest!” Dya protested defensively. “From SALT.”
“Oh, do you now.” Her namcha was unimpressed, “Is this like the quest that goes along with your speres? One that only you know and no one else can see?”
“Zuchi has the quest too! Ask her.” Dya snapped.
“Oh, and you dragged that poor girl into your game.” Namcha said with disgust. “You better believe I will be talking with her and her namcha."
"Her namcha already knows!"
"Sure she does. I'm sure that's exactly what she will tell me when I go talk to her. Go to your room. NOW.”
“But-“
“Kuwkouch.” She said with a firm anger, and Dya knew she was not going to get out of this one.
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After an interminable hour waiting in her room Namcha had returned from Zuchi’s in less of a temper, Zuchi’s namcha having talked her down some.
Zuchi had shared with her namcha and then Dya's namcha the quest screen, something that Dya hadn’t even known was possible. Zuchi’s namcha was also a priestess and was therefore an authority figure able to talk about the protection of the goddess and the unlikeliness of the goddess trying to actively kill their children. Between the two of them they were able to help Dya's nam accept the quest as real and the work as relatively safe if painful and hard.
Zuchi's upset being over the disgusting mess even helped a bit, as Dya's namcha couldn't imagine being concerned over something so ridiculous as smell unless it was safe enough to do so.
So the compromise became this: both namcha would accompany their children to this hidden chapel and inspect the location and remaining monsters of the quest. If they deemed it doable safely, they would help their daughters complete the quest.
Dya fought contain her anger at being told that this was a compromise, considering she had no say in it. Instead, her namcha had continued on to another demand, though at least this one was given in request form: she wanted to see the quest from Dya’s screen.
Dya tried to refuse, just on principle, and leaning into her ignorance as an excuse--saying that she didn’t know how to. Namcha patiently walked her through how to share a screen, and Dya sighed, recognizing a tutorial when presented one. At least this time. This whole thing was the tutorial, wasn’t it? Dya let out a low growl of frustration while Namcha frowned at the screen Dya had shared.
“I can’t read a word of this. How… how can you read this?” Namcha looked down at her daughter with something incomprehensible in her eyes.
“I learned to read it…”Dya said, her voice trailing off as she searched for a way to say in Jayin ‘a long ass time ago’ and settling on how many of the stories her parents told her started, “When the sea met the sky and covered all the earth.”
Her namcha gave her a sad, confused look, and Dya tried again, with less poetry. “A long time past. I was born with reading it.”
Her nam’s eyes closed and the membranes around her eyes reddened. Mermaids didn’t cry, they didn’t have tear ducts, but if they did Dya knew that her namcha would be crying and it broke her heart. She felt her eyes sting as they reddened with emotion as well. She wanted a hug, and she wondered if Namcha wanted one too, so she softly, hesitantly, put a hand on nam’s arm and held her arms open when the older mer opened her eyes.
Namcha swept Dya up in her arms and they remained entangled in that hug for some time. When finally she let Dya go, Namcha whispered, “You must be one of the god-marked. In all the stories they come in from out of town, never did I think of where they really came from, of the parents who had raised them. I never thought that I could be one of the ones to raise a child marked by the gods or think to know what that would mean.”
“Not everyone marked by the gods has a namcha as good as you.” Dya said kindly, thinking of all the players who were going to come in without the whole digital new world introductory tutorial she was going through.
Namcha gave her another hug.
“Can you read that to me?” She asked, looking at the screen again, and Dya nodded.
“Anáwwá: foi zhayǂïg tiepebzha –”
“cho cho cho...” Namcha interrupted her. “not in Jayin. Read this as it is. In whatever language this is that the god marked can understand. You are my daughter and I think I should understand better the gifts the gods gave to you. So let me hear this language.”
Dya-no, Brooke looked at her Namcha, startled. She had loved her parents, and known her parents loved her but they had been inflexible, unable to act in love outside the bounds of a white conservative Christian boundary that had been harsh and unaccepting. It was something Brooke had made peace with again and again through her life, and that she had thought she had buried with her parents in the past.
But this simple request, this action of acceptance prodded the wound and cracked it open again. She hid her face in her hands with the desperate urge to well up and cry, though she was unable to as a mer. Instead, she nodded her now deeply reddened eyes,"The language is called 'English' and people say it is hard to learn."
And she read the quest description to her in English, and started to teach Namcha the language.