As soon as Kaǎrie woke up from his second night of sleep, he made no delay. He did not wait to grab his satchel. In less than a minute, he had launched himself into the water of the lake.

Kaǎrie made a beeline straight for where he felt the current. Then, he followed it until he found the stream.

He zoomed through the stream at his maximum speed. He glided with the stream for a moment. Then, it began to turn, as streams tend to do.

He must have overestimated the depth of the stream, because he was surprised by a rock. He jerked and bumped his head against another rock.

Listlessly, he began an uncoordinated tumble in the stream.

He could almost sense the unimpressed amusement of his Mother. Her firm voice lectured, “You were trying to go to the end of the canal, not to the depths. Come on. You will get some rest. We will go again in an hour, slower.”

Kaǎrie considered himself lucky that he hit his head next to a forest clearing. Seeking to regain his bearing, he pulled himself gracelessly into a nearby patch of grass.

He laid dazed in the grass for a moment that felt like hours. He planned to remain in the grass until the world stopped spinning and the infernal creatures from his nightmares stopped screaming in his ear.

And when they did stop, he still laid where he was. One may have thought that he had given up. Not enough time passed to confirm this before something poked his flank.

He was committed now, of course, to doing nothing. No poke, he decided, could make him get up. So, he rolled his face into the dirt. He was not dead yet, so it must not have been important. For his commitment, he was poked again on the tail.

He did not react when he was poked three times on his hood. It squished his sensitive gills a bit, so he squirmed.

There was a quiet giggle from behind Kaǎrie, and something tugged at his head fin. He decided to psychically freeze the offending tugger with a flipper.

Stolen story; please report.

It was stuck. He heard sounds of struggle and finally decided to investigate.

What he saw was a person cloaked in white, he had no doubt. It chattered gibberish and hopped about in a manner like one of his more absent-minded classmates. But the creature was like no person like he had ever seen.

The most glaring trait of interest was its two legs. People, as far as Kaǎrie knew, did not have them. Some small animals may have had them on land, but they tended to have more than two, in his experience.

It had two other limbs. They were strange flippers covered in a white glove that ended at the creature’s elbow. One of them was attached to my flipper by my power, glove included. They must have been for manipulating things.

The creature attempted to ply its manipulating flipper from my grasp with its other. Both of its limbs were now stuck.

The creature must not be telekinetic, otherwise it would have used its power to free itself.

Sure, it had a smooth face and a hood around its head and neck like him, but closer inspection revealed some discrepancies. The creature’s narrow, violet eyes were much too… horizontal. The hood and the face were not connected to each other like his were and they were pure white. In fact, they were items of clothing that obscured the creatures real facial features from sight.

The eyes were definitely real, they changed shape too organically. How they glowed through the mask was strange; Kaǎrie was curious.

And the creature was tall. Kaǎrie’s body from head fin to tail tips would barely reach its waist. Its masked face frantically glanced everywhere as it struggled. Frequently, its eyes narrowed further at him and his flipper.

Kaǎrie wondered if adhering himself to this creature, now potentially enraged at him, was a good idea.

“Probably not,” he decided, but he did not let go.

However, the creature surprised him. It abruptly stopped struggling and then yanked its limbs away from him faster than he could even see.

This action flung its body off balance, and Kaǎrie took the opportunity to roll away into the stream. He swam against the stream back to the lake, paying attention to the stream bed to not hit his head again.

The masked creature, who did not appear phased at all by recent events, did not chase him. Instead, it followed him with its narrow, violet eyes.

When Kaǎrie arrived at his islet home, he dragged himself to his reeds.

“I don’t know why I bothered to bring this,” Kaǎrie said. He tried to put down his satchel. It was not on him.

He was too tired to care. Hopefully, he could retrieve it from where he dropped it, wherever that happened.

It was not nighttime yet, but he was too tired to lay about. He fell asleep, again hoping for a revelation.