Part of Your World
The Merfolk were nothing more than a legend.
A myth from the depths of the sea that had once resurfaced long ago, but no stories were ever proven. It was one of the main reasons Captain James felt desperate as he looked at the map with his hands tangled in his hair, tugging slightly, staring himself blind on the words and lines that never changed.
He prayed it not to be true, he prayed for it to be mistranslated, lost somewhere in the shifting and changing letters and phrases. His only hope to cure his mother as she lay weak in her bed at home, his father asking deity after deity if they could help them. James had searched his luck elsewhere, hoping to find a miracle cure, but it seemed to be for naught.
A Mer’s tear.
Where in all of the seven seas was he ever going to find a Mer mad enough to spill a tear for him?
~
For so long, Steve had thought humans had gone extinct.
He had heard many tales about them, but never had he actually seen one. Granted, he lived in the far depths where few creatures could venture, and for those who did not possess a tail quite as strong as his, he could imagine they did not dare to swim into the current-filled maze of caves.
However, when he finally did cross the border he had lived along for so long, he discovered new things he could never have dreamed of. He swam great lengths, twisting and twirling through the endless open waters, until a shadow befell him. When he tilted his head to the surface, he saw the outlines of a large object, so large that it could surely store a lot of creatures.
Curiosity strong, he swam up to the surface, strong tail beating as the blue scales reflected the rays of sunlight like a thousand pearls. He broke the ocean’s surface, taking deep lungfulls of breath, and he looked upon the strange colossus.
And just like that, for the first time in his life, he saw a human.
A handsome man, his upper body exactly like that of Steve but only with fabrics covering his chest, was leaning on the edge of the wooden structure, gazing at the horizon, deep in thought. Beneath his hips, he had no tail, but rather two stakes of flesh he moved on. Much like the paws of an animal, only two instead of four.
Steve did not think he had ever seen such intriguing thing before.
|X|
Or: James is a Captain desperately looking for the cure to his mother’s illness, growing more desperate when finding out it was a Mer’s tear. Mermaids were not real, no one had ever seen one before, and so James thought it to be hopeless.
That was, until a young man rose from the depths of the ocean, a tail so hauntingly beautiful it could only have been created by the hands of a god, and James was set to have the Mer help him.
Steve is a merman who had never seen a human before. Being one of the last of his own kind, he did not know who they were or what they were like. Until he found a ship, and the human on board was nothing if not intriguing.