Giselle and I tried to find more humans. We spent two weeks looking for them by swimming through tubes into all kinds of pools. In the meantime, I finished all the lessons I needed before I was ready to be queen.
“Did you know that people still tell me I need to be more feminine?” Giselle asked, while we were swimming one day.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“But it doesn’t upset me as much since I started taking your advice.”
“That’s good.”
“Sometimes people are aggressive with me.”
“What?”
“They accuse me of being in denial about being a female.”
“That’s closed-minded,” I said.
“I know.”
“What about the people whose opinions you care about?”
“They accept me.”
“That’s important.”
“You think?” Giselle asked.
“Yes, try to think of it as luck,” I advised.
Giselle patted me on the arm.
We swam for about half an hour. We saw lots of fish on the way. We stopped to look as we saw a mouth brooder mother gather her tiny kids into her mouth, which the mothers of that species do when they sense danger. We watched a mudskipper on land for fifteen minutes. They were among the types of fish that could live outside of water for a while.
“You know, we know nothing about humans, so we probably won’t be able to find them,” Giselle reminded me as we continued swimming. “We don’t know where they live or what they eat.”
“We know they live on land, which doesn’t narrow it down, but it does give us a smaller space to look.”
“Not small enough.”
We fell through a tube into a pool.
An hour later, we found the same man we had seen before.
My heart stopped.
We stared for a second.
He noticed us.
We swam toward him. He stayed where he was until we reached him. He was standing at the edge of a pool that had been dug into the ground. Giselle and I swam through a tube that led into the pool. Then, we swam across the pool until we reached the other side where the human was standing.
“Hello,” Giselle began, smiling.
“Hello,” the human responded in a friendly voice.
“I’m Giselle and this is Clara.”
“I’m Caleb. Can I see your tails?”
“What?”
“I need to be sure you have them. Could you show them to me?”
We showed him our tails.
His eyes widened with fascination.
“I’ve never seen creatures like you before,” Caleb said.
“We’re called merpeople,” I informed him. “And we’ve never seen creatures like you either.”
“We’re called humans. Were you looking for me?” “Yes,” Giselle admitted.
“Why?”
“Because we’re interested in knowing what you are.” “What do you want to know?”
“How many of you are there?”
“About a million.”
“That’s it?” I asked, stunned.
“Yeah,” Caleb said. “How many are you?”
“A few trillions.”
Caleb’s eyes widened in shock.
“That’s almost more than I can imagine,” he breathed.
“Well, there’s far more water than land on Earth,” Giselle reasoned. “Every merpeople city has a population of a few million. Do you only live on land?” “Yes.”
“Well, that explains it.”
“Explains what?”
“Why there are so few of you. Because there is less space for you to live than there is for us.”
“Judging by your tails, I’d say you only live in water,” Caleb realized.
I was relieved to see that he was smart. We talked more about our respective species.
For some reason, Caleb kept looking around him in fear.
“There is another reason why there aren’t more humans,” Caleb shared, looking scared.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“There is a dangerous species that keeps killing humans, which is why there are only a million of us.”
“What is that species called?” Giselle asked.
“We call them creatures.”
“Are they stronger than you are?”
“Yes, there could have been more of us in the world, if it weren’t for the creatures.” “Is that why you look so scared?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Sorry. What are you going to do?”
“We’re going to live somewhere else.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We want to build a city in a safe place, so that the creatures can’t reach us.” “Where?” I asked.
He told me where and my heart sank.
“We wanted to use that space too,” I announced.
Caleb looked a little upset, probably because he wanted humans to have that space. “What are you going to use it for?” Caleb asked.
“We’re going to expand our cities and continue exploring the world.”
“I don’t think that’s a good enough reason for you to take it from us.”
I didn’t understand.
“From you? This land isn’t yours,” I pointed out.
“It’s land, which means we have more of a right to use it,” Caleb argued.
“I don’t think it works that way.”
“But we need it more.”
I didn’t want to end this meeting with negative emotions, so I decided we should stop talking about this.
“I’ll think about it and talk to my advisors,” I said.
“Advisors?” Caleb wondered.
“Yes, in a few weeks I will be crowned queen of my city.”
“Interesting,” he said. “I’m the prince of the humans.”
I didn’t know if I should believe him. I decided that whether he was the prince or not I needed to get to know him better before I could trust him. But if he was the prince, then this was great because I could discuss anything regarding the relationship between humans and merpeople with him.
“How long have humans been around?” I asked.
“About a million years. How long have merpeople been around?”
“Four-hundred million years,” Giselle answered.
Caleb’s jaw dropped.
“That means you guys are older than the dinosaurs,” he exclaimed.
“Yes, we are,” I confirmed. “And we have a lot of information documented about them and other extinct animals.”
“How much information?”
He looked very interested.
“A few libraries’ worth,” I told him “How can you have libraries?” “Why not?” I asked, confused.
“How can you have paper underwater?”
“What are you talking about?” Giselle wondered.
“Wait, you have libraries?” I asked.
I thought they would be an alien concept.
“Yes,” Caleb answered.
“What is paper?” Giselle asked. “And what does it have to do with libraries?”
“It’s the material we write on,” Caleb explained.
“Well, we use rocks to document our information.”
“Wait, that means you have tons of information that we couldn’t possibly know.” “Where are you going with this?” I asked.
“I was hoping, if it’s okay, that we could learn from you.”
“Let me think about that.”
I was glad to tell him that at the moment it wasn’t my decision, since my parents were still king and queen. However, I was hoping that we could share what we knew with humans. And humans must have knowledge that we don’t. I would love to know what that was. Since they could explore land more easily than we could. Alastair would probably love to learn from the humans even more than I would. Still, I wanted my people, and merpeople in general, to flourish as much as possible. Maybe humans could help us with that. The fact that we might be able to help them, was also great. I wanted this to be a give and take relationship.
Will it be?
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