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l♦︎l The Mer l♦︎l

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ChatieTheDragon's Avatar ChatieTheDragon
Level 46 : Master Geek
455



Mer live in schools. That’s the way it is. With any number from ten to a hundred, schools of mer travel the seas. There are two types of schools: those made of mermaids, and those made of mermen. I’ve been told they are very different. Anyways, we mer never stay in one place for long; as I mentioned, we travel. Mer move between small buildings scattered on the ocean floor, stopping at a site for a few days, and then moving on. Each site has a small building, typically made of stone. No one goes in the building, not ever. It’s an unspoken rule.

I looked at the building my school was currently stopped at. It wasn’t very large. I wonder what could lie inside.

“ANOMALOPIDAE!”

I swerved around, my tail hitting the arm of the mer next to me. I apologized, then swam up to the mermaid who had called my name.

“Isn’t that an anomalopidae?” My friend, Eel, said, eagerly pointing at a fish with glowing spots under its eyes.

I immediately recognized my namesake. “It is!” I exclaimed. “Oh, it’s so adorable!” I reached out and gently stroked the beautiful fish’s side. Mer are often named after sea creatures (more than often, actually), and they usually have a unique bond with that creature. Personally, I think any fish in the anomalopidae family is perfect. I may be biased.

Eel tilted her head at the fish. “Eh,” she shrugged. “Eel are cuter!” Of course she would say that.

“Whatever,” I said, rolling my eyes.

We’d have stayed there, admiring the fish, until it was time to move if there hadn’t been a loud commotion on the other side of the site. We decided to check it out.

Eel whined. “I can’t see! There are too many mer everywhere.”

“Well, I guess we are just going to have to shove our way to the front,” I say, and begin wiggling between the crowd of mermaids.

When we finally make it to the front, we see the strangest thing.



The diver was the first to go this deep in the ocean. It was a great honor, and he had been training for the longest time. He didn’t know what to expect on the ocean floor, certainly not what he found.

He saw women. With tails! He stared in awe at their long, flowing hair, their beautiful features, and long, green tails. The most you could say about their clothing was that some of them wore strips of pearls around their tails. How strange!

The diver pulled out a camera to take a photo of the women for future study back on land. Quick as lightening, one of the tailed girls swam past and snatched the camera out of his hands. She swam off to the side and played with it, pulling it apart.

“What do you think you’re doing?” The diver asked, trying, but failing, to pull the camera from the girl’s webbed fingers.

The girl seemed to laugh. When she laughed, the diver noticed she exhaled no air. These women must breathe in the water, he thought, noticing the gills on her neck. The diver looked closely at her. She had human-like blue eyes, and looked about fourteen years old.

The girl turned to the other women and made a series of high-pitched squeaking sounds. One of the women swam up next to her. This one had a long fin down her back, and her pupils were so large you couldn’t see the whites of her eyes. She didn’t have any hair, either. Wait, the diver thought. She does have hair. In the right light, you could see strands of her practically see-through locks.

The woman pointed at the diver’s light and squeaked at the girl. She nodded, snatched the light, and furiously beat it until it turned off.

The diver couldn’t see a thing.



“Thanks,” I said to Eel after she destroyed one of the thing’s magical items. “I couldn’t see a thing with that bright light.”

“Yeah, I couldn’t see either,” Eel said. Then her eyes widened. “Do you think that’s how bright Up is?”

I thought about it. “If it is, I’m never going to Up,” I said.

I looked at the thing. It sort of looked like a mer. “Do you think it’s a merman?” I asked Eel. Neither of us had seen one, since you aren’t allowed to meet mermen until you mate, and you aren’t allowed to mate until you’re eighteen.

Eel studied the thing. “No,” she said after a while. “Mermen have tails. I think it’s just... a man.”

I had heard of men in legends. They weren’t mer. They lived Up. They didn’t have tails, gills, or fins. They’re very strange. “You really think it’s a man?”

“Well, what else could it be?”

I nodded in agreement. I turned to look at the man and saw Tang, the leader and eldest mer in our school, trying to communicate with it. She wasn’t succeeding. So far, all the man had done was make deep muffled sounds. I guess man doesn’t speak Mer.

“Attention everyone,” Tang called out, once man had turned and left. “That was man. I do not know why he was here, or what he wanted, but he has left, and we do not need to worry. Now, we have much to do, so please rest until morning.”

The mer turned and swam away. We are very obedient. Eel and I swam to a comfortable-looking growth of seaweed and slept.

“Anomalopidae. Anomalopidae. Anomalopidae!” I woke to Eel hovering in front of my face, violently shaking me.

“What? What is it?” I asked, pushing Eel off of me.

Eel started playing with her hair, which I know she only does when she’s nervous. “Well, you see...” she stammered. “Something’s wrong with Tang. She’s sick. Can you take a look?”

“Oh no!” I followed Eel to the sick mermaid. “What’s wrong?” I asked one of the other mer trying to help.

“Well, at first we just thought it was a normal sickness, nothing to worry about,” one of the mermaids said, “but now...” she gestured to the sick mer.

Tang looked strange. Her skin was pinkish; it had lost the usual blue tint all mermaids had. She coughed, bubbles coming from her mouth.

“Bubbles?” I looked questionably at the mermaid who was examining Tang.

“We’re confused, too,” she said. “A mer should never have air in her body. Or pink skin!”

“Hey...” Eel said, swimming closer, “doesn’t man have pink skin? And doesn’t man breathe air?”

I looked at Eel. “What are you saying?”

“Well... is it possible that Tang could be turning into man?”

We had heard stories of mer’s tails splitting and gills vanishing, so maybe Eel was right. Maybe Tang has caught man. I didn’t know man was contagious, but then again, I didn’t know much about man.

Weeks later, our suspicions were confirmed. Tang’s tail split into two strange arms, her eyes became like Eel’s, and her fin, webbed fingers, and gills disappeared completely. Since she couldn’t breathe in the water, Tang had frantically tried to swim to Up, but it was no use, she could not swim without her tail. We lost our leader to man.

“That man should never come back,” Eel said on the day of Tang’s death, “or what happened to her will happen to every last one of us.”



The diver was getting closer, he could feel it. They had all laughed when he described the beautiful, tailed women, but he would show them. Even if it meant bringing back one of the women’s dead bodies.



“What do you mean ‘man is back’?” I frantically asked Eel.

“I mean, man is back!” She said. “And if we’re not careful, we’ll be man, too!”

We hurriedly swam through the crowd of panicking mermaids and wound up face to face with man. He smiled and pulled out that strange box again, but Eel was quick to snatch it and bang it against a rock.

Man made a horrible noise.

“Anomalopidae!” Eel said. “How can man breathe?”

Hmmm... how can man breathe? I thought man could only breathe air. I examined the strange outfit man was wearing. “There’s some kind of... clear thing,” I observed, “around his face. Maybe it has air in it?”

“Hm...” Eel nodded. “That makes sense, I guess.”

While Eel and I were distracted, man attacked one of the mer swimming by. She furiously struggled to break free of his grasp, scratching at the clear thing around his face.

“He’s attacking her!” Eel exclaimed. “What do we do?”

“We fight back, of course,” I answered, already swimming towards where man and the mermaid were fighting.

Eel grabbed my arm. “Wait,” she said, “do you think we can drive him away?”

“He’d just come back. We have to kill him.”

Eel was shocked at first. “If we have to,” she sighed, and swam to help the mermaid who was being attacked.

I propelled myself through the water, charging straight at man. I latched on to his arm, trying to dig my nails into his strange skin. Man’s skin was so thick, that I could not. I proceeded to scratch at the thing on his head, but I could not penetrate it.

Eel seemed to notice my struggle and said, “His armor is as hard as rock,” — armor! That makes sense — “so we can’t harm him.” Eel shoved man into the ground, hard. “Although that couldn’t have felt amazing.”

While Eel held man to the ground, I poked around his armored suit. There was this big round thing on his back. I called some other mer over for help, and asked them what they thought it was.

“Jewelry?”

“Maybe a body part that mer don’t have?”

“Storage?”

“Wait!” Eel gasped, struggling to hold man down. “That’s it! Storage! Man has to have air somehow, maybe it’s stored in the thing on it’s back.”

“That’s genius, Eel!” I swam closed to man, avoiding his thrashing limbs. I wrapped my arms around the container and pulled with all of my might. “It’s too heavy,” I told Eel. Man threw me off of him. “Woah! And man is moving too much for me to pull it off, even with the help of other mer.”

Eel turned to me. “Can you hold man down while I get others to help?” She said. “If some mer hold him down, and more mer try to pry the container off, I think we can do it.”

I nodded, and Eel swam away. I grabbed the man’s shoulders and shoved him into the ground. He squirmed and tried to wiggle out of my grasp, but I only shoved him harder into the ocean floor. He grabbed my wrists, trying to remove them from his shoulders, but his struggle was useless; I was determined to keep him on the ground.

Eel finally swam back, with an army of the strongest mer in our school behind her. It seemed she had already instructed them on what to do, since half of them, including Eel, dashed to the man and held him to the floor. The others raced to help me pry the tank off man’s back. After struggling for a long time, we finally wrenched the container off and crushed it against the ocean floor.

Man fought for quite a while longer, eventually going limp.

Eel poked him with her tail. “Is he dead?” She asked.

“I think so,” I answered. “But... what do we do now?”

The mer all looked at one another.

I guess the decision was up to me. That’s a lot of pressure! “Uh, I guess we should take him to the new eldest mer, and see what she says to do.”

“Um,” Eel said quietly, “Anomalopidae, that’s you.”

“What? That can’t possibly be true! There has to be someone else...” I said, stopping when I realized Eel was right. Tang had been seventeen, almost old enough to mate, and move to a colony. I was sixteen, the second oldest in the school. The oldest, now. “Oh...”

“Since you’re the new eldest,” Eel murmured, “you get to see what’s in the building.”

Right again. Only the eldest mer in a school can enter the buildings in sites. I swam over to the small temple at this site. “I need to see what’s inside,” I looked back at the mer watching me, “Maybe it can help.”

The crowd of mer watched as I opened the door a crack and poked my head in. They would not believe what I saw.

Skeletons. Only two of them. But with no tails. These were skeletons of man, which meant man had come here before. Which means man could come again.

I knew what I had to do.

I swam over to man’s body, and threw it into the building. “Fellow mer,” I announced, “I need you to do as I say. Ask no questions.”

The mer nodded.

“Destroy that building,” I pointed behind me, “and when you are done, we will go to the next site, and destroy that building. We will do this again and again until all man will find if it comes here, is ruins. Do you understand?”

The mer nodded. They were afraid. But they would learn I was protecting them. Someday they would see.



50 years had passed since that foolish man had gone to search for mermaids, and never returned.

A new diver was searching the ocean, studying ocean life. She had learned many new things about the deep blue sea, but there was one thing that was puzzling her.

A small temple. In ruins. I wonder what caused this? She thought.




Word Count: 2286

It was really hard to get this under 2500 words. I had to cut out a small scene because it had reached 2608 words!
This took me forever to write, and I’m really proud of it!
But, all that matters for me to make finalists is if you like it, so I hope you did!
And I hope you read the whole thing! It’s so long!!
If you have any advice or see any errors, I’d be happy if you let me know!

Anomalopidae is pronounced: An-om-a-lope-ih-day (Here. It’s the third one.)

-Chatie
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1
07/29/2018 9:43 pm
Level 32 : Artisan Taco
Ethereia
Ethereia's Avatar
I don’t know if you did this on purpose, but in the seventh to last paragraph, you wrote “‘Follow mer’, I announced.” Shouldn’t it be ‘follow me’?
1
07/30/2018 12:51 am
Level 46 : Master Geek
ChatieTheDragon
ChatieTheDragon's Avatar
Yes, yes it should. Thanks for pointing that out, I’d never have caught it!

Edit: wait wait no she says “Fellow mer” not “Follow mer.” I see how you could easily make that mistake while reading, though. Still, thank you for pointing it out, even if there wasn’t actually a mistake. (That sounds mean I didn’t mean for it to sound mean I’m sorry) :)
1
08/01/2018 9:15 pm
Level 32 : Artisan Taco
Ethereia
Ethereia's Avatar
Yes, I didn’t even catch that! Oh, and that wasn’t mean!
1
07/23/2018 11:37 am
Level 52 : Grandmaster Enderdragon
jadeitee
jadeitee's Avatar
I love your writing!
Teach me your wayysss ;_;
1
07/23/2018 12:04 pm
Level 46 : Master Geek
ChatieTheDragon
ChatieTheDragon's Avatar
Thank you so much!
1
07/19/2018 7:38 pm
Level 69 : High Grandmaster Necromancer
TsukiaKari
TsukiaKari's Avatar
Just so that you can get a higher score...

"Well, it at first we *just* thought it was a normal sickness"

missed a t there :3

Anyways that was a great read! I’m probably not gonna finish my entry so I hope you place in a top spot at least ^^

now I’m gonna go through the entire thing once again to find any other spelling mistakes if there are any
1
07/19/2018 7:49 pm
Level 69 : High Grandmaster Necromancer
TsukiaKari
TsukiaKari's Avatar
In the first paragraph, you should add an s to the end of anyway

The third anomalopidae in the line Eel said to wake up Anomalopidae missed the i

You might want to add 'the' before 'man' when referring to the man, and not the... uh... disease thing? Idk it sounds better to me even for mer speak

oh and if it’s supposed to be what the mer are calling him then maybe a capital M
1
07/19/2018 7:40 pm
Level 46 : Master Geek
ChatieTheDragon
ChatieTheDragon's Avatar
Thank you for that! You’re very nice :) :)
1
07/19/2018 6:45 pm
Level 9 : Apprentice Princess
Sstarz
Sstarz's Avatar
Nice!
1
07/19/2018 7:05 pm
Level 46 : Master Geek
ChatieTheDragon
ChatieTheDragon's Avatar
Thank you!
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