Hot-Tempered Water-Dwellers [Itsaso + Serefina]

[Menelie]

Itsaso....mainly keeps to herself. It's hard to make friends when you're paranoid. She'd even cut her hair off with a sharp rock, to keep it from obscuring her vision.

So she spends most of her time alone, wandering through the obscure bits of Aernyn territory, collecting flat rocks to build up her own personal fortress. Currently it looks more like a ruin than a fortress in its half-built state, but Itsaso is confident if she finds enough rocks she'll have an impenetrable home to live in.

Having exhausted the unpopulated sections of their territory, Itsaso decides to try something bold. She'd heard murmurings of land, that Aernyn who wished to could go ashore, and their tail would split into two appendages called 'legs', and they could move about out of the water. It sounded absurd to her, but perhaps some good rocks would have washed up on the beach. She heads for the surface, and swims toward the shore.  

[Teigra]

Hard to believe she'd ever complained about 'boring' before. Boring might be a nice alternative to all the tumultuous happenings as of late. Falling islands, strange new Naiads, castles rising out of lakes...

...and not the least of which, discovering she had a daughter with a woman she barely knew at all. That one was rather disturbing on a number of levels. Serefina had never managed to get any straight answers out of the dingy woman, either. For all she could tell, it was as if the heavens had opened up and been all "WE BLESS YOU WITH THIS CHILD! CARE FOR IT, DESPITE BEING A COMPLETE DINGBAT WITH NO KNOWLEDGE OF NAIADS IN THE SLIGHTEST!" and teleported the child into the woman's arms.

Okay, perhaps a bit melodramatic and showy...but still, she wasn't there? How was she supposed to know what happened?

Plus...why that woman? Why? Why not Serefina? If it was supposed to be hers afterall...and it certainly looked like it was hers. She was a Naiad anyway. Then why hadn't the child been delivered to Serefina instead of that clueless idiot? At least she would know how to take care of her! Well, she'd know more anyway...right?

It wasn't that Serefina wanted a child...that wasn't it, was it? She drew up her knees to her chest, wrapping her arms around them. No, no, it wasn't anything like that. Of course not. It's just...if some higher power thought to give someone a child to take care of, and it was between the two females who were apparently her magical mothers (what was that all about anyway?), then why did they pick the other one? Did that mean...she was more fit to be a mother than Serefina? What did that say about her? That she was stupid? Incompetent? Couldn't be trusted with a child?

Groaning softly and dropping her head to her knees, still wet hair draping itself around her face in a curtain, Serefina pulled a small plushie close to her chest. The small, purple Naiad plushie said nothing, but as always, inexplicably offered her support. She was confused, conflicted, and an emotional wreck.

Hopefully no one saw her like this.  

[Menelie]

And so, of course, it's this exact moment that Itsaso manages to wash up on shore. Luckily for both of them, Itsaso is far more interested, horrified, really, in watching her tail split off into legs. She wiggles her new toes. "Disgusting," she mutters. She pulls herself along the beach until she's out of the water completely, then pushes up on her arms and brings her knees underneath her. Alright, steady, one foot, then the other. And now she's standing!

And as soon as she takes a step, Itsaso falls face-first into the sand. She comes up cursing and spitting out sand. Gods and little fishes, she hoped nobody had seen that. The sand sticks to her still-wet skin and resists her effort to brush it off. She just wants to get some rocks and get back to the ocean.

Itsaso freezes as she sees Serefina, and immediately goes on high alert. Her head-fins flare out. She can sense her pupils dilating. She glances around for a weapon.

"Who are you?" she asks, narrowing her eyes at the other woman.  

[Teigra]

She hadn't seen anything, and in fact, Serefina had been far too distracted being wrapped up in her own whirling thoughts and emotions to notice anything at all...until she was addressed directly. One ear fin twitching at the nearby angry voice, she looked up, swiftly trying to compose herself, despite the turmoil beneath the surface.

She really should have been nicer, considering how rarely she got to interact with others usually. Then again, she was feeling rather exposed, being caught in such a vulnerable moment, then being addressed as such. A touch of her old temper flared to the surface, and she met the woman's gaze without fear...even if the rest of her looked a bit dissheveled.

"Most polite company would greet someone with 'Hello' before demanding information. Especially when intruding on their personal space." She held the woman's glare with her own...discretely slipping the plushie back into hiding beneath a fallen log.  

[Menelie]

Hm, Itsaso didn't like the tone of this woman at all. She decides that if it came down to it, she'd leap for the water again where she can move normally. Without these bloody legs.

"Well perhaps I would have if you hadn't popped out of sodding nowhere while I was trying to stand," she says defensively, folding her arms over her chest. The effect is sort of lost, being that she's sitting down, covered in sand.

"And I was not intruding on your personal space," she says firmly. "Unless this deserted stretch of beach is your home."  

[Teigra]

'Popped out of...' what? Was the woman nuts? Serefina continued to glare defensively, gathering her bewilderment and irritation at the woman for use in regaining her own lost composure. It worked.

"I didn't pop out of anywhere, as you so put it. I was just sitting here by myself and you started yelling at me! How in the great world of kelp is that my fault?"

While the woman may have had a point, that this entire beach wasn't her home, Serefina wasn't going to allow her that point. Afterall...she was here first, so there.

Apparently irritation was giving way to childish stubbornness. Well, that WAS part of her old self at least.  

[Menelie]

"I didn't yell at you!" says Itsaso, indignant. "You startled me! What was I supposed to say? You could be an evil fisherman, for all I know!" She puts her hands on her hips.

Honestly, what was wrong with this person? Trying to take advantage of her vulnerable state like this. Really, this wasn't fair at all.  

[Teigra]

'It felt like it' was not the response Serefina was going to give. That wasn't strong and defensive. Even if it was true.

Instead, a strange look crossed her face and she just seemed puzzled. "An evil what now?" She frowned, tilting her head. "I'm not a man, that much is for sure." But what was the part about fish? She liked fish. Did this woman not like fish? Though, she was a Naiad too, from what Serefina could tell, if one of those strange ones from the ocean. What did she eat if not fish?

Pushing the thoughts of dietary habits aside for the moment, she picked up on something else that was said. Her flaring temper had cooled somewhat, and she reached up to run a hand through her hair. "Anyway, I wasn't trying to startle anyone, so....sorry. I thought I was alone out here." She dropped her eyes to the side at last, the battle of wills over for now.  

[Menelie]

Itsaso blinks, her defense broken. This woman didn't know what a fisherman was? "A...a fisherman." She stumbles over her words. "They float on top of the water in large crafts and drop nets in the water to catch fish. Sometimes they catch us too, and that's never good. At least, so far as I can tell, since anyone who's ever been caught doesn't come back."

She pauses and peers at the woman. "You've never heard of fishermen?"  

[Teigra]

"Well, I certainly know what fish are, and what catching them is for...they're tasty. But the rest of that stuff you just mentioned? You lost me," Serefina admitted, shrugging her shoulders. Not that it was her fault for not knowing, even with as little socializing as she did. Her life had been lived on the Isle alone, with only other Pae'il about. And while both land-dwelling and water-dwelling Pae'il went fishing for meals from time to time...there wasn't really a large industry or organized effort to do so on the island. Merely a small effort by individual Pae'il, so the idea of something larger than that seemed completely foreign.

"So..." she mused aloud, frowning, "...when I go fishing for dinner, does that make me a fisherman then? Or do you have to be out of the water first for it to count? Also...I'm still not a man, and I refuse to be counted as one, so this is all probably a moot point anyway," she puzzled, wrapped up in this new idea without a very strong grasp of the concept at all.  

[Menelie]

Itsaso shakes her head. "It doesn't count if you're a Naiad," she says, folding her arms across her chest. "Fishermen don't catch fish to eat like we do...they catch them in huge quantities. And I don't know what they do with them. Maybe they're repopulating another ocean somewhere. Oh! And that's where the lost Naiads go!" She looks around furtively. Why had nobody thought of this before?

Maybe it was a conspiracy.

[ rofl I love Itsaso.]  

[Teigra]

"You think so?" Serefina tilted her head, not sure if the conversation was confusing her more, or the newcomer. She hadn't known anything about missing Naiads before, but...

Her train of thought halted, her eyes widening. Or did she? She couldn't be sure of course that they'd become Naiads as she had, since she hadn't seen them even after that, but...she did know of a couple, she supposed she could call them 'friends', who seemed to have disappeared.

After a moment of tense silence, she asked quietly, "Do you think...that the missing ones are okay somewhere then?"  

[Menelie]

"I really couldn't tell you. I don't know where they are or anything." She shrugs, making an open-handed gesture.

After a moment of awkward silence, she clears her throat and speaks up again. "I'm Itsaso."  

[Teigra]

Was that...what happened to Dax and Merric then? She couldn't be sure, but...it was something to think over now, wasn't it? She'd had no other theories to go on as to where they might have gone.

She was sinking into a cloud of twisting thoughts when the other Naiad pulled her suddenly back to the present with a cleared throat and an introduction. Blinking a bit, Serefina shook her head almost imperceptibly and tried to look like she hadn't been spacing out completely just a moment ago. "Serefina," she offered back with a nod. They might have gotten off on the wrong...foot, so to speak, but perhaps all was not lost yet.