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Scott carries his art supplies down the beach. Which, really, isn’t that great of an idea, considering he can already see the storm clouds rolling in. But, hey–no one ever said Scott was the most rational person around, and besides, this painting is due in two days.
In his defense, he does find a nice place to set up his easel: underneath a ledge on the side of the pier, where, even if it does begin to rain while he’s still here, his painting will stay nice and dry. He knows what he’s doing! Totally. And he definitely has a plan to get the painting back in that event. Yeah. Totally.
… Okay, maybe he’s a little unprepared. But that’s what stress does to a guy!
He already walked all the way here, anyways. Leaving now would be a waste. So he positions his easel where he has the best view of the water, sets up his paints, brings out his pencil, and begins to sketch.
Scott only wants a vague outline of the ocean to work off of. He doesn’t like relying too much on his sketches while painting; he thinks it ends up looking less natural. In a few strokes, he has the basic shape of the coastline and water drawn out. He even adds the faint imprint of some far-off rocks.
When he looks up from sketching, though, the tide has retreated a few feet. Scott frowns. That’s odd.
Whatever, he thinks to himself, and erases the tide line he drew to redraw it more accurately. He’d leave it how it was, but if he doesn’t get the proportions right to reality then he’ll mess up the color distribution. And that’s the last thing he needs right now.
He keeps sketching. It hasn’t started raining yet, which is a good sign. He can keep painting. If something were to go wrong, it would have gone wrong by now.
He just gets the sketch right and begins to pull out his brushes when he looks up again. The water’s retreated more. He sighs. It’s not too stark of a change, though, so he doesn’t bother editing what he’s sketched.
Instead, he picks up his blue paint. It’s more of a green-blue, really, but it gets the job done regardless. He squirts some onto a plate that he brought and picks up his brush. Balancing the plate in his left hand, he dips his brush into the paint and reaches his right arm up towards the canvas.
A gust of wind blows. The plate in his hand–paper, because of course it is–flies out of his grip, flat onto his chest. He grimaces. Slowly, agonizingly, he peels the plate off of his sweatshirt, revealing a large green-blue stain.
He looks back to the ocean. The tide continues to retreat. Sleep-deprived Scott is really starting to get a headache.
That’s when he sees it: a seashell. It’s near the tide, revealed when the water pulled away. He’s not sure how he sees it from so far away. Maybe the fact that it’s pink, and a considerable size. And right out in the open.
Scott’s tired. He’s very tired. But he sets down his brush, pulls his hood up over his head, and heads out from under the pier ledge to grab the shell. Why not?
He keeps his eye on the shell as he walks over. The tide seems to be shrinking away from him. For just a second, he looks back towards his easel. He’s not sure what he expected, really–for it to have grown legs and run away?–but everything is just as he left it, so he presses on towards the water.
Quickly, Scott comes to where the pink shell is. Or where it was. Because as he twirls around, scanning the area with confusion, he can’t find even a trace of it.
Did he walk past it? No, that can’t be right; he searches the area behind him, but it’s not there, either. His brows furrow. It must be around here somewhere, then, he thinks. And he keeps searching, eyes on the ground. He walks a few paces along the coastline in either direction, looking towards his feet.
Which is why he hears the wave before he sees it. It’s a loud, crashing noise, and when he looks up, his jaw drops. It’s only about five feet away from him, and it has got to be at least three feet taller than him. He makes a strangled noise.
It approaches fast, too fast. Faster than Scott can run away. He still tries, though, turning around and stumbling through the sand, making a stride or two towards shore—
—but water slams his back, his head, his legs, with a horrible slapping sensation—
—he tumbles downward, the current too strong to fight against, the wave propelling him towards the ground—
—And the world goes black.
————————————————
The first thing Scott does when he comes to is cough up what must be a liter of water.
His head hurts. It’s an awful, pounding feeling, like his skull is being split open. He thinks his head should be bleeding, but when he reaches up to touch it with an unsteady hand, he feels nothing. He blinks. The world around him looks fuzzy. It takes a second for him to even realize that he’s on the beach again, back against the pier wall. He doesn’t have the mind power to consider how that is.
He rubs his eyes.
In front of him is… a woman? Scott only registers her twenty or so seconds later. She’s kneeling down a foot or so away from him, eyes scanning his face. She looks very tall, hunching over to be the same level as him. Her hair is pink—which, okay, Scott has cyan hair, he can’t comment on it—but in the moonlight, Scott thinks she almost looks… blue. Dark blue, in fact. Scott shakes his head. Weird trick of the light.
A car passes by the street on the pier above, headlights just reaching towards where they’re sitting—and with the light shone on her, she’s still blue. Scott’s eyes go wide. She cocks her head at him, and— are those fins ?
“You’re awake,” she says, and Scott’s jaw just about falls off.
“You—“ he starts, voice scratchy, and coughs up a mouthful of water. “I— What? How did—who— what ?”
The stranger comes even closer to Scott, inspecting his face. He tries to scoot backward, but there’s something behind him—the wall of the pier. He gulps.
“Who are you?” Scott asks finally, eyes wide. There’s water dribbling out of his mouth. He coughs again.
The woman is still inspecting him. “It’s Lizzie,” she says, in a tone that tells Scott he should recognize her. Scott must give her a funny look, though, because she continues. “You know, the ocean goddess? Protector of our waters? Geez, whatever happened to you must’ve…,” She begins to mumble to herself, tugging at Scott’s shirt.
“Ocean goddess?” Scott echoes. All of his clothes are sticking to him in the most uncomfortable places. A hand pokes at his stomach, and he squirms.
The woman— Lizzie?— meets his eyes. “What did happen to you?”
“Wha—“ Scott starts, and then coughs again. The woman backs up a bit. “What–you–I nearly drowned !”
Lizzie shakes her head sullenly. She looks from his face to his legs, then back to his face, before opening her mouth.
“No,” she says, with horror. “Your tail .”
Scott blinks.
“My what?” he says, loudly. His eyes are wide. Lizzie backs up some more.
“Your tail! ” she shouts just as loudly. She gestures wildly to his feet, then to his face. “And—and your fins! What happened to them? You look… you look human!”
Scott stares at the woman, incredulous. The waves lap on the shore behind her.
“I—I am human!” he shouts back.
Lizzie is now at least five feet away from him. “ No you’re not ?”
“Yes!” Scott nods frantically. “Yes, I am!”
The woman looks lost. She stares down at his legs, then up to his face again, before stuttering, “But—but your hair! ”
Scott brings a hand up to touch his head. “ What about it? ” he yells back, not even knowing why they’re yelling anymore.
“It’s—“ she gestures towards his hair with wide eyes. “It’s blue! You’re—you’re a merman, aren’t you?”
“ What? ” Scott shouts.
“ What! ” the woman shouts back, and, okay, they are getting nowhere with this.
Scott lowers his voice. “I—I’m not a merman,” he tries, still in shock. “I’m a human! I just have blue hair! Wait—mermen exist?”
A moment passes. Lizzie’s mouth falls open.
“Oh my word,” she says. Her eyes are wide.
Scott just nods his head, once, twice, three times. He’s starting to think that he died in the water and this is the afterlife’s way of screwing with him. Maybe this is what he gets for procrastinating on his painting. Maybe this is hell. When was the last time he went to church?
“But… your hair,” Lizzie whines again, this time rather lamely.
“I’m not a merman,” Scott repeats. He laughs, rubbing his temples, and, yeah, he’s definitely lost his mind. “I—I dyed it blue. My hair is dyed.”
Lizzie gasps. “You’re dead?! ”
“No?” Scott shouts back, eyes wide. “I—I’m alive! I colored my hair blue! With—with blue… blue pigment? Well, I mean, cyan, technically, but—“
“You can do that?” the woman asks with wide eyes. Scott nods, slowly. She gasps. “That’s incredible!”
Scott rubs his eyes. “Yeah,” he says. “Sure. Okay.”
“So many humans must look mer…,” Lizzie starts to mumble. The waves still lap on the beach behind her.
Scott makes a noise. He begins to pick at the tear in his pant legs. They don’t look very salvageable, if he’s being honest. Which, honestly, shouldn’t be his top priority, all things considered. But it’s his life, damn it, and he can worry about what he wants. And he really liked these jeans! And, and he’s also pretty sure he lost his phone, and…
He sighs and rubs his eyes again.
“Is that how you get the colors on everything?” Lizzie continues, now talking to Scott. “Like—on the fabric, and on the pictures? The dead?”
Scott nods, still not looking at her. “Dye. It’s… it’s called dye.”
Lizzie gasps again. “Fascinating,” she whispers.
“Yeah,” Scott nods. His head aches. He stops rubbing his eyes and looks over to Lizzie. She’s sitting on the sand across from him, looking at him intently. “Can—can you tell me what happened? Why am I washed up on the beach?” He coughs again.
The woman shrugs her shoulders. “I found you floating ‘round in the shallow waters. I thought you were a merman, but you had no gills, so I brought you here,” she explains. Her brows then furrow. “Wait—if you’re a human, what were you doing out in the water?”
Scott shakes his head, rubs his temples. It doesn’t help much. “It’s a long story,” he says.
“I want to hear it,” Lizzie says. “If you’re human, I’ve got to make sure you don’t remember this anyways. Might as well share.”
Scott blinks.
“... Okay,” he says, tentatively, but then— “Wait, you said you were a goddess?”
A moment passes.
Lizzie sighs. “Don’t… you aren’t supposed to know that.”
“Yeah, I figured,” Scott says, and he laughs despite himself. The noise sounds odd against the tension in the air. A wave crashes in the distance.
“Just get on with the story,” Lizzie—the goddess, wow, okay—sighs again.
“Okay,” Scott repeats. He rubs his eyes, half expecting her to be gone when he opens them. She is not. He starts. “Well, I mean. I was making a painting of the ocean, and I thought I saw a shell near the water, so I—“
“Wait,” Lizzie interrupts. “ Painting? Like, the pictures?”
Scott nods. “Yeah, I’m a painter,” he says, because how much weirder can this really get?
“And you use the dead for that?”
“Dye,” Scott sighs. “It’s called dye. But—no, I use paint.”
“Paint,” Lizzie echoes. “Fascinating.”
Scott groans. “Sure.”
He looks down and at his arms. There’s a long scrape that streaks up and down his right bicep. It’s huge and irritated looking, even reaching the flower tattoo on his shoulder. That’s when he realizes that his sweatshirt is completely torn, all the way up to the collar on the right side. He can feel mud sinking into his clothes from where they’re touching the ground. He grimaces.
“Show me to one of these paintings,” says Lizzie, after a few moments. When Scott looks up, she’s staring right at him.
“Excuse me?” he says, sounding more than a bit skeptical.
“The paintings,” Lizzie repeats. “Show me to one of them.”
Scott stares at her. She looks back at him, innocently.
“... Why?” Scott asks hesitantly.
Lizzie laughs, like the answer is obvious. “Because I want to see one!” She stands then, brushing the sand off of her dress, and—wow, okay, she is really tall. Abnormally tall.
“I’ve seen paintings before, but never good ones,” Lizzie continues, now from very far above Scott. He has to strain to hear her. “The ones that wash up in the ocean are almost always destroyed! Which is a true shame.”
Scott opens his mouth, then closes it. Lizzie still stares at him.
He goes to speak again. “So… what. You want me to... show you one of my paintings?”
Lizzie nods. “Mhm! If you would.”
There’s a long pause.
Scott, despite his better judgment, sighs. “Okay, sure,” he says. “Whatever.”
Lizzie cheers. The waves do a little dance from afar, as if they’re happy, too. Scott doesn’t think about that too hard.
“I need to get back to my easel, anyways,” he mumbles as he stands, slowly and carefully. Luckily, his legs don’t feel too injured, despite the condition they appear to be in. He brushes off his jeans.
The goddess looks down, and—wow, okay, she is at least a good four feet taller than him. “What’s an easy?”
Scott sighs, for what must be the millionth time that night. “Just—just follow me,” he says, and turns to walk away. He can tell that Lizzie follows by the way the ground shakes.
————————————————
Scott groans as he falls into his bed, face first. The clock on his bedside table reads 4:17 A.M. He is so tired.
His easel is sitting in his living room, in-progress painting still displayed on it, just like he showed Lizzie on the beach. He wishes he knew why she was so damn excited. It was hardly even started.
He’s pretty sure that this night has been a dream. Or maybe a hallucination.
Whatever, he thinks to himself. He made progress on his painting, he got a half-concussion, he talked to a… someone , and he made it home at the end of the day. And now he’s in bed. All is good, really. And if he doesn’t think about the weird goddess, then his head won’t hurt.
No point in thinking about a woman you’ll never see again. Besides, she already left. She’ll go away.
————————————————
The weird goddess does not, in fact, go away.
Actually, she comes back the very next day. Scott finds her in his living room, fiddling with one of the glass statues he has on display.
“It looks kind of like water,” she says, twirling it around gently in her palm. It’s a glass cat. He doesn’t comment on how her hair is still wet and dripping onto his couch.
She comes back the next day, too, complaining about a rude crab she met that morning. And she comes back the day after that, raving about how good this restaurant in her kingdom is, and, oh , she wishes he could try it.
She keeps coming back. It’s… odd. But as much as the idea of knowing her stressed him out at first, she isn’t unwelcome.
And somehow, the goddess becomes… somewhat of a regular at Scott’s place. He’ll often come home from school or work to see her on his couch, or in his kitchen, or, on one particularly strange occasion, inspecting the soap in his bathroom. Sometimes he’ll even wake up to see her there, rummaging through his clothing or inspecting his newest work-in-progress painting. It becomes almost normal. And, honestly, Scott doesn’t mind—she’s not bad company. He’s had worse actual roommates in his day, honestly.
What’s even odder is that, after months of incessant hounding, Lizzie starts to become… almost a friend.
When Scott thinks about that for too long, he starts to feel like he’s losing his mind. Friends, with a goddess. But it’s true; there is a goddess, and she’s sometimes in his house, and they chat about their days while he paints, and they sometimes buy fast food, and she’s his friend. He’s friends with a goddess. He’s friends with a goddess, and he never thought he’d be able to say that sentence.
Eventually, she starts gossiping, as all friends do.
“I’m telling you,” she says one day, groaning into her hands. “He’s insufferable! For all he rules over the sand, and he still can’t stand the ocean? Please.”
Scott eats a fry—he had gotten them Wendy’s—and nods his head. “Mhm,” he murmurs. “I hear you.”
The goddess sighs. “He could at least have some respect,” she murmurs, before shaking her head. “I give that man nothing but respect. And he repays me with—with rudeness!”
“Some people are just like that,” Scott advises, “rude. I say you give him a piece of your mind.”
Lizzie nods. “You know what? Yeah. You might be right.”
Scott smiles. “I always am.”
Lizzie laughs. After a second, she turns to her left and picks up her drink, inspecting it in her hand. “What did you call this again?”
“Vanilla milkshake,” Scott says. He eats another fry.
Lizzie nods, then takes a tentative sip. Her eyes light up in delight. “Fascinating . ”
Scott is, eventually, forced to learn the names of the people she talks about. How else is he supposed to keep up with her gossip? Unfortunately, the people she talks about are not normal people, but rather gods and goddesses. So instead of stalking their social media like he’d usually do, Scott resolves to buy books that talk about them.
These books are surprisingly easy to find. His local bookstore has a mythology section, and it’s not hard to find ones that detail deities. One scan over the section yields three books: one listing the names of each common god or goddess in alphabetical order, one detailing the lore behind each, and another explaining their qualities and how to go about worshiping them. A quick flip through the last book shows a full-body portrait of Lizzie on page 86–although some of the details are inaccurate, or outdated. He checks out at the front desk (ignoring the odd look the cashier gives him), and when he gets home, he displays the books on a bookshelf in his living room.
Lizzie is nothing short of delighted when he shows them to her the next day. They spend the whole afternoon together, flipping through the pages and reading everything that’s written. It’s pretty fun. Not all of the “facts” are true, though–some of them are a little fabricated or exaggerated, and some of them, as Scott learns, are just downright false.
“That never even happened!” says a scandalized Lizzie. She points at a line in one of the books. “I can promise you that I’d never start a war over something so–so inconsequential! The nerve… ”
He does end up returning the book about their lore and buying another, supposedly more accurate one. Lizzie approves of the change.
The books stay on his shelf. They look inconspicuous enough, and that’s what he needs–because he still is, in fact, a mortal, and he would not really appreciate any of his friends finding out about his friendship with a goddess. Neither would Lizzie.
Unfortunately, his friends are nosy and annoying. So a few weeks later, when he has some of them over, they go through the books, and he’s just drunk enough not to do anything about it. What’s the worst that could happen, anyways?
Scott doesn’t think anything of it. He really doesn’t! That is, until Lizzie visits the next day.
“Boy, do I have a story to tell you,” she declares, sitting on the edge of his bed. The mattress dips significantly, which almost causes Scott to spill his coffee all over his laptop. He groans.
And tell she does. It starts off as a normal story, with her doing her civic ocean duties; she mentions routine maintenance checks on the walls of prismarine specifically.
“I was just getting down to business,” says Lizzie, “when I felt a tug. A tug I haven’t felt in–in centuries!”
She could feel that a mortal soul had been placed in her guidance, she explained. Which meant a worshiper .
Lizzie continues the story. She wanted to visit the mortal–a young man, around Scott’s own age. Visiting is definitely not standard protocol, she said. But she wanted to show her gratitude. So she waited until the next day, as to not seem overly eager. He wasn’t too hard to track down, apparently–their bond was still fresh and strong, and with the absence of any other souls, she could follow it towards him like a hound dog with a scent. So she showed up to his apartment complex the very next morning.
But the mortal was surprised to see her. She explained who she was, and what’s weirder is that he was even more surprised. Then he seemed to realize what was happening, and explained the situation: it was an accident. The whole soul-offering thing. A drunken accident. He didn’t even know souls were real .
“Oh. I’m sorry,” says Scott. “That must have sucked to hear.”
But Lizzie looks happy. She smiles and laughs. “Scott, I feel alive! This is the most energy I’ve had in forever!”
And, well. If she’s happy, then Scott’s happy for her. He is! But then she describes the mortal. Short (“Even shorter than you!” she says, which, okay, Scott is 6’1”), brunet, weird green streak in his hair, lives in the apartment complex by the diner on the east side of town, a sculptor…
Scott, of course, freaks out. Lizzie does not.
Scott makes an incredulous sounding noise. “How–how’re you so calm? One of my friends found out about you!”
Lizzie shrugs. “He was a fun guy! I like him. We get along just fine.”
Scott begins to rub his temples. “You–if I were you, I’d be freaking out!”
“But you’re not me.”
“Still!”
“ I’m not freaking out.”
“You should be!”
Lizzie laughs. Scott puts his head in his hands.
“I liked him, though,” Lizzie repeats. She turns to Scott with a smile, filled with too-sharp teeth. “He was funny. Strange, short man—just this tall, he was—but he was funny. I liked him.”
And the mortal just shakes his head and laughs.