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Jamil awoke feeling strangely lethargic.
This was immediately a red flag for him, because he never felt tired. Even after caring for Kalim all day, he was always on alert. Not that he wanted to be, but it was whipped into him from such a young age that he always felt “on” even when he should have been “off”. The only time he could feel even slightly out of energy was the moment right before he went to sleep. That was the only way he could ever remember when he fell asleep.
So it was not right that he could barely summon the energy to open his eyes when he felt sunlight streaming through his eyelids. And when he finally peeled them open, an even stranger sight awaited him.
“WHAT THE FUCK?!” He sprang back, alarmed when the fire he saw followed him. He tried scrambling away further, but it stayed put right in front of his eyes. Finally he tried to calm down and think rationally, vaguely realizing that the fire wasn’t burning him at all. Furthermore… it was blue. Pure blue. That wasn’t a natural color for fire.
He brought up a hand, tapping the bit of fire in front of him. It swayed a bit, though he couldn’t register any true feeling on his fingers. He twisted around, only to see more of the blue fire cascading down his back. Almost like it had… replaced his hair…
He had a certain Housewarden to call.
–
Riddle awoke with his lungs on fire.
Or, not his lungs. He couldn’t really feel his lungs. Not that he could feel them before, but now something felt… changed. Different. Like they weren’t there at all.
This did not really alarm him, though.
What did alarm him was the fact that he was suffocating.
He couldn’t form rational thought. His eyes weren’t doing their best job. All he knew was that for some reason, air had stopped functioning.
To Riddle’s oxygen-deprived brain, the most obvious next step was to get to water and try there. He desperately threw up the window, his hands scrabbling against the glass awkwardly, until he could roll out of his bed into the bushes beneath his room on the second floor of the dorm. From there, he quickly crawled to the pond near the dorm building, only vaguely recognizing that his legs were refusing to cooperate.
From the moment he was fully submerged, he took what felt like his first breath in a decade.
Now that he could think straight again, Riddle took the opportunity to examine what the hell just happened. But first, his eyes fell on something shiny.
He screamed when he realized that shiny thing was a fish scale. And that it was attached to other scales. And that those scales ended in a tailfin. And that said tail was attached to his body.
He shakily held up his arm, only to see it also covered in small patches of scales, his skin patterned in gold and white and his fingers connected by webbing. From his wrists, a small semicircle of golden fin material extended around the back, and a slightly larger fin protruded from his elbow. His tail (his?!) was also spotted gold and white, ending in a majestic, flowing tailfin almost as long as his upper body was.
He was a merman.
He was literally a merman.
Oh, he knew exactly which eel he would have to ring up.
If he hadn’t left his phone up in his bedroom.
Riddle sighed, awkwardly swimming to the surface and poking his head out, praying Trey would walk by soon so he could figure this out sooner rather than later.