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"Thanks, Mai! You're the best."
The siren playfully snaps her sharp teeth at him. He takes it as playful, though he has to dodge out of the way. Siren's are a little rough around the edges, and he likes her just the way she is. Threats and all.
Ryou hadn't considered the transportation aspect of this trade and is pleasantly surprised to find that she'd wrapped his cargo in an intact sailcloth. With closer access to the surface than he has, as a deep sea merman, she can collect all sorts of nifty things, and they're often still in one piece! He'd be jealous, but sirens don't have access to the beauty of the ocean floor, and he's content to sift through the sands for some interesting antiquities.
His cargo isn't heavy and with excitement running high his journey home is faster than the journey up had been, despite the detour. He carefully avoids Oceantis, the bustling home for merkind in this part of the ocean. Though not illegal, his recent acquisition is considered one of those things a merperson shouldn’t do.
After the trouble he went through to get this, he isn’t keen on having it confiscated.
In retrospect, the trouble he went through is much more illegal than the end result.
Mai is a beautiful siren with a love for shiny and sparkly things, but even more than that she loves shiny sparkly things that are hard to get. Hence her offer - she gets him what he wants, if he gets her a pink pearl.
It’s a well known fact that those are reserved for royalty. It’s enforced to the point where all pink clams, which produce those pink pearls, are kept within the palace walls. An everyday, completely average merperson like Ryou could never get his hands on something like that.
But he doesn’t give in!
He is the most determined merman in the five oceans and seven seas and all the other bodies of water he can think of.
Thus begins a game of Trade that’s only now reached its conclusion.
It begins with his brother Bakura. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that that’s where it ends.
He isn’t going to start debating a trade with him; he doesn’t have the mental energy for whatever ridiculous request Bakura would make. He gives his brother a hug, promises the freshest seaweed he can find for dinner, and takes the tiny starfish off his wall while ignoring his half-hearted protests.
The adorable starfish is returned to its rightful owner. Téa profusely thanks him for returning what Bakura stole from her - his brother is a pest at the best of times - and happily hands him the bass guitar.
It has two broken strings and is starting to rot from its time underwater, but this is what Mako wanted, and so it’s what he’ll get. When the other merman accepts it with a grin, Ryou sighs in relief. Mako had asked for a ‘bass’, and it took far too long to realize he didn’t mean the fish. Such a pain.
The fish-loving merman hands him one of the many whale bones in his collection. It would have taken less time to find one himself, but that’s the gift of hindsight.
That whale bone is gifted to his favourite ocean witch, a young mermaid with a gift for medicine and science. Rebecca takes it, refuses to say what it’s for, and shoves a bag of herbs in his arms. He’d been more than happy to get these from her rather than the source; he is a brave merman, but not so brave as to get near a submarine volcano. These herbs grow and survive in that heat, and this merman would be almost instantly boiled alive.
No thank you, a few extra trades is more than worth the effort.
The herbs are handed off to his friend Joey to help his little sister with her most recent bout of sickness. He would have happily helped without a trade, much as Joey would have given him what he needed in return, but this worked in both their favours. Serenity will heal, and Ryou leaves with a hard won shark tooth.
Ryou had been the one to pull it out of Joey’s arm when he’d almost been shark food. That was a crazy day.
He recalls those memories as he hands it over to Malik in exchange for the necklace he stole from his sister. He’d intended to give it back, but too much time had passed and she didn’t know he was the one who had it, so it was better to pretend it had simply vanished from the ocean entirely.
Ryou is friendly with Malik, though they’re not friends, and the entanglement of his familial ties had been exhausting to navigate. Their family is an estranged branch off the royal line, due to their father’s poor life choices, and they’ve been banished to live on the outskirts of Oceantis. Malik asked for a shark tooth to prove to his sister that he can protect himself in order to have her approval to apply for a position with the royal guard, something that would restore their family’s honour.
Ryou doesn’t point out that the shark tooth was not earned, making his claim of strength a falsehood. Getting this far has already involved too much meddling.
The necklace is returned to Malik’s older sister, Isis. She quietly passes on her deceased father’s spellbook. She seems content to be rid of it, and Ryou can’t fault her for wanting to clean her hands of that shame.
No time to waste! He’s almost done - his final stop.
In a quiet secluded alcove outside the palace, he meets with Mana, one of the ocean witches appointed to the royal family. She takes the powerful spellbook with a delighted laugh and, with no knowledge to the time and effort spent getting here - to the chores completed, the conversations had, the digging into people’s stories and histories and all the back and forth - she hands him a pink pearl without the reverence this moment deserves.
One pink pearl. Weeks after his initial conversation with Mai, it’s finally in his hands.
No one but a member of the royal family has ever held one of these. According to the rumours.
It’s pretty. It’s sparkly and shiny.
To Ryou, it’s a means to his goal and nothing more. He shoves it in his crossbody bag and begins the long swim up.
The pink pearl leaves his possession. Mai tells him to return in 24 hours.
Now here he is - finally carrying his precious loot.
He can’t take this to the home he shares with his brother, even Bakura would have questions, but he already has a second home just for this situation. Far outside of Oceantis, behind a wall of carefully placed cloth and seaweed, is the entrance to his own little storage cave. He looks around , and once assured of his privacy, swims through with the full sailcloth in tow.
Mako’s home is a treasure trove of various fish bones; from a blue whale spine to the bones of the tiniest of dwarf goby. His aim is to teach people about their underwater friends and uses their remains to do so. He loves these creatures, adores them, despite their low, and oftentimes non-existent, intelligence.
Ryou’s adoration aims higher.
Humans. Their bipedal land cousins.
No one else understands his interest, not even Rebecca. She deems them lesser and boring. But to him, they are the most fascinating creature in all the waters - and out of it.
Very little of them manages to reach the ocean floor. He can find bits and pieces, bones here and there that aren’t from any aquatic animal, but it’s impossible to put it all together into one cohesive being. His home away from home is filled to the brim with what he’s found in his two decades of life; the skulls are a personal favourite.
That’s where Mai comes in.
Sirens survive on humans, and he was in search of a full specimen.
A pink pearl for a full human skeleton.
Finally he can lay it out side by side with the skeleton of a long dead merperson that he managed to acquire several months prior, and he can finally begin an extensive comparison.
He drops the sailcloth and it gently unfurls. The bones within clatter together and the sound sends a shiver rushing down his spine. Excitement makes his hands shake.
It’s beautiful.
The bones are picked clean; not so much as a drop of blood tinging them red. Mai was meticulous. Good, he has no desire to fight off a predator today. A couple of the pieces have bite marks in them, but he can’t complain. It gives the collection an extra dose of charm. Most importantly, it’s all there.
Some might consider this part tedious, but Ryou sees it as a puzzle.
Every piece is laid in the sand as he carefully rebuilds the body to his best approximation. The skull at the top with all the little bits for the ears, nose, and their teeth, then a sternum, the ribs, the spine, the clavicle, and the dozens of pieces that make up the arms and hands. He goes back and forth from his human to his merman specimen and it all matches up near perfectly.
Their sizes are different, but from the stories he’s heard merpeople are considerably bigger than their human cousins. However, those stories appear exaggerated. His merman skeleton is less than twice the size of the human one. From how people talk, he thought it would be akin to comparing a bottlenose dolphin to a sperm whale.
The other difference is that the merperson has a few extra bones; the gill arches in their neck to help them breathe underwater, and their elbow fins. It’s all so fascinating!
But the best part comes next.
The legs.
A merperson has their tail which begins at the pelvis bone, but humans have these two extra limbs called legs. Attached to those, at the very bottom, are feet.
The only reason he knows any of this is from chatting with some of the sirens. Mai even carved a picture of a human into a rock using her claws for him (after he gave her a sack of fresh roe). He uses it as reference now to try and guess how these bones function and link together.
These larger pieces all seem to work together, there, that seems about right. A weird circular part that reminds him of the elbow sits in the middle. Another joint, perhaps? They remind him of the arms, but based on Mai’s rendering these things will support the weight of a human body and that’s how they get around, though they’re much more limited in their movements than a merperson.
A smattering of tiny pieces remain in the sailcloth, the rest sorted out on the floor. They make up the feet.
He gets to work organizing them, separating similar parts into two sections, one a left foot and the other a right foot. There’s no way for him to know if he’s doing this correctly. A puzzle with no solution. But it’s not about accuracy anymore.
He holds two small bones up, as if they were legs, and walks them along the floor.
What does it feel like to move like that? Does it hurt? Is it strenuous? How long can they walk before they need to rest?
What is it like to have the entire world at your fingertips, ready for exploring?
Ryou is here, tied down to the depths of the ocean. But out there, there are trees, sunlight, wind, and fire… They have stars.
He can’t breathe out of the ocean. He swims towards the surface but the pressure aches. His ears pop and his blood burns and his head throbs, and he has to sink back down where he belongs.
But before he does, through the blur of water, he sees twinkling gold. It’s there, before his eyes, and yet impossible to reach.
He finishes putting his human together and swims home with his dreams carefully stashed away, never to see the light of day.