Chapter Text
Carlos Dave Robles was a scientist, first and foremost.
He was a scientist, which meant equations and beakers and most importantly (to him, at least), it meant absolutes. And it definitely did not mean tales of merfolk that his team had surely hallucinated.
“I’m telling you, Carlos! It had purple scales, saw it clear as day! Despite it being, like, midnight. Nilanjana will back me up! Won’t you, Nils?” Mark said, looking over at her. After a beat, she nodded.
“I mean- Carlos, we’ve seen weirder. That centipede?” Nilanjana shuddered at the memory.
“The centipede was explainable. A merman isn’t. It was… I don’t know. A dolphin. Something,” Carlos said forcefully. He wasn’t sure if he was trying to convince them or himself. Probably both, he thought.
“Dolphins don’t have scales, Carlos,” Nilanjana said, in a tone that showed she knew exactly what he was trying to do. “Just- hey, we can show you where it was. You can… I don’t know. Go see for yourself.”
She grabbed a map off Mark’s desk, where he was back to working on his machine that flashed and then made a loud noise, and spread it out. She pointed at part of the rocky coastline, marked by a sticker that said ‘Science!’ in bubble letters surrounded by a photorealistic, anatomically correct heart.
“Around here. We were getting some water samples when we saw it. Just go check it out, okay?”
“Sure, Nils. I’ll check it out,” Carlos said, promising to himself he would not do so.
That night, Carlos lay awake and stared at the ceiling. There were discolored spots from where glow-in-the-dark stars previously stuck. He’d counted them, hundreds of times, countless other sleepless nights. 82 places with nothing where there used to be something.
The insomnia wasn’t new to Carlos. But it wasn’t usually this bad. He usually wore himself out working too late, sleep came to him in an hour max. Not- he squinted at the clock, barely able to make the green blobs form numbers- going on three hours.
He groaned, sitting up and grabbing his glasses. He knew what he had to do. Carlos changed into loose jeans and jammed his boots on, grabbing his outdoor-work lab coat before heading out into the humid night.
He had to investigate. For science.