Welcome to Gaia! ::

((OOC: Right. I think I'll introduce someone new, so that you don't have to go through three hundred pages to find out stuff that everyone else already knows about the character. I'll work on it and get back to you in a moment.))

Kiro hauled it up the beach, following Joshua. The man chuckled at Joshua's evident confusion. Setting the tank down at last with a sigh, he said cheerfully, "Tianara is annoyed that I'm looking after her and is attempting to make fun of me using an outdated phrase that I taught her. It doesn't work, since I was looking somewhere very specific, but it was a good attempt."

Tianara stuck her tongue out at him.

Apparently unruffled, Kiro continued easily, "So I hear the two of you had quite an adventure after I left you." He looked over at his sister, and there was a mixture of grief and concern in his green eyes. It was with some surprise that Tianara remembered that Kiro might be grieving Kistad as well - they had been very close. She reached out and patted her brother's hand.

"Yeah," she murmured, and said no more.

((OOC: Well, most of them were just brief parts anyway. I have a very small main core of characters, with some recurring secondaries and a bazillion walk-ons. razz ))

"Ah, well, that works too," Kiro murmured. "But nightmares always end, don't they?" He smiled a little bit when Tianara looked up at him, and that caused her, however sadly, to smile back. Putting a hand lightly on her shoulder, he squeezed it briefly and made her look back over, startled.

His eyes asked her a question. She looked down, hesitated, and nodded. With a grim little nod, Kiro seemed to put an end to that round of questioning, and instead crouched down to see what Joshua was doing.

"Does it work?" asked Tianara, glancing over Joshua's shoulder for a moment to see.

~

Citara frowned, running her tongue lightly across her lips. She could taste blood in the water. Not blood she recognized - no fish or shark or whale, none of her folk had bled here. But it was strong and fresh - recent.

Flicking her long tail to catch up to the source of the scent, she soon found herself following a fishing boat. There were men flailing in the water, but Citara disregarded them after only the briefest of glances - she couldn't care less about what they were doing. None of them were bleeding, so they weren't the source of the stuff polluting her home waters.

She heard the thin sound of rough sharkskin fins cutting the water and smiled slowly. Well, the men weren't bleeding yet...

Dismissing it, she followed the boat, intent on seeing where this pollution was coming from.

((OOC: There you are, Trey.))

Citara simply dove a little deeper to avoid the ship's hull as the boat abruptly swung to the left. From her deeper vantage point, she frowned up at it. That had been a very sudden turn - had they somehow managed to lose all those men overboard? Even if they had, one would think that given the obvious amount of sharks, it would be pointless to turn around.

Rolling her eyes - it seemed that every time she turned around, humans got weirder - the mermaid drifted closer to the ship. She had no intention of coming up to the surface. Although she looked young, she was closing in on her fifth (or was it sixth?) century, and she knew the dangers of boats. Especially fishing trawlers like this one.

But it was getting blood in her water, and that blood was dirty. The human corpses now floating behind her would make a mess of her waters for weeks, perhaps months, and in the meantime she'd have to hunt outside of her comfort zone. Not a prospect she enjoyed.

At the very least, she wanted to know what was going on with this stupid fishing boat.

Citara frowned as she heard screaming - very muffled through the water, but still audible - coming from the ship. It seemed as though something were still happening up there.

More curious than she would have liked to admit, she drew closer and closer to the surface. At last she hovered just below, and off to one side - easily visible if someone chose to look down.

When the large object came hurtling over the side, Citara sped backwards, positive at first that it was some sort of net. As it hit the water, however, she grew brave enough again to approach once more. Her brow lifted. It was another corpse - possibly the body of the one who had screamed earlier.

Curiously, she opened her thoughts to the boat, wondering if maybe there was an aquarium or something on board from which she might be able to get some opinions on what was happening. She widened her range...

And fell back in utter shock.

One of their children was on that boat. One of the ocean children. Not from a clan she knew - the magical signature was unfamiliar. But one of theirs all the same. Distressed and unsure of what to do, she shifted back and forth in the water, and at last decided to follow the boat until it came to port. To see what happened. And if the child was okay.

When the gun went off, Citara jerked back in shock, with a good tinge of indignant anger on top of it. Where did he get off shooting at her? She was trying to look after one of her own, and obviously he didn't do anything of the sort for his kin. And...

Oh, look. It seemed he was coming in after her.

She shrugged to herself - she wasn't afraid. Obviously he was the only one on the boat, aside from the ocean child she had sensed, and she could easily outdistance any human who tried to come after her. That said, she also assumed he had weapons on him - he just seemed that sort. So she'd have to be careful.

Her wide silvery eyes watched him passively, even as she kept a good ten feet of space between them. There was a dock nearby. There had been no more screams. The child was probably all right, and as for this human - it wouldn't take much to wipe him out if she had to. For polluting her waters, she had to admit she sort of wanted to. And it was that very thought that made it a bad idea to do so. How could she live with herself if she killed anyone, even a human, merely out of anger?

Citara glared right back at him, watching as he began to move above the water. Not to be outdone, she rose as well so that her eyes were still on a level with his.

Those eyes went wide when he spoke. What. What. This, this was their child, the ocean child she had sensed on the boat? This man who had destroyed an entire ship's crew, seemingly just because he could, was one of theirs. One of theirs.

At the very least, he ought to know better than to pollute the waters that way.

That thought, she narrowed her eyes. "You made a mess of my home waters," she said coldly, in perfect albeit accented English, "and scared off all the fish for miles. I want to know why."

~

Tianara smiled a little bit. "So it's good?" she asked, glancing from Joshua to Kiro. The dark-haired man smiled and nodded briefly.

She shrugged at Joshua's next words. "We keep our little treasures clean," she said. "It's like our job. Do you want to try and hook it up? We could go see Sorry."

Really, she just wanted to see if it would work. She really hoped it would - she didn't want to go diving, even just to see Sorry, without him. Or Kiro, she amended quickly. She just wanted company, it didn't matter who.

Did it?