Taken By The Shark

“Wait, Chels, set down your drink first and try becoming a shark,” he chuckled. “If you can do it, I might just give you a reward.”

“What kind of a reward?” she wanted to know.

“A tasty treat, perhaps?” he grinned.

“No way, that’s rewarding you, not me,” she pointed out.

“Then I’ll taste your treat too,” he said.

“Well, if you put it that way, how can I refuse?” she said, stepping into the middle of the room. Whereupon she used up a great deal of energy to transform. She managed to change into a shark, but she was too exhausted to change back again.

“Chels?”

“Ugh!” she groaned in shark language. “Now what do I do?”

“You’ll have to rest like that, I guess,” he said. “Damn, I didn’t know it was going to take so much out of you. It’s become so easy for me, I’d forgotten how difficult it might be for a novice.”

“Ugh!” she groaned again. “Looks like tasting is on hold, eh?”

“Well, we could always go out into the water, but it might take longer for you to regain some energy that way,” Mark suggested. “At this point, if you lay there a while you’ll be able to turn back, but if you go out there you might be like that all night.”

“Great!” she growled. “Now would be the perfect time to bite your ass.”

Mark laughed. “In that form, you’d have to belly-flop your way over here. How tiring do you suppose that would be?”

“Ugh!”

“Lie still, Chelsea,” he told her. “It’ll take a good ten or fifteen minutes if you behave yourself. Otherwise, who knows?”

With no other choice but to wait, Chelsea lied still and stopped trying to communicate. At some point, Mark came and sat beside her, placing a hand on her back near her dorsal fin. She felt him push some of his energy into her, and it seemed to help a bit. With his energy in combination with hers, she finally felt able to return to her human form.

“What a relief,” she said tiredly.

“You need to do some energy-producing exercises,” Mark said as he began to rub her human back soothingly. “It’s never a good idea to bring your energy down so low.”

“Actually, I’ve transformed a lot today,” she explained. “I must have overdone it, just like Jill warned me not to do. And here I promised her I’d be careful. Not even twenty minutes later, look what I did.”

“Boy, we’re both having a brilliant day today, aren’t we?” Mark said on a sigh. “Maybe we should go up for a nap.”

“Only if this nap includes tasting,” Chelsea said. “You promised tasting if I became a shark.”

“So I did,” he smirked. “But you’re in no shape to climb all those stairs, are you?”

“Probably not.”

“Then I shall take you there the old-fashioned way,” he smirked, and lifted her into his arms.

Several hours later the makeshift alarm to alert them that somebody was knocking on their doors in the Oceanica station started to blare. Bleary eyed, Mark sat up in their bed and quickly moved the two of them into the bed they were meant to be in instead. Then he got out of it and pulled on some pants to go see who it was.

“Jill?” he asked sleepily. “What are you doing here?”

“We’ve got a big problem,” she explained in a whisper as she checked over her shoulders to make sure nobody else was listening.

“What is it?”

“Sirenia’s followers have elected to take a bit of action on their own,” she explained. “They’ve went to my brother’s kingdom and attempted to take the throne.”

“They what?” Mark gasped. He grabbed Jill by her collar and dragged her inside the door, poking out his own head and double-checked if anybody was there. They were alone.

“Sorry, Chelsea, but it looks like we’ve got trouble,” said Mark. “But I don’t think we should bring her along, do you? She’s barely learned the technique to become a shark, and she got stuck in that form as well. Not to mention she hasn’t had much rest since.”

“Well I have to go,” she insisted. “I’ve got to convince my followers to back off or get themselves killed.”

“And it’s my father your people are attacking,” said Mark. “My rightful place is by his side.”

“And my rightful place is by yours,” Chelsea pointed out stubbornly as she grabbed Mark by the hand. “You were ready to take me to the water anyway. I see no reason why you can’t take me now.”

“You’d best bring her along, you know,” Jill pointed out. “As stubborn as she is, she’ll just try to follow you, and who knows what would happen if she did.”

“Damn it, Chelsea,” Mark complained. “I won’t have time to babysit you. You’re not ready to join in a gifted battle. You’ve got way too much left to learn.”

“I’ll bring her with me,” Jill said, already glowing golden and beginning to shift her form. “Come, Chelsea, can you suspend your disbelief well enough to become a mermaid with me?”