"I’m looking forward to seeing your humble abode, Eric!" Anna said with glee.
"I'm looking forward to finally showing it to you," chuckled Eric. At last, he had a mate; the very thought was bliss. Now his life could be complete; and he could be content spending the rest of it making Anna as happy as possible.
They swamp back towards the village, and eventually Anna spied the quaint collection of—were the houses? They looked like enormous seashells, big enough to house many rooms each, and with windows carved in their sides. "Those are where you live?" breathed Anna in awe.
"Some are bigger than others," said Eric. "Mine," he admitted, "is a little on the humble side. But there's still plenty of room for a family. At least… for a small family, one just starting out."
Anna swam underneath Eric so that as they approached the village, she could press her back to his front—they spooned as they swam, lazily flicking their fins to propel them home.
Right up until something strange happened.
The shopping bag started to glow and hum. BWWWWAAANNNNHHHHH—it was a low-pitched, nearly sub-sonic sort of hum, pulsing from within the bag. Too startled to be cautious, Anna opened it and peered inside. There, she saw the gold coin and the gold-ish rock alternately glowing yellow, first one object and then the other and then back again, as if some unseen energy were pulsing between then, at a frequency that roughly matched a heartbeat.
Anna's heartbeat.
And that was when the starfish attacked.
Well, "jumped" might be a better way of putting it. Eric cried out Anna's name in alarm when the starfish leaped out of the shopping-bag and latched itself onto Anna's left boob. Anna immediately felt as if her nipple were being teased by a hundred tiny fingers, or suckled by so many tiny tongues; but the situation was so weird and frightening that it wasn't turning her on at all—at least not yet. She screamed and tried to pry the invertebrate creature off of her tit, but it clung fast, held in place by magic.
Eric too reached for the starfish, but the moment he did so, Anna was mysteriously yanked away from his grasp by some unseen force. Or at least, that was what they both thought was happening—until it became clear that the yank was straight upward, and the force in question was plain old buoyancy. Anna was rising—floating, up and up and up, at a terrific speed that would have risked a human diver contracting a really horrible case of the bends. Now it was Anna's turn to scream her mate's name: "ERRRRIIIICCC!!!" she called as she floated away, dragged up towards the surface, and Eric swam furiously to catch up with her.
And then, of a sudden, just as mysteriously as it had started, the phenomenon stopped. Anna had dropped the shopping bag in the confusion, and that item was now sinking back towards the ocean floor, and the very instant that the bag left Anna's possession, the starfish too became inert and let go of Anna's boob with a "pop"—and Anna stopped ascending.
Eric caught the bag on his way up to Anna. "Anna!" he cried when he at last caught up with her. "Thank goodness you're okay! I was so worried that something terrible was happening to you!"
Anna, badly shaken, just hugged Eric tightly. Then she sobbed into his shoulder and said, "I thought I was being carried away from you! I don't want to lose you now that I've found you and fallen in love with you and laid eggs for you and gave up real sex for you and lost my family for you and I want to see your house—"
"Anna, you're babbling. Also—" he paused and kissed her, "—I love you too."
When Anna heard those words, she snapped back to her senses and blushed something fierce. "Sorry. I got carried away." Then she reached out to where the starfish was still floating in the water nearby and snatched it up. She peered closely at it and then offered it to Eric. "Does this look strange to you?"
He didn't touch it; he just looked. "Nope. Just a perfectly ordinary, run-of-the-mill magical transformation starfish."
"This—whatever that was, the floating thing—never happens?"
"Not that I've ever heard."
"Must be because of the coin, then," said Anna. "While the starfish was attached, I just felt—so light. Like I didn't weigh anything at all, and I was floating so high…" A sudden thought occurred to her. "Eric, hand me the bag."
"What? No! I don't—"
"I have an idea!" said Anna, holding out her hand. "Trust me, my love! Hand me the bag, and then hold onto me. Squeeze tight and don't let go, okay?"
Eric hesitated. Then, reluctantly, he handed over the shopping bag.
Nothing happened. Anna shook the bag, jostling the coin and the rock around inside of it, but still no reaction. She tossed the starfish in, and still nothing. Then she remembered that the three objects had been together in the bag the entire time they'd been swimming away from the Tide Flats and making towards the village, more than 20 minutes at least. She didn't want to wait that long just to test her little theory. So she tried another tactic to speed things along: she took out the starfish, slapped it back onto her boob (it didn't feel like it was suckling anymore, it just stuck there), and then held the rock in one hand and the coin in the other. All the while, Eric held Anna around the waist from behind, looking curiously over her shoulder to see what she was doing.
Anna dropped the bag and let it float away; she gripped the two gold objects tightly in either hand. And they began to pulse and hum and glow. Once again, Anna lifted off for the surface, but now Anna found that she was in time with the pulse of the objects. The frequency matched her heartbeat, and she was calm—hopeful even—and so her ascent was more controlled, less hectic.
After what felt like a small eternity, but it was really closer to 15 minutes, Anna breached the surface of the ocean—and found to her amazement that she was standing on the water like one of those dolphins doing a trick at Sea World. Only, for Anna, it was effortless. She could float with almost her entire body out of the sea; only her tailfin remained submerged. And the magic of the coin, the rock, and the starfish was not so powerful that she floated any higher into the air. Just up to the surface of the water, and then she stopped.
It felt natural: she could still flick her fins under water and propel herself in any direction, and although it was very strange and very awkward-seeming, she had no trouble keeping her balance. Except for the fact that Eric was weighing her down from behind.
In fact, Eric was clinging to Anna more tightly than ever, and he was panicking. "Anna! This is insane! You should take that starfish off again and come back down into the water where we belong!"
"Oh, but Eric, don't you see!?" cried Anna joyfully. "You belong in the water, but I'll always belong to both worlds. It's who I am. If this magic whatever-it-is works over land as well as it does on the surface of the ocean, I can go home! I can visit my family, and I don't have to give up being a mermaid, or lose you!"
Eric was holding onto Anna around the waist, so his whole tail was still under the water. He could clearly see that Anna was pushing them both around with her fins. "I don't think this will work on land. You'd need some other way to push yourself. Like—a pole, or oars, something."
"On land those are called crutches," said Anna. "Sounds easy enough. Now let me go for a minute, dear. I want to see just how fast I can move like this."
Eric did not want to let Anna go.
"Trust me," said Anna again.
He let go.
Anna then started "jogging" in circles around Eric. She really did look ridiculous to his eyes, and he'd never even seen a dolphin show at Sea World. Anna picked up speed, and soon she was "running" as fast as an Olympic sprinter, pumping her arms in a comical fashion that was so terribly out of sync with the way that her tail actually moved. Eric was probably right, she mused; she'd need crutches or something similar to do this on land, so she wouldn't be able to move nearly as fast as she could over the ocean. But still, it seemed like it ought to work.
Now she just needed some dry land to test it out on. The thing was, though, they were in the middle of the open ocean, which meant that they were fresh out of dry land at the moment. Which was a problem.
"Anna," said Eric. "Please come down. Let's go home and think this through!"