Maine has a whopping 3,478 miles of shoreline. That 51 miles longer than California's 3,427 miles. None of that really matters to Dan, but it does mean that the people that he conceives as his captors have no shortage of opportunities for returning the restaurant's stolen lobsters to their natural habitat.
Dan's had remained breathless since the abrupt removal from the restaurant tank into one of the eatery's mop buckets. The lingering trace of bleach irritated his gills and his tiny eyestalks. There's not much his lobster senses can detect from within the confines of the bucket in the back of a pickup truck heading toward a rocky coastal beach. Like the other lobsters, he's just along for the ride.
After a drive lasting about an hour, the man and woman left the parked truck and gazed out over the misty Atlantic Ocean just as the morning sun rose over a churning surf as it collided against the rocky shoreline. "This place looks perfect," the woman said with misguided romanticism for the soon-to-be liberated lobsters.
The man grunted as he hoisted one of the buckets from the back of the truck. He wanted to dump the contents pell-mell into the surf, but the woman reminded him that they needed to free each individual lobster. "We have to remove their bands," she told him.
So, one after the other, lobsters are lifted from the buckets. The woman twisted off the blue rubber bands from their claws, made a brief but encouraging speech and hopes for a bright future for each indifferent crustacean, and handed them to the man. Much like an athlete hoisting a football, the man reared back his arm and chucked each lobster as far into the surf as he could manage.
They finally come to the "borrowed" mop bucket and its two lobster occupants. Dan's removed first, squirming as he feels a hand close around the middle of his carapace. He waves his claws in a moment of blind panic, causing the woman to shriek and drop him on the rocky ground. "That one's not banded!" The woman exclaimed in a voice of surprise.
"I can see that," the man said, trying not to laugh at her overreaction. Dan felt the man's much stronger, tighter grip around his carapace. The squeezing sensation startled him, and he already felt bruised and battered from being dropped on rocks. His gills remained scorched from their time in the bleach-tinged mop bucket. "Enjoy your freedom," the man said, hurling Dan without further preamble into the churning surf just off the beach.
"My what?" Dan had time to think before he felt himself turned into a living projectile.
"Oh!" The woman pouted. "I wanted to wish him luck."
Her partner only frowned at her sentimentality and reached for the last lobster.
"What the hell!" Dan screamed mentally as he felt his body fly through the wind-whipped misty air for an instant before his body dropped and sank like a stone beneath the coastal waters.
Dan came to rest on his back, but the constant motion from the waves helped him right himself swiftly. With his tiny eyestalks he detected a couple of the other just-freed lobsters scuttling over the rocks and rather aimlessly meandering on the ocean floor.
The couple hadn't been captors at all, Dan realized now! They had just fucking dumped him into the fucking ocean. Now things had become truly real.
The other freed lobsters, giving their first real taste of freedom, crawled rather lethargically as they didn't need any real interval of time to make any mental adjustments. Water in a bucket, water in a tank, water in an ocean, it made very little difference to their tiny brains. For Dan, the full import of what had just happened pushed him toward panic. What would he do? Where would he go? His eyestalks fixed on a nearby lobster and Dan scurried on his spiny legs across the rocks, trying not to lose sight of his compatriot. He figured he should hang with one of the real lobsters, at least until he got his bearings.
Then, he remembered...he was a "real" lobster. "Oh fuck!" He panicked again, feeling like he might hyperventilate, and in his panic he made a instinctive mental shout to his mother. He immediately felt like a sniveling little boy who had gone crying to mommy, but what was done was done.
Unfortunately, he must have shouted loudly.
"Oh, Dan, oh my...don't shout, dear," his mother's voice patched magically into his head. She sounded groggy. "Dan, what time is it, sweety?" She must have looked at a clock. "Why are you calling this early?"
"Mom, you've got to help me!" Dan shouted again, and this time he even felt some of his mother's mental discomfort as his psychic shouting caused her to recoil.
Suggesting through their mental connection that he calm down and start again, she listened, with growing distress of her own, as Dan provided what pieces of the story he had been able to connect together. As they communicated, he didn't really pay attention to his surroundings. He lost sight of the other lobster. The other crustacean had simply dropped out of sight.
"Where the hell did he go-oooohh..."
Abruptly, Dan plunged deeper into the coastal depths, having walked right over the edge of an underwater cliff. He thrashed and tried to swim, and before he hit bottom, he had managed to get a semblance of control over his lobster form.
"Dan! Dan!" His mom demanded he re-establish the connection. "What's happening?"
"It's all right," he said. "Just a bit of a drop-off."
Dan tried to use his eyestalks to determine the depth he found himself. Remembering that his size was only about 10 inches long, everything looked much bigger, much steeper, much deeper. He didn't know if he was still near the shallow beach or had blundered headlong into deeper waters.
"Oh, Dan," Mom sounded distressed. "I'm so sorry about this."
"It's OK," he said, now having to try to soothe her. "Can you just come and get me?"
Dan felt an odd prickling sensation. He could detect the hesitation as a tangible force. "Mom?"
"Dan, sweety, just stay calm, please, can you do that?"
"Mom, I'm a lobster in the ocean!" Dan shouted again and he felt his outburst cause a mental wince in his mom.
"Sweety, I'll start working on it," she said.
"Start?" Dan's thoughts rose in volume.
"Understand, sweety, that you're in the ocean." For effect, she repeated the phrase, "The ocean!"
"So?" Dan felt truly perplexed. He was a lobster. Ocean living was sort of expected of him.
"Well, magic's got its limits, Dan," she explained, somewhat defensively. "That's a lot of territory, even for the strongest locator spell. Do you have any idea where you are? Something I could use as a reference point?"
"I don't know," his thoughts began to rise in panic. "Some rocky beach..."
His mother laughed, but more from delayed shock than humor at her son's dilemma. "I'm sorry, Dan...truly... but we live in Maine. All the beaches are rocky."
"Mom, I'm a real lobster in the..." Dan took a deep breath and stopped himself from cursing to his mother. "In the ocean. What am I going to do?"
He detected that holding back of her thoughts. "Mom?"
"Well, sweety, what if you, uh, somehow, just let yourself get eaten," she suggested with a matter-of-fact succinctness.
"Mom! What are you saying?" Dan felt truly shocked.
"Kat's spell, dear," she explained. "As soon as you get eaten, you'll be returned to your room to re-spawn."
"Mom, I'm not really clear on how that works..."
He also felt suddenly very turned on and worried that mom's telepathy might pick up on the way the situation aroused him.
"It will work!" Mom insisted, not really placing any emphasis on the elevated emotional level of Dan's thoughts. Dan imagined he sensed a waver of doubt at the fringes of her thoughts. "I double-checked her spell myself," Mom said.
"But..."
"Well, no need to do anything rash," she changed her mind. She could tell that the thought of being eaten disturbed Dan. If she only knew the truth...
"I'll consult with your sister, and I'll get back to you," his mother added.
"All right, Mom, but..."
"I'll be in touch, sweety."
Suddenly, the connection went dead. Had she hung up on him? How could one even hang up a telepathic "phone" call?
"Mom?"
No response. Dan found himself alone in a dimly lit world about 80 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. He scuttled confusedly, turning one way, then another. Where should he go? What the hell should he do with himself?
Suddenly, his antennae twitched. He "smelled" something. The scent was more powerful than any aroma he had ever encountered even as a human, let alone since becoming a lobster. Fine filaments on his eight legs got into the action, too, "tasting" the water swirling around Dan. No doubt about it. Something sensational began to extend its appeal to his lobster brain.