The sun was just touching the water in the west, and the large red-sailed galley-boat was just pulling into dock when Jules and Derrick reached the top of the outer wall of the city, and they had resorted to using the time-bending magical system that was part of their Centaur Demigod forms, so they could get through the town before the boat boarded.
They returned to normal-time as their hooves touched the dock, and the boat began disembarcation.
The number of passengers getting off the boat seemed larger than either of them expected, perhaps fifty people, but Mr. Patella, riding on Derrick's back, seemed to be more interested in the line of passengers waiting to go aboard.
"Are they there?" he asked, and Jules shrugged his shoulders in response.
"I can't tell from here, the system isn't computerized," the young Centaur answered. "Wait here, I'll go ask."
The people emerging from the ship moved own the gangplank and past the two, while Jules moved to the side and up the dock to speak with one of the uniformed attendants at the head of the line-up that was preparing to board.
All of them had small, sparkling scales over most of their bodies, and their ears had been replaced by fins, though they still had hair, at least in many cases. They were all very fit-looking though not all were highly muscular. Rather than "tourist garb" they wore the usual ancient-Greek uniform of perizoma (a triangular loincloth) with some apparently more-busty women wearing the strophion (a cloth band tied around the chest, similar to a sport-bra but without benefit of spandex.) A few of them work the chiton -- a sleeveless linen tunic, belted at the waist, which reached the knees for men and ankles for women and was slit far enough up to allow free movement. The woman leading them also wore a chlamys -- a rectangular, knee-length cloak pinned at the right shoulder with a large clasp bearing a trident emblem, symbol of Poseidon.
This was all at odds to Patella, who still wore the modern human attire he had kept up, even with the spa providing more comfortable traditional Greek attire. The man was still wearing his patent-leather shoes, uncomfortable nylon socks, business-grade black slacks, white button-down shirt, and even a suit jacket. Well, it had been a cool evening, but the Centaur brothers didn't really feel the cold. The human, though, looked entirely out of place, especially astride the tall muscular centaur.
"Were they all humans to begin with, or are they myths like you?" Patella asked, looking at the exiting passengers. The citronella-scented lamps burning in glass housings drove away the shadows and the insects on the dock, and illuminated the departing people who were returning from the undersea excursions.
"I was a human, when I got here, as was my brother," Derrick said quietly to Patella.
"How did you end up a centaur then?"
"I was offered a spa day with some benefits. It turns out that I had some ancestors, far in the past, who had ties to the Olympians."
"So not like the rest of us? How is it everyone is turning into something else?"
One of the people leaving looked up at the man riding the centaur, and smiled at him, having overheard the slight bitterness in the question.
"You should relax, man, if you got here at all, it's because you wanted a change, and they wanted to give it to you."
Derrick smiled back at the fish-person. "So, what's it like out there?"
"Under the sea? That song is true. It's better down where it's wetter, take it from me. When I get home, I'm going to accept the job I was offered at the Oceanic Research group."
"Awesome," Derrick said, as the last of the other passengers moved past them. "I hope it all goes well for you."
"Is that a man or a woman?" Patella asked after a moment, as the sea-changed person ran to rejoin the others, waving a hand in the air as a good-bye or as a wait-for-me.
"Does it matter? Male and female fish can look a lot alike."
"Well, yeah, but ... I guess. It doesn't matter."
Jules chose that moment to return.
"Your wife and daughter -- that was Angela Patella and Brittany Duncan, right?"
"Yes, she married a guy named Duncan, he's in the military on deployment."
"OK, they managed to get a ride on a resupply ship this morning, so they're already on their way to Tritonis. But you can take the midnight ship and join them in place, in a few hours, or ... well, if you want to ride along on the Aphrodite's Dream, it's leaving very soon."
"What's that?"
"A personal yacht. Aphrodite loaned it to Anteros so he could visit his father. You'd have to help row."
Derrick had to look that up in his 'cybernetic' system. Anteros, the god of requited love, alleged by some to be the son of Aphrodite and Poseidon. One of at least four possible origins.
"OK, which would you rather do?"
"Were they all humans to begin with, or are they myths like you?" Patella asked, looking at the exiting passengers. The citronella-scented lamps burning in glass housings drove away the shadows and the insects on the dock, and illuminated the departing people who were returning from the undersea excursions.
"The sooner I get there, the better. Can you take me to the Aphrodite's Dream? I can't ask you to come with me, but ..."
"What do you think, J?"
"Gotta see it through, D."
"We're coming along," they said in unison, and cantered down the pier to the far end, where the Dream was docked. The Aphrodite's Dream was a smaller ship than the "cruise galleon" that was busily undergoing cleaning as the passengers waited in line. It had a mast, but it was shipped forward and down, with no sails flying. A young man stood at the end of the pier, his hair and chiton blown in the wind, and looked up as they came along.
"I have a message from the Hearth. Your parents are still on their adventure. They know that you are doing a favor to another guest, and the Spa is compensating your time, so you're free to go along."
"Thank you," Jules said. "Are you one of Hermes' people? You're not carrying the messenger wand."
"I'm the wind, baby," the young man said, laughing a bit, and a gust of warm air from the west washed across them ruffling his bright-red hair. "Or one of them."
Derrick tried not to laugh, but failed. "You sound like ..."
"Yeah, I know, but I'm not a bubble-head," the man replied, "and my name isn't Tom. It's West Sudoeste."
Jules, meanwhile, was talking to the shipmaster.
"OK, we're clear to board, and Derrick, you and I get to help row. Mr. Patella, you can row or ride as you wish."
"Might as well help out," the man said, "but I'm not sure how much help I'll be. I'm old and out of shape."
"The exercise will do you good," the Shipmaster said, escorting the three of them to the opening in the deck that led down to the oarlocks. There were several satyrs, a minotaur, and a number of humans below, about half of them wearing an iron collar indicating that they were serving out a punishment rather than there as hired rowers.
"Mr. Philotes, move the two katadikoi in the bow and the one on the port to the number three and four oars. Our centaur friends are quite strong, so we'll need to balance them on either side. Limpet, you can take the spot here across from Bovis."
"Limpet?"
"Sorry, I mean Mr. Patella. The words are similar in origin and the translation fails sometimes down here."
Mr. Philotes was a human-looking fellow with pale greenish hair. He led the three to their spots, facing the stern of the ship. They sat in place, Derrick and Jules alone on their oars, and Patella alone on his, which worried him a bit. He was across the aisles from a minotaur -- large, very muscular, and scary, and easily able to out-pull an out-of-shape human like himself.
"As usual, we'll be giving you all a dose of Scylla-Weed Tea for the trip, so you don't drown," the Shipmaster said in his 'announcements' voice.
Jules and Derrick immediately began looking that up in their lore-knowledge, but all they got was 'redundant to your adaptation protocols but slightly beneficial' before another voice was heard.
"Hello, darlings," a mellifluous tenor spoke. "Most of you know me already. Anteros, the sponsor of requited love. Those of you in collars are here because you offended against the rules and I expect you to work hard so you can pay your due. Those of you who are unchained hired rowers, thank you for joining us, and if you do well and work hard, I will reward you beyond your wages. But the two big horsey fellows, the Andersons ... your parents are one of my success stories, so I thank you for choosing to help. And now, you, Mr. Rance Patella, are a different matter. Your story is not one of my successes. You have been in love with your wife for thirty years, and she has never actually loved you, as you know. She was briefly infatuated, hence your daughter, but what you have given her has been money and safety and a moderate social standing, and what she has given you has nearly killed your capacity for any kind of love. Yet, you persevere."
The voice didn't seem to be attached to a body. It was just ... there ... in the air around them. The Centaur twins used the extended magical senses they had been gifted, and detected the presence of a powerful being but no actual body. They decided NOT to try to learn more, because at that moment a sort of tearing sob came from Mr. Patella.
"It will be all right," the voice of Anteros said, as gently as a Greek god could speak. "All my brothers have considered your situation. Pothos is especially urgent that you be given some relief. But we can no longer force desire upon an unwilling person without cause, and your Angela is not willing. She has something of Hestia's nature, you know."
That resulted in a blank confusion on the man's tear-streaked face.
"Rance, you deserve love and you deserve it to be returned. Will you let me and my brothers help?"
"I... don't know how you can, but anything is better than this constant indifference. Sure, whatever."
"Then give them the tea and give our Mr. Patella some ship's biscuit so he'll have the strength to row."
The sense of presence withdrew from them, and the Shipmaster called out, "Cast off the tie! Rowers! Begin rowing! We're backing out, so dip the oars on the forward stroke. Chant the pace, Mr. Philotes."
The greenish-haired man began singing a rhythmic chant, and many of the rowers began singing along with it. The words were obscure, the rhythm not too fast as they cast off. The twins joined in with some enthusiasm, and the ship began to move, with only a momentary confusion from Patella as he figured out the oarlock.
The Shipmaster called out maneuvers that took them away from the docks, then a young woman in a long chiton brought out cups on a slotted tray. A naked servant male, perhaps 13 at most, held the tray as she took the cups to each of the rowers, making them drink without stopping their movements. When she got to Patella, she took a round, hard white disk and broke it into his cup, muttering a charm of some sort over it. Patella slurped it up, thinking it was a bit like tea with toast, not complaining but not making happy comments either. The Twins were the last to get their tea and they accepted it with a polite, 'efkharistoo' to the server. She smiled, a bit surprised.
They felt the systems that Hephaustus had built into their bodies examining the liquid in the cup even before they drank it -- a simple adaptation using a touch of the magic of Circe and her rival Scylla. The myth of the rocks and vortex was incomplete of course. In this place and time, the reality was that Scylla was a sort of man-eating seaweed that grew along a cliff in a shallow rocky passage between two islands, with Charybdis being the swirling vortex of water that formed on the other side of the passage, leaving only a very brief and perilous route between. Ships drawn under by Charybdis were lost to human knowledge. Sailors pulled from ships by the vines of Scylla were stuffed into pitcher-plant-like pods at the surface of the water that changed them into fish, that when released, lived in the waters around the giant plant, eating the other fish that fed on Scylla, and tending to her roots. The history was long and complicated -- and contradictory, of course. But their course did in fact take them towards that famed narrow trap, according to the brochure for the Odyssean Tour.
At first, Jules had been compensating a bit for Patella's weaker stroke, given that the man was not as strong as the burly Minoutaur across the aisle, but as they hit the regular pace, Patella began to change. His body wasn't weak, but neither had he been strong or athletic. But that was changing, and fast. The man's modern clothing did not survive the first minutes of the trip; before they had left the mouth of the harbor, his jacket had burst as his shoulders broadened too wide for the narrow-fitting attire, and the shirt underneath didn't fare that well either. Rowing, if done right, uses the entire body, and Patella's legs grew longer as did his arms, and much more girthy with muscle. His back and core also grew so that his upper garments simply shredded off him as they left the harbor.
The minotaur Bovis looked over at him, surprised at the way the ship felt, and mooed out, "Not so hard, big man, you'll make us spin to the port!"
The Shipmaster laughed. "You just need to pull harder, Bovis. You've been getting lazy, rowing against the ordinary mortals."
Patella didn't seem to notice this. Since they began singing the timing chant, he'd been singing along with it and was lost in the rhythm and words, which may have been an intended outcome. Jules, seated behind him, was well aware of the changes, cataloging them for later review with Derrick, who was focusing on the details of how the galleon worked, and comparing it with what he'd read back in the human realms about biremes and triremes.
The minotaur muttered to himself, but began pulling harder on his own oar, and Derrick and Jules adjusted their own pace and pull as well. The oars were stronger than the majority of the mythologicals and humans who used them, but the Centaur brothers were blessed by (at last count) five of the Pantheon, one of them the god of sheer physical strength, and their own pull was enough that the Aphrodite's Dream very quickly hit speeds not seen for years. If they pulled too hard, they knew they could snap even these blessed oars, and that wasn't the reason for their trip. But they could make sure the rest of the crew got a good workout.
An hour of travel later, the ocean was flat, the stars and moon bright enough to see where they were going, and the moon's crescent was just off from setting when the man on watch spotted the twin promontories.
"Calabri in sight dead ahead, Shipmaster," the watch called out. The Shipmaster moved to the stern and took the steering oar from the steersman.
"Slow her down, lads, we're running a bit fast. We don't need to overshoot."
Raising the oars, they waited for the signal to put them to water again, and then the oarsmen in the stern were ordered to drag oars for a moment, until the movement was where the Shipmaster wanted it, then they resumed rowing, but with flat oars so they didn't speed things too much. The roar of Charybdis was loud enough that it almost drowned Mr. Philotes' chanting the rower's rhythm, but somehow his voice was louder than the whirlpool, and they could feel the ship speeding up.
"When we start to go in, drag oars, all, until I give the go signal, then hit it hard. We need to do the full circle downward so we get to the opening at the best time."
The rowers waited, then "GO" and they began pulling again, not quite hard enough to break the oars, but all of them bent further than they had so far. The ship rode the inside of the roaring spinning waters, and the steering oar took them deeper into the swirling vortex, hard. The sky wheeled above them, and they kept rowing, following the rhythm.
"Prepare to hit the wall," the Shipmaster called out, and the rowers froze at "stay oars" as the water began to pour over the bow, drenching the centaur brothers, Patella, and Bovis, then washing forward. There was a moment of disorientation as the water hit them, and they felt their skin change, and both centaurs felt their hindquarters being transformed into a long, serpentine tail. They wrapped them around the rower's bench and pushed their forelegs against the foot-board, and then Philotes called out with the chant again, and they began pulling harder and faster to the new faster rhythm. The oars were moving strangely in the water, swirling like knives moving forward, cutting through the transparent sea around them, then when the pressure stroke came, they became rigid and flat walls pressing against the mass of the sea.
"Good transition," the Shipmaster said. He'd become a Triton, a humanoid body adapted to the ocean with fine scales and sea-creature features and two fishy legs rather than the single thicker fish-tail of the mer-folk. Most of the crew, had done so, even the satyrs and minotaur. Some of the humans retained human legs, none had been transformed to traditional mer-people. The twin Centaurs were now Hippocampus-taurs, so to speak, and Patella had legs, of a sort -- his upper back now had a shell, a scalloped and tapered shell that looked a bit like armor, and his legs were a mass of tentacles wrapped around a pair of hinged wooden braces, positioned like corded muscles so they could move like legs, but they clearly weren't any more. A similar set of shells, in smaller segments, covered his chest and abdomen and his shoulders, so he looked a bit like an armored warrior. His clothing was gone, except for the wallet he'd managed to salvage.
"Welcome to the Life Aquatic, Mr. Patella," the voice of Anteros said. "You seem to have adapted quite well."
Patella blinked two large, multi-pupiled octopoid eyes, unsure of what had changed, but knowing that something was different. He decided to ask the Centaurs when they got to their destination.
"Keep rowing, lads. We'll be in Tritonis shortly."
The galley glided forward through the water as if it were a fish itself, leaving the roar and swirl of the vortex, and the gently waving tentacles of Scylla, behind them.
Ahead, the coral spires of Tritonis gleamed in the fading moonlight.