Demetria or Deme for short wasn’t happy to be selected for this task, she had hoped another one of the mermaids or merman in her community would be selected this time to go out and find a mate among the humans. Still the priestess who made the final selection pulled her name out of the ceremonial urn and therefor fate had decided she would go.
It wasn’t as if she didn’t want to find love, to find a mate to have children and make sure their small community stayed strong. It was just she was the 1st of her age range to go out on the hunt for a mate and therefor she was expected to come home with a mate. To not do so would be seen as a sign of bad luck and misfortune for her entire classmates and it was possible the priests and priestess who decided when to allow a mating ritual to happen would given their class less chances to go find a mate. She was only in what humans would call her early 20's like everyone else in her class, if she failed it would be seen as a dark mark among the whole class which could last for years or even decades.
They had to be careful after all, if too many humans disappeared in too quick of a succession, then the humans would know something was up and that would raise the risk of them being discovered. That couldn’t be allowed, for merfolk discovery meant death.
With a small seed weed bag over her shoulder she was led through the tunnels which connected their underground and underwater home village to the larger ocean and the human world above.
“Good luck Demetria, come back with a strong mate…may Poseidon and the fellow gods and goddess of the sea watch over you.” Said the merman guard who had led her to the entrees of the tunnel.
The tunnel halfway covered by a sunk human ship was only a couple of miles away from a popular human beach. She had been there a few times as every mermaid and merman knew at least some information about the human world be it by watching from a distance or learning it from former humans who had embraced the sea as merfolk. Her own grandfather had been a human himself, he had served on a ship if she recalled correctly.
Taking in a death breath of sea water she headed toward the human shoreline. Her powerful tail pushing her along with great ease. She wasn’t the fastest mermaid, everything about her was generally considered average among mermaids.
As she swam she thought about her looks would any mate really find her attractive, she was so average among her kind as she thought about it. She looked at her chocolate color skin as was told her skin would be described by a human. Her breasts were slightly on the smaller side but worked well with her frame she had been told. Her short lime green hair reached the back of her neck, she personally didn’t like long hair, got in the way of swimming she thought. Her eyes were a bright rich green, her tail a emerald green with some darker and lighter shades mixed in. Like most mermaids/merman her tail went up to her hips but it wasn’t a smooth transition from scales to flesh, she had patches of scales up to her ribcage. She wasn’t a red tail mermaid or the even rarer golden or silver tail one. She was overall a cute average looking mermaid even if she would be considered beautiful among humans.
She surfaced about a mile offshore and looked at the human beach, it was full of people, she wondered if her future mate be it a merman or mermaid was on that beach. Well she was about to find out as she moved in closer and prepared.
She moved to only a couple of hundred feet off the shore, she was close enough she could see humans all around her. Yet it was deep enough that she was unseen and unnoticed by the humans.
She reached into her shoulder pouch and placed the ceremonial markings in the positions she had been taught and with more then a little amount of fear in her heart she began to sing. Her song would go unheard by every human expect the human or in extremely rare cases the humans who had least had a chance to become her mate by becoming a mermaid or merman.