Curt was on the verge of panic. If someone else happened to walk into the poolroom now and find Curt and Bill — Billie, he corrected himself — with fishtails, literally anything might happen next. Crowds and phones? Police, fire trucks, ambulances? Men in black suits driving unmarked government vans? The CDC in hazmat suits? Scientists with dissection knives? He didn't want to imagine just how badly this could go for them.
And then Bi— Billie let out a pained hiss that drew Curt's attention back to the moment. While he had been mentally spiraling, she had been poking at her tail, moving it around, experimenting with the range of motion. It was totally flexible, like an extension of her spine, no leg-bones or knees or any such thing. But when she'd dipped her fins in the pool again, just to splash around and feel what it would be like, it hurt, like burning. "Ow!" she complained. "The chlorine stings!"
Curt just stared. "Billie, are you high!? Why aren't you freaking out anymore?" Then he noticed that his own tail was starting to itch. "Crap, we have to find some way to wash off this pool-water."
Briefly, he thought about crawling to the showers, but then it hit him: their gym was only two blocks away from the beach. If only they could somehow get out of here without being spotted, they might be able to make it into the ocean! The seawater would probably be better for them anyway. (Maybe; Curt didn't have any idea whether they were "freshwater" or "saltwater" fish-people now, but it just seemed to make sense that merpeople belonged in oceans.) Plus, it would give them a place to hide and . . . and . . . and then Curt put it all together. The ointment — the crap they'd put on their legs! — that was what had done this to them. And the creepy shop where they'd bought the stuff was on the boardwalk, barely a mile up the coast!
"That ointment!" said Curt suddenly. "Do you still have the bottle?"
Billie nodded and pointed over to a bench, where they still had their gym-bags — towels, clothes, shoes, and that mostly-empty ointment-bottle still sitting nearby. "It wasn't all the way empty, so I didn't throw it away." Using her arms, she dragged herself bodily over to the bench, and Curt did the same, just behind her. It was rough going; the smooth tile of the poolroom floor didn't hurt or anything, but it was slick enough on their scales that their fishtails found no purchase on it, and so they could only move by pulling with their arms and dragging the deadweight of their bodies behind them.
Billie came to rest by the benches and gym-bags and picked up the bottle, peering closely at the label. "It's just the instructions we read earlier," she said. "No mention of any of this. No warnings, and nothing about how to fix it."
Curt took the bottle from Billie, examined the label for himself, and agreed. "We have to get back to that shop, Find that old geezer. God, this is freaking insane . . ."
"You think the old man from the shop can fix this?" asked Billie. She sounded eerily calm. And on the inside, it was true, she wasn't panicking; rather, she was still in a state of shock. Everything happening now was totally unprocessed, and she felt mentally dulled, her mind muted in a cognitive fog. Weirder to her than the physical transformation, impossible as it was, was the psychological one: on an intuitive level, she couldn't help but feel like a 'she' now, even though she knew intellectually that she'd been a cisgendered 'he' all her life, and the fact that that had so suddenly and so thoroughly changed made absolutely no sense. It was beyond disconcerting.
But there would be time to have an identity crisis later. For now, they needed to act. And that was where Curt's mind was still at. "I don't know if that bastard can fix us, or if he did this to us, or what. But we need to get there to find out. Come on." Curt picked up his gym-bag, stuffed his shoes inside, and tossed a t-shirt to Billie. "Cover yourself up," he said. Then, he slung the bag across his back and started pulling his body toward the door.
Billie wasted no time in putting on the shirt and picking up her own bag, but before they left the poolroom, she stopped, opened up the bag again, and rifled through it until she found her phone. "Wait," she said Curt. "I've got an idea. For what to do when people see us."
Curt paused at the door and looked back over his shoulder at Billie. "What's that?"
Billie waggled her phone in her hand and said, "Duh! We're shooting some cringey-ass prank for TikTok!"
Curt nodded. That was good thinking. "Yeah. Yeah, that should work. Come on."
* * *
Astonishingly, they managed to make it outside of the building without running into anyone. Perk of hitting the gym at an odd hour of the day, Curt mused. The tile flooring and carpet inside the gym building weren't so difficult to deal with, but the story changed once they were outside and dragging their tails across pavement. It was probably harder on their hands than on their scales, but the slimy scales scraping across rough concrete was certainly no picnic.
Sure enough, the moment they got out onto the street and near a crosswalk, they drew stares from every passer-by. The sidewalks weren't too terribly crowded; it was a bright, sunny day in the middle of summer, so of course there were people out and about, but it was just a typically busy beachside area in a small west-coast town. Billie made sure to play up the fact that she was shooting video footage of herself and Curt with her phone, and her nervous laughter came through as more about being camera-shy than anything deeper. To any outside observer, they really did appear to be two early-20s TikTokkers or YouTubers shooting a goofy video in a mermaid and merman costume. They got a few headshakes, a few snide comments about "kids today," and also a small ring of onlookers who just wanted to see what was going on.
That last part actually worked in their favor, because once Curt made it clear to the gawkers that they were shooting a silly prank video about crawling to the beach in their "mermaid costumes," one of the assembled onlookers offered to carry Billie the rest of the way, and another offered to lend Curt his skateboard to help make the short two-block crawl easier on him. "Oh, yeah!" said Curt, secretly jumping for joy on the inside. "That'll make, uh, great footage for the video! Thanks!"
"No prob," said the skateboarder, while Billie was hoisted up into the arms of some buff stranger. "I love it when content creators go all-out on realistic costumes and makeup!"
Curt and Billie laughed nervously. "Uh, yeah," said Billie, "our makeup guy is really good."