Not too far away, a girl seemed to be floating in the sea, watching you. She disappeared below the surface momentarily only to be revealed as she got closer to shore that she was only part human.
What caught your eye at that moment though was that in her right hand she was holding a fish. She seemed to be offering it to you with a small smile on her face.
Hungrily, you take it from her hand. You were about to eat it until you thought that it would be better if it was cooked. So, delaying your meal for a while longer, you go about making a makeshift spit to cook the fish with.
The mermaid watches you intently until you remember your manners and thank her. She then attempted to join you for the time being, dragging herself further out of the water.
Looking up from the spit, you get your first good look at her.
She's nude as would be expected from a mermaid or so you though. The part of her that was human looked to be Caucasian, having blue and long blond hair that could reach to her stomach. Her ears were somewhat pointed though you thought that was more to do with elves than mermaids. Between her fingers, connecting the knuckles that were an equal distance from her fingertips and her palms, was a semi-transparent pink webbing. On her arms were pink fins from her wrists to her elbows. Finally and somewhat prominently her breasts seemed to be D-cup sized if not a little larger. Still wet, water dripped from her nipples for a while.
Her lower half was that of a large pink-scaled fish with a two-feet-long three-feet-wide fan-like caudal fin where her feet would have been had she been human. Besides that large fin, she had a smaller fin on either side of her "shin" and two more fins on top of her "thigh". Finishing off the fins, there was a flexible fish-like dorsal fin on her lower back.
She also seemed to have two sets of three gills under her breasts. You thought this was strange since she seemed to breathing all right out of the water or for the moment. Currently, she was sitting with her webbed hands on the ground behind her to support support herself up into a sitting position.
You blushed a bit as you noticed that despite being a cat-girl maid, you still found yourself a bit turned on by the sight of the mermaid's still dripping wet body. You were ultimately thankful that the witch's transformation hadn't changed your mind altogether too much (disregarding the obedience spell and your sudden interest in fish).
The fish is done, and you eagerly pull it off the spit and take a small bite out of it after making sure it was cool enough not to burn your mouth or as close as was possible. The mermaid watches you for a while, then speaks. "I presume you had a run-in with the witch?" she asks. You nod.
"I thought as much," she says. "I did too, some time ago. My name's Chloe and as you can see, I'm a mermaid." She gave a flap of her caudal fin, it beat against the sand, to further emphasize her obvious statement.
You softly nod as you take another bite out of the fish. "I don't suppose you'd know a way out of here then?" you ask after you swallow the bite.
"Well, if you just mean 'out of the forest,' you've already accomplished that. If you mean 'back home,' that's a little more complicated," she said as she ran a webbed hand through her hair as her caudal fin flapped against the sand again.
"The shoreline stretches more than three days' swim in either direction, all of it unbroken forest past the beach. And I've gone two weeks' swim out into the ocean without spotting another landmass. I'm pretty sure this is not the same world we came from," she continued as she decided to recline back with her elbows supporting herself up this time.
You stare at her, realizing the gravity of the situation. Until now, you were concerned strictly with getting home and finding a means of changing back. Now it seems as though your chief concern is getting back to your own universe, let alone home. "What can we -- what can I do?" you ask, not wanting to presume.
"If you can find a way to bring me along, I wouldn't mind if you made it 'we'," she said with a smile on her face.
"The way I see it, we have five options: we can search the shoreline, looking for an edge to the forest, we can build you a raft and sail to sea, looking for another continent with people who can get us home, we can search the woods for an exit back to our world, or we can storm the witch's house, take her prisoner, and try to get her to change us back and send us home, ... though it would still require you to carry me or find some other way to take me along at one point or another," she continued to speak, still with a normal pattern of breathing, despite seeing the gills under her breasts open and close.