#(( while having other senses that should be sharper suddenly be unreliable or absent entirely

[royalreef]

@multimusewonderland inquired: How do you think you'd fare as a human? What would you miss the most?

"Badly, I believe???" The question strikes her, simply because of how alien the line of thought would be, how hard it is to even imagine herself as one, having some experience with humans already. Landfolk alone would be hard enough, with the thought of how far her body is as she knows it from theirs, but some landfolk still have scales, still have claws, still have tails.

What would she even do, with that much reach? Why would she need legs so long, legs that sit underneath all of herself, balanced entirely on one single pinpoint, nothing hanging over or stretching out in any other direction. What could she do, with eyes made for light and for brightness, for colors in a thousand iridescent hues blooming out into a constant kaleidoscope of fury and flickering shapes? If she couldn't hear the world the way she loved, the way it sang to her, if it was all dead and she, isolated, found no reason to ever sing back, had no ability to answer on her own? To be so open and exposed, sensations pouring in through skin like too many intimate caresses, to be constantly aware of her clothes on her body, relayed back through hairs covering every inch of her? Wouldn't it be too much, too dreadfully much, to have everything feel like a kiss to her neck, her thighs?

What would she do with herself? To be so awfully fast, to keep going and going, to experience the world like the burning of a flame and to fight to keep it alive against her own whirlwind? To be hot inside all the time, to feel that yawning urgency of everything she did, to not sit and wait and let the world take her more gently by its hand? Who would she even be, if she were not a merfolk? If she was not one among many, the many looking back on itself, if she didn't have the world to hold her up when she wanted to rest? Wouldn't it be lonely, or would the independence turn all of this fervent need and beautiful connection into something ugly, something cloying, something too much for her to handle? What would she even be, if she had to be on her own, if she did not have her sister, if she became something even the dead did not know?

Worse yet, how would it feel to have her home suddenly beyond her, suddenly beauty and life and connection all closed off, inaccessible to her, and to have that which tormented her, that which hated her for not being the correct shape, not being able to move herself in the right way, suddenly be made for her? What would it be like, to be accepted into a world which had hated her up until the moment she lost everything that made her herself?

"Pretending is perhaps one thing, and it is nice to walk around in the shape of one, but I think I cannot ever imagine a world which I would not be myself! Perhaps it works for humanity, but it is just... too different, for me."