#Glory and Gore || IC

[royalreef]

She has only just begun, and she cannot stop.

[royalreef]

There's a slip in her sundress, a pale slice where the bright and golden rays of the sun transform the light pink scales of her underbelly into a winter rose, the color of petals just barely struck through with crimson veins. It's a coy unveiling, primarily unintentional. Most of her clothes are pulled aside strangely, with how Miranda's stretched out on her back, arms pulled up and on top of her chest and her legs cast out to the sides. She looks like she might be dead, roadkill found in front of an open window where shadows add abrupt contrast to all of her contours, but her chest shifts to show that she is, absolutely, still breathing.

The sun is so warm today. The kind of warmth that Miranda wants to curl up inside of, teased so playfully by a cold wind that blows through and sends the curtains fluttering around her, just enough of a bite to make the rays of light all the more inviting.

Her eyes are shuttered, not in sleep, but in the easy daydreams this portion of spring brings. Somewhere outside, carried in on an errant breeze, is the smell of the early flowers and the later buds, pushing up and into a world of birdsong. It's the kind of peace that Miranda cannot wait to sink her teeth into.

[royalreef]

"Oh!!!! It can be scary to observe the fourth wall for the first time, but I assure you that it is a natural part of puberty!"

[royalreef]

" ...... Why would you ever wish to cut back upon the fried crickets?"

[royalreef]

"Whatever do I have to do to find a single eldritch entity that is capable of respecting boundaries?"

[royalreef]

Sits in 4'8".

[royalreef]

@unfortunatedarling inquired: "What's it like; your kingdom, I mean? Is it completely underwater? Or would a lung-breather be alright touristing?"

"Yes, yes it is all entirely underwater. Without a more adequate means to breathe and move and handle the physical differences, you cannot visit." It's her lips that draw back first as she speaks, pointed back towards the fluff that covers her cheeks, forming the base of her fins. Miranda does not look up. She remains looking at her necklace, spinning the rings arranged around it, running her claws over the notches engraved into its surface.

It's a lie, in that sweet way that the best lies are, which is to say, broadly true. There are parts of her kingdom that are above water, yes. Mostly islands, too small to have, at most, a few plants clinging to the anthill mountains too tall for the tide nor the seasonal storms to flood over, more sandbars than anything worth living on. There are some, larger, with more that remains forever above sea level, but these are not much to speak on either. Seabirds nest there on these largest islands, and their eggs are a delicacy. Her kingdom sets up processing areas on it, production for the rare few things precious enough to be totally incapable of making underwater. Sometimes there are trading posts, storage areas, places run mostly by the nomadic groups who use them as tiny bastions of their economic power.

None of this, of course, is the kind of thing she would have sent a visitor to go visit, but she's not really considering the option in the first place. She's a closed door, and what lies beyond she's not saying, least of all because she was placed here and closed and locked for a good reason, and cannot simply idly break from her duties without reason. Certainly not for all of this.

"I would recommend not being too heartbroken over it. We are a private people, who prefer to keep to ourselves. Really, I cannot envision you enjoying yourself down there. You are simply too different from us."

[royalreef]

Ignore the consistent thumping of a washing machine, and the mermaid spinning around inside it. Miranda's just feeling herself again.

[royalreef]

Beeps beeps beeps. Hi it's look at her time. Time to look at her. She's incredibly cute and pettable and kissieable and deserves so much love forever.

[royalreef]

What if she rested her chin on your shoulder and looked up at you with her big, wet eyes. What then.

[royalreef]

"I believe you would be a lot happier, as a person, if someone put a hook through your ankle, strung you up, and arranged you out by cut upon a charcuterie board!"

[royalreef]

Flutters her pretty little eyes oh-so-endearingly. "Truly? Could you think so?"

[royalreef]

"I take it being suddenly surrounded by beautiful women is not something which happens often to you?"

[royalreef]

The water puddles over her hands, sweeping up to the height of her forearm before receding back to dance around the mountain ridges of her fingers as the waves lap back out to sea. Little plumes of sand stir up around her claws as she moves them, settling over her scales and gathering in the tiny crevasses between the mount of each osteoderm. The sky is grey, but the ocean is still clear here, the sand turned a darker brown and sticking to itself in clumps further back, towards the shore.

It's quiet here. The seabirds haven't taken flight, laying close to the cliffsides flanking Miranda's castle, her home away from home, until the coming storm has arrived and gone. Mostly she hears the ocean, and the wind whistling in this alcove where her favorite beach lies, whipping the flags and ribbons that decorate her castle as it plunges down the cliffside and into the sea. Above, water trickles down the rocks, the remnants of a rainstorm that warned of what was to come.

Miranda can't decide if that's better or worse. She won't say that silence has not been her companion for some time, but she won't say it's a companion she would have turned to if there were other options available.

But she can't bear the dual weights on her shoulder, the pains that come with being torn between two worlds. Beneath, her people are waiting for her, expecting her to come back again this year, to play her annual part as centerpiece to this entire affair. It is a celebration of noise and of movement, and for that, that means she will have to do what she was born to do, say what she was taught to say, behave how she is expected to behave. She will have to meet with her fellow royals and play their games, games which she is just as ingrained within as all the rest.

Back up the cliffs, however, is a world that is so unfamiliar to her that it turns hostile on a whim. It expects things of her which she cannot deliver, which none of her people would have ever thought to even need, things which mark her as alien, as so different as to be intolerable. She speaks, and no one follows what she understands, looking back at her as though she's speaking nonsense. It is hostile to her body, a measure of extremes in life which no reasonable organism would be adapted to, a trial in survivalism alone. At best, she is a novelty, a toy. At worst, someone else could kill her through simply not attempting to understand her.

The waves tip over the top of her tail, brush her upper fluke to the side. A crab tip-toes carefully up to her hand, huddling against its side so as to not get swept away again, using her as leverage. Between it and herself, Miranda can spot her own reflection, pink and mottled and distorted by the froth of the waves. She is framed by the sky, its own endless sea of clouds blocking out the sight of the sun, her fins disappearing back into them as nothing more than pale fingers touching her from the above. She flicks the dual tips of her tongue out once, and her reflection follows, dark and black as they taste the salt air.

She's going to be twenty-five in just a few days. Isn't that great? Half of her adolescence gone by, and she's still sitting out here, thinking about all the places she doesn't belong.

[royalreef]

" ...... Would someone kindly remind me what year it is?" She's been in a wife coma. As in, she's been so distracted by the amount of love contained within her heart for her darling, her dearest, that she's a little confused to step back down to reality again. Don't worry about it, she had a great time of herself.

[royalreef]

"I believe birds are typically more... spherical? They are rather bottom-heavy, yes, but they are top-heavy too, with the keel and wing muscles and such... The legs and neck just stick off of them as though barely attached! So perhaps more like a... a crab, perhaps? Or, or like a snail, if the filaments and eye stalks and such were instead limbs... Like a leech, maybe?"