Page 11 of Alien Triton's Prize

The first breath of water wasn’t nearly as bad as the first breath of air. I kicked my feet, following her out of the room. I paused in the hallway to admire a swirling mosaic design of what looked like frosted glass. It probably was something else, though, because how could they fire glass underwater?

“Did you eat yet?” Cetia asked.

I shook my head. I wasn’t hungry but didn’t know how to let her know that without words. I was still recovering from the shock of just being here and didn’t have an appetite yet.

“Well, if you’re hungry, our dining room here is stocked with the best and freshest seafood available. Just help yourself.”

I grinned. Of course it was. It sure wasn’t stocked with the bestlandfood.

She opened the door. In the middle of the room was a surface that must be used as a table. There were no chairs, probably because everybody could just float comfortably in front of the table and eat. But what caught my eye the most were the two walls lined with clear cases.

Each case held a selection of live creatures. She hadn’t been kidding about the freshness of the seafood. There were alien fish, crustaceans, mollusks, and other animals I couldn’t begin to guess at categorizing, most likely because I didn’t have a categorization for them. The largest case held a veritable jungle of plants. I could only think of it as a salad bar, except there were clumps of what looked to be eggs on some of the foliage.

Maybe the automatic translator got the name of the room wrong, or perhaps English didn’t have a word for the room I was currently in. It was more like a live pantry crossed with a dining room.

Cetia approached one of the glass cases holding bivalves with scallop-like shells, each with four round orbs that looked like eyes poking out from it. Each pair of shells was as big as my face.

“The lamellis are my favorite. You have to give them a try later. The eyes are fatty but with a crunchy center. Ugh,so good!”

The description wasn’t particularly appetizing—in fact, it might have made me more than a little queasy—but I tried to smile and be polite.

“The beetsa eggs are really good, too. Once I start, it’s hard not to just eat them all.” She opened the case with all the plants and plucked a handful of bright red eggs from one of the leaves. Eachegg was about the size of a marble. She handed me two that were stuck together, then popped a few into her mouth, flashing a set of sharp teeth in the process.

I eyed the eggs dubiously.

“They’re good. You should try them.”

Welp, when in Rome. I tossed them into my mouth and bit down. I was pleasantly surprised by the way the eggs popped and by the salty flavor that exploded in my mouth. Hey, these were pretty good! They didn’t taste fishy at all, but rather like if someone created an all-in-one cracker and soup bite. These ones reminded me of cheese and onion soup but with a creamy smokiness. I could totally imagine eating them like chips. I sent her a thumbs-up, hoping she understood what it meant.

She grinned, then reached back into the case and grabbed a few more for us to munch on as we continued the tour.

As Cetia continued taking me to different parts of the home, I noticed that there was no kitchen. A little strange. Maybe they had chefs who cooked for them? They were rich enough for it, that was for sure.

There were a lot of rooms, including one full of tiny fish and other small, live specimens in carefully crafted and labeled enclosures. These were clearly not food, but not quite pets either. More like…a collection? There was another room full of nothing but shells, stacked up in neat piles. And a huge library.

But it seemed like a lot of the rooms weren’t really in use, probably because only Cetia and her brother, a housekeeper that Cetia introduced to me as Seena, and a handful of guards lived here. The housekeeper was another of those tentacled octopus creatures, like the healer’s secretary.

Seena managed to pat down every single part of my body with tentacles and suckers as she cooed about how excited she was for my and Cetius’s union, and how she couldn’t wait to have little ones swimming around the home. Then she waxed poetic about how cute Cetia and Cetius were when they were younger. I just smiled and nodded.

Once we’d covered most of the house, Cetia opened a set of doors with a flourish. “And here’s the courtyard.”

The courtyard wasgorgeous. Every available surface was decorated with so many pearls, shells, and other shiny objects that it almost hurt the eyes to look at it. There was a fountain too. The “water” in it shimmered with tiny gold flecks. It moved like water would on land but more slowly, arching lazily up and around, then meandering back down into the pool.

I remembered learning about this in school, how there were pools on the bottom of Earth’s oceans. We couldn’t possibly be far down enough for that, though, could we? Didn’t that only happen in the abyss? I doubted we were that deep, considering our short trip down and the fact that I hadn’t been crushed to death by water pressure.

I gestured to the water, trying to mentally send Cetia my questions.

“Pretty, right? The water’s collected from brine pools in the Northern Oceans, and then we add gold dust from an island that only our family knows the location of. Our grandsire discovered it in his travels. He was quite an explorer back in the day; it’s how the family business came about. He’d always come home with all these amazing things, and everyone wanted them, and thus Ebb Tide Trading was born. We sell rare and luxury products.”

That must be the company Cetius was inheriting. I committed the name to memory.

Now that the shock of the beautiful fountain was fading, I realized I was smack dab in the middle of a gorgeous underwater garden. The botanist in me rejoiced like a kid in a candy store. I swam over to a patch of blue and purple foliage streaked with silver and leaned in closer to take a look. They reminded me of Cetius’s scales.

“Cute, aren’t they.”

I nodded, then gestured to them, hoping she’d tell me about them like she did with the water.

Instead, she plucked one of the long fronds, grabbed a clip from her hair, and then used it to clip the frond into mine. It wasn’t quite what I wanted, but that was ok.

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