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– Огурчики! Толстые, шероховатые и полны удовольствия!

Не важно, что за сон тебе снится, приходит время, когда ты должен проснуться.

– Хотела кушать. Присматривала за домом. Кушать нету. Не могла уйти.

– Так, Муроми-сан, что на этот раз?

– Спаси её. Спаси её.

– Подумаем... Раз, два, три... Семь звёзд и надкусанное яблоко. Неужели ты – Белоснежка?

– Бинго!

– Я что, угадал?

– В этом мире есть вещи, в которые лучше не совать свой нос.

– We tailed her for half the day, and not only did she not meet anyone, all she did was eat and poop.

– She entered a family restaurant.

– Behavioral psychology suggests it's suspicious for a teenage female to enter a family restaurant alone.

– Eww! Gross!

– Is there a problem you're facing? Just let me know and I'll make it go away!

Scuttle shrugged. «I don't know, Ariel. She's evil, right? Who knows why she does anything? To make more evil, maybe? Or maybe she just likes it here. Whatever is going on in her crazy head, we gotta take her down, that's what we gotta do. We'll eighty-six her, get your dad back, get the prince, and everyone lives happily ever after».

An explosion of grey and white feathers landed on the beach next to them. As soon as he recovered himself, Scuttle threw his wings around her in a gully embrace.

Without spoken language and no knowledge of signs, back then she wasn't able to tell Eric what had happened to her or how she loved him. She wasn't able to tell her father not to trade places with her. She wasn't able to rule her kingdom without the help of a fleet of people to interpret and speak for her.

Ruefully she remembered the concert that Sebastian had so carefully planned, which she had missed, which her dad had punished her for, which led him to set the little crab on her case, and so on...

She hadn't been deliberately disobedient. She just... forgot.

Her voice had been such an important part of her life before. The merfolk celebrated her for it. Her father excused her occasionally questionable behavior because of it. Eric loved the girl who rescued him, because of her singing....

...she'd never really enjoyed singing for anyone else. In fact, she hated audiences. She sang because she liked to sing. She just... felt... something, and had to sing it. If she were happy, or sad, or angry, she would go off by herself and sing to the coral, sing to the seaweed, sing to an audience of sea snails or tube worms (who listened, but never commented). Most of her mergirlhood had been spent swimming around, exploring, singing to herself. Making up little stories in her head and then putting them into song.

She coughed and tried again, cocking her head and effecting a stem look.

«Just do it. Flounder; I need the tax audits by the third tide so we have something to present to the council». «Sebastian, I don't care about the gala or its details. I'm sure it's all fine in your very capable claws». «And with the cutting of this ribbon, I hereby declare the Temple of Physical Arts open to all!» Ariel smiled, then threw back her head and laughed – but it was brittle. She picked up a shard of the nautilus and sighed.

She had the voice of the gods, some had said. The sort of voice that could lure landlubbers to sea and sailors to their deaths, a voice that could launch a thousand ships. She had the voice of the wind and the storm and the crash of the waves and the ancient speech of the whale. She had the voice of the moon as it glided serenely across the sky and the stars as they danced behind. She had the voice of the wind between the stars that mortals never heard, that rushed and blew and ushered in the beginning and end of time.

It was like a pile of books had fallen from a high shelf onto his head, and, having broken his skull, somehow managed to directly impart their contents into his brain.

His hands were raised, trying to draw more out of the violins with his left while holding back the percussion with his right.

Ariel collapsed. It was over.

Ariel sighed and brushed her fingers over it, feeling strangely melancholy despite the triumph she literally held in her hands. Years of being mute could be swept away in a second. Years of frustration, years of silent crying, years of anger. And then what?

Everything in the ocean was a thing of beauty and numbers, even in death.

Mermaids could live for a long time: but their bodies became foam that dissipated into nothing when they died. The poor little mollusk who lived in this shell had a very short life, but his shell could last for centuries.

Maybe there was a hidden panel somewhere, or maybe the sea witch kept him locked up in a real dungeon, downstairs.

What would she do if she were the old Ariel and a shark were hunting her?

Ariel wanted to stay and poke through things, try to get a glimpse of the boy she had loved. But her time was limited.

The one time a guard stopped her, Ariel just gestured the tray at him. That was enough: he grabbed a heel of the bread, leered at her, and ushered her on.

Ariel had to fight the urge not to gag. Was he really eating what he knew were someone else's scraps? Did these «advanced» humans, with their machines and fires and carriages with wheels, know nothing about the spread of diseases? Surely there was a land equivalent of the unseen, tiny sick-fishes that surrounded and lived in those who were ill...