The sound didn’t quite register with Jyrgal right away, and as he squirmed his way forward he assumed his brain was just remembering past conversations. Buuuuut... wait, he never recalled voice that sounded quite like that.
“Why, why, why? Why can’t they?”
Jyrgal blinked in incomprehension as he struggled to understand just how he distinctly heard someone speaking. But... he was underwater! People couldn’t talk underwater! And, even if somehow impossibly someone could, there was no one around!
“They said, they said... oh...” the voice returned with a weeping wail.
...Ok... perhaps the divorce proceedings were taking a greater mental toll than he had thought. He slowly gazed left and right, looking for the source of the voice. The wailing continued, though morphing into a weeping murmur, echoing effortlessly through the water. Echoing this way and that, the voice may as well have been coming from inside his head or down there in there in the pit! Yeah, like...
...No, no someone wasn’t down there, were they? Jyrgal leaned forward, squinting his eyes attempting to discern shapes down in the pit besides the giant unknown creature. That thing had to be huge; who in their right mind would be hanging down there with that monstrosity? There hadn’t been any other boats in sight when he had ridden out here, so unless someone swam all the way out from land there simply couldn’t be anyone down there.
No human being could...
“I’m not ugly!!”
Jyrgal nearly soiled himself at the sudden proclamation, hugging his belly against the coral in an attempt to remain low.
“It’s not fair!” A great slam ushered out, as if a giant were pounding seabed, rattling Jyrgal’s teeth. “I worked just as hard as the others did, I deserve a chance just as much as they do if not more so!”
Another slam permeated the entire seafloor, than another. Jyrgal snapped his head around in panic, before the pounding subsided, at which point he attempted to calm himself and still his breath. Something... weird was going on, and prudence and rationality once again knocked on his front door calmly advising him to get the hell outta there.
“Look at me, look at me! What’s not to like!? I have it, there isn’t anything the rest of them have that I don’t!”
The urge to backpedal quickly was overwhelming, almost crushing but again an insatiable yearning to know just what on earth was happening pushed back and Jyrgal found himself inching forward. Just a little bit closer, just enough to catch a glimpse of what was going on, that was all he needed.
“Is it my head? My head? They... they always go on about the jokes, and they keep looking at it, could that be it?”
One more inch, and Jyrgal found himself with a halfway decent view of the chasm below. Scans left and right revealed nothing, just that indistinct creature huddling over itself. That is, until it rolled over and spun around.
An elongated form lifted itself from the seabed, piercing through the water and hauling the rest of its mass like a coil of rope unfurling itself. A sinew-esque twine of blue picked itself up and began twirling about in a circle, as if pacing, never colliding with itself or twisting itself into a knot. “I’m fit, they can sneer all they like, they can’t deny my right to have a mate!”
The weave of blue pounded the seabed. Pounded it with fists no less. The thing had arms. It had hands.
Jyrgal blinked and froze in mute shock, unable to twitch the slightest muscle; if breathing or keeping his heart beating weren’t automatic he would have forgotten to keep those up too. It... no, that... the thing... there was no way...
The sea serpent down below wove itself around, spinning in circles so fervently Jyrgal kept on thinking to himself it was going to fly apart. Rich blue scales flowed through the water in a dizzying malisma flanked by silken flexible fins that fluttered through the waves from the arms, the spine and the tail, the last of which seemed to be one massive conglomeration of a silken fin. Thick arms held tightly to the body at such an angle that the fins growing out the side were held in a smooth hydrodynamic position. Down the spine a seamless curtain of silken fin ran all the way from tail to head, which stood out elongated and slender, a gently tipped snout elegantly shaped into the head, rimmed by curving violet ear fins and crested by luminescent pearl eyes.
That... was not something that Jyrgal ever recalled reading about in a biology textbook.
“It... why? Why does it always have to be me?” the voice returned, though this time Jyrgal had some inkling as to what might be speaking. Soooo, not only was it something that shouldn’t, couldn’t exist, it was now talking to itself. Or herself; the more Jyrgal thought about it, more he was convinced that it was a female. Not that he could figure out how a completely different species could even sound female to his ears.
“They always say I don’t measure up, they always say I’m too hideous to ever find a mate. I... I...”
A kink developed in Jyrgal’s back that had him twitching in discomfort. Squirming he squirmed to try and relieve it but merely served to bump into some coral, a piece of which fell onto a precariously placed rock which then saw fit to tumble into an even bigger rock... Three seconds later a boulder the size his head plummeted off the side and into the pit, crashing around and creating a general cacophony of smashing and crashing rock that the dead couldn’t have failed to take notice of. And the sea serpent was somewhat less than dead.
Snapping about like a fire hose gone wild, Jyrgal’s most recent aquatic find scanned her surroundings to locate the disturbance and took precisely three seconds to look up and spot the wayward diver, hiding ineffectually amidst the coral. Those pearl eyes locked on to him and scrutinized, tearing him apart and examining him through and through. Jyrgal froze, unsure whether bolting was something even feasible. It wasn’t much of a stretch to imagine that this underwater reptile could outrun him like a demented semi-truck driver.
With a start the sea serpent ended it’s examination and bulged it’s pearl eyes outward and gaped, its long jaw hanging down like a lever. “Oh, of course!” she suddenly exclaimed with rabid enthusiasm. “Of course, of course of course!! It can work!”
Before Jyrgal could blink the twirling creature unwound and propelled itself at lightning speed, faster even than he had feared it could go, spinning its body around until it suddenly hovered over his face, staring him down on the scale of a cat looking down on a mouse. Its entire head was the size of his torso, towering over him like some descended deity ready to decide his fate.
This time, Jyrgal did soil himself.
Ecstatic, uncontainable delight swamped the creature’s face. “Oh by the Mother Seaweed, this is wonderful! You’ll do! You’ll do perfectly!” it exclaimed with crushing amounts of enthusiasm, squealing in an unearthly underwater shrill that made the diver slap his hands to his ears in a vain effort to silence it.
And then she reached for him.
Even in his scuba gear the marine biologist screamed as his arms flailed backwards in some half brained reflex to haul himself out of there, heart pounding and head throbbing as he tried to get back, to get away. But the sea serpent simply extended one of her long thick arms, yanking him by the shoulder and holding him immobile. Or... on the whole immobile, squirming like a mad cat Jyrgal kicked and flailed every which way possible in mad frenzied panic.
“Hold still,” the giant underwater dragon said gritting her teeth, “You’re making this difficult!” Were his breather not wedged in his mouth Jyrgal would have been happy to enter into a hysterical explanation as to why he wanted to make this difficult seeing as how categorically he did not wish to be eaten or subject to whatever twisted fate the sea serpent had in store. Whatever it was it didn’t seem to involve eating (at least right away) but rather taking one of her talon like claws and sticking in next to his face.
Screaming and wiggling failed to deliver him as he strained against the creature’s grip, which now seemed intent on prodding his mask. Finally though some determination rose in those enormous pearl maws of eyes and her claws began intently poking at his breather, trying to wedge it out. Jyrgal snapped his arms around it, trying to protect the source of all his air dozens of meters beneath the ocean’s waves but the serpent was either completely oblivious to this fact or was playing with him like a boy pulling the wings off a fly, content to watch him squirm in agony for his last moments of life as he drowned.
“Just about... there!” the serpent suddenly exclaimed as her claw finally wedged itself under his breather. Jyrgal felt its hard polished surface rub straight past his lips as it yanked off his breather leaving him exposed and at mercy to the naked depths of the ocean. His world swam around him as his life flashed before his eyes, tightening his lips in a vain attempt to seal in what little air he had. He tried to reach for his breather which was still attached to his gear, but the serpent batted it away. “Oh, I’ve waited so long, so long!” she cried out as she absent mindedly shook him like a rag doll, causing him to cough. The biologist watched in manic despair as several bubbles leaked from his mouth and floated their way to the surface leaving him behind in the iron grip of this sea monster. Strangely enough, the one thought besides pure panic that ran through his mind was that of his wife shaking her head and laughing derisively at how he had gotten himself in this predicament.
