I awoke on what felt like a hard surface but for some reason, I still felt as if I were floating. I felt groggy and I had a headache from whatever it was that I had been drugged with but the general weariness, constant pain, and weakness that had plagued me for the past couple of months were gone. I felt healthier and full of energy, despite my head feeling like someone had stuck it in a blender.

For a while, I just lay there and considered the implications of that. Was I really cured? And what about the strange things that I had heard earlier? Had that been a dream? It had all seemed so real and yet, in a way, disconnected. As the grogginess and pain in my head began to subside I began to take mental stock of my body.

I certainly felt healthy, and strangely comfortable in a way that I had never experienced before. There were unusual sensations throughout my body that I couldn’t quite define though. My throat felt tight, but not uncomfortably so and there was this odd rhythmic pulsing sensation on my neck. I felt an impression of motion at my hips that my brain couldn’t seem to parse for some reason and my legs and feet felt strange. It was as if they were moving all wrong when I tried to bend my knees or wiggle my toes.

There was this feeling of pressure inside my forearms that I couldn’t seem to find a release for, and that made me notice that there was a slight pressure on that part of my body, like I was being restrained. That confused me a bit. I could seem to move just fine, even if everything below my waist felt weird. I raised my arms and opened my eyes to see what was up with them and when I did so my brain just froze under the weight of everything that I experienced in those brief seconds as I opened my eyes.

Even in those seconds before my eyes opened, I was aware of something strange and different. First, there was a slight resistance as I moved like I was underwater or something. My hands brushed something delicate and almost feathery that sparked a strange and faint feeling at my hips that I couldn’t make heads or tails of. Then my biceps brushed against something soft and fleshy as I raised them from my sides, a sensation that I felt not only in my arms but in my chest as well.

My eyes snapped open and I found myself staring at an unfamiliar pair of arms and hands with near-golden skin that was closer to my mother’s skin tone than my usual pasty coloring. The arms were long and slender with well-defined muscles, at least from what I could see in the upper arms. The forearms though were covered in some sort of tight-fitting metallic bracers with rings at the ends, which explained the feeling of being restrained. Those arms weren’t mine, at least not the ones that I was familiar with, and neither were those delicate feminine hands that were tipped with something that at first glance resembled manicured fingernails but actually seemed to be sharp-looking claws with a slightly pearlescent sheen.

My gasp of alarm brought another realization as bubbles burst from between my lips. I was underwater! I started to panic, frantically trying to kick my way up to the surface of the pool that I was apparently in but my legs didn’t seem to want to work properly. I was barely aware of the motion in the water until I felt a pair of arms pull me into a sitting position and wrap themselves around me as a soft voice whispered in my ear, “Shhhh! Calm down, it’s okay, you’re not going to drown. I… don’t think that we can drown.”

The voice and its words were slightly distorted from being underwater but I could feel my racing heart slowing as she spoke and my panic beginning to subside as if she was infusing me with her own calmness. She was right too, I wasn’t drowning. I wasn’t gasping for air or having water filling my burning lungs as I had feared. That strange pulsing feeling at my neck had quickened briefly but that seemed to be slowing as I began to calm down.

“Wha…” I began to ask, but I stopped cold at the unfamiliar voice that had escaped my lips. Even underwater and with just that one hesitant syllable to go on I could tell that that wasn’t my voice. It was lighter, feminine, and almost musical in and of itself. Panic and confusion surged through me once more and I wasn’t sure what was setting me off, the sound of the voice or the strange feeling of joy and rightness that it had filled me with.

Whoever was holding me, speaking to me in gentle whispers, finally released me once she had calmed me once again. She pulled away to give me some space and as she did I got a good look at her. She was slightly pale and long aquamarine hair haloed around her head in the water. As weird as it sounds, it must have been her natural hair color because it was matched by the delicately arched eyebrows perched above her large eyes. Even those eyes were aquamarine in color with flecks of sea green and long and thick lashes.

The face that held those amazing eyes was elfin; beautiful and angular with a cute button nose and full pouty lips and her ears completed that image, long and pointed but swept back against her head rather than pointing upward and sticking out. She was gorgeous and it wasn’t just her face. Her neck was long and slender, although the slightly pulsing slits that I figured to be gills to either side were a bit unnerving.

Her arms and shoulders were slim but with well-defined muscles beneath her soft-looking flesh and she wore a pair of metal bracers like my own over her forearms. Her bare breasts were on the large side of average, probably a bit more than a handful with silver dollar-sized pink areolae and nipples like pencil erasers. She had a trim tummy with muscular abs and her waist was almost too thin before flaring outward into wide hips.

Wide hips that had a large set of four translucent and ruffled-looking sea-green fins emerging from them, larger even than the width of those hips themselves. Hips that were covered in bright aquamarine scales from just beneath her navel to the tip of her fish-like tail. The fins at her hips were gossamer thin but easily six inches wide at the base and nearly three times that at the ends as they flared outward in ruffled pleats that swished in the water to steady her as she kept herself still and watched me. There were three large fins at the tip of her tail as well, in a sort of clover shape, each the same color as those on her hips and with a similar gossamer-thin yet ruffled appearance.

She watched me and remained still and silent for a moment as I took it all in. “Y-y-you’re beautiful… I mean you’re a mermaid!” I finally managed to gasp out and once again I was confused by the sense of euphoria that seemed to accompany that voice speaking my words, not to mention how strange my mouth and teeth felt.

The mermaid flushed slightly, her large eyes looking everywhere but in my direction before a sad look settled over her elfin face. It was like she was the bearer of really bad news and she was still looking carefully away as she emitted a bubbling sigh and told me gently, “Umm… yeah, so are you. I’m pretty damn certain that none of us was born this way though.” For a brief instant, I wondered why she said ‘none of us’ rather than ‘neither of us’ until the rest of what she had said made me look down at more than just my strangely different arms.

The first thing that caught my attention was the tail where my legs should have been, but then it was pretty hard to miss. In shape and size, it was nearly identical to that of the girl who had tried to calm me down with the same trio of fins at the end and the same billowing fins at the hips as well. My scales were a bright magenta though and my fins a soothing lilac, my two favorite colors, something that Maddie had teased me about a lot as we were growing up. My hips were wide and just below my navel bright magenta scales gave way to soft-looking light golden skin covering toned abs, a waist as slim as that of the girl in front of me, and a pair of breasts that may have been just a little larger than hers with prominent cocoa-hued nipples and areolae.

I just stared for I don’t know how long down at my body, reaching out uncertainly to touch it. I could feel it, it was real, and that caused a hurricane of emotions to build up inside of me; shock, panic, awe, horror, confusion, fear, uncertainty, and for some strange reason that I couldn’t comprehend, euphoria. I could understand everything else, but why in hell was I happy?

The mere thought of living my life as some half-human half-fish freak science project was more than enough to make me sick. That’s what we were. Pierce had changed us somehow, turned us into what we were now, and hazy memories told me that he planned on parading us in front of an audience like some sideshow attraction. My heart raced and the rapid pulsing of what I had to assume were gills on my neck didn’t help matters as I started to freak out.

I felt the arms of the young woman wrap around me as she tried to calm me, whispering things that were probably meant to comfort me but I wasn’t really paying attention as I continued to panic. It was sometime later that I managed to calm down again, listening to the gentle reassurances of the person holding me as she ran her fingers through my hair. Wait, my hair? That had started falling out from the chemo.

I pulled away uncertainly and tugged experimentally at the hair on my head, grabbing a lock and following it to the end as I brought it in front of my face. It was the same bright magenta as the scales on my new tail and it was thick, luxurious, and really long. It was probably past my butt, if I still had a butt. Once again I felt that strange feeling of euphoria building up in my chest and my heartbeat quickened.

“Are you okay now? I… I know this is weird as fuck and I was freaking out too when I woke up. I think that was a couple of hours ago but it’s hard to tell time here. It’ll be okay, we’ll figure this out, we just need to stick together. I’m Kara and that’s my little sister Jenny over there.” She was babbling a bit trying to put up a strong front for myself and the girl that she had just gestured to, all while being very careful to maintain eye contact with me. Maybe she thought that I was skittish.

The other girl was a short distance away and she couldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old with dark emerald hair and scales. She didn’t have any fins at her hips though and only a pair of small clear ones at the tip of her tail. She also looked at least as freaked out as I was. It made me furious. That sick bastard had experimented on a child?!

I tried to push that all down deep inside because like Maddie’s mother, Clara, always used to tell us, “Anger only makes things worse. If you’re angry or too emotional then you’re not focusing on the problem at hand. Problems don’t solve themselves while you’re getting pissed off, they just tend to get worse. Problems only get solved when you push aside those feelings and solve them yourself through cold and calculating determination and a steady hand.”

Or as Maddie’s dad, Max, would say, “Don’t get mad, get even. And remember to bring plenty of ammo.” Uncle Max was a very scary man sometimes but he had been like a father to me growing up. They were both right though, I needed to think calmly if we were going to get through this. Being a bundle of volatile emotions wasn’t going to help anyone.

It took me several minutes to calm down enough to speak and I could feel my cheeks flushing with embarrassment as I mumbled, “I’m… uh… Jon.”