Sunday; November 4, 2007
Who: Nuray & Corisanthias
When: 3 pm, November 4th
Where: In Van'taurë Lake
What: Nuray is hiding from the world and Corisanthias comes to join her at least for a moment.

Nuray was a strong person. She was adapted to survive the pressure of thousands of tons of water overhead without disorientation. Swimming in the currents of the ocean for miles without tiring. She was built strong to survive. Yet in moments like this, when she considered that all life is transient and even those she cared for deeply, her family and Jay, would eventually fall prey to that, she was weak. Weak and fearful of what tomorrow might bring. Most people, when they are depressed find a spot in which they are comfortable and proceed not to move from it. For Nuray, it wasn't a room in a house, it was the bottom of the saltwater lake where she could lie between the flagging kelp and the rocks, watching the fish go past, and wish that none of it was real. Perhaps if she had never gone ashore, she would have never been faced with this feeling.

As far as she knew, murder was an alien concept among Merpeople. There was no real word for it in her language. Among the largely tribal creations of her area of the water such a thing was unheard of. Who you swam with was often your family. Only the mad attacked their family and that came from tainted fish or bad water, not from the person themselves. There was too much to do with simple survival and then a lack of things truly worth fighting for that kept such things from happening in mer communities. So Nuray surmised as she laid there at the bottom, somewhat certain that she had no real intention of getting out of the water anytime soon. No, instead, she wanted to stay where the world made sense.

Food was never very far away. If she wanted to see the sun, breaking the surface wasn't a problem, but she felt too detached to go back to Jay, back to what could be considered her home. It was just easier not to.

Something slid across her tail and she turned back to look at what it was, just a fish that had thought she was a rock because her colors made her hard to distinguish when she was settled on the bottom like that. With a playful swat, she sent the fish on its way to find another hiding spot. She was not a rock and thus did not qualify, nor did she wish to be caught up in some fishy game of hide and seek.

There were still those caves to explore and she heard tell that there was a merperson community down here in the lake. Perhaps she simply hadn't gone far enough from the nearshore to find it. Maybe there was a possibility of forging a new life here like the one she understood. It would mean leaving Jay behind because he couldn't breathe underwater and she had yet to hear about any advances that would allow him to come down and spend time with her. Nuray would miss him. She'd spent the better part of the past decade with him. Actually, she had spent the past decade with him. He was her best friend. The closest she had ever come to having a lover, though from what she understood of his culture, their ideas of what 'lover' meant were significantly different.

Shifting, she looked up at the afternoon sun which she could still see if she turned her head in the right direction. The day was wearing on. Was she hungry? Not really. Certainly not sleepy. Just despondent. That was a good word.