Sara eyed the little gss vial with distaste. She gave it an experimental swirl, watching flecks suspended in the goopy blue solution spiral.

  "You're sure this is safe to drink?"

  "Selly made it," Ketch simply replied, crossing her arms. As far as the Azerketi girl was concerned, the work of her girlfriend was good as gold.

  Sara uncorked the bottle and gave it a sniff, a mistake that was rewarded with a nostril-clogging scent of dead fish. "Augh! God, Ketch, this smells awful."

  "Do you wish to meet her, or not?"

  "I mean, I do, but... couldn't she have, like, added some perfume to it? Maybe a bit of bacon grease or something for fvor?"

  "If you wish to critique her alchemy, you must first drink the potion required to reach her. I certainly won't be the one to deliver your childish compints."

  "By the gods, Master," Evie sighed from behind Sara, stepping forward. She uncorked her own potion and threw her head back, downing it in one slug. "See?" She wiped her mouth. "Now may we please get on with it? I'd rather not lose more daylight than necessary."

  The three of them were standing on the harbor's edge in the pitch bck of night, not a soul around to witness their gathering. The waves pping just below Sara's bare feet were impenetrably dark, starlight providing the barest glints of light when they broke against the stone. The harbor was choppy, stirred by breeze racing up and over Tulian's great walls, which Sara could see only by the way they blocked starlight on the horizon. Ketch had insisted it would be best to meet Selly and her father early in the morning, near or before sunset, and Sara hadn't wanted to wake up that early. Instead she and Evie had worked through the night, grinding their way through paperwork by candlelight until it was time to change outfits and depart.

  Those outfits were not too dissimir from Ketch's usual attire, an ensemble Ketch naturally had her own foreign names for. For all Sara was concerned, it was skimpy athletic ware, biking shorts and bikini tops that were rather fttering on herself and her companions. She'd normally have been all for prancing about half-naked with beautiful women, but she was about to be prancing her way to the home of Ketch's father, which changed things considerably. Even Sara felt a blush crawling up her throat when she imagined meeting someone's father while dressed in lingerie.

  And he made it for us, Sara suddenly realized. He literally weaved us the clothes we bang his daughter in. As a GIFT. Gods, this is going to be awkward.

  Never one to be outdone, Sara pinched her nose and opened her mouth, downing the foul potion. A gritty, slimy texture filled her mouth, sliding down her throat, but before it reached her stomach proper, she felt something shift. The concoction pierced the walls of her throat as if it were porous, entering her trachea as a thick sludge sliding down into her lungs. She reflexively choked, grabbing her throat while trying to swear, but all that came out was a series of bizarre bassy thuds and wet clicks, the solution having already expanded to dispce every inch of air.

  Ketch spped Sara's back none too gently, smiling wryly. "You know, your sve did a much better job at this than you. Shouldn't you be trying to set an example?"

  Sara flipped Ketch off while stumbling forward to the water's edge, hoping the sensation would be easier to bear when submerged. She hopped off without a second thought, embarrassment having robbed the bck waters of any ominous foreboding.

  She hit with a spsh and began sinking, none of her body's natural buoyancy there to send her bobbing back to the surface. The tropical Tulian waters were plenty warm even in the dead of night, and the thin material of her clothing was comfortable even when soaked. She opened her mouth as she felt her feet sink into the silty bottom, drawing a tiny experimental breath. When she failed to begin choking to death, she took another, and then another, and only once she was reassured that the potion had worked did she open her eyes.

  The world was painted in foreign colors, a new subcategory of vibrancy repcing the spectrum of light Sara was familiar with. Living things, such as the small baitfish scuttling by, were bathed in the brightest shades, while purely physical objects like stone and mud were almost too dull to notice. Ketch was the brightest of anything Sara could see, floating before her upside-down, arms crossed disapprovingly.

  "You really didn't trust Selly's potion, did you?" Her voice was altered by the water, but not unduly so, just the crisp edges of sound filtered out, as if Ketch were speaking from another room. Down in the water, Sara noted, Ketch's gills were much more noticeable, three slits on either side fred out and unduting.

  "I- Oh, that feels weird." Sara put a hand to her throat. There must have been some magical effect of the potion that allowed Sara to speak, because the sensation wasn't like anything else she'd experienced. She cleared her throat, trying again. "It's not that I didn't trust it, it's just that... Uh... I mean, well, can you bme me?"

  Ketch rolled her eyes, performing an acrobatic twist to pce herself in the same orientation as Sara, with her webbed feet facing the ground. Where Sara had sunk straight to the bottom, Ketch floated weightlessly above it, tiny flicks of her feet and hands correcting for the push and pull of the waves without any apparent thought. Ketch, a rogue, had always been graceful in her movements on nd, but beneath the sea there was an almost otherworldly surety to her every action, a level of precision that Sara could only imagine possessing for herself.

  A spsh from above caused Sara to snap her attention upwards, but her sight was almost immediately blocked by the halo of hair she'd failed to tie back. Shoulder-length curls looked great on dry nd, but as thick globs of it began to tangle together or get caught in her mouth, Sara had to admit Ketch's buzzcut made a hell of a lot more sense beneath the waves.

  "I swear, you fool," Ketch muttered, pushing herself over. Sara stopped fighting her own hair as she felt the azerketi's expert hands weave their way into the snarl, pinning it back in a matter of moments. Sara's vision was cleared just in time to see a smirking Evie float down, smugly adjusting the hair tie she always wore. Ketch snipped off a piece of seaweed from nearby, neatly tying off Sara's hair into a ponytail. "There," she huffed, "now you won't swim straight into a wall. Also, you probably don't want to be standing in that."

  Sara looked down for the first time. The silt beneath the ship berthing was a pale gray, suffused with decades of detritus. Rotting ropes ensnared abandoned anchors, collections of half-broken fish skeletons piled so high Sara was shocked she hadn't nded on any. She made a face and quickly kicked up off the ground, joining Evie in a light paddle just above the muck.

  "Jesus, this is your daily commute, Ketch?" Sara asked. "This shit's rank."

  "What else did you expect? Sailors are not famed for their cleanliness."

  "Still, though, you swim by this every day? We're gonna have to make, like, an azerketi-only section of the harbor. I can't imagine this'd make a good impression if any foreign azerketi came to visit Tulian."

  "Nothing worse than every other port, from what I've heard. Quite a lot better, if anything, with the reduced shipping after the storms. Now, are you all ready to go?"

  They were. Sara and Evie kicked after Ketch, making fools of themselves next to the nimble woman, who grew progressively more exasperated at having to wait up for her charges. The harbor was built around a natural bay, giving the hidden ndscape a rolling nature to it, but over the centuries more than one king or mayor had seen fit to make improvements. Channels had been dredged in the shallowest corridors, underwater canals that the deepest draft of ships had navigated through. How anyone in this world did construction underwater, Sara couldn't imagine, but she figured magic must have been involved in some capacity.

  Idly, she wondered if azerketi wizards were common; that would certainly simplify projects like dredging, not to mention the potential for magical attacks on ships from below. Per Ketch's expnation, Selly had single-handedly ripped every living soul off a ship without ever exposing herself to danger, and that'd just been one woman. In the past Sara would have left the thought there, no more than passive musing, but the revetions wrung from Vidanya had changed things. Infrastructure and military power were of vital importance, and it was her duty to explore any possible advantage. She'd ask Selly about it during their meeting.

  The actual swim itself was uneventful, aside from Sara catching a few gnces of rger things swimming at the edge of her vision. Lithe bodies with sharp fins, prowling in lonely circuits. They never drew too near, making it hard to judge their size, but Sara would have guessed most were north of ten feet in length. It was a little bit like being in the African savannah, catching the barest glimpses of lions emerging and fading back into the tall grass, never sure if she was the target of their interest. Her only reassurance was the way Ketch paid them little mind, and Sara did her best to imitate that nonchance.

  Ketch began to descend after twenty minutes or so of swimming, guiding them towards a more natural ravine that abutted the harbor walls. Unlike the dredged channels, this rift dove deep into the earth, any end well beyond sight. Ketch swam directly down, angling towards the far rock wall. Right around when Sara began to grow concerned about things like water pressure or decompression sickness, a glow faded into view, lighting the entrance of a cave. Ketch swung towards it, beckoning them onwards.

  "Hey, I'm home!" Ketch called into the cave, catching the upper lip of the cave to flip herself inside. "Sara and Evie are with me, too. They barely even choked on the potion, too."

  A muffled response began, one that became clearer as Sara approached. "...thought you said they were coming tomorrow? I'm hardly ready for guests, dear!"

  The voice sounded like an older man's, a pleasant sort of minor chastisement in his words. Ketch sighed loudly, a noise that Sara couldn't quite expin the origin of considering the ck of air.

  "Dad, it is tomorrow. It's nearly sunrise."

  "My word? Already? I must get the-- Oh!"

  Sara nded on the stone floor at just that moment, startling Ketch's father. "Sorry for the surprise, sir. If you need a bit more time to get ready, it's not a problem at all."

  As she spoke, Sara took in her surroundings. The mouth of the cave was a ten-by-ten-foot lumpy circle, the home beginning just a few feet away from its entrance. It was built from the ground up for those that lived underwater, alien in its disregard for up and down. Things cluttered the ceilings, walls, and floors in equal measure, multicolored glowing corals growing like overambitious housepnts. Seagrass woven into ropes had been looped through chiseled holes in the stone, securing sushi-like packets of goods wrapped in ft seaweed. A few intrepid minnows were pecking at the yers in an effort to get at whatever was stored inside, until Ketch shooed them away exactly as one might flies on nd. The closest thing to furniture as Sara knew it was a few stone tables near the back wall, piled high with half-woven bck threads that she recognized as the nylon-esque material that made up her current clothing. Two branching paths of the cave twisted away to either side of the desks, curving too sharply for Sara to see much further.

  Ketch's father himself was the spitting image of Ketch, or at least Sara initially thought so. The man was only the second azerketi she'd ever met, so she made an effort to note the differences. His hair was shot through with white, kept longer than Ketch's, two or three inches that floated freely as he moved. His blue skin was mottled with darker patches, a pattern simir to vitiligo, and it broke up the otherwise unremarkable fbbiness of his paunchy build. Even with gills in his neck and cw-tipped webbed hands, the man looked every part the role of 'Dad'. Sara hadn't spoken to him at all, but was already certain he had extremely firm opinions on this world's equivalent of weather forecasting, wncare, and deck building.

  Ketch's father waved them in. "Well, since you're already here, come in, come in!" He looked down at the corals and packets studding the floor and frowned. "It's been so long since I had guests from above that I forgot the way you folk are so poor at floating. If you give me just a minute, I'll have this cleared away so you don't have to kick about like that."

  "It's not a problem," Sara immediately insisted, finding a clear spot to nd on, Evie alighting a few feet away. "It's nice to meet you, sir. Ketch has said a lot in your favor. I'm Sara, and this is Evie."

  "Oh! Yes, introductions. I'm Birl, Ketch's father, and I must say that she's said very many good things about you, as well. It's a shame her mother has been away for the st few months, but the harvest is too good down south this time of year for her to waste her time twiddling her thumbs with us. You should visit again, when the rains stop. She should be home by then. Though..." he looked around at the home, wringing his hands. "I'd much rather you didn't tell her about the state I kept things in for this visit. I really ought not have put off tidying for so long."

  "I'll keep the secret," Sara agreed, smiling. For a five and a half foot tall fishman, he was adorable. "What about Selly? Is she home right now?"

  "Oh, Selliana? Of course, my apologies, of course you'd want to meet her first, I beg your pardon. Yes, she's just about always at home. Would you like to go meet her?"

  "Whatever's best, and no, I didn't want to meet her first. The clothes you've made for us have been excellent, and I've got a lot I want to talk about there. We don't have anything like them up top, and I think you'd be a very wealthy man if you could find a way to make enough to sell them."

  "Oh? Ketch said as much, but I thought she was just puffing me up. She's a good girl, isn't she?"

  "Dad!"

  Sara blinked. It was disorienting, experiencing such a normal interaction in such a bizarre environment. If you repced glowing coral with lightbulbs and stone furniture with recliners, Sara wasn't sure if she'd have been able to distinguish this moment from any first meeting of her various girlfriend's parents back on Earth. Sara even noticed the old, stilted formality infecting her words, self-consciousness leaving her talking to Birl like he was a drill sergeant.

  "She is, sir, and I'm lucky to have met her. She's been a huge help, and she's saved a lot of lives."

  It was Birl's turn to blink, astonished. "Oh. My word, that's rather dramatic, isn't it? But I guess it's true, what with the battle in the harbor and whatnot... Well. Far be it for me to get in the way of my daughter's successes, Sara. If you'd like to go meet Selliana now, I can spend a few minutes cleaning up here."

  "No need to struggle on our account, sir," Sara said, hopping back up into the water. "Thank you for your hospitality."

  As Sara and Evie began swimming toward the indicated tunnel, she heard Birl, under his breath, say to Ketch, "Rather formal girl, isn't she?"

  "I think she was just nervous, dad."

  "Nervous? A Champion? To meet me?"

  "She's kinda just like that, I guess. I gotta go, alright?"

  Sara waited until Ketch caught up, then followed her down into the cave's entrance. It immediately began an awkward, twisting dive into the earth, the sort of maze that Sara imagined would have gotten a lot of over-ambitious scuba divers killed back on earth. Ketch guided them past a plethora of branching paths, following a trail of cultivated corals that made just enough light to find the walls by. After nearly five minutes of swimming, Sara spoke up.

  "When you said Selly lives with you, I was imagining something more like a house. Where you were all sharing the dining and living room, that kind of thing. This is basically a different city block."

  "She comes up on occasion," Ketch replied airily. "And it's for the best that she lives down here. Some of her less successful experiments get... noxious. It's for the best that it's diluted by the time it gets up to the rest of the home, trust me."

  "So she is not just a mage, but an alchemist?" Evie asked.

  Ketch tilted her hand back and forth in an uncertain gesture. "Eh, I don't know about that. Mage, alchemist, whatever you want to call her, it's not quite right. You'll see. We're almost there."

  With an answer as ambivalent as that, Sara's curiosity grew with each passing moment. Eventually the cave began to narrow, signs of work showing on the stone, until Sara and the others were swimming single-file. A door appeared at the end of the hallway, treated wood coated in a thin yer of algae. Ketch put her hand on a rusted iron handle, pausing to gnce over her shoulder at Sara.

  "Just so you know, Selly can kind of be... a lot. If she says something weird, or does something weird, don't take it to heart. She does it to everyone."

  Sara raised an eyebrow, but nodded. Her idea of what was weird had been warped the moment she'd been ripped from reality by a foreign goddess; a reclusive mage couldn't be that bad. Ketch took a deep breath, then opened the door.

  "Selly! Sara and Evie are here!"

  A green current immediately swirled out from the room, eddies of disturbed moss and algae clinging to Sara's skin as she followed Ketch in. Sara coughed a little bit, waving what she could away from her face, and forded on.