About that

The priestess drifted near the tube's entrance, something joyful and reverent settling over her expression, the crescent moon on her forehead glowing steady and warm.

"...We can finally make tribute to the great Dryva again," she said, voice thick with genuine, overwhelming emotion. "We can make the journey to the City of Worship once more, exactly as our ancestors did, generation after generation, before the ring ever sealed us away."

Arista went very still.

"...About that," she said slowly, an entirely different kind of dread settling into her chest.

The priestess glanced at her, curious. "...What do you mean?"

"...We'll get to it," Arista said, deflecting for the moment, buying herself time she genuinely wasn't sure how to properly use. "Who exactly is Dryva? I want to make sure I understand what your people are actually expecting to find, before you make that journey."

The priestess considered the question, settling into the easy, practiced cadence of someone reciting something deeply familiar. "Dryva is our god. Ancient beyond memory, our stories say he was born the very moment the seas themselves came into being, a being of boundless curiosity and boundless patience, who has watched over our people since before recorded history began."

Arista's stomach dropped slowly, dawning realization arriving in pieces.

"He is said to delight in all things new," the priestess continued, entirely unaware of the growing horror settling across Arista's expression. "Curious about everything, endlessly patient with the small and the strange, and, according to the oldest stories: deeply, genuinely fond of shiny things."

Bram, floating nearby, made a small, strangled noise.

"The City of Worship," the priestess continued, "was built specifically as his resting place, generations ago, so our people could bring him tribute, precious stones, careful craftsmanship, anything beautiful enough to earn his attention and favor."

Arista pressed both hands over her face, the full, absurd, delightful shape of the truth finally, completely landing.

"...Oh my god," she said, muffled. "Oh my god, it's Squishy."

The priestess blinked. "...I do not recognize that name."

"Dryva," Arista said, lowering her hands, torn between horrified laughter and genuine, overwhelming affection. "Your god. The one who delights in new things, who's endlessly patient, who loves shiny objects." She let out a short, disbelieving laugh. "We've known him for months. We call him Squishy."

The priestess stared at her, utterly speechless.

"...You have been in contact," she said slowly, "with Dryva himself. And you named him Squishy."

"...In our defense," Bram offered, weakly, "we didn't know he was a god at the time. He was just a very large, very curious octopus who happened to be genuinely good at solving puzzles."

The priestess pressed a hand to her own forehead, the crescent moon there pulsing rapidly, clearly processing an enormous amount of information all at once.

"...He solved a puzzle," she said, faint. "For entertainment."

"He solved several things, for entertainment," Arista admitted. "He also helped build a dome. And matched materials by taste, apparently, once texture-matching stopped working. And once got so excited about finishing a puzzle that he launched it out of the water directly onto our ship's deck, cracking the planking."

The priestess sat with that for a long, stunned moment, then, slowly, unexpectedly, began to laugh, a warm, genuine, disbelieving sound, entirely unlike the reverent solemnity she'd carried until now.

"...He has always been described as playful, in the oldest stories," she said finally, wiping at her eyes. "I simply never imagined 'playful' would translate quite so literally into 'cracked your ship's deck out of sheer excitement.'"

"That's genuinely accurate to who he is," Arista said, grinning now despite the lingering shock. "He's curious, gentle, occasionally a little too enthusiastic, and very, very fond of shiny rocks."

"Then I suppose," the priestess said, still smiling, wonder settling back into her voice now that the initial shock had properly passed, "the tribute journey is going to require considerably less ceremony than my ancestors imagined, and considerably more luminescent ore."

Arista laughed, delighted, the whole absurd, wonderful truth finally settling comfortably into place.

"...He's going to be so happy to see them again," she said, quiet, genuinely moved by the thought. "Let's go tell him."

She glanced at her own status effects, checking the timers absently. Water Breathing sat nearly spent, mere minutes remaining. Tidal Tongue, by contrast, still showed a little under an hour and a half left, out of what she now realized was a full two-hour duration total.

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With the first effect nearly spent, the crew made their way back to Nettle's ship, climbing aboard just as it finally faded, ordinary air settling comfortably back into their lungs.

Everyone except Bram immediately began the same, entirely futile attempt to wring their soaked clothing dry, twisting sleeves and hems with grim determination that produced, at best, a slightly less dramatic drip.

The priestess and her two companions surfaced alongside the hull, watching the crew resettle onto the deck with quiet, curious patience.

"We'll head back toward Dryva as soon as everyone's ready," Arista said. "You can follow alongside us?"

"We can," the priestess said. "Though we will need to stop and rest along the way. Our ancestors usually completed the tribute journey in around six days."

Nettle, at the helm, glanced back. "Six days? It took us four to get here."

The priestess considered that. "Then we will slow you somewhat."

"Two days," Nettle said. "We've had worse."

"That actually makes sense," Colm said, studying his charts. "There were journeys like that where we come from. People would travel enormous distances to places they considered sacred. Sometimes on foot, sometimes by sea. The difficulty of getting there was part of the devotion."

The priestess looked at him curiously.

"We called it a pilgrimage," Colm said.

"A pilgrimage," she repeated, clearly testing an unfamiliar word.

"A journey made for religious reasons," Colm explained. "To visit a sacred place, pay tribute, fulfill an obligation. What you've been describing sounds remarkably similar."

The priestess considered that.

"Then yes," she said eventually. "Your people had a word for something my people simply considered part of worship."

Claire, reviewing the revised timeline, nodded slowly. "We'll need to adjust our own approach too, then. The ship itself could simply continue running, day and night, same as any of our previous expeditions, but the crew can't stay logged in indefinitely without real-world breaks of their own."

"Same rotation logic as the dome construction for us, then," Arista said. "Players trade off shifts, log out for actual rest, log back in refreshed. We just match our stops to theirs."

They settled into a gentler rhythmover the following days than the original outbound crossing had demanded, the ship slowing periodically to let the three mermaids rest, sometimes hours at a stretch, the crew rotating through their own shifts in the meantime, watching the horizon, tending the boiler, simply enjoying the unhurried pace of a journey that, for once, wasn't racing against any particular deadline.

The mermaids swam alongside for the active stretches, occasionally diving deep out of sight before resurfacing again, clearly reveling in the sheer, novel freedom of open water beyond the ring that had confined them for so long.

“...How does it feel?” Arista asked during one of the longer rest stops, leaning over the railing while the priestess floated quietly in the water below. “Being out here properly, for the first time in... however long it's actually been.”

The priestess was quiet for a long moment, then answered through the same quiet, private mind-voice she'd used before, rather than wasting Tidal Tongue on a conversation between just the two of them.

"...Larger," she said finally, simple and profound all at once. "The world feels larger than I ever let myself imagine it still was."

Arista sat with that, watching the priestess drift, content and unhurried, in water that had, until very recently, represented nothing but an impassable, boiling wall.

"...It is larger," Arista said, quiet. "And it's going to keep getting bigger, the more people who get to actually meet you properly."

The priestess smiled, genuine and warm, and the journey continued on, slow and patient, carrying them steadily back toward Dryva.

The priestess's earlier words kept nagging gently at her thoughts, something about the phrasing she couldn't quite let go of, until she finally worked up the nerve to ask properly.

"...When you said the world feels larger than you let yourself imagine," she said carefully, "were you remembering this, or genuinely seeing it for the first time?"

The priestess turned to her, something quietly vulnerable crossing her expression.

"...The first time," she admitted. "The ring closed before I was ever born. Everything I know of the world beyond it, I learned from the stories my elders carried: the tribute journey, the City of Worship, Dryva himself. I have lived my entire life inside that boundary, hearing about a world I never once expected to actually see myself."

Arista sat with that, the full weight of it settling in properly now. "...So this is genuinely your first time. Not a return. An actual first."

"My very first," the priestess confirmed, watching the open horizon with the same quiet, overwhelmed wonder she'd carried since the moment she'd first crossed the tube. "I inherited the mark, and with it, the role, and with it, the stories, but never the memory itself. I have spent my whole life as the one meant to carry my people's connection to Dryva, without ever once having stood before him myself."

"...That's an enormous thing to carry," Arista said, quiet. "Believing in something, representing something, your entire life, without ever actually experiencing it firsthand."

"It is what was asked of me," the priestess said, simply, though something in her voice carried the quiet, complicated weight of exactly how much faith that had actually required. "I never doubted the stories. But I confess, some small part of me wondered, occasionally, whether I would ever truly know if they were accurate."

Arista glanced toward the horizon, toward the distant, patient direction they were slowly, steadily traveling.

"...Well," she said gently. "You're about to find out properly. Not from stories this time. From him, directly."

The priestess's expression shifted, something fragile and hopeful settling into it.

"...Yes," she said, quiet. "I am."

Arista watched her for another moment before something embarrassingly obvious finally occurred to her.

"...I just realized I've never actually asked your name."

The priestess blinked, then smiled. "Selen."

"Selen," Arista repeated. "It's nice to properly meet you."

"And what should I call you?" Selen asked. "The tall human called you Straw."

"Yeah, it's short for Strawberry."

Selen considered the unfamiliar name for a moment, then simply nodded. "Strawberry."

Arista waited almost instinctively for some kind of reaction, but none came. Apparently, to someone who had no idea what a strawberry was, Strawberry was a perfectly ordinary name.

"...Yep. That's me."

Selen smiled, then drifted quietly beside the ship for a while longer, watching the open water stretch endlessly ahead, carrying with her, for the very first time in her entire life, the genuine, physical reality of a world she'd only ever known secondhand.