Beneath the ice, dread things lie dreaming. Or listening to One Direction, whatever.

On the one hand, it's pretty much the weirdest turn of events to ever hit the world in the history of ever. On the other hand, at least it happened during the off-season.

Merpeople didn’t kill humans except in stories. Merpeople also didn’t talk to humans, or bob up in the water near where a human was fishing from the dock and tell him to throw back anything that wasn’t a lionfish, or kiss humans or look at them the way Sid was looking at Zhenya now, as Zhenya finally stepped out of his trunks. Merpeople kept to themselves. But not Sid.

Magnitogorsk doesn’t hold much for him. He stares down the barrel of his future there: toiling away at a factory job, living and dying streets away from where he was born. He rubs the water-smoothed stone in his pocket, and thinks of the thunder of the waves. He knows that staying here will kill some essential part of himself. And so, he leaves. For PatriciaKoiFish, I hope very much that you like it :)

The hydrophones have been picking up nonsense for the past three days and Zhenya has had it up to here, honestly.