Chapter One
Ra Mu Ronemun the Exalted
By
Bryan McCarthy
He had no idea how this had happened but he was underwater and he wasn’t even drowning. Sixteen-year-old Mark Egan swam up to the surface only to find he could not stay up in the air for more than five minutes. Mark would have been quick to despair if he had been the kind of teenager who was prone to despairing even if he should have. Instead he tried to contemplate his new world. Thus, sitting on the ocean floor, the ruddy skinned redhead with a blue left eye, a green right eye, the lean and hungry appearance of Cassius and the square jaw a medic’s boy should have thought of everything that happened. In all honesty, he could not make sense of it. It was 1963, these kinds of things just didn’t happen. A freak storm in a coastal town was perfectly normal but someone suddenly being able to breathe underwater and not be outside of water for more than five minutes was completely out of the ordinary…
Sighing, Mark got up and began to explore his new world. Seaweed, kelp, sea life, there was plenty of it but nothing for him to really talk to that would talk back. It was that moment that nearly caused him to actually begin to despair when he heard cackling… Fell cackling. Inquisitiveness aroused Mark swam in the direction of the fell cackling to discover mermaids!
There were five of them and four of them were quite unlike anything Mark would have expected. The four had pale green hair, webbed hands with the webbing being white tails like Atlantic salmon and they were completely covered in green scales. Mark then looked at the other mermaid. She was his age and looked quite like how he imagined a mermaid to look: scales nowhere but the tail that formed the lower half and moved like that of a cetacean, no webbed hands, hair that wasn’t an abnormal color… She certainly looked more like his idea of a mermaid than the other four. She had a light skin tone, reddish-brown eyes and red hair that was long, straight and kept in a ponytail. Her tail was covered in scarlet scales, she wore a seashell headband as well as seashells on her breasts and bracelets the same color as her headband and seashells. To Mark she was a Helen of the Deep. She looked as he expected a mermaid to look but these others… They looked quite unlike anything he would have guessed and they were tormenting her. They were dastardly! He had to do something!
Swimming up to the mermaids, he tapped one on the shoulder saying: “Excuse me”, his voice deep and gravelly, before continuing saying: “Just for what reason are you tormenting—“ Mark did not get any further. The mermaid whose shoulder he had tapped had a mustache that brought Salvador Dali to mind. The other three didn’t have one and the Helen of the Deep certainly did not have one.
“What reason are we tormenting this aberration?” asked the Mustached Mermaid. “Is that what you were going to ask?”
Mark looked to the Helen of the Deep. So, it was because she looked different that they tormented her. He then looked at the Mustached Mermaid and said: “To me she is as comely as Helen of Sparta, demigoddess daughter of Zeus whom the Egyptians called ‘Amen-Ra’ and the Romans ‘Jupiter.’”
