The truck's driver and the machinist took some pictures of Sharon waving at them before she went completely out of sight. That microhole tape was a pretty good sight, in addition to being a valuable document.
It took only a handful of tail flips for Sharon to figure out that now she was really in her element. At first she tried to dive with a scissor kick. Her tail reacted to that by jerking oddly and curling around itself, making her look definitely funny to the three nerds who carried her all across Germany the night before. It took Sharon a mere minute to figure out how mermaids moved around -- she had to think dolphin. In fact, her arms provided very little of the overall thrust and she soon learned to just let them flow along her body. Her breast did get a little in the way, but it was nothing she couldn't handle.
Sharon decided to take some time for exploring her new surroundings. The water felt just a little cold (it'd have been freezing for a normal person, she thought) and she could distinctly 'smell' the industrial chemical in the salt water. Sharon already half-expected that salt water wouldn't have bothered her sight, and so it was. To be able to move in three dimensions, rather than two, made her feel exhilarated -- who never dreamed to fly, after all?
After a quarter hour or so, Sharon decided that she liked her new element. She moved away from the shore, somersaulting in the water if she felt like, guided only by her feelings and the voice of dolphins at the edge of her auditive range. She couldn't understand them, of course, but they sounded familiar. Perhaps the Babel leech would have let her understand them if she listened for long enough. It didn't take long for Sharon to lose the notion of time, just gracefully swimming in and out of the sun in the Northern Sea. She didn't need to breathe very often -- once every four or five minutes would have done nicely, and she was moving about quite fast! She figured out that she could probably stay submerged overnight if she slept.
After a deep dive followed by a minute or so of slowly floating meters above a meadow of seaweed, with her arms opened like those of a child who's pretending to be an airplane, Sharon got daring and decided to inhale a mouthful of water. To her surprise, she could do that -- to a degree. Her throat closed automatically to prevent the water to enter her super-efficient lungs, but her mouth and nose accepted the liquid with no problem. She didn't even feel a need to gag.
When the pressure on both sides of her eardrums equalized, Sharon suddenly felt as if the dark depths suddenly got brighter. Her sonar! She had barely used it since now! Her vocal cords vibrated to the ocean's tune as she laughed, unheard by anyone but a few fishes and crustaceans who cared little and a large, slow jellyfish
who lacked ears to care at all.
Or so Sharon thought. Only after that her heightened senses informed her of the gunboat plodding along at half speed, way above her.
She put herself together and made a half roll so that her head and chest was now facing the surface. The only object obscuring the water's surface, like a black cloud on a rather sunny (more like silvery) day was the gunboat's hull.
Fri Jul 9 16:33:26 1999
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