RP:A Naga Child and Her Water Dog
Summary: Reginae tries to help a seal on the beach, but the selkie dashes off before the naga can find out anything about her.
Gushing of Water
Moire is pulled in with the current of the waves, the undertow making it difficult (or easy, depending on your definition), to become stranded on the beach. The white and grey dappled seal is pulled ashore by the waves, one after another breaking over her back after the initial landing in a fan of sea spray and foam. The pinniped barks, the sound echoing over the rush of tide and time. She flops further up onto the coast, sand coating her belly and flippers as she lunges the pushes, head wobbling and bobbing the whole way. It is a graceless transport, a lumbering, flailing effort to mount the beach head. Once the seal is far enough ashore, both flippers flap against her skull. The fur and skin along her forehead begins to peel away, the bones in her fore flippers gouging a hole in it, followed by the motion of the appendages being pulled back further increasing the size of the hole. The skin does not rip, it stretches. Like pulled taffy, the skin and sinew becomes stringy as the gap between the two halves increases, and a swathe of blackness is revealed beneath.
Reginae had been walking along the beach when the creature’s bark reached her ears. Unsure of the sound, the naga in her common place traveling shape of a child pushes her way through the sand in her furry snow boots until she finds the figure that cried out. It appeared to be both fine and in pain simultaneously somehow. “Hey!” she cries out, flinging sand into the air with each awkward attempt to move forward, a small shower of grains trails after her. “What’s wrong?” The child came to a standstill by flopping onto her side in the sand, and searching for a face between flippers and blackness. What are you might have been a more appropriate question.
Moire releases her sealy hold upon the peeling pelt. Almost immediately, the gap in the rent skin begins to rejoin itself, the gummy strands retracting and pulling back together in a seamless expanse of freckled fur and flesh, to ward away the darkness below. The wide-eyed, puppy-like face wheels upward at the sound of...a child? The pinniped sniffs, her whiskers moving forward and then back as the end of her nose wriggles and weaves in an attempt to catch one solid scent from the girl. The girl who does not so much smell human, and is now questioning her. Another muffled whuff is repeated, an indiscernible language that, even if Reginae could understand it, is more an expression of exasperated confusion than anything else. The seal tilts her head, first one way and then the other, while overlarge, aqueous black eyes remain fixed upon the apparently human girl.
Reginae finds her own sapphiric eyes blinking back at the seal when it turns its attention to her. They exchange wide eyed stares and blink at each other for a few more moments before Regi summons the breath to speak. She sits up, and starts brushing the sand off the side of her tattered clothes while she addresses the creature. “You’re okay…right?” Another hesitant blink. “I heard a sound and…” She gestured over her shoulder from the direction she’d come with a lithe arm before laughing out loud at herself. “Why am I telling?” The foolishness of this little play seeped into view but she’d run all this way…it might be worth it to stick around a few moments more. “What are you?” The child stood, bending at the waist to examine the creature from a respectful distance. “Are you a seal?” Her eyes settle on Moire’s eyes, blinking, the naga turned child appeared to be thinking very deeply about this. “You don’t smell like a seal…” she said after a brief pause, with her stubble childish arms hitched to her square, blocky hips with flat palms. “Do you belong to someone? Are you, like a pet or something?” The child asked, not expecting a response.
Moire snuffles and sniffs at Reginae more, still trying to place her smell. The seal's eyes widen even more, though the already wondrously large pools would seem all encompassing before. White rims the impossibly black irises, the fathomless depths twinkling with flecks of untethered starlight. The grey-and-white puppy of the sea barks again, though far less sonorous this time. It is a conversational bark, one meant to answer the little human's query into her health. Yes, she is all right, she seems to affirm, her head swinging toward the direction Reginae points as she explains - to a seal. Again, the pinniped's head cants to one side, her eyes blinking slowly and ear flaps wiggling forward and back as the naga-come-human continues to talk. Even if she didn't smell like a seal, she certainly didn't smell like the bipedal human s her other form resembled. Moire had been born under the sea (darling it's better), beneath the crash of waves and the passing of boats (down where it's wetter), and has lived apart from humans, even despising them, for her entire life. The next question is me with a snort of disgust, and a rapid shake of the seal's head, as if she were a land dog attempting to expel water from her coat. No, she was no pet, and conveyed the idea with a shrill yip of contention.
Reginae smiles, feeling like the animal was attempted to communicate with her. A bolt of laughter shakes her small form as Moire snorts in disgust and makes it very clear she belongs to no one. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry! Calm down,” Reginae laughs. “I didn’t mean anything by it! I swear you can understand me.” The situation may have been strange for Regi if she hadn’t had a pet snail once. She talked to that poor dimwitted thing even though it refused to respond to anything in the outside world. This was different! This was basically the human equivalent of a girl and her pup! Except, neither were human and neither were puppies. Best case scenario for naga / selkie! And as such, puppies are privy to all their human’s secrets. Even some secrets that don’t belong to their humans! Life is strange. “ You’re too smart to be someone’s pet.” She noted aloud with a nod, losing her balance in the sand and toppling over again. “Ugh, this is so frustrating.” She hissed, rolling to her backside to remove her boots. “Look, don’t tell anyone, but I’m not a human okay? I’m a naga!” Regi is face to face with the seal now, looking for any trace that it understands what she is. “We’re supposed to be big scary snake people with human looking top halves, but humans don’t like us so I have to walk around like this…and these boots...” Regi overturns one of the aforementioned boots to watch a bucket full of sand dump out into a messy tower beside her, “are not made for walking. Be glad you just have those.” The naga woman gestures to her flippers. “We aren’t that scary though. Don’t tell anyone.” She winks, dumping out the sand from her other boot before wrapping her arms around her legs and abandoning the idea of shoes for a short time. Old powerful naga lady with the disposition of a child. Creepy.
Moire would pant, if she were any more doglike. Instead the seal just makes the mouth motions of a dog, without the actual need to cool herself off or sticking her tongue out. Her lower jaw drops in a happy smile, though revealing four large, sharp canine teeth as well as more triangular, oddly notched ones along the rest of her jaw. The naga's revealed secret causes the selkie's jaw to snap shut, the black outline of her pinniped lips pressing together tightly. Once more, the furred cranium tilts to one side, and a high-pitched whine escapes through her nose. She knew that scent. Well, not nagas in particular, but snakes. That is what the girl reminded her of: water moccasins. The phoca whines again, her head and neck both dropping to first stare at Reginae's boots, and then at her feet. Moire sniffs again, her whiskers furrowing forward to brush and fan toward the little girl's feet. They will certainly tickle and itch, should they make contact! The selkie rocks back and forth on her flippers, one lift as her body pitches onto it's side, and then the other as the little tubby marine animal rolls the other way. It looks like fun, so perhaps it is a celebration of some sort. Or a dance. Strange little water-dog.
Reginae flinches when Moire starts to whine. “No, no, no. It’s okay, It’s okay. “ The girl reassures her. “I’m not even kind of scary. Look. Who could be scary with such ugly feet?” Just as she goes about wiggling her toes, the seal’s flippers brush against her skin and cause her to burst out laughing so loudly it might have sounded like the seal’s bark earlier. “Hey!” Regi scolds her, a firm smile still settled on her lips. “You’re a little trouble maker aren’t you?” The observation was clearly full to the brim with affection. Her hand reaches out to gently pat the seals’ head; the soft fur like texture of her skin was foreign to the naga, so she held her hand there to feel the texture. A little scratch behind the…ears(?) for good measure. “Since we are clearly friends now, would you mind telling me what you exactly? And where are you going? You look like you have just as much trouble with walking on the sand as I do. Do you need to borrow my boots?” The girl stands, putting her feet into the warm sand and tries to fit one of the seal’s flippers into her boots playfully. “I don’t think it’s your size,” she says at length, moving to shove her bare feet back into the safe (but difficult) confines of the snow boots. “ What are you celebrating huh? Do you like nagas or something?” Reginae stares at Moire for a moment, still grinning. “I bet you do, don’t cha…girl? You seem like a girl to me. Slender, elegant.” She holds up her thumb like she’s painting a portrait, sizing up her object of interest before illuminating it on canvas in rich oils and stained fats. “ You would be the only one.” A sigh of longing escapes the child’s lips now, making her seem older than the 10 or twelve human years she portrayed. “What’s your name anyway? I have an idea, I’ll guess, and you can tell me when I’m right? Fair deal?” The girl turned to face the seal fully, sitting back down hard immediately into an Indian style fashion of legs criss crossed in front of her. “Hmmm… Let me think…”
Moire whines again, her head dipping down until her chin brushes the beach at the girl's petting. She pancakes briefly, flippers akimbo and nose buried in the sand, her stomach flattened beneath the bulk of her weight while Reginae tries to fit boots on her. The pinniped whuffs again, causing a puff of sand to kick into the air, away from her nose before hoisting herself back up onto her pectoral fins. The seal shuffles backwards, away from Reginae and her questions, seemingly unnerved about revealing precisely who and what she is. Moire spins around, lumbering down the beach at a gallop until taking a long, torpedo-like dive into an incoming wave, head first and flippers pinned to her sides. The water-dog disappears, vanishing beneath the head of the wave and the cap of foam that it bears toward the beach. The seal is little more than a darting shadow that speeds away from the shore through the oddly blue-green waters.
Reginae can only watch as the seal takes off at a wobbly first class running rate and dives into the water. Sure, Reginae could shift into her normal self, and get in the water, and swim after her…but is that what the seal would want? The child hugged her boney knees to her chest, letting stray ribbons of white get caught in the passing breeze and guessed not. “That was odd…” she said, out of habit to the space that Moire previously occupied. The woman waited, watching the waves roll up along the cliff of sand below her, for a dark oblong shaped torpedo to come back. When it was clear the seal had no intention of returned and did not want to play her guessing game, she stood up and brushed the sand off her pale knees. “See you later!” she called, hands cupped around her mouth to try and shout over the thundering crash of the ocean’s fury.