From the Deep

Research Vessel

The media went wild.

Ian had written the official report and the application for a grant at more or less the same time, because he had known that this would happen. But of course the report came out first, and it was immediately picked up on by all sorts of news sites--serious and sensationalist, television and newspaper and internet and magazine--and Ian knew how to capitalize on that. One week later he sent in the application for a grant. And, while it certainly took the usual lengthy amount of time for it to be looked at and thought over, it was pretty freely granted.

There were some funds that they already had, and there was some equipment that they already owned. Ian spent the next few months, planning--with the help of an intern--just how the whole project would be organized. He looked over what they needed to buy, rent, and improve. He looked over the timescale. He talked to his coworkers and together they agreed--or tried to agree--on what would be the best time, place, and so on to search. But the problem was that nobody could agree with each other's ideas, because nobody had any ideas of their own. All they could do was guess. Nobody knew anything.

But finally it was more or less decided. As soon as the weather was warm enough again, and the ocean would be generally calm enough to let them carry out scientific studies in peace, the boat would set out and they'd begin scouting the area from which--as Nigel and Sara broadly calculated--the first two mermaids were most likely to have come from.

And for a touch of added poetry, Ian decided that they'd set off on the day exactly one year since the discovery of the first one.

It was not a pleasant day. Cold weather had been lingering around well into the year, and April 3rd was no exception. It was almost drizzling, too--there wasn't quite enough water in the air to actually collect anywhere, but more than plenty enough to make everyone feel damp and horribly uncomfortable.

But these were, of course, fairly normal working conditions for Ian and his crew, and the general feeling running through the air was one of excitement and anticipation. Monica was smiling good-humoredly as she helped Ian load some final crates onto the deck.

"Do you think we'll find any more?" she asked cheerfully.

"I don't know, said Ian. "I certainly hope so."

"We all hope so," she countered, "but I feel like you're way more excited about this than any of us. This is something special to you, isn't it?"

"Definitely," said Ian, but there must have been something off in his voice, because Monica paused for a second in her work and glanced up at him.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

"Nothing."

"Hmm?"

"Well, just the usual misgivings. I'm excited for what we'll find, yeah, but what will we find? Probably nothing. Or, if we do, find something, what if it's... off? Not what we expect?"

"So just the usual scientific misgivings," Monica echoed, and Ian chuckled.

"Yeah."

"Or," she continued, "your misgivings have more to do with being cooped up with me on a tiny boat for two weeks."

"Yeah," said Ian, "that could be it too."

Monica flashed him a cheeky smile, shifted the last crate, and went off to look at the cabin of the boat. Ian watched her go.

The thing was, Monica was his ex. And that made things a bit... awkward, at least for him. They had dated for a long time--three years--after being friends and coworkers for almost as long. And Ian had been just on the verge of barely considering proposing marriage before Monica had broken it off. She'd made an offer of staying "just friends." And the truly bizarre thing was, she seemed to be perfectly sincere--and, even more bizarrely, natural--when it came to keeping up that offer. Ian was, in a way, impressed.

Not that it made things any less awkward for him.

Inside the boat, Nigel and Sara were double-checking that all the necessary equipment had been stowed away. Monica was talking to the intern, a pimply young college boy who had begged to come along on the study and only been allowed on the condition that he be no more than an extra hand to do all the menial tasks. The mechanic of the group, Charles, was going over the controls of the boat to make sure that nothing was amiss.

"Are we ready?" Ian asked the group.

The reply was an enthusiastic affirmative.

"Well then--" he nodded at Charles, who nodded back, "--let's cast off."

And they did.

(AN: Apologies for typos in this next section. I'm working on a keyboard that's not easily registering Fs, Gs, and Ds, and other letters too.)

Living on a research vessel for this long wasn't easy in the least. The food wasn't bad, but it was tasteless; the boat wasn't exactly small, but it was confining; and there was always something to do, but it got tedious quickly.

Most of the time was spent doing routine work--analysis of the waters and so on--things that Ian's team normally did in this boat. But they couln't devote as much energy to it as normal, because this time they had a mission. They hadn't promised the world that they would find another mermaid, and yet they knew that the world was counting on them to of so.

An Ian was counting on himself to do so.

The voyage was scheduled to take a month, scoping out sites and gathering data and forming hypotheses, before going back to the lab for a week to go over whatever they'd found and then setting out again. How often this would be repeated depended on how much information they found and how much money they had left to waste.

Nigel and Sara had looked at ocean currents and figured out a likely point that the two washed-up bodies could have come from. The boat headed to that one location. On the way, the crew took measures of water temperature and salinity and cleanliness by means of various devices they lowered into the sea.

They reached the spot by noon of the second day. The next two days were spent making slow, widening circles around the area. Nothing was found. This was not, of course, much of a surprise.

The next day they went out and followed some currents tat looked promising and could have possibly brought bodies over with them from other parts of the ocean. A full week was spent following up on these various leads. But nothing was found taking that route of investigation, either.

The third week they set out more or less at random. Charles wasn't pleased with this; it went against pretty much all his training, but Ian insisted. He knew that two bodies' locations weren't really enough to form any cohesive idea of where they had come from, an he decided that it would be far less limiting if they gave up on specifics and simply searched everywhere. Charles crossed his arms angrily and huffed out an annoyed, "Fine."

Halfway into the fourth week, Ian was awoken at 4:00 a.m. when Nigel, who had been on night duty with Monica and Charles, shouted down the hallways of the whole boat that they had seen something.