Hopeless Love

7-I Make it Rain

     "There is no way anyone in our camp will have enough to pay for all of this. We are gonna have to go to a big town. A really big one that has mermaid currency. We need to go to Halvana," Sebastian said after a few moments.
     I'd heard of Halvana before. The biggest town for many miles around. Bigger even than Grimalkin, which was pretty big for a sphinx dominant population. It housed nearly every race. They had some signs in places that were seemingly random to me. The signs promoted all the races they had in a list form. The signs looked like this:
                Halvana, City of Sanctuary
Members of many races welcome, such as:
Mermaids
Werewolves
Minotaurs
Sphinxes
Centaurs
Vampires
Merwolves
Minxes
Vamtaurs
Minomaids
Spholves
Minaurs
Sphipires
Cenmaids
Werepires
And so on and so forth.
     My guess was that even they were unsure which races were represented in their city. They had a lot of money there, and we would make a lot of money there. I just knew it.
     We decided to start the journey as sson as possible, as it was quite a distance away. It was on the coast, so we could just follow the river. Sebastian hopped into the sea river and shifted. Then his voice floated into my head, saying, Come on Jet! Let's go. We can swim to Halvana! It is much faster and you can learn to swim better this way. When I failed to join him in the salty water, he said, Please Jet. Just for a little bit. If you really don't want to we can walk. He threw such pleading fish eyes at me that I couldn't resist. I sat on the riverbank, dipping my toes unto the water.
     I was still annoyed by how much bigger he was in his beastia, almost six feet long, when my beastia made me even smaller intead of bigger as most were. I shifted ad slipped into the water. I paddled to keep my head above the water. I settled into an uneasy rhythm, already noticing that this was better and more stable than my first foray into the forbidding abyss that was water.
     Sebastian started swimming down the river and I followed. I used my tiny paws to push myself through the water. I watched Sebastian as he swam, and noticed how his fins were spread out; that seemed to stablize him and allow him to go faster. I tried it, spreading my toes out and pushing them backwards. It worked, driving me through the water at a faster and slightly (not really) more stable rate. I could now stay at Sebastian's back fin, riding the easy tide of water he made.
     Within a few minutes we reached the mouth of the river. We swam out a bit into the ocean and I started thinking as we followed the coastline.
     Pros of having a large size. Faster swimming. Cons. Need more space to move. If Sebastian was not such a...tall fish, we could swim closer to shore. If it were just me for instance, I could be so close I was almost walking on the shore. But Sebastian is too big for that. He is too big for lots of things now that I think about it. Too big for shallow swimming, too big to get little keys from holes, too big to hug anything besides my head...not that he has ever hugged me. I don't think he has hugged me. Hold on let me go through my memories and see. Well, I don't think him holding me in my beastia counts as hugging me. So no, no hugs from him. Why hasn't he hugged me? I mean there is not really any reason for him to have hugged me. Wait though. There was that time at the council meeting when I changed while he was holding me and...no that was more of a bridal carry than a holding hug...so still no hugs. My legs are getting tired. When are we gonna get there? Such a long distance. If there are any bears near here they can just eat me. I won't be able to run. Or I can just drown. That sounds more drawn out than death by bear though. Oh look. There is a town on the coast. Wait a second...or five...is that...Halvana. I think it is. Go me.
     I stopped thinking to myself when I noticed Sebastian had shifted to his humanaria and was looked at me with a great deal of amusement.
    "What's so funny," I asked when I had shifted.
     "Nothing just...I heard your thoughts. Remember, pack bond," he said snickering. "Why does it matter so much that I haven't hugged you though," he said with a confused look.
     "Nothing! No reason. I was just thinking about it. I don't know, be quiet," I blurted out. He raised his hands in surrender. We walked towards the town. I was soaking wet, although for some reason my bag was entirely dry. I noticed Sebastian's bag was also dry, and that neither of our bags were getting wet. I frowned. So unfair for our bags to be dry when we were wet. Oh wait. Sebastian was a fish. He wasn't wet. I was the only wet one. Jeez, what a bad reputation to have in a new town. The wet sphinx.
     I sighed as we entered the town and were stared at by passerbys. Sebastian found a wealthy shop that advertised the buying and selling of jewelry and precious metals. He sold a load of the spheres and things from the chests for somewhere around 140 cockle shells. Not counting those golden ones we had found. Out of everything we found, we kept the golden cockle shells, the plain gold ball, the one with the fairy queen, and the two rings. We split the money for the items down the middle, each of us getting 70. I kept one of the golden cockle shells and gave the rest to Sebastian. We thanked the woman in charge and bought a room at the inn for the night. He gave me the bed and slept on the floor. The inn was adorable and was named The Winking Cockatrice Inn. I had always wanted to see a real cockatrice but they were very rare.
     The next morning, after we ate some breakfast, we walked back to the ocean and swam back to the camp. Sebastian let me pay for my ring when we returned by playing a song on his lute so I could breath underwater for the duration of the beautiful melody. I bought it back for 27 cockle shells. When I got back to the surface, I shifted, put the ring on my left forefinger, and tackled Sebastian in a hug. I could not (sadly) knock him over.
     I whispered, "Thank you," then passed out in my tent. I really liked him. I realized it as I went to sleep. I only noticed because of how that hug had made me feel. It made me happier than anything else ever had before. I wanted him to go out with me. I wanted to ask him out and give him that ring with the fish on it if he said yes.
     That night I dreamed that I was standing outside. There were dark clouds in the sky but no rain. I looked at the clouds. I pointed towards them and thought a single word: rain. As soon as I thought it, little gold things dropped out of the clouds and clattered to the ground. They were little golden cockle shells. My dream slowly drifted into more incomprehensible situations until I no longer remembered what I dreamed.

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Hey guys. Hope you liked it. This may be my favorite story. What did you all think? Try to see you next week. Love you my land sharks. 0)