Fishing For Love

Chaper 6- The Devil's In The Details

I get to the corner of the room, I quickly glance to Axel's tank, to make sure he's not looking.
"Not looking friend," he shouts, even though he is clearly looking.
For the son of a genius, he doesn't really have a plethora of words or any common knowledge at all.
I start removing my hazmat suit, I luckily didn't have to remove the head since we don't wear it and waste oxygen before cleaning debris. I finish exiting he hazmat suit and get ready to enter the wetsuit, the only problem was that I can't zip it up, "Grace, can you help me with something?" I yell in her general direction.
I wait for approximately five minutes, 'sigh' I walk over to Axel, is there any possible way you can help me suit up?"
He nods so fast that his floating hair gets tugged down over his face, "the top of my tank has a place for me to exit, go up the ladder!"
I look in confusion, can he breath out of water? If so; why do we need to go to the ocean? I climb the ladder, hoping to quiz him when he comes up.
Up the tall ladder I begin to get a glimpse of the tank's lid, it is a large iron platform that has stairs flowing down to the cusp of the water, another platform dips about four inches under it, Axel is sitting at the edge.
After climbing the ladder I take a few steps onto the platform, I walk down the stairs as they clank and rattle through my steps. I greet Axel, "Hey, can you zip me up please?" He looks at my back, "sure thing Fran-fran!" He excitedly grabs the zip and swiftly follows through, I turn back to him and notice a few more details about him that I couldn't see before, he has gills and scales, they are so small, you could mistake them for freckles and mesmerising pure white eyes, this man can't be real.
"You like my eyes?" Axel says looking deeply into mine.
"I've never seen white eyes before, they are actually kind of cool,"
"Don't get too attached to them, when I get enough sunlight, I'll finally gain some colour, I might even have brown eyes like you," he reaches his finger out to my face and gently touches my nose, "boop," he says.
I look to him, "Axel, I have a serious question, if you can breath above water, then why don't we just go somewhere above land that's safe?"
"I can't live out of the water for longer than a day, otherwise I will dehydrate and die," he looks down at himself, then looks back at me "It's not so bad, I have lots of cool pets!" He gestures down toward his tank, where the colourful fish swim freely, he starts waving rapidly, "HI FRIENDS!"
I start to feel something in the back of my throat, laughter? I'm not sure what it was, maybe the suit was too tight or the radioactive fish was causing me discomfort, but I hid my laughter to the best of my ability.

Hurry up Grace