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They only had to follow one crucial rule: Don't get too close to the shore.
It was a simple rule in theory, but in practice? It was a million times more difficult than [Name] could imagine, especially with a friend as curious as Armin.
Even in her earliest memories, [Name] could recall the blonde-haired boy listing all the incredible things that existed on land. His sky-blue eyes would shine as he spoke of creatures that needed air to breathe and would die if they spent too much time with their noses underwater. He spoke of forests thick with greenery, called jungles; of entire patches of ground that consisted only of mountains made of sand, blazing hot during the day yet freezing at night.
But he cared very little about these things compared to how amazed he was by humans.
[Name] simply couldn't wrap her head around this hyper-fixation he had on humanity. It made no sense. They were little else than animals with a flawed conscience. Every encounter [Name] had ever had with a human only solidified her belief that they weren't deserving of her pity.
Humans were filthy things that cared for nothing other than themselves and their fleeting pleasures; everyone around her understood that... everyone but Armin, it seemed.
Still, she would be lying if she didn't admit that she was curious about those mountains made of sand and those four-legged, fur-covered beasts that she caught glimpses of from afar as they carried humans up pathways.
Horses, Armin called them.
Yes, she was curious.
And it was curiosity that had caught her in such a predicament.
Armin had assured her, promised her, that nothing would happen. He only wanted to catch a glimpse of the humans from afar. But when a fishing boat happened to come near them, Armin couldn't resist, and his unbridled curiosity took hold.
"Armin, hurry! Hurry!" she cried as her hands tried to rip away at the rope, strangling her at every angle. She could barely see him, but he was struggling to pull at the rope, the same as her.
"[Name], I can't!" he said, his face red as he tried to rip at the net. A sudden crank came from above them as the water and silver darts started swirling around them, and the net started digging into every inch of her body as it pulled her up towards the surface.
"Armin!" she panicked, her heart sinking all the way to her stomach. "Stop! Make it stop! Get me out of here!"
That was the last thing she said before she was pulled up from the water. She hissed as the warm air stabbed at her skin like needles. She took her first breath of air and did her best to calm her racing heart as she got slammed down onto a hard surface. The fish that had been caught in the net with her were slapping and swirling against her as they struggled to breathe outside the sea.
