Empires SMP Halloween prompt oneshots

Day 15 - Old Friend, New Species

           Lizzie grinned with delight as Scott puzzled over the matter before her. The two of them had been haggling over prices for ages now, having gone into the Ocean Queen's secret underwater grotto sometime earlier to trade, and Lizzie was convinced that she was winning the financial battle and scamming Scott out of his diamonds.

           Scott wanted the pair of frost walker boots that Lizzie had conveniently fished out of the ocean prior to their meeting and Lizzie wanted the ocean orb that Scott somehow had in his possession after digging it out of a mountain nearby Rivendell. It still puzzled the elf how it even got there but fossilized sea creatures came out of mountains all the time so Lizzie wasn't that surprised.

           Finally Scott came to a decision and he gave Lizzie the ocean orb in return for those silly frost walker boots that he so wanted and left, leaving the Ocean Queen to play with her newfound magical artifact and ponder over how it actually worked. She had wanted it to help her find the legendary blue axolotl, the prophesied heir to the throne of the ocean empire, but now that Lizzie had the ocean orb in her hands she realized that she didn't actually know how to use it.

           She carefully studied its shiny, embellished surface. The ocean orb was roughly the size of a coconut as as smooth and as glimmery as a pearl, although it was doubtlessly much more valuable. Strange seaweed and marine patterns dotted the orb's surface and entranced the Ocean Queen as she stared into it; the sight reminding her of gazing into the beautiful depths of the ocean.

           Suddenly the orb began to glow a strange and eerie hue. Surprised and confused, Lizzie didn't think to put it down or even to just let go of it. Suddenly in a flash of light, energy streaked from the ocean orb, through her hands which held it and jntk her body.

           Her skin suddenly rippled and split into the slimy blue scales of an axolotl. Lizzie's ears, which had slowly over the course of the last few weeks had been growing bluer and pointy and more webbed, stretched out and became like the coralline gills that axolotls had. The queens hands suddenly lengthened into fishy claws and webbing stretched between her digits, connecting them securely. Lizzie watched as the room around her seemed to shrink and realized that she was getting taller. Then a throbbing came somewhere from her lower back and a long, swishy axolotl tail sprouted out from somewhere around her tailbone.

           With he transformation complete and its job successfully completed, the ocean orb dimmed and Lizzie dropped it. It didn't shatter when it landed with a crash onto the floor, which made her feel relieved. But she was very distracted by the sight of her new body.

           Curiously Lizzie approached the pool of water that she had in her grotto and looked down at her reflection. She gasped. The orb had turned her into an anthropomorphic blue axolotl. Lizzie reeled back in surprise, her mind racing. Well, at least the prophecy about the blue axolotl being the heir to the ocean empire had come true and was no longer a problem.

           "Joel!" Lizzie gasped. Her beloved human husband. She needed to tell him about her strange transformation. But how would he react? Would he take it well? Would he still love her, even if she was a fish?

           Questions like that plagued the Ocean Queen as she paced around anxiously around her underwater grotto. She had to tell Joel about this... but his reaction scared her. She couldn't help but think of the worst possible scenarios.

           "Oh, get it together!" Lizzie suddenly grit her teeth and started to yell at herself. "Joel didn't marry you only to get a divorce when you suddenly turned into a fish! He's still going to love you anyway! Now just go up and swim to him and just tell him about what happened!"

           Feeling rather satisfied with her self pep talk, Lizzie left the grotto and swam up to Mezalea's shoreline. Thankfully it wasn't that far away from her own empire and Lizzie quickly found Joel sitting conveniently on a nearby dock and fishing. Lizzie carefully avoided the dangerous fishing hook and called up to him.

           "Joel?" She asked, feeling uneasy. "Lizzie?" Joel immediately perked up when he heard her voice and looked around, trying to find her. "Where are you?" He asked when he couldn't locate her. "Would you still love me if I were a fish?" Lizzie asked in a hurry, surfacing from the water and sitting on the dock next to him, showing off her new blue scales and fins.

           Joel just stared at his now much taller wife for a second, too shellshocked to answer. Then he recovered his voice. "Lizzie, you're the blue axolotl?!"