The Mermaid's Crowning(Book Two )

chapter one

Thunder crashed into the sky breaking it into two. I heard yells and screams and sirens. I was in the water and it swallowed me like a blackness. I was swimming down and down and down........till finaly my legs....fins......gave out. My whole body was exhausted . I just needed rest.....I felt like I had swam for miles...maybe hundreds, before finaly everything went black.

"Hey, get Britt! Wake up! Your having a bad dream."
There was hands on my shoulders. A now firmiliar face looked at me. His smile shimmered through the water. Some times I wondered how we even stand the taste of salt in our mouth all of the time. But I was used to it now, so I didn't dwell on it to much.
"Have that dream again?" The voice said. The voice was my friend Gilmore.
"Yeah, I just....can't help but think about it alot.... I can't help but think what would have happened if I didn't flee.....if I didn't...."
" No worries, just don't think of what happened to much. It may have been the hard choice to leave, but it was the right choice. I mean, you've been here for over a couple months. We'll find everything you need to know soon enough."
"Yeah I guess. I just Gilmore....I need to find my father and figure everything out.....the only hung I actualy know for sure is that all the storms on the surface stoped when I fled to the ocean. like I was the sacrifice to the ocean."

I had met Gilmore after I fled from land. He had found me at the bottom of the ocean hundreds of miles away from the shore. I had been knocked out cold from exahstion from swimming for so long , as well as not being used to all of the pressure of the waters. He dragged me to his underwater town and nursed me back to health in his coral house. I soon found out that his town was one of several small towns that protected a larger civilaization in the Pacific ocean.
Atlantis.
I heard it was big and magnificent and full of beauty. I have also heard things about their rulers, and how distraught they have been in because of recent losses. If losses I wasn't to white sure were. The town that me and Gilmore now lived in was a town called Mertal shell. It was the last town incircling Atlantis. Therefore the most important as it is the last resort to protecting Atlantis incase of an emergancy.I had been under the water for several months and I still knew very little of my family, and who they were. Before I had left my sister Miranda, had said we were royalty, but how could I know she was telling the truth? Beside, I've heard that there are many different kingdoms of royalty in the world. One for each major sea. So how could I be sure that Atlantis was were my family was.

Gilmore took a long time before answering me.
"Well, the ocean is very mysterious, maybe it was just happy that it's own daughter, came back home."

Gilmore lived alone, even though he was only seventeen years old. Things for mermaids and mermen worked differently for living conditions. His house was made out of a deep lavender purple coral. Everything was wide and open so you could easily swim in and out of the house. There wasn't really any from down in the ocean, so there was no need to worry about stolen possesions so much. For light , since it was always so dark down here, seeing as it's the bottom of the ocean, they would use glowfish, and trap them in cages. It mafe me alittle sad to see them all caged up, but it's just life down here and most people....mermaids....are used to it.

I rise from my soft seaweed bed and flipped my tail over the side off the rock ledge, and swam up to keep myself up, and not fall back down.
Gilmore swan out side, our of the window, I followed him too. Even tjough it was plenty dark down here, it was always very light out down here bcause of how many light sieves were illuminating the "streets." We swam along side by side, going for our normal morning swim that we usualy have when we wake up. I pretty much had memorized the town by now, that's how small it was.
The water surrounding me seemed to be more groggy than usual. Weirdly to say. We can still smell underwater, but not through our noses. Well you know the hills that I had started growing when I was in land.....before I fled? Well that's where we smell. Kind of like noses in our arms. I didnt kniw how it truly worked , but i didnt want to know either.
Anyways, the water smelled more putrid. It usaly smelled nice and fresh like it did in land, but today it didnt, I didn't know wha t it was, just something was different. It wasn't just the smell of the water, it was the look. It seemed to be a darker blue than usual and it was like being in fog underwater.
" Do you notice that?" I asked Gilmore. We had stopped in our place on the side of the street.
"Yeah. It's weird hu? I havnt seen something like this before."
"Well whatever it is it seems to be getting stronger as we swim this way." I pointed to off side of the road where an alley led between two houses back into a ledge where it headed into a deeper part of the ocean.
"Should we investigate?" He asked. I didn't really want i, because I had a bad feeling about whatever was over there, plus the smell was really bad that I could barley stand it. But then again I was very curious and wanted the see what it was. So I shrugged my shoulders to say whatever works. We continued swimming on toward the mysterious source. As we came closer, swimming through the ally, it became alot harder to see through the water, but it was well enough to see. We edged closer. And I could see two objects of bright yellow. I coughed out the water because it didn't taste salty any more. It had more of a matalic taste in it.
We both gasped as we aproached the objects. They were barrels, and they were in their side's leaking black liquid. The black liquid was oil. It was flowing out into the water. We both looked at each other.
"We have to stop it from leaking anymore!"
We both quickly swim up to the barrels and used all out strength to lift the barrels left side up. The next moment he wasn't there and I couldn't hate all of the weight and I dropped it causing more to spill out I turn around only to be grabbed by a pair of hands. Next to me Gilmore was handcuffed by another merman. I was soon to be hand cuffed also.
The mermen took us both and said, "You are under arrest for high treason of pollution."