She needed a blow dry.
Nym fingered strands of her long wavy reddish hair, frowning as they limply slid through her fingers. She just blow dried it thirty minutes ago, but they still looked like seaweed noodles from Marina’s Vegi Shop. And they felt like one, too. Humans would call it beach waves. She called it dry and frizzy.
Her pale eyes wandered to the stone windows, the wind running through her locks much like the way her fingers had.
Beach waves, she mused, her eyes taking in the thunder clouds rolling across the sky.
That would be misleading, she thought, the image of the tropical beach she visited two cycles ago fluttering through her mind. Warm sparkling water, palm trees and course sand beneath her feet...
No, that’s definitely not how one would describe her habitat.
Grazing the smooth cold limestone wall with her fingertips, she let her gaze flicker toward the entrance of her lair. Miles and miles of steely blue ocean stretched out in front of it.
There was not a grain of sand anywhere, just jagged gray rocks, rugged shorelines and slippery slopes. Occasional patches of moss riddled the cracks here and there, its greenish hue the only reprieve in an otherwise dreary surrounding. Aside from the blue sky above, of course. Only it wasn’t so blue right now.
The scent of salty sea breeze and storm drifted through the moss curtains, filling her lair with its familiar aromatic flavor.
“ Another storm,” she muttered, flipping her wavy locks and drifting toward her water hyacinth couch.
That’s one of the things she didn’t like about living in the middle of the ocean. Storms brewed in the heavens every three days. One would think she had grown accustomed to it by now, what with living for about half a thousand year in this climate. But Nym never warmed up to the crackling thunders and sheets of rain splattering her cliff every three days. And it made her hair harder to control; the extra humidity from the already saturated atmosphere making the strands frizzier.
She picked up a shell tooth comb from her antique limestone vanity and dragged it through her stubborn locks. Maybe she should get another blow drier. Marina said the wind spirits were launching a new line of blow driers this fall, not that she knew when fall would come. They only had storm and more storm here in the middle of the ocean. The new line would have a 5 heat/speed settings, courtesy of Saraha winds from the southern wind spirits, the same air they used for their air conditioning system. Not that she owned any of their AC products. A siren like her didn’t need one. Nature designed her body to withstand cold climates here in the Northern Atlantic. But it would be nice to feel the dessert wind on her skin even just once, even if it’s only through a silly blow drier. Visiting a dessert would be comparable to signing her death certificate, with death by dehydration her certain fate if she dared to stay three seconds away from port.
Her gaze wondered out of the stone window, staring once again at the dark masses of rain clouds racing across the sky, then she rolled her eyes.
“Wonderful,” she hissed to herself. What should she do next? Examine her nails?
“Ugh...” she groaned, remembering that she had already done that, too.
What should she do? Draping herself over the water hyacinth couch, she racked her brain in annoyance.
Cleaning her lair was out of the option, the limestone walls and floors would crack if she scrubbed them one more time. Shopping was out of the choices, too, she’d practically scoured the upper ocean malls in the last two days, buying pearl studded shell shoes and bags, all of them buried under layers of her other shoes and bags in her agate trunk three minutes after she returned to her lair. And if she stared another minute on the frosted screen of her fae dew tablet, she swore she would develop cataracts.
