A Swimmer's Tail (Connor Franta)

The Tale of the Tail

Lol what I'm updating and it hasn't been 2 months?! Crazy right!! I just had a really good idea going for this chapter so I decided to get it all down before I forgot. Also, I'm gonna try and either find or draw a picture of what Marylin looks like as a mermaid because it's not your typical Ariel type of look and I want everyone to be able to picture it right, I'm gonna try and describe it as best as I can in this chapter. Anyways I hope you guys enjoy!!

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**Connor

I hadn't been shocked when I saw her grow a tail in the water. Her scales had been a silver color, slightly tinged with a baby blue. Her tail ended right below her hip bones in an uneven line of those scales. She had grown webbing between her fingers and wisps of the webbing material grew out of the bottom halves of her arms, the back of her tail where her bum would be, and out of her back along her spine. Her hair grew longer and brighter, almost glowing even. She had scales all along her body, including two patches right over her chest that just covered what needed to be hidden. The scales were along the edges of the wisps of webbing coming out of her arms and back. it was a beautiful sight really, so much that my breathe caught and I had to get out of the water to take a breathe. She came out after me in a panic, when she spoke even her voice sounded different, she sounded as if she was echoing on her own, like she was at a distance. After I got over my shock of how amazing she seemed, I realized what she had said to me and that she was crying. I comforted her and told her I wouldn't run. I couldn't run, because when I saw her in that water I wasn't afraid, I was drawn in, and I wanted to figure out why. I knew this wasn't a normal reaction to seeing a person change form to a mythical creature so I was a bit curious.

After I got Marylin out of the water she slowly but surely shifted back into a two legged state. She informed me before she started to shift back that her clothes would no longer be in existence, I had of course blushed at the thought but went to get her spare clothes for her and a button up shirt of my own for her to cover with until her change was completely done. The shirt was well too long on her and covered her appropriately for the time being. As I watched her scaled disappear and her tail split, she told me everything.

"There are two types of mermaids, haplings and grypes. I'm a grype, which just means that I can go between the form of a person and a merperson both at will and when in certain waters, which is why I turned just now, the pool must've been either enchanted or a sacred place to our people. In those types of water, we change without a choice, and we never know if the water will change us until we are actually in the water. Haplings can't change, they only exists in the form of a merperson, and that's all they ever can be. If two grypes mate their child is also a grype, same goes for two haplings mating. however, if a grype and a hapling mate, there is a 75/25 ratio with the grypes getting the upperhand, they're considered the dominant type for this reason. Also because there are very few grypes outside of the royal families, it's very rare for a royal and a commoner to interact, let alone they have a child. It's a very old class system, very much like separation between races that happened in the US, but it's not at all violent or forced. It's just how our people have always been. I actually find it as being a quite silly tradition. I used to play with the little hapling toddlers at the orphanages, they're absolutely adorable, they have pointy little ears and adorable little gills. They're like that because both types of merpeople spend the first 10 years of their life in the water, because like frogs, we have extra parts to grow out of. We're born, well hatch actually, with fins on our ears, gills, and pointed teeth. It takes those 10 years for everything to fall off or be replaced. If we get taken out of the water before we're a year old our tail never grows, like ever. I know I'm rambling I'm really sorry."

"No actually, it all kinda sounds familiar. I'm not sure why, maybe something like it was in a story my parents told me when I was little. It actually reminds me of how much me and my mom used to swim when I was little, I remember it feeling like we were in that water for hours."

By now her legs had come back and only her hair was wet, my shirt had soaked the water off the rest of her. I'd been sitting next to her the whole duration of her story. Now I couldn't help myself from trailing my eyes over her, she really did have an amazing body, but I couldn't let that part of me take over right now. She decided to go back behind the wall she used to change to repeat the action, once she came back we packed up our date and starting walking back to my car. We held hands on the way there and walked in the waves. We ended up putting our things down and running around in the low water. She ended up tripping over my foot bringing the both of us down in the sand with her landing on top of me. It was the typical moment that you see in every movie, our faces were inches apart and we both started blushing. What separated us from the typical movie moment is that instead of me letting her pull away, I brought her back down. To my relief, she brought herself the rest of the way down, gently hovering her lips over my own. I leaned up into the kiss I'd been waiting so long for. It was more perfect than I had imagined it.

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AYY LMAO LONG CHAPTER WOO!!!! Sorry for the whole rant when Marylin was talking but I promise it was necessary. I'll be updating really soon because I already started writing the next chapter and it's super important to the story. I promise I'll start updating more often now because school is actually calming down so I have more free time. Hope you guys loved it and don't forget to vote!! AND THANKS SO MUCH FOR THE 3K READS OMFG!!!!!