Destiny Island (editing)

Chapter 7

The story the two men told them was not very different from Amber and Jade's story. They were on a ship together, and when it started sinking, they settled into a boat with a few other people. Unfortunately, the waves threw them out of it at the mercy of the fierce waves.

Luckily for them, they found a piece of the broken ship large enough for both of them to stay on. There was also a rope tied to the board, so they tied themselves to it so as not to be thrown off by the powerful waves. They had no provisions, but they reached the shore before dying of thirst, as they were caught in a strong current that brought them straight to the island.

When Amber heard that, she was very grateful for their small life raft since she wasn't sure that the two of them would have survived otherwise. The panic alone could have made them meet their demise sooner than anything else.

When Ignacio and Royce reached the island, they were so tired that they immediately fell asleep, although they were starving. After a while, a sound Ignacio couldn't recognize woke him up, although his mind was still muddled, trying to figure out where he was. As he got his bearings, the sound of splashing grew louder, as if someone was in the water swimming towards them.

It turned out it wasn't a person but something else. What Ignacio saw was something he had never seen before and never thought he would see — a mermaid. She had long blond hair, and she was covered in gold scales which sparkled in the sun. It was a magnificent sight to see.

Upon close inspection, he noticed she had something in her hand that looked like a coconut, and in the other, she was holding a strange container which seemed to be filled with water.

After seeing that Ignacio thought he was going crazy, since he was a rational human being — he didn't believe in mermaids or magic. He started calling Royce to check if he could see the same thing, to make sure he wasn't going mad.

"Royce, wake up, man! I think I'm going nuts! Tell me, do you see what I'm seeing?" Ignacio said.

Royce half-opened his eyes and said grudgingly: "Yes, I see a mermaid. Now let me go back to sleep! I'm exhausted."

The moment he said that, he jumped from his comfortable spot in the sand, fully awake. He could also see the mermaid. There were actually two of them, and they were both carrying food and water. As soon as they saw them awake, the mermaids left the offerings on the beach and promptly disappeared as if they had never been there to begin with. The only way the guys knew they were not dreaming was the food and water that the mermaids had left behind.

As time passed, Royce and Ignacio didn't see them again but kept finding food and water on the beach three times a day. These precious things seemed to appear out of nowhere, but Royce knew the mermaids had brought them there. This continued for a few days since they weren't sure what to do next, worried that moving further inland would mean losing their basic sustenance.

Ignacio suggested staying close to the beach, waiting for a ship to come, but Royce was more in favor of looking for the inhabitants of the island, well, not inhabitants the way people usually thought of them, but the magical beings living on the island. He was sure that the island was filled with them, not humans.

That was where the second reason for their argument lay. Namely, Ignacio claimed the mermaids were just a shared hallucination caused by extreme thirst and hunger. But Royce was smart enough to believe his own eyes. Besides, the food and water were proof enough, but Ignacio assumed the shy inhabitants of the island had left them when they were asleep, that the mermaids were simply women their muddled minds saw as something more. However, since Royce was a dreamer, it was easier for him to grasp the concept of mermaids.

Finally, after a few days, they settled their first argument by deciding to explore the island a bit more and look for the inhabitants, whoever or whatever they might be. When the girls saw them, they were having their second argument, the one about the mermaids.

"And that is our story," concluded Ignacio with the flair of a true storyteller, even though most of the retelling itself was more factual than anything else.

The girls who had been silent until that moment, listening to the story, started coming back to reality. Jade was unsure whether to believe their story because it seemed like too big a coincidence that both pairs would end up at the same beach at a similar time after a shipwreck.

"That is what I saw!" exclaimed Amber, blind to all the red flags that were glaringly obvious to Jade. "I thought there was something strange about the glimmer I saw earlier. Now I know it was the end of a mermaid's tail! They were helping us as well!"

Her exclamations caused an oppressive silence to wash over them as Ignacio didn't want to contradict her, having just met her — he didn't want to be rude. Jade, on the other hand, was too full of doubts to say anything, even to chastise her friend. And Royce couldn't speak, stunned as he was by what was said, but still feeling content that someone else saw the same thing and that the person didn't deny it.

"What about you? What's your story?" Ignacio asked the girls, eager to change the subject and break the awkward silence that had settled over them.

Since Jade had remained silent, scrutinizing each of the two men with suspicion, Amber decided it was her time to shine and started telling them their story with too many details, which Jade didn't like, but she let her be. Maybe when they were focused on Amber's story, Jade could figure out if they truly were harmless or if it was some kind of ploy against them.

Even the guys didn't mind her exaggerated storytelling since, for the last few days, they had only had each other for company, and they mostly argued. The energetic retelling of the most mundane things sounded like just the right thing to help them decompress.