The Great Mermaid Hunt



(After Uprising)

Annie was torn. On one hand, she didn't want to complain about the black light poster Ray had hung up. She didn't want him to think it was that easy to bother her. And for the most part it wasn't a bother. It hung high up on the wall, well above her line of sight, and typically had no impact on her life. It wasn't even on the wall the TV was on, so she had no reason to look in that direction.

On the other hand, though, if 'people' came over, she couldn't NOT think about it. A large breasted mermaid was coiled upon a rock in the surf. Nothing covered those melons, either, not seashells, not hair, not tastefully appointed starfish or even her forearm. She held a starfish she was teasing. It stood on two legs, fending off her tickling finger with two more. Annie thought it looked like she was teasing a sylph. She was pretty sure MASTER saw a giant teasing a sylph in that poster.

But Mom and Dad saw the boobs. It was embarrassing. And while she knew no one blamed HER for the damned thing existing or being hung in this house, it clearly showed the limits of her influence upon her own household.

Dad tried once to compliment the art, noting that at least the artist had made the mermaid's tail fishy. "No knees," he explained. "I always hated mermaids constructed with obvious knees. As if their fish half were also half-human. Kinda defeats the purpose of a half-fish person, if she's three quarters human."

Unfortunately, he didn't make this observation until the 15th visit after the poster went up. Mom accused him of staring at the tits for the first 14 trips, to finally come up with something else in the frame to talk about.

Dad said he was too young to be a dirty old man. Mom said he'd been a dirty old man the day they met in college. Dad defended himself by saying that Gwen was far too young to be married to a dirty old man. Annie jumped up and down on the coffee table, desperately applauding his attempt at a save. Mom sniffed, but allowed the save. Dad slipped Annie a cookie.

As she carried it off to her stash, Ray came in from the patio and the barbecue and asked what Annie had done to earn a cookie. Mom got as far as saying she'd ended a fight that Ray had started when he suddenly realized it was time to flip the ribs and made his retreat.

So Annie at least felt that she could justify an attack on the poster being relevant to Mom and Dad's continued matrimonial bliss. Not jealousy or a perceived slight on her part.

But how to do it….?

A webcam that she hadn't admitted to knowing about was hidden above the sliding door curtain and pointed at the poster. Ray would be able to see, from some surveillance website, she assumed, if she managed to climb up to it and started tearing it apart piece by piece.

The same if she somehow built scaffolding up to the sky and painted over it.

She did think briefly, and fondly, of shooting it with flaming arrows, but she had this superstition about setting fire to a house she couldn't get out of.

Ray came home while she was conducting an inventory of everything she could possibly use to get up as high as the poster. His sylph was in the cupboard next to the kitchen door, mere inches from his face when he offered his customary greeting.

"Annie, I'm home!"

"GEEZ! What? What? What's with the bellowing?" she shrieked. As he usually didn't expect a response from inches away, he flinched back against the door.

"What the fuck are you doing on the junk shelf?"

She crossed her arms and glared at him. "Like I can't have a social life? Is that what you're saying?"

He looked past her shoulder to the contents of the shelf. "What, you and the birthday candles have a liaison?"

"It's the straws," she said. "And they are very sensitive lovers."

"Right," he nodded. He picked her up, kissed her hair, then carried her to his computer desk. "Traffic was bad so it's already started."

"What's already started?" she asked.

"Your social life." He signed onto AOL. She watched as he navigated to a chat room called Rebels Without Flaws. "Get your typing stick."

"What? Oh. You're going to chat, using tiny me as your secretary? Never mind you're a touch typist and can reach every key at once you'll-"

"If you'd rather not talk to Clint, Ellen, Brad, Cherry," he said. He typed, 'Sorry We're Late, traffic sux, Annie here now.'

Three accounts welcomed Annie, though it took a while for all the replies to show up on the screen. "That's slow," she said.

"That's sylph typing," he replied, proudly tapping his 2400 baud modem. He scooted back from the desk. She stared at the screen. He gently lifted her to the keyboard. "Say hi," he said. Then he got up and wandered to the kitchen.

'mastergone' she typed. 'whatisupyall'

She had the run of the keyboard until dinner was ready. Then she spent most of dinner telling Ray what she'd learned.

"It's so COOL! Clint is allowed to be Clint in everything but official paperwork!"

"That's nice of Margaret," he nodded around a mouthful of pork chop.

"It is! And Melvin isn't making the Tan Twins playact the movie anymore." She ran to her table, dipped a sliver of the meat into the sauce then went back to stand at the edge of his plate as she ate it.

"Not at all?" he asked.

"No, why?"

"Well, at WORK he says he's expanded their repertoire. Romeo and Juliet, Rhett and Scarlet, Professor and Mary Ann."

"The great lovers," she said softly.

"Yep."

"They didn't mention it," she said.

He nodded. "Yeah, I doubted that they managed to master too much of that list in the last week."

"So…." She looked up at him with guilt practically glowing on her face. "What are you going to tell Melvin?"

"It was your conversation with your friends," he said. "I don't have anything TO tell Melvin. Certainly not a reason to question his bragging on his sylphs."

"Thanks," she said simply. He nodded. "We should probably add 'friends' to the agreement. Just for boundaries, you know."

"We already did," he said. "Rule 14."

"Don't be a fuckwit?" she asked, eyes wide.

"That wording died in committee," he reminded her.

"By 'committee,' you mean you chickened out before showing the list to Mom," she said with an evil smile.

"Po-TAY-toe, Co-WAR-do," he said with a shrug. "Anyway, I won't use you or your chat time to cause trouble for your friends."

"I'd like to think they're your friends, too," she said.

"Then why do they never pick up a check?" he asked.

"Because they've seen you eat. It's not a behavior they want to encourage!" She grabbed up another sliver of meat and stuck it halfway into her mouth. "Gnawr, gnawr, gnawr," she moaned, mashing teeth and moving the meat around very visibly.

"That's not what I do!" he shouted. He stuffed the bulk of his pork chop into his mouth, bones and all, and set his teeth against it. "Nyam, nyam, nyam!"

Grease spattered the table around his plate, splashing against Annie's thighs. She spat her food out…onto HIS plate, of course. "You fucking barbarian! No WONDER my friends hate you!" Ray couldn't think of a comeback for that, so he dropped the chop and scooped his pet up into the air. He tickled her maliciously, until they were both laughing.

When he paused to recover his breath, she slipped down to the table and got a drink of her water. He cut off a bite of pork as she sat down. "So how's Cherry?"

"Hasn't had to flash her famous teats all WEEK!" Annie said happily. "It's a new record!"

"I have torn feelings about that," he admitted.

"More dignity in the world DOES tend to mean fewer bared breasts, Master," Annie said. She tried to sound sympathetic. He nodded sadly. "Um, Master? I did kinda promise Cherry that you'd never look for that issue…"

"Wouldn't dream of it," he said. "I'd promise to keep it a secret, then I'd say something like 'you look good in a scarf' or grass skirt, or whatever they posed her in and she'd hate me. Like all your friends do."

"Probably," she said, though now she sounded proud. He was being friendly to all her friends! For all of thirty seconds she began to think she could tolerate the sea-cow in the living room. Then, of course, sanity returned.

Ray started to tell her about work. Usually she zoned right out when the topic of the world outside came up, but he only related stories of people she knew, now. "Someone tried to tease Margaret about owning a sylph," he reported.

"What do you mean, tease?"

"Well, it's that cliché." She shook her head, not following him. He wasn't a woman who owned a sylph and she didn’t' get out much. "Women…" he said and paused. "Um, they say that women who own sylphs… Are probably saving money on batteries…"

"That's disgusting!" she replied.

"Yeah," he nodded. "And why women rarely bring their sylphs-"

"I mean, I'm sure Clint is a considerate lover and I hope they find true happiness together, in whatever form they can share, but it's nobody else's business!" she said. "And to just ASSUME that she's using him for sex, merely because she owns him, that's disgusting."

"You're repeating yourself to the choir," Ray said.

"So what did she say?"

"She said, and I quote, because about twenty people quoted it to me, "I believe Annie would suggest that you take that opinion in a firm and considerate grip and shove it straight up your ass."

"GOOD for her! I'm happy for her! And PROUD!"

"I'll tell her you said so," he smiled.

----------

He took her to work for the next couple of days. Mostly because he missed her company. Also, on one of the days the boss had promised to buy the unit pizza for lunch.

It was about Annie's only chance to get a piece of meat-lovers pizza because Ray was leery of pepperoni and sausage. She told everyone around the table that it was a character flaw, but not contagious, so they should relax.

Some people asked Chrissy if Cherry talked about her that way. "What way?" Chrissy asked innocently.

"Well, um, like she's, uh…"

"A real person?" Chrissy asked. "That's 'a way' of talking, now?" Annie was impressed that a simple demand for respect accomplished what usually took her a baker's dozen of profanity.

Ray stayed out of the debate, building a little tower by slotting straws into the ends of other straws. Annie was inspired.

---------

Back at the mermaid cove, Annie stole the box of straws from the junk shelf and worked them by the unseen highway to beneath the love-seat.

It took quite a bit of time to manage the leverage necessary to crimp a straw and slide the end into the opening of another. Once she mastered it, though, the rest went quickly.

They were clear plastic, which she hoped would be practically invisible to the webcams Master was using. The ones she'd seen in the store transmitted pictures that were about two steps above shadow puppets and way below black and white televisions.

She couldn't quite figure the distance to the tacks at the top of the poster, so she asked Master how to calculate the height of a flagpole from the base.

He showed her how to figure the angles between a spot on the floor and the top of the pass-through, from that to Pythagoras, then checked his work with a tape ruler.

She clapped, very impressed at his algebra skills. "Um, geometry," he corrected her. She apologized.

The next time she was alone, she just slid the steel tape ruler to the floor under the poster. Her plastic soup bowl, used as a hot tub on cold days, was upturned beside her, propped up by part of a stir-stick.

Then she just lifted the tape and kept lifting. It spooled out, and up, dragging along the wall and climbing. When it bumped against the tack, she noted the distance.

Then she let go and tossed herself under the bowl. The stir stick fell under her shoulder and the bowl landed atop her.

The tape retracted, zzzzzzzipping back into the casing, with lengths of the fully-extended steel ribbon falling all about her. The bowl kept her safe, though.

Measuring the lengths of straws went much more safely.

On the last straw, she cut a notch. A huge loop of dental floss went into the notch, with a ridiculous strip of it laying along the straw-tower's side. The bottom of the bottom straw was taped in place at the wall beneath the poster. Then she walked to the other end and started lifting. Each step she took, she lifted the straw's top another inch until she had it vertical.

Then she moved the end back and forth until the loop was caught on the tack. She gently pulled down on the extra length, tightening the loop like a lasso.

This was repeated three times, catching floss around all four tacks holding the offending art to the wall.

The four lengths had plenty of slack to reach across the room to the curtains. She tied them together, tied the knot to her belt and climbed. From the top of the curtain, she managed to flip the floss onto the blades of the ceiling fan, then let them drop.

She didn't want any floss near her when she turned the fan on.

One of Ray's cameras would catch Annie turning on the fan, but that couldn't be helped. Hopefully the resolution on the cameras still wouldn't let him see how that action led to her victory.

The switch for the fan was on the light panel next to the curtains she was on. She climbed down, then started swinging. Her leg lunged out and kicked the switch up.

She looked up at the fan as it started to wind the floss around itself.

In her mind, that would eventually take up the slack on the lassos, which would pull out the tacks. The poster would fall to the floor, ideally rolling itself back up, and she could smuggle it under the sofa, to destroy it at her leisure.

Or maybe negotiate some deal for its safe return, she hadn't decided.

But she hadn't watched Ray mount the poster. She should have remembered college.

Ray owned a poster that showed a map of Middle Earth. He hung it on the dorm wall every school year and took it home to hang it in the bedroom every summer.

All that tacking up and taking down started to tear up the corners, so he reinforced the back of each corner with tape. Soon he was in the habit of reinforcing everything in that manner.

And when he put the mermaid up, the first tape he found was duct tape. Since it was on the back and wouldn't detract from the artistic integrity or titillation of the piece, he used it.

And since, truth be told, he was half expecting Annie to climb up and tear the thing into strips on the wall, he used rather a lot of duct tape.

So as the floss was gathered around the fan assembly, pulled tighter and tighter, it did eventually pull the tacks out of the wall.

But not out of the poster.

The mermaid burst off the wall and started to circle the living room. It was too heavy to be taken up very high by the fan, so it dragged the floss down as it went, spinning around the room like a kite with directional issues.

"What the fuck?" Annie asked.

It hit the mantle over the fire place and pushed a ceramic figure over the side. Her first thought was that Ray would thank her for that. A cousin had a rough idea that Ray 'worked with computers' and had bought a Precious Moments Accountant for his graduation gift. He had a calculator and was 'counting up (his) blessings.'

Ray loved family too much to toss it, but he never liked it when friends saw the thing. "I thought you were an atheist?" they'd ask, or "I thought you had a real computer?" or "I thought you could do accounting math in your head?"

When the poster tipped the lamp over, though, she became concerned. She turned around and tried to kick the fan back to off. In her panic, she kicked harder than she aimed and slipped down an inch or two on the drapes.

Something crashed behind her. She wouldn't have looked but she couldn't remember what was breakable in that direction.

As she turned, a giant woman swooped towards her. She screamed and dropped, barely catching herself on the drapery before she smashed to the floor.

The destruction continued. Computer disks were scattered off the desk, action figures off of the book shelves, messages from the bulletin board.

Each pass of the poster found something that had been protected on the previous round. Annie climbed madly up to the fan's switch.

Then she slid to the floor in the silence. The poster was a tangled wreck spinning in place as the fan slowed. She stood for a moment watching three images pass: boob, then face, then starfish.

Now it looked like the starfish was flipping Annie off.

She crept carefully across the floor, avoiding shards of glass or shattered plastic or Trek figures in poses of agony. She left everything alone, though she did pull Uhura's skirt down, and positioned her legs less pornographically.

She wasn't frantic on the climb to the phone on the pass-through counter, but she was quick. The talk-lever removed the handset and she dialed Mom's work number from memory.

"Annie! How nice of you to call. What's up?"

"It's about the mad minute, Mom," Annie said calmly.

"That time during which a sylph," Mom recited, "hides from the immediate anger her owner will feel when he sees what she's done."

"Yes, ma'am."

"A tactic that ended with your leg being broken at least once, I seem to recall?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Well, what about the mad minute, Annie?"

The sylph turned and stared across the destruction. "I think I need asylum, ma'am."

"For a minute?"

"For maybe a week?"

------

Mom's car was in the shop so she was ride-sharing with Dad. Both left work early to come to Annie's rescue before Master could come home.

Dad offered to start sweeping up the worst of the damage.

"NO!" Annie cried. The humans stared. "No, um, no thank you. I did it. It was an accident, and I can explain, but I don’t want to try to minimize it."

Her adoptive parents smiled with pride at her integrity. "And mostly, I don't want to BE here when he walks in, so can we GO?"

Dad left a note on the poster, 'Annie's alright. Call when you can form full sentences. Dad & Mom.' Then they made tracks.



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