It was hard being beautiful.
For Roxelle de Carreaux-Lensoise, it was especially hard.
She loved being beautiful, sure. Who didn’t? But for the most beautiful mermaid in the Emerald Sea, she suffered challenges nobody else did. And it wasn’t just the daily routine necessary to maintain her impeccable skin and flawless fins.
Because every moment of the day, without fail–
“Damnable birds!!”
Roxelle flipped acrobatically upon the water’s surface, smashing her fins against a diving albatross.
She cursed as the flying rat cawed mockingly as it soared away, barely stunned by the strike of her delicate fins. Rather, all it did was attract more of the vermin’s swarm.
They circled over her, their white wings masking the sun as they whined, squeaked and cackled before they dived. And yet again, Roxelle was forced to retreat to the safety of the depths.
“Grrrrrrrrrrhhhhhhh!!!!”
It was horrible!
As a mermaid, she had one job and one job only–to have the time of her life!
It wasn’t complicated. She danced, she sang, she played and she frolicked. Except that with fins as vibrant as a rainbow, she attracted every albatross over the Emerald Sea as if she was a leaping trout.
Everyday, she’d hear the laughter of her fellow mermaids as they romped to their heart’s content. But for Roxelle?
It was a life imprisoned beneath the water’s surface.
The mermaid grit her teeth as she thought up a solution.
It wasn’t enough to bat away the birds as they came one by one. No, at most, all it’d do was tire her. And while she enjoyed the satisfaction of hearing that perfect woomp as she struck them just right, she enjoyed the gasps of admiration from her fellow mermaids even more as she showed off her fins and her hair.
Her wonderful, wonderful hair.
Oh, how lovely it was, as red as blushing hawthorn. The sign she was prospective royalty.
And she refused to waste her beauty by hiding beneath the surface from flying rats!
That’s why, one day, 18 hours into her daily hairbrushing routine–
She paused for five minutes to devise a method to escape her predicament.
She considered a myriad of options. She could cover her fins with mud. She could surface with her fellow mermaids instead of fashionably choosing to arrive alone. She could even ask the Queen of Tides to magically conceal her.
After those five minutes of thought, she decided on the simplest solution to her albatross problem.
She would systematically murder every one of them.
A problem. She could leap. But she already knew her fins weren’t powerful enough to do more than stun them. She needed something stronger. And she needed them all together.
She needed a trap.
Her plan?
To construct the only thing which could distract them from her beauty.
A giant heap of stuff.
Clinking, coiny stuff. Sapphire, emerald and ruby stuff. Necklaces, rings and bracelets stuff.
She’d build a trove large enough to spill out from her clamshell home!
She’d fill up her reef until enough shiny stuff was heaped together to lure the damnable albatrosses into one place! And when enough of the vermin was gathered, she’d have the friendly kraken her shoal was on good terms with to swallow them all in a single bite!
Eventually, all the stuff would come back out. And then she’d repeat the process, until the sky was finally clear and she was free to dance like the innocent maiden she was!
But to do that, she needed that stuff.
Lots and lots of stuff–of which Roxelle had none.
In fact, nobody in the kingdom did. Mostly since they were all poor as weeds.
Because within the Kingdom Beneath The Sea, all that glittered was very much not gold.
Instead, it was rainbow corals, colourful butterflyfish, ribbon eels and blue tangs.
All very pretty, but also unhelpful.
The Kingdom Beneath The Sea was not awash with jewellers and tinkerers. As bountiful as the ocean was, it possessed few with the hands and minds to shape it.
Between the coral seabed and the glimmering surface, an eternity of poverty was broken only by sailors who wandered too close to the kingdom’s borders. And then the Queen of Tides invited them, offering a carpet down a vortex of crushing waves and aboleth horrors.
Those occasions were few and far between now, each time a joy for the treasurers who counted their meagre vaults with the glee of dragons upon their hoards. How low their kingdom had sunk–and they were already at the bottom of the sea!
They were a realm of scavengers. Of carrion feeders. Of plankton feeding off morsels.
And they didn’t even do it right.
Because Roxelle de Carreaux-Lensoise?
She absolutely did.
That’s why, a decade after she came up with her simple plan, she was now the wealthiest mermaid in the Kingdom Beneath The Sea.
Within her clamshell home, all that glittered truly was gold.
And the only thing it ever cost was her sense of smell.
“Alarm! It’s a mer–”
“Nope~ ”
Roxelle pinched her nose as she went by.
True, the stench was unbearable. But it wasn’t as though there was nothing to enjoy. The sight of the ogre’s shock was marvellous. They never expected her to leap through a porthole like some poor sole they’d hooked. That moment alone always made it worth it.
The expression wasn’t to last, though. A few heartbeats later, the ogre had turned into a drooling mess, his mind blanketed by a hazy dream woven by the [Charm] trait inherent in all her kind’s voices.
Except Roxelle’s was even more powerful than any of her predecessors.
She was content with leaving her victims stupefied, but she could have just as easily pushed them into a barrel of their own tar to drown in.
The thought made her giggle. And that giggle sent more of her victims dribbling.
“Ughhhh … you won’t–”
“Yes I will~ ”
Roxelle hummed to herself as she made her way up to the ship’s deck.
While the selkies, nymphs and water wisps danced within their reefs, she was busy fulfilling her plan of bird genocide. And she was so tantalisingly close. Her heap of stuff didn’t just spill out from her home. It almost touched the surface!
This haul would be the last she needed!
Obviously, accruing so much stuff wasn’t easy. In fact, procuring new stuff was exceptionally cumbersome. After all, stealing was strictly forbidden, as was harming those who hadn’t expressly breached the kingdom’s borders.
Those upon their rotting trees were left to roam the open seas, defended by ancient treaties penned in waterproof ink. Their wares and their belongings went untouched, no matter which part of the ocean they had pilfered from.
Which is why–
“Hehehe~ ”
Stealing and harming was precisely not what Roxelle was doing!
Inside the captain’s cabin, she ignored the cutlass held in the large ogre’s hand, putting aside her momentary admiration as she casually slithered over to the gleaming chest. Most never made it far enough to draw their weapons.
But then again, she wouldn’t have expected anything less.
This ogre, after all, was the one she’d married.
A pity it didn’t last. But maybe the next would prove the one.
It’s as they say. The 103rd time’s a charm!
Roxelle hummed as she delved into the chest of stuff.
She’d probably miss this, once she was done murdering all the birds.
It was so easy. She didn’t even need to use her [Charm] trait. Merely a few jumps from the water and a wave of her fins was enough before she was inundated with proclamations of marriage!
And that changed everything.
Robbing dumb sailors? Strictly prohibited.
Except that if she said ‘yes’, then it was no longer outright robbery. Just a civil dispute mired in the grey waters of division of assets after an acrimonious divorce. And nobody above or below the water wanted to get involved in that. The ogres stripped of their will and turned into dribbling statues? Obstacles to the lawful reappropriation of goods.
Yes.
Roxelle wasn’t just beautiful. She was smart. And nobody had ever told her otherwise.
Pausing only to admire her reflection, Roxelle frowned when she found one of the ends of her hair only curled 32 degrees.
It’d take another decade of continuous hairbrushing to fix that. But the sight was soothed by the sensation of her palms digging through the heap of coins.
Roxelle smiled as she sieved through the polished metal and precious gemstones.
This was enough.
Too much of enough, actually.
And that meant …
“Heheheh … you can go in my trove … and you can go in my cupboard … and you? Hmm, maybe you can go in my spare heap …”
“Or perhaps they can stay exactly where they are. At least until my own tax inspectors can properly scrutinise this ship’s ledgers.”
Roxelle blinked, then turned around.
She didn’t know what surprised her more. That a pair of girls was on this ship of ogres, or that they’d somehow resisted her voice.
They were pretty, as well. Not as pretty as her. But for girls without fins, they could probably find someone weird enough in the sea to like them.
She wasn’t one of them.
And thus–she ignored them both.
The one with the sword didn’t like that. She waved it around while raising her voice. Roxelle could tell from the way the shadows moved. She was definitely interested in that. A bright sword would go well with the heap. But at the same time, she didn’t want anything on the heap to completely take away from her. That’d be insufferable.
And so she ignored it, all the while trying to ignore the incessant questions from the girl as her fingertips grazed against the rough grain of stone amongst the jewellery.
She knew what it was at once.
A warding amulet.
Roxelle was delighted!
She’d be asking a lot of the kraken. Although they were on friendly terms, she felt bad about asking it to swallow so much inedible stuff for her sake. And eating albatrosses sounded like a nightmare. Literally. They’d caw, squawk and whine as they were being swallowed. The noise would echo inside the poor thing’s tummy for days.
Gratitude, then. And Roxelle knew for a fact the kraken enjoyed snacking on sailors.
Even ogres would suffice. It was a rare luxury. Few traversed the Emerald Sea without a warding amulet. And for good reason.
It was, for example, already right beneath them.
Useful for doing away with the angry girl wielding the bright sword too.
She was pointing it towards her. And the expression on her face made it plain that she had no qualms about using it.
Roxelle was even more surprised than before.
Despite having a conversation with her for an entire minute, the highly irksome girl hadn’t yet succumbed to her passive [Charm]. Usually, merely listening to her voice was enough. To be spoken directly to for so long and still resist showed a worrying amount of willpower.
That never happened!
In 103 failed marriages, she’d never met anyone from the shore who had demonstrated so much resolve. She’d even laced a drop of magic, skirting the treaties so finely that the ink had probably been shaved off.
And so for the first time, Roxelle actually looked at her, instead of just in her general direction.
What she saw caused her to feel a pin-drop of unease.
Pretty hair. Pretty eyes. Pretty lashes. Pretty cheeks.
So not just pretty. But annoyingly pretty.
A more direct approach, then.
She’d get into trouble for it. But that’s only if anyone saw. And the kraken was nothing if not a polite eater. He didn’t do leftovers.
That’s why …
“–There are more ways to charm than merely one’s voice.”
She offered her true smile.
It was more than the passive charm woven into her voice. That merely left them befuddled.
A mermaid’s true smile was a lethal instrument, leaving them in a dream more intoxicating than any fantasy they could wish. Within the paradise that Roxelle had sewn, happiness more enveloping than a mother’s arms awaited them.
To wake from it was to plunge into a bleak world of sorrow and hardship, stripped of warmth and fulfilment. And no soul was meant to survive such cruelty.
Against such a deadly attack, the poor girl before her could only … smile in return?
What?
“Yes, there is … why, I see it in the mirror each morning.”
Roxelle immediately tripped over her fins, such was her complete shock.
She didn’t even know that was possible!
Because before her … was the most sinister smile she’d ever witnessed in her life!
It was the smile of a vixen looking down upon her prey! A queen smirking at a toy to be plucked and broken!
It was an amalgamation of depravity, sadism and unrestrained cruelty.
There was no light in that smile. Only a darkness as unfeeling as the deepest abyss where no mermaid could swim.
And each moment Roxelle looked at it, she could feel herself being dragged further below.
Nobody, not even the Queen of Tides, had ever looked at her with so much disdain for her worth! So much disregard for her feelings! Nobody had ever dared. She was prospective royalty! A descendant of the Trident Princess! The head mermaid of her shoal’s choir … twice!
Roxelle was the most beautiful mermaid in the realm! That made her the most adored!
But seeing this girl’s beautiful, degrading smile, she suddenly felt less than trash.
And that made her feel …
“Now, behold and learn! Compared to your mockery of bewitchment, I do not require magic to cover my shortfalls. As the fairest of them all, my natural charms and affectionate smile captures the hearts of all who gaze upon me!”
Strangely … delighted?!
An unfamiliar shiver ran up Roxelle’s body as a newly found joy awakened in her heart! The shock, the wrongness of it, struck her innocent and tender soul like a harpoon!
As she looked on, unable to utter a reply, she thought it wouldn’t be so bad to be scolded by someone with such a wicked, twisted smile …
And when she did–
Roxelle suddenly stopped thinking.
It was hard being beautiful.
For Roxelle de Carreaux-Lensoise, it was especially hard.
She loved being beautiful, sure. Who didn’t? But for the most beautiful mermaid in the Emerald Sea, she suffered challenges nobody else did. And it wasn’t just the daily routine necessary to maintain her impeccable skin and flawless fins.
Because every moment of the day, without fail–
“Damnable birds!!”
Roxelle flipped acrobatically upon the water’s surface, smashing her fins against a diving albatross.
She cursed as the flying rat cawed mockingly as it soared away, barely stunned by the strike of her delicate fins. Rather, all it did was attract more of the vermin’s swarm.
They circled over her, their white wings masking the sun as they whined, squeaked and cackled before they dived. And yet again, Roxelle was forced to retreat to the safety of the depths.
“Grrrrrrrrrrhhhhhhh!!!!”
It was horrible!
As a mermaid, she had one job and one job only–to have the time of her life!
It wasn’t complicated. She danced, she sang, she played and she frolicked. Except that with fins as vibrant as a rainbow, she attracted every albatross over the Emerald Sea as if she was a leaping trout.
Everyday, she’d hear the laughter of her fellow mermaids as they romped to their heart’s content. But for Roxelle?
It was a life imprisoned beneath the water’s surface.
The mermaid grit her teeth as she thought up a solution.
It wasn’t enough to bat away the birds as they came one by one. No, at most, all it’d do was tire her. And while she enjoyed the satisfaction of hearing that perfect woomp as she struck them just right, she enjoyed the gasps of admiration from her fellow mermaids even more as she showed off her fins and her hair.
Her wonderful, wonderful hair.
Oh, how lovely it was, as red as blushing hawthorn. The sign she was prospective royalty.
And she refused to waste her beauty by hiding beneath the surface from flying rats!
That’s why, one day, 18 hours into her daily hairbrushing routine–
She paused for five minutes to devise a method to escape her predicament.
She considered a myriad of options. She could cover her fins with mud. She could surface with her fellow mermaids instead of fashionably choosing to arrive alone. She could even ask the Queen of Tides to magically conceal her.
After those five minutes of thought, she decided on the simplest solution to her albatross problem.
She would systematically murder every one of them.
A problem. She could leap. But she already knew her fins weren’t powerful enough to do more than stun them. She needed something stronger. And she needed them all together.
She needed a trap.
Her plan?
To construct the only thing which could distract them from her beauty.
A giant heap of stuff.
Clinking, coiny stuff. Sapphire, emerald and ruby stuff. Necklaces, rings and bracelets stuff.
She’d build a trove large enough to spill out from her clamshell home!
She’d fill up her reef until enough shiny stuff was heaped together to lure the damnable albatrosses into one place! And when enough of the vermin was gathered, she’d have the friendly kraken her shoal was on good terms with to swallow them all in a single bite!
Eventually, all the stuff would come back out. And then she’d repeat the process, until the sky was finally clear and she was free to dance like the innocent maiden she was!
But to do that, she needed that stuff.
Lots and lots of stuff–of which Roxelle had none.
In fact, nobody in the kingdom did. Mostly since they were all poor as weeds.
Because within the Kingdom Beneath The Sea, all that glittered was very much not gold.
Instead, it was rainbow corals, colourful butterflyfish, ribbon eels and blue tangs.
All very pretty, but also unhelpful.
The Kingdom Beneath The Sea was not awash with jewellers and tinkerers. As bountiful as the ocean was, it possessed few with the hands and minds to shape it.
Between the coral seabed and the glimmering surface, an eternity of poverty was broken only by sailors who wandered too close to the kingdom’s borders. And then the Queen of Tides invited them, offering a carpet down a vortex of crushing waves and aboleth horrors.
Those occasions were few and far between now, each time a joy for the treasurers who counted their meagre vaults with the glee of dragons upon their hoards. How low their kingdom had sunk–and they were already at the bottom of the sea!
They were a realm of scavengers. Of carrion feeders. Of plankton feeding off morsels.
And they didn’t even do it right.
Because Roxelle de Carreaux-Lensoise?
She absolutely did.
That’s why, a decade after she came up with her simple plan, she was now the wealthiest mermaid in the Kingdom Beneath The Sea.
Within her clamshell home, all that glittered truly was gold.
And the only thing it ever cost was her sense of smell.
“Alarm! It’s a mer–”
“Nope~ ”
Roxelle pinched her nose as she went by.
True, the stench was unbearable. But it wasn’t as though there was nothing to enjoy. The sight of the ogre’s shock was marvellous. They never expected her to leap through a porthole like some poor sole they’d hooked. That moment alone always made it worth it.
The expression wasn’t to last, though. A few heartbeats later, the ogre had turned into a drooling mess, his mind blanketed by a hazy dream woven by the [Charm] trait inherent in all her kind’s voices.
Except Roxelle’s was even more powerful than any of her predecessors.
She was content with leaving her victims stupefied, but she could have just as easily pushed them into a barrel of their own tar to drown in.
The thought made her giggle. And that giggle sent more of her victims dribbling.
“Ughhhh … you won’t–”
“Yes I will~ ”
Roxelle hummed to herself as she made her way up to the ship’s deck.
While the selkies, nymphs and water wisps danced within their reefs, she was busy fulfilling her plan of bird genocide. And she was so tantalisingly close. Her heap of stuff didn’t just spill out from her home. It almost touched the surface!
This haul would be the last she needed!
Obviously, accruing so much stuff wasn’t easy. In fact, procuring new stuff was exceptionally cumbersome. After all, stealing was strictly forbidden, as was harming those who hadn’t expressly breached the kingdom’s borders.
Those upon their rotting trees were left to roam the open seas, defended by ancient treaties penned in waterproof ink. Their wares and their belongings went untouched, no matter which part of the ocean they had pilfered from.
Which is why–
“Hehehe~ ”
Stealing and harming was precisely not what Roxelle was doing!
Inside the captain’s cabin, she ignored the cutlass held in the large ogre’s hand, putting aside her momentary admiration as she casually slithered over to the gleaming chest. Most never made it far enough to draw their weapons.
But then again, she wouldn’t have expected anything less.
This ogre, after all, was the one she’d married.
A pity it didn’t last. But maybe the next would prove the one.
It’s as they say. The 103rd time’s a charm!
Roxelle hummed as she delved into the chest of stuff.
She’d probably miss this, once she was done murdering all the birds.
It was so easy. She didn’t even need to use her [Charm] trait. Merely a few jumps from the water and a wave of her fins was enough before she was inundated with proclamations of marriage!
And that changed everything.
Robbing dumb sailors? Strictly prohibited.
Except that if she said ‘yes’, then it was no longer outright robbery. Just a civil dispute mired in the grey waters of division of assets after an acrimonious divorce. And nobody above or below the water wanted to get involved in that. The ogres stripped of their will and turned into dribbling statues? Obstacles to the lawful reappropriation of goods.
Yes.
Roxelle wasn’t just beautiful. She was smart. And nobody had ever told her otherwise.
Pausing only to admire her reflection, Roxelle frowned when she found one of the ends of her hair only curled 32 degrees.
It’d take another decade of continuous hairbrushing to fix that. But the sight was soothed by the sensation of her palms digging through the heap of coins.
Roxelle smiled as she sieved through the polished metal and precious gemstones.
This was enough.
Too much of enough, actually.
And that meant …
“Heheheh … you can go in my trove … and you can go in my cupboard … and you? Hmm, maybe you can go in my spare heap …”
“Or perhaps they can stay exactly where they are. At least until my own tax inspectors can properly scrutinise this ship’s ledgers.”
Roxelle blinked, then turned around.
She didn’t know what surprised her more. That a pair of girls was on this ship of ogres, or that they’d somehow resisted her voice.
They were pretty, as well. Not as pretty as her. But for girls without fins, they could probably find someone weird enough in the sea to like them.
She wasn’t one of them.
And thus–she ignored them both.
The one with the sword didn’t like that. She waved it around while raising her voice. Roxelle could tell from the way the shadows moved. She was definitely interested in that. A bright sword would go well with the heap. But at the same time, she didn’t want anything on the heap to completely take away from her. That’d be insufferable.
And so she ignored it, all the while trying to ignore the incessant questions from the girl as her fingertips grazed against the rough grain of stone amongst the jewellery.
She knew what it was at once.
A warding amulet.
Roxelle was delighted!
She’d be asking a lot of the kraken. Although they were on friendly terms, she felt bad about asking it to swallow so much inedible stuff for her sake. And eating albatrosses sounded like a nightmare. Literally. They’d caw, squawk and whine as they were being swallowed. The noise would echo inside the poor thing’s tummy for days.
Gratitude, then. And Roxelle knew for a fact the kraken enjoyed snacking on sailors.
Even ogres would suffice. It was a rare luxury. Few traversed the Emerald Sea without a warding amulet. And for good reason.
It was, for example, already right beneath them.
Useful for doing away with the angry girl wielding the bright sword too.
She was pointing it towards her. And the expression on her face made it plain that she had no qualms about using it.
Roxelle was even more surprised than before.
Despite having a conversation with her for an entire minute, the highly irksome girl hadn’t yet succumbed to her passive [Charm]. Usually, merely listening to her voice was enough. To be spoken directly to for so long and still resist showed a worrying amount of willpower.
That never happened!
In 103 failed marriages, she’d never met anyone from the shore who had demonstrated so much resolve. She’d even laced a drop of magic, skirting the treaties so finely that the ink had probably been shaved off.
And so for the first time, Roxelle actually looked at her, instead of just in her general direction.
What she saw caused her to feel a pin-drop of unease.
Pretty hair. Pretty eyes. Pretty lashes. Pretty cheeks.
So not just pretty. But annoyingly pretty.
A more direct approach, then.
She’d get into trouble for it. But that’s only if anyone saw. And the kraken was nothing if not a polite eater. He didn’t do leftovers.
That’s why …
“–There are more ways to charm than merely one’s voice.”
She offered her true smile.
It was more than the passive charm woven into her voice. That merely left them befuddled.
A mermaid’s true smile was a lethal instrument, leaving them in a dream more intoxicating than any fantasy they could wish. Within the paradise that Roxelle had sewn, happiness more enveloping than a mother’s arms awaited them.
To wake from it was to plunge into a bleak world of sorrow and hardship, stripped of warmth and fulfilment. And no soul was meant to survive such cruelty.
Against such a deadly attack, the poor girl before her could only … smile in return?
What?
“Yes, there is … why, I see it in the mirror each morning.”
Roxelle immediately tripped over her fins, such was her complete shock.
She didn’t even know that was possible!
Because before her … was the most sinister smile she’d ever witnessed in her life!
It was the smile of a vixen looking down upon her prey! A queen smirking at a toy to be plucked and broken!
It was an amalgamation of depravity, sadism and unrestrained cruelty.
There was no light in that smile. Only a darkness as unfeeling as the deepest abyss where no mermaid could swim.
And each moment Roxelle looked at it, she could feel herself being dragged further below.
Nobody, not even the Queen of Tides, had ever looked at her with so much disdain for her worth! So much disregard for her feelings! Nobody had ever dared. She was prospective royalty! A descendant of the Trident Princess! The head mermaid of her shoal’s choir … twice!
Roxelle was the most beautiful mermaid in the realm! That made her the most adored!
But seeing this girl’s beautiful, degrading smile, she suddenly felt less than trash.
And that made her feel …
“Now, behold and learn! Compared to your mockery of bewitchment, I do not require magic to cover my shortfalls. As the fairest of them all, my natural charms and affectionate smile captures the hearts of all who gaze upon me!”
Strangely … delighted?!
An unfamiliar shiver ran up Roxelle’s body as a newly found joy awakened in her heart! The shock, the wrongness of it, struck her innocent and tender soul like a harpoon!
As she looked on, unable to utter a reply, she thought it wouldn’t be so bad to be scolded by someone with such a wicked, twisted smile …
And when she did–
Roxelle suddenly stopped thinking.
