Waking up underwater inside a plastic bubble was not how Brennan Trent envisioned his day going when he first left his apartment. It had started out like any other day.

He woke up, got dressed in a shirt he modified to work around his wings, and had cinnamon toast for breakfast like usual before heading to work. Water fairies tended to gravitate toward jobs that either involved their powers or kept them near bodies of water and he was no exception.

The main difference was that he preferred saltwater to fresh. He had never met anyone else like that and his kind generally regarded him as weird. They tended to prefer sticking near lakes, rivers, and the like.

The ocean was generally regarded as too scary to deal with. There were so many giant sea creatures that could gulp up a fairy in a single bite and nobody knew much about the mysterious mermaids that hardly ever made contact with the surface.

Brennan was sure that water fairies who lived in places like Antarctica didn't have such a problem with the ocean but the ones in the continental U.S. sure did. He knew because he had lived all over it in his 417 years of life.

He was a restless soul and had never settled in one place for more than a few decades since losing his family in the 1800s during the westward expansion. Plenty of kindhearted water fairy clans had taken him in for a time but he never felt like he fit in properly with any of them.

He knew a lot of water fairies here in Florida as well but they all thought he was crazy for being a marine biologist. Most of them preferred to live in the Everglades or near various rivers or lakes. He ran into them at the witch coven in Miami now and then or hung out when he wasn't working occasionally but that was the extent of it.

Brennan's life was fairly solitary but that didn't matter much. He was used to it.

If he was truly desperate for some non-work-related conversation, he hit up the witch coven to talk to Harmony Netzley. She could talk for hours while she was in the middle of experimenting so he often found himself sitting around in her lab exchanging stories about their work.

His work and the occasional conversation with other fae kept him from losing his mind. He had grown incredibly bored over the centuries.

Part of the appeal of the ocean was that it was so vast it would be impossible to explore it all in a century or more. He found the mystery of it all exciting. It didn't hurt that marine life was incredibly beautiful either. Fairies had always loved beautiful things.

Brennan's favorite thing to talk to Harmony about was mermaids. They were elusive fae and almost nothing was known about their civilizations. The only reason the fae community at large knew about them at all was because of mermaid tears and that happened about a hundred and thirty years ago.

The way Harmony told it, a mermaid living near the Gulf of Mexico happened to find her lover caught in a fisherman's net and couldn't get him free despite her best efforts. He ended up bleeding out due to an injury he had sustained while stuck.

The mermaid burst into tears and was still sobbing as she clutched her lover's body on an abandoned beach under the moonlight. But the beach wasn't truly abandoned. A young witch had seen the whole thing and had never met a mermaid before, though she had heard of them in human lore from rare sightings that happened over the centuries.

The witch used a handkerchief to dry the mermaid's tears and ask what happened. But something strange happened to the handkerchief afterward and she realized that the tears had magical properties.

Many details of the story were lost to time but the witch and the mermaid ended up striking a deal. In exchange for offering human repelling charms to protect the mermaids' domain, the mermaid would supply tears to the witch's coven.

Witches had always had a tightly interwoven network with other covens so this discovery led to expeditions all over the continent to find other mermaids and strike similar deals. Mermaid tears were rare but available at most witch covens these days. They were extremely useful for healing wounds.

Brennan had experienced wing tear poultices both before and after mermaid tears were added and they were far more effective with them. That made him curious about the mermaids but Harmony only knew so much.

She had gone to meet up with the mermaid representative from a nearby settlement a few times and always met with the same mermaid. Most of their kind were averse to meeting with what they called surface-dwellers. The one in question was very businesslike and conducted the transactions as quickly as possible.

Harmony had been disappointed because she was curious about mermaid culture too. The ambassador (for lack of a better term) sent to deal with the witches wasn't interested in exchanging small talk.

Brennan had been disappointed too. He had seen so much marine life in his decades-long career but never saw a mermaid. They hid themselves too well.

He brushed those thoughts aside and forced himself to focus on work once he arrived. Today was a fieldwork day. He and a handful of others would be going out on a boat to do some testing near a coral reef that had been experiencing an invasive species problem that had only been growing worse.

Lionfish had been taking over the Atlantic for decades but there was no end in sight. Other native species were being affected at an alarming rate and marine biologists had been trying to find a solution for a long time to no avail.

Brennan was part of a research group trying (perhaps futilely) once again to control the scourge. His little field team consisted of himself and five others, one of which was in charge of driving the boat.

Their research would take several days but there were accommodations on the boat. He didn't mind being away from home for that long because he had nothing to go back to. In fact, he looked forward to it. Fieldwork was his favorite part of the job.