Frequently having to hide inside a too-small-for-his-wings wardrobe aside, Brennan hadn't enjoyed anything so much in decades. He was under the ocean learning more about merfolk from an actual mermaid and right now nothing else mattered.
Their conversations reminded him a bit of the ones he had with Harmony, though the witch's enthusiasm was less innocent and more of the mad scientist variety. She had a lot more questions, spoke faster and in a higher pitch, and was constantly on the move as if she couldn't stand to stay still.
Harmony was more relaxed than that. She knew she had all the time in the world and wasn't in any rush unless she got an idea for a new spell or magic item. That was the only time she would talk a million miles a minute.
Brennan was used to having long conversations with someone who had very different life experiences to him though so he felt comfortable with Talori. He was learning an awful lot too.
Unfortunately, he wasn't able to see most of the things she was describing because she wasn't supposed to leave the coral palace. And he wasn't even supposed to leave her bedroom. He couldn't go see any gardens, mollusk farms, or the layout of the rest of the palace despite his burning curiosity.
Seeing them after dark when they were planning to sneak out in passing wouldn't be the same but he would have to take what he could get. She put a finger to her lips when the time came, indicating that he wasn't allowed to make any noise.
They had to sneak past quite a few guards and, since she was a faster swimmer than he was, she ended up grabbing him by the wrist and pulling him along a few times when he wasn't moving quickly enough for her liking. Mermaid skin felt a lot different than fairy skin. It looked about the same (different colors aside) but the texture was difficult to describe.
Brennan wanted to say that it felt scaly but it didn't seem to be made up of the same kind of scales as their tails since they didn't look at all like scales. She also had webbing between her fingers that he could feel brushing against his skin and that felt strange too.
He didn't say a word though. He knew he was slowing them down because he couldn't swim the way she did.
Talori didn't let go of him until they were well out of sight of her kingdom. She heaved a sigh of relief. "Sorry about that. Come on, my treasures are this way."
They had been swimming in the dark all this time so they wouldn't get caught but now she pulled out a glowing jar from her bag that appeared to be made of kelp. It functioned as a flashlight until they made it into the cave, which had more light coming from other jars set up on shelves and crevices in the rock walls.
She spun around in a circle with her arms over her head, grinning at him excitedly. "Tada! This is everything I've ever managed to collect from the surface, plus some presents Zale has brought me. I want to know what everything is! He brought this over in the morning. Can you tell me what it is first?"
Talori pulled something else out of her bag and held it up for him to inspect, an expectant look on her face. Brennan blinked at it in disbelief.
"That's one of our cameras!"
"A cam-ras?" she asked eagerly. "Tell me more!"
"Cameras is the plural. A camera take pictures or videos of things. We were using them for our research. This must have gone overboard during the storm last night," Brennan said with a shake of his head.
He held his hand out for it to show her how it worked. There was no reason not to let her keep it since his research team already thought it was lost. They would wonder how he was able to find it when he eventually showed up again. If he was human, he wouldn't have survived ending up on the bottom of the ocean like the camera since it was too heavy to float.
"Most cameras aren't waterproof but you're in luck that these ones are. The battery won't last forever so if you want to use it, you're going to have to do so sparingly. But look, I can show you some of the footage we took yesterday."
Talori's yellow eyes widened and she watched the footage on the tiny screen, entranced, until the video ended. "So these were the moving pictures you told me about! Fascinating! Why were you using cameras to take moving pictures of the coral reef?"
"Lionfish. They aren't supposed to be in this part of the ocean and, since they lack natural predators, they've been causing all sorts of problems over the past couple of decades by killing other fish off," Brennan explained.
"We're trying to figure out if there's anything we can do about the problem because they're all over the Atlantic when they're not supposed to be. These fish are native to the Indo-Pacific where they aren't an issue to the ecosystem."
Talori frowned. "I did not realize that fish could take over other habitats. If I could tell Zale about this, I am sure he would be able to figure something out."
Would he though? Brennan was under the impression that merfolk protected the fish that lived around them. The only solution he could think of was killing the lionfish off en masse and preventing them from continuing to spawn.
It was a moot point anyway since Talori had no intention of telling her brother about him. He would only be here for a few more days and then he would have to go back and face the music at work for his vanishing act. Not that he had done it on purpose but he had prolonged it because of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that he would cut off his own wings before he would miss.