Coral Reyf was grounded, and didn’t quite get why, sure she’d snuck out to play, and yes The Quacken was in the waters round here, but that slow rubber ducker could eat her wake. It would never catch her. Of course her mother was livid, but she always seemed to be these days.

There seemed to be some kind of commotion going on though. Folks were swimming back and forth at a frenzied pace, from the scuttlebutt she’d heard she managed to piece together that there was some kind of diplomatic meeting taking place, and it was some kind of ground-pounder Princess. She was absolutely determined to sneak a peek, but the guards outside her room after her latest stunt really meant business. She couldn’t even set fin outside her door without being glared at. This sucked.

Her parents had done their very best to keep her away from the surface stuff ever since the incident with cousin Surf. Personally she’d never understood much of it, but her cousin had kinda a thing for humans. Nothing too serious mind you, but enough to worry her parents.

Well, come hell of low tide Coral was going to see what all the fuss was about. First though she needed a distraction, lucky she kept that bunch of bottom feeders for just such an occasion. She slipped up to the door and let them loose. Apparently one of her guards had a phobia, and promptly freaked out, while the other quickly started trying to round them up. So during the commotion Coral uncorked a bottle of squid ink for cover, and quickly slipped out.

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Aquarelia was the head of this particular school of Mer, and while it was true human royalty traditionally held no sway here, they had multiple problems too big to deal with alone, and a Princess willing to talk things through, maybe even offer assistance with their,...... dilemma.

But if that was going to happen then she really needed to make sure this went off without a hitch. That should be simple enough at least, it was rather unlikely that the humans, who as a rule were usually incapable of doing so would opt to stick around for food. They had a communications crystal ready to bridge the gap between land and water at least. That would let them talk. Plus from the news it was pretty clear that The Princess was a capable sort, though did tend to err on the side of hitting things.

In this case though that was hardly an issue. She had a Princess who liked to hit things, and two big things that needed hit a lot, it was hardly a square peg in a round hole scenario here. So all she had to do was make sure nothing too drastic went wrong while talks were ongoing, easy peasy.

Then she heard the noise from the reef intensify, curious as to what was going on she took a look outside. Only to see a guard who looked suspiciously like the one she had left guarding her daughter’s door. He quickly gave a salute, and resumed his search. While she swam back to her desk, and pondered whether knocking herself out would help her escape the upcoming catastrophe.

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Marianne watched the unfolding scene with a mixture of pure fascination, and aghast horror. She didn’t think that Princesses were supposed to swear like that, as a tattooist she heard a lot of curses, and some of these were STILL new to her. But for now there was a more pressing issue, at the very least as far as she was concerned. The tattoos had worked, meaning it was possible to embed magic into body art. Sure it would prove pricey, but if she could recruit a sorceress, or a witch to help her she could be in on the ground floor here.

The art itself was kind of strange too, the way it seemed like it shifted colour, she’d once seen paint like that used on a fancy wagon, and she had to admit it looked great. Though there was a risk that if you overdid it you’d end up looking like you were wearing a beetle shell or something. A look that would be really hard to pull off. (Though she was pretty sure that in the modders community she could likely find somebody willing to try. After all there was a guy who had antlers grafted for some inexplicable reason. Poor guy had them taken off a week later though, after discovering that human, plus antlers, plus door frames equals unpleasantness, and usually getting stuck. Then there was the guy who decided he wanted a..... never mind, she didn’t even want to think about that guy, or how he planned to use that. It did seem to be of limited practical use.)

She couldn’t help a surge of excitement at the thought of the undertaking before her though, but she did wish she could have figured out other colours than red, green, and blue. Oh well that was what creative mixing was for. Also would the glowing light from her back keep The Princess up at night? Because disclaimer or not usually with sleep deprivation added into the mix, all bets were well and truly off.

She quickly took down a few notes, apart from the strange song there didn’t seem to be any real side effects, at least so far. Spontaneous explosion was a thing that happened with magic sometimes, and that was something that didn’t really give a lot of warning. Which was a worry. Hopefully not too much of a one though, she’d been getting kinda bored of doing the same old tattoos over, and over, and over again. (If one more person asked her to tattoo a star, a snake, a swallow, or the name of a soon to be ex girlfriend whose name they were going to be covering up with more ink within a week then she was going to tattoo NO across their forehead backwards. So every time they looked in a mirror they got the bloody message. (Not really of course, tattoos are all about consent, though she may scream it at them at the top of her lungs.)

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Mibbet was finally starting to get the hang of this, which was probably just as well. It was almost time for her meeting.