Are you like me?
The seals down south looked different from the ones up north, but Tikaani still found herself asking that of every one she came across, hoping, praying, that maybe she'd encounter her southern kin. If she at least found another of her kind, maybe they would have heard something about her people. But every answer was a silent no. Those big brown eyes were far too wild to be selkie, and whenever they investigated her, curious but guarded, there was no familiarity there. Just a sense of otherness, that she was different and foreign and lost, the poor thing.
No selkies. Just seals.
Tikaani didn't spend too much time in the water, though. The seas were too unfamiliar here, and full of new dangers. There were many old dangers--orcas and sharks, of course, but the warmer waters bred creatures she had never before seen, long, knife-toothed serpents and a creature she wasn't sure was whale or shark. She didn't get close enough to find out, and hoped never to see it again.
It was a frightening new world, but what few clues she gleaned pointed to her people being brought this way. Somewhere...
And that was all she knew. The trail had gone cold. Had been cold for weeks.
Tikaani wove between ropes of kelp and the legs of the pier, munching on a snack of fish as she burned off some of her frustration. What did you do when you had no leads to follow? Maybe she had come too far south. Or...maybe she had to go further inland.
Inland. Shudder. She couldn't fathom the thought of being so far from the sea, but...maybe that was exactly why she needed to go there. Whoever caught her people probably had the same thought: keep them away from the sea, and they were forever theirs.
Swallowing down a final bite of fish, she jetted to the surface with an easy flip of her flippers. She gulped in air, then headed for the shore.
She hated the shoreline here. At home, it was all ice, and easy for her to maneuver on. The seals here moved differently from her own people; these ones used their whole body to move, but her people walked with their front flippers, claws digging into the ice to drag their bodies along. It felt fine on the ice; it felt awful on the rocks and sand, and the sand offered no purchase. With a sigh, she scraped her belly along the sand, grunting and struggling to at least get to shallower waters so changing would be easier. And then, when she felt settled, the waves lapping around her, she started to wriggle free of her skin, peeling it off like a wet suit.
She had just gotten free of it, and was about to rise and head for the cliffs where she stored her clothing, but a wave crashed against her then, unexpectedly larger, and she went under with a sputter.
...And when she came back up, sand and seaweed in her hair, her skin was gone.
"No!"
She splashed into the water after it as the waves carried it away, but though she was a strong swimmer in both forms, her seal form was stronger; her human form couldn't compete with the tide.
"No! Come back!" she cried, as though the sea both understood her and cared, and soon she was swimming after it as the waves tossed it, the thick blubber keeping it afloat.
And then another wave crashed over her and she went down hard, spinning and tumbling beneath the surface, water rushing up her nose and choking her, and when she resurfaced, coughing, she was a lot further out than she had realized--
With no skin in sight.
