For a brief moment Sarivi was confused as to why she had fallen getting food... Was her balance bad? Then after a moment it clicked. The food trees, of course! How could he have forgotten that! Granted, it had been a good twenty five years or so since he had decided to try his luck there, but one would think that he would remember that fall. Right onto his dorsal fin, no less, and the fruit he had taken down with him hadn't even tasted any good. Poor thing was probably hungry. Ah well, he could take her with him while he went in search of lunch and find something for them both.
"Oh no, I'm a sprite!" He answered cheerfully, tilting his head at her and tilting up one of his legs at the knee. "See! We have leg-fins, though they do look an awful lot like a mer's tail with the fins out, just quite a bit more fanned, yanno? You can tell because my legs are all whiteish, and then it goes right into the turquoise and greens." Said fins weren't near as spread out now as they had been even when the girl had first appeared. Bright sunny days were such wonderful things, especially warm ones!
If he hadn't known better, he would have assumed that someone had told the girl how best to deal with a sprite. They were notoriously vain (though the notoriety of that was questionable, since they were also a shy species. Wonderful oxymorons, that's what they were!) and the complement made his eyes light up and his fins shift a little, almost preening. "Oh no, dye doesn't work for us at all! Sprites are all different sorts of colors! And if you think my fins are different colors you should see my brother! He's almost rain--"
He abruptly stopped his cheerful explanation, having processed that she mentioned she had a tail, and implied it was a finned tail. His head tilted as he blinked at the girl before he exclaimed, "Oh, then you aren't human! I hadn't seen that coloring on a human before, now that I think about it..."
For a moment he simply peered at her, then he grinned, "I suppose you're a little mermaid then? I guess that would be logical, since you knew about mermen but not sprites."