Jyrgal’s wife Janet had always been on his case for being too nosy for his own good. She’d constantly harped and nagged him every waking minute when they had been married, and even a few times in her sleep! This, perhaps, created a rather unfortunate tendency to ignore the admonitions of others to avoid recklessness.

But hey, his constant roaming curiosity had brought him here out from some small dinky village in Kyrgyzstan. If he hadn’t poked his nose into other people’s business, asked questions, nagged the occasional foreigner who had the strange misfortune to visit his village, he’d be stuck back home unemployed or at best some migrant worker in Russia trying to scrap by on any crap job he could find. Instead, he was about as far as you could get from the landlocked mountains of Kyrgyzstan; in the tropical blue waters off Hawaii. Given that the nearest ocean to his home country was a several thousand kilometers away, most everyone he had ever known as a child had a hard time merely comprehending the idea of an open expanse of water that extended all the way to an utterly flat horizon.

Of course it got better as he wasn’t on the ocean, but beneath it. Swimming to and fro, cavorting about like an irresponsible school boy... Well, mostly. He wasn’t completely not paying attention. Scuba diving wasn’t something where you just jumped in the water and everything took care of itself all hunky-dory. There was safety to consider, dangers to look out for. When something as simple as depth meant life and death, you took things seriously. Every motion, every quiver, every thud, he was aware; he was ready at a moments notice...

Ok, maybe he was over embellishing things to himself. No doubt his (soon to be ex) wife Janet would have repeated that exact derisive opinion as he floated and swam along lazily. But he wasn’t here merely on pleasure; he was a marine biologist after all! He was just taking things slowly, and... urm... solo. He knew scuba diving alone was a number one fool notion to shake one’s finger at, but... he was itching to look at some coral formations he had spotted the other day. All his colleagues were busy with administrative garbage or other ridiculous tie ups, like he almost had been with the divorce proceedings.

Soooo, here he was, having boated solo out to these reefs to get a good look at them himself. As far as he was concerned he was saving everyone else time by scouting things out a little himself. No harm in...

A great rustling made itself known on edge of his awareness; like something had... crashed, rubbed, into the reef nearby. Curiosity piqued, Jyrgal dropped what he was doing and gingerly began swimming in the direction he thought the disturbance was coming from, past several large mountains of coral that swept up in rocky organic spires.

Creeping by, practically crawling across the reef surface, surprise visited him as a mammoth pit, a gouge into the reef (and even into the seabed by the looks of it) that he had most certainly never come across on his expeditions here. The thing had to be forty meters deep, cut like a piece of cake that had been neatly removed near the center. It was so... symmetrical, so fantastic, there was no way a formation of this magnitude could have gone unnoticed. Someone had to have come across it in surveys, it was simply impossible that he could have just made such a magnificent discovery all by himself.

Down below more thunderous noise echoed. What was moving down there, falling rocks? Or... some*thing*?...

Jyrgal wanted to swim down to the bottom and explore, but it was impossible to get down far enough to get a truly decent look; that was a bit beyond safe depth for scuba gear, but he could swim about and get just a bit closer.

Coasting and edging along tentatively he could barely contain his rising excitement as the shock of the situation wore away to the plain as day reality that he had discovered this formation all by himself. It was his, the credit, the fame, all his! He could barely contain himself with the thought of shoving that around when he had to confront his soon to be ex-wife when the divorce proceedings began again. So enthralled he was with himself that he barely noticed the moving deep colored mass down near the bottom. Eh, just some random hunk of something that quivered while he relished...

Wait a second...

Quivered?

The thing below writhed and shook, but frantic alarm was replaced by rigid petrifaction as the mass slowed, but still stirred. Sounds wafted through the water, garbled and hard to discern. Common sense dictated slowly moving upwards and promptly hauling his behind to his boat and flooring it back to land while he still had a behind.

Common sense, however, was deemed optional in this case as Jyrgal was just as mystified and intrigued by what he saw below him as he was terrified. If it was forty meters down... the size of that thing had to be absolutely enormous, like on the scale of a car or a backyard shed. Whatever it was, it was an animal of some type, no question. Just what kind of animal was one that had Jyrgal’s biologist brain chugging and churning. Again, a strange sound wafted up through the water to his ears. Frustration built as it sounded so, so close to something he could identify, but just garbled enough...

Below the mass squirmed again, now though with more force, and Jyrgal hunkered down almost by reflex, instinctual fear causing him to lower himself flat against the coral. Something was down there, and every hunch in his gut screamed with clanging of cymbals that it was something big, big as in the kind of animal that could mean slicing and dicing in his future.

Even so, his head peaked up like a lion in the savannah, insatiable curiosity driving him to capture a glimpse of the great mass that lurked in the bottom of the pit before him.

“Why?”

The sound didn’t quite register with Jyrgal right away, and as he squirmed his way forward he assumed his brain was just remembering past conversations. Buuuuut... wait, he never recalled voice that sounded quite like that.

“Why, why, why? Why can’t they?”

Jyrgal blinked in incomprehension as he struggled to understand just how he distinctly heard someone speaking. But... he was underwater! People couldn’t talk underwater! And, even if somehow impossibly someone could, there was no one around!

“They said, they said... oh...” the voice returned with a weeping wail.

...Ok... perhaps the divorce proceedings were taking a greater mental toll than he had thought. He slowly gazed left and right, looking for the source of the voice. The wailing continued, though morphing into a weeping murmur, echoing effortlessly through the water. Echoing this way and that, the voice may as well have been coming from inside his head or down there in there in the pit! Yeah, like...

...No, no someone wasn’t down there, were they? Jyrgal leaned forward, squinting his eyes attempting to discern shapes down in the pit besides the giant unknown creature. That thing had to be huge; who in their right mind would be hanging down there with that monstrosity? There hadn’t been any other boats in sight when he had ridden out here, so unless someone swam all the way out from land there simply couldn’t be anyone down there.

No human being could...

“I’m not ugly!!”

Jyrgal nearly soiled himself at the sudden proclamation, hugging his belly against the coral in an attempt to remain low.

“It’s not fair!” A great slam ushered out, as if a giant were pounding seabed, rattling Jyrgal’s teeth. “I worked just as hard as the others did, I deserve a chance just as much as they do if not more so!”

Another slam permeated the entire seafloor, than another. Jyrgal snapped his head around in panic, before the pounding subsided, at which point he attempted to calm himself and still his breath. Something... weird was going on, and prudence and rationality once again knocked on his front door calmly advising him to get the hell outta there.

“Look at me, look at me! What’s not to like!? I have it, there isn’t anything the rest of them have that I don’t!”

The urge to backpedal quickly was overwhelming, almost crushing but again an insatiable yearning to know just what on earth was happening pushed back and Jyrgal found himself inching forward. Just a little bit closer, just enough to catch a glimpse of what was going on, that was all he needed.

“Is it my head? My head? They... they always go on about the jokes, and they keep looking at it, could that be it?”

One more inch, and Jyrgal found himself with a halfway decent view of the chasm below. Scans left and right revealed nothing, just that indistinct creature huddling over itself. That is, until it rolled over and spun around.

An elongated form lifted itself from the seabed, piercing through the water and hauling the rest of its mass like a coil of rope unfurling itself. A sinew-esque twine of blue picked itself up and began twirling about in a circle, as if pacing, never colliding with itself or twisting itself into a knot. “I’m fit, they can sneer all they like, they can’t deny my right to have a mate!”

The weave of blue pounded the seabed. Pounded it with fists no less. The thing had arms. It had hands.

Jyrgal blinked and froze in mute shock, unable to twitch the slightest muscle; if breathing or keeping his heart beating weren’t automatic he would have forgotten to keep those up too. It... no, that... the thing... there was no way...

The sea serpent down below wove itself around, spinning in circles so fervently Jyrgal kept on thinking to himself it was going to fly apart. Rich blue scales flowed through the water in a dizzying malisma flanked by silken flexible fins that fluttered through the waves from the arms, the spine and the tail, the last of which seemed to be one massive conglomeration of a silken fin. Thick arms held tightly to the body at such an angle that the fins growing out the side were held in a smooth hydrodynamic position. Down the spine a seamless curtain of silken fin ran all the way from tail to head, which stood out elongated and slender, a gently tipped snout elegantly shaped into the head, rimmed by curving violet ear fins and crested by luminescent pearl eyes.

That... was not something that Jyrgal ever recalled reading about in a biology textbook.

“It... why? Why does it always have to be me?” the voice returned, though this time Jyrgal had some inkling as to what might be speaking. Soooo, not only was it something that shouldn’t, couldn’t exist, it was now talking to itself. Or herself; the more Jyrgal thought about it, more he was convinced that it was a female. Not that he could figure out how a completely different species could even sound female to his ears.

“They always say I don’t measure up, they always say I’m too hideous to ever find a mate. I... I...”

A kink developed in Jyrgal’s back that had him twitching in discomfort. Squirming he squirmed to try and relieve it but merely served to bump into some coral, a piece of which fell onto a precariously placed rock which then saw fit to tumble into an even bigger rock... Three seconds later a boulder the size his head plummeted off the side and into the pit, crashing around and creating a general cacophony of smashing and crashing rock that the dead couldn’t have failed to take notice of. And the sea serpent was somewhat less than dead.

Snapping about like a fire hose gone wild, Jyrgal’s most recent aquatic find scanned her surroundings to locate the disturbance and took precisely three seconds to look up and spot the wayward diver, hiding ineffectually amidst the coral. Those pearl eyes locked on to him and scrutinized, tearing him apart and examining him through and through. Jyrgal froze, unsure whether bolting was something even feasible. It wasn’t much of a stretch to imagine that this underwater reptile could outrun him like a demented semi-truck driver.

With a start the sea serpent ended it’s examination and bulged it’s pearl eyes outward and gaped, its long jaw hanging down like a lever. “Oh, of course!” she suddenly exclaimed with rabid enthusiasm. “Of course, of course of course!! It can work!”

Before Jyrgal could blink the twirling creature unwound and propelled itself at lightning speed, faster even than he had feared it could go, spinning its body around until it suddenly hovered over his face, staring him down on the scale of a cat looking down on a mouse. Its entire head was the size of his torso, towering over him like some descended deity ready to decide his fate.

This time, Jyrgal did soil himself.

Ecstatic, uncontainable delight swamped the creature’s face. “Oh by the Mother Seaweed, this is wonderful! You’ll do! You’ll do perfectly!” it exclaimed with crushing amounts of enthusiasm, squealing in an unearthly underwater shrill that made the diver slap his hands to his ears in a vain effort to silence it.

And then she reached for him.

Even in his scuba gear the marine biologist screamed as his arms flailed backwards in some half brained reflex to haul himself out of there, heart pounding and head throbbing as he tried to get back, to get away. But the sea serpent simply extended one of her long thick arms, yanking him by the shoulder and holding him immobile. Or... on the whole immobile, squirming like a mad cat Jyrgal kicked and flailed every which way possible in mad frenzied panic.

“Hold still,” the giant underwater dragon said gritting her teeth, “You’re making this difficult!” Were his breather not wedged in his mouth Jyrgal would have been happy to enter into a hysterical explanation as to why he wanted to make this difficult seeing as how categorically he did not wish to be eaten or subject to whatever twisted fate the sea serpent had in store. Whatever it was it didn’t seem to involve eating (at least right away) but rather taking one of her talon like claws and sticking in next to his face.

Screaming and wiggling failed to deliver him as he strained against the creature’s grip, which now seemed intent on prodding his mask. Finally though some determination rose in those enormous pearl maws of eyes and her claws began intently poking at his breather, trying to wedge it out. Jyrgal snapped his arms around it, trying to protect the source of all his air dozens of meters beneath the ocean’s waves but the serpent was either completely oblivious to this fact or was playing with him like a boy pulling the wings off a fly, content to watch him squirm in agony for his last moments of life as he drowned.

“Just about... there!” the serpent suddenly exclaimed as her claw finally wedged itself under his breather. Jyrgal felt its hard polished surface rub straight past his lips as it yanked off his breather leaving him exposed and at mercy to the naked depths of the ocean. His world swam around him as his life flashed before his eyes, tightening his lips in a vain attempt to seal in what little air he had. He tried to reach for his breather which was still attached to his gear, but the serpent batted it away. “Oh, I’ve waited so long, so long!” she cried out as she absent mindedly shook him like a rag doll, causing him to cough. The biologist watched in manic despair as several bubbles leaked from his mouth and floated their way to the surface leaving him behind in the iron grip of this sea monster. Strangely enough, the one thought besides pure panic that ran through his mind was that of his wife shaking her head and laughing derisively at how he had gotten himself in this predicament.

Suddenly Jyrgal found himself pulled in by the dragon with a stomach heaving lurch that deposited him smack in front of the dragon’s long maw. Long lips curled in some kind of gesture; he couldn’t tell if it was snarling or smiling, probably both if it was about to eat him.

Lightheadedness brought a wave of drowsy dizziness that made it hard to focus as Jyrgal found himself trapped beneath the vast reaches of earth’s liquid surface, thousands of miles from home at the mercy of this strange unknown beast that by all rights shouldn’t exist. Abruptly the creature clutched his other shoulder so as to hold him fast by both and yanked him forward. Jyrgal braced himself for his end against the beast’s sharp rending teeth. But instead, she appeared to take in a deep breath of seawater. Momentarily the marine biologist gawked in fascination as to what that could mean, but this didn’t last for longer than a fraction of a second. A mighty torrent of water as was sucked past her jaws; Jyrgal felt powerful currents speed past him into the serpent’s ever widening maw.

...But then that maw closed. Clamped tight and shut. Jyrgal blinked in surprise behind his goggles. Wait, what-

Then the sea serpent smacked its lips into the diver’s face, right against his lips. And it blew.

Jyrgal’s eyeballs practically popped from their sockets as a fire hose’s worth of water was suddenly shot straight into his mouth. His mind was literally sent spinning as a wave of seawater blasted its way inside him, powerful enough to eviscerate him from sheer force of impact and volume. But there was no rending of his insides, no slashing of his body. There was... a rumbling sensation, the stir of bubbling and expanding flesh, as if he were a kettle being held over a stove and his insides were squishing about. Water poured in, a dam burst of liquid that slammed into his mouth down in his belly and all through him.

His vision swirled and his body bloated as water kept impossibly pouring in without cessation, skin and tissue being swamped by a cascading flow that made him feel like he was about to burst. He snapped his arms to his face, trying to push himself away from his demented captor. The tiny slaps across her snout were like BB pellets against a freight train. But as he batted, his body began swelling uncontrollably on all sides, his skin puffing like billowing cloth and his bones creaking under the strain. All around his swimsuit stretched to and past the breaking point before ripping itself in a hundred different places and coming entirely undone, hanging on him in tattered slices of rubber.

Inside his head saline water leaked into his skull, pressing against all sides, against his ears...

With a great whack his inner ear cracked and split, and with it all of Jyrgal’s sense of balance, of up and down. The world flew and whirled below him, behind, to the left and right all at the same time. Sickness at his sudden and complete disorientation would have certainly struck him, but his insides were too busy gushing and spilling over with seawater. All sense of orientation chucked itself out the window leaving the only point of reference left his sense of touch, but being suspended in water and having one’s body bloated and physically altered tend to diminish the effectiveness of that.

Somewhere in the back of his mind Jyrgal struggled to comprehend what was happening. Barely anything could be discerned as the world spun, raced and fell around him, leaving him with an ethereal sense of weightlessness, suspended in a free floating world defined only by the huge beast that was huffing untold liters of seawater into him somehow. He raged his arms against the serpent’s snout, only for his arms to be... sucked back. No, not sucked back; his shoulders slipped backwards as if a conveyer belt set itself up inside him, shoving his entire torso down further away from his head, stretching his neck like an accordion. Struggles and squirms availed him not at all as his body distorted beyond recognition.

Suddenly he found his vision pushed back from the serpent’s mouth, but her lips were still in contact with his own. Midst his spinning vision she grew more distant and a great mass of... purple extend between the two of them. Jyrgal tried to bat at the new apparition but found his arms completely too far away to reach. Stretching them as far as he could he found they could barely reach the back of his head; even this lasted but a second as he found his reach shrinking... or his body lengthening as his head and torso quickly added length between them.

Such was the rapidity of his neck’s sudden expansion that even the sea serpent had trouble holding a grip and suddenly released his shoulders from her grasp. His found no reprieve as in no time at all her massive talon clawed hands griped either side of his head, almost encapsulating it. Jyrgal raged against this and the new purple mass in front of his face, causing him to buck and bend fiercely. This motion sent the new appearance against one of the talon-like claws, scratching it. The diver twitched ferociously in surprised pain; with a start he new what the purple mass was. Another burst came and pushed him back further against the sea serpent. His mouth and nose were extending into a snout.

His eyes widened at this sudden realization, eyes which themselves suddenly bloated and twitched as saline water struck them from behind. Now his vision blurred as well leaving him momentarily blinded as well as completely without a sense of up or down. Everything was a vague blue, a swirling aquatic azure midst a floating weightless backdrop as his body expanded. There was no way to tell how much he had changed or even how long he was. But each time he struggled and squirmed, his body waved and bent in an ever increasing sinew-ish fashion, a rope coiling and uncoiling, an out of control fire hose flying and twisting this way and that. Soon he could no longer tell if it was his panic or the force of the serpent’s seawater that was causing his body to spasm so.

All across his body clumps of skin vibrated and sizzled, like popcorn waiting to pop, like heated butter ready to melt. His whole skin, on the surface and the lower dermal layers as well, swirled like a swig of mouthwash in the morning, and seemed to burn just as much. It spread, coalesced and... settled, relaxing and sinking back into his flesh, crystallizing into linked fragments of something hard. Jyrgal slapped his side with his hands, which themselves had been just as altered, feeling smooth scales running along his sides. He winced and pulled back his hands just in time to feel hard protrusions grow out of the tips of his fingers: claws.

Midst his wiggling spasms Jyrgal suddenly realized that he could no longer feel his legs. He did feel his whole form bloat and swell outwards, growing a girth that would have made him morbidly obese were he still normal. Of his legs all he could feel were some small segments, small protrusions sticking out of his lengthening body. If that was... had his legs just been... engulfed? He attempted to wiggle around more, to try and get some sensation only to feel a suction, like the last clump of milkshake sucked up through a straw.

Soon his head was no longer held in place by giant encapsulating hands. Oh sure the sea serpent’s hand were still holding him fast, but they seemed to shrink up against his skull as his field of vision slowly peaked out from under them and his new snout pushed out ever further. He had no idea how big his head was, but with a hollow ringing and the highly disconcerting crunching and shifting of bone he heard his skull snap back and out. Two portions behind his head pushed out like slow motion engine pistons, growing and thickening into some kind of horns that jutted behind him.

The sea serpent didn’t let up with her breathing seawater into him. If anything, she increased her efforts as enough water to fill a swimming pool was thrown into him in some twisted bizarro world version of CPR. Twisting and spasming as much as ever Jyrgal jumped when something thumped across his face. Blinking his eyes (even as he felt them widen and bulge), Jyrgal darted his gaze to and fro looking for the source when he was whacked again. This time he caught sight of the culprit as it swung away; it was himself, it was his tail. His body had extended so long it was able to curve back around and thwack him in the face.

A trembling of his spine sent a tendril of electricity along the whole length of his body. A hardening rose and gelled together all along his vertebrae and emerged from his back, quickly toughening into some kind of staggered spiked formation. The diver couldn’t tell seeing as how his head was otherwise fixed and immobile at the moment but as his lengthening tail swished around again he saw a greenish-purple ridge of fins growing out the top.

As if not to be outdone by his spine, across his arm and at several points on the lower (now further) reaches of his body fins sprouted like dandelions. The ones on his arms threatened to outgrow his limbs entirely, but very belatedly his arms pulsed and began to thicken and lengthen, catching up to the rest of his body with much tardiness.

And then without fanfare, the undersea monster released her grasp on his face, undid her lips from his and ending her continual breath of seawater into his gut. Left floating, the spinning world slowed around him, gradually coming under a sense of order as a concrete sense of “down” started to appear again. Gravity reestablished its domain and Jyrgal found himself a different resident. He found his form curving around itself, an elongated tense cable of scaled flesh, drifting in the soft buoyancy of the depths. Bone and flesh ceased their wobbles and solidified into a more permanent form. Jyrgal shook his head to try and drive away the last of the dizziness, an action that sent a massive head and snout thrashing. Blinking with eyes that had moved upwards and outwards, the former diver gazed around awkwardly, sheepishly afraid to move the body that had just been completely transformed into... into...

Twisting his head down and under in a manner that would have been completely impossible moments ago, Jyrgal got a good look at his body and stared. Long, scaled, a very shiny shade of purple, whipping and twirled around himself, he looked like... like...

“Oh thank the Waters!” the blue serpent exclaimed in a high shrill voice that made Jyrgal’s changed ears hurt. He would have jerked his hands up to try and cover them but he was suddenly tackled and sent tumbling. Confused and disoriented he looked up to find the she-serpent grinning madly.

“It... wha...?” Jyrgal heard himself mouth in a voice that sounded like his but echoed deeper and more lyrically.

“This is so wonderful! Someone heard my prayers! I have a mate now!!”

Jyrgal’s long mouth fell open. “Wait, did you just say-“

There wasn’t any time to move or react as he suddenly found himself... hugged... and squeezed to the point where he felt his new skull was going to crack open. “This is the best day of my life!! Now the other girls won’t be able to snub their snouts at me!” Perhaps noticing that she was strangling her recently transformed guest, she let up just a moment and let a brief instant of concern cross her face. “Oh my, almost forgot, what’s your name?”

The former diver blinked at the question as the one new reality tried to dump itself upon another. “...Uh, Jyrgal?” His answer was rewarded by another face planting smush of a kiss; eyes bulging out of his head, he was terrified of another burst of seawater but fortunately the kiss was just a kiss.

“Oh Jyrgal!” she exclaimed as she embraced him again, squeezing the air (or water?) out of his lungs. Instead of pulling back and introducing herself in a nice presentable manner she continued squishing the life out of him. “My name’s Glicthu!”

“Wa-wai-wait a minute,” Jyrgal stuttered once she let up her crushing embrace. “This... did you... What did you just do to me??”

“I made you one of my own kind, so now we can be together! Oh my, in fact we should head to the rest of the Pack right now!”

“Wait, wha-?” Jyrgal attempted to begin but was suddenly and unceremoniously grabbed by the midsection of his long body by Glicthu’s massive hands and hauled off, almost literally by his tail!

“It’s going to be so wonderful, we can be mated today; we can have the ceremony ready and everything! Just wait until you meet the family!”

Family!?

“They’ll love you! Mother will be so interested and Grandmother, now she’ll be able to introduce you to everyone; she loves new arrivals, and my brothers...”

Mad panicked desperation was now the order of the day as Jyrgal tried to fight his way free, tugging and pulling with all his might and wiggling his huge form as ferociously as he could. Glicthu, however, in true female fashion knew exactly where on his long body to hold to keep him from squirming too much leaving her free to tug him along almost oblivious to his frantic attempts to escape.

“And all the little hatchlings, they’ll have so much fun, and we can throw a big feast with seasoned whale gallbladder! This is going to be the best mating ceremony ever! Everyone will be there!” the she serpent carried on in a state of bliss, either unaware or uncaring of her soon-to-be-mate’s fright.

Desperately he tried to cling to something, anything as he was dragged through the water by his legless body; passing over a large coral spike he snagged it with both clawed hands and refused to let go.

“And then,” she continued as if nothing were amiss, only tugging slightly more. “We can dance the- Wait, oh that’s right!” she exclaimed as her relentless pull caused the coral spire to snap into pieces, leaving Jyrgal dragging along grasping a chunk of coral in his arms as she tugged him on. “You probably wouldn’t know anything about that! Don’t worry, Mother and I can show you all the dances we have at these events!”

“And then,” she exclaimed as if she were about to explode with enthusiasm, “Then the honeymoon and we have a whole week to ourselves!” she looked back at him, her long mouth grinning in most disconcerting cheery display of teeth. “Come on, we have to tell everyone else!” she said as she dragged Jyrgal further into the deep by his tail.

Somewhere back on land, Jyrgal knew Janet had to be laughing her head off.