Serru had a better grasp of the ways my newly-aquian bag worked than I expected, since I couldn’t see her having much use for one in this life or very detailed memories from other lives.

  Aesthetically, it still looked roughly the same: white with a creamy pattern, which was now leaves of multiple shapes, gold hardware including rings and clips, rainbow fringe along the edge of the fp and the straps. Dangling from the gold chain were three small charms instead of a single rge and eye-catching one: a spotted pink seashell and a shiny realistic green metal leaf fnked a spear of aquamarine-coloured crystal.

  The construction of it in this form was distinctly different. It was rectangur in shape, as long as my forearm on the long side and maybe two-thirds of that in the other direction, with the doubled opening in the middle of one long side.

  It had sturdy rings at all four corners and also in the middle of two adjacent sides, which meant that there were a multitude of ways to fasten the two wide straps with their sturdy snap ends and sliders to adjust length.

  Obviously it could be worn as a simple cross-body bag, using the rings on either end of the long side that had the opening; for intense underwater swimming, apparently many aquians considered it better to keep a bag more close and immobile, so in a matter of seconds it could be turned into a backpack with a waist belt keeping it high and secure.

  The interior was divided, and the inventory screen likewise depended on which I slid a hand into; fortunately, by default, everything had gone into the dry one. The edges of the mouth had an extra fold of fabric, which could be rolled and then clipped at the ends, and apparently as long as that was the case, water couldn’t get into it. The other section had a dense sturdy mesh bottom, prioritizing all-the-time accessibility and quick drying over waterproofing, with a simple inner fp and a single csp. Actually, I’d noticed that pretty much any bag with a fp had a way to do that, but it was usually easier to leave that job to gravity. On this one, it might matter a lot more.

  So, for aquians who lived in two different environments and had two different methods of locomotion and variable sexual anatomy that I wasn’t going to assume was limited to a binary absolute, their preferred method of carrying things worked in two different ways. Made sense.

  “Is there ever anything that needs to be kept wet?” I asked, experimenting with the straps.

  Serru nodded. “Some things that come out of the water break down quickly if they get dry. But those are specialist items, like freezing bags, mostly used by aquian gatherers who search in the deeper waters.” She smiled, gncing around. Orange metal gleamed around her neck—before separating, we’d made arrangements with Terenei, who had one communicator box while Serru had the other. It would make finding each other easier once they caught up. “There’s no one in sight. Why don’t you go for a swim and test it out?”

  I hesitated, then spread my hands. She had a point. As usual.

  It was harder to fret about the future or the past in this form, anyway, and easier to just live in the moment. I had no reason to think that all centaurs were calm and confident, all felids were energetic and distractible, and all aquians were mellow and mindful, but there were definitely... not personalities, because I was still myself, but mental states or moods, that came with different forms.

  I rather liked this one. I didn’t feel like I was in any way impaired, but that extra boost in simply accepting and moving on from anxious thoughts was deeply restful.

  I waded into the clear water.

  The slope was steeper than it looked: in only a few steps I was up to my chest.

  Memories that weren’t mine told me that I couldn’t drown, that water and air were equally viable media and that water meant freedom to move and greater awareness of my environment.

  More personal memories were of Aryennos coming terrifyingly close to drowning.

  For practical reasons, I needed to establish this quickly, while Serru was close and would be able to help if something went wrong.

  I found myself taking a deep breath before I kicked off the bottom so I was swimming, and then went under. It was oddly easy, and not just because of the limited webbing between my fingers; I was sure my buoyancy in retion to the water had altered.

  Cautiously, I exhaled, and then inhaled.

  It didn’t burn, I didn’t choke. It didn’t feel all that different from breathing in cool clean humid air, actually.

  I was quite sure that lungs were not supposed to be able to process both. That just wasn’t how oxygen exchange worked in mammals.

  But the rules of biology and physiology and, for that matter, physics were as selective here as they were in a game world or a fantasy movie or a comic book. So, I had lungs that considered air and water to be interchangeable. Well, why not?

  I could see, too, without blurring or distortion. It was like watching an HD underwater video, but it was all around me. I hadn’t really appreciated just how much life thrived in the Gss Shallows. Sunlight reached right down to the bottom, and that meant pnts could grow in lush abundance across every inch, and the pnts meant that fish of all sizes and colours had a pce to live and food to eat—other than potentially each other. It was strikingly beautiful.

  I found myself briefly mesmerized watching a small octopus pulling itself around in a patch of what might be coral.

  My skin sent me messages about motion near me, the currents of the water, an overwhelming amount of information that I couldn’t even begin to transte into a usable form. Fortunately, it was for the most part easy to ignore. I could work on learning that ter.

  I could hear high rapid clicking and squealing noises and, even more distantly, a long deep slow song. Was I picking up on marine mammals? Anid had pointed out a pod of dolphins pying in the water at one point; didn’t they make high-pitched sounds? And if there were dolphins, there could be something bigger out past the Shallows. Swimming with dolphins would be amazing even as a human, but being able to keep up with them would be completely mindblowing.

  Breathing, check. Senses, check. I swam out deeper, although not far, exploring how this three-dimensional existence worked, and finally paused, hip-length hair swirling around me. Being suspended somewhere between bottom and surface, in contact with nothing solid, felt unexpectedly comfortable and peaceful.

  Now, what about this tail thing? That was actually the default for aquians submerged in water, right? Not changing was the bit that normally required effort. I looked around in dream memories for it, and there were experiences there demonstrating how to just rex in the right way and let go and...

  Oh, that felt strange. Beyond strange.

  Normally when swapping between forms, there was just a brief moment of overall vertigo that passed quickly, leaving me in the new form with no real sense of the process.

  This was all in the same form. At least it was fast, but there are really no words to describe the sensation of two limbs fusing together into one.

  It was pretty peculiar after the process finished, too. It was not at all like just keeping both legs pressed together. On the other hand, there was a definite sense of release, the loss of a feeling of effort that I had hardly even recognized was present. Presumably that was the need to suppress an innate reflex in order to retain legs.

  I was absolutely certain that my new scaled tail was substantially longer than my legs, without even counting the translucent flukes at the end that must be as wide as my spread arms when fully extended. I did have control over them and could fold them inwards, which I found interesting. Presumably that option was more important than firmer structural stability. Did it help with control? Or maybe some creator just thought it looked cool, for all I knew.

  Under my new scales, which shimmered with the blues of summer sky and winter ice and blue jays and peacocks, I could feel only muscle. Presumably at least in my pelvic region there was more than that. There were certainly a lot of vertebrae with very specialized shapes, to allow the degree of flexibility that I had in coiling and swishing it in every possible direction; knee joints, which were optimized for walking and running bipedally on nd, suddenly looked impossibly restricted as well as much simpler.

  I could see why effort had gone into designing bags that could be worn differently: mine, held only by the single cross-body strap, swung and banged into me as I tested this. I unfastened one end of the strap, looped it through the rings on the short side, and snapped it onto the other corner, creating backpack straps that I could shrug into. That wasn’t perfect, but it was an immense improvement.

  Every motion I made had an opposite reaction, not quite to the degree of zero gravity but it did mean that messing with my bag had equated to unintended twisting and motion. For that matter, my own hair threatened to turn this swim into a bondage fantasy.

  Water was a complex medium to move in, I knew that, and when combined with the next-level degree of motor skills required to master a powerful tail that could flex in so many ways, I could foresee a future that involved considerable learning. And that was with the dream-memories; without them, I might have been completely helpless.

  And here I’d thought my centaur form was complicated!

  I wasn’t sure how much swimming I’d be doing once we left the Gss Shallows, and I always had the option of not changing to my tailed form; swimming with legs would be more familiar, even with altered buoyancy and senses and being amphibious.

  I did want to explore this, though. How many chances was I ever going to get to experience life as a merperson?

  As when I’d left the Quincunx, I knew exactly where the campsite was. I wasn’t going to get lost. There wouldn’t be any rge carnivores around; while fish could presumably eat fish, I highly doubted that there was anything snacking on the aquian popution of the Shallows.

  Serru would understand if I didn’t come back immediately.

  Besides, there were probably cool things I could gather that she couldn’t reach, and thanks to my Identify abilities, I even had reasonable odds of figuring out what they were.