---
title: 00028
created: Sat, 29 Oct 2022 08:36:51 -0600
updated: Sat, 29 Oct 2022 08:36:51 -0600
public: yes
syndicated: yes
---
### 00028 {#00028}

> ~*a new player enters the chat*~
> 
> Gabs had a good life. Her little devil children were all grown
> adults now, and she no longer wanted to toil away running a
> business. When she initially shuttered her little tavern, she
> thought she might just retire. She made it two whole years of
> working in a garden, occasionally seeing grandkids, and reading
> romance novels. She eventually decided she needed a vacation from
> her retirement and traveled to a nearby port town. She was sure to
> find something fun to do there. 
> 
> Gabs eventually sees Inquire Within, and the smell of debauchery
> wafting from within made her miss her days gossiping at her tavern.
> She enters and orders a terrible drink and listens and watches. 
> 
> Hearing the tales being spun by Mister Three-Fingered, she decides,
> “I’ve never been on a ship, that’s something that sounds exciting!” 
> 
> Half-drunk and eager for something exciting, she will join on the
> journey! 
> 
> Gabs is a lanky older half-devil lady who is here to schmooze and
> have fun!

~

> Meta: a warm welcome to the latest member of our tea party! This is
> a short post to help smooth the temporal jumps between the recent
> narratives so far. As Inky reaches the deck, they see Gabs
> approaching from the other side of the ship as well, and flashes
> them a grin in greeting. After listening to the captain petering on
> about the glorious days of the now sunken ship below, while
> tinkering with the bell's tentacles — being rewarded with a mild
> zap and marginally better fit for the effort — Inky turns to the
> party. "When you're ready."

You reach into the tank and discover that grabbing a breathing bell
takes some finesse. They are very slippery! But you get the hang of
it and make a ladle out of your hands and scoop one up.

"Okay now!" laughs Three-Fingered Gerald. He gives you a wink, but
it's easy to miss because of the eyepatch. "Don't put it on until
right before you jump. It won't be able to breathe for you until
you're in the water. And this!" he continues, fitting a heavy, padded
vest around your shoulders, "will carry you down." It is a vest of
many pockets, each one holding a small dense sandbag the size of your
hand. "When you're ready to come back up, just start dropping
ballast, right?"

You hop up on the ship railing and pull the breathing bell on over
your head. It immediately contracts and squeezes and hugs your head
like a second skin, and its stubby little tentacles grab hold around
your jawline, and it feels like you have a wet plastic bag clinging
to your face, and you think you might have made a grave mistake.
Resisting the urge to panic, you push off the railing and jump
overboard. You are briefly air born and then profoundly waterbound,
crashing through the surface of the sea into the briny soup below.

The oxygen starts to flow as the breathing bell begins to do its job.
As you sink, you feel as though you are floating through space,
entering another world.

After a while you start to hear voices arguing in the distance. As
you get closer, two large shapes start to come into focus. The first
is a hulking, hairless merbear. Top half (hairless) bear, bottom half
fish. The second figure is a tardigrade the size of a large merbear.
It has eight jointless legs, each tipped with four sharp claws. It
wriggles and wobbles like jelly as it gesticulates.

"No, I am the true Bear of the Sea! I am called a Water Bear, after
all!"

"Hornswoggle and poppycock! It is I who am the Bear of the Sea! I am
half bear after all! You're just some kind of segmented nematode or
something."

The tardigrade quivers with indignation. "I'll have you know I'm a
panarthropod, thank you very much. And this is the ideal physical
body! You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks
like. I've lived under the polar ice cap, and in a sulfurous
mountaintop hot spring. I've traveled through the vacuum of space to
the moon! Have you ever been to the moon?"

"Why don't you go be the Bear of the Moon then if you like it so
much!"

"You're just as much fish as you are bear, are you sure you're not
the Fish of the Sea?"

"Are you sure you're not the Blob of the Sea, you too many armed bowl
of jelly?"

"Hey! Hey, you there!" The arguing quasi-bears have spotted your slow
descent. "Come, yes, float slowly this way! You must settle an
argument for us! Tell this slightly mammalian fish that I am the true
Bear of the Sea!"

"The Bear of the Sea must be at least 'slightly mammalian' you
egg-laying scientific curiosity! You, tell this cousin of a barnacle
that I---the mighty merbear---am the true Bear of the Sea! Say this
and I will guide and protect you on your journey."

"No! Would you like to visit the moon? Say that I, tardigrade, am
Bear of the Sea and I will introduce you to my moon friends!"

"He had to make friends on the moon because nobody on Urth can stand
him!"

"You're just mean, you know that?"

You are still quite some way from the sea bed, and there is no sight
of the SS RSS.

WHAT DO YOU DO

[www](https://framalistes.org/sympa/arc/tildepals/2022-10/msg00023.html)


