After they spread the full diving suit on the metal floor like a black fish-skin under cold light, Yekase and Ivaris finally grasped its design.

The upper half was plain neoprene, a foamed rubber shell snug as night fog. Ten fingers molded in one piece. It wrapped from neck to hips, straps cinching at the inner thighs like tethered sails.

The lower half wasn’t legs at all. It was a streamlined tail, not a cosplay trinket but a hard science sketch. Inside lay a bio-mimetic notochord, a pale cable meant to dock to the tailbone, stealing signals through skin like a wire listening through paper. The fin at the end looked like a propeller blade, cold as steel water.

It felt touched by the designer’s personal kink, but just a pinch, not a flood.

Call it a “mermaid-type robot” done in a functional tech aesthetic, sci-fi trimmed with utility, like chrome on bone.

Beyond the suit, the locker held matching externals.

Top shelf: a dive mask, glass-clear and clinical. Below: a foldable multi-function flashlight meant to sit on the chest, a small lighthouse over a heart. Finally, three rods… three rods that looked maddeningly familiar—

“Well well, aren’t these the little toys your Xiao Jiang sent you?” Ivaris smiled like a cat in cream.

“Why are they here?!”

Pear-shaped reactor control rods, infamous as a bad rumor, sat gleaming like fruit from a poisoned orchard.

“Probably the same manufacturer. Think about it. Underwater, waste is a hassle. These make it simple.”

“What’s the middle one for?!”

“Long stay undersea, certain urges mount like tide. This design’s downright humanist.”

“I’m not wearing this. No way.”

“I did a little expansion for you on the way here. Don’t you feel hollow if you don’t plug something in?”

“Wear it yourself!” Yekase clutched her chest and retreated like a startled deer.

“Boooring—”

Before the word cooled, Ivaris’s wicked hands pounced. Clothes came off in a blur, a storm stripped to bone. She grabbed the suit and tugged it over Yekase’s head with the grace of a fisher hauling a net.

“I can dress myself!”

Once the suit was on, Yekase perched on a metal chair like a small bird on a rail. Then she lifted her feet, shy and stubborn, at Ivaris.

Ivaris spread her legs with easy force, then shoved a sloppily oiled control rod toward the suit’s intake port with all the subtlety of a cork into a bottle.

“Why’s it already sticky? You little perv…”

“For god’s sake, be normal. That’s intestinal fluid! And you grabbed the wrong one! The big one goes in back!”

After a chickens-and-dogs scramble that sounded like pots and pans in a kitchen war, two rods finally settled into place. Ivaris looked almost disappointed, twirling the mid-sized one in front of Yekase’s eyes like a hypnotist’s pendulum. Yekase snatched it, tossed it back into the locker like a pebble into a pond.

Then Ivaris lifted the tail half of the suit and slid it over Yekase’s pressed-together legs. The motion was smooth as silk through reeds.

Once the top reached her waist, the suit recognized the “dressed” signal. The rubber softened like warm wax and fused into a seamless whole—no seam, no line, ocean-smooth.

“This better come off later… huh?!”

Cold stirred inside the tail like moonlight mixed into glue. A non-Newtonian swirl filled every gap between legs and rubber, snug as tide around a rock. Then a small sting pricked her lower back, sharp as a mosquito’s needle—something pierced skin and latched onto her tailbone.

Her legs vanished from her senses like stars swallowed by dawn—only a single, indivisible tail remained.

She tried moving the replacement limb. The rubber fluke smacked the metal floor with crisp pop-pop sounds, snare-drum bright.

It felt strong, a coiled spring under calm water. How did it convert six muscle group signals meant for legs into a clean tail swing without conflict or lock-up? Biomechanics had swum this far already?

Now the suit wrapped Yekase head to toe in a black sheen, shadow-slick and featureless. Only her face still belonged to her, though the mask would claim that soon too.

Once she hit water, the foamed rubber would drink seawater like a sponge and swell. It would warm her like sunlight through glass, and tighten every inch of skin like a harp string, barely hindering touch or fine finger work.

Ivaris picked up the mask.

The upper half was a transparent window, clean as ice. Below sat two round ports side by side, meant for breathing tubes, the usual in-and-out of life. But there were no hoses or tanks anywhere. Inside lay three silicone tubes—one thick, two thin—and their ends had no connectors, like vines meant to root in flesh: one for the mouth, two for the nostrils.

Only then did Ivaris find the manual, flattened under a pile of clothes:

[Left port: water intake. Right port: feeding intake. Internal oxygenator electrolyzes seawater into oxygen; no external tanks needed. After installation, flip the safety behind the ear to power the oxygenator. Warning! Once active, the wearer cannot breathe air. Do not suffocate.]

“…That’s what it says.”

“…Then we put it on.”

Hospitals run stomach tubes through the nose, straight down like rain through a gutter. Was this, too, the designer’s little indulgence?

Yekase took the largest tube into her mouth. Under Ivaris’s slow, gentle pressure, she swallowed it like a river taking a bridge. Strangely, there was no gag reflex, no revolt. The tube slid past her throat, down the esophagus, and settled into the stomach like an anchor.

Then came the two thin nasal tubes, light as pins. They slid home, neat and easy.

“Close it up.”

“…………”

Yekase couldn’t speak. A tiny nod sent the tube rubbing inside her throat like silk against a reed; she froze at the sensation like a deer under moonlight.

The mask sealed to her face. All three tubes locked firm, pinning tongue and jaw like clamps. Black, amorphous gel bled from the mask’s edge, wrapping her whole head and hair like tar made tender, then fused with the suit’s collar. Outside, the gel sprouted a deep-blue wig like a wave unfurling.

She looked like a full-sized mannequin cast in black latex, silent and uncanny.

That uncanny shape didn’t last. Once the dressing was complete, the suit shifted colors like a cuttlefish in thought. Upper body turned to human skin-tone, warm as dawn on sand; the tail bloomed teal, and scales shimmered into texture like rain on mosaic.

Minus the masked face, Yekase had become a fairytale mermaid—voice stolen by a witch, no legs to walk, no lungs for air, a small heart grieving in private under salt.

She finally understood the 3×3 grid on the flashlight’s side. It was a nine-key pad, a toy piano for the voiceless. It was how the engineered merfolk in the Origin Dragon Palace spoke without throats, words pressed like keys in water.

“Hey, hold on.”

“?”

“This mask has other modes!”

Ivaris’s smile flashed like a knife catching sun. Yekase knew trouble in her bones. She moaned soft protests, tried to grab the manual; she fumbled the new tail, toppled off the chair, and lay helpless on the floor like a beached seal.

Her muffled protests rolled off Ivaris like rain on lacquer.

Ivaris cradled her head and followed the manual step by step. “First, press this key…”

“?!”

Yekase’s sight went dark, a candle pinched out. The transparent pane turned midnight-black, stripping her of vision like fog swallowing a harbor.

Unseen, black gel spread over her upper face and sealed the last bare skin like night closing a window. Then the mask generated a pair of azure eyes—beautiful and false, porcelain pools that didn’t let light in.

“Facial disguise mode. You lose vision, but gain echo-skin in water—skin sensing distance like passive sonar. Perfect with your Infinite Force Perception.”

“Mm—mm!”

“I don’t understand your bubble-talk. That a yes to keep going? Can’t say no now.”

Ivaris tapped the second key twice, quick as a woodpecker.

“And then this—”

Her voice cut off, not by choice but by design. Gel flooded Yekase’s ears with tender violence, sealing the canals like wax poured to cool.

“You trade hearing for a lateral-line mimic. Now you sense currents, not words. Nice. You’re becoming a proper fish.”

Ivaris gave Yekase a playful shove.

Blind, deaf, and mute, the latex mermaid thumped her tail on the floor, splashy and cheerful like a carp in festival drums. Ivaris wasn’t done handing out gifts.

“Last is three long, two short. Competitive swimming mode… Competitive?”

This mode targeted defeated female combatants bought by hostile groups—slaves by a cleaned-up name. It sealed all senses forever like doors bolted shut, then digested the limbs, leaving a body that couldn’t survive away from its certified owner, a perfect competitive mermaid.

It auto-connected to the network, scrubbed the wearer’s records from Japan’s civil registry like ink rinsed from paper, revoked human rights, assigned name and number, then allowed sign-ups for mermaid races across the country.

Once activated, the only way out was to return to shore and get an Ocean Development Bureau signature to retire. But limbs wouldn’t grow back. The rest of life would be a wheelchair and a heavy sky, the body a broken oar.

“...Holy hell. Japanese devs go this hard?!”

It was a spare suit anyone inside a sub could borrow, and there wasn’t even a foolproof lock to stop a stranger from pressing the nuclear button—oh, there was a safety on an earlier page. Yekase hadn’t read the manual. Of course.

Ivaris decided this, too, was a way to taste local customs, ocean and law in the same sip—an experience the average person could never touch. Yekase had Flash Energy she could convert to Mind Energy to rebuild her body anyway, no lasting harm, no fear.

So Ivaris pinned the squirming mermaid’s head and tapped that button five times, sure as the tide.

She knew better than anyone that Yekase could endure beyond expectation, beyond everyone’s math—including Jiang Bailu, the earliest developer. As long as it wasn’t hypnosis, nothing would scar; she’d gripe, then grin, then play.

Why was hypnosis the red line? Because Reverse Meme, at its core, felt like hypnosis to common sense. Yekase had lost too much to that already. No one would touch her mind; that vault stayed shut.

Everything else? Fair game, even this hard.

The chest flashlight projected a virtual panel in front of Ivaris like a floating window of frost and light. Yekase, sealed away from sight, sound, and sensation—touch damped into silence by the suit—knew nothing. She didn’t know that this small panel was about to steer her life for days, or forever.

[Converting wearer into competitive mermaid. Be advised: this process is severe and irreversible.]

[Proceed?]

“Yes.”

[Enter owner’s name.]

“Ivaris de Finci.”

[Received. Beginning conversion.]

The suit forced Yekase’s arms to fold over her chest like wings tucked tight, then the change began.

From the outside, the arm sections seemed to melt into the torso like wax under a flame, and her chest grew by about two cup sizes, curves written in bold. Inside the suit, her long, nimble limbs dissolved under the gel’s chemistry, receding like sandbars under tide, leaving only the torso. The tail’s notochord dug deeper into the spine, a tighter, cleaner link, the new limb waking like a blade.

The look shifted again. A navy one-piece swimsuit clothed her upper body, sharp as a team uniform. On her chest, a white placard rose from the fabric like a name carved into water: the Ocean Development Bureau’s brand-new gift, a racing name for a mermaid to chase podiums and please crowds:

“No. 212 — Floral Doll.”

Below, in smaller letters, Ivaris’s name. Proof that its life no longer belonged to itself, but to the girl who claimed it. Ownership etched like a collar.

[——Congratulations. Conversion complete. Remove the multi-function terminal; competitive mermaids don’t need it. From now on, its life will hold only races, and they won’t end.]

Ivaris studied the lines of text, satisfaction spreading like warm lacquer; she was sure Yekase himself would be pleased, as pleased as she was.

Even as the apprentice racing mermaid kept flopping on the floor like a stranded carp, she had to be swept by joy at her rebirth as a possession.

“Oh, right—this too... Don’t think you have the right to protest. You’re mine.”

Ivaris fetched the last missing control plug from the wardrobe; she parted the mermaid’s cloaca like a sealed inlet and slid it along the already flooded narrow way.

The foreign weight made her body shudder like reeds in a sudden gust, but it was useless; the gel flowed back like tide, sealing the plug tight.

Ivaris raised her phone—one crisp snap, a shard of light to show Yekase later—then shouldered her dear mermaid and walked out of the prep room.