Dream Blog: The Island Mermaid
I’ve been playing a LOT of The Sims 4, specifically the Island Living and Discover University expansion packs. In hindsight, I should have saved photos and documented this run of The Sims because I am doing a pretty decent job at keeping the family line alive! I like to play The Sims a specific way; basically, I make a couple and drop them in a premade house. They marry and have a kid, and then that kid marries an NPC and has a kid, and so on and so forth. I like to try to keep the family line going as long as possible…the furthest I’ve ever gotten is five generations.
I’m on the fourth generation of Walshes (Adolfo Walsh was the patriarch, followed by his son Kelani, his daughter Mya, and her new baby boy, Ash Walsh) and I’m excited to see if I can hit the illustrious tenth generation! It’s been fun to watch the genetics change as time goes on. One thing that’s stayed constant so far is the Walsh Nose, which is very much Aquiline in appearance.
Anyway, since I’ve been playing so much of The Sims 4, I’ve been having weird dreams about it. The dream I’m about to share came the other night, when I was getting over a 24 hour bug.
I wasn’t me in my dream. I had to have been Kelani Walsh, the son of Adolfo and his wife, Kiki. Kelani looked more like his mother, who hails from San Myshuno (the Sims equivalent of multiple large cities like Tokyo and New York City). Although he didn’t look like the rest of his Sulani friends and classmates (Sulani is like Hawaii but the Sims), his love for the sea and all of its inhabitants was as pure and true as the rest of the island’s residents.
Adolfo was a marine biologist who worked on the surrounding islands, and Kelani loved going with him on his adventures through Mua Pel’am, helping the island go back to its natural beauty. One of these adventures turned scary when Kelani wandered off, losing his father in the process.
Kelani looked everywhere for his father, searching the mouth of the cavern they had explored countless times before. He didn’t dare go further in, remembering the strange creatures that lurked in the darkness and the dank air that made it hard to breathe. Instead, he walked back to the beach, picking up trash along the way (“No matter what you’re doing,” Adolfo had told him when he was young, “Always pick up trash on the beach.”).
The waves caressed the sand beneath his feet as Kelani looked out at the horizon, looking for any sign of his father. Maybe he was just snorkeling without him near the buoy? Maybe he had sailed off to the other side of the island, the side that curved around so that Kelani couldn’t see beyond its edge? Or maybe Adolfo had left Kelani behind, trusting him to find his way back to their home on the nearby island.
No, he would never leave Kelani behind. He had to be around somewhere.
Kelani waded out into the water, squinting at the buoy. He couldn’t make out much, save for the red and white object bobbing on the water. Right before he looked away, he saw something strange…a glint of something shiny? A splash that didn’t look natural? He was always a strong swimmer…he didn’t need the boat that they had sailed to Mua Pel’am on to get to the buoy.
So, Kelani started swimming. He swam with purpose out to the buoy and as he approached, he saw the shiny thing again. Soon, he was right up on the buoy, but the shiny thing was nowhere to be found.
“Son?” Adolfo’s voice was familiar to Kelani’s young ears. He spun around to see his father in the water, his expression one of surprise and relief. “Oh, Kelani!”
“Dad!” Kelani began to swim towards his father, but stopped as he saw the glint of something shiny in the water. He peered underneath the blue waters to see…
“Oh, yeah,” Adolfo said sheepishly, raising a wet hand to rest on the back of his head. “I haven’t had time to tell you…”
Kelani watched as the shiny object rose above the water, revealing itself to be a beautiful mermaid’s tail. The greenish blue, purpley fins were translucent, the thickness of the rest of the tail attached squarely to his father’s torso. Scales trailed up his abdomen and Kelani noticed the different shade of his father’s eyes. The brown had been replaced with an inky purple, the whites a pale shade of blue.
When Adolfo smiled, Kelani saw razor sharp, shark-like teeth in his father’s mouth. “I wanted to wait until your sixteenth birthday, but, well…I’m a mermaid, Kelani.”
“You’re…a mermaid?” Kelani stared at his father in shock, his arms and legs going through the motions to keep him afloat. “I…wha…how?”
“When I was sixteen I found Mermaid Kelp,” Adolfo explained, letting his tail dip back into the ocean. “You’ve seen it before. Your mother keeps a tree in the backyard.”
“The water-lemon tree?”
“That’s actually a Mermaid Kelp bush,” Adolfo said. “We keep it alive because one day, you might choose to become a mermaid like me.”
“You weren’t born like that?”
“No,” Adolfo chuckled. “I ate the Mermaid Kelp I had found in the waters of Sulani when I was sixteen because I wanted to see if the legend was true. You remember the legend of the Island Mermaid?”
“The mermaid of Mua Pel’am,” Kelani responded, remembering the bedtime stories and history classes. “How could I forget?”
“It’s a real legend,” Adolfo explained. “The Island Mermaid is a goddess that all mermaids are drawn to. I heard her call from this ocean, and I listened. Eating that kelp was the key to unlocking my own destiny.”
“What does that mean?” Kelani asked, starting to feel a little fatigued from keeping his head above the waves. His body had begun to bob slightly as the effort started to become tiring.
“It means that I, along with the rest of the mermaids in Sulani, are responsible for fixing the environmental damage that the humans have done to our land. That’s why I decided to become a marine biologist, why I take you along with me on trips to the other islands. I believe that if mermaids and humans can come together, we can reverse the damage that’s already been done. The pollution, the trash, all of that is reversible. Do you understand, my son?”
Adolfo took Kelani’s arms and held him closer to him, causing Kelani to stop moving. The effort of staying afloat was gone. Instead, Adolfo held his body steady and looked at him intensely. “Even if you do not want to become a mermaid like me, you understand that call to the sea, don’t you?”
Kelani nodded. Dreams of the ocean’s beauty came to him every night, ever since he was a young child. He was enthralled by the sea. Weekends spent on the beach, slathered in sunscreen, his mother teaching him how to swim while his father sat on the beach, watching, proud. He couldn’t have known that his father was a mermaid then. Looking back, though, Kelani never really remembered swimming with his father at all.
“You transform when you get wet, right?” he asked, already knowing that his father would nod in agreement. “That’s why Mom taught me how to swim instead of you?”
“She always wanted to be the one to teach you anyway,” Kelani confessed. “I had taught her, so she wanted to teach you.”
“Wow.”
“I know it’s a lot right now…You don’t have to eat the kelp on your birthday,” Adolfo added. “Being a mermaid is something that I want for you, but you do not have to follow my fins if you don’t want to.” Adolfo smiled, a genuine, fatherly smile that warmed Kelani’s heart. “I know you want more out of life than swimming and beach clean-ups.”
“I like those things too,” Kelani pointed out. It was true, though. Kelani loved the ocean, but he also loved reading and learning. Going to college to become a lawyer was something that had always sat in the back of his mind. “I can take cases for Sulani. Maybe by the time I come back after college, I can represent the island legally or something? Would that help save the oceans?”
Adolfo looked inquisitive. “Perhaps it could. I don’t see why it wouldn’t. Either way,” he said, letting go of Kelani. Kelani treaded water once more, keeping his head above water with ease. “Let’s go home. Your mother is making curry tonight, and you know she hates when we’re late for dinner. Climb on my back and let’s swim to shore.”
Kelani swam around behind Adolfo, grabbing onto his father’s shoulders meekly. Adolfo laughed heartily at this. “You’ll have to hold on tighter than that, son. Mermaids swim fast.”
“Oh,” Kelani mumbled, awkwardly wrapping his arms around his father’s neck and trying to avoid getting his curly black mane of hair in his face.
Without warning, Kelani felt his stomach flip as his father blasted off, the water around them barely touching them as Adolfo swam like lightening back to the shore. What took Kelani ten minutes to swim took his father less than sixty seconds.
“Holy crap, Dad,” Kelani breathed as soon as his feet hit the sand. “You…we…that was crazy.”
Kelani looked over at his dad and saw that he was sitting on the shore, wriggling his tail around. Suddenly, the beautiful tail split into two, revealing two tanned legs tucked into the cocoon of scales that were now sloughing off of him. He rubbed the scales off of him and stood, his legs looking normal and not at all like he had just cracked them from a mermaid tail shell.
“Sorry you had to see that,” Adolfo said, seeing his son’s horrified expression. “One of the not so fun things about being a mermaid is transforming back and forth. If you decide to follow me into mermaid life, you’ll see that it’s way less painful than it looks.”
Kelani just nodded and watched his father walk confidently past, back to the boat they had sailed in on. “We’re going home?”
“Yes,” Adolfo said. “You know your mother is waiting.”
“This is a lot to take in,” Kelani admitted as he followed his father to the boat. “What if I choose to eat the kelp on my birthday? What will happen?”
Adolfo looked down at his son and smiled. “We will cross that bridge in time. For now, let’s go get some curry.”
If you need to know what happened in awake life Sims, Kelani didn’t eat the kelp when he had the chance. I got bored of the mermaid part of Island Living (you can’t really do a whole lot unfortunately) so I had him become a lawyer instead! I’m a little embarrassed that I had a dream about The Sims, but I figured it made for a fun short story!
Thanks for reading! As always, feel free to follow me on Twitter for blog updates and Maryisims. I sometimes tweet about what I’m doing on The Sims, but admittedly not very often. I also have a ko-fi so feel free to leave a tip for me on there as well! I put all of the tips I get on there towards self-publishing my novel.
If you guys are interested in hearing about the Walshes, let me know! I love talking about what I’m doing in The Sims, so if people wanna hear about it I’ll document their Sim lives moving forward. Either way, I’ll see you all here next week for something new!
