You can pretend that when you hear my voice, Darling, it's your choice not to fall in

Everyone managed to get to the Banquet Hall, with the exception of Holly. She was too embarrassed to leave her room at the moment.

But they all saw what was going on. And not a lot of people were sure what to make of the situation, unfortunately.

“What’s going on here?” Dawn asked, frowning. Unlike a lot of the others, she was able to recognize the siren immediately as the one who’d come to see them. To everyone else, the girl was just another siren. “Why is that siren from the lagoon here? The one who came up to our boat?”

“Technically, it was a penis,” Gina unhelpfully informed.

Dawn rolled her eyes.

“I have a similar question,” Mary said, glancing uneasily at the black-haired creature. “She’s… she’s not exactly…”

“Not exactly what? Human?” Dani asked, frowning. “That’s-”

“Wearing clothing!” Mary blurted out, covering her eyes. “She’s naked! I can’t even look at her, and… and I don’t want my husband to be looking at her, either!”

“Ooh, Mary’s getting possessive!” Rose whistled. “Shoulda seen that one coming!”

Mary shot her a dirty look. “It’s… it’s not right!” She sputtered. “She could at least put a shirt on or something, you know!”

While Nick found it cute that Mary was so concerned about his proximity to the siren when she was stark naked, he had to agree. Out of the water, the siren’s body light had dimmed to a soft glow. It was a lot easier to make out her features now, and she seemed so much more tangible.

He could see her face. And, more importantly, some other bits that were not well-hidden.

Nick tried very hard not to look at those areas. It helped that Mary herself was wearing her usual skimpy clothing. And it seemed like Kim’s skirt lost an inch every day she wore it; it danced around the top of her thighs now, teasing a panty shot should she bend over.

…More importantly, there was a naked girl in the middle of the Banquet Hall! Naked, and dry, for once, and looking, quite honestly, like a ghost.

Nick shivered. He had a flashback to his last memory with someone who’d drowned in the water. He thought he’d gotten over that trauma when Dakota came back into his life, even after what happened to her, and how she’d turned against him.

But no. That fear of the water was still there, under the surface, waiting for him. It had dug deep into his heart, and pricked against him, and he didn’t realize it until he’d seen Dani fall into the water just like Dakota had.

Instinctively, he closed the distance between himself and Dani, and wrapped his arm around hers.

Dani stared at him with a confused expression on her face. She wasn’t bothered by the sudden contact (not because of her transformation, though, but because it wasn’t that big of a deal for two friends to touch like this) but she was definitely confused.

She had no idea what Nick was doing.

“Uh… what’s up?” She asked, staring blankly at him.

Nick blushed.

“It… it’s just… I mean…”

He pulled away from her and shook his head. “…Sorry. I kind of overreacted. I was really worried about you, Dani. After what happened yesterday…”

“Oh…” Dani’s face softened, and she realized what he was alluding to. “…Yeah… sorry, I wasn’t even thinking…”

She turned and looked at the siren, who was standing off from the others and staring up at her with those big, blue eyes of hers.

Dani bit her lip. This… this wasn’t how it was supposed to go. She wasn’t sure HOW it was supposed to go, but she was pretty sure this wasn’t it.

She’d wanted to wait for everyone to show up before she could explain things in more detail, but now that everyone had… she was suddenly wondering if maybe this wasn’t the best idea.

After what Nick had been through… would he really want a siren around? A woman whose whole purpose was to lure people into the water to drown?

Dani shivered and shook her head frantically. No! Don’t think about it that way! She chastised herself. She’s not here for that! If she was trying to lure people, then she wouldn’t have shown her face in front of me in the first place! She would have just lured me away!

Dani believed that the siren was fundamentally good. After all, when she’d fallen into the water, the siren had come up to her, and without that, she might have drowned. …Well, Dakota would have stepped in and saved her, but it certainly would have been painful!

“Listen, guys… I know you’re really confused about why the siren is here,” she said, looking around the room.

“Not really,” Gina replied. “You’re banging her, right? That’s why she’s here.”

Dani’s jaw dropped.

“What?!” She exclaimed.

“Hey!” Carly snapped. “Come on, don’t say stuff like that!” She turned to Dani, her eyes wide with concern. “…You’re not, right?”

Dani didn’t know whether she should be upset at that, or happy. Then she remembered what Carly had told her on the Ferris Wheel, and turned red.

“Err… that’s… it’s not important!” She sputtered, shaking her head quickly. “Look, whatever this girl is, I’m not sleeping with her! We’re just…”

She glanced at the siren, whose facial expression hadn’t changed. Dani had flashbacks to Mimi, suddenly, and the way the slime girl would stare at everyone. Study them. Learn from them. And grow from them.

Dani’s eyes quickly slid over to Marley, who blinked in confusion.

“Huh?” Marley tilted her head to the side.

“N-nothing, it’s nothing!” Dani said quickly, shaking her head. “Look, I just… the reason why I brought her here is because she escaped from the ride.”

“Escaped?” Mary’s eyes widened in surprise.

“Wait, you can escape from those rides?!” Morgana’s eyes bulged.

“Morgana, you were with us when we first met her,” Carly pointed out, confused.

“I-I was too busy being scared,” Morgana admitted.

Gina snickered and rolled her eyes. “So what, she escaped? Then what? Why did she come here, then, huh?”

“I think she came because she was lonely,” Dani said quietly. “She was lonely, and she wanted to be around other people. At least, that’s the vibe I got from the ride. The sirens, their song… they all seemed so lonely.”

“Right, okay, I get that,” Gina nodded. “No penis in a while, huh?”

Dawn kicked Gina in the shin with the back of her foot.

“Drop it,” she hissed to the troublemaker, while Gina just snickered in delight.

“So, let me get this straight,” Dawn said, turning back to Dani. “This siren, she saved you from the water. No, not even saved you, she was just there when you fell in, and came up to see us. And from that, she escaped from the ride, and followed us to the hotel, is that right? Where she once again latched onto you?”

Dani nodded. “Yeah, that’s kind of how it looks to me,” she confirmed.

“Anyone else getting really suspicious vibes from that?” Rose sighed. She and Dawn glanced at each other. They were both on the same page with this.

“And now, what, you want her to stay with us?” Mary asked. She seemed the most uncertain out of everyone there.

“Basically… yeah,” Dani nodded. “Dakota, she said that it would be okay if that happened. But… she also said that I would have to take responsibility for it.”

“Take responsibility?” Marley frowned. “What does THAT mean?”

Dani shrugged. “I guess it means that I have to accept that I’m responsible for whatever bad things that she does, or whatever happens as a result of her presence here.” She glanced at Dawn and Morgana. “Kind of like when you guys used those mirrors, I guess.”

Dawn winced. Morgana turned even paler.

“No way! Absolutely not!” Carly put her foot down immediately and crossed her arms underneath her chest in defiance. “It’s one thing for her to stay here, but if she misbehaves, are you telling me that’s going to cause problems for you? And that you’re actually fine with that happening? Because I’m not!”

Dani winced. She didn’t like the fact that Carly sounded right, but she couldn’t come up with a good argument against that.

“I don’t think she’s going to do anything bad…” Dani protested. “Why would she come all the way here, if she was just going to try and seduce people with her voice?”

And their arguments had come full-circle.

“It’s probably a trap,” Rose guessed. “From Dakota. She put the siren there, then made Dani her advocate, in order to have the siren suddenly do bad stuff. Dakota gets to hold Dani responsible, and torment her some more. That’s how I see it, anyway.”

Everyone stared at Rose in shock.

“That… actually sounds really plausible,” Kim said, her expression darkening.

“I agree,” Dawn agreed. “That sounds like something Dakota would do. And if that’s the case, Dani, you’re playing right into her hands.”

“Dani, this isn’t a good idea,” Carly urged her friend. She approached her, and looked desperately into the other girl’s eyes. “Can’t you see the risks here?”

Dani didn’t know what to say. Carly seemed really ****. And it was all for her sake, too, not for the concern of anyone else.

Could she… could she really have feelings for me? Dani wondered in amazement. She had been afraid of trying to confront that possibility, but with all the stuff Carly had been saying recently, and how defensive she was getting…

Dani couldn’t say it wasn’t possible.

“I-I mean…” Her voice broke, and she looked towards the siren again. She didn’t want to upset Carly or the others, but she also didn’t think it was right to just throw away the siren like she was nothing. It wasn’t fair to turn her back over to Dakota and her little flying monkey.

“Well, there is one issue with that line of thinking,” Sylvia noted. “Dakota doesn’t control the sirens, remember?”

It took a second for that to sink in.

“…Wait, what? Say that again,” Rose said, her eyes widening.

“Dakota doesn’t control them?” Nick asked. It was the first time he’d gotten involved in the conversation, since he’d been keeping off to the sidelines. He was slowly becoming aware of how much weight his voice carried with some of the girls (Mary and Rose would almost-certainly lean in whatever direction he did, and Gina would too, probably) so he wanted to remain neutral. But that was too much of a surprise.

Sylvia blinked. “What, you guys didn’t know?”

Dani nodded. “Dakota did say something like that,” she muttered. “About how she was borrowing them, or something? I don’t remember. It was a twisted conversation.”

“Explain more,” Dawn prodded. “What’s this about Dakota and the sirens?”

“Weeeeelll, this happened back when I was still helping her run her own seasons,” Sylvia said. “Remember Marley?” She glanced over at her plant daughter.

Marley shook her head. “I just remember the garden.”

Sylvia shook her head. “No, that’s not what I meant, I didn’t want YOU to remember, I wanted everyone to remember what happened to you.”

She turned back to the others. “Before Marley was Marley, before she was even Mimi, she was a Mimic Jelly, remember? The big plant?”

“How could I forget,” Carly winced. “I got freaking swallowed by that thing!”

She turned to her sister and frowned. “…Thanks for that, by the way,” she said testily, and Marley could only shrug in response.

Sylvia ignored them. “Well, anyway, it happened,” she said. “That Mimic Jelly was something Dakota imported in. She didn’t create it from scratch like me or the faeries all over the place. She was brought in as a specific event! Which means she’s a real person.”

Sylvia ignored the unspoken “unlike me” that was included with that line of thinking, much to Nicks’ chagrin.

“Hey, Sylvia, you’re a real person too,” he urged her. “You’re not just some construct. It doesn’t matter that Mimi was imported to the island and you were created by Dakota.”

“…Marley, Daddy,” Sylvia corrected her. “It’s Marley.”

Nick blinked. “Even when she was Mimi back then?”

“Okay, I think we’re getting off-topic here,” Marley said, stepping in to put an end to things before they went down a weird direction. “What were you getting at?”

“It’s very simple, my girl,” Sylvia smirked. “The sirens in that Amusement Park, they were also something Dakota imported in for a specific purpose.”

“Really?” Kim found that a little hard to believe. “Sirens in an Amusement Park? There was really a challenge about those?”

Sylvia shook her head. “No, no, the challenge had already ended at that point,” she assured the girls. “This was for a previous season. Basically, the goal of the season was to swim laps around the island, while the sirens would engage in an orgy with the master while singing at the top of their lungs to tempt the girls ashore. The last one to leave the water, whether due to running out of stamina or wanting to fuck the sirens, or just out of a desire to get to the master and get the sirens away from him, would win.”

Yeah, that sounded like the kind of twisted challenge the Dakota of the past would have come up with; something that would break the bonds of the contestants and their “pure love” for the master, while also being loaded with sex.

Heck… Nick could imagine her doing that NOW.

“Dakota actually game up with a water-based challenge? You’re kidding me…” Gina mumbled. She glanced at Nick, and they both shrugged.

“So why didn’t she just create them herself, then?” Rose asked.

Sylvia shook her head. “I don’t know that part, my girl,” she admitted. “But she sort of… what’s the word for when you buy something, but you’re just borrowing it?”

It took a second to process.

“…Renting?” Nick asked.

Sylvia’s face lit up. “Oh! Indentured servitude, that’s it! That’s what she did. She indentured servitude’d ‘em.”

…Nick wasn’t sure that was correct. But he also didn’t know where to start with correcting the girl’s misunderstanding, either.

Eventually, he decided that the best thing to do was just drop it and move forward.

“So basically, when the challenge was over, Dakota had a whole bunch of sirens now, right? Only, because she hadn’t created them with her magic, the producers said she couldn’t get rid of them, either. It’s not okay to kill people, after all, but if they’re not real, wiping ‘em out of existence is just fine!”

Once again, her smiling face did a poor job of hiding the pain in her voice. Nick winced in sympathy after hearing that.

“Sylvia…”

“It’s fine, Daddy, don’t worry,” Sylvia assured him, waving her hand dismissively. “Anyway, long story short, because Dakota removed all the water from her island, and because the sirens wouldn’t be able to last in the ocean with all the rapetopuses-”

“Wait, what?!” Mary exclaimed.

“Hmm?” Sylvia blinked innocently. “It’s not important. Let’s move on…”

“It’s important to us!” Dawn exclaimed.

“We were IN that water!” Dani cried.

“This was AGES ago, the rapetopuses have all **** each other into hibernation by now,” Sylvia scoffed. “…Probably. Anyway, back to the sirens, Dakota just shoved ‘em all into the one place on the island that had enough fresh water for them to inhabit, the Amusement Park! And, well, they’ve been there ever since.”

She shrugged.

“I’m sure they’re still getting fed. That used to be my job, but Dakota’s probably making Nola do it now,” she explained.

Nobody liked the sound of that. Or the sound of rapetopuses.

But it did raise an interesting point, though.

“No wonder she’d want to get away from somewhere like that…” Mary said sadly.

“So Dakota brought them in for a challenge, and then tossed them aside?” Marley seethed. “I can’t believe that! That’s just awful! What a horrible thing to do!”

Nick couldn’t agree more. And that hurt. Because he still cared about Dakota even now. Hearing about how callous she was about living beings… it was just terrible!

“I think this is a really serious situation,” Dawn said calmly. “We need to think about this rationally. Look, is what Dakota did good? No, of course not. But that’s also the only place that could inhabit them at the time.”

“Not anymore, though,” Morgana pointed out. “There are a lot of watery places they could live now, like that cove we found!”

“Do we really want to put them there, though?” Carly asked, frowning. “I mean, having a bunch of sirens on the loose…”

“Why are we even talking about this?” Dani asked, frowning. “We’re not talking about those sirens, we’re talking about this one! If the other sirens wanted to leave that place, then wouldn’t they have come with her?”

She looked to the siren for confirmation.

The girl nodded.

“There, see? It’s just her that isn’t content,” Dani said, turning back to the others.

“You say that, Dani… but I’m just not sure,” Dawn admitted, glancing at the siren. “Just because they’re not creations of Dakota, I don’t think that means we should take the risk of… I don’t even know what! Adopting her? Is that what you want?”

Dani winced. “I… I don’t know, okay? But I don’t think that she’s happy in that place. And if we give her back to Dakota, then who knows what she’s going to do with her!”

It was a difficult decision, that was for sure. While Nick agreed with Dani that turning the siren over to Dakota might not be the best idea, he also didn’t know if they should take her in or not. What would that even entail?

“Come on, guys!” Dani pleaded, looking around for a sympathetic face.

She found one.

“I… I agree!” Mary nodded.

Dani’s face flushed with relief.

“Really?”

“Yeah,” Mary nodded. “I don’t know if this is what Dakota wants or not, or if she’s setting a trap, but I think that if the siren really does want our help, then we should help her.”

“I understand that well enough,” Dawn agreed. “I guess… I don’t know, I just wasn’t sure whether or not she was safe. It’s not like I’m not concerned about her, I just… I don’t want this to end up backfiring on us, you know?”

Nick tensed. He could understand where Dawn was coming from.

“I think I feel the same way,” Rose admitted. “It’s a nice sentiment, taking care of, but… then what? It’s going to leave Dani in a precarious position.”

“That’s MY business, though,” Dani pointed out. “I’m saying I’m willing to take those risks.”

“But Dani…” Carly didn’t know what to do. On the one hand, she wanted to support Dani. But on the other hand, she was worried that something could end up going wrong, or that this could all be a trick of some sort.

“Come on, Carly,” Dani pleaded, turning to her friend. “You know that this is the right thing to do! And aren’t you always the one willing to do something, even if it’s a little reckless?”

Carly bit her lip. She couldn’t deny that. She glanced at her sister out of the corner of her eye, but Marley’s expression was unreadable.

“…I guess…”

“Excuse me.”

Everyone froze.

“But if you’re talking about what to do… don’t you think I should be part of this conversation?”

Everyone’s eyes turned to the siren, who had remained silent all this time.

Until now.

“…She can talk?!” Gina exclaimed, her jaw hitting the floor.