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Post by Professor Henry Jamison on Jun 3, 2008 21:07:07 GMT -5
Jamison reached inside and with drew two marbles first--a blue and a yellow--and held them out toward the glass, watching the sharkman's eyes carefully.
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Post by Wanizame on Jun 3, 2008 21:10:24 GMT -5
It tilted its head and slapped its thick tongue against the glass, leaving a smear behind, then backed off and swam to the area under the hatch, circling and waiting.
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Post by Professor Henry Jamison on Jun 3, 2008 21:15:50 GMT -5
Jamison sighed and reached out to tap the glass again. "It's not food, you bloody stupid thing," he muttered to himself, using one of the marbles to tap as well. He peered into the bag and selected a red one from the mix as well, and held it out in his right hand along with the blue one.
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Post by Wanizame on Jun 3, 2008 21:21:06 GMT -5
It only cast a look in the man's direction and waited under the hatch, circling, rolling in the water.
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Post by Professor Henry Jamison on Jun 3, 2008 21:27:10 GMT -5
Jamison considered the marbles in his hand; they were small enough that, if ingested, they were unlikely to do any harm. He ascended the ladder yet again--why hadn't he devised a hatch nearer the ground?--and slipped open the chute. Pocketing the red one, he dropped first the blue and then the yellow into the tank and waited.
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Post by Wanizame on Jun 3, 2008 21:35:21 GMT -5
The creature circled around the the marbles as they sank, following them to the bottom, picking them up in its thick fingers. It looked around a moment and then popped up to the surface again, looking up at the man and the hatch and waiting as if it knew there had been one shown to it which had not been given.
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Post by Professor Henry Jamison on Jun 3, 2008 21:43:01 GMT -5
"Hm... you're smarter than you look, aren't you," Jamison chuckled, popping a few more marbles of random colors into the tank--greens, pinks, oranges, and blues, but the reds he left in the bag. "But do you remember which color it was, I wonder?"
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Post by Wanizame on Jun 3, 2008 21:45:35 GMT -5
It gathered up all the marbles and pushed them into a pile a few inches away from its stack of reddish rocks, became distracted by rolling them around the bottom of the pond before piling them up again and returning to the surface, circling, watching, waiting.
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Post by Professor Henry Jamison on Jun 3, 2008 21:48:34 GMT -5
Jamison shook his head and let out an amazed chuckle. "Well then, you want them so badly, have the whole lot! I have much recording to do after this, anyway." He dumped the rest of the bag into the tank and watched the marbles hit the water with little plops each time. "I do believe it's safe to say that you have a favorite color, my fishy chap. But does that mean anything?" he wondered aloud, retreating down the ladder and to his desk once more, watching the merman's actions as he wrote.
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Post by Wanizame on Jun 3, 2008 21:51:07 GMT -5
The creature ducked under the water to avoid getting beaned by the falling marbles and chased them down, pushing them across the bottom of the tank, taking them up by the handful and dropping them again, and evetually sorting them out in his little collections, which now consisted of Red Things and Not Red Things.
When it got bored, it moved the water around the tank with its hands and then sank to the bottom of the pond and curled around one of the warm lights.
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Post by Professor Henry Jamison on Jun 4, 2008 18:01:30 GMT -5
Some hours later Jamison awoke, rather surprised to find that he had fallen asleep at his desk, papers stacked around his hands and head in a strange sort of chaotic order. He shook his head and checked his pocket watch--nearly midnight! His arms and legs ached from his scurrying back and forth, back and forth up the damn ladder, he was thirstier than a man in hell, and he had a headache pounding behind his eyes.
After he managed to peel himself off of his desk and sit up straight in his chair, he cast a curious glance at the tank to see what his subject was up to.
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Post by Wanizame on Jun 4, 2008 21:57:07 GMT -5
The merman could not be seen in the water, so it might have been surmised that the creature was in its cave, asleep.
That was provided, of course, there had not been a dark drying puddle on the floor at the foot of the ladder.
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Post by Professor Henry Jamison on Jun 4, 2008 22:40:33 GMT -5
"FUCKING SHIT!" Jamison unleashed a primal roar.
Upon seeing the puddle at the base of the ladder, the professor was out of his chair and pressed against the wall in an instant. He gripped the penknife he didn't remember grabbing tightly in his hand and looked madly around the room. How on Earth could it have escaped? The hatch above the ladder was closed, but he couldn't see the one on top of the tank through all of the filth. Was it intelligent enough to figure out how to twist the hatch open?
He started as he heard a noise to his left.
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Post by Wanizame on Jun 4, 2008 22:48:05 GMT -5
Wet footprints were all over the library, some books lay open on the floor (their pages damp), discarded in disinterest or frustration.
In the dark away from Jamison's desk, at the far left of the large room, the merman had found another bucket of apples. It had eaten all of them, and then taken up the bucket and placed into any item from the shelves and apparati it seemed to find of interest, and it crouched now in the dark corner in front of the bucket to examine its trophies.
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Post by Professor Henry Jamison on Jun 4, 2008 23:43:10 GMT -5
Having located the errant merman, and not at all keen on having a confrontation, Jamison considered his options. It would likely be possible that he could make it up the stairs and out the door without the creature noticing (and he was fairly confident that, with its awkward limbs, he could outrun it were it to give chase), but he would have to enlist help to come back with him and get it back into the tank, and the fewer people who were aware of its presence in his home, the better.
Jamison glanced back at the bottles of tranquilizers behind him, and down at his desk drawer where he had stored a box of chocolates to feed to the creature at a later date. Leaning out silently to ensure the animal was still engrossed with whatever was before it, he carefully slid open the desk drawer and withdrew both the chocolates and a syringe.
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