Retishella and the Dolphins

This is the opening page of Retishella and the Dolphins. I hope to upload the whole first chapter soon. 

Retishella mermaid was feeling strange. Not weird and wonderful strange like a trip to the zooquarium to see the seamagic show, or amazing strange like a brilliant birthday, but the kind of strange that gives you a bad stomach or an achy head. Ever since she lost her sister’s junkball in the stripweed bushes and had to search among the stinking blue weed to find it she had not felt quite right. She knew from her mother’s frequent warnings that it was not wise to go near the stripweed beds, but she hadn’t felt anything bite or sting her so she thought no more of it. Now she was feeling very peculiar indeed.

She wondered momentarily if this is what guilt felt like. Next time she would ask Seeley if she could play with her junkball.

She held out an arm and noticed that her smooth skin was starting to wrinkle up like the face of a wizened walrus. She looked down at her beautiful shiny tail and gasped. The silvery scales were swelling and had that pitted look like the skin of a pineapple.

 More worrying still was the fact that she couldn’t control the colour of her eyes and hair. This was particularly disturbing because a merperson with no control over their colour can’t show others how he or she is feeling. Her hair and eyes were changing from red to purple to blue to grey to green to yellow again and again, and it was making her feel quite dizzy. She leant on a seabed rock until the feeling passed.