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"I never end up with any bubbles in my ears or water up my nose after, if that's what you mean by resistances," said Pendour, stabbing the trowel into the main mass of the algae, now, and trying to carve some of it out. It was consolidated, mostly, and it didn't take long for clumps and clumps of green to be thrown down to the lower level, for Encke to collect. "But no, I'm not immune to the pressure, so I can only go so deep."

She glanced to the sea above, wondering for the thousandth time how deep her little bubble was. The light came through well enough, which was promising, but things were magic here, and appearances could be deceiving. She didn't to find some way out into the open ocean only to be crushed, after.

"But, yes. I'd love to take you out to the reservoir. We could get you a snorkel and look for rainbow trout. Something called a rainbow trout would have to look lovely in a picture with a little purple glow on it, don't you think?" She smiled wistfully, even as she gathered up a mass of slimy algae in her arms. It would be nice to spend more time around Encke, beautiful fish or no.

"It'd be a search, though. Mostly I see bass, and perch, and painted turtles. Which, they're all lovely, too, in their own right." She shoved the mass over the ledge, watched it splash with a slight sense of satisfaction, and then turned back for more. "Well, and sometimes snapping turtles, too, but they're shy. They just like the mud at the bottom."

It happened then.

The water pressure had been building up for weeks, and it built more as Pendour chipped away at the blockage holding it back, little by little. All at once, it reached the point where the water was the stronger force, and the waterfall burst through what remained of the weeds. Within a few seconds, it was trailing down to the cove below, as strong and beautiful as it had been a thousand years before.

Much of the remaining algae was washed away. So was Pendour.

She fell with only a small gasp and a single glance at Encke before she hit the water and vanished under the surface.

The impact hurt a little, but the bad backflop was the worst of it.

Once Pendour was underwater, she was fine. The cove was deep. Even half-full, there was plenty of room for Pendour to start floating up before she hit the actual tile of the bottom. She did not rush the process. She let herself drift, hair floating around her like a halo, eyes turned up towards the flickering light from above and the bubbles coming down from the new waterfall.

In that moment, the pearls and the mermaid trappings felt more right than they ever had, before. The water felt right, too. She'd loved her wonder from the moment she'd set foot on it, back when it was nothing but ruins and awful ghosts, but it had always been a melancholy kind of love, tinged with worry about the past and the knowledge that something was off in the present.

Floating there, she did not feel any of that. She just felt at peace.

She did not realize that she was the picture of a drowning victim until Encke was there, pulling her upwards. She did not fight him, either, although he broke her out of her reverie. She was quick to smile at him when they broke the surface.

"I'm okay," she said, not seeming out of breath at all. "I didn't hit anything. It worked, didn't it?"

It had. The waterfall was nearly three times as large as any of the others, and while it was sputtering a little, still getting the last of the algae free, it was quite the sight to behold. Pendour stared.

She did not notice the subtle change in her own aura, but Encke may have been able to. He almost certainly would have seen the small glowing dots that appeared across her cheekbones and her shoulders, like scales.

The waterfall had almost all of Pendour's attention. Her eyes were locked on it, even as she tried to drift back to a place where she could touch the bottom. The water breathing didn't give her more energy for treading, and she didn't want to sink again and worry her friend.

Her eyes were locked on it, admiring, and she whispered little encouragements under her breath every time it sputtered or spat out another piece of debris.

Then Encke was cursing loudly in her face, happily, but still, and he was doing something with his phone.

"What?" she murmured, blinking at him. "Careful, please." The senshi phones must have been magical, but she didn't know if that meant they were waterproof.

Then he was showing her a picture, a picture of her face, which was a sight she did her best to never linger on. Although this time, for the first time in years, she didn't look straight to the scars when she saw it. Her hands went to her cheeks. She sucked in a deep breath, her brain spinning and trying to process everything at once.

"What?" she asked again. He was saying it, saying transcended, but the word seemed distant even as she looked over the rest of herself, even as she found more glowing speckles on the back of her arms, on the back of her hands.

"It's pretty," she said, her own voice distant, too, tracing the markings on one hand with the fingers of the other. "It seems right."

She looked back to Encke, then, glanced towards his own glow. He would know, wouldn't he? "I'd always hoped, a little, but I'm not-" she said, her voice soft as soft. "You really think so? You think I'm like you?"

She looked back to her hands, back to Encke's.

Pendour let him take her hands. The contact was something grounding, and she breathed deep. She was still looking at his fingertips, and the back of her own hands. Their fingers interlaced, and that made it easy to see the bright purple glow of his Transcendence markings, brushed up right next to the slightly softer blue of-

Of hers.

The warmth of energy being pushed through her palms was another grounding feeling. Working on the algae had taken something out of her, as had the shock of the fall and then the sudden change to her body, after. She hadn't realized how much having a small boost of energy might help until she had it, and then she finally found herself smiling.

"We match, Encke," she breathed. "I'm glowing. I-"

She broke away for a moment to spin in a circle with that newfound energy, her laugh light, her mermaid skirt swishing behind her through the water. Now that she'd processed, her friend's excitement was finally catching on.

"I transcended," she said.

She took his hands again, and closed her eyes for a moment of deep focus. Her chest felt warmer, somehow. She could tell that much, if she really focused in on her own energy, but trying to pull at that warmth did not seem to get her anywhere.

"Um, I don't think that part is working for me," she said, although she sounded more curious now than doubtful. "But then, our magic and our worlds have always been different. I wonder if it'll be something else, for me?"

"Um," murmured Pendour, as she kept looking at Encke's markings, no longer just the glow of them, but now the shape, the design. She saw the lines under his eyes, straight and perfectly spaced, like wires in a computer. "Your comet's all electricity, isn't it? I know it's plasma, technically, but still. Energy."

She looked behind him to the depths of the cove, now almost full, and to the architecture or the pathways and aqueducts that ringed the edges. Here, there was barely a straight line in sight. Anything that could be sculpted had been formed into various curves and swirls, reminiscent of seafoam, or maybe shells.

"Neptune's the sea," she said, and then glanced upwards, squinting at where the roof of the pavilion was just barely visible over the top of the large waterfall. She was quiet for a longer moment. "The sea and music,"

She summoned her ocarina, and put it to her lips with a small shrug. Then she played, and the magic came, natural as her breath or the movement of her fingers across the holes. Not that the magic had ever been difficult, before, but it did take effort. Now it felt lighter, like Encke had said.

It was just over a minute before that heaviness set in again, and she felt the channeling stop.

She blinked at Encke, hoping any lingering effects wouldn't curb his enthusiasm so much.

"Oh," she said. "So that's what it does."

Pendour had watched Encke carefully while she played her song. She watched the subtle ways that his expression shifted, the way that he completely stilled for nearly the first time since she'd seen him. The magic didn't work on her. It never had, and that meant that she had to keep her eye on others to see what it was doing.

As she watched, she realized that she didn't think she'd seen Encke calm before, which must have meant-

"Oh," she whispered. "I hadn't shown you that before, had I? I'm sorry. I hope it didn't startle you."

Although as far as she could tell, he seemed about the opposite of startled. Still, not everyone loved her magic. It did play with emotions, to a certain extent, which meant it was probably the kind of thing that was best to get consent for.

"I want this to be a place of peace," she said, voice soft as soft, as she let the ocarina fade and skimmed her fingertips over the surface of the water. "Everything you said, it's what I strive for. You know how the city can be." She tilted her head, subtly, towards the scarred side. "I want to keep a sanctuary here for all of us, and I want to keep a sanctuary inside myself, too."

She looked back up, towards where the waterfall was flowing freely, now. "Um. I also think I want to jump off from the top again," she said, her smile cracking into something wider, something just a little less serious.

The cove might be large, but the waterfall was large, too, and the pool had filled considerably just in the few minutes that they'd spent looking over Pendour's new markings and testing her abilities.

It was nice to see the calmer side of Encke. He deserved peace as much as anyone else, and she wasn't sure how much he got to see it. She might have forgotten to offer her magic to him in the past, but she wouldn't make that same mistake going forwards.

Still, she was just as happy when his bigger smile broke through.

The cove was ready for swimmers, now. It only felt right that they go test it. "I thought you might say something like that," she said, her own expression bright as bright. She reached for his hand again as she headed for the shallows, and beyond that, dry land and the staircase that would lead them to the top again.

"Come on," she said, her own excitement buzzing as she glanced over her shoulder towards her Wonder. "Let's dive."