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The Dude was speechless for a while when suddenly the gray shape of the finlady in front of him changed color and became a darker tan. Her hair changed too as did her face and Maria's dark and liquid eyes stared back at him now. His wife was sitting next to him, whispering to him to be together forever. She was alive. Stretching out a shaking hand, the Dude suddenly seemed much older then he usually appeared, more haggard and beat up by life then a simple beach bum should ever be.

"Maria ..." - he whispered, leaning to embrace her, then stopped again. "You are dead. My mind knows that you are dead ..." But he hadn't seen her in so very long and to pull away, to have his heart agree with his mind and shake off the sweet illusion was just too much. "We did promise to be together forever, but then you died. Oh, how I have missed you." Finally, he hugged the soft warm shape that was and wasn't his wife. It mattered little at the moment if this all was merely an illusion. He just wanted to feel her breathe again ...

'Get off!'

Sati yelled it one more time before falling silent, her gaze locked with the woman's, however unwittingly. She tried to move her head, to run, to twist out of the tight grip holding her but she couldn't. Finally she managed..or was allowed to shut her eyes and when she opened them again she screamed, a panicked, high pitched sound.

Gripping her wrists. He stood there. Bali. The Demon King. The one that even Kali feared, so much so that she'd hatched a plan to get Sati pregnant so that she would be hidden.

'I'm not her, she's gone, she can't come out..I'm no threat to you!' she babbled, the words coming out in a barely understandable stream amongst sobs as she cried in fright. He could kill her easily, so easily.

'Please..' she pleaded, frightened beyond any more words than a plea for her life.

A failure of will. A weakness of body. A mistake of technique. It'd happened so fast that Dusty wasn't even sure what it was - but he was suddenly unarmed, and faster than he could react, a thick and slimy hand had him by the throat.

In battle, the child had always enjoyed a certain invulnerability thanks to his unusual abilities. He never feared being cut or slashed - sure, it might hurt, but he was fairly damn certain (or hopeful) that his throat could be cut without killing him. That's what made it all the more disconcerting when someone did find a way to hurt him. Like cutting off his air supply - that was a very real danger. His eyes squeezed shut, and he tried to shout, but he could barely squeak out a whimper through his strangled windpipe. Fight back, he had to fight back...!

The female voice again. Speaking things unspeakable. Shocked, his eyes opened, and were immediately arrested by her own. The world was ready to tilt on him again....

Something changed, snapped in his mind. The pressure around his neck disappeared; the child crashed down on one knee, gasping. There was something funny about his eyes, he thought - something foggier. There was a silk hem by one of his hands. Dusty stared at it, uncomprehending. Then his gaze slid upward, and things became clearer.

A woman with wide, pale eyes and a tumble of blonde hair was there, dressed in a gown that was like a sheet of water itself. She held no weapons - empty-handed and built like a twig, it was impossible to determine how she could be a threat to anyone's eyes - but she held a seizing dread for the deerkitten, who pulled away from her like from a snake.

"Thou hath returned to me at last," came the whisper like a breeze. Drips of water fell from her fingers, puddling around, while Dusty stared in horror. "Then I shalt make it now as it should have been ere that day, as it should have been. From the waters thou wert given, child, and now nameless shalt return...."

Nameless shalt return. To oblivion, to the inanimate. There was a horror there that Dusty knew, even as he had never experienced it in this life. The woman before him was an old promise only half-kept, stolen by a thief in the night, and there were so many thoughts that he could hardly keep up with them, but Dusty knew what this meant and knew where it was headed and knew that it was something he could not survive, something that would take him whole and break him to pieces and then wash him away.

The Lady of the Lake had come to claim her own once more. And Dustin was too terrified to speak, too terrified to move, until she'd drawn close enough that water fell in his face.

Then, the Finwife got her wish. The deerkitten shrieked - nothing so dignified as a startled shout, but a shrill noise of utter fear. There was no bravery now, not in the face of this. He turned tail and ran, swiftly as he could, not knowing where he was headed but only hoping that somehow, he could outrun what could only be described as a certain destiny behind him.

"Don't look them in the eye... Trick them with shiny things... Everyone is under a spell..." These words percolated in Adelaide's mind as she scampered away from Caoihme, heeding the selkie's command to run. She needed shiny things. She was the only one who could help.

Gloo came down out of her hair and whispered a plan in her ear. He had seen the fishman die. He had watched the pop and crackle when the lamp and the man had hit water together and he had an idea.

Addie listened carefully as she made her way around the house, collecting every shiny thing she could find and piling them on a throw she had taken from the couch. She pulled the blanket over to the present table and with a muffled "Sorry" tossed over her shoulder in Caoihme's direction, she began tearing off the wrapping and collecting anything that glittered. Candle sticks and mirrors and jewelry and vases and ribbons and beads and a coffee maker all piled together on the throw.

This she dragged over to the jacuzzi and began tossing it in, a tantalizing bundle of radiance meant to fool the finfolk. She had unplugged the lamp that had fallen in the hot tub and removed it, replacing it with another she had found across the room and managed to drag over. She added two more, just to make sure their plan worked, plopping them all as gently as she could into the water and fishing them to the bottom with their cords. She'd found a multi-outlet extension cord under the gift table and had brought that over as well, placing the plug end by the nearest outlet and then stringing it over to lay by the pool. Into this, she plugged all the lamps. She would apologize to Quinn for playing with electricity later. Adelaide then covered up the cords with the blanket and hopped clumsily over to where Sati had left her diaper bag, reverting to movement she didn't know she was capable of, so concentrated were her efforts on other things.

She dug around in the bag, pulling out half it's contents before she found what she was after. From the depths of the bag she pulled out a shiny pouch of marbles, a prize that Quinn had only recently gifted her with. She had thought they were a bag of jewels when Quinn had first shown them to her and she hoped the fish people thought that too.

Dumping a few into her hand, Addie approached the nearest of the fin folk, a male and female, and tapped the female one on the leg. "Um... 'scuse me?" She cleared her throat and held the marbles in her upturned hand like a shield, "'scuse me. I think I found some treasures for you. Seeeee?"

And that was when Mik lost his fight. Jophiel's protection had not been given with this manner of attack in mind, something foreign to the angel and his own origins. He stopped struggling abruptly, head tilted in bewilderment as the smaller finwife changed. She was suddenly pretty - no, beautiful - something he never noticed about anyone. It confused him utterly to look on the woman with dark, curling hair and find her attractive.

He was too lost to do anything one way or the other.

Taste was not something he was used to. Something new, that belonged to the boy of the present rather than the shade of the past. A gift of this time, something he would never have gotten to know as he used to be.

Though, ultimately, the shade of the past and the boy from the present were truly one and the same, and so he knew one thing.

Lips did not taste like algae, or like salt. From the boy's experiences, they did not taste much of anything.

Though, sometimes like strawberries, if Raven had put on some lipbalm.

It was still quite some time before he pulled away - and while those mercury gray eyes remained blank and emotionless, the rest of his face spoke of confusion.

"Anastacia... ?"

The spell was threatening to break.

The finman looks skeptical, but the finwife nudges him out of the way, looking closely at the marbles...