A Beautiful Meeting

He couldn't hold off any longer. He had put off leaving the house for so long that he was actually out of the flake food that his clownfish loved the most, and the female, Dany, spent all morning in his face telling him off.

So Abel Drakenhardt had reluctantly crawled out of his tank, towelled off enough to pull on some sweats and a t-shirt, but the t-shirt had a tear down the back so he pulled a button-up shirt over it. And then didn't bother to button it up. Too much effort. He shoved his bare feet into his most beat-up runners, since those were closest and didn't require fiddling with laces to go on and mostly stay on, and then crept out of the house.

He had managed to do it without alerting any of his siblings, or the family butler, or at least without them coming to interfere with him. He made sure he had a credit card in his pocket and then headed outside.

A few minutes later, a sixty foot long but not particularly large dragon landed near a pet store. Abel walked inside in human form, but only after he'd had a chance to catch his breath. A year of basically sleeping all the time was hard on physical conditioning.

...... they had a new shipment of marine fish in that were still getting acclimatized he knew what that disarray of boxes and plastic in the back corner meant. The extra spring in his step didn't mesh well with his exhaustion, though, and he bumped into someone staring at a tank.

Abel blinked at the algae eater. That was not the look of a fish tolerating a random viewer. "What're you talking about?"

Hey, he was a reef dragon. The idea of talking to fish was incredibly far from weird to him.

@"Yui"

@"Yui"

Abel stifled a bit of a yawn while the girl fished something out. He was patient. He was liable to fall asleep long before he got angry, after all. So tired... but Dany would probably try to take a chunk out of his face if he went back without flake. He didn't have the energy to tell her off.

Oh, words on paper. Abel glanced at it, his visual acuity far beyond a human's and a brief glance all he needed to read it. "About what? That guy is pretty stubborn about his food. I tried to get him to even try a different kind of algae once but noooo." He sighed and grimaced at the fish. "I would... recommend giving up on convincing him of anything."

@"Yui"

Abel fidgeted a bit. He wasn't unused to people or anything, but he was kind of suddenly super aware of how sloppily he was dressed. She was staring at him and he was dressed like this.

... she was more surprised he could talk to fish? Oh. Uh. Um. Okay. He rubbed at his face, trying to pretend he wasn't blushing still. "Yeah, I can. Not just fish. I can talk to anything when I'm in the water." He shrugged a bit and kind of gestured at the full assortment of tanks in the store. "I'm. Well. I'm a water dragon. Reefs are sort of my main thing but. Ah."

Three hundred years and he still wasn't great at talking about himself. He had a trick, though!

"What about you?"

@"Yui"

Abel didn't like worrying people about whether or not he was going to eat them or something. Dragons had such a bad rap, and almost all of it was born of scared humans and idiot teenagers. His older brother had probably started quite a few of the horrific fire-breather tales.

She seemed more surprised than anything, though, and Abel loosened up a little at that. He knew full well that his human form did not seem particularly dragonlike. He was small and didn't look particularly threatening... even if he'd spent most of his life working in security and had once upon a time been quite comfortable tackling thieves. That was before... well. Before he fell apart and took his life with it.

... she couldn't just talk to fish? She could swim too? A spark of at least wakefulness crept into Abel's eyes. "Hey, I have a tail too. ... and fins and wings and various poky things. Have you been to many wild reefs? There's a super cool one out by Hawaii, still young and growing and chaotic." He'd totally brought in a few strong coral frags to help it take off when he first found a little leather coral trying to grow.... a hundred years before.

@"Yui"

"The Great Barrier is amazing! I spent two months there on vacation a... few years back." Well. A few decades. "I don't get back as often as I like but I still have some connections there, mostly with some of the biiiiig old coral colonies."

His face flashed with seriousness at a burst of cursing from the back corner, and while the tiny slip of ropelike black and white coiling through the air might have been hard to see with human eyes, Abel's vision went far beyond that.

The reeflord scrambled around Mira, somewhere between fluid and controlled and... super out of practice and exhausted. He barked at the airborne juvenile eel to hold still in reeftongue, dove, and caught the abruptly frozen creature in his outstretched hands.

He glared at the new store employee who'd been stupid enough to open a wild-caught eel's bag while moving while he snatched it and gently slid the snowflake eel back in. "I'll take her home," he growled. This store knew him plenty well. Some customers you didn't argue with.

Even when they abruptly sat down as soon as the eel was secure.

So tired. He had no energy. Or sustenance in his stomach. He didn't have any appetite but he was so exhausted that he might actually be able to keep food down if he could get it into his mouth.