So I may have been slightly obsessively playing the Utapri rhythm game lately, and I’ve noticed that it’s Really Stingy with the information on how to get a high score, and since it’s a fairly new game, there are also not that many resources to consult. Especially if you actually want to get anywhere in events.(as someone who is used to Love Live, this is frustrating the hell out of me).
So let’s share the knowledge.
I’m going to preface this by saying that I’m terrible at math, so if you want to expand on this or tell me where I went wrong, please do.
The Utapri scoring system
Let’s break this down with an actual song.
Meet my current main team. Yes it’s kinda shitty, but I’m level 63. Give me a break. It has several cute Natsuki’s, and Cecil is there for a Reason (I will explain in a bit).
Here’s the breakdown of this team, for this Dream-themed song.
A few things are important to note here.
According to the calculator, I will score 45740 (this is a Lie, more on that later).
Basic performance is the base score of the team (the one you find in Edit Unit), it lists all the cards scores, plus whatever they got from Moments. You’ll note that this is only about Half of the calculated performance score.
The rest of the score is derived from things like the Attribute bonus. That’s the colour of your cards (blue-dream, pink-shine, yellow-star).You’ll see here that getting a good team per colour, can really up your score, especially if you don’t have that many UR’s yet. This team is fully Dream cards, for a Dream song, so it’s quite high.
For reference, contrast with this song:
For my Shine team:
The two blue cards make the attribute bonus in there go down, but their high worth (as UR cards) more than makes up for that.
4. The singer bonus appears to be a small bonus for putting the cards of the actual singers of the song in your team. So for Dream more than Love up there, I am getting a small bonus for having Masato and Ranmaru on the team. This is fairly small though, and I can see it only mattering if it’s like a Ran only song, and you have a full Ran team. Most of the time the value of the cards and skills would trump this bonus.
5. Leader Skill comes from your middle card. What matters here is the Colour and the percentage. The ‘charm’ thing only seems to matter for your friends during events (more on that later).
As an example: if I put the R Cecil in the middle, you’ll see the leader skill go down.
From the previous 8582 tot 7255.
What does all that translate to?
Uhh. That.
That is not 45740 points, as mentioned in the calculator.
So where does the extra stuff come from?
Let’s run through it, shall we?
Step one: Git Gud.
I mean, this is kinda obvious, but I am backed her by math.
If you’ve been watching the numbers, you already know this, but the score calculator is just an estimate. Specifically, it seems, an estimate based on Great performance.
A lot of the work has been done by kiteinen in this reddit post which has an awful lot of math, and some bad translations, but what I can get from this is the following. The base score reflects what you would get if you did consistently ‘Great’ taps. ‘Perfect’ taps add to your score, whereas ‘good’, ‘bad’ and obviously missed taps subtract from it.
So far so obvious. If you consistently get Perfects, you’ll do a lot better on base score, especially if you don’t miss too many taps.
Step two: Skills, baby
Utapri tends to hide them behind a bunch of menu’s, but your cards have skills, and they’re important. Here’s a few of the more common skills:
Perfect score bonus + ?%: Fairly obvious, this adds a small percentage to the score for every Perfect tap. If you level the skill, the percentage will be higher.
Add Stamina notes: This card will add whatever number of green clover notes it has the skill for (higher skill is more clover notes). Tap the note during a song and your stamina will go up with five.
Add Score notes: This card gives you a number of Score notes per song (those are the bubbles with the yellow note icon in them). If you tap these, you will score… about double (??) for that tap as what you’d normally get. This means you definitely want to get those Perfect, btw.
Cut-in bonus: The cut-in is those moments where your idol boys come up to tell you you’re doing great. According to the reddit thread, you have a cut-in for every 40 combo taps on Hard, and every 50 combo taps on Pro. I’m inclined to believe that. Putting a card like this in your team will give you a better score per cut-in (but it does mean you have to be able to keep a combo going).
Turn Bad taps into Good taps: These cards are what I like to call Cheat cards, because if you happen to do badly on a tap, it will fix that for you. This is Super Important, because a Bad tap will drop your combo, whereas a Good tap does not.
Step three: team play
So let’s get back to team composition.
The teams that score best for you, will be the ones that are best suited to your play style, obviously.
But there are some basic tips:
Prioritize UR’s: I mean, duh. Their base score is just so much higher than anything else.
Level the hell out of your cards: Both in exp and in Moments. Exp orbs will add to the base score, whereas the ‘moments’ will up Charm, Dance and Vocal (and add like… outfits and stuff).
Special Lessons raise the top level of a card. If you have a double of a certain card, you can use the Special lesson to feed one card to the other and up the Rank of said card. You can see it in my team with the Cecil (Rank 3) and the Tokiya (Rank 2). Mostly, this means the cards can reach a higher level (say, 45 for an SR). This lets you level the card more, so you, again, have a higher base score.
The Turn cards are So Important: if you’ve read through this post, you’ll know that A: better taps give a better score, B: combo’s up your score through cut-ins and C: most score improvement cards need a decent ‘tap’ to begin with. So cheat. Just… us any and all ‘Turn bad into good’ cards you can get your grubby hands on. Level the hell out of that skill and make it so you have to really Really mess up to drop a combo (now you know why that Cecil is in there, he’s a skilled boy).
Use Stamina cards only if you’re having trouble: If you’re trying to play through a song on pro or something, and just not making it, even with Turn cards, Stamina cards are the way to go. For songs on a skill level you can handle, they’re kind of a waste of score bonuses though.
Addendum: Events
One more thing I want to add, because it took me a while to figure out.
Events in Utapri are almost prohibitively hard (in the sense that you need a Lot of event points to get that UR card, my friend). Every little bit helps, so let’s explain that a little.
The amount of event points (the gold ‘p’) you make per song is derived from your score (this, incidentally, is different from a lot of Love Live events).
Score higher, get more event points.
What’s less intrinsically obvious, is that there’s a point bonus, in this case for Charm. (you can see the point bonus for this song above the CD picture, +15%)
This bonus seems to be almost entirely based on the Leader Skill of your Guest, aka the friend you invite. For events, specifically, it seems really important to invite a friend with a leader skill of +60 percent on the colour and attribute of that song. On top of having your own leader with the right colour and leader skill.
In this case: Dream and Charm.
I’ve been thinking about Shinsou Hitoshi a lot lately.
Shinsou canonically likes cats, but I think he’s also the type to try and Pet Every Cat. Maybe even carries treats around in order to persuade them closer. I see him as rather lonely for a lot of the time, so getting affection from animals gives him a sense of well-being. Like he can’t be that bad, if kitties aren’t afraid of him.
On the same note. He’s an observant man, sort of hanging back and watching the world, so he’s actually pretty good at speaking ‘cat’. He’s one of those people who’ll never try to force them, and he doesn’t get scratched often.
Also fairly decent with dogs, but he doesn’t like them as much because a lot of them are yappy and loud. They’re a bit too much.
People reader, too. He needs it for his quirk. He has to know what makes them tick, and he considers most people very easy to read. He’s pretty good at starting conversations, or at least getting a rise out of people.
Shinsou’s basic method of social interaction, however, is 10 metre high fortified walls, complete with cannons and those little windows where you shoot arrows from and throw hot oil out of. He’s not ‘sociable’, is what I’m saying. A lot of people fear him, so he stopped ‘caring’ in the sense that he cares a lot, but he’s not about to let them know it.
His reaction to people falls into three main categories: blunt mockery, unassuming politeness and retail politeness.
Let me explain. When we see Shinsou interact with 1A, he’s, well, mean. He teases, he throws insults. He’s not afraid of these people and he doesn’t particularly like them, so he doesn’t see why he would be nice to them. In his mind, it’s not like they’re gonna suddenly want to be his friend or something.
When it comes to people he respects, he’s polite to a fault. He’s not much of a talker, and he keeps his distance, but otherwise he’s fairly normal. The boy probably already knows your weaknesses and the gaping wounds in your heart, so you can tell he likes you when he *doesn’t* poke at those.
When it comes to higher ups, the boy is not an idiot. It does no good to upset the people who could make his life harder. So he’s perfected his retail voice. It’s a sort of barely restrained politeness. “Well what would you want me to do about it, sir?”
Having said all of that, I do see him slowly open up, especially after the Sports Festival.
You see. Shinsou gets immense amounts of support from his classmates in General Studies. People seem to forget this when they want him in class 1A as soon as possible, but his current class is really good for him. After a lifetime of being shunned, this boy is now being Accepted. Admired, even. They’re building him up bit by bit. I’m willing to bet that his classmates are seeing him train, maybe even helping him, like going jogging with him or timing him or something. He’s got a little cheer squad and honestly, he could use one of those.
Like pretty much everyone in this universe, Shinsou is a huge nerd. He’s read a ton of psychology books and body language books and possibly even some PUA books. Not because he’s an asshole, but because it’s a way of dissecting human behaviour that he finds, on the surface, interesting (he’s come to the conclusion that they’re bullshit).
Aside from that, we don’t really know why he’s desperate to become a hero, but there’s probably some mentalist of very specific hero he admires. I really like the idea that it might just be Aizawa. Please imagine that convo if he was. Aizawa: “So, I saw you in the Sports Festival. You want to be a hero, huh?”
Shinsou: “Uh, yes sensei.”
Aizawa: “It’s gonna be tough. This school is all about physical quirks, and strength wise, you have a ways to go.”
Shinsou, drooping: “I’m aware, sir.”
Aizawa: “Want me to train you?”
Shinsou croaks: “Uh, sure?” He had some trouble keeping his cool detached facade up that day.
Shinsou’s True Smile is a very, very rare sight and it’s enough to clear your skin and bless the rest of your month with sunshine and roses and warm fuzzy feels.
Shinsou as a friend is not unlike a cat. He has a sort of cool, subtle, unnasuming affection thing going. Like he won’t straight up ask you what’s wrong if you’re feeling down, but he will suddenly declare he wants ice cream and drag you to the parlour and sort of sit there quietly spooning lemon sorbet into this mouth until you’re ready to talk. He’s observant. He knows when you’re upset, but he’ll just sort of hang out and wait for you to come to him.
He’s like that because he hates, hates, hates it when people pry into him, and he doesn’t want to do it to people he cares about (not that he would admit that he cares about you, ever). He’s really good at getting people to talk to him, but in his head, it’s an attack. It’s a technique he uses for his quirk, so when people try to get him to talk, when he doesn’t want to talk, he bristles.
Shinsou is really bad at expressing his feelings, ok?
The best way to care for a sad Shinsou is to bring him cats and coffee. That’s it. Cats. Coffee. Maybe hang out to watch movies or play video games. Send him pictures of kittens.
If he ever tells you something is bothering him, you’ve reached the Inner Circle and he will now willingly die for you.
His hair really is like that. He just wakes up with it sticking out everywhere and all he can do is wrangle it into a semi-controlled shape.
The only time his hair is flat, is when it’s wet. He is unrecognizable straight out of the shower.
Riku: The Star. Sweet child. Good singer. Anxiety becomes him. Childhood Trauma™. Driven. Just wants to sing, leave him alone. Lots of Deep Secrets. Someone give him a hug pls.
Tamaki: Cutie. A less grating version of KNB’s Murasakibara. Toll. Good dancer. Eats lots. Yells a lot. Likes pudding. Kinda childish, if we’re honest. Grew up in an orphanage and desperately wants to be on tv (gee, I wonder why).
Sogo: The Nice One™. But also the Scary One™. Try not to call him Suga, he probably hates that. Friendly. Diplomatic. Don’t make him angry, you wouldn’t like him when he’s angry. With Tamaki, already the main ship? I think?
Iori: Smart Student boy. Drown him in stationary. Probably supposed to be the main character but oddly enough the one I like least. Tsun for miles. Has a tendency to berate people even tho he’s the youngest. Leave Manager alone, she’s trying. Has an awesome cat shirt.
Nagi: Awful Japanese. Super Otaku. Cute sweet bean did nothing wrong ever in his life. Just wants to make all the ladies blush. Very confused and super happy at having male friends. Loves everyone.
Mitsuki: The Spicy one. Iori’s Nii-san. Short fuse. He’s smol but he can jump. Tries so hard, you guys. Will fight you if you look at his friends weird. Too much energy, keep him away from sugar.
Yamato: Bae. Great arms. Netflix and chill. Kindof a troll. The village elder. Leader of the band but mostly because they make him. Really friggin calm, actually. Good bean. Tragic Backstory still locked, come back later.
Tsumugi: Manager girl. Super Anxious. Did I do good job? Am I a good boy? Lives on coffee. Only has one shirt? Daddy’s girl, let’s be honest. Thrown into the deep end and now desperately trying to swim. Cares™.
Ryu: Looks and acts like a slightly slimmer version of Tachibana Makoto from Free! Human puppy stuck in a world of assholes. Protect him.
Gaku: Mean™. Blunt and cold on the surface, but with a soft heart underneath. Has a shitty dad. Rebellious Bad Boy. Designated Guardian of the Trigger boys.
Tenn: Soft Boy. Works too hard. Mean to his brother, but it’s because he’s super worried about him. A Queen. Self sacrifice for days.
Hello yes, I’ve been obsessing over Mystic Messenger, so have a thing.
So I basically fell in love with 707 long before I ever got to his route (which I’m currently trying to finish), so you can consider this an… innocent au? I guess? Iono man, I just wanted to write about pretty boys wearing lipstick.
707 takes his friend out on a ‘girls night’ to cheer her up.
Ultra-fast-burn friends-to-lovers, in an extremely fluffy way.
As writers, we find ourselves in a constant cycle of looking up information to make it LOOK like we know what the heck we’re talking about. Make a list of things you have made your characters experience that you, personally, have NO (or very little) experience with. Then tag 5 people.
I was tagged by the lovely @bsinoranges, thank you! This one was a blast.
Can I just make this a list of things I have researched?
The effects and impact of close range gunshots, for different types of ammo.
Several dozen punk/black metal/goth/industrial band names (just so I could make pun names for caffeinated drinks and pastry)
The exact hours of sunrise in Kyoto in June and the time difference between several different parts of the world
Just… time zones. In general. All the time.
The most popular cellular network in Iceland
“When is Golden Week”
Train routes in Argentina
So many locations and transport routes and buildings in cities all over the world (Street View is your friend)
The feel and texture of snake skin (while the creature is alive)
Early twentieth century painters and their work
The name for different medieval era dances and music genres
The chemical composition of white-out
How much blood a person can lose before passing out and/or dying (I’m probably on a government watch list, come to think of it)
The roles and domains of several different ancient gods and assorted mythological creatures (several times)
The exact wording of the different parts of a bowling lane
Grips and strategies in arm wrestling
The colour and material of those little wristbands they give you in hospitals
The names and sizes of various Japanese swords and martial arts implements
Riot strategies and how to make street barricades (Yup, definitely on a government watch list)
The history of Silphium (the plant)
The Latin names and families of So Many Plants
“How do tides work”
I’m gonna cheat and not tag people. If you see this, go ahead and tag yourself. You can even say I tagged you. I won’t snitch.
“It’s so tiny. Are you sure nothing’s wrong with it?”
“He’s a baby, Toshinori,” Aizawa sighs, “They’re supposed to be that size.”
Your child lies in the palm of All Might’s large hand, barely filling it. He peers at it curiously and the boy wiggles, blowing a raspberry while Aizawa stands by frowning, ready to take over at any moment.
“I’m sorry, young man,” Toshinori murmurs to the child, “I’m sure you’ll grow up strong.”
Aizawa rolls his eyes. “It’s like you’ve never held a baby before.”
“I have rescued several, of course,” Toshinori says, gently running a finger over your son’s belly. “They were apparently older than two days.”
“Well this one,” Aizawa says, lifting the boy up and cradling him in his arms, “is a newborn and he will indeed grow up just fine.”
“Of course,” Toshinori hums, giving a small apologetic bow. “I believe congratulations are in order.”
“Yeah yeah.”
The baby gurgles and Aizawa holds him closer, brushing the tip of his nose against the child’s.
It earns him a happy squeak.
All Might watches them for a moment, face unreadable. Then he turns the radiance of his smile towards you. “Have you decided on a name yet?” he asks conversationally.
“Mm.” You, on the sofa, several pillows behind your back, put down your mug of tea. “We, uh, have,” you say, blushing a little. You lift your head, eyes seeking Aizawa’s support, but he just looks away, softly jiggling his son as he faces the window.
“So we were thinking,” you say, and you swallow. “The, uh both of us decided that we’d like to name him, uh, Yagi.”
“Oh.” It’s a soft breath, barely a whisper that escapes All Might’s lips.
“Because, well, uh…” You falter. “Well, it’s a good name, we think.”
All Might smiles widely, and it stretches his skin across the bone, a picture of a skull. “He will grow up a fine man, indeed.”
Hey Nonny!
Ooh, an excuse to talk about my favourite chapter in BSD! Don’t mind if I do. So the scene you’re talking about is this one, in the Double Black episode.
It’s very much played for humour. Throughout the chapter, they’re constantly dragging each other and this is like the one thing that actually seems to give Dazai pause for a moment.
But how much truth is there in it? Now there’s a question.
Dazai the flirt
Dazai is aggressively, vocally into women.
It’s one of the first things we ever learn about him.
I’m not, here, gonna go into whether or not the boy doth protest too much, but I don’t think I will shock anyone by saying that he is, when it comes to women he doesn’t know, an incredible flirt. He’s seemingly forever trying to get in the pants of the waitress at their coffee bar, he lays it on super thick with clients, etc.
It’s interesting to note here that most of that is an act.
For one, he only seems to do this to women that are not close to him.
We, as readers/viewers, also know that he doesn’t mean it.
Any of it.
He’s probably already suspicious of Higuchi long before he decides to ‘woo’ her. The same for the waitress. He’s not actually expecting her to go “Oh yes, random weirdo who hangs out here but rarely pays his tab, let’s go drown ourselves together. It’ll be romantic.”
We know Dazai as a highly intelligent man, who is very adept at reading moods.
No way in hell would he be so unaware as to think his blunt flirtations would ever actually work.
Dazai the womanizer
So where does that flirt/womanizer idea come from?
As you say, nonny, a lot of that is down to Dazai’s real life counterpart.
!Historical Dazai ( born Tsushima Shüji) was a pretty tragic figure. He attempted, multiple times, to take his own life, several times in a ‘double suicide’ that cost the life of at least two young women, besides his own. To say that !Historical Dazai’s history with women is painful, is to put it mildly. That stuff is straight messed up.
Now, it’s tempting to think of !Maffia Dazai as reflecting the tragedies of !Historical Dazai. It’s fairly obvious that the character is based on the writer, and !Maffia Dazai is certainly… broken enough. Whereas!Agency Dazai mostly jokes about the suicide thing, and has long since given up actually killing, !Maffia Dazai is shown as extremely nihilistic and just downright depressed. He is cold, and cruel, and just… really sad. I wouldn’t put it past him to try and drown his sorrows in women, like he does in liquor. !Historical Dazai didn’t only have several wives, he had a thing for prostitutes, hostesses and geisha’s, which would fit neatly into the maffia persona.
It is even possible that he ruined the lives of several of these women, the same way (or worse) as !Historical Dazai did.
We are not shown evidence of this in the series (at this point), but it’s certainly a possibility.
If you think of it that way, all those jokes of his do take on a decidedly dark turn. It’s one thing to joke about your own death (we’re on tumblr, people do it all the time), it’s another to talk of double suicides if you’ve actually ruined a young woman’s life.
In that sense, Chuuya’s threat is also incredibly bleak. The initial idea when you read that joke is the whole ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’ thing, but in this situation, it would rip open some old wounds and guilt on Dazai’s part.
But that is probably reading Too Much into what is essentially a good joke. Let’s assume that Dazai, being a big shot mobster, had a whole bunch of flings with dancing girls or whatever, and that he dumped them like the troll he is.
Dazai the s/o
Headcanon time!
I think it’s safe to say that !Agency Dazai is not the same man as !Maffia Dazai, or !Historical Dazai.
Mentally, it seems to me as if Dazai is now in a better place, and the same goes for his relationships with the world around him. His general stance seems to be ‘don’t harm, care if you must, but troll the shit out of everyone’.
Please note how much respect he has for Yosano, how he treats Naomi and Kyouka (once she’s inducted). He deeply cares about these people, but he also trolls the shit out of them.
The same pretty much goes for the likes of Maffia and Guild members, such as Chuuya, Kouyou, Akutagawa, heck, even Q. He ostensibly hates these people, but he’s not about to truly hurt them. He just trolls the shit out of them.
It is like this for pretty much the whole world. Dazai saves lives. It’s what he does, but he’s not exactly a gentleman about it. He protects, but he also trolls.
So what this means for any s/o he may have, is that at the very least, they will be trolled on a near-daily basis.
The question is: would Dazai even have an s/o.
I’m pretty big on the importance of healthy relationships, and I am also fairly certain that Dazai, in his current state, is incapable of having a healthy, loving relationship with any s/o. He cannot love another, because he friggin hates himself.
It’s gonna take a very long time to heal that.
And I think Dazai, in his current state, is also wise enough to realize when a relationship isn’t healthy, and to avoid it.
He may be prone to flirtations, to flitting from one person to the next, to double suicides, even, but at this point he’s also trying very hard to avoid those situations from ever happening. He claims, way near the start of the show, to want a death where there are no victims but himself.
To do this, he builds walls around himself, even as he is with people that are close to him.
You can see that in the way he treats someone like Atsushi. He cares deeply about Atsushi, I truly believe this, he wants to guide him and watch him grow, he wants to give him important advice to help that boy heal his wounds, but at the same time, he keeps his distance (see that ‘i’m not into guys’ thing up there). His first instinct in any situation is to push people away, to gloss it over with a joke.
He’d do the same thing if he were to actually fall in love.
If he does, as you put it, find that special someone, I believe he wouldn’t even make a move until he’s a hundred percent certain that he can control all his urges, can keep himself in check, so that No One Gets Hurt.
Dazai the character may be based on Tsushima, but he’s actively trying to avoid living the same life. He’s a that point in his life where he’s looking for atonement, he’s trying to make up for the hurt he caused, not make more. So unless he meets someone who is ok with open relationships, I doubt he’d cheat on them.
He’s a troll, but he’s not heartless.
The last thing he wants is another notch on his belt, another life ruined. Especially if it’s someone he truly cares about.
PS: I did a profile on Dazai a while back, that is Even Longer and goes deeper into some of his personality.
The feathers on his head are very soft, but they get itchy and they take a lot of preening in order to feel comfy. As a result, he is a total bathroom hog in the morning.
Also: loves it when you pet his head. Like gentle head scratches. He makes a cute little sighing noise when you do this, almost like a purr.
Tokoyami is an edgelord and he loves black things and dark rooms, but he needs to always sleep with a night light. True darkness makes Dark Shadow too powerful. Try not to make too many jokes about this (he’s kinda embarrassed about it).
Loves vampire movies à la Interview with the Vampire because he can really relate to characters struggling with the monster within. Dark Shadow thinks vampire movies are boring and will whine until you shove popcorn in his face.
Not much of a kisser for obvious reasons, but he does like rubbing his beak and his forehead on your skin as a sign of affection.
Having said that, he loves your lips? The side of his neck is especially sensitive to kisses and nips. Hint, hint.
Soft boyfriend. He’s the calm, quiet sort that likes to read and generally hang out in a comfy atmosphere. One of the first things he gets when he has his own apartment is one of those giant sectional couches that’s more like a bed or a pillow fort for your living room. You like to think of it as his nest, but you try not to say that to his face.
Halloween is his favourite holiday ever. Yes, he knows the Japanese don’t really celebrate it. He does not care. He turns his room or apartment or whatever into a haunted house and invites people over. One year he managed to acquire a broken down bus. It was Epic. What he loves about it is mostly the horror factor and the pagan atmosphere, not so much the Sexy All Might costumes. He calls it Samhain and uses it as an excuse to talk about witches a lot. (Dark Shadow also loves it because he’s Very Good at spooking people and it’s one of the few times he’s not allowed to do so at length).
Unsurprisingly: loves fall. It has apples and falling leaves and blustery winds and he’s allowed to wax poetic about the great circle of life and death all around him.
Somehow @tottwriter and @bsinoranges planted the idea of intersectional feminist mermaids in my head and, uh, this happened.
It started, like so many of these things do, somewhere in the sixties.
The world was changing, and so, it seems, was the sea.
Mermaids were spotted less often, and when it happened, they weren’t the pristine creatures with flowing hair and clamshell bras.
They had stopped shaving their armpits. They painted their nails black and wore their hair wild, braiding it with seaweed, dying it red and blue and yellow and green, all the colours the sea could give them.
Some would just shave it all off.
Instead of clamshell bras, they wore shirts. Punk-rock ones. With curses on them.
Feminist. Anarchy. Sex Pistols.
They were seen less and less, too.
The few sailors who dared try to woo them were met with curses and insults.
“Be careful,” the kids on your class would say, “if they find you, they’ll drag you in and drown you.”
And later, when they became too cool to believe in mermaids: “Be careful of the currents.”
Whatever the reason, whether they believed in them or not, no one went to the rocky shores where the mermaids lived any more.
Except you, carefully picking your way down the moss-covered path.
“There used to be a difference between sirens and mermaids, but not anymore.”
That’s how your grandfather told it.
“They’re just tired, laddie.”
That’s was the way your grandmother explained it.
Tired of falling for sailors and fishermen. Tired of loving and caring and giving their all, only to be left behind.
Forgotten as the love of their life married some girl on the shore.
Your grandmother would know, of course. She had literally pulled her not-yet-husband ashore one morning. A survivor of a ship wrecked three months earlier. A miracle, but not really.
She had stolen him from his mermaid lover and spent the rest of her life going down to the rocky cliffs on a full moon, dropping packages of fragrant biscuits and smoked fish as reparation.
That was why you went there, too. Still coming down, now and then. After her passing.
One basket for them, and one for your grandfather, sitting on a bench overlooking the sea.
“Do you ever regret it?” you asked him one day, sitting by his side with a mug of steaming tea.
And he just smiled.
“I wouldn’t have you, now would I, my boy.”
That was years ago.
You had since moved to the city, your grandparents resting in adjacent plots in the small village cemetery.
You’d met your share of lovers, and you’d lost them, like the mermaids of old, to the currents and the land.
Sad, lost, broken one too many times, you found yourself back on the cliffs where your grandmother had first seen a man come up for air in a turbulent sea.
Carefully, slowly, you made your way down the moss-covered path, no light to guide you but the full moon, barely avoiding sliding down the broken granite.
You’d pondered a while over what to bring.
Chocolate, you’d decided. The kind with sea salt in it.
And olives. Brined, juicy and full of a deep bitterness. Pleasant to the palate.
Cheese crackers, also, because everyone likes those, even mermaids.
You placed the basket on the cracked shale and sat down nearby, arms wrapped around your knees.
They came. Slowly. A small sink in the waves. A ‘bloop’, a rush, a spray.
Until you saw a head rise above the water, and then another one.
They were beautiful, but not in the way of fairytales.
One was bald, skin and scales glistening in the moonlight, a pattern of spots, like a leopard, adorning her head.
She wore an L7 shirt that you were mildly jealous of, and she came closer, like a cat, just within range of the food, but far from you.
Her friend was wilder, bolder, long hair tied in dreads and decorated with the plumes of fishing lines snatched.
She’d fashioned a dress out of netting and proudly wore it, a pattern upon patterns, not covering anything that humans would consider indecent. A bright orange ‘fuck you’ to the world at large.
“We know you,” she said, voice deep and raspy like water retreating from a pebble beach. “You smell like her. The woman who lived on that cliff.”
You nodded, silently, as you watched her curiously try the olives offered.
“Will you take me,” you asked after a while, and she tilted her head.
“If I walk into the water here, will you take me.”
The bald one sighed. “What did he do?” she asked, a hint of weary wisdom drifting on the trill of her tone.
You took a deep breath, hiccuping to keep the well of pain closed.
“There wasn’t one ‘he’. There were many, and they did lots of things,” you managed. “But mostly they did not love me. Not like I want to be loved.”
The bald mermaid nodded, and sucked on chocolate.
“Foolish boy,” her friend said, and you thought you could see a hint of a smile in her dark features. “Is this where you get your worth?”
“I just don’t know what to do,” you muttered.
“Then live,” the mermaid said. “There is no vengeance to be found in cold water.”
“I don’t want vengeance,” you shouted.
“Are you sure?” the bald mermaid noted. “Because we can arrange for an accident. Or two.”
You shook your head. “I don’t want that. I just want it to stop hurting.”
“Ah, that one requires time,” the long haired mermaid said, and she turned to you, moon shining into her eyes, deep as the ocean. “Time and the occasional friendly gesture.”
She snapped a cheese cracker in half.
“Is that what worked for you?” you asked.
“It did, young sailor.”
Unrealistic expectations 