Can a Shark Swim in Gender Fluid?

By Beedok

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Part Four

With a theory to go on, the three of them had decided they needed to investigate. Chloe and Francesca were both the sort of good friends who would go to great lengths to help out… and also nosey busy-bodies who absolutely wanted to know the answer to the question for their own satisfaction. Maraĵa rather suspected they were more invested in finding out the truth than she was. After all, she was still more than a little unsure which answer she wanted to be the truth.

Still, she did her part. She headed out to the outdoor pools, wandering about to look pretty for guests while trying to see if she could spot Thusitha in either form. Unfortunately she only had so many hours before work, thanks to the length of her Friday shift, so she had to give up after only about two hours. A length of time she found out was too short to see any changing of the guards.

Chloe and Francesca both revealed they’d come up empty in their efforts to nose about in the hallways around the President’s suite. Though they did both have to admit their ability to poke about was rather limited by not wanting to get caught by the elite bodyguards.

“Wait,” Francesca asked, as they were changing into their work uniforms. “Can’t you just text and ask?”

“I—I deleted Thusitha’s number while I was still rather emotional,” Maraĵa mumbled as a reply.

“Ah. Fair,” Francesca said.

 

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Having spent most of the day on her feet, Maraĵa wasn’t able to much more than collapse on her sheetless mattress when she got home from her shift. Standing again seemed like a cruel punishment for her poor feet, but she did need to brush her teeth, at the very least. Just… in a couple of minutes.

A couple minutes that turned out to be fifteen, when she next looked at the clock. Far longer than she’d thought. Proof she’d dozed, and was in danger of passing out for the night. So, despite the protests that came from each step, she pushed herself over to the washroom to grab her toothbrush and get to work brushing. 

Then she went and flopped back in bed, closing her eyes, ready to sleep.

Only to hear knocking on her door. 

Grumpy, drowsy, and muttering complaints to herself, Maraĵa staggered over to investigate. Looking through the peephole, she saw Francesca and Chloe outside and became confused. Wondering what could have been so important for them to rush over before going to bed, she opened the door.

“Ready to head out?” Chloe asked.

“Uh… no?” Maraĵa replied.

“Need a coffee or something?” Francesca asked.

“No? I—it’s…” Maraĵa’s eyes drifted over to the clock, discovering it was was roughly 11 am. The lack of natural light in her suite always made it hard to tell. “Oh… fff—one of those nights.”

The two other shark-ish girls tilted their heads in confusion.

“It feels I only closed my eyes for a moment, not that I got a whole night’s sleep,” Maraĵa explained.

“Oh. Oh man. That’s the worst,” Francesca said. “Especially the night between the two long shifts.”

“Sucks… you should grab yourself a treat with breakfast. Come on,” Chloe added, grabbing her wrist.

Maraĵa stumbled as she was pulled along. Still, they were doing this for her benefit (at least theoretically) so she couldn’t really complain. She just followed sleepily as they headed through the artificially lit service hallways. They were a bit of a maze, but she could navigate them reasonably well on her own after her months of employment. At least in this part of the resort. Meanwhile, the other two women had worked here for long enough to know all the twists and shortcuts.

They nudged her through the caf’s various food stations, insisting she get some sugary baked goods to compliment the heartier and more protein heavy rest of her breakfast. Once they sat down to eat it also turned into time to plan. The other two were convinced they needed to change things up, to avoid suspicion. Chloe was going to head to the pool areas of the resort to check who was out on rooftops today. Francesca had heard a rumour about where President Sharif was going today, and figured that was the best place to head for to look for Thusitha. Maraĵa nodded along, while nursing some tea to wake her up. As such, she really wasn’t rested enough to provide any complex feedback.

Soon she was being dragged off again, when Chloe and Francesca had gotten impatient and she’d been forced to finish her tea. They headed to a part of the service hallways Maraĵa had roughly no familiarity with. After a few hundred metres of twisting passageways (if it was appropriate to use the term ‘passageways’ for something so well lit and institutionally decorated), they went into an elevator and up a few floors. 

The area looked designed to hold conferences, which were something Maraĵa was vaguely aware the resort did. Never fun ones, like comic conventions or gaming conventions, though. Just ones for investors or logistics people. So, Maraĵa had never felt a desire to explore them. 

Still, there were lots of little side rooms, good for meetings and the like. Francesca led her into one of them. As they headed towards it, she saw there was a large mirror along the wall outside it, but, moving into the room, it turned out to be a one way mirror. It instead served as a rather generous window for the meeting room.

“The perfect place to watch from,” Francesca said with a sharp toothed grin.

“Unless this is the room they were planning to use,” Maraĵa pointed out.

“Probably not? I… there’s a big window to the outside,” the other woman replied, gesturing behind them with her tail (a bit of coordination Maraĵa still hadn’t mastered yet). “That seems like a—uh… security issue or whatever?”

“Unknowns lurking near the President is also a security issue,” a deep yet female sounding voice said.

Maraĵa and Francesca both spun back towards the door, where a true goliath of a woman was standing, her arms crossed as she leaned against the door frame. Even leaning, she was nearly as tall as the door was. Something about the way she carried herself left Maraĵa thinking she wasn’t just bigger than Thusitha, but also older? Despite not really looking it.

Probably another benefit of those medical nanites…

“Now then, will we do this the easy way or the hard way?” the large woman asked.

“Um… w—what’s the easy way?” Francesca asked.

“You explain why you’re trying to spy on the President and then cooperate with whatever I decide to do with that information.”

Francesca and Maraĵa exchanged nervous glances.

“We—we weren’t trying to spy on the President,” Francesca replied.

“I was in the next room. I heard everything,” the woman said, sounding unimpressed.

“It’s true… we… we’re were trying to look for a specific bodyguard,” Maraĵa explained.

The woman continued to seem doubtful in their story.

“Thusitha. We were looking for Thusitha,” Maraĵa said.

Specifics seemed to work. There was a flash of recognition in the woman’s eyes, as she muttered about thinking someone in another unit was named ‘Thusitha’. She held up a finger to silence the two shark girls, and whispered something into her ear-piece’s microphone. Then after a moment, the woman added another detail too quietly for either of them to hear. 

Hearts in their throats, the waitresses did a version of what they were paid to do, and waited. 

Finally, the woman gave a nod. “Apparently your story checks out. So, lucky for you, what happens now is just that someone will come to escort you out of this area.”

The two of them nodded enthusiastically, glad they didn’t get to the ‘life flashing before their eyes’ level of fear in all this. Even if they were pretty sure they’d been uncomfortably close. 

“Is there any chance that someone is Thusitha?” Maraĵa asked.

“No.”

Slightly defeated, Maraĵa decided to try another route. “Could… um… could I pass a message on to them?”

“We’re bodyguards, not messengers,” the hulking woman said, looking rather annoyed.

Maraĵa decided not to push her luck any further and shut her mouth firmly. Tongue pulled in for safety, as she’d learned the hard way some time ago.

The other bodyguard showed up shortly after. A man who somehow seemed grumpier than the giantess. He practically shoved them down the hallway and onto the elevator, before grunting something indistinct but vaguely threatening sounding. 

Fully spooked, the pair hurried off down the service halls on the sublevels. Francesca texted Chloe to tell her to stand down, just in case she got into any trouble either, and the trio regrouped in the cafeteria once more. 

After due deliberation, they all decided to get some dessert with lunch, before proceeding to mope dejectedly for the rest of their free hours before work.

“There’s plenty of other fish in the sea,” Chloe offered, while picking at a slice of chocolate cake. “Probably best to move on.”

“We’re the fish in the sea,” Maraĵa muttered, head flopped against the table to look at the underwater window and watch schools of marine life swim past.

“You know what I mean,” Chloe said, waving her fork in a reprimanding manner.

Maraĵa didn’t reply, preferring to mope in silence. Still, they could only dwell in defeat for so long. Eventually they had to go to work, and force on some fake smiles for the customers once again. The cruelties of service work. 

It was a busy Saturday, though. Which maybe didn’t help it go quickly, but it kept her from dwelling on her confused post breakup feelings. A few customers touched her tail over the course of the night, which she got a bit snappier about than usual, but she felt that was justified. It was also nice to see their look of terror when they realised she had the teeth to match her appearance.  Besides, just because it wasn’t a part of a normal human body didn’t make it not a part of her body.

She was finally getting into the groove, and firmly dismissing her life issues as not important at the moment, when a pair of bodyguards strolled into the club. They secured a booth, which then led to a quartet of guards following them in, President Sharif in the middle of the group.

The President didn’t matter to Maraĵa, though. No, her eyes locked on the one female guard in the group… Thusitha. 

At work. As a woman. 

It was both a relief and a punch in the gut for Maraĵa. After all, it meant that Thusitha hadn’t betrayed her… but that she’d betrayed Thusitha.

Which was obvious from the miserable look on that otherwise beautiful face. What was she supposed to do? She couldn’t really go up and apologise. Not while Thusitha was on duty, with the President right there. Could she simply make her presence obvious and hope that Thusitha gave her a second chance?

It seemed that Chloe and Francesca both wanted to know her plan, when she spotted them from across the restaurant. Unfortunately, all she could really do was offer a shrug. The two women looked disappointed, if not offended, by her lack of initiative, but there was nothing for it. 

She also had customers to serve, which was keeping her too busy to manage any real complex thoughts or plans. Remembering orders and tables, even with the various digital aids in a modern restaurant, kept the brain occupied. 

Before she knew it, the President had finished whatever had brought him to Club Ajkula, and the party were leaving. Thusitha included. She decided to risk it and hurry over…just as a table managed to spill their drinks all over the floor, forcing Maraĵa to scramble for the mop and bucket in the back. The amount spilled was a slipping hazard, and the customers weren’t letting her do anything other than clean it up.

Her chance had slipped out of her fingers, even if she’d gained her answer.

 

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Maraĵa decided to head to one of the outdoor pools and simply float there the next morning. With her ears dipped in the water, the sounds of the world around were muffled. Closing her eyes, she got about as close to sensory deprivation as she could manage, floating aimlessly in a largely unused pool. Unused because the sky was grey and it was drizzling on and off. And people, for whatever reason, didn’t like the idea of getting wet when going to the pool. It made no great difference to her right now, however.

She was slowly working on losing herself to the silence and the isolation of it all when she both heard and felt a shudder run through the entire resort.

Opening her eyes and turning in the water, she saw smoke rising from the convention area. 

What in the world was happening?