Ah'mun'del excitedly hurried to his desk, scuttling across the floor on his quartet of legs as the points of his feet clicked a rapid rhythm of clinks and tinks upon the metal. As he got to the desk, he excitedly reached into the sack-weave bag he had carried from the space station.

Pulling his hand out, he laid what he had just purchased. It had cost a lot of credits, but Ah'mun had no doubt that all the currency he spent was worth it!

It was quite a small item, about 25cm long and 14cm wide, and it fit comfortably in palm of his two-fingered right hand as he lay it facedown on his desk. It wasn't very tall, and its dimensions gave it a slender look - one that the Viruun found appealing, if he said so himself. It was a perfectly-stacked collection of thin papyrus rectangles attached to a coloured cover that protected the front, back and one side of the three-dimensional cuboid. The pages were all white with typed black writing on them. Prose organised into paragraphs and sentences.

It was a human-made literary storage unit. A 'book'.

'Book.' 'Book!' Such a simple term for such a fascinating piece of technology! But then again, with the way the seller of curiosities had described them, these things seemed to have been commonplace in human society at some point.

Maybe that accounted for the simple name, and it just stuck as time passed on?

The Viruun had never seen such an item before in any of his travels. In the Technocracy, they had always electronic tablets and screens – gifts from the Creators. They had never created objects like this to house their stories and histories, as they simply never needed to.

And besides, even if the Creators had not left their tech behind, there would be an obvious flaw with them making use of these kinds of objects.

The Viruun, of course, were a semi-aquatic species, and the book's construction looked as though with would not survive underwater. Its many pages looked rather dainty and fragile, liable to break if misused in any way. The cover was a little harder, but it only covered the front, back and one side of the book, leaving the others open to be swamped upon submersion. On top of that, he didn't even know if the material that it was made from was watertight.

Viruun tech, meanwhile, was as watertight as a submarinal transport vehicle. But this was something he would not risk taking back home. It was such a long journey, and to see such a wondrous item disintegrate would break his hemantlia.

And that wouldn't be good, either for his emotions or his gills! Much better to read it now aboard the ship. With the way things were going, he might not get a chance to later...

Ah'mun reached out with a chitin-coated hand towards the cover, excited to get a glimpse of human literature - only to suddenly jerk it back as he noticed something! As he had pulled the object from his bag, his fingertips pressed into the soft cover and slit small holes in the material! Three of them were cut through the paper-like cover, tiny dots through which the air of the ship now passed as freely as a slender-bodied eel through a coral reef.

The Viruun cursed quietly in a most disrespectful manner. He had forgotten that this artefact had been made for a race of vertebrates, not for an exoskeletal creature like himself. He imagined that the humans, with their soft skin and pad-like fingertips, could touch this without pause.

He, on the other hand, would have to be more careful. He did not want to damage this gift – at least, any more than he had already done so.

Taking his time and burning with desire to not scratch the precious object, Ah'mun cupped it gently within both of his hands, moved it through the air as it lay supported by his palms, and lay it upon his desk. Then, arching his back into a comfortable position, he looked down at the cover he had so callously damaged and turned the book over.

As he had seen earlier, there was an image upon the front cover. It was blue – the deep and brilliant blue of the sea, and trimmed around the edge with silver. Dappled beams of light were pictured peering down through the ocean waves above, a sign of clear day, while ribbons of seaweed snaked up from the sandy shallows below.

However, it was what the light illuminated that caught his eye the most. A creature most intriguing swam in those waters, taking centre stage upon the cover. At first, he thought it was a human female, for it resembled one quite closely. Two eyes, a thick mane of richly-coloured keratin hair, a nose with two nostrils, a moving jaw full of white teeth. This one was skinny of frame and narrow of waist, with a healthy-looking complexion.

However, as he examined it closer, he saw that only its top half resembled one of the Earthspecies.

Below the waist, this creature did not have the typical pair of human legs. Instead, it had a tail – a long tail coated in shining scales and ending with two gossamer-thin fins that splayed out from its pointed tip. The creature curved its tail upwards, as if to paddle through the water, just like the Viruun used his own tail.

And inscribed above this image was a title. Penned in bright yellow in a curvy, embellished font to stand out against the deep blue.

"The Little Mermaid..." Ah'mun read it aloud, using his knowledge of the human language to the best of his ability. "... by Hans Christian Andersen."

Excitement rippled through Ah'mun's body. He couldn't wait any longer. And so, twisting his wrist and gently pinching the corner of paper between the knuckles of his two fingers, he turned the first page.

He was immediately greeted by copyright notices, the book's publisher, its publication date, and the works. Then came the title of the book again, this time in black font against a pure white page. However, after these first pages, he came to what he had expected to find – paragraphs of prose, written in the human language.

And so he focused his eyes upon the words, his mind scanning each of them and registering their meaning.

'Far out at sea, where the water is as blue as the prettiest cornflower and as clear as crystal...'

That was the first sentence. It captured Ah'mun's attention immediately, and the descriptions, comparisons and metaphors that followed it continued to reel him in. For they were the most beauteous he had ever heard in his life.

The story told of an undersea nation, much like the Viruun Technocracy before its expanse into the stars. However, this nation was a monarchy, ruled by a Sea-King, and its subjects seemed to be comprised mostly of wildlife. It then told of the Sea-King's grandmother, who wore twelve oysters, a kind of shellfish, upon her tail as a sign of status. And, after this, it told of six princesses, the Sea-King's daughters and, without a doubt, those who would succeed his throne.

None of them had names, or at least none had been given yet. But the story focused on one in particular, the youngest, who the book detailed as 'the fairest of them all.'

Pausing, Ah'mun twisted the book back over and took another look at the title. Upon doing so, his mind quickly made the connection between the story's name and the youngest daughter, and marked her as the protagonist.

Reading on some more, the Viruun found himself becoming quite taken with what he read. The writing was rich and vibrant, its descriptions of the undersea world bringing images into his head that reminded him very much of home. He had read much prose in his life, mostly historical accounts and summaries that brought history to life, telling of events that happened long ago.

But this prose was different. It spoke of things that Ah'mun knew would be impossible, and that could never truly existed or happened. There was no kingdom under the oceans of Earth, no humans who swam with tails and breathed underwater without gills. These were figments of imagination. Things made up by the fantasies of dream-brained larven who promptly forgot them when they grew into adulthood. Trifles that had little actual value, for they did not tell the truth of the world...

... and yet these trifles filled him with such a strange sense of wonder that he had to keep reading.

The book spoke of wild fish letting themselves be petted and fed as if they were domesticated animals. Of an undersea garden that was divided up equally between these mermaid-princesses, for them to tend to as they pleased. Of a rite of passage in which each princess of the sea might visit the surface world above when her fifteenth year came to pass...

There was no word that Ah'mun knew that could describe how he felt. He wanted to stop reading, for the book's contents disturbed him. It spoke of things that he told himself could never be true, and that seemed so strange to be scary. But he couldn't bring himself to do anything other than keep going.

Maybe there was some reason behind this all? Would something he could understand be found amidst all this? Amidst all this talk of songs that could not be understood by men, or of the mermaids becoming indifferent to the discoveries that lay above their undersea world?

Desperate to find a way to say 'yes' to those questions, he mustered his bravery and curiosity, then continued to read. The story told of how, when her fifteenth year came about, the youngest sea-princess went up to the surface and lay herself upon a floating iceberg. Watching the ships go by as night fell, with a wreath of white lilies in her hair, she drew close to one of them and looked in through clear glass windows.

On board, the story said that she spied a prince – a true human one, mind – whose sixteenth year was being celebrated aboard the ship. The book spoke of how beautiful he was, outlining the dark eyes that decorated his face. Ah'mun had trouble picturing it, for dark eyes were the norm for him. His were black as night, but he could not imagine a human with Viruun eyes.

Aside from that, he was blind. He did not know the shape of the prince's face, nor his physique, nor the colour of his hair. All he knew was that the little mermaid found him to be beautiful, despite how different he was from her.

In that moment, the Viruun felt a strange kinship with the princess of the sea. In spite of her fear of the fireworks over her head, whose sound and flashing lights startled her and made her want to dive back under the ocean's surface, she could not take her eyes off the prince.

Just as Ah'mun'del could not take his eyes from the book. Both of them were afraid, but no matter how much what they saw scared them, they could not avert their gazes.

In that moment, they were alike. Intoxicated. Addicted. Transfixed.

The Viruun archaeologist's body trembled and seized, his thoughts twitching and cycling as his brain tried to understand. He still could not put together how all this could possibly come to pass. It was not a history, that much he knew, and he had encountered fiction before. Fantasy was not unknown to the Viruun, and stories of fake things were popular amongst the young of their society.

But this was all beyond anything that could have thought created by a single mind. It was startling and maddening, but also incredible and dazzling. It twisted his thoughts in ways he had never encountered before, make them ache in ways he never thought possible as ideas beyond comprehension wormed their way through his carapace and ate at his brain.

He could not comprehend the workings of this undersea kingdom. He could not comprehend the biology of these merfolk, humans with tails who swam in the sea.

But above all, he could not comprehend why the youngest mermaid found the prince to be beautiful. To Ah'mun and his kind, beauty was found in the skill it took to craft something. Whether it be a thesis, a statue, a painting or a song, the wonder that the Viruun found in objects was based in the concrete; how much effort it took to craft, how skilfully it was put together, and how it proved the merits of its maker. Beauty was something that was made with purpose and through talent, designed with a goal in mind.

A face was a genetic lottery. Create by a muddle of randomly decided genetic coding, without any conscious choice or learned craft put into it.

Could such an object really be so beautiful as to inspire love in a person simply by them looking upon it?

Ah'mun felt his hands tremble as he held the book, his carapace jittering and shaking as if his whole body was the epicentre of an earthquake. His hemantlia went cold in his chest, chilling him from the inside out, the icy feeling tightening around him as it reached from his round head to his spade-like tail.

A jolt of panic flooded the Viruun's brain, and he rushed to put the book down. Tearing his eyes from the pages, he slapped the story down upon the desk, shunted it away from him and scrambled away from his desk, scuttling haphazardly across the room and burying himself in a corner.

There he remained for a long while, twitching with unease. His mandibles chattered rapidly upon his face, his antennae frozen stiff. He stared at the motionless book, his claws and legs on edge as if it were to jump up and attack him.

It was so alive. So beautiful and brilliant. Its words still lingered in his brain, still speaking of these fantastical things and places. They lured and drew him in, as if to take him to another world entirely. A world were his troubles were no more, and where all these impossible things were possible...

And that scared him.