Curate, connect, and discover
After your horror post I though what if during the sailing to america KoS met up Sirens that started to lure others into the sea but they fail in the end as Senku doesn't give even one millimeter interest to Sirens and barely manages to save his companions!
Oh but you see
Senku can be affected. He very nearly is.
They offer him answers. Not love, not sex, answers. They sing that they know the secrets of petrification, that they can tell him anything he wants to know. They sing that if he just took their hands, they'd show him all the secrets of the world.
But that's also what saves him. Because Senku does want those things, but he wants to discover them for himself. He doesn't want to take the easy way out, because then he wouldn't get to have fun, he wouldn't get to do the one thing he loves doing most.
That's what snaps him out of it, milliseconds before one of the creatures can convince him to fall into the water.
When he lays eyes on a Siren for the first time, he has no idea what he's even looking at. He'd never considered the idea that something like this could happen. But then again, Sirens and Mermaids have been in human mythology for thousands of years. They had to come from somewhere. And though he'd prefer if they were just drunken hallucinations from ancient sailors, there's nothing he can do about it now.
Because he's looking a scientific anomaly in the face, and she and her sisters want to eat him and his friends.
His mind races, digging through memory after memory, trying to remember all those stories, searching for the way to defeat them without killing them.
Senku ends up running down to where their radio is, and uses it to shout across the ship as loud as he can, hoping to drown out the sound of the incessant song in the air, and manages to startle Taiju out of his reverie. Senku tells him to plug his ears, and help him herd the rest of the crew into one of the lower parts of the ship that didn't have windows.
That's where he gets his hands on Ryusui, who he literally has to shake until his eyes snap back into focus with one of his trademark laughs. The captain of the Perseus tells Senku that Sirens are tricky. That, assuming the things outside were the same ones from ancient myth, getting out of this wasn't going to be easy. Just because he broke free of their spell once, didn't mean they couldn't entrap him in another.
These things worked outside the realm of science and fact, so the only way to defeat them was to play the game by their rules. So Senku clogs his ears with some spare wax, and leaves Ryusui and Taiju in charge of looking after the rest of the crew.
He heads up to the deck, only to find the world silent.
No more singing, no more pretty words and false promises. His eyes scan the horizon, searching for the wing-ed women who had been attempting to lure him and his friends into the depths.
"I know you're still here," He says. "No way you gave up that easily."
Something like a laugh, muffled by the wax, then a body drops in front of him, crouching on the railing of the ship.
It's easy to ignore her nakedness when she's covered in feathers.
"There you are." Senku can't stop the grin that spreads over his face. She was frighteningly beautiful, all sharp claws and birdlike eyes.
The Siren mimics his grin, showing off equally sharp teeth.
She leaps from the railing to stand at her full height. She was his size, maybe a handful of centimeters taller. Her hand lashes out, grabbing his face and tilting it to the side, eyes narrowing at the wax in his ears. Her claws dig into the softness of his cheeks, drawing blood.
"Cheat." She spats, shoving him away hard enough to make him stumble, and before he can fully steady himself, she's closing the small distance again, her wings folding neatly behind her.
"Let's play a game," Senku says quickly, backing up more. "Things like you like games, right?"
She pauses, tilting her head.
"What game?" She asks.
"A question game. Whoever can't answer the others question first loses."
"What happens to the one that loses?"
"Easy," He says. "The loser has to do what the winner asks."
She lets out a thoughtful hum, head tilting the other way not. She truly looked like some kind of humanoid bird.
"Fine. Your question." She says finally.
"What are you doing here?" Senku asks.
"We have always been here," She says, as if it's the most obvious thing in the world. "My question. Where did you go?"
He blinks, then understands.
She and the rest of her sisters hadn't been affected by petrification because they weren't human. So as far as she knew, humans just suddenly disappeared for thousands of years.
"We turned to stone," He says. "How have you survived without humans? If I remember my stories, you usually eat us."
She rolls her eyes.
"Humans stopped being good food long before you 'turned to stone'." She says. "How did you come back?"
"Science," He says. When her eyes narrow, he continues. "The stone I was trapped in was eroded through contact with nitric acid, which came from the caves near where I was stuck." It was best to keep it simple for now.
"How do you convince humans to jump into the water?" He asks.
"By knowing what's in their hearts." She says with a shrug. Of course, it was something totally natural to her, just like breathing. She probably has no other way to explain it.
It was her turn now, but instead of shooting off another question quickly as she had been, she takes a moment to consider.
"What is your name?" She asks, finally.
"Senku," He says. "I'll ask the same question. What's your name?"
She gives it, but it's in a language he's never heard, spoken with an accent that makes him dizzy. He doesn't try to repeat it.
"Where are you going?" She asks.
"America, to get what we need to start saving more humans from their stone prisons." He catches the way her expression shifts, just slightly, at his words. She seems pleased.
Senku sucks in a breath, it was time to end the game, and he had the perfect question.
"Why did the Why-Man turn humanity to stone?"
"Cheat!" She snaps, baring her sharp teeth at the question he knew she couldn't really answer, despite what had been promised to him in the songs.
"The rule is that you have to answer until you can't anymore. I never said the questions had to be something you should already know," He grins at her.
Her eyes widen, her feathers puffing out and he knows he's pissed her off. She makes a noise, something similar to an angry trill.
Then, she laughs.
"You win." She says. "I do not know why your Why-Man took humans away."
"That means you have to do what I say now," He reminds her.
"Tell me, Se-en-kuu. What you want."
"To study you. I want you to stay with me and my Kingdom of Science, and let me learn everything about you."
Her eyebrows raise.
"Is that your true desire, Se-en-kuu?" She asks. "I know you want more."
"Sure, I want plenty of things. But this is what I'm asking you for," He says. She makes another trilling noise, this one less angry but still annoyed.
"Fine. I will stay with you and your people."
"No trying to eat anyone," He says. "I need every person in good health."
"That is more than you asked for."
"Wanna play again?"
She scoffs.
"No. You cheat. I will not harm your people."
"Good Siren."
"You are, as I have heard it said, treading on thin ice."