The crew slowly awakened to the amber glow of sunrise peeking in the windows. Each of their ears were greeted by their roommates’ groans, but also the chipper chirps of songbirds.

  Medusa sat halfway up, then sunk back into the premium pillows. The birds finally got her curiosity enough to pull her to her knees and unlatch the door.

  A pair of dryads, one in a gown of felty birch leaves, the other of some succulent foliage and thick petals that twinkled in the light. She held a pastel kingfisher serenading from her finger while she stroked its back with her other hand. They made their way down the hall with a whole brassy cart of breakfast platters, leaking steam out from enticing polished lids. A handful of guests had their doors opened at the beckon of this gentlest of alarms.

  “How'd you sleep?” the birch one asked Medusa.

  “...oh, so good,” Medusa managed. “What's your guys’ names?”

  The dryads looked behind them to see what guys they were supposed to know.

  “Your names!” Medusa caught herself. “Must be an island thing. Guy can mean a man, or it can just mean anyone.”

  “Oh I'd heard that, I just wasn't used to people asking,” she answered, as if she'd not been worth getting to know by most people. “They call me Clove. This is Cilia. Pleasure to be of service to you.”

  “Pleasure be…served?” Medusa fumbled the wording and melted against the door frame, laughing sleepily.

  “Would you like breakfast in bed this morning?” Clove offered, while Cilia moved onto the next open doorway.

  “You don't need to do that for us,” Arachne crept around the doorway to say. “I doubt they pay you extra for that.”

  “Pay us? No, it's just nice to do for some people,” Clove gently reassured her, not seeming to be pushing either way.

  “We'd let you hide out in here to get away from people,” Arachne pitched. “Just to give you guys a break.”

  The dryads looked between each other, their expressions mostly too serene to read. “We can't,” Cilia spoke for them. “There's still so many people to serve. We have to be careful how we use our time here.”

  “Hang in there,” Arachne told them with a somber nod. “If I catch you on break, I'll be around. Not as a customer.”

  The dryads didn't acknowledge her, but knelt to hand Medusa a steaming tray of cheesy dumplings, and moved onto the next customer.

  “Hey!” Medusa called after them. “What's there to do for someone who like… wants to do everything but like, also do nothing?”

  Clove stared wistfully out the open window down the hall, as if imagining herself out there. “That would be the beach. Keep heading upstairs and inwards until you get there.”

  “((Upstairs and inwards … to the beach)),” Echo repeated, as if waiting for the pieces to make sense.

  “... you'll get it when you get there,” Clove seemed satisfied to say.

  Medusa turned to the crew. “Let’s get there.”

  *****

  It took some wandering, but a few turns and staircases later, they came to a wide lounge bathed in pale blue light. Long green couches wound in strips around the room like exposed roots, with tables clustered in the spaces between them in pastel collages. Along one side, a curtain of mist left the far end of the room faded in a bluish murk.

  “Whaddya know, they've invented another way to celebrate sitting down,” Arachne muttered. “Wonder how many months of labor got sunk into Whah!”

  A long, limbless, inhuman shape had emerged from the mist, not walking but hovering, weightlessly. Its thin mouth as long as her forearm stopped just beyond her reach.

  ‘Whahhhh…” Medusa drew a long gasp. That wasn’t mist. That was underwater. Gusts of white sand and shells billowed and left clouds of bubbles drifting through the water. The thing nodding at her eagerly was a dolphin, getting a kick out of freaking her out. And a wall of glass, with no glare in this dim room, looked as close as could be to invisible.

  “Guys,” she told them, “I think we just found the pool…and this is the deep end.”

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Sisyphus’ eyes trailed up to the top of the room. The sea level outside of it was higher than that. It would make more sense once they were out of here

  Echo put her ear to the glass; she heard it say something. Then she replied in the shrill chitters dolphins speak in, her jaw shuddering as she made it. Arachne recoiled at the alien-ness of the noise, eyeing Echo uncomfortably. The dolphin swam back a bit in surprise, then swam along the glass while facing her, as if beckoning her to follow.

  “Iiiii think it’s taking us to the stairs,” Sis figured out, sprinting up ahead of them. Arachne stuck closer to him. He was still the least weird of the crew.

  At the far end of the room was a spiral staircase, made mostly of driftwood, the natural-cut planks jutting out from the walls. The glass came up alongside one side of the spiral, with most sides made from polished off-white stone. It ascended some four stories higher before…

  …they came out on the mountain’s peak.

  Like much of the resort, the mountaintop was sculpted in symmetry. A rounded cone, smooth as marble. Wound around it several times like a ribbon, a blue river spiraled its way from the peak, seamlessly into the artificial ocean below. Someone had poured literal tonnes of sand to make a beach at the mountain’s base, with the ocean poured around it on all sides. The only thing holding it in was the glass wall of the lounge, and the interior walls of the rest of the palace wrapped around this spectacle.

  The dimensions seemed too unfamiliar to grasp, until Medusa spotted the sign at the start of the river: Nautilus Bay. She looked around again. This mountain was the world’s biggest spiral seashell. Lying on its side, they were at the tip where the spiral began. The mouth end was the massive glass wall where they’d started. It was all too enormous to fit in her vision at once. She felt dizzy with vertigo just from trying.

  She followed the river up to its mouth. A brass sculpture of a goblet twice her height, served as a fountain, currents of water ebbing and flowing over its rim. At the base, she made out the words: My Cup Runneth Over.

  If this was what gods did when their cups ranneth over, mortals would have heaven on earth.

  In the shade of the cup, a satyr kicked his hooves up in a beach chair, flipping absent-mindedly through a scroll magazine. She caught a glimpse of a harpy posed like a pinup model. The satyr, spotting the guests, didn’t budge, but called lazily out of the side of his mouth: “Flotsam! You’re up!”

  Knee-deep in the river, the dryad who answered turned her head, her dirty blonde beach hair rolling as it caught the breeze. The rest of her seemed almost varnished with water, magnifying the dark and bright hues of her coppery tan. She'd folded a thin shawl across her chest as a tube top, folded over itself down the middle. Beneath, she’d knotted a simple beach skirt over one thigh, leaving the other daringly out with just a knot where it came together on her hip. Like the dryads, she was a nymph, but a sea-nymph: a naiad.

  She appraised them for a moment, as if knowing she was being appraised herself, and choosing to take it as praise. She made her way towards them as the waters seemed to part effortlessly where she stepped.

  “Hi, welcome to Nautilus Bay. My name is Flotsam, I'll be your lifeguard and attendant today.” She said it like a tour guide sticking close to the script, but one who still relished the chance to say it.

  “Flotsam! Nice. I'm Sisyphus, and uh, these girls are my adventuring party. We're just friends.” Sisyphus was making himself extra available today. He'd already stepped far out in front of the girls, enough to make just a casual wave towards them over his shoulder.

  “Lovely to meet all of you,” she talked right along, not letting Sisyphus single her out. “Dionysus has been generous enough to share his private beach and his dryads with his patrons and select clientele. Now if you’d like to make it down to the bay, you will be riding the Nautilus to get there. Anybody here ever ridden a water slide? Picture falling into a raging river, except on purpose, and it’s perfectly safe. Just remember to keep your arms and legs inside the current at all times. Now then - who’s first?” She gestured to the spot by her in the ankle-deep shallows, where a thin curtain of water followed them from the goblet fountain.

  Sisyphus breathed in deep as if to inflate his chest and shoulders, but came off more like a carnival balloon. He stepped ahead like a brave volunteer for the audience, for an excuse to stand close to her.

  She walked right past him and waved the others to stand behind him. “Everybody lay down,” she instructed. “You’ll be able to steer some just by leaning your torso. You’ll get the hang of it. All ready? Cause here we go!”

  She stepped behind the four of them, and turned towards the goblet fountain. As if pulling gently on some unseen silken rope, she beckoned it with a turn of her wrist. A rounded surge of water rose and came flooding over the edge. She knelt expectantly, guiding it from a distance with her hands, as it gushed on past her and lifted them up and away.

  It hit Medusa, not like the smashing of a wave, but like one smooth, unbroken stream, inviting her in. It sucked them all down the slope of the nautilus shell, a concave half-pipe of smooth stone circling down the mountain. Soon they were sliding as fast as any of them could run, and they didn't even have to sit up.

  The five of them slid to the outer edge, before realizing how to lean and steer themselves like human sleds. Sisyphus threw his weight this way and that, fighting a grin that would've let in the saltwater. Echo twirled on the surface like a falling leaf, steered by the smallest moves of her arms. And Medusa caught a rare glimpse of Arachne’s thin smile, her eyes finally showing relief. Flotsam slid on her knees behind them, propelling the current, keeping an eye on the lot of them.

  Medusa hadn't been on a water slide, but she'd been raised by sea monsters. She knew her element. She held her arms close and turned belly-down, slithering upstream and doing a loop around Flotsam, who lost control of the stream for a second there.

  “Hahah! Can’t say I’m surprised!” Flotsam called back over the hush of the current.

  It was another minute before the ground beneath them came to an abrupt stop. With one last push from Flotsam, they went airborne for seconds before each landing in the god’s personal ocean pool.

  The others soon headed for shore. Not Medusa. She could hold her breath for…longer than she’d ever tested. She was in the clearest waters on Earth, and she was going to savor it.