( Closed starter for @mina-lewis ) Here on land, there were a lot of things that Gemma found to be jarring. Abundant marketplaces, nosy humans, everyone’s extreme reliance on electronics... and of course, catching sight of merfolk. To a certain extent, seeing merfolk was expected - the entire reason she’d come to land was to find out what was going on in Assyria and hopefully prevent war. For the most part though, she’d just expected to find siren captains, mermaid princesses, and potentially some envoys. The hippocampi had been a complete surprise, as were the other merfolk who seemed to just happen to be living in Port Vale. First Elistra, then Ridley... and now Mina, of all people. It had been over eighty years since Gemma had seen the woman last, but she was positive it was her. One didn’t simply forget their first friend, after all.
That said, there was a difference between having that information and knowing what to do with it. She was relatively confident that Mina wouldn’t recognize her - she’d been a small child when they’d met, so differences in appearance were much more extreme. The time they’d spent together almost certainly hadn’t made as much of an impact on Mina’s life as it had on her own, either. So the question was, did she want Mina to recognize her? On the one hand, it would be pretty embarrassing to connect her current self to the feral child she’d been when they’d met. On the other though, she was looking for as many allies as she could find here in Port Vale. Finding an ally in Mina wasn’t quite so essential as allying with Assyria’s leaders, but the connection could potentially make it easier to earn trust from non-sirens. She could try to befriend the woman without making it clear who she was, of course, but it might be more difficult to earn her trust that way. On the other hand - would revealing who she was even help? It was a very long time ago that they had known each other, and who Gemma had been at a few years old didn’t entirely define who she was now.
She’d been weighing her options on that front ever since she’d first caught sight of the woman, a few weeks ago, and still hadn’t come to a decision on how to handle the situation. Her predicament wasn’t exactly top of mind as she went about her day, though it quickly surfaced to the front and center of her mind as she rounded a corner and had to stop short to avoid running directly into Mina. It would seem that she had just about run out of time to decide. “Hey, sorry about that - are you alright?” She was positive she hadn’t actually run into Mina and that there was no real need for her to apologize, but it seemed the most acceptable thing to say out of what she’d noticed humans tended to say in the event of a near collision.
