“You don’t need to feel bad,” said the Marine Musician, stepping out of the shell into view, “Ever since I found that shell, it always brings me back to it, whenever I’m in any trouble under the sea.”

Carey picked the boy up and looked at him closely.

“I have knowledge which could really enlighten both of you,” she said, “Let me start at the beginning. For centuries there has been a race of amphibious air and water breathing tiny people called the Ocean Mites. (Unlike the humans with the shrinking gene, the Ocean Mites were permanently tiny, having been born that way). One day some of the Ocean Mite girls found a half drowned 14 year old boy named Ivan lying in the water and sand on the edge of the surf. They used a modified sea urchin spine as a syringe, and injected a carefully concocted serum into his body. It reduced him to their size, having been derived from their own blood, and gave him the ability to breathe water as they did. He still retained his air breathing ability too. When they revived him, they explained that there was a shortage of males among their people, because there was a family line of women who always married men who were prepared to live at the seaside. This had gone on ever since the first of these women had discovered a tiny male ocean mite and taken to eating him. The women in that family line were all strong divers and swimmers, and never told anyone of the existence of the tiny Ocean Mites. Yet, inevitably, each new female would reach adulthood and discover them, while diving and swimming in the ocean. They would crave them with the same addiction as anyone who loved seafood. Prawns, lobster and calamari were as nothing in comparison to the taste of male Ocean Mites. The Ocean Mite girls told him of the way these women had created a shortage of male Ocean Mites for the girls to fall in love with, and asked him to choose one of them to date and eventually marry. The boy told them that he was already very much in love with a fourteen year old girl he’d been seeing for a number of months, and that he would return to her regardless of his loss in size. Ivan remembered the times he had seen the large freshwater swimming pool, which remained full because of a small opening underwater, that linked it from his girlfriend’s family’s backyard to the sea. He swam through the seaside until he came to the opening, surfaced in the pool and saw his girlfriend’s single mother lying on the grass beside the pool. He climbed out and told her what had happened to him, and that he hoped she wouldn’t now consider him inadequate for her daughter. The woman said that she didn’t find him in the least inadequate, but that it was no longer of any relevance, because, she explained to his surprise, she was in fact the middle aged generation of the family of women who hunted and ate Ocean Mites…”

Carey’s information was spot on, but she did not know the earliest origin of the Ocean Mites. Centuries earlier, earth was visited by tiny beings in a water filled spacecraft. They were travellers from another planet, who chose to make their home on earth. However, earth’s surface people were much larger than the visitors. So they chose to use their amphibious ability to breathe sea water, and lived most of their lives in the ocean. Hence the name Ocean Mites. However, they sometimes came to the surface and took the risk of being found by the relative giants, because they were still born with a love of both land and sea, just as they would have been on their home planet of Testamentia.