Fish Out of Water: The Catgirl Fishing Isekai

Prologue

Ashliel, Junior Archangel in service to the court of the Goddess of Reap and Sow, and Senior Soul Analyst for the Department of Reformation and Reallocation, hummed a little tune to herself as she floated through the verdant halls of her Goddess’ domain.

She had a load of scrolls tucked up under one arm, and a steaming mug of ambrosia in her other hand, which she took careful sips from as she made her way towards her station.

As she went, she passed by rows and rows of alcoves, little miniature domains consisting of three marble walls stacked together forming a U-shape, and a horizontal slab, above which hovered a multifaceted crystal and a thin slate covered in divine glyphs. Inside the alcoves, seated upon high-backed wooden chairs cushioned with solidified clouds, her fellow angels toiled away, attending to their individual duties of keeping their Goddess’ domain — that being all things to do with the cycle of life, death, and growth in the mortal realm — in order. Their fingers tapped away at the glyphs on the slate, which in turn controlled what the crystal displayed, with the combined array commonly referred to as a “consoul”. As incredible as it may seem, all the consouls were connected to one another, and to the greater network of divine knowledge, allowing one access to instant communication across the vast and multitudinous realms of the heavens, and a direct link to all information that had ever been collected and archived therein.

Marking her passage, one of the angels she peered in on tapped at her slate, and the square of light projected from her consoul shifted from the moving image of a fuzzy, four-legged mortal creature stumbling along as it chased a ball of woven yarn, to an array of little white boxes in neat rows, which she resumed filling in with another series of glyphstrokes.

But, seeing that Ashliel was only an Archangel, she just as quickly went back to looking up images of mortal creatures being adorable. Ashliel just smiled to herself and continued on her way. She had her own workstation to return to, after all.

In times of war, it was the duty of the Angels and the Archangels to guard the humans and nations under their patron’s influence from demonic attack and influence, respectively. Archangels also used to serve as messengers, delivering decrees to the mortals and ferrying messages between their respective deities. But there hadn’t been a celestial war since long before Ashliel’s time, and the Gods had taken to communicating less and less with their followers as they grew more able to take care of problems in the mortal realm themselves. Finally, with the invention of the ethereal network, or “ethernet”, which anyone who was anyone was on these days, the talents of the Angels and Archangels had been repurposed.

Ashliel entered her alcove to find a package waiting for her on her desk. It was a box, a beautiful box to be sure, made of pearlescent white wood and trimmed in platinum gold, a simple latch holding the lid closed. Plastered on the top, front, and sides of the box were various strips of parchment which read “Fragile!”, “Handle with care!”, and “Do not separate!”

Setting her scrolls aside, Ashliel dropped into her chair and scooted over to open the box and examine its contents. Inside the box, nestled in four cushioned, velveted grooves like an oyster with four pearls, were four glass orbs the size of a baseball (not that Ashliel would know what a baseball was). Each one swirled and pulsed, illuminated from within by an ethereal light and tinted in a different color. From left to right, a vibrant orange that reminded one of a setting sun, a greenish-blue that evoked the tumultuous sea, a bright red that would shame even the most vivid rose, and a fourth that fluctuated between a deep rich violet to a vibrant magenta, never staying the same shade for long.

“Oh, just some souls,” Ashliel said to herself, taking another sip from her mug. The presentation box and the warnings had led her to believe there would be something slightly more impressive inside.

Now, the process of collecting the souls of the departed from the mortal world below and shepherding them to their respective afterlife had been fairly automated for a while. Used to be, all souls went straight to the God or Goddess of their primary religion for a direct meeting, and they alone would decide their fate. Then, when that grew too irritating for the Deities, they created departments to deal with them instead. Souls from beings that had been born within the realm were sorted, analyzed, judged, and shipped off to the appropriate afterlife.

But sometimes, exceptional souls presented themselves; great heroes and leaders, skilled warriors and craftspeople, brilliant scholars and inventors. Those souls were in turn reintroduced to the world as spirits tied to the tools of their craft, so that their wisdom and skills might continue to influence the mortals that lived there.

And that was where Ashliel’s department came in. Given their packaging, Ashliel could only assume these souls were of the highest import.

“Alright, let’s see what we’ve got to work with,” Ashliel said, setting aside her mug and scooping up one of the orbs, touching it to the crystal surface of her consoul. Instantly, the screen was filled with all the information she could ever want to know about the soul contained within, and Ashliel realized why these souls had been left on her desk.

The information on the screen was littered with names, places, terms, and concepts that Ashliel had never seen before and could not even begin to comprehend, rendering most of it useless, and identifying these souls as Outsiders.

“Uuuuuugh,” Ashliel groaned as the realization set in.

No one knew for sure where they came from, though the rumors said they were sent to the Gods and Goddesses from “somewhere else”, by powers even greater than their own, intended for them to handle personally. And, like most of their other tasks, they’d found a way to shove them off onto someone else the moment they could.

Unlike regular souls, Outsiders couldn’t be broken up into their essence and returned to the world’s mana supply, and they couldn’t have their memories wiped and be reincarnated as normal mortal beings that caused only the usual amount of trouble in their lifetimes. They couldn’t even be safely shoved into a corner and forgotten about, because the containers that kept their souls contained would eventually degrade and allow them to escape, and then you’d have a bunch of mortals known for being confused, angry, and irrational running around the heavens causing problems. The only way to get rid of them was to drop them into the mortal realm wholesale.

And yet, while the true essence of Outsider souls remained completely immutable, the one thing about them that could be changed was the body, and easily in fact. It had since become common practice to attempt to gift, or perhaps bribe, the souls with a new body that fit their personality even better than their previous one, and would help them better blend in with the regular denizens of the world. Then you just had to cross your fingers and hope they solved more problems than they caused.

And someone had left four of them on her desk, an hour before her lunch break.

“Okay…” Ashliel sighed, scooting her chair closer to her desk.

As irritating as these souls could be, they were still mortals, and Ashliel had a bit of a reputation for having a soft spot for mortals. An embarrassing rumor, but nonetheless true, and she knew if she tried to pass them off onto someone else, as had likely been done to her, it was almost guaranteed that whoever decided their new forms would do a piss poor job of it.

So, determined to see that these Outsiders ended up with the best possible chance of leading better, happier, longer lives in their new world, she placed her hands in front of her consoul and got to work.

■

“Aaaaaaaash,” a familiar voice wafted into her cubicle like a particularly lazy cloud a little less than an hour later, followed by its owner, Lesrith, Archangel of The Court of the Moons, and Ashliel’s friend and coworker.

“I know, I know, I’ll be right there,” Ashliel replied without turning around. She was so close to being finished with these troublesome souls, if only this last soul would…

Brrt

The screen of her consoul flashed red and let out an angry buzz, signaling that, once again, the orange soul had failed to accept the new form she’d chosen for it.

With a frustrated groan, Ashliel’s head hit the marble surface of her desk.

Sensing an opportunity to help, or maybe just to bother, her fellow angel, Lesrith floated into the cubicle, pushing one of her friends’ wings out of the way to get a look at the screen.

“Mmm, Outsiders, huh?” Lesrith asked, draping herself over Ashliel’s shoulders.

“Mmhm,” came Ashliel’s muffled response, not yet ready to rise out of her sulk.

“But you’re usually so good with these,” Lesrith said, which finally caused Ashliel to lift her head out of her arms.

“I know! But this dumb orange ball doesn’t know what it wants! It hasn’t liked any of the forms I’ve suggested, see?” Ashliel explained in a huff, pointing at a separate window where she’d started keeping track of the mortal races she’d already tried. She’d tried human first, just in case, but that was always a coin flip. Outsiders, she’d learned, were almost exclusively humans in their first lives, and while nearly half of them would gladly keep the form they’d been born in, more often than not they’d rather be anything but. Then, she’d tried elf — that was also a popular choice — but no luck. Dwarf was similarly rejected, as well as orc and goblin.

The other three souls had rejected all of those as well, but they were just the most common races, and it never hurt to check, just in case one of them took and you managed to save yourself a ton of time. She’d eventually found what she thought were the perfect forms for all three of the other souls, but the orange orb was proving to be uncharacteristically recalcitrant. She’d worked her way through two dozen more races by the time Lesrith had arrived, crossing off slime, troll, skeleton, mimic, chicken, giant, vending machine, sword, various bug monsters including a hive queen and a giant spider, and even a blasted dragon, but nothing worked!

“Fiiiiiiiine, I’ll help you out, but you owe me,” Lesrith said, reaching over Ashliel’s shoulders and poking at the screen, starting to browse the soul’s information. “You’re probably trying to pick a form based on how it lived before it died, but maybe something about its death changed the way it feels. How’d it die?”

“It fell out of a boat and drowned, same as the other three,” Ashliel said, resting her chin in her hands and letting her coworker poke and swipe her way through the various windows.

“Mmmh, can we see if it had any particularly strong thoughts just before that, then?” Lesrith asked.

“We can,” Ashliel said, shaking her head. “But these are mortals, and Outsiders at that. Their thoughts are always so… incomprehensible.”

“Come on, it can’t hurt, can it?” Lesrith insisted, lightly tapping her fingers against the top of Ashliel’s head.

“Fine,” Ashliel sighed, reaching for her glyphboard again.

It took some searching, but they were eventually able to find the most powerful, resonant thought the soul had had moments before its untimely demise. Holding her breath, Ashliel pressed the button to play the thought aloud.

“I would rather die than wear this fucking hat for another minute.”

“Well that’s… something,” Lesrith said.

“It’s a clue!” Ashliel said enthusiastically, and perhaps a bit optimistically. All she had to do was access the data for what the soul was wearing in the moments before its death, specifically this reviled headwear, and display it on screen. With a triumphant grin plastered across her cherubic face, she jabbed the button to open the window.

As the souls last thought had implied, it was a hat. A simple cap, red and white, with a wide bill and stuck out in the front, intended to shield the wearer’s eyes from the glare of the sun. Printed on the front of the hat, above the brim, were two things; An image of a creature that Ashliel hadn’t seen before, but of a type she recognized as a fish, and a block of text which bore a singularly perplexing message.

WOMEN WANT ME

FISH FEAR ME

Ashliel and Lesrith stared at the image of the hat in silence for several seconds.

“Hmm…” Lesrith said, letting her chin rest on the top of Ashliel’s head. “Yeeeeeeeeah, I don’t get it.”

“Just go on without me,” Ashliel sighed, dropping her head into her hands and letting out another muffled groan of frustration.

“Everything alright in here?” A new voice purred from the entrance of the cubicle. It was another of Ashliel and Lesrith’s coworkers, Neshteth, presumably coming to check if either of them were coming to lunch. And as luck, or perhaps fate, would have it, Neshteth was the best possible person who could have chosen to visit at that very moment, for their friend Neshteth was a sphinx, and very very clever.

“Hey Neth,” Lesrith called, waving to Neshteth as she padded into the cubicle. “I’m helping Ash deal with a bratty Outsider. We think this weird hat it was wearing before it died might be a clue, but we can’t figure out what it’s supposed to mean.”

Curious, Neshteth took one look at the screen, and broke out into a wide, fang toothed grin.

“Well, then you’ve come to the right sphinx,” she said, sitting on her haunches and adopting a tone that Ashliel and Lesreth recognized as her “lecturing voice.”

“It’s obviously a riddle,” Neshteth explained.

“A riddle?” Ashliel asked, a hint of hope in her voice.

“You think?” Lesrith asked, laying her head sideways on top of Ashliel’s head, already starting to doze off. Not that she didn’t find her friend’s lectures fascinating, she was just always tired during the day. Why an angel of the Moon goddesses decided to get a day job, none of them would ever know.

“Clearly,” Neshteth said with certainty, closing her eyes and nodding her head. Cracking one eye open and giving her friends a sly look, she asked. “Can either of you think of something that a mortal woman would want, but a fish would be afraid of?”

The two thought for several seconds before tossing out their answers.

“Dry land?” Ashliel guessed.

“An even bigger fish,” Lesrith said.

“Good guesses, but no,” Nesrith said good naturedly, raising one of her paws towards Ashliel’s consoul. “May I?”

Eager to end this farce, Ashliel scooted her chair out of the way, and Neshteth batted at her glyphboard a few times, and when she was done she’d pulled up a race that made both archangels’ eyebrows raise.

“Are you sure?” Ashliel asked.

“Well, there’s only one way to find out,” Neshteth said, and Ashliel once again pressed the button to apply the form. All three of the cubicle’s occupants held their breath now, watching the little gray circle that slowly rotated in the middle of the screen, indicating the soul was processing the change.

Then, finally, the screen flashed green, and let out a little chime.

“I can’t believe it,” Ashliel gasped.

“Woo! Nice one, Neth,” Lesrith said with as much enthusiasm as she could muster while hanging off Ashliel’s back like a cape. Which is to say, she sounded like an anemic librarian.

“Naturally,” Neshteth said, placing a paw to her chest and preening. “You can thank me by buying me lunch.”

Ashliel cleared the windows from her consoul’s screen and dropped the orange soul back into its alcove in the white box, closing and latching it up. Lastly, she tapped the command into her glyphboard to signal that she had souls that were ready to be deposited into the mortal realm.

A glowing portal opened in the center of her desk, and after turning it sideways so it would fit, the box was sucked through, disappearing with a faint pop. The trio began to file out of Ashliel’s cubicle, but she paused at the threshold, looking back at her consoul.

Was there any possible chance there was something she could have forgotten to check while processing that last soul?

Of course not, she concluded, and either way it had accepted the change. If the soul had any complaints about its new form, it would have only itself to blame.

And with that, Ashliel turned on her heels and hurried to catch up with her colleagues, leaving her cubicle, and her role in this story, behind her.

■ ■ ■ ■

“Cor, look at that,” Nils Dahlgren said, his voice full of wonder and his eyes turned towards the heavens.

“Hmm?” The older man sitting next to Nils, known to friends and locals only as Bart, looked up from the well-worn rubber grip of the fishing pole he held in front of him.

Nils was leaning back in his seat on the deck of Bart’s boat, his head tilted back, free hand pointing to the sky. Bart followed the path of his finger and found himself looking at a section of the night’s sky a bit to the northwest, across which four lights were streaking, each one flying just a short distance from the next.

“Four shootin’ stars,” Nils breathed, his breath misting into the chilly night air. “Tha’s go’a be a good omen, aye?”

“If you’re a dwarf, maybe,” Bart replied, letting his eyes trace the paths of the four bright shining points of light. Each one was faintly tinged with a different color; one orange, one green, one red, and one a deep violet that almost disappeared against the sky behind it.

“Ha ha!” Nils loosed a good-natured laugh in two quick barks, for he was, indeed, a dwarf, and a casual adherent to the dwarven people’s foremost religion, which held a heavy focus on even-numbered pairs and numerical symmetry, with the number four especially being considered “quite lucky.”

The two men watched the celestial anomalies as they slowly crossed the sky, heading towards the horizon.

Unlike Nils, Bart was not a dwarf, but he saw no harm in offering up a silent prayer at the stars’ passing.

If you’re still listenin’ up there, you could send me a good catch. Hell, make it the greatest catch I ever seen, if ya don’t mind!

As Bart watched, the orange star winked out, leaving the other three to continue on their journey without it.

Chuckling privately to himself, Bart dropped his eyes from the stars back to the sea, where the twinkling blanket overhead was mirrored perfectly upon the calm waters. His bobber continued to bob, un-disturbed, no legendarily rare sea creature miraculously finding its way onto his hook.

Ah well, thanks anyway.

Then, a body fell from the sky, hitting the surface of the water a few feet away and crashing through, shattering the visage of the reflected sky and sending the water rippling in all directions.

Bart and Nils were on their feet in moments, their rods forgotten.

“There!” Nils called, pointing to a spot just off the stern, and Bart could just make out a patch of ocean where large bubbles were continuously breaking the surface. That meant that whoever had fallen in was still alive, or so Bart prayed, as he planted his foot on the gunnel and launched himself overboard.

Thankful that the pink summer moon of Dala was out in all her glory, her light piercing through the water’s surface, Bart propelled himself downward with a series of powerful strokes, intent on catching up with the unknown figure and stopping their descent towards the seafloor.

It was a person, of that much Bart was certain. Their skin was pale, and almost seemed to glow under the summer moon’s light, helping keep Bart on target. The closer he got, the more details he could make out. They were a scrawny creature, whoever they were, with a head full of orange hair that wafted above their head like strands of fiery seaweed, and they appeared to be without a single scrap of clothing.

There’d be time for worrying about modesty when both of them were back above the surface and breathing air. Hooking one arm around the figure and clutching them to his body, Bart reoriented himself and shot upwards, his chest only just starting to ache from the effort of holding his breath.

Breaking the surface and stopping only long enough to fill his lungs with air, Bart grabbed ahold of the wooden rungs of the rope ladder Nils had had the forethought to toss out for him while he’d been under. Hauling himself and the unresponsive figure back onto the deck of the moderately sized fishing trawler, Bart laid them out on their back and — oop, became quite certain they were a she, a young woman by the look of things.

Sorry, lass.

Bart knelt and cupped one hand over the other, pressing his palm to the unconscious girl’s sternum and, mindful of how small and frail she looked, began to rhythmically shove against her chest.

It took three solid pumps before the girl’s body lurched and Bart tipped her head to the side, helping her expel the lungfuls of water. She was coughing next, which was a good sign.

“By the tides, Bart, I think she’s a—”

“Nils,” Bart spoke, cutting his friend off and snapping him out of the shocked stupor that seeing him pull a naked, drowning woman out of the ocean had put him under. “Set up one of the cots.”

“Ah, right, good thinkin,” Nils concluded, stomping away to head below deck and pull one of the two compact cots out of the wall and, Bart hoped, pile it up with every blanket they had on board.

Bart had rolled the girl onto her side, where she continued to cough and retch up seawater for several more seconds before finally coming to a rest, curling in on herself like a dying spider.

“That’s it, easy does it,” Bart soothed, unsure of how much help it would be to the girl, but figuring it couldn’t hurt either. Finally, Nils returned, a thick red woolen blanket in his arms, which he passed off to Bart.

“Help me with her,” Bart said, and together he and Nils enclosed the girl’s shivering frame in the blanket. It might have been the middle of summer, but the night air on the ocean was crisp, and could kill as easily as drowning if one went around sopping wet with no clothes on.

As expected, the cot had had a nest of blankets arranged on it, and Bart did his best to gently tuck the girl in, mindful of her tail and the large ears on the sides of her head, before straightening his back and lumbering towards the trawler’s modest pantry to fix himself a sandwich and a drink, and wonder what the hell he was going to tell Felda.