"How long can you stay out of water?," Jon asked as he knelt down beside the mermaid, no longer concerned that she would slap him with her large tail-fin since she needed him. At this point he noticed a few features he had missed before: she had a set of three gills on either side of her torso, below her breasts, which opened and closed with each breath, even though she seemed to be breathing through her nose; and what appeared to be glitter on parts of her upper body was actually a bunch of smaller scales.
"I don't usually make a habit of that if I can help it. The most I've done is sunbathe occasionally but never completely out of the water," the mermaid answered after having a puzzled look on her pretty face. Her fin-like ears twitched cutely while she looked into his eyes. "My name is Amber, by the way. What may I call you since I think 'the human' or 'human' would get tiring after a while," she finally introduced herself. They both had been too preoccupied with her appearance in his room to introduce themselves.
"Great, ... I don't know if she can last a few minutes or half an hour," Jon thought as he looked her over again. She still looked suitably wet but looks could be deceiving. She could have needed more water than he thought she did. "My name's Jon," he stated simply as he thought over what to do next. Amber sounded like a human's name, but it sort of fit with her hair. She could have had another mineral name like Ruby after all. He could have gotten lost in those eyes of her's a thousand times over.
Finally, he came to a decision. He would simply get her some water and see if she could tolerate freshwater along with saltwater. If she couldn't, then he could somehow use the stone to change it into sea water. He wasn't going to need the stone just to fetch some water, not to mention that it would have look suspicious to cause it to appear in front of the mermaid after he had said all that to her earlier, so he casually stood up and set the stone down on the dresser. "I'll see what I can do about your dehydration situation," he said, trying to sound clever. With that, he opened the door, walked out, and closed the door behind him.
As soon as the door closed, her attitude changed. "What kind of fool does he take me for?," she thought as she began to drag herself towards the dresser. "He is a good liar, I'll give him that. He should have done some more research on mermaids. I've been able to sense the magic of that stone since I got here," she revealed in her thoughts that she had only acted scared when she first saw Jon. She was still unsettled by being in a human's dwelling, though.
"Why did he have to put it up there?," she asked herself out loud once she arrived at the bottom of the dresser. She reached up with her right webbed hand while she desperately tried to push herself off the ground with her left hand. Her caudal fin flopped about frantically as she tried to complete her task before Jon returned. Naturally, such an involuntary action was actually more of a hindrance than a benefit.
