In her young form, communicating first among the siblings, with a gentle female voice, though perhaps being born into a male's body made her more quiet. It took many years for all of her family to adjust to each of the young's abilities, from learning to shapeshift, to teleport, and using their magic born of their Cascatan side. They did part, eventually, with Zolu concentrating on a specific beach, one she'd seen in dreams. A pier enshrouded in fog and mist, but with the afternoon sun burning that mist off after a while - a long, long beach front, but narrow... somehow. Until she emerged with feet and hands, she didn't exactly know how long and narrow the Beach was, but it stretched for many miles. It also led somewhere else entirely.

She discovered a building, at first she didn't know what that could be at all, a big squared structure. How odd. But she was on land, and she did know that her form was suitable to build such things. It turned into a slightly different shape as she approached: at first plain off-white with what might have been peeling paint and some amount of broken windows along the top. But as she came near it slowly adjusted itself, as did the surrounding neighborhood street (if you could call it a neighborhood, since the nearest neighbors here would be several miles up the coast, you couldn't count the mall across the way...). A long rectangular structure with its one end facing west bearing a strange arrangement of tiered steps, all glass, and more windows and pleasant looking topiary and plants surrounding the sides, and even the roof.

It was when a bouncy and happy looking humanoid came out from the side doors, not bothering to slip on any sandals even though the pavement of this 'parking lot' was quite hot, that Zolu knew she had found the right place.

"You're finally here! Come on in, the pool's got seawater in it right now, I'm sure that'll do you better than the chlorine freshwater..." It was Kitty, Kaytcha ahlKhat, and this was her home.

"Your... home shapeshifted," Zolu quietly remarked, looking back toward where she'd come, and not seeing any sign of that long stretch of beach nor the pier associated with it. Kitty glanced over the blue-grey woman's shoulder.

"Oh yeah, you did come from that way, you'll get to know the area soon enough."

Soon enough it was, because Zolu, always a quick study, dedicated herself to learning all she could about this place, Twoarth - or was it The End? Or was it just a slice of each? Kitty had a globe in the entry hall of her big home, and it was faintly familiar through half-remembered dreams, too. Twoarth with its double spheres, but this map was special too. Sometimes, the surface of this weird globe would turn a bit transparent, darken or lighten, waver a little, even sometimes sparkle.

"Oh, it tracks the day-night cycle of non-double Earths, and also when we're due for visitors or changes," Kitty 'explained'. Zolu would also learn how to get more information out of the cheerful if slightly distracted cat-morph, within a couple days of living - even if temporarily - with her in this very spacious home. Apparently when Zolu had arrived to the Pier, which was its own whole dimension, the map had lit up with a bit of glimmering and the sound of splashing.

And now it was prompting the feline (the Fel hybrid, she'd remind people who knew, Fel was her mother's breed...) to dress and get ready for her work day at Carramba High.

"Wait, I remember that name," Zolu muttered, "my mother mentioned it. How did she know?"

Chuckling, Kitty's ears perked up with the sound of a strange vehicle just outside. "Oh, Feng's here, time to go, you coming?"

Zolu blinked several times, her finny ears moving around a little, until she nodded. First a little hesitant, then with gusto. Her new life was starting!

That new life led her to first become a student (a 'Senior' since she could pass quite a few of the classes final exams on arrival, but with the needed language and writing, history and local studies also required to catch up to students who'd been going there a while) and then after finally graduating, to work with the local community college system - now one in the same with Carramba, that shift-over happened while she was studying local sea life and going for a degree in aquaculture.

Of course, "aquaculture" wasn't merely 'farming seaweed' here... Since there was an entire ocean full of sentient people in fishy or sealy or octopus form down there! Their cultures intrigued Zolu quite a bit. From the depths out past Crescent City's bay, there was an entire massive ocean, the Pacific which spread across not one but two globes joined somewhere distantly in the middle by a slender strip of islands... the discoverer of which lent his name to the school: Oliver Carramba. In that whole-other-world below the surface, there were normal things: those fish, the plant life, endless carcass-fall feasts, incredibly deep crevaces and almost-surfaced-volcanic islands. This whole ocean could be her playground.

Well, she ... did get a little intimidated at that fact. But for sure, most of the people she discovered while out there, swimming deeply in her birth form, were well aware that there were other creatures on the lands, and most of the cultures of water-breathers could match them in some ways. Zolu was less inclined to go so deep that there wasn't enough light to see, although she could still cast her own magical glow to see it was just... uncomfortable there. Also some things were still simply 'large predators' ... or small ones. Or inadvertent ones in the cases of things that had rested there for billions of years and evolved their own special way.

But up into the lighter surface zones, Zolu actually frolicked with the dolphins, and was joined on a good number of occasions by sea bird folk, humanoids on boats and surfboards (like Kitty's!) who would point out local features, greet the deep dwellers with exchange gifts and art that could only be created under or over the surface.

And that got her thinking. Zolu wasn't specifically 'an artist', but she did have an eye for 'found' art. Driftwood, tide-smoothed volcanic rock, discarded shells, even bones that had survived being nibbled upon in the depths. Sometimes other things would wrap around those items: carelessly thrown rope or balloons from beach-side parties, even pollutants here and there, though what she was told was that the pollution levels had been dramatically dropped after the 'stop throwing your trash in our faces' campaign in the 1950s.

After gaining her 'modest' degree in "Aquaculture of the Eastern Pacific 'Skinside' Range" she then took a summer to dedicate to a teaching credential. Her beach side friends, all people that Kitty had introduced her to of course, had been encouraging her to jump on the roster at their alma mater for the entire time she'd been there after all. So now, before the start of the 2024 school season, she nervously petitioned for classes. On two feet, she wasn't wobbly but she did fidget, while the Admin was busy looking through papers and getting approval stamps ready.

By the time students were looking over their new course loads, Zolu was setting in at the Dome. Having access so easily to the sea as well as the school meant that she hardly needed to actually exit the ocean, but did so in order to instruct her crafting sessions as well as for the benefit of those who could not speak an aquatic tongue. The fact that she would start and end the day by helping kids who brought in random pieces of driftwood or shells and the like, was a nice frame to each day, and the middle occupied by studies of the cultures of the seas.

This went on for a time, not more than a couple years actually, before she noticed a pair of yellow eyes glinting and nestled among the coral and stone pillars of the pier nearby (not the same Pier, just a pier at a beach by Crescent's shore). She knew they were eyes and not just someone's drone camera because they blinked.

In a moment, they were gone, though. But she could sense where to go, where he'd been. He? Yes, she was sure of it. He was fast, but not sure enough in this area to speedily get around all the various coral and stones, and wound up bumping into a depth float attached to someone's science class experiment.

"Aha, found you!" Zolu chittered in her father's aquatic tongue. "Who are you?"

He was surprised, apparently, but too much so to bolt away again. His beautiful fins and flukes drifted carefully to a halt, as much as a halt can be when the tide was coming in anyway. He replied with a mental nudge, his voice shiny and glittering like the first stars in the evening sky. I am Cruzasi, I have watched you, you are kind and generous, I like that. I like this place, though I don't think I want to go visiting your classroom...

She felt a deeper connection, not just a friendly blip of mind-to-mind contact. "Are... you my bond?"

I suppose I am, are you mine? His mind seemed to wink, and he slipped away again into the tide-pulled kelp fronds.

***

They were mainly found in the Kaminoan Dome, of course, because Cruzasi was not a shapeshifter and didn't have the stamina to gallumph all the way from the bay to the school campus inland. The willowy voices of the two Kaminoans contrasted with the excited tones of other genetic engineers, as they looked over the complicated DNA of Zolu, and how there were plentiful similarities to the long and fancy-finned Cruzasi.

"So you both give your permission," Melissa asked, holding a datapad in her hands and her yellow eyes looking a little too eager.

Zolu spoke for them both, "we give our permission to use our samples for this purpose," she nodded and Cruzasi, barely above the water in the circular pool, nodded as well. He was obviously not as comfortable with the spotlight on them, but he knew that this was important. They'd taken many odd cell samples, fin material, skin, blood, even brain stem liquid and thorough scans of their reproductive systems.

This was something that this group of scientists - and their young interns - were obviously hoping to do for quite a while. And, for others. Though time passed oddly in this dimension, the dragon couple as well as anyone else that was involved with this current project knew that there was a directed purpose, a moment lost in time, that needed as many potentially sea-worthy caretakers as possible. And while Zolu had come to the Kaminoans herself not long before, for the more private consultation, word apparently gets around quickly among the instructors. She'd spotted several swimmers, and other shifters, some quite spectacular.

I am spectacular, and you are impressive! We will have beautiful children, Cruzasi bespoke and plipped back under the water to leave the Dome to the more private, vast, ocean just outside the hatch. But he still left the impression that he trusted these humanoids to this task.

Eventually there would be a batch of artificially created eggs, far more than the Cascatan breed would have live-born, but they were all in stasis 'until needed', they said. Whatever trigger that might be, whenever that would happen, they were both assured, "you'll have all the opportunity in the world to raise each one if you wish, or let them grow in the tubes and have implanted skills, or anything else between," it was Melissa that informed them of how this could work. She'd done so with her own young, on ... quite a few occasions - humans didn't have eggs to lay, but they did have a dangerous life where she was from, so stasis tubes and computer-aided skill downloads as well as the fact that most of her people were resoundingly strong in psionic abilities. Birthing children was both dangerous and difficult, but keeping them around for their later life 'after the world was better', Melissa seemed remarkably proud of that fact.

So they chose to let the eggs slowly mature, and would break one or two at a time, to be raised 'outside' of time and space, in some instances, and in others Zolu brought little watery strollers to her classes, and artificially aged others after they were old enough to have a childhood. Most of these offspring would then be... well, released into the wild, brought back to CHS, and sent to distant realms with dragons, befriended or sponsored or even bonded in the end.

.