"Please save my daughter, Director Bright!"
A merman and mermaid stood with red, swollen eyes, their faces completely smeared with tears and mucus.
"Our child too, Director Bright! They must have been taken by humans!"
Several other pairs of parents were in the room, both merfolk and fish-men.
But they all shared the same expression of grief. The calmer ones wept until their bodies trembled, while the more emotional ones had already fainted several times.
Bright's expression was grim.
While handling official business in his office, he had suddenly received this terrible news.
Four young mermaids had gone missing.
After they failed to return home overnight, their terrified parents had come to the Immigration Bureau for help.
The oldest of the missing mermaids was probably only a little older than Nana, while the youngest was just six, the same age as Shirahoshi. They were children who knew nothing of the world. There was no way they would stay out all night; something had to have happened.
Their parents thought so, and Bright thought so too.
So Bright immediately sealed off all of Fish-Man Island, and the soldiers began screening every foreign merchant.
As for Bright himself, he came to speak with the parents and ask about the missing mermaids. Perhaps he could find some useful clue.
Only after questioning them did he learn that these families all knew one another, and the four children often went out to play together. At first, when they discovered the girls had not returned overnight, the parents had not thought much of it, assuming they had stayed over at one another's homes.
It was not until they met today that they realized the children had gone nowhere. They had vanished.
"My daughter has always been very well-behaved,"
a mermaid mother sobbed. "She always comes