Ava Mer-astronomer

"Ava, stop where you're going," said Thalas, swimming as fast as he could.

"No way, I have *got* to see if this works!" said Ava, breaching the surface, holding a half meter long cylinder. She curled up her tail into a torus, squeezing it into a buoyant structure that she could rest on. She peered into a vast, dark sky, dotted with a hundred thousand tiny pinpricks of light. Many of them were very bright, and she could see the right triangle of bright stars near the zenith. The Moon, a crisp crescent hanging low in the western sky, shone a dim glow onto the water, and lit a few thin wispy clouds to the northeast. Presently, Thalas breached.

"What are you doing up here and with that?" Thalas asked.

"Let me show you," Ava said. She handed Thalas the cylinder, swam about ten meters away, and called out, "look through the small tube on the back, and point the tube at me!" Thalas did so, startled, and looked without the cylinder.

"What is it?" He asked.

"Jann called it a spyglass," said Ava, "but he said it was much bigger than any spyglass he'd ever found."

"Hey Ava," Thalas started, "where uh, where did you find this?"

"A shipwreck," Ava said, "five kilometers from the pit where that fish tried to steal your beads."

"I thought I told you never to go in those things! There could be dryfolk there!"

"Dryfolk die in the water. And I only ever saw dead ones."

"So you stole from dryfolk!" Thalas said.

"Oh who cares, they're dead anyway!" Ava said. "Now give me my spyglass back."

"What are you doing with it all the way up here anyway?" Thalas said.

"I have always wanted to see what the stars and the moon looked like up close!" Ava said, spiraling her tail back up into a floating seat. "Perfect surface today. Barely any waves, clear sky!" She pointed the spyglass up towards the brightest star of the right triangle.

"It's a clearly bluish color. But it just looks like a very bright point here," Ava said. She silently scanned the sky with the spyglass, then spoke, "Woah. You can see so many more stars with this thing."

"What about that one? The bright yellow one?" said Thalas.

"Oh that one? That's one of the weird ones I was telling you about. It keeps moving in a different way from the other stars," Ava said, pointing over to the bright disk. "Woah. That's cool."

"What?"

"It's a circular blob! Huh, look at that. There's four little stars in a little line with it. What a nice coincidence."

"Point it at the Moon," said Thalas. Ava complied.

"Wooaah! You gotta see this Thalas! It's like a volcanic rock! It's covered in holes and pits!"