Gone Fishin'

Parish smiles broadly as Gertrude takes the lure's box and is determined to go fishing.
He gives a blink to Monday.

"Ahhh and now relax... and fish... " he says to himself

Parish closes his eyes again as he moves his lure in the pond
trying to convince a fish (or any other thing) that it is tasty"Ohhh what did I get here! Hello little friend! How are you? I believe we have met before. I am happy to see you are fine and growing.
Now come come, I will return you to your pond.
See you another day! "

"Nothing like a good cup of ... tea to reinvigorate you," Sherry says. She sets her cup down on the ground beside her and then readies her rod. A quick cast, then she sits back to wait.In short order, Sherry pulls out the same 3-eyed fish Parish just put back.

"I think maybe this fish wants to be eaten," Sherry says to Parish. She gets the fish off the hook and looks it in its three eyes. "You should have swam away when you had the chance." Something stirs inside Sherry, and she starts to squeeze the fish in her hand. She slowly increases the pressure until the fish's three eyes start to bug out. What sounds like a hiss escapes her mouth. "You do want to be eaten, don't you?"

As the fish looks like it might burst, Sherry relaxes her grip. She looks around to see who might have been paying attention. She relaxes back into her seat. "I guess you're too small to be even a satisfactory snack. Back you go then." With a flick of her wrist, Sherry tosses the fish unceremoniously across the water and it drops into the pond with a plop.

Sherry sighs and readies her pole again.

"See?" Monday continues. "With just a simple flick of the wrist, anyone can catch a..." Then she looks at what's been caught and a sense of dread comes over her. Don't panic, Monday, you can fix this! She hears her inner-self say.Using her other hand, she snaps her fingers behind her back and transforms the toilet seat she had just dragged up from the depths into a toilet seat fish. Hopefully nobody noticed that!

With an internal sigh of relief she guides the fish into the cooler. "It's that easy." She tells everyone with a lovely smile to keep up appearances.

Even though it didn't really go as planned, she's happy to see that Gertrude heads to fishing box. Looks like she has taken the bait.

Sal bursts into laughter as Monday hauls up the toilet seat fish. "Nice one, Monday! Man, this place is wacky!"

He kicks back again, watching the others continue to cast their lines and pull up weird stuff. He's already got his catch for the day, so he's content to just laze about. It's one of his favorite past times, after all!

---

Parish approaches to observe Monday's catch

"For Yazeba's deep brows... what is that creature you got from the pond? I have come here many many days and never saw something of that type before... " he tries to touch the fish with one finger

"Are you going to... eat it? It might be a unique creature... mythical! The last of its species... It looks, unique! I have necer seen a fish with such a hole in the middle...

I once found a fish that was full of colours... its scales where each of one colour and they were shiny under the light of the sun... You could have spent hours just trying to name all the colours. And what was more intriguing is that it had the shape of a Zeta. I put it in a bucket and spend some hours watching it... I can still remember, it was yellow, red, orange, purple, cyan, magenta, olive, brown, black...

Parish keeps muttering colours names, each one a little bit quieter as the one before, with the eyes closed as he tries to remember how that beautiful fish looked like and all the different colours of its scales...

Monday realizes that Parish is asking way too many questions about her catch. If they keep giving their attention to the toilet fish, they might see through the ruse. I'll need to distract him somehow. She thinks as she comes up with a plan. The clear course of action here is to go on the offensive and deny everything!

"Oh I see what you're saying Parish." She says with a cheerful attitude and sarcastic undertone "What a wonderful fish. Monday could not possibly have caught that without cheating." She puts on her merchant's charm for this one. "Well, I'll have you know that I recently got a great deal on exotic fish and I needed somewhere to keep them. So I put them here for now until I find a buyer."

She walks over to the fish and picks it up. "But, if you're not interested in buying it, I suppose I'll just throw it back." Without waiting for an answer she simply throws the toilet seat back into the water. It swims off sideways, confused about it's new life.

All these lies are starting to stack up and somewhere deep down Monday feels bad about doing this to her fellow residents. But... not quite bad enough to not do it. At least she managed to get rid of the evidence!

"Heck, yeah! Nice catch, Gert!" Sal calls out. "That one's a keeper!" He fills up an empty jar with water from the fishing hole and offers it to Gertrude so she can put the goldfish within.

---