Mara's consciousness started floating back, little by little. One of the first things she noticed was that she was still alive. Her moment of happiness at this realization was interrupted quite rudely by the sudden sensation of aching and pain that seemed to fill her entire body from the top of her head to the tip of her tail. She made a pained little moaning sound and tried to shift her position but was rendered immobile by the fishing net that was wrapped tightly around her and pinned down by her back. Once the pain and soreness hit she felt her self waking up and becoming more in tune with her surroundings, but she still couldn't force her eyes to open. Not yet.

She could hear the sounds of waves crashing, seagulls cawing and flapping their wings, and the morning breeze. Mara could feel the breeze on her wet skin, as well, and she shivered, noting the feeling of the sand hard against her back. So...she was on the shore. On the island? Maybe. But the storm had been strong, one of the strongest she'd ever seen and probably one of the worst to caught in the middle of. She could have ended washing ashore on any beach in the world for all she knew. She probably should have been a battered corpse by now, and dissolving into sea foam. Never to be found. 

But Mara wasn't dissolving into sea foam. She was alive. Wonderfully and miraculously alive. She wanted to smile and scream out in victory. But she couldn't. One reason being she was still massively exhausted, the second reason being that she was too sore to even think about moving, and thirdly because she was still tangled up in this horrible net. Oh and she was on a beach somewhere. On land. Maybe even with humans. What if they found her? Killed her? Or put her in something Great-Grandfather called a tank where she would have watch humans through a glass surface as they paid money to oggle and stare at her. She wasn't out of the choppy water yet.

But it hurt too much to think about it right now. And she was still half asleep. Mara knew that she needed to find a way out of the net and back into the ocean, but her body refused to wake up all the way just yet. So she laid there on the shore for...must have been hours but maybe it was only minutes, and she couldn't tell when she was dreaming or not. She thought she heard a voice. A female voice speaking right beside her. It sounded hazy to her half unconscious ears, and Mara thought that it must have been a dream. Until she felt cold sea water splashing on her face.

Consciousness crashed through her instantly and Mara began raggedly coughing up whatever seawater was still in her throat from the previous night. Her body attempted to shift against the confines of the net, and her arms and torso and tale ached as she did so. She finally stopped coughing after a few moments and breathed deeply, though shakily as well. Her large, dark brown eyes finally flickered open, and Mara blinked back to shock of morning sunlight a few times before she was able to keep her eyes open. She was looking up at a blue sky and the concerned face of a human girl. After a brief moment of surprise Mara let out a startled gasp as her flight instincts kicked in. Well...at least they tried, and she wound up struggling against the net, wriggling painfully and futilely.