Title: Charlotte's Return
Fandom: H2O: Just Add Water
Rating: G
Word Count: 400
Notes: For the mustache-twirling villain cliche, inasmuch as that's applicable to a 16 year old girl, and for the Conveniently-Timed Once in X Years cliche found so often in stories with magic. This is a new fandom for me. The ficlet took about half an hour to write.
Summary: Charlotte has a plan for revenge.


The girls thought they had been so clever when they’d tossed her into the moon pool and stolen away her powers. They thought they had solved their problems, as if losing her tail and her abilities to control water would also strip Charlotte of her memory and motivations. They couldn’t keep her away from the pool. She scowled. They hadn’t even tried. More proof that they deserved what she was going to do.

She eased her toes over the rock edge of the pool, careful to not touch the water. Not yet. A glance up at the sky, what little of it peeked through the hole in the cavern’s ceiling, showed only a bare sliver of the moon. Soon, Charlotte thought. Soon, she’d be back on equal footing—to use a wholly inaccurate phrase—with the girls, and she’d be able to exact some payback. For starters, there was the small matter of Lewis.

No, for starters, there was the very big matter of how they had locked her out of her magic and ripped away the most delicious secret she had ever held.

Soon, she would be able to correct that.

She had done her research, meticulously plotting out planetary movements and learning more about star charts than she could have imagined there was to know. She quickly discovered that once-in-every-fifty-years alignments were not that unique, given how many stars and planets existed. All she had to do was bide her time. The wait was the longest six months of her life.

Overhead, the moon was nearly in position. Its full face moved inexorably to fill the hole that was the perfect size to highlight it. The water at her feet started to bubble and she could feel the electric energy of the transformative magic sparking through the room and over her skin. She inched her feet out further, balancing on the lip of rock.

The girls had pushed her in the water and robbed her of her grandmother’s legacy. What they didn’t know was how easily she could get it back. And more.

Losing her mermaid powers had been devastating—until she understood what else the moon pool could do for her.

The moon closed the last second of its arc and locked into place, drawing additional power from the planets and stars configured just so behind it. Charlotte closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and jumped.