Once upon a time, a man who loved water parks hooked up with a mermaid in a wave pool.
Nine months later, she turned up at his door with a baby girl. He inquired, as politely as he could in his mostly shocked and somewhat suspicious state, but neither the mermaid nor the baby could provide a particularly helpful answer.
Left alone with the mermaid’s baby, the man did the only thing he could think of: he built a cottage to keep her in, and on top of it built a great plastic structure with water streaming down it. When the neighborhood kids begged to have a ride on it, he realized that the thing he had built to keep his daughter safe was, in fact, a water slide. And an excellent one, at that.
For years, the neighborhood children annoyed him. They always wanted to ride on the waterslide, or see the waterslide, or throw someone bothersome down the waterslide. But that was nothing, he realized later, compared to what they annoyed him about later.
You see, his daughter had grown to be very pretty indeed, and though she only rarely went out, she attracted more male attention than her father was comfortable with. Finally, he was forced to deal with the situation in the most logical way he could think of: he declared that no boy could date his daughter unless he managed to climb to the top of the water slide while the water was on.
For a while, the arrangement worked out quite nicely: any number of intrepid suitors declared at the foot of the slide how they intended to brave the slide and capture the heart of the girl, and then inevitably plunged to the ground after only a few steps.
It was a very good slide.
However, eventually, the thing he feared most happened: his daughter favored one of the young men, and arranged, behind her father’s back, to help him make his way up the water slide.
She reached out for his hand at the appointed time and place, and he very nearly made it. But when he finally managed to grab her hand, he slipped in the water and flew down the slide, dragging the girl with him. At some point, their hands broke apart, and she gained so much momentum that she flew into the air, over the water park and into the wave pool, where she disappeared in a giant gurgle.
Her father was none too pleased with the suitor who had done her in, however unintentionally.
Meanwhile, the girl sank further and deeper into the wave pool than she would have thought possible, and when she finally hit the bottom, she found herself face to face with an old man who seemed to have scales and the body of an octopus.
“Welcome home,” the creature said, and grinned.
The End. For now…
Source: Old Rinkrank, Brothers Grimm
