XD;;; Well, your ideas are great, the problem is that she doesn't have gills. She has slightly bigger lungs and they're a lot more efficient at extracting and using the oxygen (like 90% instead of our current 30%), but she still has to resurface every fifteen minutes (provided she doesn't make any violent effort). Actually in matters of genetics, she could technically have a child with a totally normal human, and the child would live. (granted there's a very high risk he'd be deformed and stuff.)

Also she's just not going to stay with either krish and arun or the pirates very long in the grand scheme of things -- there is no time for her to be listless and nose-drippy. That's why I'm so hesitant about a sickness plot -- i'm just not sure it wouldn't totally mess up the timeline I have in mind.

I wonder if it's possible that the scientists's society has developed something that would kill any dormant, carried but not expressed, or leftover viruses/sicknesses/whatever in someone before letting them go on trips to new planets with unknown flora and fauna... Would it cause problems for their own bodies? Would they lose the ability to make antibodies for it? I just don't know enough to have a clear idea. x__x but if i could do something like that then they wouldn't worry about the merpeople catching something from them. Hrrm. I don't know. ~__~

... RESEARCH TIME!