#There also appears to be a way to make the land pup into a merpup spell permanent | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

find-your-rp-partner · 7 years

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PLEASE PLAY MERFOLK WITH ME :) >>>><

SETTING:

The world is mostly sea. Humans live on island chains far apart in the northern and southern hemispheres of the planet, and share their world with the people of the ocean. How they relate to each other largely depends on which area they’re in.

B.U (Before Unity) Setting - NORTH - In the cold north, the islands tend to be small, and most food comes from the sea. This, combined with the harsh weather, makes for tough, pragmatic humans, who tend to class anything moving out of the ocean as ‘fish’ and therefore edible, regardless of sentience.

The merfolk do not appreciate this, and tend to try and return the favour, although since they generally don’t like the taste of land-mammal unless there is little else to eat, they usually just drown them and leave them for the scavengers. In overfished areas, merfolk can resort to cannibalism and maneating, with the latter much more preferable than the former.

Coldwater merfolk use stone weapons and tools, and are literate in their own language – usually carving on stone or soft tablets made by mixing fish oil and sand. Few ever bother to try and learn any human language – they’re too busy ripping nets or overturning boats to get to crying merpups.

Northern mer give birth to one or two young each, and the whole pod will care for them for years until full adulthood, providing food and teaching life skills like hunting, weapon and tool construction and use.

They tend to be largely cetacean or shark-like in design, and their skin always matches from tail to nose. At their most showy they have barbed fins and glittering silver scales. They often wear belts with pouches and scabbards, and they can change genders depending on the population demand.

There are a couple of islands where the merfolk and the humans work together, but it’s a grim, wary allegiance. Any human that falls overboard and any mer that gets caught in the nets will still be killed if they can’t save themselves fast enough.

There are soft-hearted humans up here, of course, mostly scientists and conservationists. But captured northern mer in tanks, especially adults, tend to try and kill themselves or escape rather than stay in captivity, even when badly injured. Few humans from this end of the world know enough northern mermish to explain themselves.

Some northern mer have magic, mostly restricted to vague precognition and charms to call prey, but it’s largely up to the shamans of any given pod (usually a group of between six and twenty individuals, adults, adolescents, and young) to do the more impressive stuff. It’s usually their fault when sailors jump ship to drown themselves or a room full of marine zoologists, having captured one, go crazy and murder each other.

They tend to attribute their talents to their 'father’, Leviathan. No one knows if he actually exists or once did some time ago before the humans, but the merfolk say that he sleeps at the bottom of the ocean, guarded by the strangest and most monstrous of their kin, the deep-downers, the anglerfish and the gulper eels and the goblin shark-type mer.

The men of the north treat the mer of the north as terrifying creatures no more knowable than a hurricane or a tidal wave, but the merfolk of the bays and the relatively shallow coastal waters say much the same about deep-downers. They’re considered much the same as demons and bad spirits in human culture, alien and vicious, always hungry and a very good reason not to go into open water at night. Some of them follow their prey up in the darkness, and anything at all is food.

Mer that will fearlessly kill or drown humans without care for bullet or harpoon are stark-terrified of deep-downers, almost superstitiously so.

SOUTH – In the south, where both the water and the weather is warm and some of the islands are large enough to easily support crops and livestock, the relationship between the children of the land and the sea is very different. The behaviour of the seadwellers themselves is very different, as is their appearance.

For as long as anyone can remember in these regions, islander humans and merfolk of the reef and tropical shallows are usually friendly to each other. On some islands, it’s considered very lucky to have a lifelong friendship between a human and a mer, so often about once a year at the first spring tide, newly weaned merpups and human toddlers will be gently introduced by their parents in the shallows of the beach.

Nearly everyone is bilingual, and while southern mer have lost much of the need for their own writings, a lot of them can read land-basic due to having been taught by their humans.

It’s useful to have a friend who’ll save you if a storm washes you up high and dry on the land, or will keep you from drowning if a riptide carries you away. Human medicine is also more advanced than mermish, and it’s much easier to keep a southern mer in a tank if he knows you can get him well again.

Merfolk and humans often trade with each other – some types of southern mer have gained a taste for land-meat, so will happily swap a few legs of lamb for a string of still-struggling reef fish, and humans usually come to them if they need pearls or coral or large shells for jewellery.

As a result, southern mer actually have better weapons and knowledge of human intelligence and behaviour, although much less motivation to use it against them. Occasionally a heartbroken mer might drown their human friend for having chosen the land too much over the sea, but this is treated as a tragedy for both parties, and a symptom of insanity.

Such incidents don’t really happen more than once a generation, and are usually told as cautionary tales by the parents of both species. Merfolk have the same legal rights as men, and crimes against/by them are treated the same way as with humans.

Mer/human sexual relationships are not taboo, but since these mer can’t shapeshift except in extraordinary circumstances and are as unsuited for long periods on the land as whales and dolphins, as well as the fact that they’re simply not genetically compatible enough for hybridization, serious partnerships are not recommended. Usually it begins and ends with teenage experimentation, and anything more than that is highly unusual.

Jealousy of your best friend’s new mate/girlfriend/boyfriend is not uncommon, but acting on it without good reason is VERY frowned upon.

In appearance, southern mer are much more brightly coloured and more piscine than their northern or open-ocean kin, and tend to follow similar shapes and patterns to the reef fish and other species common to the areas they live in. Sirenia (dugong and manatee) and seahorse mer can be found on seagrass plains and near coastal mangrove forests, while cetacean mer, usually limited to dolphin and porpoise types in warm waters, can be found in slightly deeper water.

They’re more careless and happy-go-lucky on the whole, too. While northern mer stick close together in pods, the only time you’re likely to see more than one southerner, outside festival season, is if they’re a small family group – a mother and young, or a mated pair. Southerners don’t mate for life, although they can stay together for several years at a time.

Pups are usually born in twos or threes, and cared for by the mother or both parents, depending on the father’s personal temperament. A pregnant female mer or a particularly hungry adult or preadult of either gender may hunt and eat pups that aren’t theirs, not to mention the usual predators like sharks and toothed whales, so any lost children are advised to stay in the shallowest water they can and wait for an adult they recognise, whether they’re merfolk or human.

There is evidence that southern mer were once much more advanced even than their northern relatives – ruined cities and towers underwater, filled with carvings and frescos, old weapons handed down through matrilineal lines that are far more advanced than their age belies.

But whatever happened, southerners lost that, and only humans who study ancient merscript have any interest in the distant past. The brightly coloured denizens of the shallow water are very much people of the present; a common mermish saying translates as 'If you keep looking at the past, you’ll hurt yourself backing into the future’ – aka, it doesn’t do to dwell on things that happened long ago.

Most southern coastal mer are just as scared of open-ocean mer as they are of deep-downers, but since the latter are much more rarely seen than in the north (aka, about once a century) and southerners don’t write things down, they’re considered wraiths, bad dreams and boogeymen of fiction to scare pups with.

P.U (Post-Unity) Setting:

Set several decades at least after the above setting, during which a group of southern humans travelled north and worked with the scientists and conservationists there to bring a mutual end to the conflict between merfolk and men. It’s not perfect, but now that the northerners have accepted imported food from the south, it’s illegal to hunt and kill any mer.

The adults of either species are not yet at the point where they’ve forgotten the sins and horrors of the past, but the younger generation are definitely embracing the change and generally eager to learn about each other and make friends.

Northern mer, particularly those already interested in writing and carving, tend to be fascinated by the ruins in the south, and while they can’t physically survive in water that warm, waterproofed photographs and transcriptions cross-referenced with existing shamanistic knowledge is already shedding light on the distant past.

Some northern humans, particularly younger ones, move south altogether and often suffer culture shock and guilt with how vastly differently merfolk and menfolk treat each other down there.

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SO IF YOU'VE MADE IT THROUGH ALL THAT, WELCOME!

Hiya, my name's Mal and I'm a transgender dude living in the UK. (That's GMT time, folks.) I've been desperate for someone to look at and like this setting of mine as of late - it's an old one, I've had it going years, and I'm aching to find someone interested in thinking up some plots with me! Some classics I enjoy -

- Pre-Unity, a northern human and a northern mer are washed up and isolated on a tiny island and have to work together if they are to survive. (Favourite themes - language barriers, uncanny valley, alien POV, and foes to friends.)

- Post Unity, a northern teenage human and an adolescent mer start to make friends among all the mistrust and hatred left over from the decades of war and abuse.

- A southern inlander or a northern traveller come to a southern island in time for the Spring Festival (when young merpups are matched with human toddlers) and learn a lot about different cultures and lives.

- Or hell, just a beach bum and a southern mer making friends, that could be fun as well XDD

I know a lot of people are interested in the ruins and I am too, don't worry, but that one's a bit overplayed for me at the moment so I want to just let it lie. Oh, and to be clear about the non-human merfolk I like best, here are my notes for their natural history :3

If any of that remotely interested you, please drop me a line on:

My skype: lilacsofthedead (please tell me where and why you found my handle; I have issues with spambots and don't add automatically.)

Or my email: [email protected]

I RP best via gdocs (ideal) or email, but I LOVE talking to people over IM. Please please please come and chat to me, even if you're not overly interested in actually RPing this setting and just want to hear more about it :D

Good Hunting!

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fyrapartnersearch · 7 years