♛ HELL'S AQUARIUM.

If evil were a lesser breed, then justice after all these years, the righteous would have freed the world of sin. The house wins. Oh, the house always wins.

ROYALREEF; an indie, selective mermaid OC. complete with original worldbuilding, lore, and setting. mutuals and 18+ only. advised by [REDACTED].

rules + about. mobile friendly.

Anonymous questions - Accepting

Anonymous questions - Accepting

Claws scritch idly at the underside of her neck, double thumbs curled around the other side of the large musculature that runs down the middle, parallel with her spine. The motion makes the entire structure jiggle slightly, held up as it is by mostly relaxed muscle and flesh, pulled back down to earth by their own weight that hangs itself off the column of her long body.

"Well, we can all hope, can we not?" Is this dismissive? Certainly, but which truth is she supposed to be referring to? She keeps forgetting herself, and it hardly seems to matter, so long as she keeps her story in a largely digestible form.

No one even wants the truth, anyways. It's useless, hardly even worth selling to the highest bidder. Sure, people try to get it, poke and prod at her, determined that if only they do so with enough determination they can uncover a form of the truth that they can return back to their winter stores with, proclaim to everyone that they have found it, the truth and the whole truth. Everyone thinks she has some hidden truth, all tucked away inside her, coiled up like a snail inside its iron shell and they merely need a harder and harder drill with which to fetch her gooey innards from within, that it might harm her, or save her, or set her free, or some version of all three because they were never all that different in the first place.

But that thinking they want it, their own conviction, is a different thing from actually wanting it. They never come satisfied with whatever is, or was, or might have been, the truth, once upon the time. It is an awkward, gangly, nasty thing, a thing which you wipe from your claws the first excuse you get and pretend that this entire ordeal never happened. You hide the truth away not because it is valuable, but because it is worthless, because it is an ugly thing best kept out of sight and thrown out at first opportunity.

Maybe there are some truths that she could use others to arrive at. Truths that are more useful, better, have been made better and more useful and which would make her life easier. Certainly it would be easier if they realized that the truth of truth was what it was, that she could engage with them in the way that she was meant to be engaged with, a purpose given form and shape and bidding to construct the material world in accordance.

But what good was the truth, when so much about her was an absence, a truth only of void, of nullification? What good was realizing that she wasn't a person, but indeed, only that shaped tool, an incarnate means to the ends? Why focus on it at all, the vacant space around the knife that had been whet, and not the knife itself?

(( Imagine, if you will, Miranda clamoring out of water for the first time in her life, being confronted with gravity and just how heavy her own body was, and not only that, but also no longer being able to feel anything beyond her own suit of innate armor that abruptly became a hard, stiff layer between her and the world. The lateral line let her feel the finest little movements in the currents around her entire body, the slightest shifts of things that she was merely near to, not even close to touching, and was a necessary part of her navigating around, not bumping into other people, or the furniture, or walls.

(( It's always more of a theoretical thing due to Miranda's whole deal and the political/worldwide situation at hand — but I love the thought of merfolk pups and other muses ever getting to interact with or just see one.

It's always a little strange! To realize that merfolk start out fully precocial, just tiny versions of the adults with some proportions altered, but to realize that they're basically nonsocial. Merfolk pups are only ever bonded with their birth miivt'ia, and that's strictly in the context of "this is something that provides me protection and food, not something that I am emotionally attached to nor particularly view as people". They start forming little feral groups of children and speaking before they ever really pick up on the social habit, so they tend to come off as exceedingly strange, fully people in the way that you would expect a child to be, but without all those same markers of childishness or innocence that often surrounds human children. Their parents, which consists of the entire miivt'ia, are all closer to the pup than the pup is to them. They have best friends, but it's in the same way they might have favorite toys. It's a weird setup for someone to look in on as an outsider.

𝙍𝘼𝙄𝙉 - melancholy at best , introspective , severely misunderstood , pleasure in the subdued , helping in your own way , dreams in poetry , the slowness of falling asleep , refreshing meditation.

𝙎𝙐𝙉 - sunbleached clothes , futures that are too bright , everything at arm’s length , balancing intensity , blind encouragement , comfort of sleep , distracting sunspots in your vision , necessity of growth.

𝙎𝙏𝙊𝙍𝙈 - chaos with a purpose , emotions running high , natural comfortable anarchy , high volume , leaving your mark , brief flashes of violence , rambling quickly , the intensity of desire.

𝙒𝙄𝙉𝘿 - running towards instead of away , instinctive motivation , making an impact , knows everyone who knows anyone , playful pranks , mood swings in a split second , collecting old trinkets , uncontrollable focus.