#mer!cullen

So merpeople don’t communicate with each other the same way they do with humans, mostly because words get lost and muddled too much underwater. It’s mostly these clicks and sort of grating sounds that sound really harsh above water. But Culle forgets this sometimes and the first time it happened when he tried talking to Dorian, Dorian honest to goodness thought that something was stuck in Cullen’s windpipe and that he was going to choke.

for real, the process of getting Cullen back to open seas is probably a process made much more long and difficult than it needed to be simply because of the fact that Cullen is very heavy, and his tail is longer than a human’s legs would be, and there aren’t a whole lot of options for this aside from having two or three people working together to carry something that is definitely not a fish man, thank you, down to the shore. 

So i had an idea based of another idea i saw in a mer au, which was basically that yes they're chubby, because they have to say warm in the ocean, but they also have a lot of muscle because they swim near constantly. And assuming shapeshifting was possible (which i'm still debating), the muscles in their tail have to go somewhere, shit doesn't just disappear, just gets rearranged. So basically they have great legs. And so cue Cassandra, and woe betide anyone that pisses her off enough because it might take a bit for her to get used to the shift but once she has she can kick someone like a while week into the future.

Their first conversation after concluding that neither of them were a threat to the other goes something along the lines of this: "I've met with humans before, among other land dwellers," Cullen says. "Some were kind, some weren't." After a moment of careful consideration, he adds, "You seem to be a decent sort." Dorian responds entirely out of reflex: "On top of being the dashing charming sort? Unless, don't tell me, you've met a human more dashing than I." "Er, no," Cullen replies, quite honestly, too. "I don't think I have." And then Cullen proceeds to take a very keen interest in his own scales, because he walked right into that one - or swam into it, as it were. Dorian, sitting on a rock about fifteen feet from the water, takes pride in being able to hold up his usual confidence in the face of the first merman he ever met.