Not me thinking about a merpeople plot for my favorite boys. One with a Selkie Shang Qinghua with his cute fuzzy and chubby body of a harp seal that never fully grew out of his white baby fur/coloring because he rarely stays in his mer form long enough and has long ago learned to adapt to blending in with humans because life is dangerous for his kind from what he understands of ocean politics, and selkies are nearly extinct because they are not trusted by human or mer for having one fin in the water and one foot on land. Due to most of their kind having died during a war between mer and human where their people tried to mediate and were cut down by both men and mer, (which was how he ended up washed up on land as a child during a bloody confrontation)
Shang Qinghua had long ago chosen to hide his fur and live as a human. After much struggle to adapt to land, he eventually became the accountant in charge of an entire ship and crew’s documents and money as well as keeps rigorous track of cargo and who comes and goes as well as scheduling. It’s tiring work, but it pays well and allows him to stay close to the ocean, while not risking going in it and being murdered like many of his people were before he assimilated to human life. And what human would expect a Selkie to join a military ship. He keeps his fur securely locked away so no one will ever know, and those who see it assume he hunted it and that it was a normal seal fur.
Of course, life can’t be too easy, and when there is an aquatic attack and the captain of the ship is dragged under water by a terrifying mer that looks suspiciously like the young first mate that fell overboard during a pirate attack/vicious storm several years back. The ship is damaged and Shang Qinghua decides to make a run for it and hopefully escape to live another day. Between freezing to death in the arctic waters as a human, and risking the wrath of the mer if they catch him, he decides he may be able to be pitiful enough to beg for their mercy.
Of course, he was not prepared to slip off the back of the ship with his fur where nobody is looking at the moment, only to land in the water directly in front of a HUGE, hulking, terrifyingly vicious looking killer whale mer. With long sharp claws and rows of deadly teeth, the body parts of crew members that had attempted to escape floating in the water shrouded in a mist of blood and gore.
Seal vs Orca. He knows how that will end.
Meanwhile Mobei Jun sees a thought to be extinct arctic Selkie drop off a ship and right in front of him. Small. Adorable. Eyes wide and terrified. Fur white, though it looks pink because of the mist of blood in the water. It’s probably so scared because it was kept by those disgusting humans. Perhaps they were keeping it to sell it, or kill if for its fur, or something equally terrible for a creature long thought lost and were highly regarded by the arctic mer, even if the regular selkies were not by the rest of the seas.
And it tries to swim away. The poor, adorable, addled creature. It’s clearly confused and in shock.
