Do mermaids exist in tpof?
There's exactly one "Classic" Mermaid. A pregnant woman on the west coast of Ireland was afflicted by a curse where she'd give birth to a Lingcod instead of a human baby, but since she was carrying twins, the curse was split between them. One sister has a human head, chest and abdomen, and from her pelvic girdle on she has the powerful and beautiful tail of a Blue Lingcod. She's the current record holder for long-distance swimming, starred in several movies and holds multiple modelling contracts- but she's always been notably jealous of her sister, who has the head and chest of a Lingcod but the pelvis and legs of a human and (the source of her sister's ire) a devoted husband.
There's a few things that European sailors could have mistaken for human women while they were on long voyages, dying of syphilis and scurvy too- Dugong and Dolphins both exist in great numbers in TPOFATGIF, along with some very large Mimic Octopodes. But the most likely, or at least, most startling candidate is a creature only described in 1996- Ziphiius andersoni, or "Anderson's Beaked Whale", after the first ...semi-credible witness.
Ziphidae is a family of deep-diving whales whales known almost entirely by beached corpses, and Z. andersoni holds the peculiar title of the most and least seen member of the family. No body has ever been found to examine, but the animal is (apparently) the subject of many amateur sightings.
Like most Beaked Whales, Z. andersoni is about 13 feet long, and shaped like an extremely hydrodynamic sweet potato- a sharply tapered head, tubular body with small pectoral fins and a minimal dorsal fin, and an similarly sharply tapered tail with small fins, and a mouth with only two teeth- a pair of overdeveloped lower canine teeth that form a pair of tusks. Unlike most marine life, Z. andersoni has reverse Cryptic camouflage- where most marine animals are darkly colored on the dorsal side and pale beneath to hide from predators in the open water, Z. andersoni has a large, bright white pattern on it's back that starts at the head and runs the length of it's spine and across the tail fin, and includes both pectoral and pelvic saddle patches. between the whale's darkened and unusually anterior blowholes and the gloom of the twilight waters they inhabit, Z. andersoni's peculiar markings bear a STARTLING resemblance to a human woman with a piscene tail.
The species is named after the famed Fairy Tale Author, Hans Christen Anderson, who in 1835 saw what he described as a "Mermaid" swimming near the surface of the North Sea coast near Hanstholm, Denmark, when out in a rowboat with a cousin on a summer holiday. The Mermaid was "Ghostly pale, with large, dark eyes that stared up at us as she passed. She circled the boat thrice, seemingly regarding us with sadness, before she vanished into a cloud of sea-foam and we could not find her again." This encounter inspired him to write The Little Mermaid the following year. Despite his and his cousin's insistence that the event took place exactly as described, it was largely written off by the general public, and Anderson was discouraged from sharing it by his publisher.
In 1996, a family had a similar experience while Kayaking, save that this time the encounter took place in the sunny clear waters off Baja, Nihofornia, and the family had a video camera. A juvenile Z. andersoni approached them, circled the family a few times and even hung out under them for almost 12 minutes. This video proof sparked international interest, with dozens of other pictures, videos and oral accounts coming forward about encounters with these strangely friendly yet elusive creatures.
Most Recently, an exceptional individual, thought to be an old bull from it's size (i and scarring was seen following underwater welders as they repaired an underwater naval installation, picking off the curious squid that came to investigate the lights. The Naval Engineers have nicknamed the animal "The Duke", short for "Ducolax" on account of one of the engineers realizing there was 16-foot long, multi-ton carnivore floating just over his shoulder and (understandably) shitting himself.
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The Egyptian God Thoth admiring the ass of a man stuck in a hole in a wall.
More fan art for “The Power Of Friendship (And This Gun I Found)” because what else could something like this possibly be from?
This is the same man being discussed in this picture:
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The General
Another from my small army of OCs! Kasumi Maru!
Jedi Knight, General for the Republic, and the literal definition of the phrase “I’m gonna kill you with the power of friendship…And this gun I found!”
She’s very calm, collected, easily approachable when it comes to her fellow Jedi/clone troopers and very intimidating to others (she’s 6’4” and is usually holding a lightsaber rifle), compassionate, yet also pragmatic.
During one battle in the Outer Rim, her and her troops uncovered an abandoned Jedi Outpost that was used in the High Republic Era, and she unearthed a prototype lightsaber rifle (similar to the one from the Jedi Archives on Coruscant) and decided she would use this new weapon to help the Republic war effort.
[Artwork done by Birdy Raider on IG]
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Okay, so @gallusrostromegalus has a great Yugioh fic, (which I am reading despite that not even being a franchise I've consumed, it's that incredible) called "The Power of Friendship and This Gun I Found!"
In it, Anubis speculates that Téa would have a mystery cult if she'd lived in ancient Egypt, and later Téa goes on a rant about how fear is a gift, and how it's intoxicating, and, well. . .
I present Our Divine Lady of Sublime Terror.
I don't know, I just had to draw it.
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18) What's the most obscure thing you've researched for a fic?
My interests are already bizarre and varied so I couldn't pick out what's Obscure, but for Ch 10, I've had to look up:
Different kinds of gun sounds, to see if my mom's analysis of them was right (it was)
The history of conflict in the Balkans
stock trading and what the SEC actually considers illegal (surprisingly little tbh)
what different types of women's shoes are called
Brain-hemisphere-specific functions (again, surprisingly little)
The Babylon's Ishtar Gate and the related crimes of the British Museum
Cybersecurity software.
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