Horrible Deep Sea Thread

>Those crustaceans seem to be doing suprisngly fine even with that much pollutants in their bodies. Do we want a Godzilla scenario on our hands? Because this is how you get Godzilla.
Nah. At worst you get a giant crab that Godzilla goes on to kill. And really anything that keeps the big guy busy...

I have to admit that some of these weird denizens of the deep sea strike a nerve in me. They're at that point where eerie and off-putting crosses over into some kind of haunting alien beauty.

Here, have some theme music: youtube.com/watch?v=nEO2E7Jheqs&index=1&list=PL8ady045yxC_dwqQWM9pneyttMbV3GxD2

goddamnit, mermaids, stop being so damn hot.

Of course one couldn't discuss deep sea fish without mentiong the deep sea anglerfish, probably the most iconic of deep sea fish. They're a large and varied order whichaside from the standard round fangly fish with a glowing lure contains less round, more or less fangly fish with or without a glowing lure (either a lure that does not glow, or no lure at all). Some also have lures growing from their chin as well, or one inside their mouth, so that instead of luring prey within striking distance they just lure it right inside their mouths. The anglerfish lure is actually an extremely complex organ with bioluminescent bacteria that provide the light and various lenses and covers to magnifiy the light and to extinquish it when necessary. Interestingly, some species with multiple lures have completely different bacteria in them, implying the same fish has evolved bioluminescent lures more than once. So far all attempts to get the bacteria to produce light outside an anglerfish have failed.

Anglerfish also range widely in size, from a few inches all the way to around five feet (although most are less than a foot long). Well, the female anglerfish do, since like many other deep sea fish anglerfish have extreme sexual dimorphism. It's common for deep sea fish to be hermaphroditic or have a male with reduced jaws and enhanced senses, intended to find a mate and die shortly after. With deep sea anglerfish, the males are extremely small and have very good sense of sight, smell, or both, but no ability to eat at all upon reaching adulthood. Famously in some families, the male will upon finding a female bite into her and merge with her, eventually atrophying into nothing more than a pair of testicles. Some genuses of anglerfish have been observed with multiple males attached to one female, while some seem to be "monogamous" as no individual has ever been found with more than one attached male.

While I've sad deep sea fish are harmless to humans, both due to being (usually) very small and squishy and livign far deeper than people could normally venture...That's not entirely true. The cookie cutter shark is a small shark with huge teeth designed of scooping bites out of large fish and marine mammals (really, given the way its jaws work "icecream scoop shark" would've been a better name). It uses bioluminescence to lure an animal close, the quickly bites a chunk from it and swims off. The process is not fatal, but probably quite painful.
There has actually been more than one case where a cookicutter shark has mistaken a nuclear submarine as a whale and taken a bite out of the plastic covering the very sensitive sonar equipment, forcing the submarine to return to base for repairs and probably costing several millions of taxpayers' dollars. I think there may have also been a case of one biting somebody who had gone diving at night (they rise closer to surface during the night, and can actually get to fairly shallow depths).

*said, not sad. Although it's sad that we're significantly lacking in huge sea monsters, as well.

Also the part about deep sea fish being squishy and liable to suffer explosive decompression is not entirely true either. That holds for most species, but not all. The fangtooth, also known as the orgrefish, is notable for having proportionately the longest teeth on any animal (it actually has to have special "sheathes" on its upper jaw for its teeth to keep it from accidentally stabbing its own brain whenever it closes its mouth; viperfish also have a similar arrangement), but also being really tough by deep sea fish standards. It appears to be a relatively recent comer in the deep sea and still shares a lot of traits with its shallower water relatives, including still having scales (very small ones, though), and having less reduced muscles that allow for a more fast and agressive hunting style than the standard "float around until something gets close to your mouth" style of ambush predation most deep sea fish employ. These traits also allow it to handle surface conditions better than most, and individuals have been kept alive in aquariums for several weeks (compared to a few hours with most deep sea fish).

From the Twilight Zone we have the telescopefish (genus Gigantura, not to be confused with the completely unrelated telescope fish), with veyr distinctive huge binocular-like eyes. At this depth there is still some light, so the huge eyes allow it to spot prey visible in the dim light. Given that both eyes face directly forward, the fish likely also has binocular vision, helping to judge distance when it attacks. Strangely enough whoever gave the fish its scientific name didn't name it after the eyes, but the very long tailfin (which is admittedly impressive, making up half the lenght of the fish, but not really quite as notable as the freaky binocular eyes). Two species are known, G. indica and G.chuni, with the former being longer (about 20 cm, 40 with the tail fin included) but the latter somewhat shorter (about 16 cm without the tailfin) but bulkier.

Interestingly wikipedia lists the black dragonfish as a common prey item, which is pretty impressive as the drgonfish is around twice as long as the telescopefish (exculding the tail) and a pretty fierce deep sea predator by itself. Like most deep sea fish, the telescope fish has an elastic stomach and swallows its prey whole.

Another deep sea fish with strange eyes, the barreleye has eyes that normally point straight up (those green orbs are the eyes, and what at fist glance look like eyes are actually nostrils). It uses the eyes to spot food above it, then rises to the same level as its target and swivels they eyes 90 degrees (I didn't mention that the eyes can swivel to point forward, did I? Well, they can) so that it can see what it's biting.
While the species has been known for a long time (I think already in 19th century) the transparten dome that covers its eyes was only discovered when the animal was oserved in its natural habitat, as it had always broken when the fish was caught and brought to surface. It is thought to protect the eyes from stinging cells of siphonophorae (communal polyp creatures like the Portuques man'O'war), allowing the fish to steal prey the siphonophorae has caught in its tentacles.

At this point I take a break and post more pictures of the animals I've already introduced, as well as some horrible deep sea mermaids.

Ogrefish

From this angle the gulper eel's face looks uncannily like a twisted human face.

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Different anglerfish.

Dragonfish larvae have their eyes at the end of long stalks. As they age, the stalks gradually get "reeled in" inside the head. They're actually still present in the adult, coiled up behind the eyes.

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Ogrefish larva, with less teeth, more spikes, and about equal amount of grumpyness as the adult.

Black swallower doing what it does best: being a horrible vore-fish.

Biggest anglerfish, at around 160 cm.

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By the way, if anybody remembers those horrible deep sea mermaid RPG comics I did, I'm open to further ideas. Only reason I haven't drawn any more (after the time I illustrated a filk song based on a Kipling poem, which come to think of it I never posted on Veeky Forums) is because I kind of ran out of ideas.

But now we return to our regularly schedueled program. Although I won't start with a fish, but with one of the few mammals that has not just my grudging respect, but unanimous approval: whales! Specifically the sperm whale, the largest apex predator alive (actually, quite possibly the largest apex predator ever, as the largest spermwhale ever recorded may have been somewhat larger than largest prehistoric marine reptile or giant shark) and the deepest diving mammal. Aside from doing battle with giant squid in the depths of the ocean, what makes the spermwhale extra awesome is that it's armed with an organic sonic blaster. The weird shape of the whale's head, as well as its name (spermwhale is actually short of spermaceti whale) is due to an organ located on the whales head, filled with oily substance known as spermaceti. The sustance transmits sounds better than water than the organ is positioned so that the soundwaves the whale generates will pass through it and get reflected back through layers that function like sonic lenses, focusing the sound into a coherent beam of destruction. The full blast from the face-mounted sonic cannon of a spermwhale is louder than a jet engine and would easily kill a human diver on its line of fire by pulping all their internal organs. It's more than enough to stun or kill a giant squid, as well.

Since I mentioned siphonophorae earlier, it's probably worth introducing them in more detail, as they are quite faschinating. They're colonial organisms, with each colony being made from countless polyps, each with their own role. Some propel the colony, others deply long tentacles with stinging cells to catch prey, others digest said prey, and some take care of reproduction. By working together, the tiny polyps create a mighty super-organism that can be tens if not hundreds of meters long (by comparison the maximum recorded size of the blue whale is about 30 m. Granted, the blue whale is thousands of times more massive since siphonophorae are usually just long thin lines of polyps).

And since the spermwhale got mentioned, it would be amiss not to bring up its prey, the giant squid (and the similar colossal squid). The colossal squid is actually somewhat larger, but both are huge deep sea squid. The lenght of squid's mantle alone can be around 2 meters, and the lenght to the tip of the long feeding arms may be 14 m for colossal squid (around 13 for giant squid). The colssal squid also has sharp hooks inside the suckers on all of its arms and tentacles, because clearly just being a colossal cephalopod wasn't scary enough.
They also has largest eyes on any living animal (beaten only by one species of ichtyosaur, if I recall correctly), being literally the size of dinnerplates.

Not all deep sea fish are small, although most of them tend to be. The goblin shark (aka. the "lets ride a bicycle made of nightmares up your ass" shark; you've all seen that reaction image) is a particularly freaky-looking deep sea shark found in all oceans. It typically lives near the slopes of continental margins at the upper limit of the Twilight Zone, but has been encountered over 1 km deep as well. It's the last surviving member of a family dating back around 125 million years (i.e. when dinosaurs ruled the world), and has retained many primitive characteristics compared to most modern sharks.
The two most notable traits of the goblin shark are its jaws, filled with a jumbe of hooklike teeth, that can spring forward to catch prey, and the weird "nose" that contains large amount of electrosensitive organs, allowing the shark to detect bioelectricity of its prey. An adult goblin shark is usually 3 to 4 m (10 to 13 ft) long, but can apparently grow considerably larger.

Not everything in the deep sea is a horrible vore-fish. Lanternfish and other similar fish are actually the most common fish down there, and in the world. The lanternfish in particular is probably the most common fish on the planet, with population outnumbering the population every commercially caught fish species put together by a fair margin. They're so numerous, in fact, that they're the source of a phenomena that used to confuse early sonar operators: that of a "false bottom" visible on sonar, several miles above the actual ocean floor, that also seemed to move depending on the time of the day. The "false bottom" is actually cased by sound reflecting off the swim bladders of billions of lanternfish that migrate up and down the water column during the day (rising up to feed during night and sinking down to avoid predators during the day).

Because of their sheer numbers, thought has been given to commercially fishing them, but they normally only congregate in huge shools at specfic areas and are normally spread out over too large areas to be worth fishing, and also we don't known how quickly they replenish their numbers. Also they're not directly suitable for human consumption (too greasy with very little meat), and the one time somebody tried to commercially fish them the warehouse the catch was held spontaneously combusted.

As an example of what can happen when attempts are made to commercially exploit deep sea without proper study, consider the organge roughy. A fish that was found in huge amount at very specific locations (they congregate around some seamounts), whose flesh is also resistant to being frozen and tastes pretty good. The demand for the fish exploded, and they were caught in huge numbers, until suddenly the catches dropped practically overnight.
Only at this point were the fish actually studied to find out just what was going on. It turns out the orange roughly lives over 100 years and takes several decades to reach sexual maturity. Catching them in such large quantities is unsustainable and it will take hundreds of years before the population density at those locations rises to the point where they could be economically and safely caught. Obviously that actually makes them terrible for commercial exploitation, since nobody has the time to wait a hundred years between catching fish.

thanks for reminding me that im a disgusting vorefag and that i should kill myself asap

Speaking of extremely long lived fish, the Greenland shark, which briefly reached memetic status a while ago, is the longest living vertebrate known, with some individuals having been dated around 300 - 500 years. They're also very large sharks, almost as big as the great white shark, and also extremely slow moving (swimming at 1,6 mph is considered fast for them). How they're able to eat seals, which can swim far faster, I don't know. Maybe they slowly sneak up to them.
The flesh of the Greenland shark is also very high in trimethylamine N-oxide, a chemical that gives fish the "fishy" scent, acts as an osmolyte, and helps counteract the effect of pressure on proteins. Deep sea fish have higher amount of TMAO than other fish, so they smell extra-fishy (incidentally, relyiong on this chemical to counter pressure has a side effect of placing a hard cap at the maximum depth fish can live in). It's also poisonous at high concentration, which makes the flesh of Greenland shark toxic unless properly prepared. Otherwise eating it would cause an effect similar to intoxication, followed by loss of balance, vomiting, explosive diarrhea, and possibly death.

Greenland sharks are also often parasiticed by copepods that attach to their eeys and render them blind. This does not seem to bother them the slightest, and some hypotheseise that the copopods dangling from their eyes may serve as lures to attract fish.

I'm starting to think most people who follow me are vorefags, since whenever I draw the black swallower mermaid it gets a lot more attention than anything else I do.

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She's cute
Also vore is hot

Nice! Great time for a Cold Dark Vore Hell thread!!

I could draw "vore" art with pretty much any of them, since eating things your own size or bigger is a standard deep sea fish trait, but I've kept it to black swallower since it's the defining trait of the fish (anglerfish has the lure, gulper eel has a huge mouth, black swallower is the fish that can swallow ridiculously large things relative to its size). Character-wise it'd also fit the gulper eel but since it's not the most obvious defining trait I don't focus on it. In the picture I used as the OP, gulper eel actually has eaten something, her stomach just isn't as distended as the black swalloer's. In case of that picture I really did it just to get the characters off the ground so they would be more clearly visible.

Incidentally, the "thing" of that picture is that all the mermaids are drawn as long as the actual fish they represent (1 square on the picture represents 1cm of length for the actual fish). Although I think I made gulper eel's body slightly too short.

I just stopped in to say I'm really digging this thread.

Abyssal drawfag's art has really improved since these started.

horrible sea louse pregnancy > gulper eel vore.

But no-one's here for gulper eel vore, they're here for black swallower vore.
Black swallower mermaid a cute (although I think anglerfish mermaid is superior).

>although I think anglerfish mermaid is superior
Same

>Otherwise eating it would cause an effect similar to intoxication, followed by loss of balance, vomiting, explosive diarrhea, and possibly death.
Takes me back to my college days.

I do like her immature, monomaniacal obsession with stuffing herself. “I roll to eat the King!”

Is there a collection of these anywhere?

Well, my internet connection is down, so I’m stuck being a filthy phoneposter for a while.

The main campaign-ish idea I had involving a deep-sea civilization involved the recognition that the large area of the deep sea might allow an underwater civilization to reach a very high population, meaning that any sophonts dwelling at such depths should be prevented from forming a complex society at all costs. Something happens to mitigate the severe resource constraints prevailing in the abyssal zone, a civilization starts to coalesce, terrestrial critters get wind of it and freak out, and the PCs have to decide who to side with, or what to do more generally.

She's actually my favorite design of them, as well.
I have them all on my DA page, but I'm on my phone now and can't link it directly. Searching for elder-thing on DA should find the page. They're buried among others random drawings, though. I should probably make a separate folder for them.

I first encountered these in an ancient “Ripley’s Believe It Or Not!” book, in which they were described as their own species. For years I wondered what had happened to them, because I couldn’t find a reference to that species anywhere, until I hit on something about dragonfish larvae by chance and realized that it had been a taxonomic error all along.

>The gulper eel is the bigger, meaner cousin og the pelican eel, and far better lives up to the reputation of the deep sea as the underwater vore hell. It's bigger (around 6 feet long, although again most of that is tail), has a more well defined body and proportionally smaller (but still huge) jaw, and rows of sharp teeth, even if they are still small by deep sea standards.
Six feet is within striking distance of the semi-mythical Beebe’s Monster, although it’s highly unlikely (in my estimation) that such a thing actually exists, or existed. I didn’t know there was anything that even came close to being an actual candidate, so that’s very interesting.

>Really we don't know all that much about the biology of any of the gulper eels, but the onejaws are the most mysterious of them all.
Onejaws are really fucking weird. IIRC, Bogleech has written a little bit about them, with some illustrations, if anyone wants more information.

I hate posting from a phone.

this is one of the creepiest fucking fish i've ever seen

I remember a creepy video on those. Every other search I made for it just gets me a giant jellyfish, thanks for the name.

I don't understand vore, how is things eating shit hot?

Horrible deep sea? i've got some right here.

The approximately 6 ft length was mentioned in the section on saccopharyngiformes on a paper on fish of the north Atlantic. Can't remember the specific species, though. However, if I recall correctly, Fishbase gives smaller lengths (I think about 5 ft at longest) for gulper eels. That might be due to reporting assumed average versus longest reported individual, or due to uncertainty in measurements.
I'd assume in both cases the body length (without tail) would be approximately the same, and the difference is just the length of the tail which already makes up most of the total length.

I don't doubt that account, but Beebe's Monster was reportedly not only huge (for a deep-sea fish), but heavy, so I doubt it could have been a gulper eel. I rather doubt it existed at all.

>Beebe's adventures and popular books were frequently ridiculed by scientists. One such scientist, Carl L. Hubbs (University of Michigan), reviewed Beebe's book "Half Mile Down," and scoffed at the idea that Beebe had indeed seen a six foot long sea serpent, saying in his review, that Beebe probably saw two fish swimming close together. He even said that the fishes' lights "may be a 'phosphorescent coelenterate whose lights were beautified by halation in passing through a misty film breathed onto the quartz window by Mr. Beebe's eagerly appressed face." ("Natural Man," by Robert Henry Welker, p.139) Hubbs added that it was fraudulent and even contemptible for Beebe to presume "to describe and assign generic and species names 'for animals faintly seen through the bathysphere windows.'" ("Natural Man," p.139). Another scientist, John T. Nicols, a curator of recent fishes at the American Museum of Natural History, hinted that "Half Mile Down" belonged on the fiction shelf, because Beebe wrote the book in "dramatic fashion rather than meticulous." ("Natural Man," p. 139).

sites.google.com/site/cwilliambeebe/Home/bathysphere

("Half Mile Down" is out of copyright and freely available on the Internet Archive: archive.org/details/halfmiledown00beeb )

(Like all such texts, the epub version is garbage.)

Have an evil robot ogrefish. Well, maybe not evil. Sometimes it's hard to tell.

One perennial problem that I have when thinking about a deep-sea campaign is "How do I make the exploration part interesting?" Because this is definitely a case where getting there is half the fun. However, I feel like I'd need a group full of engineering nerds in order to do it in a way that's not "a wizard solves the problem with magic."

>"It was apparent that something was very wrong," Will wrote, "and as the bathysphere swung clear I saw a needle of water shooting across the face of the port window. Weighing much more than she should have, she came over the side and was lowered to the deck. Looking through one of the good windows I could see that she was almost full of water. There were curious ripples on the top of the water, and I knew that the space above was filled with air, but such air as no human being could tolerate for a moment. Unceasingly the thin stream of water and air drove obliquely across the outer face of the quartz. I began to unscrew the giant wingbolt in the center of the door and after the first few turns, a strange high singing came forth, then a fine mist, steam -like in consistency, shot out, a needle of steam, then another and another. This warned me that I should have sensed when I looked through the window that the contents of the bathysphere were under terrific pressure. I cleared the deck in front of the door of everyone, staff and crew."
This was followed by a solid cylinder of water, which slackened after a while to a cataract, pouring out of the hole in the door, some air mingled with the water looking like hot steam. Instead of compressed air shooting through ice-cold water. If I had been in the way, I would have been decapitated." (Above from: Half Mile Down by William Beebe, Published by Duell Sloan Pearce, New York, 1951.)

Have an evil robot gulper eel. The fight with this guy is pretty fun, but the resulting ending is... well, your ship implodes. Kind of a downer.

Interestingly, Barton learned about Beebe's venture from a newspaper, and, thanks to his training in mechanical engineering, immediately realized that the bathysphere design Beebe proposed to use was inadequate. If he didn't do something, his hero, the great popular naturalist, was about to die.

I'm working on a CYOA with an underwater city in it (very, very slowly). Here's a piece of art I plan on using.

I really hope this thread doesn't die while I'm away today.

Since we both mentioned phoneposting at roughly the same time, I feel like I should mention that I'm not the OP.

Any sea spider fans out there?

What bugs me about C. niger is that it must have some mode of predation which is different from most of the other deep-sea fish here. Gulper eels, loosejaws, anglerfish, telescopefish, barreleyes, and dragonfish all have adaptations aimed at acquiring prey— luring it, grabbing it, enveloping it, or seeing it. But the black swallower has none of that. Its jaws open wide, but aside from that, it looks relatively normal. Its specialty is handling prey, not getting it. Why? How the hell does it hunt? It doesn't have any obvious way to subdue fish larger than it is. It doesn't have any clear means of avoiding being killed or eaten itself. It just finds fish larger than it is and swallows them whole.

>3-4 meters
And I thought they only were about 80-140 cm from the footage of one biting a diver's arm.

Now that I got home, I can actually give a direct link, and even made a separate folder for just the deep sea stuff elder-thing.deviantart.com/gallery/64616122/Horrible-Deep-Sea-Stuff

Thanks for the link. I've heard the account of Beebe's bathysphere but haven't actually ever read his book. While the scientiic veracity of much of his claims can be doubted (naming new species based on what you glimpse from a window isn't really proper scientific conduct), he was right about a lot of things.
Also, I find it amusing that I'm pretty sure I know exactly what picture the artist of that robo-gulper has used as a reference. In fact, I posted it, or one very much like it, in this thread.

Bump

Bumping with more underwater art.

Bump for more vore hell goodness.

Well, they're like 90% legs (even most of their internal organs are located in their legs because the body i too small), so they're OK if you're a leg man, I quess.

Hmmmm...i feel inspired to write something based on things which I have read in some 5E content...

I’ll tend tobthat in a bit. Not much on the vore stuff, but adventure in Abyssal depths

Not really a seaspider fan myself, no.

I never how to get players there, or have abyssal creatures interact with terrestrial ones more generally. I want something better than "a wizard used magic," and I think perhaps the idea simply needs a higher level of technology.

It's really hard to get decent-looking art for an underwater city. This is probably the best I've got.

They are pretty spooky, user.
youtube.com/watch?v=wkX2s_xSMBU

It's a life support system for legs.

You drift, conserving energy, amid the expanse. Far from the silt deeper below you and the whispered gloaming above. The buzz of distant interlap and electrical sparks frame arcs in the back of your mind that are familiar, allowing you to occasionally push against or glide with the currents to stay within this place.

Where your natural buoyancy is steady, within the boundaries of your territory to hunt and explore. Hunt...soon it will be time to hunt again. It has been days since you last ate, in the distance you feel the presence of small things. Too small, too dispersed, and not nearly many enough to sate your need or be worth the energy.

Your mouth, already gaping and wide, adjusts to swallow the current as your gills frill as you try to settle your nerves.

In this place and moment you debate, do you rise into the reaches above for the chance at something palatable? Or do you risk sinking toward the silt and scour the seafloor for something of volume that will undoubtedly put up a fight.

Briefly, your webbed fingers grip at the necklace of shells and bones around your neck. One of the shinier ones might be worth a meal at the Gatherplace...near the trench.

While for some there are safety in numbers, the Gatherplace unnerves you. So many potential meals and predators in one place, but under the Rust King’s rule none may feast on another of full mind within it’s bounds. Though, the raiders from the trench do not abide by that rule.

Chance wasting energy above. Risk becoming a meal below. Or...the relative safety of Gatherplace unless the Sahuagin raid again.

It happened the last time you were there. You acquired a squid beak knife off the corpse of one of them after they were repelled in mutual defense, though it was a close and pitched war…

At least for the effort, many ate well that day.

Perhaps trading at Gatherplace would a good idea afterall.

As you bank toward the deep, you pause. Something has entered your territory, from above. A disturbance in the buzz at that, iron descends with this intrusion...and something else.

Long ago, when you were small, you encountered something in the deep. Not the deep of the silt or the deep of the trench...but somewhere that shouldn’t have been. Somewhere deeper and where you lost the familiar buzzing. Where you did not know where you were.

Where even your eyes meant for the dark were blinded, and strange things of immensity shifted in the distance both near and far.

There you met something that saw you as a curiosity. Too small to be a meal, but fitting for other purposes. It had a loneliness that you were all too familiar with in the deep, and in exchange for your brief company came to you with an accord in exchange for that time. A pact.

Now you know well the sniff of what descends with the iron, and have eyes that can pierce even the utter dark below the trench. Magic descends.

Holding your position, you gaze upward and search. Something moves far off, at first a gloaming to you and then a distant brightness. Smaller prey, without the full mind, investigate this light as they are want to. You’ve seen anglers use this as a tool to hunt...though have never known an angler to possess iron. It could yet be a sinking ship, readily full of meat from beyond the gloaming that cannot abide these waters.

Such succulence and exotic flavor. Could you be so lucky again?

As silhouettes become visible against the light, you find your heart sinking. Surfacers descending in a bubble, guided by a familiar presence and figure ahead of them. You have never seen those from above the gloaming alive before, it fascinates you briefly as you focus on the one leading them.

Hair braided, the color of kelp. Skin blue. Armor of coral. And a spear with the polish and shimmer of pearl. Frills upon his awkward legs as they casually kick behind him. Corus Thalhoruth, a Triton whom you met in Gatherplace. Fought beside, and shared conversation with.

Behind him, in the bubble, are three surfaces. All with profiles recognizable as similar to Corus’s, two legs, two arms, and small heads.

A broad and stocky figure, clad in skin not their own and still sporting thick clumps of fur. The skin that is their own is a lighter green than kelp. They are bald and with pointed ears. On their back is iron with a wide curved head.

Beside that one, a sleight robed figure. With rounded ears and long hair unbound. Their build, their skin, and their torso reminds you of the merfolk women you have met from afar at Gatherplace, tending the personal court of the Rust King. Though, concealed in that burgundy robe. From them you feel the source of magical disturbance.

Lastly a figure of small stature and broad set, but covered head to toe in strangely inscripted iron, which gleams in the ball of light held aloft by the magic user. A short but heavy hammer rests in their iron clad grip.

“Corus,” you think across the distance before you fall into the gloam of their light with a power born of your pact, “You are within my territory. With guests?”

Rather, any one of them would have made a fine meal. Or a dangerous predator if they were so inclined. Still, Corus has earned good will enough from your time together in Gatherplace to extend to him niceties. Besides, four of them together would not be an exchange in your favor. Were he not here, you would be on guard at their passing.

Well, more on guard.

“Zarine?” calls Corus in a tongue that matches the eb and presence of the currents before thinking back across your awakened connection, “My friend and once sister in arms, glorious tidings upon you in this most fortuitous of circumstances!”

Rolling your jaw at his over verbose nature, you begin swimming toward them. Your long tail undulating through the push and pull around you.

He raises a hand, uttering something in unfamiliar words toward the bubble behind him. Bringing himself and them to a stop at the command before he opens his arms wide and points the head of his spear away. The three seem concerned, though their eyes eventually find you when you breach the farthest edge of their light.

Beneath their helm of gleaming iron, the short one’s expression is inscrutable. The green one seems to be sizing you up as you have done to some meals and some would be predators have done to you. The sleight one, who might be a woman of her species as you are, well her eyes go wide in fear as she momentarily cringes in revulsion.

The small things swimming in the periphery of their light, you catch one such small fish in your outer jaw as you pass. It will not be enough, but it is something for the moment. Many of the other fish around their light now scatter a bit, but turn back to predictable patterns once your explosion of motion is done.

“Yes,” you think succinctly, “Tidings. Why are you here?”

One of them says something within the bubble with words you do not know. Corus calls back to them, offering a placating gesture before he swims forward and embraces you. The end of your outer jaw presses against his belt as you wraps his arms around your shoulders in what you once learned to be a hearty greeting between friends for his people.

Awkwardly, you return this...niceiety.

“We are here my friend because we are lost in our descent,” his mind expresses woe to your own, “My party and I have important business and just cause. First in gather place, and then perhaps within the depths of the trench. However I have always been a poor navigator, and our way is lost!”

“That is,” you frill your gills gulping a deep breath, “unfortunate,”

“My most stalwart ally and judicious arcane imbued friend,” he throws complimentary language at you, “Could we impose upon you to guide us to Gatherplace? I assure you my allies from the surface beyond and I can see to make it worth your time before we take to our fiendish foe beneath, and the reliquary their servants have absconded with!”

“This sounds,” you mull his exuberance over, “like a long story,”

There is a beat of silence as the fish you snagged squirms in your mostly empty gullet.

Making your time worth it may well mean a meal…

“You best tell me on the way,” you break away from him and bank toward the silt.

Glancing back up he says more of those strange words, and follows after you. The bubble close behind.

What madness have you involved yourself in, you wonder… No matter, either way you will surely eat well.

You know, I never found the deep sea creepy, but I've been fond of an idea of using the dark zones and abyssal plain of the ocean as an underworld/realm if the dead that spirits need to make their way towards (life began in the ocean and ends in the ocean) dodging deep sea demons on the way but have no idea how to use it in a setting.

Those sound like poor unfortunate souls.

>It literally sacrifices its eyes for lures

Fucking hardcore

And if they make it to the end, their reward is dissolution back into the life force of the world. The problem with the journey would be more intelligent demons trapping them for their own purposes or less intelligent ones attacking and eating them, both of which prevent their proper dissolution.

>Loss of balance, vomiting, explosive diarrhea and death.
Sounds like the average Taco Bell meal.

So sad, so true.

I almost want to imagine this as a planar sea rather than a material sea. Like, in a through the looking glass next door spirit world style

I read somewhere that sperm whales are the deepest diving mammals on the planet, and sometimes when they surface, their bodies carry scars made by another organism. Is that just a myth or does anyone know anything about this?

Also, please tell me more about large deep sea creatures like the greenland shark.

This post has quite a bit of gameable content for this kind of stuff, I know it mentions exploration mechanics a little bit, and it has a whole lot of spoors and traces of undersea monster activity.
melancholiesandmirth.blogspot.com/2017/10/watery-depths-and-watery-deaths-coastal.html?m=0

It's true that they carry scars, mainly from all their battles with squids.

>battles with squids
Sounds badass, details?

Calling it a battle is a bit overselling it. The giant squid is a big squid (the main body is somewhat larger than a grown man, and the feeding arms extremely long). The spermwhale is the largest apex predator alive, and is armed with a biological sonic blaster on its head. There really isn't any contest.
Still, all adult spermwhales are covered in scars from where the squids' suckers have gripped on their skin during the struggle.

I figure it's one of several spirit realms (Olympus or an underworld might also be examples) that from the outside appears to have specific dimensions, but once you're inside can go on impossibly even if it doesn't make sense from a standpoint of material topography outside of this realm.

it's like every shit fetish combined into one horrible image, in it's most unholy form of some edgy anime fan's school doodles that get him sent to the counselor but he technically didn't do anything wrong so he gets off with a warning until he calls in a half hearted bomb threat to get out of school picture day 2 years later or something.

Any giant creatures of the deep that are not that known? Any fascinating/weird/creepy things to share about giant squids?

>horrible image
Did you not see the thread's title?
Have you not heard of this? It's been a thing here on Veeky Forums for months, although I've only seen 3 threads with this stuff in it, including the mermaid thread that started it off. Full story (abridged): mermaid thread, someone asks "what if mermaids based on horrible deep sea fish instead of just vague fishiness", user graduates to drawfag, everyone loves black-swallower-mermaid and nu-drawfag is forever relegated to drawing horrible deep sea mermaids in the minds of anons such as myself).