Took me a while to get these all nailed down, still unsure on a few of them. Not my strongest ideas overall but I’m making it work. One or two may get retconned in the future; the aquatic concentration is especially high with this group. I gotta settle for now to meet my deadline, though. So without further ado, here they are!
Weights clanged against the ground, the last reps finished for the day. Alex wiped the sweat from his brow, heaving. He’d gotten a new personal best every day for the past week; he was on fire. Maybe working out this much wasn’t too healthy, but hey, it took his mind off things. George had gotten a cold earlier in the spring, and… well, lifting was meditative. Plus, this new aqua-protein diet thing seemed to be working out great. Nothing like fresh salmon. He may be looking a little gray around the gills, but that was supposed to be normal. The fins, maybe less so, but he wasn’t about to stop now. Maaaybe if the tail got big enough to throw off his lifts.
Inspiration. Such a fickle thing. He thought the Gem Sea would provide, but she was a cruel mistress, and the only thing he received from her was the swirling beauty of shells. So when the local farmer announced a trip out to one of the nearby Fern Islands, he leapt on the opportunity to sail into the great unknown! An adventure surely would draw out the inspiration he truly desired! Or maybe he’d just end up vacationing in a slightly damper and windier shack than the one back in the valley. Truly, what a predicament he’d landed himself in! Despair, dismay, it was all quite dramatic, truly, just ask him. As soon as he’d given up hope, walking across a rainy beach, a sight struck him: a mermaid, resting upon a stone out in the sea. Inspiration! He dove into the sea, fighting the pounding surf to reach it! He didn’t really expect to make it that far; he also didn’t expect the fish tail he ended up with. But hey, inspiration is inspiration, and his new opera is coming along quite well.
Harvey - Bio-Clockwork Kirin
Ever the optimist, Harvey hasn’t quite given up on his dreams of flight, despite their impossibility. He’s managed to get a real pilot on his radio once or twice, even. It must have been aging poorly, though; whenever he tuned it past a specific point, there was always a faint… click. So strange. He couldn’t find the source, even when he tried for hours on end, and the radio itself seemed perfectly fine. But it felt so loud, sometimes, so close. If only he could just find the right frequency…No one’s quite sure what happened, least of all him, but Harvey emerged from his room days later, frazzled, tormented, quite a bit more equine, and letting off a faint tick of his own. Despite the somewhat horrific appearance, he’s got just as much medical expertise as before, it seems. Just don’t listen to his heartbeat for too long.
Sam knew good music when he heard it, and this was good music. Ephemeral, unknowable; an absolute bop. He had to find whoever was playing it. Was that a… pan flute? What a weird choice, but it worked! He hadn’t really planned what to do when he found the musician, but he also hadn’t planned on ending up at the base of one of the town’s cliffs with the tide coming in, so a lot of things had gone wrong, really. He got himself back up eventually, after removing his shoes and finding some goat hooves; those things could stand on anything. His mom was gonna be furious about all the mud he tracked inside, though.
Sebastian - Just Kinda Fishy
The best frogs came out during spring rainstorms. Those were the ones who sang with a glee that Sebastian couldn’t understand, but loved to hear. His family acted like he was uninterested in science, like his dad and Maru; that was entirely untrue. He just wasn’t interested in their science. Frogs were way cooler. So when he saw just about the biggest frog ever chasing after some tadpoles, he knew he had to catch and identify it. Mist is a tricky force, though, and that “frog” turned out to be the biggest fish ever. Also, that log he wanted to jump on didn’t exist, so there was that. Robin let out quite the shriek when her son flopped through the door with fins and slime, but seeing as there wasn’t much to do at that point, she just sent him off to his room with some desiccants. He still likes to hang out with the frogs, but now he gets to lead the chorus, too. He and Alex seem to be getting along quite well, these days.
Blue chickens. No one had quite seen anything like it. They were fierce, protective, sharp-beaked, but around Shane all the birds became loving little balls of fluff. He just had a way with them. Even their eggs carried a slight blue tinge, with an extra savoury tang in an omelette. One of his prized birds seemed to have gotten her claws on a weird, speckled egg; Shane left it for a while, but kept a close eye on her, unsure if it was a cuckoo or not. Fortunately for him, it wasn’t; unfortunately for him, it was a dinosaur egg instead, and during the… ranch incident, it made quite a mess of things. He came out unscathed, but now that he’s lower on the evolutionary ladder than his flock, they never let him hear the end of it. At the end of the day, he’s the one with the feed, though, so they know better than to tug at his feathers or scratch up his scales.
And there’s the bachelors! Again, not quite sure on these, but it’ll do. Next up I’ll probably do the kids; after that will be the rest of the adults, split into two or three posts. At that point I’ll see about making a master post and get that pinned with links to everything. Until next time!
tl;dr
Alex is an unapologetically furry anthro shark.
Elliot is a merman (and first thus far to have changed on Ginger Island).
Harvey is a partially-clockwork kirin.
Sam is a satyr.
Sebastian is just kinda fishy. Also quite slimy. Not his fault.
Shane is a mix of bird-raptor and dinosaur-raptor.
