— Closed continuation of this thread for @goldenvisions AND @paintxd-notxs —
< A fishing boat, somewhere off the coast of England, thirty-minutes before sunrise. >
A man reaches for a bottle opener. His friend slaps him on the back.
“Y’know you can just open that on the boat, right?”
“Are you scratching my fuckin’ boat?”
The friend rolls his eyes.
“You say that as if the ocean ain’t doing that already,” he retorts, demonstrating his carelessness by popping open a second beer on the side of the ship.
“A boat isn’t meant for opening your shitty drink,” the man scowls, refusing the bottle he was being offered.
“You’re the one drinking it,” the friend points out. “C’mon, just take this one.”
The man opens his original bottle and starts pouring it into the ocean.
“Hey!” The friend yells, rushing over to grab the bottle he’d wasted his wallet on.
“Ay! You’re gonna push me over!” The man screams back, holding the brown bottle above his head while pushing his friend back.
In the scuffle, all three bottles end up pouring their contents into the sea. As the two men continue to bicker, the liquor gets pushed by the waves, drifting towards the bountifully stuffed fishnets at the back of the vessel.
The creatures unlucky enough to have ended up inside wriggle and shimmy around their tightly packed cell. They’d swim to the front of the net, then end up cycled to the back again…
…back towards a very, very hungry beast.
His top half was man, but from the waist down all you could see was a long fish tail. It was like he had jumped out of an old sailors story.
He licks his teeth before plunging his long, scale-spotted arm through a hole in the net. It stretched around his massive body like it was about to snap, tightening a thick red mark into his forearm. His claws search the net for the largest of the catch, piercing the poor creatures straight through before bringing them out and shredding them with his teeth. Then he’d do it again. And again. And again. His appetite was insatiable, which was unsurprising given his abnormal size.
He’d leave nothing but bones, bones he’d drop into the inky blue depths for some bottom feeder to pick up later.
A wave of sound pierces the deep blue, but his mouth remains unmoving as he picks flesh from between his teeth. “Thanks for the dinner, ya bloody morons…”
He looks up to the boat, wondering if the men aboard would end up catching him before he finished his meal. It’d be fun to thrash their vessel around for a bit.
The merman smirks just thinking about it. Maybe he’d throw a guy overboard for fun. Pull him under just a bit, then throw him back onto the deck screaming of a monster. The faces his past victims had given the merman was nothing short of pure gold; eyes popped out of the skull like tennis balls, opening their mouth to gasp before choking on saltwater, then frantically scrambling as he held them by the throat. They were out of their element down here… no knives or spears to save them. He’d waste their precious time as he searched them for golden bands or fancy ear-stones, reminding him about their size by creeping closer to them whenever they tried to fight back.
He fantasized about it while reaching for another fish.
Then comes an odd, stinging feeling. It starts out as nothing more than a slight annoyance, but quickly rises into a very distinct pain that makes his face scrunch up. Liquor. The feeling rapidly spreads through his gills, making him recoil in confusion for a moment as if he could taste just how awful the beers were. His head wobbles a bit as he moves to find the source of this horrible drink.
A single push forward towards the front of the boat almost shot him off course. He’d forgotten to remove his arm from the tight net, and was now jerking the boat forward to get it free.
“Fucking hell!” David snarls. He keeps pulling, but the only thing that seemed to be ripping was his patience.
The men on board stop arguing for a second.
“It’s coming from the back,” the other points out. They hurry over to the nets.
The bountiful school they’d caught had been dwindled to less than a quarter of its original size.
The man who owned the boat balls a fist, fury rising in his heart and finding its home at his knuckles. His wind-chapped face finds a way to turn even more red.
“You bloody idiot! I would’ve seen this if you hadn’t wasted our time with your stupid-“
“Mike, shut the fuck up for a second,” the friend hisses through beared teeth, urgently gesturing to a blank space in the net.
Between the intoxicated crowds of fish was the massive, scaly arm of a man decorated with razor sharp claws. The boat jostles with every impatient jolt it made trying to escape.
Mike staggers backwards. He’d heard stories of this. That’s what ate the fish, what trashed up his friend’s boat, the reason why they had to be on this stupid trip together.
That’s the monster he’d been warned about.
He runs over to the big net, the only one that hadn’t been pulled up yet. He waves for his friend to follow like their lives depended on it, and they start pulling up the final net.
David starts thrashing aimlessly against the net, now completely inebriated, snarling like a rabid dog slowly getting tranquilized. Even his thoughts were slurring.
How’d he end up in here? Who the hell did they think they were… putting him in a cage like that… like a… fffish…
One of the fisherman speeds to the wheel and kicks it into gear and the other brings the merman around to the side, away from the rudders and from any important thing he could damage. Soon, he’s upside down with his tail tied above his head. He wasn’t quite sure if the man had tied him, or if he’d tied himself, but he was way too intoxicated to really care.
He flashes his teeth to the sea below out of reflex, hurling vague insult-adjacent noises to whatever he passed.
Ugh… hhow was he swimming like ttthis…
His body couldn’t keep up with the burden of thought, and he soon fell asleep.
