#darkling deeps

[pallaspaints]

OCtober 1 - Twins (prompt list here)

Mara and Thomas! my favorite self-declared twins. they have a bad time :D

[nosongunsung11]

!!

congrats teds, the random number generator has awarded you Jonah from Darkling Deeps!

[Image ID: a picrew by @horatiosroom which I hastily assembled for this post; it features a brown-skinned man with short curly black hair, lidded green eyes, a shitty mustache and slight beard, and a disgusted expression. He is holding a silver coin in one hand, and wearing a yellow coat.]

Name: Jonah (no last name; the naming convention for this group of characters was biblical names, specifically because I wanted to use relatively familiar names while avoiding a sense of specific time or place (the setting is vaguely futuristic sci-fi but because the story is largely confined to one (1) boat it's a bit distant from the actual events))

Pronouns: he/him

Origin: Darkling Deeps, a Novel TM I was working on during the quarantine about six sailors who hunt sea monsters in the waters of an abandoned planet. It's a full-on tragedy; three of them die and only one of them will ever leave the planet again. Currently it is very unfinished but I think I'm going to come back to it one day; if I ever finish a proper novel I'd want it to be this one first.

I figure the best way to introduce Jonah is to talk about what I had in mind while creating him, cause with this set of characters I did very much have a couple guidelines I answered while working on their arcs. I wanted them to be very archetypal; Jonah falls into the Pissed-Off Loner who doesn't enjoy being here category of Guy, he's from a more populated section of the galaxy, he hates the sea, and he views pretty much the rest of the cast as hicks who aren't worth his time. The Reason He's Out Here Risking His Life To Kill Things From the Deep is because he pissed off some very dangerous people and is currently deep in debt to the mob; he needs to make money and he needs to make it FAST and UNTRACEABLY. Finally, I made a really strong naming choice with this guy, and I'm Ready and Willing to Commit To That :)

[Darkling Deeps spoilers if anyone wants to avoid spoiling a book that you can't read and is largely unwritten anyway] His storyline for approximately the first third of the book is the typical loner gets coaxed out of his shell by friendly coworker who thinks he's interesting storyline; then he promptly Fucks This Up by putting everyone in danger for the possibility of a better haul and getting his one (1) defender killed in the process! great work bud! He spends the rest of his time alive sitting in a makeshift cell belowdecks realizing that he is terribly lonely and has always been for his entire life :D

[He will resign himself to dying alone as he takes the ship into the maw of a thing too large to contemplate; and Captain Caleb will go down with him, arms locked together as they go up in flames.]

[nosongunsung11]

!!

rng said 15, that's Mara from Darkling Deeps!! teds I think the generator knows what your favorite project of mine is lkajdsf (shoutout to this old mara doodle for permanently making me a lineless artist)

[Image ID: a woman with tan skin and thick curly brown hair wearing a blue wetsuit with gold accents under a tan oilskin coat with long coattails that is belted across the chest. her hands are on her hips and she has a confident smile.]

Name: Mara (bitter)

Pronouns: she/her

Origin: Darkling Deeps again! Novel about six guys on an abandoned planet hunting giant sea monsters illegally; most of them die or leave changed.

Mara's archetype is the Warrior; she's the ship's gunner and has very little sympathy for the creatures they kill for money; she means well, but tends to unknowingly hurt her adopted twin brother Thomas because their world views are fundamentally different. She's in this trade because she was Born Here; she's one of the very few people that were raised on the planet's only settlement, and she grew up sleeping on the streets with Thomas. For her the ocean is home; it's never really occurred to her that her trade is unusual, and she tends to view people like Jonah who dislike it as being a bit ridiculous. Despite all odds, she's the book's Final Girl.

She becomes very close to Liz, the ship's navigator, before Liz's death at the end of act ii, and carries her book (scientific research on the planet and it's species) with her for the rest of the novel. She will eventually publish it, after surviving and getting off-planet, and dedicates herself to keeping the crew's memory alive.

[nosongunsung11]

!! -moss

hiiiii moss I finally got through teddy's asks :D I think the generator is biased because it's yet another darkling deeps lad; THOMAS!!

[Image ID: a picrew by @horatiosroom featuring a pale-skinned man with short black hair, blue eyes, freckles, and a friendly expression. He is wearing a red coat, holding a key, and is haloed against the background.]

Name: Thomas (twin)

Pronouns: he/him

Origin: Darkling Deeps, novel about six sailors hunting sea monsters on an abandoned planet and dying a lot etc

Thomas is the friendly, wisecracking first mate of the Inglesham. A man with a secret, connected to the sea and its creatures in a deeper way than most. He's here on the ship because he doesn't think he has any other option, because it was the only way out of living on the streets as a kid, because all the people he's lost over the years are out there on the ocean with him. Also his twin sister, Mara, is out here, and she's Important.

Thomas spends most of the first act largely without point of view chapters; we see him through the eyes of the rest of the crew who are largely affectionate but baffled by his behavior. He's the ship's fisherman, in charge of the bait and luring in the actual sea monsters, and he's been awfully spacey lately, and good at predicting their prey's movements to an almost eerie degree. During their first proper hunt, he ends up falling into the boat and deep into the water, where he finally understands what the strange humming that's been calling out to him the whole time is; it's the voices of the things they've been hunting, voices he can understand.

He was already spiralling about the ethics of this whole illegal fishing setup and this really just sends him on a downward spiral for a lot of the rest of the book, especially as he conflicts with Mara, his twin sister who can't understand the struggle he's having, but things start to go to shit Really Quickly after this and he doesn't have a lot of time to have an ethical crisis and understand what he's Becoming while they're lost and stranded out on the open ocean in a dinghy with only half of their crew left alive. Forced to choose between the human and alien parts of himself, he makes the decision to stay in the ocean with the things that sing in the deep.