my stinky vampire fish man who i forgot to draw for like 2 years. Explanation for what i mean by vampire fish man under cut
So basically. Ebby here is Harrithaean, so part of my fictional planet worldbuilding. He's a mapmaker and sailor who got caught in One Hell Of A Storm which totally wrecked his ship. While he was trying to swim towards one of the lifeboats with the small amount of his stuff he had, he got bitten by a type of fish called a Soarbitt that was getting stressed out by the commotion.
Soarbitt are similar to mosquitoes. They bite larger animals and drink their blood in order to live, but it's not common for them to bite people, since they usually go for large seabirds called Megatross that sit on the surface of the ocean to rest while flying long distances. Megatross also happen to be immune to the curse that soarbitt teeth carry.
Soarbitt curses are something that originally existed as a way for soarbitt to quickly recover their population if they were struggling; by biting another fish or a small animal, the curse can slowly turn that organism into a soarbitt. It does NOT work properly on larger animals, and human beings are one such larger animal.
It can turn people into a... sort of fishy thing at least, if left too long, and invoke a necessity for blood in their diet — with some complexity in the curse's function creating a preference for the blood of their own species. In the past, soarbitten people (as the affliction is called) were considered scary murderous cryptids from fishing communities, especially in the late-stage fucked up land fish form, and killed on sight.
In the modern day there are ways to prevent becoming soarbitten if you catch it early, but unfortunately, if you're stuck in a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean for like 4 days, and then homeless in a country you've never been in for another 2 weeks, that's not gonna happen. Ebby's case was kept from getting any worse, but it appears he's just a weird amphibious vampire now. Yayyyy. He still does his job, he just has a lot of therapy, some extremely chill friends to snack on and a dip in some seawater every few hours.
