Quinn Van der Zee || Merm || Taken || Tessa Thompson
Born just off the shores of Monterey, California, Quinn spent the majority of her childhood riding cresting waves, exploring underwater shipwrecks, and scaring idle seagulls. The sea was both her home and her playground, and each day brought something new and exciting with it. She didn’t belong to a pod in the traditional sense – with many different members – but she had her mother and father and siblings, and together, they were pod enough. Unfortunately, around the time she was five years old, her father, having chased after a school of fish, got caught up in one of the nets. Her mother had gone after him, instructing Quinn and her siblings to stay put. But they waited and waited, and no one came back for them.
They were on their own for a week, maybe two or three, hunting their own fish and mostly keeping to themselves. Even their play was subdued, affected by the absence and loss of their parents. Eventually, they were picked up by another pod, one that had pity in their eyes when they asked after their parents. But they took Quinn and her siblings in, and soon, she came to see them as family, too. What was strange to her was that her new podmates led double lives: they would spend the week onshore. Oddly fitting, though, was that many of them worked at the local aquarium: helping to rehabilitate sea animals, designing new exhibits tailored to mimic the sea for the ones who weren’t strong enough to go back to the open ocean. Quinn spent a lot of her time at the aquarium helping out with the animals where she could, and learning to speak their dialects.
And on the weekends, she and her podmates would return to the ocean, sleeping in coves hidden from humans and – at least in Quinn’s case – learning how to navigate the open waters. Even of all the members in her pod, Quinn had an uncanny knack of finding wreckages with long-forgotten treasures. She would sell little trinkets she’d find, and as she grew older, she realized how much more profitable this was than she’d ever thought. With a few of her podmates, she’d auction off her services: promising wealthy investors gold and riches that would make them even wealthier. Some of her podmates wanted nothing to do with it, calling it disgraceful – and the ones that had followed her into her venture eventually grew bored with it, fickle as merms could be, preferring to spend their time on other pursuits.
Not Quinn, though. She enjoyed the challenge of looking for the treasure, and even more so, she loved the money. So she stuck at it alone, hiring a crew at each location instead of working with her podmates. Now, she’s well-known enough in treasure hunting circles that investors come to her instead of the other way around. Her most recent investor has hinted that there are sunken treasures to be found just off the coast of Soapberry Springs, and so she set out for the slow, sleepy town to see if there’s any truth to the rumours.
How well do you take criticism? “I don’t really take any criticism; if you want to criticize me, I’ll just throw it right back in your face.”
What are you most grateful for? “Alcohol. It takes the edge off of a hard day and replaces it with a very nice, warm burn.”