Thanks for the update to Tempest! If it isn't too spoilery, do you mind mentioning which characters are mer and which are human? From my reread, the only characters I'm certain of are Mike and Levi (mer) Hange and Erwin (human). What are Moblit, Petra and Nanaba? Thank you!
It isn’t spoilery! The only mers from the main cast are Mike and Levi. Everyone else is human. I have a head canon that Moblit applied to work at the exchange either while he was in school or trying to pay off student loans. His degree field is biology and he probably has at least a masters if not his PhD. Hanji, of course, has a PhD in marine biology with a concentration in merfolk biology and behavior. I’m not sure how much of that I’ll put explicitly into the story, though.
As for Mike, he was raised with Erwin and works with him as a business partner. More about their shared childhood will come up in the story itself. Nanaba was hired as a helmsman for Erwin’s yacht and that’s how she met Mike, but in an unofficial capacity she also helps him with a lot of things that a personal assistant might do.
Squad Levi is Erwin’s crew and personal staff. I haven’t ironed out the details of their employment, but Auruo is probably their second helmsman so he and Nanaba can trade out on long voyages. The other crew is trained to watch the controls when neither of them are at the helm and the yacht is on autopilot, but they don’t pilot the ship. Gunther is probably the housekeeping staff while Eld is the cook and Petra is Erwin’s personal assistant, but the crew also functions as his personal staff when they are not on the yacht, so they can serve several functions. This is probably the outline that I’ll end up sticking with.
Sorry, wow, that turned into a book.