Story Fertilizer: Mermonsters and Blood Baths

This Story Fertilizer article was first published on May 6, 2014.

I saw a couple of intriguing links on Google Plus the other day, both, I think, from the Suppressed Transmissions community. Besides being interesting in the creepy, paranormal fashion I find so irresistible, they’ve stimulated some story ideas that are now percolating. With that in mind, I decided to launch a blog series I’m calling Story Fertilizer, wherein I share provocative links and ideas I’ve picked up on the web and talk a little about about how I intend to use them in fiction.

The first is about a cryptid I’d never heard of before called the Ningen. It’s less of a merman than a vaguely anthropoid beluga whale. As you can see from the picture, it’s alien appearance is disconcerting enough to put it into nightmare fuel territory all by itself. I think the picture of the armless proto-mass on the ice floe is particularly provocative. I don’t know what I’m going to use these for quite yet, but their Antarctic location suggests certain obvious connections. I wonder if their blowholes are capable of screeching ‘Tekeli-li’ over and over again?

I do have a couple of metahuman characters whose talents derive from bio-modification with Shoggoth tissue. It’s a handy explanation for, among other things, shape shifting and Wolverine-style rapid reconstructive healing, but oh, the side effects!

This also reminds me another idea I had regarding the Japanese water monsters known as Kappas. In struck me that, in the context of the Ascension Epoch, the kappa legend must be a regional tradition of encounters with Deep Ones, particularly in light of their fondness for raping human women.

Furthermore, the tradition that they have a bowl of water on their head that, if emptied, renders them immobilized is a symbolic representation of a Deep One’s requirement to be regularly immersed in, or at least close to, a large body of water, lest they fall into desiccated hibernation.

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Moving on to the second topic, a recent Gizmodo article announces that modern science has finally caught up with millennia-old folklore and fairy tales by discovering that a transfusion of young blood can make old people young again. True or not, this sort of thing certainly wouldn’t be news to the poor young girls who were kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by the perverted, sadist heretic Elizabeth Bathory. The technique of bathing and drinking the blood of young victims, with the assistance of some spellcraft, also worked well for the Ascension Epoch’s premier femme fatale, Sofia Tavoularis. Part Bathory, part Lucrezia Borgia, and part 1920s gun moll, Sofia Tavoularis is the sorcerous gangster matriarch of the Tavoularis Crime Family, known among other aliases as Lady Bloodbath. Besides her more conventional crimes, she is notorious for her mating sprees, which usually produce metahuman children every bit as sociopathic as she is; often she ends up killing the father so they don’t get in the way of “raising the kids right.” She is still active, beautiful, and fertile even in her late ’80s, and she’s crossed paths with every major superhero of the past fifty years.