Yesterday was Cael's birthday, and since our Blue Rose campaign ended last week, he requested a one-shot of Mermaid Adventures. Cael's only played a handful of RPGs ever, and most of them fall on the "for younger players" side of things (obviously). He's played Toon!, Mermaid Adventures, Fate Accelerated, and now Blue Rose. I think I may have run ICONS for him at one point, but I don't remember and it's been a while. Maybe Cat.
Anyway, Mermaid Adventures. On we go!
Our characters are:
- Sir Twinkleteeth, a shark-folk who's all about the rule of law. He's big and burly and combat-capable, and is an official Atlantis guard in his neighborhood.
- Sam Storm, a ray-folk who was at the Academy with Twinky, but dropped out when he realized that he just wasn't as interested in upholding the law as he was actually helping people.
- Clyde, a lobster-folk interested in trading favors and hanging with his buds, playing Clam-Ball and other sports.
- Penny, an octo-folk obsessed with puzzles and riddles, with a highly competitive nature.
These mer live in Current Row, a small neighborhood not far from the richer district of Atlantis. Homes there are made from natural rock formations and cultivated coral, and the Row is famous for its salt-water taffy. The unofficial matriarch of the Row is Mama Squid, an octo-folk whose nephew is the one who makes the taffy. The Row gets its name from the strong currents that whoosh through the streets, but everyone's just kind of learned to live with it. There's a school building in the Row where the teen mer go to scare each other; supposedly it's haunted by the ghost of a killer shark-folk.
On this particular evening, the sun has just set. Penny is drawing mazes in the sand with her tentacles. Clyde is playing games in the park with his buds, while Twinky is nearby doing crunches and slurping a protein shake. Sam is in his apartment, making dinner.
Suddenly, they all hear a terrible flapping sound, and flocks of small, bat-like rays are flying through the neighborhood. They crash into Sam's window and wreck up the place, as he tries to coax them out with a spatula. They swarm around Clyde's purple spikey hair and he panics, running through the park until he crashes headlong into Twinky, and both of them roll fish over tea-kettle down a hill and drop into Sam's yard.
Penny, meanwhile, is surrounded by a swarm of the things kicking up sand. She thinks she hears a scream, but she cocks her head to check and gets clonked on the noggin by one of the rays. She freaks out and swims away blindly, winding up in a kelp bush near the others.
Clyde and Twinky disentangle themselves with Sam's help. The rays, blown this way and that by the currents, seem to have moved on. Penny, though, feels something cold and squishy in the kelp bush, and yelps in surprise. Twinky, ever a mer of action, goes over to check, and finds the body of a mermaid in the bush.
The mermaid is Lucy, a fish-folk they all know from around the neighborhood. Sam checks her, and she's not dead, just unconscious. Also, she has weird pinprick marks on her shoulders and neck, and she's chalk white. Twinky picks her up and swims like a bat-fish out of hell for the nearest medic. The doctor treats her, and then tells the others that she's lost a lot of blood, but he can't figure out how. She doesn't have any wounds other than the little prick-marks. She's had a transfusion (sure, mer can do blood transfusions) and healing spells, but she's only stabilized, not safe. If the characters could figure out what attacked her, the doctor would have a better chance of helping her, and the staff is a little swamped by injuries and so on from the ray swarms, so could they help out?
Sir Twinkleteeth is, of course, a guard, so he's honor-bound to help. Penny likes Lucy (they're actually family - Lucy's her third cousin's sister, twice removed!) so of course she's in. Sam sighs - he's getting pulled into this kind of weirdness again, but he can't refuse someone in need. And Clyde figures hey, they pull this off, Lucy owes him one.
The characters put their heads together and try and figure out where to start. They figure the ray-swarm and the attack on Lucy have to be connected, and Clyde knows a guy who's all about Rays. He even legally changed his name to Ray! They swim off to Ray's house, and find an angry mob of people blaming him for the ray-swarm. Ray, for his part, is trying to talk them down - he didn't have nothing to do with those rays, man. He flattens himself and slips under his door. Twinky swims over and stands in front of the door, giving a glare to the mob, and they suddenly all remember they have better things to do.
Clyde knocks and entices Ray to come back out. Ray tells them that those flocks of bat-rays wouldn't swim into the Row - they're too small to fight the current. Also, you never see multiple flocks in such a small area. He opines that something summoned all those rays magically, but he doesn't know anyone who could do that kind of magic. Penny asks if someone might have trapped the rays and then released them, and Ray says it's possible, but it would have taken a lot of time and patience. They ask about the wounds on Lucy, and Ray says that it wasn't the bat-rays. They don't have teeth.
From here, the group splits up. Penny and Clyde go to Clyde's apartment to check his library for a creature that might have been able to make those wounds, while Twinky and Sam go to visit Mama Squid, since she knows about magic. Penny and Clyde hit the books, and they discover that there is such a thing as a vampire squid! The squid has little barbs on the underside of its tentacles that it uses to feed...but vampire squids don't get big enough to attack a mer like this. They wonder if they're dealing with a mutant of some kind, or a bunch of the littler ones...but then they see a face leering in the window. It's gone in a split second, but they both saw it.
Meanwhile, Twinky and Sam find Mama Squid pulling taffy off of bat-rays in her nephew's store (a bunch flew in and got stuck). They tell her what's going on, and she opines that command fish to do something harmful to them (as happened with these rays) is something only a creature from the Dark Lands would do. Sam muses that they might have to go out to the Dark Lands, but Mama Squid says that if the creature that did this is here in the Row, then here's where they need to look. They thank her and swim off to meet the others.
Penny and Clyde go outside to see if the lurker left any sign behind, and indeed, they find half a sea bug. Now, mer eat sea bugs normally, but not raw (ew), and this one's been bitten right in half. Penny picks it up gingerly, between two tentacles, just as the others arrive.
They pool what they know so far, and they decide to discount the idea that anyone trapped all these rays and released them (Twinky is actually an experienced trap maker and he figures it'd be too much work). That leaves some kind of supernatural influence. The characters decide to check the abandoned school - if any Dark Lands stuff is lurking in Current Row, it's probably there.
They swim over to the school and spot a ray-folk slithering in. Sam, himself a ray-folk, decides to go in the same way and check it out. He flattens himself and slips into a crack in the wall, and sees the ray-folk that they were following talking to someone in the next room.
The ray-folk, though, is in bad shape. His fins are green, but so full of slime that they're almost black. He's got a gnarled mess of a beard, and sea-bugs tied into his hair. He grabs a live bug off the ground and bites it in half, and continues his report. "Master, I have found another bride for you! She is an octo-folk named Penny. She will be a beautiful and clever bride, Master!"
Sam more than a little creeped out, and opens the door from the inside to admit the others. They sneak around the building to get a look behind the unseen "Master," and find that it's an octo-folk. He's tall, pale, but his black tentacles that reveal red and white underneath...and tiny fangs.
"Excellent, Rayfield," he says. "I shall build my empire of the night, and all of Atlantis shall fall before...Count Pelagica."
Twinky has heard enough. He charged into the room with his nail gun. Penny, likewise, is horrified, and unleashes a beam of magic at the Count. It stuns him, and Twinky hits him with a nail. Rayfield swims to protect his master, and Clyde and Sam engage him with their weapons. The Count's tentacles flash with colors and Penny feels sleep for a second, but shakes off the feeling and puts her googly-eyed sea-urchin mask on to counter the effect. Sam whacks the count with his ax, and the count changes into a bat-ray to flee...but Twinky deftly catches him!
They take the Count and Rayfield into custody and deliver them to the Atlantis guard. Lucy is treated with sea-garlic, and eventually recovers, though she remains even paler than before. And each of the mer are given commendations from the City of Atlantis for their exemplary service as vampire (squid) hunters!
