Schools and Ferals
Deep-sea merfolk
Deep-sea merfolk
Merfolk
Mermaid-class
Status:
Extant
Sightings
Characteristics
Sexes: {$sex}
Height:
♀&∅
♒︎
Weight:
{$weight}
{$weight2}
{$weight3}
{$weight4}
Ecology
Lifespan:
{$life}
{$max}
{$habitat}
Diet: {$food}
Abilities
{$ability}
Magic affinity: {$magic}
Psionic power: {$psionic}
Notes: {$except}

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Schooling Behavior

Schooling is a natural behavior that happens between merfolk, and the basis on which all more complex social groups are modeled. Thanks to their telempathy and telepathy, merfolk instinctively gather together under a more dominant will, in both temporary and permanent arrangements. Groups of such psionically linked merfolk are called the school, and the merfolk whose will is the school's focus and guide is called the leader.

Schools are traditionally composed of only up to a dozen merfolk or so, but pseudo-pods have been known to form with hundreds of individuals at once, distinguished from proper pods only by lacking a name and sometimes, the gender of their leader. Schools themselves can also group together, in which case the less willful leaders will take on subordinate roles until the cluster of schools disperses. A single event of pseudo-pods clustering has ever been chronicled into merfolk legend: the Wild Swarm.

A school requires the merfolk that form it to be unified in some way, either through loyalty or common goal, and will likely collapse if the goal or source of loyalty is removed. It is this aspect of schooling that allows for both temporary and permanent schools to disband without lasting damage, and prevents the use of coercion and fear to enslave merfolk to a malevolent individual with school bonds.

Schools have four distinct roles; apart from the leader, who directs the group, and the schooling merfolk who comprise the majority and follow the guidance, there are the mirror, who is psychologically and ideologically close enough to the leader to serve as a substitute in the leader's absence and keep the school from disbanding, and the second, who assists the leader or the mirror and serves as their bodyguard and right-hand mer. Both the mirror and second are optional roles that are usually only needed if the leader is respectively absent, and physically weak but otherwise exemplary in leadership.

Leaders

The leader is what holds the rest of the school together. If the leader is subpar, even the most talented school will fail to thrive, and if the leader is skilled, even a school made from the most ragtag, clumsy merfolk will excel as a school. This makes the position of leader absolutely crucial when a school forms.

The leader is selected subconsciously by the rest of the school, and might not realize they were picked as leader until the school undergoes their first hunt together or otherwise needs to cooperate. When the school chooses the leader they anchor themselves to, many factors come into play; experience, natural skill, strength of instincts, initiative, and willpower are all crucial. Being abyssborn or wildborn gives a merfolk an advantage in several of these categories, as does age, maturing into a merman, and training.

A leader has an uncanny awareness of each merfolk in their school, from where they are to what they're doing, and they can use this ability to guide the school into moving as a single entity. This gives a school their incredible synchronization, and their ability to carry out maneuvers that would usually need to be practiced and rehearsed. Every leader is capable of this feat, but only permanent leaders will ever see this evolve into a psychic bond with their school.

Leadership Bonds

The psychic bond between a leader and their school forms as an unanimous, conscious choice from the school to swear a long-term allegiance to the leader, and only dissolves for a schooling merfolk if they find themselves rejecting the leader entirely. Leaders understand instinctively how important the bond that forms is, and usually strive to protect the school with all they have, and this near-fanatical loyalty is returned tenfold by their school. A leader can prevent the bond from forming, but this refusal is seen as a show of mistrust, and usually forces the school to disband due to a loss of loyalty.

The psychic bond allows both the leader to sense each in the school's distress, and enables long-distance one-way darkspeech communication from the leader to each merfolk within the school bond. It also allows the merfolk that make up the school to sense their leader's general mood, proximity, and vague direction. This bond can be used by a broken-up school to track down their leader and reform, as long as the school's loyalty and trust in the leader remains strong, as well.

Mirrors

A mirror is chosen mostly for their similarity to the school's leader, in beliefs and goals, and serve as a temporary replacement if their leader is unavailable. The two think similarly enough that the school synchronizes with the mirror naturally, and the mirror is competent enough to direct in the leader's absence. It makes schools with a mirror harder to scatter, by outside forces or unfortunate accidents.

Mirrors allow for splitting the group in two without drifting apart, enabling both the leader and mirror to act independently and regroup without schooling problems at the end of the maneuver. While a leader can synchronize a school split into two groups as well, it requires a far more powerful telepathy over distances beyond 10-15m, and more experience, effort and concentration than relying on a mirror sharing their goals and thinking alike.

In most cases, a mirror will be recognized if a leader goes missing, or the school needs to split in two for longer durations than a hunt. Just like the leader, the mirror will slip into the role smoothly and seamlessly, and all individuals in the school are aware that this is a temporary shift in leadership. A mirror is not suited for leading a school permanently, and they only prolong the time before a school collapses due to a missing leader.

Seconds

The second's role in the school is, essentially, both to call out the leader on actions or decisions unsound for the school, and to protect the leader from physical or emotional attacks. In a way, the second makes sure the leader and schooling merfolk aren't harmed, either by themselves or the others in the school, while acting as a bodyguard, confidant, and sounding board for the leader. If the leader is absent, the second will ensure a mirror follows the same priorities and goals as the missing leader, alongside their purpose of guarding the mirror.

The other purpose of the second is to provide force when the leader is unable of defending themself. While much rarer, sometimes a leader is so competent, loyal, clever and mentally strong that they are chosen in spite of lack of physical strength. In these circumstances, the second also acts as the leader's proxy in physical challenges, and there are even rumors of seconds being psionically overtaken by their leader's consciousness, for a duel's period.

A school without a second is more likely to disband due to a loss of trust, or a feeling of discontentment, without the second establishing a bridge and a way for issues to be resolved with less dissent. Some leaders are capable of threading waters between close relationships and not taking things personally, but many others simply lack the awareness and diplomacy needed. Preventing a school from disbanding, without causing a permanent strain and compromising its future cohesion, takes decades of experience, training and empathy that most leaders lack, which makes a second's ability to ask what the problem is very valuable.

Formation of Schools

As previously mentioned, a school forms naturally from a group of merfolk, once one individual in particular takes the lead— and shows skill and competence at it. The decision to lead and the decision to accept the leader is almost always subconscious, sometimes leaving a school to only realize their new status when an outsider points it out.

The way that merfolk schools form is an inexact science, but it requires loyalty, trust, and a charismatic individual with leadership skills. When these elements are in place, a school forms as merfolk instinctively gather under the individual who is the most self-assured and steady, relying on their guidance. In exchange, the new leader shows no hesitation or wariness to the school, and assumes their orders as good as already carried out. This mutual blind faith is what makes the school move on instinct as one single organism rather than multiple individuals, and the leader's quick thinking and instinctive responses gives the school its eerie ability to react together without delay.

Once a school has formed, the only ways they can add new merfolk is by disbanding and then letting the school reform with the new individuals included, or through mate-bonds. Each merfolk's mates are considered to be an extension of that individual within the school, and given the respect and deference also given to their mate unless they prove they don't deserve it. On rare occasions, a new merfolk might join an existing school because their goals line up, they are already loyal to the leader, and the rest of the school approves their presence.

Families

The most common type of merfolk school is a family school, with the leader being one of the parents, and their mates and children forming the rest of the group. The parents are the only merfolk who reproduce in the family school, and if one of their children finds mates, the child will break away from the school once they have their own merchildren to raise, forming a new family school. Related family schools often cluster together, and tend to live close to one another with minimal tension.

Most family schools form when a mate-group has a handful of merchildren to raise, and they are not part of a pod or colony already. The innate trust between the parents and offspring, and the loyalty between the mate-group naturally encourages the schooling instinct. All the usual schooling behavior applies, but as the leader's mates are considered an "extension" of the leader, only the children can grow into the roles of mirror or second.

The average family school is sedentary, and can be considered analogous to human rural homesteading; the school settles into an area that can sustain them properly for centuries, and they raise the animals and plants that they subsist on. They supplement their lifestyle by hunting and foraging slightly beyond their usual range, and might occasionally trade when they cross paths with pods by happenstance. For the few nomadic family schools, they mainly live as hunter-gatherers, roaming across a larger area and seeking out opportunities to trade with nearby colonies.

Friendships

Pseudo-Pods

Ferals and Wildborns

Feral merfolk are merfolk who have gone into a state referred to as the feral dream; several higher brain functions operate as if under REM sleep, and the merfolk in this altered state becomes more reactive and instinctive, eschewing logic and being less capable of remembering things in both the short and long term. Moments with deep emotional or sensory impact have a better chance of being remembered, and a merfolk who awakens from the feral dream is likely to remember those events, albeit with a vague, dreamlike quality.

Most ferals who woke from the feral dream describe it as something of an idyllic state, where the only worries that exist are food, shelter and companionship, and they found themselves continuously charmed by even the most simple natural phenomena and excited to live day to day. Civilized merfolk who slipped into a feral state and were later guided back to consciousness had a completely different experience, fearing a loss of "self" and harboring a phobia for the altered state of mind, describing it as "beast-like"; this echoes the propaganda disseminated mainly by colony merfolk and pods who follow teachings called the New Way.

Merfolk have three major ways to enter the feral dream. A wildborn or former feral can, at any time, enter a meditative state that leads to the feral dream. For most merfolk, a prolonged lack of psychic contact with other psionic species can result in their feral regression, as a defense against isolation-induced depression and catatonia. Lastly, should brain trauma occur in a merfolk, they will revert to their feral state in order to allow their brain to heal without strain or interference.

Conversely, only a wildborn can leave the feral dream without continuous guidance from other merfolk. A psionic creature, feral or not, can guide a feral to leave the altered state with continuous, persistent telepathic contact, providing an anchor for the feral to break away from the dream, but the feral must be willing to wake; attempting to force a feral awake generally has disastrous results for the feral's mental stability. Many merfolk also spend too long within the feral dream to ever recover from it, their brains adapting and re-purposed for a feral merfolk's life rather than for merfolk civilization.

Feral Behavior

Feral behavior places a heavy focus on the immediate present, and on meeting the most basic needs for merfolk: food, shelter, and company. When one of these needs makes itself known, ferals will abruptly disengage from any other activity, even conversation, to fulfill it. A hungry feral will be laser-focused on finding and eating prey until they physically can't consume more, and a lonely feral will constantly look out for other merfolk or psionic creatures.

Ferals seek out shelter in one of several ways, depending on gender. Mermaids tend to remain nomadic, taking advantage of natural features or abandoned structures to hide and sleep for the night within a large territory called a demesne. Mermen prefer to establish a semipermanent or permanent nest, building a concealed area they can keep watch from, usually outside water. Merruls prefer a series of small concealed areas, natural or man-made, and rotate between these shelters in something reminiscent of a miniature pod circle. As per usual, merrow might act as any of the three others, or with a mixture of behaviors.

Once in a state of feral regression, merfolk's ability to memorize and recall events decreases drastically, lending a "dream-like" quality to the feral dream period. While teaching a feral merfolk new information remains possible, it becomes far more challenging and demands constant repetitions over a longer time period. Their reaction time and muscle memory improve to near-perfection, but they do suffer from a sharp loss in decision-making skills, with their emotional and impulse control becoming close to nonexistent. Some negative emotions, such as stress, embarrassment, depression and boredom, become impossible to experience. Positive reinforcement is also modified to be more effective and long-lasting while in the feral dream.

While no more likely to be aggressive and territorial than other merfolk, ferals tend to express their emotions far more quickly and without any care for the consequences or repercussions. They have a reputation in "civilized" merfolk society for being savage and mercurial, but their ire can be smoothed down as easily as it was raised with the appropriate body language or a placating offering of food.

Feral Schooling

Mate-Drive

The mate-drive, which begins toward the end of October and ends a little after mid-November, is a biological process which lures mate-less merfolk out into nearby cool, open waters at lower depths, and sends them into a temporary version of the feral dream. Merfolk who have mates are also affected mentally and fall into the feral dream, but they do not feel the compulsion to seek out open waters, merely their mates' company. As the name might hint, the mate-drive also causes all mature merfolk to experience an overwhelming urge to reproduce.

Two weeks prior to the mate-drive proper, the three reproductive genders all experience a behavioral shift meant to warn and prepare them for the upcoming phenomenon. Mermaids hunt and eat up to half their own body size in prey, and stockpile proteins and fats as preparation, nearly doubling their body weight without much external changes. Mermen become irritable and enter a state of hyper-arousal as their appetite becomes suppressed, and excretory body functions pause to redirect byproducts into elevated cyanide production and cyanate stockpiling. Merrows experience a lesser extreme of food-gorging and slower body functions to boost cyanide production, but they also enter a mild torpor between feeding bouts.

Merfolk mating habits

Wildborns

Wildborns are merfolk who were born seemingly feral, and always seem to be at least partly in the feral dream, with stronger instincts and less concerned about the future and past events. Being wildborn is a recessive genetic trait that was widespread in ancient pre-clan times, but just like with ferals, a large amount of misinformation and propaganda has twisted the truth.

Being wildborn is subtly different from being feral, mixing the social adaptations of merfolk with the instinctive advantages of the feral dream state, while adding its own tricks. For example, a wildborn experiences no cognitive or memory-related issues, is more empathic, and can fall into the feral dream and become wilder.

Differences from Ferals

Wildborns are emotionally affected to a higher degree, have greater empathy, and require more socialization to thrive, but these traits also make them far more cooperative than other merfolk. Their heightened emotional states makes their impulse control somewhat poor when combined with their stronger instincts, but it is generally tempered by their greater ability to empathize with not only other merfolk or even psionics, but most sentient creatures.

They have instincts and muscle memory almost as finely-honed while awake as any merfolk in the feral dream would, without losing their ability to strategize, think logically, or otherwise think a situation through. They still remain more impulsive than normal merfolk, but not to the point of complete thoughtlessness, and can still be talked down from a volatile state, unlike ferals. That is not to say that a wildborn would stop themselves from biting someone who annoys them, merely that they would be able to recognize the source of their irritation and choose if they want to stop.

Wildborn merfolk instinctively care for those they consider "theirs", which fosters a sense of closeness and loyalty that encourages the formation of a school far more easily than normal. They ensure the availability of shelter and food for their friends and family, and do their best to mediate and keep the peace between theirs, and to defend their group and territory from outsiders. Where they can, they also offer advice and assistance.

Lone Ferals

Despite being from a social species, some ferals seem to seek out isolation, perhaps because they believe themselves dangerous, or believe others a danger to them. A lone feral tends to be rather aggressive, verbally or physically, and merfolk, even other lone ferals, prefer to avoid them unless absolutely necessary.

Most lone ferals tend to be young; newly-morphed mermaids and mermen kicked out from colonies and pods for growth-frenzies gone far out of control, inexperienced merrows who leave to learn to tame their unconventional magic, abandoned or lost merchildren who learned to fear other merfolk early in life. They often reintegrate into a school, pod or colony once they work out their aggression or fear, but some ferals seem to simply become loners by nature and spend a large amount of their life needing only casual, short conversations whenever they might cross paths with other merfolk.

An example of a permanently solitary feral would be the case of the Shining One; a gigantic feral mermaid who lives alone beneath the Antarctic ice, only emerging from her demesne for the mate-drive season every few decades. She allegedly has been around since the Pleistocene Era, and mostly terrifies colonies and pods by causing intense competitions between mermen for the privilege to sire the next generation of her children. Some former ferals tell stories about the Shining One hunting down mindflayers, and protecting feral schools and pods that cross through her demesne.

Exiles

Forsaken

The forsaken are a sub-group of merfolk exiles who breached one of several way-breaking taboos of merfolk society. Their exile usually involves obvious violence to drive them off, and a magically-applied branding curse felt, and sometimes seen, by creatures sensitive to primal magic. The curse manifests as a "dark aura", stains and strands of ominous magical poison mottling their aura and soul, and a general feeling of dread and danger in the vicinity of the forsaken one.

The taboos that cause an exile to be forsaken are very serious, and the forsaken is considered immoral and irredeemable by merfolk standards for carrying out the act or acts that lead to their condemnation. Sexual coercion or assault, killing other merfolk, attraction to merchildren, relatives, beasts or corpses, betrayal of kith and kin, enslavement of merfolk, and non-consensual removal or theft of a mer-pearl are all taboos that lead to forsaking and exiling merfolk.

Some forsaken band together into tense school-like groups to avoid entering the feral dream, but the group's resemblance to a school is shallow at best. While a school's leader is appointed largely through competence, cleverness and initiative, forsaken bands determine order through force and violence alone. Where a school leader forms a psychic bond with their school, taking a role similar to a pod matriarch, the leader of a forsaken group has no trust or loyalty with the forsaken they keep under control through threats of violence or expulsion.

Sea-Witches

Sea witches are lone merfolk, often ferals, who fixate on their psionic and magic abilities. Rather than focusing on companionship, they hone their magical crafts, usually in jealously-guarded lairs. Most sea witches are merrows who seek to discover the full potential of their elemental magic, but some are adult merrul who appoint themselves as local guardians, ready to warn nearby colonies of incoming disasters they sense.

They have a reputation for being dangerous and unreliable, both for their self-taught mastery in strange magic, and for their highly territorial behavior and odd solitary nature. Many of them are considered as something like a myth or legend, talked of as bogeymen to scare merchildren out of adventuring too far, or final options for desperate merfolk with otherwise unsolvable problems.

Most sea witches behave similarly to nesting mermen, when it comes to their lairs. They select the area based on defensibility, decorate it in a way that makes it visually clear that it is occupied, and then defend it viciously from what they consider intruders or rivals. Mermaids and merruls are less likely to be seen as threats of some kind, but merrow and mermen who fail to show submissive body language, like compressed head and fin ornaments and calmly-pulsing light-lines, are treated with aggression.

Forsaken sea witches are the ones who lend credence to tales of merchildren vanishing for going too close to some lairs. These sea witches consort with mindflayers and lair far away from the abyss, in flooded subterranean caverns that are usually in close proximity with drow encampments and mindflayer nests, and are dreaded far and wide for their well-trained skills in more than one type of elemental magic.