Ariadne

Born: ?, ?
Died: n/a
Aliases: ?
Family: ?
Racial characteristics: Scales, gills, fins, etc
Sex: Female
Height: 5'8" ish
Weight: 150 lbs

Hair ~

Eyes ~

Affiliations: (News agency)

Born to a small family in a coral shoal in the Thunder Sea, Ariadne was always curious about the outside world. For most of her life, the closest she could get was to find and examine artifacts from the surface that happened to sink to the bottom of the sea. When she formed an unlikely bond with a Quori spirit, she learned of a way to be part of the world above; however, she suffers from a curse, where the touch of water will reveal her monstrous nature.

Ancestry

Commonly referred to as "sirens", Ariadne's people are dragonkin, distant descendants of waterborn dragons, diverging somewhere around the end of the Age of Demons about 100,000 years ago. In their natural form, they are humanoid-piscine hybrids, with a humanoid skeleton, distinctly humanoid features from the waist up, with legs joined into a long tail. They are scaled throughout, but less so on the face, hands, inner arms, chest, and torso. With much variation by bloodline, they feature spines and crests, and extensive webbing and fins on the arms to aid in swimming. Their tails provide the vast majority of their motive force, with narrow but long fins to transmit the force of their "leg" muscles to the water.

Curiously, sirens appear to be exclusively female. They can mate with any humanoid male, but their ancestry remains dominant despite intervening generations. On a genetic level, their offsprings' genes are not 50/50 from both parents, but are overwhelmingly from the maternal side, with a minimum of variance from the father. Their mating habits typically include the slaughter and partial consumption of the male donor; the latter doesn't appear to be necessary, but is presumably enjoyable. The siren disembowels the male, removing (and optionally consuming) the soft organs of the torso, and implants her fertilized eggs in the cavity. The corpse provides a measure of protection for the eggs, as well as a meal for those first to come out of their shells.

Siren "fry" are short-lived, as most newborn aquatic animals tend to be. There is intense competition for sustenance, as infants rely on mothers' milk for months before they can digest animal flesh reliably. The mothers have only two breasts, of course, and generally produce only enough milk for one or two children. They encourage competition, as it breeds the strongest of their young, and offer little to no protection to the weaker fry against predators.

With their potent natural abilities, sirens are usually capable of feeding themselves, if necessary, at a young age, usually around 6-8 years old. However, in contrast to their earlier callousness, siren mothers do not reject their young at this age, typically keeping their family units together until at least sexual maturity, when the first sign of mother-daughter competition emerges in the most scarce environments. This is the exception, not the rule, as siren communities are mostly limited by food availability, and the open sea tends to provide plenty enough food for dozens of sirens in a given shoal, island, or other home.

In terms of environment, sirens are amphibious, and can live underwater indefinitely, but they prefer to base themselves where they can access both land and water. They prefer small islands, shoals, atolls, and coral reefs, although it's especially preferable if reasonably deep water is nearby. Sinkholes and atolls are ideal homes for a siren pod. While time on the surface is non-essential to survival, time underwater is. Without access to water, sirens will dehydrate, even if transformed into human form. The alternative has not been extensively studied, but there are reports of sirens who were forced to live in deep water for an extended time, and became more aquatic and less adapted to surface life as a result.

Sirens are powerful swimmers, favoring short bursts of speed over endurance. Their tails are well optimized, but their humanoid shape adds too much drag to compete with cetaceans and other marathon swimmers. Since they don't usually ranged too far from their homes, they don't have a strong survival need for long-distance swimming. And while their arms aren't quite as ideals as fins for pure aquatic performance, their hands are exactly as useful as they are to surface-dwellers. Between the ability to grasp prey and to use tools, they have little trouble hunting. They can eat virtually any aquatic diet, and they prefer a wide variety to their meals. They tend to prefer eating above the water, the better to avoid diluting the taste and filling up on seawater. While they are naturally able to thrive in saltwater, they get most of their fresh water from food sources, and take care not to drink saltwater. It can slake their thirst, but only to a point--without access to food a siren's salinity level will rise to dangerous levels. They have been known to drink fresh water on land to supplement, although generally they can find a good balance point without it.

Like many aquatic creatures, sirens have powerful voices that can be used for communication both underwater and in the air. Their vocal capabilities encapsulate all of those of humans and well beyond--they can mimic whale song, they can use a form of sonar, and they've even been known to be able to inflict damage through pure sonic energy. Beyond this physical capability, their voices carry their inherent mental abilities as far as they can be heard, allowing them to affect the minds of just about any thinking creature. They can use these powers to hypnotize, dulling the senses and causing inaction (even in the face of clear danger); they can use them to fascinate, causing creatures to approach them (again, despite danger); they can even create a powerful attraction, forcing their victim to think of the siren as a closed loved one, dearer to them than their own offspring, willing to sacrifice anything on their behalf.

Famously, sirens are known for luring seafarers to their doom, using their voices to compel sailors into dangerous waters, whereupon they wreck their ship, and the sirens feast on them. This is an oversimplification, but it certainly happens. In reality, sirens are careful not to take undue risk, especially when there is no immediate survival need. Apart from mating, sirens have no physical need for humanoids, nor their ships, nor necessarily their cargo. They do prey on humanoids, but the many widely available foods in the sea are much less likely to carry weapons or wield magic. In fact, they seem more motivated by the acquisition of treasure than by preying on the sailors themselves (again, outside the context of mating). While some treasures found on ships are genuinely useful--it's hard to find a good hairbrush under the sea, for instance--most are just useless trinkets good only for hoarding. Perhaps it is due to their distant draconic heritage, but sirens tend to like to hoard treasures, and guard them jealously.

History

Ariadne was born to a small family on a coral shoal about 30 miles from Sharn in the Thunder Sea. Her upbringing was fairly typical--swimming, playing in the water, hunting, exploring...and of course luring ships to their doom. Not atypically, she was curious about the world beyond the reef, but her mother and aunt forbade her to venture too far, cautioning her that sirens were not well loved in the outside world.

Not to be deterred, she ventured regularly past the barriers imposed on her, discovering more and more of the sea, but all she could sea, was...more sea. It seemed that the passing ships were coming from somewhere and going to somewhere that was very different than home.

One fateful day, after a particularly heated disagreement about her limitations and personal safety, she snuck out, and decided to see just how far she could go. Spotting a ship in the distance, she tailed it, following for hours as it navigated far beyond the waters she was familiar with. Inevitably, it approached the land, and--beyond anything she'd imagined, beyond the exaggerations she'd assumed her mothers' stories were based on, it was enormous. Instead of a beach and maybe a few hills, it was a towering cliff, insanely tall, seemingly as flat on the side as the sea was on its top. Even birds couldn't have flown over that cliff. If ever a feature of the land announced its unwillingness to accept entry, it was this wall of stone.

Suitably intimidated, she sunk below the waves, and contemplated returning home. What would she say? How harsh would the punishment be? Should she just run away? Live here, on the shores of this impossibly huge island? Before she could think of an answer, she realized she wasn't alone.

She was aware of many other peoples of the sea--different from sirens, but properly dwelling beneath the waves as civilized people do. She'd not seen particularly many of them, and was wary, but not so much as to not feel a measure of relief to have another undersea dweller with whom to relate. They were curious beings--much more "fishy" than a siren, but still with humanoid arms and heads large enough for a proper brain. Perhaps they were intelligent. After all, they were clicking at her in what seemed like an organized language--not that she was familiar with it. So she did what came naturally, linking her mind to theirs, and hearing their thoughts. No sooner had she broadcast the most basic greeting, than they bolted in a burst of fear, leaving a trail of cavitation bubbles leading to a fissure in the rock wall. She followed, disappointed in their reaction and curious to know more, navigating a long, winding cave system. When she began to dispair of ever finding an exit, she began to sense something indescribable ahead, and finally emerged into a world she could never have imagined.

Endless lights, thousands of people of dozens of races, making their homes amidst an enormous sinkhole, with these strangely geometrically-perfect pillars of stone forming a foundation for their reefs. So many different styles of building, so many disparate cultures, all coming together in a "city", something she'd heard about but never realized could be so vast. Gone were her original quarry, but here she'd discovered thousands of new people, each with their own stories to tell.

Few of them responded as frightfully as the fishy ones, but most seemed at least wary of her, with only those in the largest groups broadcasting any confidence in their safety. Even the giant whales and the dragon turtle regarded her with caution. It didn't sit right. Sirens are feared among humanoids, of course, but why among other sea people? She'd never heard of a siren eating a merfolk. Sure, they ate fish, but everybody eats fish. Fish eat fish. She didn't eat intelligent people. Was her family unusual? Did other sirens eat everybody they came across?

Presumably no, as she would eventually learn that she wasn't the only siren there. Lyta, an older teenage siren who'd also left her home, took her under her...fins, as it were. She explained the unwritten rules of The Pit, as the city was known. Everywhere was someone's "turf", and while just about everyone had somewhere they ought not set foot (or tail), sirens weren't particularly liked anywhere, and had to stick to common areas. Everyone else--even the mightiest orcas or deadly bands of sahuagin (at least in the Pit) didn't mess around with surface-dwellers. It was generally understood that it's in everyone's best interest to pretend they don't exist. Just enjoy the things that fall into the depths, and never breach the surface. Surface-dwellers are dangerous--more so than even sirens--and they just don't fit in below the waves. Sirens, it seems, were considered pariahs, who routinely broke those rules, antagonizing surface people and giving everyone else a bad name. Even sahuagin, who will happily raid a ship, kill everyone aboard, and sink it with all valuable cargo on board, found their excuses to look down on the sirens. "We don't shit where we eat," they explained spitefully, as if avoiding that underwater was possible.

Lyta had a unique way of ensuring her safety in the Pit: she was a fighter.