Shadowgirls

I'm just wondering, since the Deep Ones seem so darn powerful compared to humans, how come we humans still hold power on the dry land?

Maiazuru wrote:I'm just wondering, since the Deep Ones seem so darn powerful compared to humans, how come we humans still hold power on the dry land?

Numbers. [s]And the fact they need to remain moist or die.[/s] Sorry, that is the Progenitors, not the Offspring.

Also, they would want to remain under the 'radar' of other orders and societies for example, the Templar.

I do seem to recall the original story of the shadow over innsmouth, seemed to suggest that the oceans teamed with them.

I guess the major factors are:

1: Technology. They have none. Can't deal to well with aircraft, subs and tanks.

2: Water dependent. They can't be out of water for more than an hour or it affects their health and they can eventually die from dehydration.

Me and D.Rod actually talked about this one night in detail. For the topic on hand, we talked about Vampires and what we don't like about the modrenization of the myth. You see... When you look at movies like Blade or Underworld, or even Vampire the Masquerade, they give this notion that vampires secretly run the world and that humans are just part of the lower rungs of the food chain to them. We don't buy that shit. You see, one thing about humans, and it's the thing that in real life makes us at the top of the chain:

We kill. And kill good.

Think about it. We're the only creatures on Earth that when we cannot adapt to nature, we force nature to adapt to us.

When Bram Stoker and all the others wrote the legends of vampires... They were thinking of current technology, which at the time, with firearms was probably the extention of the six shooter, maybe even the gatling gun. Today, I've seen wartime footage of soliders in Iraq that can take down whole building with thier firearms alone. The weaponry we come up with on it's own is staggering. If there is a such thing as vampires, we would have killed them... Commited genocide or at least drove them into hiding. We invented the flamethrower so we can slowly burn mass numbers of people to death at close ranges. And when that's not enough, we've split the atom and used it on ourselves. When that wasn't enough, we dig into biological warfare to see if we can make our enemy civilians bleed through thier eyeballs. And when THAT wasn't enough... We convince our young children to strap bombs to thier waists and blow themselves up at bus stations. And through all that... We make video games and toys about it all and sell it to our kids.

There's a reason aliens haven't come to our planet and made themselves known. Humans are really scary muthaf@&kas.

Mach Sabre wrote:Me and D.Rod actually talked about this one night in detail. For the topic on hand, we talked about Vampires and what we don't like about the modrenization of the myth. You see... When you look at movies like Blade or Underworld, or even Vampire the Masquerade, they give this notion that vampires secretly run the world and that humans are just part of the lower rungs of the food chain to them. We don't buy that shit. You see, one thing about humans, and it's the thing that in real life makes us at the top of the chain:

We kill. And kill good.

Think about it. We're the only creatures on Earth that when we cannot adapt to nature, we force nature to adapt to us.

When Bram Stoker and all the others wrote the legends of vampires... They were thinking of current technology, which at the time, with firearms was probably the extention of the six shooter, maybe even the gatling gun. Today, I've seen wartime footage of soliders in Iraq that can take down whole building with thier firearms alone. The weaponry we come up with on it's own is staggering. If there is a such thing as vampires, we would have killed them... Commited genocide or at least drove them into hiding. We invented the flamethrower so we can slowly burn mass numbers of people to death at close ranges. And when that's not enough, we've split the atom and used it on ourselves. When that wasn't enough, we dig into biological warfare to see if we can make our enemy civilians bleed through thier eyeballs. And when THAT wasn't enough... We convince our young children to strap bombs to thier waists and blow themselves up at bus stations. And through all that... We make video games and toys about it all and sell it to our kids.

There's a reason aliens haven't come to our planet and made themselves known. Humans are really scary muthaf@&kas.

It was once and for a good cause

Well I guess the whole deal with vampires is they can have hundreds of years, spent in the shadows, to slowly lurk up the chain, into power areas. Plus, if they have an area they want to get into, they can just convert the guy in that area to a vamp, or kill him and hope someone more favourable takes the position.

I guess the deal is that Vampires, are humans (or were). They're crafty and centuries of age can teach them patience when it comes to dealing with threats. They can go into hiding and wait threats out or deal with them slowly and delecately over years rather than rush at it.

With the modern view that anyone can be made a vampire quite easily and becoming one automatically puts you on their side, its an easy thing to imagine them gaining the upper hand when every advesary can be turned into a friend.

Its this part I don't like. I tend to think that a vampire is something that should be hard as hell to create. The subject should be relatively young and healthy, they should be fed vampire blood but not necessarily bitten, and in most cases they should be willing. Otherwise the process fails and they simply die rather than transition.


I loved this series of books I once read about an alien invasion by lizard men. Can't remember the title but these guys first found us when we were waving bronze swords around and, following their own civilisation's progression, they expected to arrive in the 1940's to find we'd only progressed as far as mounted knights, steel armour and maybe the first cannons with gunpowder.

Instead they jumped into the middle of WWII and got the shock of their life when the forces of the world suddenly turned on them (you think Hitler hated imperfect humans? You should have seen how much he hated these aliens). Not only did they have to deal with greater technology, Hitler gaining A-Bomb technology and not caring if he killed thousands of people to kill a few thousand aliens. They had to deal with other human trades such as drug trafficking (some enterprising chap found Ginger was addictive to them).

All in all, it quickly turned on the aliens as the humans rapidly started to gain and replicate the alien technology and the alien civilisation dealt with drug addictions, mutiny, gambling and internal politics that they all learnt from the people they came to conquer.

We is tha Nastiest Mother$%#kers.

We make our young endure teletubbies . . .

Well for starters, they seem to like doing things this way. I mean, they've presumably been maintaining a thriving civilization on the ocean floor for longer than humanity has been doing so on land; if they wanted to conquer us by force, they probably could have done it without too much difficulty when we were all living in huts just starting to learn how to farm. Apparently, they like being worshipped and sacrificed to and... um... how to put this delicately? 'Creating Offspring'.

Second... they don't need to take over the surface by force. All they want is to produce Offspring and wake up their gods. Why risk getting nuked off the face of the Earth when, as long as they're reasonably stealthy about it, nobody's even going to try to stop them?

Let's face it... if someone came running up to you on the street and told you that a town in Massachusetts had been taken over by fishmonsters that were having sex with the population and conspiring to wake up an even larger fishmonster that was sleeping in the ocean, and their first step was to use a chrysalis to turn a fourteen-year-old girl into their magic snake queen, your first thought would be something along the lines of 'Oh God, I wonder if I can run away before this psycho starts telling me to put the lotion in the basket?'

People are really good at killing stuff, yes, but we're also really good at ignoring a problem. We spend years teaching ourselves that monsters like that don't exist, and your average Joe on the street isn't going to start thinking otherwise unless he actually SEES one... and even then, if he isn't killed or driven insane by the experience, he'll probably find some way to rationalize it away. After all, the thing moved so fast, and he didn't get a really good look at it. It was probably dark out, and he was scared. Maybe it was just a really deformed wolf. Maybe it was a guy in a costume. It certainly couldn't have been a monster.

If they came surging out of the oceans in large groups anywhere other than Innsmouth, they'd have a war that they're in no way guaranteed to win. But as long as they take care to avoid exposure to the general populace, they can get everything they want for basically no risk. Same with vampires... maybe even moreso, since in a lot of the myths you can't tell a vampire apart from normal people by looking at them, so they don't have to make as much effort to be sneaky. Supernatural predators have a weird position... they're can be either above or below humans on the food chain, depending on how aware of them we are.

It was my understanding that the Masquerade was started because humans were rapidly becoming able to kill them all. So they hid their existence to evade us kill happy bastards.

I think it is largely the same with the Deep Ones, the government already fought them with some success before. With modern technology not normally available to a bunch of crazy fish-chasers, they would be in a completely one sided fight.

They dropped depth charges on them before, now they can drop a nuke. Tough as they are, I doubt any Deep One could survive that.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that one of the key rules in any Lovecraft-based universe is 'the humans lose'. With that in mind, I'm thinking:

Deep Ones + Nuclear Weapons = Radiation-powered Deep Ones


Which, while not exactly great for humanity, would be totally awesome.

The main thing in my mind is that humans are always exceptionally insignificant in Lovecraft's works; while the Old Ones will accept the worship of humans and their cults, they mean little to them - they're useful, but not a lynchpin in their plots. Concepts like loyalty, affection, even hatred are utterly alien to them; they brush us aside with less malice than we offer up to a fly buzzing around the house. Humans might hinder the Old Ones, but they have the whole of eternity to play in... the human race may well be nothing more than a blip they can afford to wait out as opposed to wasting time over truly planning their destruction. The few humans that chose to defy the Old Ones or actively meddle in thier affairs can usually be disappeared or packed off to loony bins without raising any suspicion, and considering the relative might of their forces that either stay out of sight or play dead in the deep places of the world if they wanted to put the effort into wiping us out they could in a staggeringly short period of time. We're generally-speaking not worthy of notice unless we stumble onto something big or are actively meddling in their long-term goals.

And this is why Lovecraft is ridiculous and should never be taken seriously. We humans rule. That's it, thats all.

My take is that, eventually, the Humans are gonna wipe out the Deep Ones.

Or make fishsticks out of them. Whichever is more profitable. Either way, my take is that their days are numbered.

Maiazuru wrote:And this is why Lovecraft is ridiculous and should never be taken seriously.

Actually, the real reason the Lovecraft shouldn't be taken seriously is because he was an huge racist who looked down on anyone who wasn't Caucasian (And, to a lesser extent, Christian). The human/Deep One mating thing? We might find it a little squicky... at least when the deviancy-meter isn't turned up... but to Lovecraft, it was about the most horrifying thing imaginable because it involved white people having sex with something besides ::DUM DUM DUM:: other white people. Dude had issues.

Back to the topic though. The Deep Ones are basically the lowest rung of the ladder. Even if they were all wiped out (A distinct possibility) they're human-like enough that they are essentially expendable. Like Kane said, the real big guns, the Great Old Ones and the Outer Gods and the like, are so powerful and alien that they will wipe us out or drive us to madness without ever really noticing that we were ever there. They can destroy us just by existing in the same world.

Or... just imagine the real horror here... if humanity discovers an entire race of sentient beings living at the bottom of the sea. Just picture it...

Some reporter stumbles onto it, blows it open on the front page of the Boston Herald; MERFOLK RESIDING OFF AMERICA'S COAST - FILM AT ELEVEN. Naturally everyone thinks it's complete crackpotsville, until someone actually checks it out and we get footage of lil' Mervs on CNN. Everyone panics. The scientific community barges in to start studying these creatures, regardless of the risks ("I call this an anti-triton-cage..."). Then one makes the grotesque error of speaking while being filmed. Everyone panics again; these aggressive "animals" are intelligent. The military start quickly shredding all their files on underwater cities to try and dodge the embarassment. Environmental and conservation groups start throwing things at people who send ROVs or subs down to delve into the secrets of the merfolk on our coasts. Folk start listening to them and soon these creatures are given protected status (while no-one looks into the number of folk who vanish in the sea or on the coasts because just about anything could have happened to them). Soon the fishfolk get wise to it and start popping up on beaches; looking for people to nibble on, but who wants to think about that when someone has some shaky mobile-phone-footage of a couple of fishmonsters poking through a litterbin at Coney Island? Soon we're giving cuddly Deep Ones to our kids and discussing ownership rights to sections of seafloor. Then a female one poses for Playboy. Then they start integrating. As soon as someone finds that these creatures are miraculously similar to us, genetically-speaking, the question of whether they aren't just aquatic humans rises. People start having relationships with them (openly, I mean). Then the first human/merperson child is born. Ok, it looks weird, but soon no-one cares. They start giving Deep One language classes at community colleges, and scubadiving becomes the sixth most popular passtime in the world. Soon they become commonplace; all kinds of people outside the Anthro community start getting hitched in civil ceremonies on beaches in Hawaii. Everyone should panic, but by now no longer seems to care. Then the people from the sea introduce us to their culture; particularly their religious beliefs. Branches of the EOD start popping up all over the world. Soon it's accepted as a religion for drylanders too, and they get tax breaks that go right into funding integration centers. An Offspring runs for office in Massachusetts and wins by a landslide. Soon cities all over the world have public saltwater ponds for their growing aquatic community, green becomes the new black and they make an underwater version of The Lovers' Guide... and soon after, the whole world is crying out for the return of the Greatfather... no doubt to be televised live via satellite to the entire planet...

Before you can say "Dayum, HP Lovecraft sure was a galloping racist to come up with this stuff" the whole planet is doomed. DOOMED!

Integration, love and peace... that's how you win any conflict, if you're clever... now, where's that application form, the EOD are advertising for a new Master for the Innsmouth branch...

Okay, Mondo, you've convinced me... we need to get in on the ground floor of this thing! If we play our cards right, when newly-minted Offspring governor Yoth-seris the Blood-drinker (D, MA) makes his bid for the White House, we could all end up with cushy government positions. Start thinking up campaign slogans, people!

"Equal pay for equal Blood Sacrifice."

"A fish in every pot, and a fishperson in every bedroom."

"Yoth-seris: Leading the country in a bold new destruction. #&#%&, I meant direction! Come back here! You can't print that!"

"Yoth-seris believe that all men are created equal. Granted, by 'equal' he means puny and weak, like your impotent gods. But isn't it nice to know he's thinking of you?"