royalreef

[royalreef]

#A princess needs her beauty rest || Queue #Echoes of the deep || Aesthetic

[royalreef]

(( Tying back into what I was talking about earlier — I really think a lot of people undersell the actual feeling of being face-to-face with a large predator that can absolutely hurt you and how instinctual that gut reaction is. But also, that's just a neutral feeling! It's not necessarily going to be what's happening in reality nor what's actually going on on Miranda's end, and she can't control that any more than she can change what she looks like. It's better to actually understand what's happening and to not panic.

#Most secret royal advisor || OOC #(( yes shes scary yes shes massive yes she is entirely inhuman #(( she is also just emoting like a merfolk and being friendly and talking #(( she gives you pause and you should definitely consider that yeah she IS inhuman and what that says #(( but shes not evil for that. shes just a large predator. so thats how she looks. #(( this is even worse with bellanda too #(( because miranda has imprinted hard enough to start doing human expressions #(( bellanda has NOT imprinted and she isnt interested in trying to #(( so if you arent familiar with merfolk expressions bellanda just looks like a terrifying wall all the time

[royalreef]

(( Merfolk do not see humans as prey, potential or otherwise.

First of all, humans don't look anything at all like how their typical food species do. They're strangely skinny and scrawny, oddly shaped, and clearly not at all intended to be something intended to live in the water. Merfolk do have fairly bad vision, so there is the possibility that there could be a shark situation of mistaken identity, but they also don't hunt like sharks, being as they're people who take a lot of caution to ensure that they are hunting something properly and that they will minimize any potential harm to themselves and pain to the animal.

Likewise, if they notice something being off, their first urge would be to investigate first. Merfolk, also like sharks, also tend to investigate things using their mouth first, but, again, they're smart enough to wait a moment before putting something in their mouth. They'd approach first, and even if they do not realize that the human is not a normal animal and in fact a person, this would probably still not result in a bite if the human especially began to freak out at being approached by a merfolk. This is the most likely case, especially since only very few people now know merfolk exist, but also because merfolk are indeed very large and very dangerous marine predators. Most people would panic at one suddenly getting close, particularly since they wouldn't have been taught any languages said merfolk might be speaking.

Honestly, more than any other comparison for interacting with a different species, merfolk would just view humans as... people? To a merfolk, speech and conversation matter a lot on what is a person versus what isn't, and since merfolk have no other analogs to what kind of animal a human might be, they'd just liken humans to "very weirdly shaped merfolk".

Of course, this is avoiding the political slant, and the fact that another major part of what defines a "person" to a merfolk is their social relationship and structures — but this is what the general gut reaction would be, and it serves a nice comparison against the human gut reaction of merfolk being very large, very dangerous predators similar to lions or crocodiles.

( And lastly... Humans just taste nasty to merfolk. Merfolk tend to have a lot of bone in their diet, but even for them, humans have far too much bone and the meat itself is bitter and foul-tasting. Miranda does enjoy the taste of human blood specifically, and heavily decomposed human bodies do taste much more delicious to them, but these are exceptions, not the rule. )

#Most secret royal advisor || OOC #Given by Divine Right || Headcanons #cannibalism m #(( theres a reason brian gets singled out #(( and its because yeah zombies and what meat is on them IS tasty #(( but human meat alone is. just Disgostang. #(( and really there are better options anyway #(( anyhow. very fun to me. #(( fun to think merfolk look at humans and go ''...... weird merfolk???'' #(( while humans look at merfolk and have the panic attack of a single entity looking like BOTH of their major evolutionary predators

[royalreef]

#Most secret royal advisor || OOC #(( steeples my hands together #(( i will not go on a tangent about how to write animals i will not go on a tangent about how to write ambush predators #(( i will not lose my mind rambling about how no one fucking understands animals and how no one writes them correctly #(( i will not talk about the sham that is most peoples total lack of understanding about the natural world #(( i will not do these things i will be good i will let them pass through me and in the end only i shall remain #(( i should not be allowed to listen to stupid dnd podcasts about them acting like your response to an animals natural behavior is a sign o #(( active maliciousness against you specifically

[royalreef]

Portrait of Lydia Schabelsky, Baroness Staël-Holstein (detail) c. 1857–58,  Franz Xaver Winterhalter

#A princess needs her beauty rest || Queue #Echoes of the deep || Aesthetic

[royalreef]

#A princess needs her beauty rest || Queue #Echoes of the deep || Aesthetic

[royalreef]

Oh, how everyone wishes her wanting to be punished was just a sex thing.

#Glory and Gore || IC #The rumor mill || Dash Commentary #Bony eared Assfish || Crack #(( its the opposite actually! #(( in fact its one of the easiest and most surefire ways to kill the mood with her #(( you know. because gestures to it.

[royalreef]

"Then correct me."

The words come so quickly that it's clear, beyond all doubt, that she has not thought of them. Her body tenses, jerks, settles all at once into a more upright posture better familiar as one that she'd typically wear when wielding her title like a sword. Like how she'd stand when talking business with Vera, or in the moments where she can actually get Damien to talk of his own rule, a thousand moments burned a thousand times over into memory where Miranda is regal, proper, true to her title down to her form itself.

A princess, in every way. Every way what she was born to be.

The word alone must have alit somewhere in her brain, somewhere deep in her mind, pressed her into a sequence that she can do nothing to stop but is so automatic that everything else evaporates from her mind.

Her head turns back to Oz, but it is impossible to think that she's actually looking at him. There's simply nothing there that would be, if it were Miranda staring down at him, meeting his eyes. There's nothing there but the facsimile of gaze, the imagery but nothing to suggest that her eyes weren't simply painted on there, that she wasn't the same as a mural or a statue or a toy with button-blue eyes and nothing within them with the will to see.

She speaks the empty words of a doll, a simple thing with a ring and pull on its back, nothing more complex than a motor and a speaker in her chest and fluff inside her head, and she does so because someone else recorded them in her so that she would have the honor of speech. It's a very cheap trick, but a useful one. An appeasing one, one that all the kiddies have, even if she's no one's favorite, because she can offer basic entertainment and when she's all used up and ruined no one will cry when she's thrown away. Better yet, she doesn't speak until she's spoken to, which is always a nice trick of obedience for stupid toys like her to know.

Her mind shutters, pulls back into itself, and it's clear that Miranda isn't standing there anymore. Or, she is, but only her in the sense of there is something full of blood and meat and coated in enough fear to shock her into a total absence of anything that might understand or process that fear and pain, and that there are no memories here, no intent, no purpose.

Miranda, absent of everything that someone would call Miranda beyond the name.

Indeed, it is want that rises up, swells in her. A want to be punished. A need to be hurt. It is thoroughly tainted through with a sickening over-application of self hatred, but it acts as fuel for the hurt, crawling back to the pain and the agony and staring into its abyss until nothing else remains but it and her. It swirls with the fear, chokes it, breeds with it.

Miranda was made to be hurt. She was made to be hurt because it's good for her to be hurt, because it's bad when bad things aren't hurt, hurting is what makes things good again. If she can't be hurt to satisfaction, then she must be discarded. Bad things that cannot be good things must be gotten rid of forever, because then the bad things would keep being bad and everything would get bad too.

She's good. She's a good princess.

Good princesses don't scream.

Those hands are so still now, in Oz's palms. They tilt, showing their own pale yellow undersides, the soft pads where the scales have been filed down so as not to scratch nor catch. The claws do not curl. The teeth are not bared, except in the moment it took to speak, as they formed the right shape to make the right sounds.

None of this is happening on command. Something's been tripped, some deeper mechanism hearing the correct command to come into play, and the body is able to be moved and manipulated as need be. Positions would be held, mantras would be happily recited. Everything was as it should be.

It's stopped breathing. Or, has it? It doesn't know. It's too stupid to remember how to breathe, so it's a good thing it has to come automatically, or else it would die without someone else to tell it what to do. It's not thinking either, recording these memories only to forget them again later, which is good. No one needs things like it to remember. They just need it to do what it does, and not make mistakes that can't be fixed.

He let her think. Reminisce, remember, fear. Voices in his head whispers about her thoughts, her feelings, how they taste - delicious, despite it all, and he knows it is no matter how much he keeps reminding the more chaotic part of him that no, no it isn't, it's disgusting it's bloody disgusting shut up shut up SHUT UP--

--he blinks, taking a deep breath, closing his eyes for just a second before focusing once again on hers, once again quiet, once again not daring to speak up unless she allows him to, or says something that he finds worth interrupting. Not gallant at all, maybe, but he found those kind of interruptions comforting, whenever he started rambling about this and that and everyone's phobias, his own included. They brought him back with his feet on the ground, sometimes much more slowly than others, but eventually he managed to find comfort in those interruptions.

"Miri...?"

Not an interruption yet, if we don't count his attempt at bring her back to the present, instead of dwelling on her memries. It's... more of a reminder that he's still there.

Focus on me, my princess. Focus on me.

"I won't leave. I-I promise, I won't."

His grip tightens ever so slightly.

"And... i-if you need to be corrected, then I'll... I'll do it as you truly deserve it: I'll correct you patiently, and calmly, and I'll do it because I want you to be happy and-- and us to be happy, and not because you deserve it, and not like--!"

--he rambled. He started rambling, and found himself unable to stop himself before letting too much slip. Oz tenses, inhales sharply, closes his eyes again.

"...not like that."

And when he opens them, this time, he looks down.

"You didn't deserve that.

You... don't. Deserve that."

#Glory and Gore || IC #omnifobia #Following the shadow when I damn well know that behind me is the light || Oz x Miranda ( omnifobia ) #physical abuse #self deprecation #psychological abuse #disassociation #(( a whole lot of disassociation ngl- #(( also oh hey i found the ship tag again-

[royalreef]

"I must admit, I am partial to hooking, myself." Her voice is soft, velvet, pressed forward and along her tongue so that it's polished by each and every one of her teeth. It rumbles in her chest as she speaks, deep and rich and even, befitting her shape, the slope of her neck and the mount of her back.

It does not dwell on how strange it is, she thinks, to speak of claws like this. This is not to suggest she feels no love for them, no, nor that she does not find them adept multi-tools in a wide assortment of scenarios. Rather, it is very strange to speak of them as something unique, as something that is not a simple given, mundane and not worth mentioning.

But, again, she does not speak of this. She understands when something is simply her problem when she sees it, and she adjusts accordingly.

"Something in the way they pull and tug and fight around you, attempting to flee as first thought and only realizing secondarily that they are willingly tearing themselves apart in the act. It is nice to truly get in there and pull them in tighter at the core whilst they fight it... But crushing is truly so delightful too, I do not think I could ever really pick a favorite! Is variety not truly the spice of life, after all?"

"Claws can do a multitude of actions besides snipping and crushing. Although, those are my faaaavorite things to do with them."

@royalreef

#Glory and Gore || IC #clawedevil #gore #(( on god im trotting out the gore tag early #(( miri just loves talking shop so much

[royalreef]

Her head — forever shaped more like the bricks broken beneath them at this moment than something loosely round, like a human's, giving her profile an added air of confusion, an uncertainty for what she even is, for the moment it lasts — appears first in silhouette, dark and black and haloed by the sun as she glances over her visitor's face, blotting it out for a moment as she stands over him.

"I would think so!" Her tone, contrary to this, is shaded with the light bemusement of someone who's had her afternoon tea interrupted. It's not friendly, no, but it's not unfriendly either. Something more in the middle, something that suggests that having people drop out of the sky and break apart her nice front steps is a more casual affair than it might be for anyone else. Clearly, she hardly seems upset about the destruction wrought, at least not in a manner that any more rational person might be, more irritated at the audacity than any physical damage brought.

Even worse yet, she has not registered at all that she too might have been in risk, if the angle were off or by some happenstance some shrapnel managed to hit her. Much to the contrary, all the things that Miranda seems most concerned about chewing out her visitor from the sky for are things that might have been better suited for not tucking one's shirt in, or entering without knocking.

Instead, Miranda's fins pull back and her eyes open wide into an aghast look, even though her hands remain tucked to her chest. "You cannot be here! This is quite private property, and I shall have to escort you out."

The stone breaks easily upon impact. He skids to a stop right before crashing into the castle's occupier. Whatever it is that had thrown him seems to have gone for now, vanished into thin air, but it had followed him here, and an innocent life could now be in grave danger because of him. "I'm so sorry to crash in like this." Tone stays light, an antithesis to the situation. "And I am even more sorry to say that I may have brought trouble to your front door." / @royalreef / sc.

#Glory and Gore || IC #svpe #(( no worries! it works great by me!!! #(( you know the emotional experience of a killdeer shouting at you for getting too close to its nest #(( this is what is going on with miri right now

[royalreef]

Octopus outsmarts a shark with a shield made out of shells.

#A princess needs her beauty rest || Queue #Echoes of the deep || Aesthetic

[royalreef]

A grotto to rest your fins

#A princess needs her beauty rest || Queue #Echoes of the deep || Aesthetic

[royalreef]

Look who just sneezed in her wife's face (laying on her wife's lap) (enjoying her company) (sneezed at least ten times) (just couldn't stop) (it kept coming) (she is not beating the cat allegations).

#Glory and Gore || IC #The rumor mill || Dash Commentary #Cursed words and treachery hissed between needle teeth || Discord Commentary #(( oh the ever present pet experience #(( of having them sneeze in your face #(( miri can at least feel shame though

[royalreef]

archive moodboard: order for @androphonoss | want one?

#A princess needs her beauty rest || Queue #Echoes of the deep || Aesthetic

[royalreef]

#A princess needs her beauty rest || Queue #Echoes of the deep || Aesthetic

[royalreef]

head up. voice down. eyes on the ground and snout to the sky, hand behind your back, stop moving, stop waving, stop shivering. what are you doing? stop that.

stop that.

STOP THAT I SAID ACT PROPERLY FOR ONCE IN YOUR LIFE STOP BEING LIKE THAT STOP IT STOP IT STOP IT STOP IT.

good girl.

Again.

Again.

Again.

Miranda's hands aren't trembling anymore, though she's not sure what stopped them. She hasn't been able to feel them for an hour, let alone control what they do or don't, moved as they are by the unseen whims of an unknown puppeteer. Her nerves are electric, alive, but they thrum inside her skin and coil around her organs and float disconnected from the viscera around them. There must be some command flowing down to them, down from the live battery shoved roughly inside her skull, but Miranda holds no command over them as they squirm.

She thinks she has been sick, but she cannot parse what lies in front of her enough to fully comprehend if she has. There is blood trickling up and out of her gills, little billowing clouds that introduce shades of red to the picture painted before her, but Miranda does not think anyone has put anything in her gills this time. They hurt and burn, which is what makes her think she has vomited over herself, because she knows acid will do that.

"Again," comes the command, and her hands move for her, touching something they have laid in front of her, through Miranda cannot recall what. It doesn't matter, really. She watches them as they move, holding a utensil effortlessly in her grasp, wiggling across her field of vision, ending with a lift up and a stamp down. They repeat it again, and Miranda watches it in the far distant corner of her mind, without anywhere deeper for which she can retreat.

"I understand the terms of my agreement," the words come out of Miranda's mouth without her willing it, easy and simple and worn down into her until they become a comfort in their totality. There's no use thinking about what they mean. What they mean is what they have always meant, the grand scale of their statement stretching off into the distance into a meaningless trite that she follows nonetheless. "I understand what is expected of me as Cees'rril'ta, Crown Princess, Inheritor and Gatekeeper and Future Evermore. I understand the consequences of my failure, and the steps that must be undertaken to prevent the collapse of all that we know.

My flesh is as proof of my commitment, borrowed and earned by right of the great mercy of the duty I am sworn to. I am nothing beneath the Crown, nothing without it. I am a tool for your great will, and I aim to provide as only a tool can. My body was made to perfection, born from the flesh of True Ts’yute-Yhtun’ya and True Ts’yuti Renjr’ar, gestated and fed by the Royal Flesh and born to full expectations of my duty and my role, and I too will bear strong heirs when it is deemed appropriate, fulfilling my use as I was promised. I will not sway, I will not falter, I will accept my Crown into me as I am the Crown and my body is the Throne. I will protect my Crown. I will serve my Crown. I am the Crown's will, and I will not betray our Crown. I am yours. I am yours. I am yours. I will always be yours."

They're touching her body again. Moving her, a hand against the back of her head to shove her down into her work again, another grasping at her chest to prevent her from moving.

Her hands go to move again, go to repeat the motion, but then she hears them speak the chosen word and her nerves seize inside her body.

Everything goes wrong. Her body seizes, spasms violently in their grasp so that they have to shove their body against her to stop her from moving, her brain slams into the front of her skull and trickles out between the cracks in her eyes, bubbles out her nose, swells up inside her mouth. The burning things on her back on her temples and on her neck slick and pool inside of her, her nerve-net slamming into her muscles and constricting around her guts, each a thousand needle-points made to lance out through her skin and tip-toe across the floor on pinprick legs of hardened steel-grey matter. Her body vacates. She rots inside herself a thousand times over, dies a thousand lifetimes, succumbs to her own filth a thousand failures, comes back and sits in the furthest corner of her mind to watch herself die a thousand more.

Her jaws have slammed together with enough fury to crack her teeth open. She has to stop moving. That's the only solution, to stop moving, to push her body back into the right configuration, to stop the fetid tongues of agony from licking up and inside the double hemispheres of her brain, stop the fingers from reaching inside her and pulling out her slickened membranes as she seizes around an empty stomach, an empty mind. It would be better if she could stop it, if she could control this, but her body reacts for her, does for her, and she tries to will it to follow along with the orders received.

"Again," they say, Miranda's tongue stuffed up against the front of her mouth so that she forgets if she's bitten it already or not. They're heavy against her back, squeezing her, even as she rearranges into proper form, proper shape, sits upright and fans her fins with the correct amount of confidence and utter calm, even if neither of which are what's trying to colonize her cells right now.

Her body twitches inside itself, writhes, coils, squirms angrily up against her living nerves, her body boiled down to only her capacity for pain. Red blooms in her vision, though she doesn't know what red is right now, doesn't understand the patterns that they show her. Everything happens without reason, without understanding. Everything happens only to happen. Everything splinters and shatters, and something in Miranda's mouth wills it open again.

"I understand the terms of my agreement—"

#Glory and Gore || IC #gore #torture #abuse #physical abuse #psychological abuse #vomit #(( hiiiiiiiiiiiiii-

[royalreef]

bastards!!! a bunch of bastards!!

#Most secret royal advisor || OOC #(( hi may i offer you some Bonding at this time