On an Island not far from a mainland, one many assumed was but a never inhabited mass of land broken off, A figure was waking up within a deeply hidden shrine or temple. This figure was seemingly a woman wearing a sky-blue dress flowing like water with a deep blue cape. Her hair a pure white while her skin was pearl-silver. But what was most astonishing was instead of legs this female had a pure-emerald green tail like a fish’s where legs were placed on a human…
…except this lady, Aquaris, was no mermaid. Well at least not a typical mermaid but actually a goddess who was once a figure of religious reference to merfolk. Having been in deep sleep for countless eons now to build and restore her powers Aquaris has awoken to restore merfolk from the beliefs of fiction to reality.
Now as a goddess the way knowledge and wisdom both works and is collected differs to Aquaris for even asleep knowledge of ages accumulated to her. Not every single detail mind but general knowledge of events like timelines of war events and however other races, humanity mostly, changed and evolved in their own knowledge and wisdom while she slept. Knowledge Aquaris knew she’d need in her coming divine mission.
See what was purely forgotten by humanity was how somewhere between the era of dinosaurs and the founding of Macedonia humanity was known to either offer themselves or select others to merfolk, not as fatal sacrifices but as recruits one could say…
…until sadly in a country that is now known to humanity as Japan select demon-worshipers or heathens whatever you will spread lies and falsehoods proclaiming merfolk flesh grants immortality to eaters. This lead to a mass hunting of Aquaris’s people that in a fit of rage she cast a curse, one she actually now deeply regrets, that would both physically and mentally ruin any who followed these lies of immortality but as opposed to ending this actually worsened the hunting. She was not going to do that again but so far Japan was not exactly going to be Aquaris’s first choice of locations to visit as these legends still persist in the country but not strongly.
What Aquaris was going to do was seek out candidates. One thing she came to happily accept was how the dreams of becoming merfolk was well and good in the era she woke up in, that many western media as humanity refereed to general storytelling methods had many positive messages, ones Aquaris found interesting and while somewhat conflicting often in sync with how she remembered her people.
It was time to start though and she needed to figure out where the best place to find volunteers and recruits was: