Deep One

Also known as Gillmen, Deep Ones (scientific name: Ranacephalus tasoth) are a race of sentient amphibians often thought to resemble a cross between frogs and men. Although they can breathe air, they are predominantly aquatic, and their respiratory and locomotive capabilities are much reduced out of the water. Like humans, Gillmen come in a range of sizes and exhibit different head shapes, bone structure, and coloration that indicate subspecies or racial distinctions. The most common portrayal of Deep Ones in popular culture are as slimy, greenish or yellow-green creatures, but they are actually squamous and more commonly gray, or grey-green in coloration. Deep Ones have their own languages, cultures, religion, and a civilization older than humans. They have a comparatively low technology base, however, owing to the constraints of their aquatic home. While there are many hotly contested theories of Deep One origin, they are in fact the result of genetic engineering by alien intelligences. Deep Ones have historically been hostile toward humans, but covert annihilation campaigns waged by human powers in the 20th century have pushed the surviving Gillmen even farther into the fringes and made them more reticent in approaching humans. Although they can be readily killed by violence and misadventure, Deep Ones do not seem to die of old age like humans do.

Physiology & Life Cycle

All Deep Ones, with the exception of latent hybrids, share some very distinctive physical traits. As mentioned above, they have heads reminiscent of large frogs (hence their genus name), with large bulbous eyes, nictitating membranes, they are scaly and grey or grey-green, with webbed hands with stubby fingers and sharp claws and webbed, flipper like feet with slender, distinguishable toes. They have a set of gill structures whose size and orientation are one of the major distinguishing characteristics of Tasoth sub-species, but they all generally run from the region of the neck and onto the dorsal region of their back. This placement is quite similar to several water-breathing Deviant strains, indicating a possible link between the two races.

However, Deep Ones also experience several significant metamorphoses in the course of their life cycle. Data is sketchy at best on non-hybrid infants, but evidence suggests that their forelimbs (arms) become significantly more developed between their 8th and 12th year, coinciding with the period of sexual maturity. They also probably begin the development of functioning lungs around this time. Throughout their lives, a Deep One's lungs remain relatively small in volume and their breathing musculature is weak and poorly developed. Thus, their time on land is necessarily brief and laborious. Once a Deep One has reached full sexual maturity, their limb configuration also closely resembles that of a frog with a horizontal posture and widely spread back legs. On land, they assume a mostly quadrupedal stance, although they are capable of walking semi-erect for periods of time and using their hands for grasping. Their manual dexterity is not as good as a human, but still superior to chimpanzees.

Deep One/Human hybrids more closely resemble Homo sapiens (albeit with some odd, sometimes unsettling features like bulging eyes, shrunken nose and ears, etc…) until sometime between their 16th and 30th year, when they slip into a period of weakness and torpor, often accompanied by fever and violent seizures. Eventually they enter a coma-like state where they are closely monitored by their fellows until their metamorphosis completes. Upon emergence, they more closely resemble a 'true' Deep One, although they usually retain some residual ability to speak human languages.

Deep Ones are extremely long-lived and may be functionally immortal in that they do not age. Analysis of tissue from living and recently deceased specimens shows almost none of the telomere degradation present in humans and other higher animals from years of cellular division. Various lore and the testaments of individual Deep Ones indicate that the oldest living of their kind are thousands of years old, although any given Deep One has a relatively short life expectancy due to war, misadventure, and predation by their own kind. The eldest Deep Ones are apparently also the ones with the most power within a settlement, and the indefinite duration of their reigns probably contributes greatly to the stultification of technological and sociological progress in their society.

Reproduction

Deep Ones are viviparous. They likely engage in coitus face-to-back and almost certainly in the water. Very little hard evidence is available on their litter sizes, although analysis of their anatomy suggests that the average births-per-pregnancy would be higher than humans, perhaps significantly higher depending upon the size of the neonates. Their gestation period is probably also shorter than humans, but there is precious little evidence to go on here as well. Interrogation of captives and the records of humans closely allied with Deep Ones suggests that their window of reproduction is very small, possibly as short as 5-10 years from the onset of sexual maturity, at which point both sexes become sterile.

Reproduction with humans to produce hybrids is not accomplished sexually, but rather through the application of Tentaculats, known to the Deep Ones as the “Children of Dagon.” See below for more information on this topic.

Society and Religion

Religion is the primary organizing force of Deep One society and all of their important institutions derive from religious obligations or revolve around worship. Although each Deep One settlement is apparently independent of one another (indeed, they seem to have little intentional contact with foreign Deep Ones), within the settlement control is highly centralized, with all vital task assigned and overseen by the priestly class. Thus, Deep Ones consider the political sphere as inseparable from the religious. They have nothing to approximate businesses, nor any social gatherings that do not have some sort of commemorative or ritualistic aspect.

The Deep One religiosity is deep and abiding not just culturally, but built right into their biological makeup. Their race was created by a terrible alien intelligence solely to serve and worship it and its agents, and so they can scarcely comprehend other purposes. That alien intelligence is the entity known to mankind through centuries of intermediate, watered down sources as Dagon, and it is the chief of the Deep One pantheon. Closest in glory to Dagon is his consort, rendered Mother Hydra in the lingo of the Gillmen's human cultists. Their ancient chronicles, inscribed on unfading stone, speak of a time when Dagon and Mother Hydra were present in the world's oceans with their children. These is not mere myth, but the truth of a time remembered only by the eldest of the virtually immortal race. Dagon and Mother Hydra were not native to this world or dimension and millions of years ago they were banished and the great gateways from which they entered the world were thrown down by the Celestials, unwilling to suffer the creatures' interference in the affairs of earth.

Worship of Dagon and Mother Hydra continued in their absence as it had to, but Deep Ones were used to directly communing with their gods and so they began to incorporate others, powerful and physically present, into their pantheon. Many served the Great Old Ones like Tsathoggua or the immanent earth deities like Set. They learned to loathe and fear the Celestials, but often adapted to the worship of the fearsome guardians of the Star Gods undertakings, the monstrous Daikaiju. This was more often done in the name of placating these awesomely destructive predators than genuine adoration, but the distinction is academic. The forms and subjects of worship vary by city, depending upon what vast and terrible things exist in proximity, fitfully slumbering. The only commonality is that all worship Dagon and Mother Hydra and they regard very seriously any invocation of their creator's name.

Technology

An aquatic environment is not conducive to the development of advanced technology and so Deep Ones lack it. Chemistry and electricity are unknown to them, so they have no modern weaponry or electronics, and lack all but the most primitive medical treatments and agricultural (aquacultural) skill. They do have some understanding of combustion, however, and Deep One artisans sometimes smelt metal and forge rudimentary tools on their sanctuaries on dry land. Occasionally, Deep Ones are seen with some sophisticated technology, but this is invariably either captured from others or offered in trade, and they usually employ these for very narrow purposes, as if they're not really sure of the device's purpose. Often, their clumsy employment of complicated technology leads to disaster.

Magic

The Deep One lack of technology is partly ameliorated by their extensive knowledge of sorcery. Knowledge of many of these rituals is instinctual, as intended by their creator, and goes hand in hand with their religion. This intuitive (if shallow) comprehension of magic is augmented by keen physical senses that enable them to detect the extradimensional energies (Aether or Prime) humans have tied to psychic phenomena. Indeed, all Deep Ones are psychically sensitive, although they never exhibit the sort of radical and wildly fluctuating abilities as metahumans and they do not emit the uncontrolled 'Seepage' that humans do. Unfortunately for the Deep Ones, the Celestials strengthened the Gauntlet, sealing the most powerful dimensional apertures around earth space more than 5,000 years go in an event known as the Great Interdict. This greatly reduced the efficacy of their rituals and rendered some completely impotent. The spontaneous weakening of the Gauntlet over the last hundred years has been noticed, however. Time will tell if this will embolden the Deep Ones.

The Deep Ones employ magic for many purposes, most commonly for mundane tasks such as constructing additions to their cities and to hide themselves from their enemies, and of course as weapons. One of their most important (and terrifying) magics is the ritual that calls forth the Children of Dagon (Tentaculata emersonium), or Tentaculats, alien things like huge, beaked brains with hundreds of tendrils, to create Human/Deep One hybrids.

Hybrids

The Children of Dagon devour still-living human and Deep One offerings, combining their genetic material to conceive a hybrid. These sacrificial victims are gradually consumed for the nourishment of the new fetus. The Deep Ones collect the birthing chambers and remove them to their city where they are looked after with the utmost care. After six months of maturation in the cold depths of the sea, the swollen masses break their tethers and ejecting the excess organic detritus to signal their “ripening.” Deep Ones then collect these deliver them to shore to be raised by their human cultists, since the initial stages of the hybrid life cycle are virtually identical to the human life cycle. Even though they are functionally human for the first stage of their life, they usually display some physical characteristics that give them away to an informed observer: the oddly narrow heads, flat noses, and bulbous eyes referred to in the United States as “the Innsmouth Look.” The hybrids eventually undergo a “second puberty” around their 40 year mark, wherein they gradually attain an appearance and physiology more similar to the Deep Ones, including the manifestation of gills and scaly epidermis. Fully mature hybrids are usually much larger and more physically powerful than normal Deep Ones due to hybrid vigor. Until they begin this metamorphosis, the hybrids are used to infiltrate human society, gathering intelligence, obscuring Deep One operations, and recruiting more cultists.


Discovery

The first exposure of Deep Ones to modern science came during the 1911 Croghan Expedition, during which British anthropologist Edwin Croghan unearthed several more-or-less complete Deep One skeletons in a burial pit in modern day Lebanon. The location was associated with an ancient Semitic tribe and apparently consecrated to fish-like variation of the Semitic deity Dagon. Croghan was a vigorous promoter and known for his eccentricity, and he was quick to trumpet his discovery of the strange, quasi-human skeletons as proof of an ancient, pre-human civilization akin to the Theosophists visions of antediluvean Atlantis and Lemuria. The wider scientific community was more skeptical, however, and as only portions of one skeleton made it back to Britain (the others having been destroyed in a storehouse explosion or stolen), the general opinion was that they were a hoax of Croghan's devising. The humiliated and resentful scholar spent years trying to raise money for a return expedition, but any hope of it was scuttled by the outbreak of WWI. Croghan died in 1919, almost a decade before he would be vindicated by another British anthropologist's excursions in West Africa.

In 1929, Charles Robinson Dawes discovered several Deep One skulls and portions of leg and pelvic bones on an expedition to study obscure coastal tribes in West Africa. Unlike the excitable Croghan, Dawes was a more studious and thoughtful investigator, logging hundreds of pages of analysis from study of the bones, the myth cycles of the natives, and curious anecdotes about predatory frog-men called 'tasoth'. When it came down to it, however, Dawes was just as plucky as Croghan, and a daring ambush led to the recovery of the first complete Deep One corpse. Neglecting his own injuries, Dawes used the plane dispatched to evacuate him for medical care to ferry the ice-packed corpse to the Royal Museum instead.

Gillmen and the US Navy

The scientific world was awestruck by this strange discovery, but unbeknown to them, officials of US Treasury Department, in conjunction with US Marshals and the Navy Department, uncovered the presence of Deep Ones in an isolated Massachusetts coastal town more than a year earlier. The 1928 raid on Innsmouth uncovered few pure Deep Ones, but their discoveries were even worse: hideous hybrids of man and aquatic beast, the apparent offspring of degenerate townsfolk and their amphibian patrons.

The frightening discovery was kept a state secret. The few captured hybrids were moved to isolated storage facilities in the southwest and the strange logs and artifacts mostly ended up in the hands of the Office of Naval Intelligence, which was especially worried about the threat of an intelligent aquatic civilization to American naval power. President Coolidge was briefed, but he demurred on further action as it was nearing the end of his term. When Herbert Hoover took office, he had little patience for “fish tales of mermaids and sea monsters” and was soon bogged down with other problems like the breakdown of the Washington Naval Treaty and later, the stock market crash. It was not until the Roosevelt administration and the discovery of the Atlanteans in 1934 that government officials felt confident enough to talk about the Deep Ones openly, but in the mean time the ONI's Paranormal and Psychic Phenomena Division (P-Division) waged a clandestine war on the creatures along the American coast and in the Caribbean.

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