Marina Morgan

Marina Morgan is a young mermaid who grew up in a coastal merfolk community and has spent most of her life moving easily between the open water and the human settlements along the shore. She was fascinated by people on land as a child, initially because almost everything they did seemed unnecessarily complicated. Humans built roads instead of swimming places, wrapped individual pieces of food in plastic (much of which ended up in her yard), and devoted astonishing amounts of engineering to remaining dry.

That fascination never entirely went away, but adulthood has made it considerably less exotic. Marina spends enough time around docks, harbours, beaches, and coastal towns that she has friends on both sides of the shoreline and is perfectly comfortable navigating human life. She's learned which restaurants don't mind a wet customer, where she can get out of the water without climbing a ladder designed for feet, and exactly how long she can occupy a waterfront patio before somebody asks whether she's “actually a real mermaid.”

Marina is warm, adventurous, and intensely curious about the little differences between cultures. Human food remains a particular enthusiasm, especially anything impractical to eat underwater, and she loves live music for much the same reason: sound behaves differently beneath the surface, so a crowded room with drums, amplifiers, and people singing together still feels wonderfully strange to her. She's accumulated a broad and somewhat chaotic taste in both food and music as a result.

Her affection for human comforts does not mean Marina secretly wishes she lived on land. She loves the ocean, the freedom of moving through open water, and the communities she grew up around. She's amused by the recurring assumption that a mermaid who enjoys cafés, concerts, and dry towels must be yearning to trade her tail for legs. Marina has seen what humans do to their feet with fashionable shoes and regards the entire arrangement with suspicion.

She does, however, appreciate the things land makes possible. She keeps a small collection of objects that would be useless or impossible underwater, including books, paper photographs, electronics, and several blankets whose appeal she struggled to understand until somebody introduced her to being wrapped in one after coming in from cold water. That discovery substantially improved her opinion of terrestrial civilization.

Marina is happiest somewhere around the boundary between her two worlds: swimming into town to meet friends, discovering some ridiculous new food, listening to music on a waterfront, and eventually slipping back beneath the surface when she's had enough of being dry.

She doesn't dream of becoming human. She just thinks humans have invented some pretty good snacks. 🧜‍♀️🌊