Mono Mondays: Feeding Time
On Mondays, we like to support our resident artist, Mono! They're an up-and-coming scribbler of things dark and weird, and we consider ourselves lucky to have leeched onto— er, formed a mutually beneficial relationship with them. You can watch Mono hard at work creating various pieces on their YouTube channel. For those who don't feel like watching digital paint getting splashed around, we'll be showcasing a different piece of theirs right here every Monday.
Last week we looked at dangers in the air. This week, we see the monsters that roam in the deep.
A surprising but true fact is that sharks are not, under normal circumstances, that dangerous. It turns out that humans don't taste very good to sharks, and only one or two species will willingly eat us. Most shark-related deaths are caused by shark curiosity; because sharks don't have hands and are coated in small cartilaginous "scales", the vast majority of their sense of touch is located in their mouth. If they're confused by something, they tend to take a quick bite to figure out what's going on. Sadly, we aren't equipped to survive experimental bites, but the fact remains- normally, sharks don't want to eat people.
That is not true of the sharks in Mono's world. They like the taste of magic, but their own magic is fairly weak- mostly, it's mutated them into something that can withstand temperature changes in water, making them especially effective hunters in shallow coastal areas. As a result, they're drawn toward anything that a) moves, and b) gives off lower magic levels than their own, but still more than zero. That includes your typical human wader, as well as small boats that inadvertently shield the magic radiating off the passengers.
One thing remains the same, however: they don't like how people taste. Should you be unlucky enough to find yourself looking down the gullet of a magically mutated shark, as above, know that the shark is about to tear you open, find the magic core you had inside you, and swim off, crunching it contentedly like rock candy. As with normal sharks, your survival is of no concern to them.