Okay, so now that dragons are off the table, how about mermaids? Hell yeah, beautiful half-naked women! Nothing is better than the wide, open sea where boys become men and men become pirates! Long journeys traveling the world can be tough, but mermaids make everything marvelous. Don’t think about the logistics of how to have a good time with a mermaid. What matters is that you will because beautiful half-naked women are dying to meet you at your nearest ocean!

Yeah, no.

That’s not how this works, kid.

Mermaids as you likely know them are creatures with the top half of a woman and the bottom half of a dolphin. They have just the right amount of mischievousness to make them naughty little pranksters, but they really just want to know what those quirky little things called feet are. They’re intensely curious and may have a habit of hoarding junk in sea caves. Occasionally, they’ll surface on a rock and sing to sailors because when you’re a beautiful half-naked woman, you want attention, dammit, and you want it now.

Real mermaids, on the other hand, take “mischievous little prankster” and add more murder to it. For once, humanity is in the clear for this one (but don’t worry, you’ll screw up a lot before this book is done—figuratively and literally). You see, “mermaids,” or more accurately, sirens, had an incredibly sick sense of humor. They are lovely singers, no doubt. Some might say their voices are enchantingly beautiful, so much so that hearing a siren’s song causes the listener to search for the source in a daze. Since the source happens to be located far away and in the middle of a deep ocean one thing leads to another, and bam—drowned sailors. Sirens found this hilarious. They loved luring men to their death and actively competed to see who could drown the most.

But hey, at least they got to see a pretty, half-naked woman before they died, right?

Your pitiful optimism is cute, sweet summer child.

Ever notice how in stories of sirens, shipwrecks are always located by islands made of nothing but imposing cliffs? Or how, whenever a ship is caught within a siren song, the winds suddenly pick up and smash the ship violently against the rocks?

Now what modern animal sings, is associated with air, and can make a home on a cliffside?

Hint: Rhymes with ‘bird’.

“But wait,” you cry. “A mythological bird woman is different from a mythological fish woman.”

Yes and no.

Harpies, as they were known as, were indeed different from Sirens in the same way that penguins are different from hawks. They may be different animals, but they’re both part of the Aves, or bird, family. Likewise, sirens were a type of harpy that had adapted to living on ocean cliffs located far at sea. They also looked like the stuff off a horny fisherman’s nightmares.

Since enchanting a person’s mind typically means using their perceptions against them, a siren’s real appearance remains a mystery. The lower body most likely had a smooth, silk-like texture to help with shallow swimming, while the arms contained feathers for flying. They also most likely had webbed claws to both swim and grip onto rocks.

Some early drawings depicted them as hideous with grayish blue scales, sharpened teeth like those of a piranha, and webbed hands. This representation stemmed from a combination of delusions seen while enchanted, as well as the assumption of sirens being aquatic animals.

Accuracy be damned, however, because these drawings were commissioned to remind sailors of the lies beyond the song. Many a siren sang near cliffs and reefs while creating a fog that obscured vision, thus causing the ship to crash if a captain got enchanted. Thanks to these creatures’ terrifying nature, sailors feared setting out to sea. To counteract this, captains tried to play off sirens as unreal. Sirens were, they would say, a probable speculation simply because no one had ever seen them, only heard them, and those songs could be attributed to the wind and a drunken idiot. Everyone knew the truth though, no matter how much they tried to deny it. Egotistical and vain, siren conversations probably went something like this:

“I enchanted a whole deck,” says one.

“Well, I enchanted two ships,” says another.

“I enchanted a woman!” says the third, and the other two roll their eyes because women didn’t belong on ships.

About that little detail.

You may have read the title and wondered how manatees fit into this whole narrative. Well, consider this: mermaids had to come from somewhere. If all sailors had were stories of their friends drowning to death via musical death, mermaids wouldn’t be considered beautiful half-naked women who want to have sex with you, but terrifying beasts that you must avoid at all costs.

So where did mermaids come from?

Manatees.

“Manatees look nothing like women!” you say incredulously.

To which I reply, “Alcohol solves everything.”

In a different reincarnation of mine, I had this old sailor friend. Lovely guy, I might add. He really loved sailing the ocean blue, and in exchange for enchanting his ships with a safe voyage, I could ride for free.

One day we’re sailing around the Ring of Fire, a part of the ocean where sea dragons were said to slumber, and the men on the ship start feeling a little scared since we must sail through siren country. My enchantments kept the ship safe from physical harm and storms, but the people on it were susceptible to whatever tricks may happen directly to them. Still, I helped where I could.

The captain decides to throw a little party to ease the tension.

“Drink ‘til ya blood turns to rum,” he would say, “and ye’ll never worry again.”

So, the crew throw a party. Everyone gets drunk, sailors are laughing, booze is flowing, and life feels great.

BONK

“Da fu—”

BONK, BONK, THUD.

Everyone looks over the side of the ship. Something had gotten caught on the fishing nets that the sailors left out. A few of the men hoist up the nets, and PLOP, out falls a manatee. We all share a laugh about the whole thing.

Everyone except for one young sailor.

This had been his first trip on a long voyage, and he missed the… “companionship” of women. And this manatee, well, it’s a very cute looking manatee thanks to good, old-fashioned drunk-o-vision.

Very shapely and plump.

Very soft.

Very smooth.

And the other guys, they all see the look on the young sailor’s face. By that time, I had already siphoned all the happiness from both that night and the next, so I head to bed to deal with the coming hangover.

I don’t know exactly what happened after that, but some guilty-as-hell-yet-satisfied faces told me not to ask for the specifics.

I’d like to add that this is a rather weird pattern that springs up from time to time. It’s as though people are continually trying to get around that consent thing by combining alcohol and low standards. Can’t have a woman on a ship? Manatee! Animal rights becoming a thing? Robots! Inevitable robot war over whether artificial intelligences have souls and should be treated like people? Well, that picnic table is kind of sexy.

Desperate times, desperate measures, right?

In any case, this practice of, well, let’s say having a “pet” manatee aboard a ship led to a decrease in a fear of the seas. Sirens primarily fed on the life force of drowned sailors, and since the sailors were too busy “playing” with their new best friends, sirens slowly but surely starved to death. The misconception that a man could get a manatee pregnant birthed the mermaid myth, and the rest is disturbing history.

On that note, while the aquatic maiden of myth didn’t exist, a certain other creature did. But I’m sure you’ve read enough for right now, so we’ll continue in the next entry.