Deep Ones

Overview

They are not legends. They are not metaphors for degeneration or rural decay. The Deep Ones are a species, amphibious, long-lived, organized, and they have pursued a breeding program upon the human coast for centuries with a patience that only immortals can afford.

They offer gold, oddly worked. They offer fish in abundance. They offer knowledge of the deeps. In return they ask only for worship, for a few sacrifices, and for the right to take human mates. The children of such unions are born human. The change comes later.

Description

A mature Deep One resembles no fish and no frog yet something of both: bulging, unblinking eyes; skin that is slick and scales in patches; a smell of corruption, as of fish left in the sun; hands and feet that begin to web. In the water they are swift; on land they hop and shuffle with a gait that witnesses find obscene. Their voices can approximate human speech, but the accent is always wrong, too old, too wet, too certain.

The hybrids are worse to contemplate, for they pass among us. The Innsmouth look, the narrow skull, the flat nose, the staring eyes, develops slowly. By middle age the change accelerates. By the end, they walk into the sea and do not return.

Historical Record

Captain Obed Marsh of Innsmouth was the first in his line to trade with the reef, but not the last in the world. Similar enclaves have been identified, or suspected, along the Maine coast, in Cornwall, in the South Pacific. The Federal raid on Innsmouth in 1927 destroyed the Order's headquarters but not the population; hundreds were interned, and hundreds more had already gone to Y'ha-nthlei.

Robert Olmstead escaped to tell the tale. The government suppressed it. The archive does not.

Archive Notes

Coastal screening protocols remain in effect. Do not accept employment in towns where the gold is plentiful and the churches are shuttered. The phrase 'Innsmouth look' is not a slur; it is a medical warning. Cross-reference all hybrid reports with Dagon file materials. The sea is patient. Its children are patient. We must not be.