"What about the fish?" is the first question people who say The Flood never happened ask. What about them? They're fish, just how malign can a fish be? There're those big ones with all the teeth that eat people but they're simply hungry most of the time. The death of the land animals was simply unavoidable and what humans of today would call collateral damage. Noah saved a good few and many more of the smaller ones had the good sense to run UP-hill quickly. A lot of the larger and bulkier species didn't make it but that, many would say, is evolution in action. Since when did the Creator have to be completely divorced from evolution? Since Lucifer decided it would be a fabulous way to divide up the humans in pointless arguments is when. 

 

When the waters of all the heavens rushed in and consumed Atlantis, not a creature which walked or flew was spared. We know that at least 500 nephilim got clear in ships but what about the ones who were left behind, who could not run, for whom there was no room at the inn, as it were? Did they die? Most of them did but not all. Oh no, not all.

 

Mermen, Myrmidons, Piscians, Fish-Men, Pike-Men, Deep Ones, you have heard all the legends, you may even have seen a convincing photo or snatch of video footage. You might be forgiven for thinking they are beautiful women with long hair, nice breasts demurely covered by their long hair with a fish's tail. Stern and serious men with tridents, ragged beards and well-muscled human torsos as well as, again, a fish's tail. Romantics, fanciful tales and wishful thinking. If you were faced with the real thing, I am sure you would rather take your chances with the sharks. 

 

Many of the first generation shifters of all kinds present in Atlan and the surrounding cities at the time the storms struck had the incredible presence of mind to change form as the waters hit. They saw what was coming and decided an aquatic body of some sort would be useful. Not all of them survived the resulting turbulence and ensuing predation (sharks were not the largest things in the ocean back then). Many were unable to adapt and went insane. Most realised they were trapped ten miles down and needed to decide what to do next.

 

Though no-one has been even close to the ruins of Atlan and the Storm-Bourn, as they came to be known (for they were born of the greatest storm in all history) rarely approach the surface. In fact, they will come close to our world (the upper-world as they call it) only to raid and feed. They lost interest in our affairs and those even of Lucifer, their former king, a long time ago. It is said they repaired and occupied the ruins. That they have cities on the ocean floor or inside deep caves. It is said they travel around the world and can appear in rivers and lakes following bodies of water far below the ground. It is said this ocean is what is left of the primal, Antediluvian ocean which existed before all of the others. It crosses Eurasia from one and to the other at an approximate depth of ten-fifteen miles beneath the land. It is right beneath many of you now. It is even said that there is another, larger ocean underneath North and South America, connected to the first by a long, long tunnel. It is said that you can reach Atlantis this way, a lot safer than if you started from the surface. It is said that strange things happen to the pressure down there.

 

It is also said that the Storm-Bourn guard the many tunnels and passages. That Atlantis is theirs now.

 

No Storm-Bourn have yet been caught; alive or dead; due to their preference for great depth and suspected subterranean transit routes. They have been spotted in the past, have spawned legends but, once man became more ambitious regarding the ocean - and less respectful, they do not hesitate to add - they learned to be more careful and not show themselves. Accidents still happen but not one which, we are sure, the Storm-Bourn would consider disastrous.  It is suspected, however, that they are euryhaline - can occupy both fresh and salt water - have some kind of adaptive camouflage in their epidermis (like octopi) and are still able to shift to a small and highly specialised degree). It is suspected that some of the older ones can return to the surface (slowly with many 'pressure stops' along the way) and re-adapt their bodies for surface life but choose not to.

 

One dark rumour speaks of the USAF-ACARI facility in New Mexico. There was a leak, barely plugged in time, which spoke of an entrance - almost ten miles down beneath the desert - to a great ocean where the laws of fluid dynamics and oceanic pressure appeared not to apply. Where a strange light and what looked like artificial structures were briefly spotted by the remote submersible drone before its signal degraded. There are more rumours, whispers that the range issue was fixed and it found something, something no-one on the surface would believe. Something which brought Lucifer himself running.