94828-2 RAA Outer Seas TEXT R1 Proof

Val Carter’s Guide to Merfolk

THE RECORDS,NOTES, AND LOOSE LEAF PAGES OF VELLUM THAT MAKE UP THE OBSERVATIONS OF ONE VALDER J. CARTER, DENIZEN OF THE OUTER SEAS.

The Valcora

Call me Valder I never know how to start these things. “Dear journal” sounds like some thing my adopted sister would write, and “From the desk of Valder J. Carter” sounds far too formal. The bit struck out above was how an old raft city teacher used to start his response to strangers who asked for his name. He was normally stoic and kept to himself, but every once in a while, he would drink a little too much and start telling wild stories that most of the people who called the raft city home said were the best stories they had ever been told. He had one about an albino leviathan that a captain he served under supposedly obsessed over, and another about sailing the seas in a coffin that I found way more interesting than the thing about the whale. The reason I bring up Teach, as I would come to call him, is because it was he that first told me about the Valcora Merfolk. As the story goes, Teach was serving as a tutor on a merchant lord’s estate barge. He had been brought on to teach the lord’s children about accounting and tradecraft, so they could eventually take over their mother’s business. A crew of pirates boarded the vessel, slaughtering almost all of the crew, and taking the kids, Teach, and a retainer named Old Barnabus hostage. Allegedly, the pirates were asked to only take Teach, so he could keep the children occupied while their employer negotiated terms for the children’s bounty. But Old Barnabus, being of considerable size and very politely soft-spo ken, informed the kidnappers that if they took him along with the kids and Teach, he would not have to kill the vast majority of them with his bare hands.

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