Turbot of Terror?

Ruv Draba · Apr 7, 2010

You're amphibious, tribal and you've had enough of those dryfeet pushing you around! Their mockery of your customs, pouring their ordure into your waterways, wrecking your riverbank dens with their jetties and their warehouses and their wooden boats. Lording it over you with their metalwork and their looms and their hard, clay cities...

It's time to settle the score.

You don't call it terrorism, you call it freedom-fighting, a quest for justice and dignity.

Your tools are honesty, courage, tradition... and fish.

Yes, fish -- in the herding, breeding and training of which, your people excel.

The only question is... how?

Over to you, dear colleagues: how does a stone-age, river-dwelling amphibious tribe bring terror to an iron-age, land-dwelling civilisation of superior numbers through the use of

FISH?

(I plan to write this one up as a short, but thought I'd open up this part of the premise just for fun.

Be warned: if your ideas appeal to me I will steal them shamelessly. :tongue

)

Lhun · Apr 7, 2010

This is a hard one. My initial though was: "They don't". The biggest problem i see here is not the difference in numbers or technology but simply the different medium. Seems to me that without hightech or magic, the only interaction between water-breathers and air-breathers will require one of the two to be dead.
The worst i can imagine the fishpeople to do to the landlubbers is to completely cut them off from the see. I.e. they could prevent fishing (maybe by simply herding the fish away or by getting poisonous fish to sacrifice themselves for the greater evil) and they could prevent simming/use of boats. But if the landlubbers stay on land and just uh, lub around, there's not much the fishpeople could do. It's the same the other way around of course.
If you want to go the full horror-route you could have all kinds of biological horrors infect the land dwellers through the fish they eat. Though that doesn't seem really like an attack from essentially stone age fish people.
Then there's always that really weird horror flick i zapped past on TV once with the flying piranhas. (I kid you not)
Amphibious monsters might be the way to go. If you're standing on a hill near the beach, even a small crocodile is going to be much more threatening than the biggest kraken.
Hm, last though: Neal Asher had a huge (and intelligent) sea snail in one book. Though he always has a whole menagerie of entertainingly weird and horrifically dangerous (though hilariously impossible) creatures.

Ruv Draba · Apr 7, 2010

Some ideas to help kick things off:

Killer-fish attacking swimmers
Poison fingerlings in cisterns and pipes
Eel-eggs concealed in food, that hatch into eels inside your stomach
Indelible, allergenic squid-ink thrown at nobles in their carriages
Crustaceans trained to cut through drywalker nets
Ray-stings hidden in cloth-bales
Fishermen pulled overboard and impaled on their own fish-hooks
Anchor-lines tied to narwhal horns and towed out to sea
Innocent peasant-girls drowned in streams and brooks
Borer-worms set loose on mills and boats
Exotic lampreys attached to suckling babes

I dunno... some of these are a bit lame for terrorist attacks, but hopefully you get the idea.

defcon6000 · Apr 7, 2010

Ruv Draba said:
Some ideas to help kick things off:

Eel-eggs concealed in food, that hatch into eels inside your stomach

*Thinks of alien-bursting-out-of-stomach in Alien*

I guess they could poison the drinking water, maybe they'll be immune to it, but the landlubbers can die from it.

Polenth · Apr 7, 2010

Breed killer land fish. Once the fish can crawl out on the land and breathe air, you have your army. Given how fast fish reproduce, numbers won't be an issue.

:e2fish:

Xelebes · Apr 7, 2010

*invites storygirl here*

Anyways, fish-oil bombs?

Mr Flibble · Apr 7, 2010

The despair squid

Maybe it had mutant babies?

justAnotherWriter · Apr 7, 2010

I think the most effective thing they could do is hide all the fish, or at least keep them out of nets.

An iron age coastal civilization would depend heavily on fishing to sustain itself. Even a few months without fish could tople kings and lead to rioting and revolution.

A clever amphibioius terrorist might know the right time to keep the fish out of the nets, and the right time to fill them to overflowing. Political destabilizaion is a terrorist's real game, the death and fire are just means to that end.

AnnieColleen · Apr 8, 2010

You said river-dwelling, right?

Seems like the best opportunities would be when the land-dwellers have to cross the river (what's valuable or necessary on the other side?) or have to come down close to it for other reasons (any handy areas where the accessible land is restricted?) Are parts of the terrain, or the local buildings and such, easily flammable? It would take some doing for river-dwellers to get access to fire, but say they grab a traveller to make it for them, or capture a boat with a lantern... Combine it with fish oil, or captured lamp oil or some such; come up with something to fling it & light the countryside on fire, force people to take refuge in the water...

Ruv Draba · Apr 8, 2010

justAnotherWriter said:
An iron age coastal civilization would depend heavily on fishing to sustain itself. Even a few months without fish could tople kings and lead to rioting and revolution.

I see these guys as a river/estuary culture with a single urban centre on the river, and satellite towns up- and down-river. They probably grow crops around the estuary and upstream, with hunting, lumber and mining further up into the hills. The river is a trade-route between city and towns, a source of fish and a necessary source of water and means of sanitation. The river is also a route to the sea, where they fish and trade as well.

Being a river-culture, they have pretty advanced agriculture, and being Iron Age they've managed to irrigate with aquaducts and wells, as they've got decent masonry too. I imagine that their economy has a reasonably broad base for its age. Here's a guess at the breakdown:

Farming 70%
Manufacture (e.g. cloth pottery, leather, metalware -- only the stuff sold) 8%
Fishing 6%
Shipping 5%
Resources (e.g. ore, stone, lumber) 5%
Military (standing army+navy, militias) 4%
Services (scribes, priests, government) 2%

(I don't know if that's reasonable -- perhaps an historian/economist could comment? Ancient Greece had 80% of its population working on farms, but its soil was fairly poor.)

I'm not sure how amphibians would attack this economy. Agricultural and resource economies are supposed to be more prone to rebellion than manufacturing and service economies. Perhaps turning one group of people against another might be part of the trick here.

shaldna · Apr 8, 2010

Turbot. Hmmm. Seems I did read that right.

RainyDayNinja · Apr 8, 2010

You could read "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters" for inspiration. I swear it was way better than P&P&Z.

Although you could make it a nice comedy anticlimax:
A couple of pages of the river people fuming with righteous indignation, and making proclamations of their intent to destroy the dryfeet. Then cut to a fisherman in a boat.
*SMACK*
"Dude, what the heck? Who threw that fish at me?"

justAnotherWriter · Apr 8, 2010

What about contaminating the water supply? Making it oily and disgusting with a really foul odor?

Or, you can change your mind about their dependence on fish.

Kateness · Apr 8, 2010

You said farming is extensive.

If it's a river civilization, then they're using that river as irrigation, right?

Poison that water. Put nasty stuff in it.

Crops don't grow. Famine ensues. Civilization falls into a hundred rioting pieces.

Keep the fish from them as well and you might actually go a good way to destroying the civilization from hunger alone. (at least until they get the sense to move away)

Shadow_Ferret · Apr 8, 2010

Evolve.

Vomaxx · Apr 8, 2010

The title of your thread made me think of the line in Blackadder--one of the Elizabethan episodes--where Lord Percy tells Baldrick that when he was young he was "savaged by a turbot".
Of course, the reaction of most Americans would be, "what's a turbot?"

Ambri · Apr 8, 2010

This sounds like a great premise, highly amusing. "Attack of the 50 foot minnow." Um, the first thing that came to mind is, if they had any sort of water or weather magics at their disposal, they could cause either flooding, tsunamis, or even get the sea level to rise and A, swamp the coastal settlements, and B, doesn't sowing the soil with salt make it pretty much useless for growing anything? If you're more along the lines of freshwater and riverrs, then maybe go with flooding and/ or poisoning the water supply. Also, the fish oil "napalm" others mentioned is a good idea.

Ardent Kat · Apr 8, 2010

Uhhm... Wouldn't the suggestions to poison/contaminate the water be extremely counter-productive? That would be like burning your own fields to the ground and saying to the occasionally-invading raiders, "Ha! Take that!" Could be a spiteful final gesture, but also suicidal. Amphibians & fish are incapable of living without water.

Kateness · Apr 8, 2010

They're different species, so maybe they find something that's deadly to dryfeet and not to marine life

MattW · Apr 8, 2010

Candiru aka toothpick fish aka penis parasite fish.

That's just evil to sic on someone.

Ruv Draba · Apr 8, 2010

justAnotherWriter said:
Or, you can change your mind about their dependence on fish.

I haven't discounted it yet, J.a.W! The most fish-dependent iron age culture I could think of was Japan -- only something like 16% of Japanese land is arable, so they traditionally needed it for crops. Without many farm animals, they depended on fishing and soya for protein, and that dietary tradition continued through to the late 20th century. In a culture where the basic energy source is human muscle-power, protein and carbs fuel the economy. So lacking fish would be a serious calamity to a culture like that. I'm not sure that it would topple a throne, but prolonged lack of protein could hurt the economy badly.

Ruv Draba · Apr 8, 2010

It's not really relevant, but for those who were wondering about my gag title...

(Image: FishingDartmouth.co.uk -- Bryan Davis & his Turbot)

That is a turbot. A sort of big, speckled skillet with a mouth. They're good eating. The Swiss dried and painted them, and used them for sempahores in the 13th century, and the Vikings used them as shields in mediaeval paintball too.

(Or... possibly not.)

Smiling Ted · Apr 8, 2010

Check out the short story "Guardians," by GRRM.

Ruv Draba · Apr 8, 2010

Thanks Ted! In exchange, I recommend that you check out JetSox travel and support socks!

[I know that I've given you no basis to evaluate my recommendation, but I would like to see you do my bidding.

]

LOG · Apr 8, 2010

What are the odds...I just watched Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus.

Poison the enemies water supply indefinitely.

Turbot of Terror?

Ruv Draba

Lhun

New kid, be gentle!

Ruv Draba

defcon6000

Polenth

Mushroom

Xelebes

Delerium ex Ennui

Mr Flibble

They've been very bad, Mr Flibble

justAnotherWriter

AnnieColleen

Invisible Writer

Ruv Draba

shaldna

The cake is a lie. But still cake.

RainyDayNinja

justAnotherWriter

Kateness

Shadow_Ferret

Court Jester

Vomaxx

Ambri

Plotting something

Ardent Kat

Kill your television

Kateness

MattW

Company Man

Ruv Draba

Ruv Draba

Smiling Ted

Ah-HA!

Ruv Draba

LOG

Lagrangian