Sea-Swarm

"Oh no. No no no no no!" - a sailor upon spotting an incoming Sea-Swarm

There are monsters deep within the sea which could crush a ship with a single blow. There are strange creatures which will snatch the body or mind of a sailor, dragging them into the water never to be seen again - at least, not alive. There are malevolent gods, angry living storms, and a pirate fleet living on the shell of a gargantuan turtle. And none of these things elicit more despair than the sight of a Sea-Swarm.

Every few years, a swarm of flying, hungry insects arise from the surface of the ocean. In their juvenile form, they resemble shrimp, and can be found throughout the Middlesea, eating and being eaten and generally innocuous. Then they all begin to change at once. For a day before the swarm, the sea for hundreds of square miles will be covered in their floating shells, while inside the insects are undergoing a metamorphosis. Hundreds of thousands of them are eaten by fish during this day, but millions more will split their shells open and launch themselves into the sky.

The Oncoming Swarm

Individually, the insects of the swarm are no more troublesome than any other. They are known by many names, but sailors usually call them 'Mushi', a corruption of a Yanjinese word for insect. They are large, with each mushi growing to three or four inches long, with four wings and a long body. Once they emerge from their shells, a mushi will fly towards anything that stands out from the ocean surface, such as an island, a Floating Forest, or a ship.

Watching an oncoming swarm is much like watching a storm racing towards you. There are so many insects that they block out the sun. When they reach their target, they begin to eat. Mushi are mostly not carnivorous, although they certainly can deliver a painful bite. On a ship, their targets are mostly plant matter - sailcloth, rope, and wood. The insects cover every inch of the ship, inside and out, including the sailors. For each one of the Mushi that the sailors kill, a thousand more will land to join the feast, and ten thousand will pass the ship by altogether.

The Aftermath

A swarm can take hours to pass over a ship, and when they finally do move on, the ship is usually in dire straits. Every scrap of cloth and rope on the ship will have been devoured, from the sails and rigging to the clothing the sailors were wearing. Everyone will have been bitten dozens of times, with tender welts appearing at the site of each attack. The wooden portions of the ship fare a little better, but the swarm will still have gnawed and chewed on everything they could reach, causing structural issues and leaks to appear. The ship's food supplies are rarely untouched - the Mushi will chew through water barrels and wooden crates to get at anything that smells edible, and more than one ship has found themselves without anything left on board to eat, and no potable water either.

Getting back to port after a sea swarm is no simple matter. The loss of the sails and rigging mean that oars are usually the only option, and often they will have been damaged as well, snapping at the worst time. With most of the food and water gone, the crew is often desperate to make landfall for provisions. The bodies of the Mushi themselves are edible, but foul tasting, and eating too much of them can cause a variety of digestive troubles that render a sailor incapable of pulling an oar. Most crews caught in a Sea-Swarm never do make it back to shore.

Fire!

Some ships never make it through to the other end of the swarm, and the most common reason is a fire on board. Sailors who have insects coating their body are not always stoic about it, and more than one has been driven into a full blown panic attack by the experience, flailing and screaming and hurling themselves over the side. In more than a few cases they have smashed lanterns onto the deck in the process, either by accident or in a deliberate attempt to incinerate the swarm of Mushi. Either way, a fire on the ship at sea is a catastrophe in its own right, and many ships have burned to the waterline while a Sea-Swarm surrounded them.

A Sailor's Salvation

One food item that usually survives an attack by a Sea-Swarm is Pemmican. This traveler's food is usually ignored by the Mushi, and may be the only edible item on board a ship after an encounter. As a result, some sailors believe it is foolish and bad luck to set sail without an ample supply of Pemmican on board, and may even carry some of their own just in case. You can read more about Pemmican here.

Mushi Tea

Those ships who do limp back into port do have one small upside - their ship is usually coated in Mushi bodies. These can be dried and powdered to be made into a medicinal tea highly sought after in the Empire of Wamato, as it is thought to treat a wide variety of ailments. If a crew is very very lucky, the sale of the insect bodies may bring in enough to repair their vessel, or at least to defray the expense of the disaster.