The Ferrymen

"Please. Pardon our plurality."

— The Ferrymen

The Ferrymen are, for lack of a better word, an interesting individuals. Upon first glance, their size, physical appearance, and choice of attire immediately serve to set them apart from others. The Ferrymen are over seven feet tall, with a width to more than match their height. They have a crooked posture that implies a greater height if they could stand up straight, but some physical ailment appears to prevent them from doing so. The Ferrymen typically wear long, baggy clothes which cover most of their enormous frame, most commonly a long peacoat specifically tailored to their size. They make sure to always completely cover their unusually bulbous head, wearing a large metal mask depicting a grinning, frowning, and scowling face blending together, and many tightly-wrapped bandages. In fact, their entire body is covered in these bandages, with only their mouth and gloved hands free of them. Despite this bizarre appearance, the non-physical aspects of the Ferrymen are what make them so important.

Marine Merchants

The Ferrymen are, without a doubt, the Pariah's Tides' most successful traders. Despite only being one men, they outpace even the largest trading companies with ease. The reason? Putting it simply, monopoly. The Ferrymen are the Pariah's Tides' only source of prophet-sap, the substance that navigators use in order to plot courses across the chaotic, ever-shifting sea. Without prophet-sap, navigation would be no more than a guessing game, and without the Ferrymen, there would be no prophet-sap. The Ferrymen obtain and sell this prophet sap by being the only known being capable of traveling between Gamburg, the City of Stove Boats, and the rest of the Tides.
Traveling to Gamburg is not much of a feat. All one needs is to either become Creed-wracked, or be unlucky enough to be on a boat hijacked by a Creed-wracked. Traveling back, on the other hand, is much harder. Other than the Ferrymen, the only beings capable of traveling east of East, where Gamburg lies, are the Creed-wracked. Theoretically, they might also be capable of traveling back to the rest of the Tides, but no Creed-wracked would ever do so. They are compelled to stay in Gamburg, to spend the rest of their lives in a futile attempt to hunt Wrong John. The Ferrymen are entirely unique, in that they are capable not only of traveling to Gamburg, but back again.
Being the only connection between Gamburg and the rest of the Tides, they are also the only method by which the goods of Gamburg can actually be sold. Chief among these goods are incredibly high quality whale oil, which is so pure it is practically hatred in a bottle, and prophet-sap. There is also a smaller market in less common products, such as the rare fragment of incredibly valuable whalebone that can be dredged up from Wrong John's flesh, and forbidden commodities such as the white whale's flesh itself. In return for these goods, the Ferrymen provide Gamburg with necessities such as real food, fresh water, wood, and other simple items. While prophet-sap and whale oil are largely useless to Gamburgers, these relatively resources are incredibly valuable to them, and thus the Ferrymen make a massive return on their business.

Tidal Transports

The Ferrymen do not only make their money in transporting goods across the Tides and selling them. As their name suggests, they don't only ferry goods, they also ferry people. A much less frequent service, but an important one nonetheless. The Ferrymen's unique ability to travel places no others can makes their service incredibly pricey, and it costs one a small fortune to secure passage on their ship, the Lucy Ann.
The Ferrymen primarily offer two services, as far as transport goes. The first of these is passage to and from the East. The Ferrymen's ability to navigate to Gamburg doesn't only mean that they can trade basic commodities for oil and sap, it also means that they can rescue from the whale's back those Creedless who wish to go home, and can take those interested in the strange city to it. Many Creedless, stranded in Gamburg due to their Creed-wracked captain's monomaniacal urge to sail East, spend their whole lives saving up enough to go home. Most never succeed, but a few sometimes get lucky, find or steal a piece of whalebone, and manage to pay for their whole passage with just that.
Their second, more illicit service, is transport to and from the West. The West is where the dead go, where they float upon the Tides until they reach the Sea of Bones, a great ocean where the bodies of the dead all float under the waves. Occasionally, one of the hooded Gondoliers will snatch a body from the water, and weave its life story into a song, allowing its passage into Fiddler's Green. This process, however, is a drawn out one, and many corpses spend countless lifetimes waiting to be noticed by the Gondoliers, unliving in intense boredom. The Ferrymen offer a service to the intensely rich, to ferry their bodies directly West. They avoid all the ravages of the Tides that the typical journey inflicts upon them, and the Ferrymen's service includes the neat packaging of the body into an eye-catching, watertight coffin, to ensure the Gondoliers' attention. The Ferrymen are not a well like people in the West, due in part to their dealings in the East, and in part to past indiscretions, where they not only brought bodies to the West, but took them out as well. Thus, their journeys must be done quickly and subtly, to not attract unwanted attention.

Fraternal Freak

If one could view the Ferrymen in the nude (a highly regrettable action) they would instantly understand their choice of clothing. Under the triple mask, baggy clothes, and carefully wrapped bandages, an aberrant creature lies. The Ferrymen's body could best be described as a chimeric mashup of three separate human bodies. It is as if three men were fused together, but each body was ever so slightly displaced from the others, resulting in a twisted, bulbous monstrosity. Each arm is three different arms, with fingers and wrists and elbows sticking out haphazardly, vestigial hands wrapped around and fused to the greater mass. Their legs are no different, thick and twisted, with more joints than is natural for any healthy creature. Their triple mask is more than a fashion statement, as it covers three distinct faces, all fused together at the edges.
It is the face which reveals the most about the Ferrymen's condition. In the center, the face is as ordinary as it could ever hope to me. Just a man of relatively indeterminate age. On the left, however, the skin is grey and sagging, the eyes glassy, the mouth slack. On the left, the face is that of a corpse, preserved forever in an early stage of decay. On the right, however, the skin bears the telltale grooves and ridges, the white scarring and wild eyes of the Whaleman's Creed. The Ferrymen are one-third living, one-third dead, and one-third Creed-wracked. This is why they can travel both East, where only Creed-wracked can go, and West, where only the dead can go. However, since they are also two-thirds not any of those things, they are never unable to leave, once they travel to one of these extremes.
This bizarre form is, unsurprisingly, not natural. The Ferrymen were not always like this. The origin for their twisted composite body, and the plurality which plagues them wherever they go, lies in their name. Before, the Ferrymen were nothing more than three brothers. They ran a whaling business, and were quite successful. Unfortunately, the eldest of the three died of tuberculosis, and his body was preserved in a puncheon of rum. The youngest of the three was a regular participant in the company's whale hunts, and ended up contracting the Whaleman's Creed. In a desperate bid to save his Creed-wracked brother, the middle of the three, who had focused more on the world of books than the world of business, decided to perform a dangerous onomantic ritual. He would fuse his name with that of his two brothers, becoming a composite being, and preventing his Creed-wracked brother from sailing East. However, onomancy is a dangerous and difficult art, and it ended up going wrong, turning the brothers into a single plural being, but an imperfect, twisted one.

Age

Varied

Pronouns

They/Them/Theirs, Plural Being

Sex

Male

Gender

Male

Presentation

Masculine/Androgynous

Eyes

White (Edward), blue (George), glassy/grey-blue (Joseph Brooks)

Hair

none

Skin Tone/Pigmentation

Pale, ridged, covered in white scars (Edward), pale (George), pale and discolored (Joseph Brooks

Height

8'2"

Weight

~550 lbs