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In the ocean lives a race of people who call themselves the Hitokai (aka based on Japanese words for "people" and "sea" using Google Translate because I can't think of anything else to call them right now). They are merpeople with fishy tails. In place of technology they have magic. The vast majority of technology that humans on land use is all based on fire, and fire is impossible underwater, they wouldn't be able to create glass or metal or plastic or so forth, which means they couldn't make microscopes or weapons or pretty much anything. So they use magic instead. Some of them can shape things just by touching them, like take a rock or a crystal or bone and just start reshaping it as if it were soft putty, smoothing off the edges and so on. Others can change the chemical structure of things, like turning sand into glass and merging different materials to make polymers and whatnot. Some can do this with living flesh, changing body parts around, anything from simple cosmetic changes to life-saving medical surgery.
What makes the Hitokai a unique race is that they have no violent instincts. They live to be happy and playful and free and even when they get angry and fight with each other, it's never very serious. They may dislike each other, and tease each other, and so on, but they are incapable of war, murder, or physical assault on each other. They hunt fish to eat but never kill for sport; they respect the creatures they hunt and appreciate that the animal gave its life so they could live. They love art and joy and creativity and celebrations. They have athletic competitions and put on dazzling performances, but have no natural desire to dominate or destroy. They accept gay people because it's a natural form of birth control; some couples simply can't have kids, and that helps keep the population from getting out of hand, and those childless couples can adopt the children who have no parents. Trandgendered people don't have much of an issue either because they can magically change physical characteristics. There are no poor people because their kind are very giving and compassionate and if they see someone else doesn't have the things they need, they'll share what they have. They are naturally very generous and fair and believe in repaying debts and helping one another.
There is another race in the ocean, much like them, but with one devastating difference: they posses bloodthirst. They are called Sirens, and will kill others to get what they want. They will cheat and steal and lie to each other just like humans. They will fight wars just like humans. They are basically just humans with tails who use magic instead of technology.
So it is no surprise that when the Sirens discovered the Hitokai city and how beautiful and prosperous it was, they saw things they wanted and simply took them away. They came and attacked and took what they wanted and killed whoever got in their way. The Hikokai don't fight each other and lack the capacity to properly defend themselves. What happened to their city was horrible beyond imagination because they had never experienced such violence and cruelty before.
The Hitokai ran away and began attempting to rebuild their culture, but once they started to prosper again, the Sirens came back and attacked, took what they wanted and left. They saw the Hitokai as weak and defenseless and pathetic and enjoyed harassing them just for fun, even taking some of them as prisoners to keep as slaves. Some of their malice may have been born from a sense of jealousy that they could not live as peacefully as the Hitokai do; they are like humans, simply incapable of true perfect peace.
The Hitokai began to live in absolute fear of the Sirens. They lacked the violent instinct to fight back and didn't know what to do except hide. They moved their city into underground caves, hoping the Sirens would never find them. They lived far below the surface they loved so much, away from the sun. If they wanted to jump out of the water, they had to create an area with a pocket of air inside the caves, but it was not the same. There were no more wide open spaces, only narrow tunnels of darkness, and the constant fear that one day they would be discovered.
One day a stranger came to their city. The Hitokai had come to distrust outsiders, but this new person appeared to be like them instead of being like the Sirens. He lived with them for a year or so and came to be accepted by them.
Then the day came that all of them feared more than anything. The Sirens found their underground city. They came to launch one of their usual attacks. The Hitokai were weak and never fought back, so the Sirens who came after them didn't need to be professional warriors of any sort. In fact, the Hitokai were considered so weak and easy to defeat, that the task of raiding their city was given to the lower-ranking fighters, the newbies who were still in training, etc, as a sort of milestone, a rite of passage, before they could start learning to be true warriors and take on more formidable enemies.
But this day was different. The Sirens began their usual raid on the city, stealing things and breaking things and hurting people and taking the pretty ones captive, etc, but they came upon something that had never happened before: one of them did not run away. It was the stranger who had come into the city about a year ago. He looked like the others, and moved like them, but he was different from them. He was not afraid.
The Sirens thought the Hitokai were learning to fight back, and wanted to quickly banish all thought of rebellion from their minds. The Sirens all attacked the stranger to make a point, to prove the Sirens would always be stronger and nothing the Hitokai ever tried to do would ever stop them. The Sirens were superior in every way, and the Hitokai would always be their toys, their slaves, their inferiors.
As the Sirens swarmed around, it became evident the stranger could not take on all of them at once. He revealed his true form as the black dragon Century. He did not kill the Sirens, but overpowered them with such strength that they had no choice but to flee.
The Hitokai at first were unsure how to react. They saw the mighty dragon as a god with power beyond their imagining and called him Divine Century (DC, of course) and begged him to stay and protect them. He was not truly a god, of course, simply a dragon with the power to shape-shift and take on the form of other creatures. He found their peaceful city to be a paradise free from all pain, and wanted to stay, and agreed that if they would let him be one of them, he would always protect them.
The Sirens returned, defeated, with news of what had happened. Enraged, the stronger warriors set out to set an example for their weaker underlings. They invaded the city, came face to face with a giant black dragon they could not hope to defeat, and were forced to return to their own land. Upon hearing this news, the greatest and strongest warriors in all the kingdom of the Sirens came forward. They were the best in the all the land. They saw this situation as both their duty to their people and as an opportunity to show their true skill.
Unlike the others, these elite warriors cannot accept defeat. They refused to flee. They fought to the death. The dragon was forced to destroy them, but did so with respect even though they did not deserve it. So the greatest and most elite warriors of the Sirens simply never returned. What came back instead was the black dragon, who assaulted the Siren city and took back the Hitokai captives who were trapped there as slaves, and the Sirens were powerless to stop him.
Having a taste of their own medicine struck great fear into the hearts of the Sirens. The beast became known to them as the Black Death Dragon, Hell's Harbinger, God of the Hitokai. They never bothered the Hitokai again, not until they too could find a force strong enough to defeat that monster.
He was not a god, of course, but simple little merpeople cannot hope to destroy a dragon, so he might as well have been a god from their perspective.
The Hitokai, no longer needing to fear the deadly Sirens, returned to their original true home, which had been left in ruin and occupied by Sirens after the first invasion. The dragon chased them out and they rebuilt their shining underwater city, and returned to the surface to leap and jump and spin as much as they wanted. The shape-shifting black dragon stayed with them and nothing was able to harm them again. He lived in that beloved and peaceful city among people who were more pure and good than any he'd seen before as Divine Century, the Heavenly Dragon, Guardian of Paradise.
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