Elvers. The interstellar contacts of your radio operators and mages brought the attention of the Great Eels, who blasted away from their previous planet on columns of nuclear fire. They formed a great Ball hundreds of miles across to weather the crossing of space. They dispersed and rained onto every part of your planet's ocean, which they sensed from space, for forty days and forty nights, until the entire level of the sea was raised.

A very few, the Supreme Eunuchs of their race, remained alive to watch for danger and to map out even the deepest of your planet's uranium deposits. The remainder dissolved into gametes, giving their lives to the process of natural selection.

The larvae or elvers of the Great Eels receive all the non-nuclear nutrients they need from the sea and one another, and produce energy by nuclear fission. (With a little magic, induced gamma emission definitely will work, even at the smallest scale). Their task for the coming centuries is to ingest every particle of digestible isotope on the planet. But their lives are constant struggle, an eternal facing off of contender against contender. The losers feed the winners until one day the great cycle continues once more. When they tap into their stored resources and blast aloft, the nuclear fallout will utterly sterilize the planet of all other life.

Until that time, your people are free to do as they wish. The Eels remain in the sea - they nearly are the sea - and will not bother them. Unless provoked, that is. When dealing with outside forces, for them fight and flight are all the same: they activate their immature space drive and fly away on what ranges from a geyser of contaminated water to a pillar of flaming fallout.

Because tampering with the Sea of Nightmares can destroy everything within hundreds of meters and spread fallout for hundreds of miles, humans are wary of it. There are few buildings nearby, those tightly regulated. The sea is crossed only by a guild of Navigators, people chosen as toddlers because they naturally play well with animals. Their entry examination is to play on the hole of the asp and put their hand on the cockatrice's den. A skilled Navigator can not merely launch a boat without being destroyed, or avoid being overturned and slain on the Sea. Navigators can understand and empathize deeply with the vast horde of Great Eel larvae all around them, and by subtle hints and motions, place his ship in a path to be moved forward toward the destination. There are tales of ships that made a passage at a hundred knots ... but far more of ships that never returned.

Elvers. The interstellar contacts of your radio operators and mages brought the attention of the Great Eels, who blasted away from their previous planet on columns of nuclear fire. They formed a great Ball hundreds of miles across to weather the crossing of space. They dispersed and rained onto every part of your planet's ocean, which they sensed from space, for forty days and forty nights, until the entire level of the sea was raised.

A very few, the Supreme Eunuchs of their race, remained alive to watch for danger and to map out even the deepest of your planet's uranium deposits. The remainder dissolved into gametes, giving their lives to the process of natural selection.

The larvae or elvers of the Great Eels receive all the non-nuclear nutrients they need from the sea and one another, and produce energy by nuclear fission. (With a little magic, induced gamma emission definitely will work, even at the smallest scale). Their task for the coming centuries is to ingest every particle of digestible isotope on the planet. But their lives are constant struggle, an eternal facing off of contender against contender. The losers feed the winners until one day the great cycle continues once more. When they tap into their stored resources and blast aloft, the nuclear fallout will utterly sterilize the planet of all other life.

Until that time, your people are free to do as they wish. The Eels remain in the sea - they nearly are the sea - and will not bother them. Unless provoked, that is. When dealing with outside forces, for Elvers fight and flight are all the same: they activate their immature space drive and fly away on what ranges from a geyser of contaminated water to a pillar of flaming fallout.

Because tampering with the Sea of Nightmares can destroy everything within hundreds of meters and spread fallout for hundreds of miles, humans are wary of it. There are few buildings nearby, those tightly regulated. The sea is crossed only by a guild of Navigators, people chosen as toddlers because they naturally play well with animals. Their entry examination is to play on the hole of the asp and put their hand on the cockatrice's den. A skilled Navigator can not merely launch a boat without being destroyed, or avoid being overturned and slain on the Sea. Navigators can understand and empathize deeply with the vast horde of Great Eel larvae all around them, and by subtle hints and motions, place his ship in a path to be moved forward toward the destination. There are tales of ships that made a passage at a hundred knots ... but far more of ships that never returned.