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The Oceanic Center
Staring into a tank, Lance looked at the wolf eels within. How had the narrator for "Seasons in the Sea" described them? Them? There had only been one, but the narrator had described it as a "gentle six-foot ogre" and as having a "face worthy of its prickly prey", that prey being sea urchins. The descriptions fit, not only were the wolf eels indeed ogres of six feet in length, but their faces did indeed look worthy of a sea urchin.
"Lance!" Turning away from the tank of wolf eels, Lance saw Rikki waving at him with another girl next to her, this one wearing overalls and having hair that was so dark a brown that it looked nearly black. Walking over, Rikki introduced the two saying: "Lance, this is Cleo Setori. Cleo, this is Lance Carter. He is new to Dolphin City and has a bit of an affinity for the sea too."
Setori? That was an unusual name. Lance could not remember having ever heard it before. Chadwick, Bennett, Kent, all surnames he had heard before, but Setori? Not so much, he wondered what its origin was.
With a smile, Cleo commented: "Saw you checking out those wolf eels, you ever see them before?"
"Not outside of nature documentaries." Lance answered, rubbing the back of his head. "You ever get any basking or horn sharks around here?"
"What are horns sharks anyway?" asked Rikki, still somewhat confused by the name. "I know about hammerheads, we have one in the bay, but horn sharks? Are they like the shark versions of narwhals?"
Giving a small laugh, Cleo replied: "No, no, Rikki. They are a little species of shark, only three feet three inches in length. They get their name from the high ridges they have above their eyes. They are really quite cute." Addressing Lance, she then said: "Sorry, no horns sharks, no basking sharks either, just a lone hammerhead."
"Did I hear someone mention basking sharks?" The three teens turned and Lance saw a bearded man, the head of the center no doubt. "We actually had a school of them here back in 2006. Good thing we didn't have one around here with that 'killer shark' nonsense, a shark that big would have really gotten people panicked."
"Hello, Mr. Lambert!" chirped Cleo.
Lance could not understand what the man called Mr. Lambert was talking about. "I know they look like a spectre out of nightmare, but those thirty-foot monsters feed on the microscopic, they are harmless giants."
"Unfortunately, not everyone knows that." Stated Mr. Lambert sadly. "People see that familiar dorsal fin and they think 'shark' and unfortunately when they think 'shark', they think of a certain Benchley novel and the movies it spawned."
Alas, Lance could only nod in agreement. The shark was a misunderstood creature. Sometimes people were killed by these denizens of the Deep, eaten alive and some cultures had demonized them, but there were a few who worshipped them as deities. Until recently, no one sought to understand them and there were still many who believed the only good shark was a dead one, even if it was something as harmless as the whale, basking, horn or the angelshark. In the mythology of Japan, the shark was a symbol of terror, resulting in the Second World War seeing fighter planes painted with the jaws of a shark to instill terror in the hearts of enemy forces. Even in pop culture the shark was portrayed as a blackguard, most famously in the Peter Benchley novel "Jaws" and the franchise it had spawned.
Due to a fear of the unknown, humanity had turned other sea beasts into monsters of the Deep, such as the octopus and sometimes harmless ray. Everyday scientists were filling books with fascinating new facts about such creatures, but how long would fear continue to exist for?