hey remember that little mermaid AU I started this time last year?? with it being mermay, I figured it was time to do some more. plot things are moving, slowly
I never said much about how things work in this AU but I have a lot of thoughts about it, so context for anyone who wants it under the cut:
okay so, like her AU counterpart, Kaisa is deeply interested in human stuff, but I wanted to gear that interest more towards human knowledge and understanding of how their world works - in canon Kaisa seems to care more for the information about the world that magic gives her than for the practical side, so it seemed right that in this AU, her curiosity extends to the human world too. which is why her hoard in this drawing is 90% books and most of the objects she collects are ones with some academic value (and why I replaced the fork Ariel gets hold of in this scene with the coral sextant, sorry draugen but it’s Kaisa’s now hgfjjkgf). there’s so much of the world that humans have got figured out but that the other witches have never cared for, and it fascinates her
(side note, libraries don’t exist under the sea. witches keep their spells and such on enchanted scrolls, but that’s about it. Kaisa found out what the humans’ libraries looked like from Raven, and did her best to replicate it on her own. all her books have spells placed on them to protect them from water damage. most of them were salvaged from shipwrecks, and some were brought by Raven in return for shiny objects)
the Witches’ Tower and most of Trolberg’s population are in the merfolk kingdom (Hilda and Johanna being the main exceptions). Also, witches aren’t in hiding in this AU - magic is a normal part of life for mermaids (humans don’t have magic, and this ties into the merpeople’s distrust for them) and the committee of three govern the entire merfolk kingdom as well as the tower
Kaisa isn’t a princess per se, but she is one of the more highly regarded witch students at the tower. because of the high potential she shows for magic, the committee of three personally mentored and more or less raised her (Tildy, for the most part) and it’s assumed that Kaisa will take over from one of them someday
Kaisa doesn’t exactly share this ambition and spends most of her time skipping her magic lessons to scour shipwrecks with David, much to two of the committee of three’s displeasure
speaking of which, the committee looks a little different in this AU. due to a… sudden and unexpected vacancy, Tildy has been (somewhat reluctantly) filling in as the third member for the past few years. She’s the closest thing Kaisa has to a parental figure and the only one who doesn’t mind her taking trips to the surface, but it’s the whole committee Kaisa has to answer to at the end of the day
I think that about sets the scene for now, we’ll see some more characters next :>
