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You poke your head out of the grotto to survey the waters around you and, if by instinct, duck back inside instantly. The large body of a Zhark swims by just overhead.
Oh no...
<span class="mu-s">Zharks</span> are one of the only natural predators of the Swall. Despite their obvious fully aquatic nature, they are actually your closest living relative among animals. While you are morphologically very different, Zharks have almost the exact same organ ratios, the same venom glands, same gill and similar teeth, just more of them, and even the same brain structures. Though scientists swear up and down Zharks are no where as intelligent as Swall, stories of their seemingly instinctual cruelty and cleverness abound in your historical literature and folk tales. Most of these have been forgotten, but even your advanced, scientific, and highly developed society can't fully scrub away it's superstitious tradition.
Zharks have been known to study prey items to find their habits and routines, prey on lone individuals, and single out weak swimmers or those with their backs turned to it. Despite having to constantly keep moving to move oxygen across their gills, unlike Swall, some have even been said to lay in weight; practically suffocating themselves; just to lay an ambush for a prey item. They are pretty scary, and the main reason Swall don't go out into open water. Especially not alone. Like you did.
Yet despite all this; the Swall never deemed it appropriate to eradicate the Zharks. They're too central and important to the food web; their role as Apex predators and a form of population control against all manners of creatures is too important. The Swall government even protects them; but they thankfully stay out of the shallows. Perhaps learning that sticking around means harpoon guns aimed at their direction. But you went out from the shallows, and you are trapped.
While you are fairly certain the Zhark can't get into the tight spaces and rocks of this grotto, you also know the Zhark isn't going to pass you up too easily. You're a juicy target out here; lots of biomass and a slow swimmer with no natural poisons, toxins, or quills that can upset the Zhark's hungry belly. What are you going to do?
>Hide in the grotto with your camping supplies until it goes away
>Throw out some food as a distraction and make a break for it
>Try to make bubble signals for help to arrive
>Other (Write-In)
