There are mass murderers out there. There are many more of them, in fact, than most people realize. Out of all of these mass murderers a shockingly low number are captured and brought to justice. Now, the public might feel as if the percentage is higher than it actually is. That the authorities are out there bagging, tagging, and fragging the bad guys, and that inevitably justice prevails. That’s an easy assumption to make, too, because the papers hyper-fixate on a story. Little girl goes missing, little girl is found, six weeks elapse or six months do, and then the suits find their guy. Trial ensues, the evidence tells the story, and one more mass murderer goes to the chopping block - tale as old as time. What they don’t focus on is the way that five sick-minded freaks go free for every one they siphon through the system.
Rarer still is the mass manslaughterer. In the instance of a trial most defenses will go to bat for a claim of manslaughter, and why wouldn’t they? It’s a lesser penalty, and it paints their client in a different light. Murder has malice. Murder has forethought, intention, and evil behind it. Manslaughter is an accident, something someone could stumble into ass-backwards by clipping a pedestrian with their car on a Sunday drive with their loved ones. Manslaughter is defined by an absence of malice and premeditation.
In that way King Shark was not a mass murderer. Sure, some might argue that he was, because it was easy to look at a big man-eater with a triple digit body count as an evil thing. A man with a triple digit body count is heinous, after all.
A shark with a triple digit body count, though? Well, that’s only natural, isn’t it?
When a killer stalks a victim, nabs ‘em, stashes ‘em in a basement, and little Jimmy’s mother doesn’t come home, well, that’s a crime.
When Nanaue grabs a bite to eat because a hapless mother passed by the wrong alley, groceries and all, and little Jimmy’s mother doesn’t come home…isn’t that different?
At any rate, Nanaue didn’t let it keep him up at night.
In the back of the library there resided several televisions: big, flatscreen affairs with OLED screens and all the fixings. While a television might seem counter-intuitive towards a library environment, these televisions had an out. Several sets of over-the-ear headphones - the fancy kind with all the trappings of luxury - sat beneath the televisions on wall-mounts.
The televisions themselves which lined the walls like so many ducks in a row each played a different scene, and each scene came from Death Game competitions past. Murderers and manslaughterers of days gone by, immortalized in widescreen resolution, struggled against one another in eternity for the enjoyment of others, or for the education of competitors to come.
There weren’t many spectators, though. Only one. The theater style seats were all empty except for just the single one which groaned in protest each time the enormity of a shark-man who’d found it suitable as a seat moved or shifted.
He watched unblinkingly, mouth hanging open, chest rising and falling gently. His glass-marble eyes were transfixed, locked in an eternal dance with the television. He wore no headphones, for they were beyond him, but he didn't really need sound anyway. Just the moving images were enough, really, because Nanaue really liked moving images. If one could set aside his appearance, and the natural fear an abomination like he tended to inspire, they might get close enough to see that the corners of his gaping maw turned upward. In fact, if someone were to look past the rows of sharp teeth, and the endless abyss of dark eyes, they might find an expression of joy. Raw, unfiltered joy.
“Suit man,” he announced to himself, pointing. “Not very smart.”
He followed the figure on the screen - some suave looking man a bit too skinny to look appetizing - with a large grey finger. It dangled there in the air - the finger, not the man - following the figure as it shifted in accordance to the panning of the camera. Nanaue watched.
He also listened, though the television was silent, and as he did so he heard…something. His lower jaw bobbed, his head swiveled, and with it his shoulders turned. Physically, that was the only way his head really could swivel, and when it did a significant amount of his torso did, too. The lounger didn’t agree with that position, though, and Nanaue nearly toppled the thing trying to get a peak over the back of it.
No doubt about it, though. Those were voices coming from the shelves. They weren’t loud, but they were there, and Nanaue found a meandering curiosity creeping through his brain. Voices always meant something. Sometimes they meant num nums, and sometimes they meant spectacle, and every once in a great while they even meant a conversation. Not often, but…it had happened a time or two.
He lurched out of the chair, though the effort to pry his bulk from its arms was considerable, and the chair tried to follow his aft end up as he stood; when he’d finally wrenched free, though, he made his way around and shuffled away quietly. Well, he thought it was quiet, anyway. A seven foot monster of man and shark could only manage so much subtlety, even at the best of times and in the best of circumstances, and a near silent library was not specifically the best of circumstances for that kind of sneaking.
He followed the hushed voice the way one might follow an aroma, letting it wrap around him and guide him, awkwardly shuffling ever onward. He shuffled past tables, and he shuffled past shelves, until he heard an abrupt ‘shush’ and found the sense to stop.
“Stealth,” he reminded himself in a deep low rumble. “Be stealth.”
A large sharky nose and small sharky eyes poked around the side of a bookshelf. His beady little eyes bore forward, and locked on two strangers. He looked at them. They looked at him.
Then King Shark groaned, slapped a hand to his head, and clenched his jaw.
“DAMN!” he cursed himself, loudly and thickly. “Not good stealth.”
He stepped out from around the shelf, so wide that he could not enter the gap between one bookshelf and another if he had wanted to, and stood there. He stared, but he didn’t say anything. His mouth hung open, a yawning chasm of pink and ivory that sunk back into his throat and onward.
And he watched. Very awkwardly.
Then, after awhile, he said: “...chum?”
Now, Nanaue knew the word chum, but he only knew one definition, and there was in fact more than one definition out there. One type of chum, of course, is the sort one might head on down to the pub with to pal around. The other type of chum…well, that’s the type a fisherman might toss overboard, and that a fellow like Nanaue might take in as an afternoon snack. Though he could never tell that’s what they were doing, Nanaue had watched more than a handful of folks try and puzzle out which definition he might be familiar with.
It was fun for him to watch. …he loved to watch things.