Rescue Siren Maris

Materialistic social climber Maris looks, as a human, just like one of the willowy models from Miami's famous Fashion District. Her hair, cut in a stylish bob, is a striking white that’s complemented well by her green eyes and pale skin; in her mermaid form, she has the striped tail of a common dolphin.

Maris comes from old money… really old. Several hundred years ago, her grandfather had a lengthy romance with a lady pirate and used to "clean up" after the shipwrecks resulting from inevitable battles at sea, and the treasure collection that Maris’s family has amassed is truly impressive. Thus, Maris is accustomed to a certain level of status and privilege. She expects that status to extend to the dry realm, but Nim keeps a tight rein on her; otherwise, Maris might suddenly show up at Coastal Eddie's marine antiques shop with an emerald and gold cross worthy of a place in a museum and worth a king's ransom — enough to finance a resort of Maris’s very own on South Beach, and the polar opposite of "inconspicuous."

Frustrated with what she sees as a suffocating limitation on her lifestyle, Maris constantly looks for other ways to enhance her position. In the human world, she's observed, wealth and adoration are awarded to celebrities, and she has a subscription to every glossy fashion mag and trashy gossip rag on the market to learn as much as she can about America's modern-day royals. She consumes and retains an enormous amount of perishable information but is constantly surprised by the weather. Maris also threatens to get a scooter license, which the other girls know is just so she can wear a helmet painted robin’s egg blue.

Despite being rather unenthusiastic about working (like some sort of peasant!), Maris probably clocks in more guard time than any of the other girls because she needs to feed her new-found addiction: designer shoes. You can't wedge a fluke into a Louboutin or a Manolo Blahnik, so she's making the most of her time on land by buying and parading around in as many outrageously expensive shoes as she can afford.

Maris's job as a lifeguard at one of the swanky beachside hotels affords her the opportunity to rub elbows with the rich and famous, and she'd like nothing more than to get out of that disgraceful motel that she and the other Rescue Sirens live in and move up in the world. Maris is always asking to move farther away from Pippa, whose hyperactive antics give Maris a headache.

Images drawn by Chris Sanders; bottom illustration colored by Edgar Delgado.