Like many a reclusive celebrity before her -- J.D. Salinger, Howard Hughes, Greta Garbo, Nessie, Bigfoot, and the Legendary Black Beast of Aaaaarrrrrrggghhh -- Miss Jean Louis is a shadowy figure, known best for her ability to keep the gears of Gishwhes moving smoothly behind the scenes.
Yet her personal life is shrouded in even more secrecy than her professional one. Who is Jean Louis? Can we find traces of her if we hunt? Can we stumble on telling trinkets of her life left in figurative tree trunks as if she were a present-day Boo Radley?
Reputable Supernatural Sources Who are Totally Not Attempting to Slander Her Good Name(TM) say that the truth of the matter is that Miss Jean Louis is elusive precisely because, behind all that confidence and kale, she hides a secret that could rend apart the very foundations of what we know of the natural world. She is not, as we all have assumed, a whip-smart, whip-cracking, whip-wielding woman. No. In fact, she is NOT HUMAN AT ALL.
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| Not Pictured: Miss Jean Louis (Gesner Mermaid, 1560) |
Major cryptozoological scholars have spent the past five years painstakingly following the intricate clues Miss Jean Louis herself has spread in their path, as if in a once-a-year ritual. As a result of their deep investigations and intricate studies, the truth can finally be revealed.
As most of her ardent followers know, Miss Jean Louis, Queen of the Scavengers, Empress of the Hunt, was born in Khôr 'Angar, Djibouti, home to an air strip on the coast of the Bab el Mandeb Strait. What they do not know is that this is a place of what our ancient selves knew of as magic. It is an intersection of the essential elements of Earth, Air and Water, each one shifting with the human vibrations of all that pass through. Dedicated as Khôr 'Angar is to travel, these vibrational shifts -- known to some as "auras" -- stir up Earth, Air and Water into a potent swirl of the physical and psychological. It was into this continually spiralling soup that Miss Jean Louis was born, poised between Heaven and Earth, Land and Sea. This is a place of upheaval, of earthquakes and continent-shaking shifts; it would be folly to think that anything but the supernatural could occur here.
And occur it did. For Jean Louis came into this world as something -- someone -- even rarer than Ogopogo or the Kraken. Born of sea and land and air, by all rights, Miss Jean Louis should have come into this world in her true form, that of a mermaid. Is it not true that she sings a siren song that draws all who hear it into her web? Is she not beautiful and terrible, frightening and irresistible, impossibly possible even as she manifests the most classical of characteristics of the maids beneath the sea?
And yet... and yet. The fire that Jean Louis carries in her belly did not find its balance in Khôr 'Angar. Without that element, without the essential Fire to join with Earth, Air and Water, Miss Jean Louis became a creature rarer than all the hidden mysteries of the world. Miss Jean Louis, Fairest of the Fair, Commander of the Kale, is, in fact, a mermaid, born with the top half of a human woman... and the bottom half... of a human woman!
What this means for us, only time will tell. But even as Miss Jean Louis came into the world kicking and screaming, we must learn to kick and scream our way to a new understanding of the world, one in which wonders such as half-woman/other-half-woman mermaids become the new normal rather than the strange past.
