Toxo

"*I can feel the worms writhe around inside of me!*"

🪱Dr. Toxo🪱

He/Neos 𓆝 Telescopefish 𓆞 Mad scientist

**Doctor Toxo** is an anthropomorphic adult demiboy telescopefish who is a mad scientist that focuses exclusively on marine parasitology. However, despite his "occupation”, Dr. Toxo prefers to experiment his genetically enhanced parasites only on himself and has only indirectly and unintentionally been a threat to society. He is one of the many mutated deep-sea fish that crawled up on the earth’s shores after ocean pollution got out of hand, although he was never documented and thus, his existence remains unknown to the public. He was also the cause of a recent parasitic outbreak among both the mutated fish population and human population, with the altered parasites his henchmen released into the ocean finding their way to more and more dinner plates and restaurants. Despite this, Dr. Toxo wished no harm upon any intelligent life and simply wanted his “friends” to succeed in the wild, although his own experiments were a little *too* successful and he appears unaware of the chaos he caused because of his reclusive nature.

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## Background Information

### Artist

N/A

History

Preface

In 2034, ocean pollution seemed to peak. Despite nature conservatives' best efforts, more plastic and waste continued to find their way into the world’s largest bodies of water. Toxic factory runoff and oil spills brought schools of dead fish upon the shores while large marine life continued to choke and die on plastic bags and other garbage. Many popular beaches were closed down because of high levels of toxicity in the water and the world was in pandemonium. The topic was what all the news anchors around the world talked about and made even the officials worry about the state of the world. However, among the mass-execution of marine life, something strange happened.

Fish specimens from the various schools that washed up on the shore showed signs of mutation, both internally and externally. Some had small, undeveloped legs or arms while others were in mid-development of what appeared to be mammalian lungs. At first it was brushed aside. Small mutations were strange, yes, but it was to be expected because of the toxic runoff in the water. They believed it to simply just be a slightly odd, yet small, side-effect from the pollution and nothing more. However, later in the year, bizarre "sea beasts" began crawling up from the deep.

Later on, scientists would learn that the chemicals in the water leaked down into the deeper parts of the world’s oceans and slowly began mutating the deep-sea creatures without killing them like it did the more strongly affected photic zone animals. The nearly inaccessible habitat of these animals, paired with their new heightened intelligence, prevented the discovery of these new “monster fish” until they appeared on the world’s shores.

This event caused a stir among the land-dwellers. Just a few minutes after the first discovery, people took photographs of more new creatures that ranged from fish reminiscent of horror game villains to eerily human-like marine life that stood upon two legs and made sounds that vaguely sounded like a human language, posting them online and claiming that they found some sort of urban legend or cryptid. Eventually, animal-control and scientists got involved and began capturing specimens to study. However, many of these creatures had intelligence on-par with a human’s and evaded capture, or just weren’t spotted at all.

One of these mutated and undocumented specimens was a lone *Gigantura indica* that washed up in Maine.

Gallery

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