The Deep Ones are fictional beings of the Cthulhu Mythos, a fish-like and frog-like humanoid race whose main habitat is deep in the ocean (hence the "Deep" in "Deep Ones").

However, in spite of being mainly marine creatures, they will sometimes come up to the surface to make deals with humans and can survive for some time on land. In exchange for human sacrifices and various gifts the humans get gold jewelry and lots of fish in their waters, herded nearby by the Deep Ones.

Once such a deal is made, the Deep Ones will also convince the humans to start mating with them, the draw for the humans being that their children, born looking human, will become immortal when they fully turn into Deep Ones later in life; it's not certain what the Deep Ones get out of it. As a hybrid gets older they begin taking on more attributes of the Deep Ones: the eyes become bulging and unblinking, the head becomes narrow, the skin becomes scabrous (on the way to developing scales), the neck develops folds (on the way to becoming gills), the ears shrink, and they begin going bald. When they become too obviously non-human, they are hidden away from outsiders, and eventually slip into the sea to go live in the Deep One cities, most prominently Y'ha-nthlei, on the ocean floor off the coast of Massachusetts, near the town of Innsmouth.

The Deep Ones serve Dagon (a Great Old One having the form of a gigantic deep one) and Cthulhu.

External links

• The race made its first appearance in H. P. Lovecraft's story The Shadow over Innsmouth (http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/fiction/soi.htm) from which the following quote comes:

I think their predominant colour was a greyish-green, though they had white bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating gills, and their long paws were webbed. They hopped irregularly, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four. I was somehow glad that they had no more than four limbs. Their croaking, baying voices, clearly used for articulate speech, held all the dark shades of expression which their staring faces lacked.