Phaedra Panopalous

*Scion of Madness*

* Overview
* Sheet
* Background
* 'Ships
* Logs

She's someone defined by who she's trying not to be (specifically, like her parents). An uncomplicated motive for an otherwise complicated person.

## Personality

Phaedra is a woman of contradictions. She does her best to project an image of seriousness. She truly loves mathematics and engineering and the great philosophers. She loves solving a good puzzle or a carefully played violin. Chess is nothing short of sublime in her eyes. She was often referred to as 'Ice Queen' in high school when she was referred to at all. The truth is a little more complicated. She worries about her appearance like many young women. Her soul screams with joy at the sounds of energetically executed death metal. She notices the attractiveness of those around her with agonizing detail. Call of Duty and a good slug fest make her pulse pound like nothing else. She denies herself all that stuff because more than naything, she wants to be taken seriously. Most of her life, the changeling community she was attached to expected the kind of revelry and hedonism her parents displayed grated on her. She wants to be anything BUT what she's expected to be. And a little deeper down? She wants to find out who her mother really was.

## SIGNATURE ABILITY

### Panic

Referred to by the various nymphs and satyrs of the world as 'the Bacchanalia', this is the sort of thing that only happens when Phaedra completely loses her self-control, rather through drugs, loss, rage, or other such extreme situations. She opens her mouth to voice a single un-utterable word, and madness erupts. Hedonistic displays, spontaneous episodes of self-harm, mad raving, disjointed visions of the future, intense dreams and nightmares... Essentially pure unadulterated chaos erupts. It is the purest expression of her divine blood.

It is worth noting, first of all, that she is not immune to this ability when using it, as it can drive her to madness, rage, and wild hedonism just as easily. It usually starts out just affecting the immediate area (no more than a small building) or so. Every three hours or so, the area will tend to double in size. Thankfully, there are two conditions that easily end the revel. The most likely is that she parties herself out. This involves pretty much everyone in the initial area wearing themselves out, or dying, or losing consciousness. The other is a very specific 'calming spell' that requires olive oil as one of its primary components. Of course, there are mundane ways to manage this. Silencing her (like covering her mouth) or knocking her over the head really hard would work.

The main limit on this ability's frequency of use is that she needs to rest for three times as long as it was being used, and what's more it requires a profound loss of control that is by its very nature traumatic.

## SKILLS

Thanks to both her studiousness, and the slightly supernatural ability of her mind, Phaedra is a budding young genius. While she likely has relatively little to learn from a standard university, her dislike of standing out too wildly ensures she's dedicated to learning. She's especially good at engineering and crafting things.

Fighting isn't very respectable. Still, Phaedra recognizes her nature almost ensures she'll end up faced with something awful at one point or another, so she's taken a few self-defense classes. And immediately quit once she felt she learned enough.

Another guilty pleasure. She loves games. All kinds of games. Of every stripe. She loves the challenge, and she's also a terrible loser, especially since she tends to be rather good at them.

It's a natural side-effect of her father's influence. Musical instruments and singing come naturally to her. She's loathe to admit she finds some enjoyment in them, and so mostly engages in more 'respectable' music. Piano, violin, etc.

## POWERS

Another part of her mystical nature, for whatever reason, when the blood is flying, or the winds are raging, etc... Phaedra will always come out well-coifed, clean, and at most artfully mussed. She finds it infuriating.

A near-perfect memory and an agile-mind ensure that she's rarely the last in her class, all courtesy of one of her deific forebears. Everything about her is tweaked a little bit beyond human and this is no exception.

As the child of a very primal god and a mystical creature, her physicality is generally enhanced, making her theoretically a force to be reckoned with if she weren't so adverse to gross displays of power.

This ability allows the girl to play or sing a song and infuse it with some of her parents' madness, causing the target to lose themselves in their own minds for a time.

Not QUITE as dangerous as it sounds, this allows her to open her mouth and allow out an intensely sinister note. For the living, it can weaken, damage, or even kill with prolonged contact. For the undead, it puts them to sleep AT MOST.

A reflection of the both her parents. Greek Gods are also generally well-known for their physicality. Her other parent, a higher goddess also associated with rage and madness may possibly be actually unkillable (possibly because it's not alive in the traditional sense?). Whatever the case, Phaedra is incredibly resilient, both to harm and fatigue, and in the rare case she finds herself injured or exhausted, tends to recover exceptionally quickly.

## ADVANTAGES

Raised by a pair of low key changelings has made it relatively easy to comport herself with a relative sense of normalcy. They're under the assumption she was fathered on a nymph, but otherwise, they did a decent job of protecting and teaching her. Compared to raising a godling, raising a trans girl was downright easy to accept.

Phaedra has had kind of a really weird life. It makes playing at 'blase and unflappable' a lot easier for her, and bolsters her a lot against the awful and nasty.

## WEAKNESSES

Her body only LOOKS human. Goat legs and hooves are hidden beneath a skirt and special shoes. She files down her horns and hides them beneath her hair every night. Contacts hide her golden, goat pupils. The skirt also serves to hide the inexplicable three-headed snake she has as a tail (a part of her other-worldly heritage).

Chaos and Madness is a literal part of her being. While she has cultivated a lot of self-control (possible only because of her divine heritage), anyone peering into her mind would be exposed to the madness therein. What's more, berserkers, beings who have rage, anger or madness as part of their being... they all find themselves bizarrely drawn to her. It doesn't make them any less crazy, though, and they may prioritize her as a target in the midst of a rage.

She only really derives nourishment from hedonistic pursuits. As a college RA, this hasn't been much of a problem. Still, for someone dedicated to being a wet blanket, it kind of sucks.

Bizarrely, even badly played pan flutes can put this girl in a dazed, weak-willed state. It's the surest way to get her god-given behavior to come out.

Magical Wards and spells designed to work on beings of madness and violence explicitly DO work on her.

Phaedra's story is a relatively short but bizarre one. What does she know? She was definitively sired by the God, Pan or one of his scions. What is less clear? Who her other parent is. Raised by a pair of changelings of a more hedonistic bent, they have assumed her mother is a nymph of some sort. If she isn't the direct child of Pan, there may be even some 'Nymph-blood' in her line. The truth is that her other parent is one of the Maniai -- servants of a higher deity of madness, Lyssa -- which incubated her over countless eons and spat her out as a child at the feet of a pair of reveling changelings on Beltane.

Joseph and Jason, her fathers, immediately fell in love with the little child at their feet. They figured the child was a gift from fate, and in their typically lackadaisical manner, took her home to adopt. When the apparent 'boy child' soon began to identify as female, they merely shrugged their shoulders and went with it. Her transition, in truth, was much less trouble than learning to control the impulses and passions of her heritage. Even when exposed to HRT later in life, her nature tended to develop towards beauty.

In fact, those same impulses and passions turned almost to pathology. She was so upset by the difficulty of controlling them and the stereotypes attached to satyrs and nymphs and the like that instead of just learning to manage them, she swerved away from them HARD. She has struggled, from a young age, to project the very image of a controlled, careful, humorless young woman. A series of carefully crafted facades to hide facts about herself makes up most of her public identity. She wants to be taken seriously and therefore has no time for her parents' revelry and free-wheeling lifestyle.

This mostly amuses them to no end.

Logs featuring Phaedra Panopalous:

*Coming soon!*