Kelly Serai

**Kelly Serai**/**Arachnophobia** is the de facto leader of Team Phobia after Deniz Firtina's retirement.

## Powers

Kelly manifests balls of webbing, which she throws at monsters. On impact, these balls explode into swarms of tiny blue spiderlings which cover their target and slow its movement. Over time, the spiderlings also bite the target, causing minor damage over time. Kelly can also use her folded parasol as a melee weapon. The parasol's true importance is the limited flight it grants Kelly, allowing her to drift on the air like a spider gliding on websilk.

Kelly sometimes also manifests a spider familiar; she calls it "Dummy" because she has no control over when it appears or how it behaves. Dummy has been known to bite monsters, and its bite causes targets to spasm uncontrollably for a few seconds. Dummy has usually only appeared rarely, and often late in the night on particularly challenging patrols; however, it has appeared along with Kelly's transformation almost every night since Deniz' retirement.

## Physical Appearance

Kelly has silvery-blue hair, which hangs loosely in a chunkily layered shoulder-length cut when untransformed. She typically dresses in band t-shirts, ripped jeans or miniskirts, fishnet stockings and combat boots. She wears heavy eyeliner and lipstick, paints her nails in dark colors, and is secretly terrified of going back to her naturally coppery-orange hair when she eventually retires as a Magical Girl.

As Arachnophobia, Kelly's hair becomes a severe bun which has never fallen out in battle. Although her civilian demeanor is casually cool, her MG uniform belies a heavily buttoned-up inner persona, with a heavily corseted bustled dress, veiled hat and high-buttoned boots. The dress is dark blue, and the bustle is formed by the abdomen of a large black spider, the legs of which wrap around the skirt. Her crinolines and train are a gauzy, web-like silver material which tears and wafts away as she moves, constantly regenerating as though spun by invisible spiders; the parasol behaves in much the same way.

## Personality

Kelly is a bit standoffish toward strangers; she did not make friends easily as a child and was bullied because of her hair, so before the Dream, she harbored a deep distrust of anyone trying to get close to her. This has improved as she has spent several years in the public eye, and she adores her fans far more than she would admit.

Kelly loves music, especially prog rock and punk, and has crafted her civilian asthetic to reflect that. She's very smart and quite a nerd, though, so given the opportunity she will drop what she's doing to geek out about new albums, insane guitar solos, or old music formats. Although fewer people want to discuss the subject with her, she also has a love for biology, especially "the creepy stuff." Nobody was surprised when she manifested spider-related powers: she's had a fascination with arthropods since she was a young child.

## Trivia

* "Dummy" is actually a name Kelly derived from the last syllable of *Haplopelma lividum*, the original scientific name of the Cobalt Blue Tarantula, to which Dummy bears a passing resemblance.
* Kelly's spiderlings don't conistently mirror any specific species, and they often aren't of homogenous physiology even within the same web-ball. She has seen representatives of dozens of different families of spiders over the years.
* Kelly keeps spiders and insects as pets, and actually maintains the largest ant farm in the City, a colony of black ants which she calls "Antfarmvillopolisburg" (she was ten when she named it, don't judge). The colony started as an experiment in elementary school, and Kelly has used new queens to introduce colonies in several rooftop gardens to aid in pollination, aeration and pest control. The new garden colonies have only rarely invaded the attached buildings.