Gwyneth

Gwyneth is of short stature, standing at around 137 cm tall (4' 6", approx), with a thin, gangly figure. Her skin is a light olive tone, smattered with freckles across the bridge of her nose, and her hair is a warm brown, always kept relatively short cut at chin length. Occasionally she'll pin a section back with a silver dragonfly clip, though the origins of this accessory are dubious. Her eyes are wide and innocent-seeming, a calm forest greenish-brown tone, but if you look closer you will see a very cold, calculating look to them. Overall, her face looks youthful, even kind and pure if she tries, but her personality is very, very different.

One notable thing is that she always has a snake with her, small, white and quiet. She can sometimes be seen speaking to him, calling him Asmodeus, but most of the communication they do have is spoken without words. Asmodeus is merely an extension of Gwen, Gwen is merely an extension of Asmodeus, and they typically move as one. In fantasy settings, Gwyneth also has a smattering of silvery scales embedded on her skin, particularly on the inside of her wrists, shoulders and back. She's not very proud of these markings, though they're tough and act as additional armour; she keeps them hidden with very modest, shapeless clothing. In medieval fantasy settings, this would be a dark black or grey cloak, in more modern settings this would be dependent on the time period.

In most fantasy settings, Gwyneth will have a basic education, if not by any particular facility in the setting then by her father. This gives her the basic knowledge of reading, maths, and a general understanding of the world. She does well academically, though her intelligence focuses far more on street smarts than book smarts. That being said, Gwyneth is practically born to manipulate others. Her true strengths lie in, well, lying. Behind her warm and friendly exterior is a cold, cruel, calculating thing, who always deliberates on whether there's something in it for her if she has to help someone out. She looks the innocent flower but is the serpent underneath. She favours power above all else, and if she finds herself an opportunity to take it she will cling to it at all costs. But this also has a flip side - she is terrified of being powerless. Gwyneth is the epitome of restraint and control, but she will always find her breaking point when she has no sway over events that happen. And when she breaks, all restraint she has comes loose.

Gwyneth is capable of character develop in a long term roleplay, but it will take time.

Gwyneth doesn't have many more abilities than the average person, though she has one main one. If she can initiate skin to skin contact after a certain period of time, like five minutes, she can induce a temporary paralysis in her victim. There are some conditions for this. One, it has to be skin on skin (and only from the tips of her fingers). If there's so much as a piece of paper in the way it will have no effect. Two, she needs some time to build the venom in her fingertips. She can wait for around a minute and use it, but because it's a shorter time it will only induce some feeling of vertigo that will not last long. If she waits for around five minutes, the victim will fall into a temporary paralysis, though how long it lasts depends on the target's strength. And third, every time she uses it, it takes up a fair amount of her energy, so she can only use it every hour or so. She usually saves it for emergencies so it's there if she needs it.

Aside from this, see has tough scales as mentioned in the Physical Characteristics section, and these can be like armor, sometimes even deflecting blades if they come in at the wrong angle. The downside to this is that these scales are only in a few parts of her body: the inner wrists, shoulders, back, and just a little at the back of her neck, though it's usually covered by her hair.

This may also be a good time to discuss Gwen and Asmodeus's relationship. Asmodeus, the snake constantly with her, is a little like her familiar, a little like half of her soul. She keeps him constantly with her, hidden or not, and protects him like he's her heart. This is because they physically can't break contact without severe pain. Occasionally Gwen has tried separating herself from him, to see how far she could go while withstanding the pain. This little experiment lasted about three minutes, and by the end her face was as white as a sheet. Not even Gwyneth knows exactly what this connection is, but she highly suspects that her soul was somehow split, the other half taken form. Two halves of a soul are not meant to be separate for long, and this could explain why she needs to keep him so close. They move as one, seemingly anticipating eachother's thoughts and actions, and it's very hard to catch one of them off guard if the other knows what's happening.

Note: Because her backstory depends largely on the setting she is placed in, her background will be quite vague.

Gwyneth was born a single child. Her parents had tried and failed for so long to have offspring, and while they wept with joy over Gwyneth, they soon started to feel that she was not enough. She couldn't help on her own with the hard labour that was needed on their farm, and she rarely went out anyway for an overpowering fear of snakes. For as long as she had lived in the farm house it was always surrounded by long, yellow grass taller than her, and in her younger years she had witnessed a farmhand accidentally step on one and get bitten - she saw the horrific, poisoned wound and became terrified of meeting the same fate.

The rest of her years went by in a hurry... she now only has vague recollections of trying to help her mother sew, learning how to read with her father, playing tricks on any farm hands that came and went during harvest seasons (though even then she didn't dare go near the long grass). But she remembered clearly the procession that passed by her farmhouse one day, of royalty making a brief appearance to up morale of their subjects. She had only caught a glimpse, but what she did see through gaps in the crowd astonished her. They were absolutely adorned in finery! She could only think of what even a little of that could do for her family, for her parents struggling to harvest all the crops in time, who often had to share pitiful amounts of bread with each other. If only she could have some... But by the time she had finished this thought the parade was gone, the crowd following, leaving only her and an elderly man. The man looked to her, a gleam in his eye, and asked if she would have liked to be like that.

Gwen was only a child at the time, and she did not yet know the dangers of wishing for something, especially to someone unusually interested in it. She nodded, sighing in admiration at just the memory of it. Even now, she couldn't remember the exact tone of the man's voice. Was it steely and coarse, or buttery and smooth? It always evaded her mind. But the man said he could make that happen if she shook his hand. She thought it a joke, but did it anyway, brushing off the alarm that came with the odd flickering in his eyes. It was probably a trick of the light.

Later that night, she fell into a deep fever.

She remembers only fractured pieces of it. The worried tone of her father, applying a damp rag to her forehead. The whistling of the long grass outside as the sun set. Nightmares of losing her hair, her nose, her tongue splitting, and though she never felt anything resembling pain the horror of it was enough to make her cry anyway. She remembers waking up, surprisingly clear in the night, a temporary break from her fever. The moon was high in the sky, staring down at her as if in judgment. And there, by the open casement of the window - a flash of silvery scales. Gwen watched the snake slither into the room, too terrified to even speak, let alone scream. Images of the farm hand's snake bite flashed through her head, but she found she couldn't move, not even to close her eyes. It sounded like the long grass was whispering, coming closer to creep into her window as well, or maybe that was the dry sound of the snake's scales as it coiled up her bedpost, its smooth head resting on her blanket. She still couldn't make a sound. She could only stare, the moonlight warping what used to be the comforting confines of her bedroom. And then the snake did something surprising. It didn't bite her, and instead just nudged her hand.

But somehow that harmless contact brought about the worst pain she had ever experienced - a rending, tearing pain, not through her body but through...the space within it? She still doesn't know how to describe it, only that it felt like it lasted both a second and an age. But to her credit she never screamed, instead lapsing back into the fever.

When she woke up, her parents were hanging over her in the light of day, her father checking her temperature. "Everything seems to be alright. But just stay and rest today." His voice was calm and quiet as ever, but she found it did not have a soothing effect on her anymore. Once they left, she peeled away the blankets to reveal the snake, resting his (his? She somehow knew he was a male, but she could never explain how) head on her arm. She picked him up to fling him away, but as soon as she lost physical contact with him that awful pain from last night returned, and she had to scramble to pick him up again, not even thinking about it.

Over the next few years, she tried to get rid of the snake before eventually giving up. She found it now exceptionally easy to lie, to be convincing, to get people to give her what she wanted. True to her word, she gave any riches she found to her parents, and when they asked where she got it from she merely waved them away with excuses. But her carelessness caught up with her, and a group of people she had tricked out of their wealth soon found their riches again with Gwen's parents. She had left to gather some basic supplies for the day, and when she came back, all that remained of her home - and parents - were smoldering husks.

She took her time to grieve, but didn't stop, instead only learning how to better cover up her tracks. And now she had grown a taste, not so much for wealth, but the power it provided.