Name: Desdemona Argrys
Nicknames: Des, Mona
Age: 18
Birthday: May 1
Gender: Woman
Species: Demigoddess
Class: College
Grade: 1st Year
College Major: History, with a minor in Dark Arts
Appearance Description:
Desdemona makes for an intimidating figure, but that isn't due to any kind of impression of physical prowess. She stands five feet, eight inches, but her form is willowy, her bones thin and frame lacking in muscle, making her look slightly underweight despite the fact that her metabolism insists on her keeping such a figure no matter how well she eats. She is not strong, and in fact would seem like she would snap in the slightest breeze, but she is sharp, with an eerie grace as she almost seems to glide rather than walk.
Stark paleness dominates her colour palate, her skin a porcelain white that would bloom into furious red under sunlight rather than granting any sort of tan. The only time there is any rosiness in her cheeks outside of sunburns is when something has provoked a blush out of her, and such moments are fleeting. Her hair is naturally a platinum blonde, falling to just above her shoulders, but she frequently dyes it an inky black instead, just making her skin look all the paler in the contrast.
Des' face is narrow and harsh. Her high cheekbones jut out sharply, her slender nose is pointed, and her thin brows arch above icy blue eyes that seem to stare through those they focus on. Thick lashes and full lips soften the presentation slightly, but the dark makeup she wears constantly works against it, outlining her eyes and painting her lips in the same black she colours her hair. Her lips rarely curve into a proper smile or frown, but her eyebrows are slightly more expressive, quirking and furrowing while the rest of her face seems neutral and static.
Desdemona's fashion choices lean toward the gothic, and she has a fondness for corsets, tight denim shorts, striped stockings, and leather boots. Her clothes are primarily black, splashed with bloody red or bright, 'radioactive' green for contrast, most often in the aforementioned stockings. She loves to wear necklaces, and she frequently also wears studs in her ears and in the piercing in her tongue. Her nails are often painted, usually black but sometimes red or green. Below her collarbone, on the right side of her torso, is a small tattoo of a stylized black rose.
Personality Description:
Three layers make up Desdemona. Most only see the first, some are lucky enough to see the second, and a rare few see the last.
First is the stoic girl, seemingly unflappable. Her voice is even in tone, expressions understated, never seems to flinch, stumble, or be rattled by anything that comes her way. She has little trouble being outgoing, but is ultimately an introvert, not one for rambling small talk and preferring to interact with others one-on-one or in small groups. Her sense of humour comes out dry and deadpan, her amusement in a slight quirk of an eyebrow, her attraction or embarrassment in a small blush rising to her cheeks that she pretends isn't there.
Seeing her angry day-to-day is rare, as life's little irritations just seem to roll off of her without making a dent in her calm demeanor. Even when affectionate or flirtatious, everything about Des seems quite muted, small barely-smiles and soft chuckles, physical contact accepted but rarely initiated. She hints at the promise of being someone more passionate than she seems to be, for those who dig to find it.
For those who do dig, they see the second layer, and passionate is indeed a good word for it. What Desdemona loves, she loves with all of her heart. There is a bottomless well of patience and affection for those who would find themselves in her good graces, her most precious ones held close, doted on, and protected to the best of her ability; she is willing to run herself ragged to keep them happy and safe. Likewise, what she desires, she desires with a burning intensity. She does nothing half-way, what aspirations and passions she chooses to pursue done so with enthusiasm that is difficult, if not impossible, to dampen.
There's a softness mixed with the passion as well, and an insatiable curiosity. Her heart goes out to those on the fringes, with darker powers like her own, and she approaches them with a mix of fascination and feeling of kinship. She wishes to know what lurks in the shadows, so that she can make it her friend and help others learn not to fear, and reaches out to the lonely and self-loathing with kind words and a gentle touch.
Then, comes the third layer. This one, she would rather no one ever see. She would rather they stop at the second and believe that she is okay. She is not. Under the stoic calm, under the passion and gentility, she is very much not okay. Her own nature and power plagues her, nightmares that she can not control playing her psyche like a fiddle, making her wake with heart racing. Scenes from them linger in her memory, unnaturally vivid, to taint her waking thoughts by surfacing again and again.
Every time she dies, she breaks that little bit more, memories of each death stitching themselves into the tapestry of terror from which she can never run or hide for long. It's enough to make her want to lash out, to plague another and make someone else have a taste of the inability to have a peaceful sleep. There is something truly sadistic lurking inside of her, something that would like nothing more to push others to the point that they snap or utterly crumble.
So, as an outlet, she's become vengeful. Little things really don't phase her, but the big ones? An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, is all well and good, but she would rather the price be steeper for those who dare harm her or her loved ones. She will destroy them in every way possible, and she will do it smiling, fully embracing her nature as a being of all things nightmarish.
Powers/Species Abilities:
Daughter Of Icelus
Dream Walker
Most dreamers are limited to their own corner of the realm of dreams, separate from others. Desdemona is not. Once she has fallen asleep, she unlocks the ability to stroll from dream to dream, touching the minds of anyone she cares to. Being only a demigoddess, however, she lacks the ability to take other dreamers with her on her journeys, or to merge multiple dreams into one, simply being able to wander and (whether she wants to or not) influence.
If Des decides to specifically target a person's dream, she finds it much easier to find those who are familiar to her, or who are sleeping in close proximity to her physical body. Someone she falls asleep making physical contact with, in particular, is easy to walk into the dream of, and those she is most likely to stumble into the dreams of accidentally. Dream walking takes energy, and the more time that Des spends in others' dreams while asleep, the less rested she will be when she finally wakes up; spending the whole night in someone's dream would lead to her being exhausted come morning.
Beastly Avatar
Desdemona can not fully mold dreams to her will, but she can change her appearance in them on a whim, so long as the appearance she chooses is that of an animal. Her preferred shapes are those of a hound, a serpent, or a raven, but she can potentially shift into any mundane animal that she desires. Unlike her father, however, she can not become any monster species or explicitly magical creature, and she can not take on any humanoid shape other than her true one.
As the shape shifting is merely a dream avatar, she can still speak, move, and manipulate objects as if she were still human. This does not grant her any true shape changing or illusion abilities in the waking world.
Tainted Dreamscape
Desdemona is a being of nightmares, but can not control them, merely cause them. She herself has constant nightmares, and any dream she touches will slowly twist itself into a nightmare of its own, regardless of what it used to be before she touched it. She can hold back her influence on another person's dream temporarily with concentration, but can not truly turn it off, and can not control what form it takes.
Despite her lack of control, what makes it so tempting to use this ability is that, when she is twisting another person's dreams, the torment is focused on the current victim, rather than drawing on her own fears. It becomes their nightmare, and not hers, granting her a rare reprieve. The nightmare's influence will fade when she leaves a person's dream, but the longer she lingers, the slower it will take for the dream to revert back to normal.
You Don't Scare Me
While Desdemona's primary family 'gift' is something of a double-edged sword, there is one perk. Her magic's tie to fear, revulsion, and loathing means that she herself has a resistance to magic meant to invoke the same feelings in her. Any attempt, passive or active, to give her an aversion to a person, object, or location simply will not work.
At lower settings, powers meant to irritate or place little chills on the spine, this results in a simple immunity, the effects rolling off of her like drops of water and playing further into her often-stoic presentation. At higher settings, however, it all goes a bit topsy-turvy, as the message of hate me gets warped and twisted into something closer to love me, as if out of spite, and what should be violent repulsion becomes irresistible attraction. Des tends to have no idea when this is happening, either, though she'll sometimes pick up on it via observing others' reactions to her newest object of affection.
Note that this does not mean that she can not be influenced in other ways, just those specific ones. Magic meant to calm, or attract, or give any other particular impression will still work as per normal.
Link To The Underworld
VIP Status
Desdemona is fully capable of dying, just like any human, with no added durability or longevity to her very much mortal body. It's the after part where the rules are different, as having her father and a number of her extended family living in the Underworld means that she doesn't have to deal with a number of the pesky rules attached to that particular version of the afterlife.
Paying a toll to cross the river? Nope, Charon will waive the fee entirely. Having to stay in a specific part of the Underworld? Nah, she can skip over from her grandmother's realm in Tartarus over to the Elysium Fields to hang out with the dead heroes if she really wants to. Having to stay dead? So long as she gives Cerberus a scratch behind the ears or belly rub on the way out, no one's going to give her any trouble at the gate.
Of course, there is that whole 'physical body' problem regarding leaving, but here is where the perks continue. The first time she died, she left an imprint, of a sort, on the Underworld, and when she leaves, she reforms in a body identical to what she looked like at that time, minus the injuries that killed her.
Given that she was eighteen when she died, this has its pros and a cons. On one hand, she can die of old age or disease and come back in a young, healthy body again. On the other, any changes she would have wanted to retain are erased, be it something cosmetic about her appearance, an increase of power or control with her abilities, or anything else. Plus, after the first few times she lives to a ripe old age, she might not want to go back to the form of a hormonal teenager.
Still, she's effectively immortal, and she does retain her memories, so who is she to complain too much? Being an Underworld VIP rocks.
Soul Bound
Because Des forms a new body when she leaves the Underworld, her soul doesn't have any particularly strong link to any body she leaves behind when she dies. This makes her relatively necromancy-proof, unless the person trying to raise her body is going for 'mindless zombie' rather 'back from the dead.'
It's also very hard to steal or bind her soul, and attempts to do so range from ineffective to briefly effective before it wriggles out of their grasp and dashes off to the Underworld where it belongs. Whether she could make a willing contract to sell it is unknown, and she's in no hurry to find out.
Spirit Sense
Desdemona is no medium, but her first death has given her a heightened sensitivity to lingering spirits, allowing to her see, hear, and interact with ghosts where ordinary humans are not able to. She also has a sense for whether a person is undead or has death magic, but doesn't consciously recognize it; those people simply draw her attention and pique her interest more than they would otherwise.
Biography:
For as long as Desdemona can remember, she always had nightmares. They were all night and every night, full of vivid and terrible things that left her shaking in fear come the morning. Nothing ever quelled them, no matter what was attempted; no matter how happy and content she was during the day, she would wake screaming and crying. And climbing into bed with her mother and stepfather for comfort? Half the time, one or both of them would start getting nightmares as well, and Desdemona would wake up exhausted, as if she hadn't slept at all.
Des compensated in various ways. Sometimes she avoided sleep entirely, reading books with a flashlight well into the night. As she got older, her interests turned increasingly morbid, in an attempt to desensitize herself to the things that lurked in her nightmares in the first place. The former led to more problems than it solved, and even as Des started to have a genuine interest in books and movies filled with monsters, her dreams simply refined themselves, drawing their horror from concepts much harder to be apathetic toward.
By the time Desdemona was a teenager, she'd crossed over to desperation, though she did her best to hide it. Heavy makeup to cover up the bags under her eyes, forced stoicism to make her fatigue less obvious that grew to be all too real, leaving her homework to the last minute so that she'd have an excuse for the all-nighters, buying coffee from the local coffee shop on the way to school every morning to compensate for less and less sleep...
She stopped going to her parents every time she woke up with a racing heart and tears in her eyes, but she frequently peeked into their room to check on them, just so that she could reassure herself that they were still there. The nightmares were relentless in exploiting every paranoid insecurity her mind could conjure, but the most common was fear that whatever this was would lead to her being abandoned and alone, especially when they finally saw the patterns she did.
She tried to tell herself that the days she woke up exhausted and someone else looked like they'd suffered a bad night were a coincidence, but she couldn't help but wonder if whatever strange condition she had was spreading, somehow. The idea of being patient zero in a nightmare plague sounded ridiculous, but it wouldn't leave her, and became simply more fuel for her nightly torments.
The fact that she kept her grades up to the point that no one suspected too much was a miracle, really, but she did. Concern from friends was brushed off when her facade broke; after all, what stressed-out teenager didn't have bad dreams once and a while? It wasn't as if the coffee habit stood out much, either, in high school. Her parents just saw Des being aloof, which they were assured from all sides was typical for that age.
Then, when she was barely eighteen, it happened. Driving home late from party, a drunk driver in another vehicle, a crash that killed her instantly and severely injured the other driver, and she was suddenly standing at a set of gates with a giant three-headed dog looking down at her.
Desdemona, disoriented from the rapid change in scenery and not quite having registered the fact that she wasn't breathing anymore, did the first thing she thought of and reached up toward the big beastie and said, "Whosa a good boy?" By the time anyone found her, she was rubbing Cerberus' belly and cooing over him like he was a little poodle puppy.
The welcoming attitude of the gate guardian continued as she found herself received by the Underworld--the Underworld, straight out of Greek mythology; the very idea was so surreal--as if she were some kind of celebrity. It was there that she got her answers, and met someone she had never expected to: Her father.
Desdemona had known that she was the child of her mother's last boyfriend before meeting and marrying her current husband. That was where she'd gotten her platinum blonde hair and sharp blue eyes, so unlike her mother and stepfather's. She'd also known that any attempt to track him down after her mother had discovered her pregnancy hadn't worked, as if he'd vanished off the face of the Earth the day their relationship had broken off.
It turned out that 'vanished off the face of the Earth' was quite accurate, as her father turned out to be Icelus, the Greek god of nightmares. He'd been here, in the Underworld, unaware of her existence until the presence of a demigod at the gate had been detected. Her 'condition' was a magic power, one that she currently could not control, but that he claimed that she could potentially learn to, over time.
Best of all, she didn't have to stay dead.
When Des stepped back out through the gate, two months had passed on Earth. The reuinion with her mother and stepfather was equal parts emotional and awkward as, while Icelus had entered their dreams to tell them she was all right, they hadn't truly believed it until she was right in front of them again. Desdemona also found out that, a week before she returned from the dead, a letter had arrived addressed to her.
"If you are reading this, you are a very special person. Unique, gifted, different; it does not matter how you wish to phrase it. And, as a result, I would like to congratulate you on your invitation to Starlight Academy. We very much are looking forward to meeting you..."
A world of deities, monsters, and magic has just been opened up to her, a world where she is something gifted, rather than cursed, and Desdemona intends to jump in with both feet.
Nicknames: Des, Mona
Age: 18
Birthday: May 1
Gender: Woman
Species: Demigoddess
Class: College
Grade: 1st Year
College Major: History, with a minor in Dark Arts
Appearance Description:
Desdemona makes for an intimidating figure, but that isn't due to any kind of impression of physical prowess. She stands five feet, eight inches, but her form is willowy, her bones thin and frame lacking in muscle, making her look slightly underweight despite the fact that her metabolism insists on her keeping such a figure no matter how well she eats. She is not strong, and in fact would seem like she would snap in the slightest breeze, but she is sharp, with an eerie grace as she almost seems to glide rather than walk.
Stark paleness dominates her colour palate, her skin a porcelain white that would bloom into furious red under sunlight rather than granting any sort of tan. The only time there is any rosiness in her cheeks outside of sunburns is when something has provoked a blush out of her, and such moments are fleeting. Her hair is naturally a platinum blonde, falling to just above her shoulders, but she frequently dyes it an inky black instead, just making her skin look all the paler in the contrast.
Des' face is narrow and harsh. Her high cheekbones jut out sharply, her slender nose is pointed, and her thin brows arch above icy blue eyes that seem to stare through those they focus on. Thick lashes and full lips soften the presentation slightly, but the dark makeup she wears constantly works against it, outlining her eyes and painting her lips in the same black she colours her hair. Her lips rarely curve into a proper smile or frown, but her eyebrows are slightly more expressive, quirking and furrowing while the rest of her face seems neutral and static.
Desdemona's fashion choices lean toward the gothic, and she has a fondness for corsets, tight denim shorts, striped stockings, and leather boots. Her clothes are primarily black, splashed with bloody red or bright, 'radioactive' green for contrast, most often in the aforementioned stockings. She loves to wear necklaces, and she frequently also wears studs in her ears and in the piercing in her tongue. Her nails are often painted, usually black but sometimes red or green. Below her collarbone, on the right side of her torso, is a small tattoo of a stylized black rose.
Personality Description:
Three layers make up Desdemona. Most only see the first, some are lucky enough to see the second, and a rare few see the last.
First is the stoic girl, seemingly unflappable. Her voice is even in tone, expressions understated, never seems to flinch, stumble, or be rattled by anything that comes her way. She has little trouble being outgoing, but is ultimately an introvert, not one for rambling small talk and preferring to interact with others one-on-one or in small groups. Her sense of humour comes out dry and deadpan, her amusement in a slight quirk of an eyebrow, her attraction or embarrassment in a small blush rising to her cheeks that she pretends isn't there.
Seeing her angry day-to-day is rare, as life's little irritations just seem to roll off of her without making a dent in her calm demeanor. Even when affectionate or flirtatious, everything about Des seems quite muted, small barely-smiles and soft chuckles, physical contact accepted but rarely initiated. She hints at the promise of being someone more passionate than she seems to be, for those who dig to find it.
For those who do dig, they see the second layer, and passionate is indeed a good word for it. What Desdemona loves, she loves with all of her heart. There is a bottomless well of patience and affection for those who would find themselves in her good graces, her most precious ones held close, doted on, and protected to the best of her ability; she is willing to run herself ragged to keep them happy and safe. Likewise, what she desires, she desires with a burning intensity. She does nothing half-way, what aspirations and passions she chooses to pursue done so with enthusiasm that is difficult, if not impossible, to dampen.
There's a softness mixed with the passion as well, and an insatiable curiosity. Her heart goes out to those on the fringes, with darker powers like her own, and she approaches them with a mix of fascination and feeling of kinship. She wishes to know what lurks in the shadows, so that she can make it her friend and help others learn not to fear, and reaches out to the lonely and self-loathing with kind words and a gentle touch.
Then, comes the third layer. This one, she would rather no one ever see. She would rather they stop at the second and believe that she is okay. She is not. Under the stoic calm, under the passion and gentility, she is very much not okay. Her own nature and power plagues her, nightmares that she can not control playing her psyche like a fiddle, making her wake with heart racing. Scenes from them linger in her memory, unnaturally vivid, to taint her waking thoughts by surfacing again and again.
Every time she dies, she breaks that little bit more, memories of each death stitching themselves into the tapestry of terror from which she can never run or hide for long. It's enough to make her want to lash out, to plague another and make someone else have a taste of the inability to have a peaceful sleep. There is something truly sadistic lurking inside of her, something that would like nothing more to push others to the point that they snap or utterly crumble.
So, as an outlet, she's become vengeful. Little things really don't phase her, but the big ones? An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, is all well and good, but she would rather the price be steeper for those who dare harm her or her loved ones. She will destroy them in every way possible, and she will do it smiling, fully embracing her nature as a being of all things nightmarish.
Powers/Species Abilities:
Daughter Of Icelus
Dream Walker
Most dreamers are limited to their own corner of the realm of dreams, separate from others. Desdemona is not. Once she has fallen asleep, she unlocks the ability to stroll from dream to dream, touching the minds of anyone she cares to. Being only a demigoddess, however, she lacks the ability to take other dreamers with her on her journeys, or to merge multiple dreams into one, simply being able to wander and (whether she wants to or not) influence.
If Des decides to specifically target a person's dream, she finds it much easier to find those who are familiar to her, or who are sleeping in close proximity to her physical body. Someone she falls asleep making physical contact with, in particular, is easy to walk into the dream of, and those she is most likely to stumble into the dreams of accidentally. Dream walking takes energy, and the more time that Des spends in others' dreams while asleep, the less rested she will be when she finally wakes up; spending the whole night in someone's dream would lead to her being exhausted come morning.
Beastly Avatar
Desdemona can not fully mold dreams to her will, but she can change her appearance in them on a whim, so long as the appearance she chooses is that of an animal. Her preferred shapes are those of a hound, a serpent, or a raven, but she can potentially shift into any mundane animal that she desires. Unlike her father, however, she can not become any monster species or explicitly magical creature, and she can not take on any humanoid shape other than her true one.
As the shape shifting is merely a dream avatar, she can still speak, move, and manipulate objects as if she were still human. This does not grant her any true shape changing or illusion abilities in the waking world.
Tainted Dreamscape
Desdemona is a being of nightmares, but can not control them, merely cause them. She herself has constant nightmares, and any dream she touches will slowly twist itself into a nightmare of its own, regardless of what it used to be before she touched it. She can hold back her influence on another person's dream temporarily with concentration, but can not truly turn it off, and can not control what form it takes.
Despite her lack of control, what makes it so tempting to use this ability is that, when she is twisting another person's dreams, the torment is focused on the current victim, rather than drawing on her own fears. It becomes their nightmare, and not hers, granting her a rare reprieve. The nightmare's influence will fade when she leaves a person's dream, but the longer she lingers, the slower it will take for the dream to revert back to normal.
You Don't Scare Me
While Desdemona's primary family 'gift' is something of a double-edged sword, there is one perk. Her magic's tie to fear, revulsion, and loathing means that she herself has a resistance to magic meant to invoke the same feelings in her. Any attempt, passive or active, to give her an aversion to a person, object, or location simply will not work.
At lower settings, powers meant to irritate or place little chills on the spine, this results in a simple immunity, the effects rolling off of her like drops of water and playing further into her often-stoic presentation. At higher settings, however, it all goes a bit topsy-turvy, as the message of hate me gets warped and twisted into something closer to love me, as if out of spite, and what should be violent repulsion becomes irresistible attraction. Des tends to have no idea when this is happening, either, though she'll sometimes pick up on it via observing others' reactions to her newest object of affection.
Note that this does not mean that she can not be influenced in other ways, just those specific ones. Magic meant to calm, or attract, or give any other particular impression will still work as per normal.
Link To The Underworld
VIP Status
Desdemona is fully capable of dying, just like any human, with no added durability or longevity to her very much mortal body. It's the after part where the rules are different, as having her father and a number of her extended family living in the Underworld means that she doesn't have to deal with a number of the pesky rules attached to that particular version of the afterlife.
Paying a toll to cross the river? Nope, Charon will waive the fee entirely. Having to stay in a specific part of the Underworld? Nah, she can skip over from her grandmother's realm in Tartarus over to the Elysium Fields to hang out with the dead heroes if she really wants to. Having to stay dead? So long as she gives Cerberus a scratch behind the ears or belly rub on the way out, no one's going to give her any trouble at the gate.
Of course, there is that whole 'physical body' problem regarding leaving, but here is where the perks continue. The first time she died, she left an imprint, of a sort, on the Underworld, and when she leaves, she reforms in a body identical to what she looked like at that time, minus the injuries that killed her.
Given that she was eighteen when she died, this has its pros and a cons. On one hand, she can die of old age or disease and come back in a young, healthy body again. On the other, any changes she would have wanted to retain are erased, be it something cosmetic about her appearance, an increase of power or control with her abilities, or anything else. Plus, after the first few times she lives to a ripe old age, she might not want to go back to the form of a hormonal teenager.
Still, she's effectively immortal, and she does retain her memories, so who is she to complain too much? Being an Underworld VIP rocks.
Soul Bound
Because Des forms a new body when she leaves the Underworld, her soul doesn't have any particularly strong link to any body she leaves behind when she dies. This makes her relatively necromancy-proof, unless the person trying to raise her body is going for 'mindless zombie' rather 'back from the dead.'
It's also very hard to steal or bind her soul, and attempts to do so range from ineffective to briefly effective before it wriggles out of their grasp and dashes off to the Underworld where it belongs. Whether she could make a willing contract to sell it is unknown, and she's in no hurry to find out.
Spirit Sense
Desdemona is no medium, but her first death has given her a heightened sensitivity to lingering spirits, allowing to her see, hear, and interact with ghosts where ordinary humans are not able to. She also has a sense for whether a person is undead or has death magic, but doesn't consciously recognize it; those people simply draw her attention and pique her interest more than they would otherwise.
Biography:
For as long as Desdemona can remember, she always had nightmares. They were all night and every night, full of vivid and terrible things that left her shaking in fear come the morning. Nothing ever quelled them, no matter what was attempted; no matter how happy and content she was during the day, she would wake screaming and crying. And climbing into bed with her mother and stepfather for comfort? Half the time, one or both of them would start getting nightmares as well, and Desdemona would wake up exhausted, as if she hadn't slept at all.
Des compensated in various ways. Sometimes she avoided sleep entirely, reading books with a flashlight well into the night. As she got older, her interests turned increasingly morbid, in an attempt to desensitize herself to the things that lurked in her nightmares in the first place. The former led to more problems than it solved, and even as Des started to have a genuine interest in books and movies filled with monsters, her dreams simply refined themselves, drawing their horror from concepts much harder to be apathetic toward.
By the time Desdemona was a teenager, she'd crossed over to desperation, though she did her best to hide it. Heavy makeup to cover up the bags under her eyes, forced stoicism to make her fatigue less obvious that grew to be all too real, leaving her homework to the last minute so that she'd have an excuse for the all-nighters, buying coffee from the local coffee shop on the way to school every morning to compensate for less and less sleep...
She stopped going to her parents every time she woke up with a racing heart and tears in her eyes, but she frequently peeked into their room to check on them, just so that she could reassure herself that they were still there. The nightmares were relentless in exploiting every paranoid insecurity her mind could conjure, but the most common was fear that whatever this was would lead to her being abandoned and alone, especially when they finally saw the patterns she did.
She tried to tell herself that the days she woke up exhausted and someone else looked like they'd suffered a bad night were a coincidence, but she couldn't help but wonder if whatever strange condition she had was spreading, somehow. The idea of being patient zero in a nightmare plague sounded ridiculous, but it wouldn't leave her, and became simply more fuel for her nightly torments.
The fact that she kept her grades up to the point that no one suspected too much was a miracle, really, but she did. Concern from friends was brushed off when her facade broke; after all, what stressed-out teenager didn't have bad dreams once and a while? It wasn't as if the coffee habit stood out much, either, in high school. Her parents just saw Des being aloof, which they were assured from all sides was typical for that age.
Then, when she was barely eighteen, it happened. Driving home late from party, a drunk driver in another vehicle, a crash that killed her instantly and severely injured the other driver, and she was suddenly standing at a set of gates with a giant three-headed dog looking down at her.
Desdemona, disoriented from the rapid change in scenery and not quite having registered the fact that she wasn't breathing anymore, did the first thing she thought of and reached up toward the big beastie and said, "Whosa a good boy?" By the time anyone found her, she was rubbing Cerberus' belly and cooing over him like he was a little poodle puppy.
The welcoming attitude of the gate guardian continued as she found herself received by the Underworld--the Underworld, straight out of Greek mythology; the very idea was so surreal--as if she were some kind of celebrity. It was there that she got her answers, and met someone she had never expected to: Her father.
Desdemona had known that she was the child of her mother's last boyfriend before meeting and marrying her current husband. That was where she'd gotten her platinum blonde hair and sharp blue eyes, so unlike her mother and stepfather's. She'd also known that any attempt to track him down after her mother had discovered her pregnancy hadn't worked, as if he'd vanished off the face of the Earth the day their relationship had broken off.
It turned out that 'vanished off the face of the Earth' was quite accurate, as her father turned out to be Icelus, the Greek god of nightmares. He'd been here, in the Underworld, unaware of her existence until the presence of a demigod at the gate had been detected. Her 'condition' was a magic power, one that she currently could not control, but that he claimed that she could potentially learn to, over time.
Best of all, she didn't have to stay dead.
When Des stepped back out through the gate, two months had passed on Earth. The reuinion with her mother and stepfather was equal parts emotional and awkward as, while Icelus had entered their dreams to tell them she was all right, they hadn't truly believed it until she was right in front of them again. Desdemona also found out that, a week before she returned from the dead, a letter had arrived addressed to her.
"If you are reading this, you are a very special person. Unique, gifted, different; it does not matter how you wish to phrase it. And, as a result, I would like to congratulate you on your invitation to Starlight Academy. We very much are looking forward to meeting you..."
A world of deities, monsters, and magic has just been opened up to her, a world where she is something gifted, rather than cursed, and Desdemona intends to jump in with both feet.
