Penelope Pernicious

Unknown | None | Female
Fae-Touched Nightmare/Greed Demon
Citizen | Broker
Representative of Facade

Original character owned by me. Art by AJ-H on DeviantArt.

Penelope is an enigma to look at. Her entire body looks like the silhouette of a lithe female dancer. Her skin is solid black and offers no shade or highlights, making it near impossible to discern what direction she is facing at any given time (assuming she’s naked). One can guess if viewing her from the side, owing to the shape of her head and her curves, but otherwise she's hard to get a read on.

This is not helped by the fact that Penny has a dozen or more eyes that all move independently around her body. These eyes appear to be drawings rather than actual biological eyes and come in red and white in varying sizes. The pupils are normally cat-like slits but can change shape to emote. Likewise the eyes themselves can mimic the movements of a mouth, frowning or smiling as need be.

Due to the rather bland (she says) nature of her appearance, Penny goes out of her way to dress like a star and make sure she stands out from everyone else. She wants to show off her body, her style, so she tends to wear clothes that leave enough to the imagination to almost be teasing. One could say she's almost more provocative while clothed rather than nude. Her clothes are all garish to some degree. Bright colors, a plethora of spikes and accessories, and more are the standard. And she pairs all of these with a variety of wigs in nearly any color and style combination you could imagine.


Original character owned by me. Art by Nuaramel on DeviantArt.

Most importantly, Penelope talks in a manner befitting a silver age actress or radio host. She speaks with a crisp Transatlantic accent and with the flair and posh of a game show host. But her voice has a tinny, crackling quality to it like hearing someone over old school radio. If she's ever upset the distortion gets worse until she's just white noise. For reference, her voice is similar to the Radio Demon.

Penelope is a showman first and a salesman second. She lives for the spotlight and loves back and forth banter with others. She's bombastic and jovial, with a devil-may-care attitude towards most things, including tragedy. The combination of her different supernatural traits has had a profound effect on who she is.

As a greed demon, material wealth and power are the most important things to Penelope. She wants it all and she wants it plated in gold. She loves spreading her wealth, if only because it draws people to her and showers her in praise. Charity and generosity are investments, building rapport and dialogue to get high returns.

As a nightmare, fear is a drug for her. She loves inciting fear but understands that doing so doesn't earn her any friends. So instead she just bathes in fear that comes up outside of her own influence (or finds people who like being scared). Dreams are also more appealing to her than the real world, because nothing is better than a stage that she can shape in any way she wishes. She loves interacting in dreams immensely and uses them for private conversations and entertainment alike.

Finally, since she got hired on with Facade, Penelope has a deep appreciation of law and contracts and how people trap themselves with words. But she can't break her habit as a demon of lying and tricking others, so she differs there from actual Fae.

Active
My Eye on My Money
If Penelope draws an eye symbol on an object she legally owns, she can see through it at any time.

Art of the Deal
Penelope has been given permission from Facade to represent them on the island and expand their interests.

To this end, Penelope can warp reality around herself to give the person she is dealing with whatever they want. But they must give her something of equal or higher value in return. There are some rules for this process:

Rules of the Deal

• The person must hear out her offer. After that, haggling can commence.
• The client must be fully cognizant and able to understand the deal in order to agree to it. Animals, infants, and those without at least an adolescent mind do not qualify.
• The exchange must at least be equal on the client's end, so they must give up something that they value at least as much as the thing he is offering to give them.
• One deal per customer; no substitutions, exchanges, or refunds.
• In the case of an individual not yet at mental adulthood (18 or equivalent), they are able to null the deal and revert both the wish they got and the payment they offered to their pre-deal status. • The most common things Penelope will accept are luck, talents, powers, lifespan, memories, emotions, body parts, or the bond to a loved one.
• One can delay their payment temporarily in the case of time sensitive wishes, but this accrues interest.
• Penelope does not keep the payments she receives. These instead go to Facade, to expand their influence in Underhill.
• Things have value based on what you desire in the moment. If you were kind of hungry and wanted a sandwich, you might have to pay, at most, a day's worth of good luck to have him magic you up a sandwich. If you were literally starving, it might cost you several years of your lifespan to get that same sandwich. Likewise, in general, a person could trade in the remainder of their lifespan in order to save the life of/revive a loved one.
• Penelope cannot take things from people that are not theirs to give. So you can't sacrifice a loved one's life, no matter how much you treasure them. You can give up your connection to people and things however, and it still works.

Dreambroker
If someone draws an eye symbol on their forehead when they go to sleep, Penelope can invade their dream and interact with them inside of it. Inside the dream Penelope can dig through memories and emotions as she sees fit and can manipulate the dreamscape like an all powerful deity, even bypassing the other person's control over their dream. However she cannot actually harm the person whose dream she is in, and if she 'kills' them in the dream they will wake up. Any method of waking the person up will expel her from the dream. She cannot be trapped within a dream by any means.

Passive
My Money on My Mind
Penelope knows the location and well being of every object that is legally hers. This includes up to ten people who willingly allow themselves to be called her "possessions."

Nightmare Physiology
Penelope requires no food or sleep. Her eyes can move around her body, granting her 360° vision no matter what. She can see perfectly in total darkness.

Rainy Day Funds
Penelope is immortal. If she dies, she will reconstitute back to life, at the cost of destroying some of her precious valuables. As a baseline, it costs her one hundred thousand dollars of value to return to life in a month. For every degree shorter (week, day, hour, minute, second) the price goes up by a zero.

Contracts
Any contract made with Penelope and signed legally by all involved parties is automatically magically binding. Failure to follow the contracts terms, for any person (Penelope included) results in some degree of physical punishment ranging from dismemberment to death depending on severity. Damage caused by a breach of contract will ignore healing, regeneration, or respawning.

Weakness
Iron Anathema
Even though she isn't Fae, Penelope is burned by iron much the same way they are. Even just being near a large amount of exposed iron (more than about ten pounds) makes her woozy.

The beginning of Penelope Pernicious was a nightmare trapped in the head of a psychic on Manta Carlos. The two fused into one and became something more. Living on the island, she worked for whoever would pay top dollar for terrorizing and assassinating people.

But that life grew... not boring but it didn't serve her well. On Manta Carlos, most people seemed to like to do their own killing. But they were very different about handling their money. So killing off her human host, Penelope fused to a Greed Demon and worked as an accountant. Managing money was fun and she had a nice little business of information brokering on the side. She informed for both criminals and the police and it was fun for a time.

But being the positively posh Penny P., she wanted more upward mobility. She was approached by a Fae with a proposition. Their previous representative had gotten a bit greedy and sympathetic with his assistant. They needed to downsize him. And since they couldn't trust a Fae to do the work on the island, they needed to outsource. And a greed demon seemed like a perfect candidate. Gold and money were not valuable to Facade, so they would provide her with as much as she wanted as long as she did her job and did it well.

Lives in a ritzy penthouse apartment all by her lonesome. Has hella cash inflow from her job with Facade.

This is a merged continuation of the previous incarnations of Penelope. If your character knew her before, feel free to continue having known her.