Serenity Chambers/Penelope Pernicious

In her human form, Serenity appears to be a woman of average height and build. She has straight brown hair with even bangs that hangs own her back just above her hips. She wears professional clothes pretty much all of the time and generally exudes an air of having somewhere really important to be. She looks perpetually tired, as though she got too little sleep the night before, though she wears very minimal makeup to cover the bags under her eyes.

In her Nightmare form, Serenity becomes a wall of darkness filled with eye-like symbols that look like they are drawn in chalk. These are in red and white and seem to shift, blink, and look around constantly.
She can compress this form into a vaguely feminine humanoid shape that she can wear clothes and wigs with to appear more “human.” She prefers blacks, purples, and reds for her clothes and wigs, and likes wearing stylish, if over the top, designs.​

In her normal human form, Serenity is generally quiet and reserved. A true professional, she tries to never speak out of turn and is obsessed with keeping her schedule. She seems perpetually tired and has little in the way of an obvious sense of humor. Serenity prefers to be low key, doing her job and staying out of everyone’s way to avoid potential conflict. She’s very much a homebody and has to practically dragged out to socialize.

Penelope talks about Serenity like she’s an old, worn out bra that’s a little too tight. How she enjoys peeling out of that facade and doing what she really loves, really has a knack for. Penelope is flashy, a show woman if ever there was one. She acts like some kind of crazed game or talk show host when she enters a person’s dream and seems to have flippant disregard for people’s feelings or safety.​

Mask of Normalcy. Serenity and Penelope are essentially two beings sharing a single body, at least from the perspective of supernatural means of detection. While he is Serenity, she doesn’t ping as anything other than human. Likewise, as Penelope she doesn’t ping as having any human in her at all. Likewise, in either form, reading her mind reveals nothing about her dual nature, and in fact it seems as though Serenity is largely unaware of Penelope’s actions. It takes her ten minutes to change from one form to the other the first time she does it in a 24 hour period. Each subsequent tome takes ten times as long as the last time, but this limit resets with the setting of the sun (100 minutes for the second change, 1000 minutes for the third).​

Nightmare Physiology. As a Nightmare, Penelope is largely immune to physical damage. Non-magical attacks go through her as if she were mist, while magically inclined attacks do damage to her normally as a regular attack might hurt a human. Likewise, magical attacks with an affinity towards light, fire, or the ever-ambiguous “good” alignment cause her significantly more harm.
She can slip through cracks like a liquid, though an air tight container can hold her. Penelope requires neither food nor sleep in the traditional sense, though she does need to occasionally feed on the fear in people’s dreams to keep her energy levels up.​

Eye on the Wall Penelope’s symbol is the eye, drawn in the same style as the ones that make up her Nightmarish body. If another creature willingly draws her symbol on a surface, she can see through that eye as if it were one of her own. She is incapable of drawing these symbols herself. A symbol lasts for roughly twenty-four hours before it becomes inert.​

Dream Walker As a Nightmare, Penelope can enter people’s dreams. This can be done in one of two ways. She can be invited in or she can invite herself in. To be invited in, the person in question must draw her eye symbol on their forehead before going to sleep. This will allow Penelope to enter their mind once at any point after that.

To invite herself in is a longer, more complicated process. Penelope must gather personal items of the individual. Blood and other body parts work best, only requiring four or so items for the ritual. Deeply personal belongings are next, like lucky underwear or a photograph of the person with a loved one. She would only need a dozen or so of these. Broader still, she can collect hundreds of unique items that the person is vaguely attached to, like a favorite candy or a pen they used recently. Each item must be burned in a ritualistic fire while the intended victim is asleep. This will allow Penelope to enter their dream for that particular sleep, but no others.

Once inside a dream, Penelope has pretty much free reign. She can alter the dreamscape as she sees fit, poke around for information, or even attack and attempt to kill the victim while she is in there. She isn’t god however, and each mind offers its own unique challenges. A powerful psychic or someone with a strong mind might be able to actively fight back against her influence. Someone with magical mental protections might have their mindscape laden with traps that Penelope can’t detect or alter. And those with strange psychologies, multiple personalities, or mental afflictions might have naturally hostile and difficult to navigate mindscapes, making Penelope’s task more difficult as the realm itself comes alive to attack the invader.

In the mindscape, she is as durable as the person whose mind she is invading. Where a conjured memory of a gun could harm them, so too could it harm and potentially kill her. And as the old saying goes, if you die in the dream, you die in real life.​

Penelope Pernicious didn’t always have a name. She was a shapeless, formless terror flitting from dream to dream, devouring the fears of those around her. She would only remain long enough to eat her fill and then move on. Until she came across a powerful psychic named Serenity Chambers. This was a woman who, unconscious as she was to her latent powers, used them to trap the nameless terror within her mind. Every night was a battle for dominance, a battle that the Nightmare always ended up losing. When direct confrontation obviously wasn’t going to work, the Nightmare changed tactics. She took a more recognizable form, a human form, in the woman’s mind. She began talking, reading through Serenity’s memories, and learning. This was the birth of Penelope Pernicious.

Penelope found that Serenity, while moderately successful in her life, was unhappy. Her social life was practically nonexistent, she longed to pull herself out of living paycheck to paycheck. Longed for a life more glamorous that the one that she had. Seeing these desires through Serenity’s eyes, Penelope realized that she wanted these things too. So as their talks grew less hostile and more amicable, the two of them eventually hatched a plan. They fused, becoming a single entity split down the middle. Two sides of the same bent coin.

They quickly found that their fusing had odd effects on the two of them. Serenity lost what of her psychic powers she was aware of, and Penelope had strange arcane restrictions placed on her ability to enter dreams. Still, they were happy having each other for company. Serenity was happy to get to vicariously cut loose and live dangerously through Penelope, and Penelope was excited to have a physical body. The Nightmare convinced her new friend that death and sabotage were good for money and thrills, and slowly but surely the name Penelope Pernicious started making its way into the criminal underground of Manta Carlos.​

Has been assigned as a personal agent to Cassandra Emerich.​