Coralie Psidonia in Mermaid Form (WIP)

NAME: Coralie Parthenope Psidonia [Cora-Lee Parthen-O-Pee Sy-Doh-Nee-A]

GENDER: Female

BIRTH DATE/APPROXIMATE AGE: May 6th/27-years-old

SPECIES: Siren/Mermaid

ALIGNMENT: Neutral Good

PERSONALITY:

Coralie is an optimistic young woman who, for the most part, thinks the world is a wonderful place. She is a compassionate, flirtatious, outgoing, extroverted partygoer. As a (somewhat promiscuous) bisexual, she loves men and women equally and splits her time between the two genders. She’s friendly to just about everyone she meets, save evildoers and criminals. Her main goals and aspirations in life are to rid the world of all forms of ugliness, and to live it up every chance she gets. To carry out these goals, Coralie has come into a profession as a beauty magazine writer. She writes columns and articles giving women advice on beauty and fashion. She’s also a freelance reporter each year for Fashion Week for a fashion magazine, meaning she gets to travel all over the world.

Coralie loves people and new experiences. She is lively and fun, and enjoys being the life of the party. She lives in the moment, and relishes excitement and drama in her life. She has strong social skills and is very concerned for other people’s wellbeing. She doesn’t give the best advice because she dislikes planning for the future, but she is a great sympathizer. Sometimes Coralie can be over-indulgent because she places more importance on gratification than on her obligations. It usually takes a close female friend of hers to show her the error of her ways before she’ll put forth the effort to change.

Coralie has a long list of likes and dislikes. She’s crazy about margueritas, piña coladas, wine tasting, tropical islands like yachts, Hawaii, big lively cities like NYC, jewelry, fashion, shoes, money, children, dolphins, sushi, seaweed, waterproof makeup, having new experiences, meeting new people, and dancing, among many others. On the other hand, Coralie is not very fond of women who hate other women, dangerous mythologicals like demons and vampires, sharks, killer whales, people who insult her looks or sense of style, snowy or cold weather, people who kill dolphins, commitment, etc.

Personality Profile: [link]

APPEARANCE:

Coralie has thick wavy burgundy red hair that goes down to her rear and thick lashes around her almond shaped green eyes. She is naturally light-skinned, but usually sports a healthy tan in the spring and summer months. Her lips are strawberry red and the tips are almost always drawn upwards in a pout. In human form, Coralie is 5’8”, athletic, and 130 lbs. She always wears something stylish, primarily sexy dresses and high heeled shoes, and lots of jewelry. She has no significant scars, tattoos, piercings, or other markings.

In mermaid form, she looks far more innocent and vulnerable. She wears no clothes or jewelry in this state because of the sea law making jewelry illegal. Coralie’s fish form consists of a combination of fuschia-purple and black stripes that go down her body. In the light, her scales have a beautiful shimmer. She has a fin attached to each hip, a dorsal fin running down the back, and a black tail fin. Her scales cover her breasts and shoulders. There is a strip of ordinary human skip extending down each arm, but her forearms and hands are entirely covered in scales. The scales on her hands are black, like elegant gloves. Her gills are located on her ribcage. A series of stinging barbs protrude from her elbows down her forearms. She also has stinging barbs running down each side of her fishtail. Naturally, the barbs are a defense mechanism and are highly poisonous. Whether they kill or not depends upon how much poison she injects.

STRENGTHS:

Coralie has some experience with dry land combat such as the martial arts, which her siren mother paid a professional to teach her during her childhood. Ordinarily, Coralie does not carry any weapons with her besides what she has on her own body. To fight, she either uses what she can find in her environment, her fists, or she conjures the stingers on her forearms to shoot poisonous barbs at her enemies and attackers. She can transform between her mermaid and human forms at will, regardless of water contact.

Coralie’s biggest fighting advantage is in water. Her merman father taught her many aquatic combat skills to fight and evade predators. In water, Coralie has many more powers and abilities than on land. One example is dynamic camouflage, which she uses to “disappear” against the sand, rock, or coral when a shark approaches. Her fuschia scales can also emit a controllable bioluminescent glow in deep, dark waters. She can use echolocation to find her way over several miles of open ocean, and also to communicate with sea life, such as dolphins. Coralie’s fish scales have medicinal properties that draw out the poison from her barbs, in case she ever accidentally stings a friend. With patience and dedication, Coralie could learn hydrokenesis on account of her merfolk heritage. However, given her live-in-the-here-and-now lifestyle, it is unlikely that she will master this skill anytime soon.

Coralie inherited her final ability from her mother—the hypnotic song of the siren. The sirens have different songs that they can sing to have different effects on people. For instance, some sirens from mythology infamously used the song to lure seafaring men to their doom. Not all siren songs are meant for sinister purposes though, and Coralie would never think to use her musical talents to bring harm to an undeserving soul. Most of the time she uses the song to lull stressed or traumatized people into a peaceful sleep, and give them good dreams. She does this on account of her concern for the wellbeing of others.

WEAKNESSES: (What are some physical flaws of your character? Do they have low stamina? Bad eye sight? Are they clumsy? Maybe they have emotional flaws like phobias or they don’t respond well under pressure? Do they freeze up when they’re confronted verbally? Physically? How would one go about defeating this character in a battle? In a debate? What are their shortcomings?)

Coralie has a number of weaknesses owing to her siren and merfolk heritage. As a siren, she can be obsessed with jewelry and sunken treasure. It’s very hard for her to live in the merkingdom her father is from because jewelry and frilly items were outlawed by the merking many years ago. This is why she prefers to live amongst humans. Sirens are also susceptible to men with beautiful voices, like Orpheus in mythology. As a mermaid, Coralie has a phobia of sharks and orca whales because these particular creatures are generally dangerous to merfolk and like to eat them. On land, one of her vulnerabilities is that if she gets too dirty, she begins to smell like fish. So she has to shower twice a day or else the people around her will begin to wonder what’s up with her. She also can’t hide her identity from mythologicals with good olfactory senses, like lycanthropes. They can tell she is not human through scent alone, so she has to be careful to avoid dangerous supernaturals.

HISTORY:

Coralie was born on the tropical moving island of Prothemusa on May 6th. She lived out her happy childhood there with her merman father Caspian Psidonia and her siren mother Peisinope Parthenope (maiden surname). The couple still lives by the sea in the same amphibious (meaning half on dry land and half in water) house that Coralie grew up in. While Coralie’s parents are married and love each other very much, they both live openly polyamorous lives (with lovers on the side). Some of these affairs are regular, others are just flings with various supernatural tourists.

That said, Coralie has a great relationship with her parents and visits them several times a year. That’s not to say Coralie has never had a conflict with them. When Coralie was a teenager, she felt horribly under-stimulated living on the island because there just weren’t enough people. She presented this problem to her parents, and her father told her that she could move to the merkingdom as soon as she hit 18 years of age. However, Coralie’s siren heritage gave her an obsession with jewelry and fancy items that she could not quench in the merkingdom because such things were illegal there.

Coralie wanted to move to a human city, and that’s where her parents drew the line. Living among humans was dangerous for both merfolk and sirens alike. One would be living in constant danger of discovery and persecution. But Coralie didn’t care about the danger, all she saw was excitement. When she turned 18, she packed her things and swam from Prothemusa all the way to the tip of Florida. She used her brilliant writing skills to get a low paying job as a writer for a newspaper. She proceeded to move up the ranks until she landed her dream job.

Today, Coralie is a great beauty magazine writer on Key West, Florida. At the age of 27, she already has two published novels to her name. The first is a how-to instructional on all things makeup and clothes and the second is a popular fiction—the first novel in a romantic comedy series about a sassy fashion model and her many exotic love affairs. Through this career, Coralie earns a pretty comfortable upper middle class living for herself.