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fantroll-purgatory · 6 years

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Crypha Castan

@persephoneanmystery

(Okay, so we’re getting into “writer’s special interest” themed trolls I guess? If I get too technical, just let me know! She’s kind of… flat. I think her concept is so well defined that I have trouble deviating from it to flesh her out. You ready for six straight Prospit dreamers? I… don’t think I am. Let’s go!)

Her character and theme is definitely really straight forward and tightly knit. I don’t know if I’d describe her as flat, though! Still, I’ll play around in the guts of her profile to see if we can tug anything out.

Universe: Beforus!

Name: Crypha Castan

“Crypha” comes from Cryphonectria parasitica, the fungus that causes Chestnut Blight! It’s one of my favorite named fungi because “Cryphonectria” just… sounds like a good super villain name. “Castan”, perhaps fittingly, is from Castanea dentata, the American Chestnut, a reference to this one’s ability to just… absolutely devastate things when she puts her mind to it.

I love this a lot. Ruthless and destructive, a true blight. Ready to bring the world down. This also reminds me of an analysis of 1984- a fun fact about chestnuts is that they’re a symbol of honesty and justice, but in the book their repeated reference is used to symbolize the mutation of from the old world order of justice to new world order of injustice. Maybe I’m just flaunting my AP skills here, but the historical literature linking of chestnuts and totalitarian regimes is a fun note here!

Age: Roughly 7 Sweeps

Theme/Story: Crypha’s always been a leader since the day she was spawned, she likes to say. Something of a genius when it comes to keeping things alive, she decided to study to become a naturalist. She runs her lab (that she likely shouldn’t have but… details) with an iron fist, and her understudies know better than to get in her way. Once Crypha sets her mind to something, there’s no stopping her. Her lab’s focus? Molds, creeping and blanketing.

Strife Specibus: Flaskkind

Crypha doesn’t like to get her hands dirty, but when push comes to shove, the girl can whip up a mean cocktail. She’s tried acid, explosives, mind control pheromones… All of em have some efficacy when applied directly to a fool’s forehead.

I love that. Very rude, to just splash something in someone’s face. Excellent fighting strategy, though.

Fetch Modus: Hangman

Crypha keeps her modus relatively simple, but it’s got a twist. She can’t ever choose what item she’s taking out. The hangman just simply gives her the amount of letters in the item’s name. She sometimes just memorizes everything that’s in there as a mental exercise. If the man is hung, her item is crushed and thrown out at her.

Blood color: Cerulean/Blue

Crypha certainly embodies the blueblooded idea of “doing the most harm”. She’s ambitious and devoted, and she knows she’s good what she does. In fact, she often believes that there’s nobody else out there that can do it her way! This leads to her underestimating everyone around her, and overestimating her ability. Atop of this, she’s seethingly jealous of anyone she thinks is getting credit for something she’s good at, and therefore she should be doing. Really, the worst combination of traits for a PI.

Symbol and meaning: Perhaps ironically-

SCORSCI, THE FIXER

Trolltag: [AA] adamantineAscomycete

“Adamantine” is a mythical kind of metal (I’ve often seen it in video games as a sort of off-blue color to boot) that’s impossible to break. Crypha believes herself to be impenetrable, hence the tag. To avoid going all mycologist up in here, “Ascomycetes” as a type of fungus with a wide set of traits (mostly defined my shapes of fruiting bodies and types of sexual stages and-) that many plant pathogens are grouped under. Both Cryphonectria and Cordyceps are Ascomycetes!

Beautifully fitting.

Quirk: Crypha talks like a damn saturday morning cartoon villain, always capitalizing her M’s and laughing ominously at the end of her sentences hehehehehe….

Special Abilities (if any): While she possesses the classic Cerulean Mind Control powers, Crypha has fine tuned hers into a weapon of mass destruction. Or so she thinks. One of her biggest experiments is being able to turn fungal spores that affect insects into ones that can affect Trolls. She’s been successful, but it has drawbacks. She has to craft them beforehand, but once directed they’re relatively easy to program. The problem is once she turns them on, the troll in question is helpless to do ANYTHING she hasn’t programmed. She has to be incredibly specific in what she says or it could be interpreted by the troll’s “inferior brain” as something else.

I know I helped brainstorm this idea, but it’s still so cool and the drawback is so fun to imagine in action. And her frustration when things just don’t go her way? Beautiful.

Lusus: Crypha’s been told it’s a great honor to have a Leafcutter Queen as a Lusus. She doesn’t really see the appeal. She doesn’t do a lot of like, parenting. She just sits and eats fungus all day and hatches the mindless workers that actually do the day to day work around their massive underground fungus garden of a hive. She has to give her a little credit though- her Lusus certainly ignited her love of mold, taught her the importance of letting the grunts handle the labor, and has given her basically infinite specimens to experiment on! The amount of ant corpses outside her hive that have been overgrown with parasitic fungus is… too damn many.

It’s no wonder she’s interested in picking up a higher place on the hierarchy, considering she’s got such a ruling class mother. The ant thing gives me another idea, though…

Interests: Mycology, Pathology (Specifically of Insects, like Trolls), Bartender Mixology, The Ethics of World Domination, The Ecological Necessity of The Hemospectrum, High Society Rules of Engagement

We can probably add a mild biology interest just because she’s working with implementing mind control on Physical Beings. And maybe she could be just a little interested in Marine Parasitology. Y’know, just in case seadwellers start frustrating her plans.

Appearance: Crypha is never seen anywhere without her lab coat and goggles. Always gotta practice good laboratory practices, even in the field! ….Even at home. Her wardrobe is intentionally spartan and plain, she doesn’t like colors outside of grey and black. Even Cerulean is a bit too bright for her eyes. She loves turtleneck sweaters more than she’d like to admit, and her hair is always a mess because she very rarely styles it. She just pulls it back to keep it away from her equipment. She’s always got this oddly faraway look to her- like she’s not looking at you, she’s looking through and past you. It’s deeply unnerving.

Personality: Crypha’s a dreamer and an ambitious dreamer. It’s not enough for her to just think about doing amazing things; she intends to go out and make them a reality. The problem is that her big plans are of subjugation and control. She wants an army of mindless but well-trained zombies to do her bidding. What bidding? She… hasn’t gotten that far yet. As someone so obsessed with protocol and propriety as she is, it’s odd that she doesn’t always think so far ahead. She never knows just what she’s going to do with the things she makes and achieves. She just knows that she wants them, and she wants them now, so god damn her if she’s not going to have them NOW. Crypha doesn’t really have “friends” because she’s not the kind of person who would want them. To her, there are people who are beneath you, people who should be beneath you, and Crypha herself. It hasn’t escaped the notice of many of the people around her that she’s insufferable and somewhat scatterbrained, but if you cross her, watch out! That girl can turn from zero to six thousand degrees Kelvin in an instant.

Most of my recommendations are going to come in here, since you’re dissatisfied… so I’ll talk about the idea that the ants gave me here, I guess! So, you know how worker ants are called “Drones?” Well….. I was thinking about what you said, about her attempting to Destroy Through Life, and how she hasn’t quite gotten that down yet. So on top of the attempts to take control of people’s brains, maybe you could give her a pointed interest in trying to craft new creatures? The drones are a tool of the hierarchy and help out the people who are above her, after all. So maybe she makes a habit of nabbing any that come out her way and experimenting on them in some interesting ways? Ways that usually involve failure and/or destruction, but still. It’d be a way of creating doom, actively tearing these things apart. I’m just thinking… weird, smushed together creatures like the Amalgamates in undertale. Hell, maybe she even grabs a troll corpse or two to throw into the mix every once in a while. Her hive is a little bit nightmare fuel.

Maybe you could expand that temper and make her a little prone to histrionics? Just because she wants things her way and she wants them NOW, and she’s not so fond of when other people’s needs are put above her own, and it’s not fair, it’s not FAIR-. What I’m saying is maybe she could be the fit-throwing type, a gracelessness that kind of embarrasses her afterwards but it feels a bit necessary when her emotions are running high and her prospitan emotionalism meets her scorpio intensity meets her life-i-ness.

Title: Prince of Life

Active Classes That Remain: Maid, Witch, Thief, Prince,

Passive Classes That Remain: Sylph, Page

Princes dance around using their Aspect because they are so innately tied to their Aspect’s opposite. Crypha’s a wonderful example of when a Prince goes power mad. She’s a destroyer of deviation, a destroyer of innovation. She rules her lab with an iron fist, refusing to let any opinions or facts reach her ears that didn’t come from her own mouth, even when it’s to her detriment. She’s surrounded by death and decay, the end of Life, the inevitable Doom of all things.

She’s not a true Doom player, of course. That ego and self-centered streak of hers is all Life, all the time. Crypha is so certain that she knows what’s best for literally everyone that she wants to program their brains with mind control spores and puppet them like some kind of biological marionette show. She destroys their Lives through another form of Life.

Like any good Prince, she rejects anything to do with her Aspect subconsciously. She’s a stickler for rules and restrictions, and sets those upon herself as much as she does everyone else. She’s much better at the whole “Destroying Life” part than she is at the “Destroying Through Life” part, but she’s getting there. And woe betide anyone who gets caught in the aftermath of that.

I LOVE this for her.

Land: The Land of Forests and Overflow

Crypha’s hive gets picked up and thrown at the ground, destroying a set of ancient looking redwood trees in the process. They extend all the way towards the the featureless, white sky, and it is here that Crypha realizes she has a really big fear of wide, open spaces. She retreats into her hive as thunder rumbles, and then that same sky opens and rain comes pouring out.

Her hive is swept away like a leaf in the river, as a deluge is unleashed upon the world. This is no ordinary monsoon, this is something biblical and world ending. It drives Crypha insane immediately. What kind of season is this? This doesn’t make any sense!

She must leave her hive immediately if she is to get anywhere. The corpses of ants surround her and something pings in her mind. Soon, she’s paddling around on an exoskeleton raft, using a leg as a oar, composing rules for proper boating as she does so. Something is drowning this place, doing as it pleases.

It needs to learn its place in the hierarchy.

Dream Planet: Prospit

Prospit Dreamers tend to be a bit bubbly, energetic, and optimistic people. Crypha is none of those. She’s not a Dersite because she possesses none of Derse’s dissatisfaction. She believes that she is the best, and that’s how the world works. She doesn’t question it, she merely goes with it. She’s the kind of person that if she doesn’t have a defined set of rules for how the world should work around her, she panics- flailing and gasping for air.

She also seems like she could secretly be the capricious type, so it fits.

Design:

Horns: I wanted them to look a bit like antennae and a bit like pictures of cordyceps sprouting off of nats, so I gave them some protrusions and caps. I usually don’t do this many branches, but this was an aesthetic exception.

Hair: I wanted to make it as messy as you’d said, so there’s lots of flippy and overlapping clashing bits. I put her hair up in a bun to keep it out of the way, but also because I could vaguely make the bun look like an ant butt.

Goggles: I edited them from Eridan’s glasses if I’m being honest. I tinted them with Cerulean just to put that barest pop of color in there.

Eyes: I wanted to make sure her pupils were small for that faraway, creepy look. I gave her really low set eyebrows so she could look slightly Villainous.

Mouth: I wanted to make her look mildly smug and gave her some teeth shaped a bit like a pincher.

Top: A lab coat, but in a slightly dark grey. She’s also in a sweater, as you said. I made her symbol relatively small and shoved it in the corner. I wanted her to have her symbol and blood color somewhere on her design, but wanted to respect that she’s not fond of bright colors. So it’s just very, very tiny.

Pants & shoes: Edited from Vriska, I wanted to keep them relatively simple. Grey slacks and some black square-toed lab shoes.

She’s so deliciously evil!

-CD

#persephoneanmystery #crypha castan #crypha #castan #ceruleanblood #cobaltblood #review #redesign #cd review #submission

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