Sybal Heim: Piedad

[[EDIT: This character is no longer interactable.]]

Name: Piedad Tapia

Nicknames: Mercy, Paloma

Age: 46

Physical Age: 23

Height: 4’11”

Hair: Black, immensely curly and coarse

Eyes: Very Dark Brown

Faction: Insurgent Supporter
Piedad holds no love for Basileus or the city itself, as she fully believes she is being kept against her will and that Basileus is keeping the secret to freedom from Sybal Heim’s citizens. Though she has no fighting prowess and is rather useless in combat, her small size and speed makes her ideal for carrying messages quickly and safely, and she uses her job as a cover to transport insurgent goods and messages during both day and nighttime. She hopes that one day the insurgency will reveal the secret to freedom, and grant the trapped citizens of Sybal Heim reprieve from their monotonous existence.

Occupation: Mail Courier
While searching for a more permanent job, Piedad started doing odd jobs around the city to see if she’d find something that stuck--she’d absolutely refuse any offers involving work in the fields, and when prodded for explanation she’d merely cite “personal reasons” and scowl until left alone. She eventually took up unofficially running messages for people, and as soon as she realized she could do this through the city and be paid a reasonable wage, she immediately went to the Minister’s office to apply for the job. As a courier, Piedad is surefooted and reliable, promptly picking up mail and other parcels to be delivered across the dividing lines of the districts. She enjoys the sort of freedom it brings, as it allows her to roam the city as she makes her deliveries--to this day she’s still delivering mail to places she hasn’t discovered yet.

As well as providing her salary, her job also provides an easy cover for delivering insurgent messages in broad daylight--no one really questions a courier dropping off mail at someone’s house, and no one will notice that she’s carrying an extra letter or two in her bag.

Sybal Form: Vejigante
Piedad’s sybal form stands at about seven feet tall and resembles a large, humanoid bird with a long prehensile tail. Unlike any true bird however, her entire body seems to be comprised of colorful fabric, held up by a skeleton of sorts that is more akin to the armature of a doll. The armature itself seems to be made of a solid, durable surface that feels like paper mache to the touch--her mask and feet are also made of the same resilient substance. The sybal’s body is almost entirely hollow--the only part of the body that houses any sort of vital organs is the chest cavity--and trying to lift the fabric or remove the mask would be met with an empty void. Her wings also don’t function very well for self-powered flight, as they aren’t fully attached to the armature either; they seem to just loosely drape over an arm-like structure. When she isn’t actively running around, she keeps the wings down at her side, and they resemble a large, heavy cape that drags along behind her. The cape is loosely attached to her long segmented tail, and the tail itself tends to stay curled upward like a scorpion to keep the cape from dragging too much. The mask’s face is unmoving and unchanging as it’s made of the same material as the rest of her armature and has no jaw joint, and Piedad’s normal voice emanates from within albeit with a slight hollow echo.

At night, Piedad is more energetic and talkative than during the day, and is much more willing to approach people she is unfamiliar with. She tends to continue her mail runs even after the sun’s gone down, as her long legs increase her speed and her large fabric wings facilitate running leaps across rooftops.

Sybal Power: Adrenalina
At the end of Piedad’s segmented tail is a large, round rattle, and at her ankles, tail, and within the fabric of her wings are small bells. Shaking the rattle and bells causes anyone who hears the noise to enter a state of heightened vigor akin to a rush of adrenaline, which grants individuals the energy to complete any physical tasks they may be performing.

This ability can, however, become dangerous. If one experiences prolonged exposure to the sound of the rattle and bells, the increase in energy can send individuals into a state of immense anxiety and jumpiness, and at worse, induce panic attacks. The same effect can also be produced in a shorter time span if the rattle and bells are shaken loudly and aggressively--Piedad has only ever used her sybal power in this manner when feeling as if her life is in peril, as it can incapacitate and disorient groups fairly quickly in order to allow for an escape.

The effects of her power, whether benevolent or harmful, begin to slowly wear off after exposure to the sound of the rattling is cut off, and an individual returns to their normal state after the extra energy has burned off. This effect usually only lasts for about an hour at most. Conversely, blocking the effects of her power is simple--an individual would only need to cover their ears or otherwise avoid hearing the rattling noise in order to be immune to the effects of her sybal power.

Docile or Feral: Circumstantial Feral

If it wasn’t for her horrifically negative outlook on the city when she arrived, Piedad would have easily been classified as a Docile Sybal and that probably would have been the end of that. Unfortunately, her first Sybal transformation didn’t go as smoothly as most would have hoped, and revealed the trigger for Piedad’s feral nature.

Due to events experienced before coming to Sybal Heim, Piedad has an immense loathing of feeling trapped or enclosed, both during the daytime and while in Sybal form. Though she is likely to (aggressively) verbalize her disdain during the day, her reaction after sundown can be far more violent. If she is locked/shut into a room, forced into a confined space, or restricted in her movement, Piedad will fly into a mindless fury, flailing and rattling violently in desperate attempts to escape confinement by overloading her captors using her sybal power. The rage lasts at full strength until she finds herself with enough free space to move her wings freely, and slowly diminishes as she puts space between herself the source of the stress.

A minor trigger is any mention or witnessing of confinement and poor treatment of others who lack the ability to escape said treatment. Jokes about locking people in/out of rooms, someone holding someone and refusing to let go of them--such things will also begin to infuriate Piedad into her feral rage, and she will feel compelled to approach the conflict and frighten away the culprits, ringing and rattling all the while until the perceived threat is gone. In this cases, however, it’s immensely rare for Piedad to turn to violence unless she herself is placed in the same situation. An easy way to tell if Piedad is disturbed to the point of ferality is to note her posture--if she is hunched over with her head low to the ground and her tail rattling over her head, poised much like a scorpion, she likely feels threatened by a recent action and is about to enter a more violent state.

Due to this, Piedad will spend the entirety of the nighttime hours outdoors, running over rooftops while delivering mail, both to avoid conflict that may be brewing on the streets below as well as to avoid feeling confined if she runs into a large amount of people or gets stuck indoors. As of late, she has gotten a much better handle on her temper, and she’s never been capable of causing enough physical damage to anyone to consider exiling herself to the forest at night.

Personality:
Piedad is best described as a little fireball bottled up in a jar. While she isn’t very conversational, she holds onto her beliefs very firmly and will staunchly defend them if they are challenged. She isn’t confrontational by nature, however, and tends to keep out of most situations that don’t involve her or someone very close to her--but it’s oftentimes hard to tell how she feels about people due to her guarded nature. She is a very determined individual that will put her all into whatever task she sets her mind to, and will refuse to listen when others tell her she cannot do something (occasionally at the expense of her well-being). She doesn’t take orders easily, and tends to only do things if she so chooses to.

Convincing her to disclose anything regarding her past before entering Sybal Heim is like trying to scale a smooth metal wall--you’ll get absolutely nowhere very quickly.

History:
Piedad’s life before Sybal Heim was far from glamorous. As the daughter of a slave worker, she too was set to work for life in the vast coffee plantations of her Spanish owner. Her mother taught her as much as she could about their traditions, so that she wouldn’t just waste away in a field without knowing anything of joy. All her life, Piedad has felt that she had been growing up in a cage, performing her strenuous job from dawn until dusk, with naught but her fellow workers to keep her company and offer comfort.

It went on like this for years. Her hopes for freedom slowly receded to the back of her mind as she focused solely on surviving, performing to the best of her ability, avoiding the whip. Not long after turning 23, whispers of freedom began to spread among the people, and many spoke of rebellion in hushed tones where their masters could not hear. Piedad’s lust for freedom grew, and she wholeheartedly devoted herself to the cause, eager to escape her chains of slavery...

But the day she found the Traveler’s Forest was the day her dreams of freedom were snatched away from her.

The rebellion had been planned for months now. Hundreds of people longing to be freed from oppressive rule gathered and stormed the city armed with shovels and improvised weapons, taking Spanish government officials prisoner and holding them ransom inside the city hall, and declaring themselves as independent from Spanish rule. She and many of the others thought that by holding hostages, the Spanish would be hesitant to attack them straight-out, and that more agreements could be met this way.

Unfortunately, the rebellion was short-lived, and the next day they received word that another section of the rebellion that had planned to take over a neighboring town had failed, and that the government militia was on their way to round up the rest of the insurgency. The news came too late to the rebels, and many of those who escaped were rounded up. Piedad managed to escape into the forest amidst the confusion, her small size allowing her to use the confused crowds as a cover. She ran and ran, her immediate first desire being to be able to return to the relative safety of her home--but she quickly became ashamed of the idea. How dare she call herself a freedom fighter if she was so willing to return to the toil of her slavery? No couldn’t possibly return to that, she refused to put herself back in chains.

But what should she do, then? The rebellion’s been foiled, her fellow fighters, captured, she has nowhere else to run. She kept walking further into the forest, aimless, trying to decide what to do--until she realized something was very, very wrong.

The trees were all wrong. They were too big, too tall, the leaves were wrong, the soil was wrong, it wasn’t warm enough--she turned around and quickened her pace, trying to retrace her steps, but it didn’t take her long to realize that she was going in circles. Frustrated, she just ran in a random direction, hoping that at some point she’d be able to get out of this strange section of the woods. After a few moments, she was suddenly out in the open air--the edge of the forest was much more abrupt than she expected. It was there that she saw a mysterious tall man, one she immediately mistrusted due to his formal attire and authoritative demeanor. He explained to her where she was, and what the city was, but all she was interested in was knowing how to get out. When the man shook his head and told her there was no way to leave Sybal Heim, she immediately turned away and ran back into the forest, convinced that the man was lying.

It didn’t take her too long to realize he was telling her the truth--no matter how hard she tried to keep moving in a straight line, she always wound up at the edge of the forest again, the man still waiting for her. Resigned to her fate but still furious, she followed the man into the city so he could show her this new cage.

Additional Info:

- Don’t touch her bag. Really. Just don’t do it.
- Has a difficult relationship with coffee. Loves how it tastes, hates the memories associated with it.
- Played the cuatro back home. She’s been looking for something to replace it but no one in Sybal Heim has made anything close enough for her.
- The rebellion that drove her into the Traveler’s Forest is based on an actual event.