Application (Prismatica)

[speakerstone]

▶ PLAYER
HANDLE: Salt
CONTACT: saltnoveau
OVER 18? Yes
CHARACTERS IN-GAME: N/A

▶ CHARACTER
NAME: Sypha Belnades
CANON: Castlevania (Netflix)
CANON POINT: End of Season 3
AGE: No canon age but definitely over 18, probably early 20s
BACKGROUND:
Sypha on the Castlevania Wiki
Info on the Speakers

The wiki hasn't really updated her history section for Season 3, aside from mentioning she's had sex with Trevor and nothing else, thanks guys. Here’s a quick run-down:

• Sypha and Trevor have been on the road fighting night creatures and general nasty shit for over a month, during which they’ve gotten closer and are now, yes, sleeping together. They drag a recently killed night creature into Lindenfeld, where they are met by grateful townsfolk and shady monks that seem to worship Dracula. Sypha learns through the township’s Judge that the monks have been like this ever since they encountered a night creature, it seems to have spoken to them, and they aren’t letting anyone else into the priory. The monks are wearing a symbol for hell and some are carrying concealed weapons.

• Sypha talks to a magician traveling through town, Count Saint Germain, and learns he is in search of a portal to the Infinite Corridor, a kind of dimensional door, inside the priory. She also notices the alchemical sign for Saturn/lead carved into the side of a house. Sypha becomes certain the monks are planning to take some kind of magical action against the town. Later, she and Trevor notice two monks carving the same symbol into a different house and Trevor beats them up and kidnaps one.

• They interrogate the monk and learn that the night creature is still alive underneath the de-consecrated priory. The Judge makes a plan to gather the militia and storm the priory at sundown, and while Sypha questions if they have the time to wait, the Judge pushes back and she reluctantly agrees. At sundown, talking to St. Germain as they approach the priory, Sypha gains more information about the Infinite Corridor, realizes the monks definitely know the portal is down there and that they're planning to make a sacrifice of the town. Before she can do anything, the monks complete the ritual and set all the houses in town aflame, sacrificing everyone inside. Sypha is horrified.

• A battle ensues between the town militia and the monks, and Sypha uses her magic to kill and injure several people to gain entry to the priory. She also fights and kills an actual demon, and she makes it down into the basement just as the night creature opens a portal to hell with the intent of resurrecting Dracula. She and Trevor fight and kill many more demons under serious mortal peril. St. Germain manages to use the night creature to switch the view of the portal to Not Hell before Trevor kills it, and escapes into it as it closes, basically solving the immediate crisis. The two of them escape the crumbling priory.

• Sypha finds the Judge bleeding out on the street. He tells her where he killed the head monk and to burn his house down. They find Sala’s body and a ton of small bones in a pit, and, to add insult to injury, a secret room full of children’s shoes in the Judge’s house. Horrified and angry by the obvious implications of this, she burns down the house and leaves with Trevor.

PERSONALITY:

Sypha is a relentlessly, genuinely kind person. And God hates her.

She lives in a grim time, with famine, corruption, and general suffering around every corner, but Sypha has a persistent drive to serve the greater good and help people wherever she goes. She isn’t ignorant to the world around her or how others see her people — she takes precautions when moving into new places and will typically hold a few cards close to her chest — but while she may be annoyed or frustrated at how others perceive her, it won’t stop her from doing the right thing or risking her life to protect them.

Raised by Speakers, a nomadic community with an extensive oral history, she grew up moving from place to place in search of knowledge and townships to aid. She's seen and learned more of the world than most ordinary people, thriving in an environment that emphasized the virtues of kindness, cooperation, and non-violence. Her people’s interpretation of Biblical legend paints them as the enemies of God for practicing these things, and this is something Sypha has deeply internalized. She’s not against individuals expressing faith, but she hates the corruption and machinations of the Church as an institution. To her, spreading knowledge and helping people for the sake of helping is a kind of quiet rebellion in a world where a jealous, angry God and his agents are working against societal progress.

While her upbringing informs a great deal of her values and her personality, she’s also far from a typical Speaker. She cares a great deal for her people but, in hindsight, thinks they're foolish for not writing any of their information down. She has a clearly-defined set of principles and is quick to speak her mind, but she’s also pragmatic, willing to look the other way and let things slide if need be. Speakers are ardent pacifists, and while she usually will only use her magic to attack monsters and not human beings, she’s more than okay with making threats and stepping aside to let Trevor attack and kidnap some shady monks if it’s for the greater good. And while she thinks selling night creature teeth to people for money is wrong, she also recognizes that she and Trevor need funds for food and shelter as well as allies in an unfamiliar town, so she’ll begrudge it.

Sypha is confident, aggressively competent, and once you have her trust, she’s a reliable ally. She’s used to being an outsider, but also being surrounded by people who care about her, and is quick to warm up to the right folks. She’s quick to dismiss those who are unjustly rude, callous, and apathetic to the plight of others, but she’s also more than willing to give them her trust if they turn around and make an effort to be a better person, like Trevor. She’s snarky and has a sharp wit, always ready with a quip, with a low tolerance for bullshit and petty squabbling. Her clearest strength is her intelligence, keen on many obscure topics and quick to pick up new information. She’s perceptive to boot, often noticing small details in the world around her, like runes or symbols, that others don’t. She's also the most emotionally mature of the main trio by far. That isn’t a high bar, but she has an intuitive sense for reading people and knowing how they’re feeling. After Alucard murders his own father and is visibly shaken, she responds thoughtfully, saying that he’s saved countless lives by killing Dracula but that it’s okay to mourn the man he once was.

She’s similarly well-rounded in combat and often saves herself or her companions by reacting cleverly to split-second developments. She’s physically fit, but much less hardy than Trevor or Alucard. Still, she isn’t afraid to get in close if she needs to and makes up for this with quick thinking and the sheer variety of magic at her fingertips.

Smart as she is, though, she sometimes does things impulsively or without thinking them all the way through, like magically trapping Dracula’s Moving Castle™ on top of an underground library she and her friends were in that was held up by old wood and dirt. Her magic broke the castle’s teleportation engine in the aftermath, but Sypha refused to admit it despite Trevor and Alucard insisting otherwise. Capable as she is, and perhaps because of it, Sypha is stubborn to a fault and bad at admitting when she’s goofed. Once she gets on a course of action, she probably won’t be persuaded to leave it, and she sometimes acts against other people’s concerns and wishes because she’s convinced what she’s doing is right.

And there’s part of her that doesn’t just want to be capable, confident, and helpful — she wants to be unequivocally all these things. To pass her adventures down and have strangers and friends alike view her in high esteem, to be an important part of the stories she tells, to be exceptional. It's not typically a conscious thought, but it's why she's so reluctant to admit mistakes, and why, when she figures something out, she leads up to it vaguely before she demonstrates her findings to seem more impressive. She says at one point that confident people succeed and nervous people make mistakes, and Sypha can't afford to be nervous or unsure while using magic that relies entirely on her intent and her will to enact it.

That said, in the wake of season 3 she's had her trust betrayed by a child-murdering monster, failed to prevent the sacrifice of hundreds of people, and used her magic to kill human beings for the first time. Her optimism isn't shattered, but it is significantly cracked, and she feels a guilt and personal responsibility for what happened that will impact how she moves forward.

POWERS/ABILITIES:

Speaker Magic - Sypha is a talented Speaker Magician, meaning she can create fire, ice, wind, and lightning, manipulating them with a great degree of specificity and control. She seems immune to her own magic and she can manipulate existing sources of the elements in addition to forming her own out of thin air. She can also shape this magic after it’s in the environment, like spreading a patch of ice on the floor and extending it into a thin, razor-sharp wall. Notably, she can fly using her fire abilities by projecting it out from her hands like jets, but it’s more propulsion than free flight, since she has to factor in her body’s momentum so she doesn’t go crashing into things like a ragdoll.

She draws her magic from her own willpower and describes it as changing the world to fit with her intent. She seems to pick it up quite quickly, as she learns many advanced new techniques in the one-month gap between seasons 2 and 3. She is also able to use magic incantations and spells she finds elsewhere in her setting, and can sense it in the environment at close range. Performing most magic in her setting seems to require physicality, at least hand and finger movement (think Avatar-style bending,) so if Sypha was immobilized she would be pretty much unable to use her powers.

Intelligence - Sypha is really god damn smart ─ she’s a Speaker and she knows about many things from history, to medicine, to alchemy, to symbology, to self-defense and how to spot a concealed blade. She’s quite well-read and is notably multilingual. As she puts it, her education would have been lacking if she found important written information and couldn’t read it to add to her people’s oral history. She's able to recognize that Trevor's name isn't Wallachian, so she definitely knows a few mundane languages, but she specializes in ancient and occult ones used in magic which have been largely lost to time. Canonically, she can speak and read Enochian and Adamic, and she recognizes root words from Chaldaic and High Remembrance. Which probably has zero relevance in Prisma, but. Y’know, she can do that in theory, at least, and it means she’d be inclined to dig into the Secret Ancient Prismal Language if she ever learned about it.

INVENTORY: Nothing but the clothes on her back and a mountain of Bad Feelings!

MOONBLESSING: Sanguis

▶ SAMPLES

link #1 (TDM thread w/ Zuko)
link #2 (TDM thread w/ Trevor)