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D A U G H T E R . O F . Z E U S
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20 | female | pansexual
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▹ hair color | brunette
▹ eye color | brown
▹ height | 5' 6"
▹ build | slender / athletic | .
A B I L I T I E S
atmokinesis - While this ability allows a wide range of control and influence in regards to meteorological conditions, such as winds, rain, storms, and temperature, to create various weather effects, Zelia has only ever been inadvertently proficient in regards to controlling the wind. She's always felt more naturally attuned to manipulating wind currents, something that borders on instinct, in order to give her an augmented boost of speed. It was unintentional when she was younger, but it's an ability that Zee could focus on honing further if she desired. Calling forward a soft breeze on a hot summers day, or something more cutting when her temper flares, feels as natural as breathing for her. As for things such as controlling storms or changing temperature, she's found those abilities tightly tied to her more negative emotions, so she largely suppresses them in the illusion of control, without any form of guidance or training she's more likely to be a liability whilst controlling the weather.
electrokinesis - "You have lightning in your veins," her mother had murmured those words the first time Zelia charred the table in a fit, voice soft and soothing. "Don't be scared." Before that point, she'd always been terrified of lightning. There was something jarring about how, nearly every night, sheet lightning inlaid the walls with cool gold. She'd always felt frozen at the sight of it, unbothered by the rumble that followed but choked at the flash that seared across her eyelids. Zelia didn't understand until she was much older that her mom had been correct, there was a reservoir filled with lightning in her chest, and controlling it was something that felt primal and innate. Only once before has she used electrical impulses to stimulate the nerves and muscles in her legs, granting her a higher level of speed than would be common, but she's truly never experimented with the power, accidents across her childhood leading to a subtle fear of her own power if it was left raw and unhindered, but there have been occasions when she was alone that Zee let the current of electricity dance between her fingers unchecked, searing zigzag patterns into the delicate skin of her hands that left the strangest scars.
flight - Zelia hasn't tried to fly before, the concept of throwing herself off of a roof to achieve such a feat is a little odd, even for her, though knowing what she knows now...she's very enthusiastic to learn, if only to feel closer to her father.
peak human condition - She has always been physically incredible, it was an undeniable fact that was easy for Zelia herself to overlook as she grew, but not as easy for everyone around her. She could run longer and faster than everyone else, even without her powers, she had enough stamina for three children, and could lift things easily that her mother struggled with. At large, it was one of those things that was filed away with all her other oddities, college recruiters latching onto her speed and stamina and offering scholarships for their track teams. Zee likes to think that everything good comes with some bad, she eats more than a grown man does which often leaves her starving because of her metabolism, and needs an adequate amount of rest that she rarely gets.
S T R E N G T H S
Eidetic memory - The ability to recall an image, sound, or object with extreme accuracy after only a brief exposure; Zelia has exhibited signs of eidetic memory ever since she was a child, most often using it to recall poetry, or quotes, but it has also helped her when she took Karate and Gymnastics.
Speed - Even without augmenting her speed with atmokinesis and electrokinesis, being in peak human conditions leads her to being faster than most people. Added with the years of track meets and gymnastic classes, Zelia is fast and flexible, if she has to fight the ace up her sleeve will undoubtably be her speed.
Intellect - When she was younger Zee was bullied by her year mates for her odder tendencies, there was a teacher though that quoted Stephen Hawking to her when she'd been found crying. “The thing about smart people is that they seem like crazy people to dumb people.” That always stuck with her, yes, she is peculiar sometimes, but her intellect is frighteningly brilliant, and when something catches her fancy she dedicates herself with a passion to learning it in depth.
Fast Learner - When it comes to learning new things Zelia excels. It may be a byproduct of her eidetic memory, but she truly could be labeled a jack of all trades.
W E A K N E S S E S
Aquaphobia - Nightmares from her childhood have stretched into her adult life, and more often than not Zelia dreams of drowning. She has no desire to ever venture into large bodies of water, and will avoid it if possible. She does not know how to swim, and is too scared to ever try.
Spacey - Her mind can be an enigma, she prefers nature and literature to most people, though most of that has to do with the fact that she's never felt as if she fit in anywhere. Zelia has an active imagination, and could spend hours daydreaming instead of actually focusing on the present. That can make actually living rather difficult, at times.
Avoidance Behaviors - It is easy to fall into darker emotions like sadness, anger, self-hatred. While she has her own fair share of these things, more often than not Zee will simply...ignore it. She'll focus on being happy, or optimistic, and leaning into the freak act. It will, undoubtably, make her fall out worse, but she's convinced herself that if she can fool everyone else, she can fool herself as well.
Metabolism - Always hungry, it's never enough. If she doesn't eat enough, she'll get very lethargic.
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P E R S O N A L I T Y
optimistic.... | .... eccentric .... | .... compassionate .... | .... passionate
H I S T O R Y
scintilla
(n.) a tiny, brilliant flash or spark; a small thing; barely-visible trace
Lightning arced toward dry earth, white streaking across the sky as if bony fingers reached into the purpling cloud in search of it's soul. Thunder shuddered through the early morning, the vibrations rolling through cracked soil, and Zelia was born unto the world in the same instant, silent as death but flushed with life. Amelia Darling had screamed enough for the both of them, and though the hospital lights had flickered and the windows shuddered from the force of the storm, she was at peace when they passed her daughter into her arms for the first time. The nurse had cooed at her, called her well behaved, but even then Amelia knew her daughter would grow into an enigma suiting her heritage.
Outside the hospital, lightning struck the same patch of grass three times, burrowing into the earth relentlessly until smoke billowed from the crack that splintered and fractured the ground. It would be featured in the small towns local paper as an Act of God, the zealots in town believing wild things, like an impending rapture, but Amelia saw the truth in the sanctified and charred land, and she took it as the traces of a blessing.
brontide
(n.) a low rumble of distant thunder
Most nights, Zelia dreams of the ocean. She hasn’t seen it, they live landlocked in Utah, but she can imagine it as if she has been there a thousand times before. She dreams of the crashing waves dragging her down after a current swept her away from land. She dreams of water filling her lungs and the all-consuming darkness of the depths swallowing her whole. Zee dreams of drowning, and she feels as if she deserves such a harrowing fate at the tender age of five, but she does not understand why.
Often, she dreams of a storm too. The sky is black as night, stretching on the horizon until she can’t see where it begins and the ocean ends. Lightning flashes illuminate a massive, swirling storm in the distance for the briefest of moments. Waves crash with a vengeance upon the shoreline, and Zelia can feel the wind ripping at her hair and clothes. The storm whispers to her in these dreams, an ancient song of something unfamiliar reverberating in her bones. She feels the undeniable pull, insatiable hunger for something she can barely fathom stirring in her belly. Someone, somewhere beyond the storm, bellows her name, and Zee wakes up sweaty and gasping.
She does not tell her mama about her dreams, though it would be instinct to express her fears. The distant rumble of thunder always echoes in her ears when she wakes disorientated and discontent, flashes of lightning spiderwebbing an illumination across her bedroom walls. Zelia does not like sleeping, she learns to avoid naps, stays up later than any young child should, clutching a flashlight and a book until her exhaustion wins. She is young, but her soul feels old, and she learns how to live with very little sleep quite quickly for someone her age.
la douleur exquise
(n.) the heart-wrenching pain of wanting the affection of someone unattainable
Zelia learns that it is strange how absence can feel like presence. She wonders of things like absence because she knows she is missing something every child her age ought to have. She learned the words, la douleur exquise, and what they meant just as their definition upon a page in a book, but in her chest. Amelia tries to keep her busy to distract her young daughter from missing the father she never had, she signs her up for a gymnastics class, and then a ballet class, and then because nothing seems to be quite enough to sustain the hyperactivity that seemed to always consume Zelia, she put her in a swim class. This was disastrous, Zee was terrified of the water and refused to get into the pool, pitching such a fit when the instructors kept insisting that the entire YMCA needed to be rewired after a bolt of lightning struck the building.
It had been called a freak accident, the sky had been a little cloudy, no one had been injured, but Amelia had looked at her daughter with different eyes that day onward. She took into account what Zelia actually wanted, rather than what she thought would be good to keep her busy, and she was withdrawn from the swimming class swiftly. The bulk of her childhood was spent bouncing between youth clubs, gymnastics, chess, ballet, karate. Zelia would like to say she was a jack of all trades, master of none, but better than a master of one...but the day of her tenth birthday changed everything.
nepenthe
(n.) something that can make you forget grief or suffering
Time stood still in a swelling moment where Zelia sat beneath the awning of the funeral home, a book her grandmother had gifted her that morning clutched to her chest. It seemed a sad way to spend ones birthday, and so none of her family stopped her from slipping away whilst they spoke about her mom and how much they all loved her. A quiet, cool part of Zee resented them all, it wasn't fair because none had loved her as much as she had, but love hadn't been enough to keep her mom alive.
Although it was only five o'clock, the day was encircled by a biting darkness. The fog, caused by the rain that fluctuates between drizzle and torrential, blurred every detail with its ragged veils, punctured at various distances by the glow of street lamps and shafts of light escaping from illuminated windows. The road was soaked with rain and glittered under the street-lights. A bitter wind, heavy with icy bits, whipped at her face, its howling forming the high notes of a symphony, and Zelia stared at the damp pages of her book, unseeing and as frozen as ice upon pavement. She missed when a man approached, because she was too wrapped up in the freshness of her loss. Her mom was gone, and all that was left was the space where she'd grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence, but the tree had been ripped away in a tornado and by some cruel miracle, the fence remained.
"Should you be out in this weather?" A man's voice broke through her rumination, a question posed in lieu of greeting, and she titled her head back to look up at the stranger. Zelia had never seen him and his pressed, dark suit before, but there was something familiar in the curve of his eyes, the bow of his lips, the slope of his jawline. Her head tilted to the side in a gesture that was birdlike, dark eyes assessing. "No one told me I ought not to," she said after a moment in which the silence stretched and twisted into a mosaic of cold and quiet. Zelia watched the mans lips twitch, and in his gaze was the same bright inquisitiveness she'd seen reflected in her own eyes. "What are you reading? The question was polite, but there was an edge to it that left her wondering what would happen if it went unanswered.
"Poetry, but I wasn't reading, I was listening to the rain talk." Zee answered faster now, more at ease because he hadn't apologized for her loss or looked at her as if she were a pitiful creature sniveling upon the concrete. "Oh?" Amusement colored the mans voice, but his face was impassive in a way that Zelia did not understand. "What does the rain say?" There wasn't any judgment in the question, just an open curiosity. Other people were often mean about the odd things she gave voice too, so this was...nice. "I'm not sure, I haven't learned the language yet...I was waiting for the thunder." The man's smiled widened by the smallest fraction, nothing more than a twitch of the lips, but he leaned against the wall and gazed up toward the sky.
"Do you like the thunder?" He asked an awful lot of questions, but Zelia turned toward the darkened sky as well. The clouds swelled beneath the weight of unfallen rain, and a flash of light illuminated them blindingly for a moment, followed by a distant and loud rumble. Her own smile formed, lighting up her features like fireflies twinkling in the night. "Yes, it used to scare me, but..." her voice trailed off, turned soft and sad, but he did not pester her to continue. It took a moment for Zee to find her words once more, and he simply stood there, waiting with a patience that, oddly enough, felt unbecoming for this stranger. "My mama told me I ought not be scared of thunder or lightning, she said I'd know I was safe, if it was there." Her eyes glittered with moisture just as the road that stretched out beyond the funeral home did, but no tears rolled down her cheeks.
"Curious," he mused, and another flash of lightning split open the sky, much to Zelia's delight. She hummed to herself, something that held no sort of tangible tune but seemed familiar in the way that she'd hummed it many times before. "I am afraid that our eyes are bigger than our stomachs, and that we have more curiosity than understanding. We grasp at everything, but catch nothing except wind." She quoted diligently, tipping her head back to catch the amused and quietly baffled gaze of the stranger. "Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays. I read the book last year." This seemed to catch the mans attention, and his eyebrows rose ever so slightly, his own curiosity lighting up his gaze.
"You have good memory," this was not a question, but Zelia found herself nodding in response all the same. She had very good memory, it was something her mom had been proud of. He tipped his head toward the book, circling back to one of his initial questions. "What is your book about?" Zelia glanced down at the book, lips pressing together tightly for a long moment. A gift, she loved books, it ought to be an adequate gift, but... "Poems, it focuses on poems for funerals. It was a gift." The way she stressed the word gift with a blanket of soft disdain did not go unnoticed by the man, and one of his hands slipped into a pocket. "Do you like any of the poems in the book?" Every question he asked was nothing more than a polite inquiry, detached curiosity coloring his tone. She felt as if she were simply humoring him, but oddly enough the conversation was exactly what she'd needed.
Her response with instant and unthinking, only one of the poems within the book could have been considered likeable to her, though there was a differing of opinions to take into account. "Death Is Nothing At All by Henry Scott-Holland." For some reason, this made the mans smile stretch impossibly. It was there and then gone with all the abruptness of a flash of lightning, but it had been there. He pushed off the wall, stepping closer to the edge of the awning. "Quite a good poem, I believe," he chuckled, the sound rumbling in his chest like thunder on the horizon. "You ought to read aloud more often, I've heard the lightning enjoys it." It was such a silly suggestion, something only a child could hear and latch onto as being true, but Zelia was a child and she enjoyed things that other people found odd more often than not. The man turned to go, and she assumed that meant the funeral was drawing to a close. Tomorrow, she would help her grandmother pack her room into cardboard boxes so that she could move an hour away into their home with them, but today Zelia was rooted in the moment, in her loss, and in the strange appearance of a man with whom she shared a resemblance.
"Wait!" She scrambled up off the damp pavement, book tumbling clumsily from her lap, and she stepped out from beneath the awning to follow the man, one of her hands slipping into the small pocket of her frilly black dress, withdrawing what seemed to be a lollipop. She thrust it out toward the man, head tipped back as the rain splashed across her skin, eyes wide and earnest. "Here, take it." He reached out automatically, collecting the small sweet treat with confusion painted across his face. Zelia smiled, bright and open like the sun emerging from behind the clouds. "My Nana makes them, it's honey, but they're shaped like lollipops, because I really like honey." She chirped the words with a newfound enthusiasm, answering his unspoken question. "Thank you, for talking to me. You're really nice, mister."
He looked down at the gift, face unreadable, before looking back at Zee. There is a moment of silence in which rain slips from her forehead down to her chin, another chilly breeze tousling her curls, and she is confused by his sudden intensity. "The accident was not your fault, Zelia." His voice was low, but it sounded different from before, crackling and rumbling like a storm. The hairs at the back of her neck stood on end as static filled the air around her, and above them lightning flashes a crack in the sky as if God himself has ripped it open. Between one blink and the next, the man is gone.
Years later, she'll have convinced herself that she imagined the entire interaction. It hadn't made any sense, people didn't just vanish into thin air, and no stranger would have known about how the guilt she carried for her moms death was now entwined with the lightning in her chest...but it never stopped her from reading her poetry aloud, especially on stormy days.
peripeteia
(n.) a sudden or unexpected reversal of circumstances; the point of no return
The rest of Zelia's childhood passes with the speed of molasses falling in winter air, dauntingly slow without the whirlwind of her mom by her side. Her grandparents had to cut down on the clubs she was a part of, but she managed to hold onto gymnastics, chess, and once she entered high school she flourished on the track team. She felt as if she were missing something, labeled as strange she didn't have many friends, but it was more than that. It was like Zelia had been born into the wrong world, she felt out of step with everyone and everything else, no matter how hard she tried to fit in. A keen sense of guilt floats in the air around Zelia each time she thinks of her mom, of the accident that was her fault, but she presses on and forces herself to be happy in spite of it all. Lightning still sparks between her fingers when she's upset, and the wind seems to curl with enthusiasm within her curls, but for the sake of her grandparents she pretends all is well.
It started off as a normal day, as normal days often do, which saw Zelia going through the motions. She went on her morning run, ate breakfast, attended classes, and returned to her dorm after collecting her free lunch from the mess hall. The sun was dipping low and red over the horizon, casting a fiery hue over the forests and streets as it shined through her window, and Zee absently cast a look at the blood sun as she kicked the door shut, humming under her breath whilst she moved to her desk with her food. Upon the cheap laminate wood though, was a letter.
The envelope was elegant, parchment aged, a golden and glittering wax seal keeping it securely shut. There were clouds in the wax, a hand locked around three bolts of lightning in the center. He hesitated for a moment, setting aside her tray to pick up the letter. There was a weight to it, nothing too heavy but it gave the illusion to something else than just paper residing within it. She wiggled her pinky finger beneath the wax, carefully prying it away from the parchment to try and keep the integrity of the wax. Once it was open, a letter and a...necklace spilled out. Curiosity was a beast in Zelia's belly, and so her hand closed around the letter first, lifting it from the desk and unfolding it. For a moment, the letters on the table didn't make much of any sense, she stared and stared, but between each blink they seemed to scramble themselves, until she could understand what she was looking at. Greek? She'd had a course on it in high school, enjoyed it quite a bit, but never explored it further.
When Gods Dispute the Soul of Man
Her brows furrowed, because a poem of all things was not what Zelia had expected. She read through it quickly the first time, and then slower twice over, dissecting it slowly and turning it over in her head like one would a fine wine on the tongue. It took an embarrassing amount of time for her to realize there was more to the letter, written at the bottom, almost as if in a rush.
Daughter, you have been claimed. Camp Athen's awaits. A gift, for a gift. Use it well.
— 𝓩
Beneath it were instructions for finding the camp, quite detailed, and a time frame for her to arrive. Now, came the doubt. There was no one left on this earth who would refer to Zelia as daughter unless it was the father her mom never mentioned, but that felt like a stretch. Even more so, a nonsensical poem about Zeus and Hades disputing the soul of man should have been so far out of the left field that she'd throw everything away and continue about her day. Only...that wasn't who Zee was. The oddity of it all intrigued her greatly, and it seemed as if they person who sent the letter knew exactly what it would take to snag her attention.
Her eyes turned toward the necklace at last, several leather cords weaved together in an interknit pattern. On a clip was a pendent that matched the wax seal, it looked as if the metal itself had been melted down to form the same seal, the sheen copperish in color. A gift for a gift? Her mind scrambled about for a moment, trying to place when she'd given any gifts that would warrant something like this, but couldn't quite place it. Zelia slipped the necklace on over her curls as if in a trance, humming a tuneless melody, and her fingers brushed over the cool metal of the pedant. It hung on the cord of leather with an odd sort of latch, curiosity spiking, she gave it a small and soft tug.
The pendent detached, metal falling into her palm, and then it was expanding to fit the grooves of her hand, edges on each side elongating and sharpening jaggedly until what she held in her hand was...a dagger, with two points, shaped like one of the lightning bolts that had been embedded into the seal. Her eyes bugged, and her jerked her hand in instinctive surprise, one of the sharp edges tapping the metal of the latch with a tink and before she could blink the dagger was gone, pendent clasped back onto the cord. Her mind may have already been made up with the poem, but this solidified her choice.
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