Ophelia_S

Ophelia Stavros is....not your average student. Oh, there's her impressive bustline and plump hips, but that's not it. She tends to get good grades, but that's not it either. So what makes the teenager unique among her peers? Not only is she not human, she comes from a pretty rare breed.

Ophelia is a gorgon.

No, she doesn't have serpents for hair, nor a reptilian tail. There aren't any scales anywhere on her, no matter how hard you look! See, the old stories got a lot of things wrong....because they're old stories. For the most part, Ophelia looks completely human. A little under five and a half feet tall, pink skin, light brown hair (with a few strands that always seem to stick up like an antennae no matter how much she brushes). Her eyes? Ah. Now there's something the stories got right. Looking her directly in the eyes is a bad idea, unless you have a convenient mirror. The sclera are black, surrounding a bright, glowing green iris. They'll also turn you into stone.

Yes, stone. In fact, living stone, and this is an important distinction. Victims of her petrification are not dead; they can still see (although they can't turn their eyes), hear, and feel. There's no motion at all, so there's no way for them to, say, inform anyone of what's happened. They're just trapped this way, until someone cures them with the proper spell or potion (assuming said person figures out what happened) or.....Ophelia feeds. See, that's why the "living" stone part is important. That's what she has to eat. Her teeth are incredibly hard, paired with some truly ridiculous oral muscles to make the gorgon capable of snipping off or taking bites out of her victims. Does this hurt? Surprisingly not. They can feel the chunk as if it were still a part of them. It tends to tingle. It tingles right up until the point the chunks melt away inside her belly. Since she is capable of containing an entire person's worth of chunks and tends to swallow the pieces whole, it can be a very intense, even pleasurable experience. A pity it's so often someone's last experience.

....unless they have some method of coming back. She tries to pick meals that do, having to balance her body's needs with her own conscience. While she's capable of eating ordinary "dead" stone or "normal" food, she gains virtually no nutrition from such things, making all of it basically junk food. None of it seems to taste as good as her proper meals either.

All of this is why she wears the blindfold. Sunglasses don't cut it, you see. She has to block her eyes entirely to prevent turning everyone she passes into a roost for pigeons (or lunch for her). Inconvenient as it is, she has to blind herself with the cover whenever she goes out of her home. She carries the same sort of long, slender cane an actual blind human would, and can navigate astonishingly well with it. She also has extremely sharp hearing, which leads to a disconcerting tendency to turn her head towards approaching people before they've spoken up.

Could she be eaten? It would certainly be an effective way of not looking her in the eye. Don't expect her to be happy about it, though, and beware the temptation to peek....

Thanks to Morta_Bludrein, she has a new red silk blindfold.


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