(art by halk!)

She has no natural body odor. At all. The bacteria that normally lives on a healthy body has a much harder time surviving on a person who is partially undead. She isn't a walking rotting corpse, nor is she a living person. So Iona smells like... nothing. Unless she wears perfume or has something with a particularly strong scent put on her, she doesn't register with the sense of smell. This can be more unsettling than most people realize, until they're standing close to her and realize there is a void where there shouldn't be.

Iona's vision is excellent, one of the many semi-vampiric traits she has as a dhampir. Not only that, she sees better in the dark than in sunlight. When you see her eyes in bright light, they look almost like a normal human dark brown, with flecks of red in the iris. But in the dark, if you shine a light near her eyes, they will reflect the light back like many animals do. But the membrane that reflects light back is a deep blood red.

I mentioned in the last post that Iona mostly has a normally functioning body, it just works slower than a living person. She digests food slower, heals slower (unless you use magic with a negative or undead affinity), etc. This also means her hair grows slower. Iona's hair flows down past her shoulders, but that is the result of 29 years of uninterrupted growth. It will take decades more to grow any longer.

Sadly, this means I must change something else about Iona I've established before. I said before that during Iona's sex worker days, she shaved her pubes, mostly for the ease of cleanup after a night with a client. Given how slow her hair grows, that must mean that she remains bald down there for a large part of her adult life.

Sister Of Battle