#cyphus

I romanced every character in my Cyphus playthrough.

okay long story short I’m writing a fantasy story involving all my friends and this is one I was having a lot of trouble coming up with a design for, so I drew her first. She is half human, half snake, named Cyphus. The name is short for Ithycyphus, a genus name of a species of snake from Madagascar. (The IRL friend really likes snakes and reptiles). She has the ability to produce venom (from the short fangs she keeps tucked away unless as a last resort), and can use her massive ass snake body to coil around things (friends to hug, enemies to immobilize, we’ll see..) She has vitiligo and freckles, much like the snakey patterns on the rest of her body, and a small section of her head is shaved, above her heavily pierced ear. Although she prefers to stay at people-height, she can comfortably extend to about 12 feet tall, with some tail left for balance. She relies partially on external heat sources for warmth, much like her real cold-blooded counterparts. She loves sunlight, heaters, blankets, lamps, and her favorite: black coffee. She can be reclusive and a loner sometimes, but her group of friends knows how to help her shed her past skin and open up into the better version of herself. She has bright yellow-green eyes with slit pupils as well that often intimidates strangers. Her blood may be cold, but her heart is warm!

She is half human, half snake, named Cyphus!

 The name is short for Ithycyphus, a genus name of a species of snake from Madagascar. (The IRL friend really likes snakes and reptiles). She has the ability to produce venom (from the short fangs she keeps tucked away unless as a last resort), and can use her massive ass snake body to coil around things (friends to hug, enemies to immobilize, we’ll see..) She has vitiligo and freckles, much like the snakey patterns on the rest of her body, and a small section of her head is shaved, above her heavily pierced ear. Although she prefers to stay at people-height, she can comfortably extend to about 12 feet tall, with some tail left for balance. She relies partially on external heat sources for warmth, much like her real cold-blooded counterparts. She loves sunlight, heaters, blankets, lamps, and her favorite: black coffee. She can be reclusive and a loner sometimes, but her group of friends knows how to help her shed her past skin and open up into the better version of herself. She has bright yellow-green eyes with slit pupils as well that often intimidates strangers. Her blood may be cold, but her heart is warm!

My second Tav, Cyphus. In his youth he was somewhat well known in Baldur's Gate for a successful tournament career. He kept a low profile after accidentally killed a young noble in a joust, but continued to make appearances when finances were strained.

Without a noble house to sponsor him, he competed with a plain yellow shield earning him the moniker "The Yellow Knight" from his fans.

You wake up. This surprises you. You are not sure why, but you feel as though waking were not something ordinary. In fact, it seems distinctly unordinary in this moment.

You face pitch blackness. A void of incomprehensible depth. You can feel the movement of your body, the steady heartbeat and twitching movements of live muscles, but you see nothing.

Sight. That reminds you. And by reflex, you perform a certain muscular twitch which will have very large ramifications for you.

Suddenly light floods into your perception, and you realize your eyes had been closed. How could you not have realized this? It is a simple thing. Yet, you did not. You feel as though you should be concerned by this, but more immediate matters swiftly seize your attention.

You are looking upward through a distorted view. The light is dim. It is difficult to make out any details of your surroundings. You shift as though to raise your arm, but it hardly moves before encountering resistance. Puzzled, you try the movement again. A faint *plink* sound reaches your ears, drawing your attention to the rest of your body. You realize you are warm. Very warm. You try to shift, to circulate some air, but you cannot budge more than a few inches.

You realize that you are trapped.

This thought causes you to panic, and you begin to thrash as much as you can in your limited space. You beat your hands against the distortion in front of you-what you now recognize as a sheet of glass covering the front of your body. You feel cool metal under and around the sides of your very warm body. You realize you are in some kind of tank, or tube. This thought frightens you further. You close your eyes and yell, only now conscious of your own voice, and struggle as hard as you can. You feel as though your body is warm, warmer than it should be, except for one small cool spot near your right hand, but you can't think about it now you just have to escape, escape…

And suddenly, as you go to strike out at the glass once more, you feel nothing but cool air. Your arm extends fully in front of you, and you take a deep breath of musty air. You are confused. You open your eyes.

The distortion-the glass-is gone. Instead, you are looking out into a very odd room. Metal tiles make up the floor and ceiling, and the walls are all smooth sheets of shiny steel. You seem to be situated in the center of the room, facing the wreckage of what seems to be a row of odd machinery. You turn your head to see more of this strange room, but see only a metal wall with a tube in it.

Right. You are still inside the tank. You decide to step forward.

Immediately upon moving your leg you collapse outward onto the cold, dusty metal tiles, falling upon your hands and knees. Puzzled, you look beneath you, then behind you, before finally understanding. You were not lying down inside the tank. You were standing. You are also very tired. This you do not understand. Perhaps you were struggling against the glass longer than you thought? Regardless, you are tired. You sit up, and rest your back against a corroded metal desk in front of your tank.

This allows you to see the rest of the very strange room.

There are broken pieces of machinery everywhere, with exposed wires and components spilling out of them. Monitors are attached to many of the walls, hanging at odd angles, glass broken out and in general disrepair. The tank you were lying in is in the very center of the room, and is supported by truly astounding numbers of tubes and wires of all sizes running from the ceiling and floor into the tank. You see no doors in the room, no way in or out, only unending stretches of cold steel wall, broken machinery, and the single tank.

Thinking of doors reminds you. What happened to the glass that made the front of the odd tank? You stand, and step forward, more steady on your feet now. You are growing used to the feeling of your body, the reflexive movements of muscles in order to balance and walk and turn and observe. As you approach the tank, you can see no sign of the glass that had confined you. There are no hinges, no grooves it might have receded into. It is simply gone. You raise your right hand to feel the metal edge of the tank, where the glass sheet should have connected.

You notice something odd. You remember that there was a cool spot on your very warm body, and as you raise your arm, you see what it was. A worn, faded metal bracelet, made of a thin strip connected by sturdy chain. There are spots of rust on the chain, but the metal strip itself is still shiny. You raise your wrist to your face, and see that there are letters crudely scratched into the surface of the metal. They make up one word.

Cyphus.

This puzzles you. You do not know what it means. Is it a name? A place? A person? Finally you decide that, since the bracelet is on your arm, you must be Cyphus. It must be your name.

For some reason, this does not feel right. You frown. You squint at the bracelet. It catches the dim light, shining the single word up at you.

Cyphus.

A sunburst flares behind your eyes. You drop to your knees yet again as your head fills with pounding pain. Eyes streaming tears, you open them again to see that one word, Cyphus-your name. But as you think the word "name," a soft whisper seems to speak directly into your mind. You hear, "Daniel." Daniel? What is this Daniel? You are Cyphus. The bracelet says so. Daniel is nobody. Nothing. You are Cyphus.

As quickly as it came, the pain disappears. You are on the ground, on your knees. You do not remember how you got there. You do not remember anything. You do not know anything. You are Cyphus.

You stand, understanding that you must exit this room, but not knowing how you understand this. It does not matter. You move to the burnished steel wall of the room. It is circular, so that there is only one wall. There is no door. You walk around the entire room, just to be sure. There is no door. However, at one of the desks, you find something you did not realize you had been lacking until now: clothing. Sturdy black boots, long tan pants, a navy shirt and a brown vest with many, many pockets. This pleases you. You realize that the room is chill, and your warm, warm body does not appreciate the cold. You take a moment to put these clothes on.

You return to the center of the room, feeling a sense of despair. The wall is all one piece. There is no door. You do not know how to escape, but the need for it, the urgency of the desire seems to press more heavily against you. You spin in a circle, desperately searching for something you may have missed. There is nothing. Nothing but the beating of your heart drumming against your mind, beating, beating, beating, pushing you onward, demanding that you find a way out, panic creeping up into your throat. You feel constricted, restrained, and hot, so, so hot, hotter than you can bear, hotter than is reasonable in such a cold room. You close your eyes tightly and fight against the rising panic but instead begin to feel pain as if your entire body were on fire, burning, except for the one spot on your right arm that seems to be growing colder and colder and as you scream against your confinement and the pain in your body you begin to wonder if this is what it feels like to die,  the biting cold on your wrist against this heat, this horrible, terrible heat as you feel like your body is bursting into flame-

And then it is gone. You open your eyes. The walls of the strange room have disappeared, as have the broken pieces of machinery and dim light. As has your tank. You are looking out on a vast stretch of barren wasteland-sand and cracked mud flats as far as the eye can see. There are mountains in the distance. It is night. There are many stars in the sky. What sparse vegetation surrounds you is brown, sickly, dying. You look down. In a jagged circle around you, there are the same metal tiles that made up the floor of the strange room. The edges of this small circle glitter and shine, and looking closely, you can see that the metal is fused with glass in uneven patterns where it meets the sand of the wasteland you now seem to be in. You do not understand this. You do not understand anything.

Suddenly, a deep, rolling wave of exhaustion passes through you. You fall once again to your knees, and then onto your side, unable to stand. Sensation leaves you. Thought is blotted out of your mind. There is only one thing left, five words with any meaning in the universe: