Nerodia
(#59067032)
sHE'S A LIVING TASER GET AWAY
Familiar
Larimar Tidelord
Click or tap to view this dragon in Predict Morphology.
Energy: 41/50
This dragon’s natural inborn element is Lightning.
Female Spiral
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Personal Style
Apparel
Skin
Scene
Measurements
Length
2.52 m
Wingspan
1.84 m
Weight
55.18 kg
Genetics
Turquoise
Python
Python
Turquoise
Morph
Morph
Cyan
Veined
Veined
Hatchday
Breed
Eye Type
Level 1 Spiral
EXP: 0 / 245
STR
5
AGI
9
DEF
5
QCK
8
INT
6
VIT
6
MND
6
Biography
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Nerodia
Gatekeeper, Inventor (?) We don't even have a DOOR why is she hERE??? aaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaa aaaaaa aaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaa |
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Personality and Background by ZincAlloy Entering the Runic Mountain Range is a complex task. Someone would have to find their way into a place that doesn't quite exist, keeps moving around, and actively tries to keep out anyone who wants in. So, if one were to make it into the Range, they would expect entering the lair of the clan that lives there to be incredibly easy in comparison. Well, they’d be wrong. The Aequitas clan has a gatekeeper, who can show up at any time, in any place, on account of the clan not having a gate to keep. The tallest peak in the range has many caves and tunnels, and somehow Nerodia manages to be at the entrance to every last one. Quick as lightning, she’ll dive from the shadows and wrap around her next plaything’s neck, while announcing that they must prove their worth to enter the lair or face the consequences. She has no authority to do this, but newcomers to the clan don’t know that. And those who are already clan members have learned that complaining is a surefire way to be electrocuted. Some of Nerodia’s favourite victims have electrical burn marks in the shape of a spiral wrapping around their neck scales, because they never learn. Not that those who do learn have much of an advantage, because Nerodia has elevated being obstructive to an art form. Much of her energy goes into designing ever more devious tests to subject her clanmates to. Newcomers get something simple, such as being shown three entrances to the mountain and being forced to guess which leads to the lair. They can ask Nerodia three questions, and she’ll answer whichever of the three she thinks will be least helpful. Once they can solve that, she’ll return time and time again, with ever more nefarious trials. Try solving a jigsaw puzzle with thousands of pieces, all of them pitch black. Or get blindfolded by Nerodia, and from the difference in time between the searing pain in your side and the sound of the thundercrack, guess how far away she was when she threw that lightning bolt. She even tailors her challenges to each dragon, bringing back the ones they had the most trouble with again and again to delight in their mental anguish. (And yes, that includes a written exam on the solutions to all her previous trials. It’s rather difficult when the testee gets shocked every time they spell something wrong.) |
     
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Of course, the cruel and unusual gatekeeping wouldn’t be complete without some background music. Nerodia has that covered, having trained her pet snake to play a harp with its tail. But not the tranquil, calming music most dragons would expect from a harpist. No, the only sheet music the snake has been provided with for its practice sessions is some of the most intense and anxiety-inducing punk music devised by dragonkind. Listening to it is guaranteed to make any situation twice as stressful, and it’s even worse if you watch the snake as it plays. It moves so fast that with every note you’d expect it to be filleted by the harp strings. All the better to distract those trying to enter the lair with. Now, some might say that despite all this, it seems like Nerodia is utterly failing to actually prevent anyone dangerous from entering or exiting the lair. Anyone capable of fighting a spiral should have no difficulty at all getting past her. Well, that’s what she wants them to think. Every time someone forces their way past her, the expression in her eyes is anticipation, not frustration. If someone believes they can bypass her, well, then they’ve just left their guard down. They won’t be watching their step, and will stumble into one of her many snares. Then they’ll have to solve every puzzle they skipped, all at the same time. And all that while trying to escape from the rope snare they stepped into — the most fiendish challenge of all. Nerodia is very good with knots. You have to be as a spiral. Look at her spiral clanmates, tying themselves into knots that they can’t free themselves from without the help of another dragon. They deserve to be stuck out in the rain until they can solve the riddle of Myrtle’s vegetables. (The solution is either successfully stealing some gradishes or being beat up by Myrtle in a sufficiently funny manner.) Okay, so this does mean that she is objectively useless at her job. Nerodia doesn’t care. The clan’s not paying her, so what does it matter to her in the end? The Droste Spell means the only dragons who could be breaking in are ones who are trapped in the Range, and will thus eventually be welcomed into the clan regardless. Like much of Clan Aequitas, Nedoria sometimes misses the times back in her homeland, before she was trapped in the Runic Mountain Range. The endless sand of the Shifting Expanse, fraught with constant rain storms and tornadoes — weather that was far more fun to keep someone locked outside in. Back then, she made security systems. Electrical locks and alarms to go off whenever they were tampered with, all while under explicit instruction to only do that, and include exactly zero attached death traps. She still purposely left the occasional exposed wire to shock someone trying to disable the systems, but purposely ignoring safety regulations can only provide so much fun. Having the alarms play the sounds of an entire troop of manticore screamers was pretty funny though. In fact, she would gladly design an actual security system for the lair, but again, there’s no gate to attach one to. But that was what she used to do. As it turns out that you get a whole lot of free time when trapped in a part of the world disconnected from the rest of Sornieth, she’s put her tinkering skills to other uses. Namely, making some of the most inane devices her lightning-quick mind can devise. It started with a mane-dryer for imperials that’s powered by someone else screaming into it and only got worse from there. She built a rock tumbler that hides the polished stones in a secret compartment and spits out some coloured sand in their stead. What was once a meeting hall has become the territory of an automatic floor-cleaner that was designed with an inexplicable and painful ring of spikes. And the less said about the juice machine the better. Nerodia could easily make machines that were actually useful to the clan, but why bother? The chaos wrought by her short-sighted designs is much more fun to watch. She did make an electric tuner for the harp that was functional though, that was important. |
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Some of the Aequitas clan have noticed that their gatekeeper does a rather poor job of gatekeeping, especially for someone who invented the position for herself. Chief among those is Vespera, who doesn’t even need to fabricate her editorials on how incompetent all of Clan Aequitas is for once. Nerodia gauges how successful her recents antics have been by the length of those articles. If she doesn’t get an entire page to herself in the most recent issue, then she’s been slacking on her duties of being a right nuisance. That’s easily fixed. All she has to do is gatekeep in Vespera’s direction and block the newspapers from exiting the press and entering the rest of the clan. Freedom of the press has nothing on Nerodia’s freedom to press the newspapers back into the printing press and get ink all over the place. They weren’t good enough to pass the Aequitas Clan’s strict import laws the first time, so put more words on every page and try again! Despite all of Nerodia’s efforts to be obstructive, there is someone who has managed to avoid ever having been inconvenienced by her. That would because she’s never seen them, but she knows they’re there. Somebody lives in the vents, and only communicates through messages carried by tiny metal robots. It’s a gatekeeper’s only weakness — somebody who never goes anywhere! Nerodia would like to meet whoever this is one day, and not just so they can take their turn surviving her trials. Their automatons are quite fascinating, cleverly designed and very intricate. She would like to hold a conversation with somebody who has actual engineering knowledge, instead of someone like Isfet whose idea of failsafes is to build so many traps that even if only one in a hundred works, well, good thing he spent a month building three hundred. But mostly, she just wants to ask them to keep the vents shut when they’re not using them, so that nobody else can think to crawl through them. She shudders at the thought of a world where all her clanmates have become smart enough to avoid her by detouring through the ventilation. When Nagara was first captured by the Droste spell, Nerodia performed her usual gatekeeping antics. Except, while he was distracted, she stole all of his gemstones and jewellery. While she normally wouldn’t stoop to thievery, Nagara brought it upon himself. He was so incredibly arrogant, scoffing and her puzzles, and claiming they were far below a dragon of his intellect and talents. And then he had the gall to take hours upon hours to solve said puzzles, to the point that even Neroida got bored of watching him struggle. She had the time to find some sufficiently convincing fakes and swap them for the real ones, even including the gems that Nagara was wearing at the time. That’s how distracted the nocturne was by what she feels was only a moderately fiendish word puzzle. The jewellery currently sits in a pile in her den, unused and ignored. What can she say? They just don’t match her scales. |
      
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§ Graphics by LuminousNoble, Bio Assets by osiem, Hazeledpoppy
§ Art by BugsTheDragon
§ Art by Ombekende
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Exalting Nerodia to the service of the Windsinger will remove them from your lair forever. They will leave behind a small sum of riches that they have accumulated. This action is irreversible.
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