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Kittyluvver belongs to this character. Do not use her without permission. I'm watching you. |
IMPORTANT: Name is pronounced like "fire"
IN A NUTSHELL: Petulant teenage genius with hidden troubles.
Phi, or by given name, Phirality, is a brilliant, crippled female NightWing scientist, currently working as a theoretical physicist and quantum mathematician. She can be considered a prodigy, as she is only 8 years old in dragon years. She is a professor at University of Pyrrhia but dislikes teaching the university students... a lot.
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"I work hard to give my cat a better life."
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Description
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"Somehow, he had seen from the very beginning that her mind was a hurricane, a hurricane hidden behind blue eyes sharp as glass. Dragons ran for cover when she came around, a tempest on soft wheels, and somehow she had a way of tearing your world down around you. With her words infinite as raindrops, with her storm-fronts dark as mystery and yet pierced by ideas blinding bright as forked lightning—you’d survive if only you could endure her."
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She is your typical young teenage female NightWing; rather small and awkwardly built. She is entirely unremarkable past being exceptionally bony - her scales are a shade of dark, dull purple, yet her eyes shine bright, clear sapphire blue. Tiny silver scales speckle her face like freckles or a smattering of stardust.
But upon closer inspection you'll see that she is no ordinary dragon teenager - what kind of teen has physics equations scrawled all over her white lab coat, forearms and wings? It's come to the point that when Phi runs out of space on her paper or her whiteboard, her own clothing and skin will do just fine.
Phi has a bizzare way of dressing. Somehow, you don't see that many other young NightWings on the campus of the University of Pyrrhia sporting tweed blazers and collared shirts. No one could accuse her of having anything resembling a fashion sense - in fact, it would be nothing short of a miracle if anything she wore ever matched - but she does seem to favor the colors black, violet, and blue. Her clothes are usually quite well-made and yet she sees nothing wrong with scribbling all over them, as she has a professor's salary to throw away, after all. Phi is also farsighted and is rarely without her pair of slim black-framed glasses. She has fallen into the habit of peering over them. Although she can still see without them, she has developed a sort of psychological dependence on them and is liable to go into a panic if they should ever go missing.
And yet Phi's most noticeable physical feature is, of course, her wheelchair. At an early age Phi was diagnosed with a genetic nervous system abnormality that landed her in the hospital for several months. For a while it was unclear if she'd ever make it through alive. But after a long struggle she recovered, but found that the affliction had paralyzed her hind legs completely. As a result she can fly, but not walk. Since then she has recovered some motor control of her lower body, but to move she must use a motorized wheelchair or a complex system of leg braces of her own design. The wheelchair, which had always seemed a little too big for her, is far too bulky for her to fly with, but she can still manage some clumsy semblance of flight with her leg braces.
More recently Phi has developed a new pair of neuroprosthetic leg braces (depicted in the infobox picture), calling them Legs 2.0 (new and improved). Much larger and heavier than the thin metal frames she had used before, they encase her hindlegs entirely and allow her to assume a slightly bipedal stance. They are black, blue, and gray in color, and facilitate movement through the aid of several localized motors and pistons. However, Phi still has a few kinks to work out. The new legs are very slow and heavy, and cannot manage anything subtler than a crashing, stomping walk. They also, erm, have an unfortunate tendency to get stuck in RUN mode. If Phi starts running with Legs 2.0, the legs won't stop.
Phi occasionally experiences episodes of pain from her legs, which are getting more frequent and more intense. She uses a drug cocktail in injectible or IV form to lessen the pain, though of late she has started to reject her medication because she feels that the drugs dull her mental faculties. But through it all, the reality is clear - Phi is going to die before her time. When? She, nor anydragon else really knows. Soon.
Personality
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"Hers was a beautiful mind, as lithe and dynamic as the battle of matter and void, as unpredictable as the theory of entropy, as elusive as the Higgs boson, as pure and sublime as the birth of the Lorenz butterfly from the seas of chaos. A beautiful mind, a mind that danced with light and shadow, a mind that sang the songs of creation, of life, of the universe. A beautiful mind, trapped in a dying body."
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Phi's expression is alternately haughty or frosty - she respects no one but her teachers, and after all these years there are precious few who have anything left to teach her. You'd be lucky if she even condescends to send an errant glance your way, let alone talk to you.
In truth, Phi's mind is just to busy for ordinary social interaction. With an IQ of 210, her mind is always elsewhere pondering the limits of interdimensional travel or the flaws of General Relativity. She can go entire days without talking to anyone else. She can be incredibly absentminded when focused - she once crashed down a flight of stairs right after coming up with her revolutionary new model for n-dimensional toruses. She spent two months in the hospital afterwards, but she didn't mind terribly. It gave her plenty of time to write up a paper on it.
Phi might look like a little dragonet but her mind is like a ravening, growing monster, which must be kept fed with a constant stream of problems to tear apart and devour. She is truly a sight to behold when chewing on a particularly difficult equation or formula - she will go days without food or sleep (and, unfortunately, in neglect of her personal hygiene).
Despite, or perhaps because of her prodigious intelligence, Phi's behavior can be very spoiled and petulant in other aspects. She has a catlike love of cleanliness, and will not tolerate dirt in any form. Track mud into her laboratory at your own peril. She keeps an exact and rigorous daily schedule, and any disruption to her routine will not be well-received.
Phi once had an extreme dislike of physical contact, and is loath to be touched by another dragon - but she's working on it, and has gotten better about it. At least now she won't scream if you go in to shake her paw. That's progress, right? She still avoids contact and emotionally charged situations like the plague. She can be socially insenstitive and inept, and is often unable to relate emotionally to others. She does not deal with disappointment or frustration very well at all: one incident that has gone down in university legend was when Phi, angered by a stupid question, stood up from her wheelchair and shattered a classroom blackboard with a single kick.
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"And I’d nod as if I understood what she meant, as if I, like her, knew how to put my mind away into a drawer when I wasn’t using it. For a little while, to see the world through the eyes of an ordinary dragon and not those of a theoretician. As if it were as easy as just taking off my glasses, and letting the world unfocus into a myopic chaos of shape and sound."
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Despite her academic success, Phi's mind isolates her from almost everyone around her. Even those who have known her for a long time are often too blinded by her genius to ever glimpse the true dragon underneath. She is lauded for her scientific accomplishment, and yet the face that everyone knows her as is Phi the Physicist, Phi the Prodigy. Not many dragons have seen beneath the surface and glimpsed who she truly is.
Hidden under the depths of her own brilliance, she is at heart a very lonely dragonet. Phi, despite how old her mind may be, is still only just out childhood. And the knowledge of her own coming death is a heavy weight for anydragon to bear alone.
Perhaps it is because Phi never quite learned how to process and express her emotions. The loss of her mother at such a young age was a hard blow for her, and ever since she has lacked a parental figure. Because of her genius, she was expected to raise herself, to not need further guidance. And since she has become a mass of contradictions. She still pines over her dead physicist mother Tesselation, because Tesselation was the only dragon who she could connect to on both a personal and professional level. Ever since her mother's death, Phi has had to cope with a strange duality - she disparages meaningful emotional contact, and yet craves it herself. She shuts others out, and yet she wishes that somehow, they understood.
To understand Phi is to understand a strange gestalt of old and young - in matters of all things science she has greater expertise than anyone you could name, and yet when it comes to interpersonal connection it's startling how naive and immature she can be. She publishes treatises on String Theory, but confides in her cat. The duality can be startling at times - one moment she's expounding on the properties of particle motion with youthful fervor, and the next she's fallen silent, looking through the window with the eyes of someone old and weary of this world.
Sometimes, on particularly lonely days, she begins to think of her genius as the curse that has isolated her from the rest of dragonkind. The common folk that she seems to look down on so much - in fact, they are the ones who she envies most of all. She sees her college students, and marvels at how carefree and senseless they are, how they have time to waste and so much life ahead of them. She sees dragon families, mothers walking their dragonets, and wonders what she has missed; what she has never even had a chance to know.
The dragoness with inkstains on her wings may seem harmless and safe in her own superiority. And yet she wishes more than anything that maybe, just maybe, you could understand.
Whatever happiness is, Phi hasn't found it yet.
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"She taught me love. She showed me beauty in the turn of a phrase, the drop of a note and the shatter of silence, perfection in a melody flawlessly rendered. She’d spent too much time with her paws caressing the ivory keys of the piano to live out her days in the soundless lecture hall of my mind. So Tesselation showed me art in the touch of a key, the hum of a string; she placed music in the shuttered ears of a dragoness who thought herself deaf-mute to the rest of the world."
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History
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"She was proud, wise beyond her years and yet so hopelessly proud, and from the very beginning we all saw that her pride would be her undoing, that hers would be a tragedy indeed. For she would rather die young and brilliant and celebrated, than live to be old and decrepit and… ordinary. And so every time she spoke, every time her eyes trembled with that flash of fire that we knew so well, I couldn’t help but think; if dragons were stars, she would be a supernova. If infinity had an ending, it would be Phi."
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Warning: Spoilers Ahead. Much of this has yet to be covered in The Clockwork Silence.
She was a frail, sickly dragonet from the start, too weak even to hatch free of her own egg. Doctors had to break the egg for her to save her, and even then for several days her life hung in precarious balance. Thanks to Tessellation's boundless devotion, she pulled through, but it was evident from the start that this young NightWing was destined to spend a great deal of her life in hospitals.
Although her full name is Phirality, Tessellation started calling her Phi, after the Golden Ratio, and the nickname stuck. Phi was born and raised in New Bridgeport, spending a great deal of time on campus where her mother taught. Her genius soon grew apparant even in youth - which came as a surprise to everyone but her mother, who had maintained faith in her daughter's latent talent. Because of Phi's early health difficulties, the doctors and most everyone around her had assumed that her mental growth would have been stunted as well. They couldn't have been more wrong.
Phi was able to walk normally for the first five years of her life, right up until the fault in her nervous system announced itself in the form of a massive stroke that crippled her legs for life. She had to spend many months relearning how to speak, write, and fly, and made a decent recovery in a year's time. But the catch? She would never walk again.
However, things would soon go further awry for Phi and her mother. In her previous research Tessellation had once worked with raw animus magic in her quest to understand it and reconcile it with the laws of physics, but at the time the effects of unfocused magic were not yet widely understood. Due to constant and long-term exposure to animus magic, Tessellation's mental state began to deteriorate along with her physical health. Day by day Phi watched her mother grow weaker and more incoherent, losing all semblance of her former brilliance. At her deathbed, Tessellation was unable to remember that she even had a daughter.
The death of her mother had a profound effect on the young Phi. Tessellation was given a hero's funeral, as a death for the sake of science was something quite noble to the NightWings. However, Phi soon learned that Tessellation had worked with animus magic while carrying Phi's egg. One of Phi's major fears is that she is also contaminated, and will one day suffer the same slow mental decline as her mother. She is terrified at the prospect of losing her intelligence, even more than the reality of losing her life.
After Tessellation's death, guardianship of Phi went to her next of kin. Phi spent the next year or so being shuffled around between Tessellation's various high-achieving NightWing sisters, with little lasting success. The astronaut Courage was about to leave orbit for the Intertribal Space Station. The surgeon Triage was recently widowed and having enough trouble looking after her own daughter. The oil tycoon Samantha was just not cut out for parenthood, and doesn't contribute anything past cutting Phi a check every couple of weeks. As such, Phi lives alone without a legal guardian even though she is underage, more or less sliding under New Bridgeport Dragonet Services' radar.
To compensate for the loss and distract herself from the unwelcome implications, Phi threw herself into academics. She graduated college at the scant age of 6, and quickly went on to become a full-fledged tenured professor at the University of Pyrrhia. Phi spent a few years pursuing her own theories in the university setting, while occasionally being called upon to teach classes. She found that she disliked teaching, even at such a prestigious school, and became known for occasional outbursts and fits of frustration when the students failed to understand.
Phi is now working against the clock - although she claims to do her work in the name of pure science, she is also struggling to seal her own scientific fame lest she too should die before accomplishing what she was meant to do.
Phi currently owns a fat (ugly) gray cat named Zazzles, who she is extremely fond of. Several years earlier Tesselation adopted the cat from a shelter for her while Phi was recovering from her stroke - and the two had been inseperable ever since. Now with Tesselation gone forever, the cat has become all the family Phi has left. Zazzles is getting a bit old...
Relationships
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"It began as I taught you love. I showed you my eternity, how I pushed away the four walls of my mind and counted out my bliss in pawfuls of starlit sky. I showed you beauty in the slither of chalk, perfection in the whisper of ink on paper, heaven in the eyes and in the soul. I taught you about the light and the darkness, matter and void, the earthly and the sublime. With charm quarks and stereoscopic lenses, I taught you to love the vastness of the universe in all its order and chaos, mystery and wonder. I taught you to look up into the night, and see infinity looking back."
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Cobalt the SeaWing
Put quite simply, Cobalt is Phi's best friend - and indeed, one of her only friends. She can't afford to be picky, as there aren't a lot of dragons in the world who are able to tolerate her, ah, quirks. You wouldn't be able to tell how close they are from their ordinary interaction, as they can be quite rude to each other on a regular basis. In a very best-friendly way, of course. Cobalt seems to delight in annoying Phi in as many ways as he can think of, but it's all in good fun. Inwardly, he's rather concerned about how closeted she is, and annoys her in an effort to bring her out of her box. The strategy is surprisingly effective. He's her sounding board, moral compass, occasional shoulder to cry on, and foil for some of her more sociopathic tendencies.
Cobalt is also very familiar with Zazzles - because to be friends with Phi, you have to be friends with her cat too. They're a package deal. However, Zazzles does not like Cobalt at all, and this poor SeaWing has more than one scar from his teeth and claws. Phi's explanation is that Cobalt smells like fish all the time, so Zazzles thinks he is food. Cobalt's theory is that the cat just has a demon in his soul.
Atomsplitter the NightWing
Atomsplitter and Phi haven't had that many formal interactions... yet. The two are familiar with each other's work, but have not had many changes to get to know each other outside of academia. In informal RP she was the Dragoness of Honor at his wedding, encountered him again in the labs of the old NightWing fortress, and has ran into him a few times at the University. Currently Phi considers the other NightWing a colleague, and her emotions towards him are quite a mixed bag.
On the one hand, Phi is irked on a fundamental level by even the suggestion that there might be someone else in Pyrrhia who could even come close to her level. She has come to expect a certain amount of deference and awe from others, and Phi's not the kind of dragoness who likes being made to share the spotlight.
But then again, it's a lonely life when you publish paper after paper that no one around you understands. Even though she doesn't like to admit it to herself, Phi likes having someone who she can actually hold an intelligent conversation with. Too bad he's already married.
Cordovan the RainWing
Phi doesn't know what to make of this RainWing. Cordovan has earned Phi's grudging respect, at least for her intelligence - because you'd better believe that it takes something special to get an A in Phi's classes (Phi's grading curve is nothing short of vicious). Although she hasn't said anything aloud, Phi thinks Cordovan has a lot of potential and can't quite believe how she's wasting herself - not through geology, but through cigarettes, of all things. If it were any other dragon Phi wouldn't hesitate to let them know exactly what she thought about that (no matter how badly it would be received), but something about Cory gives her pause. Maybe it's how sad Cory looks all the time.
Nowadays Phi seems to be avoiding the RainWing, at least outside of class. She tells herself it's because she's afraid of secondhand smoke, but the truth of the matter is that she doesn't understand Cordovan. And to Phi, not being able to understand is quite frightening.
Lightbringer the NightWing
WIP
Trivia
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"All little things, trivial things, but I began to gather those little tidbits of information about you the way I hoarded equations and proofs. Just like every new scientific discovery, every new theorem and law, brought dragon-kind closer to understanding the cosmos, I began to feel like every little revelation brought me just another paws-breadth closer to understanding you."
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- Currently Phi lives in an apartment at the University of Pyrrhia. Since her meals, board, and medical bills are covered by the administration, Phi has few expenses past buying clothes and cat food. It's a little known fact that Phi has actually accumulated something of a personal fortune over the years, between her professor's salaries, the money her mother left her, and occasional gifts from her billionaire aunt, Samantha Morningstar. She finds no use for it though, as she values knowledge over wealth. Many of her checks often go uncashed.
- If she encounters a character who is not a physicist like her, Phi will likely find some time to lecture the other dragon about their life choices. The natural sciences - coughGEOLOGYcough - are bad enough, but she has particular contempt for politicians, military, government pen pushers, and royalty in general. Professional assassins attract especially vehement scorn.
- If Phi should ever approach you and get going about how you're wasting your life and should do physics, it may be hard not to be offended. Still, keep in mind that she thinks she's paying you a complement. In her opinion, only the very best in the world should even consider doing physics, and if she should raise the possibility with you it's because she thinks you at the very least have a lot of potential. In a roundabout sort of way, she's showing you that she respects you.
- She gets seasick. Very seasick.
- Her birthday is June 12th. However, she does not like to celebrate it, believing that busting out of an egg was not a significant enough accomplishment to warrant festivity. She is technically a Gemini, though her personality is Scorpio to the extreme. Though she forcefully dismisses all astrology as baloney.
- Phi does not like scavengers and thoroughly disapproves of the concept of keeping them as pets, believing them to be lower life forms. Cats, however, are a different story.
- She has a long-standing feud with UoP's flyball team, who have adopted the tradition of kidnapping Zazzles every year and making him their mascot for the championship game.
- Phi also harbors a hatred for the holiday of Halloween, as her house usually gets egged and toilet-papered on Halloween night.
- Phi signs her name, not in letters, but as the mathematical symbol ɸ.
- When it comes to her college students Phi rules through fear, certainly not love. She has accumulated a wide variety of nicknames throughout her tenure as college professor, not all of them affectionate. The most popular epithet has been Professor Persnickety.
- Phi is a fan of enunciation, but occasionally when very surprised or emotionally overwrought she will stutter (very adorably).
- When feeling unhappy or depressed, Phi will sometimes dig out and wear her mothers' clothes- which are several sizes too big for her. If you ever see her in a really big sweater, it is not a good idea to bother her.
The Life of Phi
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"There are no words for the glory of endless night sky, of vast dune-swept solitudes of white sand; the intoxicating loveliness of flat horizon stretching farther than the eye can see. There are no words, just breathless silence in the velvet night as glistering starlight scatters like dust across the heavens, alight with the cold fires of the cosmos. To feel earth below and infinity above, to see the sky and the universe in all its grandeur and mystery, to glimpse perfection. How could I not fall? How could I not fall into the sky, losing my grip on the fragile ground, falling into starlight everlasting, falling into eternity? How could I not fall in love?"
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As a Main Character:
NEW! Floundering - A younger Phi deals with grief.
The Clockwork Silence - INCOMPLETE. This fic is set in Phi's early years when she was still able-bodied. It explores Phi's relationship with her mother, Tesselation, and the events leading up to Phi's incapacitation and Tesselation's death.
The Convergence of Phi - outdated fic
Yours Truly - epistolary
5:00 AM at the University of Pyrrhia - comedy
Textversations with Phi - totally lawls
... and more to come...
As a Side Character:
Gallery
Phi dressed as Rue Skyfire:
.png "Untitled Artwork (1).png (2.4 MB)")
Rue dressed as Phi:
