Masks 2

Name: Yasmine Reese

Aliases: Siren, The Herald of the Deep

Date of Birth: November 8, 1995 (lost to an eldritch god since 2020)

Place of Birth: Rainwalk, TX

Place of Residence: The Permian Sea/Rainwalk, TX

Appearance: Still a conventionally pretty Southern blonde, but with a distinct eau de fish. Siren’s hair is always wet and dripping, and her skin has a pale slimy sheen to it like a drowned corpse. Her gills are always present on her neck, and her hands and feet are webbed and dotted with iridescent scales. She dresses in tattered white and doesn’t blink much anymore. Her entire body is covered with runes which softly glow in the dark, and send a nice wash of crazy over anyone who tries to read them.

Personality:
Back in the day, Siren was a bubbly college kid with something to prove. One might assume that thirty years spent trapped in the cold, dark desolation of an ancient underwater city would have changed that. It did not!
Siren is still chipper and conversational, with a flair for fashion and a love of the spotlight. Cult leaders turn out to need some of the same skills as pageant queens after all! She still feels most comfortable in costume in front of a crowd, and is still convinced that she can make the world a better place. Now she even has a vision for how to do it – by returning the world to the seas, where the ancient gods can return to their seat of primordial power. To this end she is ruthless. It isn’t kindness to let people continue in a dying world. Siren will do anything to convince people of this – be it violence, mind control, or scheduled cult-wide trivia nights and caption contests.
The real Yasmine is still in there somewhere, recoiling in horror at every new recruit and ritual. Not that it does much good. Her reprogramming was done by a god of the old world – what chance does a fishgirl have?

Powers, Skills, and/or Resources:
In Her House in Texas, Dead Fishgirl Waits Dreaming
Siren is now the Herald of Thiotza’ma, The Voice in the Deep, an ancient god of unfathomable logic. She has returned to life to bring the Word of the Deep to the world at large, and to recruit others to her cause. Yasmine now speaks an eldritch tongue as well as English, and can write in a spiky, jagged script understood only by three scholars and one madman. The words have a warping effect on the human mind, and weaker humans will bow to instructions given in the Deep Speech. That or they just really think that giving up everything to join a fish cult is a really good idea! Those who do find slits in their neck and growing fins on their arms and legs. It’s a strange ailment, which became commonly known as ‘The Rainwalk Look’.
Thalassa, Thalassa
As Herald, Siren is a tool of Thiotza’ma’s unfathomable will. Her personality is her own, but her goals and morals have been completely rewritten, and she is little more than a brainwashed servant. As such, she knows the many rituals of the old ways, capable of summoning bizarre and deadly creatures of the Deep World. Most of these rituals require a goodly amount of human sacrifice, so its lucky she has mind control now.
Tied to Thee, Thou Damned Whale!
Yasmine still has the Spear of Oceanus, but the accessories gotta match the look, and the Spear now has dripping tendrils of black creeping up the haft. It grants her super strength and speed, and the eldritch goop will burn anyone else who tries to weild it like acid. Worse, the magic is corrupted. Anyone stabbed with the Spear may find themselves hearing the Voice of the Deep themselves, or even be drowned from the inside.
Tails from the Fish Dimension
Thiotza’ma exists in a strange dimension, a pocket of time frozen when it destroyed the lizard cities and became ruler of the ruins. There are routes back through water with certain rituals, but the only door that permanently exists is beneath Rainwalk.
Always Sharkest Before the Prawn
She can still talk to fish. They think its weird.

Biography:
Siren was only ever a blip on the superhero boom radar – a minor Texan hero known for her role in the robot uprising and not much else. She’d been a wealthy college kid when she found the Spear of Oceanus, a magical artifact of an ancient society buried in the long-dry seabed of the Permian Basin. The spear granted her strength, speed, and the ability to swim like a motorboat, although that last one didn’t get much play in her arid hometown. It also let her speak to the priests of that long-dead culture, a strange group of ghost lizards that warned her of an ancient evil in the ruins below. As bearer of the Spear, only she could defeat the eldritch nightmare and reclaim the temples. As she got stronger her dreams grew darker, and more… tentacly, but joining her idols as a real superhero was too big a chance to pass up over a few ghosts and some nightmares.
Her career was positively received but pretty short. She helped flood Texas and was star-struck by her fellow heroes along the way, but besides a friendship with the Streak she worked on her own, stopping purse snatchers and the odd bank robber. Her moment in the spotlight ended abruptly during Ragnarok. The god below broke free. It shattered the earth and arose, dragging her kicking and screaming back down with it. The Spear hurt it, but it was like fighting a kraken with a sewing needle. Siren was never seen again and was presumed dead.
Presumed, not confirmed. The tentacle mass was an avatar of Thiotza’ma, an elder god of deep water, the creature that brought doom to the lizards who created the spear. Thiotza’ma dragged Yasmine back to its pocket dimension – a lightless world of cold water and barren cities, where there was no sound but its own screams. Alone in the dark, it told her it's vision for the world outside. Petty heroism was worthless - life on Earth could be fixed only by going back to basics. Very basic basics. Primordial level basics. See, humans can blame the alien invasions and the megacorps and the supervillains, but the real­ trouble all started when that first uppity fish decided to grow some feet on a whim and started poking around where it wasn’t wanted. Stay in your watery lane, life!
This seemed pretty outlandish for the first ten years of metaphysical horror, but after that the eldritch god started making sense. After all, just cause someone has teeth in dimensions you don’t expect doesn’t mean they can have good ideas. You can’t have evil megacorps if everyone is fish. It’s just a fact. Once she understood this, once every trace of her old life had been flushed from her mind, the ruins began to change. At first she thought it was less dark, but really she was only used to it now. The impossible geometry of sunken streets and temples suddenly didn’t seem so illogical – at least no more so than the tides. And, finally, a door opened, leading to... did it matter? She had been reborn, and it was time to return. Yasmine swam through, and found herself…
Hm. Where is this, exactly?

Friends, Family, Acquiantances, Rivals, Enemies, and anybody else:
Thiotza’ma, the voice of the deep. Elder god. Friendly fellow.
Robert Reese – father. He spoiled her and they were close when Yasmine was a little girl, but as she got older he grew more distant and impatient. Lost his fortune in the flood. May or may not still be alive.
Cammie Reese – mother. She fancies herself an artist and likes to redecorate the house at least once a season.May or may not still be alive.
Allison McNamara – roommate, computer science student, webmaster and best friend. The only one who knew Siren’s true identity. May or may not still be alive.
The Streak: The fastest streaker on two feet! They used to chat sometimes.