Has it ever occurred to you that now might not be the best time for when-we-were-muck stories?
Fred's Story: Once Upon a Time in the Buffyverse...
There was a sweet, shy, goofy grad student from Texas named Winifred Burkle. She wore glasses for reading, loved tacos, had a stuffed bunny named Feigenbaum, was a complete stoner as an undergrad, and oh yeah, a genius at theoretical physics, concentrating especially on the theory of creating portals between universes.
It was one of these portals - created by Fred's jealous faculty adviser - that sent Fred hurtling into a crazy hell-dimension where demons ruled and humans were used (and referred to) as cattle. She spent five years as a slave and then a fugitive, slowly going crazy. Also, being missed by the most disturbingly loving and stable parents in the entire named-after-Buffy universe, Roger and Trish.
Rescued by vampire-with-a-soul Angel and his friends, Fred regained her sanity far too quickly eventually, and became the go-to girl for the sciencey side of all the demonic shenanigans the group got involved in. She also fell for Angel and then Charles Gunn in quick succession, and missed the part where Wesley Wyndam-Pryce spent most of the time that his nose wasn't in a book pining away for her.
Fred broke up with Gunn when he stepped in to take the revenge on her faculty adviser that she'd been planning to take herself, and -- after a whole lot of turgid supernatural soap opera and a move by the group to take over the offices of Evil Lawyers, Inc. -- finally woke up and smelled the glasses-wearing hottie in the office down the hall.
Which meant, of course, that it was time for her to die painfully in Wesley's arms, infected by the essence of an Old One, an ancient demon who'd been sleeping for millennia, whose high priest thoughtfully chose Fred as its host. Fred's soul -- so the characters say although there were plans to play with this if Angel had a 6th season -- was burnt up in the fires of the infection, leaving only memories of the goofy little girl from Texas and the cold alien personality of the demon/god Illyria.
Who immediately turned blue, put pretty streaks in Fred's hair, and whipped up a kinky leather fighting suit, as you do.
Illyria's Story: Once Upon A Time Before There Was A Buffyverse...
When mammalian life was just clawing its way out of the ooze, the great Old Ones ruled the earth and a bunch of other dimensions as well.1 One of these pure demons was Illyria, God-King of the Primordium, a giant tentacled thing according to statues and carvings. A famous ruler and war-leader, it was murdered by its enemies and left floating in an extra-dimensional place called the Deeper Well, but the old demons don't die like most people die. Rumor and forbidden texts lived on, and a young man named Knox devoted himself to bringing Illyria back into the world, choosing Fred Burkle as her vessel, ironically because he found Fred practically perfect in every way and felt it was a great honor.
However, Illyria woke to a world where humanity had overrun the planet like cockroaches. When it decided to wipe the insects off the planet, it discovered that its armies and its temple, who'd been waiting for all those years, had crumbled to dust. It -- now she -- was stuck in a human body, her powers a mere shell of what she'd had before, and her mind subject to unwanted human emotions and the memories left there by Fred Burkle, someone she'd had no specific intention of murdering in the first place.
With no home left and a cosmos out there where any of the remaining old demons would kill a fragile thing like her as soon as breathe on her, she was stuck on Earth and asked Wesley Wyndam-Pryce to help her learn to live with what she had become. He was falling apart at Fred's death, had murdered Knox in cold blood and even stabbed Gunn for his semi-accidental part in it, but he agreed to help her, because she was all that was left of Fred.
She stayed with Angel and his crew as a powerful loose cannon and reluctant ally to the end of the series. (All 8 episodes later.) Along the way, she developed a troubled attachment to Wesley that was part Fred's and part her own, only to be socked in the metaphorical gut when he died in her arms as she pretended to be Fred for him one last time. Not that this last bit has happened for FH's Illyria, as she's coming from several episodes before the finale.
1 One of them held nothing but shrimp. Illyria tired of that one quickly.
Uh, so where does the teenage part come in?
That would be the one step she takes away from canon to get her to FH. In addition to gutting her powers, Wesley's device de-aged Illyria's stolen body from its original 20-something to late teens. Instead of a pissy god in the body of a woman, Angel-Investigations-Wait-We're-Evil-Lawyers-Now got themselves a pissy god in the body of a hormonal teenager.
She's coming to FH from right after the next episode, 'The Girl In Question,' which featured a visit from Fred's parents in which she pretended to be their daughter to avoid having to deal with their grief. This Illyria still does that, but... "Hey, Mom, Daddy, so I had a little accident..." Her parents are told the de-aging happened in a lab mishap - which it sort of did - and Wesley suggests sending her to a safe place where she can pursue her studies and possibly work on a cure: Fandom High.
From his POV, it can handle someone of Illyria's nature, it will keep her away from the Burkles, get Fred's face out of his sight for a while, and hopefully teach Illyria about How To Be Human Or Reasonable Facsimile Thereof.
Personality: Um...
Illyria has access to Fred's memories/knowledge -- she refers to it as "the Burkle persona" or "the shell" -- but her own personality, which is the driving force, is hard, cold, and B-I-T-T-E-R. She disdains most of the human emotions her body subjects her to2, attempting to shut them out with varying levels of success, and it's all about I lost my world, I lost my armies, I lost my power, you creatures are scum and shouldn't dare to speak to me let alone ask me to stop eating the Petri dishes, and none of it matters. Really. I don't care at ALL. Shut your face. Give me something to beat up now.
Which is what she projects, because she's extremely proud and hates being vulnerable. On the flip-side of that, though, she can be hurt, especially by rejection. She's also very curious, sometimes almost innocently so, and a keen observer of other people's reactions and emotions. She might not get why someone's feeling the way they do, or officially care, but she's prone to noting it aloud if it's at all of interest. As she settles in to accepting her current condition, she becomes much more curious about the why of human behavior as well, and whether it's something she should try to emulate after all.
She's a loner, but when she does talk to people -- at least until she gets to know them -- it's mostly speechifying about how great it was when humans were "the ooze that eats itself," unwanted (but useful in a Machiavellian way) advice on ruling one's underlings, and frustrated confusion at life, the universe, and everything. She isn't evil, but she's violent, misses power, and is largely amoral when emotions aren't poking her in the side reminding her they exist.
She won't set out to be mean, but she's rude and blunt (though wordy) and in general will act like she thinks she's superior to... almost everyone.
She's wrong; feel free to teach her that, kindly or not.
She's also physically a teenager. Though her memories are a combination of an ancient god and a 25-ish human, emotionally... she's a teenager. Who doesn't even want to have emotions, at least not the human kind. Which means she's prone to the same kind of mood-swings and emo as everybody else at FH, and will end up really needing connections and friends - it's just going to be hard for her to make them, because she doesn't want to want them.
Her first instinct is always to say 'your rules don't apply to me' to authority or 'why should I care' to overtures of friendship, but she does recognize her own limitations and want to learn to deal with being mortal, and she does have emotions; she just fights them. She also has a self-infuriating desire to make Wesley proud of her, so any number of things that she'd normally mock or ignore, she'll do under protest if he says it's necessary for her to understand her new humanity.
2 The soft squishy ones. She's totally down with Rage, and Lust is mildly interesting.
Appearance: Stickbugs rule!
Her general appearance is pretty clear from her icons -- tall, thin, humanoid but with blue-tinted skin, unnaturally light blue eyes with small pupils, and blue-streaked hair. What's not readily apparent is her habit of jerky, kind of disturbing insectoid movements that look like something out of an American remake of a J-Horror flick.
When she's impersonating Fred, she has the same body, but with brown hair and eyes, looking perfectly human, and she can move like a normal person whenever she likes. She just chooses not to most of the time.
Phenomenal Cosmic Powers, Iiiiiiitty Bitty Living Space
When she started out in Fred's body, Illyria had a cornucopia of powers that included invulnerability, stopping time and traveling back and forth through it, crossing dimensions and communicating with plants. But. Iiiiiiitty bitty living space. Illyria's level of power quickly became too much for Fred's skinny human body to contain; she started jumping back and forth through time and leaking power on a Chernobyl scale. In order to stop her from causing an explosion that would destroy both herself and large chunks of the planet, Wesley shot her with a device that siphoned off the excess energy to a pocket dimension, seemingly removing many of her more godlike powers.
What she's got left is:
-- Super strength. (She, um. Smashed a dude's head into powder with one punch.)
-- High endurance. (She's still hard to hurt if you're not super-strong.)
-- No need to sleep. (Though we've seen her unconscious, so she probably can. )
-- Enhanced/preternatural senses. (She can read emotions and health, recognize other demons, etc.) And there is where I'mma toss up some OCD for your consent-based-RP pleasure.
-- +5 to DEX roll. (Shut up, I just love saying that.) She's very agile. She's also fast, though no longer supernaturally so.
-- She has her own martial arts style that gets compared to a mix of Tae Kwon Do and Ninjutsu "ancestrally speaking" and is an excellent fighter with and without edged weapons.
-- Shapeshifting: she can morph from the blue Illyria form back to Fred's body, complete with clothes. Whether she can take other shapes is up for grabs, but for the sake of not sue-ing her up, I'm saying she's stuck with the basic Fred Burkle body form under normal circumstances. She can change things like colors, clothing, and other minor appearance details.
-- Finally, she's got Fred's memories, so all that brilliant physicist stuff is in there -- but it's largely useless because she doesn't understand it and doesn't particularly want to embrace the Burkle persona to try to. That's also why she speaks English and uses contractions but lacks a lot of pop culture knowledge. It's there and she could dig for it, but emotions and all the human stink attached to them = BAD, a lot of the time. Except when she does a complete about-face and decides she's going to explore them.
That looks like enough to make you laugh at the "not sue-ing her up" line, but what it boils down to is she's got about the same powers as a Buffyverse vampire, without the blood-drinking or sun-allergy but also (probably) without the immortality. With a side order of never needing to buy new clothes or get a haircut.
Other Random Crap
Illyria has no scent whatsoever. (Unless someone attacks her with a perfume sample bottle. Which is not advisable.)
She'd be unreadable by most telepaths because she's a demon essence in a hollowed-out, organless human body. (And yet she bleeds. Oh Joss.) If your senses are magical, or you read energy/projected emotions, that could be another story. And if you're a projector, she won't have a problem hearing you.
She is she only by virtue of the fact that Fred was. Illyria's not exactly a dude in a woman's body, God-Kingness aside. She's just a completely alien thing in a woman's body.
*Eyes fellow Buffyversians* She knows Angel, Lindsey, Willow, and Cordelia either on her own or from Fred's memory, and she knows who Buffy is but they've never met. She's also totally familiar with the concept of alternate timelines, though, and I'm not going to have her throw any traumatic future knowledge at your character unless you want me to.
OOC: She's a Bitch, I'm...Like You Haven't Guessed By Now from the Teal Deer
If Illyria's rude, it's because she's Illyria, not because her player doesn't like you or your character. Feel freeeeeeeeeeeee to make her deal with the consequences of the way she acts.
On the other hand, if something she does or says makes you the player uncomfortable or makes it hard for your character to interact with her, please please please grab me, and we'll figure out a way to fix it, divert it, or make something enjoyable out of it. For you, not just me. I am all about the OOC communication, and the last thing I ever want to do is make things difficult or unfun for anybody else. Same goes if I am a dumbass OOCly - let me know, and I'll do my best to fix it!
[Walk it off, Tracy. Walk it off.]