Character Profile: Lila

Name: Lila Pachis
Species: Lamia
Setting: Small town, usually modern times
Stories: Song of Scales and Secrets (Ch. 1, Ch. 2, Ch. 3), Second Date, Long Distance Long Girlfriend
Microstories: Haunted Song, Help, April Fool’s 2021, Second Date, Music’s Control, Numbers Game
Sexuality: Lila is a variant of placiosexuality, which ordinarily is lack of desire to receive sexual acts but the desire to perform them on someone. However, instead of straight-up sexual acts it’s the act of hypnotizing and coiling someone she enjoys. Oh boy!!
Ancestry: Greek, Belarusian
Birthday: February 23rd
Sections
Friendly, Considerate
Dark Side
This Happens to be a Fear of Hers
Jumping to Conclusions
Lila’s family
Snakemorph
Camping Prankster
Up a Tree
Ocean Surf
Bath Pool
Lila’s Bedroom
Online
Soft Singer
Family Musician
Romantic Guilty Pleasure
An Educator
Ancient Tales
Demigod or Full Lamia?
Hypnotizing Coils
*Friendly, Considerate
Lila is friendly and somewhat bubbly, active and often up for a chat, but in new situations she can become nervous and withdrawn, especially if things seem to go south. She also enjoys quiet, relaxing time, especially with someone else, but that can lead her to become nervous. That said, while she’s initially often anxious and uncertain, she’ll be kind and courteous if someone is nice and can get her to stay calm.
*Dark Side
Though considerate to most, if Lila gets to know someone for a while, say, has them in her coils and under her spell a few times, she can become unintentionally controlling. She can become callous, disregarding the autonomy of those she’s close to and leading them where she wants regardless of what’s good for them—though she believes she is doing what’s good for them and unaware of how dominating she becomes, even regularly making light of it and playfully mocking her partner. (But maybe they’re into that??)
*This Happens to be a Fear of Hers
Though Lila is a kind soul, she is perhaps easily corrupted by her very own influence. This is, in fact, something she is afraid of, the idea of her powers getting away from her and doing something bad. Ultimately this is a fear not of her powers themselves, though, but of others’ reactions to her abilities.
*Jumping to Conclusions
Lila can also be naive and jumps to conclusions sometimes. She may assume things are going well when they’re not, and she may start to babble away unaware things are falling apart. Even in absence of evidence she may believe things are going in a good direction. She can be overly trusting of others, but she can also be overly trusting of herself, leading her to fall to her dark side she’s afraid of.
*Lila’s family
Lila’s parents are both lamias who taught her about the world and her relationship to it as a lamia. They’re kind folks who look out for her and understand she can feel awkward growing up with them as the only other lamias around. She has no siblings or grandparents or other family living nearby, her parents having moved to a small town years ago.
Snakemorph
Lila has the ability to morph her tail, shrinking and splitting it until it forms into two human legs. This is uncomfortable and she doesn’t like going around like it but in a world where lamias are considered myth it’s often necessary. When she has legs she has skin-tight black leggings on, which morphs into her skin when she changes back to a tail and morphs along with the legs when she changes.
Camping Prankster
Her parents often took her camping in the nearby forest, one of the few places where Lila could have her tail out without fear of being detected. She enjoyed the freedom it gave her and would swim in the lake and climb trees. One day up a tree she spotted a young human walking down below and thought it would be funny to pull them into the tree.
It was less funny when the human screamed and freaked out, Lila’s first experience with how humans would view lamias if they knew about them at large. Her parents had to hypnotize the human to forget they saw them. She wasn’t punished, though. It was a learning experience. The fear she had seeing the human be utterly frightened of her was punishment enough.
This event caused much of her fear of how others would view her lamia form and hypnotic ability, always afraid she would be viewed as a monster. Even when she’s known someone for a while that fear eats at her.
*Up a Tree
That camping experience didn’t diminish her love of heights, though. Between the forest and her parents’ big tree at home she enjoyed climbing up and sitting as high in the tree as she could, close to the sky and above everything else. She enjoys letting her tail sprawl throughout the tree, but as satellite map images became more prevalent that became too dangerous.
*Ocean Surf
Lila enjoys swimming, especially allowing her long tail to float among the water (although again, satellite map images make this dangerous in modern times). She could spend all day floating among the waves, and is also a fan of the ocean. To this end she’s collected a number of ocean-inspired hair clips.
Bath Pool
Lila’s tail is big, okay? Big and long. Do you have any idea how much a bathtub would cost to be big enough for her? Most houses won’t come standard with that. Indoor pools are expensive, probably. At least houses with them would be. She could wash herself outside a tub but that would take a long time to rinse, and she enjoys swimming. So she was able to get a backyard pool big enough for her whole tail to rest in. Unfortunately satellite imagery is an issue again, so she set up a tent above the pool to block visibility from above.
Lila’s Bedroom
While the exact parameters of Lila’s bedroom varies depending on the setting, she often has a big, round bed encompassing about half the floor. Rather than sleep straight down it like humans she’ll sleep with her tail curled around it, often shifting throughout the night and never sleeping in one position or one area of the bed.
Among her furniture she has a computer, books (mostly romance in her bedroom), various snake and ocean-related knick-knacks, a collection of seashells, various dresses and a few leggings for when she disguises her tail, and hair supplies including a variety of hair clips, and she has gifts from her parents, including some heirlooms like an ancient coin from a long-gone lamia civilization. She has a separate, smaller room for recording audio with a separate computer and all her good audio equipment.
Typically her bedroom will have a second floor, with the first floor ceiling mostly removed. A chandelier-like structure at the center lets her hang safely when moving from one floor to the other. This second floor is windowless and more dimly lit. Each corner has a couch, and this can give her and anyone she’s entertaining more privacy in a hidden little corner.
Online
While not a significantly online person, growing up without other lamias her age led her to look at people online and eventually found private chat groups for lamias across the world to connect. She’s learned more than what her parents told her, and they share advice and stories of human partners. She’s not online all the time, but she does some online projects and has a modest following.
*Soft Singer
Lila makes a decent side income making audio files online. She enjoys singing, often soft tunes that are somewhere between lullabies and ballroom dances. Her singing sometimes enters ASMR territory, and she’ll do some rather more hypnotic singing along with it. She tends to make relaxing videos for people, and has considered if she could find a way to get her hypnotic eyes into a video without showing her face—just to relax people further, of course, and not to have them give her more money or anything, ha ha ha.
*Family Musician
Lila can play a few instruments in addition to sing, most notably two family heirlooms, a zither and a harp designed specifically to be played by a lamia, with two hands and the tail. She can play a few other stringed instruments as well, including a guitar, sitar, lyre, and violin. Some of these, particularly the harp, she’ll incorporate into some audio files online.
Romantic Guilty Pleasure
One of Lila’s favorite things to read are stories people write online about lamias. She enjoys romance stories between humans and lamias, possibly even more when the writer is unaware that lamias are real. She has a twofold enjoyment of this, the first being she finds their lack of knowledge sometimes funny, but the other stems from her desire to have someone, and her sadness in being unable to go out and meet people with her tail visible. Even when the stories are a bit goofy she lives through them somewhat, dreaming what she sometimes doesn’t have.
*An Educator
Lila has an interest in teaching, somewhat undeveloped but she enjoys talking with people about a subject and helping them learn. She was a teacher’s assistant sometimes in school, and she picked up on ways a teacher gets students to interact. On many lamia subjects she’s actually rather lacking in knowledge, mostly knowing stuff from hearsay online, but in a subject she studies and takes notes on she could tutor in-depth.
*Ancient Tales
Part of Lila’s fear of letting her own abilities get away from her are ancient tales of wild jungle lamias who were said to capture humans, hypnotize them, crush them, and do unspeakable things to them (she was a CHILD when she LEARNED THESE STORIES and you can’t TALK TO A CHILD about SEX). The idea of her ancestors breaking humans and forcing them into love slavery frightens her, and she recognizes a lot of her abilities could be made just for that. She’s afraid it may be an innate part of lamias, and no matter how civilized they get they’re only a few coils away from reverting to such depravity. She doesn’t want to do that; she wants to use her abilities for good, kindness, to help people relax and feel good. She doesn’t quite realize that her abilities softly lead her partners to love her more and more in what is merely a modern, “civilized” version of what her ancestors did…
*Demigod or Full Lamia?
Ancient stories tell that the oldest of lamias were powerful beings, able to warp minds with a single glance and having endless tails thick enough to engulf a human in seconds. Other stories just say they had more potent magic and were usually longer. However, supposedly when a lamia mated with a human their offspring would be weaker, smaller, still hypnotic but not quite as potent. Demilamias, in a way. And even if a “demilamia” mated with a full lamia a “demilamia” would be produced. Only a lamia with no human ancestry would have these powers.
Some question why lamias would mate with humans if that were the case and then the lamias are usually like “have you seen humans, they’re hot!!” I don’t know, they have their tastes I guess.
Of course, Lila is not a full-blooded, ancient magic, god-tier lamia. The very idea is romantic nonsense at best.
Of course…
She does have two lamia parents… and apparently all her grandparents are lamias… No, it’s a silly idea. Yet . . . one can’t help but imagine. . .
*Hypnotizing Coils
A surprise to Lila the first time it happened, she still doesn’t quite know how it works but sometimes if she wraps someone up enough they’ll be hypnotized without her intending to. This seems to come about when she’s hypnotized someone she’s wrapped up multiple times before, resulting in something of a connection between her spell and her coils that causes it to resurface when she squeezes her scales over them. She can’t control it, so she usually lets people either assume they simply dozed off on their own. Her tail is so comfortable, after all.