Elisabete Twain

MOTHER SPIDER

Real Name: Elisabete Twain

Alias: Mother Spider

Title: Mother Spider

Identity: Secret

Age: 39

Species: Neo



Physical Appearance:

Elisabete possesses a number of physical spider-attributes. First and foremost, she is furry, with a short, purple fur covering all of her body. The spider-woman also has five eyes and six arms. She stands 5 feet eight tall and weights 170 pounds. Her clothing ranges from black when she wants to be sneaky, to dresses when she wants to make an appearance. She is also sometimes seen sporting an apron, if coming from a recent baking session. Most people would find her appearance terrifying. This is mostly due to anti-neo bias, as she can be quite pleasant to be around. Mother spider has a broad smile (and her teeth are not that pointy), is a bit of neat-freak (but the extra hands help) and often smells pleasantly of sweet things. She also has a keen sense of presentation and fashion.


Personality:

A pleasant conversationalist
Despite her abnormal exterior, Mother Spider is considered charming and pleasant to be around. She always offers treats to people she meets. Elisabete has perfected the art of tea. She tends to discuss all kinds of topics around a shared kettle of tea, even with complete strangers, making her very approachable. The villain also has a natural ability to read people by understanding their linkscape. Because of the early warning signal her powers provide, she is also more likely to stick around dangerous individuals as long as she doesn't perceive a threat.

motivated by emotions
Elisabete's main goal is to collect powerful and pure emotions. She also is experimenting with the best ways of mixing emotions and enhancing them with ingredients. Driven by these objectives, Mother Spider often engineers situations to trigger certain emotions for her to harvest. The most valuable emotions are courage, heroism and terror. The villain also regularly bottles up self-confidence, small doses of fear as well as attention.

who helps poor, unfortunate souls.
Mother Spider often presents herself as a Helper Of Poor Unfortunate Souls. This involves predicting people's fate, temporarily removing some of their negative emotions or giving them positive ones. She doesn't "hopus" for free however. Help comes at a cost, or at least with some benefit in mind for her. Mother Spider often hints at those terms. Furthermore, she can be very patient, making her seem to have a character's best interest at heart. For example, Mother Spider would be more than willing to help a hero overcome fear and would even spend some of her hard-earned liquid self-confidence just for that one moment of selfless heroism... to absorb, bottle up and collect.

Age discrimination.
Mother Spider is not cold-hearted towards all of humanity. While behaving outwardly the same, her internal thought process changes when faced with younger people, especially neos. She is downright protective of children, and may even sacrifice personal gain to see them safe. She will never use her emotional vampirism on a child. Even when a child is scared, she will rather give them a courage-muffin than suck out their fear. Her relationship to teens is more nuanced. While she does absorb their emotions and bargains with them, the terms offered to teens are much fairer than to adults. In terms of what emotions she uses up and which one she hopes to gain, teenagers typically are a break-even deal. Finally, adults are fair game for manipulation. Spider Mother's goal is to absorb the rarest, purest emotions and she will trade-off whatever is necessary to gain those from adult targets.

Powers:
Glimpse into the Linkscape

Mother Spider sees relationships between people. This is a telepathic ability that instantly combs through every person's mind and summarizes their memories into these relationships. To Elisabete's eyes, the relationships look like colored ribbons floating between people. She only needs to see one of the two linked people to see the link. The color code is quite complex, with unique shades for each possible relationship and mood. The villain might be able, at a glance, to get the gist of the relation between two people, but she needs more time to 'figure' things out. This often requires actually coming closer to touch or even better taste the link, which allows Mother Spider to decompose it into more detailed sub-threads. She can also roughly judge the distance someone is away by touching a thread they are connected with. Note that, by catching a glimpse of a person's intentions, she usually has a fair warning when people are trying to attack her.

Emotional vampirism

Until she touches a link, only Mother Spider can see it. When touched however, the link becomes visible to anyone. Other people can then interact with the emotion attached. Typically, a link that is being touched will move to the foreground of both linked people's mind. In addition to that, Mother Spider can extract an emotion from a link via touch. Visually, it looks as if the villain is sucking the color out of the link, extracting a liquid out of it. She can then store the raw emotion into a container, of which she carries plenty in her pouch. Ingesting the extracted emotion leads to feeling the original emotion. Stored emotions can be mixed, modified with each other as well as enhanced or dampened by regular food ingredients. Note that all of Mother Spider's emotional manipulation powers are completely temporary. Touching a link only momentarily pushes it onto the foreground. Extracting the emotion saps the energy from the emotion for a short duration, usually of a couple of seconds to minutes. Finally, ingesting an emotion only confers the feeling temporarily, typically for a similar period as the extraction.

Spider-physique

Elisabete possesses a number of physical spider-attributes. First and foremost, she is furry, with a short, purple fur covering all of her body. The spider-woman also has five eyes and six arms. These additional limbs give her superhuman dexterity as well as provide heightened reflexes. Combined with her ability to stick to walls and ceilings, the three set of arms also make Mother Spider a formidable climber. And in case she falls, the villain has enhanced durability from broad kinetic damage. Six sets of hands and durability give Mother Spider an edge when getting into fist-fights. Her durability does not extend to piercing attacks however, making knifes and bullets fair game. Finally, like any self-respecting spider, Elisabete can spin webs, typically secreting them either from her mouth or hands. These can be used to climb, swing and also physically slow down people. Similarly to her durability, the spider-webbing is resistant to regular kinetic energy but can easily be cut or pierced. Don't try to rip it with your bare hands or hope to break it with weight alone!


Abilities:

The art of Tea
Mother Spider always carries around a full tea set. With six hands to work with, she can brew an expert tea within seconds. Just pour some boiling water from the thermostat, measure the correct amount of dried leaves and sprinkle the right amount of anguish. The villain is known to always offer tea, and prides herself for providing the perfect mix in a timely manner. The tea set is made out of polished metal, except for the thermostat.

Baking
While not as immediate as her tea brewing, Mother Spider's pastries are also a work of art. Each one is expertly crafted, usually with a very specific goal in mind. Like with her tea, the patisseries are readily available in her bag and always enhanced with some emotional ingredient. Her specialty are Paris macarons. These come in different flavors, and occasionally sport spider legs. She packs them in shock-absorbent tupperware of varying sizes and shapes. Ample supplies of paper bags for handing out the sweets are also stashed.

Voice acting
Ranging young suave jazz singing voice to motherly elder voice passing through creepy spider-monster, Elisabete's vocal range is impressive. While not quite able to reach vocal mimicry, she can nevertheless emulate both male and female voices of most people she meets after some practice. Add to that some minor training as an actress, and you've got someone who can fool quite a few people.


Weapons/Equipment:

Tea and pastries.

History:

Elisabete grew up on the French island of the Reunion. As Créoles, her family were officially citizens of France. Her father Marcel was one of the best confectioneur et patissier of the island. His exquisite pastries and chocolates soon attracted the attention of Parisian chefs. When Elisabete turned ten, the large extended family moved to the mainland where Marcel took a position within a renowned restaurant. While not a chef for the full menu, he was in charge of desserts within the Paris cuisine. His family sometimes helped by running errands. He also taught teenager Elisabete how to prepare some of his old and new specialties, like the refined Paris Macarons.

But as she grew into a woman, Elisabete expressed interest in a completely different career. She wanted to become an actress. After a few grueling years, she struggled to find her place within the Parisian scene. Ignoring her parents' plea to stay, Elisabete tried her chance in New York. She progressed somewhat better within the big apple. Her career stagnated however as she fell in love with an African-American called Tom Twain. The two conceived a child, a baby boy they named Henry after her grandfather.

The small family moved away from New York City to a small town near Buffalo as Tom's mother fell sick. Away from the spotlight, Elisabete went back somewhat to her family traditions. She and Tom set up a small bakery café in the neighborhood. The town had never tasted such exquisite treats, and Marcel occasionally came to visit and teach a few new culinary recipes. Life slowed down into a comfortable lull, punctuated only by Henry's growth bursts.

Everything changed however as the little boy turned twelve. He was worried about becoming very hairy. Elisabete wrote off the fear, assuming he was just hitting puberty early. But what started off as a little hair turned very quickly into a more intense transformation. The boy grew fangs, purple fur and a few extra limbs overnight. Understandably, waking up like this, he panicked. Running outside, it didn't take very long for anti-neos to home in on the young boy. A fight ensued and Henry died. This triggered Elisabete to transform as well. The mother spider however, was able to escape.

Hurt, barely recognizable and chased down, Elisabete fled from her town, abandoning Tom and the bakery. She returned to New York, joining the ever-growing population of neos hiding underground. As the mutant learned about her own powers, she gained allies and enemies. This hardened the spider. She eventually grew in influence and found home in an abandoned bread factory from the end of the nineteenth century.

Recently, Mother Spider has noticed an influx of neos with strange links. Translucent, as if far away, the links suggested that these people had little acquaintances in their immediate surrounding. It didn't take her long to figure out that these strange visitors were in need of help in a world that was hostile to their powers. She is actively seeking them out to understand what emotions they may bring with them.

Weaknesses:

Limits to the Linkscape
Mother Spider gets a glimpse into people's emotions towards her before these even turn into conscious acts. This gives her a head start in predicting attacks. Such a "spider-sense" comes with some limitations however. It does not apply to machines or reflexes. This is because neither lead to an emotional flash that may give the spider an advance warning.

Clearly a neo
In a world where not being human leads to pain and isolation, a spider-lady stands out. Not only that, but most regular humans will find the zoomorph disgusting, despite her best efforts to seem charming.

Mother's got enemies
Mother Spider has been around for a long time. People sometimes seek her counsel, giving her credit for fortune-telling from the Linkscape. The fact that she sells powerful emotions in a bottle also make her a valuable resource to know of. But prospective clients can quickly turn into powerful nemeses when things go wrong, or when you help the competition. The government is looking for Mother Spider, mostly for her innate ability to track mostly anybody down. A number of mafia and other shady characters also have good reasons to search for the spider.


Other Information: I have applied for this character on one other site in the past. A lot of the powers/personality are identical.

OOC Information
OOC Name: Empathy
Character color: Purple
Group title: Mother knows best!
Face Claim: Muffett from Undertale