Name: Alias: The Bearded Lady, Spirit of Punishment
Homeworld: Traumland
Age: Ageless
Height: 7’1”
Weight: 163lbs
Description: The Bearded Lady is a tall humanoid being almost completely shrouded in a black, torn cloak that seems to writhe in the air as if submerged underwater. Its pointed hood usually remains down over its head to hide its face, leaving in sight only bony corpse-like hands with long spider-like fingers. When The Bearded Lady lowers its hood, it reveals a frightful visage: a bald, womanly human head without eye sockets, a nose, ears or lips – leaving only large rotting and yellowed teeth. Trailing from its chin is a large, pulsating waist-length sack of skin and flesh, its surface imprinted with the shapes of agonized faces – the souls of its past victims now trapped inside the spirit’s namesake beard. The Bearded Lady’s slimy, sickly skin is deathly-pale and covered in bloody sores and pus-filled warts the size of tennis balls.
Info: The Bearded Lady is a name given to a particularly obscure and dangerous type of punishment spirit: one concerned with punishing those who interfere with the fabric of time or travel through time itself. This spirit stalks its prey over many hours or days, allowing its victim a glimpse before disappearing to plant a seed of unease and fear in their mind. Once it has finally cornered its victim, The Bearded Lady removes its hood and consumes their body, mind and soul, absorbing them into its beard where its victim will face punishment for eternity.
This Bearded Lady (it is unknown if there are multiple or if it is a singular entity) arrived in Lemuria after cornering the time-traveling witch, Meredith. She was saved only by the timely intervention of a portal, which transported the both of them to No Man’s Land. The Bearded Lady was immediately bombarded with thousands – millions – billions – of new targets: those who came across time and space to Lemuria from their own homeworlds. In the confusion, Meredith was able to escape, and the spirit of punishment now wanders the remote wastes, hunting and consuming its countless new targets one by one …
Personality: The Bearded Lady is an implacable spirit. It is patient, slow and deliberate, stalking its targets and seeding terror and despair into their hearts. This is not an act of malice – the spirit has no such concept of the term – merely a routine part of the punishment it must dutifully carry out. Neither is the slow and excruciating manner in which it devours its prey alive bite-by-bite an act of malice, nor is the eternal torture that awaits those consumed by the spirit. The Bearded Lady knows no regret, compassion, fear, hate or pity; it is nothing but cold and methodical and relentless. It is a force of nature without mercy, pursuing its chosen targets to the ends of the Earth, even across time, never stopping until its hellish punishment has been carried out.
Abilities:– Teleportation: The Bearded Lady relentless predator capable of appearing and disappearing wherever it so please. It uses this ability to stalk and harass its next victims, appearing and disappearing out of the corner of their eyes or far down the ends of hallways or crowded rooms. Each appearance is more frequent than the last, and each time it appears it seems to move closer and closer.
The spirit of punishment wishes to inflict panic and despair as it slowly closes in for the kill over the course of many hours or even days. Its patience and desire to inflict these emotions means that The Bearded Lady never uses its teleportation to ambush or easily catch its victims – it would prefer to trap them in a corner after inflicting its victim with a sense of impending doom over the course of its stalking.
– Tracking: The second a mortal interferes with the natural flow of time, The Bearded Lady immediately and permanently becomes aware of the individual, the time period they occupy and their location. No amount of stealth, magic or disguises can hide someone from The Bearded Lady once they have its attention – though in Lemuria the spirit’s senses are easily confused. (See Weaknesses)
– Magic Absorption: Spirits like The Bearded Lady are beings of pure magic. It is only by lending their power to mortals that the witches and warlocks of their world may cast magic at all. They are naturally immune to any offensive magical energies cast their way, absorbing the magic harmlessly into their bodies. (Universes that blend magic with exotic laws of physics and unknown sciences – such as Earth CH-42’s aether and Earth TW-4’s aelio particles – affect The Bearded Lady normally.)
– Feed: The Bearded Lady is extraordinarily simple in its tactics: it merely reaches out with its spider-like fingers to snatch its victim in its iron grip, then begins to slowly take bites out of them. The Bearded Lady’s jaws and teeth are human in shape, yet can bite through a human skull with the ease of which one might bite into a peach. The rest of the spirit’s body is also supernaturally-powerful: its fingers are like iron shackles and nearly impossible to pry off its victim. If The Bearded Lady were persuaded to lift, it could most likely lift up to 3 tons off the ground.
If its victim is alone or unable to escape on their own, The Bearded Lady continues to takes bites out of their skin, flesh and bones until they have been utterly devoured. If pressed for time, however, The Bearded Lady merely unhinges its jaws and stuffs their entire body down its throat.
– Eternal Punishment: An unfortunate victim that is consumed by The Bearded Lady has their soul harvested by the spirit, where it becomes trapped in the spirit’s name-sake beard of flesh: the imprint of their faces twisted into agonized screams will join the countless others. Within the beard of The Bearded Lady the soul will find itself in a realm of eternal punishment – a private hell within which the soul will be trapped until the end of time itself; or perhaps simply until the spirit is slain.
Weaknesses: In its homeworld, The Bearded Lady, like other spirits, is incorporeal and cannot be seen, heard, felt, touched or interacted with in any way by mortals, except through specialized rituals within which warlocks and witches make offerings in exchange for magic. The only exception is those who have interfered with or traveled through time, who not only earn The Bearded Lady’s wrath but can suddenly see and interact with it – and it too can interact with them.
Lemuria, on the other hand, is a different beast entirely. As a hotspot for interdimensional travel between different worlds, universes, and times, nearly every living thing – and every physical object – not born or created in Lemuria itself can see and interact with The Bearded Lady.
The spirit of punishment is not used to such circumstances – it retains its patient, slow approach to victims, stalking and harassing them until their despair and terror has reached a peak. It moves slowly and deliberately, only concerned with grabbing, restraining and feeding. It makes little effort to defend itself – it has no experience with the superhuman strength of certain Lemurians, no experience with weapons forged from materials that hail in other worlds and timelines, nor even experience with facing multiple opponents.
The Bearded Lady now finds its stalking, harassing and feeding routines easily disrupted in Lemuria. It targets creatures one at a time, ignoring all others until it has been harmed by them, or its original target is slain. It has been known to grab assailants in its free hand, feeding on both the victim and the would-be-rescuer interchangeably.
The downside to The Bearded Lady’s newfound vulnerability, however, is that it now sees nearly every living thing brought to Lemuria as a time traveler, and thus a target to be punished. Its targets, once locked on, can more easily hide, however, as The Bearded Lady’s once unbeatable tracking abilities now detect most living creatures and physical matter, making it very easy for the spirit to lose its mark if they manage to evade it.
While not a stupid being, The Bearded Lady is quite indiscriminate about creatures that deserve punishment for interfering with time, and it is also quite fearless – this can easily lead the Bearded Lady to hunt creatures far too powerful for it to realistically take down.