[ BASICS ]
[ NAME ]Josephine Lily Hughes
[ NICKNAMES ]Jo, Josie, Joey
[ AGE ]18
[ GENDER ]Female; she/her pronouns
[ COMMUNICATOR OF ]Hecate
[ MYTHOLOGY OF HECATE ]Hecate is a goddess shrouded in mystery. Although scholars know she was widely worshipped by the Ancient Greeks, she only sparsely appears in myths, and even then only alongside other gods and goddesses. She is believed to have been the minor goddess of witchcraft, magic, the moon, necromancy, and the occult; but also a protector of the home and a guardian of boundaries. Her mythology is fraught with contradictions. However, popular Greek mythology says that she is the daughter of Perses and Asteria, two second-generation Titans. Hecate is sometimes represented as a three-parted goddess- the mother, the maiden, and the crone.
Despite the seemingly scary idea of witchcraft, Hecate is kind and almost motherly to her Communicators. She favors those who live and belong in the in-between places in society- the ones who don't quite belong. She also usually favors women, and many of her Communicators brand themselves as Wiccans.
[ APPEARANCE ]
[ PHYSIQUE ]Josephine oftentimes is described as looking otherworldly. With her cloud of collarbone length curly, honey blonde hair and striking blue eyes, she turns heads wherever she goes. She also fills out quite the bold figure. She's tall, broad, and curvy, although not overweight. Her skin is pale and unblemished, courtesy of a life spent mostly indoors; although there is a smattering of freckles across the bridge of her wide, strong nose. Notably, she wears glasses, and she's rarely seen without her signature wire-rimmed frames. She's usually adorned with some form of dark and intimidating makeup and stylish yet gothic clothing.
[ HEIGHT / WEIGHT ]6'1"/187 lbs
[ PERSONALITY ]
[ PERSONALITY DESCRIPTION ]Jo is often described as strange. It's certainly not a misnomer. She's quiet, bookish, mysterious, and has the sort of stare that can pierce through your soul. She's an old soul, so to speak. She can often be found zoning out, staring out a window, or performing a ritual in a dark corner. She's not too chatty, but when you can get a few words out of her, they're usually meaningful ones. She's not afraid of telling the truth, and sugarcoating does not come easily to her. She's rather tactless. At the same time, however, she is kind to those that are kind to her and could probably talk for hours if she feels comfortable or excited enough to. She's graceful and articulate with her speech. She has few close friends; most people find her abrasive or too intimidating to talk to. And she is, in a way. Jo isn't the most friendly person on the outside. She's observant and aloof, which doesn't invite her to many conversations.
While coming across as odd, Josephine prides herself on her ability to get things done. She's a hard worker and draws much of her self-worth from this. If someone asks her to get something done, odds are she'll do it and do it well. She's very much a dreamer and has a tendency to get distracted. She's modest and prefers not to brag or show off. However, while doing this, she manages to seem very confident.
Jo, however, is not confident. She's actually incredibly insecure. As the result of years of being put down by important people in her life, Jo's inner life is a turmoil of insecurity and self-doubt. She manages to seem perfect on the outside, but inside she thinks very little of herself and is never sure of her own actions or words or appearance. This can often lead to indecisiveness and overthinking.
As a self-identified nerd and a pagan before she was even contacted by an actual god, Josephine knows a lot about a lot of stuff. She can often be found in her room reading a book, outside gathering rocks and herbs for a ritual, or performing a spell in her bedroom. Jo isn't exactly an open book, but becoming her friend is a worthy pursuit. She's kind to her friends and is a fierce protector of them. She's brave and assertive when she needs to be and quite an opinionated person, but a kind one.
[ LIKES / DISLIKES ]Likes: Tea, Books, Ancient Rituals, Dogs, Chess
Dislikes: Dishonesty, Sarcasm, Heat, Small Talk, Large Bodies of Water
[ BIOGRAPHY ]
[ Place of Origin ]Pelican Rapids, Minnesota
[ BIO ]Josephine Lily Hughes was born the daughter of a mortician and his wife in Pelican Rapids, Minnesota. They weren't a very happy couple. Her mother was a free spirit, a bold woman who wished to travel the world and live her life. Her father, however, was a strict and severe Lutheran man who had no tolerance for hedonism. They had married young (a shotgun marriage) and divorced a few years after the birth of their only daughter, Josephine. Her mother left for Minneapolis and her father stayed in Pelican Rapids. Jo doesn't quite remember the divorce, but she knows its aftereffects well. Her father, since he was more or less financially stable, was granted most of the custody. Her mother was only granted summers, and even then only sporadically- mostly because she only wanted just that. Her life plans were too unstable and left little room for a young daughter to care for.
Thus began Jo's life. Most of her year was spent in small, cold Pelican Rapids with her father. They lived in a house on the edge of town which also occupied his morbid business. Jo grew up with a morgue downstairs and the scent of embalming in the air. Her father was not an unkind man, but he was certainly not gentle. He was strict. Nothing short of perfection was demanded from Jo. Straight As were a given, she had to go to church every Sunday and teen bible studies, dress modestly, wake up early, do the chores... the list of expectations was long and grew by the year, and she rarely met them in their entirety. Jo tried and tried to be perfect, but there was always something wrong with Jo, whether it was her ideas or her taste in books or clothes. Eventually, she stopped trying. Josephine had few friends in Pelican Rapids, and she was perceived as a very strange young woman by her community. Overall, she was unhappy, chafed by a lack of freedom and self-expression.
With her mother, meanwhile, summers were grand. While her father was strict and traditionalist, her mother was, well... not that. She was forgiving and took a very liberal stance on parenting. Basically, in her summers with Mom, Jo was allowed to do pretty much whatever she wanted. This freedom baffled her at first, but she soon grew to take full advantage of it. She was still a bit more uptight than her mother, but Jo found freedom in summers. Her mother had a cycle of significant others throughout the years that Jo didn't always adore, but they traveled and went to activism events and did artsy, creative things that shaped a lot of who she is as a person. Jo finds her mother a bit crazy and rather irresponsible (there were a few incidents), but she loves her and appreciates her as a sharp contrast to her father.
Meanwhile, in Pelican Rapids, Jo's father remarried when she was 13 years old to a widowed high school teacher with a son only a year younger than her. They had two twin girls a year later. Jo
hated her stepfamily, and she still does to this day. Her stepbrother was popular at school and had actually bullied her frequently when she was younger, and she did her best to avoid him to mixed results. Whether her stepmother is truly evil or not remains to be seen, but Jo certainly thought so. Her stepmother, much like her father, was strict and fundamentalist, but she was worse. She was nosy and controlling and viewed her strange new stepdaughter as a problem to be fixed with a bit of womanly influence. She desperately tried to "fix" her new stepdaughter, but nothing really changed Jo or her stepmother. They were both stubborn as mules. They'd often get into screaming matches so loud her father claimed they might wake the dead, and Jo even once threw a plate at her stepmother's head as a very angry 14-year-old.
Eventually, her stepmother and father stopped trying so hard. They were still strict and nitpicky, but they were tired of dealing with Jo. Jo tried to go live with her mother full-time at this point, but her mother said no. This was the point she began to be interested in witchcraft. She felt misunderstood by her parents, by her religion, and by her community. She found a broad online community of modern witches and immediately felt seen. Practicing was hard since she could never bring it to the light, but Jo was convinced it was entirely real, despite the minimal impacts her "spells" had. She found comfort in her secret craft, and it was thrilling to rebel. She made a variety of online friends and even started a popular blog for teenage witches.
From 15 to 17, Jo practiced her craft in secret at her father's house. Her mother knew, but she swore her to secrecy. She devised genius ways to hide her hobby from her father, including hiding pentagrams and altar components under her floorboards and in secret drawers, burying things in the woods, and secretly installing a VPN on her laptop to access online communities. To say that she was paranoid would have been an understatement. But all that paranoia went to waste when her stepbrother, Noah, found out. One night, he went into her room to snoop for Halloween candy. He checked under the right floorboard and... he found out. This was very bad for Jo. Her stepbrother began to blackmail her and things escalated from there. First, she was doing his chores, then helping him cheat on tests, then helping his friends cheat, then doing some dubiously legal things for him. This went on for about 7 months, but Jo was so terrified of him telling their parents that she did what he said. Then he asked her to do something that compromised her morals.
Noah told her to strongarm another girl at school into dating him. She told him no. This made him furious, and they got into a giant fight out near the lake, where they went so no one could hear them. Jo was much taller than her stepbrother, but he was stronger, and in a fit of rage pushed her into the frozen lake in the dead of Minnesotan winter. The ice broke and she sunk like a stone. It was so cold that she could barely swim, and she could not break the ice above or find the hole she had fallen through. It was so cold, and her stepbrother had gone to find help, and black was crawling in around her vision, and then...
A voice. Dogs barking.
"Would you like to live, daughter mine?"She said yes.
"Good. Then you shall be mine, and I shall be yours. Now swim, child, and live."Then, Jo felt a burst of energy and heat from within herself, and she swam upwards. The new voice in her head guided her lips as she whispered an incantation to give herself strength and burst from the ice, born anew. After that, the new energy disappeared from her and she lay there in the cold, shivering until help came.
Her rescuers told her she should be dead. No person laid there in the cold water for that long and lived. But Jo did, and she felt changed. A new woman. A bit later, she found a golden amulet on her chest and a black dog scratching at her door. She soon learned that the voice that had guided her was Hecate- the ancient Greek goddess of witchcraft and necromancy, and Jo was her new vessel to the mortal world. Fitting that she should choose the daughter of a man who dealt in death. She found that she and Hecate got along swimmingly. The goddess was motherly and kind, but also just vicious enough to be entertaining. Her new powers, too, were wonderful. She felt powerful. She told no one of what her brother had done but found no need to. He sensed something was different in her too and was afraid.
A few months after this, she left home to go on a "gap year" to the Sky Palace. She's nervous to meet the other Communicators, but also quite excited. Perhaps she'll make long-overdue friends of them.
[ REASON FOR CHOICE ]When Jo drowned in the lake on that cold January day, she crossed over into the boundary between life and death where she caught the attention of the goddess Hecate. Hecate had recently lost her Communicator and needed a new one. She wasn't particularly desperate for one- as a minor goddess with little thirst for power, she had gone up to a decade without- but something in her couldn't bear to allow this girl to die. Hecate's Communicators are often strange, outcast women and Jo certainly fit the bill. Plus, the goddess saw something in her. Bravery, a ferocity perhaps, but most of all kindness and strength; that was something Hecate saw fit to nurture rather than allow to die. Jo had a strong personality and intelligence that rivaled many. If she was right, Jo would do well with the power granted to her. She already loved her own idea of magic. Hecate thought that Jo would be a good choice for a Communicator because of this, and had faith that the girl could someday be something great.
[ POWERS ]
[ RELICS / FAMILIARS ]Hecate's Amulet: This is an ancient-looking
metallic amulet with an eye carved in the center and decorative beads hanging off the end. It was Jo's first gift from the goddess Hecate. It's an amulet that dates back to Ancient Greek times. It's usually found hanging off of Jo's neck or under her shirt. It's imbued with strong protection spells meant to warn Jo of any harm with a distinct burning feeling. However, she also uses it as a channel for her magic.
Hounds of Hecate: Soon after Jo emerged from the lake, a
black dog began to paw at her door and follow her around town. He only had eyes for Jo. Hecate soon confirmed that this ball of fluff was supposed to be Jo's familiar and protector. Jo named him Kevin. Kevin is a very good boy but is fiercely protective of Jo. As a familiar, he is much more durable and can live for longer than other dogs. His presence helps Jo with her magic and makes her stronger.
[ POWERS ]Witchcraft:As she is the goddess of witchcraft, being Hecate's communicator comes with a strong connection to the occult. Jo hasn't even begun to scratch the surface of the practice of true witchcraft, but the list of spells and incantations and potions and
pharmaka (magical herbs) is nearly endless. Each effect has its own very specific process to go through to get to it. Hecate can often help Jo to remember them, but Jo has to try her best to recall and master each and every incantation. Forgetting one or getting them mixed up could mean the difference between life and death. There are spells and potions for nearly everything you could think of, from strengthening to heat to easing childbirth and even to resurrection. Her spells can be damaging enough to use in combat, raining fire upon enemies. Curses and blessings are in Jo's repertoire. Some of Hecate's communicators have been able to raise the dead, but this is far beyond Jo. She can also create some magical charms and items such as amulets and clothing.
As a result of these extremely specific processes, Jo studies and practices very often to master them. Her magic, while exclusive to her, is a specific and old craft that does not come without practice.
[ INVOCATION ]In her true form, Hecate is a massive three-headed woman trailed by barking black dogs. When summoned, she casts spells much faster and more fluid than her Communicators. As the goddess of necromancy, she can raise armies of the dead in her true form. She can cast powerful curses on her enemies and blessings on her allies. Like all gods, however, staying in her mortal form is draining and she must eventually leave the mortal plane.
[ OTHER INTERESTS/SKILLS ]Knitting and Needlework: Throughout her life, Jo has developed a love for knitting, sewing, embroidery, and other assorted kinds of needlework. She's good at it and often makes her own clothes from scratch. She can often be found knitting in some corner or another. She really wants to try weaving next, but she hasn't had the opportunity for it yet.
Foraging: As a "baby witch" in her youth, Jo spent a lot of time foraging in the woods for mushrooms and herbs she believed to be magical. Although none of those actually had a use, this foraging skill she developed will certainly come into use in her tenure as a practitioner of witchcraft.
Piano: Jo was forced to learn piano as a girl and play in the school band. She's good, although it's certainly not her passion.
Astrology: Jo knows nearly everything about astrology. She doesn't quite believe in it, but she thinks it sounds cool.
[ MISC. ]
[ BIRTHDAY / SIGN ]May 7th/Taurus
[ FAVORITES / LEAST FAVORITES ]Favorite:
Movie- The Old Guard
Food- Chocolate
Drink- Peppermint tea
Animal- Dog
Least Favorites:
Movie- Justice League
Food- Pickles
Drink- Coca Cola
Animal- Mole
[ SEXUAL PREFERENCE ]Lesbian Questioning
Member
Hitman,
sassy1085,
Izurich,
Infinite Cosmos,
Duoya,
Mixtape Ghost N,
Rabidporcupine,
Crimson Flame
