Eliona Sylvan is a character originating from the World of Mirrors. She is a doppelgänger shapeshifter who can travel through worlds by using mirrors as portals. She now lives in a different world with her husband Zekkar and frequently visits other worlds, watching their stories and sometimes participating in them.

APPEARANCE

Despite being capable of changing all her features with hardly any limitations, Eliona usually keeps her original appearance at home and when she doesn’t need to hide it. This is a slightly older interpretation of how she was like as a human, before being given a mirror body. In this form, she looks like a young woman in her twenties, with an average height and chubby build. She has a soft fat belly and wide hips. Arms have some fat distribution too, but they also appear strong and even show defined muscles at times. Her hands are often described as beautiful, with fingers on the shorter side. Her skin is tan and covered in freckles. Her brownish red hair is long, wavy to curly and uncontrollable, with some possible hairstyles but rarely seeing a hairbrush. Her eyes are dark green, big and upturned, reminding of a cat's eyes. She has a button nose and full lips. All of her features are soft and round.

Eliona prefers both long and short dresses and skirts to pants. She likes to wear something with short sleeves, or with sleeves that can easily be rolled up for cooking and housework. When the weather is warm enough, she rarely wears concealing clothes and prefers to show more skin. She often chooses clothes with a higher waistline. Her favorite colors for clothes are forest green and brownish black, as well as various shades of brown and blue. She owns a big dressing room with outfits and accessories for any occasion, and she has a good eye for fashion. She often wears a gemstone necklace with colors that match her outfit. She always wears two rings, one on either of her ring fingers. Her engagement ring is made of platinum and adorned with a light blue topaz and small diamonds around it. The wedding ring is rose gold and has a simpler appearance with a small diagonal string of diamonds on it.

PERSONALITY

Eliona is a kind and gentle person, pleasant to just be around. She can be peaceful and calm just as well as cheerful and full of energy. She is known to be playful and even slightly mischievous at times, but never means any harm and rarely oversteps. Though she is fun-loving, she is strictly disciplined and doesn't allow herself to slack off or get entirely unserious about something. She knows how to relax, but also loves to be productive and keep her hands busy. She is a hard worker and can be trusted to do her job well. However, she is never without her curiosity, which can be a blessing and a curse.

Usually she remains calm and collected, not the one to talk often and not especially confident. She somewhat likes to be around people, curious about their stories and attentive to their needs, but prefers the company of her closest friends and family to a bigger unfamiliar circle. She gets nervous in larger spaces where she can't blend in with the background. She can deal with being in the spotlight without trouble as a dancer, but her natural (or trained) role of a spy together with her shy personality make her avoid otherwise unwanted attention.

Eliona is notably perceptive and observant, attentive to detail around her and to troubles of other people. She can easily read them but won't intervene if she doesn't deem it right at the moment. She finds it easy to sympathize with others and can understand them even if their values don't correspond with her own. She is very forgiving, sometimes to a fault. She is barely capable of anger and it's not entirely clear what would set this off. She has bigger demands and expectations for herself than for any other person, and it's easier for her to blame herself than someone else.

Eli is very polite and always wants to be helpful, with the wellbeing of others usually being her first priority. Sometimes it leads to her being a pushover. She dislikes conflict and prefers to keep her thoughts and feelings private if they would lead to it. She is usually too polite to be mean even in a harmless teasing way, only rarely allowing this to happen. Soft spoken and quiet, she has a beautiful, warm voice. People often find her harmless and charming and are rarely cruel to her if they don't want to abuse her weaknesses.

HISTORY

Eliona lived as a human centuries ago, with that same name and appearance but a different social status: a housemaid. Her human soul, captured in an old personal mirror, was discovered by the doppelgänger inventors in the future. That soul still remembered who she was, how she acted and what she looked like at that particular age she was captured in, remaining alive but asleep due to not being capable of movement. Eliona's personality has been analyzed and was deemed fitting for a new task: exploring various worlds and collecting all possible information about them. Her soul was then given a new body made of microscopic mirror cells that are capable of moving and changing their form and appearance, controlled and commanded by the soul. Reborn in a new era, curious and helpful Eli wasn't against her role and lived a large part of her life like this. Her closest supervisor was the one who engineered her body, known as The Inventor. He treated Eli like his own daughter, less like a robot or a servant and more like a living person deserving her own likes and needs, and the two were close like family.

Eli eventually gave in to her curiosity and expressed the desire to stay in her assigned worlds and observe them for longer. Not only to collect information about them, but also for her personal interest. Though it was a sensitive situation bordering on disobedience, The Inventor couldn't go against it without trying. He submitted this request to the leading researcher of the Doppelgänger Project, known as The Creator. She knew that this was bound to happen, as she saw Eliona in her own past as a child. Discovering a mysterious girl traveling through mirrors was what originally led the Creator to researching the possibility of this and establishing this whole facility. Therefore, she made an exception for this one case and allowed Eliona some more freedom in her explorations. She treated Eliona as a separate, special project, giving her other assignments that required a large amount of time and more involvement with the world she was in. This project was treated with secrecy from other researchers and dopplers, which was why Eliona had to be disconnected from the doppelgänger hivemind database and relieved of her usual observation duties. She still had to report to the Inventor and the Creator directly and her movements were observed and documented separately. She was never off the radar for her supervisors and never existed to the rest of the researching team.

As years passed, she received less instructions, as she proved to be obedient and diligent and never tried to abuse her freedom or the trust of her guardians. Even the Creator treated her like family and got closer to the Inventor thanks to this special project. As times changed, new doppler models were released, new inventors were chosen to oversee their research, and some secrets were left forgotten. Only two people knew about Eliona's little adventures, and as their own lives were moving closer to retirement, even they allowed her to finally explore freely wherever and whenever she wanted. Instead, Eli chose to spend more time with her special family while they were still with her. Eventually they left this world, and nobody knew about her existence anymore. Eliona left the World of Mirrors to start her own life and keep traveling wherever fate or interest would call her. She lived many lives under different faces and left a personal imprint in some worlds that even she didn't know about. During one of her lives, she was given a large house hidden in the woods that she now lives in and returns to after her travels. She lives there with her beloved husband Zekkar, tending to her garden and connecting with nature after growing up in a digitally advanced world.

TRIVIA

• Instead of choosing one job in her current world, she usually earns money on her travels in various ways and exchanges it for her world's currency at special interdimensional trading posts. Her usual jobs of choice are dancer, massage therapist, cook, flower shop or nursery worker and more.
• She can speak many human languages and tries to learn new languages as she travels if she intends to stay for long.
• Eliona is indistinguishable from a real human. Her mirror cells replicate not only the appearance of a body, but also its weight, texture, smell and taste. If she gets wounded, her cells imitate bleeding. Her wounds can be healed by grinding clean (soulless) mirrors into powder and ingesting that powder. She usually adds a bit of mirror powder into anything she eats, so that she can replenish the cells lost due to natural hair or skin shedding. The wound can also be closed by taking a bit of the mass from somewhere else on her body and shifting it there. For example, she can use her hair to heal a scratch on her arm. The hair will become shorter.
• Her mirror body acts as a "hardware" for the chosen form's "software". She is able to catch human diseases but they can't cause lasting damage to her actual body, as she can disable the human form and the disease with it at any point. She rarely uses this or any of her mirror advantages, as she was born a human and prefers to keep living with what she is used to. Some exceptions to this are those that are just too annoying, dangerous or make her lose too many mirror cells, because it's not easy to replenish them.
• She doesn't need to eat or breathe to live and only does it to replicate the human experience. Her main energy source is the light, because a mirror needs to be able to "see" to work. If she is trapped in complete darkness for a really long time, she will lose her energy and fall asleep. Other than that, Eliona is technically immortal and can't die from old age and time, sickness or heavy wounds. The only wound that could kill her is the one that breaks the mirror inside of her which holds her soul. If it gets shattered, the soul will be lost and her body will remain as an empty shell.
• Because she doesn't need to breathe, she can shapeshift into inanimate objects such as a nightstand. It's a good option for hiding or spying. Still, she prefers to be a person, an animal or something else that's living.
• She can replicate a being of any species, as long as she can take a look at them. If she can touch or smell them, or spend time with them in other ways to study them better, her copy will be higher in quality. There is a limit to the mass she can use to replicate something, and the resulting form can't be much bigger or smaller than that. She could turn into a wolf but not into a mouse.
• Mirror eyes can see a lot better and more than human eyes. When Eliona studies a being with mirror eyes, she can see it from several angles and even from the inside.
• All dopplers are vigorously psychologically trained to discourage them from violence. They are not taught how to use weapons and are marketed as peaceful and harmless to the public. Because they aren't machines, they can actually decide for themselves, but some of the most obedient such as Eliona can be easily and deeply impressed by this programming. She is terrified of even holding a weapon and will always refuse to use it against a human, even for self-defense. If given a gun, she will most likely drop it. This doesn't apply to her human AU versions. They are simply peaceful enough to avoid needless violence, but will defend themselves and their family if needed. Original Eliona will use other ways, sacrificing herself to defend someone without a doubt.
• A person was killed by accident because of her. Eliona suffered such deep psychological distress that she chose the most logical way to fix the situation: destroy the timeline of this accident so that it would never happen. She was caught and immediately sent to interdimensional court for prosecution, where she confessed and surrendered to any punishment willingly. She was rescued by Zekkar, who impersonated her defense attorney and made sure that she got out of this situation safely. Though she has her freedom, the court still has its eyes on her. Eliona was deeply traumatized by this event and it took her a long time to recover.
• She has a lot of siblings in AUs, which is a reference to the vast amount of other doppelgängers besides Eli. She doesn't exactly treat other dopplers as family, as their contact was usually limited. All of her human siblings are redheads. AU versions of the Inventor and the Creator are her father and mother.
• She has a dog in several AUs. Her name is Pumpkin, she is a red golden retriever. Pumpkin is a gentle dog full of love and energy, just like Eli.
• She doesn't have children in her original form. Though she might be capable of it, she and Zekkar aren't sure it's possible and what can come out of it. Their child could be technically immortal like them, or it could be a mortal human, and they don't want to influence its fate either way. Thus, Eliona only has a child in AUs, and it's always her son Eirian.
• In her ship with Zekkar, 78, Eliona is the 8. This is because Zekkar is associated with zeta (ζ), a letter of the Greek alphabet which has a numeral value of 7. The letter next to it is eta (η), which shares the letter E with Eliona's name and has a numeral value of 8. Additionally, Eliona was associated with number 3, which when mirrored and brought together results in an 8.
• Her name was inspired by prophet Elijah and W.I.T.C.H. character Elyon. Her surname comes from Sylvan faction in Heroes of Might and Magic V.
• She was originally a Homestuck fantroll. After receiving her new human form, she often appeared as a cameo in other worlds and AUs, or had her features mirrored by other characters. This is how she earned her interdimensional traveler title and a new backstory. It includes the fantroll era as one of her forms.
• As a character, she was created on May 14 in 2012.