zoe benson

[bitchcrafting]

P L A Y E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Your Name: Audrey
OOC Journal:ignipotent

Under 18? If yes, what is your age?: 23!
Email + IM: ofthenightsea[at]gmail.com / of the night sea
Characters Played at Ataraxion:

Amory Felix | fatespoken 

C H A R A C T E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Name: Zoe Benson
Canon: American Horror Story: Coven
Original or Alternate Universe: Original.
Canon Point: Episode 13, The Seven Wonders: right after she spears herself on the fence.
Number: Random, please.

Setting: Have a wikipedia entry!
History:

Zoe Benson’s magical wizarding adventure doesn’t begin with a letter from an owl, but with a boyfriend hemorrhaging to death in her bed. It turns out that she’s descended from a long line of witches, dating all the way back from Salem, and her powers have manifested themselves in the form of what is scientifically classified as vagina dentata.

She’s whisked away to Miss Robichaux's Academy for Exceptional Young Ladies, a private boarding school for young witches. Far from the bustling hallways depicted in fictional magical schools, there are only three other students besides herself: Madison Montgomery, a Hollywood diva,; Queenie, a human voodoo doll, and Nan, a clairvoyant and perhaps the sweetest of the bunch. And all it takes is four girls to cause a hell of a lot of trouble.

For a school, we never see much teaching going on. Their real education comes from survival. Zombies, voodoo queens with a personal vendetta, and a mentor who will never give up her position—her throne—even if it means killing all the girls in her coven.

Madison, who’s starved to find some sort of excitement, drags her to a local frat party on her first day at the academy. It’s there that she meets Kyle. They share a single conversation that night, and short as it may have been, she can’t forget him. One could even say that it’s love at first sight for Zoe. However, the night ends in disaster when Zoe and Kyle discover that Madison’s been drugged and date-raped by a whole crowd of Kyle’s frat brothers. By the time they force their way into the room, it’s too late and the bastards are fleeing to their sorority bus. Kyle chases after them and tries to make them take responsibility, only to be knocked unconscious as he boards the bus.

But the fact is-- you don’t mess with a witch.

Madison gathers herself and manages to chase after them. With her telekinesis, she sends the bus flipping over and kills almost every passenger, including Kyle. For a guy she spoke to only once, Zoe’s surprisheartbroken when she discovers he’s one of the causalities, and even more upset when she discovers the identity of the only survivor. It's the  guy who had  drugged Madison in the first place, and so in a true act of bitchcraft, Zoe takes her revenge by well… basically riding his unconscious body in the hospital. Death by vagina dentata.

You don’t fuck with a witch, really.

Madison tries to make it up to Zoe for killing her “boyfriend” by proposing that they raise Kyle from the dead. They have the spell. The magic. It couldn’t be that difficult, right? Except when they arrive at the morgue, they discover that the accident left him dismembered. Only thing to do is stitch back the pieces, but Madison proposes that they  shouldn't just put him back together, but rather they should pick the best pieces from the other frat boys and make Kyle into a perfect frankenboytoy. Zoe just goes along with it, even if neither of them really knows what they’re doing.

“Dude, did we just marry the devil, ‘cause I don’t think I’m down with that.”

They perform the spell. Cue flashy circle of fire. Nothing happens. Madison doesn’t waste her time lingering, officially done with this experiment. Zoe says goodbye to Kyle with a kiss, and seconds later, he’s brought back to life. The thing is… calling a soul back to a body made up of several pieces of other bodies is tricky business. Tricky in the sense that Kyle isn’t all there in both mind and body. He’s all instinct and emotion, and he struggles with simple human functions like speech or even feeding himself.

A witch in the area senses Kyle’s resurrection, and sneaks into the back of a car they've stolen. Her name is Misty Day and her power is resurgence, ironically enough. She helps Zoe out by offering to take Kyle in temporarily so that she can help him. Fix him, even. However, the whole Kyle saga is only beginning.

Meanwhile, Madison’s presence during the accident hadn’t gone unnoticed. The hospital also caught a shot of Zoe walking into the hospital room when she went in to kill the frat guy. Nervously, Zoe rambles and nearly tells them the whole story, until  Fiona Goode, the Supreme of the coven, steps in.

After a long absence, Fiona Goode has returned to oversee the coven. (As she should have been doing all this time.) She’s a steel-cold dame, who swiftly rids the coven of the cops by enchanting them to leave and forget. She’s quick to reprimand both Madison and Zoe for their foolishness by slamming them telekinetically in the wall.

Fiona Goode’s true reason for coming back is to figure out which girl is to be the next Supreme of the coven. There can be only one, and as the new one emerges, her own powers and life wane. Narcissistic and utterly selfish, Fiona will do anything to stay alive and retain her powers, even if that means killing the whole coven in the process. Her arrival sets off a whole string of dangerous events, as Fiona pisses off voodoo queen Marie Leveau. She digs up the infamous Delphine Lalaurie, whom Marie had entombed for eternity in punishment for her crimes against her slaves. Right after that, Fiona goes and insults Leveau to her face, basically telling her that their magic is better than theirs, and thus souring a tenuous truce forged by the last Supreme.

What this means for Zoe is having to fight off a horde of zombies sent by Madame Leveau. Not with magic—but with a chainsaw, she defends the entire coven and chops them down. The chainsaw stops working as the last zombie attacks Zoe suddenly slips into a fugue state and utters a spell she has never learned, breaking Leveau’s curse in an instant. This is the first time we begin to see her potential as a witch.

Matters with Kyle only go from bad to worse. After Misty heals him up as best as she can, Zoe tries to take him to his mother’s house. His mother is, of course, more than little shocked to see her presumably dead son on her doorstep. Minutes before she was just about to hang herself in mourning. After Zoe leaves, it’s quickly revealed that her intense love for her son is not just maternal. She’s been molesting her son for years, but this time Kyle reacts erratically, bashing and bashing and bashing her skull in a fit of long-suppressed rage, now brought to the surface by his incomplete state.

When Zoe returns and sees the bloodshed, it dawns on her just how messed up Kyle’s become thanks to her magic. He’s distraught after killing his mother. Out of guilt, Zoe makes him dinner and laces it with rat poison, thinking it kinder to return him to death. But she backs out at the last moment, unable to do it. She brings him back to stay with Misty Day before afterwards.

Following the zombie incident, Madison suddenly disappears. Nan can’t hear her thoughts, and after days pass, Zoe suspects that she may be dead. To confirm this, she sets up an Ouija board and attempts to communicate with her spirit. The number she dials isn’t the number she was looking for. Instead, she calls upon the spirit of a serial killer once murdered in the house. He agrees to tell her what happened to Madison if she promises to release him. Zoe agrees. So he tells her that she was killed and that her body is in the attic.  But Zoe doesn’t realize just how serious this ghost is about wanting to be released—and he nearly kills Cordelia Foxx, the coven’s acting headmaster, before Zoe frantically casts a spell that releases him from the house.  But the killer ha fulfilled his end of the bargain, and with his tip, they find where Spalding, the coven’s butler, had hidden Madison’s body.

But the killer fulfilled his end of the bargain, and with his tip, they find where Spalding, the coven’s butler, had hidden Madison’s body. With perfect timing, Misty arrives with Kyle into tow, declaring that he went batshit and broke her stuff, and she’s not taking care of him anymore. After getting Misty to help them resurrect Madison, she goes to the greenhouse where Kyle is chained up, handgun in tow, prepared to try where she had failed before. Instead, Kyle takes the gun from her and tries to commit suicide, but Zoe stops him. She’s in love, you see.

Zoe’s show of power boosts her confidence, and she proceeds to question Spalding about the circumstances of Madison’s murder. He had severed his own tongue years ago when a witch had enchanted him with a truth spell. She preserved the tongue, but lacked the magic to restore it. Zoe, on the other hand, is able to cast a spell to reattach Spalding’s tongue, and when she asks him about Madison’s murder,  the old spell still in effect. He is forced to tell the truth. Turns out that it was Fiona. As a thank you, Zoe stabs Spalding in the chest.

With her second sight, Cordelia sees Madison’s murder when she touches the revived girl. Though Madison can’t remember, Cordelia sees the murder in full. Fiona had killed Madison, wrongly assuming that she was the next Supreme. She warns Zoe that she may be gunning for her next, given that powerful bit of magic with the ghost. Not only was the Axeman released, but he was is now able to interactive the living world.

Unfortunately, reviving Madison comes with some negative consequences. Volunteering to look after Kyle for Zoe, she winds up having sex with him. After being dead for so many days, she claim that she is unable to enjoy human pleasures, and the only thing that makes her feel alive, Madison discovers, is Kyle. She declares that they are going to share him, the three of them together, no arguments. It’s simply for the sex, she claims.

But there are other things to worry about. Like witch hunters. As it turns out, Cordelia’s husband was an undercover witch hunter who married her in order to get inside the coven. He was also working on the side as a hired gun for Madame Leveau, who contracted him to murder any and all witches. Earlier in the series, he had been kicked out of the house when a vision revealed to Cordelia that he had cheated on him. Alas, it seems like love trumps duty, for after he’s told off by both his father and Fiona for basically being useless, for not being able to protect his “family,” he decides to prove himself by storming into Madame Leveau’s hair parlor and killing everyone inside, customers and fellow voodoo practitioners alike. He dies in the process, all for the sake of proving to Cordelia that he could protect his family.

This event drives Madame Leveau to seek an alliance with Fiona. White or black, all magic users are targets of witch hunters. The force of two incredibly powerful witches coming together bodes ill for the coven. And it’s only a matter of time before Fiona kills again, this time with the help of Madame Leveau. They drown Nan in a bathtub as payment for Leveau’s contract with Papa Legba – to give him an innocent soul every year in exchange for immortality.

Zoe casts a spell in the bathtub and replays the memory of Nan's death. It was Fiona, just like she thought. Even before she considers retaliating, Myrtle Snow – one of the witches on the council– steps in and gives her two bus tickets to Florida and jewelry to pawn. Zoe and Kyle have to go to Florida. After so much death and destruction in the coven, at least one of them has to have a happy ending. A true romance. Staying at the house would only keep her close to her enemies, which now includes both Fiona and Madison. For Madison has grown jealous of Kyle and Zoe. In one scene, she hits Zoe with a lamp declares that when she’s Supreme, she’ll make sure to unmake Kyle. They built him, she can destroy him. And Zoe better watch out.

Zoe decides to take Myrtle's advice and makes it to Florida with Kyle by her side. Alas, the trip is brief. She realizes that it’s her responsibility to return to the coven, confident that she is the new supreme. Her confidence is bolstered by discovering that she’s able to perform another one of the seven wonders. After Kyle attacks a homeless man that had lashed out at them, Zoe brings the dead man back to life.

She returns to the coven just in time to participate in the trials to determine the next Supreme. For Fiona has finally died, murdered by one of the many people she’s manipulated. And to have died without naming a successor, a competition is the only way to go.

The witch who can perform the seven wonders will be crowned the next supreme. Zoe is capable of performing five of the seven wonders-- telekinesis, concilium (mind control), descensum (the ability to move between life and the afterlife), vitalium vitalis (it’s like resurgence. balancing one’s life force with another) and transmutation. However, a moment of light-heartedness leads to bloodshed, when the girls turn the transmutation trial into a game of tag. Vanishing and reappearing, they chase each other across the house, but when Zoe loses concentration, she accidentally transmutes herself through one of the spikes on the house’s gate and dies.

Though Madison is capable of vitalium vitalis,  she refuses to bring Zoe back to life. She died and lost the game, and Madison only benefits. She loses a rival to both the Supremacy and Kyle’s affections. To prove her ability, she kills a fly and brings it back to life instead. Kyle is distraught and heartbroken over her death, “You said you’d never leave me.” Spiraling into another one of his rages, he corners Madison in her bedroom and strangles her. He asks her why she refused to save Zoe, despite knowing what it was like to be dead. Nevermind that Zoe had done all she could to find Madison and bring her back to life, back when she had been Fiona’s first unwitting victim.

But as the show has proved, time and time again, dying doesn’t mean you stay dead. With Madison having failed divination, the only candidate left is Cordelia. The witch that no one expects, having been overshadowed for so long by her mother Fiona. She carries out each of the wonders, including vitalum vitalis, and brings Zoe back to life. In the end, none of the girls turn out to be the supreme. Zoe may have shown herself capable of six of the seven wonders, but it wasn’t her destiny.

Three months later, after Cordelia reveals the existence of witches to the world, she invites both Zoe and Queenie to become part of the witches’ council.

Personality:

A sweet summer child…

Upon arrival to Miss Robichaux's Academy, Zoe is passive compared to her future counterpart. When Madison proposes raising Kyle from the dead, she doesn’t raise any objections, nor does she even question whether or not they are capable of such a spell. She just goes along with Madison’s plan, just as she went along with her to the frat party that started this whole mess in the first place.

Hand in hand with this passiveness, Zoe crumbles when placed in a high pressure situation. When the police come to question the girls about the bus accident, she panics and nervously admits that they’re witches in order to explain what happened… thankfully, Fiona is there to interrupt and scrub the popo’s minds, before Zoe can give them all away. Perhaps it’s simply a matter of being overwhelmed from the swift process of simultaneously killing her boyfriend and discovering her powers, to then being whisked away to a school for magic. Or perhaps this nervousness is due to the shock and guilt of seeing just how much destruction their powers can cause...

Either way, it’s important to note this early behavior, if only to show just how much Zoe changes across the series. Already, we see in the first episode that despite coming off as naïve and nervous, Zoe is still willing to carry out “justified” revenge. If she’s stuck with being a black widow, the least she can do is kill the guy who incited Madison’s gang-rape. Or so her reasoning goes. Zoe returns the favor, having sex with his unconscious body in order to kill him.

She’s shown to be morally grey from the start. Of course, killing is not something Zoe is used to, nor is it something she indulges in, which may explain just why she was so anxious when the police came to question them. Her guilt is evident, but she will do what she has to do to protect herself and the coven.

… becoming a bwitch in charge.

As danger toward the coven grows, Zoe proves herself capable of adapting quickly to the situation. After a few episodes in, she’s shed that nervous demeanor for a take-charge attitude, single-handedly defending the coven from a hoard of zombies, while the adults are out dealing with their own litany of problems. With the older witches doing little to help their young charges, she adapts out of necessity and naturally slips into the role of protector of the coven.

Out of all the younger witches, Zoe is the one that seems to put the most stock in the word coven. She considers these girls her family and friends, even if they don’t feel the same. Take Madison, for example, a self-interested, arrogant Hollywood starlet who isn’t nice to anyone. Sure, she helps bring back Kyle for her, but that was more like—“Oh, I killed your boy toy, well, I guess I owe you” sort of deal. But when Madison disappears, Zoe is the first one to show concern, going to great lengths to figure out what has happened to her. She ends up making a deal with a dark spirit in order to locate Madison’s whereabouts, and eventually asks Misty to help bring her back to life. Even when Misty doubts whether she can, given how long she’s been dead, Zoe pushes her into trying.

She doesn’t make a grand show out of helping out the other girls. It’s natural for her. And we see this behavior yet again when Nan dies mysteriously, drowned in the bathtub (as Fiona claims.) Not satisfied with that answer, Zoe looks up a spell that reveals exactly what occurred the moment Nan died.

Zoe doesn’t just consider herself, but the coven as a whole. And when she comes back to take the trials, she says that it is her duty to the coven to return and take her position as supreme. Compare this to Madison who declares herself Supreme-to-be out of her own narcissistic drive for power. She even tries to kill Misty Day to remove competition, and when Zoe dies, she doesn’t even consider repaying the favor and reviving her. Another rival dead and gone.

Her initial passivity evolves into steadfast composure. Whereas the other girls each have their dramatic fits—Nan kills Luke’s mother, Madison is Madison, and Queenie struggles with her identity as a magic user-- Zoe is the one who keeps her attention focused on the bigger picture. The coven. The girls as a family, no matter how well they get along. She isn’t mushy or sisterhood of the traveling pants about it. Zoe just respects the fact that as part of this coven, she is supposed to give a damn, bitches or not.

“All right, you skanks. That’s enough!” – as she tells Nan and Madison, when the former tries to mind control the actress into shoving a cigarette up her vagina.

In Ataraxion, I believe it’s safe to assume that she will treat the friends she makes with the same kind of compassion and protectiveness. Even if her coven isn’t here, she’s now part of the crew, and will stand with them in solidarity just as she would with her coven.

… it may not be the murder house, but it sure seems like it.

While the academy seems to do little textbook teaching, it gives the girls a practical lesson in survival. I mean, when you have a school led by a Supreme willing to kill anybody and everyone for power; or when you have zombies attacking your school without a single adult around to step in, or witches throwing acid on other witches and getting burned at the stake—

It’s a poisonous environment, to say the least. By the end of the series, each witch in the school has killed someone. Zoe kills the frat douchebag, and later kills Spalding even when it wasn’t necessary. Spalding may have helped Fiona hide the body and played dress up with Madison’s corpse, but ultimately he’s harmless. A pawn in Fiona’s game. Nevertheless, Zoe has no qualms tying him up and letting Queenie torture him for the truth, before slamming a knife into his chest. And when the Axeman – the ghost she returned to life – attacks them, Zoe and the rest of the girls eagerly stab him to death. Again and again and again, as though somehow taking pleasure in defending themselves.

Zoe will kill in order to defend herself and the coven, and she can be quite ruthless when the situation calls for it. Her time at the academy has taught her that sometimes you have to kill to survive, and that’s almost normal. Even as she watches Nan kill Luke’s mother, she yells at her to stop, but ultimately does little to stop her.

Unfortunately, Zoe’s rise in power and confidence causes her to become cocky and careless. She’s a fast learner, and knows that she possesses a great deal of power. Even Cordelia tells Zoe that her magic is powerful, warning her that she may be next on Fiona’s hit list. Truth be told, all the girls are powerful, strangely so. And at some point in the series, each girl has the potential to be the next supreme. Zoe is confident that it is her. She even declares it before the entire coven.

As it turns out, she never gets the chance to complete the trials. After successfully carrying out four of the tests, Zoe playfully engages the other girls in a game of transmutation tag. The adults warn them that their powers aren’t a game. She ignores them and continues to play until a moment’s loss of concentration causes her to accidentally transmute herself through one of the spikes on the gate.

When she is revived, she fully accepts that she has failed the trial. (Unlike Madison’s bitch fit)  She has faith in Cordelia in being the sort of Supreme the coven needs.

And after that little episode, she will likely be a little more careful with her magic.

Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations:

Black Widow / Vagina Dentata
People she engages in coitis with die without fail. Cue seizure, hemorrhaging and bleeding out of eyesockets. Exceptions include those who have already died once.



The ability to move objects with her mind. Witches who are capable of this ability can summon objects quickly from across the room, push people across the floor, or even using their telekenesis to break apart brick walls.

They can also move objects that would be too heavy to pick up physically, as Zoe demonstrates when she levitates a heavy wooden bed that she’s laying on. The strength of their telekinesis seems to correlate with their emotions, such as when a distraught Madison flips over a bus after being sexually assaulted.

 
Mind control, essentially. When Madison forces Kyle over to lick her boot, Zoe negates her command by summoning him over to kiss her. In a deadlier fashion, Nan uses it to force Luke’s mother to uncap a bottle of bleach and drink it.

Concilium can be resisted, but doing so places deadly pressure on the victim’s brain. ( < I’d be totally okay with power capping the whole brain aneurysm thing.)


The ability to transport herself from one location to another. Zoe displays the downside of this ability when she accidentally transmutes herself through a steel pike.


The ability to pass temporarily into the afterlife. Zoe uses this power to enter hell temporarily. Obviously, this ability won’t work in Atarax.


The balancing of life forces. With this ability, Zoe is able to bring the dead back to life by using a spark of her own lifeforce, like a car jumpstarting a car with a dead battery.

Unlike Misty’s power of resurgence, the person’s body has to be mostly intact for this ability to work. Injuries are healed in the process, as in the case of Zoe’s skewered organs, but a body cannot be entirely reconstructed. In Coven, we see Zoe use this ability to revive a homeless man after Kyle kills him. Other examples of this power include Fiona bringing a stillborn child back to life, Madison reviving a fly, and Cordelia raising Zoe from the dead. This ability can also be used to pull someone from the cusp of death, as Fiona demonstrates when she saves Queenie.

In Ataraxion, Zoe will only be able to bring someone back to life if a life is traded in return.


Zoe shows several instances of divination. She successfully uses an Ouija board to summon a spirit. When she needs a spell to banish the spirit of the axeman, the pages of her spellbook automatically flip to the right spell.



Though not the supreme, Zoe has proven herself to be a formidable witch. When her chainsaw fails as she’s hacking away at the zombies, she’s able to unconsciously break the spell powering them. When it breaks, the zombies' master, Marie Leveau remarks—“that witch house has got some real power there.”

And more than the other girls, she turns to spellbooks for her other magical needs.

First was the resurrection ritual performed with Madison. Following her first attempt at spellcraft, she’s used spells to reattach a severed tongue and play back the memory of Nan’s death. She was also able to banish a ghost from the house and back into the physical realm. Stuck between life and death, he was able to interact with anyone and appears to bleed when the witches stab him to death. As one witch puts it, “he’s back on the mortal coil.”

However, given the fact that supplies are limited and she’s not arriving with a spellbook, most of these spells will be unavailable to her.

Weaknesses
She's still human, meaning that she possess all the weakness associated with being a fleshy meatbag. She can't revive herself from the dead either.

Also, she's a relatively inexperienced witch when you consider that she's only been doing this for a year. More than that, she's still a kid in a lot of ways -- I mean, killing yourself while playing tag?

Supposedly blessed bullets have a special effect on witches? This is unconfirmed, as it may just be the witch hunters' superstition. 

Inventory:
Bloody clothes & boots.

Appearance:



Age: 17/18