For tropes relating to other ponies in this fanfic, see the Triptych Continuum page, as well as the Anchor Foal page for tropes relating to Fleur.
Centorea "Cerea" Shianus
A female Centaur liminal from the world of Daily Life with Monster Girl, somehow transplanted to Menajeria by an unknown force... to everyone's regret.- Abnormal Limb Rotation Range: All centaurs have skeletal arrangements that make them much more flexible than either humans or horses, as a result of the basic biological needs for a creature with their distinctive physical arrangement to be able to tend to its own body.
- Abusive Parents: Cerea's mother was cold, harsh and demanding to the point of leaving Centorea with lifelong emotional scars. Though Cerea ultimately figures out why her mother was so strict with her, she ultimately decides that part of healing is cutting off all emotional ties with her.
- Accentuate the Negative: A manifestation of Cerea's emotionally abusive childhood is that she is extremely quick to see the faults in anything she did, and always emphasizes her failures over her sucesses.
- Adaptational Sexuality: Closer to Adaptational Sexual Confusion. Most of Cerea knows about her own deepest desires is that she's never been attracted to centaur stallions (and has felt like that means there's something wrong with her, as every other mare seems to manage). She's never actively pursued a relationship with a female, but feels that she was closed out of the Gay Romantic Phase of herd life and seems to regret not having gotten to participate in 'the time for love'. The most she ever felt towards any girl in the household was sisterly affection. And she certainly isn't feeling anything towards ponies. Ultimately, there's a suggestion that what she's looking for is anyone who'll both love and accept her, and her eyes may have initially fallen on Kimihito just because he was the first person who listened to her.
- Anti-Magic: Anything plastic that Cerea brought with her from her version of Earth is a magical nullifier on Menajeria. She only brought a couple of hairpins and, of course, her plastic sword, but the former give her high protection if not immunity to mind-altering effects so long as she's wearing them, whilst the sword can be used to nullify active spells with a touch and negate a Menajerian's ability to use their magic so long as it's in physical contact with them.
- Big-Breast Pride: Cerea's relationship with her massive bosom is extremely complicated. On the one hand, buxomness is traditionally a sign of beauty amongst centaurs, and Cerea knows that she's on the healthy end of the scale even by her people's standards, making it one of the few sources of pride in herself that she can take (indeed, when she finally sees
how big female minotaurs' breasts are, she immediately desires to be even bigger). On the other hand, she's been subjected to a lot of body-shaming from human women envious of her endowments as well as the lechery of many human men, which has given her a strong negative impression of being busty as well. - Big Eater: As in canon, Cerea's massive size and high metabolic rate means she needs to consume proportionally massive amounts of food.
- Boob-Based Gag: The massive size of Cerea's bosom (along with the fact she has permanent breasts in the first place) is often played for comedy during the events of the story. At the end, it starts being played for heartwarming, too, as Nightwatch finds that these two parts of her body are the ones that "nuzzle back".
- Broken Bird: Between the abuse she took from her mother growing up, the emotional pressure cooker of the Kurusu house, and the stress of finding herself in Equestria, Cerea is quite emotionally fragile for most of the story.
- Cute Monster Girl: Zigzagged. Humans find her attractive enough, but the combination of features makes her an Eldritch Abomination to the completely nonhumanoid ponies of Menajerie.
- Friendless Background: It's made very clear that Cerea had no friends of any kind prior to coming to Equestria, with the closest she had being her rivals and housemates.
- Humanoid Abomination: The presence of Cerea's human-like upper torso in place of a pony head makes her a visually terrifying and grotesque monster to ponies. It's only the fact she looks so much like a pony below the waist that allows many ponies to even tolerate being in her presence long enough to realize that she's harmless.
- Gentle Giant: At 200.66 centimeters tall, Cerea is about on par, heightwise, with Celestia, and is by nature a docile and inoffensive girl who has no desire to provoke strife.
- Glass Cannon: By comparison to an earth pony fighter; a combination of sheer bulk and centaur musculature means that she is stronger than all but the most powerful of earth ponies, but without magic to reinforce it, her body is relatively fragile. She can hit harder than almost anypony, but blows an earth pony might shrug off could cripple or kill her.
- Hidden Depths: As every knight is expected to have at least one artistic skill, Cerea knows how to sketch. (She doesn't think much of her own capabilities there, frequently scrapping efforts and starting over.) Centaur vocal chord flexibility also gives her an impressive octave range for singing — but that's true of the entire species. Additionally, she possesses enough blacksmith skills to make and maintain armor, and her herd's need to maximize the gap's food resources gives her a background in agronomy — which is something of a mixed bag, talentwise, due to Equestria simultaneously lacking much understanding of agronomy whilst also being able to "brute force" productivity with the Cornucopia Effect of earth pony magic.
- Humans Are Ugly: It's noted that the visual problem ponies have with Cerea is due to her human-like upper torso, which they regard as hideous and monstrous-looking, especially when spliced with an oversized but attractive mare's body. The description of what a human looks like makes a pony go green, whilst a sketch of Papi is practically a visual Brown Note to the pegasus who sees it.
- Hyperactive Metabolism: Downplayed, but eating meat can augment Cerea's already quite impressive natural healing rate, to the point that part of her treatment after escaping Tartarus is being fed a specific diet.
- Lightning Bruiser: Despite her massive stature, equaling that of the princesses, Cerea is also noted to be an incredible sprinter who is at the very peak of pony foot speed, with only pegasi on the wing being noted as capable of widely outpacing her. Likewise, through a combination of centaur muscle arrangements and sheer mass, her strength level is on the upper tiers of earth pony capabilities, though she lacks earth pony durability to go with it.
- Lovecraftian Superpower: The Anti-Magic attributes of Cerea's plastic sword, which are a concept that Menajeria had never even considered outside of fiction before she arrived and which plays no small part in the hostility she receives.
- Lunacy: As in canon, the full moon triggers a massive hormone rush in Cerea, which has the positive side effect of amplifying her sensory abilities and the negative side effect of making her extremely emotionally unstable. To her chagrin, even a Princess-crafted illusion of the full moon can put her on edge.
- Mermaid Problem: A variant; whilst there isn't any question as to where Cerea's "parts" are, the fact is that her anatomical structure means mating with a non-centaur poses some inherent difficulties, both from physical interaction and from mental and/or social reactions. For humans, it's the fact that to mate with her means you need to be willing to "mount" a horse. For ponies, whilst the "business end" is normal enough, there's the issue of the freakish-looking secondary upper torso.
- The Nose Knows: As part of her Super-Senses, Cerea's olfactory abilities are incredibly potent even by equine standards. She is capable of identifying emotions and locations by scent, and even tracking ponies by their scent. When her hormones are stirred up by a full moon, she can identify a pony's gender, the use of fur dye, and the color of said fur dye several days after the fact. That said, it's noted that she has limits; she isn't a bloodhound in terms of sensitivity, and scenting emotions is only part of the problem with communicating.
- No Social Skills: Due to her emotionally abusive mother and extreme social isolation, Cerea is notably terrible at interacting with others.
- Our Centaurs Are Different: Centaur liminals resemble humans from the waist up, save for having flexible, fur-covered ears halfway between a horse's ear and an elongated, pointy, "elf" ear, and horses from the waist down. They also have a pronounced case of Sexy Dimorphism going on; females are highly intelligent, cultured and sophisticated individuals renowned for their beauty (and massive bosoms), whilst males are burly Gonks who are Dumb Muscle to the point of being little more than drunken, sex-crazed animals who are kept segregated from the females except during breeding season. Cerea herself has wondered if the two aren't actually separate species of One-Gender Race who can interbreed in a Gender Equals Breed fashion, or if the females aren't evolving into possessing parthenogenesis because the males are that repulsive even to the females. Their sense of smell is well beyond the human norm, surpassing even bears in its acuity. They're also double-jointed across most of their bodies (something which is necessary just to reach the far end of their own backs), have extremely flexible vocal chords, and at least a few internal organs are duplicated between the two torsos.
- Paradox Person: Just for starters, Cerea's status as an Un-Sorcerer makes her this, as it's a basic fact of life on Menajeria that being sapient means having magic. By the story's end, Cerea has taken it further by being an Un-Sorcerer who has gained magic... in the form of being to actively wield Anti-Magic, by summoning her plastic sword and hairpins whenever she needs them. It's lampshaded that this makes no sense, and the working theory is that it's a side-effect of being "forcefed" so much Wild Magic when she killed Tirek by stabbing him to death with her plastic sword. This can also be viewed as a magical talent for universal countermagic — with a range and focus restriction.
- The Perfectionist: Cerea's need to be absolutely perfect at whatever she tries is Played for Drama as a consequence of her mother's abuse.
- Picky Eater: As in canon, Cerea's superlative sense of taste gives her a natural aversion to overstimulation. It's deconstructed in that this supercharged sense of taste also limits how much food Cerea can actually bring herself to eat on Earth — for example, she's an omnivore who lives on a herbivorous diet by choice because she can't stand all the hormones and medicinal chemicals lingering in human-raised meat, resulting in her throwing up when she tries. Whilst Cornucopia-grown vegetation does strike her as "bland", she also finds it more palatable even than Earth vegetation, as it lacks the fertilizer and weedkiller aftertastes. Then she discovers the lack of chemical supplements makes Menajerian meat perfectly edible, and expands her diet to include it.
- Super-Senses: Cerea has extremely acute senses of taste, hearing and scent, with these being at the minimum comparable to the equines around her and at their far end exceeding their natural abilities.
- Un-Sorcerer: Cerea stands out as being the only being in Menajeria to be completely devoid of magic, to the extent she can even safely handle platinum, which normally serves as a thaumic absorber: small amounts of untreated metal can weaken any normal sapient who comes into contact with it, and large quantities can do so at a distance. This changes after she kills Tirek, where much of the Wild Magic stored in the Menajerian centaur's body is forced into her own. It causes her to develop a Cutie Mark and her own Talent, which is the ability to summon her Anti-Magic sword to her side at-will.
- Voice Changeling: Cerea's vocal range gives her a natural talent for audio mimicry, to the point that she can readily mimic other beings she's heard with startling accuracy. She even gains the ability to mimic the voices of ponies as she slowly masters Equestrian.
- Weight Woe: Cerea has a lot of hangups about her body, but her reaction to people trying to get measurements of her weight is outright phobic.
- Ye Olde Butchered English: Initially, Cerea speaks in a very archaic and overly formalized manner, which is attributed to a mixture of nerves, a desire to be polite, and reading too many badly written historical romance books. The end result is enough to make Luna, herself notorious for speaking in an archaic faction, scold Cerea and tell her to use a more up-to-date set of vocal mannerisms, after which the trait is largely dropped. Nightwatch is the first pony to recognize lapses into formality as a sign that Cerea is upset.
Nightwatch
A female Pegasus who serves in the Lunar's guards. Cerea's primary guard during her first days in Canterlot, and also the centaur's first friend.Barding
A male Earth Pony who serves as the official palace blacksmith. An example of a pony falling deeply into their Cutie Mark, Barding is fixated upon metalwork to the functional exclusion of everything else. Which makes it quite ironic that he becomes Cerea's second friend.- Character Development: Ironically, interacting with Cerea, even though it's primarily through her ability to expose him to the metallurgical techniques and compounds of a foreign culture, actually manages to slowly bring him out of his Mark. Highlit in chapter 85, Insurgent, which sees Barding noting such facts as that he used to be a really big hoofball fan, but somehow he just... let that get away from him. And now he cares about it again, if largely because he wants to share it with Cerea.
- Defeat Means Friendship: An odd variation; initially, Barding wants nothing to do with Cerea, and is in fact outraged by the foreign steel recipe (Damascus) she wants to make in his forge. When he expresses his contempt for her first piece of Damascus by kicking it, the end result is that the veteran blacksmith splits his hoof whilst barely scuffing the resultant steel. That causes his attitude to basically 180 itself, and he goes from being repulsed by her metallurgical techniques to wanting to master them for himself, which in turn leads to him unwittingly befriending Cerea herself.
- Functional Addict: Heavy towards the "addict" end of the scale, although during his introduction in chapter 28, it's mentioned he's actually not one of the worst-case scenarios. Barding is an example of what the Esteeverse calls "The Fallen"; ponies who have succumbed to the Addictive Magic of their Cutie Marks to the point it's overwhelmed them. Barding is literally obsessed with working with metal to the point he largely ignores the rest of the outside world. Even splitting his hoof to the point that those around him insist he needs to see immediate medical attention barely registers compared to his desire to understand the new metal that he injured himself on.
- No Social Skills: A side-effect of Barding's Functional Addict status is that he really does not get social interaction. Highlit in his introduction where he goes from denouncing Cerea's Damascus steel as blasphemous and tainted by necromancy to admiring it and declaring it should be named "centaur steel" to ensure ponies always remember where it comes from, and thinking he's legitimately paying the horrified centaur a compliment.
