Puzzle Princess Patricia

Female, mid to early 20s

Video Game: Puzzle Princess Panic!!!

The protagonist of one of the most brutally frustrating puzzle games ever made, “Puzzle Princess Panic!”. Sadly, Patricia is more or less a permanent resident of the Waiting Room, and it’s very unlikely that she will get out anytime soon... if ever. The original Puzzle Princess Panic! was a very popular game series back in the early 8-bit console days—back when gamers were used to being driven insane by frustrating mechanics and incredibly difficult brain-bending puzzles. Sadly, an attempt toreboot the franchise a couple of years ago—Puzzle Princess Panic!!!—was a terrible flop because the devs went way too hard for nostalgia and made no effort to make the game fun to younger and less patient audiences.

On this console, Patricia’s only here in the Waiting Room because the new Puzzle Princess Panic!!! was actually a gift to HeroFace97 from a favorite aunt who remembered HeroFace97 liking the original as a small child. Now that they’ve grown up, HeroFace97 only installed it and played it once—when the favorite aunt came to visit—and has yet to uninstall yet simply out of guilt because the aunt died soon afterwards. So poor Patricia spends all her time stuck in the Waiting Room, watching everyone else’s games get played while she can only eat jelly donuts, drink tea, and solve sudoku and jigsaw puzzles as she waits forlornly for her turn. To make matters even worse, all those donuts and being stuck in the Waiting Room all the time have done no favors to her figure, and more unkind other characters cruelly refer to her as “Fat Pat” (sometimes even to her face) on account of her now rather rotund physique. (She was quite thin when she first showed up on the console, but that was quite a while ago now, so...) 

Even though she never gets to have her game played, Patricia is still a real person with very real and sometimes raw emotions. Sensitive and sweet by nature, she struggles with low self-esteem and depression and tends to be shy, only speaking up either when someone talks to her or when she feels like she has something to say, which is usually just to be encouraging to other characters when they pop into the Waiting Room again. Although they don’t really show much interest in her, Patricia is in fact both a genius and also very emotionally perceptive–she understands a LOT more about their inner struggles and desires than they realize. She’s also secretly in love with Alaric, and finds the way Grand Duchess Elspeth treats him to be horrible but is too polite to say so most of the time... unless Elspeth pushes him too hard, then she REALLY lays into the Grand Duchess and scares the hell out of everyone else present.

Voice: Medium-to-low female. Warm, soft, and motherly, even when she allows her bitter, sad side out.