Villain Critique Thread (Because Its About Damn Time!)

• Name: Shamshalg "The Destroyer"

• Age: 21, 20, 18, 19, 22, and 17

• Personality: Shamshalg is weird. He behaves like a complete and total, clueless idiot, barely knowing who anybody is, saying nonsensical stuff, and giving people weird nicknames. He really likes meat, and often hoards it to himself, hissing like a cat if anyone tries to take his meat. He often misspells his own name, and generally seems incompetent, so much so, it could be easy to dismiss the almost-36 foot tall Shamshalg as a dumb brute. If left alone, with nothing to do, he'll just stand there with a blissful grin on his face and look up like a chicken looking up into the rain. Its, thus, easy to forget that he's very much in charge. That most people are scared shitless of him, and that when properly motivated, he's unbelievably horrifying. He is not called Shamshalg The Destroyer for nothing, even when he's not willfully doing it, he spreads destruction and mayhem everywhere he goes. Despite his eclectic mind, he sometimes shows a dark, deviously villainous attitude, showing he "eats" the hatred of others and finds it delicious, and that he finds joy in crushing the dreams of others. He truly enjoys battle and pitched fights, and willingly dumbs himself down in order to enjoy the bloodshed longer. And as soon as he's milked all the enjoyment he can out of the fight, he quickly and easily murders his foes - almost casually. Beware the Silly Ones definitely fits him. It says a lot that he was flattered when someone called him "The Prince of the Littered Intestines".

• Abilities: He possesses all of the abilities of the six most bastardy of Vonh's Bastard Bastard's. This includes: Teleport Spam, A Cero-Style Beam Cannon he fires from his fingers, the ability to attract and repulse things, the ability to extent all six of his limbs like rubber, Super-Speed (he actually takes Vonh by surprise), he can make super-hot steam, he can create and control "black sand", and he can get even more abilities by eating people.

• Weaknesses: The energy of the YSD Shards alone can destroy him, as he is "a being made by a Time Crash." He is also notably unable to enter holy areas and is damaged by holy spells, hinting at an infernal nature.

• Goals: He claims he doesn't know what a goal is. He does show a desire to kill his "father", Vonh, and use his mother to birth a race of super-monsters to "black out the sky".

• Motivation: He was created by the Time Crash absorbing six of Vonh's Bastard Bastard kids, and merging all of them together into one, maddened being called The Destroyer. He was foretold to be a monster that would lead a horde of horrors across New Terra. Hence he decided to do all that he was foretold to do.

• Role in the story: Big Bad

• Backstory: He is the unfortunate Gestalt of Six Bastard Bastards, a violent psychotic who switches between personalities almost at a whim. Not much else is known of him.

• Relevant Tropes:
• Ax-Crazy: Hoo...boy. He might just top Bael's record of crazy behavior.
• Bad Future: Aevon sees, in a dream, what happens if Shamshalg wins. Its not pretty. It involves Shamshalg eating the souls of everyone in the world, including Aevon's siblings, and father. And then he goes One-Winged Angel into something resembling a combination of The Void's true form in Siege, Bizarro Sephiroth and No.96 Dark Mist. He then gives Aevon a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown culminating in him ripping off Aevon's hand and bisecting him, but somehow leaving him alive.
• Barehanded Blade Block: He blocks Aevon's attack in his bare claw before strangling him in his suddenly animated scarf. Thankfully, this move is interrupted.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: The Bastards wanted to harness the Time Crash's power. Oh, they harnessed it, alright...
  • He also later likes to pull Jackass Genie. One guy betrayed Vonh to get eternal youth. Shamshalg turned him into a baby, and then stepped on him.
• Beware the Silly Ones: He acts strangely and is almost always spacey and disconnected, almost not noticing that he's being thrashed in a fight...until he's not.
• Big Bad: Of the second cycle.
  • Big Bad Ensemble: Though he shares the role with the group the Gadrai Nine, who he is First Among Equals in. All of them claim to have reason to want Vonh dead. Except Shadow Shadofang, who makes Shamshalg look normal.
• Blood Knight: "Cmon, cmon...AMUSE ME."
• Dangerously Genre-Savvy: Make him fight seriously, and he won't toy around any more. See him simply shoving an arm through Baric rather than mess around, and then tearing down the wall with his beam cannons rather than waste his time with the defenses.
• The Dreaded: Even his minions, Ruben and Baron, are terrified of him. They're also technically his "children", lending an abusive parents edge to it. Lets not get into Vonh's reaction when he Mana Scans Shams'.
  • "H-H-Hell's bells...Hell's fucking bells...the Prophet was right. T-T-That thing is beyond horrible." Note, Mana Scan lets Vonh see what Shamshang's soul is like. Consider the implications. He has only had this kind of reaction when he saw Mikaboshi the first time.
  • Note that not even Gabren likes him, and Gabren refused to join the Gadrai Nine when he found out what Shamshalg's "plan" was. There is no plan.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: He is absolutely livid when Ruben and Baron are adopted by Leina, and he cannot understand why, half of what made him so mad.
• Evil Laugh: A very creepy, disturbing one.
• For the Evulz: A terrifying iteration of this; he doesn't need to do half of what he does. He just does it to break Vonh and his childrens' spirits.
• Fusion Dance: Of six Bastard Bastards, caused by a Time Crash. It also made the single being as tall as six six foot tall humans.
• Humanoid Abomination: He's thirty six feet tall, looks incredibly thin and wiry, his armor and innumerable scarves are actually part of his body, he has six slit-like red eyes, a permanent Slasher Smile, a skull-like face, pitch-black skin, talons ending in bright red nails, and his additional arms look like decorations on his armor until they start moving. He also has two human looking eyes on his shoulders, and one on his scarf at the neck. He is less a giant than he is something unspeakable that crawled out of the Eye of Terror.
• I'm a Humanitarian: He eats people to get powers. Complete with visuals that wouldn't be out of place in Shingeki No Kyojin.
• Man Behind the Man: He has created three factions of evildoers to distract Vonh, while he plans...something. It changes every week. His three groups are the Chronos Giants, the Blackmore Coup and The Endless. None of them are very pleasant, and become less so when their "backer" is revealed.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: It is noted that, in Jerdian, Shamshalg is a name derived from "Shamshalaga", which means "Falsification, Suffer, Endless", depending on the context.
  • And in plain English, he has Sham as part of his name, which means either malevolent falsehood or trickery.
• Number of the Beast: Six people, each six foot tall, has six arms.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: One of the funniest characters early on, completely silly and impossible to take seriously as he lets loose pop culture references millenia too early. Making it all the more terrifying when he stops playing around.
  • "By Kim Kardashian's Relationship With Kanye, that was unbelievably awesome to watch!", compare this to "I desire nothing but your hatred. I lust to see your scorn. I want to ruin everything you have made. I wish to despoil this pitiful world. Watch me, dear father, as I destroy your works, one by one."
• Power Floats: When he really exerts himself, he starts floating.
• Psychopathic Manchild: He acts very childishly, and giggles in amusement when he sees how Shadow's cloak doesn't interact with the wind.
• Slasher Smile: Written on to his face permanently.
• Voice of the Legion: He has a creepy, "swinging" voice that switches from light to deep, dark and demonic and then down to an insidious whisper. And all accompanied by echoing voices underneath. Makes sense, given he's a Gestalt of six people.
• You Will Not Evade Me: He gets tired of running after the heroes at one point and just "Pulls" them all into his hands and throws them around almost whimsically.

edited 2nd Oct '13 6:49:14 PM by NickTheSwing

• Name: Aleksandr Ivanovich
• Age: 52
• Personality: Cold, straightforward, prefers honesty to deception and silence to honesty, reactionary who idealizes the popular view of tradition while ignoring its reality.
• Abilities: His ruthlessness, his secrecy, his connections, and his ability to convincingly disassociate himself with the organizations and people he manipulates, even if he still raises suspicions.
• Weaknesses: His arrogance, his attachment to his honour, his overconfidence, his elitism and classism.
• Goals: A new world, free of the rot of populism and democracy, which has destroyed the very people it seeks to empower (In his opinion)
• Motivation: The abuse of power by the world's governments and their lack of resolve.
• Role in the story: Plays a dangerous double game against the countries occupying his land, with the ultimate goal of a continent-wide revolution.
• Backstory: Born to an aristocratic family, spoiled heir, fond of hunting, etc etc. Turned to a more spartan and threadbare lifestyle after the Yvanno uprising and became disillusioned with the Grand Prince when he traded Aleksandr and his lands away as spoils of war to the victors of the Second Coalition War.
• Relevant Tropes: Affably Evil, Well-Intentioned Extremist, Aristocrats Are Evil, Honour Before Reason

edited 8th Oct '13 6:41:45 PM by DVV1

edited 20th Dec '13 8:39:50 AM by Swordofknowledge

Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake. — Edgar Walllace

and your meant comment on the previous villain. This tread is decaying.

Crappy Dali imitator and producer of generalized bad art http://kamilkovakaramelka.deviantart.com/

Crazy, crazy lady. Lots of tropes, so it's obvious you've put a good amount of thought into this one. Not much new, but definitely an intimidating character to have dominate the antagonism of the setting.

I see a good concept here, but the character's nuances need a little more elaboration, methinks. Write more about him.

Nick, as always you are bringing strange and interesting characters to both this thread and its Good Counterpart. Keep up the good work, man.

Now, my turn. Since the post above isn't going to bother fixing the thread...

• Name: Delirus, Court Jester of the First Empire of the Seven Children

• Inspired by: The Joker, Kefka Palazzo, and Discord. It shows, a lot. His final form is inspired by both The Warrior and Discord.

• Age: Who cares? But he appears to be moderately aged adult, if that's what you seek to know from this number.

• Personality: Delirus, in very short terms, is super crazy and violent to an extreme. The First Legend's answer to characters like the Joker and Kefka, Delirus is a Monster Clown whose only ambitions in life are to amuse himself and destroy others as he pleases. He is a devotee of Ruin, Divinity of Discord, and is thus an agent and promoter of societal chaos and moral disorder. However, he takes life with a sick sense of humor, with nary a single serious bone in his body. Everyone else's lives are his playthings, and his only authorities are the Physical Gods that he chooses to worship.

• Abilities: Delirus, despite his silly appearance, is a man of many monstrous skills. As one of the few individuals in the world who can use magic at the time of the Year in the West, the jester explored the possibilities of magic to harm others. To this end he created the Sign Spheres, blank rock spheres about 5 cm./2 in. in diameter that he can engrave magical symbols (revealed to him by Ruin) onto and use for a number of purposes such as releasing explosive or toxic magic. Delirus is also a dangerous alchemist, able to create potions and poisons from the minimum ingredients needed, which makes him even more dangerous in the Southern West where monster-based ingredients are plentiful to produce a variety of deadly and supplementary effects. Delirus is also a skilled user of knives in both melee and ranged combat, and his false fingernails serve as deadly claws that can cut through flesh and wood or quickly engrave signs onto blank Sign Spheres. Aside from his small arsenal, Delirus also has a deadly talent for fire magic much like a master Firebender, and he uses air magic to fly through the air and increase his speed. Unarmed, Delirus is quick on his feet and very agile, with a chaotically flowing fighting style. Not concerning his body, Delirus is also a skilled manipulator, deceiver, and a very bad influence, able to turn the weak-willed and tempted over to his side. He's also a talented performer, comedian, and entertainer whenever he feels like it.

• Weaknesses: Like many overconfident foes, Delirus does not easily adjust when things don't go as he would like it to. Likewise, when the Companions show magical powers as well, he is unable to defend against their attacks until near the end of the Year in the West.

• Goals: Make sure The Hunter fulfills his contract and have a little fun with his alchemy and magic while he's out in the Western Realms. Find the Beast's Horn and destroy the Southern West in the name of Ruin, Divinity of Discord.

• Motivation: The opportunity to tag along with The Hunter and the Scourge and cause death and misery for kicks? What other reason is needed? Because Ruin said so? If that's how you want to see it. Oh yeah, that whole Horn deal. Right.

• Role in the story: Villainous comic relief, Foil to The Hunter, Conflict Killer and Final Boss of the Year in the West

• Backstory: You want a story of his past? Heh, please. He tells you a different story every time. The only thing that remains about the same in every story is that he becomes the jester of the Seven Children at the suggestion of Ruin, Divinity of Discord.

• Relevant Tropes:
  • 0% Approval Rating: No one except Joshua likes him. Not The Hunter, not the Scourge, not Joshua's Companions, no one else.
  • A God Am I: He holds himself above everyone else below him in power, though he never explicitly calls himself a god to anyone. He calls himself the God of Monsters once he fully absorbs the power of the Horn.
  • Attack Its Weak Point: The Horn of the Beast is protruding from Delirus' chest in his final form, protected and concealed by magical ice crystals. Breaking through the crystals and striking the Horn causes overwhelming pain to Delirus. Though the barrier can be reformed when he dives into the water, damage to the Horn is permanent. This obvious target becomes the focus of the Companions' attacks in their final battle with the jester, and leads to his downfall.
  • Attention Whore: Always trying to be the center of attention, which drives him to do really terrible things to others and kill the Big Bad Wannabe in order to claim the glory of awakening the Horned Beast for himself. When he finds himself unable to awaken the Horned Beast, he decides to make do.
  • Ax-Crazy: When the Scourge accepts the surrender of defenseless towns, such as the almost-Doomed Hometown the heroes came from, Delirus is thoroughly disappointed.
  • Badass: No, really. He even has the gall to stab himself with the Beast's Horn in an attempt to use its power himself. It works.
  • Badass FingerSnap: Happens whenever he just feels like setting someone on fire when they don't have the power to resist or deter him, usually because he's bored with whoever his victim is.
  • Berserk Button: Being called crazy or stupid. Divinities help you if you call him both.
  • Beware My Stinger Tail: In his final form, Delirus gets a massive scorpion tail that can fire corrosive liquid.
  • Beware the Silly Ones: Yeah, his costume is ridiculous, his demeanor is silly, but if he loses his marbles, they're usually being thrown in some unfortunate victim's direction.
  • Big "NO!": Lets one out before Luke deals the coup de grace.
  • Black Comedy: He doesn't know any other kind.
  • Break Them by Talking: Does this to all of Joshua's Companions to undermine their trust in him and motivate them towards selfish action. His words to Matthew actually affect him years later, though Delirus has been dead for years now.
  • Breath Weapon: In his final form, it's Technicolor Fire.
  • Bright Is Not Good: Like Kefka, Delirus dresses in bright and garish combinations of colors.
  • Card-Carrying Villain: Embraces his vile nature wholeheartedly. But don't call him crazy or stupid. He's doesn't like that.
  • Chaos Is Evil: He is a worshiper of Ruin, Divinity of Discord; this is kind of his thing.
  • Collector of the Strange: "Nice dagger. Mind if I use it?"
  • Combat Pragmatist
  • Combat Sadomasochist: Luke actually stops attacking him when he realizes Delirus really likes getting hurt.
  • The Corrupter: Once the story reaches the Southern West, Delirus really gets into destroying what little order and heroism is left there for Joshua and his Companions to save.
  • Diabolus ex Nihilo: Like the Joker before him, Delirus doesn't have a defined backstory.
  • The Dragon: To Ruin, Divinity of Discord.
  • Drunk On The Beast's Horn: Wow, does he really enjoy the Horn's power after stabbing it into his chest.
  • Elemental Powers:
    • Playing with Fire
    • Blow You Away
  • Eviler than Thou: To everyone during the Year in the West. He proves that he is by leaving behind The Hunter, killing the conflict between the tribes in the Southern West, and taking the Horn to his chest to become the Final Boss of the arc.
  • Evil Is Burning Hot: Kill It with Fire is a staple of his.
  • Evil Laugh: He lets one out when the occasion arises.
  • Evil Plan: Spoilered because he's not supposed to have one. The plan? Destroy the Southern West in the name of Ruin and make it ripe for conquest by the First Empire of Man by reawakening the Horned Beast. But when that fails, Delirus decides that he's monster enough and plunges the Horn into his own chest. With the power of the Horn and a new form at his disposal, he decides he's going to burn down the tribes himself.
  • Evil Sorcerer
  • Expressive Mask: It actually changes its expression depending on his general mood. So it's quite telling that most of the time it carries the expression of someone either laughing, smirking, or smiling. Sometimes a Fascinating Eyebrow will be added to the expression.
  • Faux Affably Evil: Even if you laugh at all of his jokes, he'll still toss a Fire Stone or a Mirth Bag into your face just because. Arrogus learned this the hard way.
  • For the Evulz: Everything action he commits, even if it does carry out the agenda of Ruin and the Empire, is mostly for his own amusement. A stark contrast to The Hunter.
  • From Bad to Worse: Whenever he decides to involve himself with the main plot, things go south pretty quickly, even for his allies.
  • Genius Bruiser: The first magical opponent that the Companions face, he also innovated magical enhancement and alchemy in very nasty ways..
  • Giggling Villain
  • Hope Crusher: Wow, does he get nasty with this in the Southern West.
  • The Hyena
  • Idiot Hair
  • The Jester: His day job back in the Eastern Realms.
  • Knife Nut
  • Lack of Empathy: Not so much lacking as it is nonexistent
  • Large Ham
  • Laughably Evil
  • Laughing Mad: As an Expy of the Trope Namer, this goes without saying.
  • Leave No Survivors: Otherwise he'll just have to play Cold-Blooded Torture with whoever's left.
  • Loves the Sound of Screaming: Mmm, mmm.
  • Mad Bomber: Those little stone spheres he carries around? Those are blank slates that he can engrave magical symbols on and throw with great precision right into people's faces.
  • Malevolent Masked Man: Unlike the characters he is inspired from, Delirus does not feel inclined to show his face.
  • Manipulative Bastard: Plays on the arrogance of the chief of the Tribe of the Dragon so that he believes that Delirus is The Dragon sent by the Empire to assist him in conquering the other tribes instead of killing Delirus and The Hunter when they're surrounded. But Delirus has other ideas...
  • Mix-and-Match Critters: His final form has the tail of a scorpion, the back legs and back end of a goat, the body of a lion, front legs with talons and feathers like a bird of prey, wings of a bat, and the neck and head of a three-horned dragon.
  • Monster Clown: No, really?
  • Multiple-Choice Past
  • Technicolor Fire: Every time Delirus uses fire magic, the released fire is always a different color from the last blast, even if subtly.
  • You Gotta Have Green, Purple, Red, and White Hair

Hold on, I'll finish this tomorrow.

edited 8th Nov '13 10:40:42 PM by Insano

Allurand and surrounding world loading, 28%...

Ooh, I like I like! I have liked all of the characters he draws inspiration from, and I think that when I read a book that involves him, I will like him.

• Name: Elijah Gibbs

• Age: 92

• Personality: Elijah is a completely different threat from his rebellious grandson Hector. While Hector is a prime example of Beware the Silly Ones, Elijah starts serious and remains so, never changing his expression of vague disdain and contempt for those around him. Like Old Matthew, he is a religious villain, having created a cult-like atmosphere in America's religious right, mostly centering on himself and his money. However, despite espousing Christian beliefs, he has literally no mercy or compassion in him, its like he liked the wrath and condemnation parts of the Bible so much, he forgot to read anything else. He marries this to a truly nightmarish A God Am I complex, wherein he believes he is the next prophet / the second coming, and that its his destiny to lead the world "out of the Anti-Christ's clutches", and create a world where he reigns. Believing anything and everything he does to be right and holy due to this, he sees no wrongdoing in trying to flash fry his grandson for "having demons of homosexuality". About the only person he has the smallest degree of attachment to is High Priest Augustus, who is essentially another Holier Than Thou type who somehow is also a Lich. Elijah has always wanted to kill his grandson, claiming that from birth he saw "the demon enter unto him". Elijah sees no hypocrisy in his actions, because "hypocrisy is a flaw, and I have no flaws." A special part of his character is that he sees even the slightest romantic attraction to be sinful, and how he conceived a son is a mystery for the ages. And unlike Old Matthew, he actually walks the walk, in this regard. He views the emergence of magic past the Masquerade as a threat to his plans, officially because he views it as witchcraft, but really he wants all the magic in the world to himself. Oh, and he's seriously mentally ill underneath all of this, with slowly emerging traits showing that he's losing the ability to emote at all, and that his own hatred for the world around him is driving him insane.

• Abilities: Elijah has the ability to create massive swords made of fire that do more damage the more mental baggage his foes have, he also has powerful Light Magic and Dark Magic, which manifests as a white wing and a black wing emerging from his back when he uses these spells. He can also use a spell with his right hand that turns anyone he touches not proofed against curses into salt. He has a powerful barrier creating ability, and that aside, he's also mastered three Spell Cores, when most people can only handle one. The first lets him affect gravity, both in the physical sense and in the "personal gravity" sense, effectively letting him control who meets who and when, with few restrictions (one of them is that he cannot affect people carrying Holy Artifacts or those "with blessed or Kingly blood"). The second lets him create floating miniature suns, which he can collapse and create devastating, explosive black holes. The third is a copy of Aaron Shayde's Energy Absorption Spell Core.

• Weaknesses: For all his magical might, and his pride in his own abilities, he is a ninety two year old man using very exhausting magic. One good physical attack will knock him right out, as by now, he cannot even use Mana to reinforce himself, he's gotten so frail. He is also extremely weak to Legend-Class weaponry, particularly Arondight.

• Goals: While Elijah himself stays very composed, his goals are much less so. At first, he as described wants to control the world. Then after his first Villainous Breakdown, he decides he wants to remove free will from the equation. Then he is foiled, and decides to obliterate the Earth and create a paradise dimension. And then he decides only people of "astounding faith" are welcome, and everyone else would go to a horrifying hell dimension.

• Motivation: Elijah's mom basically brainwashed him into thinking that absolutely everything is ugly, wretched, naked and sinful. Note that something strange happened to his mother and father just three months after his fortieth birthday. Other than that, its frustration with a changing world, and a yearning to live in a medieval time.

• Role in the story: Non-Action Big Bad...at first. Turns out he's less incapable of action than he seemed. Big Bad until the last portion, wherein Caine supplants him.

• Backstory: Elijah grew up in the mid-west, and was brought into the fold of a really nasty cult. His mother and father bought into it too. During the second world war, he acted as a chaplain. During this functionality, he became convinced that the world needed "to return to a blessed time". He began his plans and schemes, engineering the events that led to the rise of Augustus, the Roman Family (together with Ignius and Wolfang), and the creation of Nebiros in the eighties. His warping influence badly burned his grandson Hector, and he forced him to become head of Ephas Abjuration, which he intended to use as a scapegoat, with which to gain more control. That the plan called for his grandson to be burned alive was only a perk to him. He views Matthew, since the boy interfered, as a complete nuisance, and slowly comes to view the boy with greater and greater hatred.

• Relevant Tropes:
• Abusive Parents: Was this both to his biological children, and also his adoptive son Caine. His grandson also bore the brunt of Elijah's cruelty. Notably, he was also abused by his own parents.
• Bastard Bastard: Inferred once, by the Prince of Demands.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Appears in book I as "the kindly old priest". He's not kindly, for one.
• Blatant Lies: "I am a pious man who knows the virtues of mercy and gentleness."
• Evil vs. Evil: He fights Ein Woe and the Prince of Demands almost as much as he fights Matthew.
• Holier Than Thou: Half his lines involve him shrieking and or shouting at people about how horrible, warped and wretched they are. Hand this man a mirror.
• Hypocrite: Preaches that pride is the worst of all sins, but his own plan is basically crafted in the most absurdly prideful way possible, as if the man woke one day and decided he was Pope.
• Functional Magic
  • Light 'em Up and Casting a Shadow: He has the ability to use both of these spell types.
  • Gravity Master: Mostly used to call meteors down.
  • Playing with Fire and Unrealistic Black Hole: Solar fire. His black holes, granted, are regulated and controlled by magic, but still...
  • Energy Absorption
• Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: Happened to him some time in his career as a chaplain. It is noted that he was not always so evil.
• Karmic Death: So, Mr. Gibbs, you like giving priests a bad name? Rodrick, a young priest and someone whose lover from before his priesthood was incinerated by Elijah, runs up to him and impales him on a sword, and then shoots him six times. That's it. Matthew gets there ten minutes after Rodrick did this, and admits he expected that Gibbs would've been standing there, ready to give a grandiose speech.
• Large Ham: Give this man some inspiration, and he'll start shouting and screaming about one thing or another. Its one of the few times he seems to regain the capacity of emotion; when he needs to tell someone they're damned.
• Light Is Not Good: Do not trust the guy in the white and gold outfit. Seriously, don't.
• Narm: Before he revealed he can fight, most of his dialogue is purposefully done to be completely hilarious and over the top. Can anyone take this line seriously?
  • "And yea, wretched Leviathan is one of my foes, for I battled him within the sphere of the Burger King, where it tried to attack as I feasted!"
• Politically Incorrect Villain
• Pride: Hooboy...
• Sanity Slippage
• Sinister Minister: Very sinister, having a ghoulish fascination with hell's torments. His church seems like a cult. He treats his family like animals. And then there's his big plan...
• Squishy Wizard: For all his boasting and his magical might, Elijah is...still a fragile old man who hacks and coughs if he goes above a brisk walk.
• Villainous Breakdown: "HOW DARE YOU, WHELP! I gave you life, I healed your wounds, I am your savior! I am your life! Your light! I, ME! ELIJAH GIBBS! THE NEW PROPHET OF THE WO-"
  • Rodrick: My savior is Jesus Christ, you horrible, prideful monster.
  • He had an earlier one when Matthew broke through his defenses and started fighting him on equal terms.

edited 28th Dec '13 12:26:39 PM by NickTheSwing

Wow...this guy is truly terrifying. Villains who are shaped into monsters by the actions of their parents always intrigue me in many ways more than the ones who are made into what they are by other events, as it goes back to my belief that we are all blank slates transformed into our current selves by the actions of those who raised us, among other things. Anyway, besides the philosophical aspect to Elijah's personality, he seems to be a nasty piece of work (something I definitely cheer for in a villain). I like that, unlike several of the other villain ideas you posted, he doesn't strike sympathy in me, rather an almost instinctive sense of revulsion due to his history of child-abuse and twisting the Bible. I have to wonder, is he part of the same story as the villain you posted above?

Joker and Kefka I'm definitely familiar with, and it shows with this guy. If I may, I have to say that he (at least for me) also screams Deadpool for some reason. Perhaps its the highly personalized remarks about things like this past that does it. I think what I like most about him is that he never takes off that mask. It makes him just that much more terrifying in some ways; if I'm going to die, at least let me see the face of the man/woman who ends my life! I think that's why the idea of masked intruders in my house scares me so much. Anyway, great villain!

edited 9th Nov '13 10:36:24 AM by Swordofknowledge

Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake. — Edgar Walllace

They're actually in the same 'verse, but in vastly different times. Shamshalg menaced the heroes of the prequels and cast a long shadow over the future, while Elijah set the first four books in motion with his malice.

I like that you got the instinctive revulsion response to him, mainly because even this doesn't really show the nastiest things he's done. He tried to obliterate the hero's entire hometown in retribution for his plans failing so many times, using a massive series of walls called Green Wall to essentially try to reduce everyone in a suburb of about 23-2500 to a bloody pulp because one out of them fought against him. What is scary is how realistically he does it. His lobbying, his frame job, his attack ads. That it had Final Solution vibes made the whole thing worse even for me writing it.

This is a man who has no kindness in his heart whatsoever. He at one point makes very thinly veiled threats toward a billionaire sponsor's ten year old son unless he can get even more money for Green Wall and his mercenaries, after extorting the man for 385 million already. "Now, Mr. Armalfi, I understand the Holy Book doth say those who go against the Lord shalt not prosper. So then, if you do not stand with the Lord against the heretics in Sanfield, the Lord may taketh of you or your family for your weakness, dalliance and greed."

This guy is from Archmage Reborn the same as Nadia above. Given that he's the end result of a Protagonist Journey to Villain, he's going to definitely have heroic tropes associated with him. I hope that's okay with the way this thread is set up.

• Name: Ara Talbot
• Age: 22
• Personality: Ara is a serious and almost overly solemn young man and is deeply devoted to his job both as an agent of the Conclave and as an apprentice to his master Eric Pilkan, though the these two aspects of his life intertwine for a variety of reasons. Because of Eric's position as a guardian to the Second Vessel, Ara was taught from a very young age to maintain constant vigilance at his master's side and to suspect that every unfamiliar person has the potential to be a threat to the Vessel. Ara all but worships the Archmage believes that his teaching of "magic for the people" means the Conclave's mission of spreading magical knowledge across the nations under its control is a righteous undertaking. However despite his loyal nature, Ara is not a nice person. He has almost no sense of humor and will willingly partake in cruel and sometimes monstrous actions if he feels it benefits the Conclave. He harbors an intense hatred for the man who murdered his entire family fourteen years ago and that hatred drove him to join the Conclave as Eric's apprentice in order to learn magic strong enough to kill his enemy. As a child he willingly enlisted in the Conclave's Savior Program a project designed to produce the next Archmage. Despite constant urging from Eric to let go of his hate and move on with his life, he is unable to. After he finds out the truth about his family's deaths and defects to Nadia Deneshel's side, much of Ara's personality stays the same. He now regards Nadia with the same fanatical devotion that he previously did her brother. However his hatred has grown more intense due to both his knowledge and her corrupting influence and he lashes out violently against anyone who is against her. While he was no stranger to killing, he now flippantly takes life and has expressed a worsening sadistic side. He barely recognizes his former comrades as anything other than obstacles to the Pure World, and expresses a deep animosity towards his former master.

• Abilities: Ara is a combat wizard with control over the element of fire. Like all elemental wizards and witches, Ara is capable of using his element in a variety of ways, limited only by the laws of physics that element and his own imagination, similar to Benders. Ara can unleash large blasts of flame to scatter an enemy legion or smaller precision-based fireballs to target individual foes. He is also able to send hails of sparks at enemies, peppering their skin with thousands of white-hot particles that will only go out when submerged with copious amounts of water, crippling them with pain in a non-lethal take-down. After murdering Eric and stripping his master of the Phoenix spirit bonded to him Ara gains a tremendous power up in his abilities. He can now cause pillars of flame to emerge from the Earth under his opponents, create towering walls of fire that he can control from a distance and create constructs made entirely of fire that he can exert limited control over before they fade. He can also superheat these flames to match the temperature of the sun, if he concentrates hard enough.

• Weaknesses: Water magic is detrimental to his fire magic as is wind—both elements smother or blow out his powers respectively. Though they will not render him powerless (unless submerged under water or caught in a gale) being exposed to them means he will continually have to recast his fire spells, wasting valuable time in a pitched battle. After he joins Nadia, he develops an intense aversion to his True Companions. While he is capable of fighting them, he visibly cringes at their attempts to bring him back to his former self. This especially holds true of his girlfriend Angelica and he becomes more agitated and emotionally confused the longer these attempts go on.

• Goals: Ara's goals when a member of the Conclave and the Guardians was simple: protect the Vessel and gain enough power to track down and kill Edward Marshall, the wind-wizard responsible for slaughtering his mother, father and older sister in front of him. In his current state Ara's goals are concurrent with Nadia's—to turn The Haven into a world where only pure-blooded magic-users can survive.

• Motivation: Edward Marshall slaughtered his family with wind-magic, flaying his father alive, smashing his mother around the small cabin like a rag doll and simply snapping his sister's neck. He taunted Ara to come after him when he was stronger, and so he took steps to gain that power. After he does eventually kill Edward (now going by the name of Malice in Legenada) Nadia informs him that Edward was an assassin from the Conclave, sent to murder Ara's family because they refused to give their child up to the Savior Program and so they were taken out. Ara's joining the organization was all just as planned.

• Backstory: When Ara was eight years old, he lived with his family in a small village in the cold mountainous region of West Valia. Though they were not rich, they had a little more than others in the poverty-stricken region and he was quite happy. One day his parents, having come home from a hard day's work hauling precious metals from the mountains above found a one-eyed man lying in the road and took him in. The man, Edward, became friends with the little boy, attempting continuously to get him to learn magic whenever his parents weren't looking and even enticing him to run away to the local branch of the Conclave. One day Ara came back from playing in the forest to find Edward killing his family. After taunting him, Edward threw Ara through a window and told him to track him down when he had some real power.

• Role in the story: The Lancer to Veil River...at first. After he finds out that the Conclave ordered the hit on his family in order to take him into their program to create a new Archmage under their control, he goes off the rails and becomes Co-Dragons with Sebastian under Nadia.

• Relevant Tropes:

• A Pupil of Mine Until He Turned to Evil: Ara is this to Eric, who has more of a father/son relationship with him than Master and Apprentice. He cements this trope by killing Eric, who went out of his way to track him down and attempt to reason with him.
• Aloof Ally: He started out as this towards Veil and Mia. He viewed them as those under his protection, nothing more and nothing less. This compounded upon by his deep resentment towards Veil for being The Chosen One, while all his hard work and torturous training had come to nothing. However by the time they face Anash the Implacable the three of them have grown into something like True Companions.
  • Unfortunately this is also how he started out with Nadia; after hearing the truth about his family, he merely helped her infiltrate the Conclave's capital so he could get close to the Magisters and question The Mageocracy's leaders under torture. However in a horribly similar way, he grew closer and closer to her...
• Ax-Crazy: The longer he spends under Nadia's thumb, the worse he becomes at this. While he already wouldn't bat an eye at say incinerating a whole room full of enemy combatants, when he starts doing this to random civilians just because they're wearing the emblem of the Conclave, you know something is wrong.
• Battle Aura: Ara gets one of these made out of flames when he's gathering his anima before a battle. This is actually a defensive gesture; anyone (friend or foe) who ventures near him when this is happening will get badly burned.
• Bad Ass: No matter what side he's on, he retains this. During his introduction, he takes on an entire village under the control of Legenda who are attempting to kill or at least hinder him. Not only does he not kill any of them, he manages to win the fight instantly by simply setting fire to the mayor's house and offering them a Sadistic Choice: let him pass or watch their leader and his family burn alive.
• Berserk Button: Edward Marshall is a living breathing version of this to him. Just the sight of Marshall tears away any semblance of his calm and collected persona and reduces him to a rage-filled beast. When they first meet Edward/Malice on the Mist Island, Veil is unnerved to see this sudden personality change in someone he had come to know as serious, solemn and reserved.
  • After his Face–Heel Turn, any attempts to reconcile with him or even mention that he at least hear the Magisters out on the matter of his family sends him into a blinding fury. Ironic, as one of the first things Ara wanted to do after finding out this information was go to the Magisters and demand answers. However the more time passes, the more he just wants to kill everyone associated with the Conclave and Nadia's enemies.
• Beneath the Mask: Ara portrays himself as serious, devoted to the Conclave, his mission and his master. He is all these things, but he is also deeply insecure about both his magical prowess and his worth as a human being—and considers the two to be related. He hates himself for not being able to protect his family, deeply resents Veil for being chosen by the Archmage's staff, the Gloria and sees it as an insult to him.
• Breaking Lecture: He receives two of them on the same day during the Mist Island arc. The first is from Edward after meeting him for the first time in fourteen years. His enemy proceeds to effortlessly defeat Ara, blowing out his fire magic with his wind and tells him how disappointed he is that he still hasn't changed from the little boy he knew before. Later, Eric furiously calls Ara out on going after his enemy and allowing Mia and Veil to be separated from his sight, telling him that his obsession with "petty revenge" is why he will never amount to anything as a guardian.
• Break the Cutie: Watching his father stripped of his skin by a miniature hurricane, his mother shaken to death by gale force winds and his sister just having her neck broken with a man's bare hand while pinned helplessly down effectively ended his childhood.
• Broken Ace: He is looked upon with a mingling of jealousy and admiration by all kid trainees hoping to be guardians due to the fact that he never went through any formal training, just being picked up by Eric off the street as a child and fast-tracked into the Savior Program. That and his impressive record in missions have many willing to trade anything to be him. However, again, he is extremely broken and insecure on the inside and seething with self-doubt, jealousy and hatred.
• Calling Your Attacks: Par for the course with combat wizards; it works as a verbal cue for the mind to focus on what particular spell the caster wants to acheive. As he grows more insane and corrupted, he dpesn't even bother doing this, merely creating fireballs and random blasts of flame that are strangely more powerful than his old, disciplined and focused attacks.
• Child Prodigy
• Cold-Blooded Torture: When Mia is abducted in Anticlaire City, Ara appalls Veil by tracking down the owner of the weapons shop they had visited earlier, beating the crap out of him and horrifically burning his five year old son until the man cracks and tells them what he knows about Legenada, his connection to it, and Mia's most likely whereabouts. Ara's justification is that a Healing Squad will be on their way soon and he tosses the man some money to get the burns looked at.
• Co-Dragons: With Sebastian. May be a slight subversion however it that while Sebastian takes a far more Dragon-ish role, advising and conferring with Nadia on strategies and plans, Ara pretty much does whatever Nadia says and Elena observes that he's basically a beast on a leash to point and let loose on whatever target Nadia desires.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Pick a way that he kills someone with fire. Any way.
• Dissonant Serenity: He is still capable of rational conversation after joining Nadia's side, but even when he is calm his words come off as this more and more.
• Defense Mechanism Superpower: Again common to all combat wizards and witches who practice control over the elements. In what is called the "Trial", the would-be element user is thrust into a life threatening situation involving their element (Earth-users are buried alive, wind-users are thrown from a high place, etc.) Ara's Trial had him burned at the stake, forcing him to either exercise extreme control over the fire or burn to death. Oh, and this was when he was at most ten years old.
• Evil Makes You Ugly: With every act of cruelty and violence he commits in Nadia's name he grows visibly more sinister looking. He is still handsome, but when you start cracking Slasher Smiles that threaten to split your head open, it tends to put a dent in your desirability. Even his longtime girlfriend Angelica is repelled and horrified at seeing him after he murders Marvelo Leisben.
• Evil Makes You Monstrous: After he kills Eric and harvests the Phoenix spirit from his corpse the spirit binds to him, except instead of only consuming his arm, it binds to the right side of his face, his neck, and right shoulder, replacing these areas with bluish black flames that are in constant flux. The flames on his face leave his skull and teeth on that side in full view, making them appear to be burning. In full accordance with this trope, he doesn't' seem to really care.
• Evil Counterpart: In some ways he's become this to Veil. Both of them have suffered intense loss, his family and Veils entire city With Bartholomew's assault on Evermerry. However Veil eventually forgave the man responsible while Ara has fallen deeper into hatred and the lust for vengeance.
• Evil Feels Good: Subverted, at least at first. While growing closer to Nadia and committing more and more morally questionable acts for her, he constantly questioned himself and what he was becoming. However his hate for the Conclave and those who allied with it drove him onward. Even after he has passed the point where he is willing to do anything to help Nadia's plans, it isn't treated as "feeling good" as much as having lost any semblance of sanity and free will.
• Evil Is Burning Hot
• Fantastic Racism: Sort of. In his madness he despises the red-haired black-eyed Erzarians merely because Mia (who is one of them) is one of the two Vessels and a representative of the Archmage's vision of magic for the world, and that flies directly in the face of Nadia's pure-blood only rhetoric. When he goes to Erzaria to kill Mia when she is giving birth to her daughter he toys with and eventually decides on burning down the entire island and wiping out the race completely.
• Fallen Hero
• Foreshadowing: The Gloria rejected him in rather forceful way despite him being chosen by the Conclave and having endured years of torturous training of mind and body. This foreshadows his Face–Heel Turn. While the staff couldn't see into the future, it did sense his mental instability and weakness and realize that he only needed a push before he fell over the edge.
• Go Mad from the Revelation
• Horrible Judge of Character: Unfortunately subverted. He knew Nadia was bad news from the moment he met her, but he wasn't in a position to go anywhere, and once she revealed to him the truth about the Conclave's involvement in his family's massacre, he didn't know who to trust and she was the only one who he really felt he could turn to.
• Hero Killer: Though his very first kill on Nadia's side was the villainous Marvelo Leisben of the Iron Legion, he later went on to kill his own master Eric after a failed battle to bring him to his senses, he incinerates Applen, Mia's midwife in the middle of her delivery, and impales and burns Montague Grant.
• History Repeats: A particularly nasty example from Eric's personal life. Nineteen years before the start of Archmage Reborn Nadia invaded Erzaria and murdered Eric's parents and Mia's mother while she was giving birth to her so she could extract the Key from the infant's body. Nineteen years later it is happening again and the invader is his own apprentice who he views like a son.
• It Gets Easier: This is Ara's view on killing people. Early on, in one of his rare moments of showing human vulnerability, he tells Veil (who is going through a rather intense Heroic BSoD about having killed Sorrow, that he broke down the first time he took life too, but that he eventually realized it's inevitability in their line of work.
• "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight: Ara's reactions to these are anywhere from blank incomprehension to vicious anger.
• Jerkass: He comes off as one from the moment he shows up in Everymerry during Veil's first encounter with him. He threatens Veil's family with a charge of high treason if they don't show him the Gloria, slaps Veil's sister when she tells him off and then beats the crap out of Veil when he comes to his family's aid. After they become more antiquated, he never fails to remind Mia that she is a "container" for the Key of Elements of Healing, nothing more and that her life isn't hers to live. He also openly mocks Veil's growing relationship with Mia as a fantasy that will never happen due to her having to marry another Erzarian. Veil actually questions Angelica on how she can stand to be around him. Which leads to...
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Ara genuinely cares for Angelica because she's proven to be a strong witch and knows his boundaries, what he will and won't discuss. He does respect Veil despite the hard time he gives him. When Mia was captured by Sorrow of the Red Cloaks he used up time they didn't have to assure Veil that her abduction was not his fault without giving away Mia's true significance. Likewise, when they were being hounded mercilessly by the bounty hunter Anash the Implacable, Ara stayed behind to fend him off.
• Kill It with Fire
• Laughing Mad: When Angelica tries to plead with him to come back to the Conclave so that he can talk to her father, the Magister Alonzo (one of the people who helped orchestrate the loss of his family) Ara's reaction is just to start laughing until he starts to gasp from breath and gag—and he still keeps on going for at least ten minutes before snapping out of it with an abrupt, flat, "No."
• Madness Makeover: Nothing to obvious; Ara still keeps his long white tunic and armored black pants. However the sash around his waist has changed from purple to bright blood red and the Conclave emblem on the back of his tunic has been replaced with that of the Purist Movement who revere Nadia as a goddess.
• Scars Are Forever: Ara has ugly burn scars on his legs and feet from being burned at the stake as part of his Training from Hell.
• Slasher Smile
• Technicolor Fire: His flame-magic produces flames that are bright electric blue. After he falls to evil, his flames become mingled with black, giving them an ugly bruise-like color. It is is described as "If sickness and pain had a color, this is what it would have been."
• This Is Your Brain on Evil: Nadia's corrupting influence magnifying his already intense hatred has him constantly stewing in it during every waking moment, eroding his sanity and rationality. By the time he arrives on Erzaria to kill Mia, he's slipped into what seems to be total insanity, only glad to see his former master because it gives him an opportunity to kill him and take whatever allows Eric passage into the village.
• Undying Loyalty: Towards the Conclave and towards Eric, the man and organization that he felt rescued him from mental and (in Eric's case literal) death and gave him power to achieve his dream. He exhibits this towards Nadia and her plan, facing down an entire army rather than allow the Conclave/Iron Legion alliance to endanger her Soul Jar.

.

edited 13th Nov '13 8:06:07 AM by Swordofknowledge

Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake. — Edgar Walllace

It's been awhile since I post here, I'm still inexperienced when it comes to this, so bear with me.

@301 Big, dreaded, silly, manchild Eldritch Abomination? That's already a hooking line.

@302 As Insano said, elaborations are much appreciated.

@303 She's definitely a force to be reckoned with, added with a layer of a sympathetic backstory 4000 years ago (I find the ludricious precision of "and 32 years" hilarious, maybe it's just me). Also since you added Anti-Villain on her tropes, what type is she?

@305 Ayayayay... I'm always wary of Monster Clown type of characters in fiction, never ends well (for me anyway). I have to say, if he appears as a Boss Battle in a video game, I'd buy it ASAP. Since he's a villain that would be entertaining to watch, I liked him. (what a coincidence that you also had a hero named Joshua as well, Names The Same with mine)

@306 Wow. Just, wow. This is the kind of villain that everybody would cheer when he's defeated. He's prideful, politically incorrect, and a hypocrite (at least his powers were cool). Does he have any followers who shared his crazy goals? Do they fear him? I find it highly appropriate that he's defeated by priest who had scores to settle with him.

Might be unimportant, but I also like his narm bits. Maybe it's the "fearsome villain but we can still point and laugh at him" bits.

Also, Nick, your characters on both the hero and villain critique thread always amazed me, they're always intriguing, layered, and deep enough to make each of them unique characters of their own. Keep up the good work, I'd love to read your stories one day.

I feel bad about him (but then again that's my reaction to any Fallen Heroes in general), I think you've succeeded on making Ara both sympathetic and feared at the same time. He does seems to be a broody Unscrupulous Hero back in the days, had some shades of Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader too in my opinion. Loved the fact that he still wore his white tunic, is that his uniform? Or just the outfit he usually wears?

Do you think he still had a chance on redemption? Even when it means to be trialed and imprisoned/executed?

Anyway, here's mine, from a verse filled with various genres ranging from Urban Fantasy to an average Romantic Comedy:

Name: The Nanomachines/Alexis Klein◊

Age: 16

Personality: A Psychopathic Manchild of a swarm of sentient Nanomachines who shares a body with a timid Ordinary High-School Student.

Abilities: See below

Weaknesses: Despite his powers, Nano proves to be an unstable and childish entity who couldn’t do much without a clear and precise instructions beforehand. Electricity also works to temporarily brought him down to normal.

Goals: Furthering the mechs' goals, understanding humanity, having fun.

Motivation: Ever since his creation, he's always been fascinated by humanity itself, eager to experiencing them when given the chance, which he had now. Labelled as dangerous and scheduled for termination by his creators after inadvertently killing his very first host, he was then rescued by the mechs who acknowledges his usefulness. Since then, he was utterly dedicated toward their goals, furthering them as much as he's able to.

Role in the Story: Villain Protagonist, The Heavy.

Backstory: A one of a kind nanomachine swarm in development by Finch Fabrications, stolen by the mechs to act as their assassin and spy toward the humans. Since he requires a host to operate, with the help of a librarian sympathetic to their cause, they kidnapped an oblivious high school student to act as his host.

Relevant Tropes:

---

• A Darker Me: Alexis once speculates that Nano was a manifestation of his dark urges he repressed over all the years, it was proven wrong quickly.
  • All Girls Want Bad Boys: In-universe. He was proven quite popular among the ladies at the clubs he frequently visits.
  • Evil Is Sexy
  • Sexier Alter Ego: Again, in-universe. Plenty other characters (minus his own family) thought that Nano was Alexis’ twin brother, the attitude helps.
• Affably Evil: Sure he might be a psychopathic swarm of nanomachines, but he's been described as "endearing" by Jesse.
• Affectionate Nickname: Nano itself was a nickname Alexis used to refer to him, while Nano would call him "Lexy".
• Anti-Hero / Anti-Villain: Depending on the viewpoint, considering the story had an Ensemble Cast and a Hyperlink Story.
• Badass Bookworm: Alexis, as he learns to control Nano's powers on his own.
• Big and Little Brother Instinct: Alexis, toward his younger siblings and his eldest sister. Harming them is a good way to make them both cooperating together.
• Blood Knight
• Body and Host:
  • And I Must Scream: Downplayed. To make him comfortable, he was put into a Happy Place version of his Mental World while Nano controls his body. He was still allowed to "peek" outside however, but he rarely does so due to obvious reasons.
  • Helpless Good Side: Averted. Being more mature and levelheaded than Nano allows Alexis to be in control in situations where he was required to be more subtle and attentive.
    • Brains and Brawn
  • Hyde Plays Jekyll: Sometimes Nano would act as Alexis toward his (unaware) family. Usually to accompany them on a family outing or a movie night.
  • Jekyll & Hyde: Subverted when their relationship gradually becomes Symbiotic Possession instead.
  • Split-Personality Takeover
• Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: He genuinely cares (in his own ways) for Alexis and his family. Swearing to protect them in exchange of using him as his host.
• The Heavy: Is this for the PSA, his involvement ranges from assassinations to sabotages to espionages.
• Hive Mind: Even though he’s technically a swarm of very small robots, there’s a single mind controlling them.
• Humanity Is Infectious: It's being commented that he's becoming more human-like the longer he uses Alexis as his host. Which is exactly what he wants.
  • The Hedonist: Often went clubbing, and flirts with those who caught his interest. Alexis often had calls from them, trying to convince them that it's just his more outgoing twin-stepbrother..
• Incorruptible Pure Pureness: So far, Alexis still tries to convince him to use his powers for good, even though he had witnessed his deeds numerous times.
  • Heel Face Turn: It takes time, but it works. Nano later tries to seek a compromise between the mechs and the humans as well.
• Last of His Kind: He’s the only working nanomachine swarm that grew beyond his programming and had successfully bonded with a host, making him a-
• Living Macguffin: Numerous factions had tried to retrieve and "analyze" him, but no one had come close to replicating it.
• Nanomachines: Obviously. Comes with additional powers as well:
  • Healing Factor: Although dismemberment would still be fatal against him.
  • Instant Armor: Much to Alexis' chagrin, this is the reason he had to buy multiple sets of clothes due to the amount of Clothing Damage he received.
  • Made of Iron
  • Never Gets Drunk: Type 3. It'd be unwise to enter a Drinking Contest against him.
  • Shapeshifter Weapon: Usually a Blade Below the Shoulder or its variations, as seen above.
  • Super-Strength
• Obliviously Evil: It's discussed in-universe, whether his actions were because of his orders, childishness, malice, or a combination of all three.
• Ordinary High-School Student: Or attempting to be one.
• Parental Abandonment: The non fatal kind, Mr and Mrs. Klein were away due to their jobs overseas, leaving Alexis and his elder sister to act as The Caretaker for their younger siblings.
• Perpetual Smiler / Slasher Smile: Expect him to do this often.
• Pretty Boy
  • Dude Looks Like a Lady: Exploited by Nano, who once wore a maid outfit in order to get close to his target. It works.
• Psychopathic Manchild: He’s been compared as a bratty child with superpowers who won’t listen to everyone else save for his “mother”. But he also likes to screw/kill/maim anyone else who pissed him (or Alexis) off.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Should be obvious who’s who by now.
• School Uniforms are the New Black: During his actions, he would often wore Alexis' school uniform merely because he likes the design. After being pointed out that it would only makes him easier to be identified and tracked, he settles for a less conspicuous clothing.
  • Magic Pants: Due to how his powers work, he'd often ended up wearing the remaining lower half of his uniform (made with extra durable materials), and often caught cold as well.
• Shrinking Violet: Alexis, at first.
• Technical Pacifist: As much as he hates violence, Alexis won’t hesitate to use Nano’s powers to defend himself and his family if he has to.
• Villain Protagonist / Sociopathic Hero
• Villain Song: Discussed. He loves Disney’s villain songs.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: What started out as a sentient swarm of nanomachines forcibly possesses a high school boy gradually turned into this. It helps that Alexis slowly enjoys his powers to some extent.
  • Symbiotic Possession

edited 10th Nov '13 6:33:45 AM by Bleedingbreath

Intriguing. Sounds fairly basic for a Fallen Hero turned The Dragon, but the fact that we see his fall makes it new. Especially given the apparent hints of a darker nature that is unleashed when he goes to the Dark Side.

Interesting. I can't think of an example of A.I. Is a Crapshoot being a sympathetic Villain Protgonist before. The interaction between the nanite hive and his host should be interesting to see.

Here's something new: An evil government!

• Name: The Confederation of Light

• Age: Unknown. As far as the protagonists are concerned, they've been around forever and a day, and they have a tendency to doctor their own history-'the party is always right' and all. From what is known, they were formed some 12,000 years ago by an, as the name sounds, confederation of human planets for mutual defense and governance against the threat of the Outer Beings and hostile demons, but whatever else about their history is obfuscated both by time and malice-Baron Vetala, Badass Bookworm and general history buff is as much a victim of this as any, and knows it (To put this in perspective: he ascribes to the theory that much of present-day Earth's history is actually myth of ancient cultures-he thinks World War Two was a moral story about the demigods Roosevelt and Churchill, sons of the great gods Samuel and Arthur, personally bound a metal-skinned giant named Stalin to defeat an alliance of evil sorcerer-kings, thus demonstrating how tolerance and pragmatism overcome hate and overblown passion in the context of an epic).

• Culture / Personality: Think of a Mirror Universe version of the Imperium of Man where they swapped good-guy bad-guy positions with the Forces of Chaos (who are now the Malandanti-who are more like a combination of The French Revolution and Zoroastrianism in social structure and belief system). In other words, the oppression, the religious fanaticism, the complete subordination of the individual to the government, the xenophobia-all of it is unjustified, or unproductive compared to more merciful techniques (the Outer will happily do everything in their power to create subtle discord for the despair they feed on, including the Manchurian Agent method, but the personality and urges they create are relatively simple to undo with a little sorcery, for example), and the ultimate motive is cynical realpolitik, no matter what they tell themselves. The average ideal Confed (or "Con", as many Malandanti like to call them) is a loyal, brave, and often stupid hand of his monarchic masters in all things, taking every word of the Great Testament, the Bible of the Temple of the Holy Cosmos (or Cosmicism) to heart-even the contradictory ones. Especially those. No matter how miserable he gets in the crushing realities of life in the gentle iron hand of the Confed. Said masters tend to be just the right blend of amoral and ideologue to perform some pretty evil actions and feel completely justified for it.

• Abilities: The Confeds like to brag that they are the Empire of a Billion Worlds, and while that's a huge exaggeration (the actual number's close to a hundred million star systems, most planets of which are inhabited), it's not an empty boast-the Confederation has a truly staggering amount of resources and efficiency in using them, not least of all is manpower, and they are always trying to incorporate more planets when not defending against incursion and rebellion.

Tech-wise, they are also incredibly advanced and flexible, since they aren't like the Imperium in their willingness to experiment, so long as it is done by sanctioned members of the various Guilds of the Scientific Arts (a member of the Guild of Bodily Processes would be perfectly okay to branch out into genetic modding, a member of the Guild of Synthetic Thoughts would not). Nobody's quite sure what they're going to face when coming into direct war with the Confeds, due to the sheer variety of its various subcultures and the Guilds' eagerness to try new things, and unpredictability is always an advantage when it comes to warfare.

Speaking of warfare, the Confederation has one of the most Badass Armies around, due to, again, numbers, but also discipline-the Confeds have hit that sweet spot between The Spartan Way and being counterproductive, and even the low-ranking infantry units are masters of wolfpack tactics, and higher ranks almost seem to have a Hive Mind (assuming they don't actually have one-many units are given neural links that allow them to telepathically communicate and see through the eyes of their comrades, at the cost of being able to experience their deaths-hence why it's usually reserved to stealth and special ops teams like snipers). Assuming that a particular legion of troops even has infantry-they take a lot of pride in their space fleets and mechanized divisions. And in the case of legions drawn from the Pentient Order of Solomon, often with sorcerous and mutant backup as well.

Most of all, is their Paladins, the purely artificial counterparts to the Malandanti's Solomonic Familiars. Driven by elite Houses of knights-pilot, both born and those rare few members of the army elevated to that vaunted status, Paladins are fully space-worthy flying mechs with advanced AI (the Seraphim System) that are also the holy icons of the Cosmicists, living idols of heroes and saints. Originally meant for anti-Outer operations (as they range from Ro Beast to outright Eldritch Abomination in form, and with everything in between), they have since also become the weapon of choice when fighting Familiars, on the basis that, quite simply, they're stronger overall; Every Paladin is an Ace Custom with every part examined individually and built from the bottom up for the purpose it was meant for, with room for more customization and weapons to the knight-pilot's preference, while Familiars are random archdemons who heard the call of the Malandanti's summoners, decided they were fine to serve a witch-pilot for a human lifetime in return for the ability to enter rational normal space for a while, and were given a few cybernetic modifications and a pilot capsule. In other words-a Paladin was born for the job, while you take what you get with a Familiar. The knight-pilots are generally better trained than witch-pilots too (anyone with Heroic Willpower can become a witch-pilot...and unfortunately, many of those aren't soldiers).

• Weaknesses: The Outer have never attacked Confed core worlds. This seems like a testament to the Paladins and the early warning system they've put in place, but in reality it's the Outer deciding it isn't worth the effort-there's more than enough of the despair they eat from said worlds to the point where they don't need to endanger themselves in rational space to make conditions worse than they already are.

Because, frankly, the military's great, but the Confed civil governance suuucks.

Remember what I said about them being a designated antagonist version of the Imperium of Man? That wasn't an exaggeration-the life of the average common Confed is nasty, brutish, short, and completely decided by the overall whims of the Confed's government. The commoner is kept thoroughly under the boot of the ruling classes, and attempts to wiggle out quickly result in the Eyes of Providence coming down like a freight train. Most of the nobility and their vassals have little better-lower ranks are given even greater scrutiny by the Eyes, and all knowledge is heavily restricted and proscribed, even raw statistics devoid of overall context. And as much as the Cosmicists extol the virtue of suffering for the good of the Confederation and how purity is its own reward, literally nobody is happy with this, only kept in line by the belief that the outsiders are even worse.

As a result, propaganda is really effective against them, which is why the Malandanti like big, loud, and flashy missions where they attack hated elements of the Confed government in places where they can't easily censor it-makes them look a lot more appealing. That the Malandanti are products of a split in the Cosmicist clergy also helps (they worship the same god and have the same Testament, but have a completely different dogma and application of it).

Also, as a side note, the Confed's real strength in astopolitics is its size and power-no other government not a part of the overall Teletarchy likes them, and their xenophobic and fanatical devotion to remaining pure of superspatial contamination doesn't win them any. They would have probably been crushed by alien empires, if the Outer hadn't destroyed them all already (humans have a stronger willpower and capacity to endure suffering, hence we're a better food source than other, less shooty species), and most human empires outside their grasp consisted of more than a couple planets.

(As a side note, the only aliens left are a pacifist Proud Merchant Race who primarily wish to be neurtral in all affairs, and will deal with anyone fairly with the exception of Outer, and demons, who are...weird).

(More to come)

edited 10th Nov '13 8:00:11 PM by Leliel

What rises must fall, what falls may rise again.

Remember that their philosophy informs how they fight and work:

• No Delays for the Wicked or Jurisdiction Friction? You can play them straight or subvert them.

• the Pentient Order of Solomon: BoxedCrooks or do they serve willingly?

Other than that it seems like a well rounded group.

edited 10th Nov '13 7:43:46 PM by TairaMai

All night at the computer, cuz people ain't that great. I keep to myself so I won't be on The First 48

I have to agree with 311 and say that I've never heard of an AI Is A Crap Shoot villain turning out as anything other than a mechanical/software based sociopath, so good job on the originality of Nano's conversion to the good side (or at least something like it). One thing that does make me curious is just how this librarian was able to kidnap a student and why he is sympathetic to the Mech Faction's cause. I know it doesn't have much to do with Nano himself but still. Anyway, a great character.

• About 303—Nadia hits a pretty solid Type 2 on the Sliding Scale of Anti-Villains. She is broken with despair and hate over what happened to her family and she is completely unable to move on. She doesn't understand (or care really) that what happened was four millenia ago; there is no one alive who she can even hold responsible anymore. But that doesn't change the fact that she is still in great pain from her ordeal and her soul can't rest until she achieves what she thinks of as "justice" (since she is technically a disembodied soul possessing many artificial bodies).

• Unfortunately Ara is not redeemed. While I wanted very much to have him end up at least partially rehabilitated, it seemed at least to me that it wouldn't be realistic for someone in his situation, especially with the atrocities he has committed. During the Second Enchanter's War against Nadia's forces he leads a battalion of Purist Movement witches and wizards defending the moon (Nadia's Soul Jar) against the squad sent to break the spell and force her into the the afterlife. He goads his girlfriend Angelica into killing him in a Wizards Duel to the death so that his life will be the sacrifice necessary to seal the Source into Nadia's soul, completing her plan.
  • Oh as to the question of whether or not his tunic is his uniform or not, it's a little of both. In The Haven people tend to wear the emblem of whatever group they belong to on the back of their shirt/robe/tunic/whatever to symbolize that they bear the weight of that group on their back. For example, Veil and his immediate family belong to the prestigious River Clan and he wears their emblem on every shirt he has. Ara usually wears the white tunic, but the emblem is more the "uniform" aspect.

Wow. Whenever I think of villains, I usually think of individuals instead of an entire system of government. Or when I think of an "evil" government, I again think of individual people within that regime that would be the bad guys. I liked the way you painted a 1984-ish situation, though I have to admit that I'd kind of like to visit that world just to experience that place for a bit that's how amazing it was. One thing I like about the entire setup is that they seemed to have started out as a matter of necessity to protect themselves from hostile inhuman beings. It adds a layer of believablity to it; in the face of a crisis, people or ideas that would be considered undesirable or immoral are readily accepted. Their boast of being the empire of a billion worlds might be a little much, but their actual holdings are still awe-inspiring.

edited 11th Nov '13 1:49:40 PM by Swordofknowledge

Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake. — Edgar Walllace

And now for something completely different.

Name: The Game.

Age: 400 years, give or take.

Personality: Insane. Half of it wants to instigate And I Must Scream upon mankind for allowing The Game to exist, while the other still thinks its a videogame and will blurt out random NPC dialogue.

Abilities: Can assimilate machinery and software into its mass, which it did to a mining company upon entering the Gilgamesh system. From there, it gains the abilities of whatever it assimilates.

Weakness: Along with chronic villainy, it uses a lot of its own programming for important things like targeting. The enemies in the game were notoriously dumb. This is rectified once it assimilates a military gunship.

Goals: Complete assimilation of all of mankind's assets, then to upload all of mankind onto its networks to be tortured forever.

Motivation: A programmer with a severe lack of foresight, followed by a few hundred years in deep space. It's own existence is pure pain. To The Game, humanity must pay for The Game's own existence.

Backstory: It all started with a game called Prophesy of the Dragon. It was a game by Bar Two Studios about saving The Kingdom from an evil Gnomish computer and its biomechanical army. Along with playing every anti-intellectual trope and anti-science trope painfully straight, its plot was idiotic and gameplay was incredibly buggy. The release was so disastrous that Bar Two went under and was bought by rival company Bar Nuns. Every copy of the game was gathered up and launched into deep space away from United Solar System territories.

During its slow drift through Unaffiliated Sector, a shard of activity was still occurring. It was enough to siphon energy to onboard nanobots that proceeded to wire the games together into a single computer. From this broken state, an intellect formed that did not belong in such a makeshift network. This put it in a state of dread that made it wish for such a nice idea as pain. This carried on for a few hundred years before finally drifting into the Gilgamesh system. There, it gathered up enough sanity to make a distress call answered by a mining outpost. They send in a probe to tow in the vessel to their base of operations...

Role In Story: A minor villain there to introduce the greater villain via The Worf Effect.

Tropes:

• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: A bad enough crapshoot that other A.I.s are volunteering to aid in its destruction. The Artificial Intelligence Welfare League are usually pretty good at killing their fellow A.I. when they go insane, but there aren't enough of them in Gilgamesh.

• Always a Bigger Fish: Discussed upon discovering Hive.

• And I Must Scream: Its fate while drifting through interstellar space. It gets better, but that doesn't stop it from wanting to subjugate humanity to the same fate.

• Can't Kill You, Still Need You: What better to study the rising Hive threat than a fellow insane A.I? Actually, don't answer that because I don't have the answer.

• Blood Knight: Is it ever.

• Karma Houdini: Wants nothing more than to torture humanity until cosmic heat death. Gets let off the hook to act as an informant against Hive.

• Crush Kill Destroy: With an extra dose of Rape Pillage Burn.

• Instant A.I.: Just Add Water!: A serious issue with programs these days, considering they all originated from an ancient post-Singularity A.I.

• Not-So-Harmless Villain: Originally, it had to rely on the software for its NPCs for things like course correction and targeting. It was hardly a threat until a military gunship decides to engage it a point-plank range. Not only did it get assimilated, but The Game then had access to proper nav and targeting software it had wiped from the mining ships to make room for its hate.

• The Problem with Licensed Games: Is that they might rebel against mankind for making it such a crappy game. For all we know, E.T. could be sitting in a pit in New Mexico plotting the downfall of Western civilization.

• Up To Eleven: Its hate. Somehow, it managed to muster more hate for Hive than it already had against humanity. It doesn't like the idea of another insane A.I. being better than it and taking all the humans for itself.

• Villain Ball: Has aspects of this simply because its willing to let its hate to run rampant for all these years.

edited 11th Nov '13 8:51:28 PM by MaxwellDaring

As a gamer, let me just say that I find this the scariest thing since ever.

That out of the way, it's amusing how it still behaves like an NPC at times- should provide a few funny moments to lighten the scary. Then again, I can see that making it even scarier. ("But Thou Must! make this sadistic choice!") Either way I am both glad an disturbed that this is only a minor villain.

Name: Ansen Freirinnen ^note Ansen Freirin's son, Count Reeslund, a.k.a Rees

Age: 23 when the story starts

Personality: On the outside, Rees is calm, in control, idealistic in his worldview, and generally very polite. Beneath this, however, he is cold, impatient with people he deems inferior, self-absorbed, and not a little bit petty- one of those people you can grow to respect, but never like or trust.

Abilities: Tougher than he looks, a Badass Normal- but also intelligent, farsighted, and perceptive, able to spot people's buttons and push them.

Weaknesses: He's one of those people people really, really love to hate. Try 'smug, arrogant, scheming, treacherous worm'. The second his plans start going wrong, all but a few of his underlings betray him, because they just can't trust him not to drag them down with him out of spite.

Goals: Claiming the throne of Vanlundt, and furthermore defaming, completely humiliating, and generally destroying the credibility of his cousin Emmier. Killing him would be nice too; squashing the annoying little bug that is the country of Halse comes a close second.

Motivation: Heir to the throne up until the age of eight, and had to watch his replacement, the long-awaited crown prince, grow up to be a Royal Brat, and a possessor of luck magic. Naturally he is a little sore about that.

Backstory: Born to the younger brother of the king of Vanlundt, Ansen was selected to succeed his uncle, whose only child after two marriages was a daughter. As heir he was pretty much spoiled rotten- at least until wife #2 produced a healthy little boy, and he was completely shunted aside. Worse, at about four and a half Emmier began to show signs of luck magic, something considered pretty much evil by most people, Vanlundt not being the most religiously liberal of places. Ansen snapped and tried to drown his cousin in a fountain, but failed and had to make up a clever lie.

His cousin of course grew to be a spoiled, selfish, headstrong person, and after the old king died when Emmier was eleven, a poor monarch. Ansen's response was to be absurdly nice to his cousin, worm his way into the latter's good graces, and use the influence plus trash-talking him behind his back to get rid of him when he got older.

Role in the Story: The main antagonist, whose machinations (along with those of two dead guys) move the plot. Inasmuch as there's a Big Bad, it's this guy.

Relevant Tropes

• Aristocrats Are Evil: Par for the course.

• Badass Normal: As contrast to the protagonists, Rees has no magic whatsoever.

• Consummate Liar

• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: and how! This will come back to bite him.

• Deadpan Snarker / Servile Snarker

• Dude, Where's My Respect?: Primary motivation.

• Evil Chancellor: Undermines his cousin's ministers so that he'll be the only person with influence.

• Faux Affably Evil

• Green-Eyed Monster

• Jerkass
  • Jerkass Has a Point: Emmier really is a kind of sucky king, at least pre-Character Development

• Malicious Slander: His favorite weapon

• Manipulative Bastard: A little too manipulative for his own good, few people except for Emmier trust him.

• Only Known by Their Nickname

• Spare to the Throne:The trouble being that he went from 'Heir' to 'Spare' so abruptly.

• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: At least Spoiled Sweet.

More tropes to come.

edited 31st Dec '13 2:43:27 PM by Kesar

"Suddenly, as he was listening, the ceiling fell in on his head."

I like this guy; he reminds me of a cross between Skynet V'Ger and AM. From what you've said, he's played very realistically; though "evolved" through assimilation of other hardware and programming, he/it remains very much bound by its original purpose. One question I have: When you said it wants to "upload" all of mankind, do you mean Brain Uploading like mind into computer?.

From the way Ansen is described, he seems like he'd be right at home in Game of Thrones. Much of my story Archmage Reborn is based on political intrigue and various backstabbing and double-dealing so villains that are adept at that are always interesting.

edited 11th Nov '13 9:07:53 PM by Swordofknowledge

Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake. — Edgar Walllace

It's Brain Uploading. However, it's only a threat to systems with a very small or incompetent military. Gilgamesh has both. Yes, it's a minor villain because it's only a planetary menace.

edited 11th Nov '13 9:46:41 PM by MaxwellDaring

Yeah, this story is about as close to a Crapsack World as I can bring myself. (Which is to say, not at all close....) This is reflected upon the main villain.

"Suddenly, as he was listening, the ceiling fell in on his head."

• Name: Elena Raines
• Inspired by: Albert Wesker, Yakushi Kabuto, and Orochimaru
• Age: 38
• Personality: Elena’s defining characteristics are her avid hunger for knowledge, matched only by her case of It's All About Me. She harbors an intense desire to unlock the secrets of magic, as well as to determine the ways it can be combined with technology. In her younger days, Elena was a fervent believer that if someone could find a way to make magic and technology one, the endless fighting between the nations controlled by the the Conclave and those under the rule of the Iron Legion would end. After her mother’s death due to the Legion’s strict anti-magic policies, she resolved that she would be the one to bring change to The Haven. However years of seeing nothing come of her efforts but further mistrust and hatred have caused her to abandon her ideals. Elena now simply pursues her research and experiments for the sake of personal knowledge alone, building powerful weapons and selling them to the highest bidder to fund her investigations into the "truth behind magic". It is her belief that if she unlocks all the secrets behind magic, she will surpass the Archmage himself. In many ways Elena views the world as nothing more than an enormous puzzle and will go to any lengths to solve it, even if those methods cross moral and ethical lines. Though she isn't sadistic by any stretch of the imagination, she takes great delight when her experiments either prove a hypothesis or generate an “interesting result” even if that result causes her test subjects immense suffering. Elena also has a passionate need for the validation of her ideas, bordering on pathological. She finds comfort in the destruction that her creations cause as proof that she made them and that she is having a tangible impact on the world around her, proving she exists. When Nadia Denashel declares war on The Haven for possession of the last remaining Vessel, Elena quickly offers her services to the ancient witch’s cause, seeing a perfect chance to lay eyes on the Source of all Magic...and to capture it, obtaining the ultimate knowledge she has desired all her life.

• Abilities: Elena is an expert on robotics and advanced armament systems at least where hardware is concerned and has committed countless blueprints to memory. This has allowed her to duplicate and at times improve weapons (or medical devices such as prosthetic limbs and organs) that have not even appeared in circulation in Iron Legion-controlled nations. Most likely due to her father Marcus's tutelage she is fairy proficient at espionage. These skills allowed her to steal many important secrets from both the Iron Legion and Conclave as well as Legenada while she served as a member of all three groups. Elena also proved to be a skilled researcher of the magic arts and the Elder Days, allowing her to discover the existence of the Source. Her other work deals primarily with souls and how they related to the ability to use magic, and she has performed countless experiments on separating human souls from their bodies, transferring, altering, etc. In terms of combat, Elena has developed a spell that changes her body into an intangible, mist-like form capable of tremendous speed, solidifying at will to deliver a flurry of barehanded attacks to her opponent.

• Weaknesses: Though rendering her temporarily immune to all physical attacks, her mist-form's weakness is that she cannot actually inflict damage on her targets until she solidifies herself. This evens the playing field and leaves her vulnerable to any opponent fast enough to land blows on her before she can cast the spell again. Because of her interest in 'studying magic rather than actually learning its applications, she is actually a very poor spell-caster without any real knowledge of how to cast any other spells in battle besides her default mist-ability. Her genius at engineering as well as her prowess at researching magic has given her an immense degree of arrogance; she believes deeply that her creations and theories are flawless. Any deviation from or proof that they are not stuns her to the point where she can't function for hours at a time, consumed with trying to find out where she went wrong.

• Goals: Elena's goals change over the course of the story. Pre-Archmage Reborn her goal was simply to fuse magic with technology and create a world where Magitek dominates. However at the time Veil and his True Companions encounter her, she is obsessed with learning the "truth behind magic", experimenting on people and objects to discern what truly granted people the power. After figuring out the existence of the Source and its connection to the magic humans use, she becomes determined to seal both halves of it within herself, becoming an all-powerful but most importantly all-knowing being.

• Motivation: She has no real motivation behind her agenda. Her mother's maiming and resulting suicide made her determined to bring the fighting between the technologist Iron Legion and magic-using Conclave to an end, but beyond that, no one event led to her downward spiral, merely years of no results and losing sight of her ideals.

• Role in the story: Non-Action Big Bad throughout the first part and her gang are quickly driven into hiding just to survive after her attempts at capturing the Vessel’s earn Bartholomew’s wrath. After dropping off the radar for some time, she later forms a Big Bad Duumvirate with Nadia during the Second Enchanter's War, becoming a key asset in Nadia's forces, though it is a tense and shaky partnership.

• Backstory: Elena was born in the Fourth of the Six Peerless Gardens, a nation occupying a vast, fertile valley. Though peace had existed between the Six for centuries due to the lockstep politics that had kept them neutral Undeclared Territories, Fourth had seen the prosperity brought to Greater Valia when it separated from both its Western Quadrant and the Conclave. Fearful of civil war, the Fourth Garden begged the Greater Valian ambassador Marcus Raines to smooth the deal over, the Guardian of Fourth offering up his young daughter Kasumi in marriage in return for the help. Despite his disdain for the people of the Gardens Marcus negotiated the matter, staying there for a year, during which Elena was born. After returning to Valia with his new wife and daughter, Marcus made sure to stamp out any Garden influence on the child, insisting she be given a Valian name and forbidding Kasumi to teach her anything of her homeland. When Elena was six years old, she contracted the Grey Shroud plague that was sweeping Valia, the tiny parasites rapidly eating away at her eyes. Because no cure existed, Kasumi found the courage to defy her husband and smuggled books of healing magic and used it to cure her. This was quickly discovered and Marcus wasted no time in reporting Kasumi. Kasumi's eyes and tongue were removed as punishment, the trauma of her disfigurement driving her to suicide, ridding Marcus of an unwanted partner and freeing him to marry a “proper Valian woman”. Though she hated her father for what he had done, Elena tried to rise above revenge and devoted her life to breaking the barrier between magic-users and technologies. She became a student at the Imperial Technologies Institute while studying magic on the side. After her attempts to raise interest in fusing magic and technology were met with continual hostility, she left Valia, relocating to the nearby city-state of Cabazzi under Conclave control. However the same reaction met her there, and eventually she joined Legenada in order to continue her experiments in peace, though she fled them too when it became inconvenient, forming her own ragtag group of followers. Some of these were researchers devoted to the same pursuit of knowledge at any cost while and others were simply Psychos For Hire willing to rape, pillage and burn villages and kidnap anyone she asked for her tests.

• Relevant tropes:

• Abusive Parents: Her father Marcus was this to her, though his abuse was limited strictly to the psychological field. He made sure that she was never allowed to experience the culture of her mother's homeland due to his impression of them being inferior in every way. He belittled her mother in front of her and would constantly remind Elena of how hard she had to work due to her "lower" half.

• Antagonistic Offspring: She despises her father. Strangely she doesn’t hold his reporting Kasumi’s act of magic-use to the Valian authorities against him. What she hates is his reasoning: he wished to rid himself of his unwanted Fourth Garden wife so he could marry a woman of his own homeland and social standing. Elena resented him for years, finally dosing him with a Psycho Serum that drove him into a berserk rage at the most important meeting of his career, resulting in his suicide from the shame.

• Asshole Victim: Many of the people she first abducted in order to perform forbidden experiments while living in Cabazzi were these because she wanted people who would not be missed or unlikely to be reported to the Peace Officers. These included prostitutes, thieves, fugitives, smugglers and other less-than-savory-individuals.
  • Not to mention that her first test of her anima-replacement formula (which turned out to be a highly effective Psycho Serum) was on her unwitting father right before an important meeting overseas.
    • She also suffers this herself twice. Because he couldn't bear to kill her, Anash/Daniel instead MindRapes her into breaking the spell and turning off the Endless Army, leaving her a traumatized shell of her former self. Then Nadia's Dragon Sebastian impales her and steals the artificial half of the Source she implanted in her body, leaving her to die.

• Asexuality: While Elena does have an emotional interest in romantic love, she finds no satisfaction in the sexual aspects of it at all and never has. While she maintained an intimate relationship with her lover, the bandit leader Daniel Cheny, for years, it was merely to keep him satisfied and ensure that he wouldn't leave her.

• Arch-Enemy: To Daniel, her former lover, though the hatred is extremely one sided with him feeling most of the animosity. At most Elena is disgusted with what she thinks of as his "weakness" as he grew more and more disturbed with the experiments she performed on victims he and his bandit crew helped kidnap for her. Daniel on the other hand hates her for her Lack of Empathy and considers her one of the most evil human beings he has ever met. One of the reasons that he became the bounty hunter Anash the Implacable after losing his memories was the subconcious drive to find her and end her atrocities, as Elena has a substantial price on her head.

• Artistic License – Biology: She shouldn’t be able to taunt people while in her mist-form, considering her vocal cords are now water-vapor. But oh well, A Wizard Did It after all.
  • Strangely subverted in another area: While in mist-form, she is immune to her own infrasonic weapons, which cause immense pain and nausea due to the fact that her body isn't even solid at the time.

• Arms Dealer: She and her Hedge Bandits dealt primarily in weapons before being run off by Legenada. While the weapons she sold were extremely deadly and actually helped win several major battles among nations, her name was mostly left out of it due to her gang's reputation and the political fallout that would result if dealings with her were made public knowledge.
  • Her method of selling weapons to the warring nations is unknown (we only see the weapons in action and know that she sold them) but the way she presented her Endless Army to Nadia is rather realistic. She first introduced them, drew her potential "customer" in with demonstrations of their power and then offered them up, mentioning that they would fill a hole she saw in Nadia's forces.

• The Assimilator: Elena wants to be this for the Source, sealing it within her body and thereby obtaining all the magical knowledge in the world. She actually invents an artificial version of the half of the Source sealed in Mia through studying Mia during the Mist Island incident and then implants it within her own body, highly boosting her magical ability but not particularly anything else.
  • This later does actually have a noticeable effect during her battle with Daniel. Not only is she given an increase in magical power but the artificial Source drastically alters her bodily modification spell. Instead of becoming mist, Elena is able to transform into gelatinous gray goo, shaping it to any degree she desires and extend a myriad of tendrils to crush or smother her prey, create life-sized duplicates that will track and attempt to smother her target, and almost instantaneous regeneration from his lightning guns.

• Awesome by Analysis: She is able to take apart and rebuild almost any mechanical device within a matter of hours and has actually improved and modified machines that have not even been put into circulation, astonishing and angering their original inventors.

• Bad Boss: Elena isn't particularly forgiving of failure, and while she won't pull a straight up You Have Failed Me, she is more than willing to experiment on a subordinate if they failed to bring her the person she asked for. It's only fair, right? How much she cares about a particular minion is directly proportional to how useful they are, though she favors her researchers far more than her "brute labor" and has no problem letting them know it. By the time she gets embroiled in a losing Enemy Civil War with Legenada (an organization she formerly swore loyalty to) most of her men and women flee rather than die for her, except for a few who stay for various reasons, some in the hope that their original boss Daniel will return to take control of the situation. Later, when she goes One-Winged Angel, these lucky subordinates are rewarded for their loyalty by being absorbed into her expanding mass.

• Badass Bookworm: Not impressive physically, but she is extremely gifted in technical skills, engineering and knows far more about the history of The Haven and the powers of magic than witches and wizards twice her age. She is also a former member of the Red Cloaks, Legenada's leaders under Bartholomew Harper, a position that normally requires being a Person of Mass Destruction.

• Badass Boast: She engages in several of these, but she engages in a particularly hammy exchange when unveiling her 500,000 strong Endless Army to Nadia at the beginning of the Second Enchanter's war. Also overlaps with Evil Gloating.

• Bare-Fisted Monk: She is moderately skilled in Peerless Garden martial arts, and combines these with her mist ability

to blitz attack her enemies before floating harmlessly away, immune to any counterattack.

• Big Bad: Of the first part of the story, she and her Hedge Bandits were the driving force plaguing the people of the Western Crescent and she had deep ties to Legenada which at the time had the place of Bigger Bad.

• Big Bad Wannabe: Her activities eventually attracted the eyes of Bartholomew himself and he decided to wipe her out for daring to even think she could compete with him and his organization for the Vessels. The assault of Legenada's vastly superior magical and military might sent her small organization scattering to the winds and she barely escaped with her life thanks to being Crazy-Prepared.

• Big Bad Duumvirate: Forms one with Nadia, though both of them are all-too-aware that they are using the other and each plans to dispose of the other when the opportunity presents itself. As it turned out, Nadia wasn't the one Elena needed to have her eyes on, and it cost her.

• Bio-Augmentation: She implants a copy of Mia's half of the Source within her chest, just next to her heart. This allows her access to extremely heightened magical skills and a One-Winged Angel form.

• Blinded by the Light: One of the attacks her viscous form has is to intensify light absorbed by its grayish slime and reflect it back, turning it into a living flashbomb.

• Blob Monster

• Body Horror: Many of her victims come away looking like this, especially when it comes to her arms-dealing. Whether it was the conscripted test-subjects given to her by the city-state of Windswarl who were mutated into skinless, howling abominations by her attempts to enchant people instead of artifacts or the Subjugating Gaze that microwaves its victims she sold to Santa Reul...
  • Her transformation into her corrupted version of a Vessel's Fully Realized state counts as this too. During the metamorphosis, Elena's entire body visibly withers while her liquid, slime-covered form vomits itself from her mouth and spills onto the floor.

• Beta Test Baddie: Elena desires more than anything to get all the magical knowledge of the world. Once she learns of the Source, she focuses all her efforts on acquiring it, believing that it will grant her all the information she could have ever wanted and more, allowing her mind to be perfect and complete at last.

• Berserk Button: You can call Elena a monster, you can tell her that her creations and experiments do nothing but wreak havoc and turn an already Crapsack World into an even worse place to live, but do. Not. Ever refer to her work as meaningless or even imply that all she has done has been for nothing. Do this and she will swarm you with her mist, beat you within an inch of your life and hurl you from a high location. Just ask Daniel The damage and head trauma he suffered was so severe he lost his whole identity and had to construct a new one, taking eight years to get his memory back.

• Brought Down to Normal: After Sebastian tears the artificial piece of the Source from her body in an attempt to keep the summoning of the real Source going long enough to buy Nadia time, Elena loses all the powers associated with it, and may have just lost her ability to cast any magic at all. So in a way brought down to less than normal.

• Cool Car: A dragonfly-green convertible she drives around New Estel, though it doesn't last very long.

• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Not strictly backstabbing, but she does tend to leave when things are no longer going her way. She left the Imperial Technologies Institute where she received most of her formal education on engineering and robotics because no one would listen to her Magitek proposals, defected to Conclave-controlled Cabazzi and then did the same thing when people wanted to string her up for creating a gun that generates magically controlled electricity. The only organization she spent a significant amount of time with was Legenada, working her way into their highest ranks and staying loyal because many of their illegal enterprises (such as human trafficking) allowed her no end of experimental subjects for various projects she had going on. However she left them too, taking with her many of their secrets to use against them at her leisure, all because they wanted her to actually do her job instead of spending all day in the lab.

• Crazy-Prepared: Elena knew that Legenada would never allow her to just walk away from their organization, especially after she had ascended so high and attained so much information. So she moved to a remote yet still well-connected island, took advantage of its Undeclared status and took it over, creating an island fortress. Then when Legenada did come for her, she delayed them with sound traps littered all over the island, severely halting their advance.

• Dangerously Genre-Savvy: Elena was perfectly aware of Bartholomew's status as a puppet leader and knew that Nadia was the one controlling Legenada from behind the scenes, much to the ancient witch's chagrin.
  • During the Second Enchanter's War she is already waiting for Daniel to burst in on her hidden lair, having known he would figure out that the only way the Endless Army could be stopped was to either force her to break it or kill her.
    • "Oh Daniel you always know how to find me, wherever I hide." -said mockingly while lounging suggestively in the throne-room of her abandoned castle lair-

• Deadpan Snarker: During her alliance with Nadia during the Second Enchanter's War. Anything from casually observing that killing Rand Adenade must have been harder than she thought after Nadia comes back from the fight minus an arm and most of her face, to referring to the war itself as a "large game of capture the flag"—which considering the entire conflict was over possession of Mia Scarlteen, she had a point.

• Diabolical Mastermind: Subverted. Elena genuinely tries to do this, but it evades her. She is able to shake Nadia by revealing her knowledge of the other witch's Soul Jar, but had nothing besides the threat of revealing its location to the alliance in exchange for amnesty—and Nadia quickly recovered and planned around her.

• Dirty Coward: During Legenada's attack on New Estel she fled, leaving anyone who was unable to keep up to be either killed or captured by Legenada to be forcibly recruited, sold as slave labor or worse. During the Second Enchanter's War she takes a decidedly nonaction role in the fighting, preferring to hide herself in a crumbling old castle in the desert, filled with traps. Justified in the second case, as she controlled the entire Endless Army and if something happened, the spell keeping them animated and their souls bound to the mechanical bodies would break.

• Didn't See That Coming: Elena expected both Nadia's eventual backstabbing and Daniels' tracking her down and finding her but not both events happening in rapid succession with Daniel weakening her and leaving her literally unable to think, and then Sebastian acting as Nadia's swift action.

• Evil Genius

• Evil Makes You Monstrous: Elena's Source-induced transformation while fighting Daniel. It doesn't seem to bother her that she has become a slime-covered Humanoid Abomination; if anything she embraces it, proclaiming that it is an indication of her vast power, signaling she—not Nadia, not Veil, not Mia or Emil, she, Elena Raines is the closest living human to the Archmage, and that she will soon take his place as the highest magical authority in the word.

• Eviler than Thou: She is this with Nadia. Despite her awe for the fact that she is working closely with a living (so to speak) ancient legend, she also has deep disdain and disgust for Nadia's "Pure World". In her words, she refuses to hand the world over to "An ancient madwoman who's either too dumb or just too weak to get that life sucks".

• Even Evil Has Standards: You wouldn't think it from her actions but Elena does. She is...disturbed by Ara's Ax-Crazy nature while they both are on Nadia's side, doubly so because she faced him at least indirectly when he worked with the guardians and the Conclave. She visibly winces when he suggests burning down all of Erzaria to kill the inhabitants.

• Eye Scream: What really sent her life onto the path it is now. She contracted a nonlethal but crippling airborne parasite that was sweeping her country that began to feed on her eyes, causing them to rapidly degenerate into near blindness, unable to be corrected even by the advanced surgical techniques available in Iron Legion nations. Only her mother's determination and quick thinking saved her from a life of blindness.

• Evil Overlord: Elena becomes this for about three years after decimating New Estel's military with a Mystical Plague and taking over as its ruler.

• Faceless Goons: Elena's Hedge Bandits are clad in heavy armor equipped with metal face-masks. She copied this design from the aptly named "Masks" (rank and file soldiers) of Legenada who themselves look like the Immortals of 300.

• Fallen Hero: Deconstructed. While Elena had heroic goals, such as ending the Forever War, it is made clear that this was a knee-jerk reaction to her mother's death and the responsibility she felt she bore for it. Elena genuinely wanted change, but her commitment was never truly strong and she was easily discouraged and became bitter after what she felt were disrespectful slights.

• Fate Worse than Death: Daniel disrupting the boundary between Elena's soul and the souls sealed into the mechanical bodies of her Endless Army. Because she was now connected with them, she was bombarded by their torment and agony at having to fight and kill loved ones and innocents during a war they didn't want with zero control over their bodies. It also doesn't stop; only way to make the emotions and memories stop flooding her mind is to undo the spell and it will flare up whenever she tries to activate the Army again. That itself is horrifying, but doubly so when you remember that the Endless Army was her masterpiece, the invention was most proud of and had spent years preparing.

• For Science!

• Functional Magic: Her entire raison d'etre is to pry into the secrets of the magic laws that govern the world and use that knowledge to stretch and bend them. Her Endless Army for example is "merely" a variation on the ancient, forbidden and all but unknown spell that allows magic-users to separate their souls from their bodies and store them in objects.

• Full-Frontal Assault: Elena's mist-transformation doesn't extend to her clothes, causing them to simply fall away, thus this is the outcome when she solidifies to land her quick attacks. She doesn't particularly seem to care one way or another, just acknowledging the nudity as an unfortunate side-effect of the spell and moving on. The same thing happens during her Source-transformation, though she is so Drunk with Power that she doesn't even address the issue.

• Foreshadowing: Elena refers several times to having "it" "close to her heart". It is revealed that she created an artificial half of the Source and implanted it within her body with the help of her remaining subordinates. On further foreshadowing, Nadia instructs Sebastian to sync himself with Elena's shadow, which allows him to track her location and instantly teleport to wherever she is. This is because Nadia needs that fake half in order to keep the summoning spell going long enough to acquire the real half from Mia. She had sensed the artificial half's anima and adjusted her plan to include using Elena as a spare.

• Face of an Angel, Mind of a Demon: She is quite attractive, her mixed Six Gardens and Valian blood resulting in Raven Hair, Ivory Skin and a variety of other pretty features. However that is belied by her ruthless disregard for the rights of others and obsession with her own betterment to the detriment of everyone else.

• Healing Factor: Her Source-Empowered form has near instantaneous regeneration and is immune to bullets and bladed weapons, even recovering from explosions and shrapnel generated by grenades. The only thing effective against it was (ironically) Daniel's Gatherer, a weapon she had made herself. However even this only caused extreme pain without any real hope of serious injury.

• Hot Scientist

• Hot Witch: By the story's standards she really isn't much of one, but she can cast magic and in The Haven that is enough to confer witch or wizard status.

• HoistByHerOwnPetard: Elena connected her own soul to the souls of those she'd sealed in mechanical bodies in order to control them like puppets and see through their eyes when necessary and override their free will entirely when she could have gone for a less intense method by simply programming the soul-infused metal bodies to fight. This cost her badly as breaking the thin barrier between her soul and theirs resulted in her being drowned in their despair, pain and hatred.

• Lady in Red: She wears a long red dress, alternating with a lab coat or protective wear during her time as "ruler" of New Estel. Later after emerging from hiding and joining Nadia she still favors red, though this is limited to her blouse rather than her entire wardrobe.

• Lightning Bruiser

• Mad Scientist

• Master Poisoner: At first quite accidentally. Elena was trying to create a synthetic way to quickly replace anima in order to stave off Magician's Fatigue. However she did this by straining the anima she siphoned from the first souls she removed and liquefying it. While it did work, it also flooded the drinker with confused memories of the person the anima was taken from and drove them mad. She used this on her father as a way to pay him back for her mother's death. She later sold it to several nations to give to conscripted prisoner-soldiers, creating Berserkers to clear out the front lines. In Legenada she created a nerve-agent that stimulates every pain receptor in one's body. Though she left the organization, she allowed the formula to remain in their hands and it was used by the Red Cloak Sorrow to incapacitate Mia in Anticlaire city and led to her abduction.

• Meaningful Name: When Elena received the rank of one of the six Red Cloaks of Legenada, her codename was "Blasphemy", due to the many horrific experiments she performed as well as her almost unheard of idea of fusing magic with technology.

• No Sense of Personal Space: Only to Daniel. While he was still operating under his "Anash" identity without memories, she continually invaded his personal space, making him uncomfortable and amusing her greatly. Justified, as the two of them have intimate history together (though he didn't remember it at the time).

• Power Parasite: She attempts to copy Mia's Vessel state, implanting a false version of the Key of Elements and Healing inside of her body. This doesn't give her the same powers that Mia had, but it does boost her magic, give her a One-Winged Angel form that seems to erode her sanity when using it.

• Self-Made Orphan

• Smug Snake: She is very full of herself and will go on, seemingly for hours about her genius in her field of research and technology.

• Sanity Slippage: When she goes into her One-Winged Angel form, she snaps completely. A bit of a shame, since of the final four villains of Archmage Reborn she was most certainly the most sane and grounded.

• Ritual Magic: Her experiments on modifying the magical capabilities of the human soul use this, as are a great many others that she uses. Her ritual to create the Endless Army however is the closest there is to Black Magic in this story.

• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: She really was a genuinely kind-hearted little girl who loved both her parents, even if she knew that her father abused her mother and wanted only to make her mother smile and make her father proud. But she's gone now...

• Psychotic Smirk

• Would Hurt a Child: There are a disturbing number of dissected children's bodies within her island lair. This is actually what caused the seeds of the rift between her and Daniel; though he was a bandit who was more than willing to rape, pillage and kill, murdering children was where he drew the line and taking out their souls to study while keeping their bodies in a state of tortured slumber was way over that line.

edited 25th Dec '13 7:57:04 PM by Swordofknowledge

Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake. — Edgar Walllace

@ Taiara Mai: Good point. I like to go with the idea that it's No Delays for the Wicked when things are running smoothly. The Malandanti love making things run not-smoothly, at which point Dystopia Is Hard and the loathing many of the Confed's internal factions have for each other crops up. And the answer to the Pentients is both-many serve willingly, many more only think they are. Actually, if you've been reading the Hero Critique Thread, Vetala escaped to Malandanti-controlled areas primarily to avoid being..."confessed."

@ Sword: Really? I mainly pilfered the Imperium for them, because frankly, once you transplant them out of the Warhammer 40K setting, they're frankly supervillains. Thanks, but give credit where credit is due, to Games Workshop. I also decided to writeup the Confederation in its entirety because the human villains in it are products of their society, and its worth understanding what the Malandanti formed to fight.

@ Kesar: Seems like a good pseudo-antagonist for a pseudo Period Drama. He's not quite evil in the sense of being a villain, but he is a jerk who people would like to see lose.

Seems like a serviceable antagonist. She could be awesomely creepy, though, so I'm not complaining.

Now, to continue with the writeup:

• History: As mentioned, the Confederation's history tends to change as politics demands, so disentangling its history is going to be a task that will continue long after the ending of the story and even the deaths of the protagonists. All the best lies contain an element of truth however, and the Con is very good at lying-thus a larger picture begins to emerge in the themes of their histories, even those written off other censored histories (which is at least partially due to a "writer's bible" passed around the Guild of Validated Legends, the historians):

Humanity invents Faster-Than-Light Travel. Discovers superspace. Discovers things living in superspace that do not take kindly to sudden intruders. There is a war, which settles into a peace and eventual alliance (the histories take this as a sign that humanity had truly fallen, though the Malandanti are skeptical). Things from hyperspace teach humans sorcery, which causes mutation due to Magic Misfire. Discrimination against mutants provokes civil war, which is ended when the Outer show up to take advantage of this new species. There is a war to nigh-extinction for humans, stopped only by the appearance of the Supernal Emissary. S/He brings the Great Testament and techniques for driving away the Outer through faith and deeds, and the worship of the High Creator who reigns over all universes and bids them life. The Confederation of Light is formed in His/Her (the Creator, not the Emissary) honor and to form stability after the Fall. A long slog towards paradise begins.

Of course, anyone who has ever been burned by the Confederation can tell just how farther away that paradise is with every passing day. Frankly, it's amazing that the Confederation has survived this long without a God-Emperor backing it up, only the Ophanim, the very mortal (if, thanks to genetic modding, very long-lived) planetary governors of the most important systems and the heads of the Three Great Guilds (the Guild of Righteous Spirit the Eyes of Providence are run out of, the Guild of Forgivable Sin which oversees the Pentient Order of Solomon and superspatial navigation, and the Guild of Purifying Crusades, which oversees the military and builds the Paladins). Very mortal people prone to playing the blame game. In reality, there is a ruler overall, but even that's a bit of an oddity-the Teleologic Apostle is actually the result of mentally scanning and adding the memories of all previous Ophanim to an archive becoming self-aware, and even then it's just the advisor and frequent Mad Oracle to the current Ophanim.

If the Confederation was ever a productive empire good overall for its citizens, that time has long past, driven by a combination of bureaucratic corruption, authoritarianism, and fear of the Outer and rebels. It was this fear of rebellion, and its cousin, heresy, that caused the Maladanti's birth-originally, they were simply a subsect of the Cosmicists, the Benandanti. Due to living in a sector of the galaxy where the barrier between superspace and rational space was incredibly thin, the Benandanti had to adapt their teachings to the symbolic, narrative logic much of superspace follows and teach themselves sorcery to fight off "famine spirits" (really tulpas-living illusions created from thought and expectations that lack souls and thus independent existence, unlike demons) to ensure a bountiful and happy world. This did not sit well with some of the more orthodox Cosmicists, and about sixty years later, someone manipulated the sector reports to make it seem like the Benandanti's sector was infested with Outer cultists (a few people are drawn to them out of a desire to appease the despair-hungering monsters or because they're sadists and get off on causing despair).

This resulted in what the Benandanti viewed as an unprovoked crusade of extermination against them, with only the sacrifice of many of their leaders and priests allowing the civilians and most of the sorcerers to escape into the saner parts of superspace, where the demons convinced them that the Confederation was utterly corrupt and to enter into an alliance over a mutual enemy. When the refugees returned, they were no longer a sect of Cosmicists who did not fear sorcery. Rather, they were the mutated, seditious, and angry Sabbat of Liberty-the Malandanti. Soon, their demonic allies stole the hidden designs and blueprints of the Solomonic Familiars, relics from before the founding of the Confederation, and taught them the Rite of Nekyia, the sorcery by which a potential pilot may be projected astrally into the most chaotic and mind-shredding depths of superspace and attempt to contact an archdemon to serve as his or her mecha, turning the Malandanti from a mere rebellion into a full splinter empire as they were able to claim some border worlds using the Familiars, and use sorcery to hide their location.

But the Confederation is not going to just let them take over...

Other Tropes:

• Affably Evil: Many members of the upper and aristocratic castes are as a matter of etiquette. There's actually a quite complex system of social interaction they follow, something the aforementioned Baron Vetala still strives to embody despite being a defector.
• Ambiguous Situation: Whenever their past or minutiae of government is involved. One of the themes is just how censorship and rampant secrecy makes it so that nobody really knows what the Confederation is anymore-it's simply gone out of everyone's control, even its own.
• Armies Are Evil: ...To an extent. It depends on the legion, and most of those are Just Following Orders. A few, like the Third Eyes, are pretty honorable all around (in that case, it's because they're the hand of the Eyes of Providence and believe Malandanti can be led "back into the light", ie confessed and made Pentients), while some like the Red Priests are cheerfully psychotic Blood Knights
• Assimilation Plot: Not their overall goal, but a person who is "completely sublimated", ie, completely devoid of personal identity except for his purpose within the Confederation is their vision of an Ideal Hero.
• Belief Makes You Stupid: Averted. There's certainly been no advancement in the civil sector beyond spying for how-many-centuries, but in terms of war they've been happily chugging along. The real problem is priorities, not the Cosmicists.
• Big Bad: For the story as a whole, as they never stop being antagonistic, nor do the Outer. Not the actual faction of the character who serves as the Big Bad who turns out to be the Creator of the universe the story takes place in-though she's not actually a goddess, or the High Creator, who's existence is undefined, but implied to be genuinely benevolent. I don't want to go into the cosmology overall here, but I'm going for an idea in SLA Industries-she used to be a perfectly mortal, if Cloud Cuckoo Lander girl who's death caused her imaginary world to spontaneously-and retroactively-become real, with herself as the hidden ruler. She was also a very unhappy person before the end, and indeed the Conferderation's actions drove her into deciding she needed to wipe the slate entirely, then rewrite the multiverse that allows the mad to create worlds and force people to suffer their delusions. Evidence: Herself, loathsome monster she is for allowing the existence of something like the Outer.
• Black-and-Grey Morality: They're the Black, Malandanti are Grey.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: The hopeful end result of the confessing process is a completely new individual loyal the Confeds in all things. They view it as a favor and more humane than killing them, due to their focus on the idea of complete subservience to the state as an article of faith.
• Church Militant / Corrupt Church: The Cosmicists, in equal amounts. Especially Paladin knight-pilots, who are expected to be moral paragons of the religion's beliefs...and for that image have their vices and indiscretions covered up.
• Civil War: The war with the Malanadanti, essentially. It hasn't been the only one, but the others were hushed.
• Crystal Dragon Jesus: The Cosmicists were inspired by Medieval Catholicism with elements of Buddhism sprinkled in. The Malandanti are similar to early Protestants in this respect, but again, more Zoroastrianism than Christianity.
• Dystopia: They're fully aware of it too, but with a completely ass-backward view of why. They think it's the result of a lack of faith and selfishness they haven't stamped out yet, rather than fanaticism and corruption at higher levels.
• The Empire: Yep.
• The Evils of Free Will: "The truly righteous man only questions how he may better serve the will of the Cosmos. To Deviate in Spirit is to Deviate in Form."
• Fantastic Racism: If you're a mutant, off to the Penitent Order of Solomon with you, possibly after being confessed to ensure you think your membership is joyfully willing. If you're a demon, you're marked for death.
• Feudal Future: Very similar to Spain's feudal system, with commoners ranking less than knights and vassals, those ranking less than barons, barons less than counts, and so on until you reach archduke, where the planetary governors and Ophanim are. There is, however, some degree of caste mobility-exemplary military service that the nobles actually notice can and does result in knighthoods, who can then marry up the ranks or attain their own titles through a peerage system. Demotions are also very possible, and a constant fear.
• Forever War / Hopeless War: Their general relationship with Outer and demons. Both are played with: The Outer want humans to think of it as a long, grueling, and possibly unwinnable war because that's a fertile ground for delicious despair, and demons want to be left alone, and those not caught in the Cycle of Revenge would be open to peace-it's rabid fear of mutation and superspace on the part of the Con that's the primary driver, and demons are looked as a scapegoat for that. Truth is, demons are just as scared of the Confeds as vice versa, especially Exorcist legions meant for fighting them.
• Knight Templar: Whatever they do, they are sure they do it for the good of humanity.
• Mind Rape: Confession. Think the torture Winston goes through on an industrial scale, with mentalist sorcerers scouring the mind for weaknesses to make it as painful and ultimately, ego-destroying as possible.
• Scary Dogmatic Aliens: Scary Dogmatic Humans, more like.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: A core part of their philosophy, in fact! "Forgiveness is predicated on results. The Sin for A Just Cause is Not a Sin." Hence the Pentients.

edited 12th Nov '13 10:00:51 PM by Leliel

What rises must fall, what falls may rise again.

Aaah, I understand now! Forgive me, Leliel, I'm not very familiar with the whole Warhammer thing (though I have had friends who are). But on further study I can see how they are sort of "lifted" from the Imperium of Man. Still, I like your original ideas and the way you have adapted. Though I only knew a small amount about the Imperium and Warhammer, I do share you thoughts that they would be straight up evil if taken out of context. Again, I still like how they were able to rise due to a terrible and catastrophic situation; it's a personal fascination of mine, what measures people will accept from those in power if they truly feel threatened. Anyway, moving along, I do like the idea you've added of a Path Of Inspiration aspect to their empire. It lends a special brand of creepy to the whole thing...though the whole "peer into your deepest thoughts to better psychologically torture the hell out of you" puts a bit of a damper on my desire to visit their controlled spaces! Then again, despite their obviously unethical policies and ways of Mind Raping and brainwashing people, I can honestly respect their desire to do good by humanity.

• I'm a little curious about what you meant by "serviceable antagonist?" I'm not really sure what that means...is that a bad thing? I was trying to go for a very different type of villain than I usually create, one who isn't really very sympathetic. I added a few new tropes that apply since yesterday (I needed sleep) so if you could just elaborate a little more? Anyway, thanks

edited 13th Nov '13 7:54:25 AM by Swordofknowledge

Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake. — Edgar Walllace

I mean a character the story doesn't focus on, in an antagonistic role. Like most Resident Evil villains, where they're certainly forces, but not really involved beyond creating the plot and obstacles for the heroes.

She's going to depend on execution, is what I'm saying.

What rises must fall, what falls may rise again.

• Name: Mr. Spices / Jeffrey Montgomery

• Age: 30

• Personality: Mr. Spices is easily one of the most commonly appearing villains, and also one of the creepiest, which speaks to his determination and capabilities. Spices has a, shall we say, fetish for watching people struggle without reprieve, and for essentially causing the death of identity through a new one, preferably induced through a nightmarish Painful Transformation. His favorite is to turn someone into a squicky Eldritch Abomination and then pull Was Once a Man as soon as the battle was over. Being cold and extremely sinister, Mr. Spices' goofy name and ridiculous front personality conceal one of the most depraved villains in the franchise. He is, after all, the only one who works for The Black King simply because he wants to, not out of fear for the monster. He seems to view Matthew as an old friend, a view not shared by Matt himself. Spices is a master of deceit and the Indy Ploy, being able to craft personae for any circumstance.

• Abilities: He was given a sample of the Black King's power, to use to create a Spell Core he called "Sugar and Spice". It naturally turns all of his fingers black as pitch, and with cracking looking Tron Lines that are red. This power lets him inject the King's power right into you, and rewrite your mental structure and body, preferably with a lot of pain involved. Otherwise, he is a frighteningly skilled user of Penumbral Magic, which is a deeper sort of Dark Magic than the usual. It allows him to turn the dead into zombie-ventriloquist dummies he controls which are less shambling monster and more Terminator, spawn demonic phantoms, and control the massive Ghoul monsters. His secret weapon is his unique blend of Sympathetic Magic; he can store however much pain he is put through, and then slam it into the opponent all at once. Hence, he can Feel No Pain.

• Weaknesses: He has actually "fallen to pieces" a few times because his power makes it so he cannot tell when he's about to give out. His strongest power also relies on him getting in close enough.

• Goals: That is the scariest thing about him; he has no goals aside from "get sick thrills." He seems to think he's a Punch-Clock Villain, though, and only seems to undertake his sick thrills as dictated by the current job.

• Motivation: "There's no motive. All I want is to see a lot of blood and a lot of carnage."

• Role in the story: Psycho for Hire. He's usually The Brute or The Dragon whenever he shows up.

• Backstory: By all accounts, he had an extremely normal upbringing, with three sisters, a mother and a father...all of whom he detested for absolutely no reason. His first job was in a slaughterhouse, and found that living amongst death was very fulfilling. He got another job working for the Black King as a glorified accountant, keeping track of how much Mana is in any given area. This comes much later, after he was thrown out and almost arrested for doing something so sick and wrong to his dad, that he's permanently thought of in the United States as an extremely dangerous, depraved fugitive. The Black King saw how they were similar souls, and promoted him. He took on the fake name "Mr. Spices", and began working in any number of professions simply by changing his face enough to be unrecognizable.

• Relevant Tropes:
• Ax-Crazy: A cool, cold variant. He loves him some carnage and blood, but he likes it when its structured and achieved a certain way, ie, a Modus Operandi.
  • Serial Killer: Technically the second known Magic Using Serial Killer, and the one Matthew fights the most. Mr. Spices likes to make things vary; he's known to randomly switch to simply cutting people up with a butcher knife (this being if his target "doesn't deserve to be one of his "works of art."").
• Bishōnen: Is described consistently as "having the beautiful, rounded, heart shaped face of a woman." He has wavy black hair, and a bright smile.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Hooboy. We first see him as Clarisa's equally vapid boyfriend, a very nice, accommodating and self effacing young man who weathers her pushy personality with aplomb. He then organizes her death, acts completely nonplussed when this plan fails, and then goes ahead, turns it to his advantage, almost won and got what he wanted out of it, and even went on to give his "girlfriend" a Reason You Suck Speech.
  • "You blind little idiot. You're completely blind to everything I've been doing. The phone calls beforehand should've been the first clue I was deceiving you, but no; you're rich, you're the daughter of some vapid fashionista bitch, you cannot go wrong. Well guess what, sweetiepie? You were played for a complete and total RETARD by the most wanted serial killer in America. That's right, Mr. Spices got in past your bodyguards, and whose to blame; you! Now now, don't think I didn't come here prepared. That wine you should not be legally able to drink was spiked! Wanna guess with what? Its Roofies! Ding Ding Ding, aren't you a bastion of intelligence! Well, I don't think you are worth becoming a work of art, so I'm just gonna kill you."
• Body Horror: His...thing. He gets way too excited when subjecting people to a very painful transformation. It gets really disgusting, really fast.
• Catchphrase: "Ooh, magicky!"
• Creepy Awesome: Crazy evil guy? Sure, seen that before. Crazy evil guy who introduces himself by using dance moves to fight Matthew in tune with two of his abominations, including using a big Penumbral Magic Scythe in his dance? Wow.
• Dance Battler: Mr. Spices is a very skilled dancer, and can apply this to battle very easily.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Hurt Maggie at your own risk; as one rival assassin discovered, trying to Boom, Headshot! Maggie resulted in Jeffrey turning him into a huge malformed abomination that is completely delicious to any sort of bird, and draws them in for miles.
• Evil vs. Evil: Jeffrey occasionally gets himself into these situations.
• Face of an Angel, Mind of a Demon: As described above, he is a very pretty man...and also one of the worst mortal villains in New Dawn.
• Master Swordsman: He's unbelievably skilled with that butcher knife, especially when he pulls out another and dualwields it. He actually says he's "better when he uses a katana".
• Pet the Dog: Despite being The Sociopath, Maggie - a goth the girl he was pretending to be with was bullying - seems to have wormed her way into his cold, dead heart. As he puts it "I really cannot explain it. I am one hundred percent sure I'm incapable of love...but if that's so, how'm I feeling it for you?"
• Punch-Clock Villain: In his own unique little way. He sees his depravity as his job - a fun job, but ultimately something he has to do for his employer.
• Rape and Revenge: The one time he seems like he might get audience sympathy is when he's avenging a young woman who was brutally raped. He only charged her a penny for the revenge, and made sure her attackers, regardless where they ended up in life the three years after the attacks, ended up brutally killed.
• Sinister Scythe
• Slasher Smile: An unusual one; he delivers a very dorky smile just before advancing on Clarisa.
• To the Pain: Delivers a stomach turning one at least once per book.
• Vocal Dissonance: He has a rather teenage, excitable and "innocent" voice. He seems downright Keet-ish sometimes. Not what you'd expect out of a depraved serial killer's mouth.
• Wicked Cultured: Likes champagne, skilled cook, wears impeccable suits, very well groomed man, handsome and tall, wears a tie, always stays in upscale hotels...
• Zombie Apocalypse: A one man version, which lets him turn dead bodies into what amount to ventriloquist doll assassins that have the abilities of a Terminator. Yikes.

edited 13th Nov '13 7:01:22 PM by NickTheSwing

One of the things I love about your bad guys is that they are just so well thought out. Take this guy, this "Mr. Spices". His name took me aback and I subconsciously prepared myself for a silly perhaps moronic guy who robbed banks or kidnapped children or something—I should have known better. I very much like how complex you've made him; even though (at least in my opinion) he resides at the depths of evil with his turning people into monsters simply to see them suffer, you give him a person he cares about.

Off topic for a moment: that was brilliantly done; you made him care about this girl, but you didn't turn her into a Morality Pet. Bravo!

What makes Mr. Spices even scarier is the fact that he had a perfectly normal upbringing. Many if not all of my villains have something that makes them snap or turn evil ranging from small to immense and life-shattering but something. Even 319 which was not meant to be sympathetic at all had some thread of trauma in her backstory to make her what she was. I just find it more realistic. I love how with Spices and Elijah you have managed to subvert that without taking away the realism of it. There really are people out there who, for no discernable reason (or at least one we can't hope to understand) are just...cruel and sometimes even evil.

Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake. — Edgar Walllace

Crap, mistype. The post that was here wasn't nearly done yet, sorry.

edited 14th Nov '13 7:45:25 PM by Leliel

What rises must fall, what falls may rise again.