Villain Critique Thread (Because Its About Damn Time!)

Thanks. Now that you mention it, Reinhardt really has some of Wolverine's traits, guess I subconciously copied the character.

As for your character from said setting, please do. I'd really like to see him/her and that world. This setting I'm currently using was only created a while ago, and I'd be very interested to see one similar to it.

edited 5th Dec '13 7:41:23 PM by arreimil

I'm just a complete amature so take with a pinch of salt or rather a spoon full. I find these sort of character quite entertaining. I like that Reinhadrt loses his motive unlike some characters he doesn't have a nonsensical moral framework. Just a freak who sees violence as an end in itself.

Name: Belladonna (I will change it if the refrence is too vague.)

Age: Unknown she quit counting past a thousand.

Personality: Unlike most demons she isn't outwardly bloodthirsty or sadistic. This does not mean she is not to be feared. She is obssesed with one thing; beauty. I do not mean her own apperence but rather of her suroundings. Her life revoles around expierencing and collecting things that are austeticly pleasing. Be it the natural world, artwork, human beings (especially the minds of creative people.)She is facinated by the human capability to create which she can only expierience to a limited degree (she needs to comsume souls to achieve it.) She is superfishaly polite and has good taste, however destroy her favorite vase and you'll end up dead or worse. She has no more conserm for a human being or a fellow demon than for a pretty flower. She has been known to kill people because she'd rather have a well perserved corpse than to see grow old and diseased.

Abilities: Varies on how rescently she's fed. In general she can manipulate matter. Otherwise her abilities are quite vague. She has vaporized an entier village's with it's inhabitants. She repairs her body as soon it's damaged cannot be killed as she'd have to be alive in the first place. If her real form is seen by a mortal they will worship no matter what they thought of her before. She can turn humans into lower order demons.

Weaknesses: She get distracted all the time. Being lucid for so long has taken it's toll she freqently wipes out her own memory in order to expirence novelty. She doesn't understand human morality or ethics which frequently blows her cover. If she overuses her magic her earthly body fall limp as it's only animmated by her power. If she were to completly drain her magic her soul would fall into pieces and she'd degenerate into a primal animmalistic state. She is essencialy at the mercy of the core which can dissolve or devoure her essence whethever it pleases. She is unable to think creativly unless she's recently devoured a human soul.

Goals: To gain the power of a god to reshape the world into her idea of perfection.

Motivation: To become able to create beauty.

Relavant tropes:

Blue and orange morality, utopia justifies means, codrangon, faux affalably evil.

Evil versus oblivion/faustian rebellion- Toward the end she realises the core who she's been aiding since she gave away parts of her soul to it intends to punish the gods by ending creation. She attempts to oppose her master soon it becomes clear she's only kept around for it's amusement. She is desolve as soon as she forced to accept the only perfection is void.

@ Arreimil Don't worry about it; the Wolverine thing was just my way of imagining it; Reinhardt is definitely a unique and well-created character. Okay, here goes. This lovely person is the Big Bad of Clockwalkers, an old story I made when I was in 9th grade. It takes place in a pretty standard Lord of the Rings-esque fantasy world, except that magic has "left" the world" due to an apocalypse 7,000 years ago and an industrial revolution has taken over. I apologize in advance; "he" has a long backstory.

• Name: "The Man In The Mirror", "The Wise Man", "The Founder", "Azelas Elrisani"
• Age: Hard to say. Counting from the moment it was summoned to the world of Rica, it is over seven thousand years old. However its age before the summoning remains a mystery; it could be either a few minutes or billions of years old. Azelas either doesn't know itself or simply isn't telling.

• Personality: Azelas has undergone a large personality change in the seven millennia it has existed on Rica. When it was first summoned, Azelas was oddly human-like, combining its immense knowledge with a great curiosity about the world. Though it came to Rica with a deep understanding of the customs, biology, and thought processes of the mortal races, it had never seen them for itself and wished to be free of the Mirror that was its container and explore the world on its own, showing great pain when its summoner mockingly denied the request. Azelas is a cunning manipulator; it was able to trick the ancient Empress Los Rengard into bringing about the planet-wide apocalypse known as the "Rain" allowing it to leave the Mirror at last, though it remained bound to the shards. Seven thousand years later Azelas's personality has become far more calm, almost complacent due to millennia of ruling the Kingdom of Ylati behind the scenes unopposed. It considers dwarves, elves, goblins, and even the long-lived and powerful dragons as so far beneath itself that they are not even worthy of emotions when not necessary. Azelas views humans as some see dogs: cute, endearingly loyal and excellent at doing its bidding, but at the end of the day nothing more than animals who would be lost without their master. Azelas's disregard of the mortal races borders on pathological; even when its carefully laid plans start to unravel due to the efforts of the reluctant hero Yggdrasil Jinette and his companions, it takes little personal action at first, because it does not believe they will be able to affect the eventual outcome. However its attitude towards the nuriel race is far more malevolent and involved. Because of their power, it views them as nothing more than an energy source. Azelas intends to strip them of their Mana and Life Energy to build an artificial soul for itself in order to be free of the Mirror at long last.

• Abilities: Azelas possesses an immense and innate knowledge of the world and its people, along with magical knowledge never before seen or heard of on Rica before its coming. However its powers are broken up among the forms it evolves into over the course of the story.

  • Form 1—A dark-skinned, raven haired young man : Azelas's powers in this form are wholly psychic in nature. Through pure will it maintains a nation-wide Weirdness Censor over the Kingdom, preventing most people from noticing that it has not aged and has been there since the Kingdom's founding. It is also able to charm people almost instantly, overwhelming them with a sense of contentment and well-being. Azelas's most terrifying power in this form is its ability to totally dominate a human's mind through physical contact with their head. Doing this, it shreds their mind, leaving only a husk of their personality behind, totally devoted to its every word. Azelas has done this to the Royal Family of Ylati since the Kingdom's inception, maintaining its hold over the people through them.

  • Form 2—A fourteen foot tall humanoid being whose body is composed of gelatinous human blood that burns with constant magical fire: Azelas can shift its body into a fluid shape, creating extra limbs as needed. It can also severely burn opponents through mere contact, and can absorb objects and people into its mass, slowly burning them alive or killing them instantly. The fire it is made of seems to be similar to napalm and will not go out easily if it ignites a person. Even Azelas's voice in this form is a weapon; it is high-pitched and crackling, and hearing it "pierces the mind and causes its thoughts to bleed". This effects even Clockwalkers like Drasil and Michelli. It is also incredibly durable in this form, capable of tanking several explosive crossbow bolts with ease and super-humanly strong, pulling several adults of various weights around with its tentacles and throwing them across the room.

  • Form 3—A dark-skinned, raven-haired young woman: This final form possessed great physical strength, able to tear Drasil's arm off with a single pull, leap immense distances and was able to blast enemies with torrents of energy waves, wiping out hundreds of opponents at a time. However the true power of this form was unable to be seen due to Azelas slowly dying because the shards of the Mirror were destroyed previously and its intense focus was on remedying the situation instead of fighting.

• Weaknesses: Azelas's very existence on Rica is tied to the Mirror that was its container. Because it has no soul, it cannot maintain its body away from the object it was summoned into and leaving the area where the Mirror's shards are scattered would result in fading away. While it has managed to expand its territory by having its human pawns conquer more land and spread the shards around the border, it remains trapped within the Kingdom of Ylati's limits. Destroying these shards causes it pain and shrinks the territory it can exist in. Should all of them be destroyed then it will die. Azelas's condescension towards mortals also causes it to vastly underestimate them, even when evidence of their threat-level is right before its eyes. It will act to kill those it feels pose a threat to its objectives, but even then it thinks that they will "delay" things rather than bring them down completely.

• Goals: To create an area of habitable land with a large population of the Mana-rich species, the nuriel, eventually sacrificing all of their lives to convert their energy into a soul for itself.

• Motivation: It wishes to be free of its natural limitations and be able to travel the world in the same way mortal beings can without fear of fading away if it strays too far from the Mirror.

• Role in the story: At first appears to be a standard Evil Chancellor whispering words in the ears of the newly appointed Queen Aracelli de Massimo. However "he" is soon revealed to be much, much worse than that.

• Backstory: The being that would later call itself Azelas Elrisani was summoned seven thousand years ago during the Dreaming Age by the Empress Los Rengard in the city-state of Sinestel, a land ruled over by mages. Using her own blood mingled with that of several slave sacrifices, Los drew a being from the Overworld and bound it a large mirror in her private chambers. Named the "Man In The Mirror" by the Empress, the sentient creature possessed a great deal of knowledge about the world and its people, as well as an understanding of magic that surpassed any mortal alive. Los used this knowledge to conquer other human nations as well as the lands of the other races—as well as for personal use, often on how to keep herself beautiful and stave of the specter of old age. Despite his knowledge, the Man could not perform any magic on its own due to its formless nature and could not leave the mirror. Its pleas for a chance to remedy the situation were ignored by the Empress and even a request to simply move the mirror to a different room was met with mocking laughter. Thought not cruel to the Man, few dared to even look at the Empress's creation. The only exception was a young man named Azelas who would clean the Mirror and talk to it of events happening within Sinestel and the wider world. Years later Sinestel came under attack by the nuriel, a race of humans who could use their Mana to mutate and change size when in emotional distress and ate Mana from other humans, killing them. They attacked the city in revenge for Los kidnapping and vivisecting their people in search of eternal life and the situation was dire. Seeing its opportunity, the Man instructed Los and her Court Mages in a spell that would wipe away the enemy. However when the spell was cast, a rain of flaming stones rained down from the sky, striking Sinestel and all over Rica. The impact devastated the planet and killed billions in a single day, splitting the land and destroying entire continents. The magical contamination from the spell ruined many areas that were left. The Man used the freely escaping Mana from the billions of dead to leave the mirror and construct a vessel for itself made from the solidified energy, shaping it into the likeness of the steward who had been nice to it and took his name. However, though it was able to stand "on its own two feet", the newly named Azelas found that it could not leave the ruins of Sinestel where the Mirror's remains lay and so it concocted a new plan: It would harvest the nuriel's superhuman Mana at the same time to give itself an artificial soul. Azelas called telepathically over the distance to a small group of human survivors from various countries and promised them safety and shelter. After they traveled over the miles, it took them under its wing and helped them survive. It then told them the story of what had happened, slanting the tale so that the nuriel were the aggressors. Azelas goaded its humans into capturing the remaining nuriel and putting them to work as a Slave Race in the fledgling country to "atone" for their crime of destroying the world. To ensure that none would ever figure out what it really was or rise against it, Azelas slowly but surely eradicated the knowledge of magic, and was unsurprised when humans instead turned their curiosity to technology. Over time the people formed the powerful technologically advanced Kingdom of Ylati, the only human nation in all of Rica. Azelas placed itself at the side of their royal family, keeping them under its thumb via Mind Rape in order to maintain the Ylatain national attitude of the acquisition of more land for humankind's sake and the Fantastic Racism against the nuriel. The increase of land allowed for the birth rate to go up, providing more nuriel to harvest for energy.

• Relevant tropes:
• Abusive Parents: While Azelas raised Michelli as its own daughter for fifteen years, treating her with kindness, it did this only so that it could keep an eye on her development before sending her to the Royal Technologies Institute to have her dissected so that her method of creation could be studied and mass-produced for war.
• Above Good and Evil: Azelas claims that concepts like good and evil belong to the mortal race, and as it isn't of their number, they mean nothing to it. However its assertions are not treated as being "above" them because it is so powerful or high and mighty, but actually to illustrate that Azelas is morally inferior to mortals.
• Faux Affably Evil: Azelas is calm, courteous and doesn't show anger until near the end, even as its plans are being utterly ruined by the heroes. It also makes a point not to berate its subordinates, even at several points apologizing for not being as up to date on the situation and thus having issued orders that weren't accurate. However this is nothing more than a mask. Azelas views humans as little more than pets, valuing them only for their ability to follow orders. While it can pretend very well, it is entirely devoid of anything resembling kindness or tender emotions,though considering what it is, that isn't too surprising.
• A God Am I: It's very low key about this though; it just takes for granted that it is better than any living being on the face of Rica and that's that.
• Anti-Magic: It can absorb almost all magic directed at it because its body is made out of solidified magical energy and it simply adds what is fired at it to its overall mass.
• Arch-Enemy: Cornelius Jinette considers Azelas this to him and has spent fifteen years scheming for revenge against it for having him blinded and left to die after taking away Michelli, the creation that was his life's work as well as the closest thing he'd ever have to a daughter. Azelas for its part remembers Cornelius, but views him on the same level as any other human. After Cornelius completely mangles its plan through clever manipulation of the heroes, resulting in all of its Mirror shards being destroyed and the nuriel free from the spell sapping their Mana and able to assume their giant forms Azelas definitely considers him an enemy and furiously snarls that it will rend Cornelius limb from limb for daring to stand against it.
• Artificial Human: Not the kind Drasil or Michelli are, but it has a body made from crystallized Mana made in the likeness of a long-dead man. Its female form counts too, though it is unknown where Azelas got the idea to create it.
• Archnemesis Dad: To Michelli. Azelas is her adoptive father and she deeply loves and respects him and is heartbroken all throughout Clockwalkers at the idea that "he" could be evil. However when she beholds his second form, along with the utter disregard it shows for her, it finally sinks in that she was being raised by a monster.
• Aristocrats Are Evil: Azelas itself holds the title of Royal Adviser, and many of Ylati's aristocracy are aware that it is...not exactly human and is using the Kingdom for some unknown goal, yet are perfectly willing to side with it because Azelas has promised the coming of an age to rival Dreaming Age where magic will rule the world and there will be no more war, violence or disease. That, and their parents raised them to follow the "Good Founder" like their parents before them, because "he is the soul of our kingdom".
• Because You Were Nice to Me: The reason why it keeps the real Azelas's form and name.
• Big Bad
• Bishōnen Line: Azelas went from being a fist-sized mass of flame flecked with human blood trapped within a mirror to a handsome young man, then (skipping its second form) to a beautiful young woman.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: A strange example. Azelas understands mortal feelings—actually to a dangerous degree; it is how it is able to manipulate people as it needs to. However it doesn't really understand the concept of any kind of morality. It sees nothing wrong with the idea of tricking people into mass murder or manipulating one race into persecuting another and then killing that persecuted race to get something it needs. It knows others would think that is evil, but it doesn't really see why. That combined with its immense arrogance prevents it from learning why this is wrong, as it considers mortals beneath it, so there is no "equal" to teach it any lessons.
• Brown Note: Its voice in its second form causes mental agony merely by speaking, scattering a person's thoughts and replacing with with the simple and desperate drive to escape the torment.
• Cessation of Existence: Azelas calls this "Returning to the None" and it is the only thing that fills it with terror. Much of why it has worked this hard is to prevent this from ever happening. With a soul created from the nuriel's life energy and Mana it would be able to go on forever, as well as being free from the mirror shards, effectively immortal.
  • Some Fridge Horror accompanies this fear: Azelas is said to have come from the Overworld, which to the people of Ylati is the domain of the Dancing Goddess Zalakshi and a Fluffy Cloud Heaven where the souls of the dead go regardless of their actions in life and where many hope to be reunited with their loved ones. Azelas is terrified to go back there and implies that he will simply vanish and lose consciousness once returned.
• The Chessmaster: It tricked Empress Los into killing billions of people so it could escape the Mirror and set up Ylati as a giant "farm" for both its human tools and the nuriel it needed to sacrifice to obtain a soul. It used the humans as guard-dogs to prevent its potential sacrifices from ever leaving the country and to fill them with lots of Mana-increasing negative emotions, as well as conquering land so that more will be born in order to increase the Mana haul.
• Dark Is Evil: Azelas wears long formal black robes when it goes out—though it rarely makes public appearances, preferring to be the hand behind the current king and queen due to its dislike of dealing with its pets.
• Detect Evil: One of the reasons that elves hate Ylati is because they can sense Azelas's presence the moment they set foot within the Kingdom's borders. They don't know what Azelas is exactly, but they are all too aware that it is an ancient and evil entity which surpasses their understanding. They shut humans out of their borders because all Ylatains (who are the only humans left in the world) carry its psychic "stench".
• Eldritch Abomination: Azelas is devoid of any real mortal emotions except the drive to be free, it doesn't have a fixed gender—at least not as we would understand it—but instead wears and changes genders the way we would sample outfits. It isn't even from the Standard Fantasy Setting where the story takes place, originating in a dimension that may or may not be Rica's afterlife. What's even more disturbing is that its true form, a burning gelatinous monstrosity that seems to be composed of flame, blood and viscera is just a bigger version of what it was when it was first summoned—which means that it grew over seven millennia. Who knows what Azelas would have eventually evolved into if it had been allowed to wander freely across Rica...
• Evil Chancellor: Strangely despite being an Eldritch Abomination, Azelas plays this trope entirely straight. It has sat at the side of every king and queen Ylati has ever had, dominating their minds and forcing them to do its bidding. While many of the day-to-day affairs of the Kingdom are left entirely to humans, all of Ylati's almost Manifest Destiny-ish attitude is because Azelas wants to expand its "farm" so that more nuriel will be born in time for its harvest.
• Fatal Flaw: If Azelas has any, it would be its vast underestimation of mortals. It could have killed the heroes countless times before they even discovered its vast plan, let alone once they started to become a threat, to the point of being ridiculous.
• Lack of Empathy: Justified as it is not even close to anything that has ever existed on Rica, thus it feels no reason to bother with empathy or kindness to the creatures that live there, except when it needs to. It is speculated by Lizzia Rossini that if Azelas had an equal, another individual from the place it came from, then it might have been a better "person". Of course this is then countered with the point that any being from that place might be just as unpleasant as Azelas itself.
• Public Domain Artifact: Azelas is the Magic Mirror of the old tales, who served a vain and magically gifted queen.
• When the Planets Align: Azelas's spell to transfer the Mana—and life force—of the nuriel to him and convert it into a soul requires it to 1: the caster must sacrifice a part of themself and 2: for Rica's four moons to be in perfect alignment. The whole moon alignment thing is explained to have happened many times over the past seven millennia, but Azelas feared that the population wasn't enough for the spell to make a difference. The "part of itself" it had to sacrifice were the very Mirror shards keeping it alive, so It Only Works Once.
  • Technically it was casting two different spells at the same time. One of them would drain and kill every member of the race it targeted for their Mana and transfer it to the caster. The second would then shape the Mana into an honest-to-goodness soul. Cornelius's plan involved sabotaging this second spell to return the Mana that had been lost, leaving Azelas with no mirror shards and no soul.
• Zerg Rush: Even after Azelas's Mirror shards have been destroyed and it is fading away due to still not having a soul, it is able to put up quite a fight. It takes practically the entire Helios army, many nuriel in their giant forms, the dwarves, and several dragons, along with Drasil and our heroes to weaken it enough so that Drasil can strike a fatal blow.

edited 4th Dec '13 9:18:43 PM by Swordofknowledge

@ manicnightmarepixie sorry, I didn't see your post! My apologies. . "Belladonna" seems quite the interesting villain, most likely a Time Abyss. She seems to be rather sympathetic, as you mentioned that she gave away parts of her soul in order to the core and it turns out to be unfaithful. Her ideal of creating beauty isn't too bad either, lol. But she seems like an interesting character; I don't know why I feel sorry for her more than fearing—-I guess the idea of only feeling lucid after eating a soul makes me shiver. Good job, don't feel too bad about being amateur. We all have to start somewhere, and I'm far from an expert myself.

edited 4th Dec '13 3:10:39 PM by Swordofknowledge

I love fairly eldritch characters establishing connections to humans. In my perspective, something simply "beyond human comprehension" usually just rampages around destroying things and / or unleashing massive numbers of lesser abominations. I do not get this vibe with this character. It seems this thing is an important character in the backstory, and I am left wondering if this is the same verse that your previous villains also come from.

I like the character, but I am left wondering if, since it can absorb magic, how people are going to fight it?

• Name: Odin / Gran Magus of the Northwestern Hemisphere Othinus Cyrhoden / Brunn Borson

• Age: 1022. Looks no older than seventeen.

• Personality: This individual is one of numerous, odd inconsistencies - he alleges that his group is just trying to ensure that the world of men does not encroach upon the world of magic, and is constantly trying to ensure that the Masquerade does not fall disastrously. However, he has about as many scruples as Yhwach when it comes to things its acceptable to do in pursuit of the greater good. Very arrogant, he is the type that is very nonchalant in associating with known enemies, even when its common knowledge he's planning their deaths. He seems very sociopathic and unpleasant, but maintains that everything he did is for the greater good and that people around him are foolish for just so much as questioning his goal. He really, really hates fools, and has a tendency to lop off an arm after too many idiot remarks, due to the fact he knows he has one of the strongest medics nearby at all times. Has very poor impulse control, and a tendency to get violently displeased if a failure comes with no benefits - total failure is punished usually by him carving off half of your skull. While usually dead serious, he's sometimes a little too serious in certain situations, which results in really, really strange The Comically Serious moments, such as telling a treasonous agent who could shapeshift to "Be the Ball" while co-opting his powers to turn him into a toy ball to give to Walda for her birthday. He has a more compassionate side to his being - just one he hides zealously, believing one "must cut out his heart to rule his empire." To this end, he cut out his eye personally to maximize his connection to the mythology of Odin, and is currently forging Gungnir. He disdains the idea of forcing a minion to do something he should be doing himself, thinking of it as deplorable laziness. He seems to have gathered numerous magicians to him based on fairy tales, parables and legends, holding their loyalty by a combination of fear and "the respect demanded by a god." He seems to have a grudge against Terumi Shin'ei, claiming the man damaged his Magic, and jeopardized what was already a very difficult operation.

• Abilities:
  • As Gran Magus, he has taken a number of powers with the title, including a stern, powerful body, a naturally replenishing supply of Internal Mana that recuperates at an astounding amount per second, functionally making him unable to ever run out. There's a reason there are so many names for this person, and why his position is so highly desired.
  • Hlioskjalf: A relative power to Regalia, he achieved this power by sacrificing his right eye to finalize his connection to the mythology of Odin. This power allows him to change the Mana in a spell and make it different Mana and thus, change what spell he's using, functionally allowing him to cast one spell out of another.
  • Einherjar: He can revive the dead as mythically powered Einherjar, simply by slipping a golden coin into their mouth. This process, however, severely dampens their emotions and empathic capacities.
  • Blot: He can, at any time, demand a sacrifice from his men, mostly used as a You Have Failed Me or You Have Outlived Your Usefulness on mercenaries or such. He uses it much more sparingly on his Inner Circle.
  • Draupnir: A golden ring, the power bequeathed by this mythically forged item is a Sphere of Destruction fired from his hand. It multiplies and disperses over an area.
  • Skíðblaðnir: A power co-owned by Odin and Freyr, this allows the two of them to fold reality around them and traverse the planet. It has a battle form that allows Odin to bring in elements of a powerful Viking ship to fight.
  • Incomplete Gungnir: He's not quite done forging it yet, but the Gungnir Spear is currently capable of bending and extending to no matter what hit his foe, as well as channeling his magic through it.
  • Star Reader: Odin is a formidable star reader, being able to divine the course of actions within a certain margin of error.
  • Eye of Sight: By sacrificing his right eye, in addition to intensifying his connection to the mythology, he has also gained the ability to see attacks coming before they happen.

• Weaknesses: All his stronger abilities require him to be connected one hundred percent to the Odin Mythology. This, since he hasn't finished forging his spear, means his devastating blasts and spells have a chance of not working at all or exploding on him. He also tends to get very ill if he fights too much without having his full connection to the mythology of Odin. Specifically, he has a very literal Hour of Power before his own Internal Mana starts killing him and requiring the Odin Sleep.

• Goals:
  • Goal 1: Destroy all vestiges of the Anti-Magical Faction, including murdering all politicians who supported it, dealing an equivalent amount of damage to all countries who supported it to what the Faction did, and assassinating all former members.
  • Goal 2: Forge Gungnir
  • Goal 3: Drop La Radiant Laplace Castle on Hawaii and pin it on Russia, end the world war in nine days, and make it apparent who the top dog of the new world is.
  • Goal 4: Prevent Ragnarok. ANY MEANS NECESSARY.
  • Goal 5: Ensure Loki doesn't get out of his prison.

• Motivation: He apparently has a rivalry with his "father" Bors, and his temporary substitute Ollerus, and wants to achieve the greatest power among the Gran Magi of the hemispheres to prove that they are "behind him".

• Role in the story: Bigger Bad / Outside-Context Villain / Eviler Counterpart to the Anti-Magical Faction

• Backstory: He wasn't always, apparently, the angry sociopath he is right now, and some evidence suggests that is just a front he projects "for someone else's good." He appears to have a bitter relationship with previous Gran Magus Bors. Whatever happened in his past, its a long time ago and very few except Wolfang "The Prophet", Vicelogia, and some others know what his secrets are.

• Relevant Tropes:
• A God Am I: So much. He is actually accurate, being one that the Magical Faction assigns to the position of "All Father of his Pantheon." Though he is not the only one to hold this position.
• Arch-Enemy: The Anti-Magical Faction in its entirety, and any who supported it, to the extent of trying to assassinate the Prime Minister of England who is certainly not David Cameron.
• Badass: So, Odin's heard a field full of fifty thousand men are the same guy and he's Fighting a Shadow. Response? Nuke the field so hard it plunges in altitude. By the end of it, the guy who bragged Odin was fighting a shadow was left barely able to recover.
  • Badass Boast: "So, Sir Rinkaku, you don't know who I am. You lead an intelligence division of the New Ephas Abjuration, and you do not know who your enemy is. Rebuild your pitiful group from the ground up. Fire or execute the sewage occupying the lower level jobs, and replace the drivel in the high positions. I myself cannot bother to destroy you. I'd rather fight a rival god than crush a worm under my boot."
  • Badass Finger Snap: Uses Hlioskjalf on those guards with this motion, blasting them with unusual types of Mana to prevent any of them from getting a lock on what he's doing.
  • Badass Long Coat: Aside from short shorts, this is his main worn item, in his "young androgyne" appearance.
  • Handicapped Badass: One eye lost doesn't seem to affect his battle performance much at all.
• Bad Boss: Lets see, pulling a "how dare you try to tell the future" and beheading a henchman for saying they'd win in three days against the local military, executing two members of a lesser Five Bad Band for not figuring out their powers during a fight, and altogether being very unpleasant...
  • Benevolent Boss: But perplexing enough, he also spares Aino and some others for not making their battle in Okinawa a complete loss, congratulates Thor for a job well done in destroying six of "the enemy's" ships.
• Big Damn Heroes: Inverted; when Lisa-Anne gets herself into a lot of trouble against a state sponsored team of magic users and the Mikinomi Family, Odin comes over and rescues her from them.
• Bishounen Line: Goes from an elderly man with a white beard to a young, androgynous teenager. His fighting abilities also seem to max out in this state.
• Body Horror: He usually does something really, really bad to people he captures, or mercenaries or et cetera who outlive their usefulness or fail one time too many. Take the case of one captured enemy soldier who had a missing arm, who was given over to Lisa-Anne. She healed him all right. Oh yes she did.
• Brown Note: The Hel's Fear spell, which is stated to involve making one hundred and eight dead souls scream at maximum loudness into all enemies in an area's ears.
• The Chessmaster: Althing has many plans, and Odin's usually a Magnificent Bastard, but he really takes the cake in the Hawaii Siege Arc, which sees him masterminding two to three sides of a war effort, and going plan to plan against Serena and Queen Anathema.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: He subjects Dayne to this for failing to stop Matthew from getting rid of the suitcase nuke. To be precise, he puts Dayne into an approximation of the Binding of Loki.
• Confusion Fu: Bunch of armed guards using Anti Magic Gear to lock on his Mana to predict his attacks? Simply use Hlioskjalf to change Mana Types fifty times in a second, making every one of his attacks flash different colors throughout.
• Cool Horse: Sleipnir, a bio-mechanical eight legged winged war-machine majitek horse.
• The Corrupter: Gives dangerous, highly powerful Spell Cores to people if they pay him the right tribute. He even gave a twelve year old "The Burning Lance", a Spell Core that creates Chlorine Trifluoride, covers it in Mana to control where it explodes, and then withdraws the Mana when the stuff hits a foe.
  • He does, though, seem to look out slightly for those he corrupts, considering them his "berserkers".
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Be it stringing up six of the Anti-Magical Faction's generals, two of whom being head executives of powerful private defence corporations who should've been safe from him, from trees and cutting all their important veins open, or consigning Veska to being boiled alive for fifty days, its...gonna be horrible.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: In the short story Interrupted Vacation to Denmark, he hands these out like candy. First he demolishes Shinji Outsuki, a visiting Exorcist from Japan who had proven himself able to take on Ein Woe, then he offhandedly blasts Shuuji off a cruiseliner, then he goes through fifty "Legendary Hero Model Haemonculi" created by Dinah, and then defeats her too (especially notable in that his arrival basically marked the end of Dina's Big Bad status and that these "heroes" had been throwing Matthew around handily), and finishes the whole thing by dramatically announcing he no longer intends to keep his movement secret by executing twenty eight armed guards and walking past a stunned, horrified Matthew.
• Deadpan Snarker: A lot. For example, "This must be the saddest thing I've ever seen. A man whose power is possession is himself possessed."
• Disproportionate Retribution: When he was resting in a diner and a rich teenager and his date came in, and he went at the same time to go order. He accidentally steps on the teen's shoes. Teen gets mad and accuses the Physical God of ruining his hundred dollar shoes. In response, Odin shoves the fingers on his left hand into the boy's head. "Very hard headed. Removing my fingers is going to be difficult." This freaks everyone else in the diner out and results in them running out in a huge hurry.
• The Dog Was the Mastermind: Who is the real Odin, who masterminded numerous books worth of misery? The nice young boy Anthony was playing on the Playstation with in the first two books.
• The Dreaded: You do not get to be Gran Magus without commanding a lot of clout.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: No oddly named doppelganger this time, he does seem to react poorly to news that Lisa-Anne had her arm cut off, outright charging into battle himself when he heard. He took her news that her lover died taking down the Mikinomi Family's agents even less well, brutally massacring the last few surviving agents before shoving Commander Genjou Mikinomi into a sphere of Strange Energy summoned by Enigmatic Minion Utgaroa-Loki.
  • Yeah, seems he has a...thing for Lisa-Anne. Initially squick due to the form he chooses being a bearded old man, less so once his young form shows itself.
• Evil vs. Evil: Some of the people his group fights are just as morally disgusting as he is. And considering what the Anti-Magical Faction got up to, its not hard to sympathize for his group, and root for them against the Remnants.
• Eye Scream: He actually keeps his right eye around...on a necklace. Around his neck. It looks exactly as bad as you'd expect.
• Fantastic Racism: Treats the Weiss Mark Magical Soldiers like crap, especially due to them being made by the Anti-Magical Faction remnants. He specifically calls them "disgusting abominations, gibbering demons inhabiting human bodies."
• Fate Worse than Death: The Binding of Loki is still going on, and he likes to do this to people quite a lot.
• Five Bad Band: He has six bands of baddies, all of them answering to him, possibly more. The first major one that shows up is below.
  • Group 1:
  • Aino: Hilda's elder brother, one of the District Kommandants. Holds a Nordic Artefact given to him by Odin that lets him create powerful reverberations. Aino has the distinction of being one of the few in this group to actually know what the Althing Group's true goals are.
  • Hilda: Holder of a sword that can create miracles, passed down to her from her father.
  • Fenrir: He at first seems like a deluded idiot, but it turns out he channels a powerful wolf spirit through him, and is also aware of Althing's real goals. He is introduced attacking a US Army base, taking a tank shot to the head, and throwing it back through the barrel. He seems to have a combination of Having a Blast powers, and abilities related to Fenrir's "Swallow the Sun" trait, which lets him gain power by eating things, usually shown by him manifesting a black hole in his mouth and sucking things in.
  • Alvilda: The planner of the group, her powers are - like many of Odin's followers - rather silly on paper; she can use the magic cloth in her massive get up to summon any creature sewn on her clothes. And she's got a screwed up imagination.
  • Arne: Youngest of the bunch, most emotional, and perplexingly, one of their stronger killers. Consider he's up there with a mythical sun-eating wolf, a God of Natural Disasters, Storms and Lightning, and a lady with a Deus ex Machina Sword.
  • Group 2: Thor's Group
  • Thor: The battlefield commander, Thor is called "Lightning God" for good reason, being the one Odin trusts to do fight-heavy missions, and he was allowed to form his group based on who he wanted in it.
  • "Fraulein": A strange young woman with a gnarled, disgusting looking talon for a right hand, she seems to be the one Thor trusts the most among his organization. Her ability is called Hraesvelgr, and she's occasionally called that. Her power allows her to deal severe damage automatically to enemies who are at a physical or emotional lowpoint, as well as letting her attacks trail them. Her magic usually involves large magical claw manifestations.
  • Morjun: Not as malicious as the usual brute, but a rather unintelligent young man best suited to smashing things up with his two sided pike. When he spins it, he can call forth all manner of gale force winds.
  • Annie: Not as "evil" so much as a Reliable Traitor, Annie is an informant and spy, and her magic is usually best suited toward spying on people, as it involves turning spheres of her blood into flying one eyed spies that are mostly invisible.
  • Sif: Thor's wife, she fights alongside him at all times, and in fact, due to the fact they mythically fought together, they get boosted abilities if they're on the same battlefield. She wields a long lance with what looks like a katar blade fused on the business end alongside a shell shield. It can apparently surge forward, becoming quite a BFS. She occupies this spot mainly because she changes objectives by the minute based on what she desires.
  • Group 3: Lisa-Anne's Group
  • Lisa-Anne: Also the Anti-Villain, she is mostly driven by her loyalty and debt to Odin, as well as personal honor, though this takes precedence over ethics, considering her side job aside from "Team White Mage" is "The Official Torturer."
  • "Burkh": A young Death Seeker affiliated with Lisa-Anne; Burkh wants to die to atone for "sixty crimes", but is conflicted due to his love for Lisa-Anne. She taught him magic and "elevated" him from a mere mercenary using her Magic. Their relationship turned sexual extremely quickly.
  • "Brave": One of Lisa-Anne's experiments, "Brave" is someone who has absolutely no fear or compassion. He wields a pair of huge gauntlets with two big freaking swords built into the wrists. Its hinted that his musculo-skeletal system has been changed to a different composition to facilitate this.
  • "Darkmind": A brain floating around in a tub of black energy, it can form any number of bodies for itself out of "Strange Forma", a bizarre type of Mana. Mostly attacks with Having a Blast and Casting a Shadow, though its main threat is that it has a brain that operates like a supercomputer and it can observe people through any computerized system with a camera equipped.
  • Walda: A young woman whose magical specialty boils down to "controls and generates oil". Her favorite method of attack is dousing people in Napalm. Problems arise in the fact she's thirteen, and very overemotional. Her response to a problem is to just throw more Napalm on it.
• I Lied: He lied about what, exactly, destroying Blackest Nightmare Projecting Symphonia would do to the surrounding area, including faking panic when the sword became sentient and conducted a merger with its wielder. To be precise, it flooded the London area with a lot of Celestial Mana, which let him set up Angelic Alignment, which only works on lesser celestial beings, and turns them into massive amounts of Mana. The flood of Celestial Mana made every living thing in London temporarily count as a lesser order angelic being.
• It's Personal: His father Bor apparently tried to invoke "an ancient kingly custom" on Odin's wife. Hoo boy was that ever a bad idea.
• Jerkass: Extremely unpleasant, sarcastic and rude to most people...though there are hints of a more affable personality underneath the front.
• Lack of Empathy: He does seem to not possess very much empathy, except for a few people, and even then he won't hesitate to scold them or blow up their possessions, though this has a more well intentioned bent toward when he destroyed the Artifact of Doom that was influencing Lisa-Anne.
• Light Is Not Good: Wears a lot of white, very pale in his "young androgyne" form, and, well, read the rest of this sheet.
• Magnificent Bastard: Usually finds a way to spin a situation to his benefit, and when all plans fail, he's ready to use his single most powerful piece - himself.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: He has a lot of them, and I do mean, a lot.
• Nebulous Evil Organization: Leads Althing, and controls a whole bunch more lesser evil organizations subservient to Althing, usually without the lesser groups even knowing the objective they're working toward.
• Necromancy: Can revive the dead as Einherjar, though as covered, they don't exactly come back right...
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: His facepalm and accompanying words basically say the trope name. "Good job, Matthew and friends. In turning my father from God to Elf, you made him no longer have to adhere to the parable that prevents him from unleashing his full power. By all means, good job breaking it."
• Nigh-Invulnerable: He's incredibly hard to damage. Even getting your attack in close is difficult, and having it actually do anything is almost as difficult. Though his defences have a chance of failure too.
• Older Than They Look: He and his relatives and fellow "Gods" are all Older Than They Look, but they were originally vanilla humans who became what they are now.
• Out-Gambitted: He knew just from looking at the fact that Wesley lived through Morjun that something really bad had happened, but he wasn't counting on Wesley managing to unseal another of Odin's old enemies. His expression, the greatest show of emotion he has in canon, is priceless.
• Pet the Dog: He had no reason to support the claims of Ashlea of England, and after the whole sword scheme failed, he had not much left to gain there. It is possible he grew a sense of sympathy, but whatever the case, he supported her activities and attempts to claim the throne.
• Pragmatic Villainy: He makes it clear that his support - sending Thor and Sif over to Sanfield - is not out of compassion nor sympathy, but to prevent the Anti-Magical Faction from gaining a victory, and reinforcing his allies, as well as ensuring the future of the magical group within Sanfield, given it had shown potential before.
• Ravens and Crows: He has a pair of them, as did the mythical Odin, who report to him everything they saw in their travels.
• Red Herring / Kansas City Shuffle: He deluded spies and double agents in his organization by always conducting meetings in the La Radiant Laplace Castle, making it seem like his base of operations, and speaking highly of it, as if it was absolutely essential to his plans - except it, of course, is not, and he makes sure to lure all those spies and double agents in to the castle right when it starts to fall.
• Restraining Bolt: He trusts young Fenrir so little, he puts six different restraining bolts on him, purely to stop him from fulfilling his mythical role.
• SNK Boss: Compared to everyone else in the Vacation short story, Odin is patently ridiculous. The previous Big Bad, Dinah, has nothing on him, and her Haemonculi, previously powerful Hero Killers, are swept aside in one move.
• Spanner in the Works: Wesley, the token normal, who he really did not expect to unseal Ollerus in time to stop Odin's newest diabolical plan of starting a war between the Koreas, and then curbstomping both forces.
• Status Quo Is God: After Odin's done with it, oh no its not! After a few books of Magic World Matters chiefly only affecting the magic world, with Nebiros being dismissed as a military experiment, Odin comes in and starts doing some very serious, perhaps almost Too Soon level plans to permanently shake things up, including using puppet groups to try to drop a castle on Hawaii and attempting to kill everyone in London.
• The Unfettered: Nothing is too bad, nothing is too horrible for him to use to complete his plans. Consider his plan to basically use brainwashing to turn the United States into a death cult society worshipping a God of Death, or that "drop my floating castle on Hawaii" plan meant to cause World War III. Odin is scary when he wants something.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: Turns from an old man to an androgynous youth of indeterminate gender.
• Xanatos Speed Chess: He's scarily good at this. He deflects accusations he led Surge of Tartarus and Haemon-Caras into battle by showing that they asked him for reinforcements, a request he apparently denied (this deception accomplished with Utgaroa-Loki's help), he plans out an entire series of military campaigns, and if he misses a MacGuffin he needs for his plans, he always has a backup or something to use as a replacement.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Tells Tetsuji Shin'ei this, namely because he's sick and tired of Tetsuji's petty, vicious rivalry with his brother Terumi. He promptly co-opts a hastily casted spell Tetsuji was about to throw at Odin and forces it to explode in Tetsuji's face, disfiguring the man for it, but leaving him alive. Though considering Tetsuji was incredibly vain, and that his new appearance is a Shout-Out to the Red Skull...

edited 14th Jun '15 7:31:38 PM by NickTheSwing

Your characters, I swear... The settings of your stories must be Worlds of Badass for anyone to survive, and those without power must have a shelf life of maybe a few minutes. Usually when someone claims to be a god, it's just out of arrogance, but I honestly had to keep rereading his profile to see if he was actually a deity or simply a very VERY powerful magic-user. Regardless, Odin/Othinus/Brunn definitely isn't lacking in the abilities department—and you weren't kidding about the ruthless sociopathic part either. Sheesh. Punishing entire countries (which are guaranteed to contain innocent people, as no nation unanimously decides on anything) just because they supported the Anit-Magic faction, yuck. Makes him delightfully evil. While I know of Bleach, I'm not quite sure of the Ywach reference (I stopped reading after Aizen was defeated) but either way, Odin is surely a villain of god-tier proportions and reading his atrocities—cough, actions—and powers, I'm left wondering just how the heroes are even going to scratch this guy, even with his weaknesses.

• Oh, about Azelas. No, it isn't from the same 'verse as the villains I've posted previously (though ironically enough, the story Azelas came from is what inspired Archmage Reborn where the previously introduced bad guys come from). As to the question of how people would fight it when it absorbs magic: In that world magic is an extremely rare thing, as the knowledge of how to use it has faded a long time ago (in fact only three people in the entire setting can use it). Thus weapons like swords, guns, arrows, fists, dwarven-made bombs, etc. are the primary means of attack and defense. it was finally killed when The Hero Drasil ran it through with his elven blade.

edited 5th Dec '13 7:31:23 PM by Swordofknowledge

The main point with him is that he, at this point, has difficulty safely using his God-Tier abilities, mainly because of how his powers work. Hence, aside from the odd Hour of Power here or there, he mostly leaves the fighting to Thor or Lisa-Anne. Though there are some things that can get him out of the base, and into action. His main threatening trait is actually how damn smart he is about the world he lives in. He knows Matthew is a Big Damn Hero, and plans for that occasion. He knows Matthew cannot let people suffer, so he purposefully hid the number of troops he had ready to go in the Lazar-Solais City Conflict to make it look like Burkh and Lisa-Anne needed rescuing from Matthew's old enemies, the Mikinomi.

I do wonder, though, whether you and others might think Odin is truly callous toward everyone, or if he has anything resembling true affection for Lisa-Anne or Thor, or any others noted.

edited 5th Dec '13 9:26:19 PM by NickTheSwing

Odin's affection for those close to him is interesting and it is heartwarming that he felt such anger at Lisa-Anne's mutilation that he charged into battle himself, but...I don't know. Maybe it's just that I'm jaded, but his kindnesses are swallowed up in the list of horrible things you've said he's done. It takes away from his evil acts and makes him far more human and relate-able than a Generic Dooms Day Villain. But to me he's still almost overwhelmingly bad news, even if he views his actions as for his greater good. That's just my two-cents though, so take it with a grain of salt. I'd like to know more of his backstory as you hinted that he wasn't always such a monster. Knowing what made him this way comes a long way towards making me sympathetic towards a bad guy. Of course, if it is meant to remain a mystery in the story, that makes perfect sense too.

Ahem! This guy is from my story Brighter Than Black, Darker Than White, the first villain from there I've put up...if you can call the poor guy that. Enjoy

• Name: Wesley Carmichael/"The Executioner"
• Age: 27
• Personality: Wesley's personality is harsh, brooding and distrustful of everyone around him. He is consumed with hatred for the Mortal Defense Administration, as they destroyed the only time of peace and comfort he ever knew as well as the only people who ever showed him kindness. Though he knows all too well that his actions go against the dying wishes of his adoptive mother Siobhan, he still proceeds with his quest for bloody vengeance against the M.D.A.'s Slayers, killing them without mercy. Despite Wesley's brutal actions and endless wellspring of hatred, he has a kinder side that has been mostly buried in the fifteen year since the Irish War. When imprisoned at the Underhill Circus, he sometimes looked out for the other children that had been abducted by Unseelie, sharing what little food he had and at one point saving another little boy from being raped and fed on by a vampire,offering himself instead. Though Wesley doesn't particularly care of innocents get caught in his fights—in fact he will sometimes use bystanders as cover—he tries desperately to defend those few people he does care about, even if he risks being captured by the M.D.A., once again showing his self-sacrificing side.

• Abilities: Wesley has been described as an "anti-Slayer". He is an accomplished swordsman, wielding his two blades with deadly precision. He is able to inflict deep, slashing blows with a long curved sword that he wields with his left hand, quickly closing the distance to stab with the shorter yet no less dangerous blade he uses with his right. He possess immense agility, able to defeat gun-wielders by hacking them with his blades before they have a chance to fire their weapons and snatching his swords out of the air when disarmed. Wesley is also formidable in hand-to-hand combat, capable of physical counterattacks, take-downs, and body locks. Wesley's most dangerous attribute is his right eye, which will instantly kill anyone who looks into it by inflicting body-wide organ failure. This "Evil Eye" is a keepsake of Siobhan and was implanted into him only hours after her death. Wesley's fighting style when killing Slayers revolves around weakening them until they are too injured to even move and then forcing them to look into Siobhan's eye.
• Weaknesses: Because Wesley is not a witch—and can never become one due to his gender—he lacks the power to fully control the Evil Eye, and as such, he suffers from Power Incontinence, forcing him to wear an eye patch or other concealing eyewear over it. Though deadly, the Evil Eye's power can be partially blocked by an indirect gaze. Looking at it through contact lenses or in a reflection will injure the target but will not inflict death. The Evil Eye is also useless against the undead such as vampires and zombies. Wesley's mental state is questionable as well; he suffers nightmares and at some points outright hallucinatory flashbacks to his days at the Underhill Circus, or to the days during the Irish War and the extermination of the witches who raised him. These hallucinations have occurred during fights, incapacitating him. Wesley isn't the most careful planner, and if he sees a Slayer, he will attack them, regardless of daylight or witnesses, sometimes landing him in extremely dangerous situations.
• Goals: To kill as many Slayers as he can before he is inevitably taken down, to show their friends and family the pain and suffering of losing loved ones.
• Motivation: "You killed her. You killed them all and left me with nothing again! Sibhan wasn't doing anything wrong, none of them were! You did it just because you can, because you're the bringers of death! Then I'll be like you. I'll drench your black uniforms in red until I can't fight anymore."
• Role in the story: Anti-Villain, Hero Killer and most definitely a Wake-Up Call Boss for Jasper and Mika. Later joins them in an Enemy Mine situation.

• Backstory: Wesley Carmichael was born in America in the state of Washington, the son of a school teacher and his wife. Though Wesley never really got to know his parents before he was taken, he was old enough to know his name, and to know "Mother" and "Father". The only thing Wesley feared was the darkness; at the age of five he was old enough to sleep in his own room, and yet he lived in terror of the shadows that would slither across the floor and the whispers he thought he could hear from all around him. Wesley's parents didn't believe their son's "childish ramblings" until one day, those shadows rose up, consuming his bed and muffling his screams. Wesley awoke within a small, dark cell with several other children, all of them—including him—crying for their parents. The children were given very little food by the strange and beautiful people who guarded them, and any attempts to ask what was going on were met with harsh whippings or beatings. Wesley and the other children soon found that they were the "performers" in an underworld circus run by a group of Unseelie fae. An audience of humans and other creatures would pay to watch the children take part in violent or sexually charged acts or sometimes both for the pleasure of the crowd. Refusal was met with painful torture or simply starvation. The children were branded with numbers on their right hands and only identified by them. Though Wesley was branded "8" he never forgot his name and was terrified as he watched the children around him lose memory of theirs. Seven years passed in that place, and Wesley slowly grew into the role of an older brother, teaching the new children the ropes and how to survive. One day, a vampire client paid extra to have his way with a small boy branded "7". Knowing the little boy wouldn't survive Wesley volunteered and was ravaged by the monster. As he lay recovering, he heard voices arguing and the next thing he knew the pain from his wounds was gone, healed by a brown-haired freckled young woman who had come into his cell. She introduced herself as Siobhan and told him that from now on, he was hers. She had bought him from the Unseelie, though Wesley never found out the reason. Siobhan took Wesley to Ireland with her, and though he expected her to be just like his captors, Siobhan slowly proved him wrong. Wesley lived among the witches for two years and during that time some of his emotional scars began to heal, and Wesley began to come out of his shell. Siobhan treated him like her son, never bringing up the Circus or where he had come from, and in time it seemed as if things had always been like this. When Wesley was twelve, the M.D.A. invaded Ireland, intent on punishing the witches for their Black Magic practices. Though Wesley did not really understand, all he knew was that he opposed anyone who would harm Siobhan. However things got worse; every day more stories of the fighting all throughout the country between the witch sympathizers and the M.D.A.'s soldiers and Slayers grew more intense. Then one day, Siobhan staggered in, her hands over her eyes and refused to let anyone near her. She revealed she had been assaulted by M.D.A. soldiers and awakened the Evil Eye, a death curse contained in the eyes and usable only by a witch. Blindfolding herself, Siobhan told Wesley that he had to leave the village and gave him the name of a man named Ernesto Gessati who would help him escape Ireland. However no sooner had she told him this, then they were assaulted by M.D.A. forces and a Slayer named Alastor Phoenix. Siobhan killed four of the men with her newly awakened Evil Eye, but she was pinned down and violently tortured and raped in front of Wesley. When he tried to stop the attack, Phoenix stabbed out his right eye with his thumb, accusing him of being a traitor to humanity and knocked him out. Wesley regained consciousness in a field hospital for refugees, his memory fuzzy. Seeing he was awake, one of the medics explained to the boy that he was lucky. Though his eye had been irreparably damaged, a new one had been implanted, taken from a corpse. Looking at himself in the mirror, Wesley recognized Siobhan's cold blue witch eye which still retained flecks of brown from when she had been human. In a blind rage the Evil Eye activated in Wesley's socket, killing the doctor instantly and anyone else who looked at it. Wesley staggered out of the tent, only to find it was pitched in the charred remains of the town he had spent the happiest two years of his life in, the bodies of the witches heaped in a massive fire built in the middle of the street. Worse yet, the M.D.A. flag hung everywhere, draped over the ruins as the soldiers celebrated their victory. Wesley escaped Ireland and made his way to Italy, still remembering the name of Siobhan's contact, Gessati. He found the man eventually and Siobhan’s old friend took him in. He then began to train in preparation for his revenge, spending fifteen years honing himself into the perfect murder weapon.

• Relevant Tropes:

• Faux Affably Evil: Wesley greets each of his victims with soft, easy smile and "Nice to see you, (Insert Slayer he violently attacks after greeting)”.
• Anti-Villain: Very much a Type 2. Siobhan rescued Wesley from a horrific situation and he bonded to her as a mother figure, considering the witches to be his extended family, even though their ways were alien to him and he would never be able to become one due to his gender. Now he is basically a hatred-filled shell of his former self. The only thing that gets him out of bed in the morning is the thought of inflicting pain on the organization that ordered Siobhan's death and the deaths of those like her for no other reason than what they were.
• Androcles' Lion: After Wesley has been captured for the second time and is awaiting summary execution, the young commanding officer in charge of the platoon keeping him under guard seems conflicted until Wesley taunts him into spilling what's on his mind. The man says that he is having a crisis of conscience at having to kill one of his own. When Wesley asks if he means humans and tells him such species-loyalty means nothing, the young man removes his glove to reveal the brand "7" on his hand, explaining that he is the young boy Wesley saved from being raped and fed on and that he recognizes Wesley from seventeen years ago. The Circus was raided by the M.D.A. only a few months after Siobhan bought Wesley and a Slayer adopted him and raised him as his own son. The young officer eventually helps Mika persuade Jasper not to kill Wesley but to at least hear him out and listen to his story.
  • In a way this situation causes Wesley to act as the Lion; the reason he helped Jasper rescue Mika from the rogue necromancer, Undertaker, was because he wanted to settle the debt he owed her for her intercession on his behalf.
• Arch-Enemy: Alastor Phoenix is this for Wesley; he allows his wounded victims to think that they can bargain their way out of their situation by asking them to provide him with information on Phoenix's fighting style, friends and family connections, as well as his location in exchange for their lives. As Phoenix was expelled from the M.D.A. for his atrocities committed in the line of duty, no one has been able to answer him—not that he would let them live if they did. Later when Phoenix is reinstated into the M.D.A. on a consulting basis, and the two of them encounter one another, things truly get interesting.
  • Jasper's hunt for Wesley becomes decidedly more personal when he brutally murders Ursula Holmes, a fellow Slayer who had ignored Jasper's cold facade and honestly tried to know him as a comrade. To drive the knife deeper, Wesley killed her by taking advantage of a trait she was revered and well-respected for—her commitment to protecting the innocent.
• Arc Villain: Wesley is the Big Bad of sorts for the "Vendetta" arc of Brighter Than Black, Darker Than White. Slightly subverted as he is only temporarily caught at the end and remains a large threat—he kills the men guarding him and escapes. Justified as at the time as there was only a dim understanding of his motivation while his back-story and the exact mechanics of his powers remained a mystery.
• Asshole Victim: Several of his victims are these, despite being men and women who protect the human populace from monsters. Wesley's 28th victim, Neal Southerly was a prime example of this. Not only did he use his privileges as a Slayer to coerce a clearly underage girl into sleeping with him by threatening to out her mother as a were-tiger, he was an abusive father to his son and is implied to have slapped around his long-suffering wife on more than one occasion, judging by her barely concealed relief at his death.
• Asexuality: Wesley blatantly tells a prostitute propositioning him that he has no interest in sex at all and considers it nothing more than a messy activity where one person tries their hardest to dominate another. Justified as he was the victim of sexual abuse for years before being rescued by Siobhan.
• Awful Truth: Zig-zagged. Wesley already knew the Mortal Defense Administration ordered the complete extermination of witches and those women being initiated to become witches, thus his quest for revenge. Later he comes to suspect that the Thinker agents within the M.D.A. might have influenced the decision. It turns out to be both wrong and right. The powers given to the witches such as Healing Hands, Flight, One-Winged Angel forms, and Death Curses come from having part of the Changeling's flesh implanted within them, in a manner that cannot be duplicated except by witches. It was feared that those who would free the Changeling from its prison were going to use the witches in an attempt—and so Thérèse, the Big Good and leader of the M.D.A. ordered them all executed and burned so to thwart the plans of the mysterious organization. Needles to say this just enrages Wesley even more but by the time he hears about this, he's already well into therapy and learns to channel that rage more constructively.
• Ax-Crazy: Wesley doesn't care if a Slayer took part in the Irish War or if they were even active during that time; as long as you're wearing the black uniform and emblem of the M.D.A., you're going to die. This extends to anyone who helps them, policemen, soldiers and even civilians have been cut down in his rampages, leaving hundreds of bodies in his wake.
• Badass: The man declared his own personal war against an organization of monster hunters that has basically replaced many of the world's governments, has a massive military force of its own, trains a small army of Badass Normals to police the supernatural underworld in the countries under its control, and is run by a member of the immortal Precursor Heroes that defeated a horrifying monster and saved the world four hundred years ago. Wesley doesn't care about any of that. He just wants to dye their black uniforms red.
• Badass Creed: "If you're going to soak yourselves in the blood of others, you have to leave the world drenched in your own". In other words, if you are going to kill people, you don't deserve a peaceful death. The only fit way for you to leave the planet is in a bloody struggle to the death.
• Badass Transplant: Siobhan's Magical Eye allows him to inflict a One-Hit Kill on anyone who gazes directly into it, making it very much the ultimate weapon. Part of why he doesn't immediately use it on the Slayers he kills is because he wants to wear them down slowly, to see them slowly tire and give in to despair as they realize that they are outmatched and can't win. Only then does he see the need to end it.
• Bare-Fisted Monk: Even without his swords he is quite capable of killing people, proving this when cornered by a platoon of M.D.A. guards in a bar, Wesley was able to kill several and severely injure others with bare-handed strikes alone. Justified as Ernesto Gessati, Siobhan's friend and a former Slayer trained him both in swordsmanship and fighting during the years he was Wesley's guardian, though the boy never let him know why he wanted this training...
• BFS: Wesley's left sword is almost as large as he is with a curved blade made for slashing at his enemies and ridged so that any bladed weapon clashing against it will be stuck for a few seconds—but in battle with him that's all he needs to stab with his shorter, right sword.
• Bishōnen: Wesley is clearly a man but for all his murderous ways he is quite feminine-looking. He has a very slight, lean build and is described as having no facial hair at all, large brown eyes (well, before they became Mismatched Eyes) and even has a small Beauty Mark on his left cheek.
• Break the Cutie: Wesley was an average five year old until he was kidnapped by The Fair Folk, stuffed into a cramped cell with several other children and forced to participate in a depraved underground circus for the enjoyment of wealthy pedophiles and sadists. He was then forced to watch the woman who saved him and gave him a home, love and affection raped and tortured in front of him, losing an eye when he tried to save her and then beaten into unconsciousness by Sociopathic Soldiers. The final blow was discovering that her eye had been given to him at random because some doctor snatched it out of her corpse before heaping it on the massive fire they used to burn the witches bodies.
• Breaking Lecture: Wesley receives one from the ancient witch Irene, who was Siobhan's mentor while he's lying low in Bristol as she heard about his rampage across Europe. She bluntly tells Wesley that he is wasting the life Siobhan gave him when she saved him from the hellish Circus. Irene goes on to say that if she, a centuries-old witch is able to withstand the torture and extermination of countless members of her own kind—many of whom she mentored—then surely a normal human boy who has no connection to them except through his adoptive mother can put that behind him and live on.
  • Subverted in that that lecture doesn't even come close to making an impact on him. Rather Wesley just respectfully tells Irene that the decision to stand by and let the M.D.A. get away with their crimes is her choice. His choice is to kill as many of their "blood-drenched pawns" as he can before he is killed.
• Brown Eyes: He had two before one of his eyes was gouged and switched for Siobhan's. However he is anything but stable or trustworthy, in fact he is almost the exact opposite, being crazier than a wet hornet's nest.
• Black Swords Are Better: Wesley's blades are both made of obsidian for maximum sharpness; the handles are made of iron.
• Blood from the Mouth: People who are struck dead by the curse contained in his right eye usually have this as their only outward symptom. Autopsy however shows massive organ failure throughout the entire body.
• Character Development: After he is forced to join Jasper, Mika, James and Luna in an effort to ferret out the corruption within the M.D.A., Wesley has a bit of a Heel Realization and realizes that a good number of the Slayers he killed weren't evil people, just those trying to do their duty to protect the human race from what they felt were monsters. He doesn't feel guilt at killing them, and he will never forgive the M.D.A. but he does acknowledge that he should have picked his targets more carefully.
• Changeling Tale: It's later mentioned that Wesley's parents never reported him missing due to the Unseelie who abducted him replacing him with a perfect replica which quickly grew sickly and then died without them ever knowing it was a fake, Halo-style. This was standard operating practice with the group of Unseelie that ran the Underhill Circus.
• Cool Shades: Wesley wears these after he first enters Britain from Italy due to his Evil Eye being constantly on. Though he later dons an Eye Patch Of Power, he wears these when he doesn't want to attract attention.
• Combat Pragmatist: Wesley's objective is to kill his targets, nothing more nothing less, thus he has no use for honor and will do whatever he has to in order to win. At one point when fighting "Whirlwind" Ursula Holmes, a young female Slayer renowned for both her sword skills and her tendency to go out of her way to protect innocents, Wesley purposefully engages her in a crowded plaza and then uses the bystanders as she attacks him, causing her to shear through several men women and children. When she freezes in horror, Wesley simply stabs her in the abdomen, inflicting a painful and debilitating wound.
  • A slight subversion is that he could simply end battles by flashing his Magical Eye; instead he engages Slayers in drawn out fights and tries to cripple them with despair before ending the battle.
• Combat Compliment: Related to the above, Wesley compliments Jasper on his ruthlessness when the two of them fight for the first time due to Jasper simply opening fire on him when Wesley started with his opening line of "Nice to see you" instead of waiting for any sort of introduction. Later in the same battle he again compliments Jasper on his planning skills when it turns out Jasper challenging him alone was simply a ruse. An entire capture team disguised as civilians were in the surrounding area.
• Covered with Scars: Wesley bears hundreds of scars all over his body from whips, torture devices, stabbings and his right hand is marked with the number 8 from being branded at the Circus. Not to mention that almost all of his battles with the Slayers result in him being wounded in some way (as these are highly trained Badass Normals he's taking on). Also overlaps with Dented Iron.
• Cute and Psycho
• Dark and Troubled Past
• Death Seeker: Wesley could arguably be one of these, though never says it outright. He simply knows that sooner or later his luck will run out and he will either be killed by a Slayer or captured and killed by the M.D.A. Either way he has no problem with that, as it is in perfect harmony with his creed and he will go down killing as many of them as he can.
• Despair Event Horizon: He crossed this with the death of Siobhan, the other witches, and watching his town used as a giant pyre to burn the bodies. The only thing that even keeps him putting one foot in front of the other is the thought of making the Slayers pay.
• The Dreaded: Wesley is referred to as "The Executioner" in whispers by the M.D.A. because of his ferocity and the fact that with the exception of Jasper, never lost a battle against a Slayer. Even then, Jasper survived their first confrontation only by pure luck and the second because of careful, meticulous planning. However actually calling him The Executioner aloud in mixed M.D.A. company is a surefire way to get chewed out by an officer, as calling him "Executioner" is implying that Slayers are criminals who must be put to death.
• Dull Surprise: Wesley doesn't really do shock. After he hacks off Mika's head during his first battle with Jasper, his only reaction to her body abruptly trying to roundhouse kick him is to evade it and comment that "People don't usually do that after I behead them". Similarly, finding out that the M.D.A. (or rather the Thinker agents within the organization) had recruited were-creature muscle to capture him simply caused him to raise his eyebrows and say that he wasn't aware the policies on supernatural beings in the M.D.A. had changed while he'd been lying low. This is while they are surrounding him in their transformed states.
  • Completely averted when Jasper hinders his Evil Eye with contact lenses of all things; he goes even crazier than he already is, leading to his capture for the second time.
• Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette
• Facepalm of Doom: Alastor Phoenix did this to him when Wesley tried to stop him and his company from gang-raping and torturing Siobhan, using his thumb to gouge out Wesley's right eye.
• Freak Out: What led him to what he is now. Only after he actually gets into therapy and is treated for some of his underlying PTSD and anger issues does he begin to show some signs of moving away from his former ways.
• Hates Being Touched
• Hero Killer: Wesley murders Ursula Holmes. Jasper's deep anger and hate for him come from this incident, because Ursula was one of the few people who Jasper considered a friend and may or may not have been developing romantic feelings for. While many of the Slayers he murdered are C-List Fodder, there are still a few notable ones who were seen and encountered by Jasper and Mika several times.
• He Who Fights Monsters: Wesley began hunting Slayers in an attempt to avenge the extermination of the witches, and yet as he continues on his rampage, he has actually killed far more innocent people as collateral damage than he has Slayers. In detail: He has "only" killed 57 Slayers and over 385 innocents, to say nothing of those in between like ordinary soldiers and policemen—these numbers are so high that people have stopped counting. He cares nothing for those caught up in his battles and in many ways has become a worse monster than the ones who wronged him.
• In the Hood: Wesley's usual attire consists of jeans and a large hooded sweatshirt. This latter facet isn't so much a fashion statement as it is to provide a means of covering his face when he needs to.
• Lightning Bruiser: He is incredibly fast; while he can't dodge bullets, Wesley is able to close the distance between people wielding guns before they can fire, ending the fight when he cuts them to ribbons with his swords.
• Mismatched Eyes: One of Wesley's eyes is deep brown,the other has a strange runic symbol traced across the iris, which is iridescent blue.
• Pet the Dog: Wesley didn't find out his guardian Ernesto Gessati was a former Slayer until just before leaving Italy to begin his revenge quest, when he found an old Slayer's badge while helping to clean out a closet. At first Wesley seriously considered killing Ernesto and his wife and their fourteen year old daughter, but he had lived with the family for so long as an adopted son and seen the birth of his adopted sister, and so decided to spare them. Later, he purposely avoids going back to Italy where he could theoretically lie low at his adoptive family's house to avoid directing the M.D.A.'s suspicion there at any cost.
  • He also continually writes them letters about his "hike across Europe" to "discover himself", at one point assuring them that he would be careful not to be caught up in the rampages of the mysterious killer targeting Slayers in order to assuage his adoptive parents fear that he would become another civilian casualty.
• Psychotic Smirk
• Psychopathic Manchild: Wesley's definitely of the second variety; though he is extremely powerful (rivaling many Slayers) and certainly has adult intelligence, he is in many ways an emotionally stunted little boy. One of the reasons Mika said to spare his life was because in her eyes he was like a wounded, hurt child lashing out at the world in grief and rage.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Against the M.D.A. and its Slayers. Though when you consider his massive civilian and non-Slayer body-count, it could be argued that he is taking out his rage against the entire world that was unfair enough to stick him in a torturous situation where he barely survived, only to give him a taste of something better, only for it to be snatched away again.
• Rooftop Confrontation: When he is sighted in Amserdam, Wesley leaps across the rooftops of the city, evading or killing M.D.A. soldiers that try to apprehend him, at one point distracting the pursuing troops by amputating a soldier's legs and pulling the pin out of a grenade attached the man's belt, making the unfortunate soldier a human bomb that brings down a section of a large roof—killing more people and causing great property damage.
• Spanner in the Works: The fact that he has a piece of witch tissue embedded in his right eye socket pretty much torpedoes the M.D.A.'s plan to annihilate a species of supernatural beings that could be used to break the Changeling's prison, as Wesley is literally carrying a part of them with him.
• There Are No Therapists: Subverted, mercifully for Wesley. He is later put into therapy, and while it takes quite some time for him to even willingly talk about his feelings, he begins to receive help for his PTSD and his deep hatred and anger, hopefully setting him on the road to leading a better life.
• Tears of Blood: Upon meeting Alastor Phoenix again for the first time in fifteen years, his Evil Eye begins bleeding profusely when Phoenix starts to describe in graphic detail the things he and his men did to Siobhan after Wesley passed out.
• Villainous Breakdown: Wesley has a massive one during his second fight with Jasper when he discovers that he can't kill either Jasper or Mika with his Evil Eye because Mika is already dead and because Jasper deduced indirect eye contact isn't fatal and has simply worn contact lenses. At first he is absolutely rigid with fury and true shock and then he begins attacking wildly, ranting that the Evil Eye is a gift from Siobhan to help him kill all the "bad people" who took her away, and that it won't fail him, it CAN'T FUCKING FAIL, IT CAN'T, IT CAN'T, IT MOST DEFINITELY CAN'T!"

edited 7th Dec '13 9:59:47 AM by Swordofknowledge

@manicnightmarepixie I suppose Belladonna's (I don't get the reference, pardon me, but I really like the name) evil if you consider being such a hedonist evil. I can imagine her being very creepy and morally alien that it's not even right to label her a villain. Really liking this one.

@Swordofknowledge Belladonna and now Azelas('Azelas'). The thing I like the most about it is also how it's so utterly alien, yet not to the cosmic scale(yet?), just a being from elsewhere that have coexisted with humans long enough to adapt and learn, but never enough to actually like, or hate them. The underestimating human part of him is quite determining him as a character, though, in my opinion. I mean, he just doesn't look like the type that will make the kind of mistake, even when he knows exactly that he's far above the heroes. That's my opinion anyway. Oh and by the way, on closer inspection, this setting is quite different from what I'm doing now. Would it be possible for you to post some heroes from that world? I'm quite interested.

Time for some divine intervention!

Name: Larane, the Loving, the Lady of Mercy, Solitude, the Silent Mother, the Fourth Seraph

Age: Not to be measured

Personality: What mortals know of her is that Larane is the kindest of all the Six Seraphim. After all, she's the Lady of Mercy, her domain peace and calmness of all things. What mortals have come to learn of her back in the days when she usedto appear on Erits before their eyes to grant audience and give advices to leaders of people, is that she is, or seems like, an impossibly beautiful and graceful woman of prime age, with a strong aura of serenity that silences all who have her beholden. What mortals have never come to learn, is that out of the Six Seraphim, the Lady of Mercy is also the most cunning, most dubious, and most malevolent, if the term 'malevolent' can be applied to a being so above humans at all, that is. This is the entity who's behind nearly everything that turned the world into such a horrible state. One needs to be reminded, that even if her primary monikers are that associated with mercy and love, love and mercy come in many forms.

Abilities: The Code of the All-Mother. Virtually a scaled down version of the power of the Archangel, also called the All-Mother. As with the others of the Six, Larane's power is infinite in mortals' eyes, able to create or destroy beings or objects at will, though in Larane's case, this power also covers the ability to influence mortals, indoctrinating them in effect, despite the creatures of this world having true free will. The true extent of her power is unknown, as even in the age when humans aimed to wage war against the angels, Larane was never at the heart of the conflict, and unlike her more unforgiving and brutal kins, such as Nychia, the Lady of Retribution, or Delerix, War Incarnate, she always strive to end the conflict and human's uprising peacefully, up until Dissonance came, and the angels left the world fot good.

Goal: To free human of all corrupting influences.

Motivation: Larane feels that the world is far beyond repair, torn apart by humans' insolence and misuse of their gifts. She also feels that the anomally in the form of the Chaos World of Kij surfacing in the mortal world, which the angels don't even know of, let alone understanding it, will bring disastrous, unforeseen consequences to the world and every plane of existence it is tied to, something she, as the Seraph of Solitude, cannot allow.

Role in the story: Depends on how you look at it. She can be the biggest of all Big Bads in the setting on virtue of being a Seraph, who cannot be bested by mortals (with heavy emphasis on 'cannot', even when humans were at the peak of their power, taking down a Seraph is not something within the realm of possibility), and whose intention is to wipe out human, along with all anomallies infleuncing them, so that the world may have another 'go'. Or she can be considered the all-powerfull Well-Intentioned Extremist who is trying to save the creations of the All-Mother at large from being tainted by Kij. It's undeniable that she's responsible for a whole lot of mess in the past millenium, however.

Backstory: All surviving records and manuscripts suggest that Larane, the Six Seraphim, and the angels, are the very first beings to ever grace the world. In fact, they are charged by the All-Mother herself, the one who fashioned the universe out of her own soul, with overseeing the world and its inhabitants. This was exactly what Larane did during her time on earth. She was called the Loving for her tendency to appear and 'live' among humans, and leaders of the empires that existed back before Dissonance struck were all given honor to have an audience with her. She, and her angels, were closest to mankind, and her existence played a big part in keeping the human conflicts, mainly to gain favor from the angels, who they call the People of the Celestial Empire, from spiraling out of control. Things became problematic when Endeil, the most powerful empire of Erits continent, denounced angels and prepared for war. Larane, not wanting to eliminate mankind outright, tried to act as an emissary, trying to persuade the people of Endeil and its leader, Emperor Xerxes, from committing to such foolish mission. Being that mankind and their magic were at their peak of power, Larane could not force them back to their docile state, and, seeing no other option, she, as with the Six, and all the angels, retreated back to the Celestial Empire, Abiciel. From here on, the real disaster emerged. As soon as Endeil declared their wish to conquer Abiciel, the earth was struck with what is now known as Dissonance, basically a magical decay that affected how magic worked and destroyed the world's ecosystem. The mortals were quite certain this was their punishment, and they could be right, though the reasoning wasn't spot on. In reality, the Six Seraphim, under Larane's persuasion, initiated Dissonance themselves, aiming to purge magic, which they looked at as what was corrupting human spirit. They, or she, wanted humans to learn a lesson in humility, and to start anew without corrupting influences. What she and the Seraphim didn't know was that their Code of the All-Mother may not be enough to complete such a grand task as removing magic, and by initiating a flawed Dissonance, they introduced something far worse to the universe in the form of Kij, the Chaos World, which the angels knew nothing of, aside from the fact that it was certainly not the creation of the All-Mother. Seven hundred years after Dissonance, Larane finally returns to the continent of Erits, to finish the work she started.

Relevant Tropes

Blue-and-Orange Morality: A mild case. Larane looks at the world at large with the eyes of care and love, but that's the world at large, and she sees humans as ultimately expendable, that if they grow too 'corrupted', that is, influenced by external, undesirable forces, they should be brought back to where they started.

Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Of divine and cosmic scale. Mortals know her as the Lady of Mercy, and she's the one behind the disaster that killed millions.

Irony: She's supposedly the embodiment of mercy and love.

Control Freak: Her other names include Solitude and the Icon of Harmony, meaning that she likes all things united, with one to lead, and all else follow. Out of the Six, she's the most obsessive about the fate of humanity and how they interact with other influences. She's also the only one who tends to act as the leader of the Six, in absence of the All-Mother, who went missing long ago.

Well-Intentioned Extremist: In the end, she wants the best for the world and humans, though how she goes about it is so impersonal that it's downright murderous. After all, humans can survive the worst, and they will come back, each time learning a few important lessons.

edited 7th Dec '13 10:27:01 PM by arreimil

Larne is a new sort of character in my experience; usually when I think of an evil deity it's usually along the lines of a Satan allegory or a God of Evil. Instead you've managed to create a breakout character by combining a loving goddess (or angel, I guess, though she seems more like a goddess) with a cold rule-focused Knight Templar. It's very believable when I think about it, as a "merciful and loving" deity can still be rather callous and even monstrous to individual mortals under her/his/its control. Another interesting thing about Lorne is that she isn't all knowing. Judging from what you said about the Chaos World created by the Dissonance, it looks like she was messing with thing she should have left untouched (which again makes sense, as you said she isn't the "Ultimate" goddess, only a creation of the Mother). A very good character, and definitely an amazing choice for a Bigger Bad (you said no human can stand against her power, even at the peak of their abilities, so having her as Big Bad would sort of create an Invincible Villain.) I wonder, does she have followers devoted to her real goal and nature? But above all of that, her very nature as an immortal and cosmic being makes the conflict against her interesting, as I wonder how it will be resolved. Will she be driven away or will someone or something outright kill her, or will the Mother return and punish her for her well-intentioned but still devastating actions?

• Unfortunately I no longer really remember much about the heroes in Clockwalkers, where Azelas came from, as it was so long ago when I created the story. Part of why there are so few tropes about him/it is because I sort of pieced together what I remembered from when I wrote the story. But thanks for the comment. I do remember that Azelas was one of the hardest villains I had to write simply because it had no real "human" emotion beneath the surface, and was completely alien except for its desire for freedom.

• By the way, what do you think of Wesley? He's perhaps the only villain I've created who has a real-world mental disorder, thus I always worried about offending people with it. Plus the realistic nature of the type of abuse he went through as a child and the resulting mental state always left me a little bothered it would hit some people the wrong way.

edited 7th Dec '13 9:50:33 AM by Swordofknowledge

Wesley is the kind of character that normally doesn't intrigued me (Azelas or Sebastian are more my cups of tea), but now that I reread his bio and all, with the mention of PTSD and the therapy he received, which actually worked(but not in the way that make him suddenly 'good') yeah, he does sound more interesting than the typical berserker/blood knight with traumatic past type. Much more interesting, in fact. I suppose in this case, he's even more dangerous after the therapy, right? It sounds like he's still very much intent on killing all slayers indiscriminately, still a bit childish and all. And lastly, it sounds like he will be performing a Heel–Face Turn eventually. Just a thought

Now, the problem with Larane and the All-Mother, is that the All-Mother is, in fact, unbeknownst to anyone including the Six Seraphim, dead. She died long ago when the first pair of Seraphim, the forgotten two that the Six aren't aware ever even existed, rebelled against her. If there's any way to stop Larane from manipulating anything on earth or initiating the second, 'true' Dissonance, she must be cut off from the world entirely. That means sealing away the Six, the angels, and the Celestial Empire entirely. The price of this is the manifestation of the Chaos World of Kij in the mortal world, which brings a whole lot of other issues.

However, Larane has an opposition in the form of her kins. The Seraph Nychia, the Lady of Retribution, knows that Larane is trying to do something she isn't supposed to, and since she's the only one with mortal followers who know of Larane's true nature at all, she and her 'cult', the Order of Glass, play a big part in slowing down the Lady of Mercy.

As for Larane having followers that know her true nature, no, not at all. She's the Seraph with the largest following, and people of Erits continent see her as the primary deity, with other Seraphim being secondary worship. They pray to her, without knowing what her true motive is.

Ah, I can see how the All-Mother being dead could be a problem. I just had the idea that she would show up at some point as a sort of Deus ex Machina to defeat her rebellious "child" (a similar situation happened in the backstory of one of my projects; all-powerful Creator personally punished the resident God of Evil when all seemed lost). At least Seraph Nychia knows just how terrible Larne really is and can hopefully do something to diminish her plans. Do the two murderous Seraphim that destroyed the All-Mother have a part to play? For some reason I just imagine these two, unknown to even the Six, being some sort of mysterious Blue-and-Orange Morality borderline Eldritch Abomination types who either hold themselves above the conflict or have a malevolent interest of their own with the world.

• Good; I was hoping that Wesley was much more nuanced than the usual "I have a sad past, so i'll kill everyone in sight" type. You're also right; the therapy makes him much more clear-headed and therefore more dangerous and able to focus his formidable abilities. However it happens after he's forced to join the good guys and is on his way to a Heel–Face Turn (as the therapy was one of many conditions for them not killing him for his crimes). By the time he helps Jasper rescue Mika from the Undertaker, he's basically still bitter and hateful towards the Mortal Defense Administration but his negative emotions are expressed in words and not bloody revenge.

edited 7th Dec '13 9:43:01 PM by Swordofknowledge

That's also exactly what makes Wesley stand out for me as well. I think I've seen enough character whose tragic backstory turned him/her into a blood-crazed villain and is left at just that (I mean, look at my Reinhardt) or suddenly becomes 'enlightened' by the heroes and turns to the side of good, for no particular reason. Wesley's case is much more believable; it's not like the therapy magically removes his issues, he's just developed enough to cope with them, which sounds like what a psychological therapy should be about.

Oh, and the two seraphs? They rebelled against the All-Mother because they wanted wanted free will for both angels and mankind. Again, what the two didn't know is that they already have it. Compared to Larane, I'd say they're just the more extreme Well-Intentioned Extremist. One of them was destroyed in the aftermath of said rebellion, the other, as the All-Mother's last deed before she truly died, forever imprisoned in her own domain, the Lost Moon of Lunekhi. Of course, with the coming of the Chaos World, there's a possibility that this fallen Seraph will be back in the universe soon. And a note about Nychia: she's considered the cruelest out of all the Six, and the Order of Glass is known as the organization that employs extremely brutal methods in hunting mages. Yes, I love Evil Versus Evil in a Crapsack World

edited 7th Dec '13 10:22:52 PM by arreimil

• Name: Undertaker/ Wallace Irving
• Age: Appears to be 15, though this age is a physical impossibility due to the necromancers being wiped out 21 years ago.
• Personality: Undertaker could essentially be described as everything his fellow necromancer James Lenore is not. While James views his powers as both a paradoxical burden and treasured legacy from his deceased family and treats the few dead people he raises with respect, Undertaker has no such scruples or philosophy. He believes deeply that once someone is dead they lose all right to personhood, individuality and dignity and he remorselessly uses those he calls from the grave in whatever manner he chooses. Undertaker flagrantly breaks the established law of the necromancers by creating several Type B zombies and putting them to work for him as anything from his personal retrieval and assassination team to his cleaning staff. Undertaker enjoys playing with the living even more however, several times reviving lost loved ones as mindless Type A zombies in order to illicit a horrified response. He has a deep, if twisted, interest in James due to him being the only other surviving necromancer, though he mocks Jame's deep sense of honor and his reverence for their predecessors. Though Undertaker works for the mysterious organization known only as the "Thinkers", it is clear that his loyalty doesn't really lie with their cause. Rather he allies himself with them because they allow him to use his necromancy in "interesting" ways and otherwise let him do whatever he wants.
  • When playacting in the M.D.A. as Dr. Blake's morgue assistant Wallace Irving, he put on a timid facade which was thought to be because of his frail physique. He had a quiet respect for the fallen brought into the morgue, even showing outright sadness when Ursula Holmes and David Gainsborough and his young apprentices were brought in as victims of "The Executioner", Wesley Carmichael. Wallace admired the Slayers greatly, always giving them words of encouragement and comfort when they viewed or identified dead comrades.

• Abilities: As a necromancer, Undertaker has the power to control the dead. In the case of Type A zombies he can animate dead bodies with "sparks" of his physical and mental energy, controlling corpses as slow but extremely strong puppets capable of ripping a grown human apart like a ragdoll. Unlike James, Undertaker is capable of generating a seemingly endless number of these undead marionettes, sending them in waves at his enemies. His control over them is so perfect that he can even manipulate small organs such as the larynx (in those that still have it) in order to speak through them. Undertaker is also capable of the forbidden rite of creating a Type B by binding the soul of a recently deceased person to their corpse. In order to do this, he must use his blood and the blood of a loved one along with the deceased themselves, creating a Governing Seal both on the Type B and on his own body. Undertaker takes full advantage of this ability, suppressing any free will the Type B would normally enjoy and forcing them to carry out his orders. Even stranger, he is able to actually "steal" Type B zombies from another necromancer, taking control over the Governing Seal that binds them to the necromancer that resurrected them and replacing it with his own control. It is something no necromancer in history has ever been able to do.
• Weaknesses: Undertaker is a physically frail fifteen year old boy with little endurance for sustained combat. Though more powerful and experienced in using his powers than the older James, he still has limits to how many corpses he can raise before he exhausts himself, that number being at exactly 1,000. Anything past this and he loses his ability to move properly or even think, as the animating process requires mental energy as well as physical. Undertaker must also keep a portion of his energy in constant reserve to maintain control over his Type B slaves or they will regain their minds and revolt or flee from him. Strangely Undertaker/Wallace lacks one of the most basic abilities a necromancer has: he is unable to see or communicate with ghosts; restless spirits are just as invisible and inaudible to him as they are to everyone else.
• Goals: To observe the Slayers of the M.D.A. and relay any and all information back to his handler, a mysterious "he". Undertaker also seems to be trying to capture the Gala siblings and will use any means necessary to do so. However his more concrete and fixed goal is to uncover the suppressed information about the supposedly nonexistent male witches, at least three who are still at large in Europe and in hiding with the remaining females, so that the Thinkers can retrieve them before the M.D.A. kills them.
• Motivation: Currently unknown. It has been ascertained that he isn't looking for revenge against the M.D.A. for the destruction of the necromancers. At the present it seems he helps the Thinkers because they allow him to use his necromancy as he sees fit instead of putting a "collar around his neck" like James's relationship with the M.D.A. However his past remains largely a mystery and it is implied he has a deeper goal, perhaps having to do with an incident from his past, where a boy his own age had his arm ripped off by a monstrous humanoid being of unknown supernatural species.
• Role in the story: Previously The Heart for the Corpse Disposal Unit, a physically weak boy but extremely knowledgeable about mortuary science and someone who always had an encouraging word when the job got too difficult or emotionally draining. Later revealed as The Mole and Enigmatic Minion for the Thinkers, as well as the first genuine member of the organization/conspiracy that is uncovered by the protagonists.
• Backstory: Wallace Irving was born in Cardiff, Wales, to Harry and Melinda Wallace, a young married couple. Harry had inherited a butcher's business from his father and he introduced his son to it at an early age. Wallace's early memories are filled with images of his father standing over the bloody block, chopping at dead meat and separating it into pieces. Though his mother pushed him to be active in sports, Wallace was never very good at it, due to his slight physique and the fact that he was a sickly child, always ill with some disease or other. Thus he always felt more at home at his father's shop, standing in his shadow and watching him work, knowing he would take over some day. This never happened, as Wallace's parents died one rainy night as their car slid off the road, killing both of them instantly and severely injuring Wallace who lay near death in the hospital. Upon recovering, he was transferred into the orphan care system, where he was eventually snapped up by the M.D.A. on a trial basis, as he was too young to become a full member.
  • At least that is the backstory he has given. Now that his true nature and identity has been revealed, how much of this is true and how much is merely a cover given to him by those who planted him in the M.D.A. is not known at the moment. It is implied to at least be partly true, as he shows genuine sadness at the death of his parents—though again, the circumstances of their deaths and what they did for a living is up in the air now.

• Relevant Tropes:
• Animate Dead: He can raise the dead as either rotting corpse-puppets or worse, bind souls to their corpses and force them to do his bidding without their consent, taking full advantage of the Type B technique. His ability to do this far surpasses James or any other necromancer James knew back in the day. Even with a portion of his power sealed off to maintain control over his slaves, he is able to animate one thousand corpses to act as his soldiers.
• An Arm and a Leg: When James gets momentary access to his memories while vying for control of Mika, he sees something humanoid and monstrous tear away the arm of another boy Wallace's age, splattering him with the blood. What that means is currently left to speculation.
• And I Must Scream: People Undertaker resurrects as Type B zombies are fully sentient, though they cannot eat, drink, sleep, smell and can barely feel sensation in their bodies and retain only their sense of sight and hearing. If that wasn't bad enough, Undertaker can dominate their bodies, turning them into fully aware puppets on strings.
• Awesome by Analysis: Undertaker memorized the personnel files of every Slayer or even M.D.A. employee he thought would pose a threat to him in at the present or even in the future, committing to memory their biography, fighting styles or particular method of investigation, weaknesses, and even those connected to them in case he needed to raise them as zombies. He was also able to figure out the identity of one of the male witches by analyzing hundreds of small details such as birthplace, apparent age , eye-color, etc.
• Back from the Dead: Not really; necromancers can't really restore a person to life. They usually fill a corpse with their energy and use it like a puppet. The closest they can come to bringing a person back from the dead is to bind recently deceased human's soul back to their corpse, creating a zombie that will not rot, will regenerate every wound inflicted after the binding and has all their memories and intellect intact. However this is seen as a horrific and monstrous action and so it is forbidden. Not that that stops James and Undertaker from performing it, though for different reasons.
• Bad Liar: Wallace completely fails to assure Jasper that Ursula is still alive after her failed fight with Wesley Carmichael, his voice clearly strained when he tells Jasper and Mika that she was taken to the Infirmary rather than to the underground morgue. Later he completely stammers and botches his lie to Dr. Blake that he was just playing computer games when he was looking through the personnel files.
  • Subverted in that he was a much better liar than he let on; his stammering and timid nature was a falsely constructed persona that he discards the moment he sees fit. His lie about the files was to put Dr. Blake at ease so he could get off with just a small warning and pave the way for a greater lie that he was just looking into the files so he could know exactly the right words to say to comfort people—which the doctor fell for completely. Furthermore his attempt to give Jasper and Mika false hope for Ursula's survival were nothing more than a way to grow closer to his targets. He knew that whether his efforts were appreciated or not, they got him noticed and he could form connections from there.
• Because I'm Good At It: This seems to be Undertaker's driving reason for helping the Thinkers. He cares virtually nothing for their end-goal, but they allow him to use his necromancy abilities in their service and whenever he wants to in his free time as long as it doesn't attract unnecessary attention. This is a direct contrast to how the M.D.A. treats James, only letting him use his powers in their service and giving him an entire list of rules of what he can and can not do, as well as only authorizing him to use those powers in specific situations.
  • Though if the brief flashback we see of his past is any clue, there is more to both him and his relationship with the Thinkers than meets the eye.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Wallace Irving is the kind, unassuming young morgue assistant who everyone suspects is one day going to be running the place, and perhaps be a spot better than the grumpy (if still caring) Dr. Blake. Not so—he's an agent for the Thinkers who really doesn't give a damn about anyone but himself and will murder people who have trusted him for years without even blinking and shows even less hesitation at raising them as zombies and putting them under his absolute control.
• Black Cloak: It takes quite some time to even corner Undertaker, and when he is finally seen for the first time, he's wearing a long black robe with a concealing hood.
• Blonde Guys Are Evil: Wallace has dark, honey-blonde hair.
• Body Horror: He inflicts this on his Type B zombies. Before he resurrects them, Undertaker takes time to strip the body of its skin. Because wounds inflicted before the technique do not heal, the resulting Type B is a skinless horror that will never rot or deteriorate as long as the soul is still attached but will not heal either. Undertaker uses these as anonymous assassins or in some cases "retrieval" squads to hunt down targets the Thinkers want him to acquire. After he takes control of Mika, he laments that he can't skin her because she'd just heal, and he says he regrets not being the one to bring her back because he would have made her far more "beautiful" than she is now. However he averts this when he resurrects Dr. Blake and Ursula Holmes, leaving them entirely intact except for the wounds that killed them (and it was easy for him to get Blake to cover up his knife-wound with his lab-coat). Wallace's reasons for leaving them untouched are that it would completely destroy the illusion that Blake is still alive, and in Ursula's case he just wanted to use her and Mika to torment Jasper and emotionally cripple him to make him docile enough to capture.
  • While confronting Wesley and Jasper he seems to temporarily lose all semblance of humanity, his dark blonde hair becoming lighter until it is almost white with large rubbery veins showing underneath his skin while his facial skin gets thinner until the bones can almost be seen through it, his eyes retreating deeper into their sockets. This goes away after his last zombie is defeated and his energy stores begin to replenish themselves.
• Can't Kill You, Still Need You: He both demonstrates this trope and is on the receiving end. It would have been far easier to just murder Dr. Blake after incident with the personnel files, but he needed the man, as Dr. Blake was influential in getting him, a young teenager, into the M.D.A.—though agents of the Thinkers got him past the front doors, so to speak. Similarly, because of his anonymous position, he could have killed Jasper and Mika many times over, but he needed to capture them alive and so didn't.
  • On the receiving end, Jasper wants him alive to interrogate him on the intentions of the Thinkers and why they have infiltrated the M.D.A. and several other world powers; James wants Undertaker alive so he can ask the same questions but also find out more about a fellow necromancer. Also when he takes control of Mika, James warns Jasper and Wesley not to kill him because a Type B zombie's "life" is tied to the necromancer currently controlling them, and he wasn't sure if Mika would survive his death.
• Chaotic Evil: Undertaker portrays himself as a firmly Type 1. He likes using his necromancy in ways that would appall most necromancers if they were still alive and he fights for the Thinkers simply because they allow it. That said, if the Thinkers ever tried to actually control him and set limits on what he can and can't do, then he would turn on them in a heartbeat. No one is going to put "a collar" around his neck.
• Chekhov's Skill: Or rather lack of a skill. Wallace/Undertaker is unable to see or hear ghosts for some reason. This later leads almost directly to his downfall, as James is able to ask the ghosts lingering in an old hospital to lead them to Undertaker's hiding place. Because he never formed a bond with the spirits and ignored them, they had no real loyalty to him and thus James was able to talk them into giving him up rather easily.
• The Conspiracy: Undertaker is an agent of the Thinker conspiracy, however he could be considered more of a contractor than an actual member. That said, he is extremely valuable in terms of intelligence, as the protagonists knew next to nothing about their enemies at the time, so even a low-ranking agent would be priceless alive.
• Code Name: Undertaker, for obvious reasons. With the mystery surrounding him, it's unknown if Wallace Irving is even his real name.
• The Dog Was the Mastermind
• Deep Cover Agent
• Enigmatic Minion: His reasons for lending his aid to the Thinkers, apart from freedom to use his powers, is unknown. He definitely has more reasons than just that, but he isn't particularly keen on sharing them with others. When James pleads furiously and almost tearfully with him as a fellow necromancer, to know what on Earth he is fighting for and why it was necessary to kill so many people, including Dr. Blake, who he truly liked and respected, as well as raise several dead Slayers as Type B slaves, Undertaker's response is basically "Fuck you".
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Wallace seems to genuinely miss his dead parents, though how they died and what effect that had on him remains a mystery. He also was quite fond of Dr. Blake and the morgue assistants he worked with. That doesn't stop him from literally stabbing Dr. Blake in the back when he discovered his identity as Undertaker and then raising him as a Type B and controlling him for a day to act as if nothing was wrong before simply cutting the connection and letting him slip back into death.
• Fridge Horror: In order to raise a Type B, a small amount of blood from three people must be added to the Governing Seal that calls down the soul and binds it to the corpse and the necromancer's control: the blood of the deceased, the blood of the necromancer and the blood of one of the deceased family members, preferably close ones. The Type B zombies Undertaker resurrected are all unwilling. So, what did he do to their family members to obtain the blood he needed for the ritual?
• Squishy Wizard: Wallace is physically unimposing and barely knows basic self-defense techniques, meaning that he is completely helpless against a Badass Normal Slayer capable of taking on supernatural beings. He makes up for this by summoning hordes of the undead against his enemies, concealing himself nearby in order to avoid detection.
• Puzzle Boss: Part of what makes Undertaker so strange and in many ways so terrifying is that nothing about him makes any sense whatsoever. He appears fifteen and yet he should either be in James's age group or older from the date of the war between Mortal Defense Administration and the necromancers. Even stranger he speaks as if he witnessed the conflicts between the necromancers and the M.D.A. and perhaps even fought in several battles himself. Undertaker is far more powerful than James, when necromancers grow Stronger with Age and can steal zombies from another necromancer which breaks the already established in-universe rules of the art. Add to that the fact that he can't even see or hear ghosts, which is an innate ability that necromancers are born with and exhibit long before they are taught how to raise the dead and it just gets even weirder.

edited 8th Dec '13 6:20:31 PM by Swordofknowledge

Hm, he definitely radiates mystery. How does he look so young, when he should be in an entirely different age group? I love characters like him, wherein he seems to make no sense at the start, and we can only hope for answers as the book goes on.

I'd love to know, but I don't want spoilers.

• Name: Katherine Daille

• Inspired by: Think the rocky combination of Carrie, Priscilla and Oichi

• Age: 17

• Personality: Katherine is an individual whose present day personality was heavily shaped by and influenced by her past, which would be so terrible, it manages to make Broken Bird an understatement. Nowadays, Katherine has gone through quite a lot of personality changes. At the first book, she is extremely neurotic, prone to violent screaming, crying "fits", which leave her looking almost perpetually haggard. She absolutely hates her younger brother, for very good reason, and seems to dislike even being around him, claiming he causes "echoes in my brain". Ever since she awakened to her Spell Core, she became determined to use her extremely dark powers for personal betterment and to improve her despicable situation as well as in order to help Matthew. However, after a traumatic end for her in Book 1's ending, involving a bullet in her brain, it appears her personality went through a shift - in Book II she is extremely phobic of anyone possibly getting closer to the object of her affection, Matthew, and is willing to kill to get the Alpha Bitch cheerleader and her squad away from Matthew. She seems to see people as animals occasionally, and seems to have acquired a love of violence...though not by her own choice. She is left very squicked by her own...proclivities. She experiences bouts of Freakiness Shame when she realizes she really is wanting to eat human internal organs. Following another traumatic event, namely, Blessed Tear fading away and her Imagined Matthew vanishing, she became desperate for any kind of affection or love. However, she now has a very, very flawed idea of what love is. Her new nature lends itself much more strongly to Dark Action Girl and Yandere actions, as she takes to killing anyone she perceives as a threat to Matthew.

• Abilities: Her initial Spell Core is a powerful one that allowed her to summon powerful demons based on her desires to attack her enemies, as well as enabling her to use powerful Dark Element Spells. After her headshot, however, her powers evolve even further, beyond even a Spell Core, to the extent Sorata speculated that Katherine was some sort of powerful Demonic royalty. She becomes able to summon "Claw Phantasms" which are numerous gnarled looking claws that emerge from her shadow. These can become extremely large, and crush enemies very easily. She also somehow got an Erebus Spell Circle carved on the flesh of her right hand. This lets her use a lot more powerful Dark spells. Due to her "Dark Knight" personality that takes root in this period, she also becomes a Master Swordsman, to the extent she can almost be said to be as skilled or moreso than Matthew or his father. She also attains the power to regenerate from basically anything if its not done with the right "type" of Mana. She even regenerates from having her head ripped off and her body dismembered at one point. Her Dark Knight persona is a vicious and completely fearless fighter, using Combat Tentacles and shockwaves that generate intense sound to fight. It somewhat seems to merge into her in Book III.

• Weaknesses: It seems she cannot stand sunlight for very long, and Sacred Mana or Celestial Mana burns her. She also cannot strike a lethal blow on Matthew, though this weakness seems to go away in Book IV though this was a trap to deceive Elijah.

• Goals: Fundamentally, she really, really wants Matthew to herself, though eventually she will settle for any "love".

• Motivation: Her past has largely convinced her she is basically undesirable and that nobody, as it is, loves her. She is paranoid of everyone due to a perception that everyone has hidden motives.

• Role in the story: Wild Card Yandere

• Backstory: Katherine's story is one of the most tragic out here, she had literally no choice her entire life but to be what she is. Her father hated her from her conception, which killed her mother, who was her father's primary abuse victim, so he transferred all the abuse to Katherine. When he remarried, he deliberately selected a woman who would want to help him abuse Katherine. Her younger brother, by two years, however, was intended to be used for a far more insidious purpose. He was told to love and care for Katherine by any means necessary. As such, her brother, told some extremely fucked up stuff, developed a...crush...on Katherine. The worst part, arguably, is the fact her brother is otherwise a very moral and ethical young man who likes helping people. She just tries to see everything he does as potentially getting something for himself. Jackson White and his cronies at one point "pulled a Carrie" on her, that is, Jackson invited her out on a date, stranded her on a road, and dumped tomato juice on her. As a result, she became convinced everyone but Matthew are two faced liars who have ulterior motives. Her awakening of her Spell Core led her to try to kill Jackson with a demon, and she then followed this up by finding her way back to town, and trying to gut her brother with a boxcutter. When he dodged this and started trying to talk her down, she started to have a breakdown, and a demon started to emerge from her hand. Her father then showed up and shot her in the head. And as you can tell from her personality, things quickly went From Bad to Worse.

• Relevant Tropes:
• Ambiguous Innocence: She seems to think she only hurt David and Billy "a little". She also seems to not really remember all of her fights very well, asking what happened in them occasionally.
• The Antichrist: Katherine is one of the last descendants of the Satan, through her mother. Hence why she has so many high level abilities.
• Anti-Villain: Did she ever do anything to deserve such a crappy life?
• Apologizes a Lot: She says sorry a lot immediately after acting crazy.
• Asshole Victim: A lot of her victims honestly completely deserved it for not only setting up Katherine for Jackson White's cruel prank, but continuing to torment her throughout the books, even continuing to try when she shows up looking like a Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl.
  • However, Billy and David, two jocks who were boyfriends to people in the Girl Posse deconstruct the trope in that they look like people who would be equally as culpable as their girlfriends. However, they're shown honestly having a good natured time before her attack on them, that they only hang out with Jackson because he throws good parties, never participated in the bullying or really even knew Katherine Daille existed, and that they're really not evil at all. Billy lost his football dreams when Katherine cut his throwing arm off, and David's track career ended messily when Katherine mangled his legs. We see the aftermath, and damn.
• Ax-Crazy: Hoo boy. Not by choice, but when she cracks, she really lets her inner utterly insane ham out.
  • ''"Jackson White...I can crush you into a mangled corpse! Give me the pleasure of hearing your keening screams of terror!!"
• Blood Knight: a lot of what she says post-Book I indicates she finds combat naturally thrilling. She feels ashamed she enjoys it so.
• Boss Subtitles: Shin gives us one.
  • Shin: Here we are, Matthew. Katherine Daille - Unlife Unending
• Break the Cutie: Go read her backstory.
• Brother–Sister Incest: Her brother's crush on her, and its inferred he was allowed to do...things. She seems extremely traumatized by both this, and the fact her brother is regarded well in the community.
• Brown Note: Apparently, her ghostly singing is incredibly creepy, and is made of Ironic Nursery Rhyme's, making even trained soldiers in Book IV crap their pants in terror, given her reputation.
• Bully Hunter: Literally.
• Casting a Shadow
  • Combat Tentacles: Another application of her powers. Though she uses them for...less than combat related purposes on Matthew, at one point.
  • Eldritch Abomination: She can summon these to either merge into her to give her wings, or to attack with them to drink the life out of her foes. They're explicitly called extensions of herself, which technically makes her one too.
  • Mook Maker: She can summon a lot of creatures called "devils" at once.
  • Playing with Fire: Black Fire. Eventually revealed to be hellfire.
  • Shaping Your Attacks: Usually into large shadow hands, though other forms are possible. Including the head of a dog-like monster, and other...possibilities.
  • Sword Beam: In contrast to Matthew's bright blue ones, hers are black and or purple.
• Cool Sword: Claimour, a sword almost as tall as she is. She wields it with one hand.
  • One-Handed Zweihänder: Possibly explained due to her...abnormal origins.
• Creepy Awesome: Especially in Book IV, where she gets a handle on what she can do.
• Cute and Psycho: Normally pretty depressing, but has a rather cute personality for someone with so much trauma. When she snaps, though, you'd better run.
• Dark Action Girl
• Dark Is Evil and Dark Is Not Evil: Somehow. Her powers seem to be intent on preserving her, and keeping her safe. They cause hell when she's arrested to get her out of an assuredly bad situation given all the evidence that she's done some really bad stuff, and always cushion her falls.
• Demonic Possession: Some theorize this in Book III as to what is going on with her, with one character asking if its "[[Franchise/Halloween another murderous Celtic hunchback.]]"
• Desperately Craves Affection: She is completely desperate for a functional, good relationship, preferably with Matthew. She just wants someone to prove to her that love is true. Her relationships born of this, however, seem to be very dysfunctional and incompatible.
• The Dog Bites Back: In Book II, Katherine's finally ready to pay back everyone for the horrible lot she got in life, starting with dear old dad.
• The Dreaded: Jackson and anyone from the high school find her extremely terrifying, and she's even regarded almost like a boogeyman.
• Female Misogynist: A downplayed version, but she seems to believe that she and other women are fragile, so when her second attempt at a relationship broke it to her he wanted to become a woman, she handled it poorly. This is mostly caused by her by all counts disastrous upbringing.
• Finger-Lickin' Evil: She licks her fingers after cutting off David's arm, before hurrying off after realizing what she just did.
• Genre Shift: Whenever she's on the hunt in Book II, the genre changes to Slasher.
• Healing Factor: An extremely potent one.
• Hell Seeker: She honestly believes past a certain point the only place she'll belong is Hell. Though she does settle, eventually, into being a part of Matthew's team.
• Hero Killer: Starting in Book III, when she starts racking up a body count, and causing people to freak out at her very mention.
• Humanoid Abomination
• Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: Her plot in Book II and III involves hunting down the Alpha Bitch and her Girl Posse and their Jerk Jock boyfriends, killing them as gruesomely as she wants, and moving on.
• I'm a Humanitarian: It is revolting to her, and she is almost sick when she discovers it, but starting in Book II, she becomes hungry for human internal organs.
• Limp and Livid: Some of the time. When she finds a rock in her life, it is lessened somewhat.
• Literal-Minded: One of her few comedic traits, as she's otherwise a very tragic Knight of Cerebus. She was once told not to speak her mind. When she was told to speak her mind in the crossover Tri-Age Cataclysm...
  • Deadpan Snarker: She becomes this. So much this. To be precise...
  • Katherine: I think tweedle dee and tweedle dumb (speaking of Mi Fang and Fu Shiren) are attempting to conspire, and failing miserably.
• Loves the Sound of Screaming: Against her own will; she finds herself relishing the screams of people she's tormenting.
• Master Swordsman: Her swordsmanship is explicitly compared to a dance. She's so good, she can destroy a house very quickly with just her melee attacks.
• The Mentally Disturbed: Katherine...there's something wrong with you. She seems to see pursuing her little brother like playing Hide and Seek, and generally doesn't seem very aware of her surroundings.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Very often, and after she snaps out of a murderous craze, she usually ruminates that her life has not improved at all, and she's just making everything worse for herself.
• Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant: Katherine's appearances in II and III are all horrifying, and we get a glimpse into her maddened mind, and the remorse coming with the realization she's really not human at all, and her evil claw things pulling people into a dark space where who knows what will happen...
  • There's also the fact that she moves lightning fast, meaning she can appear behind someone, gore them with something, and then be gone when everyone else looks.
• Psycho Supporter: She becomes one in IV to Matthew, deciding she has to make sure he lives through this, and even stating she could move through the shadows and kill important people until the violence in Sanfield stops.
  • Matthew, for his part, is scared of what she'll do in his name next.
• Shout-Out: Her swordsmanship, hunger, and vicious behavior at times lends to flashbacks of Priscilla.
  • The whole shadow hands deal also functions as a shout out to Oichi.
  • Her hellhound attack is also very familiar.
• Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl: She has the appearance, though her face is clear.
• Wild Card: She basically does whatever she wants after Book I and II, though in IV, she helps Matthew's side, and decides to channel her evil powers for his good.
• Woman In Black: Her outfits are all mourning clothes.

edited 26th Jul '15 2:47:51 AM by NickTheSwing

Katherine definitely reminds of of Priscilla and Carrie—and a little Alma Wade mixed in. Oh and wow. Her backstory truly is horrible. Is there any reason her father was so dedicated to making her life a living hell, besides For the Evulz? You said that he made being willing to abuse his daughter part of the criteria for a potential wife, so what on Earth is his problem? I hope it's elaborated on later in the story. Moving on, I think my favorite thing about Katherine is that she seems to be made of Deconstructions. Ahem...

• Abused, lonely and misunderstood girl gains monstrous supernatural powers and wreaks vengeance against those who have wronged her: Except that several of those she has victimizes are innocents and didn't even know who she was and are permanently scarred by her actions. (By the way, I don't know if you intended it, but that one sort of has You Bastard! written all over it for those of us who were mistreated in high school and love these sort of outcast-revenge stories, so congrats)

• She averts the standard Heel–Face Turn pulled by the monstrous but hurting-inside villain. Instead she likes your main character/hero but seems to be either too damaged or unwilling (I can't tell exactly which) to go fully over to the good side and just dedicates her horrifying power to doing whatever will make him happy. I like characters like that and have created a few myself. .
• All in all a solid, creative character.

edited 14th Dec '13 6:01:43 PM by Swordofknowledge

Now an updated version of an earlier villain posted here. I apologize for any selfish behavior in this...

• Name: Wolfang Richler / The Prophet / The Fortune Teller / "Matsuno Kyonori"

• Age: apparently only 25. In reality...

• Personality: Wolfang Richler is easily one of the most mysterious villains of New Dawn and really, any fandom RP's he shows up in. His most common personality traits are indeed his deceitful, manipulative nature, and the ease to which he goes about assuming false faces and using these to achieve his goals. He usually prefers to station himself in a villainous or even heroic camp as an advisor and use this position to gauge where things are going and how to work the situation to his advantage. Megalomaniacal and cruel when his true nature is revealed, Wolfang doesn't seem to really care what he has to sacrifice to get what he wants returned to him. He's even willing to use cold blooded murder accomplished personally to get what he wants. He desires nothing but to become a "King in the Sky", and get revenge on the familial line of his step-brother, as well as acting on any grudges or tertiary plans he has set up. Richler has a very, very long memory, and he doesn't forgive anyone for standing in his way even once. This is often represented as him not just screwing over one guy, but his entire family line down huge numbers of generations. He is also infamous for the fact that, many of the times, he has not had to lie to people to get them to do what he wants them to, just tell them the truth as obliquely or carefully constructed as he wants it to be. Despite the numerous false faces which are usually very cheerful and optimistic, Wolfang himself seems almost dead inside - most compare his appearance to the look of a man driven mad by isolation. Depressing, nihilistic, and completely dismissive of individual human life, Wolfang seems to have every intention of making his own little "Paradise on Earth (酒池肉林)". Going by the connotations of that, and who historically embraced such an idea, you just know Wolfang's ideas of what constitutes a paradise are not within the interests of the regular human being. Indeed, Wolfang himself seems to be a very, ah, lustful man, enjoying "playing" with women's hearts almost as much as he enjoys manipulating events into his favour. The Charmer to an insane degree, he uses a combination of magic, technology and genuine affable charm to worm his way into the hearts of the impressionable. A bonafide hedonist in this regard, he is bent on ensuring that his family line gives him another venue of immortality, namely, genetic immortality - and he doesn't really care what he has to do in order to get the best possibilities for offspring, outright treating his own family line like a grand genetic experiment. This being one experiment Wolfang is all too happy to leap into himself, leading to quite a few gnarled, tangled family trees. Aside this, he is also a well known "trickster" and is referred to as the "First Djinni", due to his willingness to fulfil people's wishes...though not always how they intended them to be fulfilled.

• Abilities: Wolfang absorbed the Mana of an entire Plane of Existence into his being when his portal experiment went south due to his wife's intervention, purely to survive at the time, but the process left him with Complete Immortality. This ability of his is usually just turned to him being extremely hard to kill and combined with The Ageless - he looks exactly the same as he did multiple millions of years ago. And given his fondness for time travel and dimension hopping, divining his true age is...difficult. Otherwise, due to the realm he absorbed being a "Plane of Darkness", he has tremendous dark magical powers, the limits of which are not exactly known. He is capable of Warping the Aether, but on a different level and scale than others in this level. One could say he uses it so well, it might as well be Heaven Law. He is also fond of manipulating human bone, and various "Yin Yang" Spells that focus on combining Light and Darkness magic.

• Weaknesses: His own immortality means there are some very, very interesting ways of dealing with him. Due to the fact he's not as good at sealing magic as he is many other things, he can be thrown to the bottom of the ocean, as one hero did when dealing with him. His own nature makes him ill suited for direct action, and he usually prefers to let a pawn or some other "imbecile" take care of it. His own arrogance and narcissism leads him to make a number of mistakes.

• Goals: "I want to reign over my Kingdom in the Sky."

• Motivation: His wife tossed him through a Gateway of his own devising into a place where he could not see, could not hear, could not taste, could not touch. Complete and total sensory deprivation for around one thousand years.

• Role in the story: Bigger Bad / Trickster Archetype (A few times) / Big Bad / Outside-Context Villain

• Backstory: Wolfang grew up in a society of what amounted to Winged Elves, who looked down on the humans living beyond their Hidden Elf Village. Obsessed with bloodline purity, they did...well, what the royalty of Europe did that led up to a certain ruler of Spain. Richler, the fifteenth son in a large, wealthy family, was the only one who saw something wrong with this. For this and numerous transgressions, including sleeping with a human girl, he was ostracized and cut from any kind of inheritance in his family. They just preferred to think he didn't really exist, and that if they ignored him long enough, he'd go die somewhere. He thirsted to be something special. He wanted to become a reformer thanks to this, which was certainly not the intended effect of his family's tactics. He managed to get his way into a marriage with a young woman from another large clan, and then...something happened. The rest of his family died off, his father apparently committing pater familicide with the exception of Wolfang's Birth Mother. The truth was, his brothers learned of his reformation plans and schemed to kill him. A young messenger named Arne found out about it and warned Wolfang. Wolfang, in response, poisoned them all to death. Due to learning his father was complicit, he framed him for the whole thing. Wolfang, due to this, inherited a massive amount of money and influence, enough to get his way into a position of authority. Now, he had always been a science minded individual, but with the resources at his fingertips here, he could finally indulge himself. Deciding to see whether or not there were more dimensions than his home one, he started experimenting with an aged portal. At first he took volunteers, and none came back. He then started a trend toward an increasingly disturbed Emperor Scientist. Not only did the increasing number of failures and the possibilities therein gnaw at his sanity, his "beloved wife" was attempting to control and manipulate him. He found comfort in his research and in a young aide named Kylia. During this period, orphan and homeless children started to go missing. Wolfang blamed the disappearances on a serial killer, when in reality, he had started using them as part of his experiment. He had to find a greater amount of acceptable genetic material, or as he calculated, deformities would start turning up in newborns. His wife discovered this and his affair, and used the pretence of dealing with "the wicked King of the Sky Wolfang" to also kill Kylia, who she named as the one who was abducting all the children. In the Coup D'Etat, Wolfang was recorded slain, as well as his mistress, and fifteen of his guards. The truth was, his wife pushed him through the same Gateway, as an attempt at a Karmic Death for him. Unfortunately, he wound up the same place as all those others, a Plane of Darkness, and he retained enough mental capacity and magical fortitude to begin a plan for this. He managed to, after a thousand years, absorb an entire plane of existence worth of External Mana. Using the people he threw through the Gate, he was able to construct a force for himself in order to commence plans when he "emerged"...

• Relevant Tropes:
• Affably Evil / Faux Affably Evil: Its very hard to tell with him which he is. He doesn't explode with anger very often, but when he does, hooboy, you better watch out.
  • Case in point, his last act in an RP - shanking the hero and killing him - was done while he was politely smiling, "Thanks for assembling what I wanted! You can be dismissed now."
• Ambition Is Evil: Oh is it ever. This man just doesn't know where to stop being ambitious.
• Ax-Crazy: There is no dodging it, he's legitimately mentally ill. Not just a sadist or a person who loves violence - he's completely out of his gourd.
• Back from the Dead: How he does it is unclear, but he managed to do something like this to revive Arne and Gerald.
• Bastard Boyfriend: Not an especially caring lover, preferring to control who exactly produces an heir. To this end, he gets nervous if his girl of the week even looks or thinks of other guys.
• Berserk Button: Do not insinuate you intend to "make him stay alone". He absolutely hates loneliness. The entire reason he loves his immortality is that he fears that death would mean eternal loneliness.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Do not trust this charming, erudite Bishonen from the "wrong side of the tracks." As the woman who tried to be his love interest found out, he is a crazy skilled manipulator. He may smile and show a certain amount of wisdom and a likable front personality, but deeper inside, he's a seriously messed up individual whose madness is so terrifying a mind reader couldn't go within six meters of him.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: One of his favorite ways of causing heroes agony; turning them against one another with mind control. So much so Matthew expects it whenever they cross paths.
• Casting a Shadow: Very, very dark shadows. Most remark it looks completely different from any other Darkness Magic.
  • Shaping Your Attacks: His favorite trick is to make a sabre blade of darkness on his arm, and either slash with it or throw it.
  • Gravity Master: He can create a black sphere and have this draw foes in toward it or away from it.
  • Master of Illusion: He can call up some very convincing illusions, including trying to corrupt a heroine into firing through an illusionary little girl in order to hit him with something that might not have even worked on him.
  • Space Master: Usually rendered as him moving "space" and forcing attacks to fire off in odd, different directions, or putting people in distinctly uncomfortable looking energy fields.
  • Time Master: He is capable of time travel, if he has the right resources.
• Catchphrase: "Oh, but that'd be boring."
• The Charmer
• Clasp Your Hands If You Deceive: When telling a fortune, offering a wish, or divining an occasion. Its one of the first hints he's not a good person.
• The Corrupter: He does this as a hobby of sorts.
• Dating Catwoman: One RP had a roleplayer's character become infatuated with him. They actually go pretty far with this. Squick, though, in that the character was seventeen, and Wolfang is a Time Abyss.
• Deadpan Snarker: Wolfang is extremely witty and sarcastic, and his naturally unrestrained personality makes him say a lot of (oft rudely) funny things. Such as; "You thought to trust the guy who refused to ever show his face? Wow, you really deserve to be my pawn. There's really no other role suited for you. Except, maybe, messenger. But that's a stretch."
• Death Glare: Literally; at one point he simply glares at someone and they explode into a rain of blood and gore.
• Demonic Possession: By extending his mind, he can possess people and do really screwed up things to them.
• Depraved Bisexual: He Really Gets Around. And by that, we do mean some of his actions could get many thousand cases of sexual harassment levied against him from people of either gender.
• Determinator: He never gives up on a goal once he has it firmly in his sights. Its actually quite scary how determined he gets at times, and what he's willing to put himself through to get what he wants.
• Disproportionate Retribution: The tiniest slight can result in this man becoming a plague on your household for generations.
• Dystopia Justifies the Means: It doesn't matter which dystopia he creates so long as one is made that allows for his own personal ideal to be established. He tried once to help a group of white supremacists act out The Turner Diaries, and then handed them a Reason You Suck Speech and explained why, exactly, he was helping them, and it was certainly not to create their racial utopia; "Oh, make no mistake, I have no loyalty to any race or creed. I just want to see this world as a collection of warped, destroyed cinders. That is, after all, what you're gonna create here."
  • To be precise, he wants a world ravaged and destroyed, the only hope being a floating continent he rules with an iron fist, called the "Kingdom of the Sky".
• Emperor Scientist: In the past, and some elements of this still remain to this day.
• Enigmatic Minion: Usually, the first we see of him is as an enigmatic villain who is only tangentially aligned with the others.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: In all his years of madness and misanthropy, the one person he says that he missed was his beloved Kylia.
• Even Evil Has Standards: The most lopsided, and ridiculous standards, granted, but standards. He cannot stand corruption in government, claiming that it only greases things toward all too human collapses. Again, this guy is a master manipulator and corrupter, and he's saying this. Granted, at least in his iron fisted control, the said iron grasp "clasps everything equally."
• Evil Laugh: A fairly classic muahahaha, which he claims he has to indulge in every once in a while.
• Evil Mentor: Often. Much too often. He takes great joy in twisting youngsters into being his "kind".
• Face of an Angel, Mind of a Demon: Looks like a Mr. Fanservice type, a muscular, handsome black haired young man, a regular Disney Prince Charming. Only problem? His mind is filled with horror, and he has a nihilistic philosophy that makes him incredibly frightening.
• Fallen Angel: He has the vibes of it; a respected figure of authority and power "high above" who became twisted and malignant, and was thus cast out from "heaven" and into a pit of eternal punishment. Problem? He's escaped.
• For the Evulz
• Gender Bender: He has changed his form into a woman's numerous times in order to sexually manipulate people. He can do it extremely quickly and easily, almost like changing clothes.
• Genre Savvy / Dangerously Genre-Savvy: He knows he has some really typical and old fashioned sounding plans, and that heroes will arise to stop him. Oh, he counts on that. He usually has plans and secret schemes prepared just in case, even when he's pretending to be loyal to someone.
  • Even his choice in minions speaks of this; he recruits The Baron for his illusions, Gareth for his people skills, and other minions to make up for qualities he himself lacks.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: Oh so much, going from a For Science! villain to a malignant, narcissistic sociopath with a nihilistic perspective. He even freaks out if the possibility of putting him back is brought up, even by heroes.
  • "...H-Hey, don't you brats even kid around about that. I-If I ever hear mention of that again, I'll make sure none of your children or your children's children live happy lives." -note, during this scene, his confidence was broken, and he was choking up-
• Guinea Pig Family: His own. He usually sires a line and then tries to breed for rare, valuable magic types, and combine those together to get interesting power sets. It doesn't matter to him if he needs to breed cousins or closer as long as he gets to see something "interesting".
• The Hedonist: He simply likes enjoying himself, and doesn't consider himself good or evil. Hence why he jumps around doing so many evil things - they leave him amused and happy.
• Hero Killer: An aforementioned incident aside, getting Wolfang to show his true face is a guaranteed way of increasing the body count tenfold.
• Hidden Agenda Villain: His real agenda is never so easily guessed.
• Hot Guys Are Bastards: He deliberately uses his looks to play into the innate psychological bias toward good looking people.
• I Have You Now, My Pretty: Played with; once he "has you" in a castle / manor / palace he does not seem to be interested in doing much with you except random speeches to try to bring you over to his side and fancy dinners. Though given his speeches and the other tropes here...
• I Just Want to Be Special: His initial motivation, as he thought that as a Wingless One and a societal outcast, he was never going to amount to anything if he lived the way his family wanted him to. And to some extent he succeeded.
• Immortality Immorality: One of few completely immortal characters...and one of the most hideously immoral. He knows morals are a thing; he's just stopped caring.
• It Amused Me: His stated reason for trying to force a half-sister and half-brother in one of his guinea pig families to sleep together by threatening to kill everyone in the entire state aside from them. "Why wouldn't I? It sounded fun~"
• Kubrick Stare: Sometimes, he is described as if he's "staring right through you." Generally a really bad sign for your future prospects.
• Jackass Genie: Man wishes for eternal youth? Wolfang turns him into a baby, and uses him as an ingredient in a potion. Woman wants beauty? Turn her into a horrible harpy abomination "That...is what I consider beautiful". Kid wishes the bullies would "leave him alone"? Wolfang takes this as leave to go kill the bullies in increasingly horrible ways that basically say You Bastard! to people who would think of wishing for a Genie able to do something similar.
• Love Makes You Evil and Crazy: One of the chief reasons he "likes" Katherine. She "knows the pains and blisses of love." Given a large percentage of his schemes involve trying to bring Kylia back to life...
• Loves the Sound of Screaming: "SCREAM! SCREAM IN DESPAIR! That's better, I'm liking you guys already~"
• Magnificent Bastard: He made sure to let the hero know he was thankful for him foiling all of Wolfang's plans for the Frozen North Tundra. Because by defeating and killing the Ice Master, who was of the Line of Vonh, Wolfang got all the "royal blood" he needed for his other plan, which turned out to be wrenching a piece of land the size of Texas out and into the sky and ruling it.
• The Man Behind The Neo-Nazis, the Evil Prince, the malevolent magical cabal, the sentient bacterium, the ScaryDogmaticAlien's, the xenophobic elves, the killer robot, the hollywood satanists...
• Manipulative Bastard: He's also scary, scary good at playing people's emotions into a response. Usually accomplished by using spies to study the heroes beforehand so he knows what works and what doesn't.
• Man of Wealth and Taste: He usually talks with people while having a very fancy dinner, and refuses to fight until every morsel is eaten. "Because that'd be just plain crude, ruining a nice dinner."
• Mind Screw: One particular RP with him almost starring in it resulted in a lot of headaches when Wolfang simultaneously explained a family tree, and a time travel plot that made sense only to him.
• Neutral Evil: He is always out for his own ends, regardless whether they be chaotic or lawful. Its always Wolfang, indeed.
• Nightmare Fetishist: He takes a little too much enjoyment in watching painful acts and "inappropriate, unacceptable things".
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: As "The Fortune Teller", he was so incredibly insignificant, had such a motor mouth, and was so prone to That Came Out Wrong that nobody really expected him to be the same Wolfang. Oh, he was. Oh, yes he was.
• Perpetual Molt: Whenever he appears on a scene in his full form, expect descriptions of a lot of black feathers falling around the area.
• Physical God: Once again, an entire world's supply of Mana in his being.
• Pragmatic Villainy: He doesn't work with Zachaia Elmsdotter - at least, before her amnesia. Its not out of standards or being repulsed by her particular kind of evil, its just that he doesn't like how she is prone to Bond Villain Stupidity and really disgusting acts that basically draw a big red target on her.
• Psychopathic Manchild: He has a number of elements of this, though more emphasis on the psychopathic. Though, reading the rest of this, you definitely get the feeling the isolation did not improve his empathic connections to his fellow man, or the maturity of his outlook on life. He's pretty much stuck on "What's the point?"
• Psychotic Smirk: He just seems to have a lot of fun ruining people's lives for the sake of it.
  • The Un-Smile: His smirks and smiles, though, never do seem to reach his eyes.
• Revenge: he really wants it bad on his half-brother and his entire family, for supporting his wife in tossing him into that prison dimension, and then stomping on his hand to ensure he fell in.
• Slowly Slipping Into Evil: His descent in the prequel Wolfang - Beginnings is slow, torturous, and you may find yourself wishing for the later, ruthless Wolfang to dispose of the enemies he is otherwise blissfully unaware of. He even objects to his name in that, as it "makes me sound so dreary and malignant." Its really quite sad to see the descent in action.
• Smug Smiler: Usually described as smirking confidently, regardless what he's doing.
• The Sociopath
• Straw Nihilist: The difference between him and others like him is that he actually has the power to do what he wants.
• Treacherous Advisor: His most common role, and indeed, his favorite. He often uses a position as an adviser to pursue a dystopian, miserable agenda.
• Troll: He just loves him some human misery. No amount is too small for him to enjoy.
• The Unfettered: No depth is too low for this man to sink to for his own personal enjoyment or in pursuit of his "Kingdom in the Sky".
• Villainous Breakdown: Not often, but when they do happen, its often gloriously over the top.
• Villains Never Lie: He puts it this way perfectly; "Have I ever told you a lie? No. I told you your brother was alive, you just interpreted it wrong. I have never done anything but tell you the truth, to your own interpretation. In a way, all this fracas is your fault for being such an idiot."
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: He can turn into any number of forms, his favorite being his standard form as described. Otherwise, he has turned into an old man, a young boy, a bird, or other potential things. Also, Paranoia Fuel, considering he could be anyone, putting on an extremely convincing act.
• Wham Line: "Huh? Its over cuz my boss is dead? No its not, silly! I'm my boss. Who do you think gave him the ideas? Me. Who came up with the invasion plans? Me. Who engendered paranoia and drove him to purge good men and women who happened to believe in his cause until only rottenness remained? Me."
  • Another is quite simple; ''"Well, world, I'm back. Now lets see what kind of chaos I can wreak~"
• Winged Humanoid: Subverted; he looks like it, with those big black wings, but they're actually energy constructs. One big thing that contributed to his shunning was the fact he was a "Wingless One", that is, an Aeolian born without wings, but with higher magical power. These being regarded with a certain amount of fear.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: In the original version of the novel that spawned him, he knew ahead of time that Caelos would end up betraying him, so he put the Wilting Lotus Spell Core in him, which in exchange for greater powers, drank his life force. In the revised version, instead of Caelos being pseudo-redeemed, he dies immediately after the fight with Aevon.

edited 23rd Dec '13 3:54:55 PM by NickTheSwing

Wolfgang is the first villain you've posted here since Elijah Gibbs, who utterly sickens me without even a semblance of redeeming values. Now, he is an interesting character, don't get me wrong and his backstory and history is sort of sympathetic but oh my God. Part of what appalls me so much is his callous experimentation and "breeding" of his own family lines, manipulating them into "interesting" and implied incestuous relations (I'm going to assume for my own sake that he just uses manipulation instead of forcing them, as that is bad enough) just to get offspring with superior genetic material. Strangely even his wife pushing him into the portal just seems to further blacken the tale, seeing as the woman did so for her own selfish, jealous reasons rather than to put an end to his evil reign and kidnapping innocent people. The only person I feel sorry for in his origin story is his assistant Kylia (though if she knew about the children being kidnapped, I suppose she's more of an Asshole Victim).I think the only thing that made me pity him was the And I Must Scream situation he found himself in for one thousand years. It sounds horrifying, and I wonder if that contributed to his current evil, though he certainly was pretty bad before being imprisoned.

• Apart from that, his powers and goals are certainly interesting. While you have handed him a good deal of powerful magic and other abilities as part of his skill set, his true terror lies in his ruthlessness and utterly relentless nature. Certainly a good opponent for the heroes of your story.

edited 20th Dec '13 10:00:58 AM by Swordofknowledge

This is an updated version of an earlier villain I posted here, the Big Bad of my story Archmage Reborn. I was completely new to a thread like this so the original post was rather sloppy and lacking in a lot of information.

@Nick The Swing: I think Nadia and your Wolfgang Richler would be quite compatible with one another, if not friends; both of them scheme and manipulate entire governments and wars for the sake of a complex world-devastating plot and are utterly ruthless. Makes for a great theoretical Villain Team-Up

• Name: Nadia Elizabeth Deneshel/Thana Krelios

• Age: 4,032

• Personality: Nadia possesses a very calm demeanor and speaks to her enemies and allies alike with perfect courtesy or barely disguised contempt if the situation calls for it. She excels at playing with the emotions of others in order to win them over to her side, usually by one of two methods. She either convincingly pretends that she sympathizes or shares her targets hopes and dreams or she simply brings up dirty secrets her target was better off not knowing and uses the resulting pain and confusion to weaken their willpower and resistance. She is also very focused on her goal, exercising Pragmatic Villainy to the extreme. She will sometimes do things that actually result in good outcomes and the seeming betterment of those involved, but these results are merely the accidental consequences of her much bigger plot. Beneath her tranquil facade, Nadia is cruel, vindictive and ruthlessly selfish. She claims that her plan, the "Pure World" will be a magical utopia without war violence or prejudice, but Veil River calls her out on her lies and claims that all she wants is revenge for her rape, torture and the murder of her family four thousand years ago by those who feared magic and those who practiced it. She sardonically tells him that he is right.

• Abilities: Nadia can create spherical energy shields around her body. These translucent barriers are impenetrable to both magical and physical attack and she is only vulnerable when they recede. She is also able to transfer this barrier to others, quickly constricting it and crushing them. However she can only do this by physically touching her target and it takes up to thirty seconds. She is also unable to shield herself while doing this. She is also proficient in quarterstaff fighting and uses one in battle. It is connected to her upper arm by a chain that snakes back into the sleeve of her robe, allowing her to use it like a flail at times, swinging it at high speed and killing anyone who it hits. Nadia technically has the same weaknesses as any ordinary human. She can be cut, burnt, crushed or any number of ways one can die magically or physically. However she will simply return a while later, miraculously unharmed.
  • By implanting Bartholomew Harper's heart within her chest Nadia gains the use of his Soul Synchronicity spell which melds her anima with an ideally willing partner and allows them to work in sync. Nadia instead uses this to take control of four members of Elena Raines'Endless Army, hijacking not just their movements but their vision as well, creating a deadly and well-coordinated combat team. Each of the four wields one of four paths of magic, making them formidable enemies.

  • After she becomes the Vessel for the semi-completed Source Nadia gains a dramatic boost in speed and strength and agility. Nadia's increase in strength allows her to literally tear humans apart like paper and break through layers of magically manipulated rock and ice with nothing more than a punch. Her speed is near-teleportation level, as she is able to target opponents using teleportation spells and leap to the point they appeared. She has become extremely durable, able to endure incredibly destructive magical and physical attacks from the hordes of wizards and witches, as well as bullets and rockets sent from experienced soldiers with minor injuries. Nadia's offensive barrier powers strengthened, allowing her to create "balls" of magical energy that would float like bubbles and encase entire groups of enemies and contract to crush them. She is also able to unleash blasts of pure anima, something thought to be against the laws of magic. In this state, Nadia gains the power to sense whether or not someone was descended from "pure-blood" magic-users or whether they were just a Muggle who relied on the Archmage's Keys for magical power.

  • Her Genesis of the Pure World spell summoned a miles tall thorny vine made of her own flesh which extended trillions of tendrils into the necks of all humans present on The Haven and moon and either stuck them dead or simply released them after she was finished creating the "paradise" with only pure-blooded. However this is thwarted by Veil temporarily transfering Mia's Resurrective Immortality to all humans, causing those dead to come back to life after all seemed lost.

• Weaknesses: Though she strangely recovers from death and injury without a scratch, Nadia is implied to have a severe weakness to magic that affects the soul. The only time she showed complete and utter terror was when Marvelo Leisben used his dying breaths to cast a spell that sucks in the souls of all nearby and seals them in a crystal formed at the site forever. The invincibility of her barrier is also its biggest downside. Nadia cannot exit a barrier she has erected until she consciously dispels it, so if someone manages to get inside of it with her, she is trapped with them and helpless to defend herself. Like all witches and wizards, Nadia cannot cast more than one spell at a time, thus she can only use one of her Endless "drones" to attack at any given moment. This forces her to manually dodge attacks directed at her while using one of their powers, because her own barrier magic is nonfunctional at the time. Nadia's control over the Endless that uses Summon Magic is particularly precarious as the creatures summoned are not under her instant control and will try to subvert her commands.

• Goals: Her plan is to reunite both halves of the Eldritch Abomination that granted magic to the human race by tracking down the human hosts of those halves and using an extraction spell to tear the halves out of their souls. However her endgame is to seal the whole creature within herself and become the goddess of magic. That would allow her to cast a spell called "Genesis of the Pure World" that would kill everyone not descended from "pureblooded" magic-users and spare those who are.

• Motivation': Her entire family (her parents, her husband and infant son) were killed when magic-users came out of the shadows and tried to live side by side with normal people—and this was done with the support of the world's governments. She herself was imprisoned and suffered constant rape and torture that left her clinging to sanity.

• Role in the story: Big Bad, Man Behind the Man, "Final Boss" (in a non-video game sort of way.)

• Backstory: Four thousand years before the story Archmage Reborn and the creation of the story's world The Haven, Nadia lived in the Earth city of London with her husband Galien and her five month old son George. She worked as a DJ and though she came from a family that practiced magic (as did her husband) neither of them had any use for it. When magic-users decided to break the secrecy and come out, people reacted badly and tried to exterminate them. Nadia was thrown into a prison where she was raped and tortured for over a year. The only thing that kept her sane was the thought of being reunited with her family. When a group of magic-users freed the people from the prison, she saw that Galien and George had been executed and tossed in a large bonfire to burn the bodies. Worse, the freshness of their corpses let her know that they had been killed just hours before she had escaped. The sight of her husband and baby burning to ash drove her insane. Nadia awakened her magical barrier ability and slaughtered everyone around her, screaming incoherently. She passed out from using magic in such a weakened state and when she woke up, she had been saved by an elderly wizard named Salazar. He had rescued her because he needed an apprentice in his old age. He taught her about the Source and about summoning it. Salazar planned to summon it and seal it inside himself to become a god, but Nadia murdered him and altered the plan in order to wipe out ordinary humans. This failed when her twin brother Andrew, fighting for peace between magic-users and ordinary humans defeated her in battle and summoned the Source and sealed within his own soul. He used that power to create a new world to replace the dying Earth and divided the Source's body into halves, sealing them both within two people, which granted every human magical powers. To keep this going, the halves were always sealed within new hosts over the centuries. However Nadia wasn't dead, and she spent four thousand years on a plan that would bring the Pure World to fruition.

• Relevant tropes:

• A Nazi by Any Other Name: Her master plan will—theoretically—sweep The Haven clean of all are unable to use magic naturally and rely on the Keys.

• Alien Blood: Nadia's blood is thick, syrupy and yellow. Allowing any to touch one's skin causes a brief feeling of searing hatred and crushing despair. That is because it is literally a manifestation of her soul inhabiting the artificial body and contact with it allows access to her memories.

• Anti-Villain: Debatable. While her back-story is horrific and the suffering she endured at the hands of people who feared magic shaped her into what she is, her actions at times push her into Complete Monster territory.

• And I Must Scream: Before her climactic battle with her brother Andrew, Nadia sealed her soul within the moon as an insurance policy against death. However instead of rising from the ashes after he destroyed her body, the moon became the seat of her consciousness and she was trapped within it for over four thousand years. While she could communicate with certain people on The Haven and eventually attained artificial bodies to control, these were nothing more than puppets and her mind remained trapped until she absorbed the Source and fashioned a real physical body.

• Faux Affably Evil: Nadia is well-mannered, patient and is genuinely intrigued by Veil because he has inherited her brother's Empathic Weapon. However she adopts the same soft-spoken and polite manner while informing an opponent that she had planned out his life from the moment of his tenth birthday, telling the world of her intention to kill most of its population and talking to an infant she is torturing. Nadia is also a merciless killer and will stop at nothing to achieve her plan, no matter how many lives she has to take or ruin—even if those number in the thousands.

• Badass Longrobe: In preparation for the impending Second Enchanter's War for possession of the remaining Vessel, Nadia dons a long-sleeved and high-collared black robe that splits down the lower half, revealing her Spy Catsuit beneath.

• Barrier Warrior: Nadia's magical barrier is impenetrable by both magic and physical attacks and she can expand it into a bubble-like shield or contract it into a skintight membrane around her body as she chooses. She can also crush her enemies with it by making physical contact with them for thirty seconds. Unfortunately Bernadette figures out that if someone is fast enough to get inside the barrier with her, Nadia is utterly defenseless unless she takes it down.
  • After she becomes one with the Source, one of her many powers is to create barrier "bombs", small bubbles of magical energy that expand around large groups of people and then contract, crushing them into paste.

• Became Their Own Anti Thesis: Nadia was originally one of the supporters of magic-users coming out from behind the Masquerade. Even when angry mobs started killing magic-users and their families and the world's governments began enacting radical policies, she still maintained the belief that this was all just knee-jerk terror that would die down eventually...

• Big Bad: She is the controlling power behind Legenada and it's leader Bartholomew, she is worshiped by the Purist Movement and her plan is the biggest threat The Haven has ever seen.

• Big Bad Duumvirate: Though she enters into an alliance with Elena Raines, it is a tense partnership and one purely of convenience due to Elena blackmailing Nadia about the location of her Soul Jar and her Magitek constructs being an invaluable resource during the Second Enchanter's War. She knows that Elena plans to backstab her and obtain the Source for herself, but Nadia sees her as a more than useful tool and plans to kill her at a more opportune time. Which she does.

• Bastard Understudy: Nadia murdered her Evil Mentor Salazar so she could take over his plan and modify it to her own personal agenda: her revenge on ordinary human beings.

• Battle in the Center of the Mind: When Nadia absorbs the Source, she discovers that it contains the memories of every magic-using human, all through the history of the human race. The tide of lives threatens to overwhelm her mind within its mass and add her to itself and almost succeeds—until she discovers the memory of her husband watching their son executed before being shot himself. This is enough to remind Nadia of who she is, and of her vengeance and mission—allowing Nadia to take control of the Source's powers.

• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: She spends much of the story as Malice's blind, timid partner. It's only after Ara kills Malice that she reveals her true self.

• Blatant Lies: Nadia told the traumatized Bartholomew Harper that if he followed her instructions, she could help him build a world where people no longer used magic for personal gain and ruined the lives of others as they pleased. In actuality, she just needed him as a tool to ascend to the throne of the kingdom of Enirtlath and form the Legenada to capture the Vessels.

• Black Cloak: During Nadia's time on Earth as the feared Thana Krelios, she wore a long black cloak with a concealing hood and a terrifying bronze mask over her face. She also wore a similar, fur-lined hooded black cloak during her assault on Erzaria nineteen years before the start of Archmage Reborn, when she attempted to extract the Key from Mia the night she was born.

• Blood Bath Villain Origin: In her backstory she slaughtered the soldiers who had kept her locked up in London's prison for magic-users, deflecting their bullets with ease and crushing their bodies one by one with her newfound barrier powers until her entire body was literally painted red.

• Body Horror: Nadia has been injured several times and it is always gruesome. Whether it's ripping off her nanite-tainted hand to getting the side of her face torn away by gravity magic or being burnt almost to ash, her wounds are described graphically. Her pain-free reaction to these injuries somehow makes it more disturbing.
  • Her Genesis of the Pure World spell manifests by splitting her entire body vertically down the middle while a thick, "vine" made of flesh and viscera with thorns made from bone rises miles into the air before plunging its billions of tendrils into the necks of humans—whereupon it either causes them to die instantly or leaves them alive and perfectly healed based on their ancestry. Mercifully it vanishes once the spell has been cast.

• Body Backup Drive: She has thousands of artificial bodies stored across The Haven in various secret locations. She had Bartholomew build these for her as a way to manifest in the physical world again. These artificial bodies host her soul and each time one is damaged or outright destroyed, she merely reincarnates into another.

• Breaking Lecture: When fighting Bartholomew's apprentice Rand, Nadia insults both the late Bartholomew and Rand's dead girlfriend Rose, mocking their idealism and his. She further twists the knife by revealing Bartholomew's rescue of the two street urchins wasn't lucky chance; she handpicked them to be his apprentices because she saw their magical potential.

• The Corrupter: Her very presence amplifies the hatred in a person's mind and brings it out in nasty ways. But more than that, Nadia is simply a Manipulative Bitch. She preys on a person's vulnerabilities and insecurities, always catching them at their worst moments. The results vary from person to person. Bartholomew was under her thumb for fifty nine years and became brutal and ruthless in his pursuits, but retained his honor and his rationality, as well as his great love and protective spirit towards his people and country. On the other hand entirely Ara Talbot was a sadistic, borderline-psychotic zealot for her cause within weeks of meeting her. Justified however, as he was already prone to acts of excessive cruelty and he wasn't in the best emotional health.

• Cruel and Unusual Death: Nadia inflicts one of these upon the unfortunate Rand Adenade in an attempt to break the Sensor Curse so that she can find Mia and the island of Erzaria. She first stabs him in the kidneys and then slices the knife horizontally, lacerating the blood vessels so that he slowly hemmorages internally. This inflicts a fatal and cripplingly painful injury but does not kill him so quickly that she can't torture him for information.

• Clark Kenting: Before The Reveal, she was simply Nadia Denashel, Malice's partner in Legenada, the timid Butt-Monkey who was always worrying about his excesses and reminding him to follow orders. Apart from some bandages over her Supernatural Gold Eyes, she didn't even bother to hide her face, much less her name. Justified however, as so many years have passed that no one knows what the dreaded Thana Krelios looks like, let alone what her original name was.

• Chekhov's Gunman: At first she seemed to be just the Butt-Monkey to showcase just what a son of a bitch Malice of the Red Cloaks was, even to his own subordinates in Legenada, but it was clear that something was...off about her, even then.

• Chain Pain: Mia sees Nadia's manifestation of the Soul-Synchronicity spell looking like glowing chains that intertwine with the limbs of the Endless she is controlling. Considering that it is supposed to be a benevolent spell and she is using it to control unwilling victims...

• Combat Commentator

• Cynicism Catalyst: Nadia withstood the rape and torture she endured while imprisoned within London's detention center for those with magical abilities with her mind mostly intact. But the deaths of her husband and son were what pushed her over the edge, beginning her Start of Darkness. Salazar teaching her of the Source and how it had "chosen" select humans to wield magic while passing over others (thus the origin of Empowered and Muggles) was like throwing a match on gasoline and she began to become obsessed with using it to get revenge on ordinary humans.

• Deadpan Snarker: Nadia makes calm, blunt and rude observations about her opponents in battle, especially when she knows she has the upper hand. At one point she calmly answers a panicked question of "where'd the bitch go?" with "the bitch is right behind you" before crushing the man with her barrier.

• Dark Messiah: Four thousand years ago on Earth she was one of these to the oppressed magic-users who were facing extinction. She offered them a chance to fight back against the world that had lashed out at them in fear of the unknown. It was a direct contrast to her brother Andrew's teachings of peace and coexistence. In some ways she still is for the Purist Movement that worships her, but it is downplayed far more than in those days.

• Determinator: Nothing will stand in the way of achieving the Pure World. Not her brother's attempts at stopping the war between magic-users and Muggles, not being burnt to ash with magical fire, not four thousand years imprisoned in the moon as a bodiless spirit, not the governments of The Haven and not the heroes. Beat her up, blow her apart, burn her to ash...she will keep going. When she finally does absorb the Source into herself, it almost dissolves her consciousness within its whirlwind of human memories...and she still manages to control it.

• Diabolical Mastermind: Nadia has tweaked the volatile political situation on The Haven for centuries, causing wars, revolutions or more benignly periods of prosperity in various countries across the world. However all of these are linked to her master plan and she sees all humans—even pure magic-users—as nothing more than stepping stones on her quest for vengeance and values people only for their potential to be useful to her.

• Discard and Draw: After her fight with Rand, she cast aside the used up illusion-inducing Corcoran's Emerald in order to secure Bartholomew's heart, which gave her access to Soul-Synchronicity.

• Dissonant Serenity: Played with. When Nadia is slaughtering the soldiers in her prison, Nadia imagines that she is calmly asking why they felt the need to do this to her, why they needed to murder her husband or her baby son. In reality she's screeching wildly and killing everything in her path.
  • Played far more straight after Nadia absorbs the Source into her soul. Despite the fact that people are actively firing magic and weapons to kill her and she is slaughtering masses of human beings, she loses much of her heated anger and instead reacts to almost everything with an unsettling, ethereal calm. Nadia also reverts to using Released to Elsewhere, constantly replacing "kill" "die" or other such words with saying that it's time for all non-pure magic-users to "go to sleep".

• Drama-Preserving Handicap: While using her four Endless in conjunction with her own abilities to attack Veil and Mia, Mia immediately notices that Nadia is forced to dodge attacks directed at her when forcing her "drones" to use their magic. In other words, she cannot use her barrier and cast other magic at the same time, even if it is by proxy.
  • This is completely averted when she becomes the host of the semi-completed Source. She is able to cast spells from all four paths of magic, actually break the laws of magic and create spells that have never been seen before and destroy entire swaths of people with devastating physical blows.

• Driven to Villainy: Though it is mentioned again and again that she chose the path of unforgiveness a long time ago and shows no signs of regretting it.

• Even Evil Has Standards: Nadia is revolted by Elena's Endless Army,Magitek Super Soldiers made by binding the souls of sacrificed victims to mechanical constructs. However she agrees to procure the other witch's services without hesitation as she realizes that they are a strong force to have on her side.

• Evil Is Petty: She attempts to crush infant Mia beneath her foot after painfully extracting the Key from her body for no other reason than because Mia is a Vessel, a representation of Andrew's vision of the way magic should be distributed to the people.

• Evil Gloating: Mostly averted. She rarely engages in this, preferring to just cut to the chase and kill those she's fighting. However she does do this three times, once being after she has defeated Rand, the second when Veil and Mia are facing her. She gloats that even knowing the secret behind her immortality means nothing if they can't actually do anything about it. Her third and final time while summoning the Source using one of its real halves and the artificial half she stole from Elena is the the most striking, combined with Suddenly Shouting.
  • "What's going on, you ask? Well, concentrate closely, and feel it with your souls. IT IS THE RE-EMERGENCE OF THE SOURCE! It is the end of Andrew's profane 'World of Compromise', and the Genesis of the Pure World, when I will usher in a paradise without end, ruled by the children of the Source and free of those wretches not chosen for its gift."

• Evil Costume Switch: Played with. Even after being revealed as the Big Bad and the controlling force behind much of the conflict, Nadia kept the same outfit, only removing the bandages covering her trademark yellow eyes. Later after murdering Rand Adenade she dons a high-collared black robe with a lightly armored catsuit beneath it, an almost featureless bronze mask and once again acquires her plain back staff (she had previously been weaponless).

• Expy: Nadia is basically Archmage Reborn's version of Voldemort combined heavily with Magneto and her physical appearance is greatly inspired by Miria.

• Facepalm of Doom: This is how Nadia kills people with her barrier, grabbing them by the head and holding for the thirty seconds it takes to encase their bodies in a membrane of energy and constrict it. However she can only do this to one person at a time and she can't shield herself while doing it.
  • It's also how she performs the Four Points Extraction spell to tear the Keys out of the Vessels—though interestingly enough, it is shown that this isn't necessary; she just seems to enjoy doing this to people.

• From Nobody to Nightmare: Nadia was a DJ before becoming the stuff of nightmarish legend.

• Feels No Pain: She has literally no sensations at all due to her body being artificial. In fact, the seat of her consciousness isn't even in her body but inside of the moon. Thus Nadia can take tremendous amounts of punishment, such as tearing off her own hand, having an arm and the left side of her face ripped away by gravity magic, or being run through by a sword and having next to no reaction to it.

• Hot Witch: Nadia appears to be in her mid-thirties, and is quite beautiful if you ignore her Supernatural Gold Eyes, and the odd black vein-like markings that slither across her face if particularly agitated.

• Hot Mom: Nadia was at one point quite a loving new mother (though her atrocities in both the ancient past and present make this extremely hard to believe) and one of the lesser reasons she picked Ara to be her apprentice and eventual backup sacrifice in case something went wrong with Bartholomew was because he resembled what her son George would have looked like had he lived past five months.

• Hero Killer: So far she has the newly Heel Face Turned Rand, Eric's parents, and Magister Hope on her list of kills.

• Humanoid Abomination: When Nadia absorbs the Source into her soul and manages to control its power, she constructs a true physical body to house her soul for the first time in four thousand years. However the Source's influence warps this process so the resulting body appears impossibly pretty though its skin becomes slate-gray and bulging black veins snake outward beneath her skin. Her already Supernatural Gold Eyes make this appearance even more unsettling. And that's not even going into what happens when she casts Genesis of the Pure world.

• Instant Runes: Nadia's Four Points extraction spell used to extract the Keys (halves of the Source) from their host. It does this while slicing runes into the flesh of the victim. The first person we see her use this on? A ten minute old baby.

• Immortality Immorality: Let's just say she killed a lot of people to seal her soul within the moon.

• It's All About Me: During the First Enchanter's War four thousand years ago, Nadia claimed that she fought for the lives of all magic-users and for vengeance for all the loved ones they had lost to the persecution. In reality she viewed her army of followers as pawns to buy time while she learned the exact way to summon the Source and create her Pure World. Nadia cares about vengeance for loved ones—but the only ones she wants to avenge are her own.
  • The more one looks at her character, the more selfish and frankly insane she is revealed to be. There is a strong and alarming possibility that her plan will kill everyone on The Haven due to four thousand years of intermarrying between "pure-blooded" magic users and Muggles who only have magic due to the Keys—which means that not a single pure-blood would exist to survive her Pure World spell. Despite knowing this, Nadia persists simply because she still desires vengeance.

• Life-or-Limb Decision: Heavily downplayed. At one point while engaging Marvelo Leisben, the Emperor of the Iron Legion's territories, and his bodyguards, Nadia finds that her left hand is infiltrated by weaponized nanites that change the chemical makeup of their victim's flesh to create a living bomb. She simply expresses mild irritation at this development before tearing off her tainted hand and hurling it like a grenade at the responsible soldier. The explosion kills her enemy, the smoke startling and blinding his partner long enough for her to grab his face and crush his body with her barrier.

• The Woman Behind The Man: Nadia appeared to Bartholomew while she was still a bodiless spirit and instructed him on how to capture the Vessels and create an organization to aid him and mask his movements (and by extension her own.) She also instructed him to create artificial bodies for her, allowing her to access the physical world again.
  • Naida also instigated many (though not even close to all) conflicts across The Haven, creating revolutions, wars and periods of extreme peace even without a physical body by appearing to be a kind, comforting voice in the heads of various key people and spurring them to do her bidding.

• Major Injury Underreaction: She doesn't feel pain (or any other physical sensation, really) so mutilation isn't really something she gets too upset about.

• Minor Injury Overreaction: Nadia visibly loses her cool during the second-to-final battle when Bernadette Leisben manages to nick her cheek with the tip of her sword during their furious race against time to stop the Source from manifesting in the world again. Justified as Nadia's reaction in this case has nothing to do with pain but because her barrier is the ultimate magical shield and none have ever breached it.

• Mask Power: During the First Enchanter's War Naida wore an almost featureless bronze mask over her face along with her black cloak and hood. During the Second Enchanter's War she replaces it with an exact replica, though it does not last long before it is sliced off her face by Mia.

• Ms. Exposition: Nadia is over four thousand years old and has seen the rise of The Haven and was a key figure in the First Enchanter's War. Thus she knows things as fact that many consider fanciful legend or have forgotten about entirely due to the amount of time that has passed.

• Omnicidal Maniac: She doesn't want to kill everyone, only those who wouldn't be able to use magic without the Keys. But considering that four thousand years have passed, it's possible that true magical ability has been bred out and her plan will result in a dead world. She simply doesn't care.

• Only Known by Their Nickname: Similar to her Good Counterpart, the Archmage, no one even knows who Nadia Denashel is. Instead they know her by her assumed name Thana Krelios, regarding her with dreaded whispers and stories used to frighten small children into behaving. This was why she was able to blatantly use her real name when pretending to Malice's partner. Once she actually reveals her true identity, everyone immediately starts calling her Thana, except for Sebastian.

• Our Liches Are Different: Nadia removed her soul from her body and stored it within the moon four thousand years ago, using the energy of ten thousand lives harvested from her loyal followers, making her one of these for a while. However after her physical body was destroyed, she possessed a number of artificial bodies made in her likeness making her an inversion: instead of a body without a soul, she is a soul without a body.

• Pragmatic Villainy: Nadia lives this trope, a stark contrast to many villainous characters in Archmage Reborn. She almost never engages in pointless fights and many times simply talks people into doing what she wants rather than forcing them, not because she cares about their emotional or physical well-being but because someone forced to do your bidding will try to subvert you while someone willingly serving your cause will do everything in their power to succeed. Everything Nadia does is for the sake of her plan, and so while many of her actions are immoral and horrifying, they serve a purpose. Which is why when she actually decides to Kick the Dog once in a while it is...jarring to say the least.

• Religion of Evil: The descendants of her followers on Earth took their ideals to the Haven and formed the Purist Movement that has grown to embellish the tales of her exploits until she is revered as a demigoddess. While the entire Haven (even the Iron Legion countries) revere the Archmage, they look upon him as a devil who struck down their divine figure just as she was going to ascend to her rightful place as goddess of a world unsullied by Muggles. During the Second Enchanter's War, these people are astounded and overjoyed to see her "return" (though she had been around for millennia) and flock to her side, making up the majority of her army.
  • While not a religion in of itself, Nadia seems almost to worship the Source as her god; one of the reasons that she didn't just immediately steal Elena's artificial half of the Source and use it to complete the creature's body was because she felt doing such a thing was slipshod and blasphemous and when forced to do so, she was more than a little pissed. That said, she has no problem sucking the creature into soul, as her entire plan hinges on subjugating its power and becoming a Physical God.

• Simple Staff: Nadia's black staff is relatively plain, especially when compared to the ornate magical Empathic Weapon that is her brother's staff. She is deadly wielding it in both quarterstaff combat and in the manner of a flail by swinging it rapidly from the chain that runs up her sleeve.

• Sticks to the Back: Her black quarterstaff is bound to her back by a long chain that snakes up through her robe's sleeve and is hooked onto one arm of her Spy Catsuit.

• Soul Jar: They are called chrim and can be any object the wizard or witch chooses. In order to create them a certain spell has to be said and then a human sacrifice is needed so that the energy from their departing soul can be used to fuel the spell to transfer the caster's own to the object. The larger the object the more energy is needed and thus more human sacrifices. Nadia survived her legendary battle with Andrew because she sealed her soul within the moon before engaging him. This required over ten thousand deaths, which she provided from her own unsuspecting followers.

• Supernatural Gold Eyes: Nadia's eyes are an iridescent yellow color and not only lack pupils but the irises are slightly larger than an ordinary human's. The yellow eyes of Thana Krelios are legendary among the people of The Haven, thus why Nadia wore bandages and feigned blindness during her time undercover as Malice's partner.
  • This is heavily implied to be the result of some deeper corruption that takes hold of magic-users who are consumed with hatred, as Nadia's eyes were once brown and only became this way due to witnessing her husband and son's charred bodies and killing the soldiers who were responsible. Furthermore the eyes of those under Nadia's control slowly change towards yellow; Bartholomew's eyes stayed dark brown but developed slight yellow rings around the pupil while Ara's become straight gold after being under her thumb for only a few weeks.

• The Svengali: Nadia takes in the gravely wounded Ara Talbot after his climactic battle with Malice, the man who killed his family, only to reveal that Malice was a former assasin for the Conclave and they sent him to kill Ara's family so that he would be forced to join them due to his magical potential. She further manipulates Ara's resulting pain and confusion, using it to turn him into a passionate zealot for her side and planning to use his life as the sacrifice to bind the Source to her will and seal it within her soul. It works.

• Tainted Veins: When irritated, angry or in the midst of a passionate discussion of some kind, black vein-like markings appear underneath Nadia's skin and creep across her face. The more excited she is, the more noticeable they are.
  • After she seals the Source within herself, these veins become all the more prominent and spread out over her entire body, seeming to pulse with her heartbeat. Yet another reason why her Source-form is just made of Fan Disservice.

• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Nadia and Elena's relationship is full of this with the two of them often undergoing Snark-to-Snark Combat. She knows the other witch is merely using her as a way to validate her Magitek inventions and test them out in real war, before taking the Source for herself.

• That Woman Is Dead: Nadia changed her name to "Thana Krelios" after surviving the horrors of the prison camp and murdering Salazar, partially to symbolize that the woman who had enjoyed a relatively simple and pain-free life with her husband and baby was gone forever and partially to take her husband's last name, "Krelios" (something she didn't want to do before) as a Tragic Keepsake.

• Troll: During her battle against Veil and Mia, Nadia actually takes time to stop the Four-Points Extraction spell she is using to tear the Key out of Mia in order to use her elemental wielding Endless to trap the young man in stone, rendering him helpless and immobile. It goes against her usual Pragmatic Villainy and the cruel act costs her because it gave time for Bernadette and Alonzo to pull a Big Damn Heroes moment to stop the spell and provide the Battle Couple with backup.

• Villainous Breakdown: Nadia suffers one after Bartholomew commits a Heroic Sacrifice after his battle with Veil. This severely damages her plans due to him being the figurehead leader of Legenada, as well as the man she had spent five decades molding into the perfect human sacrifice for the ritual to summon the Source. To add insult to injury, the Sensor Curse he died casting on Sebastian prevents her from instantly locating Mia and Veil. After hearing the news she declares she's "tired of moving carefully" and confronts the Magisters of the Conclave as well as the Emperor of the Iron Legion and basically tells them her entire plan demands that they hand over the remaining Vessel or face war, despite knowing they will obviously choose the second option. This culminates with her going to Enirtlah and killing Rand, screaming at him as she tortures him that there can be no forgiveness between magic-users and ordinary humans. After this is over, she returns to her calm, patient self. When you think about it, the entire Second Enchanter's War was caused by a giant temper-tantrum.
  • She has far more severe one when Veil obstructs her Genesis of the Pure World spell by spreading Mia's Vessel-abilities to every human on the planet, temporarily rendering them immortal and thus immune to the instant death effect, no matter whether they are of pure blood or not. After this Nadia's Dissonant Serenity drops and she begins muttering to herself and talking to the Source within her as if it is a close personal friend.

  • "You wouldn't fail me like all the others, would you, my Precious Source? It...would be absolutely inexcusable—for you to allow my designs to be subverted by this mere child . So of course, nothing like that will EVER HAPPEN, WILL IT?"
    • It should be noted that at this point Veil, Mia, Daniel, and Angelica were right in front of her at this moment and she had completely lost her focus on any of the battle, instead twitching all over with her eyes darting all over the place.

• Vocal Dissonance: Despite her young-looking appearance, her voice is described as sharp, high and commanding, similar to a woman three times her age. This is an indication of her soul's true age, though she is perfectly capable of hiding it and does so until The Reveal.

• Voice of the Legion: After she absorbs the Source, Nadia speaks in her regular voice, yet just beneath it are a horde of other voices, billions of them all speaking slightly out of sync with one another.

• Weak, but Skilled: Played with. Nadia's ability to create magical barriers makes her the most powerful defensive fighter in the entire story and her ability to crush people with that barrier is a One-Hit Kill. However she never uses any large scale offensive spells, while most of the magic-using characters—villains and heroes alike—rely on highly destructive and impressive magical attacks. Of course this changes completely after she absorbs the Source and she becomes a Physical God.

• Zerg Rush: Happens twice; it takes Veil River, Mia Scarlteen, Bernadette Leisben and Magister Alonzo Tiarez to defeat Nadia in the second-to-last battle and that was only because of Alonzo's Heroic Sacrifice that allowed Mia to move in close enough to destroy Nadia's artificial body with a single powerful blow.
  • Taken Up To Eleven after Nadia absorbs the Source into her body. It takes the entire Iron Legion and Conclave alliance to combine their magical and technological skills and weapons to even begin to put a dent in her power and even then it is barely enough.

edited 25th Dec '13 8:22:24 PM by Swordofknowledge

Anyone?

Well for starters, the backstory seems kinda eh. I'm sure there's some greater reason behind the instant alienation of magic users, but as it stands it seems basically just people instantly turned on them for no reason and started Nazi-ing them...

Similarly, Rape as Backstory. She's just randomly thrown into a prison where she's repeatedly raped for a year because...uhh...because. In a world where magic users are hated on sight, why is anyone interested in having sex with them? If it's the inmates, where are the guards? If it's the guards...

Why was Nadia even put in prison, given the previously stated goal of extermination and the willingness to kill innocent people for the despicable crime of mere association?

Why wasn't her husband, also a magic user, given similar treatment? Why wasn't her twin brother given similar treatment to either her or her family?

Why was her family allowed to live for a year before being randomly killed off just around the time she escaped? Why were their bodies being burned?

I will note that it's not debatable whether she's an Anti-Villain. She's not. Anti Villains are marked by their personality, goals and methods, not their Freudian Excuses. Nadia wants to kill everything that isn't like her and explicitly doesn't care that there's a very real chance that "everything that isn't like her" is defined as "everything that isn't her". This is not an Anti-Villain.

And all that's just from a quick skim.

Backstory aside, she seems to be extremely dangerous and powerful and may just have the chops to make it work for her without being TOO dangerous or powerful.

If Fridge Logicy, she seems very well thought out.

edited 1st Aug '17 5:13:27 PM by Eagal

I like Lola; villains shrouded in mystery are pretty cool. You never know what they're going to do next. In her case you're not even sure whether she's a human being or where she came from, so congratulations. She makes me curious about the nature of the story she's in: are there more "people" with superpowers, and what even happened to make the heroes oppose her? If she's not the Big Bad, then who is? These are only the beginning. Her motivations are rather small-time, but in a good way. Creating a villain who isn't world-threateningly evil has been a difficult thing for me to do, and I've often found myself trying to create a "small-time" Big Bad only for them to evolve into a menace that endangers an entire country/planet/universe. It's nice to see one who doesn't exactly do that, just wants servants and is obscenely selfish.

Nadia's back-story...Admittedly, I wanted to give her a more sympathetic origin story, so I did play up the idea that she was an innocent victim caught in a terrible injustice and might have gone overboard with it. That said, her origins were far more thought out and detailed in the story—I stripped it down to its bare bones when I posted here in order to make it less wordy and easier to read through. Sort of a watered-down version.

• When Empowered came out from behind their Masquerade, it wasn't an organized effort; people just started freely demonstrating magical powers—which means that one guy could heal otherwise crippling wounds while another guy could blow up entire city block with a snap of his fingers. Many thought this just gave them license to cause chaos and havoc that the secrecy had prevented before. No amount of reasoning worked with the "Bad Apples" and so eventually civilians just started killing any magic-user they knew of. This only caused more hate between magic-users and ordinary humans until the governments stepped in with "containment facilities" for all magic-users, similar to the way Japanese-born Americans were put in camps during World War Two for fear of what they might do to aid Japan. The government sponsored killing only started when things were at their absolute worst and outright war had broken out with magic-users who resented this treatment. Nadia was imprisoned because at the time she was captured, things hadn't gotten to that point yet, though they were on the edge.

• Nadia's prison rape was in many ways the result of the utter chaos that had gripped the world at the time she was imprisoned. The British government was all but gone by this point so the containment centers were like kingdoms unto themselves ruled over by their wardens. Nadia was imprisoned there (yes because of her lineage and not through any powers of her own) and her (at the time) timid and weak nature made her a target for sexual predators in the prison. The guards, who had their hands full just keeping their magic-using prisoners from just breaking out didn't particularly care what the inmates did to one another as long as it didn't involve attempts to escape or assault them.

• Her husband didn't get captured because he was very, very lucky and partly because again the country and world was in chaos. He used that to evade detection for a long time. In fact he was only killed because he devised a rather idiotic plan to sneak into the facility and free his wife, bringing their baby son along because there was no one else to watch him. Nadia's brother Andrew is a similar story, though in his case he was just too powerful for them to really lay hands on. He has his own entry on the Heroes thread, though I tried to water down his back-story for similar reasons.

• The bodies were being burned because the capabilities of magic-users were unknown and while no one had raised the dead, to Muggles it seemed like it was only a matter of time. Thus the standard policy was to utterly destroy any magic-user body with either fire or some corrosive substance to make it impossible to return to life. Granted it was (in their way of thinking) possible that they could just reconstruct a body but at least they were trying.

• Oh last but not least, thanks for letting me about the whole Anti-Villain thing; I wasn't really sure. .

edited 3rd Jan '14 8:38:06 AM by Swordofknowledge

IGNORE THIS!!

edited 1st Aug '17 5:13:49 PM by Eagal

Ah, interesting. I'd like to know more about the villains of your setting if you have any. It's funny, as I have a villainess named Lola as well, though she's from an old story and is nothing like yours (she's a malevolent ghost and definitely has concrete and defined goals, though they are also very selfish). Selfishness is in many ways the cornerstone of writing a villain, I've found. I could go into a whole post on that, but I'll leave that alone for now.

• Oh, I hope my above post cleared up some of the Fridge Logic around Nadia's backstory.

edited 4th Jan '14 7:30:50 PM by Swordofknowledge