Jolly Saint Nick
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Those dragons are awesome. I like that they are not Always Chaotic Evil and are instead just Anti Villains with morals and actual, real motivations, and I like all the detail and thought you put into them. I don't know anything else about your story, but I'd be careful, because readers may end up Rooting for the Empire and side with the dragons instead of the humans due to their goals and view.
Name: Kristabelle Peirce (Krista for short; her father decided to give her and her brother Greek names because he could)
Age: 23 at start, 25 at end of trilogy
Personality: Snarky, acts like a neutral player in the story, but is really manipulative and cruel, and very ambitious... as well as very intelligent. She takes pride in her secrets and flaunts to the heroes the fact that they don't know what she's doing. She also really enjoys parties and social outings, and is genuinely good at planning them. Basically, she acts fun, social and rather normal (for the daughter of the first book's Obliviously Evil Overlord) and then reveals to actually be much more dangerous, amoral and smart than her father was. But she's not all evil; She's genuinely good to her followers once they choose her side.
Abilities: Her manipulative skills, her willingness to do whatever she has to do to fulfill her goals, and her status as a Villain with Good Publicity. Later gives herself Cyborg implements to more easily hurt her enemies. She's also Dangerously Genre-Savvy.
Weaknesses: Underestimates her enemies, and becomes overconfident about her success; Keeps the heroes alive for her plans, while killing could have been easy at any moment; Her cyborg implements she gets allows her to be weak to things like water as well as the Gadgeteer Genius brother on the good side could use his knowledge to take her down.
Goals: Wants to make her country into the strongest and wealthiest by secretly harming the other countries (with, umm, Nukes) and then blame it on the heroes in La Résistance and convincing the other countries to hand over money and supplies to stop these monsters, then she'd kill the heroes, solving the problem but leaving her country the one with the power; She also wants to be seen as the greatest leader in history, another reason why she wants to keep the heroes alive until she ropes in the other countries- to eventually be seen as the hero who defeated the bad guys in the eyes of the entire world.
Motivation: Was annoyed that her older, much less competent brother was the heir to her father's throne and not her, and believed she was the only one fit to lead the country out of anyone in her family. Now she wants to prove it to the world.
Role in the story: First, manipulates both sides into thinking she's neutral, before killing her father and seizing power; then she goes onto do the whole plan I mentioned above.
Backstory: Nothing really, she was just the 'princess' of her country and decided she should, and could, and would, be the next leader.
Relevant Tropes:
- Daddy's Little Villain
- Manipulative Bastard
- Secret Police- Their secret leader
- Villainous Friendship- With her underlings
- Cyborg- Eventually
- Deadpan Snarker
- Party Girl
- Dangerously Genre-Savvy
- Patricide
- Villain with Good Publicity
- Weaksauce Weakness- As a cyborg
- God Save Us from the Queen!- Technically, though she doesn't give a darn what people title her; Queen, Princess, King, doesn't matter in her eyes.
- Middle Child Syndrome- Exploited, she pretends to have this to keep her from being seen as being a threat
- The Usurper
edited 31st May '14 7:54:22 PM by Sibuna
Happy Holidays to everyone! Have a great end of the year, and an even better 2015- you all deserve it!
Judging you
I'd say that is a pretty well developed character, but perhaps her means aren't subtle enough to match her personality, unless you're writing her as thinking herself more clever than She is so you have to make clear if she's a Magnificent Bastard or a Smug Snake
My villain
Name: Pablo, probably
Age: 17
Personality: Handsome, polite, brilliant, humble, always smiling, Never raises voice. Cultured, classy, affable.
Abilities: He's humongously rich and powerful, intelligent and genre sawy
Weaknesses: He's deeply truly disturbed, doesn't feel vulnerable to danger and underestimate foes.
Goals: Chaos. Mayhem and Misery.
Motivation: He wants to obtain pleasure of causing as much suffering as he can, because Humans Are Bastards
Role in the story: He's at first just a connection key between events
Backstory: His parents were important bussiness people who disappeared in strange circumstances. He lives with his older sister and his parents lawyer. He was apparently a cold, silent child and something happened in a countryside manor.
Relevant Tropes: Noodle Incident, Creepy Child, Softspoken Sadist, Torture Technician, Affably Evil, Mind Rape, Breaks Them By Talking, Hannibal Lecture, seems to regard well his sister, but probably wouldn't be love or Morality Pet
Haw Haw Haw
Jolly Saint Nick
I'm aiming for Magnificent Bastard, actually. I see what you mean about it not being very subtle; I guess I can remove the nukes and make her attacks on other nations less over-the-top, but still enough to make the other nations think the heroes are genuinely evil. The cyborg thing I'll keep, because she'll know that in an actual confrontation she wouldn't have the ability to actually escape the heroes without the enhancements; the only reason she keeps surviving is because of her trickery and planning. Anyone who isn't in on the truth will think she was hurt by the heroes so badly that the enhancements were the only way to survive.
Anyways, Pablo seems like a good villain, but just a little bit under-developed, unless that's what you're going for; Is there any big reason he wants to cause chaos, other than just enjoying misery? Of course, depends on what you're aiming for.
Happy Holidays to everyone! Have a great end of the year, and an even better 2015- you all deserve it!
Judging you
I'm not very fond on Freudian Excuse, while Freudian Excuses do exist in reality, almost never end up as forgiving as it seems in fiction, where Villain Decay and Draco in Leather Pants really may be troublesome. I wanted to approach a character that is by all means a cute, good boy, unless for the fact that he's a remorseless monster who crosses the Moral Event Horizont. Kinda deconstructing both Affably Evil and Faux Affably Evil. Vagueness about the true extent of his motivations and morality is what puts horror in this story. Also, I want readers to infer most of these things.
About yours, I, personally, would approach your character as a discussion of traditional gender stereotypes. I Would explore the depths an implications of the traditional view of femme villains as ambitious, manipulative bitches (O recommend you to read certain passages of The Bible such as Ruth's for Ur-Example). The point is: Deconstruct Lady Macbeth, discuss about how femme villains tend to be perceived as more evil just by virtue of being a woman performing evil on males, such disrupts ancient gender roles, discuss Femme Fatale and the another tendency of women being Stupid Evil. Take a feminist approach bit avoid Straw Feminist
Haw Haw Haw
Jolly Saint Nick
Oh, I understand. In that case, he's great.
Hmm. I personally wanted to avoid the gender thing- by having a female villain and having the characters just role with it, not caring about what her gender is. Although, it's a good suggestion, and I always have been pretty annoyed at female villains being Stupid Evil or focused on men, so I suppose this could be a subversion- a female villain who is more evil than her father and not nearly as vain as she could be, with genuinely evil goals and absolutely no interest in romance. And being that her older brother is a He-Man Woman Hater, the gender thing would come up anyways. Maybe your suggestion would work. I don't know, it's a possibility and I'll keep it in mind as I write her.
Anyways, I just noticed I'll need more genuinely bad male villains too because they all seem like they'd turn out being anti-villains at worst and pull a Heel–Face Turn at best. Meanwhile, the female villains are all actually evil. I don't want to have some Unfortunate Implications regarding the gender angle, so I'll have to fix this. 
edited 1st Jun '14 12:46:56 PM by Sibuna
Happy Holidays to everyone! Have a great end of the year, and an even better 2015- you all deserve it!
My last Clockwalkers villain for now. I apologize for her long backstory, but it is important and I tried to scale it down.
- Name: The Lady of Gold and Blood Queen Araceli de Massimo/ Marta Inzeni
- Age: 25
- Appearence: Araceli is a fairly petite woman, measuring only 4'11 in height. She possesses large, yet somehow vacant-looking blue eyes. Her blonde hair is cut quite short, just ending at her ears in order to avoid handholds for an enemy in combat. Araceli usually dresses in elegant royal gowns, but in battle dons a slim, form fitting plain dress with armor weaved into its sides, back and torso.
- Personality: On the surface Araceli is nothing short of a heroine to the people of Ylati. She is a competent ruler and known for her valor, personally leading Ylatain forces to victory against Helios multiple times. Araceli will often perform acts of kindness such as visiting wounded soldiers on the battlefield, and making tours of the Quadrants to personally listen to civilian representatives about problems that must be solved. However this is a careful façade. Araceli cares very little for others, and is merciless to anyone who stands in the way of Azelas’ and the Inner Circle’s plans to bring back the age of magic. Despite her loyalty, Araceli seems to carry a cold and controlled anger towards them, born of the traumatic memories of her life before becoming Queen. These memories torment her and she often finds herself in a mental battle for dominance against them when not keeping herself preoccupied with something else. Araceli does perform acts of genuine kindness or caring, though she just as often lashes out in true cruelty, and when angered at someone. Despite her dismissal of her “brother” Prince Niccolo for his rebellion against the Inner Circle and her commitment to killing him should he pose a threat, Araceli holds a deep admiration for his ability to overcome the process that made the two of them Azelas’ loyal servants.
- Abilities: Araceli is proficient in bladed weapons such as swords and knives and is a versatile fighter, able to change her strategy from minute to minute depending on the flow of a battle. Araceli's mastery of these weapons is only exceeded by her speed; she reach 20 miles per hour and has the endurance to sustain it for quite some time. She often uses her short stature to slip beneath blows meant for taller opponents as well as take advantage of a fighter's momentary confusion about where to strike a short enemy. As the absolute ruler of Ylati, Araceli has almost complete control over the Kingdom's military and infrastructure, as well as the feared Vision, a covert anti-rebellion force that answers only to the Crown.
- Weaknesses: Araceli is very much a Fragile Speedster. Her armor is very light so it doesn't hinder her speed, thus she is unable to endure much damage. Araceli is heavily dependent on her weapons; she knows next to nothing about hand to hand combat, as it was deemed "unladylike" for a woman of nobility to learn such things. Araceli's memories of her past life are fragmented yet they continually try to overwhelm her current persona. This is never-ending distraction that never allows her mind to function at one hundred percent.
- Goals:
- Recapture the fallen North Quadrant.
- Cleanse Ylati of rebellious elements by any means necessary.
- Sacrifice the nuriel race to give her master Azelas a soul with the resulting flood of magical energy.
- Die and be free from "the chaos inside".
- Motivation: Her implanted "Araceli" personality was created with inborn loyalty to Azelas and the Inner Circle's goals.
- Role In The Story: A beacon of hope for the average citizen of Ylati, their heroic Queen. In reality she is a just the latest public face presented to the masses by an Ancient Conspiracy. Co-Dragons with Gweyna to Azelas.
- Backstory: Marta Inzeni was born in a brothel in the year 3013 to, a prostitute living in the West Quadrant city of Del's Pleasure Quarter. Seeing her as a burden and irritation, Marta's mother was deliberately distant to her, rarely taking care of her needs. Because of this, Marta was bounced back and forth between the Madam of the establishment and the other girls, all of them taking turns caring for her in wildly different ways. Despite the atmosphere around her, Marta never knew any different and she enjoyed her home and viewed all the women as her "mothers". As Marta grew older, she understood that her real mother wanted little to do with her except, strangely, when a customer known only by the brothel as "The Big Fish" came to visit her mother. During this time they would do more than merely “transact business” with one another; he would demand to see and examine her and then he and her mother would talk in quiet tones. Marta was scared of the man and the way he looked at her, though she was forced to dress nicely and smile or face her mother’s wrath. One day, when Marta was six, her worst fears came true as her mother seized her from the other women and gave her over to the Big Fish. Bundled into his carriage, Marta sat in mute terror as she was eventually carted away into the bowels of an airship and blindfolded. When she next opened her eyes, she was in a pleasant but windowless series of rooms with a hundred other girls her age, though these were filthy, ragged children. Soon those who needed it were given medical aid and all of them were provided with meals by kind-faced men and women—as well as an elderly-looking female elf. Marta’s life settled into a routine of schooling in the arts of being a proper lady, of the country’s history and weapons training. Though their guardians were mostly kind, the punishments for mistakes were harsh and the children were pressured into memorizing things perfectly. When two years had passed, Marta and the others were herded into a room with a handsome, dark-skinned young man in long robes. He began to place his hands on their heads. Those who he touched immediately screamed and writhed, before going limp and silent. Marta and the others tried to escape, but the soldiers present held them down until it was her turn. The man expressed disappointment to the elf about the “quality” of those selected, but made contact with Marta. Marta her very essence being ripped away by the roots. She struggled with everything that she had against the destruction of her innermost self and instead of pushing back against the invading force, she simply withdrew instinctively away, allowing it room to take root in her head. What had once been Marta Inzeni was now Araceli de Massimo, the “daughter” of King Bruno and Queen Francesca de Massimo and a warrior to protect the Kingdom and give its people hope—and to faithfully serve as Azelas’ public face and messenger to the Inner Circle.
- Relevant Tropes:
- Abusive Parents: Marta's mother resented her existence as it was both an embarrassment and a burden. She ignored most of her parental duties and Marta would have died if it wasn't for the other women taking care of her either because they wanted her mother to owe them or out of pity. Marta's mother then traded her to Vincezno Attoria, a member of the Inner Circle, in exchange for a chance to leave the brothel and become a lady of wealth in the capital.
- Worse yet, Attoria is her biological father and his reason for submitting Marta as a potential Queen is that he wanted to use a member of his own bloodline to increase his favor with Azelas. However he cared too much for his legitimate children to sacrifice them, so he used the only bastard he was aware he had. Not only is it pointlessly cruel as Azelas really didn't care, but it shows that neither of Marta's parents ever loved her.
- Amazonian Beauty: Araceli is lean and muscular from years of martial training and experience on the battlefield; when she first appears in Cabazzi while on her annual tour of the Western Quadrant territories, several in the crowd mutter about this, expressing surprise and/or admiration, doubled by the fact her physique was gained not merely through exercise but through actual combat against the country's enemies. .
- …And That Little Girl Was Me: Araceli invokes this when speaking of her backstory to Cornelius Jinnette; the chapter opens with a lengthy exposition of poor little Marta's life and transformation into Araceli before panning back to the "present" (though, as Cornelius was telling the story of Araceli meeting with him, it's more of a Flashback Within a Flashback).
- Authority Equals Asskicking: Purposefully invoked by the Inner Circle before her "creation". They decided that the people needed an unusual hero to pick up their morale after the Helios victory that destroyed the North and forced refugees into other Quadrants. Thus they came up with the image of a powerful, heroic and kind female leader who would rally the flagging spirits of the populace and recover the lost territory.
- Badass in Charge: Played with; Araceli is the Queen of Ylati and ostensibly the highest power in the kingdom. However those with the real power are the Four Noble Families and their four Heads who compose the Inner Circle—and these people are controlled by Azelas, though it allows them freedom in everything not related to the Evil Plan. Araceli is nothing more than their latest figurehead. Though she has some power, she is much more limited than she appears to those outside the Ancient Conspiracy.
- Bait the Dog: At first we only see her from the point of view of Ylati's adoring citizens who see her as an action version of The High Queen. Then a notorious high-ranking leader in Helios is caught trying to flee to the North with his young son. When the man refuses to break under torture, Araceli orders the three year old boy tortured to break the father psychologically. When the guards—and the presiding Torture Technician—protest, we get this speech:
- "I will never understand why people go through so much to shield children. Human, elf, dwarf, nuriel, it doesn't matter, it's always the same. What it is about them that inspires that reaction from you people? Is it their big eyes, tiny limbs or high pitched, unformed voices? They are the next generation, yes, but that's all they are. As long as enough are kept alive, we won't die out. Don't mistake them for anything special beyond that. They are a commodity and nothing more. Would you hesitate to destroy this man's possessions if you thought that would influence this in our favor? Of course not. Now, if you are a son of Ylati, do as your Sovereign commands. Or are you willing to become an enemy of your people for foolish sentiment?"
- Bastard Bastard: She is the illegitimate daughter of Vincezno Attoria, a member of the Four Noble Families, making her the first monarch in the history of Ylati to actually have some semblance of aristocratic blood rather than common street children used for the task.
- Battle Ballgown: Much less elaborate than the usual example; Araceli wears a plain form-hugging dress of simple fabric with light armor sewn into its material. The armor is at a minimum though, as too much of it would slow her down and she depends heavily on her speed. This later proves to be her undoing, as it allows a poisoned arrow to strike her in the side.
- Berserk Button: Betrayal of any sort, especially if it is directed at her personally. It can be anything as serious as High Treason to intentionally lying to her about the number of guests coming to a royal function is enough to send her into a fury.
- Blood Knight: Araceli confesses that she actually enjoys putting her life on the line in battle against the forces of Helios. Being allowed to actually fight is one of the few things she is grateful to the Inner Circle for. Justified, as the adrenaline of the fight and the quick-thinking it requires allows her some measure of peace from her internal chaos.
- After Azelas' ritual has been successfully carried out and she is dying from a poisoned arrow wound in her side, she assumes that the dragons will be arriving any moment now to carry out their revenge on humans. Thus Araceli challenges Niccolo to a duel-to-the-death to see if he is capable of succeeding her as Ylati's first "real" monarch without strings attached.
- Blondes Are Evil
- Brainwashed/ Not Brainwashed: She is fusion of both tropes, oddly enough. Marta's mind wasn't destroyed just shoved aside. It remained somewhat aware, with its only desire being to fight back. Thus Araceli has all her Fake Memories of a nonexistant childhood and life and an understanding of what she must do. However she is aware that this is false and that she is a fabrication unlike the others who fully believed and accepted their roles without memories of who they once were.
- She is also entirely alone in this; even Niccolo who managed to regain free will has no memory of his former life or who he used to be before Azelas "hollowed out" his mind and reconstructed his personality.
- Charles Atlas Superpower: No magic here, ladies and gentlemen; Araceli's almost inhuman swordsmanship, speed and agility are nothing more than the products of lifelong training in the fighting arts.
- Children Are Innocent: Discussed. Araceli openly disdains the concept that children should be spared from strife and pain for no other reason than because they are children, referring to it as irrational. She is perfectly willing to have them tortured or killed to force the hands of their parents or to take vengeance. Her views are perhaps born of her own childhood in which no one cared to protect her because of her age.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: All of her one-on-one battles end this way, with the exception of her final fight against Prince Niccolo. The battle of the Helios remnants and their Exterior Guard allies vs the capital Kes'trina Palace Guard forces becomes this when Araceli joins the fight, boosting the sinking morale of the troops. She dashed through entire platoons and devastated them, leaving the remains to be slaughtered by her force of Palace Guards.
- Even depriving her of her weapons didn't work; it took Marco Zaccheria a master swordsman in his own right, to slow her down and even then he only drove her off with the help of two other people and a Heroic Sacrifice on his part in order to poison her.
- Death Seeker: Araceli's fondest wish is to die once her role in things is completed in order to finally be free of the knowledge that she isn't "real" but a false personality forcibly pasted over the consciousness of a frightened and angry little girl. In fact she succumbs to her poisoned wound and various other injuries with a gentle smile on her face, having found peace at long last.
- Death by Irony: Araceli is defeated and killed by Niccolo, her assigned brother and male counterpart, who underwent the same ordeal as her. Even more ironic, she dies surrounded by the corpses of the failed products of that process, Gweyna's Empities, as well as the body of Gweyna herself, who presided over the brainwashing of so many children over the centuries.
- The Dreaded: Araceli inspires morale in those fighting for the Kingdom when she appears and that combined with her actual skill is enough to turn the tides in many fights. She is known among Helios and their sympathizers as the "Lady of Gold and Blood" due to her ruthless attacks, and for the literal fact that blood often splashes into her blond hair as she swings at her enemies with her sword.
- Determinator: Araceli is driven to get back the Helios-occupied Northern territory by whatever means necessary, whipping the people of Ylati into a patriotic frenzy and throwing soldiers at the enemy in order to do so. This is because Helios threw the human population out of the North and established it as an independent nuriel nation, and for the ritual to work, there must be humans and nuriel in all Four Quadrants of the Kingdom at the same time. Similarly she fights with reckless abandon to recapture the Palace on the day of the ritual, resorting to using gardening implements to fight when disarmed.
- Dissonant Serenity: By the time of the Final Battle, she has this in spades. After she hacks through the Exterior Guard and Helios members guarding the Palace Gatehouse (along with a few dozen elves), she approaches the terrified survivors covered in blood and calmly asks them to please open the palace gates for her soldiers to enter, even offering to pardon them if they act like "good sons and daughters of Ylati" and obey their queen. It is a hideous parody of her amiable and regal demeanor from the beginning of the story.
- Didn't See That Coming: During her battle with Niccolo, she manages to wound his left leg, forcing him to his knees. Just as she is about to slice down with her sword, he throws her across the room and into the opposite wall with enough force to break several ribs—using magic, making him the third person in the whole setting able to use it. While the readers already knew Niccolo had something hidden away to use as a last resort, Araceli is so utterly shocked that all she can do is laugh in spite of everything.
- Evil Counterpart/ Shadow Archetype: To Niccolo. They had their lives torn away and replaced with false personas to fulfill roles mapped out for them in a plan larger and older than they could have imagined and both managed to subvert the brainwashing in different ways. However Niccolo received free will and is horrified at what is happening and fights against it, while Araceli is conscious of her puppet status but has no free will and doesn't seem to be interested in even trying to change it.
- Evil Gloating: After Araceli retrieves her sword and slices off Marco's hand during their duel, she doesn't kill him but instead lectures him on the fact that he swore to use those talented hands for the Kingdom alone when he joined the military, thus he should enjoy his remaining extremity while it lasts, because she will have it removed when he is tried for treason. This allows Marco to lunge forward and stab her in the side with one of the poison arrows scattered on the ground, though she immediately kills him afterwards.
- Eye Scream: One of Araceli's favorite tactics is to slash her sword across her opponent's eyes. She does this for both the tactical advantage against a blind opponent, but also because she enjoys their panic as they are robbed of their sight.
- Improbable Weapon User: When Marco manages to disarm her of her sword after a lengthy fight, it seems victory is ensured as he leaps in for the kill—only for her to retrieve a pair of gardening trowels from the corpse of a gardener caught in the battle. Furthermore she uses these to successfully fend him off until she is able to collect her real weapon again.
- Fridge Horror: The boys and girls whose minds were destroyed instead of accepting the "Araceli" and "Niccolo" personalities were used by Gweyna as Elite Mooks under her mental control to guard the piece of Azelas' mirror shard in the capital. That's bad enough, but Marta and the boy who became Niccolo were not the last of the children gathered, merely the successes of that particular "batch". Gweyna heavily implies the remaining children were turned into mindless "Empties" without even a chance to accept a new personality as a way of cleaning up.
- Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Araceli does this to both Gweyna and Niccolo, the former being the elf she loathes due to her memories as Marta and the latter her brother, in a pitched battle. The latter proves to be her undoing however, as Niccolo purposely allowed her to impale him so he could insert his broken sword into her arrow wound and drag it across her torso, widening the injury and causing her to bleed out.
- Kick the Dog: She has many moments, but one of note would be when she finds out that the Luzzato family, a clan with a long history of service to the nation has connections with Helios, she offers Fiorella Luzzato a Sadistic Choice: either her entire family face execution for treason or send her Ill Girl daughter Tina to the front lines of the North where she will almost certainly die.
- Lady of War: What she was molded to be.
- Pet the Dog: An odd example with her explaining her Backstory to Cornelius Jinette who had been investigating oddities and inconsistencies about both the monarchy, government and the country’s history during his time working for the Inner Circle. Rather than have him quietly killed or jailed in some out of the way prison, Araceli summoned him for a private audience and told him her life story in an attempt to scare him off, showing him just how deep the rabbit hole went—and where it led to. It is possible that she felt some kinship with him, both of them being children unwanted by their parents and all but ignored except when useful.
- Knowing she is dying, Araceli challenges Niccolo to a battle-to-the-death in order to test if he has what it takes to become Ylati's first true monarch. Before she attacks, Araceli gently encourages him in an attempt to calm his fear of being the ruler, telling him that if he can kill her, then he will be more than able to lead humanity out of whatever strife comes its way without Azelas shepherding and manipulating it.
- Pint-Sized Powerhouse: Araceli is only 4'11, yet she uses that lack of height to her deadly advantage and is actually more formidable due to her short stature.
- Psychotic Smirk: When the ritual begins due to the heroes failing to stop Azelas in time, Araceli sports a thin mirthless smile as the corrupted Ley Lines throughout the Kingdom break open and blood begins pouring out of the jagged wounds in the planet's Mana network, flooding the land and reducing any nuriel present to raw energy.
- Tranquil Fury: She is one of the only characters in the entirety of Clockwalkers who never demonstrates her anger in stereotypical shouting or stamping. Instead Araceli's anger is cold and controlled, remaining all but hidden. It is truly something to behold, as even Azelas, an Eldritch Abomination with very little human emotion other than deep envy for mortals and a drive to obtain a soul like them, is reduced to screaming in fury at the protagonists towards the end.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Averted, but only narrowly. Araceli's objective during the battle of Kes'trina was to retake the Palace from the rebels by opening up all four gates within the occupied structure and then sandwich the Helios and Exterior Guard forces between her advancing troops and the Palace Guard still alive and fighting within the Palace. What she didn't understand was that the Palace Guard and rebels had voluntarily shut the doors from the inside to contain the murderous Butchers wandering around inside, and her flinging wide the gates would have released them into the capital city.
edited 6th Jun '14 8:46:23 AM by Swordofknowledge
Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake. — Edgar Walllace
Sir Night, Wayward Hunter-Angel
Excellent "Hand of the Ancient Conspiracy" villain there. She's both a terror and an example of the way they victimize people in the name of control - just enough of the original persona left to understand she isn't what she should be.
Also thinking about the Nobilis villains.
Edmund and Emilia Tao, the Caretakers of the Cosmic Egg
Age: Due to the way Excrucians work, impossible to say. Both were 23 when they had the Breakthroughs and became Excrucains, though, and have remained at that physical age when taking mortal bodies.
Personality: Like most Excrucians, very Affably Evil. About the meanest they get is when they bicker with each other, and even then it doesn't get worse beyond Big, Stupid Doodoo-Head. They also aren't fans of their ostensible boss, the Magister of Dead Stars, because he's a huge jerk to everyone not an Excrucian or linked to the Beyond where they come from. They do have a rather large Berserk Button in the form of Angels, since Angels not being worthy of the title is what provoked the Breakthrough in the first place. Really, they understand why you're attached to existence, they really do! They just know a better way.
Abilities: Typical Deceiver powers, which is to say the Rite of Twin Skins, and pseudo-Estates, ways they can really mess with the world. Emilia's pEstate is "The Logical Inferences of Emilia Dao", which allows her to both explain why things wouldn't work and thus make it not work, and exile things that she says can't happen from it, making them happen. Edmund's pEstate is "The Art of Edmund Dao", which, due to his deliberately vague reading of it, essentially gives him Reality Warper capacity so long as he can read Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory meanings into the world around him, then change the meanings around. There's also the face that he spends most of the story as a Manchurian Agent...and all of it as the main protagonist.
(More to come, just have life to live).
What rises must fall, what falls may rise again.
Sir Night, Wayward Hunter-Angel
Weaknesses: The Dao siblings have an extreme grudge against Angels, and will prioritize them and anyone/thing influenced by them over everything else, to irrational degrees. Their pEstates are also vulnerable to being undone through disproving them (pointing out the fallacies in Emilia's logic and disputing the meaning of Edmund's art), so long as you do it on their level. As in, pointing out specifcially why the internal reasoning of Emilia's power is faulty, you just can't say "that's not the way it works"-she's immune to argument from authority (the authority in question being existence) and anecdotes, you have to engage her world on her level. They're also bound by the Pact of Void, a treaty that prevents Excruciation unless they can sucessfully argue the Excruciated thing poses a clear and present danger to the Excrucian community. Easier said than done, given what the Bleak Academy is (the place is built from the concept of Despair and The Truths It Reveals, ergo so long as the emotion exists it is Nigh-Invulnerable), and said things usually pose a danger to the world at large. It's why Edmund created a false mind around himself, so he could infiltrate Existence and find evidence that would allow the Excrucians legal cause to launch a full assault.
Goals: As with most Excrucians, obliterate existence so that it never was to begin with, like most Dececivers they do it to help free the true nature of things from the dross of an inherently corrupt cosmos. Individually, the Dao twins are motivated by revenge on the Angels for using them in their youth, and revealing what real beauty is to the world, specifically that it requires love and compassion as well.
Motivation: Once, there were a pair of twins. Not identical, not even that resembling of each other, but twins nonetheless. The twins weren't particularly special, either - the girl was smarter than most her age, the boy was prone to idle, strange musings, but neither to the point where anybody but their parents noticed. So as with most people, they were set for a life that was extraordinary only in the fact it was theirs, quite average for a developing Western Bloc country on Earth in the centuries that start with a two.
That's when the Man came. A very strange Man.
He worked for the government, he said, but no one quite understood what agency. He spent days walking around the brother and sister's town, as he wished to avoid being "dirtied by the shadows." In normal courses of events, the adults would have run him off for being obviously strange-to-the-point-of-obvious-insanity, but something about his words made it so that the town came to understand that shadows were filthy, filthy things that the Man was right to avoid for his hygiene. To this day, every man and woman of working age carries a brush to scrub places where shadows have been for the past hour.
More importantly, the Man was offering a scholarship to a prestigious university. Now, the town wasn't a particularly awful place, but it was a poor place, poor enough to realize that the people lacked money to have lives of beauty and luxury. Most were okay with this, but the children had been raised on tales of golden lands beyond the fallen Berlin Wall, so most, including the brother and sister, were at least somewhat interested. The Man found ten children worthy of the scholarship, two of whom were the brother and the sister. And so they bid farewell to their families, and they went...up.
Up to a golden place beyond the clouds, where everything was so beautiful and clean that it made everything else seem ugly and dirty. The students were pained by this, until the Man's employer, the Angel of Authority, told them they were permitted to look at the golden place without pain. But not feeling inadequate, because the Man felt that it would give the children something to aspire to, for it is in the nature of Angels and their servants to give grace, not to show how to live with grace.
For a while, this worked. For the golden place was beautiful, in many ways, and the Angels carried themselves with beauty. But the twins remained fundamentally human, even if their classmates did not, and instead became something painfully beautiful as well - something not quite human, but not quite Angel, either. Unlike their peers, the brother and sister had every intention of going home one day, and that beautifully small wish both limited and preserved them against the power of the golden place. The Angels became aware of this, but it is not in their nature to care about human perspectives - where others would see two who simply did not agree with the Angelic world and were fine being human and dirty, the Angels saw the willfully ugly and corrupt, not seeing the humanity behind such reasoning.
So, they attempted to scour their humanity from them, with poems so meaningful it made their urge to return home seem meaningless, sights so grand it fertilized their eyes with flowers, and replacing their skin with solid light. But none of it worked, for their essentially human nature remained, even as the sister became a genius and the brother capable of art that reduced even Angels to tears with its magnificence. Eventually the Angels grew so furious with them, that they showed the brother and sister the dirty, ugly place they were headed.
One of the greatest errors they have ever made. For Lucifer and his fellows Fell out of love, specifically the belief that all things, including things like dictatorship and greed and carrion eaters deserved love too. So the twins saw both the horror of hell, and the fundamental humanity of its masters, and their hatred of Heaven grew into loathing.
They threw themselves from the clouds then, hoping to reach that place. If the world was a better place, a kinder place, perhaps the place of absolute justice, with no punishment that does not fit the crime, that the Angels desire, they would probably have reached it. From there, possibly taken under the Devils' wings and been given shoulders to cry on, and would have returned to the world as heroes of the lost, broken, and downtrodden. Unfortunately for everyone, the Headmaster of the Bleak Academy was watching. And seeing something grand in their utter despair and sorrow, he caught them, and he took them in.
The original brother and sister are gone now. The creatures that were them redefined themselves as something far more and less human than any Angel. The Gnostic lessons and classes in joyous nihilism have fostered a mad transcendence into the unfettered beauty of alien stars, the infinite whorl of space and time uncrippled by causality, form, and thought. There is only the twins Dao, who shall return the world to its balanced state between beauty and love-by returning it to the nothingness of the cosmic egg from which it was born.
There's also the fact that Edmund willingly had his Excrucian nature "disproved" by his sister so he could infiltrate the people on the other side of the Vade Bellum and find an excuse to launch a full attack on Heaven. Some that is quite successful, but I also have it that he discovered he liked being a sane(ish) soldier of the Dark. Haven't decided if he woos his sister over to Team "Reality's Where I Keep All My Stuff" or not, though.
Other Tropes:
- Anti-Villain: Apart from their racial ethos, they really aren't bad people (indeed, like most Deceivers, they are a bit obsessed with protecting innocents (shredding existence isn't "harming", in their view, just freeing up the eternal part of things...and the thing is, Excruciating even a single person is hard, even without the Pact).
- Beware the Nice Ones: That doesn't change the fact that they're members of a race of Reality Warper Manipulative Bastards who want to eradicate the very concept of reality from the world.
- Co-Dragons: To the Magister, though they personally despise him (due to the fact that, like most Strategists, he runs on The Power of Hate.
- Irony: The Angels wanted to transform humans into something like themselves, creatures of perfect beauty. Excrucians are an Inhumanly Beautiful Race, so...Mission Accomplished?
- Mad Artist: Edmund. He regards the whole "The Mole" thing as an excellent foray into acting and the duality of familiar and alien when his real personality is awoken.
- Mad Scientist: Emilia enjoys playing with her pEstate to both foster experiments into the nature of reality and the Beyond (especially that latter, since its physical laws are inconstant and thus there is always something new to learn). If pressed for time, she can just describe how a potential creation of hers is utterly impossible...then Exile the concept, creating the impossible thing right then and there.
- Half-Identical Twins: Invoked. As humans, they were fraternal twins, but after becoming Excrucians, they thought it would be fun to embrace their Sibling Yin-Yang by looking like each other. Though not being stupid, Edmund disguised this when he started pretending to be a normal Power.
- Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Yeah, I like this trope. Both of them are driven by hatred of the way the Angels treated them, and the Headmaster convincing them that beauty and kindness cannot coexist in reality. Realizing this isn't necessarily the case is part of what motivates Edmund's Heel–Face Turn.
- Worthy Opponent: To the Dark and Hell, since those particular philosophies embody things the Dao siblings like (Valuing freedom beyond security, even beyond life, for the Dark, and omnibenevolence for Hell). Probably why Edmund decided to infiltrate the other side as a Dark Noble.
edited 7th Jun '14 1:47:39 PM by Leliel
What rises must fall, what falls may rise again.
Very interesting backstory. Actually, if anything, this entire villain profile has been an opportunity to learn about Noblis, as I had never even heard of it before. Anyway, the Dao siblings are both terrifying and sympathetic antagonists, driven to what they are by totalitarianism disguised (or perhaps mistaken) for caring and goodness. Perhaps its just because I know next to nothing about Noblis, but even though they have human origins and their backstories make sense, they give off an aura of being truly bizzare beings beyond the ability to comprehend
edited 9th Jun '14 6:16:09 AM by Swordofknowledge
Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake. — Edgar Walllace
Sir Night, Wayward Hunter-Angel
Quite. Excrucians are supposed to come off as being, well, surreal - everything in Nobilis is beyond conventional definitions of Good and Evil (the Dark, for instance, wants humanity to become extinct by it's own hand...because they view shattering even the survival instinct in the name of Freedom and Passion to be the most sublime act of liberation in existence, even to the point where they see Immortality as being inherently And I Must Scream due to eventual boredom), and Excrucians are beyond even that. Both the most human of the factions, and the most utterly alien.
Though, I did raid Nobilis' sister setting (Chuubos Marvelous Wish Granting Engine) for the Bleak Academy, and the Pact of Void isn't official in the core setting. I advanced the timeline by a tad to a possible future (the Academy was a concession to the Headmaster as part of the Pact).
What rises must fall, what falls may rise again.
Exitus Acta Probat
The main villains for my fantasy setting, which I've made for eventually running an RPG campaign in, are the Dark Elves. They don't have much to do with traditional Dn D-style Dark Elves, tho. The basic idea is that I wanted a faction that was obviously and completely evil, but whose actions are still justified from their point of view, rather than being Stupid Evil or For The Evultz.
Without getting too heavily into the background, the Elves in the setting used to have an advanced civilisation that learned how to safely draw magical energy from the Void, the space outside the physical universe. Unfortunately, by doing that they eventually drew the attention of eldritch abominations dwelling in the Void, which destroyed their civilisation. The Dark Elves were one of the groups of Elves that survived the disaster. They were the survivors closest to the epicenter of the cataclysm, where the devastation was the worst. In place of the center of their empire there was now a huge crater and a rift in reality, with unearthly enrgy pouring through that twisted the very land around it. They probably would've died off or left as bands of scavengers roaming the post-apocalyptic wasteland, had it not been for the High Priestess of the Outer Gods (ie. the BBEG of the story).
The High Priestess was an Elven woman who claimed she had been present at the very center of the cataclsym, and had looked directly into the face of the eldritch god that laid low the Elven civilization. While everything around her was obliterated by the god's gaze, she alone was spared by its divine will to act as the instrument of the will of the Gods in the world. She taught the other survivors that the Gods of the Outer Void had punished the Elves for their hubris in trying to steal Their powers for their own, but that They were willing to forgive the Elves and had gifted her knowledge of the true nature of the universe no other mortal had ever posessed. She taught the other Elves how to use Void magic safely, how to bind Voidspawn to their will, and in general how to not just survive in a world altered by the energies of the Void, but how to thrive in it and appreciate its beauty. Her teachings would become the basis of the Church of the Outer Gods, the ruling body of the new Elven society. She also spoke of how the world as mortals knew it was but a pale shadow of true existance, an insignificant speck in a vast and dark universe, and how mortal concepts such as good and evil were ultimately meaningless. True path to enlightement was to be found in becoming like the Gods, free of contraints of laws of both mortals and nature. Thus it was the sacred duty of her followers to remake the world in the image of the Gods and free all mortals from their self-imposed shackles. She also revealed that the Void God had given her another gift; she bore the offspring of a God, and when the world would be made suitable for it, this demigod would be born and usher in a new and glorious age for all true believers.
To non Dark Elves, the High Priestess of the Outer Gods would appear as nothing less than a horrible abomination. She is a fusion of an Elf and a Void creature, with an upper body of an Elf attached to a huge shapeless mass of flesh and tentacles. Her symbiosis with a powerful Voidspawn gives her immense magicla powers, as well as a seriously warped perception of reality. Her own eyes burned out when she gazed into the face of the Void God, and she now sees the world true supernatural means. The mortal world appears to her senses as a dull and grey place, a palse shadow of the true nature of existance. She sees all of her mortal followers and Voidspawn as her children, and loves them all even if sacrifices them without a second thought to further her plans and the will of the Gods, as individual lifes of mortal are utterly meaningless in the grand scheme of things. The other races of the world she views as wayward children, who are blind to the truth and cling to their delusions out of fear of change. She will open their eyes and enlighten them, whether they want it or not.
To the rest of the world the Dark Elf (as they call them) society is nothing less than pure evil. They perform blood sacrifices for their dark gods, summon horrifying monsters, enslave other races and corrupt the very land. They are responsible of the destruction of the old Dwarven Empire, killing or enslaving 9/10th of that race, and have now launched an unholy crusade against the lands of Faralon, intending on corrupting and destroying all that stands in their way. If they are not stopped, soon the whole world will be twisted according to the will of the mad gods and all mortals will become playthings of eldritch abominations from beyond reality.
An interesting fantasy race, and a perfect enemy for a fantasy novel. They are a classic example of The Horde combined with the whole "scary dogmatic race" out to conquer the world for their "evil" religion. Their high priestess is certainly terrifying; what makes them even creepier is that they are not openly malicious (at least I didn't get that sense.) They genuinely believe that what they are doing is for the good of everyone. Villains like that are always interesting, especially when you take that concept and spread it across an entire group rather than one individal. Good job.
Now that I have Clockwalkers in front of me, I'm going to re-post the information on its Big Bad. The last time I did it, it was woefully inaccurate and lacking information. So here goes:
- Name: "The Denizen of the Mirror", "The Founder", "Azelas"
- Age: At least 7,016
- Appearance: The Denizen of the Mirror was originally a shapeless fist-sized mass of red flames, possessing nine lidless yellow eyes. After leaving the Mirror, the Denizen created a "cocoon" in the form of its caretaker, and became a young dark-skinned man with long coal-black hair and golden eyes. Later it shed this cocoon, revealing a large humanoid mass of glowing rubbery red flesh with sinuous tentacles growing all over its torso in place of arms, and a vague melted looking face, where its nine yellow eyes were scattered. It finally took on the exact form of its summoner, the Empress Los, becoming a tall pale young woman with large yellow eyes, waist-length white hair and a long white and crimson robe and horn-like crown. It also has a large hole between its collarbones.
Personality
When first summoned the Denizen was strangely childlike. It had an innate knowledge of the world and its people, but it wanted to see and experience them on its own and fell into despair when the Empress Los mocked its dream of leaving the Magic Mirror that was its prison. It began to resent mortals and close itself off from connecting with them in any meaningful way. Obtaining partial freedom from the Mirror, taking the name Azelas, and becoming the shadow ruler of Ylati bolstered its belief that it was superior to all life-forms on Rica. It treats the elves, dwarves, and even the powerful and ancient dragons with bored indifference and states that it is on a completely different level from "mere mortals". Millions have suffered and died due to its actions and yet it feels neither regret or even malicious satisfaction for those events, simply viewing them as a means to an end.
Because it has a dictionary-like familiarity with nearly everything on Rica, both mundane and magical it is rarely surprised. When it does encounter something outside of its knowledge base it takes every opportunity to study it and commit that understanding to memory, as it cannot bear the idea of something it can't understand or dominate.
Azelas is most familiar with humans and is skilled at gaining their trust and slanting its attitude and speech to play to their hopes and dreams. It refers to humans as its "chosen ones", inflating the egos of its collaborators and causing them to respect and revere it. However its feelings for humankind are solely due to their usefulness and vulnerability to its manipulations. Apart from that Azelas views them with the same apathy as all the other races.
Its feelings towards the nuriel are far more malevolent. Azelas considers them a resource instead of sentient living creatures, to be harvested when they have multiplied to its satisfaction. The only creature Azelas ever cared about was the real Azelas, the original caretaker of its Mirror. It showed genuine horror and sorrow when the young man was killed and honored his memory by taking on his form and his name. However even this friendship wasn't enough to stop it from bringing about the situation that caused the original Azelas' death to begin with, showing that it values its goal of freedom far more than any relationship.
- Abilities:
- Form 1: Azelas possessed an innate understanding of the world, its people, and the power of magic. When looking at something, Azelas could provide a perfect definition about what it was and how it worked. It was also able to give directions on spells mankind had no knowledge of at all and instruct people on their use without fail. It is also able to absorb and manipulate the Mana that leaves mortals as they die.
- Form 2: It can plant subtle suggestions in the minds of humans despite being miles away and charm people almost instantly by overwhelming them with a sense of peace and contentment. Azelas can absorb magical energy into itself and drain it from other people through physical contact. 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 destroys their mind, replacing it with a personality of its own creation, totally devoted to its every word.
- Form 3: Azelas can alter its body as needed due to its slimy, gelatinous nature. It has an incredibly high body-temperature and can also severely burn opponents through mere contact, and can absorb objects and people into its mass, slowly burning them alive. This effects even Clockwalkers like Drasil and Michelli. It is also incredibly durable in this form and super-humanly strong.
- Form 4: 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 assault enemies with lightning-like discharges of energy and could perform actual magic, attempting to cause a second miniature Rain in order to destroy the protagonists. This form could also "call" the Life Energy from nuriel merely by pointing at them and concentrating, though this could be easily stopped by directing its attention elsewhere. It also showed an ability to rapidly levitate, though it could only do this for short periods of time.
- Weaknesses: Azelas's is tied to the Mirror. 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. 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.
- Goals:
- Free itself from the laws of the spell that summoned it by sacrificing the nuriel race and "eating" their life energy to create a soul.
- Use the soul to become both free and immortal, traveling the world as it pleases.
- Motivation: It feels a deep envy towards mortals for their freedom due to being "anchored" in the material world by their souls and wants what they have. Coupled with its superiority complex, it believes that it deserves this freedom and security more than they do.
- Role in the story: The Big Bad and leader of an Ancient Conspiracy controlling the nation of Ylati. Orcus on His Throne, though justified.
- Backstory:
What would later call itself Azelas was summoned 7,000 years ago during the by the Empress Los Rengard, ruler of the Sinestel Empire. Using her own blood mingled with that of several slave sacrifices, Los separated a piece of the Overworld and bound it a large mirror in her throne-hall. Named the "Denizen of the Mirror" by the Empress, it 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 take Sinestel to new heights by accelerating magical understanding that would have taken centuries for the Empire to achieve.
The Denizen could not perform any magic on its own and could not leave the Mirror. It begged for freedom, but the Empress laughed at its pleas. Few dared to interact with the Empress's personal creation, leaving the cruel Los as its only connection to the outside. The one exception was a young servant named Azelas who would clean the Mirror and speak with the Denizen, sharing events happening within Sinestel and in the wider world, and the two became friends.
Years later a failed attempt to explore a new continent resulted in a bitter war with a powerful nonhuman race known as the nuriel. Daunted by their foes, Empress Los went to the Denizen for help destroying the creatures. Seeing its opportunity, the Denizen advised Los on the casting of death magic which would sweep the entire world, killing all their enemies while sparing everything else. When the wizards of the Empire activated the spell, a rain of flaming stones rained down from the sky striking all over Rica. The impact killed millions in a single day and heavily damaged the Ley Line network of the planet, and caused magic to leave the world entirely.
Though Sinsetel remained free from the majority of the fallout, their magic vanished as well, creating a panic. The people attacked the Mirror in order to kill the manipulative creature, but Azelas defended it at the cost of his life. The Denizen used the eruption of energy from the violent deaths to leave its damaged Mirror and construct a “cocoon” for itself, modeling it after the man who had been its only friend, and took his name. It then hunted and killed all the citizens of Sinestel. However the newly named Azelas discovered that it could not leave the city, due to still being bound to its Mirror. So it made a new plan: It would harvest the nuriel’s unique Life Energy to give itself an artificial soul, allowing it to be truly free. As the years passed, the Mana unable to find its way back into the Ley Lines due to the damage became a Fog of Doom known as the Miasma that killed or mutated anything it touched. It spread across the ruined world like a plague, decimating the few surviving civilizations.
From Sinestel's ruins, Azelas sent out mental summons to human survivors of various nations. Soon the refugees arrived from across the sea in the Miasma-free land of Sinestel, led by the Four Heroes. Azelas took the humans under its wing to help them survive and told them what had happened, slanting the tale so that it looked like the nuriel caused the Rain. It then ordered the humans to capture the remaining nuriel and put them to work as a Slave Race in the fledgling country to "atone" for their crime of destroying the world. Azelas told the Four Heroes the plan to sacrifice the nuriel, but told them that doing so would restore magic and elevate humans into godlike beings. They agreed and the Kingdom of Ylati was born with the descendants of the Four governing it. Over time Azelas stepped back into the shadows to oversee events and make sure they lined up with its goal.
- Relevant tropes:
- Abusive Parent: Azelas raised Michelli as its adopted daughter for fifteen years, going out of its way to provide her with a stable and comfortable life, and treated her with great kindness. However it did this merely because she intrigued it due to being something outside its near-limitless knowledge, and fully intended to hand her over to the Royal Technologies Institute for testing and experimentation so she could be mass-produced for war.
- Above Good and Evil: It believes that mortal concepts such as good or evil do not apply to a superior being such as itself, and feels neither satisfaction or remorse for the untold death, destruction and general misery that its manipulations and actions have caused over seven thousand years in an attempt to gain a soul. Regardless, it is clear that Azelas is an evil being, and this view is simply born of its immense egomania.
- Faux Affably Evil: Azelas treats its underlings within the Inner Circle politely, accepts their advice on thoughts on how Ylati should be run, and keeps its interference to a minimum. In reality 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. Thus its "generous" treatment of the Inner Circle is more out of overall indifference than kindness.
- This lack of feeling for those who serve it becomes more apparent as more members of the Inner Circle die; Azelas remains unaffected by these deaths despite the understandable anger, worry and frustration of the others. When the Exterior Guard and Helios team up to attack the capital city Kes'trina in an attempt to topple the corrupt government and save the Kingdom from the dragons by neutralizing the threat it poses to the nuriel, Azelas simply retreats to the underground ruins of Sinestel beneath the capital, content to wait out the battle without even lifting a finger to help its subordinates.
- Alas, Poor Villain: It's entire motivation was to simply be able to leave the limits of the city that created it. As it stands defeated, stripped of its artificial soul made of nuriel Life Energy and physically crumbling away, it desperately demands to know what was wrong with that one simple desire and—accurately—-tells the gathered mortals that they have no understanding of what it is to be trapped in one area for thousands of years, only able to watch while the creatures around you come and go as they please, knowing you will never be able to share their freedom and mobility.
- Ancient Conspiracy: Azelas swayed the four leaders of the human survivors with promises of restoring the age of magic and transforming humankind into perfect beings by reducing the nuriel race to raw Life Energy and binding it to all humans within Ylati. The Four Heroes and their descendants, the Inner Circle, created and maintained an institution of slavery to prevent the nuriel from leaving before the ritual is completed. Furthermore, they spread Azelas' false story about the nuriel causing the Rain to cultivate Fantastic Racism, lowering the chances of anyone becoming sympathetic to their plight. The initial drive to settle and conquer Miasma-free land was spurred by the Inner Circle in order to expand the Kingdom enough to support the birth-rate of humans and the nuriel sacrifices, and Ylati settled into its current size once it was enough. The Inner Circle also controls the media, military and economy of the Kingdom, to the point that the supposed "Royal Family" that the Four Noble Families serve are merely puppet rulers brainwashed by Azelas and loyal to its commands. By the time all of this is uncovered, it has been going on for seven thousand years.
- The Inner Circle also viciously suppress any talk of exploring the world outside Ylati, the elven forests of Atnar, and the dwarves underground kingdom, making it a punishable offense to even speak of the possibility of unspoiled land outside the limits of the three kingdoms. This is because they are afraid that other civilizations may have survived and that trying to contact them will draw their attention to Ylati and what is going on there. Marco Zaccheria's father was contacted by another civilization, but was executed when he informed the government about his discovery.
- Arch-Enemy: Cornelius Jinnette considers Azelas his mortal enemy for having him blinded and tossed in a Red Prison after stealing his creation Michelli, but it's more of a one-sided hatred as Azelas treats him with the indifference and boredom it expresses towards any mortal... until Cornelius masterminds the failure of its seven thousand year plan, leaves it without the nuriel's Life Energy and without the Mirror that gives it life. Then it acknowledges Cornelius as an enemy, erupting into furious hatred and vowing to destroy him for daring to stand against it.
- Archnemesis Dad: To Michelli. One of her struggles throughout the story is to accept the true nature of her adoptive father and the even worse thought that "he" is trying to orchestrate what amounts to mass-murder.
- Aristocrats Are Evil: The Four Noble Families, the aristocracy of Ylati, are Azelas' loyal servants and have been carrying out its bidding for seven thousand years. Each family Head is a member of the Inner Circle, hoping fervently that the nuriel numbers in the country will be enough for the sacrifice to be carried out within their lifetime so they can see the age of magic come again and humans ascend to godlike status.
- Because You Were Nice to Me: The real Azelas of Sinestel was the only human who interacted with the Denizen of the Mirror on friendly terms. He neither demanded answers from it or feared it because of its strange nature, and was greatly protective of its Mirror, eventually sacrificing his life to protect it. The Denizen took Azelas’s name after his death and modeled the appearance of its human-looking cocoon after the young man. Its massacre of Sinestel's remaining citizens might have been as much about avenging its friend's death as it was about clearing away humans who knew what it was and could have interfered with the plan.
- Big Bad: It is responsible for Rica's current state, founded the Crapsaccharine World that is the Kingdom of Ylati, and is planning even greater destruction using the remaining human race as its "guard dogs" to ensure its potential sacrifices don't go anywhere. It's plans are the reason the dragons are targeting Ylati, thus indirectly threatening humanity with extinction.
- Bishōnen Line: Azelas went from being a fist-sized mass red flames with a multitude of yellow eyes, to a handsome young man, then a humanoid monster, then a beautiful young woman. It should be noted that its two human forms are modeled after its caretaker and summoner respectively.
- Body Horror: Azelas can drain the Life Energy from a person's body by making physical contact. Once its hands have made contact it causes large black veins to grow beneath its victim's flesh and uses them to siphon out all their energy. Its third form is made of this trope; a fourteen-foot-tall mound of raw-looking rubbery flesh in humanoid form, and can form multitudes of sinuous tentacles out of its own mass, and has nine yellow eyes scattered across a vaguely human-looking face.
- Cessation of Existence: This is the only thing that fills it with terror. Death for Azelas wouldn't be transitioning to whatever awaits mortal souls, it would simply mean absorption into the Overworld and the destruction of all its memories and sense of self. Much of why it has worked this hard is to prevent this from ever happening. With a soul created from the nuriel's essence it would be able to go on forever, as well as being free from the Mirror, effectively immortal.
- 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 as well as conquering land so that more will be born in order to increase the amount of energy harvested.
- Combat Tentacles: Its third form can exude a seemingly endless amount of them from its body, extending to ridiculous lengths and lashing out at its attackers.
- Creepy Monotone: It spoke in one of these when first gaining a human form and relative freedom from the Mirror, due to not really understanding human patterns of speech. Over the millennia its speech became far more nuanced, though it tends to lapse back into this at times—understandable since it isn't human or even mortal, and its only real emotions are jealousy and a drive for freedom.
- Dark Is Evil: Azelas male form wears long formal black robes when it goes out—though it rarely makes public appearances, preferring to leave the governing of the Kingdom to its underlings.
- Does Not Like Shoes: Its final female form goes about barefoot, though this has less to do with Azelas' preferences and more to do with how Los herself was, as it is modeled after her.
- Despair Event Horizon: Most likely what set Azelas on its current path. It gave up hope of ever being allowed to leave the confines of its Mirror—or even the chamber where the Mirror was located—and saw nothing but a possible eternity of being Los Rengard's personal adviser and magical analyst until she grew tired of it and sent it back into nonexistence.
- Detect Evil: Elves are able to sense Azelas' and those who have been heavily "contaminated" by its presence. One of the reasons that there are so few elves in Ylati is because of the vague feeling of dread and overall misery the elves feel when in the country's borders.
- The Dreaded: Sienna Marzio, one of the Inner Circle is able to intimidate one of the rotting, undead dragons digging the Ley Lines beneath the Quadrants of the Kingdom, to stop its rebellion by dropping Azelas' name, hinting that it will not be pleased with the delay.
- Eldritch Abomination: Azelas is devoid of any real mortal emotions except envy, arrogance and a small but violent capacity for anger in the right circumstances. The closest it comes to genuine happiness is mocking condescension towards the heroes after they fail. Azelas doesn't have a fixed gender—at least not in a way we would understand—and instead wears and changes genders the way humans would sample outfits. Worst of all, it was born from the same Primordial Chaos that spawned Rica's creator goddess, though Azelas's creation was done solely through magic. In other words, it is at least a partly man-made Eldritch Abomination.
- Fatal Flaw: If Azelas has any, it would be its vast underestimation of mortals. It could have killed the heroes countless times once they were in its presence. Instead it chose to lecture them on the futility of their efforts, toss them around like ragdolls and utterly humiliate them.
- Founder of the Kingdom: Well, more like the guiding force behind the founders of Ylati. In fact, members of the Inner Circle refer to Azelas as "The Founder" almost all the time, never using the name it took for itself. The only time Azelas has ever used its caretaker's name was with Michelli and a few others.
- Humans Are Bastards: Apart from being the only civilization in ancient Rica completely devoted to magic in almost every sense, Sinestel was controlled by highborn nobility who used their political and magical power for their own amusement and selfish ends, wielding great arcane knowlege and restricting the commoners to "lesser" magical powers. They in turn were ruled over by their royal family who were worshiped as gods in their own right due to their prowess with magic. One interpretation of Azelas' behavior is that its only exposure to humans for years was this decadent and toxic environment.
- Humanoid Abomination: Its second and fourth forms resemble the original Azelas and Empress Los respectively, but they are nothing more than hollow crystalline shells created out of the solidified Mana of millions of of slaughtered people.
- Irony: Several examples.
- Azelas was an enslaved magical being entrapped within a Magic Mirror by humans and forced to follow their orders. Then it destroyed most of the world or so it seems, and trapped humanity within a restricted area of habitable land and forced them to do its bidding through shadowy manipulations.
- Despite claims of superiority to all beings on Rica, Azelas is actually a rather pitiful monster, unable to leave Sinestel (or at least the city built over Sinestel's ruins) and depending heavily on humans and other beings to accomplish its goals.
- Azelas' goal was to see the world outside its Mirror and Sinestel—and in order to do so it triggered an apocalyptic event that reduced most of the world to a wasteland filled with toxic and mutagenic Miasma. It still desires to obtain a soul and freedom, but the world it wants to wander and explore as well as the civilizations and cultures it wishes to interact with are mostly destroyed.
- Lack of Empathy: Azelas considers itself so far above the creatures of Rica that it feels no reason to bother with kindness or malice towards them unless it is absolutely necessary. While not justified, it does make an interesting point, since it did not originate on Rica and is in the same class of being as the goddess who created the world to begin with.
- Literally Shattered Lives: Happens twice; Azelas's male human form is caught in a skintight barrier by Cornelius Jinette and constricted until it cracks and shatters like the crystal that it is, releasing its extremely powerful third form. Later the clothes and skin of its female form begin to crack and crumble after it is stripped of the nuriel Life Energy, causing glowing crimson tentacles to leak out of those fissures.
- Mobile-Suit Human: Its human forms are simply constructs created out of the solidified Mana it gathered from the people who died across the world during the Rain. It wrapped the energy around its fragile original form and simply "pilots" the construct like an operator with a machine as a way to interact with the world around it.
- Morphic Resonance: Its Supernatural Gold Eyes remain in every form it takes, though the number tends to change; when in its original Mirror-bound form it had nine of them, and when disguised as the original Azelas and Los, it had the standard human set of two.
- Orcus on His Throne: A justified example; Azelas doesn't take personal action towards the protagonists because it can't. It cannot leave Sinestel—and by extension Ylati's capital Kes'trina, which was built over Sinestel. All it can do is give orders to its minions to be carried out in the wider country. Even without those limits, it was detached and focused entirely on preparations for the ritual, and left the "mundane affairs" of the Kingdom to its Inner Circle—including the rebellion and the renegade wizard with a vendetta against it.
- Our Souls Are Different: Its entire goal is to create a soul from the energy that the nuriel are made from. The exact process of doing this is left vague, though the spell itself has several components and rituals that are shown. Azelas explains that the hundreds of thousands of nuriel in the country now are barely enough to forge a single soul for it to use, hinting at just how much energy Zalakshi effortlessly expended to fashion the souls of all mortals on Rica. The artificial soul has a physical presence in the shape of a yellow flame that hovers within the hole between its fourth form's collarbones.
- Public Domain Artifact: Azelas is the Magic Mirror of the old tales, who served a vain and magically gifted queen.
- Torso with a View: Its fourth form has a gaping hole between its collarbones where the yellow flame that is its artificial soul burns. When the soul once again becomes the separate individual nuriel, the flame first turns blue and then scatters away, leaving an empty hole.
- Unperson: Azelas did this to the entire civilization of Sinestel. Once partially free from the Mirror, it tracked down all of its citizens who had survived the riots and panic that accompanied the Rain and the loss of magic and slaughtered them. It then destroyed all magical books, artifacts and writings, to ensure that all knowledge of how to remotely use magic was gone, so no human would be able to relearn the art. Finally, it had Ylati's first city, Kes'trina, built over Sinestel, layering over the ruins so that they were eventually shoved far below what would eventually become Ylati's capital.
- It also did this to itself during the founding of Ylati. No mention of Azelas' name, appearance or role in the country's inception can be found in the records dating back to the Rain and the time of the human migration across the sea. Instead the Four Heroes alone are listed as the Kingdom's founding fathers without any mention of what they found when they arrived in the new land that had not been afflicted with the Miasma.
- The Unfettered: After crossing the Despair Event Horizon it became this, willing to do terrible damage to the world itself, wipe out entire nations and cultures, manipulate humanity on a grand scale and sentence a whole race to a Fate Worse than Death all in order to leave the confines of Sinestel once and for all and explore the outside world.
- Sympathy for the Devil: Despite the horrific events that have happened due to its direct actions or orders, we are treated to a three-chapter flashback of its early days as a summoned Familiar to an arrogant magic-using Empress and of its childlike desire to explore the world beyond and the eventual fall into despair of ever being free.
- Voice of the Legion: Its fourth form modeled after Empress Los speaks in a low young woman's voice until Cornelius and the dragons strip it of the nuriel Life Energy that forms its artificial soul. Then its voice changes into a mixture of Los's and its original insect-like crackling from its Denizen of the Mirror days.
- When the Planets Align: Azelas's spell to break down the nuriel into raw Life Energy requires all four of Rica's moons to be in the right alignment and for there to be Human-Aligned Ley Lines all across the surface of the land.
- Cornelius and the dragons reversed these Lines once Azelas had severed its connection to the Mirror, expelling the mass of energy from the creature and returning the nuriel into separate physical forms—leaving Azelas without its newly created soul and without the Mirror to anchor it.
- Zerg Rush: Even after Azelas's Mirror has 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 attack force, The Exterior Guard, the elves, and several dragons, along with our heroes to weaken it enough for it to finally die.
edited 5th Dec '14 12:13:58 PM by Swordofknowledge
Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake. — Edgar Walllace
The Silly Gloom
Funny, a few days ago I was rereading the threads for the fun of it, and now Azelas is back. You say this is the more accurate version, and I'm liking what I see. While I still think it's largely the same character, this version is appropriately even more alien, but somehow more understandable. The part about Sinestel being bastards in their own right balances out Azelas's villainy pretty well, I'd think.
- Name: Amanda Wallace / "Her" / The Lurking Shadow / "Lindy Walford"
- Age: apparently around 24. Really 700 Years Old.
- Personality: Amanda Wallace is a callous, manipulative villain who prefers to remain simply "her" or "the shadow". She views men as simply tools to wreak her revenge, though she takes a very personal interest if men display a certain level of depravity in their beliefs. She is utterly fascinated by the idea of despoiling people, and as she puts it "a cute little boy who is too shy to talk to a girl...grows up to take off his clothes and star in pornography. That's what I like." This hints at the fact that she despises purity in all its forms, and enjoys her activities as a High Priestess of Zayufur, this being "consuming the pure, and then releasing the disturbed." She deeply enjoys egging people on, further and further, using nursery rhyme metaphors and malignant suggestions, time by time, to get what she wants. And chances are, what she wants from you will leave a lot of bodies behind. It appears she also uses some amount of her powers for this, but mostly, its simply her mundane capability developed over the years. It appears she is very proud of the fact she knows a lot of people, and is capable of "bringing people together". There is no underestimating how persuasive she is, and even Ignius says that it is impossible for anyone, even him, to out-think her.
- Abilities: Amanda has collected four spell cores over the years
- The Swan: She secrets special Mana into a person, allowing her to make them have hallucinations whenever she wants, as well as acting as Surveillance as the Plot Demands. The Swan also allows her to view how the person will grow. Based on the parable of the Ugly Duckling. She can extrapolate from this, using other portions of the Parable to do other things to someone affected, including guaranteeing that they'll grow up with certain characteristics. She mostly uses it for the purpose of She or He Is All Grown Up.
- Eris Reed: Resembling a locket around her neck, Eris Reed draws upon the Grimms Story of a man turned into a black dog that breaths fire. Hence, she can cast black or green fire from the necklace that cannot be put out very easily. She can also conjure the "King's Hanging Horses", headless horse ghosts who have a rope for a tail. These ropes will try to bind to a person's limbs, and then draw and quarter them.
- The Red Hood: Based on the Parable of Little Red Riding Hood, this allows Amanda to inspire murderous intentions in anything she considers an animal. She considers humans animals, too. However, they apparently cannot attack her, as long as she asks them a question first. Also comes with a large butcher's knife, which can inflict massive damage on anything she considers an animal.
- King Midas: Her last spell core, she can use this one to turn what touches her into gold, though she has a lot more control over it than King Midas himself ever did. She can either turn someone into solid gold, or liquid gold. Body Horror either way.
- She also possesses the Puppets Kriemhilde and Versace, past a certain point. The former uses a lot of Rune-carved "granite squares", and attacks that involve hidden weapons and traps. The latter has four different Accurse Eyes on account of having four eyes, two implanted above its regular eyes, and its left arm has a large number of blades that slide out.
- Weaknesses: Her abilities can require a lot of set up, and are not easy to use. Its also shown that the rules of her powers make rematches easier for her foes...
- Goals: While she claims to lack ambition of her own, it is plain as day that she has some sort of plan going on.
- Her primary goal is to upset society and ensure that what she saw when she looked through Parallaxus' Tuning Fork comes to pass.
- Book II: Get what she wants out of Sharon's alliance, and then leave as quickly as she came, and with no records linking her either to the New Order or to forces opposing it.
- Book III: Kill anyone who might know she was affiliated with the New Order, and ensure the silence of people who were tied to it. Also, kill Aaron Shayde if he supports Ephas Abjuration.
- Motivation: Amanda's motivation is apparently that she was betrayed several times in the past, making her believe trust and love to be great, big lies.
- Role in the story: Amanda mostly functions as the head of a number of forces within numerous organizations, though her goals and theirs rarely line up. Most notably, she led a group called "The Chosen Ones" who she picked based on the divinations of the Tuning Fork. It appears she supplies the Ancient Conspiracy portion of the New Order, and a large amount of its Intelligence Wing.
- Backstory: Amanda Wallace started out a long time ago as the daughter of a chieftain in Germany, apparently she was always a rather cunning and intelligent woman, and she was married off to a handsome young warrior said to be the equal of thirty men. She expected a certain thing, and what she got was a rough, bearded warrior that treated her shabbily at best. She utterly despised how she was not given any freedom, and that the baby inside her was worth more than she was led her to run away. She found herself in a Shrine to Zayufur The Light Eater, one of the Dark Gods. When she heard the very old head priestess' words of Zayufur, of an actual shot at being free, she decided to take it. What she did next, however, was unpredictable - some today, though, say she was visited directly by Zayufur, which might explain something - she decided to sacrifice her baby to Zayufur. Managing to hide until the baby was born, she held her infant son in her arms...and then cut his throat and let the blood flow out on to the statue of Zayufur. Zayufur was delighted, and made Amanda...something significantly more than human. When she returned to her husband, reporting captivity and barbarism, she was locked back up and barely looked at. However, using newly developed talents and manipulations, she quickly began to play people against one another. By the time her husband tried to make another son with her, she had a plan in mind. While he slept, she sacrificed him too, and then provoked a succession crisis by framing someone who had become her new lover. Zayufur once again saw what sort of creature she had created, and hence, elevated Wallace again, giving her two of her Spell Cores. Amanda had, ever since, laid low, until she decided she could act. During World War II, she was an assistant to the Evil Sorcerer Lord Felix and the Demon called The Harpy, and then later still, she became an assistant and confidant to the Dollmaker, ultimately assisting in creating her current "boytoy" Guy Landon.
- Relevant Tropes:
- Bait the Dog: Her interactions with one of the younger Roman teenagers. She seemed like she cared for him, only to try to kill him with a car bomb, and when this didn't work, she tried to set him up to be killed by Gavin Shayde, who she secretly conspired with totally was just friends with!
- The Chessmaster: While her plans are not overly complex, she is very good at altering them on the spot to adapt to new situations. She is not even averse to technically helping the heroes if it means she gets what she wants.
- Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Amanda does not remain loyal to a "side" very long. She is loyal to individuals, just not to organizations.
- Corrupt the Cutie: Taken to the level of a fetish, given her quote above. She likes to encourage toxic, malevolent values, and despoil innocent people simply for its own sake.
- Crazy-Prepared: Amanda Wallace leaves nothing to chance. Heroes closing in on her portion of the building? Use missiles she was supposed to use to defend her position to disrupt the visibility of the stars, knowing full well the Diviner they're using to get through will lead them to Sharon and Arcana's portion of the building instead due to the smoke from the explosions. Aaron Shayde has finally gone berserk and is on the warpath? Good thing she put in that trap door...so she can use it for a quick escape. All members of the New Order are being investigated as terrorists? Good thing nobody ever got her name, except unreliable sources and people the Government cannot use against her. The only time there was a hiccup in her plan was when Aaron Shayde came back from the dead, and even then she was eventually able to play that to her advantage.
- Deal with the Devil: She made one, and now she makes others make them.
- Dull Eyes of Unhappiness: When she realizes that nothing is as she imagined it during her origin story. Followed by her eyes turning red...
- Dying Like Animals: She actually perceives the people her young "charge" is gunning down as various kinds of animals.
- Evil Is Petty: When one of her targets for info retrieval, an Otaku, refused her advances due to being obsessed with 2-D girls, Wallace became so offended she tried to set him on fire, burning down his home as well, when a rescuer arrived. She then reveals she implanted him with Swan's "power", letting her see where he was really keeping the info she wanted, which she nabbed.
- Eviler than Thou: Amanda was allied with a brutal Mafia Family that managed to successfully take over the world and institute a New World Order...and by the end, its clear who's the worst villain here. Hint - its not the people with the Italian names.
- Evil Redhead: With a heaping helping of Curtains Match the Windows, with Red Eyes, Take Warning basically serving as a warning - do not get involved with this woman.
- For the Evulz: When Matthew confronts her about the rampage and her role in it, she simply laughs and says she did it purely because she got bored and decided it had been too long since she was involved in a massacre.
- Fridge Horror: Amanda makes reference to the fact that Lord Eclipse betrayed the Romans before she did, which is, to Wallace's credit, true, and the worst she did was escape a sinking ship with a nuclear-armed madman on it. The thing is, she had absolutely no plausible way of knowing that Lord Eclipse did that, because both were on assignment, theoretically, in different places in the world. This Fridge Horror makes the implication that Amanda infected someone close to Jason Druford with Swan from a distance. You might not even know you're affected by Swan, and she could be using you as a second pair of eyes, and can control how you age. And you'll never even know she did it.
- Foe Yay: She has a lot of interactions with Matthew that speak of this. Including trying to bribe him with "encounters", offering him "sensual consolation" when he found the ending of Book III just damn depressing...
- Foreshadowing: When Matthew has Aura Vision on, he perceives a much stronger and nastier aura coming off of Amanda than what he saw from Francisco Roman, who was supposedly the Big Bad at that point.
- Genre Savvy: She knew from Waylana White, her Mole in Nebiros' organization, that Matthew was smarter than he acted, so she took extra steps in making sure her role in Sharon Tate Roman's organization was harder to pin down.
- Heart Is an Awesome Power: Not many of her abilities sound really powerful on paper. I mean, they're just fairy tale Spell Cores! Except when she uses them together, she can get some really innovative effects. It also turns out some of them have some interesting effects that can be extrapolated from them.
- Hellish Horse: The King's Hanging Horses, which have skeletal heads, tails that turn into ropes, and which try to do something horrible to their foes.
- Humanoid Abomination: Most evident in her debut, where she is relating the tale of the Ugly Duckling, and how it applies to one college boy's attempts to contact his old sweetheart. Mixed with his displays of wonder is a description that Amanda Wallace's eyes resemble scarlet-red pits of fire, and several Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl descriptions, as well as manifesting an image of a large black swan behind her as she's using The Swan on her young target.
- Lady in Red: Usually depicted as wearing a red dress to compliment her red hair.
- Laughing Mad: At first a Noblewoman's Laugh, then something...significantly more disturbing.
- Literally Shattered Lives: When she was done with Giacomo Roman, she turned him to solid gold, punched him once, and shattered him to a million pieces. Consider how strong she'd need to be to do something like that.
- Manipulative Bitch: A very passive aggressive type - it is always your idea, what happens. Its never hers.
- Master of Disguise: She is capable of some very compelling disguises, even managing to fool people who should be able to tell what she really is.
- Mind Screw: Her lesson on what a Swan really is and why this young man should not trust anyone. It has to be viewed in connection with later lectures by her to the same person, and even then, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
- Mission Control: Her role during Davos Siege, though a more sinister version in that she was informing them where more people Heretic and Cyber-Matt can kill can be found.
- More Deadly Than the Male: When she shows up with Francisco Roman, and whenever she and her young proteges are together. She is vastly more dangerous than them, even though she does not participate so readily in murder or darker activities.
- No Ontological Inertia: Averted in the case of the effect of Amanda's Mind Control over those Test Subjects. Even though she left the area, the heroes still needed to find and destroy the remaining tie she had to the spell - a Sadistic Choice on her part. Either take it as information against her, or destroy it and free her victims. Though played straight when her Proxy Form is destroyed and this frees Seth and Leon Eckart from her control.
- One-Winged Angel: She takes on a nightmarish new form after its made clear that she's quite outnumbered by the people dedicated to keeping Colin safe and opposing the New Order. She basically goes from an enchanting young woman to a large crystal-thing with her dress growing out of it...the ends of the dress turning into red tentacles, and eight thin black wings emerging from its "back", a singular eye at the center that seemingly floats over the actual structure. Its chief method of attack is the "Hell Bite", where its tentacles leech Mana out of anything they touch, leaving people, areas or animals withered...and then quickly consumed just as well.
- Given that it has a Voice of the Legion and only really high up and nasty Dark God creatures have that...it essentially infers she was a lot closer to Zayufur than what was initially suspected.
- People Puppets: She has an intrinsic link in existence to a large number of previous attempts at making the Supersoldier Serum that made Aaron Shayde into what he was. She uses this to essentially turn them into an army, which she used as a distraction in order to get her affairs in order - translation, murder everyone in the New Order who knew her real name.
- Pretty in Mink: One of her outfits - a mink coat and just a sports bra underneath...Hamuna...
- Psychotic Smirk: Often. Very often.
- Puppet Master: She later on adds Versace's Puppet to her arsenal, after plundering it from Versace's compound. She also turns Versace into a puppet, to supplement her offensive options.
- Red Eyes, Take Warning: Her eyes are as red as her hair, and hint that this woman is not someone to take lightly.
- She Is All Grown Up: it is inferred she provided the targets for her college age "mark" using The Swan to make them age well.
- Sinister Surveillance: Her Swan power, which results in a lot of scenes where Amanda and a cloaked Guy Landon watch the heroes through a sphere. An emphasis is placed upon how invasive, humiliating and disturbing this power can get. In particular when she uses it to "out" two of the Phantom Claw Trainees almost as a petty form of revenge for Phantom Claw no longer working for the New Order.
- Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Sharon and Amanda did not get along very well, but they decided to work together because of mutual goals. Even so, Amanda did not want people getting the idea afterwards that she had been a part of the New Order, due to what happened in the Midab War.
- Too Soon: Amanda Wallace's debut may be pushed back due to this - she manipulates a college student into murdering young women who grew up from high school girls into beautiful young women, and eventually pushing him into committing suicide.
- Touch of Death: King Midas gives her this ability.
- The Vamp: A role she rather likes playing. Though she is not very attached to people she has this kind of contact with. She eventually says she just likes corrupting youth and innocence, as said above.
- Villain Team-Up: The New Order is basically one big villain team up, and she later joins with Cyber-Matthew and The Heretic in their terrorist activities, purely to see how far both of them have gone.
- She also leads a hybrid of this and a Legion of Doom called "The Chosen Ones" or "The Pentagram". Composed of Amanda herself in a leadership position and eight of her "Marks", they're people developed by Swan and using dangerous, high-powered Spell Cores, and with unique mental deformities as well. One of them being a young woman who sees everyone as skeletons.
- Would Hurt a Child: Her own, in fact. And she certainly shows more willingness to kill Colin rather than simply bring him into the Roman Faction's captivity, which hints he saw something that left her deciding he needed to die, while the rest of the Roman Faction knew he had seen a lot, but felt they could still control him.
- Xanatos Speed Chess: Very skilled in this, mostly due to her normally unflappable demeanour and her cold, calculating mind.
edited 14th Feb '16 1:58:55 AM by NickTheSwing
The Silly Gloom
So deliciously vampy and evil. Even more so the fact that her four Spell Cores are themed after folktales. The combination of that and her overall attitude that I see as one part Evil Is Sexy and one part "I don't give a crap" kind of evil makes for one very delicious villain for me.
This one's from the short-ish, unfinished story (that remains unlikely to be finished. Posted in Uncle Drunkie's Writer/Critic Dating Service thread, but I suppose that's shameless advertisement![[lol]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/lol2v12_4863.png "[lol]"){kind=small}
)
Name: None, 'Mother', 'Matheld's Demon', 'The Demon'
Age: Unknown
Personality: Utterly inhuman. The more accurate word would probably be otherworldly, though even that doesn't begin to touch on how alien it is. Its smiles feel wrong, its laughs chillingly so, its attempts to mimic human empathy and emotions nothing short of terrifying. One can simultaneously sense care, malice, rage, serenity, tranquil, hate, nearly all the temperaments at once, all of them imperfect imitations, just being in its proximity. It can slaughter dozens of people and feel absolutely nothing, except maybe only the slightest need to simulate grief or bloodlust, concepts that it has at least some understanding. Strangely, there almost seems to be a pattern in its unpredictability. Almost.
Abilities: Pure Kij energy, the one type of energy mages of Minir believe can mimic miracles. Unlike the traditional chanelling of Harmony, the flow of the three core energies of being, including aeledryte or the positive, neidryte or the negative, and the neutral elements, Kij manipulation has no rule. Its only rough equivalent is 'raw magic', which only the immensely powerful mutants fleikind are capable of, yet even that pales in comparison to Kij energy. The demon wielding this power can basically undo beings, manipulate laws of nature, even disrupting the frol of reality itself. The true extent of Kij energy is unknown, and this thing, the nameless demon, shows such capability that no mortal mage can even hope to match it.
Weaknesses: Seemingly, none. Its only vulnerability, its desire to 'feel' humanity, may not be one at all, as this is its true goal as well. Its lack of complex thinking whatsoever may allow human opponents to outsmart it with devious tactics, not that it'd be of much use.
Goal: Seeking 'the child', the one mortal that may be the key to its understanding of true humanity.
Motivation: Understanding humanity, human emotions, and experiencing the world as mortal.
Role: The Big Bad of the story
Backstory: Decades back before the whole mess began, Anzus Institute of Sorcery, the central organization of the Haven continent that supervise mages and use of all sorts of magic, initiated a classified project called the Demonology Program, to combat the emerging demonic threat. Volunteers from all branches of the Institute were inducted into the program, and they would begin their reseraches on demons, the mystical beings from the world simply known as Kij. The program turned out to be a disaster. Several scholars involved died, several more went insane and had to either be killed or Purified, stripping them off all magical affinity. Of those doomed by the program, one particular Matheld Chandler, a talented mage, managed to find some success in her work. She came into personal contact with one demon as her research took her further down the road. The contact became a friendship as she learned more of it, and before long, Matheld reached a conclusion; demons habored no malice against mankind. If anything, they were so varied and different that no two demons were the same. Some were feral, beasts moved by instincts, some were confused, brought to the mortal world against their will, some were intelligent and docile. Most importantly, all of them were ancient. Timeless, even, hailing from a world where even the concept of time wasn't constant. Obsessed, fascinated, Matheld did the unthinkable. She offered the demon refuge, in her own mortal shell, and it accepted, fusing the two together at the time when Matheld became pregnant. It all came collapsing down when the child, an illegitimate child conceived by an affair between her and the son of Anzus's then Grandmaster Archmage, turned out to be a mutant fleikind. With pressure from all sides, chief among them the threat of the Demonology Program being terminated and her flei son being taken away to be sanctioned, Matheld fled the institute, only to be tracked down a few years later and killed by the Witch Hunter division of Anzus. Unfortunately, it didn't end there. Matheld died, but her demon lingered, still longing to experience the world. Decades later, following its disappearance, it returned, seeking what it called 'the child', and murdering all in its path, for reasons only it could comprehend. What Mathled learned of the demon was mostly truth after all. Demons are ancient, and above all else, the intelligent ones seek to understand humans, even to experience the world as humans. This is probably because, once, they too were humans.
Tropes
Asexual: Its material body was Matheld's, so obviously it looked a woman, but the demon is neither male nor female, nor anything in between.
Blue-and-Orange Morality: That is, if it even has a grasp on the concept behind morality at all. It committed atrocities without feeling much anything, only acknowledging that humans have either the need to feel guilt or murderous glee, and would attempt to imitate the feelings, but that's it. No such thing as morality exists in Kij.
The Corruption: The Kij energy. Some mortal mages take to channeling Kij energy, usually with horrible end results such as violent internal trauma, death, or insanity. Kij evergy properly handled can achieve nearly anything, from creating lives to erasing existence of beings. The major side effect include contamination of anything in the mortal world that comes into contact with the energy, which in long term can prove hazardous to all living things. Demons by nature live and breathe Kij energy, and so are immune to contamination, and are natural masters at conjuring it.
Eldritch Abomination: Natch.
Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Again, if it can be considered evil. The demon was strangely fascinated by Matheld and her offspring. Whether this fascination is love or any other kind of human or even bestial desire is left unanswered.
Roaring Rampage of Revenge: The moment it came back was marked by the deaths of four high ranking Witch Hunters involved in the hunt for Matheld. The general assumption thus was that it sought revenge for its late summoner. Played with in that, again, it didn't understand vengeance proper. It only hoped to experience human vengeance by taking on one such in the name of its only 'friend'.
What Is This Thing You Call "Love"?: The whole dynamic between it and Matheld. Also the reason it sought 'the child'. Love drove Matheld to sacrifice her life to give her son a chance of freedom. If ultimately humans would throw themselves away in the name of something so conceptual, then to know human, it had to know love.
edited 12th Jun '14 8:02:34 PM by arreimil
On the foundation of glass a dream is built. And, like glass, it shatters.
Sir Night, Wayward Hunter-Angel
Creeepyyyy. Probably what you were going for.
Also, as of me reading Atlantis: The Second Age, the world Flutsteicher's from now has a source of magic...which ain't particularly nice. Magic itself is neutral, but the source aren't fans of...the universe.
I'll get to that later, but let's just say they were not happy when the Primordial Chaos was ruined by form.
(Also, they're not Excrucians, different canon altogether).
edited 12th Jun '14 7:54:52 PM by Leliel
What rises must fall, what falls may rise again.
@arreimil, wow that sounds interesting and creepy. That story truly is intriguing; it's a shame it isn't finished. I'm curious, why did the witch-hunters have to kill Matheld? Was it simply to get their hands on her child? Anyway, the demon is an amazing villain; when reading the profile I kept having to remind myself that it isn't even close to anything human, but you did a good job of portraying how its actions are merely a simulation of emotion. Truly a terrifuing and relentless foe. I can't wait to see what happens when it gets its hands on the child.
edited 13th Jun '14 7:41:36 AM by Swordofknowledge
Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake. — Edgar Walllace
The Silly Gloom
Exactly. When I wrote this guy I aimed for maximum creepiness. Not sure if it's properly reflected in the draft, though
Well, the thing with Matheld's boy is that, on top of being a mutant, he's also potentially a demon-possessed mutant, as the Hunters were quite sure Matheld's pregnancy and her contact with the demon happened roughly at the same time, making that an unacceptable possibility. There's also the fact that, as a demonologist, Matheld's not allowed to leave the institute, on pain of death. This was every demonologist's contract. The program was top secret, and risk of research information leak was too much for the institute. For example, if mages outside of the institute looking to control demons gained the information, hell was sure to break loose.
@ Arreimil: Ah, I see. Thanks for clearing that up, I was wondering if there was some sort of "don't leave or we'll kill you" thing going on.
Clockwalkers bad guys again, though it isn't really a single individual this time, but an organization.
- Name: The Vision
- Age: The organization's age is at least three thousand years old. Members ages differ, the oldest known being in their late seventies and the youngest being twenty four years old.
- Appearance: Varies due to being an organization composed of many members, but unlike the rest of Ylati's martial service, the Vision do not wear uniforms of any sort. Their only distinguishing feature is a golden short-sword with a stylized eye emblazoned into the center of its blade, and knowledge of a set of code words that changes every few hours.
- Personality: The personalities of the Vision's members are naturally unique, but all share a passionate devotion to the Kingdom of Ylati and by default the human race. This devotion drives them to murder, torture, and kidnap, all in name of the country's continued stability and prosperity. They view themselves as protectors who operate behind the scenes and uproot the seeds of the Kingdom's undoing before they can sprout into something truly dangerous. While the other branches of the martial service operate largely in the open, the Vision is very secretive about their operations. No one outside their organization and the Crown knows their numbers, personnel, or even the locations of their various headquarters. The Vision is known for creating informants out of ordinary civilians through a system of payment and control those informants with fear of punishment should they fail or withhold information. They are absolutely merciless when dealing with their prey, refusing to relent regardless of age or gender or pleas for mercy. Many in their upper echelon are privy to a few of Ylati's darker secrets, though they are not fully informed.
- Abilities: The men and women of the Vision excel in swordsmanship, hand-to-hand combat, strategic warfare, and are well-versed in code-breaking. Vision members are also skilled at blending in to the surroundings of a town or city, making themselves all but unnoticeable among the populace. They are trained in eavesdropping and are able to easily overhear treasonous words and plans. Vision members answer only to the Crown and have the right to do nearly anything they deem necessary in pursuit of their mission. A member of the Vision can also conscript members of the other martial service branches to aid them in their missions without explaining what that mission actually is.
- Weaknesses: Their secretive nature and fearsome reputation breeds distrust from the other branches, often undermining teamwork when they must work together. Vision members are sometimes blinded by their self-righteous view as unseen protectors of the Kingdom and become arrogant. This causes them to underestimate the rebellious elements that they hunt, believing them to be beneath their level in strength, skill and intelligence.
- Goal:
- The primary goal is to maintain Ylati's status-quo—and thus its stability—as it has been for over seven thousand years.
- Destroy all elements that rebel or question the authority of the Royal Family (or in reality the Inner Circle).
- Motivation: They are devoted to the Kingdom's well-being; each took an oath to do whatever it took for the good of Ylati's human citizens.
- Role in the story: The main enforcers of the Inner Circle's will.
- Backstory: Due to its secretive nature, the Vision's back-story is shrouded in mystery with only a few solid facts emerging. They are said to have been formed at least three thousand years before the start of the story by King Claudio de Massimo, during the formation of the East Quadrant of the Kingdom. Because the East bordered on lands contaminated with Miasma, many citizens did not believe in pushing forward and thought that the country had expanded enough. However the King refused to listen, and soon talk of rebelling against the Royal Family simmered throughout Ylati's towns and cities. It was then that the Vision came into existence. They appeared without warning, the first signs of their presence being the disappearances of particularly outspoken critics of the King's decisions. These vanishings were all over, from the lowliest commoner to soldiers within the martial service itself. Fear quieted the remaining dissidents and the establishment of the East proceeded without further problems. Since then, the Vision has been spoken of in whispers and shrouded in terrifying stories of men and women with golden short-swords marked with an all-seeing eye. Wherever they go, bloodshed and misery is sure to follow, and not always merely to the guilty.
- Relevant Tropes
- Affably Evil: Again due to being an organization comprised of many different people and personalities it varies. However the average Vision member does lead a fairly ordinary life outside of their work, and many have families and are allowed to remain in contact with them (obviously as long as they don't reveal information.)
- Authority Equals Asskicking: Vision members can take command from even seasoned officers from the other branches and use their forces as they wish for as long as they wish, leading to complaints of them being "pampered secret agents". This couldn't be further from the truth. Vision members excel in all points of combat. Being able to take down no less than six opponents without any assistance is a minimum requirement for entrance into the organization, and their training program is hinted to be extremely brutal.
- Always Chaotic Evil: This is how they see Helios and anyone who would dare question or attempt to radically change how things are run in the Kingdom. Even treating them with kindness or mercy doesn't really help, they'd simply view it as "rebel trickery". Drasil learns this the hard way when he tries to help a Vision member, Bianca, after she was wounded and stunned in a skirmish with the Helios band accompanying him. Her response to him bandaging her amputated hand and trying to give her some of the last painkillers he had on him was to knife him in the stomach.
- Anti-Villain: Their desire is to do what it is best for the people of Ylati, shielding the populace from those who would throw the Kingdom into chaos, no matter how bloody they have to get themselves. A noble goal, but they are willing to kill and torture innocent people, and the status quo they defend is a Crapsaccharine Dystopia maintained on slavery and Fantastic Racism. Oh, and there's an Eldritch Abomination pulling the strings behind the highest levels of government.
- Antagonistic Offspring: In a weird way, they are revealed to be this trope to the Exterior Guard, the branch which protects Ylati from outside invasions. The fledgling Vision consisted of volunteers from the Exterior Guard who were fanatically loyal to the Kingdom and willing to do dirty work to keep things running smoothly and avert revolution. Though nowadays the Vision scouts out potential members while they are still in the military academy, the Exterior Guard is what "gave birth" to their organization. Thus the irony when the Exterior Guard rebels against the corrupt government and the Vision is their most ardent enemy.
- Badass: A group of fourteen Vision members are able to decimate an entire rebellious company of veteran Exterior Guard forces within minutes. What makes this so chilling is that the Exterior Guard are a Badass Army by necessity, almost edging into Super-Soldier territory.
- They are also the only branch authorized to kill without mercy. While that not sound like much of a surprise for a military organization, keep in mind that most other branches such as the Peace Officers (police) and Palace Guard have a strong Thou Shalt Not Kill policy and fight mainly to incapacitate and arrest. They will only use lethal force on human Ylatain citizens if necessary. When the Vision comes at you, they are automatically aiming to kill.
- Cold-Blooded Torture: They have a reputation for doing this to dissidents and those who associate with them in order to get information on other rebellious forces.
- The Dreaded: Their name is spoken of in whispers and shrouded in stories of pain, bloodshed and death. Everyone "knows someone who knows someone who knows of someone" visited by them, often with lethal results.
- Early-Bird Cameo: They are mentioned in the second chapter during a discussion in Drasil's history class; one of the students asks to hear about how the Vision was founded, sparking horrified reactions by the other students and the teacher, though the teacher eventually relents and tells them a brief and sparse story about their history and an event they are rumored to have participated in.
- Eye Motifs: The golden short-swords carried by all members of the Vision are emblazoned with a stylized eye in the center of the blade. This is to represent the "all seeing eye" of the organization, impressing upon the populace the need to watch what they say and do.
- Government Conspiracy: Played with. They know that the Royal Family is heavily influenced by the Inner Circle. They vaguely understand that a plan to sacrifice the nuriel race is at work, and will happen sometime in the future, and that the sacrifice will somehow benefit humanity. They also are aware that other (possibly human) civilizations exist beyond the Miasma and that those societies are trying to contact others like themselves. However that is the extent of their knowledge. They don't know about Azelas' existence, or that the Royal Family are just children brainwashed to follow Azelas and the Inner Circle's commands. So one could say that while they have part of the conspiracy, they don't know the whole.
- Still, they consider what they do know to be enough, and will kill to protect those secrets and to stop anyone who would stand in the way of the human race's path to greatness. See Utopia Justifies the Means below.
- Hates Everyone Equally: Sort of. The Vision are devoid of the usual Fantastic Racism rampant in Ylati when it comes to ferreting out what they view as traitorous elements. They treat their human targets with just as much ruthlessness and lack of mercy as nuriel. Thus ensuring that everyone fears them—and it works.
- Judge, Jury, and Executioner: They have full authority when it comes to dealing someone accused of treason. Unlike other offences, the prisoner is not taken to court and tried, they are judged right there on the spot by the Vision members detaining them. If captured and confronted with suspicion of treason, all the terrified suspect can do is pray to Goddess Zalakshi that they are declared innocent or at least "merely" relocated to a Red Prison.
- Lawful Evil
- Lightning Bruiser: Part of Vision training is learning to be incredibly fast. This is because one of their largest opponents is the nuriel rebellion group Helios. Nuriel are naturally faster and more agile than humans, with a set of nasty claws (which rebelling nuriel refuse to file down, stating its a symbol of bondage). Being a Mighty Glacier will only get you killed in those situations, so being fast on your feet is important.
- Make It Look Like an Accident: This is how they remove rebellious elements it would be unwise to deal with in their usual manner, such as wealthy business-people, well-known celebrities, decorated soldiers, or visiting diplomats from the dwarven and elven kingdoms. Instead they simply dispose of them in ways that look like an unfortunate accidents to cover up their involvement in the death. Marco Zaccheria's father, a high-ranking communications officer in the martial service, was taken out this way once he discovered the existence of other civilizations and informed the government of his discovery. However this didn't fool Marco and he nursed a grudge against the Ylatain government for the murder of his father for years afterwards.
- Meaningful Name: The Vision: they are the eyes of those in charge, and they are watching you to ensure that you behave.
- Pragmatic Villainy/ Foreshadowing: Sixty years prior to the start of Clockwalkers, the Lord Mayor of Rose City's infant son was murdered by his nuriel nurse. The incident drove the man nearly mad with grief and rage and inflamed the human populace. The result was a furious mob of angry humans striding into the city's End-Town and attacking any nuriel they could find, while the Mayor ordered Rose City's gates sealed and declared on national television that they would not open until all "filthy trolls" in his city were dead. Two days after this, the Mayor was found dead in his study with his throat slashed, and the capital Kes'trina sent a temporary replacement to restore order. It is heavily implied that the Vision is responsible for his murder, which is the first hint that the nuriel are needed for something more important and sinister than slave labor...
- Secret Police: They are never called this in-story, but they fulfill most of the requirements, being a paranoia-inducing organization of ruthless patriotic killers that enforce the will of the true rulers of Ylati and can simply hop over any pesky laws in their quest to find their prey.
- They Look Just Like Everyone Else!: Due to their lack of uniforms and their only means of identification to one another being a golden sword and a set of constantly changing code words, there is no literally no way to tell who is or isn't a Vision member. They are also able to seamlessly enter the populace, taking great pains to learn local dialects and accents to better fit in. That middle-aged man you saw leaning against a street-lamp reading a newspaper? That nice young woman who sells flowers down the street? Which one? Or is it neither? You can't even use something such as military bearing or posture, as there are many former military of all ages around Ylati. Needless to say, this is extreme Paranoia Fuel for the people of Ylati and one of the things the Vision relies upon.
- Torture Always Works: A particularly nasty example occurs the first time we actually see the Vision in action. One of their members takes control of the Peace Officers of a town and puts an entire bar on lock-down, not allowing entrance or exit. Knowing the bar is a gathering place for Helios, he then begins torturing a barmaid who had been overheard bragging about sleeping with a Helios member. He first nails her hands to a table with his sword and then punches out several of her teeth, all in full view of the terrified patrons. It eventually turns out that she knew very little, but one of the other patrons did know a great deal about an impending Helios attack, and the psychological torture of seeing the suffering woman broke him and he gave over his information in return for not sharing the same fate.
- Unperson: Nastily averted. When the Vision "visit" someone who they determine is guilty of seditious speech and/or activities, they will either kill or abduct them to be placed in a rumored "Red Prison", but they make no effort to hide the fact that the person existed. Seeing that individual's empty house and place of business is far more chilling than a total erasure of existence.
- Utopia Justifies the Means: Abducting, torturing, killing or imprisoning rebel sympathizers, vocal abolitionists, overly-curious intellectuals, and would-be explorers is necessary to weed out those who would cause a potentially deadly outbreak of unrest and war within Ylati's borders. Preventing the discovery of other nations and cultures spared by the Rain and resulting Miasma is necessary because it prevents unwelcome attention, which might result in the ritual being disrupted and humans not being able to advance.
- Villain Has a Point: As far as anyone knows, Ylati is it for humans. The other habitable land around them is the property of the dwarves and the elves. Everything else is filled with Miasma that kills and/or induces Body Horror mutations on anything exposed to it and causes the physical laws of the universe to go wibbly-wobbly. If war or unrest happens within Ylati, there is literally nowhere else for humanity to go except into the other race's lands, which will cause war on top of whatever conflict pushed the humans to migrate in the first place. In other words, Ylati literally hangs on a knife-edge. One sufficient plague, natural disaster, or revolution in all Four Quadrants and the human race is doomed. It isn't just the Ancient Conspiracy that is behind the Vision's fervent tactics and insistence on quelling any sort of rebellion—it's basic survival.
edited 14th Jun '14 8:17:01 PM by Swordofknowledge
Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake. — Edgar Walllace
Sir Night, Wayward Hunter-Angel
Good perspective on the Secret Police. It's not often you see the fanaticism that job requires.
Okay then:
- Name: The Elders (aka, the Titans, the Nameless or sometimes the Old Ones if the namer is in a Lovecraftian mood)
- Age: Older than the universe - in fact, that's why they're so antagonistic to it, they want their old home back.
- Abilities: Potentially infinite - the current form of the cosmos is the self-sustaining dream of one who wanted to create a balance between Law and Chaos, and the Elders can simply dream specific imbalances. Indeed, drawing on their dreams and creating controlled imbalances is the source of all magic. Realistically, all they can do is make reckless heroes very, very miserable - the Greek myth of the tragic hero undone by fate can be traced back to their somnolent manipulations, as can many the corruption of a politician and eventual end as a laughingstock or scorned by history.
- Weaknesses: And that is all they do. Besides being asleep/imprisoned, they don't even recognize living beings as existent until they become powerful enough to rival the Elders in their might, wisdom, and power on a mortal scale; real-life myths and powerful political figures. Even then, the line about hubris undoing itself holds true - their Winds of Destiny, Change! ability is actually something of a Deal with the Devil; a target must make the conscious choice for something to happen now, and damn the consequences, symbolically calling to their elemental and primal natures. Too much invites enough attention from them for the Elders to expend effort weaving a tragic, poetic fate...if the hero in question hasn't done enough good to confuse them about what entity is the hero and what is their deeds, undoing one of said deeds but leaving the hero intact - sucks for any beneficiaries, but enough to tip off the target to watch for consequences and thus less likely to call to them. They're also a well-known danger, so calling to them is less likely.
- Goals: Returning all the cosmos to the primal, ecstatic dance of inconstant forces...in theory. In reality, ruining lives of the powerful and hubristic. They're window dressing more than anything.
- Role: Window dressing, again. Could be considered Bigger Bad given they're the source of a lot of trouble for Edith, but no, the closest thing to a Cult found in the story is a lone Starter Villain. Bits of their bodies can be summoned into reality as powerful items, and St. Adrian hearing rumors of one is what kicks off the main plot.
- Backstory: The "siblings" of the Creator or Creators, whoever they were. The Elders did not take part in the formation of the universe, and thus remained alien beings of primal chaos and formlessness...who were greatly and painfully lessened by the existence of the cosmos, since by definition they can't live there, and thus their former omnipresence...wasn't. In pain, they lashed out at the primal universe (giving rise to the legends of the Titanomachy and slaying of chaos monsters to birth the cosmos as we know it), but were repulsed and were forced into slumber.
Since the world is like their dreams, though, their dreams had the tendency to escape into the cosmos, giving them a bleary awareness of it. Ancient peoples learned how to manipulate these dreams through proper symbolic balancing and "walking the path of the gods" (read here; as the initial Creators created for the sake of creation, a sorcerer who wants to use magic personally without an artifact must seek magic for its own sake or undergo great personal sacrifice to mimic the Elders own loss), created the basics of Functional Magic.
And...that's about it. They aren't characters so much as impersonal forces various people have cursed at times, and rarely invoked. Really, they're not important to the plot so much as an explanation as to why sorcerers are distrusted despite the world accepting the supernatural now, and the source of the Rubicon of Worlds comes from.
- Other Tropes:
- Black Magic: Most magic is generally invoked through a fundamentally human lens, scouring their influence and leaving it a neutral, often creative force. Most magic is not composed of the practices known collectively as metakosmic sorcery, which is intentionally channeling the raw, destructive will of the Elders through the caster. The results are never pretty (Law metakosmic spells, for instance, are known to have turned entire cities to nearly lifeless crystal or transform superstitions such as "putting shoes on a table puts the life of a family member in danger" into basic physics for an area). For the caster, it's also invoking the Fates, and while the Elders possess enough awareness to steer away the backlash from their ally directly, it's also dooming every purely positive deed the metakosmic sorcerer has ever done to be reversed or twisted into horrors. Naturally, using it is considered a sign the Godzilla Threshold has been broken.
- The Corruption: Invoking the Fates, a term for opening up to their influence in return for a spat of supernatural luck, is kind of like this; it doesn't turn people evil(er than they already were), but in return for that fortune, the invoker gets closer to inviting disaster upon themself or their friends.
- Eldritch Abomination: They are literally things that did not subject themselves to any of the rules of the cosmos, something that is fundamentally alien to anything even vaguely comprehensible, because they don't have the experience of anything that would lead to their personalities evolving into something other than "vaguely sapient force of supernature".
- Lovecraft Lite: Apart from the whole "tragic hero" thing, they are utterly incapable of influencing the universe to any harmful degree without the permission of natives, and even then it's just for one spell or calling minute bits of them into comprehensible form for their own use.
- Our Titans Are Different
Yeah, they do seem like impersonal, destructive forces. Not spiteful or beings full of personalized hate toward you in particular, just a force of nature that goes along.
Now, this guy is a part of a previous submission, but he's independent enough to deserve his own entry.
- Name: Jason Druford / Lord Eclipse
- Age: 19
- Personality: Jason Druford started off as the sole reasonable member of the Knights of Prayer, a brutal organization of fundamentalist "knights" who serve the Roman faction, and act as their punishing arm. Jason, unlike others, was less religious, disliked the leader, Lord Jeremy, and wanted out from the get go. His parents had made him join, and they were psychotically religious, and punished Jason for everything from showing interest in a girl to wearing tank tops and watching the wrong shows. Jason eventually managed to find his way out when Matthew killed Jeremy, but at the same time, during a fight, his Spell Core was shattered. As a result, the shoddy treatment he got from his peers and "friends", together with PTSD emerging, started to result in a disastrous change in personality. He started to lose his identity, no longer identifying as "Jace", Jason Druford, or any of his handles or identities. He became violent and moody, not to mention paranoid. By the time he ended up in prison, he was not even sure what he did to get there, and barely had any short term memory. The flashbacks were so bad, he could no longer tell where he was at a given time. That...was when Regal Kalvin approached him, and offered him a new identity - the identity of Lord Eclipse. Jason, having no other choice by this point, took up Kalvin on his offer, resulting in the newest Lord Eclipse. As Lord Eclipse, he seemed to regain his functionality...however, he was no longer a kind person. He became someone who prioritized success and completion above the lives of his allies, and he looked harshly upon incompetence, usually "rewarding" it with Electric Torture. Jason became devoted to the ideas of Lord Eclipse, including the Social Darwinist ideology. However, he put enough of a spin on it that it still came off as quite unique to him.
- Abilities: Jason Druford had his abilities upgraded by the Mark of Heraldry so much, that it took his previously minor league Spell Core - something that simply launched fireballs, and attuned it to a devastating fire-based power, together with the Khronos Attribute Heraldry, which let him decay and regrow things around him, including launching vicious Atrophic Waves that cause damage at the site of impact, and age everything around the impact site to make healing very difficult. His physical abilities are also noted to be extremely high. He is also remarked to be a capable user of Rune Magic.
- Weaknesses: His magic tends to cause a lot of damage, and is hard to control, and if he burns too hot, he can cause a shortage of oxygen in the area - though he can exploit this as well. Notably, the Heraldry Mark seems to be a weak spot as well.
- Goals: Like other Lord Eclipses, Jason wants to bring about an age where only the strong and magically capable rule. He differentiates himself by virtue of the fact he wants to create more powerful people through a number of means, and if all else fails, his last plan is to simply create a planet for Magic Users.
- Motivation: The cruelty of his religious parents apparently taught him that all Muggle societies are horrible, and will repress Magic Users, based on the bible quote on witches.
- Role in the story: The Dragon initially, though given the Collective Identity trope, he's only The Dragon if he's in the same room as Kalvin. He's the Big Bad otherwise. He coordinates the Malus Cult, he does most of the heavy lifting, and he's the most physically imposing.
- Backstory: Jason was born to a pair of very religious parents, who intended to raise him to be a knight of the Roman Family. Jason had his access to everything heavily controlled. He was forbidden from forming close friendships with the opposite sex, and his parents threatened to stone him to death if he seemed even a little gay. He was also flogged at 14, and whipped with a cat o nine tails for going out with his girlfriend instead of courting her. By the time Jason achieved his Rank in the Knights, he was a time bomb waiting to go off. PTSD caught up with him after Matthew dealt with Jeremy, and he ran away from home in rejection of his parents' values. He was still caught and dragged home, where he had to endure an exorcism. When he attacked his father enough to eviscerate the man's face, he was dragged off to prison after a sham of a trial. Lord Eclipse, however, appeared before him and offered him a deal...
- Relevant Tropes:
- Abusive Parents: His are a nasty religious flavour that did things like whip him, and threaten to stone him to death. They discover that continuing to try to abuse their son after he becomes the leader of an evil chaotic magic conspiracy is a bad idea.
- Ambition Is Evil: Jason discovers that its kind of thrilling to aim higher than what his parents told him was "okay". He also starts to show much more intelligent traits when he gets ambitious.
- He gets even more ambitious after Kalvin dies.
- The Chessmaster: At first, he required the assistance of Regal Kalvin. Then, after Kalvin died, he became more than sufficient in this regard.
- Collective Identity: Jason Druford is simply one of many Lord Eclipses. He however is more perfect for this than most, given Lord Eclipse is the only "real" identity he has.
- Dangerously Genre-Savvy: Heroes trying to escape through the airducts? Have Arlen Westlau use a spell that puts Deadly Gas up there, then seal them all shut until they're sure the gas is through.
- Hero says "Leave Him to Me!"? Eclipse says no way, and has his men start shooting at the rest of the heroes.
- Oh, what's that? the Anti-Magical Faction is falling apart at the seams? Best way to announce your resignation is to use a Mana-Accelerated Missile to murder your portion's boss and all his attendants.
- Darth Vader Clone: Lets see, black armor? Check. Tragic Villain? Check. Fallen Hero? Check. Evil Sounds Deep? Check. Uses a sword (granted, one made of fire)? Check
- And connected to one of the heroes in a very, very personal way? Also check.
- Deadpan Snarker: Due to how the mask makes his voice sound, its not immediately obvious. But when its off, he is very, very snarky after turning evil.
- "You are calm. You are the picture of serenity. You jump-rushed Future Matthew. You're the very picture of serenity, Westlau."
- Deal with the Devil: He made one with Kalvin to get an identity. Though subverted in that there was really nothing else he could do at that point.
- Disproportionate Retribution: Granted, Jason was not in a very good mental state after his Self-Made Orphan incident due to Kalvin's Mind Rape on him, but still, Percival had been kind to him while both were Knights of Prayer except for the scolding Percy gave Jason. This does not stop Jason from calling Percy a manipulative religious fascist and throwing him out a window.
- Don't Make Me Destroy You: "I like you, Matthew. I would rather you live in my world. Do not make me revoke that privilege."
- Drunk on the Dark Side: He initially stumbles around in Eclipse's armor after he finds out how damn powerful he is now, and acts very giddy. He does calm down, though, and these traits start to vanish.
- Dull Surprise: As PTSD hit him worse and worse, he started to show this. By the time Kalvin visited him, he barely reacted to Kalvin showing up dressed in Lord Eclipse's armor. He Got Better...and worse.
- Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Averted - Jason was a good guy once, so he comprehends good very well. He just consciously thinks his malevolent means will be justified by how his Strong World Plan will work out.
- Evil vs. Evil: Jason Druford is the latest of the Lord Eclipse conspiracy, and fights very savagely. His opponents in Book IV include internal elements of the Anti-Magical Faction, and really unpleasant mercenaries and spies. Essentially, its a case of "the only thing that can stop a bad guy with magic is an even worse guy with magic."
- Fallen Hero: Complete with a lot of symbolism and classic heroic tropes being treated much more differently when they are done from a villainous view point.
- Family-Unfriendly Death: Boiling his father alive, fire blasting his mother out a 10 story window (unclear what killed her, the fire or the fall), and cruelly giving a group of banking barons their "reward" for helping Elijah - a burning building, with enough smoke that they all asphyxiate.
- Five Bad Band
- Big Bad: Take a wild guess.
- The Dragon: Ian Grant - given power by a super-parasite that Varancain created, Ian can either appear as a human form, or his true nature, a writhing mass of tendrils, slug creatures, razor mouths, human bodies, and other matter. Ian is easily the most powerful of Jason's allies, and is their home base.
- Evil Genius: Arlen Westlau: The Dragon to the Eclipse Conspiracy as a whole, this crazed man is smarter than he seems.
- The Brute: Gigas, a terrifying creature whose power causes directional explosions whenever he hits someone or if they hit him. He is a towering behemoth with a One-Winged Angel form which resembles an Eldritch Centaur-creature with a scythe for an arm.
- The Dark Chick: Zachaia, who is still not sure who she is.
- From a Certain Point of View: He says three things that are technically lies, but also technically the truth: Jason Druford is dead (his identity is), Lord Eclipse is But One Man (they all have the same powers, goals and try to conform to the same personality), and The Mole is no longer affiliated. (Shane Calston cut himself free of both Eclipse and his family, and being that Matthew is not affiliated at this point with a proper side, Shane is thus no longer affiliated.)
- From Nobody to Nightmare: From poor, abused and neglected Jason Druford to an identity-lacking, trauma-filled husk, to Lord Eclipse and nothing but Lord Eclipse.
- Hero Killer: Killed Ostia, Zain Sarkhan and Devin in Book III, as the Lord Eclipse of the book while Kalvin was recuperating. He gets even worse in Book IV.
- Knight of Cerebus: Book III seemed at first to have a lighter tone, and (seemingly) the most hilarious Big Bad to date. Then Druford teleports in, wearing his black Eclipse battle armor, and everything goes to hell in a hand basket.
- Knight Templar: Genuinely believes everything he's doing is for the greater good.
- Lack of Empathy: Averted - if there was anything that was his problem throughout his life, it was that he overextended himself, and tried to be everyone's friend, even when those people outright detested him, until he finally just lost everything, including his identity.
- Laser-Guided Amnesia: It seems it starts to come undone, though its realistically depicted as that he cannot tell if his memories are real, or if they're simply manifestations of his inner mental illness.
- Legacy Character: While Kalvin is ill and recuperating from Book II's plot, he takes over. Though Matthew, by that time, saw enough of Lord Eclipse to deduce that "different mask, different guy."
- He fully takes over after Kalvin dies, just as well.
- Loss of Identity: He slowly loses who Jason Druford is during Book II. By III, he's fully lost any idea who he was...except now, he has decided he is Lord Eclipse.
- Malevolent Masked Man: Natch, comes with the Lord Eclipse identity.
- Manipulative Bastard: He certainly tries on Zachaia - thing is, she's a manipulative bitch and The Vamp, and so we're not entirely sure who is manipulating who.
- Mind Game Ship: He and Zachaia - he's manipulating her into giving him access to Gaean artifacts, and feeding her need for attention and relationships. She's trying to manipulate him into letting her in on the Eclipse Conspiracy's master plan and figuring out if it jives with her morality.
- Mind Rape: Kalvin pulls this on him when he's just thinking of simply traumatizing his parents. It prompts him into murdering them instead and later into attempting to murder Percival.
- Mind Screw: His fever dream as he accepts the mantle of Lord Eclipse. It starts with his parents as old as he is, then Parallaxus eats them and delivers a speech on what he just agreed to, completely OOC for Parallaxus. Then Jason is shown killing everyone else in the prison on Kalvin's orders as "training" except that was a hallucination too. He then wakes up in Lord Eclipse's armor, six miles away.
- Mr. Fanservice: A subversion - Jason is quite muscular, has a handsome face...but he's Covered with Scars below the neck, he's mentally unstable, and he spends most of his time in a suit of black armor, with a Nightmare Face of a helmet.
- Nightmare Fuel: In universe, Jason Druford's Fire Lance spell - its effect is basically it burns someone horribly from the inside before proceeding outward - a horrible, horrible way to die. And Matthew had to witness it happen to someone just as he thought they were out of the line of fire, because this is a very long range spell.
- No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Lord Eclipse!Jason versus his father. His father somehow had the bright idea to go ahead and attack Lord Eclipse with nothing but a hand gun. Jason proceeds to beat the life out of his father, including burning out his eyes. This goes on for five pages, each one progressively worse.
- Order vs. Chaos: Jason and The Eclipse Conspiracy represent the Chaos portion.
- Pre-Mortem One-Liner: To Mectonis; "Die, you self righteous autocrat."
- To a businessman, who just said he was promised a handsome reward; "I am your reward - being that I am handsome, I still qualify."
- Protagonist Journey to Villain: Not quite protagonist, but he goes from barely a villain at all to the Big Bad over time.
- Rule of Two: It is through Jason's Point of View Chapters that we learn that there is such a rule in the Eclipse Conspiracy - whenever they are on the move in one country, there must be only 2 Eclipses in action - the elder, the teacher, and the younger, the student. Jason, at first, is the Student to Kalvin's Teacher. Then he gets to play the Teacher to Ryan Erris in Book V.
- Self-Made Orphan: Did away with his father, following shortly after by Neck Snapping his mother.
- That Man Is Dead: "Jason Druford died in prison. I am Lord Eclipse." he has a double standard with this trope in regards to Matthew - he doesn't mind if Matthew calls him Jason.
- Took a Level in Badass: Goes from a weak, young traumatized amnesiac to the Physical God Lord Eclipse, though he required a large amount of training to get him acclimated to being a Herald of Parallaxus.
- Unholy Matrimony: He and Zachaia are apparently an item. Apparently. Nobody knows what's going on between those two.
- Unstoppable Rage: Jason has always had rage problems. In fact, the fight that destroyed his Spell Core was started because he had beef with the guy he was fighting.
- Even as Lord Eclipse, its clear he still has unresolved issues. Just look at how he dispatched his father.
- Villainous Crush: His crush on Zachaia is played as being deeply unhealthy for both of them. He tries to use any injury or near death experience she suffers as an excuse to get carte blanche to brutally dispatch her enemies, and she sees absolutely nothing wrong with having sex with a barely conscious, drunk Jason.
edited 18th Jun '14 3:52:53 PM by NickTheSwing
I remember your "Lord Eclipse" villain from before. It's funny that I don't really remember much about him except for his Collective Identity/ Legacy Character status, so it's interesting to go in-depth about one of his "incarnations". That out of the way, I actually like Jason and despite the awful things he's done. I can feel deeply for his terrible upbringing and I have to admit I cheered internally when I read what he did to his parents. Bastards deserved it, ugh. He really does inspire terror though; his ability to see through the usual cliches (your anti-Leave Him to Me! example being the one that stands out the most) truly sets him apart from a lot of other characters you've created.
Clockwalkers villain, once again. I just can't stop posting these . @Nick The Swing, she actually has an oddly similar background to your particular Lord Eclipse version above .
- Name: Sienna Marzio
- Age: 54
- Appearance: Sienna is a tall, slender woman, about 5'10. She possesses wide-spaced dark brown eyes and long platinum blonde hair. Though middle-aged, she appears—at least at first glance—to be several years younger than her actual age, and dresses lavishly in expensive and expertly tailored clothing.
- Personality: Sienna relishes her status as a member of the Four Noble Families and the Inner Circle that controls Ylati behind the scenes. She is an extremely selfish individual who values her own pleasure above the well-being of others, including her own family. Though she has a husband and son, Sienna is infamous for her string of lovers over the years. She is manipulative and selfish, telling her lovers the dark secrets of the country to make them feel special, only to have them silenced or imprisoned when she grows bored with them. Sienna is heavily occupied with her appearance and fears old age more for its toll on her beauty than for the obvious reason. Like her predecessors in the group, she is devoted and entranced by the plan to sacrifice the nuriel race to transform humans into magical "perfect beings", but doesn't understand that the Inner Circle is being manipulated by Azelas. Sienna views humans who obstruct the plan as traitors, but is genuinely confused why anyone on the side of humankind would want to deny their race such power.
- Abilities: Sienna is a capable administrator and ran the West Quadrant of Ylati for over twenty nine years without any incident. She is a skilled liar and public speaker and can convince people of her sincerity with nearly perfect rhetoric. She has minimal skill with knives, and carries a single dagger in a hidden scabbard. The blade is poisoned to make up for her lack of skill with the weapon. As the overseer of the West Quadrant, Sienna has the Peace Officers of every city and town in its territory under her indirect command, and can order aid from the Vision, Ylati's feared Secret Police.
- Weaknesses: Sienna is a short-sighted slave to her whims and often makes impulsive decisions. Her success with tricking people and making them believe what she wants has made her arrogant and thus she is literally unable to tell if someone is merely playing along with her act to spring a trap for her.
- Goals: Sienna plans to become perfect and immortal after the sacrifice, magically holding off the threat of old age, and worshiped for her unparalleled beauty and charm by hordes of not-quite-as-perfected humans within her territory.
- Motivation: She was told she was beautiful her entire life, and has seen the opportunities and perks her physical appearance and social status have given her. Having it taken away by something outside her control like time fills her with terror and panic. Her personality is the result of years of psychologically abusive and rigid training by her father as he groomed her for his seat in the Inner Circle.
- Role In the Story: Sienna acts as the Mouth of Sauron to the Inner Circle—even though she is a full-fledged member, she serves as the conspiracy's "face" when the conflict with it begins. She is also the first member of the Inner Circle to die in-story, as a result of her above-mentioned weaknesses.
- Backstory: Sienna Marzio was born to Andros and Niccia Marzio in the West Quadrant capital city of Aref. From the very beginning Sienna's parents impressed upon her the responsibility she shared as a member of the Four Noble Families and her father's only heir. She was taught—no, compelled—to act in a way that they felt befitted her status. Sienna's daily life was closely monitored by her parents, but especially her father. Andros created a schedule around which she would eat, sleep, learn her lessons, and have minimal relaxation time before starting all over again. Any deviation from this schedule was punished harshly. The rigid nature of her life and the constant criticism of her seemingly every movement ate away at Sienna and though she put on an outwardly appropriate and friendly face, she had no real friends and often felt isolated from her peers, as they had comparatively freer lives, even though they too were upper class. When Sienna hit her teens this way of life became unbearable. Even her slowly blooming interest in the opposite sex was reigned in, her father tongue-lashing her on her "whore's wandering eyes" and declaring that her mate would be chosen from the upper class by her parents. At long last, when Sienna was in her mid-twenties, she was married off to a man from a wealthy merchant family and soon gave birth to a son, Paolo. Shortly after recovery from that, she was introduced to the Inner Circle as a "junior" member, and when her father fell ill and died one winter, she took his seat.
- Relevant Tropes
- Abusive Parents: Zig-zagged. Sienna's father Andros controlled every aspect of his daughter's life from the time she was three years old, holding it up to a microscope and showering her with insults if it didn't fit his personal standards. Sienna turned to her mother, Niccia, for help, but she would report her complaints back to her father and Sienna would suffer for it. Despite their behavior, their intentions were not abusive at all. Andros and Niccia were trying as best they could to instill what they thought was a sense of propriety and dignity in their daughter and actually loved her very much. However what they did was produce a very damaged adult.
- Sienna is also abusive to her son Paolo, though it's far more passive. Throughout his childhood—and even at the present—she shamelessly flirted with and slept with dozens of men, not caring if he knew about it or not and showed nothing but indifference or contempt towards his father, leaving him with a strange and fractured image of his family.
- Faux Affably Evil: Sienna is outwardly a polite and charming noblewoman with a smile always at the ready, but in reality she is devoid of empathy and only cares about what interests her at the moment. When one of the undead dragons the Inner Circle is using to create Human-Aligned Ley Lines beneath Ylati escapes to the surface and kills a large amount of Exterior Guard, she arrives on site with a legion of Vision troops and orders the Guard to reseal it without investigation. Sienna then claims to share their pain and puts on quite a convincing act of being just as distraught as they are over the deaths. However she later confides to Marco Zaccheria (who she thinks is on his way to being her latest lover) that she resents having to "justify" her commands and finds it demeaning to explain herself to them.
- She also responds to the undead dragon's pleas to let it rest in peace by politely, almost cheerfully threatening that Azelas won't be pleased with the delay caused by it coming up to the surface and ceasing to manipulate Ley Lines, scaring it back to work.
- Arranged Marriage: Her marriage to her husband was entirely handled by her parents and his without the two of them ever really getting to meet beyond a few highly supervised "dates". Sienna alternates between indifference for him and barely disguised contempt, though this latter emotion might be misdirected resentment for having him forced on her in order to satisfy her parents and produce an heir. By the time of Clockwalkers, they rarely see each other or even speak, both having their own interests and lives.
- Arch-Enemy: Sienna herself isn't Marco Zaccheria's true enemy, but she is a member of the Ancient Conspiracy that ordered his father's assassination when he discovered the existence of other civilizations beyond the known three and attempted communication with them. That said, she is the one who personally ensured that his father was killed, so Marco strikes her down to avenge his death, and to progress the protagonists' plans.
- Aristocrats Are Evil: But of course.
- Blatant Lies: She gives a Rousing Speech to the Exterior Guard soldiers, claiming that the undead dragon was an escaped test subject from a research program attempting to control dragons for war against La Résistance and that studying it will make the Kingdom safer. She then calls the soldiers slaughtered during its agonized rampage "sacrifices" and assures them that she feels their sorrow over the lives lost.
- Black Widow: Sienna has a nasty habit of telling her lovers Ylati's secrets such as the Inner Circle, the plot to sacrifice the nuriel, and the brainwashed children playing the parts of king and queen. She does this when it feels like they are drifting away from her, to make them feel as if they are somehow "special"—as she claims they deserve to know the truth and that she loves them too much to conceal it from them. Then, when she is bored of them or finds someone more attractive she has them killed or just shipped off to some hole where they will never see the light of day again. It should be noted that she doesn't do this to all of her lovers, but a good deal have gone missing after dating her. Marco calls her out on this behavior post-mortem.
- Blondes Are Evil.
- Broken Pedestal: To Drasil in a way. Before everything in his life went to hell in a hand-basket he saw simply saw Sienna Marzio as the overseer of the West Quadrant where his hometown Cabazzi was located, and a benevolent ruler who maintained the prosperity of their land. During her visit to the East Quadrant's Compass Wall, he overhears her attempted temptation of Brigadier General Zaccheria, it hits home just how screwed up things are and have always been.
- Co-Dragons: The members of the Inner Circle act like this to Azelas along with Gweyna and Araceli, though in truth the conspiracy is more a Big Bad Wannabe than anything else.
- Complete Monster: Sienna cares nothing for those she is in charge of protecting and providing for, she dismisses the deaths of innocent people as irritations, and she feels literally nothing at the thought of condemning millions of sentient beings to an And I Must Scream situation as their bodies are broken down into raw Life Energy and bound to the humans of Ylati. Worse, this has nothing to do with Fantastic Racism in her mind; it's so that she can be powerful and beautiful forever. Furthermore Sienna implies she would have no problem doing it to other humans if the circumstances called for it. Sienna is responsible for ruining or ending the lives of an untold number of men, some of them below the legal age of consent when she took them. Her one redeeming feature is that she has a slight soft-spot for her son, but even then she barely bothers with him and only trained him in the ways of the Inner Circle because it was expected of her.
- The Corrupter: She tries and fails to be this to Marco, offering him a chance to be both her consort, and a ranking officer of the Vision, which are essentially the Inner Circle's foot-soldiers, knowledgeable about the plan. Though Marco eagerly accepts, swayed by the thought of the power, knowledge and wealth he will acquire with the Head of one of the Four Noble Families as his lover and sponsor, it turns out to be a ruse so he could mine information from her.
- Even Evil Has Loved Ones: She does somewhat care for her son Paolo, at least as much as someone like her is able to. In her final moments, she begs her killer for mercy, stating that her son will be devastated at being deprived of his mother, though it's unclear if this was genuine or just her grasping at straws.
- Evil Gloating: When Marco is asking her about the plan in detail, trying to weedle as much information about the Ancient Conspiracy as possible, she responds:
- "No need for you to worry about that right now. Just focus on all the things you're going to do when magic comes back to our world." (ruffles his hair and smiles.) "It's finally going to happen. I-it's really happening. After so long, after so many of our ancestors died with it unfulfilled, we are the ones who get to inherit the fruits of their labor and with only a minimal amount of effort on our part." (Seeing the look on his face.) "What's with that look? We're all the chosen ones, Marco. The nuriel race was chosen to pave the road for human greatness; it's their destiny. And of course we humans will ascend like The Founder chose us to do. You'll come to understand that it's all perfectly natural."
- Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: She genuinely doesn't understand why anyone human would attempt to stand in the way of the Inner Circle. Selfish as she is, she understands that their end goal is to grant immortal bodies and magical powers to all of humankind, and so she imagines that the beneficiaries of that plan won't care how it is done, and even if they do, they will be willing to stomach it in exchange for something so much greater. Which adds an extra layer of confusion and horror to Marco's attack on her. To her last breath, Sienna tried to understand what motive was driving him other than obvious revenge.
- Genre Blind: Marco Zaccheria is a military man feared for his prowess with a sword, not an actor. At best he seemed overly eager to get into her good graces and even then he was almost rigid with tension at meeting a person connected with the conspiracy that killed his father. Yet Sienna flirted shamelessly with him and by the end of two days at the Eastern Compass Wall had decided to take him as a lover and show him the secrets of Ylati. Slightly justified as Sienna was so arrogant that she couldn't imagine him not wanting to be with someone so high up in the Kingdom's social structure and in possession of such guarded knowledge.
- Have You Told Anyone Else?: She asked Alexio Zaccheria something along the lines of this question when he told her about picking up a communication in another language on his equipment and realizing that it was a language that was neither human, dwarven, or elven and that the origin of the signal lay on their continent, yet somewhere beyond the Miasma. Unfortunately he answered no to this question—though he had told his young son Marco, who was there when the communication happened—and he was killed because of it.
- Immortality Seeker: Sienna hungers for the immortality and limitless magical power that will supposedly be granted to the human race. What distinguishes her from the "dark elf" Gweyna, the only person who seems to know Azelas' true goals, is that Sienna covets eternal life in order to preserve her beauty forever. The whole "freedom from the terror of death" thing is secondary to her.
- It's All About Me: After the Bronze Dragon utterly annihilates the town of Cabazzi, slaughtering hundreds of humans and injuring countless more, as well as causing untold millions of onks in property damage, Sienna bitterly complains that the massacre impinges on her record of keeping the West free of any sort of major problem during her rule.
- Never Found the Body: Marco invokes this when he throws her body over the edge of the Wall so that it falls into the Miasma infesting the lands on the other side and thus hiding it from human discovery forever. His men volunteered to help with the task, but he refused to let them even touch the corpse, because he knew he would be targeted for killing a member of the Four Noble Families and didn't want them involved in any way. Despite the body remaining undiscovered, Marco makes it all too clear she is dead and outright brags about the murder to Queen Araceli, as part of his Xanatos Gambit to get close to the remaining members of the conspiracy and take his revenge on them as well.
- Poisoned Weapons: Her single dagger is just thin enough to slide between someone's ribs and sturdy enough not to break while doing so. Its handle is actually a vial made of thick glass and wrapped in leather. It secretes a potent toxin onto the blade through a small channel and allows her to poison anyone stabbed with the weapon.
- Pretty in Mink: Sienna wears a long white fur coat while traveling to the Eastern Compass Wall's interior because it is frigid due to its proximity to the Miasma on the other side.
- Psychopathic Womanchild: Type III. She is clearly an adult with a great deal of power and prestige...however, when looking at her behavior, it is clear that she is a stunted teenager in an adult's body, acting out in ways that she was never allowed to do when under her the thumb of her tyrannical parents. Even her end goal, to have endless beauty and power and have people basically fall at her feet is painfully selfish and childish, especially when compared to the goals of the other Inner Circle members, like stopping a famine or retaking land.
- Rich Bitch
- Slashed Throat: Marco delivers this as his coup de grace after he slashes her across the stomach, stabs her in the chest and cuts off her hand as she was about to raise her poison dagger in a failed defense attempt.
- The Smurfette Principle: Sienna is the only female member of the Inner Circle at the moment, though this is merely coincidence. Because membership is based solely on family lineage with the Family Heads of each of the Four Noble Families being members, the gender content of the group changes constantly with each generation. There was one moment when there were all males, all females and one time when there was only one male.
- The Singularity: In many ways the Inner Circle's plan to harvest the nuriel's Life Energy and use it to turn humans into godlike magical beings is a sort of enchanted version of this.
- Too Dumb to Live: She boasts that ordering and overseeing the successful assassination of Marco's father was her first action in the Inner Circle and how it proved that she was a competent and capable replacement for her own father. She says this to Marco. Worse she says it AFTER he told her of his knowledge that some faction within the Ylatain government had murdered his father, and of the awful effect the death had on his family. So the fact that he kills her shortly afterwards is almost natural selection at work.
- Token Evil Teammate: Remember Fredrigo Whitmyer?
If he's the least malevolent, then she is the most.
- Unwitting Pawn: Sienna and all the members of the Inner Circle have been these for Azelas, stretching back to their ancestors, the Four Heroes seven thousand years ago. Azelas needs the humans to keep the nuriel penned in within Ylati's borders long enough for them to procreate and increase their numbers so that there will be enough raw magical energy when the ritual is over, and it needed the humans to increase the habitable land to support that growth. The Inner Circle know all of this, but don't know that Azelas is planning to "eat" the raw energy to forge a soul for itself and leave the human race with nothing but blood on its hands.
- She also is this to Marco Zaccheria and by extension Helios, spilling information that should never have seen the outside of the Inner Circle's control. In this case, like many examples of this trope she falls prey to You Have Out Lived Your Usefulness with a dash of You Killed My Father.
- The Vamp
- Vain Sorceress: She aspires to be one of these.
- Villain with Good Publicity: This applies to all members of the Inner Circle, and Sienna is no exception. She is the overseer of the West Quadrant and has led its people into an age of prosperity and plenty while the other Quadrants have had their fair share of troubles such as the South's continuous fifty-year famine and the North being overrun by Helios.
- Villainous Breakdown: Sienna becomes hysterical when Marco confronts her with his swords drawn and pleads with him to remember that he is now a trusted member of the operation. When that fails, she frantically demands to know why he would try to stand in the way of humanity’s progress, and orders him to thank her and the Inner Circle for all their hard work in setting up the seven thousand year plan to elevate the human race. When Marco still doesn't answer and continues in for the kill, she tries to stab him with her poisoned dagger, screeching that she can’t allow him to leave her son motherless. It’s interesting to note that she only saved this one for last, as if it was a desperate afterthought.
edited 2nd Jul '14 5:49:25 PM by Swordofknowledge
Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake. — Edgar Walllace
Those Clockwalkers dragons I was talking about.
edited 31st May '14 7:24:07 PM by Swordofknowledge
Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake. — Edgar Walllace