Inconspicuous Immortal

All in all, immortals are a rather flamboyant lot. Even if they aren't gods, even if they're genuinely trying to pose as mortals and remain under the aegis of a Masquerade, they frequently insist on making the biggest possible spectacle of themselves as possible. It's frequent for them to blossom in the spotlight as some kind of paragon — the bravest warrior, the cleverest scientist, the richest plutocrat, the most decadent hedonist; many will obsessively fill their days with non-stop adventure and drama, often expend ridiculous amounts of effort in loudly proclaiming how awesome or miserable immortality is.

However, a few immortals prefer not to showboat or seek adventure. They take mundane, unglamorous jobs, live simply, raise families where they can, and do their best to fit in. If they have wealth, contacts, or spectacular resources, they usually keep them on the down-low; the same goes for any additional powers they may have on hand. They may not even have any strong feelings towards their status: if they do believe their undying natures to be a curse, they rarely speak up about it, and if they believe otherwise, they will regard eternity with a mixture of apathy and acceptance. And in the event that their immortality is discovered by their loved ones — either due to a Cover-Blowing Superpower or simply because the character never ages — they opt to avoid unnecessary dramas by uprooting themselves and disappearing as quickly as possible... if they can.

In many cases, this shyness will be due to the character being a Retired Badass or even a Retired Monster who wants to avoid any further adventures; however, it can also be due to them being Obsessively Normal, or afraid of being exposed for what they are, or unwilling to risk the lives of their friends and loved ones... and on occasion, it may simply be because they're a Shrinking Violet that honestly doesn't want that much excitement in their lives.

As such, the plot will often feature these immortals being forced to give up their simple lives and accept the call of adventure — often with a lot of kicking and screaming along the way.

Compare Almighty Janitor. May overlap with All-Powerful Bystander in some extreme cases.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Durarara!!: Downplayed. Celty is a dullahan, a headless Irish fairy and can heal from even fatal damage. She's the Only Sane Man in the entire cast and lives with Shinra in an apartment while working as a courier, though her clients tend to be sketchy. Outside of her quest for her missing head, Celty doesn't typically go looking for adventure and usually has to be forced into becoming involved in the random chaos around her. When said chaos resolves, she likes to go back to her routine.
• Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba: Tamayo is a demon, but unlike the other demons who often lead extravagant, immortal lives and gleefully embrace their bloodthirst, she has no such wish, buying blood to sustain herself from willing donors. She lives quietly with Yushiro while working as a doctor, and the younger demon uses his powers to keep them hidden from Muzan. However, Tamayo eventually starts working to create a cure for demons to aid the Demon Slayer Corps and goes down fighting Muzan.
• Fullmetal Alchemist:
  • Greed is the only homunculus to not partake in his family's scheme for Amestris, having cut ties and ran away long ago. He lives in Dublith with a gang of chimeras posing as humans, and while he wants to own the whole world, has a far more normal life than any of the other homunculi. It all comes to an end when his kidnapping of Al results in Wrath finding Greed and killing him and the chimeras.
  • Selim Bradley is Führer Bradley's son and appears to be just a normal kid with no knowledge of his father's true nature as Wrath. It turns out that he's really the oldest homunculus, Pride, who is actively helping Father and has repeated this trick many times over his very long life with numerous families.

Comic Books

• In Astro City, Tillie Armstrong stopped aging when her Reality Warper powers kicked in during World War II. Because her powers make her a Weirdness Magnet, she has to keep a low profile, and thus works in whatever menial jobs she can get as an apparent child, sometimes bartering for food and board.
• The Sandman:
  • In "Brief Lives" The more "human" immortals among the cast prefer to live simple lives, even if they were born before the Earth first congealed from gas and dust. One of them, Bernie Capax, spends his current lifestyle as a rather bland-looking lawyer, carefully hiding the fact that he's old enough to remember a time when mammoths walked the Earth and that he possesses a safety deposit box full of fake passports just in case he has to move on in a hurry.
  • One of the more prominent immortals is Hob Gadling, a.k.a. "Old Hob", who became immortal thanks to a conversation with Dream. Though he spent most of his early centuries as a mercenary, a wealthy merchant, and at one point even a slave trader (which he later bitterly regrets), he prefers to live a comparatively unassuming life in the modern era — still enjoying the simple pleasures of a drink at the pub and a day out with his current girlfriend. The last time he got any serious attention was during the 18th century, when an ancestress of John Constantine, Lady Johanna Constantine, figured out the time and place of his meet-up with Dream every century, noting that rumours had developed of the Devil (Dream) and the Wandering Jew (Gadling) meeting up; since then, Gadling has flown completely under the radar.
  • The ancient witch Thessaly has spent most of her millennia of existence hiding out in various forms of academia; in modern times, her usual guise is that of a transfer student. Justified in that, as the last of the Thessalian witches, she has a lot of people who want her dead and thus she has to keep a low profile.
• Vampirella (2014): The Accursed are a trio of people whose sins were so vile that they were cursed to wander the Earth as immortals for the remainder of all time. Each of them have relatively mundane lives in the present day; Medea is the owner of an airline and sometimes dresses as a flight attendant, Dr. Faustus lends his services as a medical doctor wherever he goes (while secretly finding ways to spread a world-ending virus), and Cain is a farmer. This is justified by the fact that it makes it much more difficult for the Kabal to track them down.

Fan Works

• Child of the Storm:
  • The Flamels stuck with academia, magical and scientific, before moving to work for SHIELD as researchers.
  • Doctor Strange is a Downplayed example. He's always manipulating and nudging events, but so subtly that it's rarely noticed and he rarely ends up in direct fights. Indeed, the simple fact is that he's rarely seen for decades, even centuries, at a time, and his behaviour during the time of the story is very out of character.
  • The Lady Knight purposefully dropped off the radar to a certain extent in the 16th century, then more or less entirely a century later. While her lives following that weren't exactly inconspicuous, they were relatively discreet and avoiding her previous pattern of legendary swordswoman and Eternal Hero, throwing others who might be looking for her off the scent. Since even Loki and Heimdall couldn't track her down when she decided to hide, she was probably onto something.
• Daughter Nature: Luz chooses to stay in the Boiling Isles because it easily allows for this trope. Unlike on Earth, where she can't use her godly abilities out of fear of discovery, here she can freely use her powers since most people will just assume its magic. In addition, while she has no qualms telling the island's residents that she's a god if they ask, she finds that everyone just assumes she's a normal human if they don't witness her performing more advanced techniques like shapeshifting, due to witches having little frame of reference for what humans should be capable of.
• The Infinite Loops: Many of the loopers are content to simply live whatever lives the loops give them, even if they aren't as glamorous as their Baseline lives. Even in their baselines, most loopers tend to not rock the boat too much, simply content to live how they always have.
• In a Harry Potter fanfic The Quiet Place, Harry and his friends have become immortal after defeating Voldemort, and are now living quietly in a small village... enchanted to draw any future Death Eater wannabes to attack it first, resulting in a massive case of Mugging the Monster.
• In Resonance Days, everyone is already dead and immortal, so the trope doesn't really fit, but most characters spend their eternal lifetimes pretty unremarkably. Mami and Charlotte harvest seaweed, Oktavia is offered a job as a music instructor, etcetera.

Films — Live-Action

• Eternals: Most of the Eternals took up comparatively ordinary lives among humans after the Deviants were wiped out; those of them who hew closest to this trope include Sersi, who is working as a museum curator, and Phastos, who has settled down into a roughly middle-class life and gotten married. This descent into obscurity has worked so well that in modern times, the Eternals aren't even known of... until the Deviants come back, stronger than ever before.
• By the start of Highlander, Connor MacLeod is enjoying a sedate lifestyle as an antiques dealer, having apparently given up on an active military career after World War II. In sharp contrast to the more flamboyant immortals like Ramirez and the Kurgan, he prefers to stay out of the spotlight unless he has no other choice; of course, he can't avoid the Gathering or the battle for the Prize, but Connor still prefers to let the fight come to him rather than actively seeking out violence. The exception to this rule is when the Kurgan kidnaps Brenda, prompting Connor to go on the offensive for once.
• He Never Died: Jack is thousands of years old, sufficiently so that he either was the inspiration for Cain in The Bible or he is Cain himself. For thousands of years he lived every conceivable life, raising many families, committing acts unspeakably violent and evil, and amassing quite a wealth of artifacts and trinkets from his exploits. However, after such an insanely long life, Jack has grown completely jaded with existence, and now lives a solitary lifestyle revolving around acquiring the blood he needs to survive and regularly attending Bingo. Jack's interactions with others are minimal and curt, and it is only when armed thugs actively begin harassing him (and not even his contacts, whose torture and murders he really doesn't care a thing about) that he gains any kind of motivation to do something outside of his usual routine. This trope is on full display when he describes his various past employments, attempting to do so in as bland a manner as possible to deflect the fact that he has clearly had more lifetime and thus careers than any mortal human would conceivably be capable of.
  Jack: I was kind of a bodyguard for a while. Then I sold antiques, which probably made me the most. I owned a few businesses. Uh, construction for a while. Truck driver. Teacher for a while, history most of the time. Military took up a good part of my life. Manager for a whole slew of businesses. Landscaper. Fisherman. I bootlegged for a while. Wreck diver. Miner for coal, silver, gold. Stunt man for movies for a while. Nurse. I was a medic for a while. That's when I was in the military. Cook. Prison. There's a good amount of prison in there. Professional gambler. Horse breeder. Potter, I made pots for a while. Tinsmith, then a blacksmith. Retail for almost everything. Mechanic...
• The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus: The movie revolves around the titular Dr. Parnassus, an immortal who lives a lowly life as the head of a magical travelling theatre called the Imaginarium. His immortality is the result of a wager with the Devil to prove that imagination can save more souls than the Devil can damn through corruption, but after finding exactly one moment of success followed by centuries of failure, Parnassus has become so disillusioned with the whole thing that he can barely give a damn about his mission; he just wants to live a normal life with his daughter Valentina, and can only go through the motions of running the Imaginarium on the few evenings when he isn't completely inebriated. For good measure, his financial situation is so dire that he's ended up homeless more than once.
• John Oldman of The Man from Earth began life as a simple hunter-gatherer in the upper Paleolithic and has preferred to remain under the radar ever since, taking relatively unspectacular jobs, avoiding fame, and vanishing into the undergrowth whenever his inability to age becomes impossible to ignore. His latest career is that of a simple college professor, and even as apparently the youngest man on the faculty, he prefers to let his more flamboyant colleagues take the spotlight. As such, the drama kicks off when, just before leaving his current life, he decides to confess everything to them. He also admits that the one time he became famous was when he tried to bring Buddhism to the Middle East and accidentally became Jesus in the process, which didn't end well.
• Justice League (2017): Diana, Princess of Themyscira, still under her nom-de-voyage "Diana Prince", works as an artifact restorer at the Paris museum The Louvre. After returning to work following the foiling of an assault on the Bank of London, she was asked by a colleague what she had done over the weekend. She replied she just stayed home and read.

Literature

• Most of the old gods in American Gods have reverted to a much simpler kind of life in America without believers to empower them; while they still retain their immortality and a few powers here and there, they seem fairly content to get by peacefully without bucking the status quo — at least until Mr Wednesday begins inspiring them to war against the New Gods. Among other things, Czernabog is working at a meatpacking plant, Anubis and Thoth run a small-town funeral parlour, and a Djinn can be found working as a taxi driver.
• Discworld:
  • Albert was once a legendary wizard by the name of Alberto Malich who attempted to attain immortality by forcing Death to keep away from him — only to end up accidentally sending himself to Death's domain instead. By the events of Mort, Albert has given up all his old ambitions and is perfectly content to spend eternity as the Grim Reaper's humble manservant, coming across as nothing more than a crusty old geezer to Death's guests — most of whom have no idea who he really is.
  • In Thief of Time, it's revealed that dependable milkman Ronnie Soak is actually Kaos, the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse. Having left the team before they became famous, Kaos has no desire to continue his usual antics or duties even after eons of retirement and prefers to use his otherworldly nature simply to become a supernaturally reliable milkman.
• The Undying from The Dalemark Quartet may be immortals descended directly from their creator god The One, but while they may act as rulers or magicians in their younger days, they tend to lead lower-profile lives later on, as weaver, museum curator, or just The Drifter.
• The Kalachakra of The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August possess Born-Again Immortality by way of "Groundhog Day" Loop; while many of them live large and devote themselves to extravagant lives of adventure, hedonism, philosophy, or scientific research, others are more than happy to spend entire lifetimes on a perfectly mundane existence. Harry himself has taken this path more than once, abandoning a decadent period of "wine, women, and song" in favour of becoming a labourer in Jerusalem. Harry also spends an entire lifetime as an unassuming journalist, simply in order to lull Vincent into believing that he successfully erased Harry's memories during their previous encounter.
• Good Omens: the angel Aziraphale, previously one of the guards of Eden, largely enjoys the quiet life of an antique bookstore owner, occasionally meeting up with his Friendly Enemy Crowley for lunch - and occasionally performing a blessing or two on the orders of his superiors. Crowley's day job is unspecified, assuming he has one, but despite being a demon - who are prone to being Card-Carrying Villain-types who consider it a point of professional pride to spread sin and corruption - he also tends to stay under the radar.
• In the story "Grotto of the Dancing Deer" by Clifford Simak, Luis (the prehistoric painter of the titular deer) explains to the modern-day protagonist that his secret to surviving as The Ageless is to be inconspicuous, as well as thick-skinned and a Dirty Coward.
• In Gene Doucette's Immortal novel series, main character Adam has been alive for over sixty thousand years, and has spent the overwhelming majority of that time staying under the radar — mainly because his immortality is restricted to agelessness and poison immunity. As such, while he's had some extravagant experiences in the past and actually maintains a very extensive private fortune, he prefers not to use his wealth or make a spectacle of himself unless he has no other choice. By the start of the novel, he's a homeless drunkard who enjoys seeking out frat parties in the hopes of scoring free booze.
• I've Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level:
  • Azusa spends 300 years living her Slow Life Fantasy as an unaging but humble witch and village healer. When it comes out that she's actually incredibly powerful, her main concern is that her reputation will disrupt her quiet life.
  • Eno lives as a Solitary Sorceress in a hard-to-find cave for over a century because she thinks it's traditional for witches. When Azusa points out that she's made herself incredibly lonely for no good reason, she moves into town and starts promoting her business.
• The Lord of the Rings: Tom Bombadil is an utterly mysterious... person who was old even before the Elves arrived and may have even been there before the world itself was created. He can banish Barrow-Wights merely by song alone and The One Ring has absolutely no effect on him whatsoever. (Which, ironically, makes him unsuitable for embarking on the quest to destroy the Ring as he would innocently forget about the Ring and Sauron would still exist.) As it is, he is perfectly content with picking flowers, riding his pony, enjoying good food, singing, and entertaining travellers.
• The Malloreon: Whereas most immortal sorcerers are Living Legends and divine agents who shape the course of history, Senji the alchemist became one by accident and settled right back down to his academic research for millennia. His colleagues quickly became Fantastically Indifferent — not least because he defenestrated a man who tried to stress-test his immortality.
• Geneviève Dieudonné in the works of Kim Newman. Before the Anno Dracula setting became The Unmasqued World, she was keeping her head down and trying to not be someone people would notice. Even after she was able to openly be a vampire, she never makes a big deal out of being an Elder more powerful than Dracula unless she absolutely has to. In the Diogenes Club setting, she's just trying to make a living (so to speak) as a doctor and resents being hauled into Diogenes business.
• Tuck Everlasting: The Tuck family unknowingly drank from an Immortality Inducing spring, then settled into their home in the woods to live quietly and avoid attention. They have mixed feelings about their immortality and don't want the secret to get out.

Live-Action TV

• Babylon 5: While most of the "First Ones" either left the galaxy or manipulated the younger races, one — Lorien — being stayed behind in hiding. Lorien is so old that he claims to be one of the first (if not THE first) sentient beings in the galaxy, and was living in self-imposed exile on Z'ha'dum when Captain Sheridan found him; the Shadows knew of his presence, but Lorien wanted nothing to do with them. However, when Lorien meets and saves Sheridan, he decides to end his exile and become a Greater-Scope Paragon — but only to aid the Army of Light and end the war, after which he convinces the older races to exit the galaxy, leaves with them, and becomes Shrouded in Myth.
• Zigzagged in Bewitched. It's unclear if mages (who, in this series, are an entirely separate species from mortals) actually can die or just age extremely slowly, but in either event, they've been walking among humans for thousands upon thousands of years, given that Endora mentions spending time with Julius Caesar. While some witches and warlocks, like Endora and Uncle Arthur, love to dress and act flamboyantly from time to time, the majority seem to be quite content spending their time in low-key jobs and keeping out of the spotlight. It helps that they're trying to maintain The Masquerade and fear persecution from mortals.
  • Samantha, the Cute Witch protagonist, is perfectly happy living as a "normal" mortal housewife in a suburban neighborhood, though she often can't resist using a little magical interference to help people or solve problems.
  • Aunt Clara, Samantha's loving but absent-minded great-great aunt, was a handmaiden to Queen Victoria in her prime.
  • Cousin Serena, being a Hot Witch, likes to dress in the latest fashions of the day and go to parties, but she never draws any more attention to herself than the average "mod girl" of the 1960s.
• Dr. Henry Morgan in Forever (2014) lives a quiet life, in the past mostly as a medical doctor, currently as a medical examiner for the Office of Chief Medical Examiner of the City of New York. He is shy of publicity (especially after a newspaper article led to his now-elderly first wife finding him, with disastrous consequences) and although he has a reputation of being a quirky know-it-all who's a bit creepy, he generally avoids interacting with mortals more than he has to, aside from his son Abraham and, for forty years, his wife Abigail. If someone from his past recognizes him or someone hints they've learned his secret, it's enough to send him moving to another continent until he outlives the danger. He gradually gets better about this during the series.
• As with the film, many immortals in Highlander prefer a relatively inconspicuous lifestyle in the twentieth century. Methos, however, takes this to a whole new level: the oldest immortal on Earth at over five thousand years of age, he's long since retired from his violent lifestyle and is now making a living as a historian allied with the Watchers — allowing him the opportunity to ensure that nobody ever picks up his trail... and it's worked so well that even Duncan is stunned when he realizes that the shy academic who just offered him a beer is Methos himself. For good measure, Methos prefers not to fight at all if he can help it, preferring to either avoid notice altogether or resort to dirty tricks.
• Star Trek:
  • The Original Series: Flint of "Requiem for Methuselah" was born 6,000 years ago and played the part of numerous famous historical figures. However, in Captain Kirk's time, he's long since left the spotlight: essentially, he's an interstellar Hikikomori who bought a remote uninhabited world to live on, and he's remained there ever since — right up until Kirk and company show up looking for a cure for Rigellian Fever.
  • Strange New Worlds introduces a race of Human Aliens called the Lanthanites, who, if not actually immortal, are certainly extremely Long-Lived (the one met so far claims to have met Pythagoras), and who lived undetected on Earth among humans for centuries. (Appropriately enough, the Greek word "lanthánō" means "to go unnoticed").
• Supernatural:
  • Cain (the first Cain, who killed his brother Abel and became a demon) tries to live a quiet, low-profile life as a beekeeper. He's perfectly willing to trash anyone or anything that tries to bother him, though.
  • There's also Ramiel, one of the Princes of Hell, who lives quietly because he doesn't care about who runs Hell or ruling it himself: he just wants to be left alone. When Crowley shows up to offer him the job of ruling Hell, he just tells Crowley to take the job himself, and that he'd better not come back and bother him again.

Mythology And Religion

• Classical Mythology: minor sea god Proteus is one of the few Graeco-Roman deities who hasn't had any adventures of his own, doesn't involve himself in any of the innumerable conflicts, and doesn't appear interested in living it up like his father Poseidon. Instead, he prefers the life of a hermit, spending his days shepherding seals and his afternoons dozing alone on a beach; even his famous shapeshifting powers are used mainly at work or in emergencies, while his prophetic abilities are only used by heroes who are out to wrestle him for information... and even then, Proteus is so deliberately obscure that, in the The Odyssey, Menelaus had to be told about him by the sea god's own daughter before he could even try to capture Proteus.

Tabletop Games

• Ars Magica: Ephram The Hermit rests by a remote crossroads to share advice and conversation with travelers. He won't admit it, but he's been there for a millennium: the crossroads is Holy Ground that sustains his body and grants him innate knowledge of geography and language.

Toys

• Transformers: In many versions of the Transformers mythos, the Thirteen Original Primes are the Super Prototypes for the Transformers. Normally they've long since become Shrouded in Myth by the time a series begins, but...
  • In the backstory of the Aligned universe (i.e. Transformers: War for Cybertron, Transformers: Fall of Cybertron and Transformers: Prime), after the Thirteen had a falling out that resulted in the deaths of Solus Prime, Liege Maximo, Onyx Prime, and Micronus Prime as well as the voluntary self-exile of Megatronus, some of their members left Cybertron behind to explore the cosmos or retreated into personal pocket dimensions. Only Prima, the First Prime, and Alpha Trion the chronicler remained to watch over the budding Cybertronian civilisation. Prima wandered the planet as a humble traveler armed with nothing but a walking stick, while Trion became a chronicler who began the first library (and became its chief librarian).
  • In Transformers: Cyberverse it's revealed that Alchemist Prime (another of the Thirteen) has been living in the capital of Iacon as the humble bartender Maccadam.
  • In Transformers: More than Meets the Eye, it's revealed that Rung, the ship's psychologist, is actually Primus. In this continuity, it turns out to be an Enforced Trope, as he's under a powerful "forget" effect that makes others have difficulty remembering him. Even if he wanted to do something memorable (which he doesn't), other Cybertronians would quickly forget about him.

Video Games

• In Control, it's eventually revealed that Ahti the janitor is some kind of immortal being, perhaps even a Finnish god; according to notes, he's been working at the Oldest House since it was discovered back in the 1960s, though nobody can remember actually hiring him, and nobody in the present has noticed that he doesn't appear to have aged in the last fifty-odd years. To most of the staff, he's just a jovial old geezer with a rather eccentric speech pattern, and he only uses his baffling array of powers to aid in his job of cleaning the building... up until he decides he wants a holiday, of course.
• Octavian the Eagle of The Secret World, unlike most of the immortals in the game, lives a much less dramatic lifestyle — partly because he was in his seventies when he was cursed with immortality but mostly because he's grappling with a major case of PTSD. On the occasions when he hasn't been forced to return to the battlefield in defense of Transylvania, he prefers to spend his days in an isolated homestead in the forest, giving every impression of being a tired old farmer who'd rather not be bothered by uninvited guests.

Web Original

• SCP Foundation: During the Bronze Age, Klavigar Saarn was the disciple and personal assassin of Grand Karcist Ion. These days, she's a supermarket clerk who uses her Lovecraftian Superpowers for little more than decorating her apartment.

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