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synodiporia_ooc2014-01-27 01:49 pm
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Nahadoth's Shadow/Naha/Hado/Ahad | The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms & sequels by N. K. Jemisin 1/2
NAME: Isabelle
AGE: 24
PLAYER JOURNAL:
TIMEZONE: EST
CONTACT:
OTHER CHARACTERS PLAYED: n/a
C H A R A C T E R;
NAME: he doesn't have a name of his own, but he uses pieces of Nahadoth, and goes by 'Hado' at the canonpoint I'm taking him from
CANON: The Inheritance trilogy by N. K. Jemisin (The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, Broken kingdoms, and Kingdom of the Gods.)
POINT IN CANON: About ten years after the end of Broken Kingdoms, after he has left the Arameri but not yet figured out that he's a godling.
AGE: about 2300 years, appears in his mid/late twenties.
APPEARANCE: Brown skin, black hair, pretty. I'm using Naveen Andrews as a PB.
CANON HISTORY:
From The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms:
"There were three gods once. Only three, I mean. Now there are dozens. They breed like rabbits. But once there were only three, the most powerful and glorious of all: the god of day, the god of night, and the goddess of twilight and dawn. Or light and darkness and the shades between. Or order, chaos, and balance. None of that is important because one of them died, the other may as well have, and the last is the only one who matters anymore."
Itempas, the god of light/order, quarreled with Enefa, the goddess of life/death/balance, out of jealousy over their brother Nahadoth, the god of darkness/chaos. Enefa was the strongest of them, but rather than facing her squarely, Itempas tricked her and killed her with poison. (The blood of human/god hybrids, called demons, is poisonous to gods, because it contains both godstuff and mortality.) Nahadoth discovers her death and attacks Itempas, filled with grief and rage, and their children, the godlings, are forced to takes sides. (Godlings are not strong enough to approach the Three, who are woven into the fabric of the universe, but they can be very powerful by following and manifesting their nature.) The God's War devastates and nearly destroys the human world.
It ends when Shahar Arameri, High Priestess of Itempas, uses a relic of Enefa's power (which Itempas preserved to prevent the universe from unraveling, as she was a part of its tapestry) to control Nahadoth and three godlings who fought by side. This relic, known as the Stone of the Earth, can only be wielded by a child of Enefa, either mortal or godling, and is so powerful than a single moment of using it burns through and kills any human who does so.
"The Arameri get their power from this remaining god. He is called the Skyfather, Bright Itempas, and the ancestors of the Arameri were His most devoted priests. He rewarded them with a weapon so mighty that no army could stand against it. They used this weapon - weapons, really - to make themselves rulers of the world...
"...What was I -? Oh, yes. The gods. Not the gods that remain in the heavens, who are loyal to Bright Itempas. There are others who were not loyal. Perhaps I should not call them gods, because no one worships them anymore. (How does one define "god"?) There must be a better name for what they are. Prisoners of war? Slaves? What did I call them before - weapons?
"Weapons. Yes.
"They are said to be somewhere in [the Arameri palace of] Sky, four of them, trapped in tangible vessels and kept under lock and key and magic chain...sometimes, their masters call them forth. And then there are strange new plagues. Occasionally the population of an entire city will vanish overnight. Once, jagged, steaming pits appeared where there had once been mountains. It is not safe to hate the Arameri. Instead we hate their weapons, because weapons do not care."
Immediately after the war, the Arameri commanded their new slaves to help rebuild the ruined Earth, offering their help to the nations of the world - but not for free. So begins their supposedly benevolent dominion. In the generations after the God's War, the Arameri form an elaborate clan system. The four gods/slaves/weapons call themselves Enefadeh ("we who remember Enefa") and are magically compelled by Itempas in conjunction with the Stone of the Earth to obey all orders from any of the Arameri, in priority according their rank designated by family sigil, and prevents them from harming them, unless they allow it by giving imprecise or idiomatic orders. Unless detained by a member of the family to make use of their divine powers or to torment or toy with them, the Enefadeh have essentially free run of the palace; human, mortal bodies are their prisons, the limits of flesh and physical space. Although they cannot be killed, and will resurrect if their bodies are destroyed, they can certainly be hurt.
Because gods are so tied to particular concepts, they are limited in how they can apply their power, no matter how strong. Nahadoth, despite being one of the founders of the universe, becomes useless during the day, because it is his opposite, the domain of Itempas. Not only does he have no strength while the sun is up, he cannot even manifest his own personality, but the prison of his body still exists, and it still has a brain.
Sieh, one of the Enefadeh and the god of childhood, tells us in The Kingdom of the Gods:
At sunset, Nahadoth's power and the full force of his mind - the enraged and enslaved god of chaos - returned, with overwhelming suddenness, and for a period of time at twilight the creature was neither man nor god, but an overwhelmed and overpowered beast of madness as the one disintegrated and was swallowed by the other.
"Because it was, in its own way, a child, I was given charge of it. From the first, I hated this. It shat itself every day, sometimes more than once. (One of the mortal women tried to show me how to use a diaper; I never bothered. Just left the creature on the ground to do its business.) It moaned and grunted and screamed, incessantly. It bit me bloody when I tried to feed it - newborn or not, it had a man's flesh, and that man had a full set of strong, sharp teeth. The first time it did this, I knocked several of those teeth out. They grew back the next night. It didn't bite me again.
"Gradually, though, I came to be more accepting of my duty, and as I warmed to the meat, so it regarded me with its own simple species of affection. When it began to walk, it followed me everywhere. Once Zhakka and Rue and I had built the first White Hall...the creature filled the shining corridors with jabbering as it learned to talk. Its first word was my name. When I grew weak and lapsed into the horrifying state mortals called sleep, the meat creature snuggled against me. I tolerated this because sometimes, when dusk fell and it became my father again, I could snuggle back and close my eyes and imagine that the War had never happened. That all was as it should be.
"But those dreams never lasted. The thin, lifeless dawn, and my mindless charge, always returned.
"If only it had stayed mindless. But it did not; it began to think. When the others and I probed inside it, we found that it had begun, like any thinking, feeling being, to grow a soul. Worst of all it - he - began to love me. And I, as I never should have done, began to love him back."
This was disastrous for Sieh, because - as a god of childhood - parenthood was against his nature, and would have killed him had he embraced it. Instead, under the pressures of slavery and confinement and abused by his keepers, and already resenting the creature for being his father's prison, he took out his frustrations on the one creature weaker than himself and in his power, abandoning him to the Arameri's whims and sometimes badly mistreating the man himself.
This person, Nahadoth's daytime counterpart, described his centuries of confinement as follows in Broken Kingdoms:
After those two thousand plus years (more like 2200, according to dates on the historical bonus documents) of torture, rape, and waking up next to the occasional corpses of women Nahadoth seduced into commanding him to pleasure until it literally killed them, he was finally set free by Yeine, a mortal woman who shared her body with the drifting soul of Enefa, embedded in her to help heal it, and who was able to use to the Stone of the Earth to free the Enefadeh, bind and punish Itempas in his own mortal shell, become a new goddess of balance, and grant Hado his own body and his own separate existence.
Although Hado had a long-standing agreement with Nahadoth that if they ever became free, Nahadoth should kill him, Yeine commanded him to live, and as the newly-invested goddess of life, this made him not fully human but a young godling, a creature that would live forever without very specific intervention, although he did not realize this at the time.
He decided it would be wrong to waste her gift, and that he would indeed live with his newfound freedom. Because he was jaded and damaged and very skilled at manipulation and navigating the treacherous Arameri court, he remained in the Palace under the new Family Head T'Vril Arameri - a former steward chosen by Yeine to moderate Arameri tyranny while preventing the immediate and terrible civil war that would occur if the world's government were dismantled straight away - and set to work playing politics.
After ten years of this, he was posing as a spy with a dangerous cult founded by a disenchanted Arameri cousin and her mad demon husband that nearly provoked Nahadoth into destroying the entire capital city. Hado's help in foiling the New Lights' plot earned him adoption into the central family, according to his agreement with T'Vril, who was if not precisely his friend, probably the closest thing he'd ever had to one. Hado intended to become family head and eventually rule the world, preferring to wield power than to be subject to it, and equally convinced he'd be at least as good at it as previous despots.
Some time after this, however, he seduced T'Vril's wife for money on behalf of another branch of the family, who wished to disgrace her and have T'Vril married to their own candidate. T'Vril, who had married her in the first place for purely political reasons, didn't care at all. Abruptly, Hado realized he was tired of scheming and the heartlessness and everything to do with the Arameri and Sky, and promptly departed. I'll be taking him from a little while after this, when he's still trying to figure out what in the world to do with himself, and has no idea he's anything other than human.
CANON PERSONALITY: As a matter of self-defense in their cutthroat, brutal court, Arameri children are taught from a young age to conceal their emotions, not with blankness, but with opposite emotions, and Hado has developed the same habit. When he's angry or hurt, he smiles; when he's pleased he looks unimpressed and contemptuous. He has absorbed their precise, high-class and high-handed way of speaking as well. The more threatened he feels in any situation, the more Arameri his mannerisms become. Although he has had little opportunity to learn anything else, he hates the Arameri and how much they have shaped him; with people he likes or halfway trusts, he can make an effort to present more honest, albeit subdued emotions.
2/2
Although Hado goes out of his way to portray himself as a cold, cruel nihilist, he's actually nothing of the sort. He's highly guarded, after a long, long life in which no one was worth trusting, he doesn't let people in and he doesn't let himself care about them. He's proud and he can be abrasive, cutting, and cold - and he enjoys it - but only ever deliberately, and only to people who have earned his ire - or, in the case of some of his prickly fellow godlings, are easier to control socially after he has humiliated them. With Oree, who dislikes and disrespects him but is herself a prisoner, he is occasionally manipulative to maintain his cover but never cutting or cruel beyond what is necessary to motivate her; once his cover is no longer necessary he is frank and courteous with her, and he's capable of being quite charming.
He's an amazing actor - he acts like a venomous monster to Yeine when Scimina, his Arameri keeper, is looking on, and gives away not one whit of the terrible hope that Yeine's presence inspires in him. When working as a spy with the New Lights, he conducts an interrogation where he appears perfectly skillful and seductively cruel - but actually succeeds in reaffirming Oree's will to resist, without either she nor his fellow cult members realizing he intended to do so. His affect is highly contextual, even within a single scene, treating Hymn and Sieh very differently in the same conversation without either of them really noticing. He responds to even very small scraps of kindess, if they are sincere, with intense gratitude, though he is more likely to express it through actions than words, and he is bitter but never surprised when people still believe in his monstrous act even when he's demonstrated otherwise. He would do anything to make his life easier, after all - with his life, who wouldn't? Except of course that it isn't true.
He volunteers to run an organization of godlings - the ultimate in herding cats - in order to protect humans from abuses of their power and protect the right of godlings to live among mortals, simply because no one else wants the responsibility, and it needs to be done. He builds up a strong business network, ostensibly for wealth and power (both of which he certainly enjoys), in part by gradually taking over all the prostitution in the city and making the entire industry coercion-free. Both Yeine and Sieh say he would do anything to make his own life easier, and he encourages this image. It's true that he's willing to do a lot of things he finds distasteful to further his goals. He's immensely pragmatic. He loathes Itempas and deeply resents Nahadoth, but he's willing to work with or style himself after either of them to achieve his own ends - but those ends are never as selfish as he presents them to be, and in fact he goes to quite a lot of unnecessary trouble to try to keep the world safe for mortals and godlings alike.
He acts ambitious, and it's not entirely an act. While he has realized by the canon point I'm using that he doesn't enjoy politics for its own sake, doesn't want to spend his whole life being a snake among snakes and no longer wants to rule the world, he has lived his whole life surrounded by the machinations of power; it is his first language, and he'll always be fluent in it. He will always be very damaged, defensively vicious and most comfortable when he has the upper hand, but he's also understandably very sensitive to abuses of power. He's a genuine sadist who never takes advantage of people who are helpless - he takes care of Yeine when she's unconscious, and protects Oree from the other New Lights as well as he can, and while he does needle Sieh and pressure him into drinking enough for a vicious hangover, he also takes care of him and makes sure he has has what he needs at his weakest point, even though he has as much bad blood with Sieh as anyone alive by that point.
He rebuilt himself shred by precious, fiercely hidden shred, in an act of incredible and terrible will, in endlessly hellish circumstances; has not become his own tormentors, and he never will. When Sieh suggests simply killing problematic mortals - or their loved ones - Hado loses every bit of patience with him, shouting at him and shaming him, compares him to Itempas and the Arameri and his past self as a weapon in their service. He alternately claims to hate and not care about Sieh, but still helps him throughout Kingdom of the Gods, gleefully making his life unpleasant and difficult but still giving his former abusive parent-figure everything he needs, and helping him when Hado could very easily destroy him instead. He wants to look like a cold-hearted power-hungry ass - and he can certainly act like all of those things - but his nihilism is a pure front. He cares very deeply about safeguarding free will, not merely in principle but in the small logistical particulars of being safe and secure enough to exercise it.
He's a principled realpolitik backroom powerbroker, wheeling and dealing and watching and scheming to safeguard people who don't even know he's there, who wears many different faces, different layers of callousness and cruelty for different audiences. He's a god of love who is afraid to admit he cares about anything, and in his own deeply bizarre way, an optimistic cynic. He expects the worst from people but tries to help make a world that will let them be their best anyway. When Oree asks whether he would choose death or life on a leash again, he chooses - despite his vehemence that no human will ever give him orders again, despite his own desire for death for most of his existence - life. "If it were truly a choice," is his caveat. Choice matters to him more than anything. If it were his choice, he would choose life just to spite his captors and his torturers, so many of whom he has outlived already. He would fight them with a smile.
POINT OF DEPARTURE: (if AU or PG, please take at least 200 words to explain the differences in background and personality from canon. Specify the game if PG, discuss the universe if AU, and then tell us how these things affected your character.)
ABILITIES: Godlings in HTK have a very versatile suite of powers; technically, what being a god is means that one's will is simply manifest in the world, and a god can do basically anything related to their nature somehow, even in non-obvious ways. However, they become stronger by living true, unreservedly embracing their natures, and become weaker when they contradict it. Hado's nature, unbeknowst to him, is love, and since he's adamantly unwilling to love anyone or anything out of self-defense, he's quite weak for godling, but this could and probably will change eventually in game (it doesn't have to be romantic love; any kind will do). The powers he actually uses in the series are as follows:
- teleportation, of himself and others, including sending others without going along with them
- transforming parts/all of himself into black mist/incorporeal form - and he doesn't actually have human bodily needs anymore
- local telekinesis, including simply preventing Sieh from coming any closer to him, because he does not wish it, and wrecking his office in a fit of temper
- lighting his cigar with his mind
- inhuman strength
- conjuring small objects
- accidentally killing someone who tripped over his triggers strongly enough (in bed; would not happen in casual acquaintance/regular game play) with just his mind/will
- the gods' language also just makes things happen, but he only knows a few words of it at this canonpoint (like atadie, 'open', which works on walls) and no way to learn more in game
Based on the other gods in the series, it's also fair to assume he can change his appearance however he wishes, although he generally prefers to use the face Yeine left him, and that he can heal himself more or less and will and cannot be killed except by one of the three high gods (or equivalent superbeing), by not only neglecting but sufficiently violating his own nature, or by poisoning with demonsblood. He can, however, feel pain if he is living his nature insufficiently to heal immediately/without effort. Once he gets a little bit more connected to his nature, he'll probably have a sense for love in others, and things that are loved, in the same way Sieh can sense which toys were the focus of children's wonder and see their little souls. He might also have an animal form. It's implied that some gods have one and some don't.
All of these will be pretty weak to nonexistent at the start of the game except for his functional immortality, and Hado completely inexperienced at using them, but once he figures out what the hell he is, he'll get better.
Additionally, because of his own strange origin, he has a sense for when people have strange/dual/modified souls. He's also a flawless actor and exceptionally good at reading people, what they want and what they fear, but nothing about this is supernatural: he earned it the hard way, with practice.
INVENTORY: Rolling paper and tobacco for making cheap cigars, a flask of expensive red liquor of some sort, a few coins of various denominations (gold/silver/copper), some silver rings, a pack of matches, a key, and a sharp inhuman tooth from Lil, goddess of hunger.
ANYTHING ELSE WE SHOULD KNOW? YOU SHOULD READ THESE BOOKS IF YOU LIKE THE KUSHIEL BOOKS OKAY JUST SAYING THEY ALSO HAVE AWESOME WORLDBUILDING AND COOL MYTHOLOGY AND RICH CULTURES AND POLITICS AND SEX
S A M P L E S;
FIRST PERSON: d_m thread - technically I was playing around with a D/s AU version of him in this thread, but his personality and history are all basically exactly the same, except with more explicit terminology for the shit that was happening in his life anyway.
THIRD PERSON: They're infiltrating Hell. Not his hell, obviously: too many shadows, not enough white. There are a few desperately Arameri touches, though - the arching ceilings, the grand marblesque sweep of the ballroom before it twists off into impossible curves, that might be painful for some people to contemplate. The open braziers with the screaming wretches dotted between the regally dressed dancers, all corsets and lace over spines and extra eyes. The throne. That's white. But bones, instead of daystone. The arrangement is geometrically fascinating.
One of his sometime-colleagues reclines there, horned, bored, cold. Disgusted with the realm he has built and the creatures that populate it, regarding Hado with worse: suspicion as well as disdain. What does a jumped-up newcomer want in the court of hell?
His laugh comes easy, rich and dark. He knows how to play the demon.
He turns to one of the other inhabitants, leaning on a cane he doesn't need. "That's beautiful. May I?" He holds out his hand expectantly, stares with a cool smile of his own until the instrument is handed over. A warm golden topaz the size of a man's fist tops the cane, and this place has a fashion for physics, for physical laws, for the verisimilitude of mortal substance. Topaz is harder than any natural mineral but corundum and diamond. He twirls it like a baton, lightly, whimsically. Then he puts the topaz through the creature's skull. He twirls it again, just as mildly, scatters purple-black blood over the red satin waistcoats of the onlookers with the temerity to act shocked.
"I want," he says slowly, making every phoneme precise, "to cause a bit of a fuss." It's even true, from a certain perspective, although the wild glint in his eye, the edge of teeth in his smile suggest that this desire comes from a raw, monstrous delight in chaos, rather than a fundamental revulsion for this place and everything it is established to accomplish. "If you really prefer to keep things continuing smoothly as they are, my Lord, by all means, toss me out onto the painfields."
He's had worse. He thinks about it, lets the edge of it show - not as bravado, but as familiarity. Allows his mad, half-eager gaze to convey how welcome it would be, if his Lord wished. But he won't, of course. Hado has gauged his ennui and his contempt correctly.
Lucifer, with his Traveler's face, invites Hado to a private audience after the ball, to discuss further the matter of a little turmoil. Just to spice things up. Hado sweeps a gracious bow, deep enough to be proper but too flamboyant in the swish of his charred velvet cape to qualify as truly obsequious, and therefore contemptible himself. He keeps the cane, and turns to a lady with periwinkle-blue bat wings and a haggard, upside-down face. Before the tawdry entertainments of the damned draw to a close, he intends to dance.
ADDITIONAL NOTE
Re: Nahadoth's Shadow/Naha/Hado/Ahad | The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms & sequels by N. K. Jemisin 1/2
Obviously, powercapping a god is tricky, but we wouldn't be accepting you as a player if we didn't trust your judgement, so for the most part we're simply going to rely on that judgment. Starting weakened is good, don't one-up other players with gratuitous displays of power, etc etc.
Since he can canonically teleport and that is definitely an ability we will be capping explicitly, you may pick one skill off the list of Liminal Skills.