The Powers That Be (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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synodiporia_ooc2014-01-27 01:49 pm
powersthatbe) wrote in synodiporia_ooc2014-01-27 01:49 pm
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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.