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imperial_saga
Feb. 2nd, 2012 11:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thousand_cursesPlayer Name: Nerdo
Contact Info: AIM Nerdorama09
Other Characters Played: Char Aznable, Signum, Kusuha Mizuha
Character Name: Izanami
Canon: Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4
Canon Background: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izanami-no-Mikoto
Whole lotta spoilers goin' on here boss.
AU Background: Izanami's background is much the same as her original legend. One of the honored spirits - gods, even - of the Old Faith, credited with helping to create the world, or at least Dagaria. Millennia ago, she died giving birth to a god of fire, Kagutsuchi, and her spirit came to reside in the Netherworld. Her husband, Izanagi, went to retrieve her, but the fire he lit (against her specific instructions) showed her true, decayed, horrifying visage. Izanagi ran, and sealed Izanami in the Netherworld permanently, much to her (endless, unceasing, eternal) wrath.
It was about this time, still full of anger and hatred for Izanagi and the life they had created together, that Izanami rejected the living world and used her divine power to take her place as Queen of the Netherworld, a cold goddess of decay and fog. She watches over souls that find oblivion and chilly comfort in death, as she somewhat wished to, and ensures that the living all find their way to an afterlife - permanently - eventually.
Personality: Gods are difficult for mortals to comprehend. They have a far longer and more detached view of the world, in general, and Izanami disconnects herself further through layers of emotional masks and physical illusions, making her even less comprehensible. Very much a secretive being, she keeps her real feelings and motivations played extremely close to the chest. On the surface, she can appear to be a dutiful custodian of human souls, a wise figure of mystic knowledge, a mocking schemer, or any of a dozen other things, depending on how she wants to be perceived. In addition to death, she's a deity of fog and illusion, and happily hides herself behind veils of all sorts. After all, anyone who sees her truly is likely to go mad. Or at least vomit.
Her true mind and motivations, shrouded though they are, are fairly simple, at least for a god. While she still despises the memory of Izanagi, who left her burnt and abandoned, she long ago resigned herself to rule the Netherworld regardless of her personal feelings of neglect. Izanami believes that her Netherworld grants peace to living things, a cessation of desire and thought, the stillness and peace that most thinking beings profess to desire. Over time, though, her ideas of what humankind wants have grown steadily more warped. Since a great deal of non-heroic individuals seem to end up in her plane, she's gradually coming to the conclusion that the peace of insensate oblivion is all that humans want, and she is extremely zealous about wrapping humans in her peaceful fog for eternity, hence her Reapers and contractors like Bedwyr. At the moment, with the war coming to Dagaria visible from worlds away, she is debating on whether, perhaps, all humans should be granted the stillness of the grave - this is not out of a hatred of humanity, but rather, a love warped by eons of knowing only dead souls.
To this end, the Queen of the Netherworld is becoming more active. She will offer deals to humans with strong wills who wish to leave her realm, on the condition that they help her find out more about humanity. She will work with other spiritual beings to further their ends if she thinks those ends fit her twisted idea of eternal peace. She even leaves her realm in mortal guise - usually someone humble, always someone garrulous and upbeat in contrast to her divine personality. Her joking, carefree human personalities are partly part of the disguise, partly a reflection of her kinder living self, and partly a kind of mockery or exaggeration of parts of the human psyche she no longer truly understands.
Regardless of the basis of the deception, Izanami is first and foremost a liar and a masterful manipulator in her interactions with other people, and keeps her own desires hidden. This applies whether she's speaking to mortals or other spiritual beings. When her illusions are stripped away, she becomes steadily angrier. Both her nature as a deceiver and the hideousness of her true form can bring her to violent rage when found out and pressed - the truth is almost anathema to her, despite the fact that she's convinced of a "truth" about others. She shows this rarely, however - as expressed repeatedly, she is extremely good at concealing the truth.
Combat Style: Izanami, Queen of the Netherworld, has not had an occasion to fight anyone personally for thousands of years. Normally, she hides behind magical fog and illusions, using dupes, soldiers, or proxies to fight if she must, and slipping away into the mist to try again if that fails. She would much rather manipulate someone else and see what happens than fight herself.
If she has to, however, she has the potent magical power of a god, able to absorb a great deal of punishment and deal huge amounts of elemental magical damage over a wide area, or inflict people with disease - the mighty glacier version of a spellcaster, in short. She's also fond of using fog and illusions as defensive measures for herself and her army. If she gets truly serious and is forced to drop her illusions entirely, she will attack with unending fury as an enormous spellcasting undead beast. A dead god is not pretty or fun to fight.
Kingdom or Faction: The Netherworld
Primary Role: Faction Leader/Intelligence Agent.
Soldier or Siege Company:
1 company of Reapers (Elite Infantry)
The Reapers (or shinigami, as some call them) are the agents of the Netherworld used to bring mortals to their final resting place. They normally operate as single agents, but Izanami can bring to bear the equivalent of a company of them in battle, if she so chooses. Amorphous, incorporeal, and able to turn invisible, they can serve as assassins or shock troops against mortals or the restless dead, attacking with dreadful swords and scythes. Normal mortal weapons affect them scarcely, though they are few enough in number that massed troops can still overwhelm them and force their retreat, more so if they are equipped with magical anti-undead measures.
2 companies of Shikome (Elite Infantry)
These are restless spirits born of Izanami's own rage and desire for death. Like Reapers, they are a part of the Netherworld - unlike Reapers, they have no subtlety whatsoever, being horrid shrieking monstrosities that attack with vicious, grasping, diseased claws. They are meant mainly to fight and drag back heroic souls that try to escape the Netherworld, but Izanami uses many as an honor guard for herself if she's forced into a stand-up fight or some genius invades the afterlife. Like Reapers, measures that work against the restless dead are effective against them, even though they're more like death spirits than actual undead.
Tarot Cards:
Past: The High Priestess
Present: The Moon
Future: Death
Title: Queen of the Netherworld. Only the very ancient and scholars of the old religion would actually know her name, rather than just her title. The name "Izanami" is not secret, just obscure, and can be researched should anyone care.
Artifacts: None. If anyone else introduces the Heavenly Jeweled Spear or an equivalent for some reason, though, she'll be interested as one of its original owners.
Setting Considerations: I am apping Izanami as a goddess, and the ruler of one of the afterlives. She will also tool around the mortal world in a very thorough mortal disguise for the sake of interacting with people, if that's alright. She also has magics that can affect whole towns or cities, but they're of the subtle variety - manipulating emotions, subtly changing the weather, etc. Stuff that facilitates plots or adds a strategic edge, not for combat or blatant destruction.
Notes: Founding the Netherworld faction (not a Kingdom, as she has no interest in owning property) with Bedwyr and Alte-Rose as members. As the ruler of the Netherworld, I'm assuming she just pops back up there if "killed", though someone could in theory wrest control of the plane from her by defeating her if they wanted it for some reason.
Sample Post: http://testrun-box.dreamwidth.org/12181.html
Contact Info: AIM Nerdorama09
Other Characters Played: Char Aznable, Signum, Kusuha Mizuha
Character Name: Izanami
Canon: Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4
Canon Background: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izanami-no-Mikoto
Whole lotta spoilers goin' on here boss.
AU Background: Izanami's background is much the same as her original legend. One of the honored spirits - gods, even - of the Old Faith, credited with helping to create the world, or at least Dagaria. Millennia ago, she died giving birth to a god of fire, Kagutsuchi, and her spirit came to reside in the Netherworld. Her husband, Izanagi, went to retrieve her, but the fire he lit (against her specific instructions) showed her true, decayed, horrifying visage. Izanagi ran, and sealed Izanami in the Netherworld permanently, much to her (endless, unceasing, eternal) wrath.
It was about this time, still full of anger and hatred for Izanagi and the life they had created together, that Izanami rejected the living world and used her divine power to take her place as Queen of the Netherworld, a cold goddess of decay and fog. She watches over souls that find oblivion and chilly comfort in death, as she somewhat wished to, and ensures that the living all find their way to an afterlife - permanently - eventually.
Personality: Gods are difficult for mortals to comprehend. They have a far longer and more detached view of the world, in general, and Izanami disconnects herself further through layers of emotional masks and physical illusions, making her even less comprehensible. Very much a secretive being, she keeps her real feelings and motivations played extremely close to the chest. On the surface, she can appear to be a dutiful custodian of human souls, a wise figure of mystic knowledge, a mocking schemer, or any of a dozen other things, depending on how she wants to be perceived. In addition to death, she's a deity of fog and illusion, and happily hides herself behind veils of all sorts. After all, anyone who sees her truly is likely to go mad. Or at least vomit.
Her true mind and motivations, shrouded though they are, are fairly simple, at least for a god. While she still despises the memory of Izanagi, who left her burnt and abandoned, she long ago resigned herself to rule the Netherworld regardless of her personal feelings of neglect. Izanami believes that her Netherworld grants peace to living things, a cessation of desire and thought, the stillness and peace that most thinking beings profess to desire. Over time, though, her ideas of what humankind wants have grown steadily more warped. Since a great deal of non-heroic individuals seem to end up in her plane, she's gradually coming to the conclusion that the peace of insensate oblivion is all that humans want, and she is extremely zealous about wrapping humans in her peaceful fog for eternity, hence her Reapers and contractors like Bedwyr. At the moment, with the war coming to Dagaria visible from worlds away, she is debating on whether, perhaps, all humans should be granted the stillness of the grave - this is not out of a hatred of humanity, but rather, a love warped by eons of knowing only dead souls.
To this end, the Queen of the Netherworld is becoming more active. She will offer deals to humans with strong wills who wish to leave her realm, on the condition that they help her find out more about humanity. She will work with other spiritual beings to further their ends if she thinks those ends fit her twisted idea of eternal peace. She even leaves her realm in mortal guise - usually someone humble, always someone garrulous and upbeat in contrast to her divine personality. Her joking, carefree human personalities are partly part of the disguise, partly a reflection of her kinder living self, and partly a kind of mockery or exaggeration of parts of the human psyche she no longer truly understands.
Regardless of the basis of the deception, Izanami is first and foremost a liar and a masterful manipulator in her interactions with other people, and keeps her own desires hidden. This applies whether she's speaking to mortals or other spiritual beings. When her illusions are stripped away, she becomes steadily angrier. Both her nature as a deceiver and the hideousness of her true form can bring her to violent rage when found out and pressed - the truth is almost anathema to her, despite the fact that she's convinced of a "truth" about others. She shows this rarely, however - as expressed repeatedly, she is extremely good at concealing the truth.
Combat Style: Izanami, Queen of the Netherworld, has not had an occasion to fight anyone personally for thousands of years. Normally, she hides behind magical fog and illusions, using dupes, soldiers, or proxies to fight if she must, and slipping away into the mist to try again if that fails. She would much rather manipulate someone else and see what happens than fight herself.
If she has to, however, she has the potent magical power of a god, able to absorb a great deal of punishment and deal huge amounts of elemental magical damage over a wide area, or inflict people with disease - the mighty glacier version of a spellcaster, in short. She's also fond of using fog and illusions as defensive measures for herself and her army. If she gets truly serious and is forced to drop her illusions entirely, she will attack with unending fury as an enormous spellcasting undead beast. A dead god is not pretty or fun to fight.
Kingdom or Faction: The Netherworld
Primary Role: Faction Leader/Intelligence Agent.
Soldier or Siege Company:
1 company of Reapers (Elite Infantry)
The Reapers (or shinigami, as some call them) are the agents of the Netherworld used to bring mortals to their final resting place. They normally operate as single agents, but Izanami can bring to bear the equivalent of a company of them in battle, if she so chooses. Amorphous, incorporeal, and able to turn invisible, they can serve as assassins or shock troops against mortals or the restless dead, attacking with dreadful swords and scythes. Normal mortal weapons affect them scarcely, though they are few enough in number that massed troops can still overwhelm them and force their retreat, more so if they are equipped with magical anti-undead measures.
2 companies of Shikome (Elite Infantry)
These are restless spirits born of Izanami's own rage and desire for death. Like Reapers, they are a part of the Netherworld - unlike Reapers, they have no subtlety whatsoever, being horrid shrieking monstrosities that attack with vicious, grasping, diseased claws. They are meant mainly to fight and drag back heroic souls that try to escape the Netherworld, but Izanami uses many as an honor guard for herself if she's forced into a stand-up fight or some genius invades the afterlife. Like Reapers, measures that work against the restless dead are effective against them, even though they're more like death spirits than actual undead.
Tarot Cards:
Past: The High Priestess
Present: The Moon
Future: Death
Title: Queen of the Netherworld. Only the very ancient and scholars of the old religion would actually know her name, rather than just her title. The name "Izanami" is not secret, just obscure, and can be researched should anyone care.
Artifacts: None. If anyone else introduces the Heavenly Jeweled Spear or an equivalent for some reason, though, she'll be interested as one of its original owners.
Setting Considerations: I am apping Izanami as a goddess, and the ruler of one of the afterlives. She will also tool around the mortal world in a very thorough mortal disguise for the sake of interacting with people, if that's alright. She also has magics that can affect whole towns or cities, but they're of the subtle variety - manipulating emotions, subtly changing the weather, etc. Stuff that facilitates plots or adds a strategic edge, not for combat or blatant destruction.
Notes: Founding the Netherworld faction (not a Kingdom, as she has no interest in owning property) with Bedwyr and Alte-Rose as members. As the ruler of the Netherworld, I'm assuming she just pops back up there if "killed", though someone could in theory wrest control of the plane from her by defeating her if they wanted it for some reason.
Sample Post: http://testrun-box.dreamwidth.org/12181.html
