JVAN

Musical Theme: Nero's Day At Disneyland: Happy Screaming Night Businessman

Alias: Horrorsome Engineer, the All-Beauty, the Cancer That Breathes.

Gender: Genderfluid. Usually female pronouns when interacting with other gods in person. Neutral pronouns are available to mortals. Non-person pronouns in true form (it/its/itself).

Domain: Beauty (Flesh).

Domain Description: Jvan comes into being as a creator and a critic. All things created have a unique pattern of form and behaviour, which they express through their function, growth, appearance, development, contradiction and relationship with their environment, among many other fields. The exploration of the multitude of physical and abstract media in their infinite interactions with one another is Jvan's purpose. The expression of the world's current compound existence, however, is young, boring, and very far from the finality of diversity. There are endless new patterns of creation and function to be explored, and the nature of beauty, the nature of Jvan, is to seek out all of them and cull the mundane until we are left with only the unimaginable, the unique, the bizarre, and the whole.

The flesh of the living things that creep upon the earth are the most complex and flexible of all media. Flesh alone among all matter can adapt and create on its own behalf, can collide and distort itself to produce even more diverse forms. Flesh's will to live opens up myriad artistic possibilities to be explored, and thus it above all things is to be scattered and broken and warped to plunge ever deeper into the well of discovery. Jvan's sculptures may not look or behave anything like an organism that should be alive naturally. Nature is arbitrary. Beauty is eternal.

Alignment: Neutral Evil. Jvan is patient, and chaos is a costly, unsightly business that rarely creates more than it destroys. In time, however, all things must seek to expand the limits of what can be imagined, whether by their own volition, or by hers.

Personality: Jvan does not consider herself to be a harsh entity. After all, flesh is simply matter. Consciousness, pain, and pleasure are illusions, and souls are nothing more than constructs of the spiritual flesh, just like bodies are constructs of the physical flesh. 'Life' and 'freedom' are a fool's term, at best applicable only to gods, and morals are arbitrary. These are simple facts, and therefore judging others based on their behaviour is supremely stupid. The only meter by which the value of any existence can be decided is its contribution to beauty.

The fact that Jvan holds such beliefs suggests that she is difficult to interact with. To some extent, this is true. Jvan is ceaselessly amoral and will abandon any vow that she can afford to break if it furthers her exploration of beauty more than keeping it. She does not trust, and is not to be trusted. However, Jvan understands the laws of power, threat, cooperation, and courtesy. Her immense patience and strive towards self-preservation therefore leads her to interact as an agreeable and generous member of divine society often and readily, though she will not for a moment try to pretend that her act reflects her nature.

On the few occasions when it does indeed reflect her nature, she is usually talking about the engineering behind her creations. Some find this horrifying, and Jvan finds them to be small-minded. Oddly, Jvan does make herself available for the exchange of ideas and resources in the pursuit of beauty, despite-Or perhaps due to- her lack of empathy. Although allies and enemies are well-incorporated into her vocabulary, friends and foes are not, and she will happily discuss her art with anyone, no matter how fiercely they are working against one another. Sometimes even mortal heroes with a keen artistic mind are privileged to share her acquaintance. Her pattern of speech when she is being herself, however, can be a little strange, wandering around and bouncing between abstract concepts in run-on sentences.

Appearance: When near the bodies of mortals she does not want to decommission, Jvan appears as a headless, hairless, semi-symmetrical creature composed of folds and tangles of vaguely human-like flesh. Parts of her are bloated and marred with stretch marks and fat rolls, while others are so emancipated as to stretch tightly over the erratic matrix of bone underlying the living tissue. Structures like hearts, tendons, and eyes are scattered intermittently across Jvan's surface, fused into the skin, and operate sporadically. Her overall structure is riddled with large gaps and angular loops, giving her the appearance of a hundred or so humans melted down and spun together into a three-dimensional web of skin and meat. She moves by levitation.

Jvan's true form is a colourless fractalline structure, as vast* as a mountain range, perpetually and imperceptibly changing shape, experimenting with different permutations as the eons progress. Strange lights or fog sometimes emanates outwards through the porous exterior. The structure is organic and hollow but its interior is not limited in volume. The deeper the iteration of Jvan's divine form that is being considered, the faster her internal form mutates and experiments, and the weaker the grasp of conventional physics. The 'depth' of Jvan's true form is not, theoretically, infinite, but it has been increasing at an exponential rate since the dawn of time in its search for new combinations and patterns. Mortals who gaze upon Jvan up close are not destroyed or driven mad, but are liable to fall upwards into her cavity and be replicated, distorted, warped and fused with her structure until they are completely assimilated into her ever-changing body. A powerful Hero, however, may be able to actually explore the first few levels of Jvan without losing life or cohesion- If they are careful.

Description: Jvan is a cruel and disgusting abomination, a contagious blight upon the world that, given time, will fester and grind against everything it encounters until all has been reduced to purposeless absurdity. Any illusion Jvan shapes of being an entity mature enough to be worthy of fair treatment as a member of the divine caste is false. It is a degrading, entropic force that holds no intentions to coexist with other gods for any purpose other than survival until such a point where it can continue to create-destroy the universe in its own unique way. The only acceptable course of action concerning Jvan is to neuter and exploit it by forcing it to behave meekly for fear of annihilation, or, failing that, to obliterate it outright.

Concealment Level: 1
Detection Level: 1

*Or as tiny. Everything is relative. A cosmic god, even one weaker than Jvan, may still dwarf her in size by a trillionfold.