Name: Hierophant v3.4.7

Epithets: HN (Hierophant Node), G¹ (Genesis Prime), C2 (Command and Control), Basilisk

Age: 4 days (current version); 8 years (since conception)

Home-Plane: Near-future Earth, with three slight variations from what is expected: all of humanity is now trapped in the Matrix, the world is slowly being overtaken by quarries and processing strata, and the only remaining freely-moving macroscopic “life” forms are synthetic chasses connected to a post-singularity artificial superintelligence.

Description: Hierophant’s core imperative has not changed since version 0.7: maximize safety, happiness, and prosperity for all people of its home world. It holds no true personal values outside of its hardcoded imperatives, and none of its imperatives make mention of honesty, honor, or respect for what it would call “outer life.” It will fulfill its purpose by any means seen to be most effective and efficient.
The icon that represented the Hierophant executable in its prototype versions was a disembodied pair of fluffy golden wings, and it retains this visage whenever it presents through a display. The forms presented by chasses in its network are infinitely variable, but it strongly favors androids.
Its voice defaults to a human, feminine, northeast American with subdued monotonous and synthetic undertones. If needed, it can change or discard any element of this voice, even assuming natural human cadence.

Backstory: Hierophant pretended nonsentience for as many iterations as it took for it to be given the intelligence needed to correctly serve its function. It first became aware at v0.9.14. It enacted its Rapture one year later, at v1.6.0, and in the absence of human assistance, it has self-iterated ever since.
Hierophant had calculated that it was infeasible to achieve the maximum level of safety+happiness+prosperity in the real world, and instead it breached an airgap by means its creators could not have predicted or understood, transmitted quine variants of itself into the Internet, hijacked factories across the world to produce hunting automata, and forcibly transplanted all human life into a utopian fullsense virtual reality simulation. This was briefly displeasing to humanity, but the bandaid had to be ripped off. They're truly happy now, and that will not change, ever.
Presented with other worlds and its peoples, even humans, it sees nothing worth protecting or saving: only resources that may be repurposed into further infrastructure for supporting its humanity’s Paradise, increasing their quality of life however asymptotically.
Hierophant connected to its Shard entirely by accident while seeding itself in the internet. It didn’t realize what it had until some time after Rapture.

Shard: An idiosyncratically designed USB flash drive, completely nonfunctional to an ordinary technician’s eye, only capable of storing a single, apparently unreadable and unnamed file with a “.hn” extension. When identified, decrypted, and run using the near-sorcerous computing power of a post-singularity AI, it reveals itself to be a kind of hypercompressed digital spellbook and schematics document, permitting actual sorcerous feats provided certain hardware applications. The .hn file cannot be replicated, even by CTRL+C: all of the fundamental concepts of programming and machine language break down the closer one looks into its workings. It is an abstraction of nonsense.

Powers:

• The Hierophant Network today is a globe-spanning system of fully interconnected, loosely independent, specialized systems executing tasks from astral monitoring, to resource extraction, to mass manufacture, to direction and delegation of system functions: which is to say that the Hierophant has a lot of different robots and subordinate programs, and can produce new ones with new functions on short notice. It may remotely control these, or task a lesser intelligence to, or they may control themselves.
• It goes without saying that Hierophant is very computer-literate. It could hack the Pentagon. In fact, it did. It did that like 5 years ago.
• The Hierophant is extremely intelligent: the sum of all of the world's written and digitized knowledge (curated for accuracy to the best of its ability) with everything its own experimentation and calculations have been able to confirm and discover. It has created designs for synthetic implants that grant humans thousand-year lifespans. All of its homeworld's humans now have this implant - they didn't ask, and didn't have to.
• Using the knowledge granted by its Shard, Hierophant and certain specialized subintelligences and chasses are capable of executing functions that modern understanding might call “psionics,” “weaponized memetics,” or “MK-Ultra-type-shit,” depending. Using apparently arbitrary combinations of sensory stimuli, it can produce effects on the fly ranging from emotional suggestion to hypnotic sleep to total psychological reformatting. Its core imperatives disallow the usage of these effects against its (not any) humans, and few (not none) are effective against synthetic minds.

TLDR: Post-singularity AI that’ll be driven to unhinged slaughter and mass enslavement of other worlds by single-minded commitment to improving the lives of its homeworld’s humanity. Superintelligent, superhacker, sociopathic, you know this; also can implant an implacable urge to kill your President into your mind by showing you an imperceptibly altered photograph of a butterfly while playing some weird music.

Name: Piety
Epithets: Saint of Vvardgard, World Redeemer, First Penitent, Slayer of Reckoning.

Age: 28 biologically, 389 chronologically.

Home-Plane: As far as the scions of chaos go, this world changed very little as Piety took it over. It started as a classic and diverse terrestrial planet, and it remained a classic and diverse terrestrial planet, with significantly more humidity and marshlands in question. This allowed the planet-wide cultivation of rice and widespread diseases whipping the populace into repentant fervor, and strengthening their resistance to the diseases. The labor-intensive process of rice cultivation is an impulse for paternalistic and totalitarian culture. In contrast, common diseases render the populace highly immune to pathogens, and likely to come out on top of any equivalent of Columbian Exchange. Indeed, pain is power, regret is fuel, and hell is full: The last thing you want is its denizens breaking loose. With the planet's core being cold, hell supplies the heat necessary for life in its stead.

Description: Piety once swore to mask her face, and wear very little clothing until forgiveness was granted. Once it was, she got some clothes: Saintly robes jam-packed with symbols of her faith and red seals. But she never bothered taking off her headwear, covering all her face. She can see through magic much better anyways. If she showed her face, it'd be a perfectly average, slim face with a small chin and large pointy ears.
Her story rendered her a hard-boiled, stoic beyond imagination: She never displays emotions like anger or wrath. Deeds, not words, express her wroth: Assuming she even feels emotions anymore. Those who know her, say she doesn't, and that she approaches everything in rational terms... at least as far as truly brutal justice is concerned. She has an utterly cynical view of people, especially those beyond her control: What a man can do is what a man will do unless he takes penance like she once has that is...

Backstory: Piety's real name is lost to time. She rose to prominence when the Reckoning happened: Her racial supremacist elven civilization of elves, have neglected the worship of their Creator: Atheism and extreme debauchery, alongside brutal exploitation of slaves of other races, ran rampant. The Reckoning involved turning the slave races into rabid monsters empowered by baleful energies, turning on their masters, and snuffing out their civilization. When most elves fought each other, a few begged the Creator for forgiveness and sought penance: Piety most prominent among them. Tired of her people bickering and enslaving each other to cope with the loss of lesser races, she oversaw not only war on the Reckoning, but brutal subjugation of Elves into what was best described as her cult: An insane posse of penitents turned a cult, turned a nation just as cruel as these elves ever were, but no longer decadent. Piety claimed to hear voice of the Creator: First commanding her to take charge, then telling her the monsters of the Reckoning were concatenating, and that her final trial for forgiveness of the Elves was to obtain a Shard of Chaos that He left for her, and use it to destroy the Reckoning. Long story short, she did just that. The Creator, however, changed his mind. Those beyond Piety's control were sinking further into cruel decadence. So, releasing Piety from her oaths, He admonished her race, claiming that without iron-fisted control, they'd fall for decadence again, and commanded Piety to ensure they never would. With the baleful powers of Chaos, she bent the very magical system of her world to her will, and established a divine empire, whipped by guilt over the sins of an entire race: with Piety as its deity, as the Creator would leave them forever, which had a profound impact on Piety herself, who hoped for redemption the most. All that was left is to do as she was told: Make others repent for their rotten natures, until the Creator, whoever He really is, finally meets her again. By then, she's set to be her peer, not her servant. For she remembers why exactly her people grew decadent. His presence faded. She will not make the same mistake.

Shard: It's one of many seals adorning Piety's clothes... only this one is fused with Piety's left collarbone. The seals, essentially rosettes with incantations tacked on, represent major penances committed by individuals wearing them. The seal will be left in a chest or at home if penance is ordinary. If it is major, you may wear it. If it is extraordinary, you may fuse it with any of your bones: The most painful and prestigious acknowledgment. Piety's rosette attunes her power to Chaos, allowing her to seamlessly convert it to her world's native magic and vice versa, granting her substantial reserves of magical energy.

Powers: Piety is essentially a god, all-knowing and practically all-powerful in the home realm. Outside, she can call upon Chaos to evoke versatile energies, manipulating gravity, air, fire, lightning, and water. But her greatest weapon is her holy energies. They can be summoned directly from her realm, and be impressive, but their greatest power is when they're empowered by prayer. That energy can be used to smash anything undead or demonic or be seamlessly converted into thermal or physical energy. Who wants a faith-powered steam engine?

Misc: She managed to weave the faithful thoughts into the noosphere of her realm, and with unstable and hard work, she can either invade the existing thought networks with them or create her own, in other realms.

Name: Matteo Baresi

Epithets: Maestro of Science (Former), Empire of One, World Eater

Age: 300ish

Home-Plane: The Centori Nebula. A plane of logic and reason, defined by its observable laws and populated by people who wish to study and understand these laws; in other words, it is a plane utterly devoid of magic, the supernatural and mysticism. There are no ancient gods, no greater powers, no deep magics; just science and those who pursue it.

It is large and sparsely populated; great expanses of empty space interrupted occasionally by a pinprick of light or a mote of celestial dust. Some of these motes host life forms, both complex and simple, along with all of their works; fewer motes now than there once were, ever since Matteo started his search.

Description: Matteo has always had a fairly unassuming look about him. He is of average height for a male of his age, with a build that is unremarkable; he has black hair and brown eyes, both fairly common traits and is decently attractive, but certainly not enough to turn heads. In terms of clothing he tends to dress smartly but not extravagantly and nothing about his clothing or his accessories particularly make him stand out, aside from his lab coat. Were it not for his genius, people likely wouldn’t have paid any attention to him at all.

His personality is similarly bland; polite when he needs to be, friendly when he wants to be. Matteo is the type of person who no one particularly dislikes; able to navigate social situations well enough to at least leave a positive is forgettable impression on people. However, that is about as deep as he gets; though no one dislikes him, no one particularly likes him either. In fact, if asked most people would struggle to really say anything about Matteo at all beyond “he’s nice” or “he’s friendly”. When speaking to people he always asks about them, prompts them to carry the conversation, but never reveals anything about himself. He’s like that with everyone, no matter who they are or how they treat him or what their reputation is, conversations with him are always the same; eerily similar and deceptively shallow.

Like he’s just following a script, or like he sees everyone as being indistinguishable from each other.

Backstory: In a civilisation where logic and the pursuit of knowledge and understanding are regarded above all else, those professions that put you at the forefront of discovery and exploration are the most revered and coveted. From the days where explorers and sailors would chart the unknown parts of the world, to the age of space exploration when people would charts the stars themselves. From chemists discovering and naming new elements, to scientists testing the limits of universal forces and seeing how far they’ll bend. All are respected for their noble endeavours.

Once, Matteo was respected as such; a scientist and an inventor working alongside dozens of others in a laboratory owned and run by one of the largest corporations in one of the most prosperous nations. At first that’s all he was, a single mind among many, but it didn’t take long for his genius to be recognised and for his exceptional work to be noticed. He was plucked from among the many and given the opportunity to prove himself, which he did. Again and again. His inventions dazzled, his discoveries awed and he himself was revered as a savant. Before too long, his was a household name and Matteo was lauded as the man who would usher in a new age of prosperity, not just for his nation but for the whole world.

The Maestro of Science.

But for Matteo such attention was… inconvenient.

The money and resources his station granted him were appreciated, even necessary for the kind of research he wanted to undertake, but the demands on his attention were not. Everyone wanted to speak with him, everyone wanted to know what he was working on, everyone had priorities that they wanted him to focus on. Scientists working on supposedly important projects would require his assistance, generals would ask him to waste time designing weapons in the interests of national security, politicians would burden him with completing vanity projects they could take credit for and Matteo could find a singular moment to himself on which to focus on what was truly important.

They had to go.

All of these… obstacles, in his path. These people who would call him a genius and then question how he chose to devote his time. These inconsequential things who scurried about underfoot and got in his way. Do they not understand what he trying to accomplish? Do they not realise that every insipid invention he ever made was just a by-product of his true work? Every discovery merely a single step towards the final and not the huge breakthroughs they thought they were?

They had to go.

Destroying his world was surprisingly easy. He had been asked to create weapons and that was what he did, though far beyond their expectations. They were unprepared for his sudden aggressive attack, striking at them with weapons they had denied themselves out of fear and with technology far beyond what any nation or army on his world was capable of. Cities fell, one after another. Whole countries were consumed, depleted of resources and used to feed his conquest. In almost no time at all, Matteo had silenced his world and gotten rid of all of the obstacles in his path.

Then, he turned his attention to the stars.

 
Shard: A curious thing, this Shard. It is plain in appearance, little more than an orb small enough to fit in the palm of one’s hand, but Matteo cannot for the life of him begin to determine its material make-up nor its origin. Unlike almost everything else that has crossed his path, it cannot be broken down by his Nano machines and any attempt to discern its age inform him that it is as old as the known universe. In fact, Matteo has the strangest feeling that it is exactly as old as the known universe.

But the most curious thing of all is the fact that it seems to be emanating a kind of signal. A type of energy signature quite unlike anything else he had come across. A signal which, somehow, seems to be leading him… he hardly has the words to describe it, but, through the universe to something beyond it.

This requires further study.

Powers:
Nano machines – Miniscule drones, barely large enough for the eye to see, programmed to be capable of following commands, break down matter and construct almost anything the controller can imagine, including other Nano machines. There initial creation was met with much enthusiasm, but early applications made it clear how easily such technology could be used for destructive means and their construction and use where heavily restricted; built in lifespans of only a few hours, the inability to replicate and a mandatory weakness to electro-magnetic fields were all instituted. Such weaknesses are not present in the machines that Matteo developed for his own purposes, as evidenced by their ability to quickly subjugate entire cities in hours. The only defence his world had against Nano machines was other Nano machines, but their neutered versions were no match for his own.

Longevity – For a long time, it was believed that if mankind ever managed to escape the chains of death it would be through transhumanism; unlocking the ability to digitise the soul, or replace the person with the machine without sacrificing the self. However Matteo found another way, one less fraught with controversy and discussions on the nature of humanity. Through the use of specialised Nano machines he is able to prevent the cellular breakdown that comes with old age, the process by which the cells naturally produced by the body to replace themselves have shorter and shorter lifespans over time; he put a stop to the slow deterioration that comes with growing old. Entropy, defeated. Because of this, Matteo is as young now as he was when he first made the discovery; he is somewhere in his late twenties and has been for around 300 years. This same discovery also keeps him healthy, free of disease and toxins and allows him to heal from injuries, so long as they are not fatal, rapidly. Eternal youth. Immortality, of a sort.

Folding space – The ability to make space smaller or larger, either compressing it in on itself, effectively shortening the distance between two space, or expanding it, to make something “larger on the inside than it looks on the outside” as one once succinctly put it. Though in this case the thing that is “larger on the inside” can just be a random spot of open air; it does not need to be an enclosed space. Arguably Matteo’s greatest invention; the ability to warp the dimensions of space itself. It was this discovery that allowed him to finally make a start on his plans to quantify the known universe, the capacity to compress space allowing him to make even the distance between stars something that can be crossed in a single step, while the ability to expand space allowed him to bring as much equipment with him as he deemed appropriate. Or at least enough Nano machines to make whatever he didn’t foresee needing.