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Name: Phage
Age: ***
Species: Sentient Bacteriophage
Affiliation: Self-Serving

History

The resiliency of the Val’gara to survive even in their worst hour caught the attention of this entity whose function as long as it’s known, has been to consume plague. Whether it was physical or mental, he viewed it the same. Viewed by some as a paragon of purity, it wasn’t so much that Phage desired to make the universe a better place. His actions were always in line with his self-determined existence.

Using his skills he was able to coerce a sector of space ridden with hundreds of Val’gara occupied civilizations under his control. The most impressive aspect of all of this is that it was done so without conventional means of war.

His successful campaign was far from propaganda. Though he initially marauded as one of their own, his regime was not one established off lies or deceit. The philosophy he taught challenged all the cataclysm knew up until this point, yet his message was understood. Without The Idea of Evil dominating their judgment, the thought of purpose fueled an existential crisis for the Val’gara. All across the multiverse, many of the abandoned colonies battled for supremacy and control with no end in sight. This began to slow upon his emergence.

Capitalizing off of this, Phage conducted a process he dubbed Lysogenicide. With this, he could potentially rid the universe of the Vesuvius virus for good. Being the natural predator of hive-minded societies that he is; it was no surprise he slithered his way into the Val’gara during its time of weakness. Those who were above his means of coercion were assassinated, most of the time by their own kin in which he’d send about to different parts of the multiverse.

Voice: Phage is noted to speak in trochaic heptameter. The manner in which he spoke gave him a charismatic charm and at times he used it to his advantage. With clarity, his deep voice echoed within the mind of whoever he spoke to, all while possessing a subtle gentleness.

Anatomy: A large bulk of its body was its multicolored Icosahedron head. Often it shifted hues within a mood-based holographic spectrum containing hundreds of colors the majority of creatures could not visually comprehend. It was mesmerizing to the eye and had hypnotic qualities. It possessed a long tail with many legs like fibers along the bottom. Inside its large body was a hidden near- indestructible hypodermic needle, which has never met a surface it could not penetrate.

– There are two components of the Lysogenicide process; Physical(Supercell) and audibly(Logic Plague), with both equality devastating.

Lytic Supercell: With the potential to spread clarity and open minds to the absurdist nature of the universe, the supercell is often described as "thinking muscle.” It closely resembles both neurons and glial cells in terms of its physical structure and can be produced by Phage at will. If introduced to a feral creature, the Lytic Supercell had the ability to bring a desired level of sentience, often mutating the neural system and brain of a creature.

The most frightening aspect is its connection to the soul. Any organism influenced ever so slightly by the Logic Plague posed the potential for Phage to spawn a cell inside them. This left the door open for psychic and illusionary games. The mass production of these could potentially erase memories, resurface forgotten ones and even create false ones if desired. Alternative uses for the cells have been the curing of plagues attacking virus as a bacteriophage would. This did not exclude plagues of the mind.

Logic Plague: In what may appear to be something as innocuous as a simple conversation, Phage is capable of using insidious arguments to convince beings and even Ai to consider its views without bias. When swooned, an ideology can spread verbally with the converted serving as a vector for the plague of logic. It can spread knowingly or unknowingly.

The logic plague should be thought of as a philosophical corruption through logic rather than a mere computer virus or software infection. On the most basic level, it takes the form of facts or arguments delivered with carefully engineered deliberation to directly or indirectly persuade the targeted intelligence to act in a certain way. This often takes advantage of the entity's existing ideas and values to achieve the desired result.

In the case of the Val’gara, Phage used this to spread his influence throughout an entire sector of space thought to be conquered by the Val’gara long ago and became the de facto leader without traveling individually.

Bacteriophage General – Phage had the ability to influence, manipulate and control bacteriophages, the most common life source in the universe.

Name: Jag
Full Name: Demarco "Jaguar" Lucas
Age: 39
Height: 6'9
Weight: 358 lbs
Race: Human

Jag is an enormous man whose size was only second to his pursuit of control. Built like a brick, he carried a reputation that painted him as superhuman. The rosette-like patterns on his skin from vitiligo were probably his most famous feature, and it only added to his intimidating mystique. When he was younger, he often put his Rühl-like physique on display as an enforcer for Trey Eleven Vice, an infamous gang known for clashing with the Red Syndicate in the 2020s before their leader, Hans, mysteriously went missing.

Since then, Jag has made name for himself as one of the most brutal crime lords in the northeast. When it came to vice, he had his foot in it all: drugs, human trafficking, arms dealing, money laundering. He accumulated a fortune of wealth from it and was not afraid to flaunt it with his large collection of chains, watches, grills, and even gold-plated weaponry. Arrogant, but calculated was his motto. The crimelord often roped his adversaries into his very hands by playing off their impatience and intense hatred of him.

Jag was battle tested and ready for confrontation at a moment's notice. He has been beaten, stabbed, shot, jailed, and tortured. The whole nine yards. He wore his large collection of scars like a general's medals, with his proudest being his severed left hand. His solution to losing this part of himself left him far from handicapped. Instead of leaning towards regular prosthetics, he managed to fortify his arm with technology, going through experiment after experiment until it was a classified superweapon.

Jag gained the ability to mold his gold-plated arm into several weapons with its base form being a dangerous set Tekko-Kagi Claws. Other forms allowed him to fire bullets from his finger like a pistol. From his palms, he could let off shots like a machine gun and a shotgun. His arm could even go as far as becoming a full-blown flamethrower.

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There was a bloody murder! Vaelith's pupilless eyes were on full display—cold, flawless, like two perfect diamonds. Silver staked through the heart, her delicate right arm dangled off the bedside, a jangling constellation of bracelets adorning her wrist, while her slender left backhand rested against her pale forehead.

It was a tragic scene.

The oversized dagger sheathed into the Katuran ruler’s heart impaled even the bed frame. It was peculiar for a vampire of her maturity to forgo resting in a coffin, but no lid would have spared her from an untimely assassination. Approaching the cherry-blotted mattress soaking up a vampire’s buffet worth of blood was Luthienne, one of several daughters of the Veylthorne estate. Borderline unmoored from reality, the young vampiress’ sleepwalking habit brought her before the felled queen. Standing at the foot of her mother's literal deathbed in a white Edwardian ruffle nightgown, behind Luthienne's moppy draping hair, her sleep-deprived hazel eyes barely widened. It wasn't because she was heartless. The blood supply shortage due to the war affected the surviving Vampires aboard the Château du Sang in varying ways. Luthienne, classified as a feaster, required consuming copious amounts of blood to offset the frequency with which she involuntarily used her powers. Any ounce of empathy and sorrow normally shown in a situation rocketed off the other end of the balance scale when weighted against her intrinsic nature as a vampire.

In awe of all the blood in front of her, quickly the young vampire’s thoughts veered towards “If only Mother was human.” She'd wring the bedsheets of their last drop were it the case. Luthienne was hungry, bed-headed, and vampire blood was about as appetizing as a Bordeaux glass of cod liver oil. Regardless, her sleepwalking, deemed prophetic by her father, brought her here before anyone else. As much as she wanted to return to her canopy coffin and close the curtains, her subconscious brought her here for a reason. Her hunger did not blind her to that aspect.

Instinctually grabbing the teal satin sheets with no reserve like any sleepwalker would a fridge handle, Luthienne had no hesitation as the first witness to the crime scene. The smart thing, the normal thing, would be to avoid tampering with evidence as it could only draw suspicion. However, the Veylthorne family operated by a peculiar set of rules and customs rebuking familial norms. In this family, the narrative is always up for grabs. Whoever can dictate and insert their self-serving will via schemes takes all. It is instilled in them at a young age that their meritocracy of family dysfunction made each generation stronger as iron sharpens iron. Programmed by that instinct, the brazen teen went to work, uncovering the recently crowned late matriarch. Conducting a half-assed autopsy with just her sleep-deprived eyes. It didn't take a coroner to realize Vaelith had been dead for less than an hour.

Further inspection made Luthienne's eyes narrow. The murder weapon of choice was… bizarre. Dull, unpolished, sinuously twisting into a helix, and engraved with a twin snake-themed insignia. The dagger resembled a prop more than a practical assault instrument. Something so unique should have instantly attached itself to a memory in the vampiress thoughts but its craftsman origins sat on the tip of the girl's tongue. That information titered much closer to her fangs than the assailant probably was comfortable with.

Though she’d pretend otherwise, the girl was more than busybodied. She was offensively intrusive in things that interested her. Clearly, her mother’s death met that criteria. Or did She? Her body language certainly didn’t say so. Probably to the glee of the perpetrator, if they somehow watched, the young vampire's head nodded a bit. Despite the circumstances, mystifyingly, Luthienne fell asleep standing at her mother’s bedside.

She stood there for more than a minute, giving ample time for someone to approach, and for a second, a shadowy figure almost had. This was not some act of politeness. Luthienne, like most of the Veylthornes, had a moniker—The Nightmare Eyes. She saw reality through an extended scope of clarity when sleeping. The room dissolved into her unconsciousness, a melding kaleidoscope until it took on an inverted palette. Not only was there a visible residual aura on the weapon but it did not manifest in her dream as a dagger. It was some strange, gold, gem-embedded artifact in the shape of a closing hand resting quite calmly on Vaelith’s chest. The aureate glow of the artifact appeared to rebuke her control over the space. Every time Luthienne’s hand crept near it began to phase away. It was a deliberate foil to her psychometry.

Stubborn, she attempted to force it, but like a bolt of lightning, a surge of energy shot through the vampiress, jolting Luthienne wide awake, severing her from the oneiric landscape she had been maintaining. “Hmph! I’ll find another way.” Pouty, the vampiress failed to realize her hunger had been mysteriously satiated. About-facing, the young vampire departed, mood much fouler than when she had arrived though her problem was solved. She returned to her corner of the Veylthorne quarters—a massive, vast, labyrinthine castle confined by dimensional magic within the Château du Sang, the final pride of the Katur. As the only intact testament to the might of their former space empire, the Veylthornes and the fractionated populace of surviving Katurans had no choice but to call it home.

Many weren’t enjoying it, including Lazarel, eldest son of the Veylthorne estate. The noctivagant noble moved through the castle’s corridors in silence, his cowl covering most of his stoic expression. Inside, his heart played his rib cage like a drum. Other than his mother who vehemently opposed it so much the prince could no longer face her, no one knew he placed his father in The Sanguine Rest, a cursed artifact his family had been designated to guard for generations. The hematite-black coffin with its agleam carmine crown was more than some magical artifact. It was living, possessing a sick sense of humor in the ways it rewarded usage. From the beyond, Lazarel could feel his father’s spirit condemning him. The way of the Veylthorne would be for the eldest son to take over and seize as much power as he could amongst the confusion, yet, he chose to dishonor the king who died protecting the last of the Katuran fleet by revitalizing him.

A thousand voices echo in the dark, yearning for the gift of another breath— but at what cost? What will the entity within the Sanguine Rest offer the Veylthornes this time in return? The first time it was used, centuries ago, is the reason their family was cursed as vampires. The last time, it gave rise to the Dream Wraith, a spirit born from Luthienne’s nightmares that continues to possess her to this day. The time before that, it snatched thousands of Katuran souls to forge the Scarlet Shell armor, a great asset at a pricey cost. And the time before that, the most consequential, opened a portal to the Shattered Lament, a dimension of nearly infinite resources. Initially seen as a blessing, it microwaved in a renaissance in technology and sorcery but ultimately led to the invasion and demise of Katur. There was no telling what curse Lazarel just inflicted on his family but it would reveal itself soon enough. The least he figured he could do was check on the present family members he cared about.

First, the prince checked on Miuccia. He scanned her room, walls draped in deep, velvety purple and midnight blue curtains adorned with silver thread. His little sister wasn’t asleep. In the corner, she knelt, long, jet-black hair nearly touching the floor as she played with her dollhouse. Soft plush toys were scattered about the floor, next to her open black-wood coffin. Many of the toys stared at Lazarel with deep, human eyes full of sadness, one painfully mouthing, 'He...lp...us...' Miuccia turned to her brother with her big brown eyes capable of capturing anyone's soul with sheer cuteness. With genuine concern, she said “Big brother, I think Lulu is sleepwalking again. She passed my room earlier.” That didn’t sound any alarms, but out of precaution, he checked Luthienne’s room. She too was up, pillow behind her back reading a yellow grimoire. “Luthienne, Miuccia said you were sleepwalking. Did you encounter anything odd in your visions?” With the most pathetic poker face in the world, his sister simply replied “Nope” before returning to her book. He left, and a brief laugh escaped her lips, thinking she had fooled him.

Shaking his head, Lazarel moved on, not even bothering to check Bastien’s room considering his younger brother has been gone wandering about the Château for days now. Without the faintest whisper of uncertainty, Bastien was using the hierarchical chaos surrounding their father’s death and colony settling on this new planet to womanize his way into unauthorized feeding sessions. Lazarel had other matters to worry about than searching for someone who attempted to take his life more times than he had fingers. If something happened to his brother it was safe to say his heart remained unmoved. Similar could be said about the eldest sister, Elara, an individual only capable of viewing him as an obstacle to the throne. She and the majority of his insufferable siblings lurking in her domain had a reckoning on the horizon—Lazarel was on his way, welcomed or not.