Hey arena peeps. Sikako j stopping back by. Been a few years, but looking around and checking if anyone would like to give me a chance to dust of some of my..well dust. I take it there is no way to recover anything from the original site, characters sheets mostly?
Dunno, our fight in the NoW is still available, but finding the CS's might be a little harder.
Human tier is like the old tier one correct? Human abilities, of near peak level? I have a lesser Lizardman I could thrown out. Most of my (old) characters are medium-low powered, some special abilities with different combat specialties.
Oh, in that case I ought to use my most consistent mid-tier. How about ol' Magna Pater?
Name: The Magna Pater
Aliases: The Sleeper of the Clandestine, Shasheuss-Gux (Seminole), Salmu Pulhu (Sumerian), The Great Father
Gender: Male
Species: Living Nightmare, Primordial Vampire
Lifespan: As long as it can continue drinking blood. It doesn't age when it sleeps for years in-between large meals.
Age: 2,387 (Current Physical Form and Mental State), otherwise timeless and unrestricted by the concept of age.
Appearance: A piebald monstrosity with slime slicked flesh and no hind legs. Its only limbs are two craggy, winged arms and a powerful tail of prodigious size. It has four fingers on each hand, with the middle one bearing a claw eight inches long and capable of slicing through muscle like tissue paper. The other claws are half that length. It wears a dripping maw packed tightly with gruesome tombstone teeth, concealed beneath flabby lips pulled back into a knowing, dog-like grin. Childhood fears, once long forgotten, echo dimly throughout its unseeing, oily eyes. These features are accentuated by long, crinkle cut ears and wrinkled leaf nostrils. It has a sharp, hollow tongue which can extend three feet from its mouth and act as a siphon to suck in blood. Dermal branchial papulae, like the thousands of little tube-like legs on a starfish, coat its skin and protrude whenever it is beneath water or drenched in slime. When inactive the respiratory feelers retreat into the body, leaving the flesh porus and spongy.
It is without a reflection and the monster's motion and form exhibit a surreal, dreamy quality that offends the basic innermost sensibilities of any remotely natural or sane organism. From snout to tail base it's over eight feet long. The tail is fourteen feet, and each arm is six foot five to the wrist. It weighs in at about two-hundred and ninety-five kilos, as much as a Siberian tiger.
Abilities
~Limited flight. Due to its wingspan and body weight, it can only glide.
~Ectothermic: It's body temperature adjusts to match its surroundings. It can withstand the hottest or coldest environments.
~Tremendous strength, speed, and agility, the likes of which dominate the animal kingdom.
~Keen hearing and sonar. It's echolocation has a maximum distance of 6,700 meters and can detect objects moving at half the speed of sound. Its hearing is so good it can locate a victim even through miles of dense forest and with its back turned. Anything faster than its echolocation it can sense almost instantly via air pressure gradient.
~Breathing: The Magna Pater respirates via both lungs and tracheae located all over its body. The tracheae are highly developed and allow it to survive in every kind of atmosphere or lack thereof.
~Stealth: Its mucous gums up and muffles any minor sounds it may make when sneaking, and it is immune to any magical or supernatural detection that doesn't naturally or scientifically originate within the five known senses. That is to say, it cannot be located via any sixth sense. It is, however, unable to change color or camouflage itself, and as such rarely stalks during the day. One with sharp eyes or a sharper wit might be capable of finding it.
~Heat pits: Can detect all forms of heat and energy. This includes light itself.
~Tongue: Can draw in blood through a wound like a vacuum. It can also squirt or spray blood and bile. The bile is not highly acidic.
~Natural weapons: Its teeth and claws are composed of a complex chitin and protein polymer, harder and sharper than a Humboldt squid's beak, which can pierce modern body armor. The Magna Pater's bite force is superior to what a Nile crocodile can exert. Its tail has nearly 90,000 muscles, flexible enough to delicately pick up small pebbles, and strong enough to accelerate to whip-like striking speeds or strangle large animals.
~Can squeeze into any opening that it can fit its head through.
~Capable of entering a state of metabolic stasis which can last for decades. It retains spatial awareness during this "hibernation" and can awaken at will.
~Sense of smell: It can track down others thousands of kilometers away just by smelling them on the clothing of its prey.
~The Pull: The Magna Pater and the places it most often visits bear a quality that faintly arouses a victim's morbid curiosity when nearby. This doesn't work if one is aware of the monster's presence. As an example, were the Magna Pater to be waiting outside of a locked window, the victim may feel vaguely compelled to go to said window and look out, but not unlock the window after sighting the horror beyond it. The monster can decide whether or not a victim feels the "Pull". It has scarcely any effect on those with a strong will and a firm grasp of what is real, since the Pull is predominantly meant to snare children.
~Intelligence: Is far more clever that it looks. It has nearly two millennia of experience as a highly prolific interdimensional serial killer, can grasp (but not speak) all languages, and never makes the same mistake twice.
~Can quickly regenerate from wounds by consuming blood and flesh. The amount of mass healed is proportionate to how much is consumed, I.E one pound of food to replace one pound of damaged tissue. It can selectively heal different parts of its body, and any excess food it eats is stored for later regeneration. It can hold up to 110 kilos of food in its stomach.
~The membrane of its wings is tougher than Kevlar, and can easily stop bullets of the highest caliber.
~Its body mucous and saliva contains anticoagulant, cytotoxic, and bufotoxic properties. Those whom it bites or claws will suffer gradual necrosis, unstoppable bleeding, and fast-acting, nightmarish hallucinations. Supernatural forms of healing are drastically hindered where the Magna Pater's juices are concerned, the anticoagulant preventing even magic from clotting or regenerating blood cells, although the monster is immune to its own toxins. The speed at which the bufotoxins take effect depends on how close the wound is to the head, ranging from several minutes to several seconds. The viscosity of the mucous can be regulated, allowing the Magna Pater to be extremely slippery or adhesive. The mucous at its stickiest can bind even the strongest of life forms, deaden the momentum of heavy impacts, and tear off the skin and muscle of any victims that are unfortunate enough to come into contact with it. The mucous functions also to mask its scent. It can convert and excrete up to twenty percent of its body weight in mucous. It becomes significantly faster when empty, and can regain the weight by eating.
~The Alpha:
Though it would never allow its young to live unless driven to desperation by an immense threat to its existence, for it is a selfish thing that dislikes sharing its hunting grounds, it is able to impose its will upon its brood of lesser vampires via shared split-consciousness. By forcefully breeding with another organism, it can produce in one month a litter of four juveniles. The juveniles are capable of killing at birth and mature after a single month whereupon they become able to breed, weighing at that time around 100 kilos each. The brood will never grow to more than 200 kilos. They are vastly inferior to the Magna Pater in terms of physical power, albeit still capable of easily tearing an adult male polar bear limb from limb. Each one can have a litter of four young, and can breed with as many victims as are available. Any sort of living organism that weighs at least seventy pounds, male or female, can be impregnated. At such a rate the number of mature brood would grow exponentially as follows, assuming the lowest estimate of each one breeding a single time per month.
Month One- The Magna Pater breeds and the young emerge.
Month Two- Five mature brood counting the Magna Pater.
Month Four- Twenty brood.
Month Six- Eighty Brood.
Month Eight- 320 brood.
Month Ten- 1,280 brood.
Year One- 5,120 brood.
Year Two- 26,214,400 brood.
~Malocchio:
It may use this power by shutting down its other senses. Before it uses the Malocchio, the intended victim(s) will have a brief premonition of the danger to come. Those who see its eyes will see also a fragmentation of its true essence, and a connection will be made. It is a thoroughly foul experience with no proper comparison. Afterwards, each time the victim goes to sleep, they will enter a trance and begin moving in the direction of the Magna Pater, wherever it may be. They will awaken at the time they normally would, such as a few minutes for a nap and several hours for deep sleep. It also allows the Magna Pater to see with the eyes of its prey whenever it uses the Malocchio, even at the same time if there are multiple victims. By using the Malocchio on one who is already cursed, the victim's sight will be replaced with that of the Magna Pater's until it deactivates its eyes. As it shares the sight of any victims cursed by the Malocchio, this enables it to mix and match the eyes of any marked opponents by proxy, without requiring them to look at it so long as it has other prey to work with. This only lasts for as long as the Malocchio is sustained.
As an example, were it to mark and capture a dog and then mark a dozen humans, it could let the humans go but then repeatedly alternate their vision with that of its own, the dog's, or with each other, by making the animal look into its eyes. The only way to break the Malocchio is to kill the Magna Pater's physical body.
It is a passive curse that has no immediate negative effects unless the victim is entirely under the influence of the Magna Pater's hallucinogens, in which case the victim will immediately lose their mind from fright as the Magna Pater fully claims them into its transcendental nightmare. If the bufotoxins haven't taken full effect then the victim will feel an intense fear which escalates in accordance to the strength of the already terrifying hallucinations.
Looking into its eyes for too long can result in the victim's body becoming riddled with cancer at a later period in time, I.E developing prostate and skin cancer two years after the encounter. It takes roughly seven seconds of eye-to-eye contact (does not have to be constant) before the dormant cancer cells begin taking root. The Magna Pater can only keep the Malocchio active for at most sixteen seconds, and cannot use it again until the same amount of time has passed. As an example, if it only uses it for ten seconds and then deactivates, then it must rest its eyes for ten seconds. The Magna Pater is able to travel to any realm or dimension that withholds a victim of the Malocchio as well. What's more, when the Malocchio is active the Magna Pater is able to touch and otherwise harm incorporeal beings.
Those that are consumed by the Magna Pater whilst cursed by the Malocchio are reduced to their "essential salts", the physical manifestation of their very being. Their consciousness is bound to these salts, and at the monster's whim it can excrete its victims and leave them to be forever lost in the earth as inert particles, the crushing weight of the ages and of their last tormented memories forming an intimate and inescapable hell. The Magna Pater can also, by consuming enough food, give "birth" to a reincarnation of a devoured victim, altering their very essence and defiling the laws of nature and spirit to create a lesser primeval vampire that wields all of the powers it had in its past life. The stronger the victim, the more powerful the primeval thrall. They are entirely subject to the Magna Pater's will, and with the telepathic connection the Magna Pater shares with all its brood, it can gain all of the life experience and knowledge that the victim had stored up before being eaten.
(An untranslated 18th century copy of De Vermis Mysteriis.)
Behavior/Personality: The Magna Pater is what one would first think of when the word "monster" comes to you in the dead of night. It may be called if one completes a forbidden ritual detailed within the ancient tome of black magic known as De Vermis Mysteriis, but nary a being would consider doing such an obscene thing. It makes no noise, has no mercy, cannot be reasoned with, and lives only to drain the blood and devour the flesh of all living things it can bind within its greasy wings. Despite its incalculable intelligence, it never makes any attempts to communicate with victims. It has no desire for social interaction or for personal expression. The Magna Pater is wise in the ways of psychological torture, and knows that it is much more traumatic for a victim to not understand the nature or identity of their tormentor. Such is its cruelty that it affords its prey not even the courtesy of acknowledging them as sentient beings.
It enjoys all manner of prey and is especially inclined to go out of its way to find toddlers and infants, but it is shy and despises the light. It prefers to remain in damp pitch-blackness, where no eyes can spy it and no light can fall upon it. Areas that it has frequented for many years are imbued with distinct, otherworldly vibes, as would be felt in a grievously haunted house. Its lairs are moreso thickened with an underlying feeling of unreality, as if partly submerged in an eerie fantasy. It holds residence in the wilds of Florida, in a basalt cavern that does not flood. When outside of its primary lair it lurks around graveyards and canals. In the graveyards it may be found squirming through the wormy soil to feast upon the dead and decaying when no live meat is available. When swimming below the canals that criss-cross through Cape Coral, it preys upon the elderly and the infirm that wander to close to the murky waters.
("The dark side of life, and the horror of it, belonged to a world that lay remote from his own select little atmosphere of books and dreamings.")
It frequently impregnates victims with its brood, keeping them alive until its malformed young are birthed. It will eat both the victim and the young, doing these things not for food but to purposefully inflict prolonged torment. The few who come into contact with it and live may never be the same as they had been before, for above all else it is a creature of persistence. Even if one leaves the Magna Pater, it will never leave them. A variety of lifelong physical complications and psychological ailments can stem from a meeting with it and it never stops pursuing its prey, even if they move far away. It will also track down any living thing that leaves its scent on a victim. This leads to the Magna Pater consuming the families of those it hunts, along with anyone those families had come into recent physical contact with. Though one may travel often and abroad, once the Magna Pater has chosen a victim their fate is inevitable. It could take days, weeks, months, even years, but eventually on some cold and moonless evening one will awaken to see a sticky face with dead eyes peering through their bedroom window.
(Drawing found in the desk of ten year old Vidya Singh, who went missing in Kanpur, India, two months after claiming to have seen a demon in his backyard.)
History:
Once in a millennium does a creature awaken, a primal horror that represents the physical manifestation of an ethereal, reincarnating monster originating in and as a part of an eternal non-Euclidean nightmare extending past the boundaries of reality. The literal translation of the creature's name, and the name of the nightmare (for it resides within itself) is that of the "Great Father", as many other monsters come from it. In order to fully influence other spheres with its presence, it must obey most of the natural and dimensional laws present. As such, it casts forth a tangible extension of itself. Through this physical presence it may gradually submit other lifeforms and habitats to its will and alter their fundamental states of being. The Magna Pater stalks alone, for it is greedy and does not abide its own kind, but always has one lived. It is the alpha of its mindless subspecies, who thrash and writhe in a charnel chaos of endless autocannibalism amongst the desolation of the heavenly bodies the Magna Pater has ravaged. When all other life is gone, the brood eat and grow off of each other as a self-sustaining conglomerate organism that is its own ecosystem. Only when the lone alpha dies is a new one conceived in the nightmare, as a new Magna Pater recycled. At this point in time does a special one exist, the worst that has ever lived, who was known by the humans of old as "The Sleeper of the Clandestine". Such is its cunning that it has learned to retrieve its memories via the psychic link to its vast brood scattered throughout time and space. It can live again as itself after death, when one-hundred years of incubation has passed. Only can the Magna Pater be permanently stopped if its pneuma, its true state of being, is destroyed or sealed away. Though it is exceedingly difficult to entirely destroy the full entity, as each brood carries with it a fragment of the whole, which in and of itself exists in abstract form, the Magna Pater can be ultimately contained and stopped potentially forever by capturing its pneuma, which leaves its eyes when it dies, in a stone of turquoise weighing at least five pounds. Turquoise was regarded by Aztecs and Native Americans alike to be the holiest of stones, and infinitely more potent than a woven dreamcatcher at stifling nightmares. Such is the truth.
It travels far and with little preference, drawn to whatever realm has foolishly called it via black magic. In Sumeria it was worshipped as an obscure and cruel deity to which countless sacrifices were made. Before the Seminole Wars it was dreaded by the Creek Indians, who gave it many names and forms, as it was too wicked a thing to exist under any one description. Even the most vile of devils balk at associating with it. Like each Magna Pater before it, it wields the unique capacity to share the senses, memories, and will of its subspecies, which it can use to wipe out entire populations. Fortunately it is a petty thing, and despite the magnitude of its origins, it remains content to personally antagonize one victim at a time. It treasures the world, but only for the sadistic pleasures it can derive from slowly bringing pain and grief to other living things.
Though it lingers not permanently on this planet, it is anchored here during times of inactivity. It haunts the secret places deep below ground, amidst a lichen hellscape of death and graverot. It slumbers upon a towering mountain of soggy bones, the bones of children, reigning over its decaying empire on a haphazard throne several thousand lives thick. Those who enter this wretched domain, where the blue sky transitions into a black void, do so at the risk of becoming yet another skeleton upon which the Magna Pater may sleep, with their loved ones soon joining them.
Theme Music:
The Magna Pater's Arenas-
Cape Coral Canals
They say all the nuts roll down to Florida. It has its fair share of wierdos. They say also, that it's God's waiting room. There are many retired folks that have set up for life in the Sunshine State. What they don't comment on are how many people go missing in Cape Coral. Grandpa reclining out in the moored boat behind the condo with a Pabst, watching the sun set. He can hardly even stand up, let alone swim. He has dementia. Probably looked over the edge of the boat, saw something floating by, and reached too far out in his heedless state of mind. He'd not have drowned though, otherwise wouldn't the body have been found? The twins playing hide-and-seek outside on the lawn after dark hadn't drowned either. Surely at some point the game had become too real. Perhaps after the first one vanished and the second realized that it was no longer a sibling they were hiding from. There are never any screams. You shouldn't scream if you are trying to hide. If you are found, the scream might be so shrill that it is like the silent wind through the twisted branches of the overhanging gumbo limbo. Further even that that, nobody can hear you when you are below the fetid green waters of the canal, decomposing leaves and fish above, and below the thing that you've met in dark dreams ever since you could walk. The canals spider web across the town for many miles, and empty into the ocean.
Cape Coral Canals Arena Theme-
The Cavern of the lost
A massive network of winding, mazelike caves that stretch on for almost a hundred miles below the Florida Everglades. There are seven entrances scattered throughout the various mangroves and vacant lots. Each entrance is only big enough to admit a large-sized man, and the cavern is of basalt, dolomite and calcium carbonate rock, somehow immune to flooding and formed perhaps by supernatural means. The caves are oddly disorientating, and the further one goes in the more difficult it becomes to gain one's bearings. The primary cavern exerts the "Pull", a subliminal draw that extends out a short distance past the cavern entrances and lures living things into the depths. Children feel the Pull most strongly.
The primary chamber measures one-hundred and fifty feet in height, three miles in length and width. It's brimming with stalagmites, stalactites, and tens of thousands of skeletons. In the middle of the lair is a pile of bones that almost reaches the ceiling. In addition to the primary chamber feeling as if it's stuck inside of a lucid fever dream, beings with supernatural senses are at risk to being driven quickly to vegetative madness by the hideous and resonating psychic screams exuded by the essential salts which thickly coat the walls, floor, and ceiling, countless condemned souls that have long since lost their sanity and humanity to the thing that haunts the cavern.
Cavern of the Lost Arena Theme-
You're welcome to choose different fighting grounds, but typically the Pater likes to hang around eerie places.
Just to clarify as I know the system Sikako is familiar with, he is referring to a T3, perhaps T4 character at most, the Pater is T6 with a few abilities that push into T7. It doesn't really have any weaknesses, it can and has lol-dodged projectiles moving at supersonic speeds and above and it regenerates from harm pretty consistently. The Magna Pater isn't mid-tier, not unless half its abilities are nerfed or given hard caps. I think you'd struggle to find anyone here who knows the system who would say it was.
@Doc Doctor I have an Allomancer/Feruchemist character that will very likely die by fighting this guy, but I'd like to try. I'll get the sheet up today. Yea he seems pretty strong and sounds terrifying in combat :)
@MelonHead Alright I have the 'Improved" Allomancer back up and running. I think she is mostly T3 with a few abilities that might make her T4. Anyone want a match to test her out?
Here's a link to the Pater's last match. It can dodge projectiles all day, but being a melee fighter it has to get close at some point.
I'd like to say that's where the chance to hurt it lies, but every one of the Pater's matches where it succeeds in getting close could be considered a contender for goriest Arena fight. If your alchemist has a strong stomach and is great at dishing out the pain, he might just come out on top when Pater eventually closes in to trade damage.
Do you mind if we take this match to an Old School arena? Perhaps the 'Shanty Town', a maze of lean-tos of shipping containers and scrap that has recently seen an attack? Comes with fresh corpses and spent shell cases.
@MelonHead Alright I have the 'Improved" Allomancer back up and running. I think she is mostly T3 with a few abilities that might make her T4. Anyone want a match to test her out?
I'd take you up on a fight if you've got time to fight multiple people, our NoW bout was one of my favourites.
I have a few characters I think -might- fit her tier and genre, in ascending order of difficulty:
Also, as you're unfamiliar with all the characters (I created them after you disappeared, I believe) here's some of their fights. Isaac's is particularly amusing, it's not the first time I've made an opponent declare that the universe ceased to exist, actually.
@MelonHead Sure multiple fights can give me different views on the character and see how to push her limits. Yes the Clockwork Man fight was wildly entertaining!
All three of those Characters looked to fit a fight against Scout quite well. Which would be your preference?
:origin()/pre14/8c2a/th/pre/i/2006/270/3/9/camazotz_by_abelardo.jpg)
