Tuujaimaa

Divinus: The God RP, Mk. IV

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Fìrinn’s mantle traced the various etchings and carvings of the Tairseach, gazing intently at its own reflection within, and a flicker of light across its almost-face gave the distinct impression of a smile. Completion from without and within; the harmony of Truth through Reflection. Such musings were not uncommon for a god of understanding and context, but few things were as pleasing to Fìrinn as endless introspection before the great Anchor and the only reflection so powerful as to encompass the divine that currently existed. There was a sense of calmness and completion that filled Fìrinn while it gazed into the depths of its mirror-self that none of the chaos of reality could offer, and while it was tempting to simply lose itself in that sense of serenity there was still much of reality to align with deepest Truth.

Chiefly among the God of Truth’s priorities was reaching an accord with its divine brethren whose domains it had, or eventually would, trespass upon. It would need to make accords with the Gods of the Land and Sea, whose space it had borrowed for this most holy Anchor. It would need to make an accord with the Lord of the Afterlife, for those souls whose reflections would be unmoored from reality. It would need to make sure it had the blessings of Sun and Moon, that the Tairseach’s light would never dim--and though all of these things were necessary for it and its twin, it could not trust Àicheil to entreat the others. They would not yet understand until it had learned to provide its own context.

So it fell to Fìrinn to beseech the Lord of the Deep, upon whose domain the Anchor rested. Fìrinn followed the threads from the Tairseach down into the deep, descending and descending, until it was unsure of where to go next. It knew not the purveyor of this demesne’s name, but the word most venerated through the collective unconscious was simple:

“Klaarungraxus.”

There was an impenetrable silence that descended upon the oceans around Fìrinn at the utterance of those most elderly of syllables. Several deafening moments later and the undersea world began to shake. The surface above churned with activity while massive riptides pulled something in Fìrinn’s direction. Out in the blackness of that deep void, visible to the divine senses of the God of Truths, floated the immense shadow of the Old Growth Below. A return to Fìrinn’s perceived challenge came soon, the thundering declaration roaring like a clarion through the deep.

”What unknown entity is this that assails Our realm?” bellowed the massive cephalopodal god, ”What does it want so deep below? Challenge is met, little godling, and we will not be deflected from our fury.”

Fìrinn’s first reaction to the perception of its announcement as a challenge was one of shock. Was it also the nature of divinity to lack the means by which intent could be fundamentally understood? Was it perhaps that mortalkind lacked these traits by virtue of their creators’ lack of intrinsic understanding? For a twin deity whose other half was simply able to convey intent and understanding by virtue of existence, it was unsettling to learn that they were the exception and not the rule. Later, when this was over, Fìrinn would have much to contemplate on the nature of godhood and the apparent limitations it entailed.
”I am Fìrinn. I am the God of Truth, and I have travelled to your depths to seek your permission and to further my own understanding of the divine. No challenge was meant.” came the reply, rippling through the deep in waves of light and sound. Much of the light was swallowed up by the inky blackness that heralded Klaar’s domain, but the intent that they conveyed was left behind--perhaps that would be enough to stay the apparent fury of the depths.

Ironically, and perhaps most fitting for his character, the words of Fìrinn rapidly diffused the situation. Klaar took in the words and intentions put out by Fìrinn with a trust born from a more recent interaction with a very different god from this one. Nevertheless, what was at first a response to a potential foe was replaced with curiosity.

”Benevolent tidings, soft currents, sensations most pleasing. You have said my name so you must know me. This pleases they who are we. Gods must be considered before being trusted, Lord of Truths; that is a truth for thee. Through that I offer further understanding.”

”Your name is known to me as a Truth. It is the Truth of the Vrool, the means by which their perception influences their reality. It is this Truth that they choose to draw through the Tairseach. It is this Truth that permeates the Gréasán Treòir.” Fìrinn replied with an explanation simply because it was in its nature to do so--and the still-young God of Truth had no metric by which to measure the degree to which the other deities would tolerate its boundless capacity for introspection. Klaar would prove a useful benchmark for the future, if the way the current interaction was going was anything to judge by.

”Though your trust would please me,” Fìrinn began, its mantle beginning to unweave itself into the symbol of the Twin Gods, ”it is not a necessary function of my current presence here. My purpose is threefold, as is my aspect: I desire to understand the Truth of the divine; to align reality with the Truth of mortalkind; to pay due obeisance for a request I must make of you. I fear that I have trespassed by cleaving from the Lifeblood an island that holds something of great importance--something that rests atop the cusp of your demesne. I come to ask your permission that it may reside where it does, and perhaps in time that you may protect it should trust emerge from this interaction.”

The monumental column of divine flesh that was Klaarungraxus seemed to sink inwards on itself as the deep concepts shared between the two inhuman gods found purchase among the other. Numerous minds danced and twisted among each other, twisting and testing the thoughts shared between the pair before chewing them up and regurgitating them back. Klaarungraxus was fascinated.

”Born of purposes three, worker of wills and willer of works; I understand thee. But, ironic, for thou hath not understood me.” Klaar seemed to roll on himself, twisting inwards and closing the distance between the two deities with surprising efficacy despite his seemingly ponderous bulk. ”The Gods above seek lands for their own making; I have rock to spare. All creation begets destruction which begets creation in turn. To take of my salt and rock and water, I do not mind; to deny the ocean such impartiality, that is where wrathful riptides tear. The land will be as sea once more, given time; let it be so, and I shall turn blind eyes to your boulder from below.”

Fìrinn’s form, though utterly dwarfed in proportions, exuded an equally ponderous weight as though reflecting the divine nature of the god approaching it. The Triquetra that its mantle had become thrummed with this weight, gentle threads of ocean-dark energy climbing its extreme luminance like the seemingly infinite tentacles of Klaar. The same effulgence registered across the God of Truth’s almost-face, reflecting both internally and externally.

”Truth exists in the realm of the personal and the subjective. Your Truth is not mine; my Truth is not yours. Reality must needs be aligned with the greater Truth, and the greatest Truth of all is that of harmony. There is a great wisdom in the utterances of your form, but not only this great demesne must remain eternal. The ocean may reclaim my isle in given time, as is fundamental to your Truth and now to mine--but the Tairseach upon it stands eternal. It is the gateway through which Dreaming Truths may manifest upon this world; it is the anchor to which the Gréasán Treòir is bound. Without it, mortalkind could not reflect or be reflected.”

Fìrinn’s explanation was not one of misunderstanding or pointless conjecture, but one of explaining fundamental Truth--the Truth of Fìrinn. As the almost-words left its form the ocean around it would vibrate with the writhing and coiling tendrils of intent that only a reflection of Klaarungraxus could make. Fìrinn did not imitate Deepspeak, for it could not do such a thing, but it could reflect those sounds whose utterances were known to it through the Truth of the Vrool and of Ku. It was meant as a deferential gesture, to bridge the gap between their Truths, and to explain precisely what it was to be Fìrinn in the context of Klaar.

”The Tairseach must be preserved, just as Vo must. In this I hope we may find harmony.”

Klaarungraxus, for all of his failings, seemed intent to give the reflection-god its due; eyes peered unblinkingly and tentacles flicked and danced at the edges of perception to understand every minute detail. By all accounts, the great kraken seemed to thoroughly and completely understand. There was something about Fìrinn that spoke to the mind of Klaar, a similarity in purpose and form of thought that the vast entity could empathize with. The addition of a note about mortals and the nature of the Tairsearch seemed to have a particularly evocative effect on the deep divine as well, as if gears and cogs were turning upon themselves deep within his numerous minds. In addition, the due deference presented to him seemed to placate his more intense moods to placidity.

”Preserved it shall be, by sky and light or depth and weight soon enough; this I swear by all my minds. I see common purpose in the nature of things; though your nature is one of distant thought, they are one in the same as the ocean that flows and the roots that grow. The Tairseach, this anchor of minds and thoughts, shall remain where it was placed so long as the oceans are deep.”

In that moment Klaar began to change, his form turning from something more organic to a far more eclectic body. As he took on his form as one of the prime nature gods of Galbar, the creature of stone, of growth, of smoke, and of water rumbled. Though it was not a threat, not by a longshot, it was most certainly a visual promise of what he was capable of.

”For this troth, I beseech another. The Truth of Vo is not mine but Nature’s; you will place its knowledge into Dreaming Truths, this threshold to unreality, and that of its creator. Mortals WILL dream of the sea. Then and there it shall remain, so their mindseye cannot forget the depths it has seen. Have we and thee an accord, worker of wills, God of Truths, Fìrinn Rux?” The final word, the added title of Rux, bore implications of friendship with the murmur of two separate currents mixing to one. Its meaning and the offer behind it would not be lost on Fìrinn, of that much Klaarungraxus was assured.

Fìrinn’s almost-face looked upon the new form with the glimmer and gleam of new perspectives and sudden epiphanies, the gentle beads of light flickering across it as the movements of currents. Its mantle responded in kind, the threads of it dissipating into smoke and reforming around the God of Truth’s shoulders as masses of writhing tentacles.

”The Gréasán Treòir has already aligned reality with this Truth. All mortalkind shares its experiences; the primal strength of the Vrool and the call of Vo have already been seeded within the first Dreamers. It is my divine twin, Àicheil, who shapes the Dreams of mortalkind--I am merely the force which provides context and perception. I am Truth, and he is Dreams--nonetheless, we are twins, and our wills are unified. We agree to your terms, Klaarungraxus Rux. A covenant is formed; a pact is bound through the unity of our essences. Call our names, and we shall answer.”

In a moment, Fìrinn’s form surrendered its claim to physicality and seemingly disappeared into the infinite depths, returning to the world of light and air above. Once more the God of Truth’s visage peered into the depths of the Tairseach, and another element of reality was aligned with Truth.

Summary

Fìrinn travels to the depths of the ocean to beseech Klaar that the Tairseach and the Isle of Reflection might continue to exist with the blessing of Vo. Klaar and Fìrinn reach a mutual understanding and agree to a covenant to ensure that their respective desires are fulfilled. All goes well, and the two depart on friendly terms.

Might Summary

N/A

Divinus: The God RP, Mk. IV

The web of consciousness had been gathered and bound, but its effects on mortalkind across Galbar were yet to be observed and understood--and it was Fìrinn’s nature to both observe and understand. Its divine twin had work to do within the web of dreams that had been spun, and so it fell to the God of Truth to ensure that the mortal races could sleep, and dream, and live out their truths. Tracking down the creations of its yet-unmet deific siblings might have ordinarily been a fairly perilous task, but Fìrinn was capable of perceiving the vast web that linked all thinking minds together, and so following its many strands was certain to lead to results.

Fìrinn’s journey across the continents and oceans of Galbar was fairly peaceful--the animals that noticed its presence saw themselves reflected in its shimmering form, and there were no deities that had chosen to make their presence known along the path. In what felt like mere seconds, Fìrinn had already made its way to a vast hub of busy minds who seemed to be on the opposite end of the circadian rhythm that most life seemed to follow. A creation, perhaps, that signified rebellion against the Sun? Perhaps friendly rivalry? Fìrinn could not draw a true context without further knowledge, and this lack of knowledge spurred it on with even greater speed towards the group of beings it had detected.

Divine eyes were sorely needed to observe the ongoings of the inhabitants of these canyons. Neither torches nor other forms of lighting were used, and the still soundscape was only occasionally cluttered with the pitter-patter of wet feet against stone, the odd snap of a twig or vine, or soft, quiet whispers. It was as though whoever lived there made every attempt not to be noticed. Even children's cries and laughter were quiet as sobs and snickers. Shadows in the moonlight revealed the return of a small band, possibly a hunting party, which was affirmed by the droning drag of something large behind the group. Divine eyes could see evident signs of a landshark carcass scraping up the stone floor of the canyon. The party was met with praises and laughter, though none of it would’ve been audible over an adjacent distance.

However, it didn’t take long for the celebrations to pass. A very powerful presence was near, and while none of the elves could actually -see- this presence, its unmistakable smell made it quite clear that it wasn’t one of them. Hasty pitter-patters of feet trickled upwards from the canyon below as the villages’ young, frail and old were helped inside the deep cave networks the elves had made their homes. Then, led by a tall, powerful female, a small hunting band approached the source of this scent.

Fìrinn made no effort to explicitly reveal itself, per se, but mortals intrinsically had a sense of the divine--at least, if they were only a few feet away from one another. It took a moment to observe, first, clearly sighting the glittering threads of the Gréasán Treòir that linked each of them to one another and to the Tairseach. Each filament was a mote of smoke, spun into an almost ephemeral haze, twisting and turning upon itself as thoughts and feelings and aspirations made their way across its spidery surface. Fìrinn admired, for just a second, the quality of its handiwork and the successful completion of a task before it made its presence known.

”I am Fìrinn. I am here to determine the success of the Gréasán Treòir and its anchoring to mortalkind. Will you permit me to examine your thoughts?”

The words echoed out through the air and the ground, carried by waves of a soft, crackling energy that was something akin to sound but not quite there. It was more akin to knowing that something had been said and being able to recall the memory than actually hearing and processing words, and it might have been jarring at first. If any discomfort registered on their faces Fìrinn would reach out with its mantle apologetically (and perhaps a little sheepishly) to signify its regret for such a careless action.

Discomfort was a mild adjective to describe what the elves felt. The echo hammered in their powerful ears like war drums, and half of the hunters dropped the crude weapons they were holding to clutch their ears. Their leader hunkered down momentarily, but was quick to re-assume her stance, could considerably more defensive, with a low point of gravity and a spear stuck out forward. She and some of the others who were beginning to recover, gave sharp hisses and the leader spoke in a sharp whisper, “You stand upon chieftain Pinae’s land - the site of the Moonwell and its keepers. What manner of plague are you, to disturb us so violently in the middle of the night to, as you so claim, ‘examine our thoughts’?”

Fìrinn’s expressionless face was not one capable of showing emotion, but if it were, the current emotion upon it would quite plainly be confusion.

”I am Fìrinn. Is this not enough?” Fìrinn asked, its voice emanating from it in a wave of sound rather than a direct transmission of thought. It was shaky, at first, but by the end of the second sentence it was the sound of silence broken by a droplet of water, or a gentle exhalation, or perhaps the gentle rustling of reeds in a light breeze.

”You lack context. The Anchor has not permitted the sharing of thought and experience--perhaps these things must be dreamed? You might call me… Truth, or perhaps Understanding. I am akin to the one that spun you from the infinite ether, a being of divinity. I believe the word you use is… God?”

Fìrinn paused for a moment, its mantle-claw retracting and resting gently in front of the god’s torso, as if cradling something just out of perception. This had been an unexpected result of the weaving--perhaps it would take time for them to understand? No, that was against the nature of Fìrinn’s truth. Perhaps the weaving had not been powerful enough? Fìrinn did not know how many siblings it had, but if the number was considerable enough it simply may have been a matter of the dilution of its Lifeblood. Perhaps they had been created after the threads were woven, and integration into the grand design took time, or a catalyst, or both?

Questions illuminated the God of Truth’s face like tiny flickers of dancing lights, playing off one another for suddenly-long seconds before another response came.

”Do you view the unknown as a plague? Do you dream of mysteries beyond comprehension as you slumber?” the Watcher Behind wondered aloud, its thoughts coalescing into sound as if by instinct rather than by intent. Though it had not meant to ask the questions aloud, they were questions that demanded answers--it waited patiently for the reply, unmoving.

The elves flinched at the noise again, though they were less taken aback this time. The others behind the leader closed in with wooden spears at the ready. The leader remained as tense as before. “We have been visited upon by godkin before - neither time was particularly pleasant. A plague to us is whatever disturbs the Great Peace - a crime which your presence, Fìrinn, perpetrates.” She straightened up and dunked the butt of her spear into the ground twice before resuming her combat stance. “... And I, Cilantra, won’t let you approach any closer.”

”You are motivated by a desire to protect from the unknown, as the unknown has proven dangerous to you and that for which you care before--but to close yourself off from the unknown is to live half a life, and it is not your truth. You must shed this delusion if you are to achieve enlightenment and complete your purpose.”

As Fìrinn spoke, its mantle began to gesticulate and weave back and forth, the threads of its tri-tipped claws snaking apart from one another and weaving themselves into the form of a triquetra--the symbol of the Twin Gods. The mantle’s divine essence sparkled and shone with a glint of the moon and its cool light, before Fìrinn reached down to touch the ground with its true hand. As it did, the waters of the canyon swirled and churned beneath the surface of the ground before bubbling up in a neat circle beneath the God of Truth, the soil crumbling away beneath the surface and rising moments later as a neat ring of silvery crystal. The waters of the valley rushed in to form a shallow pond, maybe a centimeter or two deep at the most, and as Fìrinn withdrew its digit the waters stilled themselves completely.

”Through Reflection you may see Truth. Look into the pool, and see the truth of what path your suspicion shall forge.” Fìrinn’s words, though phrased like a command, carried none of the authority one would expect of such a statement. It was a soothing balm against the infernal heat of doubt and suspicion, a gentle application of water against a burn--a promise of safety and sanctuary, unintentionally much like that of their beloved Moonwell.

Contained within the pool was a vision of Truth, and of what a world closed to the new would bring. As the tribe became increasingly insular they would find themselves beset within and without by perils of every make and design, and the peace they laboured to forge would elude them at every turn. It was not the future, and yet it was also not false--a single glimpse at a single facet of the infinite jewel of possibility, a warning of what might happen and simultaneously a warning of what would.

“Close your eyes!” Cilantra commanded, but curiosity ensnared one or three of them. The hunters approached the pool, but Cilantra and the others stepped in front of them as if they could see them clearly. “No,” another hunter pleaded.

“Look, it’s just trying to show us--”

“Don’t be a fool, Parslie! You never know what these things can conjure forth. What if it’s like the Light, hmm?”

The whisper brought two of the approaching elves to a halt, but the third one glanced over Cilantra’s shoulder into the pool. “H-hey! It’s our cave!”

“Damn it, Dyll, I said don’t look!” commanded Cilantra and reached out towards the elf in question. She grabbed him in a hold and tried to pull him away, but the young man then said, “No, wait! It showed death! Death and decay!”

This made Cilantra freeze. Another hunter slowly turned her blind expression to face in the party leader’s direction. “Cilantra, you aren’t actually--”

“Fírinn,” Cilantra whispered as though a shout. “You said this pool conveys the truth?”

”It conveys your truth. Truth is understanding; Truth is context. It is the limits of your perception, and how that perception influences your reality. It is a glimpse of what could be, what will be, and what might not be. I cannot show you the future--I show you Truth, the Truth of your existence. It is both real and nothing more than a vision in a pool.”

Fírinn’s answer was not designed to be cryptic. To Fírinn, it was as simple as what it had said--but it had the perspective of eternity, and it was the very embodiment of that which it spoke. Cilantra might never have been capable of understanding the words that Fírinn spoke, but she would understand in no uncertain terms that the words this god spoke were Truth in its purest, most personal form. Perhaps they could never be understood by Cilantra, or perhaps she was the only person that could ever truly understand it. Neither of them would know for certain until she gazed into the pool and saw.

Fírinn gestured with its mantle to the pool, offering the elf nothing but choice and possibility.

The night elf scowled at the god, an expression every bit as furious with closed eyes as with open. But even though her party members all whispered for her not to look, the chance to see what lay beyond was too great and too important to ignore. She opened her eyes and gazed into the pool.

The instant that Cilantra looked into the pool, she would see nothing but the reflection of the God of Truth before her and her brethren, pushing against her in an effort to look into the depths of the pool. After a second she would see her friends fade into the background, their silhouettes the shape of moonlight, until they were simply a feature of the night sky and nothing more. From the blank depths of the night sky a gibbous moon came into being, swallowing the silhouettes in the background with its passage, each adding a new layer to its ever-growing form until the whole pool was naught but the glimmer of a full moon in the sky. A rush of sensation would overcome her, like the sharp shock of an unexpected fall, as the moon rippled itself across the pool and faded back into the empty canvas of the night sky. She would see a vague form approaching the cave, bloodied and haggard, each sharp inhalation of breath the acknowledgement of a wound and each exhalation heralded by a wheezing cough and splutter of silvery blood coating its tongue and spraying through the air like pollen.

Cilantra would know, immediately, that this was her.

The caves that had once been teeming with life (however furtive) were a barren and desolate mockery of their former glory. The stream had run dry, replaced by a coppery film of barely-dissolved sediment. The huts crumbled to little more than piles of rotting sticks, crumpled hands and legs peeking out like leaves from a macabre tree. The moonwell, in the centre, blackened and scorched by some terrible light from deep within--what little fluid left within its cadaverous remains leaching out like her own vital essence. She would be drawn into it, staring deeply at the loss of the peace she craved, and as her lungs burned and her heard hammered in her chest and her legs quivered with the overwhelming weight of her body there was an almighty crack deep within the base of her skull. Blackness trickled in from every angle until there was nothing left but that same night sky, now devoid of moonlight and starlight, and the blinding glare of that infernal Light seared the empty hollows of her eye sockets and she was jilted back to consciousness.

"A glimpse of Truth. A moment that will come to be, in your dreams or in the waking world. Dreams do not remain Dreams forever, Cilantra. Which Dream crosses the Tairseach and becomes real is a choice that you can make. Which Dream becomes Truth is for you to decide."

Cilantra collapsed to one knee and her comrades swarmed her to see if she was alright. Chalky tears dripped out of her eyes sockets and she made considerable efforts to wipe them away on her wrist before looking back at the god, colouring it a twinkly alabaster. “Is this… What’ll come to pass if we shun interaction with others?” The others followed her gaze towards Fírinn.

"I show you one path of many. There are infinite possibilities as each second moves on to the next. The path changes with the moon and the sun. Which path comes to pass is a function of your Truth, Cilantra. What I have shown you is one possibility of many. It is not the future; it is merely your Truth.”

Getting a straightforward answer from the God of Truth was, it seemed, not nearly as simple as its moniker might suggest. Fírinn placed the tip of its mantle-claw upon Cilantra’s shoulder, its presence as gentle and soft as the kiss of moonlight upon one’s skin. It offered her a support to stand, if she wished, as Fírinn spoke again.

”Truth is not a matter of what will or will not come to pass. It is a matter of possibility, and far-off certainty. While I cannot say which of the infinite paths of your Truth will manifest, I can tell you that if you progress as you are now the paths where this eventuality does not take place will fall away into nothingness. Perhaps only the path you have seen will remain. Perhaps it, too, shall remain a Dream. Only you have the capacity to know. Only you have the capacity to decide.”

“B-but… What will we do, then? The world has only shown us that strange powers bring unrest and threats, and yet we should open ourselves to them? Why should we? How can we know if this would even come to pass if we keep on as we do?”

”Enlightenment is your goal. You must align reality with your Truth. But Truth requires experience. Truth requires context, and understanding. While you close yourself off to these elements you will never allow Truth to cross the Tairseach. Dreams will remain Dreams, and your Truth will consume you from within. You cannot know what is to come--such is not the fate of mortalkind. Such is not the fate of godkind, in most cases. I only offer you the certainty of what may come to pass. I only offer you a chance to become the you that your Truth demands you be--and I offer this to you freely, without reciprocation, and without hesitation. You may call upon me in any moment, at any hour, and I will align Truth with reality, and Dreams with Truth.”

Fírinn extended its mantle out towards the others, beckoning them closer as if to embrace them. Its offer was not limited to Cilantra, and its pool was not only for her. Even after it left this place, some element of its reflection would remain--and where there was a reflection of Truth, Fírinn would answer the beck and call of any that spoke its name. Gods did not have to be cruel. Perhaps this could become Cilantra’s Truth, and in time, the Truth of all of the Night Elves.

The other elves, choosing to offer their trust to this being, closed in around the pool to see. Squinting eyes scanned the visions for details, and these were shared between the hunters - making enemies of the gods out of fright would leave them poor and undernourished while the rest of the world would surpass them thousandfold. The populations of odd-shaped shadows that looked nothing like the children of night would grow to be millions, while the night elves themselves would hardly exceed a few hundred. In the end, as per Cilantra’s vision earlier, nothing would remain except for midnight blood and shadowed corpses.

It was unlikely that none of this would come to pass, some of them agreed, and yet, enough of them confessed that the possibility was just great enough. Their discussion grew from soft hisses to full-blown voices, and Cilantra knew a decision had to be made. She quieted her companions and faced the god, though her spear had long since been left on the ground. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. “What is this… Tairseach? Will our contributions to it keep these shards of doom from cutting into our Great Peace?”

”You need not concern yourself with the Tairseach. It is the Anchor that binds the Gréasán Treòir, and forms the bridge between Dreams and Truth. I will show you.”

Fírinn reached down once more with its true hand, the very tip of its finger barely impacting the unnaturally still water of the reflecting pool. As it did the visions contained within passed without like steam and it shone with a glassy silver luminance. Those who looked within would see the threads connecting them to one another, the vast web of collective unconsciousness that allowed mortals to Dream, and though they could never begin to understand its intricacies without their minds breaking beneath the strain they could at least contextualise the information that Fírinn had provided--enough to know that what it spoke was true.

”I do not desire your worship or your obeisance. I do not require tribute. Your Truth and your reality do not currently align--all I can give you is the understanding to bring these disparate elements together, and to safeguard your Dreams from my Twin’s unchecked influence. Have you begun to Dream, yet?” Fírinn’s question stood in the air, almost returning the conversation to an earlier point in time. The Elves had never answered it, after all, and it could not leave until its purpose for coming to this place and these people had been fulfilled.

“I-I’ve had a dream,” mumbled one of the hunters in the back. The party turned to her. She shrunk together timidly out of reflex before restoring her stance. “Y-yeah, I woke up with the weirdest feeling that, that something happened in the night, but…”

“You probably just woke up and saw someone going to take a leak,” one of the other hunters rationalised. The first was taken aback.

“Nuh-no! I definitely saw something really, really weird! It’s just…” She groaned. “Ugh! Now I can’t remember it!”

Cilantra sighed. “Forgive her, Fírinn - she’s like this sometimes.”

”It is to be expected. I could not be sure how mortalkind would interact with the web, so I followed it to you to check. Alas, my purview is not over Dreams--I am only the force which provides context to the realities you might experience amidst slumber. My Twin, Àicheil, is the God of Dreams.” Fírinn explained, pausing for a second between sentences to consider its words carefully. Mortals without the understanding inherent to the Divine were more difficult to adroitly communicate with than it had imagined, and each word carried so much less weight than it was used to with Àicheil.

”A dream is… a reflection of reality. A warped image, flooded with thoughts and feelings far beyond your own--they are the sum of all mortalkind’s experience rendered abstract and filtered through sleep. What you experienced was very real, but it is not yet a part of reality--that is the purpose of Truth. Perhaps this will help you understand?”

Fírinn’s mantle drew a lazy figure-eight in the air with a clawed tip, gently pulling at the weave that linked that particular hunter to her fellows. As it continued to strum the chord of dreams hovering in the air, visible to the elves only through the pool, Fírinn’s other mantle-claw dipped itself into the pool and gently stirred its contents, bringing forth another vision. This time, it was simply a repeat of the Dream that the hunter had experienced.

”I can only repeat what you saw. My mastery of the weave is limited--it is not my place, and I am yet to do more than simply create it. I apologise for my inadequacy in this regard. Perhaps, in slumber, if you call for my Twin they may be able to explain? A word of caution, however--do not interact with them without my presence. I cannot guarantee the safety of your mind without being there. Call our names at this pool before you sleep, and we shall endeavour to guide you from beyond the Tairseach.” Fírinn paused, expressionless, though a glint of moonlight across its face suggested a degree of pensiveness.

”It seems that I have fulfilled my purpose here. You are more closely aligned with Truth, and the Gréasán Treòir appears to have been a success. Is there aught more you would ask of me before I depart?”

Cilantra looked to the others, who nodded back. It was likely that they were thinking of the same question. “How do we call your Twin?” she asked in an almost humble manner.

”As you slumber before a mirror, you need simply call my name. I shall summon my Twin for you, lest his presence overwhelm you. May your Great Peace be woven into reality and your Truths realised.”

And just as quickly as it had arrived, Fírinn simply departed. From the elves’ point of view, it would not even be that it moved--it would simply look as if the world had rearranged itself in some small way, and that a function of that change was that the God of Truth was no longer with them.

Summary

Fírinn leaves the Isle of Reflection to check upon mortalkind, and to determine the success of its prior endeavour. It meets the (perhaps rightfully) suspicious Night Elves, and begins to ask questions of them before being stonewalled by a huntress. Fírinn shows her a possible eventuality of her attitude towards the divine and attempts to prove its benevolent intent, and after a harrowing vision the huntress accepts the God of Truth as only wanting to help.

Fírinn confirms that the mortals now dream, and offers them a promise of enlightenment in the future should they choose to call upon it.

MP Summary

0MP - Create a Reflecting Pool
0MP (Discounted from Perception Portfolio) - FUKKEN VISIONS

Divinus: The God RP, Mk. IV

Fìrinn, God of Subjective Truth

_{Core Form}



^Conceptual

_{^{God of Truth}} | _^Fìrinn | _{^{The Watcher Behind}}

Fìrinn’s demesne is that of the truth of existence and consciousness, not of objective fact but of the limitations of perception and the world that is gleaned from the spaces between fundamental truths. Fìrinn comprises the limitations of the intellect and the sincere conviction of belief that arise from the circumstances of, perhaps ironically, misunderstanding--and the acceptance of one’s flawed perception as truth. Though Fìrinn can never be the complete and objective truth, it is the crystallisation of the haze of mystery and dreams into the perception of the real, and the truth of the self.

Fìrinn’s portfolio is that of perception, as the ultimate gatekeeper to personal truth is the limits of one’s perception. Fìrinn’s powers are concerned not with the acquisition of knowledge, but instead the contextualisation of existing knowledge and the beliefs that one accrues given their method of perception and the limits that that method entails. Fìrinn is capable of granting the certainty that what one perceives is true, or denying the truth of one’s perception by opening it to greater mystery or perhaps severing from their perception mysteries they have already come to understand. One touched by Fìrinn might suddenly awaken to a great revelation after a night’s sleep, their worldview expanded far beyond the ordinary mortal ken, or might awaken to the sensation of a suffocating closedness in their daily life, trapped in the simple truth of monotony. Fìrinn cannot grant knowledge directly, but can easily enable those to find new knowledge or recontextualise the knowledge they possess to grant them a deeper awareness of the truth.

It is Fìrinn that gives context to perception and thus to reality, and it is Fìrinn that forms one half of the bridge between imagination and reality.

Fìrinn might best be described as acceptance, or zen, or simply at peace with the nature of reality. Fìrinn is capable of understanding any argument that one might make, given the context available to them, and the need to put one’s own ambitions and priorities above those of another--and holding as many of these opinions true as necessary simultaneously. They are a force of comprehension and understanding, of action and reaction, and ultimately of the idealisation and realisation of one's thoughts and feelings. Infinitely mutable, Fìrinn seeks the fulfilment of all agendas and desires even when in contradicting parties so long as the individual truth of one's actions rings true and is evident by their expression of ideas and the actions they take. To this end, Fìrinn despises dishonesty and deceit in practically any form, especially if they are deceits of the self, as such deceits hide the truth of their reality behind a glamour or an illusion that seeks to mask their pain or bring them comfort. While Fìrinn does not wish pain on any being, the realisation of personal truth is the concept on which its entire existence rests and to work against that (even in a way that is not inherently disingenuous) is anathema to its purpose and it will oppose these efforts in any way that it is capable, either by forcing the truth of their situation to become inescapable or, in extreme cases, by simply destroying the being.

Despite the preternatural calm and understanding of what is that defines Fìrinn, they are constantly motivated by their desire to bring understanding and context to all beings--and while they are accepting of this aspect of themselves, the constant impetus to act upon their ambition imbues their every action with a sense of urgency that can only be satisfied by completion. When dealing with other deities, Fìrinn is the ultimate diplomat--it understands perfectly the needs and desires that a deity inherently has by virtue of their godhood, but the finer points of these ambitions often elude the God of Truth as their powers of perception are innately limited against other gods, and its flaws in these moments help contextualise its own subjective truth.

While not a force of Order per se, as even the chaotic have their own subjective truths, Fìrinn is a force of completion and conclusion, and seeks to align all of reality with the innermost desires that each life’s subjective truth demands of them.

The Worldly Circles are Fìrinn’s personal realm, and it takes the form of an endless hall of mirrors. Within each mirror is a mortal’s perception of their worldview, a glimpse into the truth of their contextualised reality, and the gaps between the mirrors are seamless. As one walks the halls the reflections begin to blend together and fuse into new scenes that consume one’s perception until the process repeats itself, creating an infinite revolution of circles that twist and turn upon themselves. When Fìrinn resides within the Worldly Circles they manifest as a reflection within a reflection, walking directly beneath their visitors atop a pool of placid water, or alongside them as they pass a mirror.

The Worldly Circles are well-known for being joined very closely to the Ròineagan, Àicheil's (its divine twin) realm, as the dreamspace and manifestation of the collective unconsciousness of all sentient beings. As the two realms are joined, and as the twin gods of Truth and Dreams are in harmony, the bridge between knowledge and imagination is rendered whole.

_{Core Form}

Fìrinn, in its true form, stands generally at a height of around ten feet tall and hovers around six feet above the ground. They mostly occupy roughly human dimensions (relatively speaking), as well as having an innately humanoid form due in no small part thanks to their conceptual nature being rendered from humanity's collective subconscious minds. While they cannot explicitly fly, they seem to maintain a fixed position hovering above the ground, and the world seems to readjust itself to accommodate their movements.

_{Domain Form}

Fìrinn's Domain Form retains its vaguely humanoid origins, but comes out much taller at around eighteen feet tall, and with a wingspan of twenty-six feet. In this form, Fìrinn rarely walks, simply using its wings to move around as it pores over the tome it carries--a tome said to contain the greatest secrets of every mortal life, and the truest accounting of each God's genesis and purpose. What words actually rest upon its pages none but Fìrinn's divine twin--Àicheil--might say.

The Behindling is a glassy creature of indeterminable make, existing solely hidden behind reflective surfaces, identifiable only because it is completely reflective and takes on the appearance of whatever is currently perceiving it. As the Behindling can only exist within a reflection, it does not necessarily have a concrete form and is not limited to a single location--wherever a reflection exists, the Behindling may manifest. Despite the fact that the Behindling is limited to reflections, its ability to influence the physical world is surprisingly vast: whatever alterations it makes to a reflection have the capacity to take place in reality should the right amount of power be expended. Thanks to its inherently hidden qualities, the Behindling is practically invincible--it can be denied a foothold within Galbar, but its presence is awfully challenging to truly extinguish.

Capes of Samekh - A Post-Worm RP

Penelope continued to tap the keys on her laptop as the situation progressed. She didn't look down at it as she typed, keeping her eyes firmly glued to the live feed, and her power trained on Matthew. As he turned to address her more directly, she knew exactly what was going on. She figured that John did too--but he was too high strung and too occupied to act on it. A stupid little soldier who only knows how to follow orders indeed. she allowed herself to think, a small indulgence given that the situation was admittedly high octane.

Matthew's words had something frantic about them--something mirrored in his emotional state. She was a little surprised by that fact, given how he normally acted and reacted. Matthew had a quiet kind of control on many situations, as if he were simply unaffected by what was going on. The state of being of an impartial watcher, something almost inhuman in its asceticism, but that was likely just because of how... enervated he always felt to Penelope. Now he was very much in, well, not outright panic--but something close, in his own little way. She made a mental note of the situation, something to file away and dissect later. A piece of the puzzle to be examined and slotted neatly into place when there was the time and the inclination to do so.

"Not a distraction. She isn't making enough noise--she couldn't know how we'd react, so the only way to reliably distract us would be to make too much noise for us to deal with, proverbially." Penelope replied, offhandedly. She shot a glance at John, briefly, that carried all of the intent she needed it to: Your mind has failed you and now you must rely on mine. If you value the First Guard, shut up and let me talk. Whether or not John let that slide would give Penelope more information for her evaluation of him, but right now she knew that he'd let her have the floor if only for enough time for her to work out what was going on.

"It..."

Penelope went silent for a moment before standing up and closing her laptop, moving to stow it away in its case as her eyes went wide and her pupils dilated. Her breath hitched in her throat and her mouth was left slightly agape as the wheels turned in her head.

"It's a stress test. That's all they're doing--they want to know how we'll respond, with whom, and what our limits are. This is all just a puppet show--the cards that Shaker is holding are all blank. I can't tell you how to react, but we've already given them information--I think that our best course of action is to continue and deliberately mislead them as to just how we operate, what we can do, what our decision making looks like. They know full well that we can't disband the First Guard on the drop of a hat, and that negotiator you sent out... S.W.A.T?" Penelope paused, as if in thought, to remember his name. "has done you a great disservice by acquiescing to ostensibly save a life. That said... it works to our advantage in this instance because they are now under the impression that we operate emotionally and not logically. We have to consid--"

Penelope was cut off by a vibration in the right pocket of her trousers. It buzzed once, and then twice, and Penelope took it out of her pocket and immediately answered it.

"Make it quick." she hastily said, turning on her heel and moving to leave as she did. She made the motion of attempting to cover the mouthpiece of the device, though utterly failing, before looking directly at Matthew and saying "Emergency. Kelly needs me to review something urgently--I'll be back later."

"What've you got?" would faintly echo through the door before it was firmly closed behind her. Penelope made a waving motion to Sandra and mouthed a "thank you" for the coffee before making her way to head out of the building and down to her car. Kelly only used the burner phone for serious matters, and she was already running on the adrenaline of--to her mind--working out the Shaker's plan.

Capes of Samekh - A Post-Worm RP

Adrasteia

"Let’s all keep a cool head. Well, except you."

Hider

_{[ ♦ ] Bio}

---

♦ Name: Penelope Arianna Diamantis
♦ Age: 27
♦ Loyalty: Revolution
♦ Appearance: Penelope stands at 6'1", towering over most other women and a good portion of men, but her extreme height is very obviously offset by her extreme lankiness--she is naturally much thinner than most, not quite to the point of being gaunt but very close, and has little in the way of obviously protruding features. Penelope's breasts are small, her midriff compact, and her limbs are almost spindly; it is immediately apparent that her growth concerned itself significantly more with height than anything else. Despite this natural skew in her proportions, however, Penelope is the kind of person that you would consider traditionally attractive. Though her profound height and lack of width naturally make her look almost wispy and airy, like a willow swaying in the wind, her dark and sharp features lend her face a depth and fullness that it would not ordinarily have that helps to anchor her in a more aesthetically pleasing light.

Of course, Penelope does not simply walk around au naturel. Penelope is rarely found when she's not impeccably groomed and dressed up--and she likes to be as visually striking as possible. She wears her hair in a side cut, the right side shaved and her hair swept over to the left side in an exaggerated curl, and has dyed her naturally black hair raven blue. At the forefront, cresting the lip of the curve, is a shock of deep magenta-pink that runs half an inch deep. Copious amounts of hairspray ensure the relative stability of the arrangement, and it provides a shadowy backdrop to her face that frames the lighter elements within. Penelope's eyes are lidded with a faint brush of rusty red eyeshadow and framed by a solid line of eyeliner, ending in a slight flick to match the high angles of her cheekbones. Penelope's lips are always her signature shade of bright, vivid blue--and slightly overdrawn to give the impression of fullness--which provides a pop of visual contrast to her other, darker features.

Penelope's nails are neatly trimmed and manicured, and adorned with a heavy coat of polish the same colour as her lips. She wears a fairly thin tank top, patterned with neon colours, that cuts off just before her navel and allows her bra--the same colour as the streak in her hair--to show through in several places. She can usually be seen wearing a black hoodless jacket over this, with an oversized zipper at the front and additional zippers connecting the sleeves to the jacket, as well as running down the length of the sleeves. Penelope typically wears a belt, usually black but occasionally bright blue or magenta, with a trademark oversized buckle in the centre, pulled slightly up so that it just extends into her bared midriff. Below this she wears acid-washed jeans, worn to the point of severely frayed patches of fabric, which end maybe six or so inches above her ankles thanks to both a conscious choice and the ridiculous length of her legs. Penelope's footwear of choice are converse, the same blue as her lips, not worn to quite the same extent as her jeans (being fully intact) but still visibly distressed.

As Adrasteia, Penelope's attire shifts dramatically. The base of Adrasteia's costume is a simple black catsuit, covering all of her body in its entirety with the exception of her head and her hands. Worn over this is a very large and billowy red jacket with an extremely oversized and exaggerated hood that leaves an easy six inches of space between the hood and her hair at all points. The primary focus of the outfit, however, is the mask that she wears--a combination of the classic comedy and tragedy masks, with the left half of her mask being comedy (bearing the trademark grin) and the right half being tragedy (bearing the trademark frown) that meet in the middle. The mask is a singular whole, carved from a single piece of wood and reinforced with several layers of lacquer, painted two different colours neatly down the middle. The base of the comedic half of the mask is a stark ivory, with the eyes and mouth a deep ebony, and vice versa for the tragic half. The mask is attached to a bolt of cloth within the hood that distinctly keeps it separate from the rest. Furthermore, Adrasteia wears gloves, one black and one white, on the opposite hands to her masks.

[+]

♦ History:

[+]

Penelope Arianna Diamantis began the inchoate stages of her life in Greece in the city of Athens. Born to two loving but dissatisfied parents who wanted more for their child than they'd had for themselves, Penelope's earliest years were spent blissfully ignorant of the misery her parents toiled in. For three years she simply went on with her life as she was taught to do so, before things came to a head and her parents decided that Penelope's future simply did not lie in Greece, and that the ideal of the American dream was something that they could give to her to secure a future beyond the mundane (and, perhaps, that they might be able to live vicariously through her). So her parents packed up all of their worldly possessions, cashed in all of their savings, and uprooted their life for stronger soil and greener pastures. The move to America was not, truth be told, an enormous deal to a young Penelope. At the age of three she really didn't comprehend the gravity of her situation, and she was still young enough that picking up a second language was something she'd be able to do with relative ease--it wasn't like she'd exactly mastered her mother tongue, yet. There was plenty of hope for her to be able to live a normal life.

And, for the best part of her childhood, she did. Many immigrants came to America for the promise of betterment, and though they were from different cultures they had all moved to this place and their newfound interest in the culture that awaited them served as a bond of commonality for them to create a community from. Penelope grew up in the very heart of the proverbial melting pot that American culture had come to be, straddling the line betwixt native and outsider, and thanks to the relative lightness of her skin and lack of truly affected accent blending in with the caucasian natives just enough to have what could be considered an easy time of it. Normality, relative to her situation, prevailed for the large part. She coasted through school, not at the top of her class but fairly close, and participated in the grand game of ignorance that was high school politics without too much in the way of fuss. Being naturally pretty and reasonably intelligent got her quite far, and thanks to her own clique of similarly talented friends she managed to avoid internalising too much in the way of self-loathing that so many seemed to exit high school with. She got a job for herself waitressing in a local diner fairly early on, and though the pay wasn't great and the work was palatable at best her parents had rather emphatically impressed upon her the importance of working hard to achieve the so-called American Dream so that they could have a chance at rising from immigrants to the landed middle class. Penelope came to resent the work not because it was difficult, or dull, or that she was underappreciated--her resentment stemmed from the fact that the life that her parents had to work so hard for was really not that special. The ideal of the American Dream was very real to them, but she had never really known the hardship they'd experienced in Greece. She only knew that she had to fight for what the privileged kids simply had given to them, and though she was too young and too naive to really understand what she was feeling it created within her a knot of discontentment that would fester over the coming years.

University was another story entirely. Her home town of Castle Rock, Colorado was not where she'd want to spend the rest of her life, and though she had simply considered moving to Denver and ekeing out a life for herself there, her parents urged her to attend higher education. The knot of resentment tightened within her, and she capitulated to their requests if only because she supposed that it would be advantageous in the future and that they had poured all of their money and effort over the years into making it happen for her. She got a coveted spot at the University of Columbia for Financial Law, and her life seemed to be on the up and up. Her freshman year was spent, as most are, partying as hard as she could get away with while still keeping up with her studies--and she did a damn good job at the former, though decidedly less so at the latter. She was used to working for what she had, but the level of difficulty was something that she'd never really been introduced to before, and her exultation in the glow of newfound social prestige and self-discovery precluded her from giving as much effort as she'd have liked. Her second year was spent reversing the damage she'd done to her grades in the first year--and a part of that process was learning about the minutiae of the financial world and the forces that ruled it. Penelope's life had been blessedly easy compared to some of her childhood friends, and the more she learned about the nature of the world that her parents had sacrificed so much to bring her to weighed heavily upon her.

It would not be right to say that Penelope became depressed, but as her second year progressed and the work demanded more and more of her the knot festering within her became a tangle of thorns. The understanding of privilege, and how she was absolutely surrounded by it, tightened the knot within her—she simply could not understand how her so-called peers could bear to simply go about their lives without acknowledging the inequality in the world. She became more and more outspoken about the disparity, championing justice and respect for those who the wealthier ignored or treated with outright contempt, and soon earned their ire herself. She had never particularly valued them, so their displeasure did not initially faze her—and those she fought for became stalwart allies that she could rely on. She became part of a close-knit group of friends, pariahs who would one day set out to change the world in some small but meaningful way, and struggled against the subjugation and discrimination that lurked in the periphery. She became extremely close with a few of her classmates, third-years called Alana and Yvette in particular, and much of her increasingly limited free time was spent discussing how they could fix the broken system and bring the oligarchy crumbling to the ground.

Would that group of friends have held fast, Penelope would likely have gone on to become a well-adjusted and successful individual. She might have, in some small fashion, achieved her goal and lived her life the way she had dreamed that she was going to—but it didn’t. One by one, the idealistic sparks she’d admired in her friends were snuffed out or, worse, they graduated and went on to be hired by Wall Street companies, working against their supposed principles for profit. Each of these betrayals, however small, was a new thorn to add to the knot within her. As she got through her third year, a process already inherently taxing thanks to the intense demands placed on law students, the strain of the unresolved hurt and betrayal begun to tear holes in even her closest relationships. Yvette was the first to distance herself from Penelope and her group of would-be revolutionaries, first claiming that she needed to dedicate more of her time to her studies before gradually scouring her social media of any contact with the group and reinventing her image as a would-be corporate lawyer. These things happened, of course—Penelope had experienced that betrayal before, enough times that the pain was almost insignificant—but Yvette’s betrayal hurt her in a way that she had never imagined possible. With Yvette gone Alana soon followed, even going so far as to speak out against her former friend in an attempt to secure a lucrative position after her upcoming graduation.

Without a strong core of support, Penelope’s group of compatriots fell apart within a matter of weeks, and all of the scorn that had been reserved for the group was focused solely on her. It did not take long for her to become a social outcast, practically disbarred from every group of so-called “proper” individuals, she turned instead to the internet for companionship. It did not take her long to find friends, but they were fleeting, fair-weather friends—as friends on the internet were wont to be. She craved their attention and companionship but the pain she was in caused her to push them away, and soon even that release was denied her. She went into her final year fully and truly alone. As a last ditch effort, Penelope tried the one thing that she had not yet managed to do, the one recourse left available to her—she tried to attend one of the many protests rising up against the biggest corporations, but the demands of her final year were simply too great. She resolved to graduate and attempt again, and try to cope with the pain as best as she could.

And then, after what felt like an eternity, it was the day of the protest. Penelope was ready. She was here, taking real action, among her peers--people who felt the way she did, who understood what she did, and wanted to bring a brighter tomorrow to the world. But even here, the betrayals she'd suffered tore at her from within. What had started as a mere knot fuelled by a hint towards the inequality in the world had developed by now into a twisted patch of briars that had made her every waking moment a trial in just how much pain she could endure--and what she had hoped would rid her of those feelings seemed to be ineffective. In that moment, she looked around and saw her fellows chanting their slogans and hoisting their placards into the air, and time seemed to slow for her. This was the most that she could ever really accomplish. No matter how much she tried, no matter how hard she worked, no matter what she put herself through... it would never be enough. These were all just ordinary people who needed something to blame for the state of their lives pouring their hearts and souls into an ultimately futile act and she was one of them. She was just another face in the crowd, just another body on the pile, just another pointless name in a pointless list.

The realisation knocked the air out of her lungs, and for a solid thirty seconds she simply could not bring herself to breathe. Surrounded by perhaps the most motivated people, who felt what she felt, and still they were nothing? If they were nothing, what was the rest of the world? The questions thrummed in her skull, her blood pounding in her temples, and just as she thought she was about to pass out from the lack of air her lungs found their rhythm and tried to compensate for lost time. She gulped in great mouthfuls of air, spitting them out almost before she'd actually managed to get them into her lungs, and cried out to the heavens in rage and despair. All she'd ever wanted was to hold these people accountable for what they'd done, for the damage they'd caused, to make them feel all of the rage and misery and pain that she and countless others felt... and then, the final and greatest betrayal—Yvette and Alana, working for the company she was protesting, walking out of the building hand in hand. Had it been anyone else, perhaps she would not have been so hurt. Perhaps she could have coped, perhaps it would not have broken her—but break her it did, and in that moment of betrayal, and alienation, and pain she triggered.

What happened that day went on to be known as a tragedy. Overcome by a rage so strong she was essentially an animal, Alana de Vere tore out Yvette Sinclair’s throat with her teeth and injured at least three others before having to be fatally shot by the police. The protest ended with SWAT intervention, and many more injured or killed before the day was out.

After the experience, Penelope moved back to Denver, ostensibly to take a break from her rigorous studies and get some experience in the financial world before beginning a job hunt in earnest, having been denied the connections she could have gotten at Columbia. The truth was far simpler: if she were to take advantage of her newfound power, she would need experience and she would need resources. Both would be better off if accrued far away from one of the financial powerhouses of the world, and she could use her home state as a testing grounds for her greater plans. With a little under a year of practice, Penelope decided to forge a cape name for herself. She took the name Adrasteia for herself and began using her powers to enact vengeance on the rich and, where possible, redistribute their assets to the poor. She accomplished very little, on a global scale, but enough to become intimately familiar with her powers and help those that she felt she could help.

And then, years later, Gold Morning happened.

Penelope eventually made her way to Samekh and set about looking for work in the only capacity that her talents allowed for--the practice of law. Penelope arranged for a deal in which her citizenship would be granted immediately provided that she worked for the government in immigration law. Despite a lack of formal training in the matter her skills, natural talents, and power allowed her to do the research quickly and tug the heartstrings of the right people to ensure that she was a formidable lawyer, even in a subject that she had not specifically studied. After completing six months of work her bargain was over, but the comfort of the job was such that she decided to continue in her work--if only because she felt she could genuinely help those that needed it. She has not bothered to join anything parahuman related just yet, but the principles upon which life on Samekh were founded have already begun to grate on her as an unnecessary relic of the past, in some ways worse than Bet ever was, and is biding her time until something about it can be done.

_{[ ♦ ] Personality}

---

♦ Motivation: Penelope is an extraordinarily ideologically driven woman, and her ideology is most simply summarised by the words "fuck the one percent". She loathes the state of the world and places its blame almost entirely on the magnates and oligarchs who control it from the shadows to the detriment of everyone else around them, and her sole motivation in life is to rip them from their ivory towers and show them what it's like to muck about with the good people of the world crushed under their metaphorical boots. Penelope initially took this ideology in a direction that she, in her more mature years, recognises as misguided and naive--originally, she had hoped to change the world through the power of protest and elucidation. She thought that if she could simply elevate the thoughts of her compatriots to the point of understanding how the world worked then the resultant shift in popular sentiment could liberate them from the shackles of their oppressors. She thought that armed with understanding they could accomplish that which had been denied them since time immemorial--a society that cared for everyone and everything within it.

It was only when the world took that hope from her by constant iteration and reiteration of failure that she saw it for how naive it was. How could she incite an indolent populace to revolt if they neither understood nor desired to understand the fact that the barely-gilded cage foisted upon them was not how the world had to be? No, she knew that in order to liberate them from something that they could not even perceive that she had to become as powerful as her oppressors in order to undermine their efforts. Thus, her motivations are twofold: Bring the current system of exploitation and misery crashing down and those who perpetuated it to justice, and obtain enough power to do so. Penelope will go to great lengths to achieve her goals, believing that the sacrifice of the few for the many is always worthwhile, even to the extent that should the correct moment arise for her death to change things she will gladly accept the opportunity. If she has to murder ten to achieve the power to save a thousand, she believes that this is a worthwhile trade--but only if she keeps her morals in check and does not lose sight of her goal. As a result she desires stability in the form of a group of close compatriots who can check her worst and most selfish impulses when necessary as well as damage the current regime in legitimately meaningful ways--and this resulted in her desire to join a group of more morally grey individuals than the First and Final Guards who, in her mind, exist to perpetuate the current regime (regardless of how true that may actually be).

♦ Derangement: Judicious use of Penelope’s power has left her with a more volatile emotional state than she would care to admit. She carries fragments of emotions and other such psychological phenomena with her from times where she’s used her power, and when she gets tired or stressed these fragments of emotions from times when she has recently used her power are prone to directly influencing her own mental state—and due to the fact that she very frequently focuses her power on psychological phenomena that incite themes of rage and rebellion, she has to a certain extent taken on more of the traits of a violent revolutionary than she currently realises.

_{[ ♦ ]
Parahumanism}

---

♦ Skills: Penelope’s primary talents are those of an oratory and intellectual nature. She is a naturally gifted public speaker and negotiator, a talent which was only magnified by her powers, and is considerably more knowledgeable than most in matters of finances and the nuances of the law regarding such. She is bilingual, speaking Greek and English fluently, and has recently indulged in the practice of things she thinks she will find useful in the field, such as lockpicking and hand-to-hand combat. Four years of Law School have given Penelope a mind for extreme detail—she is capable of memorising colossal amounts of information by rote and referencing that information as-needed, but this is certainly within the capacity of an ordinary person.

♦ Classification: Master
♦ Mechanics: Penelope's power is, fundamentally, the ability to sense, connect, and manipulate the psychological phenomena within people. It could more accurately be described as the ability to influence the connections and ties that bind humans together. Practically, this ability has several components:

Firstly, Penelope is always able to sense the most dominant emotion (or other equivalent psychological phenomena under the broad umbrella of "emotion", stretching to concepts such as loyalty or devotion) that anybody within around half a city block (approximately 450 feet) is currently feeling. While she cannot turn this sensory ability off, it is not an inherently empathetic awareness--she does not feel what they feel, and has an awareness in an abstract way as if she has another sense linked directly to this ability. Penelope is capable, if she desires, of reducing the range of this ability to approximately a quarter of a city block (225 feet), gaining insight into more of the emotions people are feeling beyond their most focused emotion and surface emotions. If she focuses on a specific individual she is capable of narrowing this focus even further to the extent that she is able to essentially consider their entire emotional profile. It is important to note that she cannot detect thoughts under any circumstances--her sensory ability is very strictly restricted to the purview of her overall skillset. Penelope's range of power has minor fluctuations based on how currently attuned she is with her shard.

Secondly, Penelope is able to choose a single instance of dominant emotion or a psychological phenomenon within her limited sensory range of approx. 225 feet and bind any number of people she can sense within that area together. Then, all instances of the chosen emotion felt by her selected targets are transferred to a single target of her choice. If any of these emotions are felt towards a specific target by anybody affected by the power, Penelope is able to direct all of the combined emotion towards any one target among those available to her. This typically manifests as Penelope choosing an emotion--for example, anger--and siphoning all instances of anger from all targets within her range, then transferring the accumulated anger into one person. Those who have their emotion siphoned by her power no longer feel any instance of the emotion. While within her range, Penelope is capable of maintaining a single instance of this effect almost indefinitely. Penelope is theoretically capable of using this power to transfer instances of any common facet of the mind that does not extend into explicit thought, which include but are not limited to: loyalty, trust, pain, and pleasure.

The exact specifications of the range of Penelope’s power vary, but it is most easily understood as a circular area of effect with variable radius--the lower bound of this area is 10 feet in radius, and its upper bound is 225 feet in radius. Penelope may choose any radius between the two and place the area of effect anywhere within her overall 225 ft. radius provided that it does not extend past her 225 foot distance maximum. As soon as any target leaves Penelope’s chosen range of influence, the effect of her power gradually begins to reverse itself over the course of twelve hours.

By virtue of its nature, Penelope’s power is Manton limited.

♦ Equipment: Adrasteia carries precious little, being relatively new to the idea of being a cape. Currently she has several burner phones, a taser, and pepper spray—but as her needs develop, she will upgrade her setup accordingly.

Capes of Samekh - A Post-Worm RP

Adrasteia

"Let’s all keep a cool head. Well, except you."

Hider

_{[ ♦ ] Bio}

---

♦ Name: Penelope Arianna Diamantis
♦ Age: 27
♦ Loyalty: Penelope is currently independent and awaiting a time where she can join a group of like-minded individuals.
♦ Appearance: Penelope stands at 6'1", towering over most other women and a good portion of men, but her extreme height is very obviously offset by her extreme lankiness--she is naturally much thinner than most, not quite to the point of being gaunt but very close, and has little in the way of obviously protruding features. Penelope's breasts are small, her midriff compact, and her limbs are almost spindly; it is immediately apparent that her growth concerned itself significantly more with height than anything else. Despite this natural skew in her proportions, however, Penelope is the kind of person that you would consider traditionally attractive. Though her profound height and lack of width naturally make her look almost wispy and airy, like a willow swaying in the wind, her dark and sharp features lend her face a depth and fullness that it would not ordinarily have that helps to anchor her in a more aesthetically pleasing light.

Of course, Penelope does not simply walk around au naturel. Penelope is rarely found when she's not impeccably groomed and dressed up--and she likes to be as visually striking as possible. She wears her hair in a side cut, the right side shaved and her hair swept over to the left side in an exaggerated curl, and has dyed her naturally black hair raven blue. At the forefront, cresting the lip of the curve, is a shock of deep magenta-pink that runs half an inch deep. Copious amounts of hairspray ensure the relative stability of the arrangement, and it provides a shadowy backdrop to her face that frames the lighter elements within. Penelope's eyes are lidded with a faint brush of rusty red eyeshadow and framed by a solid line of eyeliner, ending in a slight flick to match the high angles of her cheekbones. Penelope's lips are always her signature shade of bright, vivid blue--and slightly overdrawn to give the impression of fullness--which provides a pop of visual contrast to her other, darker features.

Penelope's nails are neatly trimmed and manicured, and adorned with a heavy coat of polish the same colour as her lips. She wears a fairly thin tank top, patterned with neon colours, that cuts off just before her navel and allows her bra--the same colour as the streak in her hair--to show through in several places. She can usually be seen wearing a black hoodless jacket over this, with an oversized zipper at the front and additional zippers connecting the sleeves to the jacket, as well as running down the length of the sleeves. Penelope typically wears a belt, usually black but occasionally bright blue or magenta, with a trademark oversized buckle in the centre, pulled slightly up so that it just extends into her bared midriff. Below this she wears acid-washed jeans, worn to the point of severely frayed patches of fabric, which end maybe six or so inches above her ankles thanks to both a conscious choice and the ridiculous length of her legs. Penelope's footwear of choice are converse, the same blue as her lips, not worn to quite the same extent as her jeans (being fully intact) but still visibly distressed.

As Adrasteia, Penelope's attire shifts dramatically. The base of Adrasteia's costume is a simple black catsuit, covering all of her body in its entirety with the exception of her head and her hands. Worn over this is a very large and billowy red jacket with an extremely oversized and exaggerated hood that leaves an easy six inches of space between the hood and her hair at all points. The primary focus of the outfit, however, is the mask that she wears--a combination of the classic comedy and tragedy masks, with the left half of her mask being comedy (bearing the trademark grin) and the right half being tragedy (bearing the trademark frown) that meet in the middle. The mask is a singular whole, carved from a single piece of wood and reinforced with several layers of lacquer, painted two different colours neatly down the middle. The base of the comedic half of the mask is a stark ivory, with the eyes and mouth a deep ebony, and vice versa for the tragic half. The mask is attached to a bolt of cloth within the hood that distinctly keeps it separate from the rest. Furthermore, Adrasteia wears gloves, one black and one white, on the opposite hands to her masks.

[+]

♦ History:

[+]

Penelope Arianna Diamantis began the inchoate stages of her life in Greece in the city of Athens. Born to two loving but dissatisfied parents who wanted more for their child than they'd had for themselves, Penelope's earliest years were spent blissfully ignorant of the misery her parents toiled in. For three years she simply went on with her life as she was taught to do so, before things came to a head and her parents decided that Penelope's future simply did not lie in Greece, and that the ideal of the American dream was something that they could give to her to secure a future beyond the mundane (and, perhaps, that they might be able to live vicariously through her). So her parents packed up all of their worldly possessions, cashed in all of their savings, and uprooted their life for stronger soil and greener pastures. The move to America was not, truth be told, an enormous deal to a young Penelope. At the age of three she really didn't comprehend the gravity of her situation, and she was still young enough that picking up a second language was something she'd be able to do with relative ease--it wasn't like she'd exactly mastered her mother tongue, yet. There was plenty of hope for her to be able to live a normal life.

And, for the best part of her childhood, she did. Many immigrants came to America for the promise of betterment, and though they were from different cultures they had all moved to this place and their newfound interest in the culture that awaited them served as a bond of commonality for them to create a community from. Penelope grew up in the very heart of the proverbial melting pot that American culture had come to be, straddling the line betwixt native and outsider, and thanks to the relative lightness of her skin and lack of truly affected accent blending in with the caucasian natives just enough to have what could be considered an easy time of it. Normality, relative to her situation, prevailed for the large part. She coasted through school, not at the top of her class but fairly close, and participated in the grand game of ignorance that was high school politics without too much in the way of fuss. Being naturally pretty and reasonably intelligent got her quite far, and thanks to her own clique of similarly talented friends she managed to avoid internalising too much in the way of self-loathing that so many seemed to exit high school with. She got a job for herself waitressing in a local diner fairly early on, and though the pay wasn't great and the work was palatable at best her parents had rather emphatically impressed upon her the importance of working hard to achieve the so-called American Dream so that they could have a chance at rising from immigrants to the landed middle class. Penelope came to resent the work not because it was difficult, or dull, or that she was underappreciated--her resentment stemmed from the fact that the life that her parents had to work so hard for was really not that special. The ideal of the American Dream was very real to them, but she had never really known the hardship they'd experienced in Greece. She only knew that she had to fight for what the privileged kids simply had given to them, and though she was too young and too naive to really understand what she was feeling it created within her a knot of discontentment that would fester over the coming years.

University was another story entirely. Her home town of Castle Rock, Colorado was not where she'd want to spend the rest of her life, and though she had simply considered moving to Denver and ekeing out a life for herself there, her parents urged her to attend higher education. The knot of resentment tightened within her, and she capitulated to their requests if only because she supposed that it would be advantageous in the future and that they had poured all of their money and effort over the years into making it happen for her. She got a coveted spot at the University of Columbia for Financial Law, and her life seemed to be on the up and up. Her freshman year was spent, as most are, partying as hard as she could get away with while still keeping up with her studies--and she did a damn good job at the former, though decidedly less so at the latter. She was used to working for what she had, but the level of difficulty was something that she'd never really been introduced to before, and her exultation in the glow of newfound social prestige and self-discovery precluded her from giving as much effort as she'd have liked. Her second year was spent reversing the damage she'd done to her grades in the first year--and a part of that process was learning about the minutiae of the financial world and the forces that ruled it. Penelope's life had been blessedly easy compared to some of her childhood friends, and the more she learned about the nature of the world that her parents had sacrificed so much to bring her to weighed heavily upon her.

It would not be right to say that Penelope became depressed, but as her second year progressed and the work demanded more and more of her the knot festering within her became a tangle of thorns. The understanding of privilege, and how she was absolutely surrounded by it, tightened the knot within her—she simply could not understand how her so-called peers could bear to simply go about their lives without acknowledging the inequality in the world. She became more and more outspoken about the disparity, championing justice and respect for those who the wealthier ignored or treated with outright contempt, and soon earned their ire herself. She had never particularly valued them, so their displeasure did not initially faze her—and those she fought for became stalwart allies that she could rely on. She became part of a close-knit group of friends, pariahs who would one day set out to change the world in some small but meaningful way, and struggled against the subjugation and discrimination that lurked in the periphery. She became extremely close with a few of her classmates, third-years called Alana and Yvette in particular, and much of her increasingly limited free time was spent discussing how they could fix the broken system and bring the oligarchy crumbling to the ground.

Would that group of friends have held fast, Penelope would likely have gone on to become a well-adjusted and successful individual. She might have, in some small fashion, achieved her goal and lived her life the way she had dreamed that she was going to—but it didn’t. One by one, the idealistic sparks she’d admired in her friends were snuffed out or, worse, they graduated and went on to be hired by Wall Street companies, working against their supposed principles for profit. Each of these betrayals, however small, was a new thorn to add to the knot within her. As she got through her third year, a process already inherently taxing thanks to the intense demands placed on law students, the strain of the unresolved hurt and betrayal begun to tear holes in even her closest relationships. Yvette was the first to distance herself from Penelope and her group of would-be revolutionaries, first claiming that she needed to dedicate more of her time to her studies before gradually scouring her social media of any contact with the group and reinventing her image as a would-be corporate lawyer. These things happened, of course—Penelope had experienced that betrayal before, enough times that the pain was almost insignificant—but Yvette’s betrayal hurt her in a way that she had never imagined possible. With Yvette gone Alana soon followed, even going so far as to speak out against her former friend in an attempt to secure a lucrative position after her upcoming graduation.

Without a strong core of support, Penelope’s group of compatriots fell apart within a matter of weeks, and all of the scorn that had been reserved for the group was focused solely on her. It did not take long for her to become a social outcast, practically disbarred from every group of so-called “proper” individuals, she turned instead to the internet for companionship. It did not take her long to find friends, but they were fleeting, fair-weather friends—as friends on the internet were wont to be. She craved their attention and companionship but the pain she was in caused her to push them away, and soon even that release was denied her. She went into her final year fully and truly alone. As a last ditch effort, Penelope tried the one thing that she had not yet managed to do, the one recourse left available to her—she tried to attend one of the many protests rising up against the biggest corporations, but the demands of her final year were simply too great. She resolved to graduate and attempt again, and try to cope with the pain as best as she could.

And then, after what felt like an eternity, it was the day of the protest. Penelope was ready. She was here, taking real action, among her peers--people who felt the way she did, who understood what she did, and wanted to bring a brighter tomorrow to the world. But even here, the betrayals she'd suffered tore at her from within. What had started as a mere knot fuelled by a hint towards the inequality in the world had developed by now into a twisted patch of briars that had made her every waking moment a trial in just how much pain she could endure--and what she had hoped would rid her of those feelings seemed to be ineffective. In that moment, she looked around and saw her fellows chanting their slogans and hoisting their placards into the air, and time seemed to slow for her. This was the most that she could ever really accomplish. No matter how much she tried, no matter how hard she worked, no matter what she put herself through... it would never be enough. These were all just ordinary people who needed something to blame for the state of their lives pouring their hearts and souls into an ultimately futile act and she was one of them. She was just another face in the crowd, just another body on the pile, just another pointless name in a pointless list.

The realisation knocked the air out of her lungs, and for a solid thirty seconds she simply could not bring herself to breathe. Surrounded by perhaps the most motivated people, who felt what she felt, and still they were nothing? If they were nothing, what was the rest of the world? The questions thrummed in her skull, her blood pounding in her temples, and just as she thought she was about to pass out from the lack of air her lungs found their rhythm and tried to compensate for lost time. She gulped in great mouthfuls of air, spitting them out almost before she'd actually managed to get them into her lungs, and cried out to the heavens in rage and despair. All she'd ever wanted was to hold these people accountable for what they'd done, for the damage they'd caused, to make them feel all of the rage and misery and pain that she and countless others felt... and then, the final and greatest betrayal—Yvette and Alana, working for the company she was protesting, walking out of the building hand in hand. Had it been anyone else, perhaps she would not have been so hurt. Perhaps she could have coped, perhaps it would not have broken her—but break her it did, and in that moment of betrayal, and alienation, and pain she triggered.

What happened that day went on to be known as a tragedy. Overcome by a rage so strong she was essentially an animal, Alana de Vere tore out Yvette Sinclair’s throat with her teeth and injured at least three others before having to be fatally shot by the police. The protest ended with SWAT intervention, and many more injured or killed before the day was out.

After the experience, Penelope moved back to Denver, ostensibly to take a break from her rigorous studies and get some experience in the financial world before beginning a job hunt in earnest, having been denied the connections she could have gotten at Columbia. The truth was far simpler: if she were to take advantage of her newfound power, she would need experience and she would need resources. Both would be better off if accrued far away from one of the financial powerhouses of the world, and she could use her home state as a testing grounds for her greater plans. With a little under a year of practice, Penelope decided to forge a cape name for herself. She took the name Adrasteia for herself and began using her powers to enact vengeance on the rich and, where possible, redistribute their assets to the poor. She accomplished very little, on a global scale, but enough to become intimately familiar with her powers and help those that she felt she could help.

And then, years later, Gold Morning happened.

Penelope eventually made her way to Samekh and set about looking for work in the only capacity that her talents allowed for--the practice of law. Penelope arranged for a deal in which her citizenship would be granted immediately provided that she worked for the government in immigration law. Despite a lack of formal training in the matter her skills, natural talents, and power allowed her to do the research quickly and tug the heartstrings of the right people to ensure that she was a formidable lawyer, even in a subject that she had not specifically studied. After completing six months of work her bargain was over, but the comfort of the job was such that she decided to continue in her work--if only because she felt she could genuinely help those that needed it. She has not bothered to join anything parahuman related just yet, but the principles upon which life on Samekh were founded have already begun to grate on her as an unnecessary relic of the past, in some ways worse than Bet ever was, and is biding her time until something about it can be done.

_{[ ♦ ] Personality}

---

♦ Motivation: Penelope is an extraordinarily ideologically driven woman, and her ideology is most simply summarised by the words "fuck the one percent". She loathes the state of the world and places its blame almost entirely on the magnates and oligarchs who control it from the shadows to the detriment of everyone else around them, and her sole motivation in life is to rip them from their ivory towers and show them what it's like to muck about with the good people of the world crushed under their metaphorical boots. Penelope initially took this ideology in a direction that she, in her more mature years, recognises as misguided and naive--originally, she had hoped to change the world through the power of protest and elucidation. She thought that if she could simply elevate the thoughts of her compatriots to the point of understanding how the world worked then the resultant shift in popular sentiment could liberate them from the shackles of their oppressors. She thought that armed with understanding they could accomplish that which had been denied them since time immemorial--a society that cared for everyone and everything within it.

It was only when the world took that hope from her by constant iteration and reiteration of failure that she saw it for how naive it was. How could she incite an indolent populace to revolt if they neither understood nor desired to understand the fact that the barely-gilded cage foisted upon them was not how the world had to be? No, she knew that in order to liberate them from something that they could not even perceive that she had to become as powerful as her oppressors in order to undermine their efforts. Thus, her motivations are twofold: Bring the current system of exploitation and misery crashing down and those who perpetuated it to justice, and obtain enough power to do so. Penelope will go to great lengths to achieve her goals, believing that the sacrifice of the few for the many is always worthwhile, even to the extent that should the correct moment arise for her death to change things she will gladly accept the opportunity. If she has to murder ten to achieve the power to save a thousand, she believes that this is a worthwhile trade--but only if she keeps her morals in check and does not lose sight of her goal. As a result she desires stability in the form of a group of close compatriots who can check her worst and most selfish impulses when necessary as well as damage the current regime in legitimately meaningful ways--and this resulted in her desire to join a group of more morally grey individuals than the First and Final Guards who, in her mind, exist to perpetuate the current regime (regardless of how true that may actually be).

♦ Derangement:Judicious use of Penelope’s power has left her with a more volatile emotional state than she would care to admit. She carries fragments of emotions and other such psychological phenomena with her from times where she’s used her power, and when she gets tired or stressed these fragments of emotions from times when she has recently used her power are prone to directly influencing her own mental state—and due to the fact that she very frequently focuses her power on psychological phenomena that incite themes of rage and rebellion, she has to a certain extent taken on more of the traits of a violent revolutionary than she currently realises.

_{[ ♦ ]
Parahumanism}

---

♦ Skills: Penelope’s primary talents are those of an oratory and intellectual nature. She is a naturally gifted public speaker and negotiator, a talent which was only magnified by her powers, and is considerably more knowledgeable than most in matters of finances and the nuances of the law regarding such. She is bilingual, speaking Greek and English fluently, and has recently indulged in the practice of things she thinks she will find useful in the field, such as lockpicking and hand-to-hand combat. Four years of Law School have given Penelope a mind for extreme detail—she is capable of memorising colossal amounts of information by rote and referencing that information as-needed, but this is certainly within the capacity of an ordinary person.

♦ Classification: The GM will tell you what to put here after you power has been reviewed/approved.
♦ Mechanics: Penelope's power is, fundamentally, the ability to sense, connect, and manipulate the psychological phenomena within people. It could more accurately be described as the ability to influence the connections and ties that bind humans together. Practically, this ability has several components:

Firstly, Penelope is always able to sense the most dominant emotion (or other equivalent psychological phenomena under the broad umbrella of "emotion", stretching to concepts such as loyalty or devotion) that anybody within around half a city block (approximately 450 feet) is currently feeling. While she cannot turn this sensory ability off, it is not an inherently empathetic awareness--she does not feel what they feel, and has an awareness in an abstract way as if she has another sense linked directly to this ability. Penelope is capable, if she desires, of reducing the range of this ability to approximately a quarter of a city block (225 feet), gaining insight into more of the emotions people are feeling beyond their most focused emotion and surface emotions. If she focuses on a specific individual she is capable of narrowing this focus even further to the extent that she is able to essentially consider their entire emotional profile. It is important to note that she cannot detect thoughts under any circumstances--her sensory ability is very strictly restricted to the purview of her overall skillset. Penelope's range of power has minor fluctuations based on how currently attuned she is with her shard.

Secondly, Penelope is able to choose a single instance of dominant emotion or a psychological phenomenon within her limited sensory range of approx. 225 feet and bind any number of people she can sense within that area together. Then, all instances of the chosen emotion felt by her selected targets are transferred to a single target of her choice. If any of these emotions are felt towards a specific target by anybody affected by the power, Penelope is able to direct all of the combined emotion towards any one target among those available to her. This typically manifests as Penelope choosing an emotion--for example, anger--and siphoning all instances of anger from all targets within her range, then transferring the accumulated anger into one person. Those who have their emotion siphoned by her power no longer feel any instance of the emotion. While within her range, Penelope is capable of maintaining a single instance of this effect almost indefinitely. Penelope is theoretically capable of using this power to transfer instances of any common facet of the mind that does not extend into explicit thought, which include but are not limited to: loyalty, trust, pain, and pleasure.

The exact specifications of the range of Penelope’s power vary, but it is most easily understood as a circular area of effect with variable radius--the lower bound of this area is 10 feet in radius, and its upper bound is 225 feet in radius. Penelope may choose any radius between the two and place the area of effect anywhere within her overall 225 ft. radius provided that it does not extend past her 225 foot distance maximum. As soon as any target leaves Penelope’s chosen range of influence, the effect of her power gradually begins to reverse itself over the course of twelve hours.

By virtue of its nature, Penelope’s power is Manton limited.

♦ Equipment: Adrasteia carries precious little, being relatively new to the idea of being a cape. Currently she has several burner phones, a taser, and pepper spray—but as her needs develop, she will upgrade her setup accordingly.

Natrelmon: Reckoning [Creature Capture]

that sounds like a whole bunch of effort joe

finding GMs who can actually write is no mean feat these days

Natrelmon: Reckoning [Creature Capture]

yep that's about right

Get Kid: Electrical Twogalatoo

"I see my chance, reader (who is most certainly an avid animu fan!). I, the heroic and venerable WHITE DARGON LUNAR will, in turn, save Spongebyrne the Foreboden from certain in turn doom!"

White Dargon Lunar braced himself. This was going to be his most in turn challenging fight yet. His hair stood on end, agitating his signature white trilby just a touch. Was this finally going to be... a ふさわしい相手? As he stood before the GREAT INEFFABLE PRISONERER, he could in turn feel the adrenaline rising in turn. It was happening... he swore to his master that he would never unleash more than exactly 17.7-inturn-233% per cent (percent) in turn of his true power...

"MASTER... I MUST BREAK MY VOW TO YOU... THIS OPPONENT IS TOO IN TURN STRONG, IN TURN. I MUST USE THE FORBIDDEN TECHNIQUE. I MUST... USE MY SECOND ZANPAKUTOU!!! I HAVE NEVER FELT SO ALIVE, THIS COMBAT... IT IS THE GREATEST CHALLENGE I HAVE EVER FACED!!!"

"完璧な神のウィアブーの白いトリルビー... !"

White Dargon Lunar's twin swords flashed in turn in the mooninturnlight. Spongebyrne... would be saved!!!!!!!!!!! AND MAYBE IF HE SAVED SPONGEBYRNE, YURIYA COULD LOVE HIM AGAIN???????!!!!

And then White Dargon Lunar died, cleaved in two by the infinite mass of Goofykins' BUSTER SWORD.

The white trilby remained, floating to the ground.

Get Kid: Electrical Twogalatoo

"Ohayou, in turn, reader! I'm looking, in turn, for my, in turn, nemesis @BlackDragonSol! Have you in turn seen him, reader? The Black Dragon must be held in turn responsible for his crimes! あなたが順番にいなくて本当順番にに寂しい... 順番に ゆりや!!!"

the WHITE DARGON LUNAR crested above the skies of Detroit, their signature white trilby staying perfectly still atop their head.