Horror
Physical appearance:While his appearance is highly variable, this is his "true" form.
Some 8 feet tall, standing on 7 inch hooves rather than human-like feet, Horror has gray skin studded with small, curved spikes growing from it here and there, with two small horns on his forehead and two on his chin. His scarlet eyes are deep-set in shadow-dark orbits glaring malevolently from his demonic face. Long black hair hangs back a bit past his shoulders, and a somewhat wild, somewhat shaped beard adorns his chin and cheeks. Apparent gashes in his flesh show raw, bloody muscle here and there, though no liquid oozes from them. His hands are free of spikes, but have pustle-like bumps and long, filthy-looking talons most of the time. His preferred garb in his demonic form is armor from his shoulders down, with many metal spikes up and down the torso and limbs, and a pair of large horns curving upward from the shoulders. Skull motifs optional.
Should he be seen naked, what is between his legs resembles neither mundane gender in the slightest.
History: Somewhere, somewhen... the planet Floccinaucinihilipa orbited a sedate greenish-yellow star, in a system plagued by recent bursts of inexplicable chaotic principles, unknown monsters, and Void incursions. All of which were the fault of Floccinaucinihilipa's ruler, Princess Truly Scrumptious, who was as black-hearted of a villain as she was gorgeous and perfect of manners. The people of her world lived an almost fairytale existence - on the surface. Behind the scenes they were scared witless of the Princess and her secret police. And her legions of mages, both Magem and Magus, kept visiting heroes from finding out the truth until it was too late for them. And she invited plenty of would-be heroes over, gracious and sweet as always thanking them for their efforts. Even as the monsters they slew were oft-times former heroes who had been transformed by her experiments into reconstructing ancient spells to make powerful minions.
The person who would become Horror was no off-world hero, but a simple Ogre farmer born and raised on Floccinaucinihilipa. Besides his crops of cabbage-like vegetables, he was the brother-in-law of one of the leaders of the resistance that opposed Truly Scrumptious from among the common folk, and arrested due to that connection when the secret police uncovered it, though his sister and her husband escaped the attempt to capture them.
He'd witnessed others being "punished" before his turn came, seeing most evaporate into dispersing chaos that was safely channeled away from the labs, the castle, and those within to strike elsewhere on the planet. A few victims managed to re-condense, becoming the monstrous slaves of the Princess. Her demonic warriors, as he heard her call them in the mystic ceremony of transformation. But... in hearing the spell(s) repeatedly, he fancied that he saw a weak point in the incantation. Assuming that exact words were somehow important to it, as she seemed to be sticking to a precise set of formulae, and her mages taking notes on the results.
His turn came, bound in chains on the altar in the middle of her complex diagrams. The poor farmer shivered in fear, sweat everywhere on his hairy frame and not from any chill in the air. But he knew, like any other adult on this world, that pleading for mercy would be a waste of breath. This was not a court trying him for a normal crime.
The opening invocation began. "Ancient spirits of the Moon Star of Evil! Grant me the power, the pussiance, the peril to transform this ogre into a fiend most pernicious!"
He felt nothing. No visible manifestation ever seemed to come from that invocation, oddly.
And the heart of the ceremony began. The opening of the Void around the imprisoned victim, and the calling of a strange lightning around his changing form. "Activate interlocks! Dynotherms connected! Infracells are up...!"
The true nightmare began. "Form Cup. And. Ring." The utter nothingness of oblivion beyond oblivion lapped at his soul, trying to extinguish his very essence, held off solely by the unknown lightning aura as the first transformative command worked its' way into his being. Cup... a perception with his mouth, his stomach, his gut and butt of a being beyond the Oner, beyond any Oners, a being that was all-wise, all-knowing, all-kind and free of desire. A being of perfect devotion whose very existence corrupted the Oners that its' existence upheld and sustained. A being who, being perceived, left him all too keenly aware of his own flawed nature. And incorporating that flawedness into his aborning new self. Ring... his skin and face perceived the being that defined the difference between chaos and void, between self and other, the boundary spirit between all things. The being that was the machine(s) working beneath the surface of every Oner, keeping the laws of reality real. The author of self-awareness, yet it had none itself. And in that perception he learned the secret lessons to enable his own existence against the call of the Void, to hold himself in being as an individual rather than an ephemeral awareness on the verge of blinking out of being at any time.
"Form Staff. And. Sword." The next command came in only seconds, but it felt like he'd endured many lifetimes in the first two components of the transformation. Staff... a mindless, senseless, unaware thing of spirit. Utterly isolated and alone, and by that loneliness it made it possible for lesser spirits to have senses and be aware of each other. It was a ghastly revelation sinking into him to give his new self the capability to communicate and know laws. Sword... a perfectly peaceful and accomodating spirit. Whose splintered aspects were the most horrific forms of violence imaginable in their incompleteness. The implications of what that meant about war scarred his soul to the deepest depths, the perception of ultimate peace making him something that could cause harm to others.
"Form Way. And. Mask." The third level of transformation, worse than either of the Lovecraftian nightmares before it. Way was a spirit whose mad eyes gazed on everything, everywhere simultaneously, stretched to infinity in all conceivable directions yet compressed into nothingness. It would speak, but had no room in which to move. It wailed its' agony endlessly, and that agony was what mortals called travel. And if seeing a meaning underlying space wasn't bad enough, it was followed by experiencing Mask... a spirit so utterly without deception or guise that to say it was formless would be attributing infinitely more shape to it than it had. Mask expressed a mind-shattering truth no language could transcribe.
It was taking all that he could muster and more to keep his attention on the weak point he'd noticed, which was about to be upon him. With the firsthand experience of the transformative spirits amidst the all-annihilating Void fresh and raw on his soul, he could barely hold onto the hope of thwarting the rebirth and the Princess, such was the burden crushing the man, the Ogre he had been.
"And you'll form the Heart," Princess Truly Scrumptious was saying, the final command in this portion of the ritual. The Horror-who-would-be spoke up at the same time, trying to pervert her evil wishes as the last act of his dying humanity.
"Form. Book. And. Heart," he managed to get out with his Cup & Staff-mutated tongue and lips, the final word timed to match her also saying Heart. Something answered him. Something that could not possibly exist, for to do so would prevent anything else from existing, and thus even more than the other spirits it had to stay beyond and without all that was, in order for the All to avoid unmaking the very creation it cherished by reabsorbing them into its' greater totality of eternity. The Ogre died, and Horror was born. Mothwings go spinning, end and beginning.
The transformation into a monster was not thwarted, nor did he dissipate into a storm of chaos. But Truly Scrumptious' will was indeed thwarted, as the binding spell she concluded the ritual with failed spectacularly. "Darkest soul, evils' courier. Serve me now as a demonic warrior!" His contact with Heart, with the All, in a way so unlike her intended enslavement and perversion of him resulted in a fresh burst of lightning instead as the binding shattered and reflected off of the glimmer of purity that had withstood the worst of the Void.
The monster on the altar snarled back. "Horror not warrior! Horror refuse!"
Flaws:
* Total amnesia of his past. Everything he was and could have been was wiped out by the transformation and rebirth.
* Loathes Truly Scrumptious and anything/anyone that reminds him of her.
* Inherently monstrous and alien to conventional reality. His existence is subjective, not objective.
* Hedonist and transformation addict. He cannot change his Raksha nature, but he can experience being so many different things. And put others through bizarre transformative experiences.
* Has to share his occult knowledge if requested by a human or human-descendant, and cannot ask for any but the most minimal payment for it.
* Can only draw upon concepts, imagery and forms from his matrix-library - okay, that's not much of a flaw given the size of it, but it will be limiting for him in time as the library cannot be expanded upon or changed once something is revealed. Nor can he truly invent new things, only apply what he has in new ways.
* Cold Iron/Ordered Iron. Like all Raksha, this substance is anathema to him, one of the few things that can truly end him for eternity. And if he hasn't recovered his humanity yet, he won't have an afterlife, as a deathblow with a weapon made from it will extinguish what is left of his soul.
Skills:
Has a broad but low-powered array of magical arts available to him. Knows of, but cannot himself use stronger levels of magic.
GM's refference
http://riseupfromdarkness.wikidot.com/shinma
http://exalted.xi.co.nz/wiki/OhJames/ShinmaAspects
https://phantasmods.dreamwidth...6.html?thread=157402