Xashara: Difference between revisions
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| name = Xashara | | name = Xashara | ||
| player = @Erauru | | player = @Erauru | ||
| archetype = Scrapper | | archetype = Scrapper/Brute/Tanker | ||
| origin = Magic/Technology Hybrid | | origin = Magic/Technology Hybrid | ||
| level = 50 | | level = 50 | ||
Line 80: | Line 80: | ||
And that makes moments the most important intervals there are. From her perspective, at least. | And that makes moments the most important intervals there are. From her perspective, at least. | ||
==What She Can Do== | |||
She can hit things with giant weapons really well. There's always that. | |||
While she is an intensely magical monstrosity, she is not herself a mage of any sort. She can and does feed on the essence of the concept of conflict itself as a means of what she calls 'meeting her nutritional requirements', but the truth that even she's not entirely aware of is that she doesn't need the essence of conflict to 'feed' upon; she needs nothing but her own self awareness to continue living and functioning just fine. | |||
She *likes* conflict and she thrives in it to such extent, and always has, that she simply doesn't know how to function or who she'd even be without it. To that end, however, she can literally feed on the essence of conflict and restore her reserves of power by literally hoovering it up from ensouled entities that she's in some sort of fight against. | |||
Her natural affinity for darkness, shadows and the concept of Void itself stems from just how and *what* she was made of in the first place by the seriously ill-advised beings that made her. Her soul, her consciousness; her essence; is a thread that her creators stole from the demiurgical mass of an ancient sleeping Cthulhu-class Old One entity they thought was long dead. | |||
It wasn't. They were wildly successful in stealing some of its essence and cramming it into their Super Murder Golem though; too successful. Much more successful than they should have been, and had they been the sorts that questioned their own successes, they might have realized that for themselves. But they didn't. | |||
And now Xashara exists as a sentient magitech golem-robit that makes the Terminator look like a toy, that sucks replenishing energy out of the concept of conflict itself and that cannot functionally die and stay dead because she's intrinsically made, at her core, out of the Darkness Itself. | |||
Launch all the magic missiles you like at the Darkness, Galstaff ye Sorcerer of Light. It won't help at all. | |||
As such, Xash has formidable abilities to merge with shadows and darkness, and even to shunt herself halfway out of the physical strata of reality altogether and render herself virtually untouchable by less-than-godlike means while she continues to hit things with giant weapons. | |||
Or conversely to concentrate void anti-energy into blasts that break physics and actually delete quantities of the energy that matter is composed of from the universe by neutralizing them at a fundamental level. | |||
She's also really great at lurking in shadows and becoming indistinguishable from them, though she can't turn truly invisible. Mundane physical light reveals her in such occasions as appearing glassy and ghostlike of translucence, but the *concept* of Light as is often thrown about by magical means has extremely derogatory effects upon her abilities to hide in shadows like she otherwise can, and can be used to great effect to drive her out of the shadows altogether. | |||
In terms of superhuman strength and speed, she's at a Hercules level of physical push/pull/lift strength, and it is through this strength and her flawless abilities to control it that she can also blitz around at ~600kph and take bounding leaps across distances of hundreds of meters like its not even an effort. | |||
Being able to mentally keep up with superhumanly fast-moving objects and while moving through terrain at tremendous velocities also has the effect of giving her reflexes and perceptual acuity on the level of a true top-shelf Speedster or Super Reflexes mutant or super, though these are all byproducts of her demigod-like strength, her magitech sensory abilities and her supercomputer-grade mental functions. | |||
She cannot keep up with higher tiers of the true Speedsters or Super Reflexes types, but she can absolutely keep up with any of the Super Strength varieties that exist, or have ever existed in Earth's history. She doesn't just swing giant weapons around; she does so like they don't weigh anything of significance. This doesn't stop applying when the weapon gets put away. | |||
The greatest weakness she has is that she is sentient and can be mentally affected by fairly pedestrian means. There is no kryptonite for her. No 'gotcha' magic spell that will stop her. No loopholes to exploit. | |||
She was made by a cabal of archmages that set out to create the ultimate weapon they could thereafter hide behind and deploy from the safety of their demiplanar havens. They stole the binding, fueling essentia from something older than linear time that they neither understood nor even had accurate knowledge about. | |||
What they did know is how to create a thing that all the 'gotcha' magic spells and the loopholes wouldn't apply to. It's why they went for the not-actually-dead-oops Old One essence to power the damn thing to begin with. How could *that* possibly go wrong, after all? | |||
Their wish was functionally granted, and now? Here she is, the product of a degree of hubris, arrogance and ignorance unified into an imperfect humanoid storm of immortality and deathlessness that has absolutely no idea what to do with a house or a Saturday or a cat, but here she is, having to figure that stuff out anyway. | |||
[[Category: Character]] [[Category:Vigilante]] | [[Category: Character]] [[Category:Vigilante]] |
Latest revision as of 14:55, 6 April 2021
[[Image:[url=https://imgbb.com/][img][/img][/url]|300px|]] | |
Xashara In Her Base Form | |
Xashara | |
Player: @Erauru | |
Origin: | Magic/Technology Hybrid |
---|---|
Archetype: | Scrapper/Brute/Tanker |
Security Level: | 50 |
Personal Data | |
Real Name: | Confidential |
Known Aliases: | None |
Species: | Magitech Synthetic Gynoid/Golem |
Age: | Unknown - has decades, possibly centuries, of combat experience. |
Height: | 7' |
Weight: | Varies by Form |
Eye Color: | Varies by Form |
Hair Color: | Varies by Form |
Biographical Data | |
Nationality: | Confidential |
Occupation: | Confidential |
Place of Birth: | Confidential |
Base of Operations: | Confidential |
Marital Status: | Single, Probably Not Looking |
Known Relatives: | Confidential |
Known Powers | |
Shapeshifting, Super Strength, Super Speed, Super Senses, Near-Invulnerability, Darkness Manipulation | |
Known Abilities | |
Kicking ass, shapeshifting, spying, infiltration, advanced tactical ability, eidetic memory, superhuman computational abilities, pretending to be a lot more naive and ignorant than she is. | |
Equipment | |
Beats things with giant weapons of varying self-emitted varieties. | |
She can't really be disarmed effectively as her armaments are always a part of her. If a weapon is broken or stolen, it will dematerialize into dark mist within minutes, and she will simply reform a new one as required. |
The Nature of Life
Radiant with intensely strong magic associated with darkness and void energies, Xashara is very much like a classical golem made of stone or metal, except she is extensively robotic. What her creators intended and why they went to all the trouble of making a magitech golem like her isn't at all obvious save for that they clearly intended to create a humanoid weapon, probably for other-than-noble reasons.
Like classic golems and other comparable automata of magical and technological natures, she doesn't have baseline biofunctions at all. She has no need to sleep, eat, rest or recuperate, she doesn't get fatigued and she cannot be poisoned or otherwise affected meaningfully by normal environmental conditions.
In the vaccuum of space or under five miles of ocean water, Xashara is just fine. Tremendous extremes and environmental conditions can hamper, hinder or even damage her, but her commanding resilience isn't easily overcome by just about anything nature is likely to throw at someone on a planet.
She can endure and function in temperatures up to ~6500c and down to ~100 kelvin, though approaching either thermal extreme can severely compromise her functionality as more and more of her overall power and resources become required for self-preservation and even basic functionality.
Sufficiently magical weapons, and magic itself, can affect her...but the weapons have to be functionally intense in their enchantments to a degree that is very uncommon, and a great deal of weaker magic is as useless against her in a physical manner as would be throwing a chancla at her.
Mind-affecting psionics and magic, however, might be effective. Most automata aren't sentient and don't have the 'Essence of Mind' to affect by such means, but she is definitely sentient, and that is hands down her greatest strength as well as her greatest weakness - she is not immune or even overwhelmingly resistant to mind-affecting powers. They can and may work on her even from undramatically mediocre sources, which, as much as it annoys and vexes her, is not something she's yet secured greater protections from than she has by nature.
By nature, she has the will of something on the order of a god, however. Grapple mentally with her and you're grappling with the mind of a sentient magitech supercomputer. Trying to mentally wrestle with her would be flatly suicidal for most things that are not so mentally titanic and immortally fast, but illusions and trickery could be extremely effective, and your absolute best bet in throwing her off or having any hope of winning a fight against her would be through misdirection, trickery and deception, be they mundane or supernatural in nature.
In assorted forms that emulated organic shapes, the emulation goes to a molecular scale. That is to say, if she looks like she's made out of meat, she probably is functionally made out of meat, and cannot be distinguished as synthetic by most forms of bioscan or even magical assessment.
In such forms, she is as physically vulnerable as whatever material she is emulating and can both feel and suffer from anything the form would be vulnerable to, though causing physical death of an emulated form only causes her to revert to her true, base form, which probably won't be a good time for whoever might have 'killed' her.
In the event that she is actually overwhelmed or destroyed in her base form, Xashara will reform in 10-40ish days much like a lich with a phylactery might do, except she doesn't have a phylactery that could be destroyed, and even she isn't certain what it would truly take for herself to be permanently slain. She's not keen on exploring that either, but this condition is such that she has no fear of death at all.
Instead, she has a mortal's fear of death for effective imprisonment, confinement and deprivation. Powerful though she is and inordinantly difficult to contain if such were to be attempted, the concept of being essentially locked in a box that can hold her and forgotten forever is truly horrifying to her, and she would go to the same extreme lengths to avoid and prevent such a fate for herself as most people would to avoid dying horribly. A credible threat of being contained and isolated as such would be a very effective way to both antagonize and redirect her.
As a fundamentally timeless entity that experiences the passage of time differently from anything organic or even conventionally mortal, she doesn't think of time in the same ways, and she doesn't place the same degrees of value or urgency on a lot of the same things that meat-people so often do. From her point of view, circumstances alone dictate a need for urgency, and if she doesn't feel worried about the circumstances, she won't behave as though they're somehow urgent.
Similarly, she has no motivation at all to collect or own much of anything. Being impervious and needing nothing tangible by which to survive and even to prosper means that she has no intrinsic concern for the value of materials or resources that aren't relevant to her interests, and she can be absolutely awful about causing collateral damage during messier fights accordingly.
She does not, however, have any interest or attraction to killing, harming or destroying either other people or their things. In general, this curbs what would otherwise be the absolute worst of her inconsiderations regarding the destruction of buildings, property and even lifeforms that had the bad luck of being in the way. This is not a moral concern for her so much as a logistical one that is basically predicated on her conclusion that 'if you act like a monster, you get treated like a monster'.
She vastly prefers to be treated like a person that can, and will, be considerate of all the fragile squishypeople that go about their lives everywhere she goes, and she'll go to considerable lengths to keep it that way, to make amends for lapses in this judgment and even to help out in communities with rebuilding and restoring things that were lost because of battles she was in, even if it wasn't her that did the damage.
To this end, she is utterly selfish, but subverts her own selfishness by applying modifiers that benefit people other than herself and interests other than her own. To say that she is calculated to the extreme in these manners is absolutely correct...but then, she *is* a sentient magitech supercomputer that runs around in a humanoid array of forms and often beats things to ruination with huge weapons.
However naive, ignorant and socially awkward she seems to be is a lie about half the time. She almost always knows more than she lets on, and she is desperately capable at getting information as and if she requires it. She has learned, and learned well, that most other beings find it neither comforting nor appealing to often have nothing to tell her that she hasn't already figured out, observed, learned or extrapolated for herself, so she point-blank plays dumb a lot of the time as a social lubricant and interpersonal glue all in one.
She wants friends and she is fascinated by the idea of family, and as she rationalizes it to herself, if she has to pretend to be less intelligent, observant, cunning and capable than she is in order to facilitate positive relations with others that might lead to friendship, she'll probably do it.
Ego is not an issue for her, either as a motivator or as a figurative hound at her heels. She feels no sense of competition with anyone or anything except herself in even the faintest of fashions, and she is often genuinely perplexed by behaviors others enact that feature that kind of competitive, jealous, envious or even spiteful expressions of competitiveness.
The simple fact of the matter as for why is not that she is incapable, but rather that her ego is so overwhelmingly profound that the concept of insecurity is completely foreign to her. If she wants something, she'll get it. If she needs to do something, she'll do it. If she can't get it or do it alone, she'll find the help she needs and get it done.
It all seems very simple to her, and her confidence in her own ability to do whatever she sets herself to is genuinely undented and unbroken in event the faintest of fashions. Not, as some might wind up assuming, because she's never failed before...but rather because she's never given up before.
And when you're functionally immortal in most ways, it isn't that much of a risk or a gamble to keep trying, keep working at a problem and to be as obsessively persistent as one feels like. What, after all, are you going to lose by being relentless to the outer limits of comprehensibility when you can't be hurt by most things, won't stay dead even if you get obliterated at a quantum level and aren't hindered in any particular way by getting old?
For Xashara, the those and similar questions don't merit asking because the answers are foregone. If she wants it, she'll get it. If she can't get it now, there will always be later. If it doesn't work out with this person or that group, mortals are inherently made disposable by their mortality anyway, so there's really no point to her in laboring under any delusions contrary.
What she cares about very much is curating her own experience of living. She wants to be a good friend, and to be able to know for her own sense of satisfaction that she did the best she could, even if it didn't work out. When she chooses to apply herself to something, be that friendship or otherwise, she always tries to do her best with it, because she's the one that has to remember, possibly forever, if she half-assed it.
Accumulation of unnecessary regrets is not something she wants to do. The unanticipated regrets are bad enough without adding those that might have been avoided by caring properly and not behaving selfishly even if one is sociopathically selfish.
For better and worse, Xashara is an immortal magitech abomination that gets to live out the rest of maybe-forever having to live with herself.
Everything and everyone else will come and go. Whole universes might come and go for all she knows. She is not intrinsically unaware of how vast Eternity is. Is she eternal? She doesn't know that she's not, and prefers instead to act like she might be.
For her own sake, that means making sure that she treats every Today like it matters, because the crap she'll remember forever will happen in moments. All the good, all the bad; all the everything - it will all happen in moments.
And that makes moments the most important intervals there are. From her perspective, at least.
What She Can Do
She can hit things with giant weapons really well. There's always that.
While she is an intensely magical monstrosity, she is not herself a mage of any sort. She can and does feed on the essence of the concept of conflict itself as a means of what she calls 'meeting her nutritional requirements', but the truth that even she's not entirely aware of is that she doesn't need the essence of conflict to 'feed' upon; she needs nothing but her own self awareness to continue living and functioning just fine.
She *likes* conflict and she thrives in it to such extent, and always has, that she simply doesn't know how to function or who she'd even be without it. To that end, however, she can literally feed on the essence of conflict and restore her reserves of power by literally hoovering it up from ensouled entities that she's in some sort of fight against.
Her natural affinity for darkness, shadows and the concept of Void itself stems from just how and *what* she was made of in the first place by the seriously ill-advised beings that made her. Her soul, her consciousness; her essence; is a thread that her creators stole from the demiurgical mass of an ancient sleeping Cthulhu-class Old One entity they thought was long dead.
It wasn't. They were wildly successful in stealing some of its essence and cramming it into their Super Murder Golem though; too successful. Much more successful than they should have been, and had they been the sorts that questioned their own successes, they might have realized that for themselves. But they didn't.
And now Xashara exists as a sentient magitech golem-robit that makes the Terminator look like a toy, that sucks replenishing energy out of the concept of conflict itself and that cannot functionally die and stay dead because she's intrinsically made, at her core, out of the Darkness Itself.
Launch all the magic missiles you like at the Darkness, Galstaff ye Sorcerer of Light. It won't help at all.
As such, Xash has formidable abilities to merge with shadows and darkness, and even to shunt herself halfway out of the physical strata of reality altogether and render herself virtually untouchable by less-than-godlike means while she continues to hit things with giant weapons.
Or conversely to concentrate void anti-energy into blasts that break physics and actually delete quantities of the energy that matter is composed of from the universe by neutralizing them at a fundamental level.
She's also really great at lurking in shadows and becoming indistinguishable from them, though she can't turn truly invisible. Mundane physical light reveals her in such occasions as appearing glassy and ghostlike of translucence, but the *concept* of Light as is often thrown about by magical means has extremely derogatory effects upon her abilities to hide in shadows like she otherwise can, and can be used to great effect to drive her out of the shadows altogether.
In terms of superhuman strength and speed, she's at a Hercules level of physical push/pull/lift strength, and it is through this strength and her flawless abilities to control it that she can also blitz around at ~600kph and take bounding leaps across distances of hundreds of meters like its not even an effort.
Being able to mentally keep up with superhumanly fast-moving objects and while moving through terrain at tremendous velocities also has the effect of giving her reflexes and perceptual acuity on the level of a true top-shelf Speedster or Super Reflexes mutant or super, though these are all byproducts of her demigod-like strength, her magitech sensory abilities and her supercomputer-grade mental functions.
She cannot keep up with higher tiers of the true Speedsters or Super Reflexes types, but she can absolutely keep up with any of the Super Strength varieties that exist, or have ever existed in Earth's history. She doesn't just swing giant weapons around; she does so like they don't weigh anything of significance. This doesn't stop applying when the weapon gets put away.
The greatest weakness she has is that she is sentient and can be mentally affected by fairly pedestrian means. There is no kryptonite for her. No 'gotcha' magic spell that will stop her. No loopholes to exploit.
She was made by a cabal of archmages that set out to create the ultimate weapon they could thereafter hide behind and deploy from the safety of their demiplanar havens. They stole the binding, fueling essentia from something older than linear time that they neither understood nor even had accurate knowledge about.
What they did know is how to create a thing that all the 'gotcha' magic spells and the loopholes wouldn't apply to. It's why they went for the not-actually-dead-oops Old One essence to power the damn thing to begin with. How could *that* possibly go wrong, after all?
Their wish was functionally granted, and now? Here she is, the product of a degree of hubris, arrogance and ignorance unified into an imperfect humanoid storm of immortality and deathlessness that has absolutely no idea what to do with a house or a Saturday or a cat, but here she is, having to figure that stuff out anyway.