ntn-compliant app.

[necrolord]

Character Base

• Character Name: John Gaius, The Emperor of the Nine Houses, The King Undying, God, and many other epithets.
• Age: appears late thirties | actually 10,000
• Canon (Date/Year Released)/Canon Point: Nona the Ninth (September 2022) | post-canon
• Items Coming Along: Not even the clothes off his back.
• Content Warnings: Mass death, war crimes, soul horror, forcible body manipulation, shady emotional manipulation, religious violence, gore...

--- MAJOR SPOILERS BEGIN HERE ---

Character Background

• History: link
• Core Relationships:

• Alecto - John met God and he swallowed her whole. He fused his own mind and soul with the soul of the Earth, but It was too big to contain in his body, so he poured all the leftover parts of It into a human form. When the dust had settled, he named this person Alecto. She was at his side through the hell of rebuilding, and he loved her with everything he has. She never knew how to love him back. She has always been a monster, so at the pleas of his saints, he sealed her away in a locked tomb for thousands of years. He plans to wake her up at the end of all things, so they can die together.
  
• Augustine - His first necrosaint. One of his closest loved ones before the Resurrection, who has remained close in the ten thousand years since. As of this canonpoint, Augustine has just tried to kill him; it's unknown to what degree John suspected this was coming, but John tried to lie and pacify his way out of the entire confrontation. In the end, Augustine died in the assassination attempt.
  
• Mercymorn - His second necrosaint. One of his closest loved ones before the Resurrection, who has remained close in the ten thousand years since. Along with Augustine, she has been working to plot John's assassination. She succeeds in killing him briefly, but it does not stick, and John murders her in retaliation.
  
• Wake - The charismatic general of an interplanetary resistance against John's imperializing force.
  
• Harrow - His newest necrosaint and the protagonist of Harrow the Ninth. John regards her as a daughter and treats her kindly, but he also orders her assassination should she pose a threat.
  
• Ianthe - His second-newest necrosaint and the girl who saved his life at the end of Harrow the Ninth.
  
• Gideon - His daughter, of whom he was not aware until the end of Harrow the Ninth.

Character Personality Through Key Moments

Gideon the Ninth, the first book in the series, begins "in the myriadic year of our Lord – the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death!" Every successive mention of the year, or the Emperor, is just as impassioned and creepy.

Throughout his canon, we hear of the Emperor. The story plays out in his orbit, in which he is, at first, distant as a star; he is the setting backdrop, the deity invoked when one says oh my God. He is a concept, not a man. It is especially jarring, then, when we finally meet him.

At first impression, he is kind and humble. God dresses in simple clothes and holds himself like nobody in particular. He speaks informally, in a gentle voice. We see one of his subjects give up their heart's blood to create a protective ward for him; God heals them in an instant, thanks them for their service, and admires their work throughout all the following scene. (Each time their contribution comes in handy, he says, absentmindedly, "I'll have to give them another commendation.") He very clearly tries to appreciate his people, value their work, and present himself as a respectful leader.

To Harrow, the protagonist, he goes a step beyond: he takes the role of a father figure. This is clear from their earliest interactions, wherein he is gently but firmly encouraging as Harrow recuperates from terrible mental and physical trauma. It becomes explicit later in the book: months into coaxing a half-feral Harrow to sit and take tea and biscuits with him, he tells her he would've liked her to be his daughter.

This shatters Harrow. She throws herself down and confesses her greatest sin to him, her apocalyptic crime, that of freeing his ultimate enemy from her prison. He listens all throughout her miserable speech, and is again calm and firm as he soothes her. His efforts at physical comfort seem earnestly clumsy and out-of-practice, and he always seems faintly out-of-touch; he continually offers her biscuits in the hopes she might someday, miraculously, evince interest in sweets. But he is very plainly trying.

Now, with Nona the Ninth out, we can better understand that he was expressing genuine love— and also lying to her face. We learn that, throughout all these fatherly interactions, he ordered one of his saints to kill Harrow should she not fall in line.

John tends to lash out for control when he is afraid, and he is very often afraid. When he met Harrow, whose eyes were chosen-one gold— the same gold John's had been, back when God had only blessed him, and he hadn't yet eaten her— it would have shaken him to his core. He would've been forced to ask whether this was Alecto's power bubbling up, Alecto's ghost trying to break free of the prison he'd made her. It would have looked like a sign of the apocalypse. It would have looked like everything was on the verge of getting very complicated, and very out of hand.

The last time things were about to get very out of hand, it was when his loved ones discovered Lyctorhood. They made their own attempts to swallow whole the souls of the people they loved, and become fused with them as John was with Alecto. They did it wrong. Instead of creating a unified being, each created one dominant personality who had murdered— was eternally in the act of murdering, as a power source— the other. John watched them get it wrong, and encouraged them down this path. When one pair cracked true Lyctorhood, true unification and immortality, he stopped them.

To this he has no excuse except weariness and desperation. He tells Harrow it seemed simpler not to let other full immortals run around; not to let them get away from him; to retain control. John Gaius is a man who has been watching the world burn for ten thousand years now, and he's always planned to pack it in once the fire is out. He has always planned for his own suicide. The idea of immortal loose ends must be exhausting.

The idea of letting his loved ones exist beyond his reach must be exhausting.

We the audience now know how the world ended. We know the scope of John's crimes. He conceived of an ark to save humanity, a last-ditch plan for a dying world. The ark was stolen by trillionaires who left everyone else to die. As he tried with more and more manic intensity to stop them from getting away, he reached for more and more power— and he has always been powered by death.

John Gaius nuked the world and ate its soul so he could scrabble at the men who'd fucked him over. They still got away. He was left alone in the wreckage.

He could have chosen differently. He could have focused on saving lives, on finding another way; his loved ones tried to tell him this. But now that he's come this far and lost this much to his decisions, he sees no choice but to double down. He assures himself it was always necessary. He assures himself there was no other way.

He hates himself, because he knows it isn't true. This is why he wipes the memories of his loved ones. This is why he never tells anyone his story.

John Gaius is a man who made a horrifying mistake and decided that trying to go back on it would be unbearable; so he put himself in a position where no one can question him, and no one can rake through the ashes to see what was lost. Now he'll never have to face his grief. Now that no one has the chance to forgive him, he'll never have to face the idea that no one ever would.

He's still chasing the trillionaires. He wants to wipe out every last reminder of their cruelty, and his crimes, even if that means nuking their great-great-great-grandchildren. Even if that means he's killing every human-habitable planet in reality just to feel like he's wiped existence clean. There's something reassuring about a blank slate; there's a comforting finality to a flood.

In Nona, the ghost of a murdered planet says I poison the universe to match my grief. John Gaius would end all of everything just so he could look at the wreckage and say, It's finally over.

And his loved ones aren't having it anymore.

This is where his relationship with Mercymorn comes, explosively, to a head. The narrative describes theirs as "a complicated power dynamic," which is putting it lightly. When he greets her, it is with a yell and a hug, "as though she were a precious and runaway child." She is snippy with him, which he accepts with good grace and humor; he gives her orders which she seems to trust in full. She calls him my Lord in everyday conversation and John when she's properly agitated. She has slept with him at least twice in recent years, both times with ulterior motives. Their relationship is deeply fraught, and at the end of Harrow the Ninth, it goes like this:

Mercy claims she will forgive him all the lies. John, too invested in her love or loyalty to acknowledge the danger, lets her get very close. And she blows his body to dust, cell by cell.

He regenerates about twenty seconds later and blows her head and chest to wet shreds. He does this with a fixed, mild calm. When he turns to the remaining characters to demand their loyalty, he gives no indication of being anything but moderately pissed off. This is when he and Augustine have their moment of truth.

As of Nona the Ninth, we finally understand his relationship with Augustine. They were close before John was God: John reminisces about a compliment Augustine paid to the color of his eyes. They tried to die holding hands, them and Mercy. He talks about their trio as though they were best friends, or lovers, or both.

Even now that he is God, Augustine is the most overtly friendly with him. They get drunk together and tell your mom jokes and cuff at each other, and to what degree this is genuine or performed is up for debate. Augustine is certainly trying to leverage his closeness with John to carry out a scheme, but there seems to be a deeper love beyond that. At the book's climax, with Mercy newly dead and Augustine clearly a part of the coup, John still offers him a choice to repent. John offers forgiveness.

Given this choice, Augustine says No. He sacrifices his home and his soul to drag John down into Hell itself. He fails, in the end. Augustine is swallowed up by that terrible, unknowable place, and John gets away.

This is how John enters Trench: having just survived a betrayal by his two closest loved ones. He regards this with a sort of exhausted inevitability. The poem at the beginning of Nona the Ninth goes like this, wherein the speaker is Alecto and John plays the you:

You told me, I'll wake you in the morning.
I said, What is morning? and you said,
When everyone who fucked with me is dead.

When everyone we love has gone or fled,
That's morning. Empty's just another word for clean.
Let's put this first-draft dream of mine to bed.

Even as he hunts his enemies' civilizations to the ends of existence, John has never believed he deserves forgiveness for what he did. He has never really thought he's in the right. There's no one left who can control him anymore: there is no higher power than himself. It's exhausting, going unchecked. He is like a vengeful ghost, and knows it.

There's an element of relief to it, now that all his loved ones have turned on him and died by his hand. It simplifies things. He has so little left to live for; he has so little left to care about. There are so few pieces left on the field that matter.

They're so very close to morning.

Chapter 2 Attributes

• Canon Powers: I am streamlining John's powers and nerfs! Powers I have mostly or entirely nerfed are marked with strikethrough. All powers that affect other PCs will be used with OOC consent only. When John inflicts violence on any creature with a soul, his Omen may spawn against his will and enter a berserker state.

God Tier. Here's what he is losing, in part or in full:

• He is utterly immortal. Total destruction of his body will reverse within seconds.
  
• He powers the sun. Without him, it collapses into a black hole.
  
• He can manipulate the landmasses of planets.
  
• He has an extensive awareness of the spirit-realm called the River.
  
• He can fully resurrect the dead.
• He can fully heal a person's life-threatening wounds in instants. (Caveat: Pthumerian, Beast, and Sleeper physiology often resists him.)
• He can puppet the bodies of the living as easily as the dead. (Caveat: Pthumerian, Beast, and Sleeper physiology often resists him.)

Lyctor Tier. Here's what any Lyctor can do:

• He is CONDITIONALLY immortal. Partial damage to his body heals within seconds, but total destruction of the brain or body is fatal.
  
• He can traverse the River to near-instantaneously teleport vast distances across physical space.
  
• He has an awareness of life-energy, death-energy, and souls in his vicinity.
  
• He can perceive the details of a person's anatomy to a very fine degree.
  
• He can inflict deadly wounds by manipulating a person's body, e.g. stopping their heart from a distance.
  
• He can use flesh magic to heal any creature whose body he can understand.
  

Necromancer Tier. Here's what any trained necromancer can do:

• He can puppet the bodies of the dead, and can create undead constructs from even a small amount of existing material.
  
• He can create anchor points for necromantic teleportation.
  
• He can manipulate souls and bind ghosts.
  
• He can create protective wards of blood or bone.
  
• He can receive another person's sensory input, e.g. he can see through their eyes.
  
• He can drain another person's life energy, using them as a battery to fuel his power, which can be temporarily debilitating or fatal.
• He can create massive explosions using necromantic energy.

• Blood Type: Darkblood
• Omen: A Herald; an eldritch creature that looks a bit like a gory humanoid insect. Because this is only the mimicked shape of a Herald, not a real one, it has a consistent form for everyone who sees it, and it does not inflict fear or madness on those who look upon it. It's just a really awful nasty space wasp. Think something like this, but humanoid like this, and dripping Darkblood. Her name's Lenore.
• Blessed Day: 7/8
• Patron Pthumerian: Reckoning
• Blood Power Manifestation: John will be able to use a slightly-nerfed version of his canon abilities via Deer's blood magic. This is the blood color I'm picking to reflect total control of life and death energy; technically Vileblood might be more fitting, but his power is on such a vast scale that "reality manipulation" feels more apt. Also, it suits his aesthetic.

The Player

• Player Name: Rona
• Player Age: 26
• Player Contact: ochrona
• Permissions: Here.

Comments

[necrolord]

Player Name: Rona
Character Updated: Emperor John Gaius
Original Canon Point: post-Harrow the Ninth
New Canon Point: post-Nona the Ninth

Summary of Psychological Changes: It's been a bad six months.

We don't get to follow John's POV through much of the timeskip, but we can draw conclusions: he escaped the River fight in which his two closest friends and lovers tried to kill him, and in which they destroyed the ancient home they'd built together. He probably pulled himself and his remaining Lyctor, Ianthe, aboard a ship in his armada. He declared at least two of his Lyctors dead, probably lied that they'd fallen in battle for him instead of against him, and had to restabilize his panicked empire after his brief death made the Sun itself flicker and threaten to collapse.

He probably searched for survivors Harrow and Pyrrha, and learned that Pyrrha was with his enemies. He fought those enemies and won the corpse of his daughter, Gideon, which he rendered indestructible via magic and housed her soul in. She joined his side alongside Ianthe as his corpse-daughter, and together he named them his two Princes: Ianthe now titled the Saint of Awe, Gideon renamed the Crown Prince Kiriona Gaia.

For months he has showered the Princes with honors, and for months they've watched him tenuously pretend he isn't totally breaking down. The Sixth House, one planet of his central star system, has evacuated and fled his empire wholesale through the treason of their leader. Horrifying, demonic enemies are massing throughout the universe against him. All his original Lyctors are dead, except Pyrrha, who seems to have turned traitor. Everything is falling apart.

To cope, John has been drowning himself in alcohol and sex with the officers who serve under him. He's been putting on an unconvincing front for the girls, Gideon/Kiriona and Ianthe, but they worry that even that will soon collapse. And he has apparently sent Gideon/Kiriona to kill Alecto, his beloved, the other half of his soul.

It's unclear how much John lied to Gideon when he assigned her mission; it's likely he wanted her to wake Alecto, and knew Gideon couldn't actually kill her. Still, it's possible that John is at such a low he would accept either answer, in the same way he once demanded that Harrow be "fixed or put down." All he wants is closure and a release from uncertainty.

I suspect John is in the final leg of his ancient vengeance quest, and is ready to lash out at his enemies— perhaps deliver his people to the promised land he intended for them ten thousand years ago— and then accept his own death. He has been patient for ten thousand years and he cannot be patient any more. This feels like the gloves coming off, like a grand finale.

When he arrives in Deer, he will be furious that he was robbed of a reunion with Alecto, and exhausted that he can't goddamn finish his unfinished business. He is also fresh off a heart-to-heart with Harrow, wherein he confessed his full, true backstory for the first time in ten thousand years. In some ways, he's primed for the emotional intimacy Deer demands, having been so worn down by canon that Deer will be a reprieve.

In most ways, though, he will be agonized by the prospect of having to live with himself, his terrible purpose incomplete, in this land of second chances.

Summary of Physical Changes: He will emerge from the moment the book ends: drunk and naked, with a rapidly-healing wound through his heart.
Summary of Power Changes: N/A
Summary of anything else significantly changed: N/A