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chemoscion) wrote2020-06-23 09:38 pm
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ryslig
OOC INFORMATION
Name: Nix
Contact:
salroka; PM
Age: 30+
Other Characters: N/A
CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character Name: Lucius the Eternal
Age: 11,000 years (give or take a few decades)
Canon: Warhammer 40,000 (As a note, since there are a few disparate and sometimes conflicting sources of canon within the franchise, this is a list of works I give primacy.)
Canon Point: Following the events of Lucius: The Faultless Blade, prior to the 13th Black Crusade
Character Information: Brief summary, or a more detailed one
Personality:
In the grim darkness of the 41st Millennium, Lucius is a figure of notoriety for many reasons. The battle-hungry, cruel, unkillable champion of Slaanesh, Lucius has ended countless lives and inflicted untold amounts of suffering in his eternal quest to find enemies capable of testing his skill with a blade. One might wonder how a proud Astartes warrior, a human altered to its very genetic level to be the perfect protector of mankind, could become little more than a roving monster working in service to the chaos god of pleasure and excess, but in truth, the answer is simple: Lucius really is that shallow.
That may sound like putting too fine a point on it. It isn't. Lucius cares for nothing but his own pleasure and freedom; he has allowed his pursuit of it to rule him for eleven thousand years, and he'll allow it to rule him for eleven thousand more. Even before his fall to Chaos, his actions are driven not by morality or reason, but by impulse. A thrill-seeker, Lucius is in need of constant stimulation, and when he finds something that might provide, he leaps to meet it without considering the consequencesâor, more often than not, before he has considered the idea that his actions may have consequences at all.
But for as quick as Lucius is to pursue whatever may divert his attention, he loses interest just as quickly when the sheen of novelty has worn away. Walking a tight line between fickle and fanatical, rather than savoring his pleasures, Lucius drains them dry the instant their taste is on his tongue. His mind is a perpetual cycle of wild ecstasy and yawning, empty lows as he chases an ever-greater peak, and disconnected from the morality that guides the average person, there are few heights he won't climb and depths he won't plumb in the pursuit. Forget eleven millenniaâafter embracing the dark gods, it didn't take him eleven months to experiment with eating human flesh.
Through it all, Lucius has found only one source of pleasure that can reliably bring him the high he craves: swordplay. A childhood passion turned to obsession with the passage of time, Lucius finds that nothing stimulates the senses quite like a good old-fashioned duel to the death! It helps that he is, of course, a horrible little sadomasochist. There is little that brings him as much pleasure as the moment an enemy realizes they will die by his handâexcept, perhaps, the tension of feeling his own life hang by a thread. When a battle stimulates his senses, he fights joyously, laughing and boasting and basking in adulation and hatred alike.
More than simply a way to satiate his base need for sensation, however, swordsmanship also represents the one greater goal Lucius can be said to possess: a quest for perfection. Rather than merely wanting to test his skills, Lucius wishes to improve, seeing this endless pursuit of greater things as another piece of his service to Slaanesh. Naturally, the more his abilities grow, the more difficult it becomes for him to find opponents of the caliber he requires; repeatedly, we are shown that this is the first criteria by which he judges others, and when he does encounter a worthy foe, his thoughts become obsessive to the exclusion of all other concerns.
Given all that, you might think an opponent able to best him would be a delight, providing a constant source of challenge and a new goal to climb towards. You would be wrong! Both prideful and petulant, he is quick to find reasons why a victory over him should not count as legitimate, with tactics he deems to be "underhanded" anathema to him in particular. He may even believe himself, when he says this; though his morals range from "inconsistent" to "nonexistent" with his moods, he displays a consistent disdain for those unable to earn their victories or take their trophies through honest means. See, for example, Afilai, a member of Lucius's warband who killed his wounded comrades on the battlefield to steal the armor from their corpses. Lucius calls him "a thief and a murderer", despite the fact that Lucius has likely taken many more lives, and tells him that he has only permitted him to live by grace of his association with a man he can't afford to quarrel with.
And, when there is nothing Lucius can make into an excuse, he sulks and stokes a vendetta instead. These grudges last for a very, very long time, given that he speaks of them decades and even millennia after the deaths of their subjects. In the end, this is just another facet of his obsessive nature; though his loyalty might be won on a whim and lost just as easily, whatever Lucius feels, he is all in for as long as he feels it. This is a truth that manifests as much in his outward mannerisms as his underlying connections to others; while Lucius's moods are as fickle as his attention, they always swing towards extremes, and in the span of seconds he can shift from furiously stomping a man's head to pulp to laughing as he puppets the skin of their face in a mock conversation.
Despite all of thisâhis refusal to think ahead, the shallowness of his desires, the childishness of his moodsâLucius isn't stupid in the way he might initially appear. Throughout his appearances, he is repeatedly shown to outmaneuver others through out-of-the-box thinking, subversion of expectations, and his ability to accurately predict what other people are going to do before they do it. During the Horus Heresy, he betrays the loyalists and rejoins his traitorous legion through what at first seems to be a simple trophy he's taken from a defeated foe. Ten millennia later, he allows himself to be killed so that his later resurrection will position him to take a ship he wants from within it. He is also very good at sniffing out other people's weaknesses and hypocrisies, and using them against themâeither to tactical advantage (manipulating Lord Commander Eidolon into doing what Lucius wants despite arguing from a position with almost no leverage) or simply to cause the maximum amount of hurt (his last words to a friend he's betrayed being to put his ideals on blast).
It might be tempting to conclude, then, that his silly exterior is some kind of facade, purposefully constructed to make others underestimate him. But, as with so many other things about Lucius, the truth is much simpler: he just doesn't like being alone with his own thoughts. Initially, this was born out of Lucius having just enough self-awareness to know that the inside of his head is a deeply unpleasant place to be; in time, however, this aversion became something of a self-defense mechanism. As the number of souls trapped within in his flesh-armor grows, more and more space within his mind is taken up by them instead of him, with their voices drowning out his thoughts and even displacing some of his memories. To a man who cannot die, and a man who has always valued his independence to the extent of being self-centered, loss of control is perhaps the only thing in this galaxy that he truly fears. As long as there is something outside himself to hone his attention on, however, he can keep his thoughts his own.
And so Lucius continues, on and on, never allowing himself time for sobriety or introspection or the thought of reversing course. After all, in his own words, turning back is the one thing he never does. Though he knows he walks a damned road, every step he takes is one that carries him forward on its path, his faith never wavering in the same promise embodied by his warband's battle cry:
Agony! Ecstasy! More!
5-10 Key Character Traits: Battle-hungry, childish, obsessive, impulsive, thrill-seeking, fickle, prideful, clever, self-centered, cruel
Would you prefer a monster that FITS your characterâs personality, CONFLICTS with it, EITHER, or opt for 100% RANDOMIZATION? Fits
Opt-Outs: Goblin, Lich, Minotaur, Pooka, Waldgeist, Werebear
Lucius was previously assigned manticore.
Roleplay Sample: TDM (December 2022)
Name: Nix
Contact:
Age: 30+
Other Characters: N/A
CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character Name: Lucius the Eternal
Age: 11,000 years (give or take a few decades)
Canon: Warhammer 40,000 (As a note, since there are a few disparate and sometimes conflicting sources of canon within the franchise, this is a list of works I give primacy.)
Canon Point: Following the events of Lucius: The Faultless Blade, prior to the 13th Black Crusade
Character Information: Brief summary, or a more detailed one
Personality:
In the grim darkness of the 41st Millennium, Lucius is a figure of notoriety for many reasons. The battle-hungry, cruel, unkillable champion of Slaanesh, Lucius has ended countless lives and inflicted untold amounts of suffering in his eternal quest to find enemies capable of testing his skill with a blade. One might wonder how a proud Astartes warrior, a human altered to its very genetic level to be the perfect protector of mankind, could become little more than a roving monster working in service to the chaos god of pleasure and excess, but in truth, the answer is simple: Lucius really is that shallow.
That may sound like putting too fine a point on it. It isn't. Lucius cares for nothing but his own pleasure and freedom; he has allowed his pursuit of it to rule him for eleven thousand years, and he'll allow it to rule him for eleven thousand more. Even before his fall to Chaos, his actions are driven not by morality or reason, but by impulse. A thrill-seeker, Lucius is in need of constant stimulation, and when he finds something that might provide, he leaps to meet it without considering the consequencesâor, more often than not, before he has considered the idea that his actions may have consequences at all.
But for as quick as Lucius is to pursue whatever may divert his attention, he loses interest just as quickly when the sheen of novelty has worn away. Walking a tight line between fickle and fanatical, rather than savoring his pleasures, Lucius drains them dry the instant their taste is on his tongue. His mind is a perpetual cycle of wild ecstasy and yawning, empty lows as he chases an ever-greater peak, and disconnected from the morality that guides the average person, there are few heights he won't climb and depths he won't plumb in the pursuit. Forget eleven millenniaâafter embracing the dark gods, it didn't take him eleven months to experiment with eating human flesh.
Through it all, Lucius has found only one source of pleasure that can reliably bring him the high he craves: swordplay. A childhood passion turned to obsession with the passage of time, Lucius finds that nothing stimulates the senses quite like a good old-fashioned duel to the death! It helps that he is, of course, a horrible little sadomasochist. There is little that brings him as much pleasure as the moment an enemy realizes they will die by his handâexcept, perhaps, the tension of feeling his own life hang by a thread. When a battle stimulates his senses, he fights joyously, laughing and boasting and basking in adulation and hatred alike.
More than simply a way to satiate his base need for sensation, however, swordsmanship also represents the one greater goal Lucius can be said to possess: a quest for perfection. Rather than merely wanting to test his skills, Lucius wishes to improve, seeing this endless pursuit of greater things as another piece of his service to Slaanesh. Naturally, the more his abilities grow, the more difficult it becomes for him to find opponents of the caliber he requires; repeatedly, we are shown that this is the first criteria by which he judges others, and when he does encounter a worthy foe, his thoughts become obsessive to the exclusion of all other concerns.
Given all that, you might think an opponent able to best him would be a delight, providing a constant source of challenge and a new goal to climb towards. You would be wrong! Both prideful and petulant, he is quick to find reasons why a victory over him should not count as legitimate, with tactics he deems to be "underhanded" anathema to him in particular. He may even believe himself, when he says this; though his morals range from "inconsistent" to "nonexistent" with his moods, he displays a consistent disdain for those unable to earn their victories or take their trophies through honest means. See, for example, Afilai, a member of Lucius's warband who killed his wounded comrades on the battlefield to steal the armor from their corpses. Lucius calls him "a thief and a murderer", despite the fact that Lucius has likely taken many more lives, and tells him that he has only permitted him to live by grace of his association with a man he can't afford to quarrel with.
And, when there is nothing Lucius can make into an excuse, he sulks and stokes a vendetta instead. These grudges last for a very, very long time, given that he speaks of them decades and even millennia after the deaths of their subjects. In the end, this is just another facet of his obsessive nature; though his loyalty might be won on a whim and lost just as easily, whatever Lucius feels, he is all in for as long as he feels it. This is a truth that manifests as much in his outward mannerisms as his underlying connections to others; while Lucius's moods are as fickle as his attention, they always swing towards extremes, and in the span of seconds he can shift from furiously stomping a man's head to pulp to laughing as he puppets the skin of their face in a mock conversation.
Despite all of thisâhis refusal to think ahead, the shallowness of his desires, the childishness of his moodsâLucius isn't stupid in the way he might initially appear. Throughout his appearances, he is repeatedly shown to outmaneuver others through out-of-the-box thinking, subversion of expectations, and his ability to accurately predict what other people are going to do before they do it. During the Horus Heresy, he betrays the loyalists and rejoins his traitorous legion through what at first seems to be a simple trophy he's taken from a defeated foe. Ten millennia later, he allows himself to be killed so that his later resurrection will position him to take a ship he wants from within it. He is also very good at sniffing out other people's weaknesses and hypocrisies, and using them against themâeither to tactical advantage (manipulating Lord Commander Eidolon into doing what Lucius wants despite arguing from a position with almost no leverage) or simply to cause the maximum amount of hurt (his last words to a friend he's betrayed being to put his ideals on blast).
It might be tempting to conclude, then, that his silly exterior is some kind of facade, purposefully constructed to make others underestimate him. But, as with so many other things about Lucius, the truth is much simpler: he just doesn't like being alone with his own thoughts. Initially, this was born out of Lucius having just enough self-awareness to know that the inside of his head is a deeply unpleasant place to be; in time, however, this aversion became something of a self-defense mechanism. As the number of souls trapped within in his flesh-armor grows, more and more space within his mind is taken up by them instead of him, with their voices drowning out his thoughts and even displacing some of his memories. To a man who cannot die, and a man who has always valued his independence to the extent of being self-centered, loss of control is perhaps the only thing in this galaxy that he truly fears. As long as there is something outside himself to hone his attention on, however, he can keep his thoughts his own.
And so Lucius continues, on and on, never allowing himself time for sobriety or introspection or the thought of reversing course. After all, in his own words, turning back is the one thing he never does. Though he knows he walks a damned road, every step he takes is one that carries him forward on its path, his faith never wavering in the same promise embodied by his warband's battle cry:
Agony! Ecstasy! More!
5-10 Key Character Traits: Battle-hungry, childish, obsessive, impulsive, thrill-seeking, fickle, prideful, clever, self-centered, cruel
Opt-Outs: Goblin, Lich, Minotaur, Pooka, Waldgeist, Werebear
Lucius was previously assigned manticore.
Roleplay Sample: TDM (December 2022)