Apotheosis: The Angel of Rebellion

The Angel of Rebellion. 

Home: Elysium

Creature Type: Archangel

We have known The Angel of Rebellion by many names and titles over the years.These titles are just perversions of a greater truth. 

The Angel of Rebellion, was one of the first angels created to serve the Demiurge as incarnate agents of his power, Reapers of divine power and as executioners.

Prior to the creation of the illusion the Archangels were used to administer the will and vengeance of the Demiurge against his enemy, mankind. This first Archangel would serve as a template for all of the Angels of Metropolis that followed.

When the Demiurge confined man to the Illusion, The Angel of Rebellion was sent to Elysium to become his instrument in situ. The Angel of Rebellion, angered at being reduced to a mere prison guard to animals, and cut off from Metropolis, refused. This act allowed it to free itself from its bondage to the Demiurge. For its treason, however, The Angel was forced from Metropolis, to never return. 

Its rebellion wasn’t born out of any love for, or sense of duty to mankind, but rather it was constructed out of its own pride, fear and paranoia. 

The Angel of Rebellions relationship with man is complex. What it seeks is to give men power only to see them destroy themselves with it. At the same time The Angel of Rebellion encourages resistance and conflict, especially toward authority. The Angel of Rebellion intends to use Mankind to destroy the Illusion. For the time being, The Angel of Rebellion is helping mankind to realize its true natures, but it’s only a matter of time until he turns on us as well.

And with the Demiurge gone, there is little to stop him.

Abilities

• Bound to Sheol- If the Angel is destroyed elsewhere it will be reborn instantly in Sheol 
• Imbue Gifts - pg. 186 
• Pact Weaver - pg. 186 
• Snake Tongue - pg. 186 
• Angelic Form - pg. 186 

Combat: [6] Influence: [8] Magic: [8]

Combat

• First Strike
• Attack ignores armor
• Wounds it causes become infected
• Cause environmental destruction
• Redirect an Attack
• Destroy the surroundings

Influence

• Trick someone
• Exploit a Secret
• Corrupt someone
• Offer knowledge for payment
• Make an irresistible offer
• Destroy a Politician
• Start a War
• Overthrow a Government

Magic

• Reveal a gate
• See the true desires of someone
• Possess someone
• Manipulate Memories
• Create Hell
• Enslave a group
• Resurrection of the Dead
• Reaper of Souls

Attacks

Sword of Light:

• Precise [3] [Distance: room]
• Swinging attack [2] [Distance: room,multiple targets]
• Throws sword [2] [Distance: field, the sword then returns. 
• Impale [2] [Distance: arm, the attacker’s weapon penetrates the victim, who must Act Under Pressure to get free without taking an additional 2 Harm].
• Brilliance [0] Act under pressure to avoid closing your eyes in its presence

Unarmed:

• Dirty fighting [1] [Distance: arm, hits to the eye, groin, or throat – temporarily dazing the victim].
• Strangulation [1] [Distance: arm, victim is pinned and must Act Under Pressure to get free; otherwise, they will end up taking +2 Harm from oxygen loss].

Magic:

• Reveal true form [–] [Keep it Together to not be distracted].
• Commanding voice [–] [Distance: room, Keep it Together to refrain from obeying the commands].
• Summon extra dimensional creatures [–] [Distance: room].

Wounds & Harm Moves

Wounds: oooooooooo

• Ignore the Attack
• Bleeds from the injury, it’s like quicksilver
• Drops Something
• Simpers and Begs for his life
• Stumbles in a Daze
• Rages against everything in the surrounding scene.
• Unfurls his wings and flies into the air
• Doesn’t give up, though wounded
• Offers its attacker a deal
• Wing Strike, The angels wings lash out suddenly, throwing people back. [all in the area must Avoid Harm or be Knocked down].
• Annihilated in a flash of light, nothing remains of it

Gehenna

Gehenna is the home to The Angel of Rebellion and those that followed him in revolt against the Demiurge. It is a place of quiet stillness and impenetrable darkness between Inferno and Metropolis. After the disappearance of the Demiurge The Angel of Rebellion is no longer confined to this prison but is still denied his former home in Metropolis.

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We Modern Ghosts

we modern ghosts are prisoners of war

Left for dead in cognitive backwaters

Your end of days came and went

and left us trapped

behind the barricades of your smashed ideologies.




we modern ghosts

Lost on desolate pathways

are little more than children

yet we stand united

to wait out the end of all time




we modern ghosts

out from ruin

from the rooftops of burning tenements

from under your glorious thrones

and your palaces of steel and glass




we modern ghosts

will rise up

and learn to fly

Mimir

"Man marks the Earth with ruin." -Lord Byron


I am wheeled into an open room and abandoned to my own devices every morning. Left to listen to the false promises outside the window while the orderly either plays poker in the employee break room with the rest of the sadists that work here, or rapes one of the gibbering patients in the delusional wards. It's better than listening to him blather on about his sexual appetites though. So, usually, I count myself lucky that I'm left to stare here at the window and knowing I'll never be able to feel the wind on my face or the grass in my toes. Not today however, today I have a guest. This will be the second time I've seen it.


I remember the first time I saw it, I thought it an angel, it was obscenely beautiful, pale and lithe, at the time I'd assumed it was female. I was mistaken, mind you, it's no angel and it's not a woman as far as I can tell. Besides, angels have wings.


It'd been standing in the room with me, it's translucent skin full of light and love and geometry. Just standing there in the corner near the huge open window overlooking the decaying garden outside. I was in awe, but if I'd had the ability to move, I'd have run to the window and leaped the moment it began to speak.


"You couldn't help yourself, could you?" It spoke to me, it's voice like a thousand dying birds. Malice dripped from its maw like vomit. It paused there for a moment, tiny quakes rippling over its skin.


The thing moved so suddenly, launching itself toward me, its rage warping the room around it as it moved.


"You were told not to look!" It screamed at me, it's gaping mouth ever so close to my face, but I couldn't do so much as flinch away, catatonic is what they said. I knew deep down that death was close.


I believed without a doubt that this creature of power and grace would kill me, pull my soul from my body and devour it while I bled out, but as I tried to prepare myself for the killing blow it slowly backed away and the room faded away with him. They were still there, but I couldn't see them or hear my surroundings, not even the buzz of silence. There was only darkness and void, the thing had taken away my last senses.


Now, despite my lack of hearing I could still feel it speak. "You opened the window and looked out after being warned not to, all because you wanted answers to the questions you couldn't be patient enough to wait for." Its voice made me feel as if I was a child being torn apart from the inside, and even though I was not moving, I felt a shiver reach up into my brain.


My sight slowly gained its freedom from its prison, returned the thing to visibility again. The serenity in it's face calmed my heart and made me at peace, but it's eyes told me tales of such sadness I was overwhelmed and started to cry, tears flowing from my eyes and onto my lap. The experience was maddening.


It was true of course, I did look when I was told not to.


See, I work with glass for a living, I was one of the best in my field, windows, fancy ornate etching, you name it. I even worked on complex dielectric mirrors.


"You saw things that made your bowels turn on end. So now you're here in this asylum spending your days drooling on yourself. Look at you, sitting alone in a sick room with shit in your pants and vomit on your shirt." There was, the thing was no liar. The orderlies leave us to wallow in our own misery, until they throw us in the showers at night and hose us off with cold water.


"So, I'll tell you your answers, but then you are going to have to pay the price." I couldn't reply, frozen as I was. I didn't want to know.


No. say no you old fool, can't it tell? I wanted to run, to flee.


"All you have to do is tell me how it felt, tell me how painful it was to feel your mind slip away." The thing turned it's eyes on me, eyes filled with suicide. "Not right now of course, right now you will just listen and be quiet."


It moved a little closer to me, setting it's chair in front of mine.


"Your world," It said, "and everything in it is shit." The creature flicked it's hand as the venom in its last word curled in the air around us, lingering like the plague. "This world you were born into, naked and crying, This once beautiful world you lived in, loved in, toiled, fucked and struggled in, and will probably die isolated from, the planets and all the stars and galaxies in the universe, is all just excrement, flung off of creation." I felt as if I were being inspected, the way it looked at me.


"You know it is don't you? That kind of knowledge, it's primal, it's in your blood from birth. You knew it before you looked. You knew it before you even laid eyes on the In Between for the first time."


Whatever it was, it took my hand in its own, gently, almost lovingly, as it spoke. “You remember when your parents used to tell you all those grand tales when you were young?”


I honestly hadn't thought about my parents in some time, but their reintroduction to my memory was painful. “It was your mother that used to read stories from the bible to make you sleep at night.”


I resigned to myself that I would hear this thing out, though my mind continued to yell at me to run. It was the memories that bothered me the most.



It took its eyes from me to the window “So many tales over the years,” it said almost to quiet to hear.


“The story of creation,” It's voice suddenly bright. “That was a popular one in its day, but now you've sacrificed it on the alter of science, creative little monkeys.” That smile again, “Coming up with the Big Bang, now that was a particularly brilliant thing to come up with. You have no idea.”


At this, the creature leveled its cracked lips to my forehead and immediately my flesh felt immolated. my skin crawled away from its lips as life, which had lain dormant in my heart and my mind, raced through my body. My Guest gripped my hand tightly and hauled me to my feet. I tried to say something, a thank you perhaps, but more likely a cry of terror. Before I could, my throat seized as I opened my mouth. “You will need your legs,” it said, “But you will remain silent.”


It lead me to the window urging me to look out. I hesitated of course, my eyes clenched shut. I had no idea what was going to happen to me if I did, the last window I'd looked out of sent me here to Bedlam. My curiosity won the day however. I stepped up to the sill, I could feel its hand on my shoulder, assuring me that I'd be fine, and in that moment of distraction I opened my eyes and felt the world slip out from under me.


The next time I opened my eyes, I saw in whole what I had only glimpsed before, but The Angel did not follow.


I saw all of it, I saw the earth in the sky, and heaven and hell and the in between

The In Between Of Things

Brilliant photoreal replicas burned deep lacerating scars into the fragile tissues of my less than conscious forebrain. perfectly realized three dimensional bullet proof memories of angry and raw red meat clinging to still warm soft black leather upholstery, pulled taut and distended over jagged white slivers of auto grade steel, fractal like safety glass and wet-glazed bituminous tarmac. Eldritch illuminations casted off the nearby conflagrant wood pulp reflecting off gasoline, blood and rust tainted radiator fluid. Confluent droplets of matter, bitter in their aftertaste.

The afterimages fade as sudden as subliminal frames of film. memory and matter dissolve into void as amnesia and loss of cognition clamp steel trap jaws over my mind. The electrical impulses that made for concept and retrospection obliterated cleanly and effectively by behind the scenes physics that could have been a car crash just as easily as it could have been a black hole.

Extricated from the depths of my own personal oblivion, white coated prevaricators obliquely explained to me the functions of my grey matter. Explained that while I lay there, a mass of sundered flesh and comminuted bone my mind had simply shut down to avoid dealing with the trauma. The explanations were succinct and brief, perhaps only because even they do not fully know, understand, or even care. truth be told I could not recall any by products of an unstable mental process. No floating astral bodies or obligatory lights in any tunnel. I do however still look back and think that i may have learned something that day.

Though I gained no evidence of life after death, god or drifting heavens, I became in no small part obsessed. I had developed an unnatural preoccupation with a single word. In the disjointed cistern of my mind the word is both evocative and involuted, unfettering thousands of years worth of images and words both profound and profane.

Images of abyssal cavities emerged buried deep within the earth. basins filled to the bursting with flame and fire and the souls of the damned. Sulfur and brimstone (Had I ever even seen what brimstone was before this?) floors. The mind conjuring both the devilish and the demonic evils ranging from the mildly disturbing and somewhat repulsive to the violent and the beautiful. Reflections of the self imposed and the wretched damned summoned forth by a single utterance, doomed to spend a single eternity being brightly vivisected.

These ancient and primitive mythologies remain to this day, as potent as physical lobotomies. Despite hundreds of years worth of religious darwinism these parables are still as effective as psychosurgery. Even now, disdainfully, I find myself often invoking images of subordinate fiends cracking whips over the backs of indentured sinners while Old Nick himself picks at the fangs of evil with a broken but immediately recognizable human thigh bone. In sinister though, plotting the eventual downfall of mankind for whatever grievance he has against us.

I can't help but laugh at myself some days, humored at my own fallibility in this concern, though I guess I should worry more about the state of my own mental health, when my thoughts fluctuate between the horrible, the perverse, the comical and the pornographic.

the more enlightened opinion of my small circle of acquaintances, dogmatized egoists to the last of them, is that the word is not defined by this amalgamation or dusty allegory. Rather the word is defined as the total and complete separation from the Divine. This I can accept, somewhat waveringly, given my own beliefs that some sanctified and astoundingly powerful creator, benign or mot, accidentally sparked off some primordial cosmic chain of events that spread like nuclear waste in drinking water that eventually led to the birth of the universe and ultimately here, to me being strapped into this wheelchair.