[Exalted] And Sol Must Scream: The Warped Incarnae (Tragic Monsters For Everyone!)

[Leliel]

Well, an idea I had loong ago was an idea of a nWoD crossover, in which the PCs, as inhabitants of World of Darkness recently Exalted, put the broken world of Earth back together while finding out why Creation no longer exists.

Of course, this brings up the question of "What happened to the Celestines?". Now, they could just be dead, but that cuts off a lot of story potential of kicking out the current Celestial Spirits and replacing them with the actually benevolent Incarna, as well as a huge source of information. So, that leaves "imprisoned" or "amnesiac".

Since the inevitable conclusion is to find the BBEG who broke the world and kick his ass to the Abyss and back, I've decided to show just how evil his actions really were by what he did to the Celestines.

Namely, he turned them into monsters.

Gruesome, homicidal, and utterly mad parodies of everything they once were, without even the ability to understand what he did to them...but still able to remember that they were once beautiful and whole, whereas now they kill those they once loved by existing, grotesque and horrifying, Things That Should Not Have Been. And the only mercy, the only way to take what remains of their divine souls and remake them into something remotely sane again, is to destroy them.

So, without further ado

The Warped Incarna: Products of What Should Not Have Been

The Yozis are notoriously uncertain of what, exactly, caused the Shattering of Creation. True, they have a few good ideas-mostly involving the Neverborn-but when it comes down to it, all they know was that all their souls in Creation suddenly died, and when they reformed, all they could remember was fire and darkness, consuming and breaking everything in it's cataclysmic path. They've found clues, mostly in that archipelago of Wyld reality-pockets known as, fittingly, the Shatter, but other than that, all they can say for certain is that there was an intelligent will behind it, mad and nihilistic.

It is certain that the Incarna know, but unfortunately, the Dark Will had a creative streak that Yozis would be impressed with and repulsed by-before he broke creation, he decided to make sure the Celestines would suffer.

How he did this is a mystery-he was definitely not a Yozi, so the lore of making behemoths would probably not have been known to him, although none of them doubt he had the power. What is known is the result-rather than simply tearing apart their divine Essence so they could never reform, he build seven great mounds of flesh, which he imbued with their regenerating souls, stopping their reformation in the process. After ensuring that none of the Lords of Heaven would break free of their imprisonment, he then began to puzzle what to do with them. He could return their conscious minds to them, and force them to watch as he destroyed everything they loved, but then they could puzzle out a way to stop him despite the uselessness of their new forms. He could make it that the nerves in their prison-bodies could only feel pain, but that struck him as being incredibly cliche and unpoetic. Besides, after Creation was annihilated, both would leave the Incarna to the mercies of the Wyld, where their torture would inevitably end as they were dissolved in the currents of Chaos.

Then, the Dark Will struck upon an idea-mental pain was as agonizing, if not more so, then the physical version, and that "sentience" did not necessarily mean "memories" or "personality". So, he decided, the best way to ensure that the Celestines would exist forever in agony and misery was an incredibly simple solution, one that would give them the impetuous to continue existing within the Wyld or whatever world they wondered in, while constantly mocked by a trickle of memories that taunted with them with memories of happier times, while racked with the knowledge that they could never again retrieve them.

He turned them living embodiments of what they most hated about themselves.

From the Unconquered Sun, he created Zmai the Worm, a blind, colossal abomination that took everything from the worshipers he drew through no worthy deed of his own, giving nothing but the illusion of happiness and contentment in return via his addictive ichor. From the Argent Madonna, he made Suhadu the Flesh, an amorphous blob of organs and skin who hunted sentient prey simply because predation defined her. From Venus, he made Ahranuz the Mother, a grotesquely fecund beast of cancerous virility, bringing new beings into the world for no reason other than her need to be loved and wanted, and throwing them aside when she grew bored with them. From Mars, he made Tha'hon the Deep, a nearly-mindless being of chaos and destruction, killing for only the most vague of reasons and causing disasters at her whim. From Jupiter, he made Nuigim the Unseen, a monster literally unable to understand truth or light, and neither truth nor light could understand her. And from Saturn, he made Zho'hak the Breath, a poisoned wind that killed by simply existing, with only the delusion that it was for some unknown greater purpose. What happened to Mercury is anyone's guess (ie, left to the Storyteller), but it was certainly not pleasant.

In these seven living mockeries of the Celestines, the Dark Will returned their minds-but buried under a deep sea of bestial instincts and animalistic emotions, swamping any hope of higher thought or the ability to understand the consequences of their actions, beyond that which he found most amusing. And so, he sent the seven Warped Incarnae out into the world, unknowing that is was the creatures they once loved that they devoured and massacred, and the gods unknowing that it was really their long-lost rulers that heralded the end of all. And so they continued throughout the Shattering, wandering the Wyld in a self-loathing haze, pausing only to eat the occasional raksha.

That is, until they found the World of Darkness.

(more later-tell me if I got the Celestines' inner demons wrong)

[nolispe]

Typo - when you list the maidens, you list Saturn twice. The first one should be Jupiter, I think.

[Leliel]

(Thanks for that. And now....)

(Continuation)

It was inevitable that they found Earth, really-it was where the majority of the Shatter had embedded itself, and even the pieces of Creation had the scent of "home" about it. Actually, the Warped were far more punctual then the Yozis-they literally arrived thousands of years before the disruptions in the Wyld caused by the wake of Malfeas' Shaping began to disrupt the supernatural ecology, and thus, their infiltration of the foreign cosmos went unnoticed amidst all the other monsters that dwell within it. True, there were rumors of the god-horrors that acted in ways weird and eldritch, but the domain of the Primordial who built the dimension was Mystery and Arcana, so this was in no way alarming-in fact, it was appreciated, since the Warped did not intrude on the infinite power games of the supernatural underworld, other than as an occasional weapon that would almost always backfire.

And so, the Warped faded into slumber and myth, serving only as reminders to the few scholars that knew of them as to the infinite secrets of the world, never to see light or truth. Occasionally, they would emerge to assuage their hungers and their atavistic goals, but these events were few and far between, little more than natural disasters with thoughts.

That is, until the Exalted arrived.

It was Suhadu that first noticed their return. This was unsurprising, as she was always the most active and lucid of the Warped Incarna, not entirely unlike her previous identity as Luna. She didn't actually see them or hear of their deeds, but instinctively, she felt the return of her children, the shapeshifting masters of divine madness, rather then the oddly static and angry imitations who frightened and enraged her for reasons she couldn't articulate. Zmai was roused next, as even in his blind and bestial state, he still possessed great wisdom and perception, and he could sense something had changed above the caverns he dwelled, something that panicked and interested the supernatural legions. The Warped Maidens were last, as they had forgotten how to read Fate or Samsara, and thus, they had to learn from the other two. In any case, something perturbed them, something that both brought back agonizing, contradictory memories and a strange sense of hope. In an event that had not been seen since the Shattering, they conferred with one another, puzzling what to do with this mysterious event that filled them with happiness, with sadness, and with no small amount of envy.

In that council, they came to a conclusion, one born of eons of disappointment and despair-that whatever hope for freedom from a torturous existence and an understanding of the beings that they could sometimes remember, the even greater suffering that the invaders had put them in and the fear of change into unknown territory was simply too much of a price. Whatever-or whoever-that provoked those bittersweet memories had to be eliminated.

The Exalted must be destroyed.

(I'll give a general personality and begin Zmai's writeup later)

[Leliel]

(Continuation)

The Warped Today: Same as they always were, only awake and with an actually coherent goal this time

That may seem a bit anticlimactic for the corpses-turned-monsters of Antediluvian (ie Creation relic) gods, let alone the king and queens of all gods, but keep in mind that the bodies that guard and cloud their minds were meant as prisons and torture chambers, not as a fleshy form for divinity that walked among mortals. Each one was built with just the correct mix of hormones and neurons to reduce their prisoners to a state of less-than-beasts; atavistic, primitive, and aware of what that entails.

So, a better header is: "The Warped, In Essence and Thought".

In the shortest and most ironic statement possible: "Kin to the Yozis."

It's not a fact the actual fallen Primordials like to dwell on-mostly because they don't like to think that their former nemeses could ever have suffered as much as they have-but when it comes down to it, each one has a direct parallel to the general psychology of the mad Parent-Emperors of Demons. Zmai has a psychological need to assure himself of his high place in the world through the creation of his ghoul-like cults. Suhadu acts upon mindless instincts in a very intelligent matter, never questioning why it must be so. Both Tha'hon and Nuigim destroy and rend to work catharsis on a barely-disguised sense of envy for everything not themselves. And Zho'ak and her parental sister believe they work towards an objective that will be better for all involved, but is really a psychological crutch to prevent themselves from falling into suicidal ennui.

Each and every Warped is unique (not that hard, given their number), but when it comes down to it, each and every one is driven by the same thing-hate.

They hate the gods, for what they believe was abandonment to the hands of the Dark Will, they hate humanity, for reminding them of a lost world, and they hate the Exalted, for failing to prevent it's end. But most of all, they hate themselves-they all believe, if only subconsciously, that their accursed state was brought about by actions they could have prevented if they were better rulers, if they hadn't retreated into themselves and the Games of Divinity, if they hadn't been proven themselves utter hypocrites in light of the Dawn War. And it is this that drives them to survive, rather than search for a way to finally satisfy their collective death wish-deep down, they want to be hurt, to be rendered the victim so they don't have to confront the fact that it's their own fault they must be like this.

Not that they're aware of this, mind you. Their Beast-and the use of vampiric terminology is quite intentional, for how else could you define the demonic predator that acts on the darkest impulses of what is left of the Warped's sapient minds?-has swallowed their capacity to reason, to understand what they think. But unlike a dragur, whether they be mindless berserker or guileful hunter, this is not a constant state-a Warped, no matter how debased it may be, is still a Celestine, the highest of all gods, and on occasion, they remember what it was like to love and be loved, to recall the halcyon days of glory stolen away. And this, perhaps is the most exquistie cruelty inflicted upon them.

For no matter how this moment of sanity and intellect may fight to survive, to be for just a second more of inner peace, their warped nature shall inevitably triumph, and they shall be naught but primal monsters once more, bitter and relentless.

(Putting off Zmai until after Christmas)