Carvaka App

[owlfeathered]

▸PLAYER
Name: Masheli
Means of Contact: masheli @ plurk (pplurk me before adding please); maskedsky @ AIM (primary contact method) ; mashelichi @ dreamwidth
Age: 25
Other Characters Played: nope.


▸CHARACTER
Name: Okshauanli “Nahollo” Graves
Journal: owlfeathered
Canon: Original Character!
Age: 19
Canon Point: mid-2016


World Description:

Nahollo’s home world is almost a mirror to our own; the same continents, the same level of technology, and almost all of the same historical figures and events.

There’s just one small wrinkle- angels and demons are real. To be more accurate, semi-divine beings with powers centering nebulously around a particular concept. In the early days of the Earth, the most basic concepts became personified, sometimes worshipped, sometimes feared. These early “angels” and “demons” were primal, the living incarnation of darkness literally leaking shadows wherever it went, the living incarnation of death leaving patches of dead flowers and grass in its wake.

Though longer-lived than their human brethren in these early days, they eventually discovered that they would die, and find themselves reincarnated in the body of a child conceived at the moment of their previous incarnation’s death, or the first child conceived after that event. Shortly after the parts of their brains that managed anything like concrete thinking solidified, these children found themselves reverting into the primal forces of existence that they truly were.

Over the course of several repetitions of this pattern, these beings learned that they stood better odds of long-term survival (and not being drowned by their mothers or left for wolves to eat) if their true natures remained hidden until they could fend for themselves. This marked a turning point for these living incarnations, and they integrated better within the societies that they had been born in. So well-integrated were they, that they occasionally procreated with… interesting results. Lesser supernatural beings were the result of these unions, carrying a fragment of their supernatural parent’s power with them. Occasionally two supernatural parents would procreate, creating a powerful, but ultimately unstable child who would ‘burn bright’ for a short time before wearing out the very substance of their existence.

As human society grew and evolved, the supernatural beings found themselves being pushed to the fringes as a universal ‘out’ group. Hunted down for their potential “threat” to others, they quickly learned that even their strongest could not stand against humans all the time. After all, though they were powerful, they were constrained by the same physical needs as any human.

With this, they sought further measures to hide themselves, entrenching themselves in enclaves of worshippers where they could, avoiding notice when they couldn’t. In time, myths sprung up around varying aspects of these individuals, labelling them gods, demons, spirits, and other creatures, giving them form in the minds of the humans surrounding them. Some of their descendants- many highly dilute at this point- acted as the heads of varying cults of their progenitors. These dilute lines of descendants often mutated in unpredictable ways, just as humans had. From the largest tribes of these descendent-lines came energy-manipulators, healers, empaths, vampires, were-beasts, and many of the other mythic varieties of humanoids.

As human society evolved, so too did the ranks of supernatural spirit-types, with more or less one for every major concept of the time. Where once there had been no spirit of architecture, as humans became more advanced in the area, a spirit with a preternatural gift for designing buildings cropped up. Some speculated that above the entities known to them as gods and demons, there was one even further beyond that, one who had none of the traits of mortality to them, and was utterly beyond human experience.

Humans moved slowly from believing in more anthropomorphic spirits and gods to this monotheistic view almost as they did in our Earth, with the varying monotheistic sects actively persecuting some spirits and holding others up as signs of their god’s grace and blessing to the world. Worse, this level of belief had an active impact on the energetic world, being sent up and originally given form by those of supernatural descent who could manipulate the energies of creation with their belief.

The entity created from this monotheistic belief, like many other spirits at the time, went by many names and was of many faces. However, the constraints of his creation gave him several disadvantages on maintaining something resembling human standards of sanity. His first disadvantage was being created by nothing more than pure belief. Where a spirit of manipulation or death or peony flowers had an anchor in the world by means of their aspect existing outside of themselves, this god had no such center. He was easily swayed by the beliefs of his followers, changing aspect depending on who was making demands of him at the time. When called into direct conflict between two groups of his worshippers, his sanity frayed slightly. His second disadvantage was being created explicitly of the belief that he was never mortal, above and beyond petty mortal concerns. This imbued him with an all-too-human sense of overblown pride, and the belief that he really should be none other than Earth’s Only God. Third, a combination of the first two factors only served to further erode his sanity as his believers went to war with themselves. Without mortal experience or a truly solid ‘center’ of existence, a concept that was utterly immutable, this god was the expression of the worst of human belief.

This combination of factors made this god believe that all other supernatural beings were a threat to his rightful throne as the sole arbiter of all on the planet Earth. In his initial heyday, when his powers were at their peak and belief was fervent, he taught his followers secrets to unmake other godlike beings, imbuing them with enough of his power to truly do the job. The weakest ones, barely ranking above humans in terms of power, were the first to go. Wherever they could be found, they were hunted and driven off of the mortal coil, the essence of their being tangled in the aether, unable to reincarnate as they were naturally inclined to do. Stronger entities, such as death and darkness, were harder to destroy with this method. Where genius in architecture and the arts could be ascribed to purely mortal abilities, there were other concepts that were not so easy to tame. While humans could kill one of these more powerful spirits for a time, they were unable to effectively prevent reincarnation.

From this came a resurgence in visibility from these larger powers, as they awakened to their powers earlier and earlier in each incarnation in a desperate fight to ensure their own survival. Great plagues swept throughout most of the monotheistic areas, and death rampaged wherever it could. Unknowingly, at one point, it had taken one of darkness’s close allies and done awful things to her, something that forever scarred the current living incarnation of darkness. With that in mind, she lived on, setting a record for the number of years a spirit incarnate could force their mortal shell to live on in peak condition.

Even with this silent spiritual war raging on, humanity’s progress marched ever onward. A curious thing happened—in spite of the prevailing religious attitudes, the human study of the natural world pushed back the boundaries of their young god’s power, weakening his assault on his elders. While some measure of madness still gripped death, darkness thwarted it wherever she could.

Science, technology, and history progressed to the modern day, where again, darkness struck down death’s mortal incarnation. It was reincarnated in the body of a boy born in 1997, marked by his power with white hair, as many other supernatural beings had been marked before him. While his family was leery of him- and his mother’s choice in suitor—they said nothing to her face. Still, early on, there were few problems with this arrangement. It was only when he proposed moving his wife and young son off of the reservation, for good, that the Graves family doubled down.

Insular and wary of outsiders, the young death’s extended family had tolerated the white outsider so long as he did nothing to take any of their people away. When Opia wanted to move off with her son, the family simply made her husband vanish, never to be seen again. By this coin, Opia and her son Okshauanli (“Shaun”, as nicknamed by his father) inherited his wealth.

Unbeknownst to the family, there was already one spirit standing amongst their ranks, an adolescent as compared to the infant death. Named Kanchitubbee and called Chase, he was the driving force behind the cruel turn his family had taken, subtly exerting his influence on them to turn them towards insularity and cruelty. As Okshauanli grew, he was tormented by his many cousins, and Opia weathered a similar assault for not marrying within the community.

One day, Chase overstepped his bounds, using his influence to cause two of his hated relatives to have a tragic car accident. Opia died, leaving her seven-year-old son to weather the pain of being orphaned. Where many children would have suffered worse and worse at the hands of someone who was a cruel being at his core, the child who had grown used to thinking of himself as “Nahollo”, or ‘white person’, got lucky.

Darkness had taken many other spirits under her tutelage at one point, teaching them the use and finer points of their abilities with upwards of five hundred years of experience. However, the force of personality keeping her alive for those years included an essentially kind spirit, an unwillingness to see humans abused as somehow lesser than others like her. She had kept tabs on Chase, knowing all too well that his own abilities predisposed him to behavior she could never approve of. Where his prior influence over his family had been subtle, using their own worse natures against them, this was overt action, and was met with equally overt action.

Where many other beings had made creative use of their abilities in the past, darkness had honed it into a fine art in her five centuries. Making liberal and creative use of her abilities, she swept in as a long-lost half-sister of Nahollo’s, an older child from the time that Opia had been kicking up her heels as a teenager. With this, she easily got Nahollo’s current guardian and aunt, Grace Graves, to sign custody of the child over to her, as well as all assets associated with him. In the time between her first encounter with death in this incarnation, she had built up an array of wealth that was impressive indeed, with her eyes turned toward the long haul. In an effort to apologize for her transgressions-by-proxy of educating Chase, the woman calling herself Anita set Nahollo up with a fairly comfortable home situation far from Mississippi, in the Lake Tahoe area.

It was here that the subtle effects of what Chase had done came to light. It started with a flu, something Anita did her best to care for. However, even when the worst of the flu faded, damage to his respiratory system remained. This damage escalated, with Nahollo finding himself the subject of many investigative procedures to determine what the cause of his illness was. There were no easy answers, and the illness slowly progressed. It was slow enough that Anita never noticed the thin thread of power encouraging it. Her own relative discomfort with directly dealing with any of her foundlings meant that she soon gave him to the care of nannies and doctors in her stead.

It was by this coin that Nahollo grew up, if not surrounded by love, at least by those who were not casually cruel. Still, he grew sicker and sicker, with no resolution to his illness in sight. Where he had once been able to manage school with other children his age, exhaustion and weakness kept him home and bed-bound. The first trace of his fledgling powers had him certain, without knowing why, that this illness was entirely capable of killing him.

The illness spanned from months into years, Nahollo growing into a shy and relatively isolated young man. At sixteen, he negotiated a deal to game Nevada’s system for emancipating minors with Anita, in a misguided attempt at severing his ties with anyone, in case he were to die abruptly. Without much to do but schoolwork, Nahollo had already attained high school graduation at age sixteen, thanks to the formatting of the homeschool program he was enrolled in.

While Nahollo’s life appeared to be in a holding pattern, a lark of fate rapidly changed all of that rather abruptly. Someone was killing off teenagers in the surrounding areas, in varying and gruesome ways. Had it been the work of another spirit, Anita likely would have detected it. Instead, it was the work of a run-of-the-mill serial killer.

As it had been with his certainty that his illness could prove lethal, Nahollo had an uncanny sense for the killer’s movements. For the first time in several years, he had motivation to leave his home and involve himself in the community around him. Without a clear sense of what he was going to do with himself when he found and confronted the killer, Nahollo began haunting sites where he felt something was likely to happen.

Eventually, something did.

The killer came for Nahollo, and the young man’s life exploded all at once. One of the subtler side-effects of awakening to that power at an older age was the ability to have the powers and drives of the entity subordinate to the identity of their current incarnation, as Nahollo proved. Where once, the death-entity was cruel and prone to rampaging, Nahollo’s own nature forced those powers to be more in line with death as a long rest, and the end of suffering. His own beliefs shaped his powers in that moment, using Greek mythology’s Thanatos as a basic framework to fill out.

Nahollo found himself with a sword and feathered wings, and a sense of purpose about what to do with this serial killer.

Namely, calling the police, because he was still a teenager and wasn’t quite grasping the extent of his abilities. Before the police arrived, the obvious signs of Nahollo’s newly-awakened powers had faded away, and the police could not fathom why a serial killer would willingly confess in order to get away from what they could only assume was another intended victim- especially one as sick and scrawny as Nahollo.

Still, after getting a confession and corroborating evidence out of the killer, this oddity was put out of the minds of the local police. This did not mean that Nahollo rested easily with this sense of power… and neither did Anita. She had sensed death’s awakening, and feared for the child she had adopted—not knowing that they were one and the same.

Anita was far from the only one who had sensed Nahollo’s awakening, and her own remote location meant that she was not the first to arrive. That honor went to Nahollo’s cousin, who sensed a threat to his convenient source of potent misery-energy. The two cousins did battle with wit and weapon, Chase seeming to have the upper hand—

--until Anita’s arrival. The elder spirit did not take kindly to Chase’s actions, and was even more disturbed to learn that the child she had cared for was death incarnate. She was close to repeating the sins of the past, taking out her ire on Nahollo, when a realization struck her.

It was entirely within the realm of Nahollo’s abilities, nascent though they still were, to have killed any and all threats to his person with a thought. It was obvious that he had detected the intent to kill him coming from Anita and Chase both. Instead of doing anything to defend himself from Anita, instead of ending her life, he was waiting, doing nothing else.

Instead, Anita took her ire out on Chase, finally connecting the slow, seeping misery of Nahollo’s illness with the living incarnation of cruelty. It was only when Anita would have left Chase to die slowly that Nahollo demonstrated his ability to end a life with little more than a twist of power, his disapproval of Anita’s methodology plainly obvious.

This was a turning point in their relationship. Where before, Anita had been rather awkward about growing too attached to a human who would die far too soon, she was drawn toward the merciful, strong-willed young man who was death’s latest incarnate form. Life seemed like it was on-track to be peaceful for the duo, and two years passed with it being precisely that. However, long-term peace for them was not yet in their grasp.

The nation they lived in had pockets of religious extremism that were growing more vocal by the minute- and with this resurgence came a resurgence in their god’s awareness of, and desire to destroy, his elder spirits. It was quiet, at first, but soon spread to a near-maddening level. Those who were deemed to be ‘possessed’ or otherwise powered were being hunted, with vampires and others often being used as bait for the larger fish. Anita (now going by the name Atira, a pseudonym she had used prior to meeting Nahollo) called all of her various pupils from far and wide to Nahollo’s Lake Tahoe home and began discussing this alarming turn of events.

It was Atira’s own experience that confirmed what they feared: they were targets, and something about the relationship between the common monotheistic god and his followers was capable of eradicating lesser spirits from the face of the Earth, binding them in a realm where they could not reincarnate.

While the spirits were formulating a plan of attack, their enemy was doing the same. It was with this in mind that Nahollo decided to put himself out into the larger world, applying to a college and being accepted. He had grown up mostly independent of religion, and found that he wanted a firm basis in knowledge of his newfound enemy. While he was there, he strove to make life better for his fellow students, often steering suicidal ones away from that metaphorical cliff and directing them towards assistance wherever possible.



Personality:
At his core, Nahollo is a relatively shy and socially awkward young man- a side-effect of spending most of his life socially isolated due to illness and fatigue. He is not very prone to talking in large groups, often using louder, bolder proxies if they are available to do so. He genuinely cares about all those around him, but has a very difficult time expressing that. Adding to his shyness is a rather raked-over sense of self-esteem and self-worth. Though he knows he has inherent value as something slightly more than mortal, he has issues understanding why others would value him for things aside from that. He is very prone to rejecting compliments directed his way, even if it’s not a spoken rejection.

Hiding behind the shyness is an essentially kind bleeding heart. Though Atira did try to teach him that he could do more good alive than dead, Nahollo is not averse to risking his life for the sake of others when needed. He is not selfless to the point of sheer stupidity, and certainly has moments of being somewhat selfish about what he wants. Still, the rate of suicides on his college’s campus went down after the first year he was there, by a dramatic amount, with Nahollo to blame for it. He is unafraid of using his powers to play dirty in that regard, hunting down those with the active desire to run into death’s arms. The combination of his willingness to let others talk more than he does, and his essentially gentle nature, means that he ends up listening to a lot of people’s life problems… not that he minds this in the least.

Even with his gaggle of somewhat-friends on his college campus, Nahollo has been adept at avoiding deep interpersonal relationships. His background means that he is not entirely sure what to make of relationships that go beyond superficial, friendly acquaintances, something Atira encouraged him to rectify. Because he is not sure how one even makes close friends, he tends to try and linger on the edges of things, with the misguided belief that hanging on the edge of things will somehow make him friends that are ‘just close enough’ for his sense of privacy.

Because of his relative isolation as a child, Nahollo does not have many prejudices about people, and what few preconceived notions he has, he is willing to put aside with ease. He is generally quite happy to interact with anyone and everyone, so long as they respect the fact that he is bound to be quiet, prefers to be sparse on the details of his personal life, and has a rather large personal space bubble. This unwillingness to talk about himself much extends even toward his own feelings and thoughts. This unwillingness to speak about his own feelings has nothing at all to do with the intensity of his feelings, and in this regard he is hardly private. Whatever Nahollo is feeling, he feels intensely, and displays it in equal measure.

Nahollo’s idea of kindness can be warped by normal standards at times. He finds certain forms of life support to be utterly abhorrent, for example. Where he once hesitated at the thought of ending the life of another, his cousin’s actions proved to Nahollo that he could occasionally be more merciful by ending someone’s life than forcing them to remain among the living.

Emerging from his childhood of relative isolation and, prior to that, abuse, is a subtle sense of morbid humor and even sarcasm and snark. Though he is essentially kind, he is also prone to managing quiet, passive-aggressive digs at people that could almost go unnoticed. One such dig he employed even as a child was a refusal to call any of his extended family by their more traditional Native names, instead calling them by the names they used when forced to interact with the wider world.

Equally surprising to anyone thinking that the soft, self-sacrificing young man is a pushover is the stubborn will beneath the gentle exterior. Nahollo is no stranger to fear and uncertainty, and can maintain a sense of calm and level-headedness in a crisis. Though his actions are sometimes guided less by what is most practical, and more by his innate sense of death and the probability of people dying, he is no bad person to have around when things are going straight to hell.

While Nahollo is difficult to anger, violating his sense of fairness is a fast way to do it. Seeing another powered person use their abilities to harm another is a great way to earn his quiet, passive-aggressive ire. If pushed to a far enough extreme, abuse of others will cause him to go from passive aggression to active aggression- with plenty of warning in advance. He is more than willing to bring his weapon to bear on people.

Since recovering from his illness, he has discovered a love of exercise and can often be found running for no other reason than because he can.

Appearance: Nahollo is all of 5’2”, with the build of someone who runs a great deal and is not prone to gaining much in the way of muscle mass. His hair is long enough to go just past his ass end, and is often kept braided or tied up in some way, and is white. His eyes are a medium grey tone, and his skin is a light brown in color, showing off his mixed Native heritage. His ears are pierced, and he usually wears an owl feather somewhere on his person. He tends to wear neutral colors, such as brown but especially greys and black, and tends to wear hoodies and t-shirts that are as plain as possible. He also prefers jeans and sneakers, though some of the people on his college campus have convinced him to wear slacks and nicer-looking shoes on occasion.


Abilities:
The first, big thing to note about Nahollo’s abilities is that they all revolve around death. Nahollo is literally death as processed through human experiences, and all of his powers center around that. In addition, the way all of the assorted spirits’ powers work is incredibly broken, in that if they can truly convince themselves it is within the realm of their ability to do so, they can. Not being able to do this, with relatively unlimited resources (because he is a Big Concept with lots of power behind him) will be incredibly jarring to him. He normally has a general range of fifty miles around him, which he actually finds to be quite annoying when Old Man Johnson died of a heart attack mid-coitus and Nahollo wakes up knowing about it.

Cloak, Sword, Wings, Torch and Scythe: Because little tiny sixteen-year-old Nahollo had been investigating Greek mythology at the time, Nahollo can take on the appearance and accoutrements of Thanatos. This includes having a sword, feathered wings, and a torch (that for some reason, always appears upside-down). These objects are literally extensions of his power, and can return unharmed after being destroyed. The cloak and scythe are typical of the pop culture ‘grim reaper’ image. Nahollo is capable of flight with his wings, though it does expend a great deal of physical effort, and his wings are scaled appropriately to support a light human in flight (also known as FREAKING MASSIVE). They are all roughly as durable as a normal, if high-quality, item of their make should be. Nahollo is far more proficient with the sword than the scythe, though he can switch out fairly easily. This comes from his belief that Thanatos, having a sword, would know how to use the damned thing.

What are locked doors?: Nahollo does not believe that death itself can be stopped by a locked door, and is capable of… essentially teleporting himself to a given place. This is easier to do if it’s just a matter of a locked door- all anyone else would see is him opening the door as if it isn’t locked, and going through normally. For more isolated places, Nahollo does actually teleport- though he is only able to convince himself he is able to do so if there is someone who is either going to die there, or someone he is going to kill.

Death-sense: Nahollo’s first power and most passive one is the ability to sense death. He can sense it on people. He can sense when it’s happening to humans around him within a range of about fifty miles, and animals within the same area if he focuses. He can detect a person’s most probable cause of death at the time, as well as being able to trail a killer from the corpse of one they killed. If a person has killed, he can sense all salient details (at least to his mind), which include things like intentional versus accidental, the method, the rationale for death, and any guilt attached to it. This even applies for people who have used several proxies in order to accomplish it. Long story short, if removing an individual from a picture means that someone would be alive, or would have died differently, Nahollo can sense it. He can also sense others within a fifty-mile radius who have death-based powers, or are some strange case of ‘somewhat dead’. The latter is actually kind of annoying for him to sense. In addition, those with literal genocides can ‘blind’ this sense by forcing Nahollo to process every single death within a fairly short range of time, though he can only be ‘blinded’ once in this manner, on first exposure to a person.

Owls: Because Choctaws associate owls with death and the dead, Nahollo does. Therefore, he can exert a bit of supernatural influence over owls. As long as he is aware of them, he can essentially use them as non-talking extensions of his will, including making them carry messages for him. Owls in the area will also start raising an alarming racket unless he silences them, as an owl hooting is considered the harbinger of a death.

Death: At the core of it all is Nahollo’s signature ability, the ability to kill someone with no more than a twist of power. As long as they are within his fifty-mile range, he can accomplish this- though it’s generally easier if he can see them. He can choose the method of death, though by default the cause of death is impossible to determine. He prefers not to use this, instead opting to use his sword. However, in cases where he is mercy-killing someone, this is his preferred method.

SAMPLES:
Carvaka Sample: TDM with Mikado
Non-Carvaka Sample: Open post in Tahoe Shenanigans