Entry tags:
Augustine the First | The Locked Tomb
Character Base
• Character Name: Augustine Quinque / Augustine the First
• Age: Unspecifically Really Old; greater than 10,000, looks older than anyone else in his canon who's that old; appears to be late-forties, roughly, in a solidly Silver Fox way.
• Canon (Date/Year Released)/Canon Point: The Locked Tomb; specifically Harrow the Ninth, published August 2021.
• Items Coming Along: The clothing he was wearing at death (generally unremarkable shirt/trousers/shoes; not the iridescent-white robe, he'll get one somewhere else), a rapier (found at the Moss King's summer home), a smallsword (found at the carnival), and an "ivory" (read: bone) cigarette case, mostly full, embossed with a Tarot's Hanged Man design featuring his likeness (also at the carnival).
• Content Warnings for Character: Blood, gore, unconcerned attitude toward violence (and toward inflicting body horror on others). Frequent, if not constant, amoral and callous outlook on life. Hypersexual, with a tendency to use sex and sexuality as a weapon, with or without involving magic. Death of a sibling. Suicide (by pact or otherwise). Imperialistic tendencies.
Character Background
• History: Fandom.com biography
• Core Relationships:
- John Gaius: He is God; he is Teacher; he is ... John. Augustine worships him; learns from him; loves him, as a brother, as a beloved, as a God ... and also hates him, for the lies he's told. Immediately before washing up on shore, he'd done his level best to kill him, as a round two for Mercymorn's (only temporarily successful) attempt. No divorce is as messy as the ones that involve ten thousand years and at least one literal deity.
- Mercymorn the First: Augustine loves her, but has never even remotely liked her. She is the object of a myriad of transferred loathing for her cavalier, who talked his beloved (actual, blood) brother into committing suicide and forcing Augustine to ascend to Lyctorhood in order to a) grant Alfred's final wishes and b) keep his death from being truly meaningless. There's a whole lot of hatred there. On the other hand, he has never once let that hatred keep him from working with her, when their goals have aligned, up to and including having sex with her and putting on a damn good show of delight about it.
- Gideon the First: A true friend, mostly. Here, the transferal is more favorable; Gideon's cavalier was the hottest of them all, and Augustine had been trying to impress her for centuries. (This is also why both he and Gideon started to smoke cigarettes.) On the other hand, to Augustine's eye Gideon has been growing more and more erratic, lately, and harder to manage, or steer in predictable directions — hence a willingness to offer Harrow the opportunity to get her revenge on him without John's oversight and interference. Either the brat is finally fixed in place, or a friend who has become a thorn is no longer being a thorn: win/win.
- Ianthe
Tridentariusthe First: As Ianthe was the less-broken of his two new baby sisters (at the cost of his former Younger Sister), Augustine nabbed her up in a heartbeat. (The fact this drove Mercymorn up the wall? Major bonus.) Always nice to have someone following him around cooing over how amazing all of his stories are, of course; he's fully aware that she's trying ineptly to butter him up so he'll teach her more about the River, and liminal spaces, and Hell. He actually had a measure of expectation that she might end up surviving the encounter with Number Seven, even, once she stopped hating her arm. Overall, treated her somewhere between a student, an ingenue, and a pet. - Harrowhark
Nonagesimusthe First: Opinions worth rather less than a fart in a hurricane, but it's vaguely charming that she's so very much a second-coming of Anastasia. Also, cause to coin the delightful term "diet Lyctor". Terrible student, even if she does learn things; some sort of pubertal gremlin for the rest of eternity? Wretched. Pity she's so very overly dependent on bone, though. Could almost have become something, someday. - Alecto: Hated; feared; begged John to kill her; believed him that she was actually dead, for the better part of ten thousand years.
Oops. - Gideon the Ninth: Proof that God lied; proof that the universe has a really rude sense of humor; proof that Harrowhark really did go and fuck up basic-standard Lyctorhood
; proof that it might actually have been possible to achieve some form of personally-powered immortality without hanging around God's apronstrings the whole time. Absolutely zero relationship to her as a person, just as a symbol. (To be fair, he also only knows that her eyes are golden, and nothing at all otherwise of what she looks like.)
Character Personality Through Key Moments
(2+) Positive Experiences:
- Dios Apate, major/minor: Calculating; detail-oriented; unsqueamish; unsentimental. Capable of plotting a seduction in its every single detail over the course of five hundred years for a single night's payoff; capable of plotting a seduction in ... enough ... of its details over the course of five minutes for a single night's payoff. Even if this means working hand-in-hand (or other-body-part in other-body-part) with someone he absolutely loathes, or providing an opportunity for someone else to ambush/murder a third party who he's been close personal friends with for ten thousand years (given that the third party had "recently grown harder to steer").
- Becoming a Saint: Living in God's immediate presence was wonderful; dying in God's immediate presence was not to be borne; taxing God with keeping everyone alive was also unbearable, though, especially when it became very obvious that He would need to be able to extend His Reach through a greater part of the universe than any one god-become-man could manage alone. And so: let His closest disciples find a way to ascend to Sainthood, that they might work His Miracles by their own hands. Should be easy, right? ... Answer: sort of. The Fifth House (which Augustine founded with his brother Alfred, in orbit around what used to be known as Jupiter, once upon a Time Before the Resurrection) dedicated their expertise to spirit magic, and so Augustine and Alfred were the two to develop the necromantic theorems behind the preservation of a soul — to keep it from decaying, no matter how long it might be held in place outside its original body. Collectively, God's disciples figured out a path to immortality; His adepts agreed that the price — the sacrifice of their beloved cavaliers, each to each — was too high, and struggled, seeking to find another path — a kinder path, or a more selfish one; one that did not require that they each murder someone they loved. Alfred and Cristabel took matters into their own hands, with a suicide pact; Augustine, furious and desolate and heartbroken, desperate to keep Alfred alive somehow, knowing he had chosen to act while God was far too far away to trap his soul and restore his life without a risk that he become someone else, was the first to Complete the Great Work — the first to devour his brother's soul whole, and yet keep it there, lodged in his metaphysical gut like a bezoar, discrete and undigested, giving as much as it took. The power it gave him was phenomenal, miraculous — his ability to travel through space without becoming sick, reeling from the deprivation of thanergy, was astounding — and from the first second in which his eyes opened with the color of his brother's, there was nothing he wanted more than to undo what he had done, and have Alfred back before him again, whole and hearty.
Then God told him that there was no way to undo what he had done, and the only thing worse was the way he patted Augustine on the shoulder awkwardly, as if that was supposed to help.
(2+) Negative Experiences:
- Named the Saint of Patience, but incredibly impatient: attempting to train Ianthe in the use of her rapier (and of her cavalier's knowledge of the rapier), his impatience with her psychological block involving her right arm was more and more quickly triggered every time she drew her sword, until the day she showed up with an arm made of naked bone instead. He promptly dumped her in the River, went several rounds against her body (steered by her cavalier's soul), and in celebration of her gamble paying off, decided to gild the bone for her, coating the whole thing in gold. (This also shows a fuck-it level of whimsy, because why not gild someone's exposed-living-bone arm? At least it's novel!)
- Mercymorn's murder of John, or, "Bitch stole my thunder and then fucked it up": Augustine had had a plan to deal with John, and to evacuate the Nine Houses safely in the process. Mercymorn saw an opportunity and jumped on it with both feet and several hand grenades, and while it might have seemed for about five minutes that she'd succeeded, well, she sure did fuck that one up, didn't she! Adaptable and perceptive — he could tell what she was about to do, before she did it, and yielded to let her try — but also adamant that she carry through in cleaning up the problems that God had let loose in the universe. Sure, they were going to go off and die quietly and peacefully once God was dead... but that was only under unreasonably perfect circumstances; there were still Resurrection Beasts out there, and until there weren't, the Saints of the Necrolord were going to have to make sure the Necrolord's mistakes didn't keep devouring the rest of the universe. Besides, he'd always loathed suicide pacts, and saw nothing wrong at all with laying on a guilt trip to force her to agree to stay. (Right before God showed up and killed her very thoroughly, anyway.) After that, well, nothing for it but to try to drag John, who really needed to stop being God, all the way down to Hell, if that was what it took; he could follow Ulysses's example and drag him all the way in, if it came to that. (Once Ianthe betrayed him, though, he despaired and stopped fighting.)
Deer Country Attributes
• Canon Powers: Taken with permission from
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
necrolord's excellent writeup (as seen here), with a few Augustine-specific modifications. Powers he has lost for jamjar convenience are marked with - 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 heart, brain, or body is fatal. Anything chopped off does not regrow without concerted attention and effort.
He can traverse the River to near-instantaneously teleport vast distances across physical space.Augustine (specifically) can create wards to keep the River itself away from specific locations, along with the capacity to relocate physical locations into the River wholesale, at any depth he chooses.
- 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.
- As a "spirit generalist", Augustine is particularly adept at tracing and understanding how (and from whence) a particular necromantic act draws its power. (This may or may not cross-apply to other canons' magic systems, depending on OOC arrangements.)
- 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 summon and bind ghosts.
- He can create protective wards of blood or bone.
- He can create perceptive wards from other body substances (especially any-fluid-other-than-blood, but technically including the microscopic quantities of saliva present in breath).
- 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 disperse all the necromantic energy in his body at once to "self-destruct" and kill anything in his immediate vicinity. This kills him instantly.(Due to the nature of the process of becoming a Lyctor, this one was already off the table.)
Necromancer Tier. Here's what any trained necromancer can do:
• Blood Type: Darkblood
• Omen: Coastal taipan, "Alfred"
• Blessed Day: May 1st (started in the Fifth House, moved to the First)
• Patron Pthumerian: Bauphomet
• Blood Power Manifestation: Haphazard/weak/suppressed at first; dismissed in favor of relying on necromantic habits; will mostly manifest, at least early on, in the form of very minor time discrepancies (minorly changing position so quickly as to seem instantaneous, such as from leaning back in a chair to sitting forward, or from 'hand on hilt of blade' to 'naked and ready blade held before him', that sort of thing).
Writing Samples
February TDM: Arrival (contains interactions with six different characters)
The Player
• Player Name: Dex
• Player Age: 18+.
• Player Contact: PM or discord (starcrest#2462), please!
• Permissions: Here.
• Activity Check: Here.
Inventory
JohnTeacherGod.On your Blessed Day this month, your Patron Pthumerian will bless you with a Comfort Blanket. This blanket appears to be made out of a butter-colored, soft material. It's warm and cozy and can instantly alleviate anxiety. But that's not all! Baus is known as the Pthumerian of Transformation and spending some time curled up in the Comfort Blanket can cause some unique attributes such as temporary transformations into different versions of yourself. This transformative quality only lasts a few hours, but it's a valuable shape-shifting ability. You can't seem to control what you will transform into, but it's useful all the same and can be used for anyone who curls up under the blanket for longer than an hour. It's a standard blanket size.