Destroying Angels

Destroying Angels

The Underworld’s bureaucrat-assassins. Grandmother Possum takes especially promising paper-pushers and breathes a legacy into their eyes, which germinates in their orderly minds and blooms into a fruiting chaos through their mouths and ears and nostrils and empty eye sockets, encasing their whole head like a fungal rocket ship. 

Then they hone themselves for 7 years, fighting the rattling cold in cages made of razors, wrestling jaguars made from dead pets to bone-deep blood-soaked exhaustion, until their minds break sharp and clear and perfect, and the legacy chokes on them, burning to a char-black bramble cage.

They smell like sweat and charcoal. They sound like like a phone call from a submarine.


They’re the ultimate enforcers of the Underworld’s order:


To every life, a name.
For each name, a life. 
To every name, a soul. 
For each soul, a name. 
To every soul, a death.
For each death, a soul. 



Most violations of this law are innocent in nature. 

There are only so many souls in the underworld, after all (a constant number since the birth of the world). Filing the paperwork to receive one for your automaton or miracle of surgery could take a whole lifetime. So people don’t. 

The names are easy targets for the Zār, they say. They’ll steal it to use the evil eye on you, and you’ll have to go and buy it back. So superstitious people hide them. 

Removal of the soul is especially common among young radicals. A few minutes with a long spoon can fish it out, and it feels liberating and transgressive. 


The Angels rarely stop these things. They don’t have the time.

But if you try cheat death or destroy your soul or erase someone’s name, they’ll come for you and put everything back the way it’s supposed to be. Or try to, at least. Then they’ll kill you.


Their professional culture is dismal, but resolute, like a doomed company of soldiers. It is common for them to hold the world at arm’s length, with a deep, weary cynicism. They consider themselves beyond fleeting passions or superficial opinions. They do, however, share and develop a great many inside jokes. These are always deadpan factual observations at which they do not laugh, but they are appreciated nonetheless.


They are not immortal, or infallible. Each year there are fewer and fewer.


by Dragan Bibin


Destroying Angel

Roll 2d4 to see how many HD they have, 7 at most. Every time the angel drops to 0 HP, they resurrect and roll their HP again, permanently discarding any HD that come up 1s. Most of them have burnt through at least a few lives in the line of duty.

AC 10, DT 7 (faded suits and terrible determination)

Attacks with a Pistol (a single grey revolver that holds 6 bullets)

Morale 11 (occasionally, the futility of it all really gets to them)

History’s Shadow:
They’ve seen it all before. They know what you’re going to do before you do. Unless you’re doing something truly unpredictable, they have +2 to AC and Saves for each missing HD. (So an Angel with 4 HD would have +6 to AC and Saves).

Matte Black Dossier:
They’ve been briefed on the injuries you’ve suffered in previous battles, and how best to exploit them. They’ve been told what equipment you’re carrying, and how to use it. They know every word you’ve said aloud, and will turn them against you. If you don’t have a soul, and don’t have a name, there’s only a 1-in-6 chance they’ll be able to find your records. They won’t be happy about this at all.

Dolorous Stroke:
If they reduce someone to 0 HP or below with an attack, they may immediately attack that same person again. They keep doing this until they run out of bullets, or decide to stop. 

MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN:
Destroying angels impose order on the world like the edge of a knife, or the clean lines of a ruled page.

They can use their turn to assert a definition, so long as it is aligned with and in support of the order of the Underworld, or of a peripherally relevant law: the laws of physics, the distinction between reality and dream, etc. This requirement is a procedural one, open to the discretion and interpretation of the Angel.

Everything in violation must save or comply.


Comments

  1. This is very good (both as the idea and an implementation). Thank you for posting it.

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    Replies
    1. Thanks! I really like noise sans signal! ^_^

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  2. “They sound like a phone call from a submarine.”

    Any examples of “asserting a definition”?

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    1. Asserting a definition would be something like: "By The Law of the Underworld, to each thing named, there must be a soul, and from its namesake each soul may not be separated." Which would, theoretically, un-do the soullessness of those soulless who fail to save. Stuff like that.

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  3. I'm familiar with the Supernatural Magnitude post yet don't understand what DT means. Does it take 7 points of damage to deal them a single hp? And they might have 30 or 40 hp?

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    Replies
    1. Yep! Though they'll probably have less HP than that. If you want to kill one, it would probably be smart to use a death trap or magic or something.

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