The Great Belligerency [Round 4: Static]

The Great Belligerency [Round 4: Static]
#5
Re: The Great Belligerency [1 Spot Left]
Originally posted on MSPA by SleepingOrange.

Username: SleepingOrange

Name: Ur. She that Was Before. The Progenitress. Beginning and End and After. There's no real way to know what her name is or was, so she tends to accumulate names as different people or groups discover her. The simple Ur tends to be the most used.

Gender: Female, by and large.

Font color: 339933

Race: Dead goddess

Weapon: Ur doesn't typically use weapons, but she does carry an exquisite silver sickle at her belt. Its honed edge glows faintly blue, but the nature of its powers or lack thereof is unknown; it is entirely possible that Ur herself no longer has any idea of the function of her sickle and merely carries it because she always has and is no more capable of getting rid of it than she would be of being a large, bearded fire god.

Abilities: One of the few things that is known about Ur is that she was a goddess of life, and the creator of her universe. This once meant nigh- or full-blown omnipotence, but because she is no longer in the universe she was inextricably tied to (and it in fact no longer exists), her power is vastly diminished. She is still divine, though, and has a number of abilities tied to her primary domain: where she walks (when she walks, rather than hovering), flowers or grass or mushrooms spring up (and often more hostile plants if she wills it); she can create living things with a thought, and often uses it to create monsters which are then inhabited by the souls that haunt her (large or complex organisms tend to disintegrate shortly after their creation though); she can induce growth or reproduction in things that are already alive, from making house-sized pumpkins to turning floating spores in the air into fungal pestilences. She has little power over inanimate or dead things, but can occasionally return life to the dead if the whim takes her. In life, her powers were used to bring plenty and happiness to her followers, but in death they have become perversions of their original intentions, more often used to sow chaos and destruction than life and order. Additionally, due to the nature of her being, she is invulnerable to mental control or detection, and any attempt to pry into her thoughts or mind often leaves the unwise telepath a gibbering husk. It is probable she has a great capacity for healing, but her hateful and vengeful nature means it rarely if ever manifests.

Description: Ur is- or rather, was- a tall, slender humanoid woman; the race she populated her universe with was very much like humans, but slender, angular, and with a second opposable thumb opposite the one humans have. With the exception of their polydactyly, they could easily be mistaken for the elves of Earth folklore. Back when she was alive, she always wore a simple but clingy and low-cut spring green dress as well as the aforementioned sickle; her hair was long and golden, and usually kept up with an abalone clip. Her narrow-but-warm eyes lacked pupils and the irises were a reflective silver, complementing the rich olive tone of her skin. The overall effect was slightly-otherworldly beauty, but clean-cut and without the gaudiness many divine entities lean towards.

Now, her skin is an ashen grey and her eyes a uniformly milky white dotted with splotchy red. Her dress is tattered and hangs loosely from her desiccated frame, the bright and cheerful green at odds with the ashen tone of her skin. The elegant clip is dulled and spotted with grime, and the hair it once kept in an attractive but understated style is thinned, browned, and spilling out. Her lips are typically slightly parted and her head lolls slightly; a nauseatingly sweet smell of fermentation follows her everywhere. If you stand close enough to her while it is quiet, you can hear soft, hissing whispers with no apparent source. It is unlikely, however, that many people experience this; Ur rarely allows anything close to her for long.

Ur, for all that she was an overdeity of life and creation, now hates and seeks the destruction of all life, especially that that is sentient. Even undeath or machine intelligences are anathema to her: anything self-aware deserves destruction, followed by everything that grows regardless of whether it thinks. Given the fractured nature of her personality, though, she is not always actively pursuing the destruction of everything and may simply wallow in despair or grow magnificent jungles in some sort of nostalgia for her old existence, only to watch them decay as she succumbs again to her melancholy.

Aside from the intermittent hatred of the multiverse and everything that inhabits it, there is little consistent about her personality. It is dominated by negative emotions, but she is as likely to drift aimlessly in a state of crushing depression as she is to mercilessly slaughter everything around her. In fact, little if anything is actually left of the goddess: what remains is a sort of schizophrenic gestalt entity composed of the souls who inhabit her divine shell. Trying to pick one dominant persona out of millions of vengeful ghosts is impossible and pointless.

Biography: In the beginning, there was nothing.

Rather, there were millions of universes, each separate from each other and largely unaware of the others' existence. The vast emptiness that separates each bubble of reality, however, was full of nothing; as had happened countless times before, some spark of divinity spontaneously created itself, and unaware of the multiverse around it sought to create the world.

This particular spark became the being who would eventually call herself Ur. She created an infinite universe like so many had before, seeded it with planets and stars and life, and began the endless task of tending to her creation and creating and instructing followers. Eons passed; she was a loving, even doting goddess, and created others like herself to help tend to her flock. Peace and tranquility were the watchwords of her universe; it was an idyllic existence for all those she shepherded, and for the gods and goddesses she created under her.

Her universe was old when things changed; her followers had long since begun exploring the boundless expanses of their reality, had long since discovered faster than light travel, had long since discovered the other pockets of sentience she had placed there. Under her watchful guidance, the universe and its inhabitants thrived. It's uncertain what could have made her turn her back on her creation, but in the end, she did. Jaded and furious, she sought to unmake everything she had spawned in a blazing explosion of righteous destruction.

But she couldn't.

She was fundamentally a being of life and creation; her omnipotence wasn't quite the limitless power she thought it was. In trying to destroy her creation, she was unable to fully destroy herself, and she was unable to fully destroy those who followed her.

As reality collapsed, she and the souls of the faithful were shunted into another universe. Most of her true self was swallowed into the nothingness she had sought to turn her creation into, leaving an undirected divine shell; the fractured remains of countless beings were forced into it, angry and terrified and distraught bits of consciousness drowning out what remained of the progenitress. With barely the power of the lowest of demigods left and a mind that was not a mind in charge of it, she drifted through a world she had no idea existed, halfheartedly continuing her attempts to snuff out everything that was.

Those that encounter or learn of her often believe based on her appearance and wanton destruction that she is a goddess or monster of death and chaos, but she is still fundamentally a being of life, unable to truly accomplish the unmaking she relentlessly seeks. Those, who divination or divine consultation, find what little information remains about her are often torn between pity and fear; it is nigh-impossible to destroy or contain even what little power she has left, and her nature is the epitome of Sisyphean tragedy. Fortunately for those worlds she lands on, she frequently fades out and finds herself in another universe. Part of her suspects (and hopes) that she will one day disappear and fail to reappear in another reality; part of her doubts she will be able to cease being until everything else does.

When she was selected for this battle, she had recently landed in a young universe, on a planet inhabited by troglodytic crustaceans barely making the first forays into society. Her bizarre (to them) appearance and powers led them to believe she was a goddess, and in fact led to her being worshipped for the first time since she destroyed her own universe, albeit for very different reasons. The effect of the worship was... unusual. Belief has a very powerful effect on divine beings, and the stabilizing effect of worship may have drastically changed Ur, eventually turning her into the avatar of death they thought her to be. It is unknowable what the end result would have been, though, as she was plucked from that world to participate in the Great Belligerance.
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Re: The Great Belligerency [1 Spot Left] - by SleepingOrange - 08-02-2010, 03:55 AM