| Mastema | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Mastema | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
A greedy demon that fancies himself an honest dealer despite his one sided arrangements. His avarice hides his love and hatred for a humanity that he helped create.
Special Skills
- Salesmanship
- Psychological Manipulation
- Profiling
Special Abilities
As an Angel of House of the Indigo Night he can divine the future, however because of the fluidity of time his predictions cannot be 100% correct. He can accelerate or decelerate the flow of time for inanimate objects to a max of one year, within a sphere of about 10 meters around himself. In addition he can grant wishes at the cost of a person’s time left to live. The more power needed to make the wish come true the more time taken from the client (he cannot take so much that it kills the client before the wish is granted). He can create portals for transportation though only he can traverse them (anyone else would suffer from a permanent psychotic break from reality). As an angel he can fly using his wings. In the unlikely case he is forced to fight his form will shift to a more demonic looking one, in this form he has superhuman abilities (strength, speed etc). His demonic form renders him especially vulnerable to sanctified objects, holy spells and magic meant to damage or repel evil.
Inventory
The only item Mastema brought with him from his original world was his sword named Masit. Usually kept hidden between the layers of reality this sword is only used when he is forced to fight. Apart from extreme durability to conventional damage Masit shares the same vulnerability as its owner. In addition to the regular damage expected from a sword it also steals time from the victim. The sword appears like a Kriegsmesser with a black blade and the word Masit is etched onto the blade in Hebrew.
Background
Mastema was part of the House of the Indigo Night, a band of angels created by god with the order to set creation in motion. They would dictate the orbits of the planets and stars, time was entirely their creation. Mastema was happy to do his part in putting in motion the grand artwork the other houses had built. When the other houses finished making the rest of creation he was proud to work alongside them though like other angels he had his reservations about the reapers, angels of death from the House of Falling Night. He worked hard when god announced his greatest creation, man. Man was to be different from the angels in that they were made in god’s image, but not physically. Humans were granted the ability to create in much the same way as god can.
In a twist of events he found himself befriending Masit a reaper. Though Masit was always busy with his job in the time between one death and the next they found the time to chat. Masit was happy to make a friend from one of the other houses and Mastema was happy to learn that the reapers took care to preserve in memory what they killed. He like many other angels was under the impression that reapers did not respect their work.
Despite the celebration and expectations of greatness humans acted as nothing more than animals. Mastema like many other angels was growing worried with this and compounding it was god’s order for angels to not directly interact with humans. Soon a rebellion grew within the ranks of the angels led by Lucifer. Mastema hurt by his inability to grant humans his knowledge joined the rebellion. Things went slowly for awhile and mostly consisted of the rebels finding enough support to begin their plan. He tried to way his friend to their side but he wouldn’t budge, this was something that still haunts him. He was still sulking when part of the reapers allied with Lucifer and the War in Heaven began. All of a sudden he was thrust into battle and given command of a war host of his own. All he was asked to do was to predict the future of the battle and give commands to counter the enemy before they could properly act.
As the war ramped up every battle became a tense affair and the possibility of failure always loomed over his shoulder. Things only became worse when humans not only became susceptible to aging but also when the first murder happened. All of a sudden the death of a single person could change the course of the war and the reapers seemingly disappeared from the battlefield. Using his powers he found out why, the city of the dead built by the rebel reapers was under attack. He wanted to help but two things stopped him he was responsible for those under him and his friend Masit was among the loyalist forces. He cursed the situation he was in as a result of his choices. As the war got farther along a terrible order would come down the chain of command. Victory seemed far and they were ordered to eat their enemies in an attempt to bolster their own forces while permanently decreasing the power of their enemies.
He hesitated to relay that order but did not want to come into conflict with the others. Even with the new order the war continued going poorly and to make things worse the constant use of divination had altered the future so much that the angels of the fourth house could no longer predict the future accurately. After that things degraded quickly and he was also forced into battle. He was competent but relied too much on his divination something that was still almost as good as before. In a twist of fate during his last battle he was pushed to his limit and finally resorted to eating those he had slain. He entered into a battle frenzy where he killed and consumed as many angels as he could and too late he realized that the last one he consumed was his friend Masit. It was at this moment that the rebellion also ended in failure and god banished the rebels to an eternity in hell. Within the void of hell he stewed in his own thoughts guilt and shame slowly eating away at his sanity. As all of the fallen in hell he eventually went completely insane.
After a few hundred thousand years of solitary confinement the barriers that kept them in hell began to crack and it allowed the weakest of them to slip through into the mortal world. He also slipped through and arrived on earth in the 1950’s. He began hatching a plot to get revenge on his cruel creator. After a while and a small rampage he learned that to challenge god directly was suicide and decided to torture his creations instead. In order to achieve this he needed to become more stable mentally so he won't scare the mortals away.
To regain a modicum of sanity he pushed away most of his power and memories into an entity separate from him. He shaped it into the form of a kriegsmesser, similar to the sword he used during the war. He placed it into a pocket dimension he had found before the fall so it would not bring back his memories and with it his insanity. With his chaotic nature tamed he set about finding a way to trick humans into allowing him to torture them. During this time he discovered that he had the power to take life from mortals something he must have gained from the consumption of his friend.
The taken life boosted his powers to a level somewhat approaching what he had before the fall. Finding this to be good he set his mind on tricking mortals into giving up their life in exchange for granting a wish. He took to copying the dress style of a man in the era he was in, the 1950’s. He practiced this nonstop for many years and around the 90’s he had become extremely good at it. He began to increase his influence on other fallen as his power grew. This was a fragile power dependant on him not using his abilities too much lest he slip back to insanity. Even so he continued his plan. Along with his plan he explored creation for a place to hide into should things take a turn for the worst. He was traversing one of his portals when he spliced in.