Emil

Emil

Marquis of Determinism

Age: 59 (appears ~30), Gender: Male

26 CP spent

9 Fleurs in stock

4 DP in Chancel

Symbol: Yarrow and pimpernel, side-by-side, upon the emblem of Enlightenment.

ASPECT 1 (Metahuman, 3/7 AMPs)

DOMAIN 3 (Marquis, 7/9 DMPs)

REALM 0 (Citizen, 5/5 RMPs)

SPIRIT 4 (Conflagration, 5/5 SMPs)

GIFTS & VIRTUES

HANDICAPS & AFFILIATIONS

Light Touch (Emil's inability to influence free will carries over to his Anchors, gives 4 MP per story)

The Code of Enlightenment

BONDS

The sanctity of the Estate of Determinism - 5

Emil's own ability to fight the Valde Bellum - 4

Sam, especially his dignity as an Anchor - 4

Sophia, especially her career - 2

Humanity's scientific progress in general - 2

Penny and her position with Emil in the Chancel - 2

Chika's wellbeing and status - 1

OBJECTIVES:

Nowadays, Emil's foremost concern is the Valde Bellum, as he seeks to continue in his mentor's footsteps. What time he spends in his Chancel, he tends to spend alone in his workshop. At first this was because he knew he couldn't match the people's expectations for Cosmos's prodigy, and now, a generation later, it's due to habit.

He provides circumspect assistance to scientists seeking to unlock the secrets of the universe, not only to help bring more robust concepts into the universe to fight the Excrutians, but also because greater scientific understanding aids his Estate and appeals to his aesthetics.

He also works to make sure that magics and miracles, even those not under the command of the Excrutians, do not cause paradoxes that would weaken his Estate.

He keeps four Anchors - less, in fact, than his spirit is capable of maintaining, but he is careful and deliberate enough in the actions for which he uses his Anchors that a fifth one isn't necessary, and he likes to maintain the option of taking another Anchor on the spot should it prove helpful. He guides his Anchors with a light touch, and this lends itself well to constructive relationships with them - when there is no especially pressing concern regarding his Estate or the Valde Bellum, Emil tends to set time aside to help strengthen their positions.

BACKGROUND:

Emil, Marquis of Determinism, was not born inside his Imperator's Chancel. He did not even grow up there. His first encounter with the obviously supernatural came during his apprenticeship as a watchmaker in a small town in Switzerland. It was an autumn night in 1967, and the 15 year old Emil was drawn outside by a commotion.

He emerged to see a battle between gods. Cosmos, King of Determinism, was singlehandedly fighting an Excrutian Strategist. Where the Excrutian swept his hand, whole aspects of reality were rendered into dust and misconception. The gears of the universe were sundered and swept aside as the Excrutian nullified those aspects of reality that were being used against him, and just as quickly replaced by entirely new ones that allowed the Noble to continue his attack.

The Excrutian fled, but not before the town was reduced to a flickering wasteland of scorched reality. In almost anyone else, the supernatural display would have induced dementia animus, but Emil was lucky.

He simply said to himself, "Oh, so that's how the universe really works," and that was that.

After that, Emil lived in the Chancel. And shortly thereafter, he became Cosmos's Anchor. The old Noble had once been among the mighiest forces in the universe, rivalling even many Imperators, but a disaster some 72 years prior had gravely wounded his Estate. He adopted the young Emil as both a successor and a son.

Emil's days as an Anchor were characterized by Cosmos's determination to bring justice to those that wronged and endangered his Estate - not just the Excrutians, but those traitorous Imperators and Powers that allowed such Excrutian victories to happen in the first place.

Perhaps Cosmos knew that his end was near, as only a few years later, the Power of Determinism fell, and his shard was given to Emil.

As the Power of Determinism, Emil's differences from his predecessor are more significant than merely being much weaker. While Cosmos more easily dealt with the causes and purposes of things, Emil has always approached Determinism from a mechanical angle. In a pinch, he can apply his Estate more broadly, but his instincts are still those of a watchmaker.

Emil was the first to use his Estate to construct automatons - fifty years ago, the Chancel was a place of brightness and glory, but its technology was that of the glory days of swords and sorcery. Slowly, through subtle, thankless tasks, Emil has influenced the makeup of the place, so that now giant gears and mechanisms dot the skyline and clockwork automatons patrol the streets.

There is a darker side to Emil's contribution to the Chancel, though. Among his first great tasks upon inheriting Cosmos's shard was to begin producing these humanoid automatons. Though they act only based on predictable, deterministic programming, the complexity of that programming is so great that even Emil doesn't always know precisely what they'll do. One can even fool oneself into believing them to be sentient.

And every one of them is named after one of the villagers from Emil's destroyed hometown. Names and faces that, due to the Excrutian's utter destruction of them, are remembered by no one but Emil himself. Perhaps his status as the survivor haunted him a bit more than he'd care to admit.

APPEARANCE:

Emil is a tall man with dark hair and eyes. His fashion is that of an older time, favoring a greatcoat and fedora when he goes out in public. His inhuman Aspect has slowed, but not stopped, his aging - Emil's face and voice are that of a human about 30 years old, though his manner can sometimes betray his true age.

In accordance with his high Spirit and low Realm, his presence defines a room, but does not command it - when he leaves, the remaining occupants tend to find themselves feeling like something is missing, and looking over their shoulders for an unseen watcher.

ESTATE:

Emil's Estate of Determinism is all about how the state of things at one point is determined by the state of things at every other. This is not only in the physical sense, but also in the sense of everything's first cause and final purpose. The antithesis of Determinism is that which is completely disconnected with cause and effect - an action that is swallowed up into the universe with no effect, a circumstance which exists inexplicably without origin, or a paradox that has the same cause and end but somehow manages to be different in substance.

Emil's interpretation of his Estate tends to cause his miracles to work in the context of physical laws. This is somewhat limiting, although with a bit of creativity and desperation Emil can transcend it, but it also has a benefit. Very few of Emil's miracles have any risk of causing dementia animus - they can easily be explained away as strange, but not impossible, events well within the bounds of physical law.

The most glaring blind spot in Emil's miracles is that of free will - despite mental action theoretically being mediated by the deterministic interactions of neurochemicals in the brain, Emil is powerless to directly influence free will. Incidentally, this carries over to his power over his Anchors. But despite his complete inability to directly influence free will with his domain, he does not begrudge humanity its freedom. Water needs Air to form clouds, and Dirt to form mud, and an Estate of Water without mud or clouds is incomplete. Just in this manner, Emil feels that free will is not antagonistic against Determinism.

DOMAIN MIRACLE LIST:

0 - Estate Driven Divinations - Know when your Estate is in trouble (0 MP)

1 - Ghost Miracle: Causality Nudge - Get the desired effect from a simple deterministic system. Example: Flip a coin a hundred times and get heads every time. (0 MP)

2 - Lesser Divination: Event Extrapolation - Figure out the past and future of a deterministic system. Example: Know when to pull a slot machine's lever to win the jackpot, or when its last jackpot was won. (0 MP)

3 - Lesser Preservation: Plausibility Ward - Ensure that the statistically most likely sequence of events happens. Example: Keep a machine in working order for precisely the statistically expected lifetime. (0 MP)

4 - Lesser Creation: Perfect Catalyst - Perform an action with certainty of achieving a given normally unlikely result. Example: Shoot a bullet that ricochets in a useful manner, kick a malfunctioning machine to make it start working. (1 MP)

5 - Lesser Destruction: Rule Breaker - Locally suppress or reverse a law of reality. Example: Turn off Newton's first law to bring a terminal velocity fall to a harmless halt inches above the ground, subvert the second law of thermodynamics to unscramble an egg. (2 MP)

   Major Divination: Laplace's Demon - As the lesser version, but treating the universe itself as a single deterministic system.  Can't account for free will. (2 MP)

6 - Lesser Change: Murphy's Law - Causes another's action to have an unintended consequence. Doesn't stop the intended consequence from going through. Example: Make a bullet fired into oneself keep on going and rupture a gas main, make a bomb go off at an unintended time. (4 MP)

   Major Preservation: Telos Thaymasio - Gives a tool or action a supernatural ability to meet its purpose.  Example: Make a gun kill whoever it is fired at, make a car keep running despite being greatly damaged. (4 MP)

7 - Major Creation: Butterfly Effect - Perform an action that has an apparently unrelated but spectacular effect. Example: Release a butterfly to cause a tornado hundreds of miles away, hammer the ground in a particular spot to cause a large building's structure to fail piece-by-piece. (4 MP)

8 - Major Destruction: Infinite Improbability Drive - Crush the predictability and order of the universe itself. Can also attack a being or object's "first cause." Very much a desperation measure. Example: Make local reality go mad in order to equalize the situation when badly outmaneuvered. Make reality itself attempt to reject another Noble's existence. (8 MP)

9 - Major Change: Fulcrum of Causality - Recognize that this moment in reality is all that exists - the past only has reality insofar as it explains why things are the way they are now, and thus the past is determined entirely by the state of the present. Therefore, impossibly significant changes to the present retroactively become explained by insignificantly different events in the past. Example: Cause a computer error half an hour ago to have launched a nuclear missile that will strike a target in a few seconds. Cause a lockpick to have been dropped under a loose stone in a dungeon built a thousand years ago. (8 MP)

ANCHORS: 4/5

name: Sophia

gender: Female

age: 35

personality: Driven, independent, arrogant.

background: A doctor of physics working at CERN, Sophia is rarely called to carry out some specific task for Emil. She occasionally prays for a small Aspect miracle for the clarity of mind to do her research, and Emil considers this a fine investment, taking the opportunity to chat with her from afar about recent events and the state of the science. Very much a long-distance relationship.

"Sophia once asked me, very early in our relationship, whether magic and science ultimately worked through the some common law. I told her that they were both deterministic, but that they were completely irreconcilable. I think her main purpose ever since then has been to prove me wrong."

name: Sam

gender: Male

age: 71

personality: Disciplined, badass, prideful.

background: A Navy SEAL, and the only other living former Anchor of Cosmos. He suffers from old age, but - he insists - this is more than balanced by his experience, and he can still do wetwork with the best of them. Nonetheless, Emil mostly relies on him in an advisory capacity. Sam's loyalty is more to Cosmos's memory than to Emil himself, but the two of them do have a sort of bromance going on.

"Back during my days as an Anchor, right before a tough mission that neither of us were sure we'd survive, Sam and I invented a sort of secret handshake on the spot just for the hell of it. It ended up looking pretty cool. A few years back, it came up again, and on a whim I ended up pulling some strings to get it put in a Konami game. Sam says he ranks it in my Top Ten Miracles." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kTElePSfyM

name: Chika

gender: Female

age: 19

personality: Ruthless, sadistic, reckless.

background: A deadly Japanese assassin, trained from a young age by the Cammora and traded to Emil. Despite their virtually antithetical natures, Emil inexplicably gets along quite well with her. Chika is Emil's first choice for wetwork ops these days, and although she has a tendency to derail things (maybe that's why the Cammora sold her service so cheap?), she's generally good enough to fix them up afterwards. Her relationship with Emil is complicated - genuine enough on her end, if perhaps a bit obsessive, and Emil for his part tends to indulge her less rational tendencies. Does not get along well with Sam.

"I once got a prayer in the middle of an important duel, and only managed to finish up just in time to see that Chika had challenged some guy to a game of Russian Roulette. I was almost too late to make sure the bullet was in one of his chambers. Later, I found out that this had happened twice before and she had just gone into those games without any miraculous assistance at all. You'd think she'd learn."

name: Penelope

gender: Female

age: 24

personality: Levelheaded, prudent, greedy.

background: Emil's seneschal back at the Chancel, Penny is a capable administrator of Emil's affairs when he's away or otherwise can't be bothered - perhaps too capable. If there's a single point of friction between the two of them, it's that Emil doesn't spend enough time building his domestic power within the Chancel. Pennny's greed isn't directed against Emil, but rather towards bringing more of the Chancel under his control. This can lead to trouble.

"One time, I was attacked by an assassin while I slept in my room at the Chancel. Apparently he was hired to kill me in order to vacate an office I didn't even know I had. He had no chance to succeed with mere Earthly magics and weapons, of course, but I still had a firm talk with Penny afterwards about keeping me in the loop."