Divine Blood Gods

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Gods

Category: Mimic (occasionally Afflicted)
Active Psychics: 100%
Common Talents: Domains, Shapeshifting, Shared Subconscious and Lifeforce, Universal Instinct, Medium Travel
Status: ~465,000 Nirvana (~94,000 Tartarus), ~80,000 Earth (83% Nirvana, 17% Yomi), ~70,000 Yomi (~16,000 Abyss),
Location: Primarily live within dimensional shards orbiting within Earth’s cosmology
Life Force: Blue, Mana, Stable, Abstract but Slow

Description:

Currently Gods mostly appear as human beings with blue marks on their foreheads, cheeks and shoulders. They are not often skinny or slender in appearance, ranging in appearance from well-fed to weight-lifter to voluptuous, but mostly appear healthy and attractive. They often have cool colors to their hair and eye including blacks, whites, blues and greens. Most of them have skin colors staying within human limits. They tend to be taller and broader than humans and also most Demons, often well over six feet in height and rarely less than five feet and seven inches in height.

For the most Gods prefer ideal or perfect appearances. They almost never scar. They have a tendency to appear regal in various ways. Even the more humble Gods still tend to have a touch to them that other people associate with aristocracy or other individuals in elevated position.

Previously, Gods were mammalian with thick skin, often with dark gray or black colors. They had flexible necks ending in a whale-like head with a long snout and teeth only in the lower jaw. Their arms were long and flared out ending in six long, slender fingers. Their legs are comparatively short but as heavily muscled as the rest of them. Despite their apparently bulky builds, the way they move seems to be exceptionally graceful and deliberate, as if every motion is considered.

As with the Demons, both forms are in essence only an expression of what the Gods believe their body should be. Currently, Gods are born and live pretty much their entire lives looking completely human. All are shapechangers and easily capable of taking the older form, but most don’t know how to make the change and only a few of the ones who do know anything about using the non-human body efficiently. That said, Gods are a lot more aware of the fact that their bodies are expressions of their desired appearances than Demons are.

Gods are almost entirely less than forty thousand years of age and a majority of those are less than two thousand years of age. All but the oldest were born in human form or even were human to start. They’ve kept a fair amount of their original culture and are more distant from humanity than most Demons, but they are still heavily influenced by the fact that they all still routinely live among humanity for a time.

Gods consider duty extremely important. They tend to believe that they are born to particular responsibilities and have to fulfill those responsibilities before anything else. Their own personal desires or ideas are secondary to their duties. They tend to feel that giving in to such things is a sign of weakness of will or a giving in to instinct. This applies not only to the subordinates of the various divine Houses, but also the leaders. In the purist form of their ideal, no one God in the House and no one House is more important than any other, with all having individual jobs that are equally important. Tyranny is considered as much a betrayal of duty as rebel is.

Some feel the system is incredibly oppressive to the individual, and in certain Houses this is a true observation. Gods can tend to either completely bury their own personalities under the expectations of their position or they can tend to enforce their own ideas of what is best for everyone on others. The Gods tend to wave off such concerns as examples of individuals who mistake their duties for their own desires.

Gods also expect individuals to endure injuries and insult quietly and with dignity. Complaining and raging loudly against insults are considered beneath the dignity of a God. Instead, they are expected to move on and deal with the situation as best as possible and add it to their experiences to strengthen themselves for the future. Railing against obstacles, accidents, attacks or anything else is simply a sign that one has too little control of themselves.

They tend to interact first on a manner of fitting the individual into the group dynamic and where they fit in. Gods have a rather high need to belong to an extended group beyond even the connection of the Divine mindscape connected through the tree Ashvattha. They are highly reluctant to break off from their established positions even in situations that would be perceived by outsiders as unhealthy and dangerous. This is one of the reasons that the large number of Gods abandoning House Tinia in the last two thousand years is considered extremely telling. The fact that no one is blaming Ares, Athena, Hermes or any of the others who have cut ties with Zeus is even more so.

Wisdom, or at least knowledge, is very important to the Gods. The glimpses of how things are interconnected and how they fit together in general only whet’s their appetite for knowing more, especially about things that can’t be explained by relatively simple universal mechanics. They tend to be very curious about the reasons why anybody chooses to do something. They have some sense of the reason why other Gods do the things they do, but even in those cases, the full thoughts and motives of their fellow Immortals is protected. This curiosity appears in different ways dependent on the individual attitude of the God in question. They can be the tale-telling commoner, the gossip monger, the journalist, philosopher or any of a number of other manifestations. In some Gods it is stronger than in others, but on average most have more curiosity than most other sentient races. And they all like to know things that nobody else knows.

They do not require a person to completely ignore their own desires. In fact, a House where the members are entirely denied personal interests is considered a sign of a poor leader and unhealthy. However, those interests will always be expected to be put aside in the face of what the group needs. This attitude extends to the way they approach other races and individuals.

Gods are quite a bit more alien in thought compared to humans than Demons appear to be. Simplifying things down, their thought processes tend to be three-base style logic. They tend to test situations along the lines of true, false and maybe. This, in addition to their cultural upbringing, is part of the reason that they seem so distant emotionally. They will frequently respond to questions in a vague and indirect manners because they are in a maybe-loop. However, a maybe-loop does not discomfort Gods the way it does most other races.

They are perfectly fine setting aside a question they have no information as adverse humans, who tend to want to reach either a true or false before they’re happy, or Demons, who tend to at least want to know if there is conflicting information. It tends to give them the impression of knowing more than they do and of being cagy about what they tell other people. They are also usually more aware of what things that they do not know.

The very obvious differences between the way an average person thinks and behaves from the way a God thinks and behaves actually makes it easier for them to deal with most of the human related mortals than Demons sometimes have. Mostly because it is easier to see that there is a difference in thought with Gods and both individuals are able to consciously adjust the way they do things resulting in fewer misunderstandings. In addition, their cultural and common thought processes are such that they at least seem to be very patient.

Gods have similar physiological needs for telepathic interconnection as Demons, and just like with the Demons, while they have individual privacy and personality, parts of their minds are shared with each other. However, the structure of the Gods’ mindscape is moderately different. For one thing, Gods within a single House both have more privacy from the mindscape as a hole and less privacy from each other.

Abilities:

Gods have an underlying sense for how forces and beings interact and connect with each other as well as their communal pool of mana and processing power. These inherent talents combined with training in the use of their mana combine to allow for the nearly reality breaking abilities that most stories connect with the power of the Gods.

Their senses of connections and interactions are not quite conscious usually, but close enough to the surface to add to the sense of the Gods being disconnected from other people around them. This extends to everything about their lives. They have amazing insights about skills, occupations and areas of knowledge though without training or education these insights are interesting but not all that useful. It is most comparable to how everyone can see, but not everyone can paint a good picture. Sometimes their methods and actions seem rather bizarre or strange, often doing things that don’t seem like they should work.

The Divine mindscape, often referred to as the Ashvattha mindscape, is a massive shared mental construct that seems to be a near endless collection of walled, maze-like cities consisting of similarly twisting estates. Trees and foliage are a very frequently occurring theme within the mindscape as well as a near constant wind that seems to act more like underwater currents. This is how the Houses currently stand, combining together to bolster their collective defenses against the curiosity of their fellow Gods. It means that they are slightly better protected against outside intrusion than Demons are.

There are avenues between the Houses, however, they are still inherently connected and leaving that connection behind results in long term health issues. Gods and other Immortals within Ashvattha speak all languages and they share problems amongst each other when they need to. They are not limited to considering problems only within their own minds, the way most mortals are, but can reach out to other Gods and the great tree, Ashvattha, itself. They do this instinctively, often without being aware of it or bothering the conscious mind of their peers.

Gods also share their Mana between each other, which is rather important. Without the ability to draw on the Mana of Ashvattha and other Gods, they are relatively weak compared to mortals. They have a lot more trouble building themselves naturally up to the second tier, but when drawing from the collective, they can sometimes even reach first tier level abilities. They perhaps accrue the lent power slower than the other Immortal race, but one thing that can definitely be said about the Gods is that the powers they use tend to be very stable in addition to having unusual effects.

It is through their collective power and thought that Gods are able to make use of their Domain. Even using these templates and patterns to apply their insights in directly practical ways as adverse through some crafted device requires more power and calculation ability than most Gods have on their own. Without making use of these short cuts, they are generally only capable of the same sort of life force manipulations performed by mortals. The communal mindscape allows them to affect things down to much smaller details and across a much broader scope. Essentially, they are able to perform any feat which they can conceive of themselves as being able to do, much like their eternal rivals, the Demons.

Gods are masterful shape-changers and while most Gods never learn how to use the capacity, living out their entire lives within one form with occasional variations, they are well known in ancient legend for taking on many unusual shapes. Also, while Gods seem to have the request physiology used by mortal shapechangers to achieve the effect, they are able to complete the shape-change in another fashion. Gods can rebuild themselves from concept to conclusion creating much more thorough shape-shifts than that achieved by other shapeshifters. It is in this manner that the old Yaron eventually became the current Gods.

Every God has a medium through which they can travel, somehow joining together. These mediums range from something physical like blood or steel to events or circumstances such as laughing or screaming. These mediums are usually connected to the particular God’s Domain and the Gods have a heavy understanding of their connected medium, even if it is even less conscious than their more usual sense of how things work. Through this, a Goddess of Cheer might have an instinctive knowledge of everywhere someone is laughing at a given time. Instinctively, this allows them to find an example of their medium through which to travel. For example, a Goddess who travels through steel has a rough awareness of where all examples of steel are. With enough training, the God can listen and see through places where something that is their medium sits. For example, a Goddess with a blood medium would eventually be able to see out of any place where blood is pooling on the ground or splattered on the wall. Despite being rather slow, medium travel has the benefit of usually being traceless and very quiet as well as a better ability to carry allies with you.

Weaknesses:

Gods seem to prefer thicker, more humid environments than the average human. They can adapt to Earth’s atmosphere easily enough, but there is still a tendency to find their living places have been made as artificially humid as possible. This can even get to the point where mists and near fogs can occur around an Earth residence for some Gods. However, that circumstance is rare given the general attempt to exist among mortals without being noticed.

Pomegranates and several related fruits are toxic to the Gods, which is mildly ironic given the large number of cultures around the world which consider pomegranates to be a symbol of fertility and prosperity. Among mortals this is represented as an allergy, though it does not present the same symptoms as pomegranate allergies do when appearing within humans, instead hyping the digestion up to dangerous levels. Symptoms begin with nausea, and, if not quickly treated, moves on toward the development of bleeding wounds within the digestive track and eventually painful death.

Gods have some level of psychic defense from outsiders given the collective wall put up by each House, but even here they require a great deal more constant connection than most mortals and all the passively existing walls can do is slow down an invader to a degree, unlike the nearly monolithic defenses possessed by most mortals. They still find themselves experiencing the touch of wandering minds, though for the most part they simply fail to notice the occasional presence.

They are very used to occasional visitor, and it is possible to take on the attitude of a daydreamer or wander and start poking around the mind of the God, looking for information. The personality and essential will of each God exists behind the rather impressive frameworks that represent their marks. These developed mostly to prevent the Gods from psychically connecting so strongly that they were no longer able to distinguish themselves from each other, but with regards to attackers, at the very least playing around those areas relates to the God in no uncertain terms that someone is playing around in their head. At which point any of a number of things can happen.

The primary through-fare from one God to the next exists in the neighborhood of those marks. They interconnect some of the more vital parts of each God or other connected Immortal. While a visitor can move on toward another God’s consciousness, they would still find themselves in the cluttered maze of the God and having to navigate to find anything useful. However, if the God is physically present, a telepath can go through those marks to short cut to the deeper parts of other Immortals’ minds. This is immediately and horrifically painful for the God being used as the short cut and, as a result, it is tactic only ever used to attack the Divine mindscape as a whole, either to retrieve information, attack specific individuals or lay out a mass curse across the whole of Nirvana, or possibly Yomi.

The last weakness of the Gods is the fact that they are subject to a slow build up of life force corruption that primarily manifests as mental aberrations. Every four hundred years or so, they undertake to clear their minds and souls of this strain by returning to a state of childhood and allowing themselves to mature again. This period is not simply a matter of them taking the appearance of a child and maintaining an illusion of youth. They actually return to a mental and physical state of childhood complete with developing brain and hormones. Every God reincarnated this way keeps some level of their identity intact, such as their name and a basic understanding that they are not really human as well as a few personal memories, but for the most part they are starting over.

Without this process, the Gods tend to find themselves drifting either into ever more arrogant thoughts or else getting more and more stuck in the afore-mentioned maybe-loops. The nature of the development is that Gods might initially think their changes in attitude are reasonable, but both represent a degeneration in the thinking process. Those on the arrogant path feel self-assured that they are entirely correct and need not check their own conclusions against anything while the other Gods going in this direction tend to wait for more information before making up their minds eventually settling into what could be mistaken for catatonia after enough centuries have passed without doing anything about it.

Reproduction:

Reproduction among Gods is essentially similar to the methods of reproduction amongst Demons. They mostly reproduce sexually with fertility being triggered by desires for children either in the lover or the God. They have the same sort of telepathic interaction on top of the physical sex that occurs in Demons as well.

Where Gods primarily differ is in their approach. Gods are much more likely to involve shapeshifting in their sexual relationships and they are quite a bit more willing to use non-sexual methods of reproduction as well. In fact, a good number of Gods are what Nirvana refers to as homunculi, essentially clones who were constructed using the combination of two genetic codes and grown via artificial methods until they were able to operate as any other child. Perhaps 30% of the Gods were conceived non-sexually and a little more than half of those are homunculi with the others being psychically induced pregnancies of one sort or another.

Homunculi, despite having a larger percentage of the God and Nirvana population, have a discernible social stigma attached to them. There is a level of condescension among “naturally” conceived Gods (any born from a mother’s womb) with regards to the created despite there being no noticeable difference in their physiology or psychology, aside from what can be attributed to growing up in those circumstances.

More recently, in the last two or three thousand years, this prejudice has started to fade and most of the born treat homunculi the same as they treat everyone else. However, it should be noted that, contrary to the Demons, the Gods actually have a separate term to describe such individuals and that they still use it. For the homunculi born or created in Yomi, the fact that they didn’t mature inside one of their parents is an obscure footnote, but in Nirvana it is a defining fact of their identity.

Like the Demons, the Gods have a process for changing humans into Gods. They refer to their artifact as the "Altar of Apotheosis" but it functionally serves the same purpose. It can be used medically to repair some mana related damage. It can also be used to attune a immigrating Demon to the Advarttha network, though Demons cannot become Gods.

History:

The history of the Gods is very much tied to the history of the Demons. Before they first evolved into the second Immortal race, their people were under attack by the Enki who thought that the world belonged to them because they were their first. In the course of this war, the ancestors of the Gods stole the secrets by which the Enki became what they are. However, the war waged on and the civilization that spawned these new Immortals failed to survive. The war forced the Enki and the newly named Yaron to flee into the cosmology while the mortals on Earth died in the various calamities that Immortals and mortals alike had released upon the world. When the Yaron came back, they found that a new race had arrived upon the world: humans.

Unlike the Enki, the Yaron set about to rule this new and clearly inferior race. By this time, millions of years after their fleeing the first war, they were now mostly insane like many of their hated enemies, who had also arrived. The Yaron made appearances and examples of the mortals, eventually pushing themselves into positions of authority all across the world while the Enki performed attack after attack and attempted to exterminate the pests they had discovered.

They began to infiltrate humanity at almost the same time that the Enki did and, like with the Enki, this slowly resulted in the twisted remnants of Yaron culture being reborn as the Gods. One of the older Yaron, one who had never seemed to fall into the same pits of insanity, gathered together the human seeming Gods and eventually overthrew their insane leaders.

Vishnu’s rebellion was almost certainly timed to coincide with Lilith’s own revolution among the Demons. Also, some activities taken by either group of upstarts was clearly beneficial to both groups while the Enki and Yaron continued to kill each other as always. The proof of the cooperation between the soon-to-be King of the Gods and the soon-to-be Queen of the Demons came after the Enki and Yaron were either destroyed or sealed when the first God-Demon hybrid was born to Lilith.

Lilith and Vishnu had a definite falling out when Lilith’s Demonic sense of independence flared against Vishnu’s sense of duty. Who was at fault varies with who tells the story, but it is clear that Vishnu expected Lilith to conform to his standards of obedience to one’s duties. In some stories, Vishnu’s request is perfectly reasonable and rational to which Lilith responded with unnecessary violence and megalomania. In others it is something petty and unworthy as an attempt to force Lilith to submit to him in all ways. Lilith and Vishnu admit to themselves that they were both at fault, but, even if they are pushing peace again, neither has seen fit to speak to the other for over thirty-five thousand years.

The history of the Gods in dealing with men and Demons has always been the subtle manipulation over brute force. While they do have their great warriors such as Thor, who is half-Demon, and Ares, these are not where the Gods have placed most of their faith and effort. Instead, it is in their propaganda and spreading word among the humans about the distrustfulness of the Demons that they really achieved their successes. Demons found themselves repeatedly having less mortal support and the support that they often got was not morally appealing. Even long after they had stopped actively smearing the reputation of the Demons themselves, the humans continued the trend. It became quite clear that the Gods had won the most essential part of the propaganda war.

Since then, the Gods have grown consistently more complacent about the way things are. They’ve mostly been going through the motions of living normal lives, even by mortal standards. Occasionally they would reincarnate and grow up among humans all over again. They still maintained an effort to push humanity toward their way of thinking in subtle grass roots manners. They have noticed that Demons are both more populous on Earth, which is explained by the fact that Yomi is so very much smaller than Nirvana, and that the Demons are still actively manipulating some groups of mortals, mostly criminals of one stripe or another.

The Shadows and Eyes of Ra have been dancing around each other for the last few centuries, sometimes even making use of the existence of defectors one way or another to even get into Yomi and Nirvana. Meanwhile, the Faustians and Heralds have been interacting on a more friendly basis. Still, Demons and Gods go missing every few years, sealed away somewhere where they wouldn’t be killed accidentally, but also placing them out of each other’s ways.

As it stands now, the Gods are probably the most complacent major power around. As far as they are concerned, they’ve won and now it is just a matter of time before the Demons admit and take the reasonable path of joining with Nirvana and taking up Nirvana’s superior ideals, setting aside their anarchistic “culture” for something of structure. Of course, there are some who want a peace more even than that, and those who realize that the Demons are still strong and not that desperate, but the overall attitude is as stated above.

Index of Other Divine Blood Stories and Art in my gallery

Divine Blood Index**************************
Divine Blood stories available on DA:
Novel Sample Chapters:
This Looks Like a Safe Neighborhood... : http://fav.me/d42d6br
Deployment: http://fav.me/d42d9cq
Just a Girl: http://fav.me/d42dado
Creepy Cute: http://fav.me/d42dbfa
In Motion: http://fav.me/d42ddgt
Center of It: http://fav.me/d42dfjf
Unique Perspective: http://fav.me/d53r3zz
Extracurriculars listed chronologically to the Divine Blood Timeline (focus character in parantheses):
Regarding the Proper Use of Force (Gaetana Trolleti): http://fav.me/d5vpbpa
Following Dernhelm (Eowyn Desai): http://fav.me/d5bh3hn
Can't Go Home (Whelan Connor): http://fav.me/d5nw5qc
Smoke Over Grimsvotn (Lilitu Geisthexe): http://fav.me/d5bh2wj
Serious Matter (Sherissie Minaba): http://fav.me/d5bh3zv
A Day in the Life of a Busy Woman (Mao Semezou): http://fav.me/d5c0o5b
High School Hel (Hel Logesdottir): http://fav.me/d5j1hg7
Pop Quiz (Naiki Semezou): http://fav.me/d62tdla
Magnets: http://fav.me/d6eju4e
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