[wip][vil][play] king nimrod

[dandelion]

Name: King Nimrod, Dormin
Age: Although he’s given up counting, it was he who commissioned the Tower of Babel: does that give you some idea of his lifespan? He looks any age from mid-twenties to late forties; it depends very much how tired he is and what he’s wearing.
Alignment: Evil / ‘netural’
Homeboard: N/A
Power: Immortality

Occupation: None, although he once wore the crown of men. Compound interest and ancient artefacts collectors pay megabucks for ensure that Dormin never has to work a day in his present life. His … occupation is as figurehead and spiritual leader of a nameless, secret cult.

Appearance: Dormin dresses simply, somewhere between casual and business without being business casual. Sometimes he wears his dark crown, but it’s fairly rare, and more often than not you would be hard pressed to recognize him in a crowd. Other than his crown, he wears little that is eccentric: except perhaps the glove that covers his right hand nearly permanently. The reason for this is simple: just below his fingers runs a long, silver scar, the same sort that is visible at his shoulder, his elbow, across his chest, along his throat: all the lines where he was hacked into pieces. There are other scars, many of them, but they heal while these seem to have no intention of leaving.

History / Personality: Dormin, the King Nimrod of the Bible, has had his named blackened by thousands of years of Christian teaching: he was never the most just of rulers but he certainly never meant to be emblematically evil archetype of an idolater and tyrant that legend transformed him into. He definitely ruled with an iron fist and an effortless ruthlessness, but there are stories about him killing every firstborn in his kingdom that are completely unfounded in fact and have a firmer root in fiction and propaganda. These days, Dormin has mellowed out, become on the one hand more at ease with the world and on the other far more juxtaposed to it. His name is a reflection of his response to the world: Nimrod no longer suits him, so its mirror image is now his title; it is only his surname – why would he have a Christian name?

Dormin speaks candidly, but you can never tell what he’s thinking; he doesn’t speak often but when he does deign to use his voice he’s compelling, a born leader of men. He’s level-headed and calm, self-assured and ready for almost anything, weaned of such habits as fear and surprise by his millennia-long lifespan and general inability to die (he’s tried numerous inventive ways of suicide, none of which worked). His story is one of tragedy – he tried to build a stairway to the heavens, made a conscious effort to distance himself from God and forge a place for his Kingdom that was free of the stifling effects of dogma and religion – and was punished for an eternity for his great disobedience. The act of defiance cost him not his life but his death: although he was ritually dismembered and cast to the wild animals, his wife collected up all his pieces under the watchful eye of an angel sewed him back together, a sick Christian parody of the story of Isis and Osiris.

And this is God’s punishment: unable to die, soul locked outside the cycle of reincarnation and recreation, unable to end or to die, doomed to wander and hate. He watched his wife age and die, and lived a thousand lives full of human suffering, losing the emotional capacity to become attached to people – now so transient and distant from his plight. He has been killed in more horrible ways than his original dismembering, the eternal enemy of the church. For if his long life has ironed his emotions to a level, calm sea, a deep hatred for God festers inside him like an infected wound, the only one his seeming immortality won’t heal. Some of those he has confided him counsel him to repent, to confess before God to his Sins, but Dormin’s greatest stumbling block is his pride – the same arrogance that forced labourers to lift block onto block to construct the world’s greatest skyscraper in challenge of God now fuels him.

Dormin is a clever man, a scholar and philosopher, and he has considered his immortality from every angle: the men of his time lived long, his ancestors spending a thousand years on the earth; maybe he’s not immortal, his life simply unnaturally extended so he can think over his folly. Maybe he’ll still be locked in purgatory when the four Horsemen take to the world. He has no way of knowing. So he plans, with all the time in the world. For the last hundred or so years there has been a cult of sorts in his wake, hidden, secret, following him and his seeming deity status. Their very purpose is arcane: an army against God? Some say they hold strange rituals in their hospital headquarters, and that a physic who walked in sane came out mad and gibbering about demons. Its acolytes are not merely the lonely and the defeated: business men, school teachers, students, scientists – all walks of life seem to have a few people who identify themselves with his message and his quiet power.

With the amount of time and money Dormin has, he could by now have long ruled a country of his own again: but this time he moves in secret, uses byways, speaks only in a gentle whisper. He has invisible power, networks the world over, men whose grandfathers told them: ‘trust this man,’ or who have never totally understood why there are paintings of their ancestors standing next to a man who is undeniably the same one they now work for. Others don’t even know they work for him: his subtle reach is long, but does not diminish his grip; To small men, he is a very large god. To the biggest of Gods, he’s a small man who lives a long, long time.

All things considered, there are greater sins against God committed these days, but his punishment does not diminish and he meets few other immortals; sometimes the scariest thought to cross his mind is that he may have been forgotten. And forgetting is a strong theme with Dormin: people have forgotten the good he did as ruler – and he’s starting to run out of space in his head for memories. As his brain tries to organize all his many thousands of years worth of memories, he indubitably loses some. Names are often the first to go, but sometimes other things fade or go away. He remembers physical things well enough: his body remembers them. But words – in the dozens of languages he speaks, having watched them evolve from when they first branched as the Tower fell – slip away and don’t come back. Worst perhaps of all, is that his oldest memories are going now too: he loses the faces of his councillors, his generals; forgets the smell of his wife’s favourite flowers, and the first drawing his nephew made for him.

Weapons: Humans like wars, and it’s been impossible for Dormin to avoid them all: he’s watched clubs grow to swords and into pistols and into RPG launchers, and is proficient in modern weaponry as well as being perfectly capable of picking up a sword and doing massacre with it. He’s a most excellent a fighter unarmed, although he takes wounds like anybody else – they just heal faster. Hundreds of years have contributed to this prowess, the only memories that are guaranteed to stick.

Genre: whatever
Permissions: whatever