Nokov | Divine Cities

User Name/Nick: Sy
User DW: N/A
E-mail/Plurk/Discord/PM to a character journal: @anstaar on plurk & discord, PM to journal
Other Characters Currently In-Game: Fitz Kreiner, Antryg Windrose, Armand
Character Name: Nokov Series: The Divine Cities
Age: as old as the first night humanity experienced, but also around ~ 17 
From When?: when he's killed by Sempros at the end of City of Miracles

Inmate Justification: To start, Nokov came very close to destroying his universe and killing everyone in it, but that’s just a symptom of his larger issues. He’s killed and tortured people in pursuit of his goal and because of a desire for revenge. He’s hunted and consumed his siblings, so he could be the most powerful divinity. Just generally, he’s taken the pain he’s endured out on the world around him.
Arrival: against his will
Abilities/Powers:

Nokov is a Divine child, the son of two Gods. As with all the Divine offspring, he was granted a domain of reality that was affected by the domains of his Divine parents. Like most of the offspring, he also isn’t nearly as strong as his parents, though as they can re-write the fabric of reality, that isn’t saying much.

As his domain is the night, he’s one of the more powerful of their children. He has a wide range of powers, which increase as he consumes his Divine siblings and takes over their domains and powers. All shadows are connected for him, and he can travel instantly from one to another. He can find and take anything hidden in darkness. He’s far stronger than any human. He can create things out of shadows. He can hear and find anyone who speaks his name. He can bring on the night in the day. To make a short list.

On the barge, the majority of this is either locked away or greatly reduced, but I’d like him to still have access to a small fraction of his abilities: being able to fade easily into the shadows, though not turn into one; still being slightly stronger than his human form would suggest; and small tricks with shadows, like being able to change their shapes. As the night, he has a weakness for light and can be hurt by strong, direct light. He also feels a strong obligation to answer direct questions honestly.

Inmate Information:


Nokov tries to project an air of control, even if it often comes off as suggesting a deep paranoia. Still, he can appear to be completely certain, and almost dispassionate calm in the actions he takes in order to achieve his ultimate goal. He can easily admit to hating someone, without sounding emotional about it, but those deaths are just steps for him. Just the same as the other people he’s killed in order to gain power. He is emotional when it comes to his ultimate aims, fierce and determined in his claims that he will create a just world, a moral world, righting all the countless wrongs that have been done in the world they currently live in. But even this controlled certainty can be fractured, he’s deeply sensitive to comments that are little more than playground taunts and in the face of refusal tends to lose his temper and control easily.

The truth is, under his grand declarations, Nokov is a maimed child striking out blindly, trying to avenge past misdeeds. He was hurt, and much of his personality is built in response to how he was hurt. But he doesn’t want to see himself that way. He wants to be a savior, to be a champion creating a better world – not a hurt kid casting around for something outside to fix, in the belief that will erase what happened to him. He’s caught in a story of pain and destruction, but he wants to believe that he’s doing something new, something great. They’ve all been failed by the world, and he can gain the power to right that wrong.

Nokov speaks about breaking the cycle of suffering and failure he considers have been the history of all powers in his world, and he gains helpers who agree with him. He means what he says, he believes he’s pursuing the right path. Yet it’s also an echo of his need to make his pain have a greater meaning. He wants to be strong enough to change things, but, even more, he wants to be strong enough that no one can hurt him again. He heard of the death of his Divine parent and saw the destruction that came afterword. He saw the world he knew shatter, and then was made to forget in order to save him from the fate of so many other Divine offspring. Then the mortal parents who had taken him in and loved him died, and with that trauma came the memories of the older one. The wounds of these memories are almost overwritten by the next crack in his personal foundation.

Nokov spent years being imprisoned and tortured by the government of the country that had once been enslaved by the Divinities, before the Gods deaths, and whose hatred and fear meant they didn’t hesitate in doing their best to break even a being who looked, and was, a child. He spent years powerless and hurt, he eventual escaped the physical prison, but, in many ways, he’s still mentally trapped there. Much of his feelings of betrayal come from this time. He wasn’t saved from his imprisonment, and he blames his Divine mother, who had left long before, but was aware of his situation and did nothing. On a less conscious level, he also blames the Divine children who didn’t suffer as he did. He’s angry that they have memories of good lives, that they can be happy. He blames the world that let this happen, and he feels his pain means he deserves to change things. He’s terrified of ever being captured again. If he’s strong, he can’t be hurt. He can’t understand why someone with more power would ever allow themselves to be beaten by someone with less.

This trauma is also the root of his paranoia and trouble connecting with other people. He’s deeply wary of anyone offering to help him, as that was how he was caught. He’s also afraid of the idea that he might imprison himself through attachment to other people. Vinya Komayd, the woman who took him and was behind most of what happened to him, told him that he would come to love her, that he would have to as she would be the only thing he knew, and a large part of him believes what she told him.

Nokov is incredibly lonely, but to acknowledge that would be to be truly alone. He has to believe that he’s grown beyond the miserable, terrified days of his childhood when he’d been abandoned and forgotten. Because if he hasn’t, then he’s still the powerless child he was. He kills his Divine siblings instead of trying to work with them, or even find company with them, because they have powers and the idea of closeness is dangerous because it’s what he wants. He was hurt for no reason he can understand, without having done anything, so anything might be a reason for them to try again. He’s always known how to be alone, and that’s safer than trying to get what he wants most. Considering all these cracks in his personality, it’s not surprising that he can be so volatile. He’s scared and hurt and full of anger at everything. He has to believe that he’ll be different, he’ll be able to change things. He has to be certain of his course. He has to stand alone and strong. He deserved better, he should have been given something else. That a lot of this isn’t true, just means that for all he can patiently wait and plan and act, he can also fly in to vicious attacks when confronted with uncertainty, because he doesn’t know how to deal with it.

Path to Redemption:

Nokov’s done a lot of terrible things, but he channeled his anger and pain into at least the idea that he’s trying to make things better. He thinks he has the right to change the world because he was hurt, not that having the power to do so gives him the right. He has the potential to heal and become someone who can actually help. 

To do so, Nokov needs help dealing with his issues, admitting to the effect of his trauma instead of believing he can externalize and defeat them by destroying the universe and starting over so it all never happened. He’s shown that he still has the capability to trust people, and that’s vital, though his warden will likely have to be very patient in order to gain any measure of it. Having people he can trust who aren’t under his power and making friends is deeply important. It won’t be easy, but he needs not to be alone.

He also has to work on understanding other people’s motivations and internal lives and caring about them. He puts his own pain ahead of others, and it's part of the self-absorption (also manifested in not understanding that the people who hurt him were reacting to their own histories) he has to deal with, if he’s going to grow in more productive ways.

Nokov is used to living in a world where reality is frequently and easily rewritten by Divine powers. The concept of floods and breaches isn’t strange to him. The fact of the barge itself won’t even seem particularly strange, considering the wide range of afterlives and demands that the world was made up of when the Gods ruled. Miracles provided the effects of advanced technology and in the years after their destruction, human technology has progressed quickly.

On a personal level, Nokov didn’t want to die, but he really, really doesn’t want to be imprisoned on a ship. Especially as his powers are incredibly reduced from where they were at the moment of his death. His greatest trouble with dealing with other people won’t be that they might come from very strange worlds, but dealing with them at all, especially from what he sees as a position of weakness. So, breaches or floods that leave him feeling close to people against his will would be very hard for him. He also won’t like anything that reminds him of what he lost.

History:

Novok’s history is intertwined with the history of his country. ‘The Holy Lands’, later just known as the Continent, lived under the protection of their Gods for nearly a thousand years. These near-omnipotent ‘divinities’ ruled the continent, granting their people protection and allowing them to conquer and enslave the island nation of Saypur. The Continent was rich, powerful and full of miracles – in the most literal sense, almost all of which disappeared in a blink when the Saypuri found a way to kill the Gods. As the Continent had relied on these miracles and lived in the reality of their Gods, with their destruction the Continent was plunged into plague and chaos, along with a war they lose to the newly emerging Saypuri republic.

These Gods also had many children, as well as many other sorts of Divine creations. When the formerly enslaved Saypuri people swept through the continent, they did their best to destroy anything Divine that hadn’t vanished with the deaths of the Gods. They slaughtered the surviving offspring and destroyed or locked away miracles that still worked. Two had already retreated from their people and Jukov, a trickster God, hid himself away in a plane of glass. He also worked a miracle to hide the surviving Divine children.

The miracle worked by shifting reality around the children. They forgot who they were, instead thinking themselves just a little lost orphan mortal child and, in the nature of the Divine control over reality, they became that. Then they might be adopted by a common mortal family who loved and cared for them, so they were happy for a time. Then people would start to get suspicious as the children stopped aging after a while and then Jukov’s miracle would work again, making them children and resetting everything. They were sleepwalking children, repeating their youth over and over again, drifting from family to family. Without even leaving a memory behind. But sometimes they’d wake up, something would happen to their adopted family and that trauma would bring back the memories of the older one and they would remember everything, who they were and what they could do.

Nokov was one of these children. There was an accident and his family tragically lost, and he woke up to what he was. But on first waking he was still young and confused, and dealing with the remembered trauma of the war, along with the death of his mortal family. When in yet another orphanage, he performed some shadow tricks that were noticed by someone. The word got back to the Ministry and to Vinya Komayd, a woman ready to do anything. She came to him with the promise of help, and he went with her – only to find himself locked on a boat, far from the Continent where his powers were strongest and with his powers further restrained by the use of Kolkan’s sigils, a divine miracle that still worked as Kolkan was merely locked away.

He spent years being interrogated and tortured in the service of ‘Operation Rebirth’. The still only recently free Saypur is terrified of the Divine, something which they no longer had any defense against. Their idea was to create their own God, as protection in case the old Gods returned. They didn’t know how, but they were ready to try anything. They had a child Divinity in their hands, and they wanted to remake him as a true God, broken and reprogrammed to serve them.

But due to a series of events Kolkan was unlocked from his prison and killed. The trapped boy found some of his powers returned and broke his way out of his prison. Having escaped from this torture, Nokov wanted revenge, and a world where such a thing wouldn’t happen. With the power to reach into any dark place, he quickly amassed a lot of money, which he used to have Vinya Komayd assassinated and to hire other mercenaries for jobs.

To gain more power, he starts killing the other Divine children. He first has to make sure the remember, so he kills their families if they aren’t awake yet and then devours them. He takes them into himself – the depth of the night – and then they’re gone forever. From each, he takes whatever power they had over reality and added it to his own. His goal was to gain enough power to kill the remaining God, and then use his power to rewrite reality to create a ‘just’ world.

He manages to get very close to at least destroying the current world to remake it, though the question of whether there would be any real difference in a new one is one he ignores, but he’s killed by a Divine power greater than his, and so find himself on the Barge.

Sample Network Entry:

[As always, Nokov appears in shadow. He could just use audio, but then how could people appreciate the darkness of his cabin?]

I see there are certain behaviors that have not changed. From the first, humans have always tried to escape knowledge of themselves and the world. Yet if you must indulge in wine soaked bacchanalia, you could at least make it an offering. A gift to the night that sees all. Otherwise, flee back towards the light that seems to hold some safety in your mind.

[He saw people making out on deck.]

Sample RP:

Nokov has never been here before, and yet he knows that he has. Is this part of the pattern of the world? The cycles that he's been told happen again and again? He refuses to believe that. He could've actually changed that. If other people hadn't gotten in the way rather than accept that there was nothing they can do than he'd have been the one to fix it all. He prefers to focus on that then how much he's been stripped of the power he had finally gathered. On how much he hates where he is. 

One part of the ship he doesn't completely despise is the deck. The rest of the ship is often far too bright - and people are far too unreasonable about letting him (and it's letting, now) break a few lights to make things more comfortable. At least at night, he can sit in the shadows of the deck and almost fully disappear into them. It's not the same as what he should be able to do, but there's no light to hurt him and where most people can't see him. He doesn't want to hear them talk.

Sometimes he stands at the very edge of the deck. He pretends the railing isn't there and he could step forward off the ship and become part of the darkness that's foreign and yet always familiar. But the Admiral has barriers in place stronger than a mere railing. The Admiral has enough strength to keep him little more than the teenage boy he looks like. But it's not all gone. If anyone meets his eyes, they can still see a little of what he is. They are still the dark of the night with the glint of far away stars deep in the black. It can make some people leave him alone, at least.

Special Notes: Nokov doesn't exactly remember his time on the Barge, but he does have a feeling that he's been in this situation before (something he's not unused to), with certain memories stronger than others