Envy (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cobbledtogetherenvy) wrote2021-12-03 03:35 pm
cobbledtogetherenvy) wrote2021-12-03 03:35 pm
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User Name/Nick: Siobhan
User DW:fiercebadrabbit
E-mail/Plurk/Discord/PM to a character journal/alternate method of contact: plurk
Other Characters Currently In-Game: Xiao Xingchen, Brooklyn
Character Name: Envy
Series: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood
Age: Physically about fifteen, actually several hundred probably
From When?: His canon death in E54 “Beyond the Inferno” (the one that stuck), where he tears out and destroys his own philosopher’s stone following defeat and humiliation by Our Heroes.
Inmate Justification: Envy is a murderer in just about every permutation from the personal and petty to the genocidal, a manipulative liar without a hint of remorse, and generally of the opinion that humans are worthless, pathetic toys for him and other greater beings to use as they see fit. The trick is that it’s personal with him; the opposite of love isn’t hate but indifference. He wants what humans have, purpose and resilience and relationships, but the circumstances of his existence made that appear to be both impossible for him to grasp and shameful to desire. His road to the other side begins with letting go of the idea of humans as lesser beings, which opens him up to dealing with the devastation he’s wrought, but is the only way to ever have what he actually, well, envies. In his previous time onboard, Envy did lose his sense of superiority in a large part, but he didn't consciously or coherently learn to like humans any better. Enough of his illusions have been stripped and a lot of the motivation to be actively horrible went with, but he's still brittle and angry. Just not so energetic about it. Conceding that he doesn't care about his old goals or like himself has yet to lead to admitting what he does want, even to himself.
Arrival: Extremely against his will
Abilities/Powers: Envy is a homunculus, an artificially created being that doesn’t age, require any sort of sustenance, or suffer from illness, poison, etc. Like any homunculus, he is sustained by a philosopher’s stone, created by ritual sacrifice of a nonspecifically large number of innocents. He has rapid (though not unlimited) healing and normal injuries more or less don’t matter unless there’s a sustained barrage. Physical abilities (speed, strength, stamina, etc.) are all well over the human norm. Envy on his own isn’t an accomplished combatant and relies on these powers entirely. He specifically is an extremely malleable shapeshifter, with the ability to take on the specific appearance of a human or animal, shift parts of his body into just about any shape, and generally treat himself as a horrible canvas. His default form of a passably human teenager isn’t his “true” form, which is a monstrous creature with uncomfortable numbers of eyes, limbs, and teeth, and which bristles with horrible moaning human figures representing the souls locked inside his stone, which are marginally conscious and possess some of their own memories (a fact he actively denies). Because of the size of the real Envy, the one who’s usually physically present is much heavier and stronger than it looks. Furthermore, if he takes enough damage, he can abandon both these forms for a lamprey-mouthed, squirrel-sized lizard-monster with huge eyes and a squeaky voice, which is mostly powerless but can still talk and, if he manages to pull it off, possess humans and created beings as a step toward regaining his proper form.
On the barge, Envy will be stuck in the humanoid form, which will be as heavy as usual, and only some of his speed and strength. Because his shapeshifting is locked down, his healing will be more limited and he won’t have access to his usual escape hatches, so while damaging him will still be a lot of work, killing him will take a lot less effort.
Inmate Information: Envy is a homunculus, “born” from an ancient, eldritch being tearing out the weak pieces of its own mind and turning them into useful pawns with independent thoughts. He’s not really alive in any meaningful sense, and his existence hinges on a philosopher’s stone, a magic core made out of thousands of screaming souls. He didn’t exactly start out on the road to heroism. While some of Envy’s sibling homunculi were fairly simple creatures, following their father’s orders and using their straightforward powers to further his goals, Envy is a bit of an odd one. He doesn’t really embody the sin of envy the way the others do their own namesake failings, doesn’t act out of envy or inspire it in others. Even the more complex homunculi, his brothers Pride and Greed, were able to internalize their own feelings about humans and their own wants more simply, and through the lens of their own sins. Envy seems to be more of a vessel for feeling his father’s envy toward humans and the things they seem to have that the homunculi can’t. He’s a bitter, angry, rage-fueled mess as a result, but in hating humans, he has to care about them. A homunculus who did far less damage but never thought much about it one way or another might be less redeemable than Envy, who causes wars for fun but obsesses over human victims with rabid enthusiasm.
Envy’s actual life, such as it is, consisted mainly of furthering his Father’s plans to attain even greater power by ritually sacrificing a country to be… an even bigger, cooler monster. As a shapeshifter, he was in the trenches, setting up conflicts that would become mass sacrifices, maximizing bloodshed, feeding both witting and unwitting human pawns information, and covering their tracks whenever the homunculi made too big a mess. Exactly how old he is is unclear, and probably doesn’t matter, because there were no life events, no real relationships (except with his siblings, and those were fractious at best and indifferent at worst), no ups and downs. Just ruining things. Both because of his own nature and because his mission was generally to be the people whose lives he was ruining, Envy was far more sharply aware of human wants and needs and foibles than anything his fellow immortal weirdos were up to. He hated them, but he understood them. He just used that understanding to make everything worse.
Envy’s known crimes range from manipulating a child into abandoning her quest and country for his convenience to imprisoning a repentant war criminal just to taunt him over the futility of ever hoping to fix what he’d done wrong to hunting down and murdering a troublesome witness (ultimately taking the man’s wife’s shape to kill him for maximum horrible points) to starting a civil war by publicly murdering a child. He responds with petty cruelty even when he has straightforward reasons to take action, twisting knives literally and figuratively, and has done so as long as he’s existed. Have to have a little fun.
His tasks rely on his powers, for the most part, usually his specific abilities, because what are the homunculi for but to be useful to Father. He’s never really developed skills or impulses beyond those. He’s not one of the fighting homunculi, and he’s strong enough simply by dint of being what he is to come out on top of most humans if combat does break out, so why learn to be more effective? He can look and sound like anyone, any time, so why look beyond the surface level of what humans do and why? He’s better than any other natural or created being because he’s a homunculus, and he’s less than Father, and that’s all there is to him. He doesn’t even have much of a relationship with most of his siblings, viewing most of them with mild annoyance or grudging respect as the moment calls for it. The only one he liked, insofar as he likes anything, was Lust, and when she was lost, he didn’t fight for her restoration or go out of his way for vengeance. Too much trouble. Everything is set out for him, everything is circumscribed, and there’s no variation to be found but in what cruel games he can play with his targets. Envy has, and was always doomed to have, a very stunted, sad inner life as a result. He is a tool and a superior being and between the two lies the whole of his existence.
Envy is mean, petty, vindictive, and cruel, because it’s all he’s got. Envy is manipulative and dishonest, because that’s the purpose he was made for. He loses his composure at the slightest setback and blames everyone around him, and when he’s stymied, just shuts down, because what else is there? Moment to moment, his instability, his fragile but inflated ego, his vanity and brittle temper, all are nasty little ripples in a sea of directionless, empty ugliness.
In his previous time on the barge, Envy spent most of his time being recreationally horrible, first for fun, then to test the limits of the boat, and finally because he had to. A few (very few) humans or human adjacent beings got under his skin enough for him to be fond of them, major glitches in his worldview that he never really reconciled. Most importantly, time away from home and mission opened up space for him to question and confront, to admit he hates what he is and has no loyalty to a family that didn't care about him, and even to wonder (a little) about whether some of that is fixable. He found the potential to change, even if it doesn't look like much from the outside.
Path to Redemption: Envy has a lot of problems, but they all rest on his view of humans as lesser beings. Human lives don’t mean anything, so destroying them is fine. Humans think they’re so great, and it’s only right to teach them they and all their pretty beliefs are nothing. Humans are stupid and violent and it’s their own fault they’re so easy to destroy. Human meaning and family and strength and comfort are very clearly just lies they tell themselves and when you reveal that by ruining everything, you win, and you definitely don’t want that safety and camaraderie and purpose yourself. Nope.
Envy’s road is a hard one, because if he gives up his idea of humans as lesser, he has to face what he’s done to them. It’ll be ugly and probably full of rage and recrimination and steps backward for every lurch forward. But because what he really wants is what other people have (he is Envy, after all), being able to admit it is his only way forward.
He’s likely to approach the barge kicking and screaming for a while. Envy comes from a pretty horrific death that ultimately was his own decision. Not much of a decision, but he was losing and humiliated and hopeless, and he chose oblivion because his other choice would be admitting his own emptiness and failures. He’ll be angry he’s not dead, angry at the powers he’s used to for not helping him, angry at the powers that currently interfere with him for daring, and angry at any stupid human (or sufficiently human-adjacent person) who is unfortunate enough to be in his vicinity. And he won’t learn from head on confrontations well. He’s used to those, and well defended. Shouting is comfortable and familiar and he can do that forever. People who are interesting (or even just confusing) will catch his curiosity better than arguers. That said, he does not need to have his shit put up with. Questions will just work better than assertions.
Breaches are always messy but necessary learning experiences. Floods will probably register a lot less, because “a powerful force doing inscrutable magical things to you” is a pretty ordinary element of his reality, but empathy and having an even slightly human existence will be rough, however needed. (Probably don’t let him off on ports, he will do horrible things to local populations just to prove he can.)
History: Here.
Sample Network Entry: Here
Sample RP: Here
Special Notes: Technically, Envy’s existence hinges on a magic rock full of semi-conscious dead people, and his “true form” is dotted with semi-independent screaming faces. On the barge, as the admiral is presumably anti-human-soul-rock, the admiral has presumably left these on autopilot, but the fact that Envy is actually a lot of people (while also being just part of one person) is something he should deal with, so it won’t be completely ignored.
User DW:
fiercebadrabbitE-mail/Plurk/Discord/PM to a character journal/alternate method of contact: plurk
Other Characters Currently In-Game: Xiao Xingchen, Brooklyn
Character Name: Envy
Series: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood
Age: Physically about fifteen, actually several hundred probably
From When?: His canon death in E54 “Beyond the Inferno” (the one that stuck), where he tears out and destroys his own philosopher’s stone following defeat and humiliation by Our Heroes.
Inmate Justification: Envy is a murderer in just about every permutation from the personal and petty to the genocidal, a manipulative liar without a hint of remorse, and generally of the opinion that humans are worthless, pathetic toys for him and other greater beings to use as they see fit. The trick is that it’s personal with him; the opposite of love isn’t hate but indifference. He wants what humans have, purpose and resilience and relationships, but the circumstances of his existence made that appear to be both impossible for him to grasp and shameful to desire. His road to the other side begins with letting go of the idea of humans as lesser beings, which opens him up to dealing with the devastation he’s wrought, but is the only way to ever have what he actually, well, envies. In his previous time onboard, Envy did lose his sense of superiority in a large part, but he didn't consciously or coherently learn to like humans any better. Enough of his illusions have been stripped and a lot of the motivation to be actively horrible went with, but he's still brittle and angry. Just not so energetic about it. Conceding that he doesn't care about his old goals or like himself has yet to lead to admitting what he does want, even to himself.
Arrival: Extremely against his will
Abilities/Powers: Envy is a homunculus, an artificially created being that doesn’t age, require any sort of sustenance, or suffer from illness, poison, etc. Like any homunculus, he is sustained by a philosopher’s stone, created by ritual sacrifice of a nonspecifically large number of innocents. He has rapid (though not unlimited) healing and normal injuries more or less don’t matter unless there’s a sustained barrage. Physical abilities (speed, strength, stamina, etc.) are all well over the human norm. Envy on his own isn’t an accomplished combatant and relies on these powers entirely. He specifically is an extremely malleable shapeshifter, with the ability to take on the specific appearance of a human or animal, shift parts of his body into just about any shape, and generally treat himself as a horrible canvas. His default form of a passably human teenager isn’t his “true” form, which is a monstrous creature with uncomfortable numbers of eyes, limbs, and teeth, and which bristles with horrible moaning human figures representing the souls locked inside his stone, which are marginally conscious and possess some of their own memories (a fact he actively denies). Because of the size of the real Envy, the one who’s usually physically present is much heavier and stronger than it looks. Furthermore, if he takes enough damage, he can abandon both these forms for a lamprey-mouthed, squirrel-sized lizard-monster with huge eyes and a squeaky voice, which is mostly powerless but can still talk and, if he manages to pull it off, possess humans and created beings as a step toward regaining his proper form.
On the barge, Envy will be stuck in the humanoid form, which will be as heavy as usual, and only some of his speed and strength. Because his shapeshifting is locked down, his healing will be more limited and he won’t have access to his usual escape hatches, so while damaging him will still be a lot of work, killing him will take a lot less effort.
Inmate Information: Envy is a homunculus, “born” from an ancient, eldritch being tearing out the weak pieces of its own mind and turning them into useful pawns with independent thoughts. He’s not really alive in any meaningful sense, and his existence hinges on a philosopher’s stone, a magic core made out of thousands of screaming souls. He didn’t exactly start out on the road to heroism. While some of Envy’s sibling homunculi were fairly simple creatures, following their father’s orders and using their straightforward powers to further his goals, Envy is a bit of an odd one. He doesn’t really embody the sin of envy the way the others do their own namesake failings, doesn’t act out of envy or inspire it in others. Even the more complex homunculi, his brothers Pride and Greed, were able to internalize their own feelings about humans and their own wants more simply, and through the lens of their own sins. Envy seems to be more of a vessel for feeling his father’s envy toward humans and the things they seem to have that the homunculi can’t. He’s a bitter, angry, rage-fueled mess as a result, but in hating humans, he has to care about them. A homunculus who did far less damage but never thought much about it one way or another might be less redeemable than Envy, who causes wars for fun but obsesses over human victims with rabid enthusiasm.
Envy’s actual life, such as it is, consisted mainly of furthering his Father’s plans to attain even greater power by ritually sacrificing a country to be… an even bigger, cooler monster. As a shapeshifter, he was in the trenches, setting up conflicts that would become mass sacrifices, maximizing bloodshed, feeding both witting and unwitting human pawns information, and covering their tracks whenever the homunculi made too big a mess. Exactly how old he is is unclear, and probably doesn’t matter, because there were no life events, no real relationships (except with his siblings, and those were fractious at best and indifferent at worst), no ups and downs. Just ruining things. Both because of his own nature and because his mission was generally to be the people whose lives he was ruining, Envy was far more sharply aware of human wants and needs and foibles than anything his fellow immortal weirdos were up to. He hated them, but he understood them. He just used that understanding to make everything worse.
Envy’s known crimes range from manipulating a child into abandoning her quest and country for his convenience to imprisoning a repentant war criminal just to taunt him over the futility of ever hoping to fix what he’d done wrong to hunting down and murdering a troublesome witness (ultimately taking the man’s wife’s shape to kill him for maximum horrible points) to starting a civil war by publicly murdering a child. He responds with petty cruelty even when he has straightforward reasons to take action, twisting knives literally and figuratively, and has done so as long as he’s existed. Have to have a little fun.
His tasks rely on his powers, for the most part, usually his specific abilities, because what are the homunculi for but to be useful to Father. He’s never really developed skills or impulses beyond those. He’s not one of the fighting homunculi, and he’s strong enough simply by dint of being what he is to come out on top of most humans if combat does break out, so why learn to be more effective? He can look and sound like anyone, any time, so why look beyond the surface level of what humans do and why? He’s better than any other natural or created being because he’s a homunculus, and he’s less than Father, and that’s all there is to him. He doesn’t even have much of a relationship with most of his siblings, viewing most of them with mild annoyance or grudging respect as the moment calls for it. The only one he liked, insofar as he likes anything, was Lust, and when she was lost, he didn’t fight for her restoration or go out of his way for vengeance. Too much trouble. Everything is set out for him, everything is circumscribed, and there’s no variation to be found but in what cruel games he can play with his targets. Envy has, and was always doomed to have, a very stunted, sad inner life as a result. He is a tool and a superior being and between the two lies the whole of his existence.
Envy is mean, petty, vindictive, and cruel, because it’s all he’s got. Envy is manipulative and dishonest, because that’s the purpose he was made for. He loses his composure at the slightest setback and blames everyone around him, and when he’s stymied, just shuts down, because what else is there? Moment to moment, his instability, his fragile but inflated ego, his vanity and brittle temper, all are nasty little ripples in a sea of directionless, empty ugliness.
In his previous time on the barge, Envy spent most of his time being recreationally horrible, first for fun, then to test the limits of the boat, and finally because he had to. A few (very few) humans or human adjacent beings got under his skin enough for him to be fond of them, major glitches in his worldview that he never really reconciled. Most importantly, time away from home and mission opened up space for him to question and confront, to admit he hates what he is and has no loyalty to a family that didn't care about him, and even to wonder (a little) about whether some of that is fixable. He found the potential to change, even if it doesn't look like much from the outside.
Path to Redemption: Envy has a lot of problems, but they all rest on his view of humans as lesser beings. Human lives don’t mean anything, so destroying them is fine. Humans think they’re so great, and it’s only right to teach them they and all their pretty beliefs are nothing. Humans are stupid and violent and it’s their own fault they’re so easy to destroy. Human meaning and family and strength and comfort are very clearly just lies they tell themselves and when you reveal that by ruining everything, you win, and you definitely don’t want that safety and camaraderie and purpose yourself. Nope.
Envy’s road is a hard one, because if he gives up his idea of humans as lesser, he has to face what he’s done to them. It’ll be ugly and probably full of rage and recrimination and steps backward for every lurch forward. But because what he really wants is what other people have (he is Envy, after all), being able to admit it is his only way forward.
He’s likely to approach the barge kicking and screaming for a while. Envy comes from a pretty horrific death that ultimately was his own decision. Not much of a decision, but he was losing and humiliated and hopeless, and he chose oblivion because his other choice would be admitting his own emptiness and failures. He’ll be angry he’s not dead, angry at the powers he’s used to for not helping him, angry at the powers that currently interfere with him for daring, and angry at any stupid human (or sufficiently human-adjacent person) who is unfortunate enough to be in his vicinity. And he won’t learn from head on confrontations well. He’s used to those, and well defended. Shouting is comfortable and familiar and he can do that forever. People who are interesting (or even just confusing) will catch his curiosity better than arguers. That said, he does not need to have his shit put up with. Questions will just work better than assertions.
Breaches are always messy but necessary learning experiences. Floods will probably register a lot less, because “a powerful force doing inscrutable magical things to you” is a pretty ordinary element of his reality, but empathy and having an even slightly human existence will be rough, however needed. (Probably don’t let him off on ports, he will do horrible things to local populations just to prove he can.)
History: Here.
Sample Network Entry: Here
Sample RP: Here
Special Notes: Technically, Envy’s existence hinges on a magic rock full of semi-conscious dead people, and his “true form” is dotted with semi-independent screaming faces. On the barge, as the admiral is presumably anti-human-soul-rock, the admiral has presumably left these on autopilot, but the fact that Envy is actually a lot of people (while also being just part of one person) is something he should deal with, so it won’t be completely ignored.