Kirin, the Koi Goddess, the Light Magister of Tea, Immigration, Education, Etiquette, Koi Fish and Rain

The Chinese Unicorn, the k’i-lin, is one of the four animals of good omen; 

the others are the dragon, the phoenix, and the tortoise. 

The Unicorn is foremost of all the 360 creatures that live on land… 

Its appearance foretells the birth of an upright ruler. 

To wound the Chinese Unicorn or to come across its dead body is unlucky. 

The span of this animal’s natural life is a thousand years. 

-Jorge Luis Borges, the Book of Imaginary Beings

No Imperator is more beloved of Vancouver (and perhaps the world) than the beautiful Koi Goddess, Kirin. She is your dreams made flesh. She descended from her Island that Isn’t, the Mountain of Dreams, Peng Lai, and brought with her the promise of a better life. Her passage makes turns peasants into kings. A wish in one of her ponds can give you the most loving of wives. Invoking her name can substantially improve your efforts to find the cure to dangerous diseases. She has been worshiped throughout the world in a thousand small cults, by those who would be kings, or who would fall in love, or simply those who wanted a better life. Even so, the goddess of Rain struggles with a tragic existence. Peng Lai has been poisoned and cracked by saboteurs unseen, and now her precious Abigail Ng has been taken from her. Torment is often visited upon her, and she makes no secret that she believes this comes from her opposition to many of Lord Entropy’s Laws:

• The Windflower Law: We must all learn to love
• The Chestnut Law: We must learn to forgive
• The Rule of Man: Humanity deserves our respect.
• The Rule of War: Why must we make war on the Excrucians? Has none tried to understand their grievance?
• The Crowfoot Law: Makes us all complicit in Entropy’s tyranny.
• The Code for Humanity: Let humanity be as they would be.

Thus far, she merely voices her objections, but she has begun to grumble that Lord Entropy seeks to destroy her.

She has three powers.

• Abigail Ng, the Power of Tea, who was always destined to be Kirin’s power, who brought solace to the the tormented Koi Goddess. She’s taking Abigail’s death pretty hard.
• Bob, the Power of Immigration, a Zeta Reticulan who has forged a pact with Kirin to evacuate doomed humans from this world and resettle them elsewhere. In exchange, she allows him to smuggle aliens onto Earth.
• Deirdre Brooks, PhD and the Power of Education, a Bodhisattva who transcended both life and academics to become Kirin’s most potent power.

Her Flowers are the Lotus (the Key of the Descending Angel) and the Star of Bethlehem (the Key of Something, Changed Forever)

Estate of Tea

-Tea infuses water with its essence (2).
-Tea soothes pain (2)
-Tea quiets the din of the world (1)
-Tea is surrounded by beauty and class (1)

Domain Miracles of Tea

1. Make a cup of tea. Make a moment momentarily peaceful, or more beautiful, or more classy.
2. Know everything about a cup of tea (where it came from, what sort of tea it is), talk to a cup about what it has seen, sense the nearest tea.
3. Make a cup of tea a potent pain killer. Make a cup of tea enormously enlightening, or make a tea party/ceremony magnificently classy. Make a cup of tea very strong.
4. Conjure a pot of tea out of nothing. Summon tea to you. Animate tea like a water bender, lashing it around and attacking people with it.
5. Destroy a cup of tea. Remove taste or color from a cup of tea. Prevent a cup of tea from soothing someone, or from being classy. Look into a cup of tea and see through any other cup of tea, or know details about someone who drinks a cup of tea, or see the future in the tea leaves.
6. Transport a specific cup of tea from one place to another. A cup of tea can cure wounds, or fill a lake with tea-goodness, or become bitter enough to kill.
7. Create and animate a great tea tsunami that crushes cities. Creat a new flavor of tea ex-nihilo.
8. Remove a sort of tea from existence (“Nightshade tea is no longer possible”).
9. Oolong tea was never “blue” tea. Green Tea is native to China, rather than the Americas.

Persona Miracles of Tea

1. Make someone a little more soothing, or a little more bitter, or make their surroundings a little classier.
2. Become present in any cup of tea. See through any single cup of tea.
3. Change your surroundings to something classier and more beautiful. Infuse water with some element of our essence. Sooth the pain of others with a touch.
4. Infuse water with someone’s essence, so that people pick up their memories with a drink. Make someone harsh and bitter (without a bit of sugar, in any case). Surround someone with beautiful and classy people.
5. Remove someone’s bitterness. Erase their essence from water (such as their blood). Cast them into a world without class or beauty. Become incarnated in all cups of tea.
6. Make someone a divine saint of tea, for whom the presence of tea, or the drinking of tea, will greatly empower them. Make tea obey someone’s whim, turning into the greatest tea-master ever. Become able to soothe the pain of death. Turn the entire country around you into a place of beauty and class. Slip your entire essence into the water around you, becoming incarnated in water.
7. Make someone hatefully bitter and willing to kill. Turn someone into a scar that silences all around them. Suffuse an ocean with the essence of a dying ship-captain.
8. Remove the essence of the God of Salt from the ocean. Cast down a king by removing all beauty and class from around him. Pluck the thorn of hatred from the thumb of Lord Entropy.
9. Enchant an entire bloodline to require tea to survive, but to gain magical powers whenever they drink tea.

Estate of Immigration

– Immigration is feared by conservatives (1)
– Immigration crosses borders (3)
– Immigration moves people from places of despair to places of hope (1)
– Immigration brings a foreign influence into an area (2)

Domain Miracles of Immigration

1. Add a bit of foreign flavor to a local establishment or culture or individual (Give someone the ability to speak a new language for a little bit). Move someone closer to a place that will help them. Create a visible path from where you are to where you need to go. Get past customs.
2. Know something about a specific immigrant, or about the state of immigration in the area, or where the nearest ethnic district might be. Speak to any immigrant from anywhere without use of the Gift of Tongues.
3. Protect a specific immigrant from harm. Protect a small ethnic district from harm. Increase the immigration into a particular city.
4. Create a wave of immigrants into a city. Summon/Create/Control a specific immigrant. Open a gate from one world to another.
5. See the state of immigration in the future. Speak to a spooky immigrant and find out the truth of the future. Kill an immigrant. Damage or destroy an ethnic enclave. Prevent people from crossing a specific border. Remove foreign influences
6. Make a specific immigrant immortal. Make an ethnic enclave an eternal fixture of a city and a constant well-spring of its unusual culture, like NYC’s chinatown. Damage the walls of creation to allow more Excrucians to spill in. Change the ultimate destination/fate of a specific immigrant. Change the source, or destination, of a group of immigrants. Change what immigration will mean to a city. Shift an enclave or an immigrant from one city to another, or change someone’s origin point.
7. Create a mass migration from one location to another. Conjure an entire nation of immigrants from nothing.
8. Cast an entire nation back to their homeland. Remove all immigrants from a country.
9. Change the historical impact of a migration (“The Great Migration strengthened the Roman Empire”)/

Persona Miracles of Immigration

1. Make someone a little more controversial with conservatives. Give someone an accent, or the ability to speak a foreign language.
2. Become any immigrant.
3. Become terrifying to conservatives. Become able to cross any border (passing through locked doors, making it through customs). Create a foreign influence on someone (changing their language, or the local food, etc). Teleport someone to a better place.
4. Curse someone to be feared/hated by a conservative. Curse someone so that everyone around him speaks a language he doesn’t understand.
5. Incarnate within an entire immigrant enclave, or within all immigrants. Prevent someone from crossing a boarder, or from entering a better place.
6. Make someone able to sense immigrants, or to better understand them, or to guide them to where they need to go and to protect them. Teleport an entire nation to a better place. Add a foreign influence to country or a world (“No matter what planet he went to, Shakespeare and Coca-Cola followed thereafter). Become able to cross mystical borders (such as the border between life and death, or between worlds).
7. Throw someone across a border.
8. Prevent anyone from leaving a nation. Prevent an entire tribe from making it to their promised land for forty years!
9. Make a nation a beacon to all immigrants everywhere, even aliens (as has already been done with America).

Estate of Education

– Education turns a student into a master (2)
– Education reveals your ignorance (2)
– Education changes how you see the world (1)
– Education exacts a price for its wisdom (1)
– Education takes place in a school (1)

Domain Miracles of Education

1. Make someone a little more sophisticated without making them any smarter. Ring a school bell. Impress someone with your obviously superior intellect, or make them feel a little foolish. Know a useless bit of trivia. Conjure the ringing of a school bell. Summon up useless schoolwork.
2. Learn an interesting new fact! Intuitively know where someone was educated. Know the location of the nearest school.
3. Improve someone’s innate education so that they know something the didn’t before (or “had always known” this). Protect a teacher or a school building. Protect a specific school program from harm.
4. Conjure a teacher or student from nothing. Create a new class in a school with a wave of a hand (“Oh, Excrucian Studies 101? That’s on floor 2. Better hurry!”)
5. Open up a text book and learn the future from it. See anything that takes place in a school. Destroy a school, kill a teacher, or remove someone’s education (or at least their credentials) from them.
6. Ensure that a lesson is so thoroughly learned, it is never forgotten. Educate someone perfectly and instantly, making them a master in a mere montage. Rewrite the nature of someone’s education or a school program. Ensure that someone will learn at the feet of a particular teacher, learn a particular fact, or shape the impact of that person’s specific education on the world (“You’ll look back on this lesson and realize this was the beginning of your discovery of the cure for cancer”).
7. Create a new educational philosophy, a new franchise of schools, or an entire body of students.
8. Wipe out an entire topic of education, or destroy an entire nation’s educational system.
9. Change the destiny of a particular form of education (“Only get a STEM degree if you want to flip burgers. Liberate arts are where the money is at). Give a student a world-shaking destiny, provided he finishes his education (“If you want to conquer the world, you really need to learn your multiplication tables”)

Persona Miracles of Education

1. Make someone a little more educational. Make a place a little more school-like.
2. Be present in any single teacher; appear in any school.
3. Turn someone who has declared themselves your student into a master. Reveal someone’s specific ignorance about something, or convince others that he’s a (legitimately!) a fool. Beguile someone with illusions. Extract a supernatural price for your wisdom (their life, their first born, etc)
4. Anoint someone as a miraculous teacher, who can turn others into masters; anoint a location as a proper school.
5. A teacher’s lessons will never stick. This location is no longer a school. Someone’s ignorance will remain hidden. See everything that happens in a specific school, from all locations at once. Listen to the thoughts of every teacher. See through every PHD document in the world. Ensure that someone can never step foot in a school again. Death cannot occur in this school until the end of the day;
6. Turn someone into a powerful advocate for Education; A particular books or TV program becomes notoriously educational. Instantly make someone a master of something magical or powerful; reveal the ignorance of God; cast an illusion over an entire city;
7. An entire nation becomes a school; Marriages can only take place in schools; Death can only take place in schools;
8. Russia has no schools; Ensure an entire race cannot step foot on school grounds. Death cannot occur in any school;
9. Grant easy (or difficult) access of Education to a nation;

Estate of Koi

– Koi are ornamental carp (Koi are an ornamental version of their species) (4)
– Koi grant wishes (2)

– Koi belong in water gardens (1)

Aspect 2 (Touched-Up)
Persona (Koi) 1
Treasure 0
Miracle Points: 8
Common Gifts: Immortal (6), Glorious (2)
Gifts:

• Awaken Inner Potential (4): With a touch, a blessing or a kiss, the Koi Goddess can awaken your dharma and set it on fire. You will achieve your destiny now, rather than later, and your destiny will be even greater than anything you could have achieved on your own. This costs her a miracle point.
• Prophecy (1): The Koi Goddess knows the future. She can focus on a pool of water or a mirror and tell you what your destiny will be. Sometimes, the Koi Goddess will froth and lose herself and speak of the future. The Koi Goddess can also rewrite your destiny, but she only does this as an Imperial miracle.

Passions and Skills

Passion: “I want to make the world a better place” +1
Passion: “I want to be loved” +1
Superior Quality: Grace +2
Cool +2
Shine +5

Bonds and Afflictions

Bond: I am the most beloved in the world +3
Bond: I make dreams come true +2
Bond: Lord Entropy’s tyranny must be resisted +2
Bond: I find peace in Abigail +1
Bond: I find strength in Dierdre +1
Bond: I will honor my oath to Bob +1

Affliction: Everything I do has superhuman consequences +3

Belphegor, Devil of Corporations, Toys and Music

“This world is a machine. A machine for pigs. Fit only for the slaughtering of pigs.”
— The Engineer, A Machine for Pigs

Belphegor is the Devil of Corporations, Toys and Music.  His Powers are Magnus Carter, Dark Duke of Corporations, Damien Bogsworth, Dark Viscount of Toys and President-for-life of Toyland, and Chad Kroeger, Pawn of Music.  His Chancel is the Reincarnation Engine, a secretive construct of vast, steampunk architecture and metaphysical machinery whose purpose remains mysterious.  He rules over a cabal of powerful mortal conspirators who work together to secretly rule the world.  Through them, Belphegor hopes to create a New World Order.

Belphegor’s flowers are Acacia (Something which must be hidden) and Clemantis (Something given gifts).

The Estate of Corporations

• -Corporations seek to increase the profits of their shareholders (3)
• -Corporations are legally people (1)
• -Corporations are constructed out of legally-binding contracts (1)
• -Corporations only understand money (1)
• -Those under the thrall of Corporations eventually become empty suits (1)

The Estate of Music

• -Music is Sound made Art (2)
• -Music is seductive and alluring (1)
• -Music inspires passions and soothes worries (1)
• -Music makes you want to move (1)
• -Music is subjective and divisive (1)
• -Music sets the mood (1)

The Estate of Toys

• 

  -Toys are the playthings of others (3).

• -Toys tempt you to use them (1).
• -Toys spark nostalgia and fond memories (1).
• -Toys bring fun and amusement (1).
• -Toys are childish (1).

Background

Belphegor is not a “true devil” in the sense that he’s a creature native to hell, but a fallen angel, one who defied the wishes of heaven. Unlike most of his kin, he’s a recently fallen angel, a member of a secret cabal of angels that seek to subvert one of Heaven’s rules: That only the truly worthy can get into heaven.

In fact, Heaven demands that only the truly beautiful soulscan get into heaven, and no human soul is beautiful enough. Each time Belphegor was forces to send away a human soul for lacking the breathtaking perfection necessary to enter Heaven, he grieved, for human souls would never have a chance to embrace the beauty of heaven. For whom were the angels creating this beautiful Heaven if nobody could enjoy it?

Together, a cabal of like-minded angels got together and created the plans for the Reincarnation Engine. The Engine would take the beautiful, unique and pure things of whatever world it was built upon and strip them of that beauty and uniqueness. It would then take the souls of the damned who had been bound up in the laws of a demonic contract, and combine them with the stripped beauty and purity, infusing them with the necessary perfection to attain Heaven long enough to witness true grace.

Belphegor took the plans and fled from Heaven and took up haven in Hell and Earth, where he begin to lay the groundwork for his Reincarnation Engine. Through trickery and clever contracting, he stole the Estates of Toys and Music, among others, from their previous Imperators. He then bound himself to the world in 1602 with a powerful ritual in which he created a contract with a conspiracy of humans who sought to secretly rule the world. With this contract, he forced both the Estate of Corporations, which would make his Reincarnation Engine possible, and the closest thing he has to a son, Magnus Carter.

His Reincarnation Engine has been slowly and meticulously built and hidden in the folds of the world. Already, it devours that which is beautiful and pure, leaving behind stagnant, gray corporate swill, and then uses it to bind the souls of the damned, those who have pledged their souls to Belphegor to gain some power, to that beauty to forge newpeople. The Reincarnation Engine is currently flawed, though. It can only create fully-formed artificialpeople, ensouled automatons that look and seem almost entirely human, but are in fact built of the same sort metaphysical machinery as the Reincarnation Engine. Until the world is sufficiently reshaped that the Reincarnation Engine’s metaphysical machinery lies at the center of the world’s civilization, it’s “New World Order,” this is the best Belphegor can do. Currently, until it is perfected, Belphegor uses it to replace political figures or business leaders with simulcra, to create agents that he uses to advance his agenda, and beautiful youths with which he tempts the virtuous and fulfills the terms of contracts. One such example is Chad Kroeger’s (ex?) wife, Avril Lavigne.

Belphegor’s relationship with the Tacoma

The Tacoma is a dragon, and thus seeks to horde beautiful and pure things, such as treasure and princesses.  In so hording, he hampers the efforts of Belphegor to infuse the souls of the damned with purity and beauty.  Worse, the Tacoma is the Imperator of Secrets, which makes it highly probable that the Tacoma knows of Belphegor’s plot and his secret, angelic cabal and could expose him.  The Tacoma represents a grave risk to the efforts of Belphegor, so while Belphegor himself rarely picks a fight, over than an Imperial Miracle which Belphegor has not yet finished speaking, and isn’t sure if he should (it would trigger war between the two imperators), he fosters conflict between his powers and his minions and those of the Tacoma.

For his part, the Tacoma seems greatly amused by the rivalry with the Belphegor, and encourages his his powers to actively fight back. “It shall be glorious.” He rumbles when asked on the matter, before rolling over and going back to sleep.

Character Traits

Aspect 2 (Pulp-Hero) (6)
Domain 0 (0)
Persona 0 (0)
Persona 0 ()
Treasure 2 (6)
Miracle Points: 8
Common Gifts: Immortal (6), Flying (1), Glorious (2)
Gifts:

• Contracts: For 1 Miracle Point, if you sign a contract with Belphegor, he will change your destiny, as per Lesser Motion. He can change it to anything and from anything, but only as per the contract signed, and often with hidden drawbacks (“Did you read the fine print?”) (6 points)

Passions and Skills

• Passion: “Everyone deserves access to beauty” -1
• Superior Quality: Contract Lawyer +2
• Angelic Architecture +2
• Conspirator +3
• Witchcraft +1

Bonds and Afflictions ()

• Bond: I always keep (the letter of) my word (4)
• Bond: I love Magnus as a son (1)
• Bond: I honor the laws of toyland (1)
• Bond: I have promised to fulfill Chad’s dreams (1)
• Bond: I will bring about a new world order (2)
• Bond: I serve the agenda of a secret conspiracy of angels, the Reincarnation Engine (4)
• Affliction: Those who know my true name can control me (2)

Projects