Mephistopheles

OOC

GAME: Neopolis
DESCRIPTION: Freeze-rays and monsters and magic and superpowers, oh my!
DATE: October 2009
PB: Eddie Redmayne
JOURNAL: mephist

IC

Name: Dante Decarabia.
Age/Birthdate: Eighteen years old, born sometime in 1991. Dante doesn't know the exact date, but has arbitrarily decided on the 6th of June.
Sexuality: …Powersexual? He's fairly disinterested for now. It doesn't help that he views all other demons in Neopolis with ill-veiled hatred and competitive drive.
Alias/Codename: Mephistopheles.

Concept: Mephistopheles is an old-fashioned demon, complete with every aspect from campy pop culture: red horns, red forked tail, a predominantly red wardrobe, red hair, and a red pitchfork required for his demonic magic. This does not, however, mean that he isn't a creature to be feared — no, quite the contrary! He sips a diet tea called Eville, keeps soul contracts locked in his enchanted filing cabinet, and represents the deepest pits of hell named — wait for it — Corporate Bureaucracy. Brought back to the surface world to master his trade with mortal souls, all of young Dante's pitchfork magic is wholly contingent upon his promotion and progress in the Lowerarchy. If he wants an increase in his magic quota for the month, he has to sign forms for it. In triplicate. And send blind copies. It's uncertain what's most horrifying: his cold and callous demeanour, or his corporate jargon. Let's think synergy, people.

Faculty: Gothic.
Year: First year.
Skills: Pitchfork magic © (©) Hell, Inc. His abilities include:

• Enhanced strength and speed. Also uncontrollable flaming during moments of distress — which can get embarrassing sometimes.
• Telekinesis. Generally used for moving things back and forth or slamming enemies around.
• Using the pitchfork to appear and disappear in a puff of smoke and brimstone, mad laughter optional. Dante usually coughs like crazy each time. Sometimes he even gets his tail caught in things.
• Contract magic. By forging unique individual contracts with humans, Dante can barter and trade various advantages for them — this varies according to the deal, and whether or not he can score the appropriate incentive from his higherups in the Lowerarchy. Usual incentives include money, good luck, bad luck for enemies, glamour charms, love spells, money, popularity, good health, delights from the smorgasbord called the seven sins, and money.
• General magic. His demonic blood lets him access a certain amount of magical skill, and education in Neopolis has been teaching him how to harness it. Dante will never be a powerful sorcerer, but he can do spells!

Alliance: The Evil League of Evil, more by philosophy than practice. Dante offers the official compliments of the Tempters' Training College to the ELE, but all too isn't interested in joining it.

Personality: It's a devil-eat-devil world down in Hell, and Dante reflects this. Where some might consider demons to be mischievously malevolent creatures, Dante is actually deathly serious — he is sombre and grim and not prone to chuckling unless it happens to involve the brutal evisceration of kittens, or a particularly ironic Darwin Award. Irony is the flavour of choice in Hell, considering Tartarus is the realm of fitting and appropriate punishments. Accordingly, the humour in Dante's division was always sporadic and hard to predict; he oscillates between grim sobriety and whimsical cruelty.

His brand of villainy would be terrifying — if he were a Saturday morning cartoon, that is. Dante is so unrepentantly over-the-top that one wouldn't be surprised to find him twirling a moustache, tying girls to railroad tracks, and capering on someone's shoulder in a puff of brimstone. He enjoys overblown exaggeration of his ~monstrosity~, and often turns an explosive shade of red whenever angered. Dante fiercely restrains his anger, however, and represses it beneath layers of blasé respectability and aloof sarcasm. The more distanced, after all, the cooler you'll seem!

Partially due to his unfamiliarity with the surface world, he hangs onto a superiority complex like it's his security blanket. As snobbish he might seem (and how snooty regarding his tastes), Dante isn't actually too discriminating regarding who he associates with. His home-realm operated on a different function than ELE vs. BHH; hell welcomes all applicants, after all. He'll socialise with anyone, but hesitates to call students "friends". Instead, he cultivates Associates™ and partners.

Dante likes bones, cemeteries, crime shows (!), and the phrase "rue the day". This is largely due to the linguistics of the Lowerarchy itself, but Dante's language is saturated with corporate buzzwords and jargon. He takes notes and memorises project deadline quotes. He makes schedules, memos, post-its, meeting requests and forms in triplicate. His whole life is structured around an ominous whiteboard over his desk, meticulously (and neurotically) colour-coded.

Dante believes he has no soul, and that it disappeared along with his pet hellhound, Shemp. He isn't actually too far from the truth; having spent so many years operating on a life based on torture and maiming, he rarely bats an eye at bloodshed and possesses a severely stunted sense of empathy. He does try, though; in fostering communication with his Associates™, Dante sometimes finds himself consciously struggling to wrap his mind around mortal concerns. In these respects, he's not all too different from his cousin Rose.

He has his weak spots, however. Dante is a compulsive snacker, particularly on ground-up bones. His homepage is set to Cuteoverload. He's sensitive about his half-blood heritage. He is deeply, intensely frazzled about his performance assessment meetings, and as desperate to reconnect with his father as he's bitter at the demon for being gone for so long. He draws his feelings — generally awful landscape pieces, and illustrations of torture and hell and grotesquery. He's actually quite sensitive about his artwork, and often quite fretty and anxious to hear if he's doing well. More often than not, it's only inspired bemused "Er… that's nice?" reactions from his art teachers over the years.

History:

• Dante Decarabia's single-handed determination to climb hell's bureaucracy stems from his own father's success in the business. Walking in Belial's footsteps was nervewracking; in his heyday, the father was an utterly successful and unrepentantly evil soul-possessing, contract-signing, mortal-torturing scoundrel. He specialised in deal-making, and roamed the world conning innocent mortals — until he met the one woman who was, well, incorruptible. Her name, appropriately enough, was Hope. And like some tale of starcrossed lovers, Belial fell head over heels for her, rebelled against his father, quit his job, fled to the mortal plane and married the human. Good times!
• Redemption doesn't always last, however, and even the most well-intentioned demon can get… well… bored of the surface world. Despite them having an infant son together — Dante — the father soon found himself drifting back towards old habits. Hope, who despite her stubbornly good disposition and strong moral fibre, wasn't exactly a woman to be trifled with, either — all the reasons he fell for her in the first place. The marriage soured and fell apart. Badly. Belial left, leaving his son behind, and Hope raised their half-demon child alone.
• Despite not having heard too many good things about his father — Hope was, if anything, biased — Dante still met his father every so often in order to maintain a relationship with him. He found himself in awe of the terrifying demon. For a child who had grown used to dull monotonous normality, Belial's flashy life was something to look up to, as saturated in material enjoyment as it was. In the meantime, Dante went to Neopolitan schools, had a few embarrassing demon-power-related accidents, and visited hellandia every so often. He spent most summers there, trading in a hot Californian summer for an even hotter environs.
• But then Hope remarried when the boy was 12, sending Dante to live with his dad and to ~reconnect~ with him. He was excited about the prospect at first, but life down below soon turned out to be something else entirely. Living in hellandia brought out all his nascent demonic sides, and in attempts to be more like The Other Kids, Dante became more and more of a devil. He took to their mentalities like a fish into water — or in this case, a fish in brimstone and sulphur, but whatever. It didn't help that Belial, having gone full-time back into tempting and contract-writing, was almost perennially absent on long 'business trips' and had no time to spare for fathering.
• Meanwhile, Dante progressed through the ranks at the Tempters' Training College… and was bullied mercilessly for being half-human. This barbaric, unchecked treatment by his peers withered his self-esteem and hardened his own cruelty. It was three years of nigh-torture — it got worse and worse and worse, and Dante was still getting sparing attention from Belial, who was constantly busy with his career. Finally, life at the College became intolerable; Dante became a troublemaker, and in one rage-filled incident, accidentally set the school on fire. The College burned down. (What irony!)
• The boy was suspended for arson, had to spend several months in the House of Correction for Incompetent Tempters, and there was no doubt that the debacle was a cry for attention. Realising his mistake, Belial soon retired from active duty and decided to teach and spend more time on his budding boy. Dante was fifteen, and they moved up top to Neopolis. Dante went to Fenris Academy while Belial started schmoozing with ELE people; he also decided to meet and stay in touch with others in Neopolis of demonic heritage. There were gettogethers with Esme Tucson's parents, as Lurker and Covetous hoped Dante's League-friendly mentality would rub off on her. The Decarabias had a distant cousin in Neopolis, as well: Rose Scarlett.
• When the Academy opened, Belial got a job there, and by pulling strings with his old contacts below, he scored Dante an official Temptership on Earth — which would enable him to use pitchfork magic.
• The pitchfork is only a means to an end, however; it grants him his abilities, but the end goal is always, always forging magical contracts with mortals. People are bound to Dante when they agree to one of his contracts (obviously, they have to sign in blood), and for every contract made — no matter how small — his pitchfork is imbued with even more Hellish Power™. To get it upgraded, he needs to climb up the corporate ladder, and schedule the occasional meeting with his supervisor down below to assess his quota and evaluate his efficiency.

Played-By: Eddie Redmayne

fun questions!
Aspirations: To corrupt others. To climb the ranks of the Lowerarchy and upgrade his pitchfork. To find a human to write a soulbinding contract with, in order to greatly augment his own skills.
What would be the title of the comic book starring your character? The Tragic Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mephistopheles.

NOTES

LYRICS: everybody’s sick for something that they can find fascinating. everyone but you, and even you aren’t feeling well.
QUOTE: Some fellows, they say, are possessed with the devil, but this great fellow were able to possess the greatest devil and make him worse.

• "I will grind your bones into dust and sprinkle it on my cereal."
• "I will pick my teeth with your fibula."
• "Your mother sold her soul for a night in bed with me. ;x" <— too playful? hrm.

"Laughter of this kind does us no good and should always be discouraged. Besides, the phenomenon is of itself disgusting and a direct insult to the realism, dignity, and austerity of Hell."
"We have trained them to think of the future as a promised land which favoured heroes attain—not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is."

the House of Correction for Incompetent Tempters.
Tempters' Training College for young devils
official Temptership on Earth
active service
oh my devil

Intelligence Department, Research & Development Department, philological/linguistics
Beelzebub, what a useful word!
Hell forbid!

classes (term 2)

• Personal Development
• Economics
• Math
• Advanced Transformative Theory
• Curses and Hexes
• Heaven and Hell: Otherworldly Bodies on Earth

classes (term 3)

• Personal Development
• Economics
• Math
• Ritualistic Magics of the World
• Curses and Hexes II
• Sin-ergy: Understanding Demon-Human Relations