OOC
GAME: Canonish
DESCRIPTION: Literary multi-fandom game.
DATE: May 2008
PB: Liv Tyler
JOURNAL: Miss Zuigiber
IC
CHARACTER'S FULL NAME: War. Also known as the Second Horseman, one of the four Bringers of the Apocalypse, Scarlett, Carmine Zuigiber — or just "Red".
BOOKVERSE: Good Omens
AUTHOR: Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
CHARACTER HISTORY: War has been around ever since one caveman first got the bright idea to hit another one with a heavy stick. It's been lurking in the seedy corners of the collective human mind for millennia; everyone knows this. It's also been sidling along in corporeal form for much the same amount of time; not a lot of people know that. Not as inconspicuous as Pestilence, but almost as pervasive as Death and very much as hands-on as Famine, the second horse(wo)man has enjoyed millennia of giving humans a helping hand to hack, chop, maim, stab, crush, bludgeon, smash, shoot, and ultimately blow each other up with varying degrees of success. Invariably much more success with Red around.
War wasn't always female, though; for a while, he was a big man with a beard, in the days of brute strength and splintering bone and good old Viking pride. But after warfare got easier and easier, and weapons more effective (War was doing his job very well, it must be said), a female body seemed to fit the profile better.
There were a few centuries of that, and mostly she was just killing time, biding the decades and waiting for the big day. The last huzzah. The final hooplah. The Apocalypse itself, and going out with as big of a bang as she and her cohorts could manage — only the day didn't work out exactly as planned, so War had to take an unscheduled and involuntary detour back into the minds of men, courtesy of Adam Young, the erstwhile Antichrist.
She stayed there until the bookverses exploded. With Wonderland going mad, she suddenly had a job to do again. It was time to take up arms and tools once more, and she was especially glad of it, because it meant having a body again. She'd always liked doing her task by hand.
Now, she's doing something she's never done before: repeating a career. Weapons and arms trade just works so blessed well when you have dozens of new universes to visit and pay your questionable respects to, after all.
CHARACTER APPEARANCE: It was always tall, red-headed, and with distinctly unnerving orange eyes. The slinky red dresses, however, are relatively new, as are the breasts; War looks like something all men want to get into bed with, which is only appropriate, really, all things considered. She seems like an attractive twenty-five-year-old woman, and things are probably going to stay that way for a while.
CHARACTER PERSONALITY: War. What is it good for? Absolutely everything, if you ever bothered to ask it.
War likes getting its hands dirty. Its appearance may have changed over the years, since it's no longer a big burly man — but then again, we aren't hacking at each other with spears anymore. War has become cleaner, sleeker, more streamlined; now it deals with pistols and bombs, mines and missiles, and it deals with seduction. She's not lust, but she recognises that tell-tale gleam in a man's eye meaning he wants something she has to offer — and odds are she's willing sto sell it, as long as it hurts. All four of the horsemen walk hand-in-hand with death, but War has always taken a more direct approach, stepping right into the trenches before wreaking her havoc and then stepping right out. She sows the seeds of chaos like an artist touching up their masterpiece.
She's dry, classy, and dangerous in her behaviour and effect — but surprisingly enough, she's also colloquial, blunt and straightforward, perfectly capable of being somewhat rude and impolite. She's coy and infuriating about as often as she's blunt and infuriating. War is a fan of slang and informal tone, because when you get right down to it, nothing's quite as simple as warfare: Grab Pointy Object A; Kill Person B with Pointy Object A. Mission accomplished. She might sound English, but truth is she fits in everywhere. The creature lives for the moment, for glory, and for her own individual brand of play.
War and Famine have spent a lot of time amongst humans, and associating for so long with mankind has brought her relatively close to them — but it has never, ever made her human. She might enjoy their physical comforts, but some things you just can't get past, and being an anthropomorphic representation of universal slaughter is one of them. She never bonds properly. She socialises, but no one sees beneath the surface. Probably because there's nothing much there, aside from a pile of even bigger nasty, glinting sharp and dangerous. The closest things to friends she has are the other agents of the apocalypse. At least they have something in common.
It may not have worked out last time, but it feels a bit like she has a second chance. It's time for Doomsday II: The Sequel, and Carmine Zuigiber's right there on the frontlines, smile and sword at the ready, foot on the ignition.
