Duke Mikhainon
Voted "Most Likely to Have Already Conquered The World" in the 2015 Yearbook Awards
by @Tom Marvolo Riddle
human name: Gabriel Baltimore
rumor name: The Devil
Age: Incalculable
Birthday: Predates Calendars
Gender: Genderless
Species: Goetic Demon
Category: Citizen, Supervillain
Career:
+ Wish-granting demon
+ Businessman
+ Proprietor of Temptations and Gomorrah
Appearance Description
Duke Mikainon is a Lovecraft-esque Eldritch Demon with features of a Medieval king, an octopus, a bat and a lion. He has thousands of eyes, a sharp mouth full of spikes, an armor made of gold and bones, monster arms and giant-bat like wings. His form is literally too incomprehensible, too marvelous and too terrifying for mortal eyes to behold that those who have gazed upon his visage either went mad or intentionally stabbed their eyes out so they would never have to see him ever again.
His chosen default form on Earth for the moment, Gabriel Baltimore, is kind of pretty. He’s a six foot tall white male with short deep red hair and golden cat-like eyes. He has a lean and toned build, with a light tan and mild freckling around the nose. His features are androgynous-leaning, if not outright feminine. Gabriel has a smooth baritone voice.
As far as fashion goes, Gabriel is very modern and formal, preferring Italian suits for everyday wear. Sometimes he dons the occasional leather jacket because it makes him feel cool. Gabe, no, you’re a dad. His colors are black and red with the occasional white and gold. If there are patterns or jewelry, they’re very tasteful and not overdone. He almost always carries a silver dagger or a gun on his person at all times.
His form is subject to change whenever he feels like it. He has walked around in the form of a blonde woman named Cecilia to Lochlann and a white-haired Japanese man by the name of Yuki to Tucker. In animal form, he favors a black raven.
Personality Description
updated as of January 2016
Duke Mikhainon maintains several human personas on Earth to keep up his business of granting mortals wishes. He can transition to almost any kind of person from any age, ethnicity and gender with minimal effort, but his preferred forms tend to be ones with the most institutional power in a society. For the moment, his default human form is Gabriel Baltimore.
Gabriel Baltimore acts like what his appearance might suggest. As owner of the night club Gomorrah, Gabriel gives off the image of a rich, smooth-talking playboy and heartbreaker. He’s the sort of finely dressed gentleman people go to when they’re sick of playing with boys and want to sleep with a man. Despite this rambunctious public image, Gabriel also somehow keeps up the act of being a loving father to his daughter Chloe Black and is known as an important and respected member of the Manta Carlos community. He’s a little too perfect.
Given that Duke Mikhainon can embrace his non-human aspects in Manta Carlos, it’s common knowledge that Gabriel Baltimore is a demon lord. He supports his daughter Chloe Black’s endeavors for equal rights for demons in Manta Carlos. There are rumors that he is involved in many criminal activities but he has never been formally arrested. People think he’s either too slippery or it’s simply sabotage from his business competition. Either way, Gabriel doesn’t easily give out any information regarding this matter.
There are little bits of Duke Mikhainon’s true personality slipping into Gabriel’s persona. The truth is that Duke Mikhainon as a creature is very old, and very, very far from human. Duke Mikhainon started out as an unknown powerful entity, then he was classified a pagan god, and very recently, a demon. He is too sharp and too old, knowledgeable in ways that transcends time and space.
Duke Mikhainon is not necessarily good or evil by nature, but many of his actions could be considered petty, manipulative and malicious. When drawing parallels with other creatures, it’s easier to compare him to Greek gods and ancient spirits rather than the stereotypical Christian demon. Duke Mikhainon is gracious to his allies and dangerous to his enemies, and for the most part, he greatly dislikes humanity and he considers hurting them his favorite hobby.
He does, however, like human innovation and thrill seeking. The Duke is very old, and without constant stimulation, he gets bored easily. Mikhainon as Gabriel parties, drinks and fucks a lot. He has a long string of lovers and one night stands. When he’s not partying, he’s scheming or looking for novelties. Mikhainon is a secret nerd for things that are out of the ordinary.
If there’s one way to describe Mikhainon’s morality, it’s selfish. Mikhainon is looking to gain in every situation, whether it’s souls, money, sex or just plain, old entertainment. If it’s interesting, he’ll want it. If it stops being useful, he’ll discard it. Simple as that.
Powers
Duke Mikhainon's main ability on Earth is to grant wishes in exchange for whatever humans want to offer, preferably souls. That's why he went to Earth in the first place. As a salesperson, he wants to have more class and dignity than petty criminals. After all, wishes are a high quality product. He has policies and personal rules he always adheres to such as:
a) The Customer is Always Right: He will grant the customer whatever wish they want as long as they can pay for it!
Emphasis on the if they can pay for it part: If their soul is incredibly strong and thousands of years old, they could wish to distort reality itself. If their soul is desperate and kind of weak, the Duke doesn't want to break it to you, but you're not going to be the pop star you've always wanted to be, buddy.
b) Exact Amount Only: The Duke only accepts payment in (in order of preference): souls, firstborns, senses (e.g. sight), talents and body parts. Is their soul so powerful that they felt like they were getting cheated by selling it for a simple wish? Too bad. So sad. The deal was their soul and he's not going to take anything less.
c) No Refunds: Unhappy with your product? Unfortunately, his contracts have an airtight no-refunds clause. It's not his fault that, when you said you wanted your mother to live, you never specified she couldn't be a perpetual, incurable vegetable.
However, it is possible for someone to play him at his own game. A person can be eligible for a refund if they find out what his name is, either through asking other demons or studying ancient manuscripts. The Duke goes out of his way to erase any evidence of his name and he will listen to someone’s request if they find out. The reason he doesn't want people to know is because, in magical terms, names possess a lot of power and a degree of control. A powerful mage will be able to use his own name against him.
There are three ways wishes could go:
i.) They get their wish and he gets their soul: The most desirable outcome for all parties. They get what they want and he gets what he wants.
ii.) They get their wish but it's not what they wanted and he still owns their soul: The most common outcome of his deals. He will not always ensure a quality product. He enjoys fucking people over like a quintessential genie and then watching the dawning horror in people's faces upon realizing their dreams were distorted before their very eyes and they still owe their soul to the guy that ruined their life. A classic.
iii.) They get their wish and they get to keep their soul: The rarest and best outcome for mortals that make a deal with him. If they manage to outsmart him, he will acknowledge their victory and let them keep your wish. The only condition is that the mortal is not allowed to tell anyone his name, and if they do, he'll take their wish and their soul.
Where does the payment go?
80% for his demon kingdom in hell, 10% for granting wishes and 10% for maintenance of his organic form. The 10% could last him several decades. If he runs out of energy, he will have to take energy from his demon form. That would be the worst case scenario. Mikhainon takes the souls immediately after the contract. He is able to return it if somehow he lost a refund case.
Why does he want people's souls in the first place?
Think of Hell as an immaterial realm that's powered by thought and energy. It is stagnant if there are no souls to expand its reach and power it. Dead souls are nothing but echoes of life, leftovers of once constantly energy-producing entities. Worship is the process of sending one's energy to whatever deity they choose. Living souls are powerful and vibrant and incredibly foreign for supernatural creatures dependent on energy, and thus have the most effect in Hell.
What kind of souls does he prefer?
Old and strong souls like immortals, powered people, scholars, the cultured and the optimistic. The weak, sad and desperate are good for change but they're not nearly as delicious. He doesn't grant wishes to magical creatures.
What happens when a mortal's soul is extracted from their body?
Mortals are not typically supposed to go around without souls. Usually, after a contract, they would go about their day normally but feeling like something important in their life is "missing". Some people's bodies might react badly to his wishes and they would develop unusual mutations. I'll leave the side effects to the Players that take him up on his offer, and we will discuss significant drawbacks if they used the contract to expand their powers and run it through the mods.
The payment doesn't always have to be souls, right?
Right! But souls are the most valuable thing you could offer him. Tiny things, like the senses, can only get people tiny wishes. Think the sea witch taking the little mermaid's voice to give her legs.
Species Abilities
Goetic Demon
Duke Mikhainon is essentially a Goetic Demon. In the lost pages of the Ars Goatia, his official description is as follows:
It goes without saying that Duke Mikhainon is not able to do any of those things on Earth. To understand his form on Earth, one must understand that it does not encompass his entire form and power, but rather, only a small fraction of it to serve its purpose. His current form, Gabriel Baltimore, is nothing but an avatar to act out the actual Mikhainon’s will on Earth. His main duty is to grant wishes, but he can also act as his emissary, able to be summoned and communicated to by Mikhainon’s wards.
As of recent, Gabriel has also been assigned to take care of Mikhainon’s daughter, Chloe Black, and act as a present for his bonded Klaus Rosales. All in all, Gabriel only possesses the power to grant wishes as well as special powers of self-preservation.
Mikhainon’s body is nothing but powerful magic inhabiting a clay form. As such, Mikhainon is able to shapeshift. His usual forms are humans to tempt others into his devil’s deal, but he can also turn into animals for self-defense. The limit of his shapeshifting is strictly on the amount of dirt needed to shapeshift. He can only shift to slightly above Gabriel’s own body mass. He can shift into a tiger, but a bear or a whale is strictly out of the question. Mikhainon’s favored animal form is the raven.
Given that his true form of Earth is nothing but a ball of magic, he can use telepathy. He can communicate telepathically with other demons and psychics if they choose to open up their minds to his, but once they give him access, he would be able to scour through their heads if their mental resistance is weak. If they refuse to open up to him, their minds would be shut and he will be blocked from accessing their thoughts.
Mikhainon can now use telepathy on normal mortals as long as it’s consented to. Mikhainon can also be communicated through the use of his seal, usually by drawing his symbol or touching anything shaped like it, or through prayer. Additionally, Mikhainon can link his mind to another person with consent, giving him access to communicate with them at all times and vice versa. Mikhainon and Chloe have a mental link by default, but it’s currently a one-way link. Only Mikhainon would be able to open a conversation instantaneously – Chloe would have to pray to him or touch his symbols. During communication, Mikhainon wouldn’t be able to scour their minds.
Duke Mikhainon is more attuned to magic and psychic energies especially compared to humans. He can see ghosts and astral projections, and is able to utilize common divination tools and magical rituals. He has lived a long life, so he has a wide knowledge of magical arts.
Mikhainon cannot truly die, so he is immortal. When his organic form is "killed", he will be incapacitated for a week while his soul regenerates in Hell so it can hold a mortal body once again. On the whole, his mortal form is still subject to hunger and exhaustion.
As long as Mikhainon’s form isn’t destroyed and his magic marks another creature, either his hell servants or Chloe, he’d be able to possess their form. In the case of his hell servants, he can immediately transfer his consciousness to them as long as they’re within ten feet of him. For Chloe, he can take control of her body while she remains conscious behind her own eyes or he could let her take control while he lurks inside her mind. This power doesn’t apply to people he’s made deals to, even if they’re powered by his magic.
Since Mikhainon’s current form is made of earth, he’s able to use sand to reconstruct his form, which means he can use sand to heal wounds and replace limbs. This is a quick process, but the amount of sand used should weigh as much as what he’s using to replace them.
Duke Mikhainon has plenty of weaknesses. He is affected by the unspoken rule of supernatural creatures, which is to never upset the balance of the world for personal gain and without people's consent. If he chose to unleash all his powers on Earth, every powerful creature would seek to subdue him. His little granting wishes schtick is heavily frowned upon in Hell. He's in thin ice. He’s treading very carefully to say the least.
He is also not human, and he doesn't have some of the things humans take for granted, like free will, the capacity for growth and the ability to reproduce*. He may seem liberal and unusual for a high-ranking demon, but he is still bound by the physical and mental restrictions of other powerful supernatural creatures and he never strays from his internal wiring. In his case, he only uses the knowledge he learned on the mortal realm to expand his power. He only seeks to expand. He is literally unable to take another path.
* He can reproduce with psychically sensitive humans. Demons can take advantage of humans' fertility, but they can't reproduce with their own kind.
Note 1: Souls that could alter reality are very rare. Even King Solomon, who possessed the strongest soul he had ever seen in a mortal, was only able to influence his kingdom. The soul that could make the grandest wish would have to be thousands of years old, ambitious, intelligent and unrelentingly optimistic, and that is impossible. Don't worry about him breaking the setting.
Note 2: These are the rules for HIS hell. He acknowledges that there are many dimensions and many hells. His existence doesn't have to conflict with other demons.
Biography
Marquis Mikhainon is one of the original demons residing in the immaterial realm of Hell ever since it was formed, which was on an uncertain point in time. Hell is a place where people with heavy souls — those sinful and wracked with regret — come to spend the rest of their undying "lives" in. They would be ruled over by the demonic hierarchy with Kings at the very top, then Dukes, Princes and Counts.
In Hell, the more offerings and believers you had on the mortal realm, the higher your rank and the more domains you had power over. Marquis Mikhainon had 10 domains and 5 legions of demons at the time and he was content with it. He had several human tribes worship him, and when those humans began to speak and form villages, he was always a friendly spirit that people summoned and asked wishes from. He was revered as a God. People made statues in his image. His seal was designated as holy. His kingdom on Earth wasn't large, but he loved his people and his people loved him.
There was a rough couple decades when Solomon put him and his brothers in a pot, but other than that, it was a good enough existence.
Until the rise of Christianity. All of a sudden, the mutual cohabitation that has sustained Hell, Heaven and other Supernatural hierarchies was disrupted as a new system of worship normalized one religion and oppressed the others. Suddenly, the demons were considered malevolent, the angels benevolent and the spirits mysterious and dangerous. The goetic practices have been mostly abandoned and demons were rarely summoned. There was a systematic cleansing of other beliefs, and Marquis Mikhainon's worshipers were either slaughtered or converted.
It wasn't just him that was affected. The whole thing disrupted the intense, ever changing politics of Hell. Marquis Mikhainon's domains ended up stagnant and his powers began to deplete.
After a couple centuries of this, Marquis Mikhainon got fed up with his kingdom of nothing and took on a mortal form with the strict intent of gathering worshipers. In the 1400s, he succeeded, creating a cult in a village in a faraway island. But it wasn't enough. His power was depleting, and he wasn't fond enough of his worshipers to take care of them.
He found a different way to gain power. One day, one of the village's elders approached him about the drought and pleaded him to fix it because it was killing his harvest. He declined to help, because doing so would deplete his power in Hell. That was when the elder offered him the blood of his firstborn.
At that moment, he realized something: The only thing more powerful than a mortal's belief was their life itself. It was why Heaven and Hell forever struggled against each other to harvest the souls of dead mortals. When he sunk his blade into the baby's heart, he used the power to bring rain into the village and took the remaining life force to power his body in Hell. For the first time in centuries, he was satisfied.
After that event, Mikhainon left the village to travel the world and created the infamous "deal with the devil." People were more materialistic and they abandoned spiritual pursuits so they openly sold him their souls for petty wishes. Despite earning more than he used to, making these humans happy gave him no satisfaction. He began warping the wishes into curses, finding ways to ruin their lives using the dreams that used to give them hope.
People that wished a long life were still subject to decay. People that wanted love got abuse. People that wanted popularity gained infamy. As long as they never clearly specified what they wanted, Mikhainon exploited that and took a sadistic satisfaction in seeing their lives burn.
Mikhainon also fell into the sensory and material pleasures that he used to tempt people with. Mikhainon might not like people, but he liked their new self-indulgent culture, and he developed a special fondness for good fashion, good food and good sex.
At some point between the 1700s and the 1900s, the Industrial Revolution desensitized so many lives that he was making contracts left and right. This sudden outburst of souls eventually tipped the scales in his favor that he managed to achieve what he always wanted since he came to Earth: to be promoted. He became Duke Mikhainon. His domains multiplied and his kingdom in Hell flourished.
He could've called it quits then, but he was starting to really enjoy watching the fast modernization of mortals and partaking in their new and innovative methods of debauchery. Before he knew it, it was the 21st century and he was in a boat heading to sunny Manta Carlos, famed for its lovely beaches and exotic people.
Manta Carlos History:
- Arrived at Manta Carlos at March 2015.
- Immediately found out he has a daughter, Chloe Black. Decided he wants to attempt having a relationship with her — if he can get her to do his bidding, it'll make him more powerful.
- After the Dream Thread, decided to make his now famous night club, Gomorrah.
- Chloe decided to break into the VIP room, which is Mikhainon's secret door to hell. He takes her there to show her the power she could possibly have.
- Met Basil Velius, an Eldritch abomination, and he helps him read a part of the Necronomicon. Secrets are uncovered.
- Basil and Mikhainon infiltrate a cult in the Forbidden Forest. Mikhainon takes the totem, Basil gets a new cult.
- Michael Ashworth and Damon Vesper recover a full copy of the Necronomicon for him.
- December 2015, Klaus claimed Gabriel as his own possession.
- After the 2016 Kyros tsunami, Gomorrah got renovations. The third floor is converted into an office.
- Mikhainon moves out of Gomorrah and into a mansion with his daughter.
- Eroshay pisses him off, then makes him a shrine to make up for it. She becomes his first religious follower in a long while.
Additional Information:
- Odd items in possession upon arrival at SA: (Various knickknacks from clients that compensated for their weak souls)
- Scottish charmstone
- The Satanic Bible by Anton LaVey
- A jar of homunculus
- A bottle of Abramelin oil
- Ouija board
- A tarot card deck
- A chart of the constellations
- A bottle of holy water
- The Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage
- The Ars Goetia, Ars Theurgia Goetia, Ars Paulina, Ars Almadel, Ars Notoria (original copy of manuscripts)
- The Prince by Niccolo Macchiavelli (original text)
- A mandrake
