OneClassyBanana
kilroy was here
- Joined
- May 1, 2016
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- Nebulae
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Steam name: badmann
Steam ID: I’ll get it later, I’m writing this on my phone at work.
Previous experience with Vortigaunt factions: Been a consistent player since Lemonpunch, and through most iterations of nebulous. I also lead the faction for two separate periods, once as full lead and once as co-lead when the leadership at the time was looking for a full-time successor.
Have you read the Vortigaunt Guide? Yes, but the big words hurt my brain.
Character Name: sbymm’Naach — (the nearest approximation in a wholly mechanical tongue is ‘suh-Bayem-muh-Nah-hogh’.)
What kind of character do you plan on portraying? How do their traits distinguish them from the rest of their species?: An agent of designs far beyond their own reckoning. A scholar and a mystic, seeking knowledge that was never meant to be known. Long-lived yet no less capable, their errant travels have left them wise, but in equal measure, deeply inscrutable. On some fundamental level, in a way that defies human understanding, Bayem simply sees the world — physical and metaphysical — differently. To this end, they are well suited to their fondness of collecting obscure and arcane things from this world and theirs alike, always seeming to be in the right place at the right time to acquire new curiosities. However, this softly-spoken and often esoteric wisdom is often mistaken for arrogance or, worse, madness, and their unorthodox nature often finds them ostracized even by their own kin.
Brief Backstory: sbymm’Naach is old. Very, very old. So old that they have become the stuff of stories told by their contemporaries to the young. But these are not laudatory tales of their exploits, songs sung of their wisdom, portraits painted in kindness and admiration. No, these are whispered stories of ‘The Mad One’, ‘The Fool on the Mountain’, ‘The Antiquarian’. A creature to be not hated or loathed, but kept at arms’ length. Whose thinking was amorphous, whose place in the Vortessence was constantly at odds with itself, who was at once one with and separate from the amalgam that is the Vortigaunt.
One particular story claimed that they had, in their arrogant youth, sought a text that had been deemed a mere myth. A long-since forgotten shred of their kind’s incomprehensible vast philosophical history. But if it had ever truly existed, or had yet to be written, all wisdom said that it was simply lost to time. And so, the story said, they did not merely stare into the ontological abyss, but submerged themselves in it. Deeper and deeper, they let themselves descend into the what was and wasn’t, drawing so near to impossibility itself that they had become its synonym.
In the span of a single moment, they had ceased to exist. And yet they had always existed. For in their recklessness, they had passed before the very moment of their own conception, sinking farther and farther still from the unified Vortigaunt as they became their own anathema.
Or so the story goes.
Though at a glance, even the more derisive of these cautionary tales always did seem to hold some truth. They always spoke of was and when to those who were not there, musing at random to an audience only they were privy to. They kept themselves far from the communal clusters and gatherings that would become hallmarks of their identity and one of the few reliefs to be found under the industrious regime of the Nihilanth. Instead, Bayem preferred the company of books and relics and obscurities that beggared belief. Their only true friend was only moderately less eccentric, affording them both a reputation as loners who were fit only to share their thoughts with one another.
That was a long time ago. But sbymm’Naach is old. Very, very old. They have seen worlds end thrice over, and still they seem to exist as an immutable constant through times of roiling uncertainty.
Perhaps they will see a world rise from the ashes, now, as well. But their eyes remain ever outwards, ever forwards, shifting through the war in which they have become entangled in search of something that has no name. Following a call that defies understanding.
Only time will tell where their paths lead.
Only time will tell how this story ends.
What kind of group(s) are you planning to work with (if any)?: None. Bayem is far too mercurial to adhere to any one group. There are few who make the attempt to understand this bizarre Vortigaunt out of time, and even fewer who would call them ‘friend’. Those few that do see the wisdom in their philosophies are often equally inclined to think against the grain — for better or worse. They may keep allies, but they are far too entrenched in their archaeological ways and the unknown things that steer them to commit fully even to the broad cause of liberation from Combine rule, another reason they are often regarded at an unusual and almost unnatural distance from their kin.
Do you intend to request a power specific to your character? If so, specify (Keep in mind you cannot use this in S2K situations): Yes, but it’s arguably more a curse than not. Bayem is, frankly, not quite in sync with the rest of the cosmos. They are a paracausal observer, an anomaly, whose perception of time does not fall within the simple and unbroken continuity of their kin. As such, they often find themselves speaking to people, doing things, or making comments seemingly 'out of order', or in seeming repetition, due to this inexorable temporal connection.
In a word, that is their ‘power’ — paracausality. A power over which they seemingly have no true control, and which appears to command them more than they command it, as their innate relationship with the metaphysical drives them to ‘the right place at the right time’ — all to unknown ends. Any true benefits conferred by existing in such a manner are so deeply esoteric, so impossibly volatile, that it's arguable whether or not they exist at all.
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