In Nomine Revisited: Satan, Malakite Angel of Temptation.

Oddly enough, this was not the most controversial thing I ever wrote for the In Nomine fan community. No… that prize goes for my write-up of the One Ring, which infuriated a whole slew of people and I still don’t know why.  And I’ve wondered why for twenty years.

Satan – Google Docs

Satan
Malakite Inquisitor of Judgement
Angel of Temptation

Corporeal Forces: 5 Strength: 10 Agility: 10
Ethereal Forces: 6 Intelligence: 12 Precision: 12
Celestial Forces: 6 Will: 12 Perception: 12
Word-Forces: 16

Vessel: human male/4

Skills: Detect Lies/6, Dodge/5, Emote/6, Fighting/5, Large Weapon/6 (sword), Knowledge (Ethics/6, Theology/6), Ranged Weapon/6 (shotgun)

Songs: Light (Corporeal/3, Ethereal/3, Celestial/6), Motion (All/3), Nimbus (Corporeal/3), Retribution (All/2), Shields (All/3), Tongues (Corporeal/3, Ethereal/3)

Attunements: Malakite of Judgement, Inquisitor, Angel of Temptation

Angel of Temptation: As Angel of Temptation, Satan automatically knows what would best tempt another to renounce the cause of Good. He doesn’t know how tempting it is, or whether the person would be able to resist it, unfortunately. He also may isolate an individual to tempt them, via an elaborate illusion (this is what he did with Job. Jesus stared him down, and told him to go through it in real time). The cost for the latter ability is 8 Essence: Satan gets half of the Essence back if the target successfully resists the temptation).

Special Rites (Satan doesn’t give these out):

• Tempt someone without lying to them.
• Have someone resist one of your temptations (not cumulative with above) 

Oaths:

• “Suffer not an evil to live, if it is my choice.”
• “Never surrender or be captured by the forces of Lucifer” (Satan is even less willing to let this happen than most Malakim. He does not ever want to meet up with his former boss, for reasons that should be obvious).
• “Never go too far while performing my tasks.”
• “Always make sure that those I successfully test are not harmed by the experience.”

No, no, NO. Put down the Milton and step away slowly. The author got it confused.

Well, it wasn’t really his fault: the theologians were the first ones to get things all muddled up. And that’s mostly because of St. John: an examination of the books of Job and Zechariah will reveal the picture of a Dominican just trying to do his job, not the Great Beast. Unfortunately, when you walk around with a name derived from the Hebrew word for ‘accuser’, mistakes like these can happen — especially when a primary source is more interested in getting the prophecy written down than in providing footnotes. Anyway, Satan has his share of issues. His job is probably the least appreciated in Heaven: after all, who can like somebody who’s trying to actively subvert your virtue?

Unfortunately, there’s a very good reason why an Angel of Temptation is so necessary: complacency. The last thing that the Host needs is humans and celestials that are good simply out of habit; virtue like that can shatter like a tea cup on a stone floor the first time that it gets seriously tested. People should be good because they’ve faced up to the alternatives, weighed the options, and decided to reject evil anyway — but to do that, they need to be tested.

That’s where Satan comes in. He worked for Light once, sure.  He even once shared the same Choir as his Superior. But he made his own choice during the First War, and never regretted it. After the dust had settled, the new Malakite ended up working for Dominic, specializing in humanity. He was very good at his job, which eventually led him into serious trouble.

You see, when Dominic caught wind of a certain prophet in the Near East, he naturally sent his best Inquisitor to check out the situation. The results were later deemed … unfortunate. Jesus came through His tests with flying colors, but was apparently not too pleased with the fact that Heaven felt the need to have a Malakite Inquisitor rake him over the coals for over a month. Worse, Satan walked away from the whole thing with absolutely no clue whether or not Jesus actually was the Son of God (ineffability is a cruel burden for a celestial). This did nothing for his career prospects, especially since the person that he was supposed to test ended up founding a world religion.

All in all, the Malakite has wanted to change his name more than once in the past two thousand years: thanks to his unfortunate interaction with Jesus, the latter did not remember him fondly — and later Christian theologians took His irritation and ran with it. Pretty soon, the garbled story was that Jesus had had it out with the devil himself — and, hey, what’s one more name for the Prince of Lies? The name shows up in the Old Testament, after all.

Personally, the Malakite is fairly lonely (having blessed souls run screaming the first time that they hear your name will do that to you). Really, he’s only doing his job, for the love of God. There are a lot of angels with distasteful jobs. But, even in Heaven you get those who like to rationalize a dislike, so Satan spends as much time as he can on the Corporeal plane, trying to make sure that people aren’t getting spiritually lazy.

Well, when he isn’t bursting into the nastier sorts of Black Masses and eviscerating everyone there who calls on Satan to protect them. That isn’t really part of his job, but it does relieve his frustrations a bit.

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