Omparkash
Balseraph Baron of Screams
Renegade Demon of Fear of Darkness
Corporeal Forces: 4 Strength: 6 Agility: 10
Ethereal Forces: 6 Intelligence: 12 Precision: 12
Celestial Forces: 6 Will: 12 Perception: 12
Word-Forces: 14
Vessel: Male/2
Skills: Dodge/5, Emote/3, Fighting/6, Knowledge (Psychology/6, the Marches/6, Dream Logic/6), Tactics/2
Songs: Darkness (All/6, Virtuoso), Dreams (All/4), Light (Ethereal/4, Celestial/6), Location/6, Motion (All/6, Virtuoso), Nightmares (All/4), Shields (All/5), Succor (Ethereal/3)
Attunements*: Balseraph of Nightmares, Calabite of Nightmares, Dream Joining, Dream Walking, Terror, Dream Drain, Baron of Screams, Demon of Fear of Darkness
Demon of Fear of Darkness: Omparkash automatically enters any dreamscape where the dreamer is actively afraid of the dark, and gets a +2 to shift the theme of any dreamscape on Beleth’s side of the Vale to one where fear of the Dark is the primary motif.
Rites:
- Cause someone to be afraid of the Dark (usable three times a day)
Discord: Selfless/4
Omparkash is best described by the effect that he has on others. Here’s an example: wait until midnight. Get up. Draw the shades, turn off all the other electronics besides your computer, and go through the house turning off lights. Don’t forget to yank the power cord from the refrigerator, the microwave, and the alarm clock: we wouldn’t want any blinking lights, do we? No, of course we don’t. When you pass the front door, be sure to unlock it, needless to say. But only leave it open if there’s no lights on outside.
You should end up back in front of your computer, which should by now be the only source of light available to you. Reach for the monitor’s off switch — but WAIT! Think about what you just did, first. Think about the unlocked door. Think very hard about the unlocked door, and about how little you really know what’s going on out there in the big, bad world. Anyone could be right now quietly watching the crack between the bottom of the door and the floor, waiting for that last glimmer of light to flicker and die. Anyone, or anything.
Now turn off the monitor.
That’s what Omparkash is like. He’s a taste of absolute silence and darkness, that sudden involuntary intake of breath, the vain straining of your eyes for stray photons. The Balseraph can reach into a human’s head, and tickle that reptilian brainstem that’s been faithfully keeping humanity alert and usefully paranoid for the last three million years. The mere presence of him in a room causes people’s hearts to unaccountably accelerate, and their skins slick with sweat. Omparkash is incredibly good at his job.
And when Beleth, Princess of Nightmares, finally catches up with him, she’ll have his hide. You see, the Baron has recently had a bit of an epiphany. Omparkash likes to scare people. He loves to scare people. He is a virtuoso at it. However, it turns out that he honestly doesn’t like hurting them.
The difference is subtle, yet important. Have you ever watched someone voluntarily be frightened? It’s more common today, but the condition has existed throughout history. The experienced fear is real, mind you: it’d be pointless otherwise. That means that the physiological and psychological reactions are the same, while the fear is going on — but the aftermath is different.
Look in their eyes, and you’ll see what I mean. Those people really and truly enjoyed being scared. They were ready to do it again, and the experience didn’t hurt them. Properly prepared, a human can use artificially induced fear as a catharsis for what’s really worrying them, and actually end up being better for the experience.
This infuriates most Servitors of Nightmares: it used to infuriate Omparkash, too. How dare they bear up under what he deigned to inflict upon them! They should be gratified that such a majestic being would see fit to offer such a potent link to their primitive origins, in fact — but then he noticed that, in fact, some of them did. Omparkash also noticed that using his powers on those who enjoyed being scared would not send them closer to Beleth’s side of the Vale of Dreams. Indeed, one of Omparkash’s best performance pieces could even end up sending a dreamscape all the way to Blandine’s side of the Vale.
At first, this appalled Omparkash. But after a while, he found the experience at first attractive, and then addictive. Going Renegade was the next obvious step.
Omparkash is thus now a good example of someone who has gone through cruelty, and come out the other side. He sincerely believes that scaring people is good for them, and is pleased to be of such good service. But since he is not a Habbalite, he can actually provide said service without breaking the recipient of Omparkash’s ‘gift’. By now, the Balseraph cannot really understand why Beleth herself does not do the same: why rape, when there are so many humans out there genuinely eager for release? It’s senseless to rip apart such an appreciative audience, simply because one is nursing old grudges.
Naturally, actually explaining this to his former colleagues has proven to be pointless, and Omparkash is understandably leery of formally seeking Redemption. He suspects that the price would include never being ever permitted again to help his nightly partners to embrace terror, until terror is gone. He will try to Redeem eventually, if Servitors of Nightmares don’t catch and kill him first: better life than death, and there is a rumor that Blandine has a Word-bound that might understand what he so desperately wants to explain to others. But not tonight: there’s always one more person who urgently needs to reaffirm his or her humanity by embracing the most primal of fears, and Omparkash does not shirk his duties.
Incidentally, the Princess of Nightmares is reasonably certain that she’s kept Omparkash’s Renegade status from the Game. It would never do for Asmodeus to find out that one of Beleth’s best Word-bound has apparently decided to defect, out of sheer elemental revulsion for the ideals of Nightmares. The political fallout alone would go beyond ‘unfortunate’ and well into ‘disastrous’. Unfortunately, her errant Baron is practically flaunting his apostasy. The only bright spot in the entire mess is that Omparkash spends most of his time in the Marches, albeit in places where the Word of Nightmares has difficulty projecting power.
But it’s not much of a bright spot. Asmodeus is not known for having agents in the ethereal plane, which almost certainly means that he has more there than anyone would reasonably be expected to believe.
*Omparkash still uses all of these Attunements, albeit in ways that has earned Beleth’s permanent ire. It’s all in the execution.