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voidtreckerexpress application
Feb. 26th, 2022 02:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
redprayerPlayer Information
Name: Ro
Age: 27
Contact details: DM here for best results; I’ll give out my discord contact on request but would prefer not posting it anywhere public. My plurk is
Other characters: n/a
Character Information
Name: Rezo Greywords
Canon: Slayers (anime ‘verse)
Canon Point: Post EVO-R
OU/AU/CRAU/OC: OU
Age: Unspecified beyond “over 100 years old,” I’d estimate him as being around 120.
World Information:
Aesthetic-wise, the Slayers world is a fairly standard D&D/classic RPG setting with Vaguely Medieval technology, with a strong dash of silliness and humor when it isn’t doing a serious end of season plot arc thing. Expect anachronisms, especially in aid of said humor. That said, the cosmology of the world is a little complex. (And explaining it is slightly complicated by the fact that a lot of the terminology is inconsistently translated from the original Japanese.)
The most powerful being is known as the Lord of Nightmares, a kind of supreme creator goddess who is also a primordial force of chaos. She created four worlds from herself, possibly unintentionally, and with each world she created a powerful being to represent creation, order, all that good stuff, and an opposing powerful being to represent destruction, chaos, etc.
Slayers is set on one of those worlds, known as the Red World. The God of the Red World is known as Flare Dragon Ceifeed while the Dark Lord is known as Ruby Eye Shabranigdu. The two of them have been fighting since the moment they came into existence, with subordinates created to aid in this purpose. Ceifeed’s subordinates are broadly known as the shinzoku whereas Shabranigdu’s subordinates are known as mazoku. Shinzoku and mazoku, including Ceifeed and Shabranigdu, also play an important role in the magic system of Slayers as holy magic and black magic call upon the power of the shinzoku and mazoku, respectively.
Roughly 5,000 years before the main story of the anime Ceifeed and Shabranigdu got into a major conflict known as the Shinma War. There were two major consequences of the Shinma War: First, prior to the Shinma War most of the land was connected in an enormous supercontinent known as the Sleeping Dragon; during the Shinma War an enormous chunk in the middle of it was destroyed, leaving the Demon Sea in its place.
The second major consequences of the Shinma War was that Shabranigdu was split into seven pieces by Ceifeed, and those seven pieces were sealed within the souls of humans, with the hope that the birth-death-reincarnation cycle would gradually purify the dormant pieces before they could be revived. Breaking Shabranigdu apart, however, also used up Ceifeed’s power and the God sank into the Sea of Chaos. (Which is like a chaos. Void. Place, outside of the main worlds- basically Ceifeed is now out of the picture, that’s the important part.)
The subordinates of Ceifeed and Shabranigdu have continued to fight and scheme since then, and another major conflict was set into motion 4,000 years after the Shinma War: This one was the Kōma War.
The Kōma War was initiated by one of Shabranigdu’s top subordinates, Hellmaster Fibrizo, with the dual goals of killing Aqualord Ragradia (one of Ceifeed’s subordinates) and awakening a piece of Shabranigdu that resided within the soul of a sorcerer named Lei Magnus. These goals were technically successful: Ragradia was killed, but was able to imprison Lei-Shabranigdu in a block of magical ice (where he remains trapped to this day) as well as seal another of Shabranigdu’s subordinates, Chaos Dragon Garv, into a human body.
The biggest consequences of the Kōma War that can be felt during Rezo’s time are first, that various monstrous species, such as trolls, came into existence with the rise of Lei-Shabranigdu; and secondly, that Hellmaster Fibrizo sealed a large chunk of the world within a magical barrier in order to keep the shinzoku in the rest of the world from being able to aid Aqualord Ragradia during the Kōma War.
The barrier has remained up even after the end of the Kōma War, and the first two seasons of Slayers take place within the barrier. Because the world within and without the barrier were unable to contact one another for a thousand years, the two places progressed somewhat differently.
The region within the barrier lost the usage of holy magic, magic that calls upon the powers of the shinzoku, but black magic and shamanistic magic (magic that calls upon the powers of the natural world) considerably advanced, whereas humans outside the barrier broadly have little to no magical abilities. On the other hand technology has been slower to progress within the barrier because for many purposes it’s easier to rely on magic.
With all that information under our belt, let’s dig into Rezo’s own place in the story.
Personal History:
Rezo is a priest with an unmatched proficiency in white magic- that is, healing and exorcism magic. Despite his relatively young appearance he has lived for over a hundred years and has spent most of that time wandering the world healing the sick and injured. As a result he is regarded as a Great Sage and has a saintly reputation.
Very little of Rezo’s early life is known except that he fathered a child at some point and has been blind since birth due to a mysterious condition that makes his eyes literally unable to open. Although he is famous for curing others of blindness, Rezo has not been able to cure himself and has been searching increasingly desperately for a cure for his entire life. He has studied all sorts of magic, even outside of white magic, to try and find one.
Despite his reputation, Rezo has secretly done various terrible things in an attempt to find a cure; these include forcibly transforming his great-grandson into a monster, experimenting on a magical clone of himself, manufacturing a deadly disease and unleashing it on a country as part of a scheme to test soul transferal magic, and summoning a Dark Lord intent on destroying the world.
Rezo thought that said Dark Lord, Shabranigdu, was sealed within an ancient tower, but it turned out that Shabranigdu was actually sealed within Rezo’s very soul; the plan was to use Shabranigdu’s power to fix Rezo’s eyes and then banish the Dark Lord, but instead Rezo was painfully transformed into Shabranigdu.
During the ensuing boss battle with the heroes who’d been trying to thwart him the remnants of Rezo’s soul mustered up the strength to hold Shabranigdu back so they could kill him properly. Afterwards Rezo thanks the heroes and apologizes and presumably passes onto the afterlife-
-except instead he wound up as a disembodied soul stuck in a magic jar, with Shabranigdu still grafted onto him. The jar bounced around being a bad influence and source of magical consultation for a few years before the heroes found him, got him into a body, and had him cure the deadly disease he'd infected a country with.
Rezo, knowing that Shabranigdu would only regain his strength if Rezo avoided the issue, decided to get it over with and unseal Shabranigdu again, this time with the understanding that the heroes would be able to destroy the two of them. They succeeded and as Rezo fades away, this is the canon point where we’re hauling him onto the train from.
Personality:
Rezo is a somewhat ambiguous figure, having undeniably done terrible things and yet at the same time having earned a saintly reputation for the considerable work he’s done to help others. Furthermore we mostly only see Rezo from the perspective of others, leaving his internal life up to interpretation. What’s more we do know that he’s never been wholly himself, having been attached to Shabranigdu for his entire life, but how much influence Shabranigdu has had over his actions is difficult to say, probably even for Rezo himself.
Still, we can observe several things about Rezo. As an antagonist he is ruthless but generally goal-oriented; he doesn’t act out of sadism beyond verbal taunting but he is quite able and willing to harm others in pursuit of his own desires. And while he’ll come up with failsafes to lower the amount of damage he does (e.g. planning to keep Shabranigdu under control using Zanaffar) that doesn’t, yanno, stop him from having trampled over others in the first place.
In fact it speaks to a certain arrogant quality in Rezo that he feels that he has the right to, and that he thinks he can control others- from the simplest mercenary to the Dark Lord himself- to get what he wants. Even if one accepts his justification that as a sighted person he can be of much more help to others, there’s still the unspoken assumption that people need the powers of the Great Sage Rezo regardless of the cost.
And yet despite the undoubtable ego he has, Rezo shows some awareness that he isn’t the saint the world thinks he is. He’ll downplay his status and abilities in conversation (though arguably, this may be more a manipulation tactic, making himself appear humble rather than being actual humility) and towards the end of his life he shows signs of being contrite towards the heroes who have to clean up the messes left from all his schemes. He accepts his death alongside Shabranigdu as an inevitable necessity for the good of the world, so even he has limits to his selfishness.
While he makes questionable decisions, there is no doubt that Rezo is a very intelligent and curious individual. He is known not only as a master of white magic, but also of the extended shamanistic magic and black magic, has done research into new and less understood techniques, and has also studied a few subjects outside of magic such as navigation and, bizarrely, explosives. There’s a touch of a scientist’s wonder at the world around him in his character and he takes satisfaction in his work even when it doesn’t necessarily further his own goals.
In fact, in many ways Rezo is the quintessential mad scientist transposed into a fantasy setting. He is subtly eccentric with a sense of humor his great-grandson complains about, a doll collection and toys in his secret laboratory, and he once spends an entire episode tormenting the protagonists by tricking them into running errands and dramatically imparting proverbs such as "The early bird catches the horse." It’s a bit easy to overlook considering he’s normally involved in more dramatic scenes but Rezo is the sort of weirdo who puts a cuckoo clock in his living doll servant for no apparent reason other than the heck of it.
The more serious side of this eccentricity is the fact that Rezo does see himself as inherently different compared to other people, at one point directly referring to himself as an “outsider.” He dismisses the possibility that the protagonists could understand his motivations for healing his eyes, and privately admits to Ozzel that he sometimes loses his “sense of what it is to be a person.” And in general Rezo is only shown interacting with other people as either an adversary or a mentor figure, suggesting an inability or unwillingness to form personal, equal relationships.
As part of that “mentor figure” thing, Rezo also has a somewhat philosophical bent. He’ll make remarks, often morose ones, about the necessity of sacrifice, the influence of emotions and desires, and the overall nature of the world. One gets the impression that he spends a lot of time in his own head.
To sum it up: Morally fickle, self-pitying mad scientist cleric who might save your life but also might sell you to Satan.
Key themes: Accepting one’s limitations and the destructive consequences from failing to do so. Ethical culpability when under the influence of a powerful outside force. How a single person can have the capacity to both help and hurt others.
Main Motivation: Redundant as it may sound, Rezo’s main motivation seems to be just to feel like he has a purpose. During the show his stated goal is to cure his blindness and the only reasons given for that are “because the light is beautiful'' and “so I can help even more people.” There’s probably a myriad of other reasons too but the latter seems particularly important in light of the fact that he has spent most of his life in the service of others, his statement that Ozzel’s devotion to duty made her “beautiful,” and his willingness to die as a part of destroying Shabranigdu. So I think it’s fair to say that at his core Rezo just needs to feel like he’s doing something important.
Skills:
Magic
Rezo is a master of white magic, which is a branch of shamanistic magic that specializes in healing, protection, and the exorcism of evil spirits. Shamanistic magic is a type of magic that draws upon the powers of the natural world, and Rezo is proficient in the broader shamanistic magic as well despite being known for his white magic skills.
He is also skilled in black magic which, as mentioned under world info, draws upon the power of the mazoku; black magic is mostly known for its many variants on Spell Of Blow You The Fuck Up but Rezo also uses it to summon mazoku and have them serve him. Black magic is also used for curses and it’s probable that he knows how to cast those as well.
He has a staff, a little taller than he is, with chimes and a bauble at the top, which he uses as a magic wand and a mobility aid. This staff can be summoned with magic, so I’m assuming it counts as a “skill” more than an item, but I’m amenable to the mods vetoing this.
Rezo is very powerful as a mage although it seems some of that power comes from his connection to Shabranigdu, so it’s likely that with the train interfering with that connection that he’s going to be nerfed a bit.
Knowledge - Medicine
Besides using healing spells on people and the fact he manufactured a disease he is briefly shown to know how to make medicine, and in general it seems a reasonable assumption that he knows enough to at least administer first aid even without magic. Honestly, I just straight up work under the assumption that he’s an all-around skilled physician albeit by the standards of a medieval fantasy world.
Knowledge - Misc
Rezo is over a hundred years old so it’s a reasonable assumption that he has a fair assortment of life skills (though the light novel author states that Rezo’s not much of a chef) and Zelgadis mentions Rezo having researched firearms, bombs, navigation, etc. Magic and medicine are very much his areas of expertise, however.
Item: A pink teddy bear that once resided amongst the hoard of crap in his laboratory.
Sample:
https://voidtreckerooc.dreamwidth.org/82650.html?thread=11142362#cmt11142362
https://voidtreckerooc.dreamwidth.org/82650.html?thread=11142618#cmt11142618
Notes:
I discussed this a bit with Mod Katy and other players in the discord channel, but I’ll reiterate here that Rezo is keeping the magical seal on his soul that makes him blind… But Shabranigdu’s soul is back with Rezo’s real body, and unable to exert any influence on Rezo or those around him.
Due to the way the seal on his soul/eyes manifests, Rezo effectively has total blindness. I headcanon that he relies on his hearing to help him avoid obstacles and that he uses magic to read with his fingers, via a spell that raises ink into tactile ridges.
He can get around pretty well on his own even without his staff, so probably the minimum the train’ll need to do to make it accessible to him is make sure the ICPs and Rezo’s SCA have screen reading functions. Helpful additions might be making sure that signs and things already have raised or indented lettering so he doesn't have to go out of his way to make them readable; railings in the hallways and along both sides of any stairs; adding different textures to the ground to serve as wayfinding cues; and generally making sure the basic layout of the train is free of tripping hazards.
Rezo's Backstory: The Unexpurgated Version
Date: 2022-05-13 03:10 pm (UTC)Originally when writing this particular application, trying to explain every little thing that happened in Rezo's time on screen was taking forever. I am not good at being concise! By the time I was about 2/3 of the way through writing a 1000+ word summary (I AM NOT GOOD AT BEING CONCISE) I realized that it would be much more efficient to just slightly modify the information I already had in my pinned post and that it would save a great deal of time for both me and the mods.
That said I did write up a lot of stuff so I've been meaning to finish it for a while regardless. I don't know if this will be of much interest to anyone but now that I've finally gotten around to it, I'm just going to tack it on here.
The final word count is 2,299 words. Fuck me.
Part 1
Date: 2022-05-13 03:13 pm (UTC)The reason for this unusual blindness is because Rezo was one of the individuals whose soul came with a free, bonus Shabranigdu piece glued to it, and the blindness was how the seal on Shabranigdu manifested. Rezo, however, did not know this. Determined to discover a cure, he began researching white magic (a branch of shamanistic magic based around healing) and traveled the world applying the results of that research upon anyone he came across in need of healing.
Rezo has been doing this for a long time and at the start of the series is known to be over a hundred years old. He subsequently has a reputation as a Great Sage for the astonishing amount of magical knowledge he has obtained as well as the innumerable medical miracles he has performed.
At some point, he fathered a child. We know this, because Rezo’s great-grandson, Zelgadis, is a major character in the series. Pretty much nothing else is known about the rest of the Greywords family, although the author of the original light novel series suggested that Rezo killed Zelgadis’s parents in order to take Zelgadis for himself.
You may be thinking “Wow, that’s a fucked up thing to do.” Rezo has, in fact, despite his reputation as a veritable saint, done a lot of fucked up, unethical things over the decades in order to achieve his own ends.
Part 2
Date: 2022-05-13 03:15 pm (UTC)He obtained these by manufacturing a sickness known as the Durum disease and secretly infecting citizens of Taforashia. When the infection had spread into a full-blown pandemic Rezo approached the royal family, specifically Prince Posel, and offered to put the citizens into a state of suspended animation, protecting the country behind a magical seal until a cure was discovered. Posel agreed, Rezo was able to test the Hellmaster’s Jar on the Taforashians, and discovered a viable host body for himself in the form of Prince Posel, though with the Prince’s body infected and no cure yet available Rezo was not able to immediately steal the Prince’s body.
Presumably around the same point that all this was going on, Rezo also created Ozzel, a living, life-sized doll woman with mild shapeshifting abilities, an unshakeable sense of devotion towards Rezo, and a lack of understanding of human emotion. Ozzel’s duty would be to protect the Hellmaster’s Jar when and if Rezo’s soul would be placed in it, and it’s not stated where and what she was doing until that point. (Which we’ll get to later.)
Part 3
Date: 2022-05-13 03:18 pm (UTC)While these experiments were going on, Rezo also had a group of swordsmen and sorcerers working under him who would fight bandits and similar ne’er-do-wells and donate the loot to Rezo. The money and supplies were used in Rezo’s charitable pursuits, but also for his own personal research.
One of the swordsmen working under Rezo happened to be his own great-grandson, Zelgadis Greywords, by then a starry-eyed teenager eager to be of use to his sainted grandfather. Rezo took advantage of Zelgadis’s desire to be stronger, stronger for Rezo, to use Zelgadis as a guinea pig for the chimera process.
Zelgadis was turned into a being that was ⅓ human, ⅓ demon, and ⅓ rock golem, was much stronger than a normal human and was also, unfortunately, shunned by others and regarded as a monster. When Zelgadis furthermore discovered that Rezo had used him as a guinea pig and was really only after a cure for his own blindness, that starry-eyed adoration was shattered properly and Zelgadis was left harboring a desire for both revenge and a cure for his own condition, so. Good job on ruining the life of your only remaining relative, Rezo.
Zelgadis was also not the only guinea pig Rezo used; with Eris’s help he also created a clone of himself who he chimerized with a mazoku. Copy Rezo’s blindness was thus cured; alas for Rezo, when he tried to chimerize himself his body rejected the magic entirely. (Possibly another effect of the seal preventing Shabranigdu being unleashed, but who knows.)
Part 4
Date: 2022-05-13 03:33 pm (UTC)This doubtless would have been a bad idea even if Rezo hadn’t been working off of an incorrect assumption about where Shabranigdu was, but it’s fair to say that by that point Rezo was more than a little unhinged.
Rezo enlisted the help of Zelgadis to find the Philosopher’s Stone and it was eventually located as being hidden inside a statuette that was part of a bandit gang’s treasure collection… where it was then picked up by a teenaged sorceress and known bandit killer named Lina Inverse.
Lina and her companion led Zelgadis and company on a merry chase for a while, during which Rezo briefly appeared, pretending to be an enemy of Zelgadis in order to trick Lina into handing over the statue. This did not work! Zelgadis then kidnapped Lina and let his minions “torture” her (they weren’t very good at it) before deciding to tell Lina the truth about Rezo and join forces with her to keep the Philosopher’s Stone from Rezo.
With several of his minions either going over to Lina’s side or getting killed, Rezo finally took matters into his own hands and threatened the heroes that either they would bring the Philosopher’s Stone to him, or he would start killing entire villages of people. They went to confront Rezo but he was able to take the Philosopher’s Stone from them (with help from a mind control spell he cast on Zelgadis) and scurry off to summon Shabranigdu.
The summoning was, technically, a success! The seal was broken and Rezo was able to open his eyes and see light for the first time- for about ten seconds before he realized something was horribly wrong and he was physically and painfully taken over by Shabranigdu, turning into a giant monster in the process.
Shabranigdu was now fully in control and ready to start his reign of terror but fortunately, Lina had an ace up her sleeve in the form of the Giga Slave, an offensive spell that used the power of the Lord of Nightmares and was thus powerful enough to destroy Shabranigdu. What’s more, Zelgadis was able to appeal to the remnants of Rezo’s consciousness, moving Rezo to hold Shabranigdu back enough for Lina to destroy him.
Defeated and fading away, Rezo’s last words were “Thank you,” and “I’m sorry,” before passing on… and winding up in the Hellmaster’s Jar we mentioned earlier. With Shabranigdu still attached, albeit badly damaged.
Part 5
Date: 2022-05-13 03:36 pm (UTC)However, now aware that he had Shabranigdu attached to him, Rezo was uncertain about being revived. When the heroes wound up involved with Marquess Gioconda- the owner of Rezo’s jar at the time- he sent them a request via Ozzel to find and destroy his jar.
The heroes had their own problems to deal with however, so it took a little while before they got their hands on Rezo’s jar. When they did, a conflict arose in the team between Prince Posel- who had been put into the body of a stuffed animal courtesy of Rezo way back when and had recently joined Lina’s team- and Zelgadis. Posel wanted to revive Rezo so he could awaken the Taforashians and supply them with the Durum disease’s cure, which had been developed a few years ago. Zelgadis was unenthusiastic about the idea of Rezo being revived and wanted to take advantage of Rezo’s current state to make him cough up the cure to Zelgadis’s chimera state.
The conflict was… more or less resolved when everyone confronted Rezo and he revealed the less-than-pure machinations behind the Taforashia situation, devastating Posel in the process. Zelgadis then threatened to destroy Rezo’s jar if he didn’t cure Zelgadis’s condition; Rezo then revealed that he didn’t know how to cure Zelgadis and thought it was impossible anyway, devastating another person in the same night. Rezo also tried to goad Zelgadis into destroying him but was rescued by Posel (and Zelgadis’s hesitation.)
There was a bit more fighting between the party members after everyone caught up with Posel. Lina had noticed and was suspicious of Rezo’s own ambivalence about being revived; and Xellos, a powerful mazoku who is kind of an ally of Lina’s group, suspected Shabranigdu was still attached to Rezo. The mazoku forces in general actually weren’t in favor of Rezo-Shabranigdu’s revival however, because at this point Rezo-Shabranigdu would have been a fucked up, unstable version of Shabranigdu instead of a proper Dark Lord.
This time the fighting came to a halt when Ozzel interceded, having decided that regardless of whether or not Rezo desired to be revived, she wanted him to be revived so she could meet him properly again. Although tensions still remained high, everyone settled down enough to release Rezo’s spirit from the Hellmaster’s Jar.
Part 6 (Last Part)
Date: 2022-05-13 04:00 pm (UTC)To the horror of the heroes watching them, Ozzel then collapsed into a lifeless doll, as her life force was tied solely to her purpose in reviving Rezo.
There was little time to mourn however. After Rezo took a moment to enjoy having a living body again, he went ahead and awoke Taforashia from its magical slumber. Rezo and the heroes then spent an unspecified amount of time nursing the population of Taforashia until foreign aid, including the medicine needed to cure the Durum sickness, arrived.
Once the citizens had all recovered a celebration was thrown, which Rezo chose to avoid in favor of going off to brood. Lina Inverse followed him and confronted Rezo about how cagey he’d been, and Xelloss also popped up to confront Rezo, via attacking him.
Rezo and Xelloss sparred a bit and the power of Rezo’s magic, as well as some of the actual conversation, allowed Xelloss and the heroes (the rest of whom were drawn in by the sound of the fighting) to realize that Shabranigdu was still attached to Rezo. Rezo confirmed this, as well as the fact that Shabranigdu would be released if he opened his eyes again… Although it was inevitable that Shabranigdu would reawaken and devour Rezo’s soul regardless.
Rezo, however, wanted to experience sight again, no matter how briefly. And since Lina had the power to destroy Shabranigdu, Rezo decided to take the route of deliberately releasing the Dark Lord while Lina was around to destroy him. Rezo opened his eyes and for a few moments, was able to take in the sight of the heroes in front of him, and the moonlit sky above- a sight that deeply moved him.
Then Shabranigdu started awakening and Rezo’s last moments in control were spent both demanding and pleading that Lina destroy him, before Shabranigdu fully awakened.
Cue another major boss battle. The heroes tried various things to weaken Shabranigdu, ending with Prince Posel finding and destroying the Hellmaster’s Jar that Rezo had originally used to transfer Posel to his stuffed animal body. This had the effect of transferring Posel’s soul back into the body that Rezo and Shabranigdu were occupying. There, Posel helped to hold Shabranigdu back while Lina cast the Giga Slave spell that could destroy Shabranigdu, much as Rezo had done during the last boss fight.
Posel had assumed he would perish alongside Rezo-Shabranigdu but Rezo himself was able to intervene and send Posel back to his stuffed animal body. The Red Priest’s final words, heard only by Posel, were “No... You stay behind…”
And that draws Rezo’s story to a close… Or it would if the Voidtrecker Express hadn’t picked him up.