Hermes (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
messageforyou) wrote2022-09-23 12:07 am
messageforyou) wrote2022-09-23 12:07 am
Entry tags:
Application to Rhodos
PLAYER INFORMATION
Name: Smurf
Age: Adult
Contact:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
smurfsmuggler
Timezone: CST
Other characters: N/A
CHARACTER INFORMATION
Name: Hermes
Canon: Hades
Canon point: Post-Epilogue and post-bond forged with Zagreus
Age: Immortal
History: CW: myth-typical SA mentions
Hermes is taken from the original myths, and Hades softened the original myths a little bit to make everyone (except Zeus) more palatable for a modern audience and more consistent from a story perspective. With that in mind, here is a brief description of my Frankenstein history knitting the myths into a consistent story that make sense with Hermes as we see him in Hades:
Hermes was born to Maia the Pleiad after Zeus raped her. Maia’s own trauma meant she didn’t feed her baby, so baby Hermes, at the ripe old age of one day old, orchestrated a series of events that led him to humiliating his half-brother Apollo, securing him a place in Olympus, and diffusing the goddess Hera’s usual wrath at Zeus’ bastards by manipulating her into accepting him as a foster son. But by accepting Hera as his mother, he effectively disowned Maia when he was two days old, and he hasn’t faced her since then.
After becoming an Olympian, Hermes was subsumed by the weird drama of Olympus. He gets by keeping busy off the mountain and avoiding getting publicly involved in intense family drama, but he absolutely gets involved behind the scenes as other gods or his conscience requires.
Notes for the myths that are picked and the ones that aren’t: Hermes is not (yet) a father (as far as he knows), nor is he married to anyone. Iphigenia died, and she wasn’t turned into a deer. All sexual encounters have been consensual, and he was the one who took baby Dionysus and hid him away when Semele was vaporized by Zeus. Maia and the Pleiades turned themselves into stars when Orion started chasing them and they all agreed they were sick of being harassed and pursued.
Notably, he has witnessed his family, especially his father and foster mother, behave horribly. Hermes keeps his head down and pulls strings to get things done, but he is the only person besides Zeus who is aware of where Persephone has gone when she disappears, and he’s also the only person period who knows where she went when she left the Underworld. He still chose to help his cousin, Zagreus, find his mother… with the condition that he not tell anyone that Hermes was involved, of course.
Suitability: Hermes doesn’t come from an explicitly horror canon, but he has dealt with a lot of gritty stuff throughout the myths and isn’t out of place somewhere with dark magic. He also is very independent and capable, even without his power.
Is this a re-app? No.
Inventory:
Caduceus – the mark of his office, a long winged staff with two snakes wrapped around it. The Caduceus is bound to Hermes, so it’s always available to him whether he’s carrying it or not. It can wake the sleeping, put the waking to sleep, make a dying person’s death gentle, and revive the dead. (Suggested nerf: get rid of the ‘revive the dead’ part.)
Messenger bag – a tool he uses for work, it automatically fills with written messages people intend for him to deliver.
Powers, abilities and/or inhuman traits:
I’m going to split these into categories for my own sanity.
Divine Body
• Wings at temples and ankles. These wings are orange and yellow with flecks of pink, they’re warm to the touch, and they glow, with fallen or plucked feathers containing the power to help speed a person up the more effort they put into doing tasks quickly. These wings also allow him to fly.
• Divine aura. Hermes, like all Olympians, has a resplendent presence that is noticeable when looked upon or in the vicinity of.
• Immortality. Hermes doesn’t age, and if something manages to ‘kill’ him, his body will always reconstitute unless someone goes to ridiculous lengths to take it apart and bury all the pieces far away from each other.
• Near-invulnerability. Hermes can be injured, but it takes a lot of effort to hit him in the first place and then actually do damage with a hit.
• Super strength. Gods are established to be far stronger than mortals, including being able to carry the sky.
• Super speed/agility. Hermes is the god of swiftness, so he’s the fastest of the Olympians by far, able to safely deliver all the souls who die violent or early deaths to the Underworld within moments.
• Ichor. Hermes bleeds a metallic gold fluid called ichor instead of blood.
Suggested Nerfs for Divine Body:
• Plucked feathers lose power gradually, so a person can’t just pluck Hermes like a chicken so they can outrun all the monsters forever.
• Hermes is sturdier than mortals and can take heavier hits, but he can be hurt by an armed human and especially by manifestations.
• Hermes is as stronger and more speedy/agile than a mortal, but he can’t lift the sky or zip from one end of the island to the other in moments. Think Captain America strength/speed. This is severely diminished in the Nightmare.
• For the immortality, the usual game mechanic of him waking up in the fountain can just be him ‘reconstituting’.
Greek God Bullshit
• The ability to shapeshift. Gods regularly disguise themselves as mortals or change into animals.
• The ability to ‘sense’ people. Gods are able to track people down and know where they are unless they’ve concealed themselves with the power of Nyx or some other god.
• The ability to change other people’s shapes. Gods regularly do things like turn people into trees or animals or the opposite sex.
• The ability to put really fucked up curses on people. This is loosely defined, since gods are seen doing things like cursing people to only repeat what others say, or falling in love with their own reflections, or going mad and ripping apart their loved ones.
• The ability to communicate with people far away. Think of it as a magical Bluetooth, hearing people’s prayers and being able to send messages directly to them that other people can’t hear or see.
• The ability to give divine healing or protection to people. This isn’t foolproof by far, but gods are seen either healing wounds, telling people what they need to heal wounds, and divinely redirecting wounding blows or sending assistance to favored mortals.
• The ability to get animals to do what they want. Animals know what’s good for them and do what gods tell them to.
Suggested Nerfs for Greek God Bullshit:
• Personal shapeshifting takes a lot of effort. Shapeshifting into an animal only lasts five minutes.
• Shapeshifting someone else can only happen with consent and only lasts five minutes.
• Curses can only be minor and inconvenient, like someone’s shoelaces always coming untied. His curses cannot apply to Manifestations.
• Sensing can be clouded by the Nightmare and only happens if someone wants to be found.
• Divine healing takes a lot of effort and can only be done if Hermes is undisturbed for an extended period of time while he works on it.
• Divine protection is worth nothing in the Nightmare.
• Animals can’t understand what Hermes says.
• Hermes can only insert himself into the ears of people who want to hear him.
Greek God Bullshit Specific to Hermes
• Boons. Hermes can grant boons to people related to speed, dexterity, merchants, cleverness, invention, diplomacy, and any other category that falls under his domain.
• God of Roads and Boundaries. Hermes can change the shape of roads, change paths, and confuse travelers or keep them safe.
• God of Athletes. He can manipulate or sabotage contests of physical strength/agility/endurance.
• Trickster God. Hermes can create illusions that fool people into thinking that something is there when it isn’t (or vice versa).
Suggested Nerfs for Hermes-Specific Bullshit:
• Any boons he grants requires significant effort, so he can’t give them to everyone and he can’t give them continuously. They’re also temporary, so when he gives them, they had better count. Their effectiveness is reduced in the Nightmare.
• Any illusions/sabotages/manipulations he does are imperfect, temporary, and require effort. He can mask the effort, but eventually the illusions will crumble if he’s not focusing on keeping them up.
MANIFESTATION
Character flaws/traumas:
Flaws:
What most people would call flaws, Hermes would insist are either survival or just a family trait as a god. A sampling are as follows:
1. Manipulative. He has absolutely no qualms about manipulating people to get what he wants.
2. Deceitful. He doesn’t generally lie for fun, but he has no problems lying when it serves his purposes.
3. Intentionally callous. Hermes is naturally inclined to a gentler, more compassionate disposition than most gods, but surviving on Olympus meant turning a frequent blind eye to the suffering caused by his family or wrought on the surface, so he’s trained himself to stifle urges to go out of his way to help strangers or people getting hurt by those more powerful than him.
4. Proud. He’s a god, after all. He’s supposed to be the best at things all the time and never be vulnerable or scared or anything like that. (Though it should be noted that his ego isn’t as sensitive as other Olympians’, and he outright encourages someone to lie on his name and say they beat him in a fight so they wouldn’t feel bad about themselves in the Iliad.)
5. Emotionally Unavailable. Hermes is the sort of person who’s difficult to get close to because he puts so much distance between himself and others… especially others who have the ability to betray him, which are most people.
6. Secretive. Hermes is always playing things very close to the chest and doesn’t extend a lot of trust to the people around him.
Trauma:
1. When he was born, Maia flinched away from his touch and couldn’t bare to feed him. He orchestrated a way to get on Olympus, and only after realized he had effectively disowned his mother. The deep guilt and confusion about all this became all the greater as he gradually realized over time that he was conceived by rape and his mother may have been relieved he was gone.
2. Part in parcel with the above is the gradual realization over time that his father is a horrible person who probably has never selflessly loved someone in his life. A part of Hermes wants his father’s approval, but that’s at war with the other part that never wants to be like Zeus at all and that despises how he treats people.
3. The Pleiades turned themselves into stars to avoid the further harassment of men, meaning they are permanently out of reach to anyone but each other (at least half the year, until Orion chases them from the sky). Hermes has complicated feelings about this because he doesn’t actually talk to them and they’re basically barely family, but he still wishes that his mother had asked him for help because he would have done everything in his power to help her.
Manifestation name: Belabored Mother
Character trait(s) the Manifestation reflects: Hermes’ guilt about abandoning Maia and the guilt and self-loathing that’s grown from the circumstances of his conception.
Description: The Belabored Mother is a tall (9’+) pale woman in a torn, stained peplos (notably, there’s blood around the crotch of her skirts and the chest is torn to reveal bloody breasts). Her limbs are stretched unnaturally long and tend to bow and move like a spider’s. Her face is a black hole that sucks out light, and the only indication that it’s a face are two stars where her eyes should be.
In one arm, she holds a parasitic baby monster. The parasite’s face is only teeth and feathers and it’s constantly gnawing on her breast. The other breast is already bloody pulp, indicating the parasite’s already been through that one. The parasite has clinging claws on its hands, and it has a horrible scream when separated from its meal.
Attacks and behavior: The Belabored Mother is mainly focused on Hermes, but it will attack anyone in its way (especially if they’re men). It favors dark indoor places, but it moves very quickly and will give chase to Hermes. Usually, it grasps people in its unreasonably strong grip and drags them in for some horrible parody of an embrace, and presses its face against their head like a mother kissing them good night. In its embrace, a victim is seized by horrible hunger and paralyzing guilt. The hunger is so great that some victims may try to bite the Belabored Mother, but while they’re held by her, the parasite dislodges from her breast and starts eating them instead.
Left with a victim for an extended period of time, the parasite will eat them entirely before reattaching to the mother’s breast. If Hermes is present, the Belabored Mother will release its victim so that it can go after him instead.
Path towards resolution: Hermes has to openly, both in mind and with his words, acknowledge his and Maia’s pain. He has to acknowledge that his mother was a scared, hurt woman, but that he himself wasn’t responsible for how he was conceived and he was only a baby. He doesn’t know if Maia was happy or not to see him go, but he can’t torment himself forever wondering if he should have gone home to talk to her, because it wasn’t a baby’s responsibility to figure out why his mother didn’t feed him and repair their relationship, it was Maia’s.
He has to forgive Maia and himself. At this point, the Belabored Mother will offer her parasite, and in Hermes’ arms it just becomes a sleeping baby with downy wings on its head and feet. With this transformation, the Belabored Mother becomes just Maia with stars for eyes before both she and the baby disappear.
This would be an extremely difficult process for Hermes, because before he can do any of this, he has to actually be willing to face his pain head on instead of cleverly dodging and avoiding it like he does everything else. It is also an extremely difficult thing for him to do, and will take a lot out of him emotionally and psychologically if he manages it.
SAMPLES
One from the TDM and two from a meme where he talks to Achilles about his mother and obliquely refers to his distaste for his father
Name: Smurf
Age: Adult
Contact:
Timezone: CST
Other characters: N/A
CHARACTER INFORMATION
Name: Hermes
Canon: Hades
Canon point: Post-Epilogue and post-bond forged with Zagreus
Age: Immortal
History: CW: myth-typical SA mentions
Hermes is taken from the original myths, and Hades softened the original myths a little bit to make everyone (except Zeus) more palatable for a modern audience and more consistent from a story perspective. With that in mind, here is a brief description of my Frankenstein history knitting the myths into a consistent story that make sense with Hermes as we see him in Hades:
Hermes was born to Maia the Pleiad after Zeus raped her. Maia’s own trauma meant she didn’t feed her baby, so baby Hermes, at the ripe old age of one day old, orchestrated a series of events that led him to humiliating his half-brother Apollo, securing him a place in Olympus, and diffusing the goddess Hera’s usual wrath at Zeus’ bastards by manipulating her into accepting him as a foster son. But by accepting Hera as his mother, he effectively disowned Maia when he was two days old, and he hasn’t faced her since then.
After becoming an Olympian, Hermes was subsumed by the weird drama of Olympus. He gets by keeping busy off the mountain and avoiding getting publicly involved in intense family drama, but he absolutely gets involved behind the scenes as other gods or his conscience requires.
Notes for the myths that are picked and the ones that aren’t: Hermes is not (yet) a father (as far as he knows), nor is he married to anyone. Iphigenia died, and she wasn’t turned into a deer. All sexual encounters have been consensual, and he was the one who took baby Dionysus and hid him away when Semele was vaporized by Zeus. Maia and the Pleiades turned themselves into stars when Orion started chasing them and they all agreed they were sick of being harassed and pursued.
Notably, he has witnessed his family, especially his father and foster mother, behave horribly. Hermes keeps his head down and pulls strings to get things done, but he is the only person besides Zeus who is aware of where Persephone has gone when she disappears, and he’s also the only person period who knows where she went when she left the Underworld. He still chose to help his cousin, Zagreus, find his mother… with the condition that he not tell anyone that Hermes was involved, of course.
Suitability: Hermes doesn’t come from an explicitly horror canon, but he has dealt with a lot of gritty stuff throughout the myths and isn’t out of place somewhere with dark magic. He also is very independent and capable, even without his power.
Is this a re-app? No.
Inventory:
Caduceus – the mark of his office, a long winged staff with two snakes wrapped around it. The Caduceus is bound to Hermes, so it’s always available to him whether he’s carrying it or not. It can wake the sleeping, put the waking to sleep, make a dying person’s death gentle, and revive the dead. (Suggested nerf: get rid of the ‘revive the dead’ part.)
Messenger bag – a tool he uses for work, it automatically fills with written messages people intend for him to deliver.
Powers, abilities and/or inhuman traits:
I’m going to split these into categories for my own sanity.
Divine Body
• Wings at temples and ankles. These wings are orange and yellow with flecks of pink, they’re warm to the touch, and they glow, with fallen or plucked feathers containing the power to help speed a person up the more effort they put into doing tasks quickly. These wings also allow him to fly.
• Divine aura. Hermes, like all Olympians, has a resplendent presence that is noticeable when looked upon or in the vicinity of.
• Immortality. Hermes doesn’t age, and if something manages to ‘kill’ him, his body will always reconstitute unless someone goes to ridiculous lengths to take it apart and bury all the pieces far away from each other.
• Near-invulnerability. Hermes can be injured, but it takes a lot of effort to hit him in the first place and then actually do damage with a hit.
• Super strength. Gods are established to be far stronger than mortals, including being able to carry the sky.
• Super speed/agility. Hermes is the god of swiftness, so he’s the fastest of the Olympians by far, able to safely deliver all the souls who die violent or early deaths to the Underworld within moments.
• Ichor. Hermes bleeds a metallic gold fluid called ichor instead of blood.
Suggested Nerfs for Divine Body:
• Plucked feathers lose power gradually, so a person can’t just pluck Hermes like a chicken so they can outrun all the monsters forever.
• Hermes is sturdier than mortals and can take heavier hits, but he can be hurt by an armed human and especially by manifestations.
• Hermes is as stronger and more speedy/agile than a mortal, but he can’t lift the sky or zip from one end of the island to the other in moments. Think Captain America strength/speed. This is severely diminished in the Nightmare.
• For the immortality, the usual game mechanic of him waking up in the fountain can just be him ‘reconstituting’.
Greek God Bullshit
• The ability to shapeshift. Gods regularly disguise themselves as mortals or change into animals.
• The ability to ‘sense’ people. Gods are able to track people down and know where they are unless they’ve concealed themselves with the power of Nyx or some other god.
• The ability to change other people’s shapes. Gods regularly do things like turn people into trees or animals or the opposite sex.
• The ability to put really fucked up curses on people. This is loosely defined, since gods are seen doing things like cursing people to only repeat what others say, or falling in love with their own reflections, or going mad and ripping apart their loved ones.
• The ability to communicate with people far away. Think of it as a magical Bluetooth, hearing people’s prayers and being able to send messages directly to them that other people can’t hear or see.
• The ability to give divine healing or protection to people. This isn’t foolproof by far, but gods are seen either healing wounds, telling people what they need to heal wounds, and divinely redirecting wounding blows or sending assistance to favored mortals.
• The ability to get animals to do what they want. Animals know what’s good for them and do what gods tell them to.
Suggested Nerfs for Greek God Bullshit:
• Personal shapeshifting takes a lot of effort. Shapeshifting into an animal only lasts five minutes.
• Shapeshifting someone else can only happen with consent and only lasts five minutes.
• Curses can only be minor and inconvenient, like someone’s shoelaces always coming untied. His curses cannot apply to Manifestations.
• Sensing can be clouded by the Nightmare and only happens if someone wants to be found.
• Divine healing takes a lot of effort and can only be done if Hermes is undisturbed for an extended period of time while he works on it.
• Divine protection is worth nothing in the Nightmare.
• Animals can’t understand what Hermes says.
• Hermes can only insert himself into the ears of people who want to hear him.
Greek God Bullshit Specific to Hermes
• Boons. Hermes can grant boons to people related to speed, dexterity, merchants, cleverness, invention, diplomacy, and any other category that falls under his domain.
• God of Roads and Boundaries. Hermes can change the shape of roads, change paths, and confuse travelers or keep them safe.
• God of Athletes. He can manipulate or sabotage contests of physical strength/agility/endurance.
• Trickster God. Hermes can create illusions that fool people into thinking that something is there when it isn’t (or vice versa).
Suggested Nerfs for Hermes-Specific Bullshit:
• Any boons he grants requires significant effort, so he can’t give them to everyone and he can’t give them continuously. They’re also temporary, so when he gives them, they had better count. Their effectiveness is reduced in the Nightmare.
• Any illusions/sabotages/manipulations he does are imperfect, temporary, and require effort. He can mask the effort, but eventually the illusions will crumble if he’s not focusing on keeping them up.
MANIFESTATION
Character flaws/traumas:
Flaws:
What most people would call flaws, Hermes would insist are either survival or just a family trait as a god. A sampling are as follows:
1. Manipulative. He has absolutely no qualms about manipulating people to get what he wants.
2. Deceitful. He doesn’t generally lie for fun, but he has no problems lying when it serves his purposes.
3. Intentionally callous. Hermes is naturally inclined to a gentler, more compassionate disposition than most gods, but surviving on Olympus meant turning a frequent blind eye to the suffering caused by his family or wrought on the surface, so he’s trained himself to stifle urges to go out of his way to help strangers or people getting hurt by those more powerful than him.
4. Proud. He’s a god, after all. He’s supposed to be the best at things all the time and never be vulnerable or scared or anything like that. (Though it should be noted that his ego isn’t as sensitive as other Olympians’, and he outright encourages someone to lie on his name and say they beat him in a fight so they wouldn’t feel bad about themselves in the Iliad.)
5. Emotionally Unavailable. Hermes is the sort of person who’s difficult to get close to because he puts so much distance between himself and others… especially others who have the ability to betray him, which are most people.
6. Secretive. Hermes is always playing things very close to the chest and doesn’t extend a lot of trust to the people around him.
Trauma:
1. When he was born, Maia flinched away from his touch and couldn’t bare to feed him. He orchestrated a way to get on Olympus, and only after realized he had effectively disowned his mother. The deep guilt and confusion about all this became all the greater as he gradually realized over time that he was conceived by rape and his mother may have been relieved he was gone.
2. Part in parcel with the above is the gradual realization over time that his father is a horrible person who probably has never selflessly loved someone in his life. A part of Hermes wants his father’s approval, but that’s at war with the other part that never wants to be like Zeus at all and that despises how he treats people.
3. The Pleiades turned themselves into stars to avoid the further harassment of men, meaning they are permanently out of reach to anyone but each other (at least half the year, until Orion chases them from the sky). Hermes has complicated feelings about this because he doesn’t actually talk to them and they’re basically barely family, but he still wishes that his mother had asked him for help because he would have done everything in his power to help her.
Manifestation name: Belabored Mother
Character trait(s) the Manifestation reflects: Hermes’ guilt about abandoning Maia and the guilt and self-loathing that’s grown from the circumstances of his conception.
Description: The Belabored Mother is a tall (9’+) pale woman in a torn, stained peplos (notably, there’s blood around the crotch of her skirts and the chest is torn to reveal bloody breasts). Her limbs are stretched unnaturally long and tend to bow and move like a spider’s. Her face is a black hole that sucks out light, and the only indication that it’s a face are two stars where her eyes should be.
In one arm, she holds a parasitic baby monster. The parasite’s face is only teeth and feathers and it’s constantly gnawing on her breast. The other breast is already bloody pulp, indicating the parasite’s already been through that one. The parasite has clinging claws on its hands, and it has a horrible scream when separated from its meal.
Attacks and behavior: The Belabored Mother is mainly focused on Hermes, but it will attack anyone in its way (especially if they’re men). It favors dark indoor places, but it moves very quickly and will give chase to Hermes. Usually, it grasps people in its unreasonably strong grip and drags them in for some horrible parody of an embrace, and presses its face against their head like a mother kissing them good night. In its embrace, a victim is seized by horrible hunger and paralyzing guilt. The hunger is so great that some victims may try to bite the Belabored Mother, but while they’re held by her, the parasite dislodges from her breast and starts eating them instead.
Left with a victim for an extended period of time, the parasite will eat them entirely before reattaching to the mother’s breast. If Hermes is present, the Belabored Mother will release its victim so that it can go after him instead.
Path towards resolution: Hermes has to openly, both in mind and with his words, acknowledge his and Maia’s pain. He has to acknowledge that his mother was a scared, hurt woman, but that he himself wasn’t responsible for how he was conceived and he was only a baby. He doesn’t know if Maia was happy or not to see him go, but he can’t torment himself forever wondering if he should have gone home to talk to her, because it wasn’t a baby’s responsibility to figure out why his mother didn’t feed him and repair their relationship, it was Maia’s.
He has to forgive Maia and himself. At this point, the Belabored Mother will offer her parasite, and in Hermes’ arms it just becomes a sleeping baby with downy wings on its head and feet. With this transformation, the Belabored Mother becomes just Maia with stars for eyes before both she and the baby disappear.
This would be an extremely difficult process for Hermes, because before he can do any of this, he has to actually be willing to face his pain head on instead of cleverly dodging and avoiding it like he does everything else. It is also an extremely difficult thing for him to do, and will take a lot out of him emotionally and psychologically if he manages it.
SAMPLES
One from the TDM and two from a meme where he talks to Achilles about his mother and obliquely refers to his distaste for his father