Zephaniah Armati

Name: Naya
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Contact: missnaya
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Name: Zephaniah Armati
Canon: Original (Monsterhearts)
Age: 20
Gender: Male
Species: Immortal human
Appearance: Zeph's appearance can change wildly, but in general, he is a tall, skinny white man with black hair that's shaved on the left side and dyed partly green on the right. He wears dark makeup and has many ear and facial piercings, and always wears a necklace bearing the symbol of his religion, as well as a collar, usually. His style is very punk/emo, but he has a fondness for shitty t-shirts with dumb memes on them, too. He never wears pure white. His eyes are an unnaturally bright green color, and remain that way no matter what other form he takes on.
Canon point: The start of the school year

History: NOTE: This app contains elements of child abuse, torture, incest, rape, cults and religious fanaticism, body horror, and cosmic horror.

Zeph, born Zephaniah Arkwright, was conceived under an arcane ritual intended to make the resulting child immortal. His father leads a cult called the Order of the Devouring Silence, which calls upon an eldritch being named the Devourer to provide freedom from pain in exchange for sacrifices. The deity is bloodthirsty, and the cult was running out of ways to continue finding new sacrifices to satiate its hunger, which is where Zeph came in.

Zeph was raised with the expectation that he would one day become the cult's only sacrifice. He was indoctrinated and brainwashed into finding this a noble pursuit, and it was a point of pride to him to be someone so important. This pride continued all the way until he turned 10 and was first sacrificed on the altar of the Devourer, as painfully as possible.

From there, Zeph dutifully allowed himself to be tortured and murdered whenever his Order required it. He wore only white and was used as a communal slave and sex toy by his fellow cultists, who lived a life of hedonistic pleasure as each of Zeph's sacrifices took more of their ability to feel pain away. Zeph considered it an honor to feel all the pain that his friends and family were unable to.

Until he started to feel pain less and less. Zeph's psyche began to twist his constant painful sacrifices into something pleasurable, until he finally snapped and found himself incapable of registering pain as pain at all anymore. It was at this time that the Devourer decided his flavor was no longer appealing -- it fed on pain, after all, and Zeph could no longer provide it.

So he was excommunicated. Kicked out at age 17, after nearly a decade of constant torment, Zeph was left to fend for himself outside of the walls of the commune he'd known all his life. He even changed his name from Arkwright to Armati to account for the shame he'd brought to his family. After a period of depression and homelessness, he began to find older men to latch onto to pay his bills and give him a place to stay. Sure, sleeping with these older men often meant getting murdered thanks to the quirk of his biology that gives his partners the urge to kill him, but it's not something he minds.

Well, all except one time. Zeph's first serious relationship after his excommunication was with an older man into the BDSM scene, but they didn't actually have sex for a few months; they'd do other things, but never cross that line. The day they finally did, Zeph's companion was overcome with the urge to kill him, and gave in to the compulsion. Once he snapped out of his haze and realized what he did, not knowing of Zeph's immortality, he killed himself in shame. Zeph woke up to the grisly scene, and reacted by going on a bender that resulted in many more deaths and quite a few nights of poor decision-making.

Now, after taking some time to grieve and get his life in order, Zeph is a college student in Tennnessee, living with a man named Henry who rents out his basement to him. He's an inquisitive person despite being a religious zealot, and enjoys learning about the outside world he was kept from for so long.

He still wants to go back, though.

Personality answers:

What does your character think about physical appearances? Are they the sort to meticulously primp themselves, or could they not care less?

Zeph takes some pride in his appearance, though you probably wouldn't guess it from his smudged makeup and shitty meme t-shirts. He doesn't wear pure white, as that's what he had to wear in his cult, and he doesn't think himself good enough for it anymore. So, he focuses a lot on black, as well as shocks of bright color to match the green streak in his hair that he can't control.

To Zeph, appearance can be just another tool or weapon. It's the thing that gets people to pay attention to you in the first place, and it lets them know what sort of biases to have about you. Due to the fact that his whole look can shift whenever he comes back to life, he's less married to his appearance and more casually curious about what different apperances can mean for his life. It's not common for his body or face to radically shift, but when it does, it's something he either has to live with or kill himself to try and get away from. When those are your options, you tend to get real okay with most appearances real fast.

What is your character most afraid of?

Abandonment. Zeph was devastated when he lost his whole community in one fell swoop, and he'd do anything to keep it from happening again. Up to and including pushing people away before he can get attached to them in the first place. He's a ragebaiter first and foremost, preferring to keep people at an arm's length or make them hate him before he can fall in love.

Zeph feels his emotions very strongly, so it's a real risk at any given time that he might develop some unnecessarily intense level of attraction to someone. He knows this about himself. He's also acutely aware that people are evil little snakes who will break your heart for fun. His solution may be unorthodox, but "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" is an iconic phrase for a reason! Why not act just as unholy and evil as the rest of the wretched world, if they're going to make you love them and then leave you anyway? That's what Zeph believes, anyway.

What would your character say is their best trait? What is truly their best trait?

If you were to ask Zephaniah, his best trait is definitely his faith, and his passion for it. He truly believes that his devotion to his cult and a higher power is admirable, and not just sort of sad and brainwashed. In his mind, it demonstrates all the best traits a person can have: loyalty, dedication, and a single-minded ability to push through pain for the greater good.

In reality, his best trait is probably more akin to his curiosity. Despite being raised in a cult for 17 years, Zeph's near-immediate course of action after being excommunicated was to find libraries and ingest as much information as possible about the world that he'd been missing out on. While he frames this as simply wanting to be informed about heathen matters in order to more effectively argue against them, he truly has a skill for research and a talent for teaching himself new things. In just 3 short years, he's grown from a brainwashed cultist into a terminally online memelord who probably (but not always) knows what pop culture reference you're making.

Whether that's an improvement or not is up to you.

What would it take to truly upset your character, enough that they would act upon their feelings? Are they the sort to forgive?

Zeph has a complicated relationship with forgiveness. Forgiveness is, after all, a core tenet of Christianity, and cultural Christianity is one of the most vexing parts of the outside world to him. His religion has no concept of forgiveness and repentance, no concept of sin needing to be cleansed from the masses. So, when upset, Zeph feels no strong calling to forgive anyone who's wronged him.

It doesn't take too terribly much to upset him. All you'd need to do is insult his religion, call it a cult, or otherwise disrespect his faith in any way. This is the quickest and most effective way to get a rise out of him -- he doesn't care what he looks like, or if people like him, or if he's respected as a person, but the Order? He'll move mountains to defend it. It's still, even now, the one place he truly felt like he belonged, where he was wanted and loved and cared for. He doesn't take kindly to those fond memories being tampered with, even if it's with the best of intentions, i.e. if someone were to try and convince him he'd been abused.

Inventory: 1. A plastic ball containing a sticky hand, like you'd get in a quarter machine
2. His completely ordinary laptop (with about 6GB of fetish porn saved)
3. A second collar besides the one that's on his neck when he arrives, with a collar tag that says "Daddy's boy"
4. His drum set, if it's not too big. He wants to be loud.
Powers/Abilities: 1. Immortality - Zephaniah will come back whenever he dies. His body turns into black goop, then reforms naked from that goop. His appearance can change in any way when this happens; he cannot consciously influence how he looks when he comes back. He can even look like a doppelganger of an existing person, but his eyes will always remain the same unnaturally bright green color.

2. Sex move - Anyone who has sex with Zeph gets filled with the urge to kill him. This can be resisted. What counts as "sex" is variable, and can encompass anything from dry humping to oral to full penetration.

Samples: Here & Here
Player Goals: I want to lean into Zeph's sacrificial lamb nature and see how wild and crazy this bad boy can get in a setting like this. I'd loooove to have interactions where people try to get him to see he's more than just a sacrifice -- but I'd also love it if some characters just tried to make him worse, instead! Really up for most anything. :)
Soul Choice: Ruminantia