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[shotgunangel]

Player Information
Your Nickname: Brig
OOC Journal: hane@lj
Under 18? no
Email/IM: twopoinsettias@gmail.com
Characters Played at Singularity: Erik, O'Brien

Character Information
Name: Castiel
Name of Canon: Supernatural
Canon/AU/Other Game CR: canon
Reference: http://supernatural.wikia.com/wiki/Castiel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castiel_%28Supernatural%29
http://www.supernaturalwiki.com/index.php?title=Castiel

Canon Point:


Setting:

On the surface, ordinary Earth in the 21st century. People go to work, kids go to school, the sun rises and sets and most humans live fairly ordinary, oblivious lives.

Underneath that surface, there are monsters. Vampires, demons, ghosts, werewolves, wendigos, shapeshifters, angels and even pagan gods. Many of them prey on ordinary people and get away with it, fitting themselves into society or hiding away and only striking at the most convenient opportunity. The general public has no knowledge of what's lurking just outside their doorsteps, or under their beds, or in their walls, aside from the generic and often faulty pop culture awareness they might have of the supernatural. Strings of mysterious murders all too often simply go unsolved, since the local authorities are unlikely to believe witness accounts about ghosts or unnatural creatures.

Some of these entities are harmless or even benevolent, but many more are definitely not, and that's where hunters come in. Hunters are usually ordinary people who dedicate themselves to, you guessed it, hunting down the nasties that go bump in the night. Some of them have been trained since childhood to hunt monsters, some come into it as adults after exposure to the supernatural (a loved one being murdered is a recurring theme). There's no strict organization to their ranks, a man can apparently go years without realizing there's an entire population of like-minded professionals out there doing the same job, but occasionally they can and do coordinate. The current stereotype of hunters seems to be survivalists, living on the road or maintaining a base of operations, outrunning and/or manipulating the authorities, and doing what they can to hunt while being viewed by regular society as crazies or outcasts. Hunting is not a glamorous lifestyle in the slightest. For the two most visible hunters in the show, their lives are a constant stream of driving across the country from 'job' to 'job,' running credit card scams for money, getting the crap kicked out of them by various monsters and being chased by the police or FBI, and usually having the innocent civilians they're trying to save not believe them about impending danger. It's a thankless job, but someone's got to do it.

Enter Sam and Dean Winchester, two brothers from Kansas who were raised in the hunting life by their father, John Winchester, after the mysterious and traumatic death of their mother Mary in a "house fire." Which of course was really nothing of the sort. In an effort to track down their missing father and also solve their mother's murder, Dean and Sam criss-cross the country in their trademark black Impala, putting angry ghosts to rest, hunting vampires and werewolves and other things that eat people, and eventually working up to regularly tangling with demons. Their weapons are guns and knives and silver and salt, the occasional use of seals, exorcism, and witchcraft, and the willingness to barge into terrifying situations because, honestly, no one else is going to. As it turns out, the Winchesters are probably the most fearsome hunters in existence and everything from monsters to demons has good reason to be wary of them, but we'll get to that in a bit.

As the Winchesters spend their time hunting, their perspective of the supernatural world also broadens. For the most part, the enemy classes fall into four categories: straightforward Ghosts or Monsters, monsters relating to Purgatory, miscellaneous gods and other things (the personification of Fate, other gods, Reapers, etc), and minions of Heaven or Hell.

Ghosts and angry spirits are fairly run of the mill occurrences. Creatures like vampires and werewolves can be either individuals or small groups operating independently as they please, acting as your standard serial killer(s). The occasional pagan god will also make an appearance as a serial killer type, having been reduced from their former status to a standard monster by dwindling belief or dwindling sacrifices. Most of these have no particular tie to Heaven or Hell and appear as stand-alone monsters of the week.

Monsters relating to Purgatory are creatures like Eve (mother of all supernatural creatures) and her first-born children, the original vampire, the original werewolf, the original shapeshifter, etc, that spawned all others in the world. These originals are called Alphas and are considerably more powerful and plot device-y than their children. These, at least, seem to be aware of the higher organization of Heaven and Hell and the existence of angels and demons. Eve can be considered the mother goddess of monsters, and Purgatory was created by God to keep overwhelmingly dangerous creatures like her locked away. The souls of monsters flow to Purgatory after death, instead of Heaven or Hell, and apparently angels and demons have no direct hand in Purgatory to the point that they spend a whole season searching for its entrance.

Other creatures like Reapers are personifications of natural processes.










Minions of Heaven and Hell are, of course, angels and demons. While demons have plagued the Winchesters for years (their mother, grandfather, grandmother, and Sam's nearly fiance were all killed by demons), and hunters in general are aware of demons and demonic possessions, there is at first no real working knowledge of how demons function as an organized whole and what their motives are. Demons appear as black smoke and apparently have to possess humans in order to affect the physical plane. Exorcism rituals don't kill demons, only force them out of their host body, which unfortunately does not often survive after being possessed, and the demon is sent back to Hell where eventually it can and usually does make a re-appearance in a new host body. There are special weapons that truly "kill" demons, but those are few and far in between. Demons can be summoned and even controlled by witchcraft or other seals/traps/rituals, but this tends to end badly for the summoner.

As for demonic motivation, apparently all demons are actually human souls that have been tortured and twisted during their time in Hell until all humanity has been stripped away. Lucifer is considered by some of them to be a myth himself, supposedly imprisoned by God for the crime of creating the first demon out of a human woman's soul (Lilith), but few (or none) of the other demons have ever seen him or his cage personally. Nor have many of them ever encountered angels, which would lend credence to Lucifer's existence. Higher demons give the orders to lower demons, and the high rollers are individuals like Azazel and Lilith, who work to free Lucifer from his cage and bring about the Apocalypse. Presumably they had no doubts about Lucifer's existence, but most demons are of a "lower pay grade" and only do as they're told. There are demons with ambivalent opinions about Lucifer and the Apocalypse, such as Crowley, who maintains that he's "in sales" and has no interest in ending the world. Crowley believes that Lucifer being set free will actually result in all demons eventually being destroyed, as Lucifer has as little love for them as he has for anything else.

In other words, factions in Hell. Demons don't like each other, jockey for power, and stab each other in the backs just like any corporate organization worth its salt.

Unfortunately for everyone, Heaven is much the same way. God has been absent for a long, long time, and only the four Archangels (Gabriel, Raphael, Michael, and Lucifer, in this particular interpretation) have ever seen him in person. Orders come down the chain of command from Michael and Raphael (Gabriel having long since fled Heaven and vanished somewhere on Earth) and angels are expected to obey without question and have faith that their orders must be the will of God. Disobedience is strictly punished, even by implied torture, and their society is structured like a military. There are very few people on Earth, hunters or otherwise, that know about that Heaven is real, and Dean is adamant that if angels actually existed, someone would have seen some proof over the centuries. Castiel states that angels have not walked the earth for thousands of years (wiki says it was forbidden for them to do so), which might be an exaggeration, but all the same the portion of humanity that happens to be in the know about the supernatural has all kinds of definitive proof about the existence of demons and apparently zip about the existence of angels. As hunters don't seem to be particularly religious, possibly because they deal with the secular, hard-proof side of demons and monsters affiliated with religions that at the end of the day are just monsters, perhaps this is only to be expected. They do, however, make frequent use of religious practices and objects like churches being hallowed ground, and holy water, but none of them have seen angels. Go figure.

Just like demons, angels have to manifest on the physical plane by occupying human vessels. Unlike demons, who can possess anyone they want, angels can only possess vessels from certain bloodlines. This ends up including Lucifer, and the explanation is that only these particular bloodlines can contain the raw power of the divinity inside. Less suitable vessels are slowly burned up by the process, so vessels are a big deal, and they have to give their consent before an angel can possess them. This, again, includes Lucifer, which is a major Plot Point later.

Angels are easily capable of dispatching demons, but they can be killed, trapped, de-powered by certain tiers of beings (such as Eve), locked out of locations with the use of seals, and even forced to manifest by witchcraft. Angels derive their power from their connection to Heaven, and since Heaven is full of squabbling factions and even corruption, any given angel can be "unplugged" and their powers significantly reduced. A rebellious angel can have their powers reduced without actually being banned permanently from Heaven, so there are apparently degrees of Falling. Lucifer was cast out, Anna voluntarily left Heaven and ripped out her Grace which turned her human (but she was able to become an angel again by getting her Grace back), Gabriel voluntarily left Heaven but retained all his of powers, and Castiel disobeyed Heaven's orders and had his powers greatly reduced but was not actually cast out. Out of these, only Lucifer and Anna count as Fallen Angels, while Gabriel and Castiel are merely rebellious.

According to Castiel, angels don't exist simply to help people but to serve God's will, and in his absence that means Michael and Raphael's will, and what Michael and Raphael (and a number of other angels) want is the Apocalypse. They want the showdown between Michael and Lucifer, and all the disasters that lead up to it because it will mean eternal peace if Heaven wins. Or eternal suffering if Hell does. To most of the angels, the misery of humanity caught in the crossfire is simply collateral damage. Sure, thousands of people might die when the Four Horsemen are unleashed on the world, and a whole slew of people are going to have to die in order to get Lucifer out of his cage, but them's the breaks. Also the angels are fairly surely that they'll win (having any opinion otherwise is forbidden), so everyone will have eternal peace in the end and that's totally worth the death toll.

It's also apparently worth murdering other angels in order to allow the 66 Seals to be broken and get the Apocalypse ball rolling. Michael and Raphael didn't simply give the orders to let Lucifer rise and let the Apocalypse happen, even if they secretly wanted those things. Instead they command their soldiers to go to war against Hell and do everything in their power to keep the 66 Seals intact, which in some cases ends up pitting angels against angels and sowing more doubt and confusion in the ranks. Some angels are alright with this. Some angels feel no compassion for humanity but balk at murdering their own kind, and some angels draw the line at all of it being corrupt and wrong.

Our heroes, of course, want to stop the Apocalypse at all costs, but it turns out they have a very personal stake in the coming duel between dutiful older brother Michael and estranged younger brother Lucifer; dutiful older brother Dean is Michael's vessel, and estranged younger brother Sam is Lucifer's. Both Heaven and Hell are determined to force the Winchesters to consent to be used as meat puppets and fight each other to the death, so when they aren't being kidnapped or tortured or threatened by demons, they're being kidnapped or tortured or threatened by angels.

Angels are kind of dicks, when you get down to it. While the various demons can be manipulated by their own senses of self-preservation, angels are hard to fight and harder to convince to back off for any reason. When they can't force Dean to agree to be Michael's vessel, they bring his half-brother Adam back from the dead and manipulate him into agreeing, even though he's a less suitable vessel and will probably die from it.

Fortunately for everyone, the grand duel between possessed Sam (who had said yes to Lucifer in hopes of gaining a moment of control so he could throw himself-and-Lucifer back into the original cage) and possessed Adam is interrupted by Dean being Dean, who decides that if he can't save either of them he's going to die with them. Sam gets his moment of control, and both he and possessed Adam are sucked down into the prison God built for Lucifer. Hypothetically forever.

So yeah, the Winchesters are not happy with angels.







Personality:

Abilities, Weaknesses, and Power Limitation Suggestions:

Inventory:
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Age:

OC/AU Justification
If AU, How is Your Version Different From Canon, and How Will That Come Across?
If OC, Did You Run Your Character Through a Mary-Sue Litmus Test?
And What Did You Score?

Samples
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