Look at your life through heaven's eyes...

[carnagecarnival]

To be Divine. To be lauded and praised and in turn gain power. Power greater than, perhaps, any other thing in existence. But even the deific can have downsides. Especially with a pantheon like this.

It's the............





The World of the Lost has introduced all kinds of godly beings young and old, each defined different ways, more worlds and more flocks. Now all the lowly mortals can have a crack at it! To play:

1. For your character, consider:
a) What is their ASPECT, the one thing that defines them? How do they fare being set in one specific way and unable to change? Are they a young godling or an elder deity.
b) What is their world like? How does it reflect their nature?
c) What is their Flock like? Were they created brand new or brought in from elsewhere? How do they appear to their flock? How does their flock feel about them?
d) How do characters (who tag them as below) influence them in their growth?
2.Tag others as either a member of the flock or the pantheon describing what life is like as a member of the flock or perhaps what chaos is caused for a fellow god.
3. Have fun!

Comments

[ignes_fatui]

The god of Curiosity is a fairly well-established god (older than Zephyr, but not yet fully grown) who presides over a city of skyscrapers in glass and steel and marble on an endless tundra, referred to as the Ivory Towers with varying degrees of irony by its residents. Predictably enough, it is populated by scientists, wizards, detectives, spies, monks and countless other seekers of knowledge of all kinds, all borrowed from other worlds - all the better to learn what else is out there, after all. Over time they've come to fill the city with labs and libraries and colleges and forums of debate.

He and his flock both have a bit of a reputation for egotism and ruthlessness, as one might expect from a group of people defined by their burning and insatiable need to pursue answers, sometimes at any cost, but he does his best to be fair, or at least something close to it. Unlike most gods he requires payment for wishes made, to be negotiated in the highest room of the tallest tower, decorated to look like a sleek, imposing office - tell a story or teach him something for a simple request, or give away a treasured memory or an eye for something more - but he never takes offerings of greater value than what he'll be giving in return, and those who truly come to regret their bargains can usually get their possessions back in exchange for a favor.

(Often these favors verge on the side of 'ironic punishment,' but he does keep his word, and it's hard to be around a populace like his without developing something of a mischievous streak.)

He has many names (as gods often do), but the most common among them is Heosphor, and he takes the form of a slim young man with night-dark eyes and hair as white as starlight, seen as often in his office with his ceremonial quill in hand (for drafting and signing contracts, as his flock was very quick to teach him the value of getting his agreements in writing) as in the labs conducting experiments of his own.

[carnagecarnival]

As stated in the previous iteration of this meme, Izzekiel's paint-aspect and kind of actual aspect is Fear. Unlike in the previous meme, I'm going to roll with that this time!

Fear works much the same as Fovos does. Their forms are alike, with Fovos a blue-ish bit of space given form, and Izzekiel a sparking pink and purple void, horned, but both shape shifters taking form to reflect. There's the carnival and the shoreline, just the same, though Izzekiel's shore stretches wider and the Carnival farther out. But there are slight divergences.

The Carnivals blend into cathedrals, the shores bleed into boat and shanty towns off the docks. Though typically a dark world, the sky is ever lit with sparkling stars, bonfires, floating lights, and carnival neon. The Carnival is labyrinthine and while many tents have been adapted into homes and sanctuaries, many others reveal visions inside, usually presenting that which the person fears. In order to reach certain portions of the carnival or get certain items, it is required than one face their fears in these tents, gaze upon the funhouse mirrors and all the like.

This Fear god demands that fears are faced, with good intention, and for the sake of amusement alike. Doing things for entertainment is a great draw, but ultimately this god seeks growth in their flock, a moment in which one realises the good that can come of understanding one's own fear. As well as an understanding of their god. As Fear, tribute is demanded. This can be done through performance, dedication in facing fear, praise, prayer, worship, and maybe even small personal sacrifice. Direct interaction is often through dreams or veiled in some way, appearing in tent vision as something else and rewarding their flock when pleased with the result.

Fear is fiercely protective of the flock. A single unlost soul may mean upheaval for the entire world in some way. It is enough to keep those within the world on their toes, forcing them inward and closer together. Though a god that tries for the free and chaotic, Fear is strict and acts that displease are met with the harshest punishments. Though adoring of the flock, and wanting the flock to love in turn, fear of god is not an alien concept.

The chosen individuals are the fearful, the paranoid, the distrusting, and even a few of the seemingly brave.

Wishes are made by entering a tent and finding an empty seashore. The wisher must fold hands in prayer, find the stardust left between their palms, and cast it out into the sea (blowing it away can easily accomplish this) all whilst being firm enough in their own conviction.

(Keivoz, a bastardization of Deimos and Kurloz, may be the name, if not anything else...)

Fear has a sibling who is Beauty In Death and their world is all things bittersweet, beautiful, and ending, and that god loves sacrificial folks and those who crave death, one way or another. Also pretty people.

[bard_of_fuckiforgot]

The god of Rage was a chill motherfucker. Almost the god of Mirth or Miracles, the state of the flock took a sudden and quite sharp turn in such a critical moment, that rage was then set in stone. There are signs of that old hope, little wonders and simple pleasures all around, bringing joy and laughter. Music and color and all things made to lull one into contentment. It was a world initially and solely made to soothe. A paradise for the living. A place in which people could put their pain to rest.

But the skies are often overcast now, weighing down like a bruise. The wind whips and promises a coming storm. When tempers truly flare, it strikes. The lightening comes down in all manner of color, the fires it can cause, the same, but neither are any less destructive.

The quaint tent village sits on the edge of a cliff, where raging ocean roars below. Journeying in the opposite direction, away from the roar of the sea but also the safety of the village, one may find themselves in the wastelands where murdered dreams lay in ruins in the sand. Illusions dance and voices whisper, bringing up pains of the past (or present) that were run from for so long. Personal flaws, failures, and losses. While before, the village was a sanctuary, now the storms may occasionally sweep someone away into the desert, or even drive in the whole village for a time.

The people collected are those who are angry, and those who show no anger at all at the expense of themselves, or the complacent. Those who would destroy in their anger, and those who would let themselves be destroyed in lack of it. Or both.

While initially meaning to heal those collected, the angry and the hurting alike, the realisation of aspect solidified a permanent turmoil of some sort. The godling sits on the edge of unleashing rage, and allowing the flock to run them ragged, just as the flock itself fights the same. Should the godling grow into a balance, a manner of lesson teaching and rougher-style healing may be achieved, giving the flock both control of themselves, and a backbone. Should the godling fail to grow into this properly, control may very well be lost of the flock entirely...

Rage appears a two faced, curly haired chimera with three different kinds of wings (angelic, demonic, insectile), fins, goat-ish fur, a snake's tongue, and long claws. The faces change in a blink from one smiling calmly to one in a furious and despairing grimace of fangs. The skin is lined with swirling patterns that glow, the colors shifting with the face. Typical garb is a shredded and worn purple jester's garb.

[noblankpages]

One might think a person who shouldn't be able to feel anything at all wouldn't belong in a realm governed by a god of Rage, but Zexion has lived in the tent village for some time regardless, coming in right on the heels of his second death (or maybe his third) in the midst of a whirlwind of nested betrayals. He'll explain, at length and whenever it's relevant, that he's actually an empty husk of a being, incapable of any true emotion at all, and at first glance he does seem fairly calm and collected, but there's something undeniable in him that looks a whole lot like fury and resentment. It's just very well-hidden.

He displays precisely none of the desire to be helpful that his counterpart in the Meadous does, and for the most part he just tries to stay out of things, considering himself above the petty squabbles of his peers. Misfortune and nightmares do seem to befall people who he perceives to have slighted him a little more frequently than most, but that's probably just a coincidence.

[aigue]

The god of never-ending stories is an ancient beast that most often appears in the form of a young woman, a fox, or something in between. Fairly simplistic for a god, but she's a big fan of 'appearances can be deceiving'. Her fur is the colour of black and grey smoke, or the night sky and its stars, or coal dusted with ash.

The flock consists of people whose own personal story was cut short, which generally means a whole lot of infants and children who died before they had the chance to experience life. Along with this group are those who craft narratives in various forms: everyone from writers to traditional storytellers to philosophers and even liars. They're all encouraged to do what they can to craft their narrative, whether that's their own life or a story brewing in their mind (occasionally these narratives have a tendency to come to life, oops). Creativity, cleverness and imagination are favoured upon and those who don't lean towards those characteristics tend not to last long in her world. Also favoured are those who have been ground down in life; the poor and peasants and lower classes. Very few nobility, clergy and royalty can be found.

Her world is an old one that has been built up organically over time. Buildings of various eras wrap and intertwine with each other, reaching high into the sky. A stone castle might be perfectly melded with a modern skyscraper, for example. At the base of them all are thick forests with tunnels and burrows leading deep beneath the ground. One can find winding alleys, hidden passages, and routes through the tree canopies easily. It's chaotic, dangerous, and full of secretive paths and hideaways.

Because of her aspect, time flows a little weirdly in her world. Her flock will find that their aging slows down, stops, or even reverses, and the same goes for the days. Occasionally a week or a month will simply be stopped or repeated, Groundhog Day style, so time is regarded in the most casual way possible by her flock.

Offerings (food, art, creations of any kind) at one of the many fox shrines scattered about are often given in exchange for wishes, though it generally seems to be random whether the god will actually grant them. She seems to prefer being a mischievous terror and harassing other gods, or being a layabout and seeing what creative inspirations her flock has conjured up.

[furgood]

Some gods are wielders of great and powerful aspects. Some are consigned to something more small. Maurea, the goddess of tide pools found her aspect rather quickly in life. Her whole world is a rocky vast shallow ocean, littered with little volcanic islands with very little vegetation above water but home to various birds that scavenge the pools as well. Below the water is a different story. It's full of life, pockets of rocks that house fish and crustaceans, tough water plants and spiky urchins. They're also home to bits of driftwood, tumbled sea glass, nets and shells, anything discarded in the worlds might make it's way through the great ocean to her doorstep and linger in the pools at low tide.

Due to the changing landscape, the great steps of rock at low tide and the submergence of nearly all land at high tide, homes are built on sturdy stilts, each to their own little space. At low tide, wandering is easy, but at high tide, seeing one another is only done by boat and such boats must be tied tight to one's house or you risk losing the only to see them once more as driftwood.

She's an easy going goddess, smiling and happy in all things. Most often, she appears as a reflection in the ocean, beaming with hair like a cloud of black gold speckled with bits of shell and sand. Her form shifts with the tides, almost never exactly the same from one time to the next. Her eyes shift color but tend to a deep green and her skin slips between the tan of driftwood at low tide and the deep slate of volcanic rock at high tide. On land, she's surrounded by a dresslike mist of seafoam and draped with bits of the sea, shells and , kelp braided strong to hold those bits on her. There's always something new added and she will occasionally join her flock in their hunts of the tidepools. In the water, she grows a tail and it's a continual debate among her flock if her tail is always there and she simply floats on land in the misty foam or if she truly changes like so much about her does. She shrugs and says she's the same either way. They're not all exactly happy with that answer.

Her offerings are placed in little bottles and sent out to sea, as are the wishes made by her flock. Thusly, their wishes are haphazardly granted, as she finds them, and they find themselves forgetting they wished for anything at all only to wake up one day with a new building settled into the haphazard town that they wanted a year ago.

Her flock consists mainly of those who are themselves the flotsam of the worlds. The unwanted or simply unappreciated, those who found themselves flung out to sea and fought their way back. She treasures those who are special in their own small ways, whose beauty hides from common eyes, who have been tossed around by life. She even likes to find those whose lives begin and end with the sea, who live and breathe it like she does. She is, most of all, a collector and if she's honest, her flock is a little too large for the bits of exposed rock her world is made of.

Her flock has been making the best of it, creating bridges of rope that collect barnacles at high tide and planting gardens in their windows and sheltering little plants on what land they can find. Perhaps one day there will be proper islands, islands that thrive as her people build but she finds no flaw in that. What is a tidepool but a changing adapting world? It's only proper that her flock changes it and adapts to it in turns.

[psycheslantern]

The goddess of Choice is a stubborn little shit.

Well, ok, resolute is probably a more polite way to describe her. She's open-minded, right up to the point where she decides what she wants to do; she can't make a good choice if she doesn't know what her options are, after all. But once she decides, it's very nearly impossible to get her to take it back - she may later make another choice on the same matter, but only to a third option that she hadn't originally considered. (The few major decisions she has reversed are usually because her flock was able to reconceptualize an option she'd previously rejected and present it to her in a sufficiently different light.) She's a bit older than Zephyr but she tends to stagnate in her development and then go through dramatic bursts of growth, so at any given time she tends to be either a little behind or a little ahead of her peers.

Her realm isn't often referred to by any particular name, but sometimes residents call it the Possible. Most of the landscape is dry, hot scrubland deeply cut by narrow canyons of banded sandstone. In terms of square mileage the world is fairly small for a godling her age, but the complex of canyons and cave systems is very nearly a three-dimensional labyrinth, and it's very common to find unexpected resources or even entire microbiomes tucked away somewhere between the arid surface and the icy rivers that run along the bottoms of the canyons. The major village is built on and into the walls of a particularly complicated tangle of branching ravines; individual buildings are connected by bridges built from a variety of materials, and the bridges are frequently rebuilt or added to. It's considered neighborly to help construct bridges between a new arrival's home and public areas such as the Archives and the Warehouse, and often you can judge how well people like each other by how much effort they put into maintaining the bridges between their homes. Occasionally when residents are feuding, bridges get burned in a very literal sense, and the godling doesn't mind as long as no one's on the bridge in question at the time. She doesn't like it when people get hurt, but she appreciates dramatic gestures.

Early on, she experimented with both creating and finding people to build her flock, but she fairly quickly decided that she liked finding her flock better and she hasn't created any sapient beings in years. Her own physical form closely reflects that of her early created followers - a small, slim humanoid with prominent insect features, including a pair of wasp-like wings, a partial brightly-colored carapace (golden yellow in her particular case), and large faceted eyes. She still has a few of her created followers hanging around, but she hadn't made many of them in the first place and most of her flock at this point are found - she selects for decisiveness and willingness to consider unconventional courses of action. Innovators, explorers, rebels, and strategists are common, and they are very much the "hold my beer and watch this" flock.

The goddess answers to several names - Oriana, Hornet, and Amanda being the most common - but she will only ever answer to the first thing each person calls her. Mostly her flock tries to warn newbies about this and advise them on what the common names are, but there's at least one person in town who can only get their deity's attention by calling her "Hey You."

Her flock is also unusually small, because she is functionally incapable of holding onto a flock member who does not choose to be there. She can find and introduce them to her realm as per normal for a young god, and she does her best to convince them to choose to stay - she tries to do right by her followers, and she often can't tell what happens to them after they leave, which frightens her. But if, after she's laid out the situation, a new arrival still says they want to leave, that's their choice. She isn't capable of holding them in her realm after they choose not to be there. Occasionally if she's quick about it she can pass them off to another godling whose realm she hopes they'll appreciate more, but sometimes they just slip out of her grasp and she's not sure what happens to them. On the other hand, this also means that the flock that she does keep is unusually loyal to their godling.

She grants wishes that are yelled into the Wish Cave; occasionally the Cave echos back an alternative to the wish, and the wisher may choose between their original request and the goddess's suggestion. She never reverses a boon once it's been granted.

[ignes_fatui]

Oriana and Heosphor are classmates and are not allowed to sit anywhere near each other because they are an unholy terror together. Heosphor is endlessly fascinated with the Possible flock and how unpredictable and inventive they are and spends as much time as he can reasonably spare watching them and occasionally meddling with their affairs. He's mostly allowed to get away with this because he's given her full access to the Ivory Towers to do the same. As a result of this, they've each caused major catastrophes in each others' realms in the course of their various experiments five separate times according to school records, and that's only the ones they weren't able to fix themselves before their teacher caught them.

Sometimes the people who choose to leave the Possible wind up in the Ivory Towers. Imagine their surprise when they wind up metaphysically right next door and the bug goddess who made a huge deal about not knowing where they'd go occasionally pops in and breaks the world. There may or may not be a support group.

[psycheslantern]

For her part, Oriana is enthralled by how many options for everything the Ivory Towers flock keeps discovering. She doesn't have the patience for much in the way of formal research herself, especially not theoretical research, but she loves hearing about others' results. Potentialities she never would have considered! How great is that? Of course, just because you can act on something or bring something about doesn't mean you should. For instance just because your buddy let you mess with his realm doesn't mean you should make changes based on unproven theories, even if you are super excited about those theories right now.

I'm fairly certain that on at least one occasion these two have accidentally grabbed each other's fishbowls at the end of the school day and taken them home, too. They got traded back the next morning, but "overnight" on the god plane does not necessarily mean "overnight" inside their realms. Oriana is at least a lot more careful with the Ivory Towers if Heosphor isn't around to help her figure out what she did to it.

[telecosmetic]

The goddess of Devotion can be kind of terrifying.

It's not really her fault. She chose for her flock the ones who'd had little love in their lives, who needed someone willing to stand by them no matter what. While she also tried to choose those who were capable of returning her devotion, that doesn't mean they'd always do it in a healthy way.

Still, there were enough who appreciated her original bright, chirpy manner that she still mostly acts like that, especially among her own flock. She can get a bit more vicious to outsiders, especially those she feels would hurt her flock. But even within her flock-she holds tightly to them. She doesn't quite demand absolute worship from them, but she often acts unhappy if they're too obvious about other gods they revere. However, if they've found someone they love deeply as part of another flock, she's likely to let them go to join that flock if she feels their devotion is strong enough.

She looks like a humanoid bird, with bright pink and purple colors. However, when she's enraged, or even slightly upset, those colors start to darken in shade, and black markings start to creep among them. And she'll start to show teeth, which she usually doesn't have.

Her world looks like a giant tree, with houses built into the trunk, and some among the thicker branches. It's actually impossible to actually fall off the tree, and it's much easier to traverse than it seems-travel works much faster than you think it would. Each house, however, contains a shrine of some sort to the goddess. Or at least the houses of her older flock members all do, because they know she appreciates it as a gesture. She's fine with almost anything as a way of worship, except maiming or killing other members of her flock without their consent. In such cases, she often rushes in to put herself physically between the two flock members. Her punishments usually involve blocking them off from things they love, and in extreme cases she'll block communication between herself and the offender for anything but an apology. Still, she doesn't do it that often, since it hurts her to be cut off like that as well.

She goes by Ellie, a name apparently given to her by the first member of her flock, although she always appreciates extra titles and honors being added to it.