This is an explanatory writeup of one of my Original Characters (OCs). Nothing here is necessarily related to a meaningful fiction you should recognise and is shared because I think my OCs are cool and it’s cool to talk about OCs you make.
So he’s an incubus? Is that the word for a boy one?”
“Succubus and Incubus refer to ‘bottom’ and ‘top’, you know.”
“Whoah, really? Then which one is he?”
“I’m RIGHT HERE.
Bael really doesn’t like the word ‘sidekick.’ It hovered over him too long – first as a Demon Prince’s human-world emissary, then the caged pet of a Thorn mage, and finally as the protege of one of Paragon’s heroes. It was a tightly-packed few years.
Now the leader of the Young Spartans, Bael makes it his job to get the best out of his entire team.
Bael is a shirtless swaggering demon hero, covered in magical runes that glow as he fights. What he does has so many of the hallmarks of a ‘demon’ ability in a story, being able to ‘poof’ from point to point, short teleportations, making deals, and of course, the danger represented by a character who is both immune to fire and capable of pulling souls out of bodies. Not that he does that much. Bael is a melee combatant who deals with ranged opponents by just teleporting into them; appearing behind someone with a puff of smoke and a crack of an impact.
Despite being extremely tough and capable a fighter, Bael is also a tactical thinker and a leader who believes it’s important to understand his friends extremely well. To that end, he spends time studying them, training with them, but also, supporting them emotionally and ensuring they trust him. This means he wants to position himself in the middle of fights to be able to create opportunities for his more powerful, more specialised friends, and to take hits so they don’t have to.
Bael has a few weaknesses he can’t route around. Thanks to being a devil there are locations he can be literally warded out of. It’s hard to sneak around in a church while your skin is burning. He’s completely unable to be subtle about his body – thanks to his incubus nature, people notice him, he is captivating to the eye. There are whole disciplines of magic designed to attack someone like him, too.
Mechanics
Bael is a Fire Armour/Dark Melee tanker, one of the most survivable combos you can have out of the gates. It’s a really strong build because both your armour and attack sets overlap on ways to keep you alive. Two self heals, two endurance recovery tools, two damage boosters, and a resistance armour that ties into a -tohit defense set, it even has a big area damage attack in Fire Armour’s Burn to compensate for what was, at one time, the weaker area damage in Dark Melee.
Bael’s build, which is pretty expensive, has:
- 45% melee defense
- 35% smashing and lethal defense
- 25% cold and fire defense
- 90% resistance to smashing, lethal, and fire damage
- 66% resistance to energy and negative energy
- 165% global recharge, so permanent hasten, and almost permanent Soul Drain
It’s an undeniably pricey build. Purples and ATOs! But it’s also a build that leans heavily into my existing laziness. He has Physical Perfection instead of fireball because I really didn’t want to care about managing my endurance.
Exports still don’t work on Mids Reborn, so no link for you. RIP. That’s for the best, it means you haven’t seen the way he hasn’t been rebuilt since the change to Flight a year ago.
History
In character, Bael is one of the founders of the Young Spartans supergroup, of which we’ve also discussed Brand and Hext. Bael, the former sidekick of the Robot Superhero Evocatus, was found once upon a time as an errant demon child summoned accidentally by Hellions. A few heroes considered the task of rearing him, and he was eventually adopted by the robot hero Evocatus. Evocatus, as an entirely inhuman entity, was immune to a lot of the demonic magic the boy had. Over time, Evocatus, who was very good at extremely dense, theory-led visions of ethics and morality, helped to contain the boy’s magic and taught him to be a good hero, a good leader, and a good friend. Evocatus is also why the boy is covered in runic tattoos – safety wards that protect other people from his magic without consent. When he achieved majority Evocatus gave him a stipend of cash to help him strike out on his own, and assured him he would support him when he could.
It’s the single best relationship between mentor and sidekick that exists in the Young Spartans.
The history of the character though, well, that’s much longer.
What a thread this character has taken. In the true Loachevsky litany of names tradition, the story starts with a demon boy called Conspyre. Conspyre was a blaster who, back on Live, was created to be part of a friend’s supergroup project that wanted prestige for base building (Conspyre even one day became the character Brand). Inspired by this character and while waiting for others to play, I made him a villainous fire/fire dominator brother, Expyre. Expyre fell in with a roleplay group, that treated him badly and disintegrated, so I tried again, rebuilding the character and remaking him as a martial artist channelling a dragon’s energy. Then, that fell through again and I found myself with the project to make the Young Spartans.
A detail missing between here, I suppose, is that Expyre’s build, in the context of the in-game economy, was absurd. It was very hard to level a Dominator, I had a lot of time to play around in the marketplace and he wound up being an expensive build in an expensive time. Without access to Incarnate material, he was still fantastically powerful.
The Young Spartans was kind of an act of personal defiance. A lot of my characters had entered RP spaces, and then been ghosted or abused and rather than delete them when I left, I used my resources to rename and rebuild the characters and put them in their own RP SG that ultimately, was just me and just my characters. Perhaps a little sad to say ‘hey, I have solved the problem of other people treating me badly, by withdrawing from everything’ but I feel like the result was a lot of stuff that makes me happy and can serve as a good example to other people what I like about superheroes. The Young Spartans are a supergroup composed of former sidekicks, all having left their former mentors happily or otherwise, and it was in this group that I decided my over-built, expensively crafted Dominator was going to be an important, central character in the group.
That remake was Bael. The noble demon, the devil boy, the heroic leader of a group of rejects and losers holding themselves together, and damnit he’d be bloody hot.
Then the game shut down.
I played Bael a bit in G4 RP, post-City superhero RP. With a whole bunch of dollies to rebuild and put together I could take some ideas and explore them in a lot of different ways. Some of these ideas worked out really well when I shared them with other friends – undeniably in my mind, Bael was massively improved by the idea of having had a Robot Mentor! That’s something that comes from Cass and it’s now 100% bedrock to how he wound up being so well rounded and sensible. Bael’s whole wing of powers working on consent, meaning that sure, he could do cool demon things to people as long as they wanted him to was a big part of it too, which is in no small part informed by Cae.
When we got City back in Homecoming, I resisted for a bit remaking the characters, but couldn’t stop myself because I had their costume files and I liked them a lot. That meant I brought back Bael, and because now I had the character much more solidified in my mind, I made him with his new build; a Tanker, which meant that he was taking point ahead of his friends.
It’s such an unnecessary detailed backstory for ‘hot demon anime big brother figure.’ But here we are.