Dorian_Damned

@grimmwald:

He didn’t manage to inflict the horrors of old age upon the devilman, but Dorian did drain a bit of time away. It was delicious. The devilman’s life force tasted of calculation (hints of copper and fresh grapes), domination (cinnamon and rock dust), and desperation (sea salt and pomegranate). He wanted more. He wanted much more. But the devilman darted out of range of Dorian’s grasp, thwarting Dorian’s feast. Still, the time he had taken made Dorian feel much better – he was by no means fully healed, but some of the edge had been taken off.

Dorian’s little paint trick instilled a surrealist bent into the devilman. He twisted and bent and deformed, becoming now a tree, and now a snake, spewing paint from a hole in his head. Yes, he would be a most popular model amongst Magritte and Dali and the like. Dorian felt a pang of envy. No one could be a more coveted model than he, even in Dorian’s imaginings!

Dorian suddenly found he couldn’t breathe very well. This was perhaps not surprising considering the rearranging of his internal organs, so he didn’t give it too much thought. He wouldn’t die if he suffocated, it wasn’t a big deal. So why was he so anxious about it? His heart was a nice lump of pummeled meat right now, but if it wasn’t it would be beating fast, beating hard. Its absence, the still fear, was perhaps worse than a racing heart.

“Don’t worry, it’s all chemical,” said Alan Campbell, the chemist who had helped destroy the evidence of Dorian’s first murder. “It’s not really happening.”

Dorian wasn’t standing in the middle of a currently less-than-idyllic island…he was lying in a tub, his rigor-mortised limbs cramped, an old stain running down the porcelain, a crack intersecting it near Dorian’s fingers. It was so real.

And yet at the same time Dorian saw the devastated island, the devilman watching him.

He had a high tolerance for fear-based attacks, but this one was ever so strong…

Alan Campbell picked up the acid and poured, and the scene changed.

Dorian was staring at his portrait, but it was not corrupted. It was beautiful. Dorian had led a full and rich life, and he was old now, his golden hair faded to silver, his smooth skin seismically made into mountains and valleys of wrinkles, his blue eyes clouded with cataracts. He had travelled the world, made many friends, and it was all…such a waste! He could have had it all, with beauty to spare! But here he was, ugly and old, and his life would be over soon even though it had just begun! He sat down in a chair and waited for death, and the scene changed.

Dorian’s hand twitched. His eyes, darting to and fro as he lived out nightmares, were full of rage.

He was running through back alleys, breathing hard. He stumbled over cobblestones. The moon sounded the alarm high above, revealing his presence with her harsh light. Behind him was the demon. They said he was just a man, but he had hunted Dorian for eighteen years, and finally caught up. “Prince Charming” he growled, and there were sea shanties in his voice.

“Leave me alone!” whimpered Dorian.

His movements were unknown to Dorian himself…they would be hard to predict. He clenched his fist.

He was cornered in an alley. The demon had a gun. Dorian found he couldn’t move, couldn’t speak as the demon (‘devilman’ something whispered) approached. He was twelve feet tall, and the only feature on his face was a wide, wide smile. He spoke in Shakespeare quotes as he approached. Dorian pressed himself against the wall, but it did not give.

“Prince Charming…” said the demon (whose name was James Vane if it mattered, which it didn’t). He ran a hand down Dorian’s cheek, wiping away Dorian’s tears and licking them from his fingers.

Dorian dug his fingernails into his palm until blood dripped down onto the grass.

“Leave me alone!” said Dorian, more loudly this time.

Demon blood ran through his veins. Demon blood ran through the ruins of his heart. Demon blood burned through his brain.

Dorian burst into flames.

Dorian burst into flames.

A blast of hellfire radiated out from him at a devastating pace, a humungous blast like a bomb, eradicating the alley, eradicating the demon.

A blast of hellfire radiated out from him at a devastating pace, a humungous blast like a bomb eradicating everything it touched, trees, picnickers, flowers, it’s center aimed squarely at the devilman.

“I carry Hell within me,” said Dorian, one eye seeing nightmares and the other reality. “I have faced my personal demons in hand-to-hand combat, and while many have bested me I have always fought them, again and again. I know no fear, for while fear relies on the unknown, I know exactly what will happen to me, the torments I will endure, as consequences of my fear.”

Tall talk for someone currently reliving his childhood nightmares, all alone in his bedroom at his grandfather’s house, but the devilman didn’t have to know that…assuming there was more than ash left of the devilman.

Dorian crossed his arms and waited to see what fresh Hells would be dropped at his feet.

@grimmwald:

The devilman dodged and weaved between Dorian’s barrage like it was nothing, his motions as fluid as a cockroach, an ultimate survivor. Back in the opium den days, half-asleep and reclined on silk pillows, Dorian had made games of how many cockroaches he could kill. Dreaming of innocence and beauty, his hands were coated in the yellow guts and exoskeletons of creeping vermin.

Dorian chattered his mandibles furiously and increased his tempo, but to no avail. It was as if the devilman knew what Dorian was going to do before Dorian did it, knew each gouge and swipe. Each missed blow only served to enrage Dorian further. He had taken Dorian’s arm from him! He had sullied Dorian’s beauty! He was no Venus de Milo…or perhaps he was? The thought was comforting. He could be his perfect self even without a limb. That didn’t change the fact that the devilman had to die, but it made Dorian feel more magnanimous towards him. When he returned to hell, where the devilman would certainly be waiting, he’d take over his torture personally of course. Maybe he would only punish him for this fight for the first thousand years or so, instead of the twenty thousand he had originally planned. It was amazing how Hell could grow on one, Dorian thought.

He feared ugliness and age above all else, with death in a close second. Now he was dead, dead and damned, and it wasn’t so bad. Pain was as much an aphrodisiac as it was punishment, but he knew that from when he was alive anyway. They had let him stay beautiful, and that’s what mattered.

He stumbled over an irregularity in the ground just at the moment that the devilman directed his blow towards Dorian’s head. It missed by a fraction of an inch, ruffling Dorian’s perfect hair. He darted back before Dorian could do anything, but he had forgotten something. Dorian smiled, revealing sparkling teeth and jagged purple-black mandibles. He still had paint on his eyes.

Dorian took control of the paint. He’d send it rapidly digging back through the eyes, into the brain, to wreak havoc there, drilling mercilessly into the vital tissues.

Oh, but the devilman had another gift for Dorian. He punched his hand into Dorian’s chest…making direct contact with Dorian’s flesh. It didn’t matter if he had clothing, Dorian could work through that. Dorian wasted no time in implementing his life draining ability. As long as the devilman was in contact with Dorian he would have years pulled from him…and given to Dorian. To prolong contact, Dorian would attempt to grab the devilman’s wrist with his remaining arm, and hold it inside his chest. He would actually manifest his exoskeleton, trapping the devilman’s hand for real within the chitinous shell. He disliked his exoskeleton – it was so drab and ugly – but it came in handy on occasion, and he was awfully squishy in his humanoid form.

There was the small matter of Dorian’s heart however; he couldn’t pretend that wasn’t a problem. His heart contained a rather large section of his portrait, and its actual destruction would be a problem. It was a problem he had to address immediately.

As his heart burst, he jabbed several of his own sharp-edged limbs under his rib cage, wrapping them tightly around the ruined organ. Inside their grasp was the portrait fragment – the flesh and blood were unimportant. The portrait shard had been damaged by the blow, and Dorian felt faint. It had not been destroyed, and this was his salvation, or as much salvation as a damned being can have. He coughed up black blood, could feel fleshy swill inside of him. He would see this through even if it killed him again. No devilman could come near the level of his inner demons anyway, he assured himself.

@grimmwald:

Dorian waited impatiently as his spiders went to work. He would have tapped his foot, but his foot was somewhere beyond the reaches of his brain at the present time. He hoped it was having marvelous debauched adventures in the absence of controlling brainwaves, though that was probably difficult with it being attached to the rest of his body and all.

There was a blaze of fire and a good number of trees crumbled away to nothing. The picnickers, who had so far largely been ignoring Dorian and the devilman, started to panic and run around wildly, still clutching bottles of wine and ham sandwiches as if their life depended on it.

Just as Dorian was almost finished with his riddle, the devilman plopped to the ground a few meters away. He picked himself back up in a contortion the likes of which Dorian had only ever seen in Hell, and began to approach. He stood. Dorian appraised him. My, my, my, was he a mess. Hellfire would do that.

His answer to the riddle was to forcibly spit chunks of his own flesh, which was decidedly not the answer. Not particularly gentlemanly either, flesh should be kept inside one’s own body at all times.

“A game of darts. The answer is actually a game of darts, not an expectoration ofyour own innards” said Dorian, and two red things affixed themselves to his flesh. He could feel them draining him immediately, and tore them off with clawed hands. Some damage had been done, but actually the foul leeches were more of a blessing in disguise. Much like the tool of health they had once been, they solved one of Dorian’s major problems: They sucked out all the nanobots in his blood and cerebrospinal fluid and therefore restored sensation to Dorian’s legs. He happily retracted all his abdominal limbs and was once again the picture of health and beauty (though he could use some moisturizing).

Therefore the distraction had worked exactly as planned. Dorian was not prepared for the canister of acid. With his quick reflexes he was able to throw up an arm – his left – and block the majority of the caustic fluid.

His skin melted like oversaturated watercolors, his flesh like acrylic, and his bones like wet chalk. He watched in horror, shrieking in pain as the piece of portrait in his arm was destroyed. The arm – from hand to mid-bicep - would not be growing back any time soon. Droplets of acid spattered him and left deep holes resembling worm tunnels in his body, but those were less serious.

Worse though, were the memories:

It was his first murder – his first and only real murder. Sure, there had been the suicides committed in his name, but those still weren’t really his fault. This time the ghost of the knife still lingered in his hand. What was he to do? He called the chemist Alan Campbell, who brought with him salvation in a bottle. Acid. Dorian watched as Campbell poured the acid onto the body of Dorian’s dearest friend, more than friend, and he would swear that there was an expression of betrayal in the skull’s face right before it imploded upon itself and melted away. Every night after that, up until his own death, Dorian dreamed he was in a tub of acid, his dead friend staring down at him with disinterest and hatred.

Dorian cried out again, this time from the anguish of memory and not the pain itself (which was considerable). Then he opened his mouth and sprayed purple paint like a spitting cobra. Ideally some would get into the devilman’s eyes, and Dorian would be able to blind him. If not, he’d bind him, the paint hardening and slowing movement.

Then he’d take revenge. He’d send the Frame’s Edge circling behind the devilman, not to cut him (though if the devilman got too close it certainly would) but merely to block his path. Then Dorian would approach, moving at his full, considerable speed, and attack the devilman with a barrage of bites and blows from his sharp jaws and numerous claws. The wounds would instantly necrotize. Teeth and claws worked on a fractal scale, going between molecules and therefore shredding the toughest of materials by actually slipping between dimensions.

The devilman had taken Beauty from Dorian…he would pay with everything he had.

@grimmwald:

Dorian frowned. He had assumed the devilman would help him, because living in Hell as he did, devils were among the more reliable of demons. It appeared, however, that this was no devil, but rather someone in a devil disguise. How rude. He was also staring at Dorian quite unpleasantly; didn’t he know it was rude to scare? Now it was true that Dorian was immensely good-looking so a little staring was warranted, but the devilman should just paint a picture – it would last longer.

Then one, two, three, the devilman was in a tree! Dorian tried to hit him, but missed rather spectacularly.

The people who had come here to picnic and escape the city life kept on about their business, even the ones who had caught bits of Dorian’s hellfire barrage and were currently smoldering.

The Frame’s Edge sword came back to Dorian and he caught it neatly. He’d have to try something else. He pondered for a moment, not keeping track of time. Usually he had an eternity to make up his mind on matters, since things rarely happened in Hell. It was all so predictable. Torture at half-past-pain, damned shrieking at betrayal o’clock, that sort of thing. It wasn’t all so different from life in the late 1800s, so it hadn’t even been that difficult of a transition for Dorian. Actually, it was a hell of a lot better than Lady Ampersand’s dinner parties.

Lost in thought as he was, Dorian didn’t notice the knife until it sliced into his knee (his exoskeleton was only helpful if he went full on Dorian the Damned, Prince of Vanity and Scion of Grey). The wound itself healed almost instantly, but he knew full well a sneaky blade like that could only be poisoned. He sighed. His portrait would remove whatever nastiness was in his bloodstream, but it might take a little bit. In the meantime his eyeballs would pop or he’d start speaking in tongues, or whatever the poison did.

He plopped to the ground. How inconvenient. He sighed again. For a moment he considered playing the fool, sobbing and wailing and trying to drag himself to his feet, only to fall back again. But he didn’t know his foe well enough, and he would rather put him on the defensive. Still sitting on the ground, Dorian extended his long tongue and licked the blade of his Frame’s Edge. Blood dripped to the ground. Dorian caught it between his palms and muttered an invocation.

The trees rustled and moved. Dorian had just ordered every spider on the island – and every island has a lot of spiders – to swarm the trees and find the devilman. When they did, they would coat him, bite him (and Dorian did not expect this to do any real damage), get under hands and feet until their crushed bodies proved too slippery to hang on to the tree anymore, drive him down or drive him to madness.

Oh, no, even better!

He planted a spark of hellfire in each spider. When they were crushed the spark would escape and burn and grow until it was a small arachnid inferno ready to engulf the devilman.

Any remaining spiders would pick the devilman up and bring him to Dorian, who would attempt to hit him (anywhere…he wasn’t picky) with the Frame’s Edge.

Dorian frowned. He was still on the ground, and this wouldn’t do. Gentlemen did not sit on the ground. A variety of horrific limbs burst from his abdomen, and lifted him up. He scuttled around a little to test them, his humanoid legs hanging limply below.

This whole set-up took less than a minute.

One thing more…to make it fun.

“False devil that you are,” he called, so that he could be heard even through the trees, “I have a wager to make with you – I’m going to tell you a riddle. If you solve it, I will cut off my own left arm. If you don’t, we can work it out from there, though I’m sure you’re honorable enough to forfeit something. Here we go:

“Concentric rings denounce the bounds of gentlemanly taste

Only the blade determines the score

Outside the rings your parry is a waste

And frankly makes you really quite the bore

What am I?”

Dorian crossed his arms and waited for something to happen.

@grimmwald

He was one of legions, and oh there were legions of them! Those who had sold their souls, usually for a discount price, for something silly like knowledge, truly a bargain basement deal. The thing about knowledge is you can’t un-know anything, and too much knowledge is what started this whole silly thing we know as mankind on the wrong trail in the first place. Much better to be ignorant. Much better to sell your soul for say, riches, or best of all, eternal youth. His eighteen years (for he had only lasted eighteen years after the sale) had been the best of his short life. He was sure if he had lasted longer the years would have been better yet. In fact, he would have had the time of his life by the time he was a hundred or so, but he only made it to thirty-eight. This was his own fault of course, but like any self-respecting young scoundrel he blamed it on anything but. ‘He’ is of course, Dorian Gray.

Let’s not talk about the torments he went through right now…the details are juicy, juicy as his flesh, but let’s let them simmer a little longer. He was remade through suffering, and as all terrible things are, he is beautiful.

Okay we’ll talk about some torments. If you insist. We’ll still save the really good stuff for later. He was, at the time in question, hanging crucified on a mirror, his wrists pierced with paintbrushes. A demon was engaged in hammering glass stakes into his stomach. Thus is vanity’s reward, and also maybe a hint of murder in there somewhere. Well, the demonic foreman came running, holding a piece of paper that smelled of blood from a hundred yards away. Dorian’s eyelids, which had been closed, fluttered.

“Dorian Gray? Really?” said the foreman. Hearing his name, Dorian smiled slightly, and the edges of mandibles peeked out from his cheeks. The foreman came over. “Dorian, you’ve been selected to represent Hell (demonic pact division) in an Earth-based tournament. The organizer is part of the Sanguine Ones, who we’ve worked with in the past…it wouldn’t do to get on their bad side by keeping you here, so if you wish to participate you’re free to go.”

Dorian wrenched himself off of the crucifix and tore the glass spikes from his stomach. “I was just getting relaxed,” he said, and cracked his neck, fingers, and back. “But if you insist…I haven’t been allowed to go upstairs in ever so long. It would be good to take in the scenery.”

Before too long, after a brief speech by the whelp who called himself ‘Master of Ceremonies’ Dorian was standing on a wonderful little island surrounded by water (as islands generally are). Everything seemed more colorful than he remembered – shimmering dots swam across his vision as if they resided in the very air. He took a deep, deep breath. The air was as sweet as his coffee, which when he was alive he had taken black as his heart and sweet as his sins…so very, very sweet.

Now Dorian had a plan. Several plans to be precise. He didn’t know exactly what his foe looked like, so he would have to improvise.

Dorian appeared to be a young man, absolutely beautiful, composed of ‘ivory and rose petals’ as an admirer had once said. (Dorian thought this was a bit much, but flattery was flattery and would get you anywhere). He was wearing a summer suit, grey, minus the jacket, and a green carnation in his buttonhole. He was twirling a periwinkle parasol above his head (this was, of course, the dread Hellsword ‘Frame’s Edge’ but no one had to know that). The sun was bothering him, and the parasol helped.

Anyway, his plan – he looked utterly harmless and he knew it. He’d put on his best ‘little boy lost’ expression, shed a crocodile tear or two, and search for his opponent. He’d be able to tell the difference between him and the fake people of the island with a touch. When he found his opponent he’d try to make skin-to-skin contact (he’d go for fabric if nothing else), putting his hand on an arm or clutching his hand if possible. “Please sir…I need help,” he would say. “No one is helping me.” He’d meanwhile drain as much time away from his foe as he could, and at the moment his enemy realized what was happening, Dorian would try to bite him at the junction between neck and shoulder with his horrible fangs, simultaneously stabbing right underneath the ribs with a bladed abdominal limb.

Now if the enemy saw through his disguise and wouldn’t let Dorian get close, Dorian would hurl the Frame’s Edge at him, ‘missing’, and letting it circle around behind him. He would simultaneously blast at and around him with hellfire, and for the grand finale (for Dorian doubted this little fight would take very long) the Frame’s Edge would come from behind and run him through, and that would be that.

He presumed he’d see him again in Hell soon enough, which would be a bit of an awkward encounter to be honest.

I want to get it started already...

I want to actually DO something with this character, but I've got to wait for the Big Event before I can get properly started...

@_animus_: @the_ghostshell: @hitman_:

All excellent ideas, thank you. I will have to give this some serious thought.

I need a look for his demon form...any suggestions?