Litany

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Litany 	Litany
 	
Background information	Background information
Creator 	Soi-ke
Main Attribute 	subversion
Theme Color 	purple
Fatal Flaw 	stubbornness
MBTI Personality 	ESTP
Character information 	Character information
Age 	young adult
Gender 	female
Orientation 	heterosexual
Occupation 	member of the necro brigade
Tribe 	nightwing
Goal 	to erase everyone's powers; to radically change society
Residence 	necro brigade hq
Relatives 	unknown
Allies 	a few members of the necro brigade
Enemies 	the chasten
Powers and abilities 	power manipulation; typical nightwing abilities
Ships 	tbd
</noinclude>
This OC belongs to Soi-ke, and is a part of the Modern-Futuristic timeline.
It’s always about power with them.
They’re greedy for more and more and more.
It’s not going to stop.
I need to change it.
I suppose that makes me a villain
"Do I look evil enough? Seriously, I need a second opinion on this.'"
Description
----
Conviction.
It is seemingly present in every aspect of the NightWing’s appearance, from the raw intent in her dull red eyes, to the certitude in the way she struts about, her head held high. She has no need for regret nor hesitation, and acts with all the self-assurance of a dragoness who knows she is justified. Her frame is lithe, her posture tall and straight. The NightWing wants to be noticed, to be more than another face in the crowd. 
Her face is a strangely beautiful thing, with a tapered snout and sharpened features, so often contorted into a disdainful frown. The reds of her eyes are darkened crimsons and burgundies, speckled with flecks of gold and amber. Her horns are jagged, and a sickly green.
Her scales are a dark violet, stained with elaborate patterns of azure blue and turquoise. Her underbelly is a contrasting light greenish hue, lined with both scars and recent wounds. She takes little care in her appearance, as evidenced by the grime and mud that coats her scales. 
Her wings are unusually starless, barren of the cosmic liveries that usually decorate a NightWing's wingspan.
Graceless metal takes the form of her arms from the elbows down, rough steel and brass sheets, woven together with tangled wires and gears. In the stead of flesh and blood talons are a quintet of sinisterly long metal proxies, more like jointed blades than functional digits. The prosthetics are rudimentary and simple, their movements clumsy and lifeless. They were intended to hurt, to rend scales and to taste blood. Fated to do nothing more. 
Destined to.
"Demonizing them. Condemning their actions from your oh-so precious moral high ground. Attacking them relentlessly from the position of power you undeservedly occupy and take such desperate measures to maintain. Does that sound like "justice" to you?'"
Personality
----
There’s something unnerving about her.
The NightWing is never afraid to speak her mind. With the Chasten, this often results in rather puzzling antagonism. She’ll viciously mock and insult them when confronted, and seems to know exactly what to say to get to the various members of the superhero team. She seems to genuinely hate them, and is outraged at their very existence. If given the chance, one gets the impression that the villain would tear down everything they’ve accomplished without a second thought.
When in conversation with literally anyone other than the Chasten, a whole different side of her takes the wheel. She becomes kind and down to earth, empathic to the concerns and struggles of her comrades in the Necro Brigade. 
She can be devilishly charismatic when she wants to. Her ability to read people extends to her allies and acquaintances as well, and she knows exactly what to say to make them feel better. The NightWing has a good sense of humour, if not a slightly mischievous one, and enjoys joking around to a point that irritates many of her colleagues. She presents herself as negotiable and easy to talk to. While she believes strongly in her personal convictions, she never comes across as overly zealous about them to anyone other than the Chasten.
The villain is an optimist through and through, though she isn’t very open with it. Even in cases where she really shouldn’t, the NightWing tends to believe that dragons will learn from their mistakes. She gets proven wrong a lot, especially given the company she keeps, but this doesn’t discourage her in the slightest.
To many in the Necro Brigade, she’s just straight up annoying. As a matter of fact, she comes across as the type of dragon who should be a hero. 
She’d disagree. 
Openly, the villain pretends to see contemporary heroism as a concept that has been twisted and desecrated by dragons like the Chasten. She’ll loudly lament that the team is antithetical to what heroes should be, a group of attention-starved narcissists who are barely in control. But there is far more to her hatred than that. 
She ultimately sees justice itself as flawed. Too often in her eyes, “justice” simply means the labelling of dragons as “evil” as an excuse to in turn do evil things to them. Justice isn’t based on such things as morals and ethics and “greater goods”. No, to the hypocrites, it’s all just superficiality. It’s about how touching their backstory is, how cool their powers are, how appealing to the masses their personality is. “Justice” is the status quo, where the popular, the beloved people’s champions show just how evil they can be without the fear of backlash. “Justice” is the status quo, where the unpopular, the ugly and unpresentable of society, are hated, dismissed for nothing more than said unpopularity. 
"Evil" is simply a product of this status quo. A result of deterministic circumstance. A destiny.
At the very core of her character, she is angry. Angry that she was demonized and vilified, the victim of “justice”. Angry that many others suffer the same fate everyday. Of course, the superheroes will save the innocent-looking, conformist dragonet from a rampaging monster. But they won’t do the same for the dragoness who walks home alone everyday, who has some morbid interests and likes to cheer for the villain while watching television programs. Oh no, she’ll call for help for hours on end, but nobody seems to be listening. The rest of the citizens will run away, save themselves without a second thought. After all, a hero will handle it! But they won’t, and she’ll find herself lying in a ditch, bleeding out slowly, every second seemingly more painful than the last. Her heroes didn’t save her.
The villain is a completely functional, even somewhat charming dragon otherwise. If not for this stubborn anger and her past experiences, she would perhaps stand on the other side of history. But she just can’t. She can’t look past her own personal experiences and preconceived notions about the Chasten and their ilk. The consistency of her worldview becomes a hinderance in this regard. For how often she accuses the Chasten of having a narrow perspective, her pain and anger and outrage make her unable to reassess her opinions, no matter how often the Chasten prove her wrong. 
It is for these reasons that her hatred for the Chasten runs so deep. When she looks at them, when she talks to them, the NightWing can’t help but feel genuinely disgusted. They’ll preach about justice, about what’s right, but only with society behind them and omnipotence at the tips of their talons. To her, heroes are only heroes because they have power and popularity behind them. The NightWing can't betray her convictions by becoming a hero, as doing so would be a condonement of everything she hates. This is a problem, but one perpetrated by the masses. When this inevitably happens to someone, nobody seems to care. There's no backlash, nobody willing to speak out. To the NightWing, there simply isn't enough outrage in the world. 
She thinks this is a problem. She thinks someone has to change this.
If that makes her a "villain", so be it. 
"I wanted be a hero once.'"
History
----
<tabber>
|-| 1 =
Litany loved a television show when she was younger. 
In hindsight, the plot was pretty bad, the characters were one-dimensional and it was super cliche. That didn’t matter to her when she was six. She remembers running home from school everyday to catch the new episode. She also remembers the end of every episode, where the main character would turn to the viewers and tell them that anyone could be a hero if they tried. 
She wasn't alone in this. The show was very popular amongst dragonets her age. Everyday at recess, they would talk on and on about yesterday’s episode like the rabid fans they were. They would read the comic books that the show was based on. They could have intelligent discussions that spanned hours and got them in trouble during class.
She loved every moment of it.
Litany had always felt like an outsider. She lived in a broken household, with parents who were barely ever around and a brother who was off in a college on the other side of the continent. Her manners were strange and her habits were stranger. She liked to play with dead things. She dressed different. She seemed to be a massive germaphobe, always wearing a pair of black gloves. And for that, she was shunned, hated. 
All until that cheesy show premiered.
First things first, they didn’t pick on her anymore. All of a sudden, she wasn’t the weird girl and they weren’t the popular kids. They were all just giddy fans of a really rather bad show. With all the things they had to say about it, they didn’t have the time to heckle her. 
But there was also something strangely alluring about being told that she could be a “hero”, even with her condition. Being someone who used their powers to help those who needed help was certainly rather appealing to her at the time. She was told from the moment she hatched that her magic couldn’t do anything but hurt others. That they were a curse, that she had to hide from the world, lest anyone die. 
Uncontrollable transmutation definitely wasn’t the only thing she could do. Her mother always told her that she had magical potential. The first way in which it manifested just happened to be dangerous. If she practiced more, learnt more, maybe she could use her magic to save people. This sounded good to her. Being a hero sounded good. 
|-| 2 =
It was few years after the show premiered that Litany found her faith in heroes shaken.
As she grew older and more observant, she saw disturbing trends in the show. She noted how the villains were rarely without motivation for their actions, and how the hero refused to acknowledge this. She noted that some of them had noble goals and aspirations, and that were shot down by the hero without a second thought. That seemed unfair. She noticed how the society would always cheer for the hero and scorn the villains, even before they even knew what they were fighting over. That seemed unfair. Above all, she noticed how the characters were portrayed. The hero was handsome, charming and collected, while the villains were almost invariably hulking, ugly monsters. That seemed unfair.
She would bring this up in discussion, but nobody else thought it was unfair. The hero had omnipotence in their palms and society behind them, it was only right that they exercised this power and popularity to do what the masses wanted them to. It was only right that the monster died for their sins.
Heroes only helped other people, not monsters. If they helped everybody, there wouldn’t be any monsters. 
Litany took care to point this out.
That seemed to p*ss them off.
|-| 3 =
Eventually, she found herself back where she started, scorned by everybody around her. It was even worse this time.
They would call her “monster”. And from there, they were free to do whatever they wanted to her. She was less than a dragon to them. They were the heroes of this story, because they had the power and popularity to make it so. Anything was justifiable when done to the villain. 
At this point, she knew better than to call for help. 
They would say horrible things, about how she was an evil witch. They said that Litany would never amount to anything, that everyone hated her, that little monsters like her deserved to die. 
She wondered whose fault that was. 
Her grades were slipping and she was increasingly strained and anxious. Apart from school, she never left the house anymore. She was angry. So, so angry. And when she watched her former favourite show, when the hero turned to the screen and told her she could be a hero too, she could swear she heard a mocking undertone to his voice. 
When she was about fifteen, she got into a fight after being provoked. In the struggle, she lost her gloves. She was blinded by rage, she wasn’t being as careful as she should of been. She threw a punch. They caught it. 
Luckily, she broke contact almost instantly and they only lost an arm. The rage was gone in an instant, and Litany panicked and ran away. She almost killed them. She really was a monster. 
Nobody saw her for a few days. When she came back, she was missing her front paws and on the verge of unconsciousness from blood loss. She dropped out of school soon afterwards. 
|-| 4 =
It was intoxicating. 
It was horribly traumatic for her, but also satisfying in a cruel way. That terrified look on their face when their arm crumbled away to nothing. In that moment, she seriously considered not letting go. Watching smugly as their arm turned to dust and scattered in the wind. Listening to that shriek of pain. They deserved it.
This was what it felt like to have power. 
It scared her. 
She couldn’t let anyone have that sort of unaccountability ever again. 
She locked herself in the closet for years, practicing and learning the limits of her magic. She didn’t eat and rarely slept. She pursued the mystical arts with determination that bordered on madness. 
Litany’s mother knew better than to disturb her during this time.
Nullification magic was difficult to master. It took even the most powerful sorceresses years to learn the most simple spells in the field, and her magic was far weaker than most. But it was the only thing she ever pursued, the only thing she truly needed to fix everything. Most branches of magic were instruments to gain more power. Such unfair power was detestable. What she sought in the magical arts was the ability to let nobody have this unfair power ever again.
It took five years for her to succeed. 
Afterwards, Litany resumed life as well as she could. She was given her prosthetics by a stranger at the park one day, who also invited her to the Necro Brigade. She doesn’t know who it was, but would really like to thank them one day. She began meeting with the Necro Brigade more and more. She found herself participating in supervillainy more often. It was fascinating to her, seeing people just like her, who were bad solely because society gave them no choice.
She was welcomed half heartedly. Her ability to disable superpowers proved incredibly useful, but her overly friendly attitude towards her fellow members was irritating to many in the Necro Brigade. It took some getting used to, but becoming a villain was all she could do now. It only made sense to oppose the heroes who had so much power and popularity and so little sympathy for people like her. 
This was the only path she had, the destiny her surroundings had doomed her to. She can’t help but chuckle when the Chasten take the moral high ground. They’ll say people like her are a cowardly lot, that they’re criminals, that they have no boundaries as to what they’re willing to do out of pure self-interest.
Whose fault is that?
Hypocrites.
They’ve gotten everything they wanted in life out of fatalism, and talk down to those who didn’t.
Hypocrites.
“Anyone can be a hero if they try.”
Hypocrites. 
|-| 5 =
It also turns out that her favourite show got cancelled. 
Shame.
</tabber>
"It isn't very complicated. You don't deserve your powers. I'll remove them."
Powers and Abilities
----
<tabber>
|-| Powers =
Litany has had a natural, albeit weak affinity for magic since birth. Her sorcery is limited to only a few applications, and she is a lot less versatile with her magic than most practitioners of the mystic arts. 
Power Nullification
By speaking someone's name, Litany can disable any powers they possess for the next ten minutes. As this ability is derived from magic, it can even nullify powers that are not biological in origin. 
The name she speaks doesn't have to be the legal name of her victim, simply a name they personally identify with. Litany can only disable a dragon's power for ten minutes every hour, although she can disable the powers of multiple dragons at the same time. Her target has to be within earshot of her for their powers to be disabled.
Power Fluctuation Inducement
By speaking someone's name backwards, Litany can cause their powers to become unstable and prone to malfunction for the next ten minutes. Much like her nullification, it is capable of affecting powers that are not biological in origin. During this ten minutes, the victim's abilities will rapidly activate and deactivate and vary wildly in strength, often putting themselves and their teammates at risk.
The name she speaks has to be the legal name of the target, or the spell won't work. Litany can permanently affect a dragon with this power as long as she speaks their name every ten minutes, though can only affect one dragon at a time. Her target has to be within earshot of her for their powers to be affected.
Power Erasure
Litany is capable of permanently erasing a dragon's powers. Unlike her ability to nullify them temporarily, the dragon in question must willingly sign a contract with her to have their powers erased. While practically useless in direct combat, many of Litany's schemes involve trying to trick members of the Chasten into signing this contract.
Transmutation(formerly)
Any living thing that makes physical contact with Litany's paws is instantly transmuted into salt. She had no control over this power and it automatically activated upon even the slightest touch. As she lost her paws, she can no longer use this power.
|-| Abilities=
Charisma
When she wants to be, the NightWing can be incredibly persuasive. In social interactions, Litany is excellent at reading dragons and figuring out their vulnerabilities. She always knows what to say to make her friends in the Necro Brigade feel better and the Chasten feel worse, and makes it so in eloquent fashion. She finds this skill distasteful, and feels like she’s being manipulative when she influences her close friends. This disdain doesn’t extend to the Chasten however, and she seems to take sadistic pleasure in exploiting their fears and flaws. 
Martial Arts
Litany has practiced martial arts for what seems like most of her life. She found it therapeutic when she was younger, a good distraction from the stress and anxiety that dominated her everyday life. As such, she is very experienced in paw-to-paw combat. While her prosthetics proved to be a setback initially, they carry with them unique benefits. The metal limbs, although lacking dexterity, have enough weight behind them to shatter bones, and the knife-like talons can easily cut through scales and weak body armor. 
|-| Weaknesses=
Limitations on Power Nullification
Although her power nullification can affect most dragons, there are certain limits to its scope. Litany’s magic works by restricting the abilities of a dragon to those a completely regular member of their species would possess. For example, an animus IceWing would have their animus powers nullified, but would still be able to use their frost-breath. A being who appears to have super strength from draconic standards, but in reality possesses an average physique for their species, would not have their powers disabled. Additionally, a dragon whose powers are derived from an outside source would not be affected by her nullification.
It is worth noting that her power fluctuation inducement is not subject to these restrictions.
</tabber>
"When I first heard stories about the Necro Brigade, it was easy to think they were something less than dragons. I was told constantly that they were the worst kind of scum, that they were monsters who would kill people like me without a second thought. But when I finally met them, I realized how terribly deceitful those stories really were. They were nothing more than dragons who had lost things. Friends, family, their old lives. Stolen from them by people like the Chasten, while this hateful society cheered on. If only the Chasten weren't so blinded by their narcissism and fanaticism, maybe they would see who the monsters really were."
Relationships
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<tabber>
|-| Necro Brigade =
Kashmir: 
Zaaner: 
Kaeru:
Cecidit: 
|-| Chasten =
Kokoro: 
Vestige:
Sorno: 
Retora: 
Wraith (Esther):
Genesis: 
Planck:
Professor Q:
|-| Other =
text
</tabber>
Reference
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<noinclude>
Category:Females
Category:NightWings
Category:Occupation (Criminal)
Category:Content (Soi-ke)
Category:Characters