Michael (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
eudaimonikos) wrote2019-01-04 06:10 pm
eudaimonikos) wrote2019-01-04 06:10 pm
Daybreak App
PLAYER INFORMATION
NAME: Lu
CONTACT:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
lluosogrwydd
OTHER CHARACTER(S) IN GAME: None
CANON INFORMATION
CHARACTER NAME: Michael
CANON: The Good Place
HISTORY: In the universe of The Good Place, every action that a person takes has a set positive or negative point value based on how "good" it is. When a person dies, their points are tallied up. The small percentage of people whose point value is over a certain threshold gets to go to the Good Place, and everyone else goes to the Bad Place to be tortured forever by demons.
Michael is one of these demons. After a long time of working in a low-ranking administrative role, he received a promotion to architect. Architects take a group of humans, craft a way to torture them forever, and then move on to the next group. This is the way it's been done for all of human history, so obviously Michael decided to use his very first assignment to pilot his own personal idea for a better way to torture humans. His plan was basically just the plot of No Exit: put the humans together in a fake Good Place, and then manipulate them into forming their own eternal feedback loop of toxicity and psychological torment. The argument was that this was both more effective and more entertaining. Michael's superiors were doubtful, but ultimately allowed him to proceed, with a warning that failure would be met with severe consequences.
In order to set up his neighborhood, he stole an artificial intelligence named Janet from the Good Place and pretended to be a legitimate Good Place architect to secure her assistance. Though he had a few moments of self-doubt about his grand plan, she also provided emotional support, as the only person around who genuinely wanted to help him and believed in him. With her help, he got everything ready, placed his four chosen humans into the world, and began.
Things went smoothly for several months. Michael took on the role of a kind, human-loving guardian to the humans, and spent his time engineering various types of unpleasantness for them. Part of the plan involved making two of the humans, Eleanor Shellstrop and Chidi Anagonye, live together as soulmates. Eleanor thought that she had been accidentally brought to the Good Place, and she turned to Chidi, a professor of ethics and moral philosophy, to help her keep her secret and teach her to be a good person. Michael's plan fell apart because he didn't believe that Eleanor could actually become a better person, and her Season One character development started throwing his plans off the rails, until eventually she ended up figuring out the truth. Michael was forced to ask his boss for permission to reset the humans' memories and try again. He received it, but was told that he only had one more chance, and that if it failed he would experience retirement, an eternal form of extreme torture that is the closest a demon can come to actually dying.
Michael's second chance failed within a day. He concealed this fact, lied to his own employees about having permission from the higher-ups to try as many times as necessary, and proceeded to spend a really, really long time continuing to fail in various ways. He became increasingly frustrated and despondent, but couldn't see a way out of the situation; he had to somehow make the experiment work to have any hope of survival, but with every unauthorized reboot, the shit he'd be in when he was caught only got worse.
Eventually, his employees lost patience and blackmailed him, threatening to reveal what he'd done unless he handed control of the experiment over to them for one last attempt. If they succeeded, they would get all the glory, and if they failed, they would turn him in anyway so that they could wash their hands of the whole thing. Michael was sure that they would immediately fail, so in order to save himself he decided to bargain with the humans. If the experiment ended, they would be sent to the normal Bad Place to be physically tortured forever, so both groups would benefit if things went well this time. Michael agreed to not wipe their memories and to find a way for everybody to escape to the Good Place, and the humans agreed to pretend as if they'd been reset and to play along with the other demons' psychological torture efforts. Eleanor added another condition at the last second, though - Michael had to attend Chidi's ethics lessons with the rest of them. Though he was scornful of this idea, he was also completely out of options, and signed on for that too.
The lessons did not start well. Chidi decided that Michael might be failing to engage with the material in part because he was immortal, and thus didn't have a finite human's understanding of consequences. He talked to Michael about how possible death actually was, with his current precarious position, and made Michael contemplate his own mortality until he eventually collapsed into an existential depression. Eleanor comforted him and helped him deal with his newfound feelings by understanding how humans deal with their mortality, and the two began to form a bond.
Over time, Michael grew to enjoy the humans' company, especially Eleanor's. They turned out to be pretty similar people, to the point that she could recognize a lot of her own behavior in him and variously help him out or call him on his bullshit. He also came to recognize that he really didn't understand human ethics at all. He lashed out at Chidi over this and got himself kicked out of class, which made him realize that he'd come to enjoy the humans' company and missed being around them. The realization that he'd be rejected for doing shitty things forced him to actually apologize for his behavior and apply himself more to the lessons. Much of this was still sort of self-serving. As a demon surrounded by other demons, he had never formed close positive relationships with anyone before, and though he didn't entirely understand his feelings about these new relationships, he didn't want to lose them.
One major breakthrough came when Janet began experiencing severe glitches that threatened to destroy the neighborhood. She decided that the best course of action was for Michael to kill her. He initially agreed, but found that he couldn't bring himself to do it; after a fight where he presented several excuses and got shot down on all of them, he was forced to admit to Janet and himself that he considered her his first and best friend, and would rather risk destruction than kill her. Later that day, he also realized that he felt the same way towards the humans, and couldn't bring himself to cause even emotional harm to them for his own safety. After that day of significant personal epiphanies, he went to Eleanor for advice, wanting to understand why she consistently worked to be better even when it was hard and unpleasant. The two had a heart-to-heart, where she explained her own views on morality from the perspective of another garbage person, encouraged him, and affirmed his place in the group.
About ten minutes later, Michael's boss showed up! He'd been fooled by all of Michael's lies and believed the experiment had been a huge success. He gave Michael a promotion, complete with a special senior staff pin, and explained his plans to put Michael in charge of a larger-scale psychological torture rollout, while the current group of humans would be taken and vivisected for study. The promotion was everything Michael had ever wanted - but upon being presented with it, he realized that it wasn't what he wanted now. Instead, he decided to gamble on the humans, leaving them hidden clues to communicate his plan for their escape while pretending to have flipped back to torturing them. Perhaps the most important clue was simply asking them to have faith in him. It worked out, and Michael hid the humans while tricking all the other demons into thinking they'd escaped. When they all went to recapture them, he was left alone with them once more. Having been unable to confirm their safety until that moment, he broke down in tears of relief when he reunited with them. It's been a long fucking couple of days at this point.
Once alone, the humans pressed Michael to reveal his plan for getting them to the Good Place. He created a golden balloon that required them to pass a test to board, but after they'd failed multiple times and broken down into arguing, he had the new experience of feeling overwhelmed with guilt and revealed that it was just a lie he'd made up to stall for time. Despite trying, he'd been unable to find a way to get to the Good Place, and he also had no way to escape the demons who would shortly realize what he'd done and come back for all of them.
Demoralized, the group decided to spend their last night of freedom partying. Despite their initial anger, everyone decided to forgive Michael, as he had tried his best to do right by them and admitted his mistakes when he couldn't. They named him an honorary human and presented him with a Human Starter Kit, filled with pointless junk that he didn't need, just like humans collect! He was extremely touched, having never been given forgiveness or that level of care before, and they all proceeded to get very drunk and have fun together. Late in the night, it came out that there was a judge who oversaw disputes between the Good and Bad Places. Michael had already considered taking the group to her to plead their case, but had dismissed it as a viable option because it would involve sneaking the humans through Bad Place headquarters to reach the portal to her chambers, getting them the senior staff pins necessary for portal access, and somehow convincing her to hear their case despite not approaching through the official channels. Everyone agreed it was a bad plan, but now that they had no other options, the humans decided they wanted to at least make the attempt, and Michael decided that failing at a stupid plan with his friends would at least be a good way to go out.
The plan almost immediately fell apart. Michael was unable to get any extra pins, and was reduced to stealing a bunch of senior staffer's jackets from a coat rack. They were quickly discovered and fled to the portal, where he began rushing the humans through. He and Eleanor were the last two remaining when their pursuers caught up to them, which was when Michael discovered that he hadn't managed to steal enough pins. He made a quick decision to give Eleanor his own, shoved her through the portal, and locked it behind her, sacrificing his own life in the process.
That was the intent, at least. Though Michael's treachery was now thoroughly known by the other demons, Janet managed to escape detection and rescued him, so the pair followed the humans not long after. By the time they arrived in the judge's chambers, the humans had already all failed their tests and been sentenced to the Bad Place. Michael stalled the decision by stepping up as their advocate and offering a new angle to the case: that the system by which humans were judged was fundamentally flawed and unjust, as proved by these four humans becoming better people even after their deaths. The judge argued that they had only worked to become better for selfish reasons; they thought that if they did it, they would be rewarded with passage to the Good Place. Being a good person with the expectation of reward was not really being a good person.
To prove that they would have improved even without knowledge of the aferlife, Michael convinced the judge to place them in a simulation of their real lives in which they'd narrowly avoided whatever killed them in actuality, betting that with the near-death experience as impetus, they would still manage to become better people. When last seen, he was overseeing this test - and definitely cheating to help Eleanor reconnect with Chidi, on the grounds that the group's friendships were key to everything.
STRENGTHS:
Dedication
Michael doesn't do anything by half-measures; if he's in, he's 100% in. A meticulous perfectionist, he'll give everything he's got to whatever he's working on, even if it's something he's not particularly enthusiastic about. If it is a pet project, though, he can be invested to the point of overthinking everything and getting really neurotic. He's also willing to take some pretty extreme personal risks for things he cares about. In the past, these were his aforementioned brilliant ideas; he proposed changing the entire system on basically his first day at the job, despite the heavy penalty for failure. Nowadays, these things can also include his people.
Innovation
Everything in the show is initiated by Michael's willingness to break with eternal demonic tradition in order to find a better way of torturing humans. After he's done a 180 on the whole torture thing, he instead decides that the entire afterlife system is unjust and must be torn down. Michael puts little stock in the status quo, and is always looking for ways to build and improve. This applies to himself as well - once he sees that human morality could be better for him, he's willing to throw away everything he's followed for an eternity to try to improve himself.
Intelligence
Part of this just comes with the territory of being an eternal being who exists beyond the scope of human understanding. Michael knows a lot of stuff. More than knowing a lot of stuff, he's also inhumanly fast at processing and applying new information - to an extent. INT isn't WIS, and when it comes to anything that's not purely objective, he can be dumb as a rock.
FLAWS:
Egotism
Michael thinks he's very clever, and he's not entirely wrong. But he's certainly not infallible; there's plenty of things he doesn't know, subjects he finds difficult, and times when he's straight-up failed. He easily gets insecure over gaps in his knowledge or ability, and will go on the offensive to cover for them. This high opinion of himself can also lead him to underestimate others to his own disadvantage, and to just repeatedly insult them to their face, which is usually not great.
Perpetual Lying
When faced with any kind of difficult situation, Michael's first instinct is basically always to spin a lie to get out of it. He's good at lying, and good at holding together large webs of lies; when he's caught out, it's generally not because he failed at playing the part. But he defaults to this even when there's no real need, often making things more difficult for himself in the process. Plus, now that he's trying to be a good person, he sometimes gets to feel bad about doing it afterwards!
Big Jerk
Being a good person isn't the same as being a nice person, and even Michael's friends aren't spared from his tendency to make mean jokes and poke at people's insecurities for funsies. He'll apologize if called out, but like - it was still pretty funny, right? He can also be incredibly petty and passive-aggressive, and respond strongly to minor slights.
Canon Abilities:
Extrasensory Perception
Though he's currently inhabiting a human body, Michael still exists on several planes at once. He can pick up on a lot of sensory data that humans can't. Some of this appears to manifest as a type of synesthasia; he associates other people's emotions with colors and tastes, for example, and he's mentioned vague things about auras before. He's probably capable of picking up on magic shit too?
Durability
The human bodies created for demonic use can definitely experience pain. However, they seem to be able to take a lot more punishment than a normal human. Demons can walk off pretty nasty beatings. They also seem to ignore extreme heat, judging by Michael's ability to stand very close to lava and also wear those suits in fucking Florida without complaint. Because it's not like he doesn't complain loudly when he feels there's something to complain about.
Lack of Human Needs
While demons are shown eating and enjoying human food, the show also goes out of its way to observe that Michael does not need to use the bathroom. But we've seen other demons use the bathroom? He can also both get drunk and shake off the drunkenness very quickly if he needs to. My conclusion is that he can sort of pick and choose whether his body processes things using normal human digestion or if it's just goddamn vaporized or whatever he does???
Demons are also shown casually consuming shit like antimatter, physical manifestations of envy, and the concept of time. Basically, Michael can probably eat anything with no ill effects, including things that aren't actually made of matter. He doesn't need to sleep. He might not actually have internal organs.
Astral Projection
This has never been shown in canon, but in theory Michael is fully capable of abandoning his physical body to dick around as an intangible horrorterror for a while, and then returning to it later. He isn't terribly likely to do this without a specific and pressing reason, because he likes being able to talk to people.
Immortality
Michael is an immortal being from the dawn of time, and the closest he can come to dying is a form of eternal torture that would not actually end him. If his body were destroyed, or if he left it, he would continue just existing in his natural form. Evidently, they haven't even found ways to kill each other in this form, so that's a thing.
Information Processing
Michael has a perfect memory, and also seems capable of absorbing new information extremely quickly. He claims to be able to read all human literature in a couple of hours; while the scope of this could easily be a boast, he definitely does prove that he can read far faster than a human. The flipside of this is that absorbing information doesn't always equate to comprehending it. He could probably perfectly recite all the philosophy texts he's read, but he still needed Chidi's teaching and a lot of effort to actually parse the words into something meaningful.
He seems to have strong mathematical and spatial reasoning abilities. He also just knows a lot of facts - it just comes with having lived forever and never forgetting anything.
Manipulation
Michael's very good at lying and manipulating others. He can look anybody in the eye and spin a story without even thinking about it, and he's also good at predicting how people will respond to his actions. He can maintain large webs of lies and even entire fake personas for a long time. More recently, though, this ability has begun to degrade a little as he's gained the ethica
AU INFORMATION
AU CHARACTER NAME: Michael
AGE: Unspeakably old
POSITION: Professor of Illusion Magic and maybe a few other things he doesn't care about as much
AU BACKSTORY:
- A daemon from the Outlands, Michael has spent most of his existence doing normal daemon-y things: contracting with humans to get souls, to get power, to rise through the ranks in daemon society. He was always ambitious, but in a sort of aimless way. Becoming powerful just didn't seem like a fun achievement on its own, without having built or created anything to show for it. You know, like famous humans do?
- He was always interested in humanity. Not always in a benevolent way; he is, after all, a daemon. He found psychological games most engaging, and enjoyed screwing with them in manipulative and gaslight-y ways. But as the Night drew ever closer, he started to focus more on observing them in their natural habitat. By the standards of an immortal, the entire species was going to be gone in no time at all, and after that it'd just be...dull, maybe.
- To this end, he started making contracts for things other than souls or servitude. One was with Kano, who traded the ability to see through his eyes. Kano was only six at the time, so Michael saw this as an opportunity to observe a human growing up from afar, with possibly a side dose of his normal psychological games; after all, sooner or later the kid would realize that a daemon could be watching him at any time, right?
- Kano's life became Michael's personal reality show. That was the level on which he initially invested; he'd provide telepathic advice from time to time just to keep from having to watch the kid do dumb things. And then sometimes they would talk. After a while, he started showing up in person, kinda just to hang out?
- At some point during this time, he was also accidentally summoned by Tyzias, who was bleeding out on top of some arcane texts. Since she was unconscious, Michael couldn't negotiate any kind of deal, but he was curious enough about the strange circumstances to heal her for free. That gesture is probably why she told him anything, and she continued to summon him occasionally after they parted. He was never able to get a contract with her, but Michael was amenable to their talks.
- Of course, Michael couldn't have kept this up forever, especially with the Night coming on. Other daemons were preparing by gaining and consolidating power, and eventually one of them posed a threat to the area Michael's friends were living in. Michael himself was surprised at how upset the thought of them getting murdered by other daemons made him, so he ended up fighting and driving off the other daemon. Though fights among daemons are common, the fact that he'd specifically sided with humanity drew attention; he didn't have anywhere near the power to protect himself from that, and ended up getting thrashed some before he was able to escape the Outlands. He donned a human body to fit in and made his way to where his friends were, and eventually to Daybreak.
AU PERSONALITY DEVIATION:
- In canon, Michael's species existed solely to work at their jobs. Here, daemons don't have any pre-existing purpose or a bureaucracy keeping them in line. As a result, he's just generally more relaxed and open. He's always been free to pursue his personal desires, even his curiosity about humans, as long as he kinda kept it to himself and was strong enough to fend off any criticism. As such, Michael's more familiar with humanity, has a few more hobbies, and isn't all that defensive about either of these things.
- As a counterpoint, violence between daemons is far more common in this universe. Michael's not as defensive about social stuff because he doesn't need to be. Though he still prefers trickery and webs of deception, he's willing and able to throw down if it comes to that.
- Not having an employment history has also done a bit of a number on his work ethic. It's still there in full for things he cares about, but without a job or a boss to please, he hasn't regularly had to apply himself to anything he didn't want to be doing. He's more likely to rush through uninteresting tasks - like the aspects of teaching he's not that into - and just generally not apply his usual level of care.
- In this world, Michael does not have Chidi. His human friends are still the impetus for him to turn his back on his kind, but their company didn't come with a literal ethics class included. He does ask Tyzias questions from time to time, and he listens to her opinions; he knows that there are new rules among humans that he should at least be aware of. His goal, though, is primarily just to not upset his friends or risk his ability to remain at the school. He's more amoral, hasn't really come to consider his moral development as a personal project, and is far less likely to behave altruistically.
- The conflicts Michael's undergone for the sake of his engagement with humans have pretty much entirely happened away from the humans themselves. They've rarely seen him be vulnerable, and so he doesn't exactly have practice being emotionally open even with people he inwardly cares about. He may not be entirely sure how to do it? He still very much considers himself a sort of patron, rather than a teammate.
RACE: Daemon
SECRET SOCIETY: Not really a secret society as such, but he is very much on the outs with daemon society as a whole.
POWERS:
Immortal Eldritch Daemon-ness
Michael is a daemon! He has no natural physical form; the body he inhabits now is a fabrication meant to mimic a human body, but since he made it himself, it lacks a lot of the usual pitfalls. He's a hell of a lot more durable than he appears, and doesn't really require food or sleep, though he can partake in both. In theory, he's capable of leaving it to screw around on the higher planes of existence, and then going back when he's done. Killing the human body does not kill him, although in this AU, his daemon form could be killed via magical means once expelled.
Illusions
Michael can create extremely realistic and large-scale magical illusions. These have to be actively maintained by him, and he needs to be able to see what he's doing, but otherwise he can keep them going for a while. He needs to understand the structure or physicality of anything he's creating an illusion of. Though this naturally involves some screwing with other peoples' perceptions, he can't change their perception of themselves.
Memory Manipulation
Michael's capable of manipulating the memories of humans. The easiest thing to do is wipe them entirely; for example, he could wipe someone's memories of the past few months. Altering existing memories is more difficult, and fabricating new ones entirely is harder still.
Extrasensory Perception
As something that exists beyond the limits of his human appearance, Michael can still pick up on a lot of magical things that wouldn't be perceived by normal human senses. He can reliably tell when a human's been contracted by another daemon, for example, though of course he couldn't discern the exact terms of their agreement just from looking. Of course, it's always possible that he wouldn't be able to tell what exactly something was if he hadn't observed anything like it before; he's got a lot of experience, but there's a wide range of weird magic shit out there.
HOUSING: Solo room, no preference where!
RP SAMPLE
TDM thread!
NAME: Lu
CONTACT:
OTHER CHARACTER(S) IN GAME: None
CANON INFORMATION
CHARACTER NAME: Michael
CANON: The Good Place
HISTORY: In the universe of The Good Place, every action that a person takes has a set positive or negative point value based on how "good" it is. When a person dies, their points are tallied up. The small percentage of people whose point value is over a certain threshold gets to go to the Good Place, and everyone else goes to the Bad Place to be tortured forever by demons.
Michael is one of these demons. After a long time of working in a low-ranking administrative role, he received a promotion to architect. Architects take a group of humans, craft a way to torture them forever, and then move on to the next group. This is the way it's been done for all of human history, so obviously Michael decided to use his very first assignment to pilot his own personal idea for a better way to torture humans. His plan was basically just the plot of No Exit: put the humans together in a fake Good Place, and then manipulate them into forming their own eternal feedback loop of toxicity and psychological torment. The argument was that this was both more effective and more entertaining. Michael's superiors were doubtful, but ultimately allowed him to proceed, with a warning that failure would be met with severe consequences.
In order to set up his neighborhood, he stole an artificial intelligence named Janet from the Good Place and pretended to be a legitimate Good Place architect to secure her assistance. Though he had a few moments of self-doubt about his grand plan, she also provided emotional support, as the only person around who genuinely wanted to help him and believed in him. With her help, he got everything ready, placed his four chosen humans into the world, and began.
Things went smoothly for several months. Michael took on the role of a kind, human-loving guardian to the humans, and spent his time engineering various types of unpleasantness for them. Part of the plan involved making two of the humans, Eleanor Shellstrop and Chidi Anagonye, live together as soulmates. Eleanor thought that she had been accidentally brought to the Good Place, and she turned to Chidi, a professor of ethics and moral philosophy, to help her keep her secret and teach her to be a good person. Michael's plan fell apart because he didn't believe that Eleanor could actually become a better person, and her Season One character development started throwing his plans off the rails, until eventually she ended up figuring out the truth. Michael was forced to ask his boss for permission to reset the humans' memories and try again. He received it, but was told that he only had one more chance, and that if it failed he would experience retirement, an eternal form of extreme torture that is the closest a demon can come to actually dying.
Michael's second chance failed within a day. He concealed this fact, lied to his own employees about having permission from the higher-ups to try as many times as necessary, and proceeded to spend a really, really long time continuing to fail in various ways. He became increasingly frustrated and despondent, but couldn't see a way out of the situation; he had to somehow make the experiment work to have any hope of survival, but with every unauthorized reboot, the shit he'd be in when he was caught only got worse.
Eventually, his employees lost patience and blackmailed him, threatening to reveal what he'd done unless he handed control of the experiment over to them for one last attempt. If they succeeded, they would get all the glory, and if they failed, they would turn him in anyway so that they could wash their hands of the whole thing. Michael was sure that they would immediately fail, so in order to save himself he decided to bargain with the humans. If the experiment ended, they would be sent to the normal Bad Place to be physically tortured forever, so both groups would benefit if things went well this time. Michael agreed to not wipe their memories and to find a way for everybody to escape to the Good Place, and the humans agreed to pretend as if they'd been reset and to play along with the other demons' psychological torture efforts. Eleanor added another condition at the last second, though - Michael had to attend Chidi's ethics lessons with the rest of them. Though he was scornful of this idea, he was also completely out of options, and signed on for that too.
The lessons did not start well. Chidi decided that Michael might be failing to engage with the material in part because he was immortal, and thus didn't have a finite human's understanding of consequences. He talked to Michael about how possible death actually was, with his current precarious position, and made Michael contemplate his own mortality until he eventually collapsed into an existential depression. Eleanor comforted him and helped him deal with his newfound feelings by understanding how humans deal with their mortality, and the two began to form a bond.
Over time, Michael grew to enjoy the humans' company, especially Eleanor's. They turned out to be pretty similar people, to the point that she could recognize a lot of her own behavior in him and variously help him out or call him on his bullshit. He also came to recognize that he really didn't understand human ethics at all. He lashed out at Chidi over this and got himself kicked out of class, which made him realize that he'd come to enjoy the humans' company and missed being around them. The realization that he'd be rejected for doing shitty things forced him to actually apologize for his behavior and apply himself more to the lessons. Much of this was still sort of self-serving. As a demon surrounded by other demons, he had never formed close positive relationships with anyone before, and though he didn't entirely understand his feelings about these new relationships, he didn't want to lose them.
One major breakthrough came when Janet began experiencing severe glitches that threatened to destroy the neighborhood. She decided that the best course of action was for Michael to kill her. He initially agreed, but found that he couldn't bring himself to do it; after a fight where he presented several excuses and got shot down on all of them, he was forced to admit to Janet and himself that he considered her his first and best friend, and would rather risk destruction than kill her. Later that day, he also realized that he felt the same way towards the humans, and couldn't bring himself to cause even emotional harm to them for his own safety. After that day of significant personal epiphanies, he went to Eleanor for advice, wanting to understand why she consistently worked to be better even when it was hard and unpleasant. The two had a heart-to-heart, where she explained her own views on morality from the perspective of another garbage person, encouraged him, and affirmed his place in the group.
About ten minutes later, Michael's boss showed up! He'd been fooled by all of Michael's lies and believed the experiment had been a huge success. He gave Michael a promotion, complete with a special senior staff pin, and explained his plans to put Michael in charge of a larger-scale psychological torture rollout, while the current group of humans would be taken and vivisected for study. The promotion was everything Michael had ever wanted - but upon being presented with it, he realized that it wasn't what he wanted now. Instead, he decided to gamble on the humans, leaving them hidden clues to communicate his plan for their escape while pretending to have flipped back to torturing them. Perhaps the most important clue was simply asking them to have faith in him. It worked out, and Michael hid the humans while tricking all the other demons into thinking they'd escaped. When they all went to recapture them, he was left alone with them once more. Having been unable to confirm their safety until that moment, he broke down in tears of relief when he reunited with them. It's been a long fucking couple of days at this point.
Once alone, the humans pressed Michael to reveal his plan for getting them to the Good Place. He created a golden balloon that required them to pass a test to board, but after they'd failed multiple times and broken down into arguing, he had the new experience of feeling overwhelmed with guilt and revealed that it was just a lie he'd made up to stall for time. Despite trying, he'd been unable to find a way to get to the Good Place, and he also had no way to escape the demons who would shortly realize what he'd done and come back for all of them.
Demoralized, the group decided to spend their last night of freedom partying. Despite their initial anger, everyone decided to forgive Michael, as he had tried his best to do right by them and admitted his mistakes when he couldn't. They named him an honorary human and presented him with a Human Starter Kit, filled with pointless junk that he didn't need, just like humans collect! He was extremely touched, having never been given forgiveness or that level of care before, and they all proceeded to get very drunk and have fun together. Late in the night, it came out that there was a judge who oversaw disputes between the Good and Bad Places. Michael had already considered taking the group to her to plead their case, but had dismissed it as a viable option because it would involve sneaking the humans through Bad Place headquarters to reach the portal to her chambers, getting them the senior staff pins necessary for portal access, and somehow convincing her to hear their case despite not approaching through the official channels. Everyone agreed it was a bad plan, but now that they had no other options, the humans decided they wanted to at least make the attempt, and Michael decided that failing at a stupid plan with his friends would at least be a good way to go out.
The plan almost immediately fell apart. Michael was unable to get any extra pins, and was reduced to stealing a bunch of senior staffer's jackets from a coat rack. They were quickly discovered and fled to the portal, where he began rushing the humans through. He and Eleanor were the last two remaining when their pursuers caught up to them, which was when Michael discovered that he hadn't managed to steal enough pins. He made a quick decision to give Eleanor his own, shoved her through the portal, and locked it behind her, sacrificing his own life in the process.
That was the intent, at least. Though Michael's treachery was now thoroughly known by the other demons, Janet managed to escape detection and rescued him, so the pair followed the humans not long after. By the time they arrived in the judge's chambers, the humans had already all failed their tests and been sentenced to the Bad Place. Michael stalled the decision by stepping up as their advocate and offering a new angle to the case: that the system by which humans were judged was fundamentally flawed and unjust, as proved by these four humans becoming better people even after their deaths. The judge argued that they had only worked to become better for selfish reasons; they thought that if they did it, they would be rewarded with passage to the Good Place. Being a good person with the expectation of reward was not really being a good person.
To prove that they would have improved even without knowledge of the aferlife, Michael convinced the judge to place them in a simulation of their real lives in which they'd narrowly avoided whatever killed them in actuality, betting that with the near-death experience as impetus, they would still manage to become better people. When last seen, he was overseeing this test - and definitely cheating to help Eleanor reconnect with Chidi, on the grounds that the group's friendships were key to everything.
STRENGTHS:
Dedication
Michael doesn't do anything by half-measures; if he's in, he's 100% in. A meticulous perfectionist, he'll give everything he's got to whatever he's working on, even if it's something he's not particularly enthusiastic about. If it is a pet project, though, he can be invested to the point of overthinking everything and getting really neurotic. He's also willing to take some pretty extreme personal risks for things he cares about. In the past, these were his aforementioned brilliant ideas; he proposed changing the entire system on basically his first day at the job, despite the heavy penalty for failure. Nowadays, these things can also include his people.
Innovation
Everything in the show is initiated by Michael's willingness to break with eternal demonic tradition in order to find a better way of torturing humans. After he's done a 180 on the whole torture thing, he instead decides that the entire afterlife system is unjust and must be torn down. Michael puts little stock in the status quo, and is always looking for ways to build and improve. This applies to himself as well - once he sees that human morality could be better for him, he's willing to throw away everything he's followed for an eternity to try to improve himself.
Intelligence
Part of this just comes with the territory of being an eternal being who exists beyond the scope of human understanding. Michael knows a lot of stuff. More than knowing a lot of stuff, he's also inhumanly fast at processing and applying new information - to an extent. INT isn't WIS, and when it comes to anything that's not purely objective, he can be dumb as a rock.
FLAWS:
Egotism
Michael thinks he's very clever, and he's not entirely wrong. But he's certainly not infallible; there's plenty of things he doesn't know, subjects he finds difficult, and times when he's straight-up failed. He easily gets insecure over gaps in his knowledge or ability, and will go on the offensive to cover for them. This high opinion of himself can also lead him to underestimate others to his own disadvantage, and to just repeatedly insult them to their face, which is usually not great.
Perpetual Lying
When faced with any kind of difficult situation, Michael's first instinct is basically always to spin a lie to get out of it. He's good at lying, and good at holding together large webs of lies; when he's caught out, it's generally not because he failed at playing the part. But he defaults to this even when there's no real need, often making things more difficult for himself in the process. Plus, now that he's trying to be a good person, he sometimes gets to feel bad about doing it afterwards!
Big Jerk
Being a good person isn't the same as being a nice person, and even Michael's friends aren't spared from his tendency to make mean jokes and poke at people's insecurities for funsies. He'll apologize if called out, but like - it was still pretty funny, right? He can also be incredibly petty and passive-aggressive, and respond strongly to minor slights.
Canon Abilities:
Extrasensory Perception
Though he's currently inhabiting a human body, Michael still exists on several planes at once. He can pick up on a lot of sensory data that humans can't. Some of this appears to manifest as a type of synesthasia; he associates other people's emotions with colors and tastes, for example, and he's mentioned vague things about auras before. He's probably capable of picking up on magic shit too?
Durability
The human bodies created for demonic use can definitely experience pain. However, they seem to be able to take a lot more punishment than a normal human. Demons can walk off pretty nasty beatings. They also seem to ignore extreme heat, judging by Michael's ability to stand very close to lava and also wear those suits in fucking Florida without complaint. Because it's not like he doesn't complain loudly when he feels there's something to complain about.
Lack of Human Needs
While demons are shown eating and enjoying human food, the show also goes out of its way to observe that Michael does not need to use the bathroom. But we've seen other demons use the bathroom? He can also both get drunk and shake off the drunkenness very quickly if he needs to. My conclusion is that he can sort of pick and choose whether his body processes things using normal human digestion or if it's just goddamn vaporized or whatever he does???
Demons are also shown casually consuming shit like antimatter, physical manifestations of envy, and the concept of time. Basically, Michael can probably eat anything with no ill effects, including things that aren't actually made of matter. He doesn't need to sleep. He might not actually have internal organs.
Astral Projection
This has never been shown in canon, but in theory Michael is fully capable of abandoning his physical body to dick around as an intangible horrorterror for a while, and then returning to it later. He isn't terribly likely to do this without a specific and pressing reason, because he likes being able to talk to people.
Immortality
Michael is an immortal being from the dawn of time, and the closest he can come to dying is a form of eternal torture that would not actually end him. If his body were destroyed, or if he left it, he would continue just existing in his natural form. Evidently, they haven't even found ways to kill each other in this form, so that's a thing.
Information Processing
Michael has a perfect memory, and also seems capable of absorbing new information extremely quickly. He claims to be able to read all human literature in a couple of hours; while the scope of this could easily be a boast, he definitely does prove that he can read far faster than a human. The flipside of this is that absorbing information doesn't always equate to comprehending it. He could probably perfectly recite all the philosophy texts he's read, but he still needed Chidi's teaching and a lot of effort to actually parse the words into something meaningful.
He seems to have strong mathematical and spatial reasoning abilities. He also just knows a lot of facts - it just comes with having lived forever and never forgetting anything.
Manipulation
Michael's very good at lying and manipulating others. He can look anybody in the eye and spin a story without even thinking about it, and he's also good at predicting how people will respond to his actions. He can maintain large webs of lies and even entire fake personas for a long time. More recently, though, this ability has begun to degrade a little as he's gained the ethica
AU INFORMATION
AU CHARACTER NAME: Michael
AGE: Unspeakably old
POSITION: Professor of Illusion Magic and maybe a few other things he doesn't care about as much
AU BACKSTORY:
- A daemon from the Outlands, Michael has spent most of his existence doing normal daemon-y things: contracting with humans to get souls, to get power, to rise through the ranks in daemon society. He was always ambitious, but in a sort of aimless way. Becoming powerful just didn't seem like a fun achievement on its own, without having built or created anything to show for it. You know, like famous humans do?
- He was always interested in humanity. Not always in a benevolent way; he is, after all, a daemon. He found psychological games most engaging, and enjoyed screwing with them in manipulative and gaslight-y ways. But as the Night drew ever closer, he started to focus more on observing them in their natural habitat. By the standards of an immortal, the entire species was going to be gone in no time at all, and after that it'd just be...dull, maybe.
- To this end, he started making contracts for things other than souls or servitude. One was with Kano, who traded the ability to see through his eyes. Kano was only six at the time, so Michael saw this as an opportunity to observe a human growing up from afar, with possibly a side dose of his normal psychological games; after all, sooner or later the kid would realize that a daemon could be watching him at any time, right?
- Kano's life became Michael's personal reality show. That was the level on which he initially invested; he'd provide telepathic advice from time to time just to keep from having to watch the kid do dumb things. And then sometimes they would talk. After a while, he started showing up in person, kinda just to hang out?
- At some point during this time, he was also accidentally summoned by Tyzias, who was bleeding out on top of some arcane texts. Since she was unconscious, Michael couldn't negotiate any kind of deal, but he was curious enough about the strange circumstances to heal her for free. That gesture is probably why she told him anything, and she continued to summon him occasionally after they parted. He was never able to get a contract with her, but Michael was amenable to their talks.
- Of course, Michael couldn't have kept this up forever, especially with the Night coming on. Other daemons were preparing by gaining and consolidating power, and eventually one of them posed a threat to the area Michael's friends were living in. Michael himself was surprised at how upset the thought of them getting murdered by other daemons made him, so he ended up fighting and driving off the other daemon. Though fights among daemons are common, the fact that he'd specifically sided with humanity drew attention; he didn't have anywhere near the power to protect himself from that, and ended up getting thrashed some before he was able to escape the Outlands. He donned a human body to fit in and made his way to where his friends were, and eventually to Daybreak.
AU PERSONALITY DEVIATION:
- In canon, Michael's species existed solely to work at their jobs. Here, daemons don't have any pre-existing purpose or a bureaucracy keeping them in line. As a result, he's just generally more relaxed and open. He's always been free to pursue his personal desires, even his curiosity about humans, as long as he kinda kept it to himself and was strong enough to fend off any criticism. As such, Michael's more familiar with humanity, has a few more hobbies, and isn't all that defensive about either of these things.
- As a counterpoint, violence between daemons is far more common in this universe. Michael's not as defensive about social stuff because he doesn't need to be. Though he still prefers trickery and webs of deception, he's willing and able to throw down if it comes to that.
- Not having an employment history has also done a bit of a number on his work ethic. It's still there in full for things he cares about, but without a job or a boss to please, he hasn't regularly had to apply himself to anything he didn't want to be doing. He's more likely to rush through uninteresting tasks - like the aspects of teaching he's not that into - and just generally not apply his usual level of care.
- In this world, Michael does not have Chidi. His human friends are still the impetus for him to turn his back on his kind, but their company didn't come with a literal ethics class included. He does ask Tyzias questions from time to time, and he listens to her opinions; he knows that there are new rules among humans that he should at least be aware of. His goal, though, is primarily just to not upset his friends or risk his ability to remain at the school. He's more amoral, hasn't really come to consider his moral development as a personal project, and is far less likely to behave altruistically.
- The conflicts Michael's undergone for the sake of his engagement with humans have pretty much entirely happened away from the humans themselves. They've rarely seen him be vulnerable, and so he doesn't exactly have practice being emotionally open even with people he inwardly cares about. He may not be entirely sure how to do it? He still very much considers himself a sort of patron, rather than a teammate.
RACE: Daemon
SECRET SOCIETY: Not really a secret society as such, but he is very much on the outs with daemon society as a whole.
POWERS:
Immortal Eldritch Daemon-ness
Michael is a daemon! He has no natural physical form; the body he inhabits now is a fabrication meant to mimic a human body, but since he made it himself, it lacks a lot of the usual pitfalls. He's a hell of a lot more durable than he appears, and doesn't really require food or sleep, though he can partake in both. In theory, he's capable of leaving it to screw around on the higher planes of existence, and then going back when he's done. Killing the human body does not kill him, although in this AU, his daemon form could be killed via magical means once expelled.
Illusions
Michael can create extremely realistic and large-scale magical illusions. These have to be actively maintained by him, and he needs to be able to see what he's doing, but otherwise he can keep them going for a while. He needs to understand the structure or physicality of anything he's creating an illusion of. Though this naturally involves some screwing with other peoples' perceptions, he can't change their perception of themselves.
Memory Manipulation
Michael's capable of manipulating the memories of humans. The easiest thing to do is wipe them entirely; for example, he could wipe someone's memories of the past few months. Altering existing memories is more difficult, and fabricating new ones entirely is harder still.
Extrasensory Perception
As something that exists beyond the limits of his human appearance, Michael can still pick up on a lot of magical things that wouldn't be perceived by normal human senses. He can reliably tell when a human's been contracted by another daemon, for example, though of course he couldn't discern the exact terms of their agreement just from looking. Of course, it's always possible that he wouldn't be able to tell what exactly something was if he hadn't observed anything like it before; he's got a lot of experience, but there's a wide range of weird magic shit out there.
HOUSING: Solo room, no preference where!
RP SAMPLE
TDM thread!