Entries tagged with deerington

IN CHARACTER

Character Name: Michael
Canon: The Good Place
Canon Point: Chapter 51, "Patty"
In-Game Tattoo Placement: Left side of chest, about where a lapel pin would rest
Current Health/Status: Alive
Age: 4.543 billion
Species: Demon

Content Warnings: Torture

History: Wiki article here, although apparently they haven't filled out the past two seasons' worth of history. I'll summarize:

As the humans' second chance on Earth continued, Michael interferes with the others as well in order to help bring the group back together. This is very against the rules, and eventually he is caught, but as a result of an act of kindness to one of the Judge's employees, he manages to flee to Earth with Janet. Trapped and powerless, the two of them devote their energies to improving the human's lives from behind the scenes. Eventually they're also caught at this, ruining the humans' chances of making it to the Good Place - if they know about the afterlife, their good acts are considered void. Instead, the group decides to help other humans save themselves.

They travel around doing this for a while, are attacked by a group of rogue demons, and escape back into the afterlife. Having realized that things are funky, Michael visits the Accounting department and learns that no humans have been admitted to the Good Place for the past 531 years. With no further authorities to appeal to, he takes it upon himself to break into the Good Place and present their council with evidence of this, believing that it's the result of demonic sabotage. As it turns out, the real reason is that there's no ethical consumption under capitalism. Michael argues to the Judge that the system is unfair because humans are trying their goddamn best, and gets her to agree to an experiment wherein he'll prove this by helping four other humans improve themselves.

The Bad Place picks these humans, so they pick Chidi's ex from Earth, forcing them to wipe his memory so he won't ruin things with his anxiety. Michael then receives a call right before the experiment begins, where Shawn reveals that he's created an exact duplicate of Michael's skinsuit, which he plans on using to trick the humans into believing Michael is torturing them for eternity if the experiment fails. Michael promptly has a panic attack, forcing Eleanor to step up as the new neighborhood's Architect.

Michael acts as Eleanor's assistant, and the group works on helping the new humans. It doesn't go great. After a while, another demon, Glenn, arrives. He says he's snuck out to warn the humans that Michael is an impostor, because he's developed his own doubts about the system. Michael is unhelpful to the extreme; he had previously lied about the reason for his panic attack, and the discovery of his dishonesty damages everyone's trust in him. Additionally, he refuses to remove his skinsuit to prove his identity. After repeated questioning, he breaks down and admits that he's a fire squid, and he considers his true form to be so grotesque that he doesn't believe anybody could possibly want to be his friend after seeing it. Fun! We will not revisit these issues!

It turns out that Janet is the real impostor; she's a Bad Janet who secretly replaced real Janet a little while ago. Michael and Jason travel to the Bad Place to retrieve Janet. While there, he expresses regret and shame over his past. Through a series of people pretending to be people pretending to be other people, Michael ends up confronting Vicky, who is now his physical double. She throws his past in his face and tries to convince him to return to the fold, but he blows her up and escapes with Jason and Janet. On the way out, Jason tells him that it's okay to feel guilty about what he's done, but that he's changed and doesn't need to feel shame.

In the following months, Michael keeps Bad Janet prisoner for a while, trying to convince her that humanity isn't as bad as she believes. But eventually, he comes to the conclusion that people being good or bad doesn't matter; what matters is whether or not they are trying to be better today than they were yesterday. He admits that he's realized he's being cruel in keeping her captive, and releases her.

In the end, Michael wins his case with the Judge and proves that the system is wrong! So the Judge decides to destroy humanity and start over! With the help of a union formed by Bad Janet, who was moved by their last talk, the humans talk her down. Michael helps to design a new afterlife system, where humans are put through neighborhoods in the Bad Place until they improve themselves enough to graduate to the Good Place. Michael tries to take charge of this project, but he no longer fits in at all with the other demons; he can't put things in ways they understand, and they all think he's a soft traitor. He resists for a while for fear of losing his purpose, but eventually yields this job to Vicky and travels to the Good Place with the humans. He's initially afraid that he'll be killed for being a demon openly in the Good Place, but the Good Place employees offer him a job, trick him into agreeing to run the whole place, and scarper. In an effort to improve things, he implements a way for people to move to nirvana(?) from the Good Place, and then takes up his new position as Head of the Good Place.

oh no I'm sorry that was such a long summary

Personality:Michael is, first and foremost, an extremely dedicated, ambitious, and creative person. Despite being seen as something of an huge nerd in the Bad Place, he applied himself to his job hard enough to get promoted, and then tried even harder to make a splash in his new position. If he was hardworking at his desk job, which he was not passionate about, he's intense when it comes to a personal project. Every aspect of the fake Good Place project was engineered personally by Michael; he's good with both details and big-picture stuff, and he's extremely perfectionistic.

This can lead straight into neuroticism. Michael's generally self-confident; he didn't hesitate, after all, to present any of his crazy ideas, or to continue with them even when faced with the potential consequences. But when things go off the rails, or when he looks around and realizes that he's suddenly miles from shore, he’s prone to nervous breakdowns. He also gets extremely frustrated when other people don’t put effort into their work; it’s just not an attitude he can get with at all.

Michael's always wanted to do big things. It might have been easier to do this within the bounds of tradition, but he's never put much stock in the status quo. He's willing to break with age-old demonic tradition near-instantly because he believes strongly in innovation and improvement; the current way is not always the best way. He’s also creative, willing to think outside the box and pursue ideas that spark his interest. All of this seems to have made him something of an oddball among demons, who mostly just like to torture people and dick around.

Demons do not seem to form friendships in general, but Michael specifically appears to have not been particularly well-liked among his own kind. Though he would have been unable to admit it for most of his life, his ambition was also deeply tied up with a desire for validation. He wanted to be famous for revolutionizing torture and show everybody that they were wrong about him - as a demon who had only ever really interacted with his own kind, that's about as far as he could conceptualize what he wanted. Some of his underlying anxiety does seem to have come from never having a support structure; after making friends with the humans, he really only ever panics when he feels like he's in danger of losing them.

All of this makes Michael's heel-face turn pretty natural, when it comes right to it. He'd always been interested in humans, to the point that the Neighborhood he built was predicated on him living and interacting with them. While it took being backed into the last possible corner for him to actually deign to speak to the humans without some fake persona, once he did, he took to their generally friendly attitudes quickly. As someone who was already willing to throw out all demonic tradition to try new stuff he thought would be better, throwing out all demon stuff in general to try out human friends and morality was just an even bigger version of what he was already doing.

At this point, Michael is generally a friendly and open person. Having experienced friendship now, it's very important to him. He wants to be friends with the people he meets! His code of ethics is something he's thought about a lot, given everything. Unlike Chidi, he wouldn't root it in any specific philosopher's work (except perhaps Chidi's own). Instead, he believes most in other people, and what we owe to each other as fellow beings. Taking care of others is the highest good. As such, he doesn't feel at all beholden to rules or laws when they either harm or fail to help actual people. He's also very accepting of grey areas. Sometimes people make mistakes; sometimes there just is no perfect option. He might label certain actions as definitively bad, but he could never justify labeling a person like that - just look at what he's done. Anybody can be better tomorrow.

Of course, he hasn't magically transformed into an angelic individual. He still has a rather dark sense of humor, and can be rather callous, if unintentionally. He's still working on his empathy skills, so he doesn't always gauge other peoples' feelings correctly or even think to consider them right away. He’s also still pretty petty. It’s a flaw he’s been made aware of, and as such tries to monitor somewhat, but he'll definitely get bitchy over minor slights, especially if they catch on any of his insecurities. On the other hand, he's never been one to hold a grudge, and tends to forgive and forget these incidents fairly soon afterwards.

Though Michael's generally confident in his ideas and actions, he often isn't that fond of himself as a person. He doesn't like to think about his past. After his talk with Jason, he's started to accept that he did awful things and hating himself for them doesn't help, but he still does feel very bad about it. He also has a lot of issues about his demonic nature. Even after everything, he still thinks his natural shape is too grotesque for anybody to care about him. Terrible body image on this one! Though he's willing to allow that even the worst humans can grow and improve, none of them could ever have committed crimes on the same level as an immortal demon; he really hasn't had the time to wrap his head around all of that yet. Additionally...well, most of his attempts to do good failed utterly. At this point he's gotten everything he wanted, and he even rules the Good Place! But he just sort of bumbled into that. It's a little hard to feel like he's actually good at this.

Abilities/Powers/Weaknesses & Warping:
Powers
⭐ Afterlife Magic (inanimate objects)
As a demon, Michael has what's described as "afterlife magic". He can just snap his fingers and create things or creatures, destroy them, alter them, or just kinda do anything he feels like. On his home turf, he can also alter the environment, but let's not even worry about that, he isn't in charge here.

This is pretty similar to the miracle power the Good Omens folks have, so I think a similar nerf would work! It's unreliable to the extreme and mostly doesn't work, or sometimes creates an awful version of what he intended!

⭐ Afterlife Magic (animate objects)
Afterlife magic can also affect people. He can effortlessly knock humans out, warp their physical forms, render them capable of flight, or kinda whatever he likes. I'd suggest this one just goes away, too OP. Maybe he can knock other people out and also just instantly drops himself? That would be pretty funny.

⭐ Memory Erasure
Michael can erase a human's memories of a specific time span. He can't edit their memories or create false ones. He can later return the memories he's taken, though it's unclear if he could restore memories that were lost some other way.

Nerf-wise, I think he should just erase his own memories equally if he does this to someone! They'd both forget whatever happened if it was in-game, and he'd forget an equal amount of time from his own past if it was a memory from before Deerington. He'd have to restore the other party's memories in order to fix his own, assuming he eventually realized something was wrong. And, of course, I wouldn't do this without OOC discussion. (He's not terribly likely to use this on people anyway, these days.)

⭐ Immortality
Demons are immortal. Even if their physical form is destroyed, they simply revert to a goo-like state and rebuild their body over a period of several months.

The obvious nerf here is that he just dies if his body is destroyed. But I'm pretty interested in him reverting to his true form if his human body's destroyed, and then being killable in that state? See the "Fire Squid" section for details.

⭐ Durability
Michael's body is technically a human skinsuit that he's wearing. It doesn't contain blood or organs or anything like that, only his demonic essence. As such, it can take a lot of beating, and is unaffected by extreme temperatures.

Nobody else can safely remove the skinsuit without Michael's participation - it's described as being like a "very complicated bra" - but anybody can just straight-up destroy it. The only way we see this happen in canon is via explosion, but I think any significant piercing damage and resulting "blood loss" could also result in the skinsuit failing. I just like the idea of Michael bleeding burning ink.

⭐ Lack of Physical Needs
Together with the skinsuit thing, Michael doesn't need to eat or sleep, and doesn't have any of the physical drawbacks one might expect from an elderly body, though enough physical exertion can still fatigue him. While he doesn't require food, he can and does eat, both regular food and things like antimatter and the concept of envy. He can also get drunk or intoxicated, although he seems able to sober up instantly at will.

From my reading, all this seems fine for the most part? We can drop his ability to sober up at will, and obvs he can be poisoned by event-type things.

⭐ Fire Squid
Beneath the skinsuit, Michael's true demonic form is a 6000-foot tall fire squid with teeth everywhere that oozes burning ink. This is as tall as 17 Godzillas!

Michael would never willingly remove his suit, because he has a lot of body image issues surrounding being a giant gross squid monster, but I'm interested in him keeping this form to some degree...because of the body image issues, honestly. He's gotta work through that shit. SO I THINK he could just revert to the form of a significantly smaller fire squid if his human form is destroyed, and then be pretty normally kill-able from there. Maybe as long as his human body is tall? Six-foot-two floating fire squid?

⭐ Strength
Michael is significantly stronger than a human. All demons are, but this is also related to rank; he's also much stronger than lower demons. He's shown effortlessly separating conjoined super-magnets when his employees couldn't. Sounds like this sort of thing doesn't need a nerf?

⭐ Extrasensory Perception
Michael can evidently see in nine dimensions, and perceive things like peoples' "auras"? Canon never really goes into what this means, other than "can see peoples' digestion happening". It's basically just a joke that never gets expanded upon, honestly.

I'm really not invested in him having x-ray vision and most of the rest of it is too vague to do anything with. Let's just drop all of this.

Abilities
⭐ Doing Harm
Michael spent most of his life as a torturer; he knows a lot about human anatomy and how best to cause the most damage. He knows how to use a lot of weapons and tools effectively. However, he's always been an all-powerful demon tormenting captive humans, so he doesn't necessarily know how to use any of these in a fair fight. It's like how surgeons aren't necessarily good at knife fights, right? In theory, though, he might be able to reverse-engineer some of this to diagnose injuries and help patch people up!

⭐ Information Processing
Michael seems to have a perfect memory, due to just being able to keep track of all the details of all the dumb shit that he's done throughout eternity. He can also absorb new information extremely quickly, claiming that he could read all of human literature in a couple hours if he wanted. This doesn't equal comprehending new information; he read all of Chidi's philosophy texts real fast, but couldn't parse them meaningfully without a teacher. He also seems to have very strong mathematical and spatial reasoning skills.

⭐ Architecture
In addition to being a magical afterlife architect, Michael's also capable of being a regular architect, with drafting and stuff. He doesn't have a lot of experience in the construction portion, but his designs impressed an actual human architect!

⭐ The Arts
Michael is good at drawing, seems to enjoy design, and can play the cello and the piano. But not the guitar. Very much not the guitar. He also can dance well, like a formal slow dance, although he more often does silly dances like an idiot.

⭐ Bartending
I mean, it's Ted Danson, obviously they had him doing this at least one time.

Inventory:
- A medal on a rainbow ribbon. It has a thumbs-up embossed on it.
- A metal lapel pin. It has a thumbs-down embossed on it.
- Michael's phone? It works like a normal phone, especially without access to its usual network, but it has no apparent physical components and works via Tony Stark holoscreen? Lemme know if that's a problem.
- A battered old Minion doll
- A bound copy of Michael and Janet's manifesto. Very long, extremely biographical.
- Extra outfit! A different suit, with bowtie and everything. Also comes with a wooden box labeled "Michael's Human Starter Kit". It contains a stress ball, a Dr. Oz diet book, a set of car keys (car not included), and one of those plastic banana holders.

Writing Samples: One and two

OUT OF CHARACTER

Player Name: Lu
Player Age: 27
Player Contact:

lluosogrwydd / goldfinch#4530 @ discord

Other Characters In Game: None
In-Game Tag If Accepted: Michael: Lu
Permissions for Character: Here!
Are you comfortable with prominent elements of fourth-walling?: Sure!
What themes of horror/psychological thrillers do you enjoy the most?: Mind games, identity fuckery, a thing I can only describe as "the vibe of PT"?
Is there anything in particular you absolutely need specific content warnings for?: I don't love physical trauma to the brain? I read Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates once and that was about fucking it for me thanks
Additional Information:

Deerington IC Inbox

Deerington App

IN CHARACTER

OUT OF CHARACTER