#maxidren

[lightdancer1]

Been fiddling a bit with the Omniverse Tales:

In particular with expanding on the family and siblings of the protagonist, Xaderavcal H'vat H'vorxixnon. Her people, the Hatari, rely on patronymics (though the full name, like Hispanic peoples, includes names from both lineages and is essentially a family genealogy from three or four generations back, which is why the full name is almost never used).

Her father, King-Bishop H'vorxixnon H'ven Soroundon, is the Bishop of Chalae and the ruler of House Chaliel, the second-most powerful dynasty in the Bizjarran Empire. The Chaliels were, in the past, also essential bulwarks of Underlan power and when that foundation cracks, so does a fundamental part of the Underlan system. Fordin VI didn't give a shit, his son and grandson do but by then the rift is too deep to repair. He is also a radical firebrand in a context of both a civil war and its aftermath, with speeches modeled before the war on William H. Seward but after the war he's essentially Thaddeus Stevens as a royal.

Anzaea Roes, her mother, is the daughter of Alavan and Kalmi Roes, who are essentially a pair of Caligulas leading the fourth-most powerful dynasty (the third are the Vintrons) whose tyranny is sufficient to be its own worst enemy, as is the program of Utawalization they put into effect. Ironically, by virtue of Xaderavcal's own rise Anzaea achieves the very aims her family seeks....on behalf of a more powerful, richer dynasty. She is also the wealthiest woman in the Empire and modeled on a blend of J. Pierpont Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and Alfred Nobel. She would essentially be a 'Robber Baron' archetype in a very literal sense, and as a rich, powerful woman is subject to a long list of libels and smears in what's deliberately modeled on real life here.

They have four children old enough to play roles in politics. Xaderavcal herself is the Unifier, the victor of the forty-year Restoration War, a revolutionary in the very pattern of her ancestor, the previous unifier, Chaliel I. She is Junior Diarch of the Empire and a survivor of a super-soldier program created by the super-science cult called the Architects of Fear. As Xaderavcal takes more than a few leafs from Paul Atreides and Superman (with Anzaea accordingly taking a few from Lady Jessica and H'vorxixnon from Leto I, if ending somewhat happier than the other guy) the Architects of Fear are essentially the Bene Gesserit as an alien science-cult with sufficiently advanced technology to be a cosmic force in their own right.

Her younger sister Xaderavcar is a professor of theology and a writer, the person who briefly could have been selected as the dynasty's future but elected not to press the issue when her sister returned, escaping the Architects of Fear. For all of the rumors surrounding Queen Anzaea's family life the rumors are entirely true with Xaderavcar, who is basically a rolling stone, wherever she lays her hat is her home. She also has more power, in a very literal sense, than her sister for very literal reasons and a small demonstration of it is that she can blatantly indulge in things that repeatedly violate the codes of her caste and challenge reality to notice it when she uses her powers to prevent them doing so.

The middle child of the ones old enough to be involved, Suvaono, is both the Bobby Kennedy and the Andrei Zhdanov to Xaderavcal's JFK/Stalin (she's the Junior Diarch of a space empire, you're a son of a bitch by definition if you reach that position). She is a political hatchetman who takes a great glee in doing what she does, and has more direct knowledge and experience in greater detail.

And then there's Maxidren, who's a speedster to Flash proportions with access to something modeled on the Speed Force within copyright guidelines to avoid all the problems that otherwise come with this particular power (if also a fair bit tougher than any Flash to withstand the inertia and friction and capable at the most extreme speeds of being her own FTL engine and thus on an inhabited world of shattering it and killing all life if she does that on an inhabited world, that's the most unsporting way in the Empire to Blaze a world and more thorough than dropping an asteroid of dino-killer size on it). Maxidren is the guide to the more veiled extralegal aspect and here works with Lord Agati Heshatani, master of the Directorate of Intelligence Consortia, modeled on the KGB, as the Empire is presented as a de facto totalitarian state with all the trimmings and this is hardly soft-selled.

#omniverse tales #house chaliel #h'vorxixnon #anzaea #xaderavcal the unifier #xaderavcar #suvaono #maxidren #my ocs

[lightdancer1]

A snippet from the upcoming chapter of Blood Among the Stars:

You're alive, they heard the mind-voice speak. How?

Queen Anzaea of Hataria leaned back on her chair. Not the throne, for this was not a matter of state, not yet. She then bit her lip and sat up, hiking up a part of her informal outfit and there was a vision of a wicked and jagged scar where flesh didn't seem to tear so much as dissolve in places and healed.....strangely.

"I was tougher to kill than the archdemon expected me to be." Her smile was a bitter one, the lines of grief carved on an otherwise-ageless face moving like water in a riverbed. "I have power and skills of my own, and they do not know what they are, or how it works. To be fair in this case, neither did I. There aren't many entities that could live from being disemboweled and having their heart removed, however briefly." She looked at her hands. Father? Is he-

She shook her head. "Ravvy, Maxi, and I are all that's left. Once this was one of the largest families in the Empire, and there were no worries about such things. Now it's almost extinct." Her voice cracked with the last words and then she looked at her with that sense of wonder.

"And you, you've changed. It took you, the Kelzhandari. It must have made you one of them."

Xaderavcal nodded.

As far as I knew you were all gone.

Anzaea's lips were thin.

"As I said, we're harder to kill than they expected. Maxidren survived, in spite of their best efforts."

Suvaono?

Anzaea sighed. "I can take you to the graves, if you like. Can the deathless mourn?"

Xaderavcal nodded.

We mourn as anyone else does.

#omniverse tales #blood among the stars