A Solitary God In A Dark Multiverse - 186 A God Among Humans

[Flame Subdomain passive powers:

Absorption and Nullification: You can absorb and/or nullify flames at will. Absorbing flames can speed up the rate at which you regenerate health and regain lost strength. Nullifying flames can render them unable to harm lifeforms of all sorts.

Auras: You gain an assortment of auras that you can utilize at will. Some of these are simple auras, like an aura of plasma that surrounds you with ionized gas, an aura of immense heat, or an aura that shrouds you in a fire. Others are not so simple like an aura of holy fire that purifies people and things, or an aura of demonic fire that burns everything to ash and corrupts what it can’t burn. These new auras include auras of passion, auras that inflame love and lust.

Blast/Combat: This is a standard power, but in acquiring the second tier of influence over the subdomain of flames it is now far more enhanced than it was before. With this power you can fire bolts, balls, bullets, optic blasts, breath attacks, walls, vortexes, and other forms of attacks using flames, heat, and plasma. This power has also transferred over to other energy based domains and subdomains. This freakishly powerful ability grants you mastery of energy and element-based projectiles. You can also inflict burns on creatures at will.

Detection: You can detect and warp to fires anywhere in the universe.

Empathetic flames: This power is being granted to you solely because of your chaotic nature and the sin you came into being influencing: lust. With this power, you can generate empathetic flames that either burn away emotions or cause them to burn more brightly. Your flames can amplify love, lust, anger, and passion and can burn away all emotions, leaving someone extra susceptible to your powers.

Flame embodiment: You can take on a form made entirely of flames.

Incineration: This potent and destructive power allows you to melt things and also people using your mastery over fire and heat. It is synergistic with the destruction domain and is enormously powerful.

Inflammation: You can cause targets to experience burning pain. This burning pain can be as “real” as you want it to be, since you are a deity with power over enchantments, pain, minds, and fire.

Heat/Temperature manipulation: You can manipulate heat. This power allows you to fire beams of heat that increase the kinetic energy of atoms thereby causing the heat they experience to increase. Inversely you can also fire beams of energy that decrease the kinetic energy of atoms, which causes things to slow down.

Plasma Generation and Manipulation: You can manipulate and generate plasma, highly ionized gas.]

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The god had layered himself with powers, old and new alike, that made him the center of attention, activating them all, including an old favorite of his “Religious fervor”. He was wearing an unbuttoned button-up shirt that exposed his perfectly molded chest, and a pair of loose jeans that weren’t yet stretchy enough to hide one of the original tools with which he could bestow pleasure. He had a charming and utterly relaxed smile on his face. He knew he was in control here.

Anthony hadn’t yet recovered enough from the god’s singular moment in which he acknowledged the human to be able to do anything but stare, and so far that human was the only member of humanity awake in the lounge. After a few moments of casually playing with his powers some more, the god turned to face Anthony again and chuckled.

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Anthony Pendragon was the very first human to wake up in the lounge. He was an impressive artist, and like me not someone whose sexuality was limited to people of one gender. I could accurately be described as “Omnisexual”, though I rarely acted on such impulses, Anthony could be described as “Pansexual”, which made him similar to but not quite exactly like me. He was also much more sexually active than I was, and I could smell him on and in many of the other artists here. He was apparently impressive in bed judging from the number of encounters he’s had, recently, in the lounge.

Anthony was one of the humans in the lounge with a chocolate-like complexion. He was also quite tall for a human, standing close to 1.8 meters in height. He wasn’t as tall as I was, but I quite liked being the tallest person in a room when I could be, and I could always be taller than someone else so I usually defaulted to standing a few dozen centimeters than others did. Today I was closer to 2.5 meters tall and thus towered over him and everyone else in the quirky colony of interconnected sofas.

I studied him for a moment before the others began to slowly stir to consciousness. The next person to awaken was a woman named Lyla, an almost unhealthily pale woman in her mid-twenties with a fascinating with statues and a surprising skill at sculpting. She groggily opened her eyes and the first thing she saw was Anthony staring at me, awe-struck by the array of powers I had activated at once. She turned slowly, first noticing my long legs, and then finally looking at me, and immediately falling victim to the same effects as Anthony.

Over the course of the next few minutes, the rest of the seven artists scattered about the sofas would awaken. Of them all, only two straight men and one lesbian would prove even a bit resistant to the numerous auras I had wrapped around myself, and even they weren’t completely resistant to my auric prowess, they could only manage to resist falling in love with me immediately, which their peers weren’t able to do successfully.

I considered targeting the mortals who resisted me with “Bliss inducement”, or with another of my mind-warping abilities but I ultimately decided not to do that. I knew that I wouldn’t need to. My symbols were enough.

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The mortals gazed upon the deity and felt his powers wash over them like a tidal wave. To merely be in his presence was enough to feel waves of a variety of sensations wash over them, with the most notable one being a considerable amount of physical pleasure, as though they were being skillfully fondled by someone who knew exactly where and how to touch them.

The god was powerfully channeling a number of his powers, especially ones related to both sex and to pleasure. To be in his presence at this moment was to experience considerable pleasure and to feel a strange, inexplicable joy so long as someone was looking at his face. The god hadn’t used any of his truly mind-shattering abilities such as his ability to induce bliss, dominate someone, or his parasitic spores, but those abilities weren’t the only ways which he could break minds and erode wills.

One of his newer powers that was on display here was his aura of heat. This distinct aura was powerful even on its own, but in conjunction with his other powers it was truly memorable. At the moment the heat was fixated on a few specific body parts of those in its range. It was focused on the most sensitive body parts of those who were in its range and caused them to experience a truly pleasing warmth that prevented them from fully focusing and questioning the oddity of their new circumstances.

The god paused for a moment and studied the mortals around him. After he did so for a brief instant he smiled at them and finally began to summon symbols once more. But all he did was summon a single symbol. A silver sphere. The artists collectively turned to face the sphere and were shocked as it burned its way into their minds the second they gazed upon it, instantly washing over them and forever altering their minds.

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[The Silver Sphere symbol description:

The Silver Sphere is an Althonian symbol that physically is exactly what it sounds like: a silver sphere. To gaze upon it is to open one’s mind to Althos’ eerie powers and corruptive influence.

An alternative version exists that hypercharges its lust aspects and forfeits the artistic aspect. This version of the Silver Sphere has an infinite symbol within it.

The Silver Sphere effects:

The Silver Sphere fills those who behold it with both considerable lust and also with an immense burst of creative energy. Artistically inclined people will be filled with an immense desire to create artwork that depicts the Silver Sphere and thus spreads its influence. Even gazing at it through some sort of medium, like a photo or a video doesn’t render it powerless though to stare at the symbol through such a thing does make it easier to resist than being in the same space as the symbol.

People who are not artistically inclined will be filled with a supercharged urge to indulge in their lusts, one far more potent than they would have been otherwise. If they don’t have sex before they next go to sleep, their dreams will be lavicious things that haunt their memories for days until they finally have sex. These dreams will heavily focus on the most secretive and darkest sexual desires the person has and may inspire them to act on them if they are plagued by the dreams long enough.

At will, Althos has the power to cause the Silver Sphere to penetrate targets with a life-creating lust, a need to breed. This useful option is handy for creating cults of lust and life, but by default the Silver Sphere doesn’t make targets feel this. Normally the lust the Silver Sphere plagues with them is for sex they are comfortable with, be it protected or unsafe.

The object is also sanity draining, and addictive to gaze at. Those who behold it will want to stare at it again and again. It can be branded onto someone as a tattoo through a considerable number of fire abilities and it’ll retain all of its effects, including its addictive quality, even for the person on whom it is tattooed. If it steals away all of someone’s sanity, they will be filled with an urge to make others stare at it and thus further spread the symbol.]

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The three-dimensional sphere that was conjured just over my hand was a potent symbol. It was quite simple in its effects, but it was also quite powerful. It was so powerful that as one of the artists gazed upon it I felt her mind begin to break and she got off of the sofa she was on and crawled towards me.

She was the pale-skinned statue maker I had noticed earlier. There was a nearly blank gaze in her eyes as she crawled speedily towards me until she was between my spread legs. Her eyes were still affixed to the symbol, and her mouth began to open absentmindedly. She was thoroughly ensnared and ensorcelled by the symbol, and I chuckled at her.

“Hello Lyla…” I said, speaking softly. My voice washed over her and over her companions, and I felt them tremble in fear and confusion. They hadn’t know that I knew their names. Lyla herself was thoroughly in the grip of the symbol. I suspected of all of them she either had the weakest will or for whatever reason had been the one with the lowest sanity.

On her knees in front of me, she was quite cute in a rather meek way. I considered having fun with her for a moment, and it was a tempting idea. I ultimately decided against it, for now, but I did move the symbol so that it was right in front of her. In doing so, from behind, it looked like Lyla was staring at my lower body, even though she wasn’t. I then turned to the rest of the artists and began to act.

The first thing I did was strike every artist in front of me with an “Ascenion”, informing them of a simple truth: I was a god, through a customized message. Lyla began to giggle upon learning this, and for a moment her sounds were the only noise that filled the combination living/display room.

The second thing I did was utilize a number of my healing powers on each of the humans around me. I watched them each become shrouded in a silvery air that conformed to the shape of their bodies, illuminating them as they felt every ache and every pain they felt at the moment wash away.

All of them, including Lyla, smiled and shivered as they felt even the pains they had long ignored vanish in an instant.

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[Ascension:

The strange man sitting among you has kindly allowed you to recognize him for what he is: a god. The entity sitting in front of you is the god of art, life, law, and goodness, named Althos.

Althos is a simple god. He seeks worshipers, and to spread his message of art, life, and goodness. He has chosen to transform you into some of his first worshipers on this world and he has arrived to reveal himself to you and to educate you. Listen and obey, for he is goodness, order, life, and art embodied, to serve him is to be good.]