Deus Pater (Exalted/40k)

[X] Mercy. His crimes do not deserve forgiveness, but this is not about 'deserve'. Spare his life, bend his knee, and give the man a chance to atone for his failures with loyal service in your name.

Truth be told I just really like his description.

[X] Exile. You find this man unworthy, and banish him from your sight. Let him go forth and spread the word of what happened here today, the first of many heralds that you must send forth to better enact your will upon this world.

[X] Mercy. His crimes do not deserve forgiveness, but this is not about 'deserve'. Spare his life, bend his knee, and give the man a chance to atone for his failures with loyal service in your name.

Omake coming I don't know if you'll allow bonuses or not but I've got a speech in mind.

[X] Exile.

In the Eyes of the Emperor!
YOU ARE NOT WORTHY!!!

[X] Exile.

[X] Exile. You find this man unworthy, and banish him from your sight. Let him go forth and spread the word of what happened here today, the first of many heralds that you must send forth to better enact your will upon this world.

[X] Mercy. His crimes do not deserve forgiveness, but this is not about 'deserve'. Spare his life, bend his knee, and give the man a chance to atone for his failures with loyal service in your name.

[X] Mercy. His crimes do not deserve forgiveness, but this is not about 'deserve'. Spare his life, bend his knee, and give the man a chance to atone for his failures with loyal service in your name.


Emperor, in his infinite compassion for mankind, gives the wayward ones a chance.

[X] Mercy. His crimes do not deserve forgiveness, but this is not about 'deserve'. Spare his life, bend his knee, and give the man a chance to atone for his failures with loyal service in your name.

Our character seems a bit ...naive, but we haven't seen much of him yet so I will hold my judgement on this for now.
He was also casual as fuck in front of the Emperor but ok.
Nice update otherwise

[X] Mercy. His crimes do not deserve forgiveness, but this is not about 'deserve'. Spare his life, bend his knee, and give the man a chance to atone for his failures with loyal service in your name.

[X] Mercy. His crimes do not deserve forgiveness, but this is not about 'deserve'. Spare his life, bend his knee, and give the man a chance to atone for his failures with loyal service in your name.

[X] Mercy. His crimes do not deserve forgiveness, but this is not about 'deserve'. Spare his life, bend his knee, and give the man a chance to atone for his failures with loyal service in your name.

[X] Death. A million hands stand ready to enact your will, and the world you would create has no room in it for such treacherous monsters. Let him reap what he has sown, and die as he would have condemned others to die in his place.

[X] Exile. You find this man unworthy, and banish him from your sight. Let him go forth and spread the word of what happened here today, the first of many heralds that you must send forth to better enact your will upon this world.

We still get to use him with this vote, and still punish him. It seems like a good choice.

[X] Mercy. His crimes do not deserve forgiveness, but this is not about 'deserve'. Spare his life, bend his knee, and give the man a chance to atone for his failures with loyal service in your name.

[X] Exile. You find this man unworthy, and banish him from your sight. Let him go forth and spread the word of what happened here today, the first of many heralds that you must send forth to better enact your will upon this world.

Fully expecting Mercy to win because of course, it would.

Maugan Ra said:

"Was it worth it?"

There is a man by your side, tall and cadaverous, wrapped in a robe of gold and blue at least five sizes too large for his diminished frame. The skin of his face is pulled taut against the skull beneath, highlighting his patrician skull, and in their darkened sockets twin orbs of midnight sky regard you with infinite sorrow.

You have known him all your life.

"Yeah, I think it was," you say softly, mind adrift on tides of senseless euphoria that leave you blind to what you surely should be feeling. "The ending's a bit shit, but I guess there are worse ways to go, right?"

"Yes," the old man says, turning to look down the stairs in turn, "there are."

He lets you contemplate that for a moment, in this instant that stretches to eternity. Then he speaks once more.

"If you had the chance," he says, gesturing vaguely at nothing that mortal eyes can perceive, "would you do it again? Knowing where it leads?"

You consider that for a moment, weighing up all the myriad paths your life has taken in the endless journey up until this point. There has been suffering, true, and compromise in act and principle alike you never would have tolerated in your youth… but there has also been joy and satisfaction, an honest pleasure in improving the lives of billions.

"You know what?" You say thoughtfully, "I think I would."

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Man ngl I absolutely love this depiction of the Emperor and the way the Cardinal slips from a more authoritative, refined register to something way more informal, personal, almost intimate I mean. All colloquial and shit. And I like how it ties back in with the stuff at the start about how he's an old man in a young man's body and so much of what and who he is is just accumulated layers. It's kinda heartening to see that, at his core, he's still just A Guy. A Guy who probably pulled late nights at the Skull Seminary and got loaded on the weekends.

Maugan Ra said:

You open your eyes, and in their depths blaze fires from beyond the mortal word. Your body straightens, flame-charred spine hidden from view beneath a layer of fresh-woven meat, and where others would lose blood you shed only light unlike any this mortal world has seen in ten millennia. It gathers around you in a cloak, a halo, a great pillar of divine fire that reaches for miles into the air and reaches out to touch the horizon with its light.

Deep within the glow, the double-headed eagle flares its wings and screams with the pleasure of victory long deferred.

You look upon the world, and see a flawed creation in dire need of judgement. The architect of some small facet of such suffering stands before you now, an Inquisitor rendered speechless at the sight of his own hubris, and in a voice of thunder you do what you were put upon this world to do.

You Judge.

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man i don't really have anything to say, this is boss as fuck and everything i didn't know i wanted

hrm

[X] Exile. You find this man unworthy, and banish him from your sight. Let him go forth and spread the word of what happened here today, the first of many heralds that you must send forth to better enact your will upon this world.

Exile, Death, and then so far off in third that it's kinda just a speck on the horizon: Mercy. Ultimately it's important to remember that there are degrees of complicity. This isn't, say, a ship captain born to privilege and a noble house who tries to be decent but struggles against her own inherent biases and super goddamn lucky starting point. Or a senior officer in the Imperial Guard who's lost the ability to see beyond the next campaign, has been tossed into the grinder countless times, and just cares about his men. Or even a Space Marine from a more traditionalist chapter 'cause they're literally super-augmented, mega-indoctrinated child soldiers.

Inquisitors are endowed with a broad remit and significant amounts of agency, one of the few officers of the Imperium who are. They have little direct oversight, are allowed (encouraged even) to apply their own judgement to a situation and evaluate it comprehensively, critically. It's also not a position you're exactly shunted into by forces out of your control, if you're being considered for the Inquisition you're undergoing a process of rigorous review by senior, seated Inquisitors for the proper mindset and a significant amount of internal zeal for the duties involved. This guy, at multiple points, chose to be here. Chose to do what he did. Chose to become what he is. His tragedy isn't, like, that he was a victim of circumstance but rather that he damned himself while thinking he served his God.

Moreover: he was sent to investigate a Cardinal.

This isn't any kind of junior flunky or a a closet radical, you only send hardline, hardcore, do-or-die Puritans to handle what's probably the most sensitive kind of operation you can possibly do in the Ecclesiarchy. Not only is this a guy who chose to be here, he's a guy who committed himself again and again, proving himself loyal in the eyes of all possible doubters of his faction, his party.

This Is Not A Good Guy is what I'm trying to say. He's got a cool description and a neat affect but he's a monster who was literally tying up our loyal, devoted followers to be burned alive on our doorstep. Like ffs people, are guys haven't even been cut down from the stakes yet and you want to give the guy who was going to do it, like, amnesty? C'mon.

The only reason I'm voting for Exile over Death is because I think it's the choice that'll do more damage to the Inquisition in the short and long run. More than any other organization the Inquisition has solid, reliable, rapid channels of communication available for the dissemination of information and the assessment of new threats. What do you think's going to happen when one of the Puritan golden boys turns up babbling about how the Cardinal he was going to execute in a few weeks ignited with a gigantic column of energy signifying a blessing from the Emperor Himself?

I mean the Puritans might kill him themselves which is just :chefkiss: a beautiful kind of irony. But it'll bring tensions in the ministry to a boiling point and will probably get every Radical in the Segmentum and probably no-few-Puritans too to pull an aboutface and start hauling ass our way. And them we can deal with. Them we can ally ourselves with and build bonds with. Not this fucker. Besides, it means he might show up later as a recurring antagonist and I'm all about this shit.

IC it's like...this isn't a day for death and murder no, we've decisively stopped that. But it's not a day for mercy either. Not with this chucklefuck.

Artemis1992 said:

We direly need him. An Inquisitor can be many things, enforcer, information-source, even champion in some cases.
If we can hold him we should certainly recruit him.

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I really, sincerely doubt this is our only chance to get an Inquisitor in our retinue and, beyond that, I'll remind everyone that he was about to start the day off with a marathon BBQ of the people we actually care about. Like, think about the messaging that sends to our followers if we turn around and instantly recruit the guy?

[X] Death. A million hands stand ready to enact your will, and the world you would create has no room in it for such treacherous monsters. Let him reap what he has sown, and die as he would have condemned others to die in his place.

This guy has been burning untold numbers of people all day for the sake of politics, meaning this man is burning men, women, and children alive just for the prospect of a few political favors or to repay a few past favors. Either way, I certainly wouldn't want to have someone so monstrous and callous of human life on our side.

[X] Exile. You find this man unworthy, and banish him from your sight. Let him go forth and spread the word of what happened here today, the first of many heralds that you must send forth to better enact your will upon this world.

[X] Exile. You find this man unworthy, and banish him from your sight. Let him go forth and spread the word of what happened here today, the first of many heralds that you must send forth to better enact your will upon this world.

[X] Exile

[X] Mercy. His crimes do not deserve forgiveness, but this is not about 'deserve'. Spare his life, bend his knee, and give the man a chance to atone for his failures with loyal service in your name.

[X] Death. A million hands stand ready to enact your will, and the world you would create has no room in it for such treacherous monsters. Let him reap what he has sown, and die as he would have condemned others to die in his place.

Yeah, I think it's time for this guy to meet his Emperor... Excommunicate Traitoris!

ctulhuslp said:

Emperor, in his infinite compassion for mankind, gives the wayward ones a chance.

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There's degrees of complicity like I said, and on the scale as it stands This Fucker pretty willingly bloodied his hands, supremely secure that he was serving the greatest possible good and too arrogant, too callous to really consider that he was wrong. I mean this is a guy who affects a jovial, friendly air while getting ready to set people who relied on us on fire. Why do you want to recruit him? Why should he stand with us?

And why do you want the Cardinal to be, like, the kind of guy who looks at this tableau and kinda deliberately turns his back to the near-death-by-immolation of his first followers 'cause Ooh Shiny?

Like I'm aware that this probably comes off as sorta hostile and it's really not intended to be. But I am a little baffled and frustrated by the Mercy vote which feels a little like SV reflexively mashing the Paragon option.

Random Shinobi said:

Yeah, I think it's time for this guy to meet his Emperor... Excommunicate Traitoris!

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Look if you want to hurt the Inquisition as a body rather than burning out one asshole part of it, then sending him back alive to his peers is flatly the way to do it.

[ ] Mercy. His crimes do not deserve forgiveness, but this is not about 'deserve'. Spare his life, bend his knee, and give the man a chance to atone for his failures with loyal service in your name.

This is deffo some version of YOU CAN BE MORE